Michael McBride - Snowblind

The frozen tears glistened on his cheeks as the flame gave up the ghost and darkness swarmed in to fill the void.

Coburn slid the dulled knife back into its scabbord and tucked it into the inside pocket of his jacket.

It was time.

He was going to have to move fast, which meant he needed to travel light. Everything he absolutely had to have from his backpack was stowed in one pocket or other, including half of the remaining food. He left the rest, along with all of the collected canned goods, in his pack, which he tucked into the corner against the wall for whoever had the misfortune of coming next. He wouldn’t be walling it up in the tunnel considering he wouldn’t be able to turn around to do so once he was inside. That in itself bolstered his confidence in his decision.

Coburn drew a deep breath and exhaled it slowly.

Keep moving forward.

Continue heading down.

Find help .

He thrust his Remington into the hole and shimmied in behind it. The smell immediately struck him, but he forced it aside. He concentrated on pushing his rifle ahead of him and then wriggling to catch up with it. Baumann’s blood had hardened to an icy crust on the dirt, making traction tenuous at best. The flow of air against his face metamorphosed from a gentle breath to a frigid gust. He braced his knees and elbows against the sides for leverage and kicked with his feet. It wasn’t long before the tunnel widened enough for him to crawl. It grew steeper and steeper, all the while the darkness faded away until it revealed a drift of snow that had formed over the mouth of the tunnel, directly overhead. Flakes had accumulated on the bloody swath where Baumann had been hauled out into the open, but had merely whitened the deep red to a washed-out pink.

Coburn shoved aside the snow and broke through the crimson ice. He widened the egress just enough to propel himself through with his arms over his head. The wind hit him like a truck, pelting him from the side with such force that the snowflakes nearly beat him back to the ground. He crouched with his rifle at port arms and surveyed his surroundings.

He was on an exposed face of the mountain, roughly thirty feet uphill from the house, which would have been indistinguishable from the surrounding field from his vantage point were it not for the holes in its roof. The forest beyond had been swallowed by the blizzard to such a degree that he couldn’t see a single tree, which meant that anything lurking beneath them wouldn’t be able to see him either. Beside him was a boulder with less accumulated snow on it than its surroundings, presumably because it had been rolled away from the mouth of the tunnel. A sheer granite escarpment rose toward the sky behind him, at the top of which was a crown of ponderosa pines that speared the belly of the storm. Loose talus covered the steep ground, making every step a challenge as he negotiated a trail, of sorts, that would make a mountain goat think twice. He stayed low and hugged the rock formation to keep from both being seen and being thrown down the slope by the wind. Each gust cut through his clothing and seemed to peel off increasingly deeper layers of his bare skin. He could already feel the ice freezing in his beard.

The cliff at his back grew shorter until it melded into the forest. The path widened slightly and veered to the left, tracing the topography of the mountain into a deep valley, across which he could barely see the opposite forested slope through the snow. A twinge of panic momentarily paralyzed him as he rounded the bend and the house disappeared into the blizzard behind him. With the homestead gone, his bearings would be completely shot. It wouldn’t be long before he wouldn’t be able to find his way back again. The wind was already erasing his tracks. He had abandoned the only known shelter from the elements and forsaken it for the unknown.

He closed his eyes and focused on his breathing.

No, he had left the house behind in order to embark upon a trek that led to salvation. This was what he had to do. This was his only hope for survival.

“Keep moving forward,” he whispered. Fresh blood seeped through his cracked lips.

He placed one foot in front of the other. Repeated the process. Again. Again. Again-again. Again-again. Again-again-again-again-again-again.

The forest closed in from his left. The drop-off to his right grew so steep he could have stepped off the path and onto the treetops. He imagined a stream somewhere below the clouds; a crystal clear ribbon of water so cold in the summer that only the rainbow trout could tolerate it for more than a few seconds. He tried to picture it as it must be now, buried underneath inches of ice and feet of snow. Was it the stream Vigil had fallen into which felt like a lifetime ago now? Nothing around him looked familiar, and yet at the same time looked exactly like every other stretch of wilderness.

Down .

He needed to focus on the plan. He didn’t need to know exactly where he was going, only the direction that would eventually guide him to help.

The wind screamed through the valley, beneath the sound of which he thought he heard a distant bass rumble.

He picked up his pace; faster and faster until he was running, lifting his knees high, snow flying from his feet. Distance. He needed to create distance between himself and his pursuit; a gap too wide to close, miles of virgin white snow already absolved of his footprints.

Pine branches overburdened by accumulation sagged across the path in front of him. He held his rifle up, closed his eyes, and plowed straight through. The snow hit him in the face like an icy fist. He opened his eyes and let out an involuntary shout.

There was someone on the path, staring directly at him.

He tried to stop his momentum, but his feet slid out from beneath him, depositing him on his rear end. His Remington fell from his grasp and disappeared into the snow. He lunged to the side, thrust his hands into the snow, and grabbed his rifle. He brought it to his shoulder and aimed at his attacker-

“No…” he whispered.

He hadn’t recognized the face with the hair covered with white and the ice that had formed in patches on the blue skin and in the brows, lashes, and beard. But the eyes were unmistakable.

They were Baumann’s eyes.

Todd’s head had been raggedly severed from his neck at roughly the fourth cervical vertebra and impaled upon a crooked pike still ridged with bark. It had been staked into the accumulation, right in the middle of the path. There wasn’t so much as the hint of a footprint leading up to it. Beyond his old friend’s head, there was nothing but clouds and snow. The trail wound tightly to the left around another vertical stone embankment, to the right of which was a deadfall straight into the bottom of the valley, so far down he couldn’t see it through the storm.

Another bass rumble. More distinct this time. Closer. It echoed from the opposite mountainside, making its origin impossible to divine.

They were coming.

“ rrrRRaaAHHhrrr! ”

A guttural roar. Closer still.

He fished the snow out of his barrel with his index finger and directed his rifle toward the forest uphill from him.

Crashing sounds.

The treetops shook and snow fell from the branches at the crest of the second rise.

It was too soon. They couldn’t have seen through his ruse yet. It was too soon!

“Umph. Umph. Umph.”

Grunting sounds from the woods.

Closing in.

“ rrrrrrRRRRRaaaaaAAAAHHHHHhhhhrrrrrrr! ”

A roar grumbled through the valley behind him, from one side to the other, like a semi speeding past on a highway.

He glanced left. His tracks vanished into the trees, beyond which the only path led back across the treacherous scree-lined escarpment and ultimately to the house itself.