Black Mountain (3 page)

‘Pretty secure grain store if you ask me. Maybe it was a prison – you know how the legends go: mess with the chief’s daughter, get entombed, problem solved.’ She had another thought. ‘Hey, could be hidden treasure maybe. You think?’

Brad rolled his eyes. ‘They were Indians, not pirates, Amanda. The ancient tribes never valued gold, or jewels. Land, good hunting and honour – these were the things they treasured. Can’t seal them up, can you?’

‘Guess not.’ Amanda stepped back again, craning her neck to see the stones better. The ground shifted under her feet as the lip of the ledge started to move. She felt herself sliding towards the abyss and pinwheeled her arms, trying to regain her balance.

Brad grabbed her by the front of her parka and pulled her roughly forward. ‘Stop playing around, will you. Anyway, we’ve seen all we can from here. Let’s go on up to the Dome, and we can report the wall to the ranger when we get back.’

Amanda looked back at the edge of the path and shook her head, trying to clear the image of that long fall to the forest below. She started walking, her legs feeling wobbly, then turned back briefly. ‘Okay, we report it, but only after we’ve got that stone safely in the trunk of my car. Just one second.’

Buzz-click, buzz-click
– two more photos for her album.

*

By the time Brad had hauled Amanda up onto an outcrop of rock and declared they were as high as they could go, the occasional speck of sleet had turned to real snow. There was a wind chill that cut through their clothing and made their lips so numb it was hard to talk.

‘We might be the first people to have stood here for nearly one hundred and fifty years,’ Brad said through gritted teeth.

Amanda tried to give him her best appreciative smile. She was standing as close as possible to his huge frame so he acted as a windbreak. As far as she was concerned, and kept telling him, the view had been just as good from the side of the mountain where the slip had been. She noticed his lips were turning blue and he’d developed the hunched look of someone whose body temperature is rapidly falling.

The snow either drifted down or whipped past them, depending on the gusts of wind, and she had to speak loudly to be heard. ‘Let’s go, baby. We’ve seen enough now.’

Brad stared into the wind for a few more seconds, then nodded and took her hand to help her down from the rocks. ‘You’re right, time to go. I don’t like the way the weather’s closing in on us.’

There was no sightseeing on the way down. Away from the exposed Black Dome, there was more shelter so the needle-sharp cold wind with its haunted moaning was left behind. The falling snow suppressed any sounds around them, except for the squeal of crushed flakes under Brad’s large feet as he moved them quickly along. Amanda had her hands firmly tucked up under her arms and only pulled them out to maintain her balance when they had to hop across logs, boulders or particularly slippery-looking drifts.

‘You hear that?’ Brad said, stopping and half-turning to her with a frown on his face.

She almost bumped into him. On seeing his expression, she stopped to listen to the snow-dampened silence. She didn’t hear anything . . .
no, wait, there
. . . It was a thumping sound, like a fist striking a giant pillow. There was no rhythm or pattern to it. She slowly turned her head, trying to determine where the sound was coming from.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Shit, better not be another rockfall. Come on, let’s hurry – we’re nearly at the slip. I’ll feel better once we’re back across it.’

‘Goddamnit, Brad, I am not staying on this mountain tonight. I warn you – you’ll be in big trouble if you’ve gone and gotten us stuck.’

Brad just frowned before setting off again.
He looks worried
, she thought. She didn’t know why she was blaming him, after all she liked to hike and it wasn’t as if he’d made it snow or caused the slip to drop more debris. She just felt like venting – and probably would again before they got back down.

It didn’t take them long to get to the slip, now white with fresh snow. Its surface looked like a powdery moonscape complete with meteor-strike craters. Brad hung onto a tree, not yet ready to step out. He leaned out and craned his neck to look upwards.

Amanda grabbed a handful of his parka and tried to lean out too. ‘What is it?’ she whispered. ‘Has there been another landslide?’

Brad kept his eyes on the track. ‘I think . . . yes
and
no. That old Indian wall up on the rock face – it looks like it’s finally crumbled. I think that’s what’s causing the pits in the snow.’

‘Is it safe to cross?’

Brad hesitated. ‘I guess so . . . doesn’t look as though there are many stones left to fall. Besides, there’s no choice if you want to sleep in a bed tonight.’ He still hadn’t moved, just kept looking from the path to the cliff face and back again. Finally, he turned to her. ‘Just a little over a hundred feet – stay close to the wall, and to me.’ But he still didn’t move.

‘What’s wrong? You’re scaring me, Brad.’

‘Nothing, just a funny smell – reminds me of when we were kids and Scotty found a dead bird and rolled in it. Sort of a rotten, wet-animal-hair, shitty smell – took us two baths before we got the smell out of his fur.’

‘Hey, that’s what I smelled in that little hole before. Maybe it’s that dead falcon again – remember you said that?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I do. Stay close.’

Brad stepped out, his foot sinking into the snow to his ankles. He kept one arm up towards the rock face, not touching it, just monitoring where he was in relation to the wall and the sheer drop to the slopes below. Amanda could understand his tentativeness. The late afternoon, combined with the heavy cloud, was creating an early twilight on the mountain. Snow was starting to fall again, making the edge of the cliff path hard to see. The whitening air around them, white sky and a white pathway – all definition was disappearing, making it too easy to step off into limbo.

She hung on to the back of Brad’s jacket and tried to test the path with her small staff, but nearly tripped several times as she was pulled along at a speed that better suited his long legs than her shorter ones. Out on the slip path, the lack of trees meant the wind chill was severe again, and the earlier silence was broken by the wind’s shriek and moans.

She flinched when Brad stopped dead. He spun around and stood like a statue, his eyes wide and his face frozen as he stared along the bleak pathway. She put her hand on his arm and felt his large bicep shivering under his parka. She hoped it was just from the cold, but deep in the pit of her stomach she knew it was something more. As he gently pushed her behind him, she realised her legs were shaking so hard she could actually felt her knees knocking together. It hurt.

‘Please, Brad, let’s go.’

Her stomach was fluttering in a tingly, upsetting way. She craned her neck and looked up at his face, hoping to see that big dumb grin splitting his handsome square jaw in an
I gotcha
kind of way. She’d be real angry for a while, sure, but then
real
relieved. But he wasn’t smiling; instead, he looked pale . . . and scared.

Amanda saw his hand go to his waist and lift his parka. There was a gun tucked in behind his belt. Anger flared inside her then, at his secrecy, at bringing a dangerous weapon . . . And then, just as quickly, the emotion disappeared.
Thank god he did.

He pulled the revolver free – shiny black metal against the white surroundings. As she stared at it she saw snowflakes melting on the short barrel; the heat from his body was still radiating from within the steel. She was about to speak when he raised the gun slowly to aim down the path. She followed its grim pointer and made out a shape in the swirling snow – roughly man-shaped, but impossibly huge.

‘Is it . . . a bear?’ Her voice sounded ridiculously small.

‘Back up,’ Brad said.

She was pressed up behind him, looking at the shape from under his arm. She lifted her camera on the cord around her neck.
Buzz-click
.

Brad stepped back just as she took the photo and tripped over her crouched body, falling backwards on top of her. The gun went off and she screamed. In a flash Brad was on his feet, the gun pointed back at the shape. But the slip path was empty.

‘Shit. Did I hit it?’

‘Was it a bear?’ she asked. ‘It looked like a big deformed bear.’

‘I dunno. Must have been. I’ve heard black bears can get pretty big – 800 pounds and seven feet tall on their hind legs. It was a lot bigger than that, but it had to be a bear . . .
had to be
.’

‘It seemed to be waiting for us, but I can’t see it anymore. Do you think it’s gone?’ Amanda had both hands on her stick, holding it out in front of herself like Gandalf at Helm’s Deep.

‘I think the gunfire scared it off. I might have even winged it. We’re just lucky we didn’t set off any more landslides. Come on, we better get off the path.’ Brad looked over his shoulder briefly, then down at Amanda. ‘Take my hand and hang on tight. We need to move quickly.’

*

Brad leaped off the path, back into the forest, literally dragging Amanda through the air with him. Being out of the landslide zone should have made him feel more secure, but the thick tree cover did the exact opposite. The wind was muffled, and light snow swirled gently around the tree trunks. The thick cloud, combined with fast-approaching twilight, made the dense stands of spruce and fir trees even darker.

Brad rushed them headlong down the mountain. Several times he stumbled on logs or loose rocks hidden beneath the snow and knew that come tomorrow his ankles would be painful and swollen.
A cheap price to pay
, he thought,
if it gets us off the mountain safely
.

Amanda fell and reached out to a slim tree trunk to save herself. She pulled her gloved hand away quickly when it stuck to something sticky and red.

Brad saw it. ‘Hey, I did hit it.’

Good
, he thought, and cast his mind back to the shape on the slip path. He’d seen black bears around the Appalachians before, but what had stood in the centre of that trail was no bear – he knew that even with the low visibility. It wasn’t like anything he recognised.

He could hear Amanda gasping and slowed his pace. He didn’t want to stop, but he knew what she was experiencing. Even in an environment of frozen water, dehydration was a danger to both experienced and amateur hikers alike. He slid the pack off his shoulder so he could pull a water bottle free.

‘C’mon, sip slowly. You’re doing great.’

Twigs snapped behind him. Both of them froze, paralysed by the sound of movement behind the tree line. Their breath created small plumes around their faces before dissipating into the white landscape.

A creaking beside them made Brad whirl with the gun. He found himself aiming it shakily at a tree that had become overburdened with snow. A huge mound slipped from a branch to fall harmlessly to the ground.

He laughed nervously. ‘I knew that was probably all it was.’

He looked down at Amanda, but her face was half-hidden by the hand she held over her nose and lips. Brad had been breathing through his mouth to avoid taking the stinging air into his nostrils, but now he tested the air and it wasn’t the cold that assaulted his senses. It was back – that shitty, rank, animal stench.

‘God, no.’ Amanda buried her face into the side of his parka.

What Brad had taken to be a tree trunk shifted on the darkening slope. The enormous hulking shape swayed slightly, a snow-covered colossus. Though it was partially obscured by the trees and falling snow, Brad could see that his first thought had been correct – the limbs were too long and the head too small for it to be a bear. It also looked to be well over ten feet tall; even a full-grown male grizzly topped out at about seven or eight, max.

‘I love you,’ he said to Amanda.

She nodded and said something back, but it was muffled by his parka. Brad didn’t feel afraid anymore. His wife’s frightened shivering brought forth in him a growing anger and a determination to protect her with his life.

He levelled the gun at the creature’s enormous barrel chest.
This is gonna hurt you more than it is me, buddy
. . .
I hope
, he thought.

Without taking his eyes off the figure, he leaned down close to Amanda’s ear. ‘No matter what happens, if I say run, you run. Don’t look back. I’ll be right behind you, but don’t stop until you get to the first trekking station – the one with the emergency callbox. Tell the ranger –’

He stopped as a booming
whoop
caused the snow to fall from the tree branches around them. Brad flinched, then tried to swallow. His throat and mouth were bone dry. The thing thumped the ground with both arms and Brad actually felt the enormous power of the movement through the soles of his feet. The
whoop
came again, then the thing charged ten feet towards them and stopped.

Brad took an involuntary step backwards, dragging Amanda with him. With one hand he pulled her away from his body and shook her until she looked up at him. Her face was wet and her mouth was turned down in fear. He saw that her nose was running.

‘You gotta go now,’ he said. ‘Remember what I told you – run and don’t look back.’

He kissed her quickly and she tried to cling onto him.

‘Don’t look back, baby – I’ll catch up.’ He pushed her hard.

She seemed about to turn back towards him when the
whoop
came again, followed by deep grunting. She ran.

The creature made to follow the small running figure – until Brad stepped towards it and fired three shots. Things happened quickly then. It charged at him, faster than he’d expected. He fired again, but it was moving so fast he didn’t know if he’d hit it.

At twenty feet, it leaped. He didn’t feel the impact – everything just went black.

*

As consciousness returned, he felt the pain in his body and knew things inside were broken and torn. The shitty, rank stench was all over him – in his nostrils and mouth, on his skin. He tried to open his eyes but only one worked. He had the sensation of being carried, and looked at the ground. He saw the corner of one of those stones Amanda had wanted, the opposite-pointing arrows clear on its exposed surface.
I need to bring that back for her
, he thought crazily.