Dean Koontz - Dark of the Woods

The light was slowly beginning to leave the sky when they were near to the end of the valley. For the last half hour, the land had sloped upward, growing steeper and steeper, and their spirits had lifted with it. There had been no encounter with the searchers and, except for the area of the stream itself, the pass was thickly treed, providing heavy cover for them to slip through the net of their captors. A thousand feet from the brink of the valley and a reprieve from the from the pressure the Alliance had put on them, Davis called a halt so that they might gather energies for the last leg of the assault and so that he could reconnoiter to see if things were going to be as simple as they seemed.

They were not.

He had left Leah and gone only a third of the way up the slope, slipping quietly from tree to tree, when he saw the sentries stationed only a dozen feet down from the top of the ridge. They were stooped so that they could not be silhouetted against the sky, and each of them cradled a rifle across his knees. They peered intently downward, and he realized that, if the valley had not been slightly darker than the top of the ridge in these last minutes of daylight, they would be able to see him as he now saw them. They were no more than five feet apart. If that spacing had been maintained across the entire width of the pass, there must be a hundred and fifty men in the line. Which meant there had been other helicopters involved in the operation and that the men had been brought up from the other side of the pass. It seemed as if the entire mountain range had been blanketed by the Alliance. It pleased him to know that they considered the two of them important game. But he supposed any totalitarian government must go to great extremes to punish each and every violator of its dictums, lest one man who escapes their wrath becomes a symbol of rebellion for the masses.

Carefully, so as to make not the slightest sound or present even the slightest movement to the sentries, he worked his way back through the brush and the snow to Leah. He noticed, as he moved, that the wind had picked up, even though the snow had stopped, and that the disturbances he caused in the landscape were fairly swiftly eradicated by the brisk air.

"Well?" she said when he returned.

"We can't get through."

"I have bad news too," she said.

"What?"

"See that clearing half a mile down in the valley?"

He nodded.

"A moment ago, a line of searchers moved through it, each only a few feet away from the other. They must have been in the woods to either side of the clearing with the same distance between them. Every other man carried a short-range heat sensor and was fanning it in front of him."

He looked at the now empty clearing in the fading light below. "They'll be here in half an hour."

"Less. They were walking rather fast."

Davis finished digging the snug cave into the drift and said, "Hand me the blanket." When she passed the coverlet to him, he pushed it to the back of the snow-walled chamber without unfolding it, examined his handiwork once again, then turned around, smiling. "It's all done and looks like it won't cave in on us. We ought to have even a few minutes to spare to give the wind a chance to erase our tracks."

"Proteus," she reminded him.

He turned to the hovering protection robot, reluctant to make this final move. He had come to depend on the presence of a mechanical bodyguard, and there was something almost sacrilegious — something taboo — about shutting it down without having a temporary replacement. But when he looked down the slope and saw the lamps of the soldiers who were beating the brush for them, lamps lighted only moments earlier, not even five minutes away now, he reached out, thumbed the stud that opened Proteus's sliding access panel, and quickly cycled down the machine's systems with one toggle control until it was totally inactive except for its grav plates, which damped slowly to a complete shutoff, letting the sphere settle softly to the ground without sustaining damage. None of the sensors nodes gleamed from without or within. For the first time in nearly three years, Proteus was "asleep."

Davis hefted the sphere, pushed it through the narrow tunnel that led into the snow cave, shoved it to the far end of the small chamber. Leah went through next, disappearing from sight, and he brought up the tail end after taking a final look at the approaching, irresistible line of lights that bisected the valley floor. Inside, he required two minutes of hasty work to block off the entrance with snow which had been piled in the entrance tunnel for that purpose. He knew the seal must be clumsily obvious from outside, a blotch on the smooth sweep of the remainder of the drift, but he could do nothing more but trust to the now rather stiff and persistent winds and the whipping clouds of fine, dry snow to conceal his labors as well as the majority of their footprints.

Inside the igloolike dwelling, the air was relatively warm, for there was no wind at all, and what little body heat did escape them was contained in the small area that had been carved out of the white stuff. Snow proved such a good insulator, against even the slightest draft, that he wondered why he had not thought of this the first night out rather than erecting the flimsy and dangerous lean-to. He supposed it was because the survival instinct had not yet bloomed from the bud he had then possessed.

They sat, quietly, shoulder to shoulder with Proteus at their feet, still and mute.

They could hear a faint wind.

As yet, nothing more.

Davis felt as if they were mice, huddled there in the darkness, anxiously waiting for the cats to pass by and leave them so they might resume life as normal mice should live it. And, like the mouse in his wall nest, he felt as much relieved as afraid. There was at least two, and possibly three feet of snow on every side of them except one. Snow would either hold their body heat within the little room he had excavated or filter the warm air into coolness before it reached the world outside. On the one side where there was no snow, the back of the chamber, there was a rock wall, which should certainly prevent the emanations of bodily heat from reaching the delicate sensors of the thermal detectors carried by the Alliance troops. If things worked as they planned, as they thought they should, the searchers would stomp right by them and collide with the sentries at the top of the ridge. They would then conclude that their quarry had somehow gotten through the pass — either before the line of sentries had been posted or in the first moments of the watch when the soldiers' attentions were not as sharp as they should have been. Excuses would be made, heads would roll, but at least he and Leah would get by unscathed.

He hoped.

"Have they gone by and—" she began.

He shushed her.

Outside, the faint sound of footsteps, breathing, and a few muttered commands passed as if down a line in chain communication, echoed in the night and found their way through the shell of the snow cave.

Davis sat very still, as if the slightest movement might cause the drift in which they hid to collapse and blow away on the wind, leaving them exposed and defenseless.

The voices faded; the footsteps faded; the breathing sounds were gone…

The wind replaced all of them.

"I think it worked," she whispered.

"Let's wait," he said.

The time went by so slowly that he felt he was going to have to scream to get it moving again. He remembered how, when he was hollowing out the drift to make a place to hide, the minutes went by so rapidly. If time were not only so subjective, but objective as well, maybe aman would not have so much trouble in life!

Then the sound of footsteps came again.