The moonlight dimmed and a few fresh snowflakes began to filter their way down as Thibideau made his way through the bare patches and drifts. The trees here were spaced a good distance apart, their lower branches gray and stunted, and a snapped twig under his foot sounded as loud as a gunshot. He knew his way around well enough to keep from getting lost; in any case, the road down to the hydro compound was probably still impossible to get through by car. They’d stopped construction late that fall when the first heavy storm blew in. He never could understand the idiot who organized that whole project. Winters in this remote area of Canada were a bitch, and nobody but that special contractor (who was, incidentally, originally from California) thought they could get the place finished without building a quality road to it first. Now there was no doubt that contractor was out of a job, but it was too late for the road. The ground was rutted, frozen hard as a rock, and covered with a foot of snow. So the plant just sat like some huge, hibernating beast, waiting for the scientists and construction workers to wake it up in the spring.

A few more minutes of walking and he came to a break in the trees, and the entire vast, unfinished compound spread out below him, a huge and gaping hole in the earth with several small buildings scattered around it, including the old mining building beside the frozen river. The river itself cut through the woods directly below, at the foot of a steep bank scattered with small saplings and naked shrubs. It sat as a silent warning, like a line drawn in the dirt by a childhood bully. Cross it and you’re gonna get yours.

The scope of the thing was remarkable. Until now he had never seen the place, and standing here at the edge, he found it lived up to the stories he had heard in town. Hell, it blew the stories out of the water. Trees had been cut down for what seemed like miles in every direction; the place looked like the center of an atomic bomb blast, the half-completed buildings dotting its edge like props for a toy train set.

Standing there gaping, it took him several minutes to realize that something seemed out of place, something more than just this alien blast site in the middle of dense woods. In another second, he knew what that thing was, and crouched behind the trunk of the biggest tree he could find on the upper slope, trying to calm his thudding heart. Partially hidden behind the old wooden mine building just across the river was a snowmobile, cleaned of snow and with what looked like fresh tracks behind it.