Fatal Consequences

by JG Faherty

  Every decision carries a price.

  Alec Winter is a man haunted by his own cowardice. When a bear attacked his family during a camping trip, he ran and hid. When he returned, his children were dead and his wife badly injured. But everyone believes he’s a hero because he led rescuers back in time to save her. Ever since then, his children’s deaths have haunted him. Now, on the anniversary of the attack, strange things begin happening. The people who helped Alec are dying in very violent ways, leaving him to wonder if guilt has finally driven him crazy...or if something far worse is coming for him.

  Fatal Consequences

  JG Faherty

  Dedication

  To Andrea, my long-suffering wife, who gives me the time to write. To my parents, whose passion for reading stoked my own at a very young age. To my college mentor, Richard Bothner, who passed away before my writing career took off, but who would have been very happy to celebrate it with a beer or a scotch over a roaring campfire. To my many friends who cheer me on. To Harley, who helps me relax. And to the people who buy and read my books.

  Thank you, one and all. You are the ones who make it possible for writers to do what they do.

  Fatal Consequences

  If a man screams in the woods and no one hears him, is he really screaming?

  Alec Winter stumbled over a fallen branch and wondered if he was going crazy. His aching throat was evidence that he’d screamed—screamed a lot over the past few hours, in fact—but the fact that no one had come to his aid seemed to prove the hypothesis that an action which causes no reaction isn’t an action at all.

  He wrapped his arms around a tall, aged elm and tried to catch his breath. The act of not moving set his mind racing. Casey—was she still alive? What if she woke up and he wasn’t there? It seemed unlikely, but who knew? If she did, would she be able to walk? He hoped not. If she wandered off, how would he lead a rescue team back to her? And what if she found Nick and Sue? Seeing their ravaged bodies would probably kill her, especially in her condition.

  I can’t let that happen.

  Alec pushed himself away from the tree and continued walking, each movement wringing fresh pain from over-used muscles and bruised limbs. Something jabbed and poked inside his chest. A broken rib? A damaged organ? It didn’t matter. All that mattered was finding help. He tried shouting again but it hurt too much to draw a deep breath; all that came out was a raspy croak that couldn’t even compete with the sound of his own passage through the bone-dry dead leaves and sticks covering the forest floor.

  The snap-crack-crunch of his footsteps was a constant reminder he was in deep trouble. They’d set up their campsite only a few hundred yards from one of the smaller paths paralleling the main trail. And although things had gotten pretty confusing during his escape, when he’d finally hidden Casey’s body and taken off for help he’d been pretty sure he was heading in the right direction to hit the trail again.

  Except he’d been walking for what seemed like hours and there’d been no sign of any man-made paths at all, let alone the wide expanse of the Appalachian Trail.

  For what seemed like the hundredth time, he looked up at the sun through summer-thick foliage. Based on its movement, and the direction of the shadows from the trees, he was still heading south. That should have put him back on the main trail in less than an hour. Had he missed it? Walked right across it in a daze?

  Alec stopped again. Should he turn around? Choose a different direction? He tried to picture the map of the area in his head but all he kept seeing was the campsite, the tent torn to pieces, blood and bits of clothing everywhere…

  Stop it! Focus. You have a job to do. Remember, Casey is counting on you.

  Nick and Sue had counted on you. Look where that got them.

  He shook his head. No time for regrets. Not now. That would come later, after they were home and safe. He took a stained, filthy rag from his pocket and wiped sweat from his forehead. A stray breeze wove its way through the trees, lending a cooling touch to his over-heated body. He was about to start walking again—keep going south—when he heard it.

  Something crashing through the woods.

  Something large.

  Oh, God, no! Not again!

  Had it followed him? Been behind him all this time, playing with him like a cat stalking a bird?

  Alec started to run but only managed three steps before his left leg cramped up, sending him to his knees. The pain was so intense he cried out. He beat at the traitorous muscles with his fists, desperately trying to pound the spasms out of his disobedient thigh. The crashing noises grew louder and he looked around for a stick or rock he could use as a weapon, knowing that nothing short of a gun would save him. All he came up with were leaves and twigs and dirt.

  A dark figure emerged from a thicket of bushes. Alec screamed and threw his arms over his eyes, afraid to face the ravenous beast that was about to end his life.

  This time there would be no running away.

  For a moment there was dead silence. Then a voice spoke.

  “Jesus, dude. What the hell happened to you?”

  The news of David Gregg’s death reached Alec while he sipped his morning coffee and read the sports pages. Casey was already up and out of the house, dropping Jennifer off at daycare on the way to work. Alec cherished what he called his quiet time, that half hour between Casey’s departure and his own. With a two-year-old demanding attention all the time, any moments of silence were like a gift from God.

  So he wasn’t particularly happy when the phone interrupted his morning ritual.

  “Alec Winter?” A woman’s voice, one he didn’t recognize. He answered in the affirmative, prepared to give her a piece of his mind for bothering him with a marketing call so early in the morning.

  His anger crumbled away when he heard her next words.

  “This is Sarah Gregg. David Gregg’s wife? I…I just wanted to let you know that he…he passed away last week. I’m only calling because I think he would have wanted you to know. He always said that saving you was the best thing he ever did in his whole life, something he could be proud of. Anyhow, I didn’t call sooner because we didn’t have much of a service. He was…well, it wouldn’t have been right.”

  Alec mumbled his condolences, his mind whirling as he said goodbye.

  David Gregg was dead? It seemed like a bad joke. He made a note in his BlackBerry to have one of the girls at work send flowers and a card, even though the body was already buried.

  Coffee and paper forgotten, he grabbed his briefcase and headed for his car.

  It wasn’t until hours later, after he’d fought his way through the morning emails and attended two product launch meetings, that Sarah’s actual words came back to him.

  “…we didn’t have much of a service. He was…well, it wouldn’t have been right.”

  Although he hadn’t noticed it at the time, it was an odd way to phrase a sentence. Almost as if she’d switched thoughts in mid-stream. And she’d never said how David had died.

  His curiosity aroused, Alec did a quick Google search for David Gregg’s obituary.

  What he found sent a shiver down his back.

  Local Hero Found Dead in Woods.

  The headline screamed at him from the front page of the Daily Mail. The article below it was short but concise.

  The body of David Gregg, 52, of Greene, New York was found at the bottom of a ravine in Catskill Park. Gregg, who a year ago saved the lives of two campers in the same park, was an experienced hiker who frequently spent weekends in the park, photographing wildlife and posting his observations on nature in an Internet blog. Police do not suspect fou
l play, and they estimate Gregg died twenty-four to forty-eight hours earlier, but are awaiting results of the autopsy to be sure.

  “Any time a body is in the woods that long, there are extenuating circumstances that make it difficult to establish a firm time of death without an autopsy,” said Chief of Police Gerald Moonachie.

  After rescuing Alec Winter and his wife, Casey, last July, Gregg enjoyed an upsurge in the popularity of his blog, “Observations on a Wild Life”. He said at the time that helping them after the bear attacked…

  Alec closed the page, unable to read any further. He didn’t just die. He died in that goddamned park. Almost a year to the day… No wonder Sarah didn’t want to tell us.

  A sudden thought hit Alec with the intensity of a punch to the stomach. The date on the article had been July 12, just six days ago. The police statement said that Gregg could have died on either the 10th or 11th. If it was the 10th, that would make it…

  Exactly one year.

  The guy who saved us dies one year later to the day—the goddamned day!—in the same park?

  It couldn’t be coincidence.

  Could it?

  Calm down, Alec, he told himself. Think it through.

  David Gregg was an avid hiker who spent a lot of time in Catskill Park, especially in the area near where they’d gone camping. That’s why he was there that day. He’d probably been hiking and camping around that same area dozens of times since then. It was no different than if he’d been driving to work and come across an accident. He’d be driving that same route again the day after, and the day after that. So if he got into an accident himself, the odds were good it would be in the same general area.

  Alec felt his heart rate slowing down. When you thought about things logically, they made more sense. It wasn’t fate, it was simple coincidence. Favorable odds.

  Still, it was damn freaky. But then, weren’t all coincidences?

  I have to tell Casey.

  She’d be devastated. Not only because Gregg had died, but because it would be adding one more shitty memory to the anniversary of the worst day of her life.

  I have to tell her, though. He had no choice. It was bad enough he was already keeping one secret about that day. One that constantly threatened to come out when he least expected it, rising to the surface on a wave of guilt and self-loathing so vile it made him want to puke. Adding another secret to the mix might just be the final straw, the last little bit of pressure needed to send everything tumbling free.

  Yes, he had to tell her, but he didn’t have to tell her now. It could wait until after work, after they’d had dinner and put Jennifer to bed. He’d pour them a glass of wine and break the news to her. Let her cry herself to sleep again and wake up in the morning purged.

  Casey took the news much like Alec had expected. First there was shocked disbelief, then sorrow over his death, and finally sadness and guilt and anger over the loss of their children. Survivor’s guilt, the shrinks called it. The same doctors who believed Alec suffered from it as well. Except with Casey they were right. She hated that she’d been the first one attacked, rendered unconscious through everything that followed. Because of that, she’d never even had the chance to try and save her children. To her, it was no different than if she’d done nothing, just sat there and watched while the bear turned Nick and Sue into lifeless piles of flesh. The fact that she’d been seriously—almost mortally—wounded herself meant nothing. In her mind, her injuries, and the weeks of pain and physical therapy that had followed, were her penance.

  And yet she hadn’t once blamed Alec. Just the opposite. To her, he was as much a hero as David Gregg. After all, he’d risked his own life in a desperate attempt to find help.

  Sometimes he just wanted to shoot himself and put an end to the lie.

  Like she had so many other nights, Casey burst into tears and pressed herself against him when they got in bed, sobbing about how could God be so cruel as to let them live while taking good, innocent people like Sue and Nick and now David.

  As always, he held her and told her it wasn’t her fault, they’d been spared because Jennifer needed them, and that maybe God’s plan was for them to make sure Jen grew up and made a difference in the world. All the while, the lie festered deep inside him, a pocket of poisonous gas bubbling and growing in a swamp of guilt.

  After she drifted off he needed two antacids and a Valium to follow her into sleep.

  Following Gregg’s death, things actually got a little better for Alec. There was no longer a reason for Casey to follow Gregg’s blog, so that last reminder of their loss was finally gone. Casey started sleeping better at night. And although their sex life didn’t improve in terms of frequency, on the one night every week or two they actually did make love she seemed to really enjoy herself rather than just going through the motions for him.

  After a few weeks of relative bliss, he began to think that maybe things were turning around, that their lives could be normal again. Even the demons living inside him seemed to have gone into hiding.

  For the first time in a year, Alec found himself smiling when he came home from work.

  Had he known what the future held for them, a smile would have been the last thing on his mind.

  “All actions have consequences, people. Good or bad or just plain insignificant, there is always a reaction to each action in our lives. The scientists call it physics; the Buddhists call it karma.”

  Father Hayden paused and looked at the congregation. Everyone stared back in anticipation, awaiting his next words. Alec stirred in his seat, suddenly uncomfortable with where the priest’s sermon was heading. He wished Jennifer would cry or fidget or whisper that she had to go to the bathroom, so he’d have an excuse to take her outside.

  His face lighting up with holy glee, as if he’d just discovered the tablets of Moses, Hayden broke the heavy silence.

  “I like to say, ‘What goes around, comes around.’ If you do good, good comes back to you. And if you do bad…well, all we have to do is look at the gossip columns in the newspapers to see what happens.” He paused for breath, then continued.

  “All actions have consequences. You might not see them, might not even realize they’ve occurred. The things you do, each and every one of you, can change not only your own life but the lives of people you don’t even know. Let’s take the example of a drunk driver who kills a pedestrian. That action produces an obvious consequence, one that anybody can see. Someone dies. But what if that driver calls a taxi or lets a friend drive him home? He’ll never know the consequence of that action—that he saved someone’s life—and we’ll never see it, but it happened just the same.”

  Alec’s guts clenched. Even though Father Hayden’s gaze traveled around the room, Alec felt the man had singled him out and was pointing the finger of God’s guilt his way like a second-rate oracle.

  I can’t take it anymore.

  He whispered a quick apology to Casey and slid out of his seat, thankful they always sat at the end of the pew in case Jennifer got too loud. Doing his best to ignore the curious looks of his fellow parishioners, he hurried to the doors and escaped the suffocating confines of the church. Once outside, he leaned against the railing and took a deep breath of the sultry, heavy summer air.

  He wasn’t talking to you. He doesn’t know.

  Alec repeated it like a mantra until his heart calmed down and he no longer felt as if he might puke.

  Have to remember to thank Father Hayden for that chest-wrenching episode. In two minutes the priest had managed to rouse the old guilt monster from a slumber I was very comfortable with.

  Which meant he had to be careful. If his guilt was still that close to the surface, still that raw, then anything might set it off. And if it happened in front of Casey…

  No. He couldn’t let that happen. Not when their marriage, their life, was finally getting back on track again.
<
br />   Get your shit together, asshole. The past is the past and it needs to stay that way. Bury all those feelings, just like you buried your children.

  Not the most pleasant of images, but it did the trick.

  And by the time church let out, he had his lie all prepared when Casey asked what had happened.

  “A little stomach problem.” He gave her his best embarrassed smile. “Guess I shouldn’t have had those extra sausages with breakfast.”

  She shook her head and laughed, never knowing the person she trusted most in life was lying to her.

  Again.

  That evening, two hours north of Rocky Point, where Alec and Casey were busy putting Jennifer to bed and cleaning up the dinner mess, Dr. Eddie Trano was sitting down to watch the first night of the summer Olympics. He didn’t particularly care about any of the events; at the age of sixty-eight, it was his firm belief the integrity of the games was long gone, another victim of corporate greed. Too many events held at night, interrupting regular programs, and too many “spotlight” pieces on athletes, as far as he was concerned. All of it only for TV ratings. But it was still better than game shows or reality TV, and the ballgame was already over, so he’d fixed a beer and a ham sandwich and resigned himself to sitting through endless commentary from monotone announcers until he fell asleep.

  Things were going just as he’d planned until something hit him in the chest, waking him from a doze during one of the swimming events.

  “What the…?” Trano looked down at the object sitting in his lap. It was a figurine Marge had bought on their first trip to Germany, back in 1956. A figurine that had sat on the fireplace mantle since the day they’d brought it home.

  The mantle that was all the way across the room.

  Trano stood up, the figurine clutched in his hand.

  Someone’s in the house!

  His wife was dead and his children all lived out of state, which meant there could only be one explanation: an intruder.

  He ran through the possibilities as he hurried over to his gun cabinet. Since Marge’s passing, he’d taken to keeping it unlocked—just in case.