“I am no longer among the living,” Rasputin had said on that Christmas night.
But even now, even here, some part of Anastasia did not believe it.
Chapter 22
Lying in his sleeping bag on the floor of the cave, Harley checked the time on his cell phone. The phone reception was for shit—what would you expect from a cave on an island in the middle of nowhere?—but the clock told him it was 8 A.M.
And that meant it was high time to get this damn show on the road.
After they’d run the Kodiak aground the night before, Harley and his two next-to-useless assistants had off-loaded their supplies onto the skiff and laboriously toted them up the side of the sloping cliff and into the first cave that looked relatively safe and dry. They had left an LED light burning atop a crate all night, and looking around now, Harley saw the ration boxes and knapsacks stacked against the craggy stone walls, along with the shovels, spades, and, leave it to Russell, three cases of beer. Judging from the sound of his snoring, Russell was still sleeping off the cold ones he’d already drunk. Harley crawled out of his sleeping bag, kicked Eddie to wake him up, then, bending to keep from banging his head on the low ceiling, went to the mouth of the cave; they’d stretched a tarp between two crates to keep out the wind. Batting the tarp aside, he looked out on the cold, dark morning and the seawater frothing in the tide pools at the foot of the cliff. The boat was still marooned on the rocks, advertising their presence on the island, but at least it was stranded as far from the old Russian colony as it could get. Harley would have liked to find a hideout farther from the boat, just in case the Coast Guard ever came along and spotted it, but he knew that if he’d asked Eddie and Russell to hump the supplies any deeper into the woods, he’d have had a mutiny on his hands.
“What the hell time is it?” Eddie said, burrowing deeper into his bag to escape the cold blast from the entrance.
“Time to get up and get going.”
“Take Russell.”
But Harley had already decided to let Russell sleep it off. After the brawl that had erupted on the boat, he was wary of having the two of them along—especially on this first reconnaissance mission. He didn’t know exactly what was out there, and a loose cannon like Russell could wind up proving a liability. Plus, he wanted to cover some serious ground.
After they’d both eaten some canned Army surplus meals that Harley had picked up at the Arctic Circle Gun Shoppe, they stepped out onto the rocky ledge. Harley had strapped a twelve-gauge shotgun on his back and wedged a can of bear mace—made from concentrated red chili peppers—in his pocket. Over one shoulder he carried a spade; Eddie had a pickaxe. As they marched off, he had an unfortunate image of the seven dwarfs heading off into the woods.
Fifty feet in, and it started to feel even more like that damn fairy tale. The island itself was small, but forbidding. Densely forested with spruce and hemlock and alder, the ground was rocky and uneven and lightly dusted with snow, with a lot more to come if the weather reports were true. The prickly spines of devil’s club bushes snatched at their sleeves, and one of them even pulled Eddie’s stocking cap off his head. He had to stop and snatch it back, then, out of sheer annoyance, he broke the twig off and stomped on it.
“You sure it’s dead?” Harley said.
“Fuck you,” Eddie replied. “You have any idea where you’re going, by the way, or are we just out for a hike?”