Supernatural Fresh Meat - By Alice Henderson Page 0,61
heavily snow-laden trees. “You could be right.”
“He might be hot on the trail, reluctant to lose it,” Sam suggested.
Bobby pointed up the trail. “I say we rule out that he’s back at the car, and go check it out.”
“Good idea. If it’s still there, we come back and follow the trail, searching for any sign of him.”
Bobby nodded. “Right.” He considered separating, one of them trekking back to the Impala to see if it was still there. But in this storm, finding each other again might be impossible.
Bobby had never been in a snowstorm this bad, and he was starting to worry about Dean. He knew he could take care of himself, but even the most experienced outdoorsman could get hopelessly lost in whiteout conditions like this.
As they set off toward the last known location of the Impala, Bobby hoped that Dean had held on to his map and compass, because without it, he could be freezing to death even now.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Dean stepped around a tree, suddenly sinking up to his knee, even with the snowshoe on. “What the hell?” He struggled to pull his foot free.
“It’s a tree well,” Grace told him, hooking a hand under his arm and hefting him upward. “Snow collects at the base of a tree, and it gets really powdery and deep. People have been known to suffocate in them.”
“Great. I’ll keep that in mind.” He extracted his foot, then gave the tree a wide berth.
They’d been walking for over two hours, the progress painfully slow, while the storm raged on. He had hoped they’d come across some sign of Jason. Dean dismissed images of the hunter lying frozen at the base of a tree. Jason could easily have gotten hopelessly lost. He wasn’t even entirely sure Grace knew which way they were going. She kept staring off into the distance, waiting for clouds to part. Sometimes they waited more than ten minutes, just standing and staring. Then they’d either move on without getting a glimpse of landmarks, or the landmarks would be treated with the briefest of looks before Grace hurriedly jotted down notes and studied the map again.
They entered a very dense section of forest. Dean had slipped more than once on strange shapes under the snow, logs and huge rocks. Once he’d even stumbled over what turned out to be an old mine car. At least that meant they weren’t the first humans here, though it felt like it to Dean.
All he could hear was the wind sighing through the trees. They hadn’t seen a single sign of human habitation since they left the cabin.
“How are we doing?” Dean asked Grace when she stopped again to look at the map.
“Good, I think.”
“You think?”
“Well, it’s hard. I’m pretty much having to use dead reckoning.”
“That sounds about as cheerful as I feel.”
“It works, that’s the good part. You just try to keep track of the distance and time you’ve traveled. Well, it works most of the time. Unless you’re a complete idiot, which I’m not.”
“As long as this doesn’t end with one of us slicing the other open for warmth, I’m game.”
“Don’t worry. You smell better on the outside.”
He peered over her shoulder at the map while she consulted it. His breath frosted in the air. Beyond them, the clouds slid through the tree trunks, creating an unsettling, eerie landscape.
Dean had been watching for the gaunt figure, but hadn’t seen any sign of him.
“Okay.” She checked the bearing with her compass. “Let’s head slightly to the northeast. It’ll take us around a massive ridge that we can’t see, but is only a half-mile away from us right now. If we keep going straight, we’ll be looking at an impossible ascent. So instead we’ll skirt around the base. It’ll still be a bit steep in parts, but we’ll go around the worst bits.”
Dean quickly compared his own map to hers, seeing what she was talking about. The last thing he wanted to do was to be completely lost if they somehow got separated. He stared around, tried to get his bearings. Behind him, according to the map, was that ridge, ahead of him this ridge. It seemed impossible in the whiteout. He stuffed the map back in his parka pocket.
They started climbing at a slight angle. The snowshoes which at first had felt cumbersome and awkward now felt like part of Dean’s feet. They hissed in the powder when he stepped down, and the metal teeth on the underside made climbing easy.