second. Pine trees, mulberry bushes intermixed with birches and oaks. Still another bolt revealed something else- something scattering before me. Something alive, quick and fleeting.
At first I thought it might be a dog. Maybe a deer. Instinct spoke to me, told me to drop to my knees while gripping the flashlight, holding it out before me. It was my only available weapon. Lightning struck. Thunder exploded. The concussion took my breath away, shook the ground at my feet. Lightning restored my sense of sight. It allowed me to spot the monster, if only for an instant. That single instant is all it took for me to know the truth.
Whalen blocked the trail.
Whalen, head shaved, dressed in dark clothing, smiling, eyes covered with goggles. Green tinted eyes. Green tinted, mechanical, night vision eyes. He stood in the center of the narrow trail, heavy rain water washing over his lean body.
All oxygen escaped my lungs. Blindness returned. But not for long.
More lightning lit up the night sky. Another eye view of the path came and went with the speed of a heartbeat.
Now the path was clear.
Like the lightning, Whalen had vanished in an instant.
Now you see the devil. Now you don’t.
Chapter 52
When I tried to walk, I tripped. With every step I took along the trail in the darkness came a branch slap to the face, a tree trunk to the thigh, a boulder to the shin. I caught a thorn from a thick bush that hung over the trail. It tore into my jeans, penetrating the skin on my lower calf. I knew I was cut. Not because I could feel the sting. But because I could feel the blood trickling down the calf muscle, warm and wet, the thick consistency not at all like the cold October rain.
It was a struggle to get anywhere in the dark. Five minutes of walking and stumbling, and I managed to cover no more than thirty or forty feet. Whether or not I was maintaining a straight line was a mystery to me. I might as well have been crawling.
The only way to continue with the blind trek was to drop down onto hands and knees, feel my way along the gravel trail the same way an animal might do it: by touch, by smell, by sound. By using as many senses as possible.
It’s exactly what I did.
From down on all fours I crawled over the smooth rocks and mud-covered gravel toward the sound of water. Not rain water falling from the sky, but stream water running heavily into a pool. I knew the pool from my childhood. It had to be the same one. The more I crawled the louder, more forceful it became. I knew the pool was situated close to the house in the woods. No more than a couple hundred feet separated the pool from the house.
I was closer to Michael than I thought. Just the thought of going to him, helping him, offered me a trace of hope and a trace was better than nothing at all.
I felt suddenly lighter.
I began to move along the earth floor with increased speed while the sound of rushing water became more intense. A sudden burst of energy filled my veins. But when something stung the back of my leg, I dropped down face-first onto the path like a sack of rags and bones.
My God, had I been shot?
The ground zero of pain was located in the back of my right thigh. From there it rippled throughout my body. The pain shot up and down my backbone with surprising efficiency. I might have rolled over onto my back then, bled to death.
But I attempted to move my feet, then my legs. Until I pulled myself up from off the wet ground. I leaned up straight, felt the welt growing behind my thigh. Because the wound was out of vision, I had no way of knowing if a bullet had actually lodged there or merely grazed the skin.
My gut reaction was a graze. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to move my leg.
Then, coming through the leaves, the quick whoosh of bullets flying overhead, slapping the foliage. Some of the rounds that pinged against the stones blew up red-yellow sparks. I dropped down hard onto my belly. My body ached while the bullets came at me fast, but missing all the time as though Whalen intended for them to miss. And I was sure he did.
Whalen had lived in these woods, hunted them for food. He knew what he was doing. The silent rounds fell short, most embedding themselves into the ground only inches from my face. Water and mud splashed into my eyes, ears, nose and mouth. The rapid fire rounds burst through the trees, but not a hint of gunfire or a muzzle flash as though Whalen were using a silencer. The scene was like something out of Michael’s manuscripts-guns, bullets, silencers. But then I was no stranger to firearms. My dad had been a trooper, a hunter, a shooter, a gun collector. I’d lived with guns for my entire childhood.
From down on the ground I reached around to my thigh, touching the spot of impact. The thick welt had already formed. There was a small tear in the jeans above it. I felt the sting of my touch. Bringing my fingertips back to my face, I raised them to my lips. I tasted the fresh blood.
The rounds kept coming at me fast, furious and accurately inaccurate. If this weren’t like a surreal dream, I would have been too petrified to move. But none of this was real to me. It was all a bizarre dream that only bordered on the realistic. At least, if I wanted to live, if I wanted Michael to live, that’s what I had to believe.
I had to do something. I could either lie there and waste precious time, worry over the pain, worry that I would never wake up from the nightmare, or I could make a move, get myself further downhill, out of range, and closer to the house in the woods. Closer to Michael.
A scream pierced the darkness-a yelp coming from behind me along the high ground. The yelp shattered my senses; cut through flesh and bone.
Whalen releasing thirty years of pent up desire?
I made a silent three count. Breathing deep, I pushed myself up and onto my feet and bolted off through the brush like an angry field cat.
Chapter 53
I ran.
Didn’t seem to matter where to, so long as he couldn’t aim a gun at me, hit me with a bullet. The whole of Mount Desolation had become an unrelenting obstacle. Branches whipped and flailed at my face, little devils stinging my arms and chest. I limped and hobbled as fast as I could, off trail, in a directionless panic, desperate to get myself out of range before one of Whalen’s near misses connected again.
My escape should have been a good thing.
But it turned out to be a grave mistake when a head-on collision with a tree trunk knocked me senseless.
Chapter 54
The noise from the slamming door shoots through me like an ice cold blade. Even Molly stops her incessant mattress jumping. She stops and stares at me. And me back at her.
The solid noise of the slamming door… It’s a noise you feel as much as hear.
“ Must be the wind,” Molly says, eyes wide.
