Chapter Five

AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you get tired of waiting for new chapters, the entire book is for sale on Amazon in print and on Kindle: https://www.amazon.com/Skinwalkers-Distant-Thunder-Adam-Bolander-ebook/dp/B0D128VD9V?crid=24W41CTHT7EDC&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.KfDW2-M5NGa2qL0wxty7rQc5lxHh_f-10YwlqipBh4g.UFzNpMAr6R_3JpGzb6Wjyoivt59NgZ3InddvCwBhnOI&dib_tag=se&keywords=skinwalkers+distant+thunder&qid=1730566075&sprefix=skinwalkers+distant+thunder%2Caps%2C135&sr=8-1

Chapter Five

Everything hurt.

With a quiet moan, Fey forced her eyes open. She was lying on her back somewhere in the middle of the forest. Below her, the ground was wet and muddy, and up above the sky was gray. The fearsome storm from earlier was gone, leaving behind nothing but a misty sprinkle of rain that—

The storm.

The giant bird!

Clueless and Zave!

Ignoring the pain, Fey scrambled to her feet. Her shoes—or the human feet inside them, more likely—were ill suited to conditions like these, though, and she promptly slipped and fell back into the mud. Cursing herself, she got back up and put one hand on a nearby tree to steady herself before looking around.

It wasn't hard to deduce what had happened after the giant bird's attack. Fey was standing at the bottom of a steep hill, practically a ravine. She could even make out the trail she must have left in the mud on her way down, which meant she probably hadn't been here for long.

More importantly, at the top of the hill, Fey could see a pitch black pillar of smoke billowing up into the cloudy gray sky. The trees blocked the source of the smoke from view, but there was no doubt in Fey's mind as to what she was looking at.

"No!" she whispered, terror filling her veins like liquid ice. First Derrick and the other kids, and now Clueless, Zave, Glenn, and Norrin. She even felt a stab of guilt for Ember, imagining the fox-walker burning to a cinder in that twisted metal deathtrap.

That’s enough of that! she told herself. Clenching her fist, Fey took hold of her emotions and, with some difficulty, managed to push them back down. She would have time to mourn her friends later—after she had checked to make sure they were dead in the first place!

Wiping away a mix of mud and blood that was drying on her face, Fey marched to the hillside and surveyed the challenge ahead of her. The hill was steep, and at least fifty feet tall, but there were trees growing from it that could serve as handholds. Taking a deep breath, Fey fixed her eyes on her destination, and set forth.

She was barely a quarter of the way up when her foot found a muddy patch and slid out from beneath her, sending her rolling painfully back to the bottom, knocking into what felt like every tree in the forest on her way down.

"Damn it!" she yelled, picking herself up out of the mud a third time. Part of her journey down had been face-first, and now the vile taste of forest mud—and everything that could be found in it—filled her mouth.

She took a few steps in both directions, but couldn't see any place the ravine became less steep. She growled in her throat and spat to get the taste of dirt out of her mouth. This would be so much easier if she was in her true form. But she was right on the edge of a plane crash. Who knew how many people were rushing in her direction right at that minute to put out fires and look for survivors? If she transformed and was seen, it would make the punishment for returning to the Wild after going Tame seem Tame in and of itself.

The ground rumbled beneath Fey's feet, and up above the pillar of smoke became even thicker.

"Fine," she hissed. "To hell with it, then!"

In a flurry of motion, she stripped herself of her human clothes, tossing them aside like the worthless lumps of fabric that they were. Once naked, her skin exposed to the refreshing chill of the forest air, she couldn't help but sigh in relief. Ember had been right about one thing: skinwalkers weren't supposed to wear clothes, and the way her body rejoiced at being free of it proved that. She had spent the past three years of her life trapped in that prison of cloth, and she had almost managed to convince herself that she didn’t hate it.

Reaching deep inside herself, Fey located the power that separated her from normal humans, and seized it. Immediately, fur as white as snow burst from her skin. Horns as black as midnight sprouted from her skull, curving backwards before ending in wickedly sharp tips. Her feet shrank into themselves, hardening into cloven hooves the color of obsidian. Her face stretched forward to form a muzzle, the perfect balance between beast and girl, just like the rest of her. Energy rippled through her, filling Fey with the power of the animal kingdom.

Then, bending her knees, the goat-walker leaped with all her might!

Fey Greenbriar may not have been able to do anything about the weather, but she did have the natural abilities of a forest goat. In an instant, all the distance she had traveled on foot flashed past her in a blur of greens and browns. The misty air whipped her fur into a frenzy, the cold raindrops like tiny shocks of electricity to the skin beneath, and it all came together to make Fey feel alive in a way nothing else could.

Her momentum began to fade, but rather than land in the mud and risk not being able to gain enough traction for a second jump, Fey angled her body in midair so that her hooves were pressed against the wet, slimy bark of a tree nearly a third of the way up the slope. Then, before gravity could fully reclaim her, she thrust off the tree and was sent flying up the hillside yet again.

In her younger years, Fey had resented her goat form. Why couldn’t her true self have been something cooler, like a wolf, or even a falcon like Skylar? But the first lesson Glenn had taught her was that every animal in the world had a special skill or talent that helped it to survive in the Wild. The strongest skinwalker wasn't the one with the biggest teeth and claws, but the one who mastered the innate abilities of the animal they were given.

And in Fey's case, those abilities were the agility and balance to climb nearly anything she wanted.

In a blazing streak of white, she burst out of the treeline and performed a graceful flip before landing nimbly at the crest of the hill. There, less than ten feet away from the edge, lay the broken remains of the airplane. It looked surprisingly intact, considering how many thousands of feet it had fallen before crashing here in the middle of the woods. Every single window was gone, not a single shard of glass left, and the once-conical nose had been smashed flat. Seeing it, Fey suddenly remembered how the giant bird had torn the plane in two. That explained why the back half was nowhere to be seen.

Why didn't the bird come back for this piece? she wondered, staring at the decapitated machine in a mixture of awe and horror. Looking at the destruction, something about it struck Fey. She had assumed that the giant bird had attacked them because it mistook the plane for prey, and had only realized its mistake after prying its “head” off and not finding any meat inside. But this didn’t look like the work of a hungry animal.

It looked like a pissed off monster.

Cautiously, Fey made her way to the back half, which lay open to the elements. Luckily, while there were fires burning where the fuel lines had ruptured, the entire thing hadn't gone up in flames just yet. Still, the sheer heat was enough to make Fey shy back from the opening. It was nearly pitch black, but the smell of death was easily detectable through the stench of burning fuel. That, even more than the fire, made Fey's fur stand on end. It was almost enough to make her turn tail and run the other way. What were the chances that the others had survived such a nightmare? The fact that she was alive was nothing short of a—

"Fey? Fey!"

The voice was faint, choked, but Fey's sensitive ears perked up when they heard it. Her mouth fell open in shock. That was Glenn!

Without another thought, Fey charged into the burning wreck. Just like she'd feared, there were corpses everywhere. In the seats, in the aisle, even crushed between folds in the metal. Even after the horrors she had experienced over the past week, looking at the angles and poses in which death had claimed the other passengers made Fey sick to her stomach. But there was nowhere else for her to look. All she could do was grit her teeth and force herself onwards. It was dark and the smoke burned her eyes, but if memory served her and the other seats had been right…

There!

The outline of Glenn's antlered head became visible through the smoke, and Fey was so relieved that she couldn't stop a desperate laugh from bursting out of her mouth. She rushed over, kneeling next to him.

"Glenn! Tell me you're all right!"

He was still sitting where he'd been when the plane had taken off, though now that all the other passengers were dead he apparently had no qualms about taking on his true form. The back of his seat had broken, forcing him to hunch forward, with the weight of two heavily disfigured corpses keeping him from being able to push himself upright. If that wasn't enough, the tray on the seat in front of him had come unlatched, and was doing its best to cut him in half.

“I'm fine!" he said, coughing. He grasped at the seatbelt that was still wrapped around his torso, but the angle that the tray was jutting into his stomach kept him from reaching the buckle. "I just can't get…this damn thing…off!"

"Hold on," said Fey, running her hands across his lap, looking for where the latch had hidden itself. But then a hot breeze wafted through the wreckage, clearing the smoke for half a second, and Fey spotted another figure sitting right beside Glenn. She gasped in terror. "Zave!"

Zave was slumped forward, his eyes closed and his mouth hanging ajar, looking alarmingly—terrifyingly—corpselike.

"He's alive," Glenn reassured her, his breathing becoming more ragged with each lungful of smoke he choked down. "Just unconscious. Hurry, Fey!"

With an effort, Fey managed to tear her attention from Zave and focus on freeing her former alpha. An ominous rumble came from somewhere inside the plane's walls, and she glanced nervously at the cockpit where the flames were thickest. Had the fire grown even more when she wasn't looking? The floor shook beneath under her hooves.

Right, she thought, redoubling her efforts, time to go!

Wedging her elbow under the seat in front of Glenn, she managed to raise it just enough to give the deer-walker some wiggle room. With a grunt, he thrust up with his knee, knocking the tray back into its upright position. With it out of the way, Fey immediately spotted the buckle and rammed her finger into it, popping it free.

"Grab Zave and let's go!" he ordered, wasting no time clambering out of his seat as another rumble came from somewhere inside the airplane's corpse.

Luckily for Fey, Zave was easier to get free. As soon as his seatbelt was undone, he fell face first into the seat in front of him, and with a mighty heave Fey was able to haul him onto her shoulders for a piggyback ride.

"F…Fey?" he rasped as she trudged toward the exit. "What…"

"Just hold on," Fey told him, doing her best not to step on any corpses. "We're almost out."

She took one last step through the curtain of smoke, and found herself back in the wet and rainy forest again. The sudden transition shocked her senses so badly that she stumbled despite her goatlike balance, and would have fallen to the muddy ground if Glenn's strong hand hadn't reached out to catch her.

"Further away," he said, pointing into the woods. "Go! Now!"

Fey's head was spinning from all the smoke she'd inhaled. Luckily, the instinct to obey her old alpha won out, and she hoofed it toward the treeline as quickly as she could. The going was easier out here in the open, and Zave wasn't terribly heavy, so she—

The plane exploded.

Fey was thrown off her hooves and into the mud. Indescribable heat and what she could only describe as power washed painfully over her. Half a second later, Glenn landed just beside her. Bits of flaming metal rained down all around them, sizzling in the rain. Fey turned to look, and saw that barely a husk remained of the plane’s metal frame. Even as she watched, the trees that had been holding it in place gave way, and the once mighty jet went rolling down the same hill she had just climbed up.

"Fey, are you okay?" Glenn asked, sitting up.

Fey nodded mutely, stunned beyond the use of words by what she had just seen.

"Good." Glenn doubled over and had another coughing fit. His grayish brown fur was matted with soot and mud. "Ember, Norrin, and—"

"CLUELESS!"

Fey was on her hooves in an instant, unceremoniously dumping Zave into the mud. How could she have forgotten her one and only packmate? Why hadn't she been just a little bit faster?

"Calm down!" Glenn snapped, his voice ragged. "I'm trying to tell you, they weren't in there! They must have still been in the other part of the plane when it broke in half."

"Then…" Zave groaned, sitting up and rubbing his head. "Then Clueless is okay?"

"As far as we know, they're all okay," Glenn said.

Fey sighed in relief, feeling like a deflating balloon. It wasn't a promise, but by God she would take whatever sliver of hope she could grab hold of. There had been too much death over the past week.

So much death…

"What the hell," Zave asked, finally voicing the question that had been on Fey's mind this whole time as well, "was that thing?"

For a long, tense minute, Glenn didn't answer. Getting to his hooves, he tilted his head back and stared into the sky, heedless of the cold rain that spattered against his muzzle. His mouth was moving, though Fey couldn't hear any sound coming out of it. And while she wasn't an expert lip reader by any chance, she could have sworn that there was one word he kept repeating over and over to himself.

Impossible. Impossible. Impossible.

"Glenn?" she asked nervously.

Glenn turned his haunted, exhausted eyes on her, and said in a voice that suddenly sounded very old, "That…was a thunderbird."

NEXT CHAPTER: 12/11/24