Chapter 5
*Three minutes.*
I thumbed the power dial off, killing the green backlight before the glow could leak through the shutter chinks.
The survey shack wasn't a fortress; it was a pine tinderbox. Dried out by seventy years of mountain air, rotted at the sills, saturated with old pitch and linseed oil. A single phosphorus emergency flare into the dry cedar shingles and the interior would become a kiln in sixty seconds.
I scrambled across the floor on my knees, my numb feet dragging uselessly behind me, and reached the shuttered window on the western wall.
I pressed one eye to the narrow space where the pine frame had warped away from the casing.
Through the black silhouette of the spruce branches, two yellow needles of light were cutting through the blizzard at the base of the knoll.
Twin headlights. The sleds were running in tandem, three hundred yards down-slope, their engines roaring in a synchronization that shook the frost loose from the shack's tin roof. The blue exhaust smoke hung in the headlights like toxic fog, shredded instantly by the forty-knot gusts ripping off the ridge crest.
They were moving fast, trusting their wide powder tracks to ride the crust where I had sunk to my waist.
I didn't have time to put the boot back on.
I tore a strip of orange surveyor's tape from the roll in the sack, wrapped it three times around the wool sock on my right foot to keep the wool from sliding off, and wedged my toes back into the stiff leather boot. The pain was immediate, sharp enough to bring tears to my eyes, but I didn't stop to lace it; I kicked the heel home and shoved the radio into my coat pocket.
There was no back door. The rear of the shack was built directly against the limestone ledge of the ridge.
The only way out was the floor.
Every CCC shanty in the Bluefield district was built on the same template: three feet of dry-stacked fieldstone piers supporting four-by-eight floor joists, leaving a shallow crawlspace underneath to keep the timber clear of damp ground and rattlesnakes.
I dropped to my belly near the corner bunk.
The pine floorboards were two inches thick, nailed with cut-iron square spikes, but forty years of damp earth beneath had rotted the tongue-and-groove joints along the north wall. I jammed the iron survey pin into the seam between the outer boards, throwing all my body weight onto the makeshift lever.
The wood groaned. Old nails squeaked, their rusted shanks shearing off with a brittle *ping*.
One board popped upward three inches.
The draft that hit me from below was colder than the room above—a damp, mineral-heavy breath smelling of wet shale, copperhead musk, and decaying leaves.
Below me, the two-stroke engines peaked in a high, grinding scream as the sleds hit the final terrace seventy yards down-trail. The twin headlights flickered across the shanty’s front window, painting horizontal lines of white light across the rafters.
I hooked my fingers under the lifted plank, hauled it back until the pine cracked down its spine, and rolled into the dark.
The drop was two and a half feet.
I landed flat on my ribs in a bed of frozen leaves and sharp shale fragments. The jagged edge of a foundation stone caught my injured knee, sending another wave of blinding nausea through my skull. I didn't move. I reached up, caught the edge of the splintered plank, and pulled it back into its slot as gently as a mother closing a cradle gate.
Above me, through the quarter-inch cracks between the floorboards, the room flashed white.
The snowmobiles had cut their engines.
The sudden silence was louder than the machinery. Just the low, tearing whistle of the gale through the hemlocks, the ticking of hot exhaust manifolds cooling in the sub-zero air, and the rhythmic crunch of heavy pack-boots stepping off rubber running boards.
Two men.
“Look at the hasp,” Caleb’s voice was six feet from my head, separated only by the dry-stacked stone pier. “The pin’s on the snow. Fresh.”
A second set of boots crunched up onto the stoop. Lyle Redfern—Caleb’s younger brother, twenty years old, half-witted and mean as a chained cur.
“Door’s barred from inside,” Lyle grunted, his shoulder thumping against the heart-pine planking. “He’s in there, Caleb. He’s tucked in like a rat.”
“Step back,” Caleb said.
A heavy mechanical clatter followed: the slide of a pump-action shotgun being racked with deliberate, unhurried strength.
*Thump.*
A heavy boot struck the pine door near the latch. The drop-bar held. The shanty frame shuddered, showering iron rust and dry moss down through the floorboards into my hair.
“Jesse!” Caleb shouted, his voice flat, carry-all, carrying no anger—just the dull efficiency of a man calling a steer into the squeeze chute. “You come out on your belly with your hands flat, we take you down to Silas in the cab. You make me burn this box, you go down in a grain sack. Silas don’t care either way, long as the state troopers don’t find you talking.”
I held my breath. A drop of sweat ran down my eyebrow, freezing into an ice bead at the corner of my lash.
Beneath the floor, pressed against the wet shale, I could smell the grease on Caleb’s boots—the same beef tallow Faith used to water-proof the family’s field gear.
“He ain’t answering, Caleb,” Lyle said, his voice hitching with nervous excitement. “Burn it. Let’s just drop the flare and get back by the fire. My ears are freezing off.”
“Shut your mouth,” Caleb snapped. “Look at the snow around the base. There’s no tracks going out the backside.”
A boot stepped off the stoop, circling slowly toward the corner pier.
He was eighteen inches from my shoulder. Through a finger-wide gap between two foundation stones, I could see the bottom edge of Caleb’s heavy duck coat, caked with yellow road salt and frozen mud. He was holding a road flare in his left hand; I heard the dry scrape of the plastic cap being pried off.
*If he strikes that flare, the sulfur will drop through the cracks.*
My right hand closed around a fist-sized chunk of limestone half-buried in the frozen dirt beneath my hip.
It wasn't a weapon. If I hit him, Lyle would have twelve pellets of double-aught through the floorboards before I could clear the crawlspace.
I looked through the dark toward the downhill edge of the foundation.
Thirty feet away, where the stone pier met the steep slope of the ravine, the snow had drifted high against an old hemlock stump. Sitting on the crust, half-buried under new powder, was an empty five-gallon steel grease bucket the forestry crews had discarded a generation ago.
I didn't throw the stone at Caleb.
I leveled my arm along the frozen shale, slipped my wrist through the narrow space beneath the sill log, and whipped the stone with a side-arm snap downhill, toward the hemlock stump.
The stone arced through the blizzard, clear of the shack's footprint.
*CLANG.*
The heavy, hollow bell-strike of iron hitting frozen sheet steel echoed through the draw.
Lyle spun on his heel with a sharp curse, his shotgun coming up against his shoulder with a wet leather creak. “Down the draw! He went off the shelf!”
