by David Haynes
Vinson snatched his head away. “Quit it, won’t you?”
Puckett shrugged. “Only trying to patch you up.”
Vinson sounded angry. “Yeah well, I’m okay now.” And then almost as an afterthought, “Thank you.”
“Where’ve you been, Mike?” Draper asked. “We went all the way down the cut and found the truck. We didn’t know where the hell you were.”
Vinson swung his legs off the table. He may have been in shock but his movement was not indicative of someone with broken bones. The last of the open wounds leaked a drop of blood. It rolled along his chin and dropped onto his knee. He smudged it in with his thumb.
“That thing I was telling you about, the thing you all told me to shut up about, well it’s out there. He knows.” He pointed at Puckett. “He saw it too. Everything he said about it is true. It’s hell.”
“Mike, what are you talking about? Where were you?” Draper asked again.
Vinson looked directly at him. “I heard someone shooting. I ran down to the creek but you guys had all vanished. I thought maybe you’d gone to find this... this wolf, dog, whatever it is so I crossed over the creek and ran into the forest.” He paused. “Where the hell did you guys go? That’s what I want to know? You left me to die, you bastards.”
“Man, you need a bandage on that.” Puckett came around the table with a bandage in his hand. He lifted it to Vinson’s head.
He batted it away. “I told you, leave me the fuck alone.”
Puckett threw the bandage at Vinson’s torso. “Bleed to death then. I couldn’t give a shit.”
“That’s right,” said Vinson. “None of you motherfuckers give a shit about me. I got lost out there.” He pointed toward the trees. “Not one of you came out there looking for me. Not like your precious Mercer. Nobody leaves till we’ve found him, that’s what you said wasn’t it? Well, I bet none of you said the same thing about me.”
He looked at each of them in turn. The room was silent.
“Didn’t think so.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Draper. “We spent the last two hours looking for you up there. I said we’re not leaving anybody behind and that’s exactly what I meant.”
“Sure,” Vinson replied, sliding all the way off the table. He held his hand to his cheek and wandered over to the coffee pot. Blood trickled through his fingers.
Whatever guilt trip Vinson was trying to pull didn’t wash with Draper. He walked over to him.
“What did that to your face?”
Vinson had his back to him. “Never saw it. There’s dark and there’s dark. I never saw anything until I felt something scraping at my skin… trying to rip into me.” He turned around and lowered his hand. Blood dripped slowly from it. The wound needed stitching up. “Look at this.” He grabbed the tattered material on the front of his jacket. “I fell down a bank, not my choice, but it saved my life. Only way I could get away.”
Something was off here. Something about Vinson’s tale was just the wrong side of believable. It hadn’t escaped his notice that Vinson smelled bad too, worse than normal. When he spoke, breath drifted from his mouth like the outlet pipe from an abattoir.
“You get any of it?” he asked, nodding at Vinson’s hip.
“I hit it three times,” interrupted Puckett. “Not one of them made a difference. I get the feeling Mike’s little toy won’t hurt it at all.”
Vinson shot Puckett a glare but said nothing in reply. He turned back to Draper. “Didn’t have time.”
“Anyone else notice how bad the smell’s getting down there?” Meg asked. She was still standing by the table where Vinson had been a few minutes before.
“It’s getting worse by the hour,” said Flynn.
“Take some rotten meat and you mix it up with some bad eggs and you’re pretty close.” Puckett walked to the door and threw the bloody water out into the night.
“What you do that for? Bears’ll smell the blood,” Flynn said.
Puckett walked back. “Bears? What I saw could put a collar around a grizzly’s neck and call him pussy. Screw the bears.”
Draper looked around the room. Three of the crew had seen something they didn’t understand. Something that had them scared. He could see at least two of them, Vinson and Puckett, were on the verge of leaving whether he wanted them to or not. He hoped Meg and Flynn would stay with him.
What about what he’d seen? What about the body in the container, the disembodied limb he’d found and the second weird experience inside the container? All of them strange and unsettling, but frightening to the point of hysteria? No, the body had been an unfortunate accident and the limb the result of a wolf. The apparition on the container was just tiredness, fatigue and fumes from all the industrial fluids in there. Nothing more than that.
So why had the sense that something was very wrong been nibbling at the base of his skull for the last couple of months? Mercer had felt it too. He suspected every single one of them did, but a bad feeling wasn’t something you discussed over a beer after a full day toiling in the wild. The dreams were what linked them all. The dreams and the reek. Or maybe the poisonous reek was what was giving them the bad dreams? Black Pine Creek was toxic.
“You have any bad dreams, Mike?” Draper asked.
“What? What’re you talking about?”
“Nightmares, you have any?”
Vinson looked at him as if he were mad, then shook his head. “Can’t say I have. Sleep like a log.” He looked away quickly. That was as telling as any verbal response.
“If everyone’s stopped talking fairytales, I say we get back out there and find Mercer.” Flynn’s voice was a welcome break in the silence.
“I’m not sure I can,” said Puckett.
“Sure you can.” Meg punched him on the arm. “I’ll look after you.”
Puckett looked like he wanted to be anywhere but Black Pine Creek at that moment.
“I’m not going back in those woods,” he said. “I’ll look anywhere but I’m not going back in there.”
“Okay, okay,” said Draper. “Mike, you sit this one out. You need to rest. Still got the walkie-talkie?”
Vinson patted his jacket pocket.
“Keep the volume up and shout if you need us.”
He looked at the other three. He didn’t want Puckett going with Meg. Not after he’d left her to chase after a shadow. Besides, the kid was still shaken up. He turned to Flynn.
“You happy to take Puckett?”
“I don’t need a babysitter!” Puckett shouted.
“Neither do I,” said Meg.
“I’m not babysitting anyone. I’m picking the best teams to work together. Okay?”
“So why don’t I work with Flynn?” she said.
Goddamn independent streak. Trying to prove a point, thought Draper. “Fine, you go with Flynn and I’ll take Puckett. Happy?”
He suspected she’d only said it so she didn’t have to talk to him about her underwear in Puckett’s berth. Not that he would have mentioned it. That topic was locked away somewhere and he wouldn’t have to think about it ever again.
“And you’re not going to take a swing at me, are you boss?” Puckett asked wincing.
“No, but if I do, I reckon Flynn will have something to say about it.”
Flynn smiled. “I think we should all stick together.”
“That’s a better idea,” Meg said.
“Fine by me,” Draper agreed. “We’ll walk a line, cover less ground but no chance of missing anything.”
“Safer too.” Flynn checked his sidearm.
“Don’t reckon that thing cares if there’s one of us or a hundred. The look in its eyes...” Puckett started.
“Let’s go then,” Draper interrupted. “We got any more lights?” he asked Flynn as they walked outside.
The floodlights only illuminated the plant and the surrounding fifty feet. There was another set at the top of the cut by the glory-hole but they had already searched there. They needed the bank
s of the creek lit up like a Christmas tree because that’s where they were going next. They were going to walk the entire length of Black Pine Creek, all the way down to Chicken if they had to.
“No more lights. They’re all out there already,” Flynn replied.
“We stay close together then, not more than ten feet between us at any time. Anyone sees anything they don’t like, you let the rest of us know. Gunshot, shout, anything but make a lot of noise. Got it? Everyone got a flashlight?”
The others nodded their assent.
They walked four abreast through the camp, to the creek bridge and across. Enormous flakes of snow swirled through the air, their crystalline forms delicate, beautiful and yet – in the numbers they gathered – deadly. The wind whipped through the camp and snatched at their clothes. Hell-hound or not, Black Pine Creek had become a killing ground.
They turned away with the plant at their back, pointing downstream and the hundreds of miles to Chicken. It was an area of the claim that was unexplored.
Puckett grabbed the base of one of the floodlights and tried to push it toward the creek. It wouldn’t move.
“Anyone want to give me a hand?”
Flynn clapped sarcastically. “Thing’s frozen to the ground beneath a foot of snow. It ain’t going anywhere.”
Draper looked up at the sodium bulbs. One had blown and the others were of insufficient quality to throw much light beyond the immediate perimeter of the camp. Snow fluttered around the light like moths around a flame.
They trudged through the snow toward the creek. The temperature had dropped another ten degrees in the last hour.
As they reached the treeline, they paused. Draper had Mercer’s rifle over his shoulder, the others each held their handguns out before them. Flynn put his flashlight on the ground and withdrew a flask from his inside pocket.
“I don’t know about you guys but I could do with a drop.” He took a sip and passed it around. Puckett took it last and drank for the longest.
The whiskey provided a brief, but welcome, surge of warmth in Draper’s belly. He checked his watch. “Just after seven. A couple of hours in this and we’ll be done. Ready?”
They all nodded. Draper checked Puckett’s face. He looked terrified. If he was that scared and still willing to go in there, maybe he had some balls after all. He patted him on the shoulder. He had come close to killing him back there, had wanted to kill him. He couldn’t remember ever wanting anything more at that moment in time. It made him feel sick.
Draper walked closest to the creek, next to him was Puckett then Meg and finally Flynn on the outside. The water rolled on beside him, sometimes silently and sometimes with an unexpected hiss and spit that made him jump and reach for the rifle. Their four flashlights were hopelessly inadequate in the conditions but they were the best they had. Vinson had a powerful spotlight hidden away somewhere. Why hadn’t he offered to give it to them for the search? Draper had seen the beam reach high into the night sky when they had worked night shifts together. It was like the Bat-Signal in Gotham.
Something had been niggling him since they found Vinson in the snow. There was something about how he acted and what he said that didn’t sit right with him. Maybe he was looking for something that wasn’t there? Or perhaps it was so obvious that he didn’t want to tackle it.
Vinson’s wounds had been genuine enough. He’d be left with some pretty impressive scars as a result but...
And then it came to him like a hammer blow to the back of his head.
How would Vinson have known what Puckett had seen? Vinson had pointed at Puckett and said, “He saw it too. Everything he said about it is true.”
He couldn’t have known what Puckett had said unless he was outside listening to them. Listening when he was supposed to be running away from the animal, delirious and cut to ribbons. There was just nothing to trust about Vinson. Nothing. If he found out Vinson had anything to do with Mercer going missing then he would kill him. He knew it without question. He would shoot the man.
He was shocked at the certainty of it but his mind had thrown no objections, no spinning moral compass, no fear. Just resolve to do what had to be done. When and if the time came, he knew he would feel the same way. The resolution was a steel rod that ran through his entire body. He liked how it felt.
After an hour passed, Draper calculated they had made less than a mile. Every so often he would look up and see Puckett staring across to the other side of the creek. When he saw Draper watching him, his head would go back down.
Draper heard noises coming from over there too. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end and a shiver race down his spine for no apparent reason. And when he too looked over there, he saw nothing. Noting but an ever-changing shadow and deepening snow. There was one thing that was always there though. One constant in the environment. The stench. The foul, pervading essence of what he had started to regard as the reek of death. If he had ever smelled anything in his life that compared to it, he couldn’t recall. And if he couldn’t recall then he knew he hadn’t. Not even the stinging, metallic smell at Delta Junction where blood had leaked into the soil and gunsmoke drifted through the air. Not even that could compare to the malodorous reek of Black Pine Creek.
He stopped and called across to Puckett. He couldn’t see him but he could see the beam of light wobbling across the forest floor from his flashlight.
“Let’s have five. Shout across to the others and tell Flynn to bring his flask!” The volume of his voice made him feel like an unwelcome intruder. Although the wind was shaking the canopy, that was nature, it was a natural occurrence. His voice was not. He was an alien.
He heard Puckett shouting to Meg who passed it down to Flynn. In five minutes they were all huddled together.
Puckett leaned against a tree and looked up. “You can hear the storm out there. It’s bad.” Periodically, one of the pines would send down a cascade of snow from their upper reaches as the wind tried to snap the trunk in two. It sounded like Bigfoot was following them.
“Won’t be long and then we won’t be able to leave until the spring,” he added.
“Don’t you think I know that!” Draper snapped. “What do you want to do? Just up and leave him?” He waved his arm back toward the camp. “Be my guest. I’ll send your share on.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it. I just...”
Draper turned away and took the flask offered by Flynn. He took a good slug then gave it back. The warmth mellowed his thoughts in an instant.
“Listen, I’m sorry. I just...”
“We understand, Dad. We all just want to find him, whether he’s alive...”
“Or dead?” Draper finished her sentence. “Is that what you were going to say? Mercer isn’t dead. Not like this, he isn’t.”
“Dad, if he’s out here, how the hell is he still alive?”
If Puckett or even Flynn had said such a thing, he would have knocked them on their ass. Instead he simply took Meg by the shoulders.
“He’s alive. He needs us to find him.” He turned and looked at Flynn. “Right, Flynn?”
Flynn took a sip of the whiskey and then wiped a hand across his mouth. “We better stop dawdling then.” He walked away back into the woods, and within a few seconds he was gone from sight.
The others followed suit without further comment. How long could they stay out here? Listening to him come up with reasons why they shouldn’t just pack up and leave right now, when he knew, deep, deep down that the chances of finding his best friend were slim. Finding him and finding him alive, even slimmer.
The ground sloped gently downwards, in a never-ending decline away from the Brooks Range to the town of Chicken. Draper swung his flashlight in a continuously moving arc out in front of him. The beam never settled on anything but broken twigs, cones and snow. There was nothing else here. He had also been checking the creek’s bank, although had anything been there it would have been washed way down by now. Maybe the creek split at some point
and ran off in another direction.
He put his foot down, twisting it awkwardly on a hidden tree trunk.
“Shit,” he hissed. There was a brief flash of pain and an injection of heat along his ankle. The flashlight lay at his feet, pointing across the forest floor, illuminating the top of the river bank. The beam caught something, something that looked apart from everything else.
Forgetting the pain in his ankle he hobbled over, crouched down and picked it up. It was Mercer’s Broncos hat. No mistaking it. The badge was almost faded away to nothing and the bright orange had become a dirty brown color.
A dream-like image flashed across his vision. It showed Vinson with a knife at Mercer’s throat. He was laughing as he cut into the other man. Draper knew Vinson was responsible. The feeling was so certain it was impossible to ignore. A rage exploded in his mind, so powerful his head felt too small to contain it. He roared into the darkness.
“I’ll kill him,” he whispered, pushing the beanie into his pocket. His jaw ached from clenching his teeth so tightly. He was going to rip Vinson apart, and if anyone got in his way he would kill them too.
The shattering crack of branches snapping above his head startled him and he instinctively ducked. A scream swiftly followed on behind.
“Meg!” he shouted, sliding the rifle off his shoulder and readying it. Hatred gone, concern and love for Meg slid easily into its place.
He had only taken a few sliding steps when something dropped onto the pine-needle carpet immediately in front of him. It landed with a resonating thud that made the earth feel hollow beneath his feet. He was forced to sidestep to avoid tripping over it, his ankle sending a vicious flare of pain through his leg.
His first thought was that a tree had lost a bough. Maybe the wind had wrenched a rotten limb away and tossed it to the ground. But then he saw the jacket, Flynn’s jacket, and the mangled body beneath it.
30
Draper felt like he was no longer in his own body, staring down from somewhere else, some place else. The forest came in around him, threatening to drive the air from his lungs and suffocate him. The flashlight he’d been holding fell to the earth, wobbled to the side then shone its beam on Flynn’s face.
