Ice and Monsters (The Lost Book 1) by Peter Nealen

Author:Peter Nealen [Nealen, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: WarGate Books
Published: 2022-01-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

We were half-frozen and sleep-deprived when the Dovos moved past us in the early morning, and the rest of the platoon came up to join us. No monsters had come at us during the night, though I’d seen what had looked very much like an oversized, humpbacked wolf step out of the trees sometime after midnight and stand at the edge of the cliff for a moment before disappearing. I’d had my sights on it, though I was so cold by that point that my red dot was shaking from its shoulder to its tail. It had vanished before I could even take the weapon off safe, so quickly that I started to doubt whether I’d really seen it or not.

Rodeffer had been up at that time, too, and he hadn’t said anything. Which only strengthened my doubts.

It was hard to say what was real and what wasn’t in those mountains. So many of the vague shadows and flickers of movement that you saw out of the corner of your eye vanished as soon as you turned toward them and left you wondering if you’d caught a glimpse of another monster or were just exhausted, cold, hungry… and starting to hallucinate.

Maybe it was both. I had no way to know.

We kept climbing the mountain.

The trees got shorter, the wind got harsher, and the rocks got sharper and steeper. The snow got deeper, and more and more it overlaid deep, packed ice. On one of the increasingly frequent and necessary halts, I looked over my shoulder and saw the river valley spread out beneath us over the treetops, shrouded in blowing snow and scudding low clouds. A new overcast had moved in, though it was still thin. Despite the dimmed light of the sun, I still had to squint against the harsh, nearly unremitting white of the snow-shrouded landscape.

As my eyes turned north, I saw what looked like a blue-white line along the horizon, far off in the distance, above even the northern peaks. I squinted as I took it in. Unless I missed my guess—and that was possible, given how little sleep I’d gotten since we’d arrived—that was the biggest glacier I’d ever seen.

Looking up, I saw what appeared to be a slot in the mountain ridge above us. And the longer I looked, even as I leaned on my knees, my rifle dangling from its sling, the more I was sure that was where we were going. There didn’t appear to be any other viable pathways through that wall of rock and ice rising in sheer, jagged peaks above us.

Our progress got slower still as we fought the terrain, the wind, and the snow and ice. It became harder and harder to maintain security, not only because we were getting strung out into a single file as we worked our way up the mountainside, but also simply because the difficulty of the terrain and the cold was making us start to turn in on ourselves, just putting our heads down and putting one foot—or gloved hand—in front of the other.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.