The Servants of Twilight (54 page)
“But you’ve got to . . . look out for Joey,” Charlie said. “Better cut a piece of line . . . put him on a tether.”
That was a good suggestion. Out in the open field, visibility was only a dozen yards in the best moments, declining to less than four yards when the wind whipped up and the snow squalled. It would be easy for Joey to wander a few steps off course, and once they were separated, they would find it difficult if not impossible to locate each other again. She cut a length of rope from the coil that hung on her backpack and made a tether that allowed the boy six feet of play; she linked them, waist to waist.
Charlie repeatedly, nervously looked back the way they had come.
Christine was more disturbed by the fact that Chewbacca, too, was watching the trail along which they’d come. He was still lying down, still relatively calm, but his ears had perked up, and he was growling softly in the back of his throat.
She helped Charlie and Joey put on their ski masks because they would need them now, whether or not the eye holes restricted their vision. She put on her own mask, replaced her hood, pulled the drawstring tight under her chin.
Joey rose without being told. She decided that was a good sign. He still seemed lost, detached, uninterested in what was happening around him, but at least on a subconscious level he knew it was time to go, which meant he wasn’t
completely
beyond reach.
completely
beyond reach.
Christine helped Charlie get to his feet.
He looked bad.
This last half mile to the caves was going to be sheer torture for him. But there was nothing else they could do.
Keeping one hand on Charlie’s good arm, ready to provide support if he needed it, tethered to Joey, she led them into the meadow. The wind was a raging beast. The air temperature was at least twenty below zero. The snowflakes were not really flakes anymore; they had shrunk to tiny, crystal pellets that bounced off Christine’s insulated clothing with a sharp ticking sound. If Hell was cold instead of hot, this was what it must be like.
65
Ashes and half-burned
black branches were all that remained of the fire that had recently flourished in the middle of the deer path. Kyle Barlowe kicked at the charred detritus, scattering it.
black branches were all that remained of the fire that had recently flourished in the middle of the deer path. Kyle Barlowe kicked at the charred detritus, scattering it.
He stepped under the rocky overhang and looked at the abandoned backpack. There were scraps of paper in one corner of the rocky niche, wrappers from prepackaged gauze bandages.
“You were right,” Burt Tully said. “The man’s been hurt.”
“Bad enough so he can’t carry his pack anymore,” Barlowe said, turning away from the abandoned gear.
“But I’m still not sure we should go after him, just the four of us,” Tully said. “We need reinforcements.”
“There’s no time to go for them,” Kyle Barlowe said.
“But he . . . he’s killed so many of us.”
“Are you turning yellow on us?”
“No, no,” Tully said, but he looked scared.
“You’re a soldier now,” Barlowe said. “With God’s protection.”
“I know. It’s just . . . this guy . . . Harrison . . . he’s damned
good
.”
good
.”
“Not as good as he was before Denny shot him.”
“But
he
shot Denny! He must still have a lot on the ball.”
he
shot Denny! He must still have a lot on the ball.”
Impatiently, Kyle said, “You saw the place farther back on the trail, where he fell. There was
more
blood there, where she came and helped him.”
more
blood there, where she came and helped him.”
“But reinforcements—”
“Forget it,” Kyle said, pushing past him.
He had his doubts, too, and he wondered if he was being sharp with Burt only to push his own second thoughts out of his mind.
Edna Vanoff and Mother Grace were waiting on the trail.
The old woman didn’t look well. Her eyes were bloodshot, deeply sunken, pinched half shut by the sooty flesh that ringed them. She stood round-shouldered, bent at the waist, the very image of exhaustion.
Barlowe was amazed that she had come this far. He had wanted her to stay back at the cabin, with guards, but she had insisted on going farther into the mountains with them. He knew she was a vital woman, possessed of considerable strength and stamina for her age, but he was surprised by her unflagging progress through the woods. Occasionally they had to help her over a rough spot, and once he had even carried her for thirty yards or so, but for the most part she had made it on her own.
“How long ago did they leave this place?” Grace asked him, her voice as cracked and bloodless as her lips.
“Hard to say. Fire’s cold, but in this weather the embers would cool off real fast.”
Burt Tully said, “If Harrison is as badly wounded as we think, they can’t be making good time. We must be closing on them. We can afford to go slowly, be careful, and make sure we don’t walk into another ambush.”
Grace said, “No, if they’re close, let’s hurry, get it over with.”
She turned, took one step, stumbled, fell.
Barlowe lifted her to her feet. “I’m worried about you, Mother.”
She said, “I’m fine.”
But Edna Vanoff said, “Mother, you look . . . wrung out.”
“Maybe we should rest here a few minutes,” Burt said.
“No!” Mother Grace said. Her bloodshot eyes transfixed them, each in turn. “Not a few minutes. Not even
one
minute. We don’t dare give the boy a second more than we have to. I’ve told you . . . each second he lives, his power increases. I’ve told you a thousand times!”
one
minute. We don’t dare give the boy a second more than we have to. I’ve told you . . . each second he lives, his power increases. I’ve told you a thousand times!”
Barlowe said, “But Mother, if anything happens to you, the rest of us won’t be able to go on.”
He flinched from the penetrating power of her eyes. And now her voice had a special quality that entered it only when she was having a vision, a piercing resonance that vibrated in his bones: “If I fail, you
must
go on. You
will
go on. It’s blasphemy to say your allegiance is to me rather than to God. You
will
go on until your own legs fail, until you can’t
crawl
another foot. And then you will
still
go on, or God will have no pity on you. No pity and no mercy. If you fail Him in this, He will let your souls be conscripted into the armies of
Hell
.”
must
go on. You
will
go on. It’s blasphemy to say your allegiance is to me rather than to God. You
will
go on until your own legs fail, until you can’t
crawl
another foot. And then you will
still
go on, or God will have no pity on you. No pity and no mercy. If you fail Him in this, He will let your souls be conscripted into the armies of
Hell
.”
Some people were not swayed when Mother Grace spoke to them in this manner. Some heard nothing but the ranting of an old fool. Some fled as if she were threatening them. Some laughed. But Kyle Barlowe had always been humbled. He was still enthralled by her voice.
But will I be enthralled and obedient when she finally tells me to kill the boy? Or will I resist the violence that I used to thrive upon? Wrong-thought.
They left the rocky overhang, headed down the deer trail, Barlowe leading, Edna Vanoff second, Mother Grace third, and Burt Tully bringing up the rear. The howling of the wind seemed like a great demonic voice, and to Barlowe it was a constant reminder of the malignant forces that were even now conspiring to take control of the earth.
66
Christine was beginning
to think they would never get out of the meadow alive.
to think they would never get out of the meadow alive.
This was worse than a blizzard. It was a whiteout, with the wind so strong it would have been a hurricane in a tropical climate, and with the snow coming down so hard and so fast that she couldn’t see more than two or three feet ahead. The world had vanished; she was moving through a nightmare landscape without detail, a world composed solely of snow and gray light; she could not see the forest on any side. She couldn’t always see Joey when he ranged to the end of the tether. It was terrifying. And although the light was gray and diffuse, there was an all-pervading glare that made her eyes burn, and she realized that the threat of snow-blindness was very real. What would they do if they had to feel their way through the meadow, sightless, seeking the northeast end of the valley by instinct alone? She knew the answer: They would die. She paused every thirty steps to look at the compass, sheltering it in her gloved hands, and although she tried to move always in a straight line, she found, on several occasions, that they were heading in the wrong direction, and she had to correct their course.
Even if they didn’t get disoriented and lost, they could die out here if they didn’t move fast enough, for it was colder than she had ever thought it could be, so cold that she wouldn’t have been surprised if she had suddenly frozen solid, upright, in midstride.
She was worried sick about Joey, but he stayed on his feet and plodded along at her side long after she expected him to drop. His quasi-catatonic withdrawal was, ironically, of benefit to him in these circumstances; having tuned out the real world, he was less affected by the cold and wind than he otherwise might have been. Even so, the elements would take their toll of him in time. She would soon have to get him off the meadow, into the comparative shelter of the forest, whether or not they reached the area in which the caves were situated.
Charlie fared worse than the boy. He stumbled frequently, went to his knees a couple of times. After five minutes, he occasionally leaned on Christine for support. After ten minutes, he needed her more than occasionally. After fifteen, he required her support constantly, and they were slowed to little more than a shuffle.
She couldn’t tell either him or Joey that she was soon going to head toward the woods, for the wind made conversation impossible. When she faced into the wind, her words were driven back into her throat even as she spoke them, and when she faced away from it, her words were torn like fragile cloth and scattered in meaningless syllables.
For long minutes she lost sight of Chewbacca, and several times she was certain she’d never see the dog again, but he always reappeared, bedraggled and obviously weak, but alive. His fur was crusted with ice, and when he appeared out of the surging rivers of snow, he seemed like a revenant journeying back from the far side of the grave.
The wind swept broad areas of the meadow almost clean of snow, leaving just a few well-packed inches in some places, but drifts piled up against even the smallest windbreaks and filled in gullies and depressions, creating traps that could not be seen or avoided. They had abandoned Charlie’s snowshoes with his backpack, partly because his wounded shoulder prevented him from carrying them any longer and partly because he was no longer sufficiently surefooted to use them. As a result, she and Joey couldn’t use their snowshoes to go across the drifts because they had to follow a route Charlie could negotiate with them. At times she found herself suddenly wading in snow up to her knees, then up to mid-thigh and getting deeper, and she had to backtrack and find a way around the drift, which wasn’t easy when she couldn’t see where the hell she was going. At other times, she stepped into holes that the snow had filled in; with no warning at all, from one step to the other, she was waist-deep.
She was afraid there might be an abrupt drop-off or a really deep sinkhole somewhere in the meadow. Sinkholes were not uncommon in mountain country like this; they had passed a few earlier in the day, seemingly bottomless holes, some ancient and ringed with water-smoothed limestone. If she took one misplaced step and plunged down into snow over her head, Charlie might not be able to get her out again, even if she didn’t break a leg in the process. By the same token, she wasn’t sure she could extricate them from a similar trap if they fell into it.
She became so concerned about this danger that she stopped and untied the tether from her waist. She was afraid of dragging Joey into a chasm with her. She coiled the line around her right hand; she could always let go, let it unravel, if she actually did sink into a trap.
She told herself that the things we fear most never happen to us, that it’s always something else that brings us down, something totally unexpected—like Grace Spivey’s chance encounter with them in the South Coast Plaza parking lot last Sunday afternoon. But when they were well into the meadow, when she was almost ready to lead them back toward the eastern forest again, the worst happened, after all.
Charlie had just found new reserves of strength and had let go of her arm when she put her foot down into suddenly deep snow and realized she had found the very thing she feared. She tried to throw herself backward, but she had been leaning forward to begin with, bent by the wind, and her momentum was all forward, and she couldn’t change her balance in time. Unleashing a loud scream that the wind softened to a quiet cry, she dropped into snow over her head, struck bottom eight feet down, crumpling, with her left leg twisted painfully under her.
She looked up, saw the snow caving in above her. It was filling the hole she’d made when she’d fallen through it.
She was going to be buried alive.
She had read newspaper stories about workmen buried alive, suffocated or crushed to death, in caved-in ditches, no deeper than this. Of course, snow wasn’t as heavy as dirt or sand, so she wouldn’t be crushed, and she would be able to claw her way through it, and even if she couldn’t get all the way out, she would still be able to breathe under the snow, for it wasn’t as compact and suffocating as earth, but that realization did not alleviate her panic.
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