Red Hands: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  She plunged ahead. A thin branch scraped her cheek, and she hissed at the sting. Raindrops ran down her face as she pushed through, tripped on a root, and stumbled half a dozen steps to land sprawling on the path. The fall knocked the wind out of her. A rock jutting from the ground smashed into her left breast, and she groaned and rolled over, arms across her chest. She coughed a little. The ache in her throat throbbed, but as her breathing evened out, she managed to turn over and rise up onto her knees.

  The trail had turned parallel to the mountain. The rain had lightened up. Ahead, the path sloped downward to a break in the trees. Silhouetted in the gray light, perhaps two hundred yards ahead, a broken, jagged stone chimney rose from a sloped roof. Maeve shot to her feet in panic, ready to bolt, fearful that she had unknowingly doubled back toward town.

  Something skittered through the trees overhead, but she heard no voices, nothing to indicate there were people around. With cautious steps, she started down the path toward that broken chimney, trying to orient herself. As the path sloped, she ran through all her past fishing and camping trips with her family, and moments before she reached the aging, moss-covered stone structure off the trail, she realized she had found the Moonglow Inn.

  It stood on a stony precipice overlooking the glacier-carved river gorge for which it had been named. Three hundred million years earlier, the Ice Age had caused glaciers a mile thick to move across the land, forging mountains, slashing valleys and deep gorges, shifting stone, leaving tunnels and caves and beautiful rock formations behind. Maeve’s father tended to be a quiet man, but she believed he had a bit of poetry in him, because occasionally he would reveal a love for some beautiful place or story that had touched him.

  Once upon a time, a trapper named Elwin Grey had been knee- deep in the river, looked up, and seen the full moon framed between the walls of the gorge, its light reflecting off glacial stone, and felt himself transported somewhere magical. Elwin Grey had named the place Moonglow River Gorge, and as more settlers moved in, the name had stuck. In high school, Maeve had written a paper about the native Abenaki people, who had surely had a name for the gorge before Elwin Grey’s magical evening, but she didn’t share that paper with her father. She didn’t want to extinguish that little bit of poetry in him.

  The Moonglow Inn had its own story. Maeve had never been there before. Like most who’d caught a glimpse of it, she had only seen the corner of its sagging roof from down in the gorge. But her father had told her the story of a Scottish laird who had fallen in love with the view from that precipice and believed others would as well. He’d sold his Highland estate and invested his money and influence building the inn. For a time, Maeve’s father had told her, it had worked. Hunters and fishermen and bird-watchers came, people of wealth and breeding who wanted to explore the wild mountains. But the waterfalls to the west drew more visitors, more development, and no road could be built to reach the Moonglow Inn. By the time the Great War erupted in Europe, the Scotsman’s dream had already faded, and before the war ended, the doors had been shuttered. Several times, investors had purchased the property in hope of reviving it, but over the course of a century, it had never actually reopened.

  The Moonglow Inn had become a memory. A ruin. A stone heap covered in moss, broken windows looking out over the gorge. One wing of the inn had collapsed and slid over the precipice into the gorge about eighty years earlier. Hikers would sometimes make their way there, Maeve’s father had told her, but it was far enough and spooky enough that the place did not draw vast numbers of partying teenagers the way it might have if it were closer to town.

  The place was just empty. Crumbling. A dead shell of a thing, the hollow husk of a man’s lost dream.

  It was exactly what Maeve had been hoping for.

  With the rain pattering the leaves overhead and the wind gusting over the rim of the gorge, she left the trail and explored the façade of the inn. Some of the windowpanes were intact, but most had been shattered. Maeve pressed against the swollen wood of the front door, and the rusted hinges squealed. She put her shoulder into it and yanked up on the handle as she pushed, and it scraped against the stone threshold just enough to give her room to squeeze through.

  Her nausea had faded, but she grunted as she squeezed through the gap and inhaled the moldy stink of the rotting wood. Her stomach churned, bile at the back of her throat. Maeve forced it down, but the moment it passed she began to cough again. Each barking seal cough sent a spike of pain through her skull, and she felt something trickling from her nose. Reaching up, she wiped away something she first thought was blood, but which she saw, in the wan light coming through the broken roof, was putrid yellow and oily black.

  She collapsed to the floor in what had once been the lobby. The thick pine beams of the floor had turned soft where the roof lay open to the elements, but here it retained its solidity and strength. Where the huge stone fireplace rose to the ceiling, the fallen portion of the chimney had crashed through the roof and lay in a pile on the floor. The rain fell through the opening. Across the lobby, a staircase rose into shadows and cobwebs.

  The stairs seemed to call to her. They looked protected from the wind and rain, dry and warm. She could curl up at the top of the steps and figure out what to do next. Another cough rumbled in her chest, but she took small sips of breath, fighting it, staving off the pain that came along with it. Maeve stumbled toward the stairs, wheezing, barking, head throbbing, that disgusting crap in her throat.

  Her eyes were wet. She went to wipe at them with her hands, but when she blinked, the gray interior of the crumbling lodge turned a filmy red.

  Through the veil of red that covered her eyes, the room around her changed. A fire roared in the fireplace. The dying echo of laughter hung in the air. The stink of booze filled the lodge. The whole world turned crimsons and scarlets and bright candy-apple reds, but mostly bloodred, because all around her, strewn across the lobby, were bloated corpses dressed in the finery of another era. Their eyes were stained a reddish black, clotted with dried fluid. Their throats were swollen and black, their exposed skin covered in deep red blotches that had bled and scabbed and begun to rot as if acid had eaten down to the bone.

  Maeve tried to scream, but her throat was so raw that pain silenced her. Another round of coughing racked her body, and she dropped to one knee. She drew a ragged breath, managed to stifle the next cough, and stared at her hands, which were trembling and pale in the storm light.

  Pale, not veiled by that red film that had affected her vision.

  The moment passed. The fireplace no longer roared with flame. The inn had returned to the moldering, broken, abandoned gray pile it had been upon her entrance into the place.

  Maeve wanted to rise, to run, even to weep, but she didn’t have the energy for any of those things. Instead, she lay on the floor, listened to the rain on the roof, and winced at the strange hunger that gnawed at her.

  The itch returned to her hands and her fingers twitched while she lay there, yearning for something she refused to allow herself to imagine. Yearning for contact.

  She closed her eyes for fear of what they might see.

  * * *

  Rose knew she ought to have come alone, but she was deeply grateful to have Priya with her. Without the comfort of her company, the warmth of her love, she’d have been alone with her grief. Images of her mother and Logan swam into her thoughts, and she shoved them out. Yeah, if she’d been alone, she knew she would have collapsed into helpless sobs by now. Full fetal position breakdown. Mom and Logan were dead, the two people who seemed to always look out for her the most. Now what, she was supposed to live with her father? Sometimes she loved him so much it hurt, but she couldn’t trust him to do what he said or be where he promised, and that hurt even more.

  “Gorilla Rock’s just up here, isn’t it?” Priya asked.

  Rose smiled, surprised that Priya would remember. She wasn’t much of a nature girl. They had overheard enough to know that Maeve had set out north and
east from her granddad’s cabin, so Rose had parked Mr. McHugh’s old Corsica at the entrance to the Edison Campground and they’d hiked up the southern approach, hoping to intersect her path. Rose had halfway expected to be stopped by local or state police, but the quarantine didn’t stop people from moving around Jericho Falls—only from leaving it. There had been a number of police cars parked along the trailheads, where cops and others out searching for Mae must have started up the mountain. There’d been a single state police car at Edison Campground, but it was empty. Whoever had driven it over, they’d been deployed up onto the mountain. Most of the cops who weren’t part of the search must have been manning roadblocks on the main routes out of town or still helping with the cleanup downtown.

  Maybe tomorrow there would be more searchers—National Guard or something—but for now, the numbers were limited. If they hadn’t found Mae by then, Rose wondered how long it would be before they decided other people were or were not infected. The federal government would be monitoring the situation, but they had proven to be colossal fuckups when it came to the containment of contagion in the past. In the end, the only thing Rose cared about was that there was nobody there to stop them from going up the mountain after her sister.

  “We follow the markers for the Eagle View Trail and we’ll come to the fire pit,” she said. “Gorilla Rock’s not far after that.”

  She took Priya’s hand and led the way. When the Sinclair siblings had been small, their father had taken them to Plug Pond to fish at least once a week during the summer. For him, fishing had always included drinking, but he’d had it under control in those days, or at least none of them ever seemed to notice how much he drank. It was just Ted Sinclair, catching fish, drinking beer, laughing with his kids.

  She knew this part of the mountain well. Gorilla Rock had acquired its name over generations, first as a colloquialism, until someone had included it in a hiking brochure, and then the name became permanent. A piece of glacial stone, its broken edges formed what looked to be a protruding brow, shadowed eyes, a sloping forehead, so that it looked like the head of a brooding gorilla.

  The first time Rose had climbed up to the rock, which stood twenty feet above the trail, she had found a depression in the back of the stone head. The way the ground sloped up to it, and the concavity in the rock, it was the perfect place for a girl to secrete herself away if she wanted to play hide-and-seek or just give her long-suffering father a heart attack.

  She had been a mischievous girl.

  Priya took Rose’s hand again, her brow furrowed as she marched through the trees.

  The trail had been marked with spots of blue paint to let hikers know they were on the right track, but this route was so well traveled that it would have been hard to miss. The thought caused a frown to crease Rose’s forehead.

  “Shit,” she whispered. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Priya squeezed her hand. “What is it?”

  How could Rose explain the impact those blue paint spots had on her?

  “This trail … it’s too well known,” she said, looking at Priya. “I’m so stupid. Maeve’s probably a mess right now, but she’s not stupid.”

  Rose cursed herself again, silently now. Maeve would be terrified and lonely and shattered by guilt. But if she wanted to hide on the mountain, she would be too smart to travel the most familiar trails.

  “You’re right,” Priya said. “She’s not stupid. She has to know she needs help. Do you really think she’s going to hide somewhere your father wouldn’t find her eventually?”

  Rose looked at her, a rough heat rising in her cheeks. “You were there.”

  Priya squeezed her hand. “Finding her isn’t enough, Rose. We’ve got to figure out what’s been done to her, how to help her, and we can’t do that if she’s—”

  “The last thing she wants is for my dad to find her,” Rose said. “I’m sure she doesn’t want us to find her, either.”

  Priya chewed her lip. “Then how are we supposed to find her?”

  Rose looked up toward the mountain’s peak. “Someone’s going to. Which means it has to be us.”

  * * *

  Priya kissed her tears. “Then let’s focus. You said she wouldn’t have come here. Where would she go? The peak? I know there are caves up there. Or maybe she just doubled back and headed for the falls. There are houses there, cabins, plenty of camps where she could try to hide.”

  “Maybe,” Rose agreed, “but I don’t think so. She’d have taken the Jackrabbit Trail from the cabin. If we start climbing from here, head straight up the mountain, we’ll cross it. From there, we’ll find some of the narrow trails that hunters and animals use. Not the kind of thing hikers would bother with. We find those and we search, and if we find any sign of her, there’s no point in shouting her name. Chances are, she’s not going to answer back. She doesn’t want us anywhere near her if she thinks she might … that she could kill us.”

  Priya gave her a gentle kiss. “Lead the way.”

  Rose felt a hitch in her chest as she turned and left the path, hiking up the mountain through the woods. A flood of images flashed through her mind. Bouncing on Maeve’s bed on Christmas morning, dragging her sleepy sister into their parents’ room to wake them, the two girls teasing Logan, who would always be seated halfway down the steps waiting for them, more excited than any of them to see what Santa had brought.

  Logan, gone.

  Years had passed since Maeve had left for college. The bond between the sisters had evolved and matured. In some ways it had grown stronger, but Rose had often thought how much less fun growing up had made her relationship with Maeve. No more blanket forts.

  As a little girl, Rose had often woken in the night, terrified of the darkness inside her closet. The door never quite shut all the way, and the age of the house had warped the frame so that it swung open slightly when the wind blew outside and the gusting made the house breathe in and out. On those nights, Rose would tiptoe into Maeve’s room, climb into bed with her, warm and safe under the blankets with her big sister.

  Maeve had never sent her out, never complained of being woken. No matter how old they’d become, Maeve had always opened her arms, hugged Rose, stroked her hair, and kissed the top of her head. It had been Rose, eventually, who had decided she was too old for such displays.

  Maeve could hide as deep in the woods as she liked. No matter how afraid Rose might be, no matter how much she grieved, she was going to find her sister. Maeve had never turned her back, and neither would Rose.

  “Hey,” Priya rasped, grabbing at the strap of her backpack.

  Rose frowned, turning to look at her. They had hiked about twenty yards above Gorilla Rock.

  “What’s the—”

  Priya held a finger over her lips, neck craned, listening to the woods. All Rose could hear was the patter of the rain on the leaves and the path. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  “I don’t—” Rose started to say.

  But then she did. A noise down in the clearing below Gorilla Rock, a padding of footfalls as if someone had dashed across the clearing, trying to make as little noise as possible. The noise went silent for a few seconds, and she was about to speak again when the sound of something in the brush carried up to them.

  It might have been a lone hiker or someone searching for Maeve, but whoever it was, they were attempting to be quiet, and something about that made her skin crawl. She glanced up at Priya and saw what looked like a gleam of hope in her eyes, and only then did the other possibility occur to her.

  Maeve.

  Sliding and scrambling, slipping on the rain-slicked forest floor, she rushed down the slope, heedless of the noise she made as she crashed through branches.

  She slipped. Cussing loudly, she flailed and tumbled the last few feet into the clearing. On her hands and knees, Rose looked up, glanced around, and ached with fresh loss as she saw the clearing remained empty.

  “You heard it, right?” Rose asked, standing and brushing off dirt and
pine needles. “Someone was here.”

  “I thought I did,” Priya said, brows knitted. “Unless it was an animal. A deer. Maybe a bear, or a wolf—”

  “Oh, that’s a cheery thought,” Rose replied. “Thanks for that.”

  Quiet descended on the clearing for a moment. Even the rain paused. No birds called, no squirrels foraged. The two of them stood and listened, but if anything had been there, it was gone now. They were alone.

  Rose felt hollower, lonelier as she turned and started to climb up the mountain again. Priya being there, strong and calm and brave, should have comforted her, but suddenly the presence of this girl she loved only made her feel her loss more keenly.

  How many hours until dark?

  Rose began to lose hope.

  9

  Ted Sinclair liked movies about the apocalypse. Sometimes he would daydream about what it might be like—what kind of person he might prove to be—if the world ever really began to fall apart around him. Not that Ted was eager for nuclear war or a zombie uprising, but he loved those stories because they were about ordinary human beings having their mettle tested by the crumbling of civil society. He liked to tell himself that he would rise to the occasion, that instead of seeking the comfort of oblivion he would step up, fight for survival, for himself and the people he loved. Ted could picture himself a hero, living wild, running some guerrilla war campaign against an oppressor. But in that lizard brain at the base of his skull, he could feel a different instinct. A tremor, an urge.

  He wanted pills. A little plastic bottle rattling with lovely tabs of Oxy. Better yet, a dose or two of fentanyl. The pills might kill him, but first they’d get him so high that dying wouldn’t seem like such a terrible plan.