He wanted Jase to surrender.
Now Jase was dashing across the drawbridge. Mitch scrambled back up onto his feet, covered with snow, and lumbered after him, huffing and puffing, seeing his hot breath before him, the winter air a jagged knife deep in his lungs. He didn’t have on his jacket or gloves. His hands were wet and numb. The snow that clung to his sweater was quickly beginning to melt from his considerable body heat. He felt like a slow, hairy mastodon. Also a bit dazed from that blow to the head he’d taken.
And he was not exactly used to getting shot at.
When he’d crossed the drawbridge, gasping, he discovered that Jase had vanished. There wasn’t so much as a glimpse of him anywhere in the distance. No movement. Nothing but virgin snow-covered meadows and forest. Mitch held his breath, listening. Not a sound.
But he still had Jase’s footprints to go by. All Mitch had to do was follow his trail through the snow. Jase could not get away from him. No, he could not.
So Mitch tracked him-in the direction of Choo-Choo Cholly’s miniature depot, which still lay crunched under that huge fallen sugar maple. As Jase’s footsteps approached the little station, they veered around it and made for a wide, cleared corridor between the trees. The railroad tracks, Mitch realized. Jase was following Cholly’s snow-covered narrow-gauge tracks all the way down the mountain to the front gate, to Route 156, away.
Mitch pursued him, running hard, the sweat beginning to stream down his face. Jase’s footsteps made a clear path before him down the center of the tracks, the cross-ties deep underfoot beneath the snow and ice. Wherever Jase ran, Mitch ran. Around the trees that had come down alongside the tracks. Over the trees that had fallen across them. Mitch ran and ran. Until he could run no farther without his chest exploding. He paused for just a second to catch his breath, his ears straining for a sound, any sound in the frozen winter silence. Crunching. He could hear the definite crunching of footsteps. Not very far away either. He was staying right with Jase. Maybe even gaining on him.
Heartened, Mitch forced himself farther on down the tracks. There was a quaint, hand-painted wooden sign up ahead now-“River Walk Station.” And a big bend around an exposed scenic overlook where there were handrails and benches and wonderful river views that Mitch had no time to look at. As he came charging his way around the bend, Jase’s footsteps before him veered off the tracks and curled into the woods. Crashing his way in among the fallen trees, Mitch followed Jase’s footprints until, suddenly, they stopped entirely right there deep in the woods. No more footprints. Yet, no Jase either. It was as if he’d disappeared into thin air. Either that or Scotty had just beamed him back aboard the Enterprise. Mitch stood there, baffled, seeing no sign of Jase, hearing no sound other than his own heavy breathing. How was this possible? How could Jase’s footsteps simply halt right here, two feet from the base of a beech tree? Where the devil was he?
Mitch suddenly realized where. And felt like a total moron.
Only, by the time he looked up, Jase was already diving out of the tree right on top of him, knocking him hard to the ground and smashing him across the bridge of the nose with his thirty-eight. The SIG went flying out of Mitch’s hand as he found himself flat on his back in the snow, Jase clutching him by the throat with his rough, powerful hands, jabbering at him incoherently, his breath hot and sour in Mitch’s face. His eyes were the crazed eyes of one of those unkempt wild men who prowled the streets of Lower Manhattan at four o’clock in the morning, ranting at unseen enemies in no known language.
Mitch fought back with everything he had. Fought for air. Fought for life. His hands clawed at Jase’s. But he was no match for Jase’s unleashed fury. And he was losing. And Des’s gun was gone-Mitch didn’t know where. And he was going to die here in the snow, right here, right now…
Until Jase suddenly recoiled from him in horror and screamed, “Damn you! Damn you!” And scrambled several feet away from Mitch, scratching angrily at his knit cap, yanking it from his head, hurling it off into the snow. His hair underneath was stringy and long. “Stop following me, will you?! Just let… me… go!”
“I can’t,” Mitch croaked, blood streaming from his smashed nose. “Come back to the castle with me, Jase.”
“You’ve got to let me go!” Jase moaned, staring in apparent disbelief at the thirty-eight he was clutching in his hand. He seemed genuinely repulsed by who and what he’d become. “You go back to the castle. Forget about me, please!”
“It’s no use, Jase.” Mitch yanked his handkerchief from the back pocket of his pants, stanching the flow of blood from his nose. “You have to give yourself up.”
Jase shook his head at him violently. “Never. No way. No. I can’t go back. I just can’t.”
“You have to,” Mitch insisted, wondering whereabouts in the snow Des’s SIG had fallen. If he could reach it. If he could use it…
“I’ll never, ever go back,” Jase vowed, staggering his way back through the trees toward the railroad tracks. “Just forget that!” Now he took off again down the tracks, running hard, away from Mitch, away from the castle, away. Jase didn’t bother to search for Des’s weapon in the snow. Didn’t so much as look back.
He just ran.
Mitch remained there in the snow for a moment, his nose bleeding, his throat feeling as if it had just been stepped on by someone wearing cleats. Slowly, he got to his knees, fighting off a wave of dizziness. Kneeling there, he groped around in the snow until his numb fingers found the SIG. Weapon in hand, he climbed back up onto his feet, handkerchief pressed to his nose. Then Mitch resumed the chase.
He was an old hand at this now. All he had to do was follow Jase’s trail down those tracks. Around a bend. Into a straightaway. Mitch pursued him, step for step, stumbling repeatedly, falling to his knees, but refusing to stay down. As he came around another big bend, Mitch heard a gunshot up ahead in the snowy silence. Now Mitch was streaking his way around that bend, wondering what he would find.
It was Choo-Choo Cholly’s House, the bright red railroad barn where the little train was stored for the winter. A spur of track led off the main line straight for it. So did Jase’s footprints. One of the sliding barn doors was opened wide. Mitch found the shattered remains of a lock in the barn’s doorway. Jase had shot the lock off.
Once inside the doorway, the narrow-gauge railroad tracks emerged from under their snowy blanket and continued their way deep inside the cavernous barn, which smelled moldy and damp. After the bright white glare of the snow, Mitch could barely make out anything inside the unlit barn. Not until his eyes had a chance to adjust to the dim light coming through the open door. Only then could he make out the brave little train, all shiny and clean, waiting there for spring to arrive. In point of fact, Choo-Choo Cholly was a bizarre thing to stumble upon right now. There was something surreal about Cholly’s locomotive “face,” with its bulbous red nose, electric-blue eyes and cheerful crooked smile. To Mitch, the little engine looked eerily like W. C. Fields after Fields had just done something especially stinky to Baby LeRoy. Maybe it was just Mitch’s head trauma, but he suddenly felt as if he’d wandered into a ride at Disney World while under the influence of a major hallucinogen.
Until, that is, another gunshot rang out, splintering the barn door next to his head. Mitch hit the ground immediately.
“Don’t make me do this!” Jase called to him from deep inside the barn.
“You can’t get away, Jase!” Mitch called back, edging his way on hands and knees toward Cholly, keeping low to the tracks. “Give yourself up!”
“No way! I won’t ever give up! Not ever!”
And yet, as Mitch inched his way deeper inside the barn, it occurred to him that Jase had purposely trapped himself in here. Why had he chosen to do this? Why hadn’t he kept on going down the tracks?