Hunters (37 page)

Jean walked over to Megan as though the snow
was no hindrance, brought up her .38, and fired once, the muzzle
less than a foot away from Megan's chest.

The force of the shot threw the woman
backwards. Her arms flew up, her head jerked, and she landed flat
on her back in a cloud of down feathers, and sank slowly into the
yielding surface of white. Michael shone the light on her, and Jean
looked at the ripped hole over Megan's heart and the snow that was
quickly filling up the hollows of her closed eyes. Then she turned
away, back to the tower.

"Let's get him," she said through clenched
teeth.

"He ain't shot since I fired up there," Sam
said. "Maybe I got him!"

"And maybe not," Jean said, plowing through
the snow toward the tower. "We're going to make sure he's dead, and
find out what the hell happened to Chuck."

Michael fell in behind her, and Sam followed
more slowly, limping on her injured ankle. Even with their
flashlights, it took over a minute for the tower to come within
their sight.

"He might shoot down at the lights," Michael
said as they neared the base and the first set of steps.

Jean paused. Her flashlight had caught a
glint of something in the snow, and she shone her light in its
direction. When she saw what it was, she gave a hollow laugh. "And
then again he might not," she said, holding the beam on the Ingram,
whose long magazine and stubby barrel were protruding from the
snow.

"Let's go kill that bastard."

N
ed Craig had
dropped the Ingram when one of Sam's bullets hit it. The impact had
ripped it from his hands, and it was so dark that he had not seen
it fall, though he knew that it was irretrievably lost.

A few more bullets whined past the open
window, and he heard another strike a steel girder and scream off
into the black, and still another thud into the wooden floor of the
cab. Then it was silent for ten seconds that seemed like an hour,
and there was one more shot. Even high above, he could tell that it
was from a different caliber gun, and that it had not been aimed
upward at the tower.

A single shot. A killing shot. The kind of
shot used for an execution. And then he knew what his attempt had
cost him. He knew that they had killed Megan.

He had to survive now. He had to survive to
make them pay.

Ned took a quick glance out the window and
saw the tiny lights far below, nearing the base of the tower. They
were coming for him. But they wouldn't find him.

Before he had fired his shots to take out the
headlights, he had opened the windows on the two sides of the cab
facing away from the watchers below, and looped the long rope
around the steel frame between the two windows. Now he dropped the
two ends out into the storm, letting them fall, but held on to the
top five feet of each side. Then he tried to remember the precise
configuration of the technique that Megan had once shown him, tried
to remember the body rappel, a climber's last resort in descending
a face.

He straddled the ropes, then brought them
over his left hip, across his chest, and over his head to his right
shoulder. Then he let them fall down his back so that he could
grasp them in his left hand. Finally he knelt and stripped off
Chuck's gloves, putting them on his own bare hands. The rough rope
was not intended for climbing, and the friction against his bare
hand would tear through his skin in seconds. He wondered if the
gloves would last much longer. He zipped his jacket and put the
collar up over his neck, knowing that the rope would try and saw
through wherever it touched his body.

The height still terrified him, but he had
the advantage over his fear of not being able to see what lay
below. He would be going down the side of the tower in nearly total
darkness. If he was lucky, he would be able to see the beams off
which he would have to kick.

He opened the trap door, gave Pinchot a quick
pat, and said, "Your only way out boy. Go for it."

Then Ned climbed up onto one of the flat panes and
crouched so that he could get through the opening. He grasped the
upper part of the rope with his right hand and the lower with his
left, took a deep breath, and stepped backwards into the darkness,
into the air.

T
he steps of the
tower ran diagonally across the square that its four corners made,
and Jean Catlett went up them as fast as she could, not bothering
to look up. She kept her eyes fixed on the snow covered steps
before her, and on the footprints of Ned Craig and Chuck Marriner
that the fast falling snow had nearly filled in. In her right hand
she carried both her pistol and her flashlight, and she clung to
the thin metal rail with her left.

Still, she often stumbled, and was thankful
that Michael was right behind her. With both his gun and flashlight
wedged into his pockets, he had his hands free, and had kept her
from slipping several times.

The wind became more terrible the higher they
climbed, but her fury drove her upwards, the light scarcely
illuminating the treacherous steps ahead. She had no idea where
they were, but thought that they might have climbed halfway up the
tower by now. The steps grew slick with ice, and the traces of the
footprints disappeared. It was colder up here too, and she shivered
inside her down-filled jacket.

All she could hear was the panting of her own
breath, and Michael's equally labored breathing behind her. At one
point she thought she heard a dull reverberation, as though a fist
had pounded on the tower, or a gong had sounded far away, or high
up in the sky.

She didn't know how far behind them Sam was, and she
hardly cared. All she cared about was getting to the top and
finishing Ned Craig.

S
am stopped again,
wincing. Her leg throbbed painfully, but she sighed and kept
climbing the stairs. She'd catch up. She wasn't going to give that
bitch Jean any more ammunition against her. Not today.

Sam muttered obscenities under her breath as
she climbed. She had been too much of a pussy about her leg, and
she'd get to the top now if she had to do it on one foot. Still,
she didn't like it, not one bit, climbing this fucking tower in the
middle of this fucking storm. She hoped that Craig shit hadn't done
anything to Chuck.

The steps were getting icy now, and she
wasn't sure how far she had climbed. She paused on the tiny landing
between flights and shone her flashlight straight up. She thought
she saw Jean or Michael moving two flights up, but it could have
been just the snow in the wind.

Just as she turned to start the next flight,
from the corner of her eye she glimpsed something large coming
toward her from behind. She swung around, and her flashlight shone
upon a white, swooping ghost just as a foot exploded into her face,
catching her under the jaw and knocking her backwards.

She hit the steps, slid, and fell, her
flashlight dropping from her hand and shooting comet-like toward
the ground. Blindly she fumbled in the air as she slowly slid off
the landing, and wrapped her gloved fingers around the thin
horizontal steel of a railing support. Her legs dangled in the air,
and she hugged her body against the edge of the landing, afraid to
move. She kicked with her boots, moaning as her injured calf
stretched, trying to find a foothold where there was none. Then she
tried to pull herself up, but discovered that she lacked the
strength.

"
Help!
" she cried as loudly as she
could, but not loud enough to be heard by her comrades over the
wind.

And then, as she clung between the dark sky
and the darker earth, she remembered the face of her vengeful,
malevolent ghost, and thought with crystalline clarity,
Craig
.

Ned Craig was coming down the tower.

"
HELP!
" she shrieked, even more loudly,
crying now for all of them.

J
ean felt Michael
grasp her shoulder, and she swung around, roaring,
"
What?
"

"Did you hear that?" He glanced downward. "I
think Sam was calling."

"I heard the
wind
, Michael, just the
goddamned wind, all right? Now let's go!" She turned and started
climbing again. If that little whore Sam was calling, she could
just
keep
calling, for all Jean cared. She wasn't stopping
for anything or anybody now. She had Craig, and she would shoot the
bastard right in the chest the way she had shot his woman. Only
with Craig she would fire and fire again until her gun was empty,
and then she would spit down into his dead face.

Two flights away now, that was all. She was
certain that when she looked up she could see the flat black slab
of the cab's bottom. Then she looked down again at the steps lit by
her flashlight's beam. She paused on the landing, breathed heavily,
and then looked up the next to last flight.

And saw a black nightmare plunging down.

She knew it was the dog only a split second
before it hit her, shoving her to one side. But she had seen him
coming, and had time to clutch the railing tightly. Michael was not
so lucky.

When he saw Jean stagger he reached forward
to grab her, and was clinging to nothing when Pinchot hit him. His
feet slid out from under him on the ice, and though his fingers
madly flailed, nothing came into his grip before he slid under the
railing and into the air.

He fell twenty-five feet before he hit the
first steel support beam. It broke his hip and twisted him over so
that he hurtled toward the ground head first, and it was with his
head that he struck the next piece of steel. His limp body flopped
from beam to beam like a pachinko ball, and he was dead by the time
he hit the ground.

"
Michael!
" Jean cried out, knowing
that it would do no good. She had heard the soft impact of his body
against the steel as he fell. She knew he would not answer.

Still, she called his name again, and then she
screamed a wordless cry of rage that tore her throat, and she
looked upward to the cab where Ned Craig was, and she screamed
again, and kept screaming as her tired legs carried her upward,
step by step, to that dark glass box in the stormy sky.

H
e would have to
kill them all.

If he ever hoped to find where Megan lay
wounded or dead, he had to kill them first. And the only way was to
take down the tower, now that they were all up there.

As he had lowered himself down the side of
the tower, letting his heavy boots bounce him off the big corner
beam, he had seen their lights going up, seen, for only a second at
a time, their forms picking their way up the steps gingerly, turned
away from him, thank God, except for the one he had kicked.

He didn't know who it was, and let himself
drop more quickly, more recklessly, if such a thing were possible,
expecting at any second to hear a ripping series of shots falling
down about him, a leaden rain amid the feathery snow.

But the shots never came, and he continued in
his controlled fall, the coarse hemp tearing through the gloves and
burning his hands, scraping his hip and shoulder. He didn't know
how far he had come, nor how far he had yet to go, and when he
launched himself out one final time, and his legs, instead of
hitting the beam with a jarring impact, sank into deep snow that
embraced him like a feather bed, he gave a cry of relief and
despair and let himself fall into it.

He lay there for only a few seconds, then
pushed himself to his feet and hauled in one end of the rope until
the other went up and around the cab and fell next to him. The
killers would not come down the way he had. Then, ignoring the pain
in his hands and body, he stumbled back along the path that had
been made to the cabin, the path where Chuck had so proudly shown
him the detonator. He found the hollow in the snow easily enough,
and brushed away the new layer that covered the device.

It was a simple box detonator, and he steeled
himself, then pushed the red button on its top. When nothing
happened, he turned it over, popped off the back, and saw that one
wire had been detached. He hooked it around the terminal so that it
made contact, and, just as Pinchot came bounding to his side,
pushed the button again.

S
am Rogers's fear of
death kept her clinging to the thin steel far longer than she had
imagined she could. She hung on even when the body fell from above,
when it bounced off the beams and struck near her so that she could
hear the sound of the breath leaving the lungs. She didn't know
whose body it was.

Seconds later, the big dog had stopped on its
way down the steps, sniffed at her once, and moved on.
"
Please...
" Sam had called, but no one answered, and she
continued to hang on, and began to cry. She hated to cry, because
it made her feel weak, and she had to be strong, be strong and hang
on until Michael or Jean or Chuck came down from that fucking
little room up there and
helped
her. At least the snow
seemed to be falling less heavily, though the wind still buffeted
her. She clung to her perch, crying and wishing that she had never
even
come
to this fucking place.

Then the charges blew.

N
ed knew enough to
close his eyes and look away. But even so, the flare of the
igniting plastic lit the insides of his eyelids a hot orange, and
the sound of the explosions tore through the storm like twin
strikes of thunder, so that Ned dropped the detonator and clapped
his palms to his ears. If the dog reacted, Ned never heard him.

A split second later came the force of the
concussion, like a far greater wind behind the wind. It threw him
to his knees, and buckets of hot snow blew over him.

When the flash faded, he got to his feet,
turned, and looked at the tower with nearly blind eyes. It was hard
to make it out by the feeble light that crept from the open door of
the cabin, but he could see it, black on black, lurching, bowing
away from him, toward the cliff.