Leaving the cold locker behind, Winnie examined a bulkhead stairway and rotting cover door. Placing a shoulder against the old wooden access, she moved it, letting in a shaft of light. There was an avenue out of the basement other than the way down from the kitchen. Turning from the bulkhead, she was startled by sudden movement, other than quarter-size flakes of snow now falling beyond the casement window at the far end of the foundation. Winnie chanced to see something race by the glass.
Chapter Eighty-Nine
Up the basement bulkhead stairs Winnie crept, and there she camped beneath the slanting bulkhead door. Somewhere above, a large dog was all commotion, whining and yipping. “Damn it,” whispered the woman. Should she bolt or stay hidden in the basement? She remained where she was.
The dog clawed its nails into the house siding.
“Come on, you little bastard,” a heavy male voice rang out. Leggings appeared outside the casement window. The stranger pounded up the front steps with the dog in tow and opened the kitchen door. The two were in the house.
Immediately the canine began pacing the floors, sniffing. Through the rooms it pranced, weaving to and fro. Finally the unseen creature seemed to narrow its focus on the basement door. Winnie could hear its rapid inhalations. Then came a toenail scrape on wood, then another. Whimpering now, the creature began pawing frantically.
The male voice, annoyed: “What the hell are you doing, you idiot? Get away from there!”
The dog kept up its scratching.
“What is it, boy? What is it?”
Winnie rushed up the bulkhead steps, pushed a shoulder against the slanted entryway door and with great effort lifted the thing. Snow cascaded into the basement. Outside, she lowered the rotting wood bulkhead cover as quietly as she could. Her ears detected the interior basement door open and the dog leap down the cellar steps. Keeping her composure, Winnie closed the bulkhead entry without a sound, turned and ran to the outbuildings and out beyond them into the forest. All the while, the canine howled in the basement confines.
Dodging branches and forest debris in a leaded snowflake downpour, she caught a glimpse of the bulkhead as it was thrust up from the inside. A black shepherd vaulted from the earthly bowels running, its nose close to the ground following new scent and the sight of foot tracks in new snow. Winnie froze in terror a second, but then something kicked in—training, her self-defense marksmanship training. In a fluid motion, she unzipped the right pocket of her parka, retrieved her pistol. Dropping to one knee, she brought both arms up, cupped both hands about her Beretta handgun, released the safety, nudged her head down and, with the cool confidence of dozens of hours on firing ranges, aligned the sights. In the few seconds remaining to her before she pulled the trigger, she steeled herself against the coming brutal act. She didn’t want this—couldn’t kill something. At the last instant, eyes wide and teeth clenched, she pulled the trigger. The thunderclap of the discharge echoed through the hollows. No time for contemplation, for self-recrimination. Never mind checking on the sprawling dog. There was no time. She had to put some distance between herself and the hovel behind.
Weaving in snow fog, Winnie reached the shore of Big Stone Lake and an abandoned access lane that skirted the shore northward. She was tempted to leave the trees and trudge out into the lane, but her mind conjured up the image of the rifle in the cabinet in the basement of the house. Best to stay in the woods, hidden by tree trunks, snowflake-laden leaves, and the cascading white, than to show a snow ghost profile to whomever was in the hollow.
Striking a course parallel to the snow-covered skidway along the lake but fifty feet or so from it, Winnie drove hard, despite the snow and ash sucking at her feet. Squeezing between two glacier-dropped boulders, she sensed the sputter of a small gas-fired machine rumbling to life. The rider goosed the throttle several times, then engaged a clutch and was off. The whir of the engine had the whine of a snowmobile. She guessed it was moving to the abandoned road and would be along quickly.
The agent couched between the boulders, guarded, attentive. The buzz of the engine increased: the Doppler effect. It advanced in the lane, slowly, swept by and rolled north, the engine noise declining. Winnie abandoned her boulder den and followed the sound, slinking along well off the pathway in the forest. If she had to, she thought, she could play cat and mouse with the snowmachine for some time.
Quickening her pace, the woman pressed forward, always northward, as fast as she could manage in the flake-filled forest maze. She was in a rhythm, despite here weariness, synchronized to the whitening landscape. Adrenaline had a firm grip on her. Her living gears were turning, meshing fine, obedient to her call to duck and weave, reorient and advance.
The whine of the motor returned. A muddled apparition appeared in the gloom of the storm-darkened day, a Stentor, half-man, half-mechanical beast. The huge creature rolled its head surveying the wall of woods. As the power sled passed, the woman recognized a vertical form lashed to the back of the beast. A rifle. The thing was hunting her.
To the south, the sputtering creature tracked. Winnie rose to her feet again, listening to the engine noises fade and back off to a steady idle. The machine stopped and putt-putted in the lane somewhere nearby. Not waiting to listen, Winnie sprinted uphill. Behind her, she imagined, the human on the snowmachine had dismounted with his rifle and was drifting into the forest margins to search for clues of passage. If he ventured east, he should find her footway in the snow.
A shot cleaved the air and the whine of a high velocity bullet sang high above the ruddy corridor, followed by a crack as the projectile impacted a tree limb far ahead.
A distant shout muffled by the snow: “Fucking goddamn. I’ll get your ass, you Indy bastard.”
Winnie kept to the trees for an hour, rising as the land increased in elevation. Hustling uphill, her legs muscles ached from the accumulated acids of exertion. She needed a rest, needed to sleep but pressed on in fading light until a solid stonework portal built into a ledge in the bluffs hove into view. She recognized the stonework entrance. She had taken a tour of the facilities of Independency village and had come to this place nearly a year ago. It was the cold storage and mushroom culture facilities of the community.
She kicked her way through the snow to a small door in the masonry. Tripping a latch, the door opened. Winnie bent over and placed her gloved hands on her knees. She closed her eyes, exhaled thick pillows of breath into the cold, and sighed in relief.
Stepping through the portal door and out of the snapping teeth of the wind, a crisp photon of light poked the woman in the right eye. The twinkle brought her to a halt. She pivoted to the west, from where she had come, and peered through waving walls of blue snow. At the edge of a steep pitch in the direction of Big Stone Lake, a low golden halo glowed, illuminating the snow flood there. As she watched the light flickered, shafts of illumination bobbing up and down. The man whose dog she had killed was still out on his little monster of a machine. As it bounced and bobbed over rocks on the incline below, its headlight jostled and jumped so that the beam sliced erratically into the atmosphere.
There was a man determined, Winnie concluded. That character out in the blizzard, he was possessed. The man had not returned to his bungalow to sulk. He was not nursing his anger or his grief by a fire or having a pull on a whiskey bottle. Out there in the snow was a game tracker, one lone madman with a single black thought to fill his bloody head.