The Shadowkiller by Matthew Scott Hansen Page A

his pocket, then looked around, knowing Jack would not have parted with them unless something was very wrong.
    â€œJack?” He called out, “Jack!”
    His voice echoed away and he waited for a response, even a moan.
    â€œJack! Hey, Jack!”
    More nothing, except the white noise of soft rain and occasional rustling of birds and small ground dwellers.
    â€œJack!” Mitch gazed around. Not prone to cursing, he categorized this situation as appropriate for an expletive. “Shit,” he whispered.
    Regretting his no-phone rule, he decided to jog to the car and call for help. He’d have either the King or Snohomish County Search and Rescue here in no time and they’d have Jack back safely before dinner.
    Now this will be a story for the office on Monday.
    It was easy to jog using the trail’s steep downward slope. About five minutes into his trek, he slowed and looked around, feeling that the sun had just peeked through the rain clouds. A few yards later, after searching the sky, he realized he was actually having a gut instinct that something was wrong. He increased his jog to a run, his feet now sailing over the ruts and dips and switchbacks in his path. Racing down the trail, he suddenly had the perception he was being pursued. He acknowledged it was totally irrational, but there really seemed to be someone following him.
    Even though he knew it wasn’t Jack—everything told him it wasn’t—he stopped to look, to listen. Though the soft whisper of rain had let up for a moment, he was woodsman enough to be aware that what he heard was nothing. Not a sound other than air molecules rubbing together. Not a bird, squirrel, cricket, or fly. Nothing. On any other day he might not have even noticed, but there was something ominous about the silence and a slow wave of panic swept over him.
    Mitch began to run as fast as he could.
    Running at full clip for ten minutes, he saw landmarks that told him he was less than half a mile from the Cherokee. The syncopation of his footsteps on the hard-worn trail beat a steady rhythm, and as he poured on the coal, the snapping of twigs and thudding on hardpan under his feet no longer sounded synchronized with his footfalls. Even in the split second of ground contact he was making, he could feel other, faster, bigger steps. Much bigger steps. It wasn’t Jack and it sure wasn’t anything he wanted to see. He concentrated on getting to the car and getting the hell out of there.
    He was sprinting now, flying. The rain returned, harder than before.
    Throwing his stride off slightly, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys and the Cherokee’s remote transmitter. That little black piece of plastic was a welcome feeling in his hand and gave Mitch the illusion he was safe already. But that warm shell shattered when Mitch heard the breathing —metered, regular breaths, but at a volume and resonance that were unreal, like a horrifyingly deep, basso profundo recording someone had concocted in a sound studio and was now playing behind him to frighten his wits from him. And it was working.
    And the giant footfalls of the other were overpowering his too. Now there was no doubt something was right behind him, something really big, something…
    Through the misty rain he saw the Cherokee and readied the door clicker, his thumb on the button—the one-touch, driver-side-only door opener. Closing on the truck, only thirty seconds more and…
    He was going to make it…
    He knew it…
    He was so close. He visualized jumping into the front seat and…
    It grabbed him.
    There were no doubts in his mind as he was stopped short and lifted two, three, four feet off the ground, the transmitter falling out of his hand. A throaty, tearing snort from a maw like Cerberus’s told him he was not in the grasp of anything human, and when he was whipped around, his mind froze as he realized he was merely a smaller animal in the