Page 88 of Mazywood

His Nikes were soggy from the morning’s ordeal, so he took them off and felt his socks. Slightly damp. Shit. He wiggled his toes, which were complaining about the cold, his pinkie toes halfway numb before he rubbed feeling back into them. No fresh socks were in sight, so he put his cold, damp socks back on.

Now the boots. The two pairs of snow boots, one gray and one brown, were so old that Johnny wondered if one pair had belonged to Uncle Ricky. He couldn’t fit his foot into the first gray boot he tried, but the brown boots fit, even if they were snug. He wanted to rush back out in only the boots, since he’d already wasted so much time—was it five minutes or an hour?—but he knew that Uncle Ricky would tell him not to be a damn fool. So he grabbed the snowshoes and a ski pole too, hugging the gear to his chest as he flung himself back outside.

“That’s more like it,” Uncle Ricky said, still nursing his joint on the side porch. Johnny hated craving the approval of a phantom, but his spirits stirred with new hope.

He made his way to the top of the ski trail, his feet much steadier in the boots. His eyes fixed again on the trails below marking the passage of his family. His life.

“Watch yourself out there, boy. See those snow clouds? They’re really gonna let loose soon.” Uncle Ricky’s voice sounded far away. Imaginary. Johnny’s mind kept trying to fool him, but he knew he was facing this alone.

Johnny clung to his snowshoes and ski pole like a shield and sword with one arm as he stared down at the ski trail. He didn’t know how to ski and had no faster way down, so with his other hand he held tightly to the wooden rail because he was so dizzy that he saw dancing spots—not unlike the fireflies in his dream.

He began the climb down the gauntlet his daughters had named the Steps of Death.

Twenty-Six

IMANI WASHINGTON’S WHOLE WORLD WAS snow.

After fifteen minutes, maybe twenty, she and Sharise were far from the border of her family’s property, away from the familiar path they had mapped yesterday even in their short time on the trail. The Beast’s tracks had led them beyond the pine groves to land with barely any downhill grade, a new clearing of snow with rocks bleeding through. And Imani was studying every detail, especially since the lower grade had slowed their speed.

She looked for signs of Mom—anything, good or bad. But what could be good? So she kept her eyes on the snow’s bumps and grooves. The blue ice patches hidden in the powder. Pine cones and the sharp tips of gray stones jutting out in her path. The different depths of the Beast’s circuitous grooves; sometimes deeper, sometimes shallower, as if at times it floated rather than sliding. She was staring down at the snow with so much focus as she balanced on her snowboard that she’d nearly hit a tree more than once, snapping her eyes up when Sharise called out a warning, breaking their unspoken rule not to make a sound.

They were tracking the Beast, but the Beast didn’t need to know that.

Imani heard Sharise sob behind her. She had been whimpering or crying much of the time, although she had mostly stayed on her feet. But Sharise was lagging so far behind Imani that she circled back and skidded to a stop to wait for Sharise to catch up to her, shifting the rifle into her hands so she could fire it if she needed to. Neither of them wanted to be alone on the Beast’s hunting grounds.

Imani’s fingers on her right hand were frigid because she was only wearing her left glove, but she wanted to make sure her trigger finger could fire. She had argued for the right to carry the gun, so she couldn’t let her glove get in the way.

Imani only noticed how hard she was breathing when she stopped moving and could hear the rasping breaths in her chest. Sharise was breathing in long clouds too. They had never crossed a long terrain on their snowboards, just the simpler downhill trails at Big Bear. Imani had barely noticed her backpack when they first went down the ski trail, but now it felt like a fifty-pound stone on her back. And her thighs usually felt sore the day after snowboarding, but today her thighs and calves were already tight with painful bands of fatigue. Stopping always made the tightness worse.

Besides, they needed to catch up to Mom. Another pine grove ahead looked so much like the one they had already passed through that they could be going in a circle. But they weren’t. They had come so far that when she glanced behind them, nothing looked familiar. The ridge leading back up to Bear Creek Lodge was nowhere in sight. Only their tracks in the snow would lead them home, or lead someone to them.

As Sharise approached, her face was wrenched with such misery that Imani almost reflexively started crying too. But she had promised herself that she wouldn’t cry yet. She would only let herself cry if they found Mom’s dead body. Or… a part of her body, like the deer’s head or the hand Dad had found under the Jeep. She wouldn’t cry unless she knew for sure that Mom was really gone.

But Sharise’s tears and snot were caked in white streaks across her dark skin. “Imani…” she panted. “We have to go back.”

“There’s still a trail!” Imani said.

Sharise was shaking her head. She pointed an unsteady finger ahead. Imani followed her sister’s pointing finger and realized that she’d been so absorbed in the snow a few feet in front of her that she had missed what Sharise had seen two dozen yards ahead, right before a large snowdrift fencing in the tree line—the trail stopped. The familiar zigzag continued within a few foot of the snowdrift… and vanished.

“Maybe that’s where Mom is,” Imani whispered. “In that mound!”

“Imani, that thing is so big!” Sharise said, blubbering again. “It moves so fast!”

“I have a gun.”

“You don’t even know if that’s loaded!” Sharise said, her voice hoarse from crying. “Please. Now we know it might be here. Let’s go get help.”

“Dad’s getting help.”

Sharise sobbed again, her face contorting in that awful way, and Imani knew why. They didn’t know if Dad was alive either, much less if he was getting help. He might be in a coma back on the lodge floor.

“If it took Mom under the snow, she can’t breathe!” Imani said, raising her voice, forgetting their rule to stay quiet.

Sharise’s sobs burned Imani’s throat. Sharise’s tears tried to spill from Imani’s eyes. Imani could hear the hysteria and delusion in her own words.

“Imani… listen to me… You saw what that thing did to her. Mom is dead—”

“No!” Imani said. She whipped the rifle strap from over her shoulder so she could examine the Winchester at every angle. She needed to figure out if it was loaded. She turned the gun on its side and saw a lever, which she pushed away from her. The rifle spit out a casing.