“He’ll just shoot us,” yelled Rice. “He’ll just shoot us both dead.”

Shaw looked down at him. The man was going into shock and there was nothing he could do to stop it. He froze with the sound of the dogs. Only this time it wasn’t baying. It was snarls and paralyzing growls that made every hair on the back of Shaw’s neck go vertical. He eased his head over the top of the boulder to see.

“Shaw!” screamed Katie and Reggie together.

Two of the largest, fiercest dogs Shaw had ever seen were bearing down on his location at speed. They bounded over the rough terrain like it was level high-pile carpet.

“Shaw, run!” yelled Reggie.

Shaw held his knife tightly, processing through the possible scenarios as fast as he could. He stood but kept in a squat because he didn’t know if the dogs were a ploy to get him in range for a killing round. He looked over the rock again in time to see the first dog leap. Shaw slashed with the knife, catching the two-hundred-pound beast across its massive chest and opening a gaping but unfortunately largely superficial wound. He used his free hand to lever the airborne animal into a tight arc, and it hit the ground hard, but didn’t stay down.

With a speed and agility that no human could match, the dog rolled, gained purchase on the rocky dirt, turned in a split second, accelerated on its four legs, and collided with Shaw, chest to chest. He went down, his own blood from one of the dog’s canines ripping into his arm mingled with the blood from the dog’s chest wound. Shaw was up again in an instant because lying on the ground he had no chance. His fist collided with the animal’s snout once and then twice, momentarily stunning it. The impacts sent stingers all the way up Shaw’s arm and into the tight mass of muscles on his shoulder. He cut with the knife one more time, the beast let out a whine, and then Shaw jumped over the boulder and ran, his feet slipping in the loose dirt.

He tensed for the rifle round hitting him in the back or else the dog attacking him from behind. In his mind he saw it pulling him down, the jaws, the stench of breath in his face as the dog bit into his neck, following an ages-old instinctual tactic it knew would rip the big blood vessels and kill the prey. None of it would be less than a nightmare.

But it didn’t happen. He understood a second later why.

Rice screamed louder than Shaw had ever heard anyone do before. It was like he had ripped his lungs from his chest and inflated them with a ton of oxygen, producing a sound that froze Shaw to his core. He looked back and wished he hadn’t. Shaw had seen a lot of violence in his life, more than most people. But he had never seen anything like this.

One dog had Rice’s arm in its mouth. The other had just torn through most of the doomed man’s chest as freed blood sprayed everywhere. Shaw had a fleeting image of the Goya painting he’d seen of the monster eating the man. Nothing as feeble as oils and canvas, even powered by the imagination of a genius, could match the horror of the real spectacle. It was only at this point, his body perhaps more gone than not, that Alan Rice finally died.

Shaw reached the others and they ran as fast and as far as they could. Shaw half-carried Katie as they slipped and slid and rolled across ground that, at best, should have been traveled over at a measured, cautious pace.

Two miles later they collapsed, flat on the ground, their breaths coming so hard that it sounded like they were sucking on their last bits of oxygen.

“How?” Whit finally said as he sat up, his chest still heaving.

“I don’t know how,” answered Shaw. “He outmaneuvered us.”

Reggie slowly sat up. “We have to keep going. If we have to jump in the Belle Strait and swim to a boat, that’s what we have to do. We stay here we die.”

Whit punched his knife into the dirt. “Get a clue. We are dead. It’ll be the dogs on us next. We’ve got no chance, Reggie.”

Shaw stood, helping Katie up with him. “Reggie’s right. We have to keep moving.”

Whit looked up at him. “You really think that will make any difference?”

“No, but I’m going to make that son of a bitch work a little bit more for it. How about you?”

Reinvigorated, Whit slipped the knife in his pocket and jumped to his feet. They ran as hard as they could to the water.

98

WHAT WAS LEFT of Alan Rice was swept into plastic trash bags and carried off. The gorged dogs, blood running down their jowls, were corralled with the long metal control poles and their muzzles were once more attached. Sitting on his haunches, his rifle lying across his thighs, Kuchin watched this work even as he muddled over his next maneuver.

He looked off into the distance. Water. It was a requirement of life. They would be heading there now. It was logical. Indeed, it was their only option. He could kill them all easily right now, but that wasn’t the point. Kuchin could have shot Shaw when he went to Rice’s aid or after Shaw fled the dogs. Yet again, it wasn’t when they were going to die. It was how. And he would dictate those terms. And they had done one thing that he assumed they would. He rose, and as he did so he smiled. They would not understand the significance of their action now, of course. But he intended to point it out moments before it was all going to end.

One down, three to go. Well, two down if he counted the man back at the house, but Kuchin didn’t really care about that. He already had the order of deaths planned out. The woman would go last. Kuchin had not forgotten his earlier desire. He would possess her and then finish her. He could think of no better revenge. And her death would be by far the most painful of any of them. In his backpack he had his skin peeler. He would see if he could beat his record of under one hour. He felt that he could. He could already hear her screams in his mind.

“Pascal?” he said, and the small man appeared next to him almost immediately.

“Yes, Mr. Waller?”

“It is time to move on, I think.” He looked to the sky. The darkest moment of night had come and gone. Above him now was the very earliest appearance of the tipping point of night passing to dawn. “They will be heading to the strait. The ships.”

Pascal nodded in agreement. “The channel is wider than they probably think. And there was an ice floe reported there yesterday, hugging the Labrador side. All the ships will stay well to the south of that. They will see no ships.”

“I believe they will realize that when they arrive there. It will be lighter then. They will wait and they will try to signal in the hope that there is something out there. The gun safe was intact?”

“Yes sir. We checked after they left. We’d emptied it of all the weapons and ammo just in case they were successful in breaking into it. They only took knives. The big man used his on one of the dogs, but he seems fine.”

Kuchin stroked the barrel of his custom-built rifle. “A knife. A poor weapon against this.”

“I can take the shortcut and turn them back towards you. Tactically, they will have nowhere else to go except into the strait.”

“Do that, Pascal. Drive them to me.” He pulled out a pocket map and Pascal shone a light on it. “Drive them there.” He indicated a spot on the map.

“It’s a good choice,” said Pascal, nodding his head approvingly. He looked back at one of the trucks where they were loading the trash bags with the remains of Alan Rice.

“He was a stupid man.”

“He was actually a very smart man, which can make someone do very stupid things. In intelligence there is ambition. And in ambition there is peril.”

“If you say so, Mr. Waller.”

“Drive them to me, Pascal.”