She started after Van Bleek before he vanished entirely into the mist, and she mentally channeled her thoughts onto the tasks that lay ahead. It bolstered her, gave her a renewed sense of purpose.
Another ten minutes or so into the hike, and a small stone clattered noisily down the rocks to her right. Tana froze, breathing hard. Her heart thumped a steady whump whump whump of blood against her eardrums. Slowly she moved her head, panning her headlamp over the area where she’d heard the noise. But her beam was useless. It bounced back off the fog instead of penetrating it. The sense that something was out there, hidden just behind the wet curtain of mist, intensified.
Another rock clattered down the slope. She jumped, and became acutely aware of her rifle and her 12-gauge pump action on her pack.
“You okay down there?” Van Bleek called.
“Heard something.”
He ran his headlight across the slope. Twin orangey-red glows suddenly bounced back. Shit. Tana’s stomach jerked.
“Bear!” she yelled, reaching for her shotgun. She shook free her gloves, put gun stock to shoulder, heart jackhammering. She curled her finger around the trigger. Mist swirled, and the hot orange orbs vanished.
But it was still there. Just hidden.
She sighted down the barrel at the spot where the glowing eyes had disappeared, her body anticipating the explosive impact of the bear. If a grizz charged now, she was toast. At this distance, with this visibility, she was unlikely to stop the animal before it was on her, even if she did place her slug just right. Stones clacked to her left.
She swung her gun after the sound, sweat breaking out on her brow under her hat.
“Can you see it?” she yelled.
Van Bleek panned his light slowly across the slope again. Silence was suddenly suffocating. Bears were cunning predators. It could have stalked around behind them. Could be anywhere.
Time stretched.
“I think it’s gone!” Van Bleek called from above. Tana waited another moment, then reluctantly lowered her weapon and put her gloves back on. But as she did, out of her peripheral vision, she caught a shadow. She tensed, spun. Her movement caused her boot to slip on a layer of ice underfoot and she went down hard, smacking her elbow into rock. Pain speared up her arm, stealing her breath. Her gun dropped and slid down onto a lower boulder. Fuck.
Van Bleek turned his spotlight on her.
“You need a hand?”
“I’m fine,” she snapped, blinking like a mole into Van Bleek’s beam. “Get that light off me so I can see.” She reached down to retrieve her shotgun, frustration riding her hard. She held onto that emotion, used it to beat back fear before it beat her. “Rocks are slick,” she said as she heaved herself back onto her feet under the weight of her pack. “Why don’t you aim that damn thing where the danger is instead of at me, huh?” Van Bleek was watching her, waiting for her to gather herself.
“I’m fine.” She dusted snow off her pants.
He hesitated. “You sure you’re not hurt?”
“What part about ‘fine’ did you not hear?”
He eyed her a second longer, then turned and resumed his climb. But he’d dropped his pace noticeably.
“No need to slow down on my account,” she yelled after him. “I said I’m fine.”
He had the audacity to chuckle softly. Smug asshole.
It was 11:40 p.m. and snow had stopped falling by the time they crested the ridge. They heard them first. A wet snarling, snapping, growling. Crunching. The sound of animals feeding on flesh. Bones.
Human flesh and bones.
Van Bleek made a rapid sign for her to lower herself. She crouched slowly to the snow beside him.
“See?” he whispered, pointing. “Over there.” Tana blinked, her brain trying to process what she was seeing in the darkness.
Shapes. Shadows. Animals—the wolves, she couldn’t tell how many—were fighting and tearing at what she reckoned were the bodies of Selena Apodaca and Raj Sanjit. Bile rose up into her gullet. “Sweet Jesus,” she whispered.
“What do you want to do?” Van Bleek said.
“Scare them off those kids,” Tana said without hesitation. From her breast pocket, she removed two little pencil rocket launchers, gave one to Van Bleek. She handed him flare cartridges. “Take these. I want to see how many animals are down there, and what kind.” She screwed a flare cartridge into her own launcher, using the light of her headlamp to see what she was doing. “You go first,” she said. “Try to fire into the air right above them. Then I’ll shoot mine.”
Van Bleek shot off his flare. He aimed true. It exploded into a mushroom of bright pink cloud above the massacre. There was a yelp, squeals. Some of the wolves retreated, but two big ones stood their ground over their kills—wet, foaming, bloody mouths as glowing eyes looked in their direction. A kick of fear shot through Tana’s adrenaline at the aggression she saw in the alphas’ postures. She fired her own flare farther to the right of the one Markus had expelled, in the direction several animals had run. Her flare exploded with a massive crack above them, frizzing brightly into the mist. The canines cowered, but this time they did not flee. Five in total that she could see. One of the two alphas and a smaller wolf slinked back to the carcasses.
“They’re not going anywhere,” she said quietly. “They’ve been emboldened by the blood.”
“And the taste of human meat,” Van Bleek said quietly.
Tana slid her rifle out from her pack. “You take those two big ones on the left,” she said, focusing through her sight on the carnage below. “I’ll start with the animals on the right.”
They fired, reloaded, fired, and launched more flares. Like soldiers on a ridge they worked in concert to slaughter the pack. Below, wolves cried, yelped. Snapped. And fell. The killing was over in minutes. Silence was suddenly deafening. She could smell the sulfurous powder from the flares. Tana’s heart boomed. Sweat slicked her body. A kind of pain burned behind her eyes. “We had to do it,” she whispered more to herself than Van Bleek. “They’ll need those animals for necropsy. They’ve eaten from those kids’ bodies—they’ve been acclimated to human flesh. We had to kill them all.”
Van Bleek remained silent beside her, just staring down into the valley as the light from their flares dwindled and flickered out. Darkness closed around them. Tana swiped the back of her glove over her mouth. Her hand was shaking. “We need to get down there,” she said. “Before more scavengers come. Need to secure the remains of those poor kids.”
CHAPTER 6
“Looks like a bloody butcher’s shop,” Van Bleek said, panning his beam over the slaughter.
Or big game kill … apart from clothing and other gear that had been shredded to ribbons and littered the site. The snow had turned pink and red and was all chunked up. Wolf carcasses lay among the remains of the two humans. Rib bones gleamed through dark red, wet flesh. Bits of human meat and innards congealed in the subzero temperature. Entrails tangled across the snow.
Tana moved toward the closest human body, careful to minimize her own tracks by making only one line of footprints both in and out of the main kill area. But it might prove futile since the entire site appeared to be tracked out with both boot and animal prints, along with other drag and pull and scuffle marks. The boot prints were likely Van Bleek’s and Kino’s, left when they came to shoot the first pack of wolves.
The stink in the air was thick, heavy. It smelled of sweetish, raw meat, and it was underlaid with the corroded green copper tang of blood. An odor of violent death, never forgotten once you’d smelled it before. A memory slammed into Tana—finding Jim in the bathroom. She inhaled sharply at the impact of it. Mistake. It forced a whiff of punctured bowel deep into her nostrils, and her stomach heaved violently.
She doubled over, trying to control herself.
“Here,” called Van Bleek. “This is it. The decapitated head.” He bent down to take a closer look.
“Step back,” she commanded.
He glanced
at her, blinding her with the spotlight on his head.
“Christ, keep that thing out of my eyes. Stand up, and get away from that. Don’t touch or step on anything. Back out the way you walked in. Go around to the base of that cliff over there,” she said. “Keep guard from there in case any animals come.”
Her brain reeled. Assess. Contain. Control any further contamination until daybreak. After which she could inventory the whole thing—photograph and document it.
He stood in balky silence for a moment, his breath heavy white steam under the glow of his headlamp.
“And you?” he said.
“I’m going to string two electric fences up. One around each body.”
“Body parts are fucking all over the place.”
“The … main parts.” She cleared her throat. “Go, please. Now.”
He hesitated a moment longer. “Yes ma’am.”
She watched until he’d made his way to the base of the cliff. When he’d positioned himself and was panning his light into the fog in search of animals, she returned her attention to the massacre.
What was left of the body closest to her she determined to be Raj Sanjit, although most of his face had been chewed off. His hair was matted with gore, but it appeared to be black and cropped short. A hand, partially torn from an arm still attached to the body, looked dark-skinned in the light of her headlamp.
His stomach was gone, vital organs rich in nutrients hollowed out, leaving a cavernous, glistening maw beneath his rib cage. Tana moved to the other body. Her stomach recoiled violently.
Only a ragged stump with bone and gristle remained where the head had been. The rest of the torso was mostly eaten. Inside the ripped-open rib cage, the body cavity was empty. The heart gone, just a bit of lung left.
Tana panned her light over to the decapitated head.
It lay facedown. Ragged neck stump. Skull gleamed through torn scalp. Long hair, lighter in color. Frizzy looking.
Selena Apodaca.
Near the head was something pale blue. Part of a woolen hat. An eyeball was stuck to it.
Tana puked almost at once, stumbling to the side. She tried to stop herself, but nature’s urge was uncontrollable. Seized by cramps, she bent over, bracing her hands on her knees, and she threw up again, and again. Until all she had was the acid burn of bile in her throat and mouth, which made her stomach clench all over again. Heaving, sweating, she waited for the cramps to pass.
“You okay out there, ma’am?” came Van Bleek’s voice.
She swore like a trooper and swiped the back of her sleeve across her mouth. “Fine.”
I’ve gone and puked my DNA all over a fucking scene—so, yeah, I’m great. I’m doing fucking just swell …
“Want me to come over?”
“Stay where you are. Keep covering for us.”
She retched one more time. Tana cursed again. She could usually control herself. But her body was no longer her own. She was being commandeered by this tiny thing growing inside her womb. Even out here, even among all this blood and death and pointless gore, it was asserting its presence, reaching determinedly for life. And Tana’s own will to survive—for her baby—was so sudden and sharp and fierce that it stole her breath.
She took a moment to marshal herself, planning how best to tackle this.
One of her fences would cover an area of about twenty-seven square feet. Not much. But it was better than nothing, because if the wolves, or bear, returned before dawn, the electrical jolt would give them pause. Enough so that she or Van Bleek could shoot.
And in case of more snow, she’d need to get the small tarps in her pack covering those torsos at least.
The fencing was going to take a while to set up. Which was fine—better than sitting and doing nothing but staring at this mess in the dark and waiting for more predators. Carefully, she retraced her footsteps, retreating to an area where she could set down her pack. Shadows leaped in the mist as her head moved with the lamp. A bird, probably an owl, swooped low, fwopping wings in the dark. Tana glanced up, saw the big shadow, then it was gone into the darkness.
A feeling of cognizance hung in its wake, a sense of being watched by unseen eyes.
She glanced at the cliff. Van Bleek’s shape hulked at the base under his headlamp. A chill snaked down her back. That man felt no safer than a wild predator. Tana shook herself. It was fatigue. Hormones. Blood sugar. It was the violence that seemed to scream in the silence. The fact that she’d been forced to slaughter so many beautiful wolves who’d just been doing what they were programmed to do—stay alive. Hunt. Eat meat.
She first unpacked the two small tarps. Tana walked carefully back to the bodies, and covered them gently. She returned to her gear, crouched down, removed her gloves, pocketed them. Fiddling with bare fingers in the cold, she unstrapped the bags of electric fencing and assembled the poles.
When she had all the poles assembled, she carried them to the gutted torsos and poked the first pole into the ground, struggling to find a soft spot between rock and stones. She got it in at a good thirty-degree angle, moved on to plant the next stake. Once they were all in place, she unspooled the thin wire and affixed it pole to pole with clips. It was finicky work and her fingers grew painful from the cold.
An hour passed before she was able to connect the batteries and make her two fences live.
Once she’d finished, Tana circled around to join Van Bleek, who sat on a rock under the cliff face, gun resting in his arms. His hunting spotlight was planted on a boulder beside him, pointing out into the dark night.
She clicked off her own spotlight to conserve batteries, and seated herself beside him. It was almost 1:00 a.m. Monday morning. They had another seven hours at least until the beginnings of faint dawn light. If and when the batteries from Van Bleek’s spotlight failed, she’d have hers as a backup.
Hours ticked by. The night grew colder. Quieter. No more animals came. It was as if word had gotten out—this was a bad place.
“First time you seen real blood and gore, Constable?” Van Bleek said quietly.
“I’ve got a bug.”
Silence.
“Flu or something,” she said. “It’s going around. Rosalie—our dispatcher—her grandkid has it.” Why was she even justifying herself? She didn’t have to lie to anyone. She needed to embrace this, feel proud. But holy crap, she’d thought the “morning” sickness would have quit by now. She was five months in. And heaven forbid that anyone should ever grow so inured as to not be sickened by a scene like this. Or was it just a sign she’d never be a good cop? Never make homicide detective someday?
And it made her wonder about Van Bleek.
“How about you?” she said.
“I lived in Africa.” He offered nothing more, and she didn’t press.
She leaned back against the cold rock face, wrestling with her doubt demons. The night always brought the demons. They got off on mocking her lack of self-worth. They laughed in her face, and said, ha ha, little half-breed, you think a badge and uniform and gun will prove to the world that you’re not the abused offspring of a drunk hooker? You think people won’t know how your mother beat you when she was wasted? You think you are worth something, you little slut—apple never falls far from the tree, Tana Bee …
She cleared her throat. “You want to catch some sleep while I keep first watch?” she said.
“Don’t think either one of us wants to risk sleep tonight,” he said quietly.
He was right. Even though no scavenger had approached, there was a sense of them lurking, just beyond sight—wolves. Bears. Coyotes, maybe. Foxes. Wolverine, even. She’d throw out another flare in about an hour, just to see what was out there. Warn whatever off. She had several flare cartridges ready. Bear bangers, pepper spray, an air horn, too.
Wind soughed, moaned in the rocks. A wolf howl came over the hills. Answering cries sounded from a far-off pack. Communication. Wild style. Informing of the kill in Headless Man Valley. As the world tilted toward daw
n, air currents began to shift, as if the earth was stirring, getting ready to wake.
“You do hunt, right?” Van Bleek said after a long period of silence. “Your sort all hunts.”
She shot him a look. “My sort?”
There was a glimmer in his eye. He was toying with her. “Oh, you mean Natives.”
He chuckled.
She let it slide. Gallows humor took odd shapes.
“I hunted with my father,” she said after a while. “Since I was five. That was the first time he took me away.”
“Away?”
“I mean, out into the wilderness, for several months. I don’t know exactly how long.” The image of her dad filled her mind. Big, strapping Norwegian. Bushy beard. He seemed so very large in her mind’s eye. So strong. Even now. She quickly blocked out the other memories that she knew would follow—the reason he’d taken her away that year. “He taught me how to track. He was a prospector, an illegal trapper. He did whatever kept him off grid and alive in the bush.”
“So, the daughter of a man who walked on the wrong side of the law becomes a cop.”
She said nothing.
“And your mother?” he asked.
“She was Dogrib, the Native, yeah.”
He waited for her to say more, but Tana kept quiet, thoughts churning unwillingly, inexorably, back toward her mother.
“So,” he said after a long period of silence, and she almost briefly liked him for distracting her, “I take it that you’ve seen enough animal kills over your lifespan, at least—what’s your read here. Something a bit … off about this one?”
“Off?”
“Like … weird. Like not normal.”
“Never seen a human mauling. Nothing normal about that.”
“You know why they call this place Headless Man?”
“I’m sure you’re about to tell me.”
“Two prospectors were found a few miles southeast from here, in the twenties, sitting with their backs leaned up against a cliff face, just like we’re doing. Fully dressed. Boots on, packs and picks and guns at their sides. Only trouble—no heads. Just gone. Just the two torsos propped there like they were having a good old chat. Still had diamonds in their bags.”
In the Barren Ground Page 5
