David mumbled something.
“What’s that?” Darius said.
“He says they’re bowhunters,” Billy said.
Darius raised his eyebrow, and the pink scar stretched like a small mouth making a grimace. “Not tonight they’re not.”
* * *
Now they were in the backseat of Vanessa’s Crown Vic again, he and David sandwiched in the middle of the back seat, the spruce and aspen rolling slowly past them in the spray of headlights. Weasel was on one side of them, Billy on the other, with Garney driving. Darius was in the front passenger seat, silent except for the occasional left or right. They had left the main road fifteen minutes earlier—if you could call a rutted two-track with a few sprinkles of class 5 gravel the main road—and the Vic was screeching and scraping its way over the rocky forest trail.
“I’m gonna be sick,” Byron said.
“Don’t puke in here,” Garney said. He was thickset and nearly bald, and Byron could see a patchwork of scars across the folds of skin at the base of his neck. “They puke in here and Vanessa’s gonna be pissed.”
“I can’t hold it,” Byron said. He could feel the bile building up in his throat again, the slow rolling of his stomach.
“Stop,” Darius said. “We’re close enough.”
Billy pushed the car door open and Byron stumbled after him, going to all fours on the rocky ground and arching his back, the hot churn boiling out and out and out. He crawled to the edge of the road and vomited again, his entire body convulsing, the smell of beer and cinnamon and inhaled smoke rolling out of him. He heaved until the convulsions stopped and he was spitting out bile. When he looked up he saw they had David pushed up against a tree on the other side of the road, his arms tied behind the trunk. He looked sick and weak, smaller than Byron had ever seen him.
Darius said something, and Billy and Garney walked over to Byron, crossing through the headlights and casting long-legged shadows on the road behind them. They pushed him against a poplar tree, seized his wrists, and yanked them behind his back. Something hard and thin was wound around his wrists and cinched cruelly tight. A second later Billy passed a loop of wire over his ankles and repeated the process. Then Billy wound a length of wire around Byron’s forehead, cinching it so his face was pointed directly at David. The wire cut into his brow, and a line of blood trickled down his nose and fell to the ground with a steady pattering. More blood soaked into his eyebrows, which Billy wiped away with the pads of his thumbs.
“Good,” Darius said. “Make sure he can see.”
There was a knife in his hand, Byron saw, a hunting knife with a five-inch stainless steel blade and a molded plastic handle. A practical knife, nothing showy. And in that instant everything Byron had told himself over the past hour, every assurance that the Budweiser men weren’t going to really hurt them, fled.
“Back the car up a few feet,” Darius said. “Light ’em up.”
“It’s good where it is,” Billy said. “They can see.”
Darius stared at him for a second, his expression flat, then walked over to David and pushed the knife into his right side, almost casually, sticking the blade in up to the hilt and then pulling it back out. David inhaled sharply, his eyes bugging out at the monstrous and sudden pain come alive inside him, and began to scream. His screams went on for a long time, eventually turning into a rapid mewling. The bottom of his shirt was drenched with blood, soaking into his jeans.
Darius handed the knife to Weasel.
The small man stalked around David, then poked the knife into David’s belly on the other side. This time David’s scream was higher, raspy, and went on for even longer. Byron closed his eyes and Billy slapped him. When he looked up again, Weasel was grinning at Darius and pantomiming a twisting motion with his hand and wrist, showing him the technique. Now Garney held the knife and he was prodding David with it, saying something Byron couldn’t hear. For a minute David’s pain-crazed eyes settled on Byron, and somewhere inside his blood-streaked face came that curious tilted expression, the look they had given each other for years, the look that made Byron love the man through all his faults. We doing things right?
No, Byron thought. We sure didn’t do things right on this one.
Then Garney stepped between them, and the night air filled with more screaming.
This time Byron didn’t open his eyes when Billy hit him. He kept them closed for a long time, but when he opened them he had to look, his eyes wouldn’t not look, and David was pressed against the tree like a bloody scarecrow held captive, his eyes glazed and staring off into the night forest. Denied even the ability to slump his head.
Then Darius was poking Byron in the belly with the point of the knife, not hard enough to draw blood but painful, like a hornet stinging him again and again. He was talking, and Byron knew he had to listen.
“Yeah, there you go,” Darius said. “You not feeling too good about your friend?”
Byron mumbled a reply.
“No,” Darius said, and his voice was sad. “We aren’t the fuckers, By-ron. You and your buddy are the fuckers. You think I don’t know?” He stepped closer, his features largely lost in the shadows, the lights from the car backlighting his head. “I see the truth.” Behind him, Byron saw three heads bob up and down in agreement.
“You want to know the truth?” Darius said. “You knew, like the bear knows. Knew there was something wrong with him.” The pressure from the tip of the knife eased. “Knew it for years.”
Byron’s eyes opened wider, and Darius smiled, his stained teeth yellow in the headlights. “I see far and I see deep, By-ron. All of you guys want to come up here, sample what we have. Shoot our bear, mess with the women, okay? Take what’s in the woods, in the ground. Okay. But you don’t got no respect; I see that too. This land just something you visit, the people just jackpine savages, eh? It’s only interesting ’cause you wanna take something from it.”
The knife pressure was back, just below his belly button, light but constant pressure. “Tell me it’s true.”
Byron wondered where his inner steel was, why it didn’t rise up, tell this guy to kiss his ass. There was nothing inside of him except for terror and a deep, inconsolable sadness.
“Fine,” he said. “It’s true.”
Darius’s eyes squinted shut. “Oh man, that’s the wrong answer. You shoulda said it was true, that now you learned better. You can’t learn, can you? Like a goddamn puppy so retarded it pisses in its bowl, then drinks it.” Behind them, one of the men giggled. It sounded like Weasel, the man who an hour earlier had given Byron a nickname, had passed him a bottle of whiskey to share. Darius motioned behind him, jabbing at the night air with his knife. “Your friend’s dead, Byron.”
“I know.”
“You gonna die, too, Byron.”
Spit in his face. Come up with something to say. Try to get his face a little closer, then bite off his nose. These thoughts came and went, and in the end he simply said, “I don’t want to.”
Then the knife pressure was back, scalding his belly. “Man,” Darius said, “I wish I don’t want to meant something in this world.”
* * *
By the time Byron’s screams had faded and they had finished the rest of the beer, the eastern horizon had turned gray. They took turns standing or sitting on the trunk, occasionally looking at the two bodies wired to the trees. Weasel wanted to take pictures with his phone, but Darius wouldn’t let him, not because he was worried about evidence, but because he felt a picture wouldn’t be as powerful an image as the memory of this sight that they would keep in their heads. When the sun had nearly broken the horizon Darius deemed it light enough to work, and they cut the wires and lowered the bodies to the ground. Garney looped short sections of rope around the bodies’ ankles, leaving ten feet of slack and then tying the other end to a stout dead limb Billy salvaged from a blowdown. Then, with one man on each side of the limb, they began to drag.
They stopped several hundred yards from the car
, where the flinty ground dipped into a spruce bog. The trees were mostly dead, but the ground was a deep and vibrant green, covered with a thick layer of moss and Labrador tea. Weasel and Garney cut through the moss with a spade from the trunk of the car, severing the green carpet and the thin roots underneath, carving out large sections to expose the dark and acidic soil underneath. The openings immediately filled with brown water. Darius and Billy dragged the bodies into the carved-out graves and heaped the moss over them, the resulting bulges no different in appearance than the hundred other moss-covered hummocks in sight.
“Man,” Garney said when they were done, wiping sweat from his brow. “All this work—shit, and for what?”
“Because,” Darius said, resting a hand on his shoulder and gesturing around them with his other hand. “They’re coming, Garney. Like we always knew they would. Coming for what we have.” He paused, surveying his bloody hands, then dropped to his knees and scraped up a bit of the dark loam. He rubbed the dirt in to his stained hands, rolling it back and forth, then let it drop back down to the pine needles. “They might take it,” he said. “I know that. But when they do, they’ll pay full price.”
Garney looked at him. He nodded, slowly at first and then with more emphasis, and Weasel and then Billy followed suit, the three of them nodding at Darius as the sun broke over the horizon, their long shadows stretching out to the west, to the swamp where the acidic waters had already begun the long, slow decomposition of the two corpses.
Chapter 3
They stood on the ridge above the valley, gathered in a semicircle. It was noon and they were soaked with sweat, their shirts darkened all the way through. Jake could remember only a few days warmer in his time in this area, and none this late in the summer. That has to be the reason, he thought. This much warmth, this much moisture, things are going to happen that normally don’t.
Before them, in a broken circle of brush, a fuzzy mass pushed up from the ground. Cameron Fairchild squatted next to it, head cocked, his lanky frame less than two feet from the mold-covered mass. It had structure under the growth, perhaps something that had once been alive. Hard to say what that might be except . . . except it wasn’t alive anymore. The material covering it was thick, a sickly whitish-gray color, like congealed wax or animal fat. Cameron reached out and then pulled his hand back, wiping his fingers on his pants even though he hadn’t actually touched it.
“Rachel?” Warren said. “Is it from the . . . ?”
“The reaction?” she said. “I don’t think so.”
She stepped forward, plucking a branch out of the pine needles and prodding the mass with the stick. It dimpled under the pressure, and when she pushed harder the end of the stick broke through. She levered the stick upward, trying to break off a piece of the moldy exterior, and the wood snapped. She leaned in closer, using the butt end of the stick, and pushed harder. The material parted around the stick, but did not break off.
“There’s something in there,” she said. “Looks like fabric of some kind.” She poked again. “The biological material grew around it, so it’s some kind of saprobe.”
Warren tapped her on the shoulder. “Plain English.”
“Just a mold,” she said. “Typically these kind are black in color, and we call them sooty molds. They form a carpet over the material, like this one did, and break it down for the nutrients. But this is white, like a Penicillium genus, which are dry molds. This is a wet one. Gelatinous.” She dropped the stick and stood. “It’s nothing. Nature’s Jell-O.”
“You said there was fabric inside it?” Cameron asked.
“Hard to tell,” she said, then suddenly became aware everyone was looking at her, waiting for more. She blushed. “Relax, guys. Something died here, and this fungus is breaking it down. Happens all the time.”
“But there’s fabric inside,” Jaimie said. “That means—”
“Nothing,” Jake said. He could feel the tension ratcheting up, and he wondered if it was because they were out here, finally, at their destination and hadn’t found the gear, or if it was due to some other reason. He did know that they were on edge as a group, and a panic could start as easily as a brush fire in an old pine forest—and would be just as hard to put out. “It’s a gutpile,” he said. “Somebody put on gloves to keep their hands clean, then threw them on top when they were done.”
“You’ve seen this before?” Jaimie asked, eyebrows furrowed.
“All the time,” Jake lied. “I’m going to go look up top again.”
Jake left the small copse of alder and walked to the top of the ridge. The X on Warren’s laminated map led to an open patch of rocky ground. There was nothing there but stray lichens and long inch-deep furrows where glaciers had scraped over the rock surface millennia ago. They had been searching in concentric circles since the previous evening, combing the brush along the ridgeline. From what Jake understood, the equipment should have been easy to spot: a diesel-powered Geocore pneumatic drilling rig, ten six-gallon fuel containers filled with stabilized diesel, a bundle of ten-foot-long core tubes, and seven diamond-tipped drill bits encased in plastic sheaths; $2.3 million of equipment, according to Warren. And Jake’s own worth, according to Warren, was less than two shits if he couldn’t find something that big in this little patch of godforsaken wilderness.
Jake looked around the woods, a mixed stand of mature hardwoods and pine with narrow stands of alder and poplars running down the drainages. Open country, at least for this area of the bush. Warren was right. He should have been able to find the rig within an hour.
“Someone took it,” Warren said. He had joined Jake on the ridgeline and stood looking at the woods and brush with an expression of barely controlled fury.
“Who?” Jake said. “Why?”
Warren turned to look at him, his face smoothing out, becoming unreadable. “Who knows?” He looked down at his rolled-up cuffs, frowned, and rolled them back down to cover up his wrists, taking time to button each cuff before turning back to Jake. “The world is full of people who don’t like explorations of any kind.”
“Maybe,” Jake said. “Who was the pilot, again?”
“The pilot?”
“The one who took a round through his hand.”
Warren studied Jake for a moment, impassive. “Who told you that?”
Jake turned away, moving to a slightly higher point to survey the valley. Far below them, the slow, tannin-stained water reflected the granite outcroppings on the far side of the river. The ground leading up to the river was fairly open, pockets of wetlands mixed with granite outcroppings. The only tall vegetation was along the fringes of the river, a dense stand of sedge grass and cattails.
“I hired him out of Vancouver,” Warren said from behind him. “He has a reputation for discreet work.” He paused. “And it was a piece of shrapnel, not a bullet.”
Jake turned. “How shaken up was he? After he took fire, I mean?”
“Plenty,” Warren said. He was watching Jake closely. “What is it?”
“Let me see one of your maps.”
Warren shrugged his backpack off his shoulder, rifled through several scrolls of laminated paper, and selected one. He unrolled the map, revealing a multicolored contour map. Warren placed a finger—no dirt under the fingernails, Jake noted, the cuticles neatly trimmed—on a location that Jake understood to be the spot where they were standing. The landscape around them was shown in a series of lines, evenly spaced to the south, then changing direction in the area around Resurrection Valley, switching direction to run north and south, then breaking off the linear lines into strange swirls. To Jake it looked like someone had stuck a giant spoon in the earth and done some mixing.
Warren saw him squint. “It shows geomagnetic signatures,” he said. “Not topography. Lots of people think the underlying rocks follow the same pattern as what we see up here. Not necessarily so.”
“We’re here?”
“Yes.” Warren removed a pen from his backpack and carefully placed a
n X on the map. “You want the flight path, don’t you?” Without waiting for an answer he drew a dashed line to the southeast. Jake and Warren turned in unison to the direction that the helicopter had taken into—and presumably out of—the coordinates they had been given. Jake oriented himself along the line, then looked up. The vector Warren had drawn on the map led to a dense tangle of brush, then more woods. Beyond that was a small, flat-topped hill, perhaps a quarter mile away. It was rocky and barren, with only a few wispy cedars clinging to the edges
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Warren said.
“He wasn’t shot at on the way out,” Jake murmured. “He took fire on the way here.”
Warren nodded, excited, but for a moment Jake had seen something flash through his eyes. A recalculation, perhaps—Jake not quite the simple-minded country Indian Warren thought he had hired. “You military?” he asked. “Putting that government training to good use?”
Jake looked back at him. “What reaction were you talking about, earlier?”
Warren cocked his head, smiled, then shouted out for the group to stay where they were. Jake was already moving, and Warren followed him. They found a game trail and wove through the brush, not talking, Jake caught up in the same excitement as Warren: the pure pleasure of seeing the mystery, any mystery, dissolve before your own reasoning.
Yeah, yeah, Jake thought, as they climbed the hill. We get on top, there’ll be nothing but some lichen-covered rocks and a strong breeze.
He heard the flapping before he crested the hill, and quickened his pace until he and Warren were nearly running up the incline. Jake pulled himself up the last ten feet and stood on top of the rock outcropping, panting and happy. The ground in front of him was about a thousand square feet of basalt rock, with a large, tarped bundle smack dab in the middle. The bundle had been covered in a heavy-gauge camouflage tarp, but one of the stones used to weigh it down had rolled off, and the corner of the tarp was snapping in the stiff southwesterly breeze. He turned and held out a hand for Warren, pulling him over the last lip of rock.
Resurrection Pass Page 4
