Frozen

by Jay Bonansinga

  Wiping the beads of moisture from his bald dome and his eyelashes, then glancing over his shoulder, he squinted down into the river valley from which he had come and realized he had ascended a gradual rise into a densely forested ridge overlooking the Columbia. The molten gray reaches of the river—over a mile away—were visible through breaks in the sumac. Zorn glanced down at his gun, snapping the slide back and checking the chamber, making sure he was operational.

  He started up a jagged pitch of limestone. His boots slipped on the moss and he nearly fell backward, grabbing at a hank of branches overhanging the rocks in order to avoid tumbling back down the slope and hitting his head and dying in shame. Finally he made it to the summit of a craggy plateau that overlooked the river.

  The rain was blowing profusely up there, and Zorn had to lift his collar and squint in order to see around that desolate clearing. It was the size of a squash court, the ground a rolling mogul of granite and petrified deadfalls. The rocks looked like tiny tombstones sticking out of that seared earth, glistening from the rain. The surrounding foliage and trees formed a natural barrier, behind which windblown shadows danced and swayed.

  Somewhere nearby a twig snapped.

  Panic sizzled off Zorn’s nerve endings, and he crouched down suddenly, involuntarily grabbing his Desert Eagle with both hands, every muscle in his body tensing up. The hair on his arms stiffened, his scalp crawling. He had just remembered something at the precise moment he had heard the snap of that twig behind him, and the revelation was like a giant lead weight pressing down on his shoulders all of a sudden, taking his breath away, leeching his courage, and squeezing his heart.

  It was something he should have remembered from all the profiles, something incidental that now called out to him like the voice of doom on that wind-whipped plateau: the long, slender object bouncing around inside Ackerman’s raincoat!

  Ackerman had a bow and arrows.

  16

  The Bottomless Dark

  Ulysses Grove heard two noises in quick succession up ahead of him. The first was a muffled cry—so distorted by the noise of the storm and the apparent anguish being expressed that it was difficult to identify the gender. This choked wail was followed almost instantly by the bark of a large-caliber handgun—a watery blast arcing up into the sky and echoing off the decaying thunder like a sonic boom.

  The two noises sent adrenaline bolting down through Grove’s arteries as he struggled through a thick, strangled copse of hemlocks, immediately quickening his pace, awkwardly slashing at the hanging branches and wiry undergrowth with the long stainless steel barrel of the .357. The woods of the Pacific Northwest are basically rain forests, and this one was no different. The floor was a matted carpet of resinous, mold-slick ferns and moss, which felt to Grove as if he were trying to run on ice skates.

  The ATF guys were behind Grove somewhere, yelling at him through the rain, ordering him back, but Grove ignored their muffled warnings and kept hacking through the foliage as he made his way up the side of the rise, slipping on the greasy deadfalls, the gun throwing him off balance. He could see a jagged precipice of rocks up there, perhaps fifteen, perhaps twenty yards away, and he muscled toward it.

  The sounds had come from up there somewhere, and Grove homed in on them. He was drenched. His clothes felt as though they weighed a thousand pounds, but he ignored the handicaps and roared toward the source of the gunfire. A moment later he reached the lip of the plateau, a ragged outcropping of boulders and exposed roots shiny with rain.

  He climbed over the slippery rim and into a small clearing of scabrous stone.

  “Nnnaahhh—”

  The sound penetrated the rain, and Grove whirled to his left, his gun stuck out amateurishly in front of him, the barrel dripping and trembling. He saw Zorn keeled over in the mud twenty yards away.

  Lightning erupted.

  Grove’s first instinct was to rush over to his partner, but something stopped him, some deeper instinct, something emanating from deep within his primitive reptile brain, ordering him to get down, get down, getdownget-downgetdown!

  Grove slammed down hard onto his belly, an evasive military position that his muscle-memory had dredged up from his days in basic training. He kept his arms outstretched, the gun out in front, pressed against the ground, braced and ready, his arms aching. What the hell was wrong with his arms? Why were they aching all of a sudden?

  This is a trap, it’s a trap. Do something! Do something now!

  Another garbled cry rang out—this one more of a croak, or perhaps a feeble attempt to speak—and Grove realized his partner was dying, maybe bleeding to death, maybe in shock. It was difficult to see any details through the rain. Terry Zorn appeared to be lying supine, his arm raised at an awkward angle, tangled in the weeds on the edge of the clearing. His chest heaved, and his neck looked dark and shiny, as though someone had poured black paint on him.

  Grove crawled on his belly across the mossy ground toward Zorn.

  Thunder vibrated the air, the ringing in Grove’s ears constant now, as he tried to remember the axioms of Israeli counterinsurgency techniques that he had learned in the academy. You wield the gun like you’re pointing a finger at the target, and you focus on the back sight, not the front sight—or was it the other way around? Grove’s brain was swimming with panic.

  He reached Zorn and got close enough to hear the watery gasping noises.

  “Ahhh—ssssuuh—” Zorn was convulsing, his blood-spattered face contorting, something resembling words coming out of his breached throat. He was drowning in his own blood. His neck was punctured all the way through, a broken hunting arrow sticking out of the back, forming a V.

  “It’s okay, I’m here, I’m here, Terry, take it easy, gonna get you outta here—Shit!”

  Grove rose to a crouch, set down his gun, reached for the Texan, and tried to cradle the man’s head. Blood was splashing in the raindrops. Tributaries of Zorn’s life snaked off from his body, seeping into the moist earth. With trembling hands Grove pressed a flat broadleaf against Zorn’s jugular in a futile effort to stanch the bleeding.

  Zorn’s eyes were blinking fitfully in the rain. “Ahhmm sahrrrrrr—”

  All at once Grove realized that Terry Zorn was trying to say I’m sorry.

  “Don’t worry about it, man, you’re doin’ fine, gonna get you outta here, you’re gonna be okay—” Grove glanced over his shoulder, wondering what the hell happened to the ATF guys. Did they get lost? Grove’s voice piercing the rain: “Officer down! Goddamn it, officer down! Officer down up here! Somebody get a goddamn doc up here right now!”

  Zorn was trying to say something else, craning his neck, bloody lips quivering. Grove leaned down close, the rain dripping like liquid rubies onto Zorn’s face.

  “S-sorry,” the Texan enunciated barely above a whisper, then let out a ragged breath.

  “Terry—”

  Zorn deflated like a balloon in Grove’s arms, and Grove shook the man. “Terry!”

  Nothing.

  “Terry!”

  Zorn was a stone.

  Grove stared and stared at the man’s empty cellophane eyes. Emotion flooded Grove, and all of a sudden he did something that field analysts would later deem reckless and foolish and strictly the act of an amateur: he hugged his friend. The embrace didn’t last long—the blood-steeped rain was sluicing down between the two men, and Grove’s fight-or-flight instinct was surging inside him, stiffening the tiny hairs on the back of his neck—but for that one foolish, amateurish moment Grove felt a tremendous sadness and affection for the Texan. Zorn had been a friendly adversary for years, a casual associate, certainly threatened by Grove. But now, in that single, terrible instant of clarity, the dead man’s body still warm in his arms, Grove felt the entire crestfallen arc of Terry Zorn’s life coursing through him, the sorrow of it, the father who could not be pleased, the standards that could never be met. Grove’s eyes welled. His stomach clenched.

  He held his deceased friend for on
e more brief moment until he heard a new sound emanating from somewhere close by, a sound that defied easy categorization, a sound that penetrated Grove’s skull and resonated the strings of his central nervous system like a tuning fork being struck.

  Human emotions are slippery. One emotion can present itself as another. Feelings can project themselves inappropriately. On that rain-swept ridge above the Columbia River, Ulysses Grove slammed up against a painful confluence—years of repressing his loss and sorrow over Hannah’s death, months and months of losing control over his health and his life and his powers as a behavioral profiler, an endless, painful embrace of a man lost in the line of duty, and that indefinable kernel of preternatural cognition that had been stirring deep inside him. All of it seized up in his gut suddenly and presented itself as cold, metallic rage—rage spurred on by that other worldly noise coming from the shadows to his immediate right.

  He gently laid Zorn back in the mud and slowly lowered himself back into the “trench” position—belly against the ground, arms out front, neck craned. He reached for his gun. The .357 Tracker felt cold and oily in his grip. Where the hell are those ATF guys, for God’s sake? Grove’s hands had stopped shaking. His tears had ceased. The anger steadied him, fortified him. He started crawling toward the noise, his embattled brain attempting to identify it.

  It came from the deeper woods along the north edge of the clearing. Grove elbowed steadily toward the wall of spruce and foliage, ready to shoot at any moment. The sound was difficult to place. It was more of a vibration, a gravelly, twenty-cycle hum, like air blowing at frantic, uneven intervals through the lowest chambers of a pipe organ, and the closer Grove got to the trees, the more it sounded like labored breathing. Maybe Zorn had wounded the killer. Maybe this was part of the trap. Grove didn’t care anymore.

  He reached the threshold of the forest and rose to a crouch, jerking at every sound no matter how faint, his hands in the weaver position on the gun. The noise had ceased for a moment, and Grove peered through the columns of trees and thickets of vines, expecting an arrow to leap out at him at any moment. He yelled through the rain, his voice sounding bizarre in his own ears, as though it were coming from some one else:

  “Ackerman!”

  It was black as night in those woods, a world of crisscrossing timbers and rioting undergrowth, so dense it swallowed any remnant of the gray daylight. Grove scanned it over the barrel of the Tracker, backsight blurred, frontsight crisply focused, his arms and tendons as steady as a marble pillar. To his right, something gleamed dully in the ethereal light. Grove blinked away the rain in his eyes.

  He finally identified what he was looking at: a sheer plane of rock behind the trees, a natural convolution of granite probably carved eons ago when the Columbia was young and the Iceman was still trudging across the frozen slopes of the Cairns. The weathered face of sediment was obscured by forest and mist, but it clearly framed a deeper shadow in its center—down at ground level—an opening.

  A cave.

  Grove braced himself. The noise was coming from that black opening. It was snoring and sputtering, a breathy, guttural wheeze echoing from the darkness. Staying very low, both hands on the gun, licking lips, blinking moisture from the eyes, he started toward the cave.

  The noise rose as he approached.

  Grove reminded himself that he had a double-action revolver with hollow-points in his hands, and two speed-loaders pressing against his kidneys. Even if he were struck in the carotid with an arrow, he would probably be able to squeeze off a few rounds and vaporize the bastard’s face. Rage coursed through him, galvanizing him. The mouth of the cave was a jagged seven-foot oval—just tall enough for a grown man to pass. The noise hummed.

  For a moment, pausing at the threshold of the cave, heart thumping, rain slanting down, Grove considered waiting for backup. He could linger at the mouth of the cave and cover the exit until the ATF guys arrived to do the cleanup. But as quickly as the thought crossed his mind he abruptly discarded it. What if there was an opening at the other end of the cave? Grove took a deep breath and slipped inside the darkness.

  The dampness slithered around him, engulfed him in its moldy chill. The deep, sepulchral snoring rose all around him—the sound of a giant bellows. Grove crouched and inched sideways through the darkness with the gun held out.

  Lightning flickered outside the cave, just for a moment, just enough to illuminate the depth of the cavern, and it was deep, incredibly deep, the far reaches seeming to vanish in the bottomless dark. About ten feet wide with stalactites of limestone hanging down from the ceiling and walls glistening with slime and guano, the cave was moldering stone, with the fossilized remains of an iron rail long since oxidized into crumbs, embedded in the mossy floor.

  Grove had a vague memory of hearing about these mine shafts cut into the sides of hills in the Pacific Northwest. He couldn’t remember if they had openings at either end. He couldn’t remember much of anything right now but a strange fragment of a nightmare clinging to his midbrain: a pellet of copper, a bundle of grass, a lizard’s foot, a curled tube of birch bark, an ash-handled flint dagger.

  He inched deeper into the cavern, his eyes watering. The odors of ammonia-rot and something else—something so rancid it was almost sweet, like spoiled meat—permeated the air. Grove sniffed. He was about to wipe his eyes when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye.

  He whirled.

  A shadow blurred across the cave behind him—immediately registering in Grove’s brain as huge, massive, and probably not human, the way it shambled instead of scurried. The gun went up, finger on the trigger. Grove’s flesh crawled. He crouched and listened to the low pipe organ noise rising in front of him like an engine.

  Lightning flickered, illuminating the cave for just an instant.

  An adult male bear was blocking the opening of the cave, its massive incisors gleaming with drool, its eyes rolled back in its head like egg whites—that subterranean growl like the lowest, longest, deepest bellows of an organ.

  In the momentary strobe-light flicker, Grove was paralyzed with primordial terror—his finger frozen on the trigger—as the giant black bear emitted a thunderous roar before gathering its haunches.

  Then it pounced.

  The .357 went off—two silver flashes in the darkness—blasting tufts out of the bear’s ear in midleap as Grove stumbled backward over his own feet. He landed on his ass, the air punched out his lungs and the Tracker knocked out of his hands.

  The gargantuan bundle of fur and teeth landed on Grove, eliciting a garbled gasp—it was as if a small automobile had been dropped on his midsection.

  The bear’s gaping jaw full of dripping fangs and filthy breath came at Grove’s face, and Grove, moving on pure instinct now, summoned all his strength in one last-ditch attempt to pinion his hands against the black glistening muzzle of the rampaging beast.

  In the darkness Grove fought for his life: it was like holding on to a fat, wooly, vibrating chain saw, the creature’s jagged teeth impaling Grove’s hands, the animal’s bulk pressing down on Grove’s legs, its rear claws gashing the profiler’s thighs, stabbing divots into his sodden trousers. A keening shriek came out of the enraged, bleeding bear—a weird, almost infantile sound—bleating out of the chasm of the animal’s throat.

  Lightning popped again.

  In the violent silver flash Grove and the animal were face-to-face when all at once a whispery noise snapped behind the bear and made the animal’s head jerk.

  Over the space of a nanosecond—before the flicker of lightning subsided—Grove saw the shimmering metallic tip of a hunting arrow protrude from the animal’s left eye. The bear deflated then. Noxious air puffed out of the animal, its massive jaws still quivering open. Then it sagged in a heap, a bundle of dead weight pressing down on Grove’s torso.

  Sudden agony screamed through Grove, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe. His hands were numb, ravaged with wounds, a major gash clawed open on his left leg.

 
He wriggled out from under the bear and rolled across the mold-slick stone, gasping for breath. He struck the wall and sucked air for a moment—all manner of panic coursing through his brain: The gun! The gun! Get to the gun, you idiot! THE GUN!

  That’s when he heard a new noise—a low, percussive burst of breathing—and Grove realized instantly that this new sound did not come from a beast of the forest.

  It came from a man.

  A man who now darkened the entrance of the cave, silhouetted by faint traces of lightning.

  17

  Cruel God

  Grove tried to move. His body was sluggish, flooding with cold concrete from the sudden blood loss and trauma, making movement excruciating.

  The dark figure started toward a silver object gleaming on the stone floor maybe ten feet away: the .357 magnum.

  “Ackerman . . . Ackerman!”

  The shadow continued slowly yet steadily edging across the cave toward the gun.

  It was too dark to get a good look at the man, but it was clear he was moving in a strange manner—stiffly, jerkily, as though electric current were running through his tendons. That low, hyperventilating noise emanating from his lips had coalesced into something that sounded like an incantation or a litany in some unidentifiable foreign language.

  “Ackerman, listen to me, okay? Listen now, just for a second, focus, okay? Focus and listen, listen, listen—”

  Grove tried to scoot backward toward the deeper regions of the cave, tried to buy himself time, but his body was as heavy as a block of ice, slimy with blood. His legs shrieked, perforated by the mauling. His hands were greasy with blood. He could feel his pulse in his neck, and his vision was beginning to blur. Hypovolemic shock can quickly indicate paralysis, disorientation, even hallucinations.