Darkness(59)

Snow began to fall, big, fat flakes that drifted down lazily at first, then came faster and faster. She welcomed it, knowing sufficient quantities would mask the marks of their passing. The temperature dropped until her face felt like it was freezing and each breath became a frigid assault on her lungs. Her feet got cold in her insulated boots. The wind picked up, whistling through the high passes, rushing down the slopes, blowing the fog and snow into wintry dust devils that rose like dervishes around them.

They reached Terrible Mountain as dusk fell, and began to climb. The rusted-out skeleton of a World War II–era vehicle—“A Weasel!” Cal murmured reverently upon spotting it—was overturned near where the almost invisible path to their destination branched off from the main trail. It was the landmark Gina knew to look for to find the way. The new path went almost straight uphill, and grew so steep and so slippery that Gina needed handholds in places to get to the next section. Thickening darkness made it hard to see by the time they reached the last little bit, and if she hadn’t had the familiar growling rumble to guide her she might have missed the final turnoff. What she had once considered an inconvenience she now knew was a blessing: the cave was not on any trail. It would, she thought, be almost impossible for anyone who was unfamiliar with it to find.

“Wait.” Cal stopped her with a hand on her arm when she would have scrambled up through the rocks toward it. Looming close behind her, he was a tall, broad-shouldered, reassuringly solid shape in a gloomy world that had been rendered almost phantasmal by the mix of heavily falling snow and shifting fog. The purple twilight made his eyes look black as coal. His hard, handsome face was grim.

Holding her in place, his grip hard enough so that she could feel the imprint of his gloved fingers through her coat, he leaned down so that his mouth was at the approximate level of her ear.

“What the hell is that?” His voice was just loud enough so that she could hear him. She looked up at him with a frown.

“What?”

“That sound.”

“Oh.” She supposed that to anyone who hadn’t heard it before, the continuous low, grinding errm coming from somewhere up ahead of them would sound ominous. To her, the sound was comforting: it reminded her of a giant cat purring. Lots of giant cats purring.

“Puffins,” she said. “They have burrows all along here, among the rocks. That’s how I found the cave.”

“Birds? You’ve got to be kidding me.” He released his hold on her.

Gina would have smiled in spite of herself, but her facial muscles were too frozen. “We’re here,” she told him, and started to climb.

Careful not to put her hands or feet into a burrow, catching glimpses of dozens of funny little red-beaked clown faces that were the puffins peering out at her anxiously as she passed, she ascended the black, snow-dusted, nearly vertical cliff until she reached the entrance to the cave. Impossible to see from the path, it had an unimpeded view of the valley where the LORAN station was located, and beyond it to the bay and sea. The entrance was tall and narrow, a slit in the rock no more than five feet wide that was all but hidden by a jutting stone formation beside it.

It was dark inside the cave, she saw as she hoisted herself through the opening, but not so dark that she couldn’t see, at least for the first few yards. After that the cave was black as pitch.

It smelled faintly of earth and various other not unpleasant things she couldn’t identify. There at the entrance it was still cold, but it was many degrees warmer than it was outside and she was out of the wind and snow and relatively safe and that was all she cared about for the moment. As Gina looked out, though, she discovered that there was a problem, or at least there would be from Cal’s point of view: she could see nothing but a nearly impenetrable wall of blowing snow and heavy fog turned deep purplish-gray by the coming night. She couldn’t even see the lights of the buildings at the camp, which she knew had to be on and shining through the windows.

Unless there was no one left in camp to keep the generator running, of course. Unless the bad guys had gone, and all that was left behind were corpses.

She shivered and did her best to push away the horrifying images that accompanied the thought.

Having crawled well out of the reach of the wind and snow, she sat, knees bent, resting against the wall with her head tilted back against the worn-smooth stone, and watched as Cal levered himself inside, then stood up to tower in the entrance.

“I can’t see anything,” Cal complained. He was looking out toward the camp, so she knew he was worried about their ability to watch for the plane that was presumably going to arrive at some point. Or maybe it already had arrived. She felt sure that they would have heard any plane flying low enough to land, but maybe she was wrong about that. Maybe they’d missed it, she thought hopefully. He added, “Not that there’s a chance in hell a plane landed in this.”

Another hope dashed. Since she didn’t feel like arguing about his plan right then, she made a noncommittal sound.

He turned away from his unproductive contemplation of the deepening darkness to walk over to where she sat. She didn’t glance up as he stood there looking down at her.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes.”

He shrugged out of the backpacks. There was the slightest of twin thumps as he dropped them on the ground beside her, then hunkered down to unzip one. Her mouth was dry, and she thought about searching through one for water, but she was too tired and dispirited to move. They’d each eaten a second protein bar on the long march to Terrible Mountain, but the effects of that had worn off and she was hungry.