by Jeff Strand
He retracted his arm slowly, took the other half of the hot dog from his left hand, and held it out for the cat again.
Oscar had finished the first portion and now crouched on his belly, haunches flexed, prepared to pounce. He watched Gabriel closely for several more minutes before venturing out from behind the side of the building. Once he was again close enough, Oscar sprung at Gabriel’s hand and relieved him of the food. In a blur of orange, Oscar fled in the direction of the woods and vanished.
Gabriel stared into the darkness beneath the snow-covered pines for a long time before he finally stood and headed back into the cabin.
November 15th, 2010
Monday
Gabriel had barely fallen asleep when Cavenaugh’s alarm woke him. The crushing feeling of dread followed within seconds. Today would potentially be one of the worst days of his life, and as much as he hated to begin it, the sooner he did, the sooner it would be over.
The bed shook as Cavenaugh climbed out, and Gabriel could hear rustling from the adjacent room as Jess slipped out from under the covers. After a long moment of hesitation, Gabriel finally followed suit. He dressed in a fog, adding layer after layer of clothing until he felt as though he were smothering.
Cavenaugh passed him and exited the room as he donned his coat and snowcap.
With a sigh, Gabriel joined the others in the main room and waited while Jess bundled into her massive coat, pulled the hood over her head, and cinched the ties tight to hold it in place.
Cavenaugh left through the back door without a word.
“Are you ready to do this?” Gabriel asked.
Jess looked him squarely in the eyes.
“No.”
***
Jess shouldered the backpack while Gabriel slung the rifle over his back. He was surprised by how light it was. Between the two of them, he was the only one who had ever fired a gun, and not since his father had died. Even then, he had only ever shot on a range. What were the odds that he would have to use it though?
The others appeared ready, but none of them were in a hurry to head out into the storm. All wore matching expressions of apprehension, save Cavenaugh, whose mouth was a tight line of determination. Gabriel couldn’t remember seeing him blink.
Will and Maura had been assigned the spring on the northern slope of Mount Isolation. It was the farthest trek, but the trail looked to be the easiest. Cavenaugh and Kelsey had chosen the northern slope of Mount Haverstam based on the spring’s proximity to the mountain lion’s charted range. Considering his police experience, it made the most sense to gamble that Cavenaugh would make the discovery so it could be handled by the book. Jess and Gabriel had been relegated to the southwestern slope of Mount Isolation, which meant they would follow the stream through the bottom of the valley before scaling the heavily-forested hillside. That placed them in a position to be the second party to reach either of the other sites should problems arise or if they found the bodies.
“Are there any final questions?” Cavenaugh asked. He paused just long enough to slide his Project 25-capable, digital walkie-talkie into his outer jacket pocket. “Good. Now let’s get a move on before—”
“Who’s carrying the emergency transceiver?” Jess interrupted.
Cavenaugh flashed her an angry glance, but it quickly disappeared.
“It’s in Kelsey’s backpack.”
“I want to carry it.”
“It’s most logical to bring it with us based on the probability of our destination.”
“We’ll be in constant radio communication. Any one of us can use it just as well as another.”
“If I give you the goddamned transceiver, will you let us leave now?” Cavenaugh’s face grew bright red.
Jess nodded.
Cavenaugh stomped over to Kelsey, spun him around, and unzipped the backpack. After some digging, he extracted the transceiver, which looked like a long walkie-talkie with a small digital readout and a miniature keypad, and threw it to Jess. She caught it and shoved it into her jacket pocket.
“Can we go now?” Cavenaugh asked through bared teeth.
“After you,” Jess said, gesturing to the door.
Without a backwards glance, Cavenaugh opened the door and stepped out into the storm with Kelsey right behind him. Will and Maura followed, leaving Jess and Gabriel to close up behind.
The snow had slowed noticeably. The flakes were smaller and more sporadic, and the wind only rose in occasional gusts. There was still no sign of the night sky through the thick cloud cover, but at least it no longer felt as though the storm was sitting right on top of their heads. Maybe there was actually a chance they might see the sun at some point during the day. Gabriel couldn’t help but think of that as a good omen.
He and Jess stood on the porch and watched Will and Maura disappear down the driveway behind the island of evergreens. They were to head north once they reached the road before finally branching from it at the designated trail.
Cavenaugh and Kelsey had already disappeared to the south.
“Ready?” Gabriel asked.
“Just a minute,” Jess whispered. She walked away from the cabin and looked around before returning. Gabriel was just about to ask her what she was doing when she pulled the emergency transceiver out of her pocket. She switched on the power and there was a hiss of static.
“Try a different frequency.”
She turned dials and pressed buttons, but the quality of the static never changed. When the steady hiss began to grate on her nerves, she clicked it off and shoved it back into her coat.
“It should be working,” she said.
“We’ll try again at a higher altitude. I’ll bet it’s a combination of the storm and this location.”
“You’re probably right,” she said, forcing a smile. “Just interference.”
They started their journey to the north, prepared to intercept the path that would lead them northeast into the valley.
***
The sun rose somewhere above the rocky peaks to the east, but did little more than cast a gray pall over the forest. At least it was now light enough to watch their footing more carefully. Neither of them could afford to so much as sprain an ankle or their journey would be over. The maze of pines protected them from the majority of the snow and wind, and the accumulation was only half of what it was in the thin meadow lining the stream, which was nearly invisible beneath a rugged sheet of ice. Soon, even that would vanish until spring.
Gabriel had known his physical prime was well behind him, but he hadn’t been remotely prepared for this kind of exertion, especially in the thin air so high into the mountains. His lungs burned and his legs ached. It felt as though he were trudging through peanut butter. Whether Jess was any better off or not, she did a better job of hiding it. Her cheeks and nose were scarlet, and clouds of steam burst past her lips in a panting rhythm, but she waited for him to call the breaks, which he had begun to do with increasing frequency.
They sat on a fallen tree in a small enclave beneath the protective canopy, momentarily shielded from the wind. Jess slipped out of the backpack and set it on the ground beside her. She removed one of the bottles of water and passed it to Gabriel, who tipped it back and took two long swigs, savoring the second. He debated taking off his jacket for a few minutes as he was dripping with sweat beneath, but he knew he needed to preserve his body heat. His best guess was that they were roughly halfway there, and the going on the easy leg had been even more challenging than he had speculated. He was dreading the prospect of scaling the hillside on the opposite side of the stream, which appeared to grow even steeper farther to the east. If they could barely maintain their traction on level ground, how were they supposed to do so on the sharp incline?
The radio crackled before Cavenaugh’s voice emerged from the static.
“How’s everybody doing out there?”
“We’ve reached the trail that leads away from the road,” Maura said. “With all the snow, it took us a while to find
it, but we can see timberline from where we are now. Will thinks we should reach our destination within the next two to three hours, barring anything unexpected.”
“Good. Gabriel? Jess?”
“We’re still down in the valley and the mountain looks a lot steeper than it did on the map, but I’d imagine we should reach the spring around the same time Will and Maura reach theirs. So long as neither of us fall and break our necks,” Jess said. “How about you guys?”
Gabriel heard something rustle in the scrub oak behind him and turned toward the sound.
“Same here,” Cavenaugh said. “We would have been there already if it weren’t for the blasted accumulation. Now that we’re into the forest where it’s not as deep, we’re making decent progress.”
There was only the gentle swaying of the disturbed branches.
“I’ll check in on you guys again in an hour,” Cavenaugh said. “Out.”
Gabriel reached into the bag and removed a granola bar. He unwrapped it, took a bite, and climbed over the log toward the bushes.
“We should probably get moving again,” Jess said. “The worst is still to come.”
Gabriel looked back at her and pressed his forefinger to his lips, then crouched in front of the tangle of branches, beneath which the fallen leaves were merely dusted with snow. A crunch of the detritus drew his attention to the right, where a pair of green eyes stared directly at him. There was Oscar, body pressed flat against the ground, partially concealed by a cluster of thin trunks. His one good ear stood erect.
Gabriel broke off a section of the granola bar and slowly held it out for the cat, which visibly tensed at the movement. He reached deep into the brush. Oscar licked his scarred nose, but held his position.
There was the sound of footsteps approaching from behind.
Gabriel saw the cat’s eyes tick upward, and in one swift motion, Oscar dashed away into the forest.
“Damn it,” Gabriel whispered. He scooted back out of the branches and rose to his feet.
“Is that cat following us?” Jess asked.
“I managed to get him to eat a hot dog out of my hand last night. I thought maybe he’d take some granola bar, but…”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare him off.”
“Hopefully we’ll see him again.”
He was angry she’d startled Oscar to flight, but if she hadn’t done it, he probably would have. After surviving in the wild for so long, the cat had become feral, tapped into his primitive instincts. The idea of catching him was a fool’s proposition.
“We will,” she said, wrapping her arm around his back beneath the rifle.
Gabriel hugged her around the shoulders. Without having said so, he knew she understood what he was trying to do with the cat. He gave her a gentle kiss on the bridge of her nose.
“I suppose we should hit the trail again,” she finally said.
“Yeah,” he said, reluctantly releasing her from his embrace.
He helped her into the backpack and followed her to the edge of the woods toward the path. She turned around and smiled. His heart fluttered. He couldn’t help but wonder what the future might hold for them back in the real world.
***
Just over two hours later, they were both beyond the point of exhaustion, but they were too close to stop now, and in no position to do so regardless. The sharp, snowcapped peak loomed over them from above, a fin of white blowing from the pinnacle. Their zigzagging ascent had brought them to the point where they now had to crawl around tree trunks that grew at bizarre angles from the steep embankment. If a path existed somewhere beneath the snow, they had long since lost it. They had to be close to the hot spring by now. The abrupt transition from forest to bare rock at timberline was perhaps a quarter-mile above them and the satellite image had shown just a hint of water through the overhanging branches.
Gabriel’s heartbeat was racing and his thoughts were a blur. He both hoped to find some sign of his sister and dreaded the possibility at the same time. The urge to turn around was now more pressing than his will to continue on, but one glance back over his shoulder, down what appeared to be a deadfall into the valley now hidden by snow, and he knew he had no choice but to proceed.
The wind shifted and pelted him in the face with ice crystals, and something else…the familiar stench of rotten eggs. Sulfur.
“Do you smell that?” he called to Jess, who was just up the slope to his right. Beyond her was a cloud of mist. No, not mist. It was steam.
She turned at the sound of his voice and he saw the look of recognition on her face. She had seen it too.
They scrabbled over the crest of a stony knoll and stared down into a small crater, at the bottom of which was a pool of murky gray water, barely visible through the swirling steam. Sliding down the slick, granite slope, they stood at the edge of a small pool no more than twelve feet in width and twenty feet long. The smell of salt and dissolved minerals washed over them, something of a cross between a marsh and the ocean. Tiny bubbles rose to the surface, like a pot of water only beginning to boil. Uneven stones lined the bottom, covered with a thick layer of hairy moss. The snow melted in the steam and fell to the spring as droplets of rain.
“How hot do you think it is?” Jess asked.
“Most geothermal springs are between ninety-seven and ninety-nine degrees.”
“Were it not for all the slime on the bottom, I’d climb right in.”
Gabriel thought of the strange bacteria they had found on Nathan’s femur and shuddered at the idea of them crawling all over his skin. He walked around the side, careful not to slide off the uneven rocks into the water. If he did and his boot became soaked, there would be no way to dry it and he’d end up losing his foot to frostbite. He scrutinized the choppy surface and the crevices between the stones beneath for any of the telltale signs of the presence of haloarchaea. Granted, they were making an assumption about the unique microorganism, which appeared to be the same as that which had arrived fossilized on the meteorite from Mars, based largely on the physical resemblance to haloarchaea, but the composition of the celestial rock and the known qualities of the soil on the fourth planet made it a sound correlation. Perhaps this new species didn’t have the same need for ultraviolet protection, and hence wouldn’t necessarily produce the same red-tinged pigments. After all, if they were correct about its origin, Mars was hundreds of thousands of miles farther away from the sun, the source of the radiation. Maybe it simply didn’t need to—
Gabriel stopped and crouched right at the edge. Steam billowed in his face, momentarily warming his cheeks and stinging his eyes. He waved it away and looked deeper into the water. There was a crevice between two jagged rocks, a slash of blackness from which a steady stream of bubbles flowed. And lining the rocks was a thin layer of scarlet, tight lips around the mouth of the geothermal fissure.
“Well, what do you know,” he whispered.
Jess knelt beside him and followed his gaze into the murky water.
“That red stuff,” she said. “That’s what we’re looking for, isn’t it?”
Gabriel nodded. He wished he had some way of excising a sample of the bacterial growth so he could study it up close. It was staggering to think that these microscopic creatures may have originated across space on a planet that hadn’t seen water in eons. If that was indeed where they had been spawned, then how had they managed to survive the journey? The only other example had been fossilized in a chunk of rock. Maybe what they were looking at now was simply a variation of a naturally occurring species of haloarchaea.
“Do you think this is where the mountain lion found Nathan’s bone?” Jess asked.
“It’s possible.” Until that point, he had been specifically looking for the proliferation of microorganisms, and not for human remains. “I didn’t see any other bones right off, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any down there covered in algae.”
They walked a complete circuit of the spring, often stopping and crouching to get a b
etter look at something on the bottom, until they finally returned to where they started.
“Nothing,” Gabriel said. Though disheartening, it was still a relief not to have found any skeletal parts. It allowed them to cling to the grain of hope that somewhere their sisters might still be alive.
***
Gabriel sat on a stone at the edge of the steaming pond and poked a long branch down into the water. He scraped a section of the red growth off of one of the rocks and held it up so he could take a closer look. It was just like any sample of pond scum in texture: slimy, phlegm-like. There were striations, almost as though countless organisms had aggregated into long strands that stuck together to form a sludge. Part of him wanted to believe that these microorganisms had traveled from a distant planet to populate this spring, but they appeared too ordinary. And generally, the answer to any scientific question was the most obvious one. He was probably just staring at an unnamed species of haloarchaea, and nothing more mysterious than that.
Tossing the stick back into the water, he remembered the verse Jess had quoted from the blog. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so; thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Even studying the red rocks in the water now, he had a hard time imagining anyone calling them “stones of fire,” even metaphorically.
He rose and ascended the slope to where Jess stood between two tall pines, staring out over the valley through a gap in the branches while talking to Cavenaugh on the walkie-talkie.
“That’s right,” she said. “There’s nothing here.”
“You’re sure you found a geothermal spring and not just a freshwater pond?”
“Please.”
“And you’re certain you can see that red bacteria down there?”
“For the hundredth time, yes. We found the hot spring. There’s all kinds of red slime around what looks like where the water comes in, but no sign of human remains.”
