Snowblind (19 page)

The JetRanger hummed like a black fly beneath the swift-flowing ceiling of clouds. Snow had started falling again, and winds were picking up. Josh peered out ahead over the riverine mountains and steep knobby hills toward the high granite pinnacles of Caribou Mountain, veiled in a snowy haze.

"You should start listening now," he told Lorraine as he adjusted the dial on his receiver. "They may not be on the mountain itself. They could be anywhere down there."

Lorraine took off her headphones, slipped a wired pair of plastic nodules into her ears. Then she put the headphones back over them to deaden the roar of the rotors. "How close we need to be before I hear something?" she asked.

"It's got a two-to-three-mile range. The beeps should get louder the closer we are to the transmitter."

Directly below, Josh could make out the snaking white ribbon of the Dalton Highway. Around it, rugged valleys and high hills stretched out endlessly toward the misty horizon. "Needle in a haystack," he mumbled to himself. But then he began recognizing land features he had seen on Monty's wall map. Big Salt River, Dall Mountain, Fish Creek, the Kanuti. If Andrea and the girls were down there, they would have to be somewhere west of Dalton Highway, off one of the twisting roads that wound around Caribou Mountain toward Pine Summit. The same area the O'Donnell plane had gone down.

Josh thought about the madman running loose in that frozen landscape. According to Dr. Katukan, most of the maniac's victims had been female, both white and Inuit. "Repetition compulsion" the doctor had called it. Josh recalled the photograph of the half-human giant, hunched over a carcass on the frozen tundra. The killer was more beastly than the wolves, thought Josh. He had murdered his own father. Devoured his own mother. Eaten her unborn child. Josh found himself wondering if the fetus had been female.

He shuddered, suddenly nauseous. It's madness to think about such things, he told himself.

"Say something, Josh," Lorrain
e demanded.

"What?"

"You don't say somethin', I don't know you're there."

"I'm here," he assured her.

"That's good. I don't want to be havin' to do no — what' he call it? —'roto-rooting?'"

"Autorotating," said Josh with a laugh. "Don't worry — I promise you won't have to do any piloting this trip."

There I go again, he thought. Making promises to keep. With miles to go before I sleep...

Staggering through the dense spruce forest, tottering on her skis, Kris fought to hold herself back from the beckoning bliss of unconsciousness. The undulating sound of the low tones rolled through her mind like ocean waves, surging this way and that, pushing her left and right through the crashing sea of pines.  Her face grew numb from the lashing branches, her gashed legs weakened with every sliding step. From her torn and bleeding shoulder, crackling with pain, her left arm dangled like a broken branch. She plowed forward, driven on by the sheer force of fear — the instinctual, primal fear of the hunted, the intractable will to survive.

Every fall slowed her pace. Crashing to the ground with a jolting shock of pain, she lay still in the snow till her senses recovered. The tones fell silent, and the sound of the wolves filtered into her headpiece — yapping, yelping, barking.

They were on her trail again. And the killer was with them. She could tell from the fervor and fire of their cries, from the fleet-footed speed of their run through the trees. They were coming for her. The charred body of their butchered brother was awash with the scent of her blood.

Kris picked herself up off the ground. Surrounded by trees in an endless forest, her head swam through a torrent of tones. She listened for a gap — an opening, a passage, a way out. The tones pulsed. Then another sound came to her ears. A howl. A straining howl like the sound of the snowplow, or the sound of...

Kris's heart leapt into her throat.

The helicopter swept toward her over the forest, its whirling blades beating the stone-cold air.

"Here..." she stammered. "I'm here!" She began to scream, waving her arm, shouting into the sky: "Help me! I'm here — please, help me!"

She fumbled in her pocket for the flare gun as the helicopter soared overhead. "Oh, God, please let them see me, please..." She pulled out the pistol and fished for a shell. The chopper was moving off. "No — please — wait!"

She pressed the shell into the barrel and pointed the gun straight up over her head.

She fired!

The flare hit a spruce limb, exploding in a shower of sparks. Kris covered her face with her arm. The smoky scent of sulfur filled the air; snow sizzled at her feet.

Kris stood in stunned silence, her eardrums humming with the echo of the blast. The chopper was gone. She felt her legs wither beneath her.

The cries of the wolves rose again out of the silence. They had heard her shouts. They had heard the blast. They were coming for her.

Frosty's throaty howl bellowed through the forest. Digging in her pole with her one good arm, Kris pushed off, gliding deliriously into the trees.

"You hear anything?" asked Josh.

"Nothin'," said Lorraine. "Not a peep. How do you know this little invention of yours is still workin'?"

"I
don't
know. I'm just hoping. In this mess, it's our only chance."

Whipped snow whirled around the windshield of the JetRanger, nearly obliterating Josh's view of the fast-changing terrain below. His hand stayed glued to the cyclic control, fighting the gusting winds that swung the chopper's tail and lifted the aircraft in sudden upward thrusts.

A buffeting gale nearly bounced Lorraine out of her seat. "Whoa!"

"We're all right," said Josh as the chopper settled down.

Lorraine did not look well. "Speak for yourself," she said, grimacing. "This gets any worse, you're gonna be wishin' you had windshield wipers on the
inside
of the glass."

Josh reached for the dial on his radio. "I'm gonna see if I can get an update on the weather."

*  *  *

Monty Harper was on his twelfth round of hearts with the six volunteers of the Civil Air Patrol, when cigar-chomping John Schneider called him on his way to the can. "I hear somethin' on your radio, Monty."

Monty looked surprised.

"Got a girlfriend?" asked Leo.

Harper folded his hand and headed for his office.

A voice broke through the static. "You still awake, Colonel?"

Monty grabbed the mike. "Josh! Where
are
you?"

"A couple hundred miles due north of you, staring at Mother Earth from my chopper."

"Your chopper?! Where the hell did you get a chopper?"

"I'm working for KNBC. They needed somebody to cover disasters. How's the radar looking, Monty?"

"Bad — real bad! This thing is huge! And it'll be on top of you any second. What's your visibility?"

"Seventy-five... maybe a hundred feet."

"Get the hell out of there!"

"I've gotta find my friends."

"Get out of there. Now. Before it's too late."

The radio clicked off. Monty sat listening to the static. Then he lowered the volume, and leaned back in his seat.

He turned. Leo, Verne, Galvin, and John-boy were standing silently at the door.

Monty just looked at them.

*  *  *

Thirty seconds passed without Josh and Lorraine speaking a word. Josh glanced over at her: she looked tense, pale. He thought of her experience in Iraq. She'd already given more than anyone should ever have to.

"Lorraine...?"

Lorraine swallowed dryly. "We're not going back yet, Josh. I didn't come this far to go back with nothin'."

Josh looked at her another moment, then turned forward, peered out into the snow. "Five more minutes," he said. "Let's give it five more minutes."

A strong wind buffeted the aircraft, jolting them sideways. Josh quickly regained control, leveled out. He took a deep breath.

"You hear anything?" he asked Lorraine.

"Not yet," she said.

Josh squinted down through the blinding swirl of snow. He had been following — as best he could — the wandering curves of the broad Kanuti River; now the river appeared to widen out into the white porcelain plate of a frozen lake. He remembered the lake from the map. On the map it was blue.

"Josh? ...I think I got something..."

"You hear the tones?"

"I think so..."  She listened intently. "Yeah — they're getting louder!"

Josh glanced back and forth from the windshield to his blind copilot. She cocked her head in concentration.

"We getting hotter or colder?" asked Josh.

"Uh... I think... Josh — it's fading."

Josh yanked hard on the cyclic; the chopper pitched steeply to the right, wheeling through an airborne U-turn.

"Okay," said Lorraine. "They're coming back."

Josh pushed forward on the collective control, easing the chopper down closer toward the lake's surface.

Lorraine shouted. "We're gettin' hot now, baby!"

They were cruising ninety feet above the flawless face of the white lake. Josh peered out through the veiling snow, looking for some clue...

"There!" he shouted.

The ghost of Jake O'Donnell's DC-3 floated out of the snowy mist like a sinking ship on a frozen sea. Josh wheeled his thundering black bird, circled the crash site, then set down softly beside the upturned plane.

The bloody remnants of Jake O'Donnell's corpse had been mercifully covered by the blanketing snow. Josh stepped closer, grimacing at the jangle of gnawed bones and frozen shreds of flesh. His foot cracked through broken glass — the neck of a vodka bottle, its jagged jar edge crusted with blood. All around the corpse, faint traces of paw prints dotted the snow. And among them, huge footprints — the footprints of the giant.

Josh backed away in horror. A vision of the pilot's last hours came unbidden to his mind; again he saw the image of Frosty flailing a carcass on the tundra. Fear came over him, a mixture of nausea and chilling dread. He wanted to return to Lorraine in the waiting chopper, to ascend back into the sky and leave this horrid patch of frozen earth forever.

But then he saw the ski tracks. Faint in the blowing snow, they seemed to come from across the lake — long, straight, parallel lines passing into the chaos of wolf tracks near the bloody corpse, and then on toward the dark forest on the opposite shore. He could not tell which had come first and which last — the wolf tracks, the massive footprints, or the trace of the skis. Then he noticed a blood-stained path stretching away from the pilot's remains along the side of the upturned plane, as if his body had crawled or been dragged through the snow. The path led to a gaping crack in the fuselage.

Josh stepped through the opening into the cargo hold.

The hold was dim, filled with a jumble of debris, lightly dusted with blowing snow. Despite the strong wind twisting through the crack, a putrid scent of decaying flesh permeated the air. The hold seemed alive with a murmuring presence, a shuffling of padded feet, a spectral breathing. Josh moved warily into the darkness.

Toward the tail of the cavernous hold, dull sunlight fell from a skylit opening in the upturned floor — the open cargo door. Beneath it lay the giant cage, its sapling bars heaped with fallen snow. Josh examined the gaping hole torn through the bars. His hand wiped snow from a twisted branch, revealing a rust-colored coat of frozen blood on the bark.

The growl of wolves sent a shiver up his spine.

Josh turned slowly, peered into the shadows at the pale edge of the shaft of light. He saw the dark glint of eyes and bared white teeth — three snarling wolves crouched over the ragged remains of the copilot's corpse. Sticking out into the light like an image from a dream was the bloody, mangled flesh of Donny's foot.

Josh backed slowly away, fighting the impulse to turn and run. The wolves growled menacingly, leering out of the dark. Josh slipped back into the jumble of the hold, made his way quietly to the opening in the fuselage.

The sated animals did not pursue him.

He hurried back up the path past the pilot's remains, lumbered through the snow to the waiting helicopter.

"She's not here," he shouted to Lorraine.

"Then what about the beeps?"

"There's ski tracks back there that head across the lake. I'm going to follow them — I’ve got to hurry." He borrowed the receiver and earpieces from Lorraine, and started down the tracks toward the shore.

Immediately, the pulsing tones grew faster and louder. She
is
here, he thought — and very close by. His heart raced as he trudged toward the shore, slowed by the knee-deep snow. He tried stepping in the huge footprints, but found there was too much distance between the giant strides. He wished he had remembered to bring the rifle he always carried in the Cessna. The 12-gauge pump shotgun — intended for bears in the event of an emergency landing — was just the kind of gun he might be needing right now.

On the open lake, the wind had nearly obliterated the light tracks of the skis. As Josh followed the tracks up into the woods at the shore, they appeared deeper, the footprints fresher. He moved up the gentle slope from the lake, weaving through the massive trunks of spruce, into the relative quiet of the sheltered forest. His pulse quickened as the fluttering tones piled up in his ears, transforming into a steady hum.

She had to be right here.

Josh looked ahead through the trees. He saw nothing. The tracks appeared to stop at the base of the giant spruce towering before him. He moved closer to the tree, his eyes narrowing on a hole in the bark, a splintered gap revealing the pale inner flesh of the trunk. It wasn't until he moved within inches of the bark that he saw it was splattered with blood.

A queasiness came over him. He staggered back, stepping on something soft. Bending down, he brushed aside the snow to reveal a bright patch of cherry red.

Kris's parka. He pulled off his earphones, resting them on his neck, and gently extracted the buried coat from the snow.

It was stiff with frozen blood.

Josh dropped to his knees. Scattered around the jacket, more clothes had been covered with the falling snow: jeans, blouse, sweater, ski shoes, gloves, T-shirt, brassiere, thermal socks, panties — most all of them torn and stained with blood. Tears welled in Josh's eyes. He grabbed the parka in his fists and pulled it to his chest, his body shaking uncontrollably. He staggered to his feet, clutching the jacket, and slowly turned away from the tree.

What he saw made him gasp aloud.

The long, heavy harpoon, red with blood, had been planted vertically in the deep snow, a pair of skis crossed against the massive tree behind it. On the upright bladed end of the harpoon, a girl's head, blindfolded with a black cotton scarf, had been impaled through the neck. Her long dark hair, flecked with snow, fluttered in the wind. Blood still dripped from her severed throat, staining the snow at the base of the pike.

Josh gaped in horror. He dropped the clothes and staggered forward, reaching out, groping upward with his trembling hand toward the spiked head, the head whose hidden face tormented him.

His fingers grasped the soft scarf, gently pulled it down.

Josh doubled over, vomited into the pool of blood.

Erin's eyes had been carved from her head.