Four Live Rounds

Jesus. Six of them.

He jogged up through the trees.

It was snowing again, and he thought he heard thunder, but he wasn’t sure with his heart banging relentlessly in his chest.

The wolves loped along beside him as Will tried to retrace his own footprints, and something snapped near the back of his left leg, the click of teeth clamping shut.

He stopped, spun around, leveled the .45 between the big black wolf’s eyes, and fired.

The report filled the woods, and the wolves scattered.

The one he’d killed lay crumpled in the snow, a mound of black fur. “Go find an elk or something!” Will yelled.

He pushed on through the trees, now moving at a solid clip through the snow.

He kept expecting to emerge from the forest, and at last he did, but it wasn’t into the meadow they’d camped in.

He came out of the trees, and the ground sloped for two hundred yards down to the shore of a narrow lake whose water appeared black as blood. The inner lake. He looked to the near end, saw where a ribbon of water flowed out of it, knew that was the stream they’d followed earlier in the day, hoped it would guide him back to the meadow, to Devlin.

As he started for it, he heard something moving in the woods, and not creeping or sneaking, but the full-on noise of something, somethings, running toward him.

He ran for the end of the lake, glancing over his shoulder every few steps, trying to keep his footing in the snow. The third time he looked back, he saw five shadows break out of the trees, racing toward him in tight formation, kicking up powder clouds in their wake.

It was snowing hard again, and the moon disappeared, the world now gone cavern black. He could see nothing, but he heard them coming, and as he looked back, the sky flickered with lightning and he saw them—Oh God, so close—aimed the .45, firing at the lead wolf, the big white one with pink eyes. It was panting, its huge blue tongue swinging out of its mouth.

Lights-out. No way to know if I hit—

Something rammed him from behind, a wolf throwing the full weight of its muscled frame into his back.

Will went down, toppled over several times in the snow, jaws snapping all around him, as he smelled the sharp odor of their scent glands, then on his feet again, somehow untouched.

Lightning offered a fleeting glimpse of where he stood, forty feet from the lake’s edge, the mouth of the stream, and the wolves surrounding him, snarling, growling, the ones behind him lunging at the back of his legs.

Darkness again. He’d dropped the gun when he’d fallen up the slope, had nothing but his bare, freezing hands. This is not happening.

Something ripped a piece out of his leg and he screamed—more out of fear than pain, too charged with adrenaline to feel a thing—kept spinning around in the merciless dark, his hands outstretched, getting shredded as he fended off bites.

The sky lighted up, the wolves right there, five sets of bared teeth and eyes mad with the ravenous rage of the hunt, crouched down, on the verge of lunging.

Will spotted a stand of spruce trees at the mouth of the stream, thought, You get to those trees and you climb them. He pushed on through the dark as thunder echoed across the lake, struggling against the mounting pain in his legs.

Electricity raked the sky. He was just five yards from the trees, saw that the branches were low, thought, I can climb that.

The Lodge That Doesn’t Exist

FORTY-ONE

Devlin crawled out of her sleeping bag and unzipped the tent, caught a draft of bitter, choking cold that ran down into her lungs like battery acid. The moon shone upon the meadow. The snow had let up. She didn’t know how long she’d hidden in her sleeping bag—an hour, perhaps two—and though, up until this moment, she’d done exactly what her father had said, not leaving the tent, she still felt like a coward.

It had been some time since she’d heard the gunshots, and the Wolverine Hills stood silent now. She laced her boots and zipped up her oversize parka, dug the pair of gloves and hat out of her father’s backpack. In Kalyn’s, she found the .357. She’d never held a gun in her life, but she picked it up and put it in her pocket.

The snow came halfway to her knees, having partially buried the tracks around the tent. She followed them down through the meadow to the point where they split, one set veering into the woods, the other crossing the meadow, back toward the tent, missing it by less than ten feet.

She was seized with a sudden coughing fit, her eyes watering as her lungs strained against the cold. When it passed, she turned and followed the tracks that went by the tent, her legs sore from yesterday’s hike, her lungs raw, her body reeling with every breath.

She pushed on through woods, down small hills and up them again, through glades of drifted snow, thinking the tracks seemed strange. They didn’t go in any one direction, but wound erratically through the spruce, crisscrossing over themselves, and, at one point, even circling the same tree three times.

Her legs were killing her when she came out of the trees at last. She stopped to let her racing heart slow down. A long lake stretched out below her, and the way the moonlight fell upon it, the surface resembled black ice, though it had yet to freeze. Her eyes followed the course of what she hoped were her father’s tracks. They beelined downslope toward the lake’s end, and she smiled, spotted movement by the water, just a few hundred yards away.

Dad. She almost shouted the word as she started down the slope.

Thirty yards out from the trees, she stopped. From the woods, she had seen only movement by the lake. On closer inspection, she saw with more clarity what she was heading toward, and it didn’t appear to be her father. It looked like several people, children perhaps, on their hands and knees, crawling around in the snow in some sort of game. In the windless silence, she could hear them, but they weren’t speaking any language she understood. They were growling and snarling, fighting over something. Wolves. Why do Dad’s tracks go down there?

She turned around, and quietly, carefully started back up the slope.

Halfway to the woods, she felt it coming—an insuppressible itch in her lungs, growing exponentially with every passing second. Hold it, Devi. You have to hold it. The cough jumped out of her, then another, a series of violent spasms that shook her body and burned her throat.

When the coughing spell had passed, she looked downslope, saw the wolves already coming—five of them bounding toward her through the snow.

She ran for the woods, only fifteen yards away, but her legs felt leaden and stiff, barely capable of pushing her up the hill. She lost traction and fell facedown in the snow. By the time she’d regained her footing, she heard the wolves panting, close enough for her to see their eyes gleaming, big tongues lolling out of their smiling, bloody mouths.