* * *
Seaver watched the beacon on the monitor. It had stopped moving and only disappeared for a few seconds at a time.
Woof…woof…woof…woof…
He couldn’t hear a blasted thing over the dog’s barking. It originated maybe twenty or thirty feet diagonally off to his left, but sounded like it was inside his head. Presumably, the sheriff was already there, although why he hadn’t silenced the dog was beyond him.
Seaver had struck off from Dayton’s trail when he got a true bead on the signal, which grew closer with each step. He watched the red dot pass through the inner ring on the monitor and approach the tiny crosshairs at the dead center.
There was a smell. Faint at first. Something like rotted cheese and spoiled meat. Like bighorn sheep during rutting season. The animalian, pheromonal stench of smegma.
Maybe something had recently rubbed up against the trunks around him to mark its territory. Elk and bear did that kind of thing all the time, although they usually left claw marks or bare spots where the bark was worn away by antlers.
Woof…woof…woof…woof…
The transponder was maybe ten feet away now. Close enough he should have been able to see it.
There were no prints in the snow, which was accumulating so quickly that it could have easily concealed the collar.
Five feet.
There was an odd-shaped shadow on the ground ahead. No, not a shadow. A hole. It almost looked like a pine cone had fallen from one of the trees and passed straight through the snow.
He glanced down at the monitor.
Three feet.
Woof…woof…woof…woof…
That had to be it. Whatever carried it all the way out here must have found a way to dislodge it and dropped it here.
Seaver set down the antenna and reached into the snow. It was strangely warm and wet all the way down to the ground, which was soft and muddy. The box from the collar wasn’t down there. Nothing was.
Woof…woof…woof…woof…
The barking made it impossible to think. And the smell was making his stomach clench.
He caught a flash of movement from the corner of his eye and felt something strike his wrist.
There was a spatter of fluid on the back of his hand. He watched it slowly roll between his knuckles.
Woof…woof…woof…woof…
He glanced at the monitor. At the beacon in the center of the crosshairs.
Another droplet struck the cuff of his jacket.
He looked straight up into the dark canopy.
Woof…woof…woof…woof…
Seaver never had the chance to scream.
* * *
Through the bushes, Avery watched Crowell’s body twirl on the breeze. There was no doubt in his mind that the wounds on her abdomen could have only been inflicted by animals, but the damage to her face and the way she’d been hauled up by her ankles? Animals didn’t do that kind of thing. Only man was capable of such cruelty.
Woof…woof…woof…woof…
That idea had always been at the back of his mind, but it was one he was hesitant to explore. The thought of Michelle being hunted by someone through this godforsaken wilderness was more than he could bear.
He clenched his fists so hard the blood started flowing again. He’d finally found what he’d spent so many years searching for, what he’d sacrificed his entire life to find.
Zeke abruptly stopped barking and turned to the northeast.
For as awful as the barking had been, the silence was even worse.
The branches rattled overhead. The needles sighed under the weight of the snow. The wind moaned as though from faraway.
His breathing was too loud. His pulse pounded in his inner ears.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
And beneath it, he could have sworn he heard a distant, guttural roar.
“rrrrrrRRRRRaaaaaAAAAHHHHHhhhhrrrrrrr!”
“Did you hear that?” Avery whispered.
The sheriff didn’t respond. He just turned and slowly struck off into the trees toward where the dog had disappeared into the storm.
Avery suddenly became acutely aware of every little noise. The rope from which Crowell hung made a grating sound as it rubbed against the bark. The dog crashed through the shrubs. The wind was a physical entity skulking through the treetops.
Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.
The hairs rose along the backs of his arms.
He clicked on the flashlight and ran after Dayton. The beam threw shadows everywhere and made them writhe in his peripheral vision. He glimpsed the sheriff’s silhouette through the underbrush. The wind roared again and shook pine needles loose from the boughs.
“rrrrrrRRRRRaaaaaAAAAHHHHHhhhhrrrrrrr!”
The beam focused on the back of the sheriff’s jacket. His shadow stretched across the snow toward Zeke, who had his head lowered and his ears forward.
The dog bared his teeth and growled with the kind of ferocity Avery had never heard from a domesticated animal. The sound stopped him in his tracks.
Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.
He shined the beam past the shepherd and onto the ground in front of it. There was blood everywhere. Not like before, when they had to brush away the fresh accumulation to see it. There was an enormous starburst of crimson in the center of the clearing. Blood dripped from the branches with a pattering sound and alighted on the bloodstained snow and the broken antenna and monitor. And the lone boot resting on its side. Blood dribbled from it like a spilled pitcher.
Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.
“For the love of God,” Avery whispered.
“Seaver?” Dayton said. He advanced in a shooter’s stance, sighting down his pistol from left to right. “Trey?”
With the dense forest and the worsening storm, it would have been a small miracle to see anything before it was right on top of them.
“He was right behind me,” Dayton said. “Right behind me and I didn’t heard a goddamn thing.”
Avery glanced over his shoulder with every step. The only thing he’d heard was the roar of the wind, but judging by the clearing, he couldn’t be certain that was what he’d heard at all. And the smell…it was mealy and metallic and almost reminded him of the monkey house at the zoo.
“Do you see anything?” Dayton whispered.
Avery shook his head, but couldn’t seem to make his voice work. He could only stare down at the handheld monitor, half-buried in the snow, and the red dot just off center.
“Talk to me, Avery. You’re the eyes in the back of my head. Tell me what you see!”
Avery turned to his right, toward a maze of lodgepole pines and the source of the signal.
Zeke growled again. The sound was so deep it resonated in his chest.
“Answer me, for Christ’s—”
“Shh!”
Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.
Avery shined the light into the trees. The long shadows of their trunks striped the snow. There was something on the ground back there. Dead pine needles. On top of the snow. Several more fell as he watched.
Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.
He heard a wet sniffing sound. The odd acoustics made it sound as though it originated from somewhere above him. He picked up the monitor. Appraised the beacon’s position in relation to theirs. Looked back at the pine needles.
“Run,” he said.
“What are you talking—?”
“Run!”
A crashing sound from above them and maybe ten feet away. Needles and branches rained from the trees, tracing a course across the snow directly toward where he stood.
* * *
Avery whirled and shoved Dayton, who watched the trees seemingly explode over the kid’s shoulder. Before he knew it he was running in the opposite direction, dodging branches that raked at his face, churning up a cloud of snowflakes through which he could barely see. The adrenaline kicked in and his instincts overrode his conscio
us attempts to rationalize the situation. Crowell was dead. Seaver likely was, too. And there was something up in the trees. No, many somethings. He could hear them behind him, hurtling through the canopy with the force of a hurricane.
A grunting sound from above him.
Umph, umph.
He fired blindly behind him and immediately regretted it. His hearing took on a tinny, hollow quality, as though he’d fallen down a deep aluminum well, beneath which he could hear the blood rushing in his temples.
Thoosh. Thoosh. Thoosh. Thoosh.
Pine needles clawed his face as he burst from the forest and into a broad, windswept clearing. The snow blew sideways so hard he had to lean into it to maintain his balance. He saw Avery ahead of him, little more than a vague human shape through the storm.
Dayton tripped and went down with a shout. Lost his hat. Pushed himself up in time to see Zeke streak past him. Glanced back. The trees. Shaking. Dropping clumps of snow. Their branches. Positively alive with shadows.
Thoosh. Thoosh. Thoosh. Thoosh.
He propelled himself to his feet and tried to catch up with Avery, whom he only intermittently glimpsed through the blizzard.
Behind him. A sound that made his heart skip a beat.
“rrrrrrRRRRRaaaaaAAAAHHHHHhhhhrrrrrrr!”
Dayton didn’t dare look back. He just lowered his head and ran as fast as his legs would carry him through the accumulation. He remembered what Seaver had said about the elk stomping into the deep snow while the mountain lion ran on top of it.
Thoosh-thoosh. Thoosh-thoosh.
A light ahead. On the ground. He was upon it before he recognized it as his flashlight and past it before he even thought to pick it up. In the distance, a large shape through the blowing snow. Dark. Rectangular. A structure of some kind.
Zeke barked from that direction, urging him onward.
The building materialized from the storm and he recognized it immediately. He’d seen that abandoned ranch house before. In fact, he had a picture of it folded up in his pocket.
Thoosh-thoosh-thoosh-thoosh.
His instincts screamed for him to veer away from the house, to take his chances on his own in the forest. Deep down he understood why the lost kids had taken a video of this place on their approach. They must have felt it, too. This was a bad place. He felt it as deeply as he’d ever felt anything in his life, and yet there was nothing he could do to stop himself.
Avery’s silhouette appeared in the open doorway. Zeke blew past him into the shack.
“Hurry!” Avery shouted.
Dayton covered the final fifty feet with the last of his energy and barely made it through the door before collapsing. He hit the floor on his shoulder and tried to cry out in pain, but couldn’t seem to draw a breath.
“Help me!” Avery shouted. He slammed the door and started barricading it with a mound of debris leaning against the wall next to it. “For the love of God, man! Help!”
Dayton flashed back to another time and place.
A man on the ground in front of him.
Help, the man says. His eyes are burned red by the sun reflected from the snow. He makes a horrible laughing sound and presents the severed head to him.
Drop it! he hears himself shout. Don’t you dare move a muscle!
The man raises the head in response and he can see the markings on the bone he has no doubt were inflicted by teeth.
The pressure in Dayton’s chest released. He gasped for air and crawled toward the door. Braced his back against the pile of raw timber, broken furniture, and stones. Pushed off with his legs. The mound toppled against the inside of the door a heartbeat before something struck it from the other side.
Dayton scooted away from the barricade and sighted his pistol through the gaps in the wood-plank walls.
Thoosh-thoosh-thoosh-thoosh.
All he could see was darkness and sheeting snow, whistling past on the frigid wind. If anything was out there, he sure as hell couldn’t see it, and if it wanted to get in badly enough, there wasn’t a whole lot they could do to stop it. The external walls were a solid kick away from coming down, which is exactly what it looked like had happened to the doorway to his left, through which he could see a heap of burnt wood and beyond it, a window against which a piece of plywood leaned.
Several minutes passed in silence marred only by the wind screaming down from the high country. The decrepit structure creaked and groaned. He waited for any sign of the return of whatever had struck the door, but he couldn’t see a blasted thing.
He caught Avery’s attention from where he crouched on the opposite side of the barricade. The younger man shrugged and shook his head, then pressed his face against the rough-hewn wood in an effort to better see outside.
Thoosh-thoosh-thoosh-thoosh.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he took in the room around him from his peripheral vision as best he could without looking away from the sightline of his weapon. There was a massive hole in the roof, through which snowflakes fluttered around the branches of a ponderosa pine and into the dwelling. The floor was bare earth, frozen and riddled with gravel. Someone had dug a hole maybe five feet deep, although he couldn’t fathom what purpose it served.
He stood and more carefully inspected his surroundings. Sections of the wall had been reinforced with lumber and stones at the points where they appeared the weakest. No effort had been invested into fixing the roof, or at least not that was immediately apparent. There was a narrow doorway off the rear of the room that led to an area he guessed once served as dry storage before the tin roof was eaten away by the same rust that laid claim to the stacks of unlabeled canned goods. Skeletal aspens grew through the gap. The saplings surrounding their trunks were nearly buried under the snow, which fell unimpeded through the gap. There was a wood-framed hole in the wall beyond them, through which he could see only darkness. It almost smelled as though something had crawled in there to die, and quite some time ago at that.
“You need to see this,” Avery whispered from off to his right.
Dayton skirted the remains of the fallen roof and made his way toward what must have been a bedroom. He was entirely conscious of the fact that his movements were undoubtedly visible through the gaps from the outside, where the driving snow concealed anything out there from them. Throw in the open window and the crumbled roof and they were about as secure as goldfish in a glass bowl.
Zeke darted from one side of the room to the other, sniffing at positively everything, seemingly on scent overload.
“What did you find?” Dayton whispered, but he saw it the moment he crossed the threshold.
Thoosh-thoosh-thoosh-thoosh.
The wood was discolored by what could only have been spattered blood. It was old enough that it flaked like lichen and fell in desiccated flecks onto the bare ground, which retained a black puddle-shape crusted with dried footprints.
“What happened here?” Avery said.
Dayton could only shake his head. It all added up to one conclusion. The remains of the fire inside the building. The structural reinforcement. The barricade right beside the front door. Even the hole in the floor, which, now that he really thought about it, looked almost as though someone had attempted to tunnel out of the house. And now the blood. All of the evidence pointed toward a desperate, and ultimately futile, attempt to keep something out.
Thoosh-thoosh-thoosh-thoosh.
“This is the place,” Avery said. “The house you showed me. Michelle was here, wasn’t she?”
Dayton nodded and removed the folded pictures from his coat pocket.
Avery struck the flint on the lighter he’d taken from the buried vehicle.
Schick.
Schick.
Shick-schick-schick.
He shook it and tried again.
Schick.
Schick.
A small blue flame blossomed from the housing. It wasn’t much, but it was a whole lot better than nothing.
Dayton tilted the stack
of printouts toward the light and flipped past the one on top.
“Wait,” Avery said. “Go back.”
“You don’t want to see that, son.”
“The hell I don’t.”
“I’m telling you…you don’t.”
Dayton returned the screenshot to the top of the pile. It showed a body suspended from the trees in the same manner as Crowell’s, only the silhouette defined this one as male.
“Jesus. That’s Jeremy. Why didn’t you show me this earlier? What else have you been keeping from me?”
Dayton locked stares with Avery, then handed him the stack, minus the one of the house. He hoped he might be able to see something from the exterior that wasn’t evident from his current vantage point.
He turned and scrutinized the image in the lines of light that passed through the wall. It looked like the front window was boarded from the inside, not the outside. The door was closed. The roof looked largely intact, although the angle made it difficult to tell for sure.
The blowing snow caused the picture to appear blurred, as though it were just slightly out of focus, obscuring fine details. There wasn’t anything useful. He was about to cast it aside when he caught something from the corner of his eye. He’d been concentrating so hard on the house itself that he hadn’t seen it. On the ground. Maybe ten feet from the structure, at the edge of the image.
Thoosh-thoosh-thoosh-thoosh.
A vague shape, a mere shade of white apart from the accumulation. Nearly indistinguishable. A mound where there shouldn’t have been one on the windswept field and the subtle shadow it cast.
Dayton brought the picture to his face and tilted it until the weak light illuminated it as well as it was going to. He still couldn’t tell what it was, but it almost appeared as though long hairs blew sideways from it in a way that mimicked the snow being swept from the ground during a blizzard.
And it wasn’t the only one. From this distance he could clearly see at least three more that neither he nor Thom had seen in real time.
Obviously, whichever one of the kids filmed their approach hadn’t either. They were completely oblivious to the fact that they were walking blindly to their deaths.
Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds Page 8
