He stepped under the rocky overhang and looked at the abandoned backpack. There were scraps of paper in one corner of the rocky niche, wrappers from prepackaged gauze bandages.
"You were right," Burt Tully said." The man's been hurt."
"Bad enough so he can't carry his pack any more," Barlowe said, turning away from the abandoned gear.
"But I'm still not sure we should go after him, just the four of us," Thlly said." We need reinforcements."
"There's no time to go for them," Kyle Barlowe said.
"But he. he's killed so many of us."
"Are you turning yellow on us?"
"No, no," Tully said, but he looked scared.
"You're a soldier now," Barlowe said." With God's protection."
"I know. It's just. this guy. Harrison. he's damned good." "Not as good as he was before Denny shot him."
"But he shot Denny! He must still have a lot on the ball."
Impatiently, Kyle said, "You saw the place farther back on the trail, where he fell. There was more blood there, where she came and helped him."
"But reinforcements-"
"Forget it," Kyle said, pushing past him.
He had his doubts, too, and he wondered if he was being sharp with Burt only to push his own second-thoughts out of his mind.
Edna Vanoff and Mother Grace were waiting on the trail.
The old woman didn't look well. Her eyes were bloodshot, deeply sunken, pinched half shut by the sooty flesh that ringed them. She stood round-shouldered, bent at the waist, the very image of exhaustion.
Barlowe was amazed that she had come this far. He had wanted her to stay back at the cabin, with guards, but she had insisted on going farther into the mountains with them. He knew she was a vital woman, possessed of considerable strength and stamina for her age, but he was surprised by her unflagging progress through the woods. Occasionally they had to help her over a rough spot, and once he had even carried her for thirty yards or so, but for the most part she had made it on her own.
"How long ago did they leave this place?" Grace asked him, her voice as cracked and bloodless as her lips.
"Hard to say. Fire's cold, but in this weather the embers would cool off real fast."
Burt Thlly said, "If Harrison is as badly wounded as we think, they can't be making good time. We must be closing on them.
We can afford to go slowly, be careful, and make sure we don't walk into another ambush."
Grace said, "No, if they're close, let's hurry, get it over with."
She turned, took one step, stumbled, fell.
Barlowe lifted her to her feet." I'm worried about you, Mother." She said, "I'm fine."
But Edna Vanoff said, "Mother, you look… wrung out."
"Maybe we should rest here a few minutes," Burt said.
"No!" Mother Grace said. Her bloodshot eyes transfixed them, each in turn." Not a few minutes. Not even one minute.
We don't dare give the boy a second more than we have to. I've told you each second he lives, his power increases. I've told you a thousand times!"
Barlowe said, "But Mother, if anything happens to you, the rest of us won't be able to go on."
He flinched from the penetrating power of her eyes. And now her voice had a special quality that entered it only when she was having a vision, a piercing resonance that vibrated in his bones: "If I fail, you must go on. You will go on. It's blasphemy to say your allegiance is to me rather than to God. You will go on until your own legs fail, until you can't crawl another foot. And then you will still go on, or God will have no pity on you. No pity and no mercy. If you fail Him in this, He will let your souls be conscripted into the armies of Hell."
Some people were not swayed when Mother Grace spoke to them in this manner. Some heard nothing but the ranting of an old fool. Some fled as if she were threatening them. Some laughed. But Kyle Barlowe had always been humbled. He was still enthralled by her voice.
But will I be enthralled and obedient when she finally tells me to kill the boy? Or will I resist the violence that I used to thrive upon?
Wrong-thought.
They left the rocky overhang, headed down the deer trail, Barlowe leading, Edna Vanoff second, Mother Grace third, and Burt Tully bringing up the rear. The howling of the wind seemed like a great demonic voice, and to Barlowe it was a constant reminder of the malignant forces that were even now conspiring to take control of the earth.
Christine was beginning to think they would never get out of the meadow alive.
This was worse than a blizzard. It was a white-out, with the wind so strong it would have been a hurricane in a tropical climate, and with the snow coming down so hard and so fast that she couldn't see more than two or three feet ahead. The world had vanished; she was moving through a nightmare landscape without detail, a world composed solely of snow and gray light; she could not see the forest on any side. She couldn't always see Joey when he ranged to the end of the tether. It was terrifying. And although the light was gray and diffuse, there was an all-pervading glare that made her eyes burn, and she realized that the threat of snow-blindness was very real. What would they do if they had to feel their way through the meadow, sightless, seeking the northeast end of the valley by instinct alone? She knew the answer: They would die. She paused every thirty steps to look at the compass, sheltering it in her gloved hands, and although she tried to move always in a straight line, she found, on several occasions, that they were heading in the wrong direction, and she had to correct their course.
Even if they didn't get disoriented and lost, they could die out here if they didn't move fast enough, for it was colder than she had ever thought it could be, so cold that she wouldn't have been surprised if she had suddenly frozen solid, upright, in mid-stride.
She was worried sick about Joey, but he stayed on his feet and plodded along at her side long after she expected him to drop.
His quasi-catatonic withdrawal was, ironically, of benefit to him in these circumstances; having tuned out the real world, he was less affected by the cold and wind than he otherwise might have been. Even so, the elements would take their toll of him in time.
She would soon have to get him off the meadow, into the comparative shelter of the forest, whether or not they reached the area in which the caves were situated.
Charlie fared worse than the boy. He stumbled frequently, went to his knees a couple of times. After five minutes, he occasionally leaned on Christine for support. After ten minutes, he needed her more than occasionally. After fifteen, he required her support constantly, and they were slowed to little more than a shuffle.
She couldn't tell either him or Joey that she was soon going to head toward the woods, for the wind made conversation impossible. When she faced into the wind, her words were driven back into her throat even as she spoke them, and when she faced away from it, her words were torn like fragile cloth and scattered in meaningless syllables.
For long minutes she lost sight of Chewbacca, and several times she was certain she'd never see the dog again, but he always reappeared, bedraggled and obviously weak, but alive.
His fur was crusted with ice, and when he appeared out of the surging rivers of snow, he seemed like a revenant journeying back from the far side of the grave.
The wind swept broad areas of the meadow almost clean of snow, leaving just a few well-packed inches in some places, but drifts piled up against even the smallest windbreaks and filled in gullies and depressions, creating traps that could not be seen or avoided. They had abandoned Charlie's snowshoes with his backpack, partly because his wounded shoulder prevented him from carrying them any longer and partly because he was no longer sufficiently sure-footed to use them. As a result, she and Joey couldn't use their snowshoes to go across the drifts because they had to follow a route Charlie could negotiate with them. At times she found herself suddenly wading in snow up to her knees, then up to mid-thigh and getting deeper, and she had to backtrack and find a way around the drift, which wasn't easy when she couldn't see where the hell she was going. At other times, she stepped into holes that the snow had filled in; with no warning at all, from one step to the other, she was waist-deep.