Though Matt shouted so loudly that his voice choked on her name, his desperate tone sounded flat and muffled, even to his own ears.
“I shouldn’t have left her alone. What the fuck was I thinking?”
It’d seemed like a simple enough plan at first: him leading one of the brothers into the forest while Mona finished off the other one. But he’d forgotten how quickly squalls could form in these parts. Sometimes, the change was so abrupt that it was like someone had thrown a switch on the control panels of reality. He and his father had once spent an afternoon of extracurricular activities with one of their living toys only to find, mere hours later, that snow had fallen so quickly that the cabin door wouldn’t so much as budge.
He could still remember the girl, curled up on blood spattered sheets, naked and trembling, as she pleaded between sobs for them to just let her go. To let her live. When they had done nothing more than ignore her, her pleas turned into a single repeated word: why?
She’d reminded Matt at the time of a wounded pixie: short hair, pointy ears, smears of blood on her back that very well could have come from having the wings plucked out of her spine. But now, in his memory, the face began to morph. The cheekbones seemed to raise as the face became less angular and the ears rounded as her hair lengthened like time-lapse footage. The thin lips become fuller, the eyes a little less round, and the skin tone lightened subtly. No longer was she the hitchhiker with disproportionately long legs and willowy arms. Now it was Mona that he saw, cowering against the log walls as his father approached with Bowie knife in hand. But her eyes looked past his old man, past the flannel shirt and gleaming blade; she stared directly into Matt’s soul as she parted her lips and formed that single question: why?
“No!”
Matt pounded on the side of his head as if his palm could somehow dislodge this faulty memory from his imagination. But the image clung tenaciously to tangled synapses, growing more and more vivid with every step he took. Now he could see the puffiness beneath the left eye that, if she’d been allowed to live, eventually would have turned to swelling. The chip in the front incisor from where she’d bit the iron railings of the bed to keep from screaming. The glossiness of fear in eyes that seemed to both beg and condemn in a single glance.
“She’s okay.” He tried to tell himself. “She’s tough. Whatever’s going on, she’ll get out of it. She always gets out of it. She has to.”
What the hell had happened anyway? When Matt saw that it was the larger of the two men who’d ran into the woods after him, he’d expected it to all be over quickly. The little one would be no match for his Mona. He had the timid mannerisms of fodder, of someone who’d stumbled into an abattoir and only became a butcher because the others who worked there assumed he was one of their own. He’d fooled them into thinking he was worthy of a the white apron and cleaver when, in fact, he was actually destined for the hook.
But Mona’s screams… the pain that trembled her voice even from such a great distance: what the fuck had went wrong?
Even though the question plagued his mind, Matt instinctively knew the answer. In a lot of ways, Mona was like a cat. The thrill of the hunt wasn’t enough for her. She needed to draw the game out, to psychologically bat her prey back and forth before plunging her teeth into its jugular. She needed to play. Only this time, she’d apparently taken it too far… and was now paying the price.
Lifting his head, Matt fully expected to see nothing more than the same vortex of snow that had swirled around him for the last ten minutes. But there, in the distance, he could just make it out: a large, dark blob that was shaped vaguely like a house. Like a phantom in the storm, it faded in and out of existence. One moment he could see it so clearly that he could almost make out the shape of the chimney on the slanted roof; the next, there was nothing but flakes of snow whirling on eddies of wind.
But those brief glimpses were enough. Matt felt warmth flood through his chest as his pulse quickened. He bounded through the snow like a lumbering bear, adjusting his trajectory every time the farmhouse manifested through the blizzard so that he was heading straight for it. Leafless brambles snagged his clothes as if they were the fingers of the forest trying to pull him back into its depths and hidden rocks sent him flailing into deep drifts; snow had become packed into his boots so tightly that it felt as if his ankles had been wrapped in cold packs and the tears in his eyes seemed to be on the verge of freezing his lashes together: but none of that mattered. He was close now, so very close that the house’s periods of invisibility were becoming less and less frequent. As if it were pulling itself into existence from the tightly clustered flakes of now.
He couldn’t hear Mona screaming anymore. But maybe he was still too far away. Maybe the wind was still masking her cries with its incessant wail… maybe she was still alive.
“She could’ve killed him.” He tried to tell himself as he scrambled closer to the house in the distance. “She could be sitting on the couch right now, looking at that catalog, and waiting for me to come back.”
Of course, there also could have been another reason that she wasn’t yelling anymore. But that was an alternative that Matt refused to entertain. His wife was alive and he’d be with her shortly: that was the only possible outcome he could accept.
For a while, it seemed as if the farmhouse always stayed the same distance away. As if it were running away from him as quickly as he stumbled toward it, mocking him with a distance he could never hope to close.
“I’m coming, baby. I’m coming….”
But then details began to present themselves. The corrugated, tin roof. The brick chimney wrapped in chicken wire, weathered clapboard walls, and windows that looked slightly askew. And then, just like that, the trees that surrounded him were gone.
Matt stepped out of the woods and, without the protective barrier of the pines to buffer it, the wind slammed into him so hard that he staggered backwards. As he struggled to retain his balance, his eyes peered through the snow, searching for even the smallest sign of the woman he loved. And that was when he noticed the car.
Even though it was practically buried in accumulation, the outline was distinctive. It was a cop car.
“Oh, fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
In a way, Matt would have almost preferred Mona to be dead than arrested. The knowledge that she was still out there somewhere, separated from him by bars and razor-wire coiled walls, would have been too much. To know that he could feel the warm touch of her hand, feel her lips brush his own: it would be like torture. At least in death he would be able to join her. At least there would be a chance they could be together again.
As he shambled closer to the parked cruiser, he realized that tracks led away from the passenger-side door. They couldn’t have been very old or else they would have already filled in like his own had. And the tracks seemed to be making a beeline directly into the forest. They disappeared into the woods almost at a forty-five degree angle from where he’d emerged. If the snow hadn’t been falling so heavily, there was a good chance that the cop would have even been close enough to see him out there in the pines.
Still… there was something about the tracks which bothered Matt. Something that didn’t quite seem right. His eyes followed the trail again and again, trying to discern exactly what was wrong with them as he hobbled closer to the car.
Now he could see that some of the snow had fallen off the roof of the cruiser when the door had been opened. It lay on the ground in a small mound with tracks cutting a solid trench through its center. But even something about that felt wrong.
He glanced into the forest again and tried to imagine the cop bolting from the car and running across the lawn. His feet would have kicked out clouds of snow in front of him as he ran and….
The snow. It should have been piled up in the opposite direction. The little dunes scattered by running legs would have been heading toward the forest if the cop had truly ran there. But they weren’t. Instead, they seemed to be leading to the car. And, now that he was closer, Matt could also see that the snow was discolored with dark splotches. As if something had dripped down and splattered against the drifts.
Blood.
At the same time this thought crossed his mind, the door of the cruiser swung open. He hadn’t been able to see the behemoth of a man through the frost-covered windows, but Earl Gruber lurched out of the car almost as if he’d been thrown off balance. His clothes were crusted with icy blood and the arrow shafts still jutted from his body; only the feathered tips were missing. He must have snapped them off to keep them from getting caught in the undergrowth as he took a more direct route back to the house. And then, realizing that Matt would return there, waited in the car as his blood slowly clotted and froze.
The large man’s face was so pale that his skin almost blended with the falling snow and he staggered forward as if nothing more than sheer willpower was keeping him alive. Bobbing and weaving, his feet crossed in
