Witch's Canyon

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  Heather turned into the gated driveway. After she sat there for a couple of seconds, the gates swung open for her. Dean and Sam sat on the road outside until they closed again and she was on her way to the house. Dean started to put the Impala into gear when Sam said, "Let's give her a minute."

  "She's home," Dean said.

  "Let's just wait till she's inside."

  Dean shrugged. They already knew that people weren't actually any safer in their homes than outside, but maybe Sam was into her.

  Like she was into him.

  Across Cedar Wells, the attacks began in earnest. Dennis Gladstone was sound asleep in his bed, dreaming of three women who were very friendly and very blond, when a smell in his room, a pungent mix of stale earth and sour air, woke him. He sat up and switched on a bedside light. The smell came from what looked like a cowboy. Air sucking in and out of a ragged lung wound made a wet whistling noise. Before Dennis could say anything to the intruder, the cowboy drew a gun and fired it once, piercing Dennis's lung.

  Maria Lima hadn't been able to sleep. She'd finally given up and gone downstairs so she wouldn't risk waking up her husband or their baby girl. She sat on the living room couch with a pillow across her lap, watching a late movie with the sound turned low. Seemingly from nowhere—since the couch was pushed against the wall—hands reached around from behind her and closed on her throat, cutting off her air supply. She struggled, but the hands couldn't be pried away. Before she lost consciousness, she saw—and then didn't see, and then did, and then didn't again—a woman wearing a nightdress that looked like something pioneer women might have worn. The nightdress left her neck exposed, and Maria could see dark bruises ringing the woman's throat. Then she couldn't see anything at all.

  Larry Gottschalk worked nights at the Stop-N-Gas on the eastern fringe of town. The only people who ever drove up after midnight were drunk, and they were usually coming in so they could stock up on more booze to continue their buzz. A couple of times people had been so drunk that they parked at the gas pumps, came inside and bought a twelve-pack or a box of wine, and then drove away again, all without remembering that they actually did need gas. Larry took a perverse pleasure in seeing them stumbling back twenty or thirty minutes later carrying empty gas cans.

  But tonight the bell on the door rang and he looked up from the scandal rag in which he'd been reading about Paris Hilton's latest escapade, which would have humiliated anyone with common sense or a feeling of self-worth, and standing in the doorway was someone who was either a cavalry soldier from the time of the Indian Wars or someone who played one in a movie. If the latter, it was a gory movie with realistic makeup effects, because a chunk of the soldier's lower jaw was missing. He had skin halfway down his cheek, and then there was just exposed bone and upper teeth, and then nothing. Larry felt the frozen burrito he'd microwaved for dinner lurch in his stomach.

  Maybe even stranger, the soldier carried what looked like an Indian spear, with feathers and hair dangling from it.

  "Dude, you need a hospital—" Larry started to say.

  The soldier raised the spear and hurled it. Larry tried to dodge but he had hooked his ankle around the crossbar of the stool he sat on, and when he moved suddenly, the stool tipped over and pinned his ankle there just long enough. He could tell the spear would hit him in the face, in the jaw, but he couldn't do anything to prevent it.

  Gibson Brower, who went by the name Gib, was out in his garage installing a winch on his 1947 Jeep Willys. He liked working in the garage late at night with the door wide open, even in winter, with a space heater and a radio going and a work light hanging down. He found it peaceful. He never had to worry about neighbors dropping by or phone calls. He lived far enough from town that nobody would complain if power tools or engines made noise.

  He was flat on his back, underneath the front end, when he heard a fluttering noise. He pulled his head out from under the Jeep, thinking that an owl must have flown into the garage. But when he spotted it, flapping around the ceiling, it was not an owl, but a red-tailed hawk. He couldn't remember ever having seen one of those about at night, and certainly had never heard of one going into a noisy, occupied garage.

  "Get out of here!" he shouted. He pushed himself to a sitting position, intending to get up and wave it out the door. But it dropped at him before he had time, talons and sharp bill extended. The talons bit into the flesh of his neck and chest and the bill poked through his eyelid into his left eye, and as hard as he tried to grab it and hurl it away, he couldn't budge it before the strength ran out of him completely.

  And so it went.

  * * *

  Jim Beckett was overwhelmed. Grief and shock and fury warred within him, and he tried to push them all back, to focus on the job at hand, but with each passing moment, each panicked call to 911, the job grew more and more impossible. Police work required a degree of detachment that he could no longer achieve. When Susannah, the dispatcher, handed him a piece of paper detailing the call from Ward Burrows, in which he said that his son Kyle had been attacked by unknown intruders and his skull split open, Jim buried his face in his hands and tried to fight back tears.

  "I'm calling DPS," he said. "Hell, I'll call the President if I have to. We need help here."

  The moment he admitted it, he was filled with regret that he had not done so earlier. Maybe lives could have been saved if he hadn't been so proud, or so concerned for the county's economic bottom line. He wasn't the mayor or a county supervisor, he was a cop, responsible for people's safety above all else. He had made the wrong decision and his neighbors had paid for it—were continuing to pay—with their lives.

  Susannah just gazed at him for a moment. Her face looked like he felt—tired and heartsick, with dark bags under her eyes and frown lines etched, seemingly permanently, across her forehead and around her mouth. "Good luck," she said. The words fell out into the air, but they rang flat, without hope.

  Beckett had looked at the phone number so many times in the past thirty hours or so that he had it committed to memory. He reached around a foam cup containing his millionth coffee of the day, its aroma bitter from sitting too long, hoisted the receiver to his ear—it felt like it weighed fifty pounds—and punched the buttons. Instead of ringing, though, he heard the phone company's standard "Don't bother trying" tone, and then a message telling him that his call could not be completed.

  In case he had misdialed, he tried again, but with the same results. Thinking exhaustion might be playing tricks with him, he looked up the number again and discovered that he had indeed been dialing it correctly. He tried once more, fully aware of the definition of insanity as repeating the same action while expecting a different result. He didn't really expect anything different, though, because that would require too big a departure from the way the rest of his week had gone. His pessimism proved not unfounded. The same tone and message came again.

  He tried another number and got the same thing. He flipped through his business card file and found the mobile phone number of a DPS detective he'd met at a state law enforcement function. Same thing. As a test, he went online and found the phone number for a pizza parlor in Phoenix and dialed that. Same thing.

  "Can anyone get a long distance call through?" he shouted to no one in particular.

  "I did about an hour ago," someone called back. "Haven't tried since then."

  "Try," Beckett said. "I want to know if it's just my phone, or if I'm cursed, or what."

  He heard phones being dialed throughout the station. Then he heard receivers clacking back into their holders. "No luck," someone said.

  "Same here."

  "Ditto."

  This was just great. Having finally decided that he needed help, he couldn't make a phone call out of town. He decided to try another approach, and sent an e-mail to the DPS. Within seconds it bounced back as undeliverable. He tried a couple of test e-mails to other people, friends and family, and they did the same. Finally he sent one to himself, knowing that he was onl
ine and able to receive. Undeliverable.

  Unbelievable.

  EIGHTEEN

  "We're completely cut off," Sheriff Beckett had said. He'd taken Trace Johannsen outside, where they wouldn't be overheard. The night—early morning, Trace supposed, was more accurate—was frigid, and they zipped up their heavy coats and wore hats and moved about in close circles as they talked.

  "The long distance, you mean?"

  "Long distance, e-mail, shortwave radio. I even tried sending a fax, but of course that requires long distance service, too. I don't understand it." The sheriff's face looked pale and pinched. "There's a lot I don't understand right about now," he admitted.

  Trace had felt more shaken by this admission than he would have expected. He looked up to Jim Beckett, who knew more about law enforcement than Trace believed he ever could, and who combined that knowledge with an understanding of people that let him apply his experience wisely and well. Maybe Jim was a country sheriff, but he was the best lawman Trace had ever known. All he had ever wanted was to be a cop, and much of that was because of the example that Jim had set. The idea that anything could trouble Jim was scary.

  "What can we do?" Trace asked.

  "What I want you to do is take one of the department Yukons and drive like hell," Beckett said. "Go all the way to Flagstaff if you have to. Use your cell phone, your radio, smoke signals if need be, but get hold of DPS and get some troopers here as fast as you can."

  "You got it, boss."

  "And you be careful out there, Trace. I don't want to put too much pressure on you, but there's a lot riding on this. We're completely overwhelmed here, and I have a feeling things are going to get worse before they get better. The number of attacks keeps climbing, we've all been on duty too long, we're tired and we're going to be losing our edge, making mistakes. We need reinforcements, and we need 'em bad. We'll keep trying to get through from here, but I have this bad feeling. Like we're not just dealing with the kinds of things we can understand, you know? Like somehow the rules have changed."

  "I'm right there with you."

  "Good. You're a good man, Trace, and you're destined for big things in this department. Now get on the road and find us some cops."

  Trace took a minute to pour himself some of the sludge that passed for coffee and to grab a couple of bottles of water. He made sure he had his cell phone, that the gas tank was full, and the shotgun was in the Yukon he checked out. Once he'd done that, he climbed up behind the wheel and pulled away from the station house, in the northeast corner of town. Highway 180 was nineteen miles from the station, and it would take him right into Flagstaff.

  The first twelve miles passed quickly. The clouds had passed on and the night sky was clear, with stars and a half-moon shining down on the road. It wasn't fitting for a law officer to think it, but when he pulled this off, he knew, he would be some kind of hero. The day would be saved because of his desperate ride. He smiled at the thought, and wondered if he'd get a medal, maybe get his picture in the papers.

  At mile thirteen the engine started to knock. Trace knew the department maintained their vehicles well, and so he figured it wouldn't be a problem. Anyway, given the urgency of his mission, he didn't want to turn around and check out another car. He pushed on.

  In another mile or so the knocking got worse. The SUV started to actually shudder on the road during the worst of it. Trace swore silently. At this rate he wouldn't even make the highway, much less Flagstaff.

  He pulled over to the side. He hadn't seen any other vehicles out, and the road was a remote forested two-lane, but he still wanted to be safely out of the traffic lanes just in case. Once he had stopped on the shoulder, he tried his mobile phone and his radio. Neither one worked. No choice but to press onward, then.

  He turned the wheel toward the road and pushed lightly on the accelerator. As the SUV started to inch forward, he saw clouds of insects in the double streams of the headlights. Bugs, in this weather? It didn't make any sense. Normally they wouldn't be out in quantity until spring, and especially on such a cold, snowy day—the temperature now couldn't be higher than twenty-five or so—he would not have expected to see as much as a single housefly. They were out in force, though. Flies, bees, wasps, moths, mosquitoes, dragonflies, beetles... as many as he might see in a full summer's day outside. But these were swarming together, which never happened, and all gathered right around his vehicle. More seemed to be appearing every second, as if they were materializing in his headlight beams. That couldn't be—they had to be flying in from the surrounding woods, attracted by the light. Trace didn't like it, though, and he gunned the engine, pushing through the bugs and onto the road.

  He thought he would leave them behind quickly, but he didn't. The insects stayed in the headlights, except for those that splatted against the windshield. He pressed on the gas, and the SUV knocked but lurched forward. Fifty, fifty-five, sixty. No way those bugs should be flitting around in his way at these speeds.

  But they were.

  More and more hit the windshield. Bug guts littered the glass. He flicked on the wipers and sprayed the windshield, but that just smeared them, turning them into an opaque film. And still more smacked into it every second. He'd have to stop soon, or risk driving off the road or into an oncoming vehicle.

  Then he heard the buzzing of a bug inside the Yukon. It sounded like a bee, but could as easily have been a horse fly, or a wasp or something else. He couldn't see it in the dark and didn't dare take his eyes off what little he could make out of the road to look for it. It buzzed toward his head, then away, darted for him and swooped back again.

  Within seconds the buzzing was joined by a highpitched whine that could only have been a mosquito. As soon as Trace heard it, it bit him on the cheek. He slapped at it, smacked himself. This time he cursed out loud.

  Another buzz chimed in. He had to stop, had to close the vents or whatever these pests were using to get inside, and had to kill them before they stung. A bee stinging him while he was driving, more than half blind anyway, could turn out to be fatal. Besides, he reasoned, if he had left the others behind—through the windshield he couldn't see them anymore—he could scrape the glass off and continue. He braked suddenly and yanked the wheel to the right. The shoulder came faster than he'd expected, and he took a bounce that almost slammed his head into the roof. As it was, the seat belt bit painfully into his shoulder. As he brought the vehicle to a shuddering stop, one of the bees sank its stinger into the side of his neck, just below his right ear.

  "Damn it!" he shouted, swiping his right hand across his neck. He thought it collided with the insect's body, but the damage was already done. He clicked on the dome light. Time to find that other one and finish it off, too.

  The vents were thick with insects, writhing through the slots. They dropped to the floor when they came through, pushed aside by the ones behind, or they took flight—most almost soundless, the fluttering of tiny wings drowned out by the roar of the big engine, but some adding their own buzzes and whines to the mix.

  Trace reached to close the vents, but the action brought a dozen or more to his right hand, stinging and biting as if choreographed. He yanked his hand away, suddenly on fire. The bugs seemed encouraged by their small victory, and wriggled through the vents in greater numbers.

  He took off his hat and swatted at them, but within a second several dozen lit on his scalp and started attacking. They were on his face, in his eyes. He opened his mouth to scream a wordless curse and felt them dive inside, stinging the insides of his cheeks, his gums, his tongue.

  They would kill him if he stayed in the SUV's cab a second longer, he knew. Jim and the people of Cedar Wells were counting on him. He couldn't let a few insects stop him from getting help. And outside, he would be able to run.

  He steeled himself and threw open his door. As he did, he lost his balance, tumbling out to land in the snow and grass on the road's shoulder.

  And they swarmed him. From the ground, the ants came, the cock
roaches, the spiders, tarantulas, scorpions, centipedes, their bites and stings like liquid fire injected directly into Trace's veins. From the sky, the bees and yellowjackets and mosquitoes attacked. Moths flew up his nose, plugging his nasal passages. Clouds of gnats flew into his mouth, gagging him, choking him.

  He tried to rise, but they weighted him down, and the poisons rushing through him weakened his muscles. He couldn't see anymore, his eyes long since swollen shut. He pawed uselessly, pointlessly, at the Beretta in his holster, as if he could shoot a million impossible insects with the bullets it carried.

  His mind flitted to the people he had left behind, his parents, his big sister, Jim and everyone he worked with in the sheriff's department.

  Being entrusted with a badge and a gun and a uniform had been the greatest thing that ever happened to Trace Johannsen. Living up to that, being the hero of the hour... that would have been so perfect. Would have been...

  NINETEEN

  They were a couple of blocks from the motel, heading up Main, when a car darted out of a side road directly in front of them. Its driver slammed on the brakes and the car swerved, coming to a stop across both lanes.

  Dean reacted, stomping on his own brakes. The Impala fishtailed, then caught a patch of black ice on the roadway and launched into an uncontrolled slide. He wrestled with the wheel, but it did no good. His precious car would end up where it ended up.

  Which, at the moment, looked to Sam like it would be right on top of the car that had startled them both.

  It was a station wagon, roughly a thousand years old, with fake wood paneling on the sides, rust growing around the wheel wells like lichen on rocks, and a ladder in the back along with some paint buckets and drop cloths. Sam could see all this in the headlights with perfect clarity as the Impala skated toward it.

  He could also see its driver, a skinny young man wearing a baggy fatigue coat, with long greasy hair that flopped into his face as he rushed from the car. He didn't bother closing his door, possibly more worried about trying to keep his balance on the ice and not shoot himself in the leg with the cannon he carried.