J Moncrieff - Return to Dyatlov Pass

“You have Joe’s knife?”

“Yes.” She’d somehow managed to keep it with her during her stabbing frenzy and afterward. Its weight in her lap was the only security she had.

“Use it to slit my throat. Wait a minute before you argue. You’d be doing me a favor, Nat. It feels like my whole body is screaming, all the time. It never shuts up. I can’t sleep, can’t get any peace. I’m in so much pain, but I’ll be damned if I let those bastards take me. I want to choose my own death, and I want you to help me. I’ll show you where to cut.”

She shook her head. “No… no. I can’t do that.”

“Sure you can. You’ve killed two of those things now. I’m not going to fight back.”

“I can’t kill you, Igor. I—I love you.” She was surprised to find it was true. At some point, their little group had become her family. It was what she had left to live for. It wasn’t worth surviving if she was the only one left.

He squeezed her hand. “I love you too. That’s why I’m asking you to do this. I trust you.”

“There has to be another way. There has to be.” Could she get help before Igor succumbed to his injuries or the snowmen returned to finish him off? She wished she’d entertained Steven’s idea of splitting up. If she’d let him leave, the mountaineer would be halfway down Kholat Syakhl by now. He’d be alive.

As her adrenaline wore off, her lids grew heavier and heavier, until they felt weighed down with sand. She rested her head on Igor’s shoulder, taking comfort in the rise and fall of his massive chest. Nat knew she was drifting, but it felt impossible to stop, like she was a late-night driver hypnotized by the road. Her chin fell to her chest, and she slept.

A strange scraping sound made her open her eyes. The first thing she saw was Igor’s face looming above her. Somehow, she’d ended up with her head in his lap, but before she could register any embarrassment, he held a finger to his lips.

Tilting his head, he indicated something in front of her. Warily, she rolled to the side, moving off Igor’s lap and onto her elbows. Weak light filtered into the cave from the ruined section of the roof, and she started to see the prone figure of Steven was moving. Drag, pause. Drag, pause. The weird scraping was his body being towed along the snow.

Something was in here with them. Something alien, something evil. She could make out a great, hulking shadow, its claws piercing Steven’s hood. Mercifully, the mountaineer’s eyes were closed now. She couldn’t have handled it if he were staring at her.

When she’d moved off Igor’s lap, she’d felt the weight of Joe’s knife slide off her legs onto the snow. She felt for the weapon now, but the Russian pressed her arm. “Let it go,” he whispered. The creature stealing Steven’s body didn’t react, though it must have heard. The space was too enclosed for it not to have.

“They can’t have him.” Her fingers tightened around the knife’s hilt, and as if it could read her mind, the creature fixed its hateful yellow eyes on her. She caught a glint of light reflected from its teeth.

“Nat…” Igor urged her close, so he could whisper his next words into her ear. “You don’t have the benefit of surprise this time. If you try to stop that thing, it will kill you, and Steven would never want you to die for this. He’s dead, Nat. That’s just his body. His soul is long gone from this place.”

She realized this, accepted it even though she could feel the mountaineer’s presence watching over them still. “They can’t have him.”

“It’s not him—it’s a body. A corpse. That’s all.”

“Why can’t they leave us alone?” Rage made her body surge with renewed energy, but whenever she tried to move, to grab Steven’s leg and pull him back, Igor stopped her.

The creature kept its baleful eyes on her, staring backward as it hauled their friend toward the entrance.

“I imagine they want his skin.”

“What?” Her brain refused to process the Russian’s words, the image too repulsive to contemplate.

“Its coat—what did you think it was made of?”

The suggestion drove her gaze upward before she could think better of it, away from their dead friend and onto the creature itself and the oddly shiny-looking hide that covered it. The hide had always repulsed her, though she’d never asked herself why. Everything about the creatures had been repulsive. But now she knew. Her stomach filled with ice. Intermingled with the patches of animal fur on its coat were large swatches of human skin.

Something inside her snapped. Those things were not going to use any of her friends—her family —as their fucking clothing.

Before Igor could react, she dove for the creature, who gaped at her, startled. The shallowness of the cave worked in her favor, as the snowman was hunched over, nearly frog-walking away with its prize. Using both hands, she swung the knife home, plunging it into the thing’s eye.

This time, neither the gush of gore nor the metallic-sounding shrieks fazed her. She stabbed again and again, never pausing, her rage and fear driving her to destroy.

“Nat. Nat!”

Whirling around, she saw it was Igor who was trying to restrain her. For a second, she didn’t care. She wanted to keep stabbing, keep destroying. The realization horrified her, and the knife fell from her fingers. The sight of the thing at her feet made her gut churn.

The creature’s face had been obliterated. Her clothing, the snow, and the snowman’s coat were covered in blood and bright yellow fluid. Stumbling away, she vomited until nothing was left but dry heaves.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” Igor said once she’d rejoined him. “There are more, and they’ll come after him. We can’t win. There are so many of them and only two of us.”

She shuffled forward to retrieve Joe’s knife. Settling with her back against the wall of the cave, she focused on the hole in the roof.

“Let them come,” she said. “Let them come.”

Hours passed, but she never faltered.

Eyes narrowed, she stared at the slice of sky visible from the hole in the snow cave’s ceiling, waiting.

Steven was on one side of her, Igor on the other. Sometimes she forgot who was dead and who was alive, her only reminder the Russian’s ragged breathing.

It didn’t matter, in any case. Both were too far gone to help her, like Anubha and Andrew and all the others. She was the hunter now.

She was Death.

Clutching Joe’s blade in two hands, she pointed it at the opening and waited. She could be patient. She knew they would come, and when they did, they would die.

The moment before it happened, part of her—the part that was still sane—wondered how it had all gone so terribly wrong. She cuddled closer to Steven, though her friend’s body had long grown cold and stiff.

She tensed her muscles as she heard a crunching sound from above. At last, her waiting was over.

She was ready.

A shadow fell across the floor of the cave.

She burst through the roof, blinded by snow, thrusting the knife upward with all her strength.

Her target fell to the ground with a yelp of pain. An all-too-human sound.

“Nyet, nyet! STOP. ”

A cacophony of shouting. Cruel men’s voices surrounded her, followed by an ominous click.

Nat blinked, feeling her fragile sanity return. She lay half in and half out of the ravine, her victim facedown in front of her. Crimson pooled around the wound in his throat where she’d buried Joe’s hunting knife. A cry of anguish erupted from her as she recognized the diminutive figure.

Vasily.