K Stewart - A Shot in the Dark

The roar came from my right, and I flinched into a defensive stance before I realized it had to be yards and yards away. Even with my less than functional ears, I could tell that much. The sound bounced up the mountain and back down, making it sound like a whole herd of mini-Yetis joining the chorus. I had to wonder what the sleepy denizens down below thought of this strange noise on their mountain.

Something landed in my hair and I reflexively ducked again, swiping with my free hand to discover only pine needles. Glancing up, I found Handless above me, balanced on a thin branch like a half-shattered gargoyle. “How did you even get up there?” Her mouth opened like she might speak, but only air came out, a warning hiss. “Yeah, yeah, I’m moving.” Play the Yeti’s game, I got the message. I set out again, pretty sure that having a chat with a zombie said some bad things about my sanity.

Three more times, we zigzagged our way up Pikes Peak. Each time, he lured me on with a downed tree, a roar, or even just the flash of white fur in the darkness. And each time, Handless was there, my zombie shadow reminding me what would happen if I hesitated.

As we climbed upward, and my lungs started burning with every breath, I realized exactly what he was up to. Lowlander that I was, the very altitude was going to work against me. The higher we went, the colder it got, and the thinner the air became. I stopped for longer and longer between each leg, concentrating on my breathing. I couldn’t afford to get winded, or lightheaded. I also couldn’t afford to stop too long, lest Handless get antsy.

Luckily for me, the Yeti suffered from extreme predictability. Each jaunt was almost the same distance, crisscrossing back and forth up the mountain at almost the exact same angle every time. It wasn’t hard to guess where I’d find him next, and I used the last two legs to prove myself right.

The tree line was going to end soon, leaving me on the bare mountain face. The next time the Yeti laid his little bread crumbs out, I got my bearings and chose a path straight up the mountain, fixing my mind on that point. That’s where I’d meet him coming.

The Yeti’s pet dropped from a tree only a few yards from me as if she too knew that she was going to run out of branches soon. “You gonna narc on me?” Her head swiveled almost a full one eighty as she tilted it, almost like she was pondering my words. “ Shh. Don’t tell.” Her head swiveled the other way. Those glowing dark eyes watched me, but I got no sense of the Yeti behind them like I had before. He wasn’t watching me, at least not through her.

After a moment, her face stretched, the tendons drawing her lips back from her teeth in a gruesome snarl. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t a snarl at all. She was smiling. Smiling at me. Oh that was just… ew.

“Good girl. Stay.” I had to hope she wasn’t following me as I broke into a run, rushing through the trees to lay an ambush for my worst nightmare.

The wind was wicked, once I got out of the trees, whipping my hair around my face hard enough to sting, and the terrain was treacherously rocky. There had obviously been a rockslide along this face sometime in the near past, and jagged chunks of pink granite stuck out of the ground like some giant kid’s discarded building blocks.

I found a relatively flat place, and was just planting my feet when the great horned head broke through the brush at the edge of the trees. There was a brief moment of surprise, when his ears perked up and he got that comical tilt of the head like puzzled dogs do. It was almost cute. Then the large muzzle rippled into a low growl, and he prowled onto the bare rocks, nimbly clambering from one heap to another. His claws clicked on the hard granite. “Tricky, tricky… Ready to die, then?”

“I’m always ready to die.” The way of bushido is death. I had no problem with that, so long as I could take this ugly mother with me. I was done with him hurting people I cared about. Hell, I was done with him hurting people I’d never heard of before.

“Wish granted.” He sunk his claws into the boulder he was perched on and launched himself off it like a furry freight train.

It was different from the first time. I was more experienced, in better shape, more practiced. He was bigger, stronger. I had a slight speed advantage over him, and that was all that kept me one hair ahead of his swipes, dodging and parrying as best I could. Something that big should not be that fast. It simply isn’t fair. I fully intended to file a grievance with the union, if we ever started one.

I briefly wondered where Handless was, but she was wiped from my mind in the face of the onslaught that was the Yeti. I couldn’t even get a chance to go on the offensive with him. Every shred of my energy was poured into keeping those wicked claws away, into keeping those horns from connecting with my unprotected skull. The Yeti sprang from rock to rock, and I was forced to keep turning to face him, not giving any ground, true, but not gaining either. There was no way I could try to clamber after him and fight at the same time. He could dance around me all night, and all I was going to do was get tired.

Predictability. It led a demon to target a distraught boy, knowing that I’d come to his rescue. It almost got my friends killed. Might still, if things at the hospital were going poorly. It had me tracking a demon through unfamiliar territory, and it helped me catch up to the Yeti here at the end. It was the one thing I couldn’t afford, anymore.

Being that you are samurai, be proud of your valor and prowess and prepare yourself to die with frenzy. Advice I could live by. Or die by, really.

The next time the Yeti landed, claws chipping shards away from the pink boulders, I was already on the move. I saw the demon’s eyes widen as I charged him head on, roaring my own battle cry as I came.

It almost worked.

The first two slashes opened up blight-gushing cuts across one furry forearm and the thigh below it. The dark essence poured out, flowing down the jagged rocks like a deadly, life-sucking stream. It found a low spot and started to pool. The portal would form there, the doorway sucking the Yeti back to Hell.

The demon bellowed in pain, and I ducked under his arm to take a swipe at a hamstring, feeling my blade slide through thick fur into the solid muscle beneath. I let my momentum carry me off the rock, arms pinwheeling for balance as I landed on the next one below. A rank breeze ruffled my hair, the Yeti’s backhanded swipe just missing my head as I dropped out of his reach.

Like I said, it almost worked. Before I could get my balance on my new perch, before I could turn around, I was bludgeoned across the back hard enough to send me hurtling through the air and into the rocks below. I went rolling down the jagged boulders, bruising and scraping every single part of me, and into the trees where the pine needles gouged at the already bloody places. Just as I came to a stop, I heard a distinctly metallic snap, and my sword hand came up empty.

Oh fuck.

I found the blade, easy enough. It was pinned beneath my body, and only kind fate had kept me from impaling myself on it. But it was snapped off neatly, just where the guard should have been, and the hilt was long gone, wedged somewhere in the rocks above me. If the Yeti didn’t kill me, Marty was going to.

I scrambled to my feet, bare blade in my hands because hey, it was all I had. Holding it loosely was no problem, but the second I tightened my grip to strike, I was going to fillet my own fingers. Mentally, I did a quick check, cataloguing my other injuries from my tumble down the hill.

My back and both hips were bruised all to hell, I could tell that much. Something warm and wet was trickling down my left shoulder. I was scraped from knuckle to elbow on both arms and the back of my head throbbed dully. All in all, it could have been worse.