Snowbound - Crouch Blake - Страница 36

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Her feet ached. She looked down at them, but they were submerged in the snow the wind had blown against the pillar. She ran at the door and beat her fists against it and screamed. On a summer evening, her voice would’ve carried across the lake and up the mountain slopes. This night, the blizzard destroyed the echo and her voice went wherever the wind took it. She turned away from the doors, looked down toward the lake. She stamped her feet, snow continuing to fall onto the porch.

She turned back to the doors, put her lips to the snow-glazed iron: “It hurts. Please.” She registered the desperation in her voice. It scared her like nothing else had.

Devlin shut her eyes. I’m going to die out here. She ran out naked into the snow. It was waist-deep, numbing. She collapsed, sank into a drift. Above the chattering of her teeth there was only the hush of the storm, until a howl erupted across the lake.

She looked up, her head nodding with cold. The howl came again, closer this time. She struggled to her ice-burned feet. In the nearby woods, more howls answered. Not the wolves, please God, not the wolves.

Now she glimpsed something—a shape bounding through deep powder. There were tears and snowmelt in her eyes, and when she blinked them away, she saw the wolf. She looked back up the corridor of spruce leading to the lodge. The five-story tower, the projecting four-story north and south wings, stood black against the storm.

A series of explosions shattered the silence. She felt the vibration in her chest. Somewhere in the distance, an avalanche thundered down a mountainside.

An idea struck her—she envisioned climbing up to the veranda. She would break a window, slip into the library.

Now the wolf was coming toward her through the snow.

By the time she reached the end of the south wing, she was moaning from the pain. Her hair hung in her eyes and when she tried to brush it away, it broke off. To stay above the snow, she held on to the cold rock of the first level, making her way around the chimney to the back side of the south wing, coughing now in painful, choking fits.

Thirty yards from the veranda, her left foot stepped on something. She bent down, brushed away the snow. Screamed. A woman sat against the stone wall, naked, half-eaten. While new snow blanketed the dead girl’s face, Devlin pushed on toward the veranda, swimming through snowdrifts as deep as she was tall.

Now the burning had begun to subside in her feet and hands, her extremities assuming a clumsiness that made it impossible to grip the stone wall. She looked down at the deadweight hanging at the ends of her arms, imagined the flesh and the bone and the blood freezing solid in her fingers, wondered if she’d already lost them.

The steps to the veranda were buried, the balustrade covered. She fought her way through the snow, her cheeks going numb, the dull intoxication of hypothermia beginning to cloud her brain. From below she could see the French doors leading into the library, the glass panes fogged, firelight ricocheting off a wall of books.

Devlin heard something behind her, turned, saw three wolves emerge around the corner of the south wing, only their heads visible, rising and falling in the deepening snow.

She backed up to the foot of the stone steps, nothing to do now but watch them come, steel herself to die. She closed her eyes, felt the snow collecting on her face, her eyelids, the tip of her nose. Possessed by a strange, sudden warmth, she sensed the delusional euphoria lurking, and she welcomed it. Her lips moved in rhythm with her thoughts. She was thinking that she would have a little nap to gather her strength and when she woke she would climb out of the snow and go inside and sit by the fire.

But there was no great urgency. She could last the night if she had to. She could last until spring, until the thaw. She was finally comfortable and getting warmer by the minute.

Devlin heard the wolves coming now, tramping toward her through the snow, snarling, the sound of their great jaws snapping closed all around her like gunshots in the night.

What They Lost

FIFTY-TWO

Twenty minutes had passed since he’d thrown the teenager out into the storm, and in the dining room, the oblivious Texans were still playing Hold ’Em for foolish stakes, trashed beyond all reason.

He’d lived in this lodge and run its business going on ten years, with nothing approaching this level of catastrophe—Gerald dead, now Paul, and that woman, Kalyn, still unaccounted for, though Donald, that imminently capable sociopath, would surely find her before dawn, as he had so many others.

Ethan reclined in one of the brown leather chairs in the vicinity of the library’s hearth, his legs stretched across the matching ottoman. He’d left his brother in his bedroom in that chair by the fireplace, Gerald in the south-wing alcove, where Kalyn had slit his throat. He’d deal with it all in the morning—the cleanup, public relations with the Texans, if they even remembered—and think of nothing more tonight but how monumentally fucked up he was about to get.

He filled his lungs with a hefty intake of smoke.

When it finally hit him, Ethan let the long bamboo pipe slip from his fingers and eased back into the chair, grinning stupidly at the ceiling, blowing smoke rings at the fire.

Through the opium fog, he heard a banging sound, thought for a moment it was his heart, since frequently, after a big hit, it raced and thumped in his chest like a blacksmith shaping out a piece of iron. But this wasn’t that. He could feel his heartbeat, which was soft and slow; there was something comforting about its methodically steady pace.

He rarely hauled himself out of the chair on nights he smoked, preferring to pass out before the warmth of the fire, letting the twisting flames and the coals and the sounds they made occupy his mind.

It took considerable effort to maneuver out of the chair. At last, he did, looked down at his feet when finally standing, puzzled at the strange sensation, as if he was watching appendages that didn’t belong to him. He certainly couldn’t feel them, even as he walked onto the freezing stone of the lobby, where Donald was already waiting in the vicinity of the door with his shotgun.

Ethan said, “Tenacious little thing, isn’t she? Give me that.” He swiped the shotgun out of Donald’s hand. “Wanna watch her go airborne?” he asked.

The guard chuckled as Ethan slid back the three iron bolts and pulled open the doors.

From Don’s perspective, it appeared as if the back of Ethan’s head exploded, his knees buckling, his body dropping like an inanimate sack of bones to the stone, a razor shard of Ethan’s skull lodged in Don’s eye.

A figure stood in the threshold, shadowy and formless in the candlelight. Don was backpedaling, reaching for the Glock in his jacket as a second muzzle flash blinded him, followed by a fragment of white-hot pain that was the end.

FIFTY-THREE

Will Innis, frostbitten, mauled, half-delirious with cold and exhaustion, limped through the open doors into the lodge, glancing down at the two men he’d shot, both undoubtedly gone, great pools of blood like black lacquer in the light of a nearby lantern.

Footsteps resonated through a passage at the other end of the lobby, and uncomfortable with the .45, the way it had seemed to spring out of his hand when he’d pulled the trigger, he traded it for the shotgun of the first man he’d killed.

Pumping it, he aimed down the passage as three shadows emerged into the lobby, silhouetted by candlelight.

One of them shouted, “Ethan, you having a little target practice without us?”

The first blast filled the lobby.

Will pumped again, fired again, the men running now, chased by two more thunderous booms that put everything quiet.

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