CLAWS

by Stacey Cochran

  PRAISE FOR STACEY COCHRAN’S NOVELS

  “A tense and gripping thriller. . . Stephen Kingesque!”

  — Becky Sutton of Becky’s Writing Blog, U.K.

  “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the scrub brush, along comes this book CLAWS. And I was planning a nice family hiking trip in the Santa Catalinas, too. Thanks for nothing, Stacey Cochran.”

  — Sean Doolittle, author of Safer, Burn, Dirt, and The Cleanup

  “CLAWS pits one smart, tough heroine against one bad, bad kitty and some humans who may be even worse. Stacey Cochran’s tale of deadly predators, both four- and two-legged, will have you looking over your shoulder, convinced you hear something creeping up behind you. Maybe I won’t go camping after all.”

  — J.D. Rhoades, author of Breaking Cover

  “The strength of this book is the story and level of suspense. I didn’t want to put this one down simply because of the suspense and wondering who would make it out alive.”

  —SciFiChick.com

  “An entertaining, fast-paced read . . . Highly recommended.”

  —Jeremy Robinson, bestselling author of The Didymus Contingency

  “Nonstop action . . . powerful!”

  —Brew City Magazine

  “A unique blend of fantasy and suspense, The Colorado Sequence builds a strong female character in Amy Levine.”

  —Julio Vazquez, author of Death at Disney

  “I have sacks under my eyes because I have been up late the last few nights reading The Colorado Sequence. I finished it last night at 2:31 A.M. because I simply could not put it down. I so enjoyed this book!”

  —Ericka Jackson, author of A Mansion Mindset

  “With all the action scenes, running gun battles and explosions this story has all the makings for an action packed, big-screen movie.”

  —Gene Curtis, author of The Seventh Mountain

  “[I]ntrigue, adventure and thought-provoking speculation on the nature of the universe.”

  —Mark Jeffrey, bestselling author of The Pocket and the Pendant

  “Thrilling, action-packed!”

  —Hannah Stone, author of Remembering Our Angels

  CLAWS

  STACEY COCHRAN

  For Susan,

  who believed.

  Once in a while a puma appears to have an insatiable desire to kill well beyond the limits of its food requirements. The remains of 275 sheep that had been killed in two nights by a puma in the vicinity of Strawberry Reservoir, in Wasatch County, Utah, were viewed by W.O. Nelson, supervisor for the Predator and Rodent Division of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Utah. On another occasion, Nelson counted forty-eight sheep killed in a single foray by another puma.

  —The Puma: Legendary Lion of the Americas

  They brought Daniel and threw him into the lions’ den, and the king said, “May your God, whom you serve continually, rescue you!”

  —Daniel 6:16

  One

  Dr. Angie Rippard became an expert on mountain lions, when at nine years old, she and her twin brother were attacked by a young male four miles north of their Tucson, Arizona home. Her brother lived, but he lost his left arm and he carried the facial scars from the attack the rest of his life. For Angie, the scars were more psychological in nature because she never understood why the animal maimed her brother and not her.

  “What do we got, Robert?” Angie said into the headset.

  The helicopter swung around the northeast side of Rice Peak and started cruising up toward the nine-thousand-foot slopes near Mount Lemmon.

  “Felis concolor,” Robert’s voice squawked excitedly over the headsets. “Looks like a mother with cubs.”

  Robert Gonzalez was her top grad student at the University of Arizona, and he and his team were tracking a mountain lion on foot, three miles west of the ski resort at Mount Lemmon.

  “Hot damn,” Angie said to herself.

  “I didn’t quite catch that, Angie. Over.”

  Angie said, “That’s excellent, Robert. Hold your position and keep your satellite link-up clear.”

  The helicopter raced out to the north, high over the green sea of ponderosa pines, which was finally beginning to show green color again. The previous summer, the Santa Catalina mountain range suffered its worst wildfire in over a century, burning more than two hundred and fifty thousand acres of land.

  To the west, Tucson sprawled northward through a fifteen-mile-wide valley, the Saguaro Wilderness and Tucson Mountains to the southwest, Pusch Ridge Wilderness and the great Coronado National Forest to the northeast. Multi-million dollar homes lay perched on the southern slopes of the Coronado National Forest, some situated nearly three thousand feet above sea level. They were built within a hundred yards of the National Forest Land boundary.

  It was a hotly debated topic for Pima County officials. Three acres of land with sixty-mile views bordering National Forest Land would sell for more than nine hundred thousand dollars, and that was just the land. Several movie stars actually kept homes near the Ventana Canyon Resort north of Skyline Drive, such was the draw of the desert sunshine during the day and the spectacular view of city lights at night.

  “Give me a reading on the cubs,” Angie said.

  The helicopter hovered along the steep cliffs east of the Catalina State Park. Pilot Dave Baker spotted the ground team on infrared and pointed to the screen for Angie to see. She smiled, and her blue eyes filled with excitement.

  Angie had shoulder-length brown hair that was pulled back in a ponytail. The large gray headphones looked funny on her head, and a thin line of sweat formed on her upper lip. She had a smallish round nose, a prominent round chin, and the bridge of her nose was spotted with a half dozen freckles. Several strands of brown hair hung down past her ears behind the headphones, and a thin line of sweat showed through the back of her white cotton button-up blouse.

  Angie looked at him and pointed toward the cliffs.

  Robert Gonzalez’s voice came through the headset, “Looks like a litter of three.” There was a long pause. “Check that, Angie. We got a litter of five cubs. Three male, two female.”

  “Five cubs.” Angie was astonished.

  The helicopter hovered a quarter mile out from the cliffs. Angie could see the bright orange climbing ropes Gonzalez’s team had used to rappel down the cliffs.

  “All five have opened their eyes, Angie. Repeat, all five kittens have opened their eyes.”

  “Can you see their teeth?” Angie said into her headset. “Have they cut their first teeth?”

  “Negative, Angie.”

  “About fourteen days old.”

  Gonzalez’s voice squawked back, “Looks like it’s been a good year for momma.”

  Two

  Johnny Watkins was a homeless drunk who had seen more of the United States than most RV owners. He was forty-three, weighed one-thirty, and carried all of his earthly possessions in a dirty green hiking backpack. His face was covered with soot and dirt, and he wore a beard that stretched down to his dirt-stained T-shirt. He had electric sky-blue eyes, and he talked out loud to himself when in public. It was like whistling in the dark for a man whom no one in this world cared.

  He spent a month last fall up near Monterey in California, sleeping on seaweed-strewn beaches near the Pebble Beach Golf Resort. He hitch-hiked his way southeast through Bakersfield in October, went northeast up to the Sierra Nevadas near Olancha in November and nearly froze to death, and then headed southeast and walked across the Mojave Desert in late December and early January.

  He spent his nights in rest areas, truck stop parking lots, or out under the wide open heavens. Had he looked a little cleaner (and saner), carried a guitar, or been able to explain what the hell he was doing, he might have impressed a few people with his tra
vel stories.

  He came south along State Highway 95 from Needles, California to Blythe, where he spent a few nights begging for change at the 7th Street Chevron and the Dairy Queen on Lovekin Boulevard. Then, he headed east for Arizona.

  From Blythe, it took seven days to reach Phoenix, and had he held up there, everything would have been fine. Phoenix, Arizona had one of the highest populations of winter indigents in the United States. Nights were cool but reasonable, and the daytime highs and the rain-free weather made for fine living from November to May.

  Numerous city parks, safe street corners, and a city of three million too caught up in its being the eighth-fastest growing city in the U.S. to bother with policing homeless folks made it something of a winter paradise for Johnny Watkins.

  He spent late January and February strolling from street corner to street corner, convenience store parking lot to convenience store parking lot, from Sun City to Paradise Valley, from the Tempe Town Lake to Mill Avenue. He headed east toward Mesa and then south through Gilbert and Chandler, and from there, he walked southward along State Highway 79.

  He reached the northern edge of Tucson four days later on March 9. The highest peaks east of the city were blanketed with snow, and clouds formed from the moisture atop the peaks like sky islands.

  He stumbled and staggered up into the mountains and made his way south along a ridgeline that gave him views clear down to Nogales, Mexico. He passed giant Finger Rock and bulky Table Mountain.

  Johnny Watkins felt like a General high atop a battlefield, looking out across the great sea of homes, cars, and civilization. He talked out loud to God. He communed with pine trees. And on the morning of March 11th, he started down from the mountains along a well-worn hiking trail south of Mount Kimball just a mile from official Tucson city limits.

  • •

  The big cat lay sleeping. He’d taken down a mule deer around midnight and had eaten until he was sated. The sun was now up, and he’d found himself a rocky outcropping, curled up, and drifted off to sleep. Curled up like that, the big cat was as large as a hood on an economy car, but when he rolled onto his back and stretched out, he was as long as a car from his head to the tip of his tail. He licked his paws and then began working the fur on his abdomen. His tail thumped up and down like a firehose, and he yawned.

  Suddenly, he detected movement up the hill from the rocky outcropping, and he sprang silently to his feet, sniffed the air, and crept up into the woods.

  • •

  Johnny Watkins was lost in his own world, singing Amazing Grace aloud. He staggered down the trail.

  Giant ponderosa pines rose on either side of the soft, bark-chip trail. Farther up the hillside, he caught glimpses of snow on the ground through the trees. But the forest was thick, and he couldn’t see very far in any direction. He started whistling.

  The big cat was forty feet to Johnny’s back and right, the distance of three car-lengths parked at a stoplight. The man smelled strongly of sweat, his odor filling the forest all around him. The cat walked slowly, tracking the man with his eyes through the trees, his huge paws deftly moving over the ground, instinct keeping him downwind from his prey.

  Johnny saw something shiny on the ground. It was about thirty feet down the trail, and it glinted in a ray of sunlight that reached through the trees. Johnny squinted and scrunched up his nose.

  “What in the world,” he said.

  He walked up to it and realized it was a pocket knife. Someone had dropped a pocket knife on the hiking trail. It was a black enamel lock-blade about six inches long, and the silver blade was locked in its casing. Johnny squatted down and picked it up from the soft earthy ground. He popped the blade out, and it locked firmly into position.

  He touched his finger to the blade and felt that it was plenty sharp. All the while, Johnny remained knelt down. He turned the blade over in the sunlight, smiled, and then locked it back in its casing.

  “Must be my lucky day,” he said. He started to stand up.

  The attack came without a sound.

  Johnny was knocked forward onto his hands and knees, the knife hit the ground and skidded under a green bush, and then something had hold of the back of his neck. He screamed out and flailed his arms all around, but the big cat had hold of the back of his neck, and it wasn’t letting go in this lifetime.

  The cat dragged him up the hill away from the trail and the recent smell of other humans. Through the trees, the cat dragged Johnny Watkins up the hill. Johnny screamed. Something near the base of his skull cracked, and his vision went black, but he could still feel with his hands as he was dragged up the hillside. Johnny kicked at the ground, and the cat clawed at his side to turn him over.

  They were now two hundreds meters up from the hiking trail, and the cat twisted him around. His backpack made it impossible to roll completely over, but the big cat’s head popped up a split second and then lunged forward at Johnny Watkins’s throat, its powerful jaws locking firmly onto the man’s neck.

  His voice was now gone. He was blind. His legs thrashed and kicked, but the cat held his neck in its mouth while its powerful forelimbs balanced the struggling man, holding him in position.

  The cat held Johnny Watkins that way for another ten minutes, until it was certain that he was dead.

  Three

  “The attack,” Dr. Rippard said, “comes from the front left.”

  The auditorium classroom was filled with senior level undergraduates and first year graduate students. Ninety-eight students total; only two were absent tonight. It was the single most popular upper level biology course at the University of Arizona. Dr. Rippard stood at the front of the room, a huge sixty-inch plasma TV screen to her left. She held a remote, and she paused the digital video.

  The screen showed a grassy field and a single dirt road winding ahead no more than twenty meters, where it curved out of sight to the right. A tree line stood in the distance about four hundred meters away, and the grass in the field was seventy-five centimeters tall, about hip height on an adult.

  Rippard looked around the auditorium and said, “Who can tell me the native region for and name of this grass species?”

  Only three hands rose up in the auditorium. Rippard waited for more.

  “Come on, people,” she said. “Midterms are in one week; you’ve got to know your grass species.”

  Up came a few more tentative hands. Rippard frowned. She pointed seven rows up to Jenny Granger, one of the smartest girls in class. Jenny had shoulder-length red hair and a soft round face with light freckles and dimples.

  “That’s a field of mostly Danthonia spicata,” Jenny said, “commonly known as ‘poverty grass’.”

  Rippard looked impressed. She said, “And where might you find poverty grass, if you were so inclined?”

  “Well, it’s a native of North America,” Jenny responded.

  “What kind of soil?”

  “Mostly acidic,” Jenny said, “you find it in old, worn out fields.”

  “Hence the name,” a girl on the second row whispered to a neighbor.

  Rippard went back to the video. She waved the remote around like a wand.

  “Anybody know where this was shot?” she said, looking at the screen.

  “I believe that’s South Carolina,” Nick Jacobs said.

  Nick was Jenny’s boyfriend, and they sat next to one another in class each day. Nick had the piercing blue eyes of a likeable troublemaker and the lanky, lithe body of a cross country runner. His wavy brown hair was long enough that he fidgeted with it so that it wasn’t over his eyes.

  “Close, Nick,” Rippard said. “It’s actually North Carolina. A little farm in the eastern part of the state about an hour southeast of Raleigh. Nearest town is called Warsaw.”

  She turned and looked at the class and smiled. The image on the TV screen was still paused, but with the high-definition plasma TV and digital video, it might as well have been a crystal clear photograph.

  “I’m surprised nobody’s
seen him yet,” she said.

  A stir went through the room. Heads turned.

  “Seen what?” one student said.

  “He’s right there on the screen,” she chided.

  Everyone looked at the TV screen. They all saw a field of grass, the thin dirt road through the field, the trees in the distance; nothing special.

  “If you were walking on this road,” Rippard said, “and you were carrying this video camera, as this boy was doing, every one of you would be attacked within a minute.”