Creature (44 page)

Kelly turned and looked back at the house.

She knew deep in her heart that she was never going to see her family again.

The image of the house began to swim crazily as tears flooded her eyes. Then, once more, she turned away.

   Sharon was breathing hard and her whole body had turned into a mass of aching muscles, but still she trudged onward. Ahead of her on the trail, Mark seemed to be tireless, striding ahead, pausing every now and then to wait for her to catch up. But even when she could go no farther and had to sit down for a few minutes to catch her breath, he’d kept moving, hurrying back down the trail or moving off it entirely,
always searching for a spot that would give him a view of the valley. Each time he found such a spot, he would stand and stare like a frightened animal, his eyes searching the terrain below, looking for signs of the hunters they both knew must be coming after them.

When they’d arrived abruptly at the end of the road several hours ago, where there was nothing but a large parking lot at the base of a ski lift, Sharon’s heart had sunk. She should have gone the other way, sped through Silverdale and headed down the valley. Now they were trapped. For a moment she was tempted to turn around, but Mark seemed to read her mind.

“We can’t go back,” he told her. “They’ll block the road and we’ll never get through.”

“Well, we can’t stay here, either,” Sharon replied, but Mark was already out of the car, staring up at the mountains.

“Up there,” he said at last. “We’ll have to hike out.”

He began rummaging in the back of the station wagon, but the only thing he found that would be of any use at all was a worn blanket that looked as if it hadn’t been used for anything but spreading on the ground for picnics over the past dozen years. Worn and thin, and filled with fragments of grass and leaves, it would offer little protection against the cold of the night, but it was better than nothing. With the blanket tucked under Mark’s arm, they had set off.

For the first few miles they moved quickly, but as they climbed steadily upward, Sharon began to tire.

Mark, on the other hand, felt his body quickly begin to respond to the exercise. His legs seemed to take on a rhythmic stride of their own, and as he climbed the steep trail, his body began to sweat as his system struggled to keep his body temperature in equilibrium. Finally he felt the last remnants of the headache fade away, and he kept moving, breathing deeply. When his mother eventually called out to him that she had to rest, he turned back to face her without thinking.

For a moment, as he caught sight of her face, the now-familiar anger built inside him, but he fought it, forcing it
back down, repeating to himself over and over again that it wasn’t real, that it was only something Ames had induced in him, a Pavlovian response like a dog salivating at the sound of a bell. Finally, as the afternoon wore on, he found that he was able to control the rage completely.

It was still there, smoldering within him, but he was no longer afraid that at any moment he was going to strike out at his mother, close his strong fingers around her throat and begin squeezing.

The sun was setting when he spotted the search party. He wasn’t certain how many of them there were, but they were moving swiftly, climbing the trail he and Sharon were following, and for a moment he wondered how they could be so certain they were following the right path.

Then he caught a glimpse of the dog—a big shepherd—straining at a heavy leash as it pressed forward, its nose close to the ground.

“Oh, God,” Sharon moaned when he told her about the dog. “What are we going to do?”

“Keep going,” Mark replied, his voice grim. “We’re not just going to sit down and give up.”

And so they’d gone on.

Darkness closed around them, and with the night came a cold breeze, slicing through their clothes to chill their skin. Sharon felt herself shiver as the wind cut through her thin coat, but Mark, his legs still moving with an apparently endless energy, barely seemed to notice it. And then, as the dusk turned into pitch-black night, Sharon stumbled, a sharp pain shooting up her leg as her ankle twisted.

She yelped out loud and sank to the ground, rubbing gingerly at her injured joint. “Mark?” she called out. “Mark!”

He turned back, then hurried down the trail and squatted beside her. Taking her ankle gently in his large fingers, he tried to massage it. Sharon winced, partly with pain, partly from the sight of his deformed hands and the strange feel of his rough skin against her flesh. At last, with Mark supporting
her, she got to her feet and tested her weight on her throbbing leg.

She was able to walk, but she was limping badly now.

Saying nothing, Mark moved next to her and slipped his arm around her, then started walking up the trail again, half supporting her, half carrying her.

After an hour Sharon could go no farther.

They were on a hillside, and the trail wound through a maze of enormous boulders. Mark left Sharon where she was and moved forward a few yards, scouting the area. Finally he found a boulder that was deeply undercut, with another, smaller rock sitting a few feet from it. Between the two rocks there was enough space for the two of them to sit for a few minutes, and the rocks themselves would provide them with at least a small amount of shelter from the wind. But even as he led Sharon to it, he knew the boulders couldn’t protect them from the dog that was tracking them.

And the dog would bring the men with it.

“We can’t get away, can we?” Sharon finally said after they’d been sitting for several minutes. The blanket was wrapped around her shoulders, and her injured leg was stretched out straight in front of her. She felt like crying, but wouldn’t give in to the urge.

“I—I don’t know,” Mark replied after a few more moments. “Unless I can figure out a way to kill the dog.”

He said it so matter-of-factly that Sharon shuddered. But then she remembered the carnage she’d seen in the yard of the sports center, and steeled herself against the weakness of her own emotions. So Mark had once killed a dog and would do it again? So what? Compared to what Ames had done …

“How?” she asked. “How could you do it?”

Mark shook his head. “I can’t, unless they let it go. But they won’t let it go.”

They sat silently then. After a while they began to hear the baying of the dog as it climbed the trail below. At first it was nothing more than a faint sound in the distance, but it grew steadily closer.

Even as the fear built inside her, Sharon couldn’t bring herself to get up, couldn’t force her body to respond to the need to get away.

Mark, as if understanding, sat next to her, apparently resigned to whatever might happen next.

The dog was close now, barking, and they could even hear the voices of the men shouting to each other and see the flickering beams of flashlights as they tried to light the trail ahead. Then, as if sensing it was closing on its prey, the dog fell silent.

A moment later a man’s voice blared through the darkness, amplified by a bullhorn.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Tanner. It’s the State Patrol. It’s all over. You can come down.”

Sharon froze. Was it really possible? But how?

And then the voice came again.

“We’re here to help you, Mrs. Tanner. Your husband called us this afternoon when they wouldn’t let him speak to you at the sports center. It’s over, Mrs. Tanner. We have them all.”

Blake! Blake had finally believed her and called the State Patrol! Almost crying out with relief, she struggled to her feet, but Mark’s hand closed on her wrist.

“They’re lying, Mom,” he whispered. “It’s just a trick!”

“No!” Sharon whimpered. “It’s all right—we’re going to be all right!” She couldn’t see Mark’s face at all in the darkness, but she felt his hand tighten on her wrist. She spoke again, struggling to keep her voice calm. “Mark, what if it is a trick? We can’t get away. I don’t think I can take more than a few more steps. So let me go out, darling. Please? If it isn’t a trick, we’re all right. And if it is, well—” Her voice caught for a moment, then she went on. “If it is a trick, you’ll have time to get away from them by yourself. If you don’t have to carry me, they won’t be able to catch up with you.” She paused, and could almost feel his indecision. “Please?” she breathed.

Slowly, she felt Mark’s grip on her wrist ease, but then he pulled her close.

“I love you, Mom,” he whispered. “No matter what happens, I love you.”

She kissed him then, her lips brushing against his distorted mouth, her fingers tracing the rough line of his swollen brow. “I love you, too,” she whispered. Then, her ankle threatening to give way beneath her, she stepped out into the trail.

“I—I’m here,” she called out, and instantly the night was filled with lights, all of them trained on her. She took a step forward.

And then the guns began to sound.

The night exploded with shots, and Sharon’s body crumpled, dead before it even hit the ground.

Bullets ricocheted off the boulders, screaming like angry hornets as they flew through the night.

The sounds of the shots echoed and reechoed through the mountains, but even as they began to die away, Mark dashed from the shelter behind the boulder, slithered through a narrow gap between two others, and began scrambling up the mountainside, threading his way between some of the rocks, clawing his way over others.

“Turn the dog loose!” he heard a voice shout behind him. “Let her go, damn it!”

Then the night was filled once more with the barking of the dog as it hurled itself after him, ignoring his scent now, easily following the sounds he made as he scrabbled up the mountainside. The men were coming, too, doing their best to keep up, but they weren’t nearly as fast as either Mark or the dog, and within less than a minute he was well ahead of them.

Suddenly there was a furious snarl behind him, and Mark whirled around just as the huge shepherd threw itself at him.

He caught it in midair, grasping it by the throat, holding its snapping jaws well away from his face.

This time he didn’t waste time strangling it to death, for this time he knew exactly what he was doing.

It was either kill the dog or let the dog kill him.

His fingers tightened on the animal’s throat, then he raised it over his head, slamming its body down onto one of the rocks.

There was a sharp cracking sound as the dog’s back broke over the rock, and it went limp. Dropping it instantly, he turned and darted away once more into the safety of the darkness.

Without the dog, he knew the men had no hope even of following him, let alone of catching up with him.

He breathed deeply of the night air and his lungs filled with scents he’d never experienced before, all the subtle odors the human nose can never respond to but which lead an animal through the night.

Then he was out of the maze of boulders, finding himself on a gentle slope of grass-covered earth dotted with pine trees and clumps of aspen. He ran through the night then, his powerful legs once more taking on the easy rhythm that he felt could carry him forever.

He began moving up the mountain, upward into the vast reaches of forests and meadows where he could almost smell the rarefied scent of true freedom that only a wild animal ever knows.…

27

It had been nearly two weeks since the funeral at which they’d buried her family. Every morning since then, when she’d awakened, totally disoriented, in the unfamiliar surroundings of the small bedroom next to Linda’s that the Harrises had moved her into the day her family had died, Kelly Tanner felt the dampness on her pillow and knew she’d been crying. But this morning—a Saturday—Kelly knew where she was from the moment she came awake.

And the pillowcase was dry, which meant she hadn’t been crying that night at all. Or at least not enough to get the pillow wet.

She lay in her bed for a few minutes, listening to the sounds of the Harrises’ house. It wasn’t really much different from the way her own house had sounded in the morning, and if she closed her eyes and concentrated very hard, she could almost imagine that nothing had changed, that she was back in her own room in the house on Telluride Drive.

The shower going on would mean that her father was already up, and the clatter of pans in the kitchen meant that her mother was making pancakes. She could even imagine that the thumpings from down the hall were coming from
Mark’s room; that he was doing the exercises he’d started a month ago.

But it wasn’t Mark, and it wasn’t her mother and father. It was just the Harrises, and even though she knew they were trying to be very nice to her, she always had a niggling feeling at the back of her mind that they didn’t really care about her, that they thought they had to be nice to her because she was an orphan now.

An orphan.

She turned the word over in her mind, kept examining it, until suddenly it had no meaning at all. It was a game she played sometimes with herself—taking the simplest word and repeating it over and over and over, until instead of meaning something, it wasn’t anything but a sound.

For the first time that morning she was able to think about the funeral without crying. She didn’t know whether it had been like other funerals, because she’d never been to one before. There hadn’t been very many people there, and it hadn’t taken very long, and as she sat in the front pew of the little church, listening to a man she’d never seen before talking about her family—and she knew he’d never even met her family, so how could he talk about them?—she tried to convince herself that it really was her father and mother and brother in the three coffins lined up in front of the altar.

But the tops of the coffins were closed, and nobody had let her see the bodies at all, and it had been hard for her to accept that any of it was real. In fact, when she’d heard the door open at one point, she looked back, almost expecting to see Mark walking down the aisle toward her. But it hadn’t been Mark at all. It had just been another stranger, so she turned back and faced the front again. And then, when they’d gone out to the little cemetery behind the church, she had the strangest feeling as they put Mark’s coffin into the grave.