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.”
~ Chapter Twenty-two ~
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.
As she screamed her rage to the darkening sky, another threatening click came from the circle of men who pressed closer, rifles pointed at her head.
The Russian police.
They stared at her in horror.
What did they see when they looked at her, she wondered. A victim? A survivor? A monster?
Not daring to move, she waited for them to fire.
Acknowledgments
I’m eternally grateful to everyone who continues to support these wild stories of mine, especially Hunter Shea, LaVona Parker, Tara Clark, Louise Gibson, Dana Krawchuk and John Toews from McNally Robinson Booksellers, R.J. Crowther Jr. from Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore, Wai Chan, Nikki Burch, and the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.
I would never have survived my trek through the Ural Mountains without my personal cheerleaders Simon Fuller and Christine Brandt. Thanks to my copy editor Chris Brogden for his patience and eye for detail.
To all my readers, blog followers, librarians, friends, and family: I couldn’t do this without you. Thank you so much for your encouragement and support.
Once again, Gary and the folks at Severed Press have been great to work with, and I’m thrilled to be one of their authors.
Sample of The Beasts of Stoneclad Mountain
James Payne lounged in his lawn chair under the overhang of the cave, reading one of his Louis L’Amour westerns. The paperback was missing the front cover, and the pages were about to fall out of the spine, but that didn’t deter him from continuing the saga of the marshal single-handedly trying to protect the townsfolk from the ruthless outlaw gang.
He flipped the page, bumping his elbow against the barrel of his 30-shot magazine Bushmaster automatic rifle leaning against the armrest.
It could hardly be called a sporting hunting gun—more of an essential weapon for protecting one’s property.
He took a break from his book, dog-eared the page, and tossed the reading material onto the backpack just inside the cave. The cavern went back twenty feet, was ten feet wide, and was high enough to walk upright to the rear of the hollowed rock.
Marijuana stalks hung from clotheslines stretched across the width of the cave, the ends anchored to carabiners wedged in the crevices in the walls. A large blue tarpaulin was on the ground where James would bring in his lawn chair and trim the buds off the stalks. A couple canvas picking sacks with neck straps were on the ground next to some tilling spades, shovels, rakes, and hoes leaning against the cavern wall.
He had a modest setup for cooking: a frying pan and a pot for boiling water and a double-burner portable Coleman camp stove. For lighting at night, he had one flashlight and a kerosene lantern. His sleeping accommodations consisted of a dirty mummy goose-down bag on top of an inflatable air mattress that demanded to be frequently filled up with air with a foot pump as it had a slow leak.
Besides preparing the next shipment for transport down the mountain, eating, sleeping, and suffering mind-numbing cabin fever, even though he was in the great outdoors and it was a cave, there wasn’t much more for James to do during his solitary five-day durations sharing the duties of the family business, other than to read.
James raised his arms and stretched. He got up from his chair, leaving the slumped webbing in the shape of his butt.
He glanced out at the lush field of ten-foot-tall marijuana plants—last count there were somewhere over two hundred—clustered tightly together, surrounded by the dense forest of broad-leaf bur oaks and white pines.
It was the perfect spot for cultivating weed. The soil was rich, and it was secluded, an arduous four-hour hike up the steep and treacherous mountain, miles away from the nearest farm. James thought it was overkill having to climb so far up the mountain, but that was how his eldest brother, Landon, wanted it, so what choice did he have?
And there was no worry of hikers or campers stumbling onto their operation, as there were no proper trails in the rough terrain. Nothing on the mountain, but abandoned moonshine stills, more natural caves and forgotten mineshafts, and maybe the occasional reclusive hermit that didn’t want to be bothered by civilization and could care less about the Payne brothers’ moneymaking venture.
While James spent most of his lonely hours on the mountain, reading, his other three brothers could care less about books, especially the twins, Jacob and Mason, who would rather drink moonshine and play mumblety-peg barefoot—even though Mason had self-amputated two of his own toes with bad knife throws from being too drunk to care, and his lack of depth perception because of his one eye.
But James knew better than to talk down to Jacob and Mason as each of his brothers weighed over two hundred fifty pounds and looked like true mountain men with their rough appearances and wooly beards. Their jobs were, when the time arose, hauling the packs of hemp down the mountain.
James’ older brother, Landon, was head of the family business and was in charge of distribution. Only on rare occasions did he come up to the field.
James was glad that this would be his last night on the mountain until his next time around. All he could think of when he was up here alone, were his brothers carousing at home, getting drunk on two hundred proof pure grain alcohol and having a good time.