Hank stood on the frozen riverbed, both barrels of the shotgun still smoking in his hands. He shouted a warning and fumbled in his pockets. David scrambled backward and got to his feet but the man was already past him and headed for the ice, stumbling down the gentle bank, his ruined arm hanging limply at his side.

It all happened incredibly fast: Hank struggling frantically with his heavy gloves, finally stripping them off and throwing them to the snow; the man lurching towards him, leaving a bright red trail behind; Hank dropping the new shells clumsily to the ground at his feet. David’s terror broke all at once and he scrambled for the gun that lay several feet away. As he reached it, he heard a horrible shriek.

They stood on the center of the barren, frozen river bed like a puppet and his master, the killer still holding the handle of the knife embedded in Hank’s throat as the man jerked and writhed on his knees.

“No.” David shook his head from side to side as the killer twisted the knife in Hank’s throat and ripped down, sending an arterial spray across the white snow. David raised the gun and squeezed the trigger, feeling it recoil against him as the shock ran up his arm and through his chest. David pulled the trigger again and this one sent up a fine plume of snow from the ground just to the left of the two figures. The killer slid the knife out of his victim’s throat, and Hank’s body collapsed onto the snow.

David pulled the trigger again, something in the back of his mind shouting at him to stop before the bullets were spent, and this one went too high into the air and took down a pine branch, heavy with snow. The branch fell with a thump against the riverbank.

The figure on the ice spun around and ran across the snow to the far side of the river, his wounded arm jerking and flapping against him like a slab of dead meat, the elbow broken and useless. David aimed the gun once more, but didn’t shoot. If he couldn’t hit anything standing still, he sure as hell couldn’t hit a moving target already more than fifty yards away through a snowfall. The killer disappeared into the woods above the far bank.

David ran down to where Hank had collapsed. A stain spread outward from the body in all directions, coloring the snow a deep red, and a fine, rust-colored bubble of blood sat upon the open wound in his throat. It only took a second to see the man was dead.