I scan her fast, checking for bullet wounds, arterial spray.
“No. You?”
“Fine.” I wipe the blood from my forehead. Scalp wound. Messy, but shallow.
I check the weapon. Full mag in the Glock. But I need more.
I look up at the road.
Tactical lights sweep the slope. Beams cutting through the trees. They’re coming down.
“We can’t stay here.” I keep my voice low. “They’ll box us in.” I grab her arm. Her gaze runs wide, terrified, but focused. “Into the trees. Move.”
We run.
We leave the wreck. We leave the road. We plunge into the deep, unforgiving dark of the forest.
And for the first time in ten years, I’m not the hunter.
I’m the prey.
13
All Is Lost
IRIS
The cold has teeth.
A living, malevolent thing, it bites through my coat, through the denim of my jeans, sinking its fangs straight into the marrow. It doesn’t chill. It devours. Every breath knifes in like a razor blade, crystallizing the moisture in my lungs before I exhale, turning the simple act of breathing into a battle for survival.
The wind threads through the trees with a high, thin wail. A chorus of dying things, a ceaseless keen drowning out the crunch of boots on ice and the rasp of my own laboring lungs.
To my left, Boyd drives us forward.
He isn’t running. He moves with an economy of movement that defies the conditions. Hunched low, keeping his broad profile beneath the wind line, he uses the shadows of the ancient pines as if they were solid walls protecting us from the storm’s gaze. He steps where the snow is shallowest, near the trunks of the firs, avoiding the deceptive drifts that would swallow us whole.
I track his movement through the lens of a physician making a diagnosis. It’s the only way I can keep the panic at bay, reducing him to mechanics and physiology.
He’s injured.
Blood dried in a dark, crusty streak on his forehead where the windshield cut him during the rollover. It tracks down into his eyebrow, matting the hair. He favors his left leg, an antalgic gait he tries to hide by pushing hard and dragging the limb slightly with every step. The quadriceps aren’t firing correctly. Soft-tissue damage, perhaps a tear or even a hairline fracture. He runs on structural damage and a reserve of violence I can’t comprehend.
My own body fails.
The shivering, violent an hour ago, has stopped.
That’s bad. I’m sliding from mild to moderate hypothermia. My body gave up on generating heat. Blood shunts to the core, abandoning my extremities to keep the heart and brain alive a few minutes longer. My fingers turn to clumsy, frozen claws inside my gloves, bereft of sensation. My toes are gone, phantom appendages I can no longer feel striking the frozen earth. I walk on stumps.
“Keep moving.”
Boyd’s voice comes as a rough vibration against the wind, cutting through the white noise.
“Don’t stop. Never stop.”
We exist as ghosts in a world of white and black. The forest feels ancient here, the trees towering like pillars of a ruined cathedral, their branches heavy with snow, bowing under the weight. The darkness remains absolute, broken only by the faint luminescence of the snow itself, reflecting the nothingness of the sky.
My boot catches a buried root.
