by Jeff Strand
Surely nothing had happened to Maura and Will. They had probably found somewhere out of the wind to keep from freezing to death like any sane person would have done under the same circumstances. And yet still Gabriel couldn’t bring himself to leave the cover of the forest.
Jess leaned over his shoulder and whispered into his ear, “Do you see anyone?”
He shook his head, silently pulled the rifle over his head, and held it in front of his chest. It took a moment to find the safety by the trigger guard through his thick gloves. He pressed his right index finger onto it in preparation.
The water was still hidden from sight, but he could see the majority of the eastern side and the wall of forest beyond through the thick steam when the gusting wind shifted. There was no sign of Maura or Will, no movement at all.
He crawled through the scrub oak toward the clearing. The Styrofoam crumpling of snow and the snapping of branches announced his advance to whomever may have been lying in wait, but it was still preferable to walking unguarded into the open. He tried not to think about what might be lurking only feet away. There was no chance of outrunning either a mountain lion or a bullet. The words of an old high school friend rushed to the forefront of his mind. I don’t have to be able to outrun trouble. I just have to be able to outrun you.
The tangle of branches opened in front of him and granted an unobstructed view of the clearing. Snowflakes and steam swirled in the center, creating a dense fog that churned at the mercy of the wind. To his left, the mountain fell away from the rock embankment like the edge of a dam, and pines crowded against it to bar even a glimpse of the valley below. The bank directly ahead was coated with a skin of ice that had to be several inches thick, and he could barely see the red crescent of water four feet down against the granite. The summit rose steeply to the right in sheer formations of slate, between which pines and scrub oak battled for root space.
He held his breath and scrutinized the scene down the barrel of the gun, wishing it had a scope rather than this strange arrangement of steel sights. But this weapon hadn’t been made for hunting. This was an assault weapon. What had Cavenaugh suspected they would find that he had felt it necessary to bring such firepower? Gabriel couldn’t imagine one could sign out a case of semi-automatic assault rifles from the police armory either. What was really going on here?
The radio screeched behind him and he heard Cavenaugh’s voice.
“…copy me, dammit?”
The sudden burst of sound made Gabriel cringe. He waited for the white and gold streak of a mountain lion to leap at him with his finger on the trigger. When nothing moved, he crawled out of the brush onto the slick rock. He heard Jess answer Cavenaugh, but he couldn’t make out her words over the pounding of his pulse in his ears. There could have been packs of feral creatures hiding in the wilderness just beyond sight, but he was completely alone in the clearing.
If Cavenaugh’s voice hadn’t brought every predator in the forest running, then he figured it was probably safe to risk calling for Maura and Will, but neither answered.
He scooted to the precipice of the crater and looked down. Maura hadn’t exaggerated. The spring was so full of the bacteria that it had a pink cast and the edges were thick with it, a ring of crimson sludge, except for one small stretch where a pile of bones jutted from the surface. His breath caught at the thought that they might have belonged to his sister. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He wanted to remember Stephanie as the glowing young girl with the world stretched out before her, not as a collection of broken and disarticulated bones.
The tears stung as they ran down his cheeks. He looked up to stall their descent and caught a blur of movement from the corner of his right eye. There. At the top of a stone outcropping, nestled against the twisted trunk of a spruce, was a small orange face with green eyes and one stiff ear.
“Oscar,” he whispered. “You nearly scared me to death.”
Gabriel stood and walked slowly toward where the cat crouched about twenty feet up the rugged slope. He was nearly to the end of the spring when Oscar scurried down the granite toward him. Gabriel froze.
Oscar stopped halfway down, lowered his head, and lapped at the rock with his tongue. The tabby’s eyes never left Gabriel as he approached in what he hoped were non-threatening steps.
He was almost close enough to consider trying to pet the cat when he recognized what Oscar was gleaning from the slanted stone surface.
“Oh, God,” Gabriel whispered.
He nearly dropped the rifle in his hurry to turn away.
Blood.
The rocks were crisscrossed with arcs of blood.
***
It was unnerving watching Oscar squatting there on the rock, licking and licking, the fur surrounding his mouth turning a rich shade of red. Gabriel had no way of knowing whether the blood had come from a human or an animal. Regardless, whatever had met its demise in that dead end had done so badly. He was no forensics expert, but long spatters of blood that stretched more than a dozen feet up a nearly vertical surface implied an attack of unimaginable violence. And they hadn’t been caused by a firearm. A shotgun would have created a large blot spatter; a pistol or a rifle a similar high-velocity starburst. In either case, the mess would have been surrounded by a mist composed of droplets of various sizes. These arcs had been caused by a blade, and one wielded with frightening strength.
Gabriel tried to convince himself that Will must have encountered a cornered mountain lion and been forced to battle it with a hunting knife, but Will had been carrying a rifle with which he was intimately acquainted. If push had come to shove, he would have shot the animal and its skin would have been tanning between the trees while its carcass rotated on a spit over a roaring blaze.
“They should be here within half an hour,” Jess said. “Or at least they hope so.”
Gabriel nodded. He couldn’t force himself to look away from Oscar. The cat was like a machine, showing no sign of tiring, licking over and over and over and over—
“Are you okay?” Jess asked.
“They died here.”
“Maura and Will?”
“All of them. They all died right here. Where we’re standing at this very second.”
“You can’t know that for sure. These bones could belong to anyone and that blood—”
“Is still fresh, Jess. It hasn’t even frozen yet.”
The wind shifted and blew the salty steam between them.
“What are we doing here then?” Jess asked. “We should just leave.”
“Don’t you want to know what happened here? Don’t you want to know how your sister died?”
“Of course I do. I loved Deb, but she would never have wanted me to risk my life for that knowledge.”
“They obviously risked their lives for the sake of knowledge. What’s the difference?”
He felt her hand close around his, but she said nothing more.
Together they watched Oscar slather his sandpaper tongue on the steep granite outcropping without any indication of slowing.
***
Gabriel sat at the edge of the spring and scooped gobs of slime out of the water with a branch. Were it not for the striking red color, it could have been any pond scum from anywhere in the world. And maybe it was. Haloarchaea certainly didn’t aggregate like this. Without a microscope, he couldn’t determine a blasted thing about the microorganism. He was stalling anyway, postponing the task he had originally sat down here to begin. And he only had a few minutes to do it while Jess was still up the slope, out of the trees, trying in vain to reach the sheriff’s department again on the emergency transceiver.
She had promised not to go very far and to stay within earshot. He could see her perched on the top of a rock to the left of Oscar, who seemed to have forgotten they existed as he tried to consume every drop of the rapidly freezing blood. The barely audible hiss of static and the occasional squawk of feedback told Gabriel everything he needed to know.
He had
to be quick. Cavenaugh had told Maura to leave the bones where they had found them. Obviously, she and Will had shoved them back into the spring. Gabriel understood he would have no idea which bones may have belonged to his sister, but he held out hope that none of them did, that he would pull them out and recognize immediately that they weren’t human at all, but instead belonged to some deer or wolf that had fallen into the water and drowned while trying to get a drink.
A glance in Jess’s direction confirmed she was still battling the transceiver.
Gabriel jabbed the stick down under the surface and dragged out an interlocked tangle of bones to where he could reach them. They were unmistakably human and belonged to at least two distinct individuals. Some were longer and thicker than others, most evident in the curvature and width of the ribs and the height of the vertebrae in the red-stained columns. Rolling the first pile away from the jumble beneath, he dragged several more long bones toward the surface. One was clearly a humerus, another a tibia through which a vertical fracture coursed. There was another, this one still articulated in spots despite the rotting cartilage. The radius and ulna were still connected at both the proximal and distal joints, and the carpals held the rest of the skeletal hand to the wrist. But there was something wrong with the arrangement. The wrist and the hand were contorted, twisted.
He reached down and examined it in his gloved hands. The carpals were fused, making the wrist curl in upon itself, and the metacarpals and phalanges appeared too short and thin in proportion to the rest of the forearm. The fingers were curved inward in such a way that they were more reminiscent of a bird’s claws than—
The truth struck him, but it was too late to throw it back into the spring.
Jess moaned behind him and he turned to see her face contort with pain. He watched a part of her die in her eyes.
It was a palsied hand.
He remembered the picture on the website, of all of the kids smiling on their first day at the cabins, and the girl to the right with her stunted hand held to her chest.
Deborah MacAuley.
Jess’s sister.
***
“I’m so sorry,” Gabriel said. He stood, still holding the arm, unsure of what to do with it. Jess couldn’t look away from it. He didn’t want to throw it back into the water right in front of her, nor did he suspect offering it to her was the right thing to do.
Jess nodded. She appeared to have disappeared somewhere inside of herself. Her eyes no longer shimmered, but drained a steady stream of tears. She reached out tentatively, then jerked her hands back to her sides.
“What are you doing?” Cavenaugh snapped.
He and Kelsey emerged from the forest with the racket of snapping branches.
“I told you to wait for us before coming down to the spring,” he said. His face flushed purple-red when he saw the bone in Gabriel’s hands. “And I said I don’t want anyone touching or moving those bones in the slightest. Jesus Christ! That’s evidence of a crime! We can’t risk anyone contaminating—”
Cavenaugh fell silent. He looked from the forearm to Jess and then back again. The color drained from his cheeks. When he resumed speaking, his voice was even and calm.
“For the time being, why don’t you put that back where you found it.” He turned to Jess. “We’ll make sure that everything is handled with the utmost care and respect. She’s somewhere better now. You and I both know that.”
Jess stared through him with a glazed expression of shock. Gabriel used the distraction to return Deborah’s arm to the pile under the water, where it mercifully sank beneath the bacterial sludge.
“Any sign of the others?” Kelsey asked. He alone appeared unaffected by the significance of the finding. His jaw was thrust forward, his lips a grim line, reflecting a frightening measure of determination.
“We couldn’t reach you on the radio…” Jess whispered.
“Where are they?” Kelsey asked. “Will? Maura?”
“The blood,” Gabriel said. “There’s blood all over the rocks. It was still warm when we arrived.”
He pointed toward the stone abutment.
When Oscar saw all of them turn in his direction, he abandoned his meal, bolted up the slope to the right, and vanished behind a sharp crest of stone.
“That’s the same cat, isn’t it?” Cavenaugh asked, but Gabriel was already walking away.
Gabriel affixed his stare to the point where the cat had disappeared, passed the spring, and began to scale the cliff. He should have seen Oscar emerge from the other side of the rock. Maybe the cat was still hiding behind it, but he had been moving so fast it would have been nearly impossible to stop so suddenly, even for a clawed feline. Gabriel clambered over a granite pinnacle and had to drop to all fours to maintain his balance on the slick stone. Behind and below him, he heard the others calling to him. Cavenaugh had found the spatter patterns and cursed him for allowing the cat to disturb them while Jess cautioned him to be careful. He made no reply as he crawled toward the jagged slate fin.
Oscar wasn’t crouching behind it, nor were there any footprints leading away on the snow-dusted ice.
There was only a deep black crevice under the slanted rock that led down into the ground.
Gabriel leaned closer, expecting to see the cat wedged down in there, staring back at him with terrified green eyes, but there was only darkness and a faint, warm breeze that smelled simultaneously of dust and mildew, salt and biological decay.
He reached down into the hole with his right arm until it was all the way inside and his shoulder was lodged in the opening.
And still couldn’t feel the bottom.
***
They had uprooted a six-foot aspen sapling, stripped the branches to the three-inch trunk, and now Cavenaugh knelt above the hole, prodding the darkness below. He had forced the tree all the way into the ground and had encountered no resistance. Gripping it in one hand, he added the length of his arm and thrust. He grunted and swept the trunk from side to side, but only succeeded in losing his grip. After a moment they heard the hollow clatter of wood striking the ground.
Cavenaugh leaned back and stared down the slope toward the spring with a look of confusion.
“That hole has to be at least fifteen feet deep,” he said. “And did you hear the sound it made? There has to be some sort of cavern directly under us.”
He gnawed his chapped lower lip, then brushed away a patch of snow until he found a rock about the size of his fist, and dropped it down into the crevice. It pinged off one of the slanted sides before ricocheting from the stone surface below. He grabbed another rock and did the same thing again, only this time, after striking the cavern floor, it hit something that sounded like metal.
Cavenaugh looked at the others where they huddled for warmth. The expression on his face had metamorphosed into excitement.
“There’s something in there,” he finally said. “And if someone could find a way to get a sizeable metal object in there, then we can get in there too.”
“We shouldn’t do anything until the police are able to get here,” Jess said. “The signal cut out, but I’m sure he said they could be here in under twenty-four hours.”
“What if Maura and Will are hurt? What if they need our help? Are you suggesting we should allow them to bleed to death while we wait?”
“There was so much blood—” Gabriel started.
“All the more reason to find them now. We can’t sit on our thumbs if there’s a chance we can help them.”
“They could be dead already.”
“Then whoever killed them probably already knows we’re here. How long until they come after us?”
The words chilled Gabriel on a level even the storm couldn’t. Until Cavenaugh had vocalized them, the concept had been an abstraction. He suddenly realized that someone could be watching them that very second, hiding in the branches of a tree, crouching behind a boulder, or simply standing there at the very edge of sight, cloaked in the blizzard. Jess was right. They ne
eded to get the hell off that mountain, but would they be any more difficult to overcome on the steep descent through the dense forest and deep valleys? But at the same time, what if the others were lying somewhere in desperate need of help? And the most horrifying thought of all…
“The rifle,” he said. “Where’s Will’s rifle?”
“Jesus,” Kelsey whispered.
They were all exposed on the face of the peak and the range of the rifle exceeded the extent of their visibility through the storm.
Jess clicked on the emergency transceiver again, but there was still no hope of finding a functional channel.
With the click of a disengaging safety, Cavenaugh was on his feet, rifle at the ready.
“We need to seek cover,” he said. “Now.”
***
They stood in the cul-de-sac on the south end of the spring with the steep, bloodstained granite wall at their backs. The steam was a living cloud that seemed to move with their eyes, alternately concealing and revealing the snow-blanketed trees and the shadows wrapped around their trunks. They were sitting ducks.
“We should head back to the cabins,” Jess said. “Even if we can’t reach the highway in our cars, at least we’d be inside where we can defend ourselves.”
“We’d still be alone on the mountain,” Kelsey said. “If someone wanted to hurt us badly enough, they’d find a way.”
“You’re assuming we could even make it back to the cabins in this snow,” Gabriel said.
“What do you suggest then?” Jess asked. She was barely holding the panic at bay. “Should we just stay here and wait for whoever got to Maura and Will to come back for us?”
