“Oh, shit!” Campbell cried, and reached up to readjust his goggles. As he did so, the light blinked out and doused the macabre scene.
Farkus said, “Put him behind me. This old horse is stout enough to carry us both. I’m sure he can hold on.”
The men didn’t pause or talk it over. They gathered Capellen up, and Farkus felt the weight and heat of the man behind him. Capellen leaned into Farkus with his arms around his ribs and dropped his face into his back.
“Get his gun,” Parnell said. Smith pulled Capellen’s weapon out of his holster, and Farkus fought an urge to mouth, “Damn.”
There was a wet cack-cack-cack liquid sound when Capellen inhaled. Farkus recognized the sound from hunting. The arrow had pierced a lung, and probably collapsed it. Capellen’s chest cavity was filling up with blood. He would drown from the inside, like an elk hit in the same place. It was a miserable and drawn-out way to die, Farkus guessed. If Capellen was a game animal, there would be no question but to stop the suffering with a bullet to the head or a slit across his throat.
Farkus thought: This is just like hunting and these men are just meat and organs, sacks of bones, like elk. It’s time to quit being scared of them.
But he didn’t feel the same way about whoever had shot the arrow and had taken them all by surprise.
“Let’s move back to where we’ve got an advantage,” Parnell said, turning his horse around and riding past Farkus and Capellen, back down the trail they’d come on.
“Are we headed back to the rock face?” Smith asked, turning his mount.
“Absolutely,” Parnell said.
Farkus remembered it well, and it made sense. Just below the summit, the trail had switchbacked through a massive rock slide where it looked like an entire wedge of the mountainside had given way and fallen like a calf from an iceberg, leaving a long treeless chute of rubble and scree. And a few room-sized boulders. It would be a perfect place for them to go: treeless so they could see for half a mile with their night vision goggles. And well beyond arrow range from an archer in the trees.
Parnell had kicked his horse into a canter, and they retreated quickly.
Farkus had his reasons to take Capellen. The first was his hope they’d forget about the handgun, which they didn’t. But Capellen still wore his night vision goggles, and Farkus reached over his shoulder and snatched them off. After fumbling with the straps, he managed to pull them on. The pitch-black night turned ghostly green and he could see everything! The clarity was astonishing, even though the color scheme was largely green and gray. When he glanced up at the sky, the few stars that peeked down between the clouds looked like Hollywood spotlights. He was shocked how dense the forest was as the trees shot by on both sides. Up ahead, he could see Parnell and Smith pushing their horses, and he could see the big butt muscles of their mounts contracting and expanding with their new gait. When he saw how tight the trees were that he’d come through earlier, he wondered how it was he hadn’t been knocked off.
“When we get to the rocks,” Farkus said to Capellen, whose head bounced on Farkus’s back as they rode, “we’re trading pants. You look like my size, and why should you care if your pants are clean or dirty?”
The fourth reason he’d volunteered to take Capellen was still forming in his mind, Farkus thought. But by taking their buddy, they might decide he, Dave Farkus, was all right after all. He was on their side. And they might forget about him and quit telling him to shut up every time he spoke.
And he could work the new angle and get the hell away from them before the Grim Brothers killed them all.
“THEY MUST HAVE SPLIT UP,” Parnell said, a note of puzzlement in his voice. He adjusted the dial on his equipment. “One of them has the sat phone and has finally stopped moving. The other one is down there somewhere.” He motioned toward the dark wall of trees. “They split up so we’d march right toward the guy with the sat phone while the other one waited for us here.”
“Do you think he’s still there?” Campbell asked.
“I doubt it,” Parnell said. “He knows we have the high ground and a clear field of fire. He’s not stupid enough to try to take us on up here in these rocks.”
Smith nodded. “He waited until we left Capellen alone before he attacked him. That way, he had the odds on his side as well as the element of surprise. I wonder how long he’s been tracking us?”
Parnell shrugged.
“Maybe all night,” Smith said.
Campbell turned. “Farkus, what the hell are you doing back there?”
Farkus said, “Trying to make Capellen more comfortable. I took his vest off so he could breathe easier. I’m sure he won’t mind if I wear it for a while.”
“What are you doing with his pants?”
“WHAT IS IT with those guys?” Smith asked no one in particular. “We couldn’t see a damned thing without our night vision equipment, but whoever went after Capellen didn’t seem to have that problem. And I seriously doubt those guys have any real technology to use.”
“They’re not human,” Farkus said.
“Bullshit,” Parnell spat.
They’d made it to the rock slide without being attacked. The horses were picketed on a grassy shelf above them, and Capellen lay dying in Farkus’s jeans with his back to a slick rock. There had been no movement on the scree beneath them or in the wall of trees below since they’d arrived an hour before.
Smith said to Farkus, “If they aren’t human, then what the hell are they?”
“They’re Wendigos,” Farkus said, pleased to finally be able to introduce his theory.
Smith said, “Jesus. But that doesn’t work because these guys used to be human.”
“That’s exactly how it works,” Farkus said. “They start out human, but something goes wrong. It’s usually related to terrible hunger, but sometimes it’s like a demon enters into them and turns them into monsters.
“I know it sounds crazy, but things have been happening up here in these mountains for the last year that don’t make sense. It’s common knowledge in town that something’s going on up here.”
Hearing no objection, Farkus forged on, keeping his voice low. “One night, in the Dixon Club, I asked an old Indian I know. He’s a Blackfoot from Montana by the name of Rodney Old Man. That’s the first time I heard about Wendigos. Then I did some research on the Internet and checked out a couple of books from the library. It’s scary stuff, man. These people who turn into Wendigos look like walking skeletons with their flesh hanging off of their bones. They stink like death—like those horses we found back there. And they feed on dead animals and living people. They’re cannibals, too, but they’re really weird cannibals because the more human flesh they eat, the bigger they get and the hungrier they are. And they can see in the dark.”
Farkus said, “You guys are from Michigan, which is close to Canada, where most of the Wendigos come from. Do you know the story of an Indian named Swift Runner?” Farkus asked. No one spoke. “Now there was a man filled up with the spirit of the Wendigo. Killed, butchered, and ate his wife and six children.
“You hear of a guy named Li just a couple of years ago? Up in Canada? He cut the head off a fellow bus passenger he’d never met before and started eating him right there on the bus.”
Parnell hissed, “Shut up, now,” and put the muzzle of his weapon against Farkus’s forehead. Parnell’s face was flushed red with anger. The soundtrack for his rage was Capellen’s wet breathing, which had got worse.