The iron handle was cold to his fingers and resisted any movement. Ryan waited a moment, then tried again, using greater force.
But nothing happened; it was rock solid. He looked around as another great flash of sheet lightning illuminated the rain-slick slope.
The thought of calling out crossed his mind, but he doubted that they’d hear him anyway. The storm’s heart seemed locked in place, directly over that part of the Sierras.
Ryan looked around one more time, shaking his head to clear his vision. He wondered whether he’d actually just seen fresh movement, along a narrow path that he hadn’t noticed before, which led past the cabin down toward the stream, flanking what had probably once been a car-parking area.
On an impulse he followed the movement.
The wind was deafening, combining with the constant rumbling of thunder to seal him off into a buffeting world of noise. A gang of stickies could have come up behind him, letting off triple-power cherry bombs as they came, and Ryan wouldn’t have heard a single sound.
Branches lashed out at him, making him duck and weave, fending them off with both hands while trying to maintain a tight grip on the blaster.
There it was again!
It was definitely one of the rats, scuttling along about thirty yards in front of him, belly down, scaled tail scooping through the mud. The compensation from the storm was that the gigantic rodent was way too busy to worry about whether it was being the hunter or the hunted.
The trail wound steeply downhill. Ryan could make out faint ruts, despite the streaming dirt, as though some sort of barrow or handcart had been frequently used on the path.
There had been no lightning for several long beats of the heart, and Ryan reluctantly stopped, waiting to gather his bearings again in the swooping blackness. If the rat had stopped, as well, there was the real menace of walking right into it. With predictably unpleasant consequences.
To his surprise the ragged veil of clouds was suddenly torn apart for a moment and watery moonlight broke through, showing that he was on the edge of a wide clearing.
Ryan’s mind registered two separate and bizarre images, almost simultaneously.
One was the rat, silhouetted by the stark light, towering on its hind legs, clambering and gnawing away at a mound that stood up against a roof-high deadfall. The other, seen in that frozen fragment of time, like a fly trapped in amber, was what the rodent was eating.
There were bones, glistening, stripped of meat, with just a few shreds of gristle and sinew dangling from them. A small mountain of death was piled high, the smell penetrating to Ryan despite the wind and the rain.
That first hideous glance revealed the presence of dozens of flayed carcasses, all too obviously the source for Mrs. Fairchild’s wonderful jerky.
It was the next flash of chem lightning, a triple heartbeat later, that showed Ryan precisely what kind of meat he and the others had devoured so enthusiastically.
There were femurs and clusters of carpal bones, entire rib cages and pelvises. But most of all there were dozens of grinning skulls.
Human skulls.
Chapter Sixteen
Aware of the watcher, the mutie rat turned from its feast and dropped to all four legs.
The few seconds of moonlight were over, the wind blowing the banks of cloud back, plunging the area into total darkness again, with only the scattered bolts of pinkish silver lightning to bring any illumination.
Ryan moved a few steps to his right, feeling with his hand to encounter the rough, streaming bark of the nearest of the immense pines. He sensed the importance of having some kind of solid cover to make a stand against the mutie rodent and pressed his back against the trunk, the SIG-Sauer probing at the blackness like an extension of his right arm.
Part of his fighting brain was locked into the problem of the rats, but another part was wrestling with concern over the grotesque hill of human corpses and what the implications were for himself and the six friends.
And another part of him desperately wanted to throw up and rid himself of the half-digested jerky that seemed to have swollen to near bursting.