They had sent a scout ahead, and the scout had laid a trap.
Pressing hard against the ground, trying to become one with the stone, Charlie wondered why the trap hadn't been sprung earlier. Why hadn't he been gunned down the moment he'd come onto the top of the ridge? Maybe the scout had been inattentive, looking the wrong way. Or maybe the heavy snow had closed around Charlie at just the right time, granting him a temporary cloak of invisibility. That was probably part of the explanation, anyway, because he remembered a particularly thick and whirling squall of snow just as he'd come over the crest.
The machine gun fell silent for a moment.
He heard a series of metallic clinks and a grating noise, and he figured the gunner was replacing the weapon's empty magazine.
Before Charlie could rise up and have a look, the man began to fire again. Bullets ricocheted off the boulders among which Charlie was nestled, spraying chips of granite, and he realized that none of the other shots had been nearly this close. The gunner had been pumping rounds into the rocks north of Charlie. Now the piercing whine of the ricochets moved away, south along the ridge line, and he knew the Twilighter was firing blind, unsure of his target's position.
There was, after all, a chance Charlie could get off the ridge alive.
He got his feet under him, still hiding behind the boulders, keeping low. He shuffled around a bit until he was facing north.
The gunner stopped firing.
Was he just pausing to study the terrain, moving to another position? Or was he changing magazines again?
If the former were the case, then the man was still armed and dangerous; if the latter, he was temporarily defenseless.
Charlie couldn't hear the noises he had heard when the magazine had been changed before, but he couldn't squat here and wait forever, so he jumped up anyway, straight up, and there was his nemesis, only twenty feet away, standing in the snow.
It was a man in brown insulated pants and a dark parka, not changing the machine gun's magazine but squinting at the ridge plateau beyond Charlie-until Charlie popped up and caught his attention. He cried out and swung the muzzle of the machine gun toward Charlie.
But Charlie had the element of surprise on his side and got off a round first. It struck the Twilighter in the throat.
The man appeared to take a great jump backwards, swinging his automatic weapon straight up and letting off a useless burst of fire at the snow-filled sky as he collapsed. His neck had been ripped apart, his spinal cord severed, and his head nearly taken off. Death had been instantaneous.
And in the instant Death embraced the machine gunner, as the sound of Charlie's shot split the cold air, he saw that there was a second man on the ridge, thirty feet behind the first and over to the right, near the rocky crest. This one had a rifle, and he fired even as Charlie recognized the danger.
As if battered by a sledgehammer, Charlie was spun around and knocked down. He struck the ground hard and lay behind the boulders, out of sight of the rifleman, out of the line of fire, safe but not for long.
His left arm, left shoulder, and the left side of his chest suddenly felt cold, very cold, and numb. Although there was no pain yet, he knew he had been hit. Solidly hit. It was bad.
The screams brought Christine out of the cul-de-sac, past the dying fire, onto the trail.
She looked up toward the ridge. She couldn't see all the way to the top of the valley wall, of course. It was too far. The snow and the trees blocked her view.
The screaming went on and on. God, it was awful. In spite of the distance and the muffling effect of the forest, it was a horrible, bloodcurdling shriek of pain and terror. She shivered, and not because of the cold air.
It sounded like Charlie.
No. She was letting her imagination run away with her. It could have been anyone. The sound was too far away, too distorted by the trees for her to be able to say that it was Charlie.
It went on for half a minute or maybe even longer. It seemed like an hour. Whoever he was, he was screaming his guts out up there, one scream atop the other, until she wanted to scream, too. Then it subsided, faded, as if the screamer suddenly had insufficient energy to give voice to his agony.
Chewbacca came out onto the trail and looked up toward the top of the valley.
Silence settled in.
Christine waited.
Nothing.
She returned to the sheltered niche, where Joey sat in a stupor, and picked up the shotgun.
It was a shoulder wound. Serious. His entire arm was numb, and he couldn't move his hand. Damned serious. Maybe mortal.
He wouldn't know until he could get out of his jacket and theirmal underwear and have a look at it-or until he began to pass out. If he lost consciousness in this bitter cold, he would die, regardless of whether the Twilighters came along to finish him off.
As soon as he realized he was hit, Charlie screamed, not because the pain was so bad (for there was no pain yet), and not because he was scared (though he was damned scared), but because he wanted the man who had shot him to know that he was hit. He shrieked as a man might if he were watching his own entrails pour out of a grievous wound in his stomach, screamed as if he knew he were dying, and as he screamed he turned onto his back, stretched out flat in the snow, pushed the rifle aside because it was of little use to him now that he no longer had two good hands. He unzipped his jacket, pulled the revolver out of his shoulder holster. Keeping the gun in his good right hand, he tucked that arm under him, so his body concealed the weapon.
His useless left arm was flung out at his side, the hand turned with the palm up, limp. He began to punctuate his screams with desperate gasping sounds; then he let the screams subside, though putting an even more horrible groan into them. Finally he went silent.
The wind died down for a moment, as if cooperating wah Charlie. The mountain was tomb-quiet.
He heard movement beyond the boulders that screened him from the gunman.
Boots on snow-free stone. A few quick footsteps. Then wary silence.
Then a few more footsteps.
He was counting on this man being an amateur, like the guy with the machine gun. A pro would be shooting when he came around the granite formation. But an amateur would want to believe the screams, would be congratutating himself on a good kill, and would be vulnerable.
Footsteps. Closer. Very close now.
Charlie opened his eyes wide and stared straight up at the gray sky. The rock formation kept some of the falling snow out of his way, but flakes still dropped onto his face, onto his eyelashes, and he needed all of his will power to keep from blinking.
He let his mouth sag open, but he held his breath because it would spiral up in a frosty plume and thus betray him.
A second passed. Five seconds. Ten.
In another half minute or so, he would need to breathe.
His eyes were beginning to water.
Suddenly this seemed like a bad plan. Stupid. He was going to die here. He had to think of something better, more clever.
Then the Twilighter appeared, edging around the hump of granite.
Charlie stared fixedly at the sky, playing dead; therefore, he couldn't see what the stranger looked like; he was aware of him only peripherally. But he felt sure that his performance as a corpse was convincing, and well it should have been, for he had provided a liberal display of his own blood as stage dressing.
The gunman stepped closer, stood directly over him, looking down, grinning.