The Veritas Codex Series, #1

by Betsey Kulakowski

  “We went to fix the perimeter alarms. When we got back, she was gone.”

  “Well maybe she went to pee,” Chance suggested.

  “Bahati...” Rob called out, his voice cracking. Bahati walked over to see what Rob was looking at by the edge of the clearing.

  “Team One ... you better get back here.”

  * * *

  The footprint was nearly 20 inches long. It was deep, too. The ground wasn’t particularly muddy, but whatever had made the print was big ... and heavy.

  “There’s no sign of a struggle. No other prints,” Rowan rose from his examination of the depression. It was twice the size of his hand.

  “Do you think she took off after it?” Jean-René asked. “Or away from it? Maybe she was scared, and she ran.”

  “I’ve never seen her run from anything,” Rowan said. “Never.”

  Chapter 10

  “Our mission is to search for the truth, not create speculation,” Rowan stood at the trailhead in front of a slew of reporters. Word had gotten out, and it was interfering with his efforts to find her. The U.S. Forestry Service had taken over the search. Meanwhile, the Network had insisted he personally address the media. “We are concerned for Lauren’s well-being and we will not rest until she’s returned safely.” He stepped away from the mic. He did not take any questions.

  Rowan knew there was plenty of speculation that their Field Producer had been abducted by Bigfoot. Everyone from CNN to TMZ had put the theory out there, and everyone was beginning to believe it. Tabloid headlines declared “Adventure Show Host Abducted by Bigfoot.” Lauren was going to be furious. If they found her. And if... He didn’t allow himself to even think the rest of that sentence.

  “Mr. Pierce. This way. The chopper is waiting.” The park rangers arranged for him to ride in one of the helicopters flying over the area, looking for any sign of Lauren. They surveyed the area in an intentional grid pattern, combing the trees, straining their eyes to see a flash of metal from her signal mirror, or a whiff of smoke from a fire.

  Rowan took a great deal of comfort in knowing that Lauren was trained to survive in the wilderness, but her recent injuries troubled him. She had suffered a concussion in the first attack. Head trauma could do strange things to people. When he’d been a medic in Afghanistan, he had seen soldiers suffer traumatic brain injuries and turn on their own troops. One of his comrades took shrapnel from a mortar blast, then asked him if he’d tried their mother’s apple pie yet. Ten minutes later, he was dead. He’d suffered a massive aneurysm. Concussive trauma effects were not always immediate, and delayed reactions were not uncommon. She could have run off chasing rabbits or become disoriented. The thought that someone or something had taken her was more than he could bear.

  Rowan wasn’t buying the theory that she’d gone to the bathroom and lost her way. That wasn’t the Lauren he knew. She had an impeccable bump of direction. He had gone with her on more than one occasion when she led a team through the darkest jungles and come out the other side within 50 yards of where she was supposed to be, without any navigational aids.

  She knew how to keep herself alive. She could catch a fish with her bare hands, bite its head off, and eat it raw. She could build a fire without flint or matches, and she could find water in the middle of the desert.

  In her college days, she spent her summers in Alaska working for National Geographic when an aggressive grizzly attacked her tent. She managed to flee, wounded, but undaunted. She escaped from the bear, who decided her pack of military rations were far more interesting than a lean researcher. It was a rookie mistake; leaving food in her tent. She had a locker, but she didn’t think the sealed pouch would attract any attention. She had been wrong.

  With a mangled arm and numerous bite and claw wounds, she had managed to get back to civilization. Once mended, she headed right back up to her camp. She salvaged what was left, collected her data, and continued her research.

  It had taken her three days, then. She’d been gone now for six. Each passing hour made them worry more. Bahati hadn’t eaten in two days, and when Jean-René tried to force her to eat, she threw up. She spent the rest of the afternoon crying in her tent.

  The team tracked down Lauren’s transponder and found it just down the hillside from where she and Jean-René had been attacked. Without it, they had no way to track her.

  Jean-René, Rob and Chance went out every few hours, calling her name while scouting the animal trails around their camp. The park service captain, Ranger Kent Derry, took a team into the nearby caves to look for her, but came back empty-handed, several hours later.

  “It’s just one big lava tube. It’s about 14,000 feet long and there are too many twists and turns. It’s open to hikers year-round, and we’ve never lost anyone in there yet. It’s not likely she’s there, but I can’t give you a 100% guarantee. We’ll send a team over to Smith Creek and Lava Canyon, tomorrow, if the weather permits.”

  “What’s the forecast?” Rowan asked.

  “It’s not good. Conditions on the mountain can change at a moment’s notice. Could have freezing rain, maybe snow,” he said. “We need to be ready for anything if you’re not willing to evacuate.”

  “We’re not leaving.” Rowan remained stoic.

  “Well, I can’t say as I blame you, but you best be ready to hunker down and wait out a big storm.”

  “We’ve done it before,” Jean-René said to the ranger. “Remember Nepal?” He turned to Rowan.

  “Yeah.” Rowan blanched, his ankle throbbing in response. “I remember Nepal.” There was a long pause. “Let’s hope it’s not as bad as Nepal.”

  Before this, Rowan hadn’t thought anything could be worse than Nepal. They’d been making the trek towards basecamp on Everest when an unexpected storm came over the great mountain. They’d been so excited when they found the suspected Yeti-track. They were anxious to get back to civilization and get the cast to their experts back in the States. Their enthusiasm carried them for a time, but as the storm grew worse, Rowan knew they needed to hunker down and ride it out. Instead, he chose to push through, believing base camp was within reach. It was a mistake he paid for in pain. Crossing a crevice on snow ladders, Rowan lost his grip and slipped through. In a desperate attempt to save himself, he tried to turn and catch the ladder on one side as he fell. It worked, but the ladder flipped with his ankle still between the rungs. The gut-wrenching breaking of bone had been audible, and the sound of his own pained cry echoing in the crevice still lingered with him. The ache in his bones was a constant reminder of how close he came to death.

  This time, he made the decision to hunker down. He wouldn’t leave without Lauren. He hoped she knew it—wherever she was.

  Chapter 11

  Rowan sat under the canopy that covered the center of camp. He poked at the fire, staring into the flame. His face was a reflection of the desperate panic in his heart.

  Jean-René watched him for a moment before sitting down across from him. “Let’s hope this is the worst of it.” Thunder answered him, and lightning cast a brilliant glow on his equally troubled face.

  “Probably not.” Rowan’s voice was heavy with exhaustion. Everyone else had retired to their tents. They were too tired to do much else. Since Lauren disappeared, there had been no mournful calls from the trees, no new footprints, no rock-throwing. It was as if the monster had disappeared with her.

  “She tries so hard to hide it, but ... we all know.” Jean-René lowered his voice. “You realize that, right?”

  Rowan blanched. “She wouldn’t let me say anything.” He managed a dour laugh. He hung his head, fighting back tears.

  “You never had to.” Jean-René studied his boss. He looked exhausted. “Her eyes say it all. Every time she looks at you—even how she gets mad at you—how she tries not to let the rest of us see how she smiles at you.” There was a long silence between them. “When I saw that, I envied you. Did you know that?”

  “Really?” Rowan ran his hand over his fac
e.

  “Well, I am French. Eh, French-Canadian. Whatever.” He chuckled. “A beautiful woman like her? How could you blame me? But then I realized she wouldn’t even give me a moment’s consideration. She didn’t see me. She saw only you.”

  “I asked her to marry me.” Rowan managed a small laugh, but his brow knit and his smile faltered, his voice cracking. “More than once but ... she said no.” He pursed his lips. “She said she didn’t need it ... didn’t want it.”

  Jean-René shook his head sadly, empathetically putting a hand on Rowan’s arm. “She’s an independent woman. She’s afraid to admit she might need a partner to rely on. She doesn’t realize that there’s more to marriage.”

  “And you’re the expert?”

  “I was married for twelve years.”

  “You were?” Rowan sat up straight. He had never known about this side of his co-worker.

  “Catherine died in a car crash,” he said. “It was a long time ago.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Rowan looked up at him. There was a long pause. “You must have married young.”

  “We did. I was twenty, she was eighteen.”

  “That’s too bad,” Rowan said. “I can see you miss her.”

  “I do. Some days, I am still very sad.”

  “Is that why you’ve never re-married?”

  “No. I just haven’t found another woman who captured my soul like Catherine did. She was everything to me.”

  “That’s how I feel about Lauren, but ... I just don’t think she sees it.”

  Jean-René chuckled. “Believe me, she sees it.”

  “I just hope we can find her. So I can tell her.”

  “We’ll find her.”

  * * *

  The weather continued to deteriorate through the night. The temperature dropped even more. Rain turned to sleet, tapping on the top of the tent where Rowan lay fretting. Sleep eluded him.

  When he crawled out of his tent the next morning, there was an inch of ice on the tents and the tarps over the center of the camp. The trees bent under the strain. The tents bowed under the weight. Only the heat from the bodies inside had kept them from collapsing.

  The team milled around camp, distraught and helpless. Rowan rummaged through the equipment, finding the walkie-talkie. He radioed the Park Service team in charge of the search, only to learn it had been called off until the weather passed and it was safe to resume.

  “I’m going out.” Rowan stood abruptly; swaying with exhaustion.

  Jean-René put a hand in the middle of his chest to steady him. “You can’t,” he said. “It’s too dangerous. The ground is slick, and you’ll freeze to death.”

  Rowan hesitated. He glowered at Jean-René when one of the camera crew reached for a camera, as if this were the time to get some footage for the episode. One icy look from Rowan, was enough to prompt the tech to retract his hand.

  “I have a coat.” Rowan turned back to Jean-René. “Lauren doesn’t. She’s going to freeze to death if I don’t find her.”

  Bahati caught his elbow and put herself between him and the trail. “Look, you are no good to Lauren like this. You need to rest. I know you haven’t been sleeping. It’s affecting your judgment. You know you can’t go out in this.”

  “I have to find her,” he said.

  “Look at me,” she said, softly. She took him by the shoulder and turned him. “You can’t do anything for Lauren now. You know that. Rest now. When the weather breaks, we will go find her.”

  Rowan nodded. “You’re right,” he said. He clenched his jaw. Turning, he ducked into his tent and zipped it up behind him.

  * * *

  The rain turned to snow just after noon. It was heavy, large wet flakes that clung to the branches of trees and drifted high against their tents. No one had expected it to get so cold so late in the spring. But the weather in the Pacific Northwest was unpredictable, especially at these elevations. At least the volcano was sleeping peacefully ... for now.

  Rowan glanced up at the peak of Mount Saint Helens that loomed over the horizon. It was barely visible for the snow that swirled around him. It had been quiet for most of the past 20 or so years. In the last six months, there had been signs of recurrent activity in the mountain, and researchers were monitoring it closely to see if it was going to erupt again. Several times over the last year, USGS reported an eruption was imminent, but the data hadn’t been proven, yet. Volcanic eruptions had never been predicted with any kind of accuracy. Not yet, anyway. His emergency evacuation plan for the expedition took possible eruptions into account. He’d trained the team on terrain traps, to avoid the canyons and riverbeds like the ones that had been flooded by pyroclastic flows back in 1980. His plan assumed they’d be together if something happened. He’d never expected them to be separated. No one could have anticipated a scenario like this. He could only pray the mountain would sleep for many more years before it woke.

  * * *

  The mood among the searchers remained overcast as hope for finding Lauren waned. Temperatures now hovered just above freezing as the sun began to undo all the work Mother Nature had put into the past few days. With the Park Service team taking the lead, the search party blazed a trail along the northern path toward Climbers’ Bivouac. It was an area they had slated to investigate, but search teams hadn’t been able to get to before the weather had gone foul.

  “How much farther?” Rowan asked. The trail was muddy and icy even where the sun was nearing its zenith as they topped the ridge. Rowan was anxious to get there.

  “Maybe thirty minutes that way, if we keep at this pace,” the ranger said.

  A broad meadow lay ahead. Rowan stopped. He scanned the scene, noticing that a large briar trembled, and a shadow moved behind it. The figure rose slowly, turning in their direction before calmly moving off into the trees.

  Rowan looked at the rest of the team. Their aghast expressions told him they saw it too.

  “What was that?” Bahati asked. “Who got that on film?”

  Jean-René seemed to turn to marble, his features locked. The camera on his shoulder drooped at an angle. Rowan turned and slugged him in the shoulder, snapping him out of the stupor. “What?” Jean-René demanded. He fumbled with the camera, righting it on his shoulder.

  “Did you see it?” Rowan turned to the ranger.

  “I saw something,” he said. “Was it a bear?”

  “That was no bear,” Rowan said. Turning back to Jean-René who was fumbling with the replay on the camera. “Did you get it?”

  Jean-René gulped. “I got something.”

  While they were standing around the camera, trying to get a good look at the replay, Bahati glanced up. “Lauren?”

  Rowan looked up. His heart quavered in his chest when he realized it was her. She staggered awkwardly towards them in the same direction in which they saw the figure. He tossed down his gear and dashed across the expanse towards her. Halfway across the clearing, he skidded on a patch of ice. He righted himself. Sprinting across the wide meadow he reached her. She looked like a zombie, her hair wild about her head. Her clothes were torn, her face bruised. He caught her by the arms as she stumbled toward him.

  A gut-wrenching yelp echoed across the valley. “A’yo!” Her gaze went down to her right arm. She looked back at him, then her eyes rolled back, and she went limp in his arms.

  Chapter 12

  The helicopter landed in the meadow. Paramedics rushed in. Rowan had already triaged her. She was alive, battered and bruised, but in poor condition. Her pulse was thready. She was in shock. Rowan helped them get her into the Stokes basket, falling in behind them. “Sorry. No civilians.”

  Rowan protested. “I’m a medic. Was a medic ... in the twenty-third med-evac. Three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Please, she’s my girlfriend. You have to let me go.”

  He wasn’t sure what part had been his ticket, but it worked. One of the flight crew handed him a set of headphones as he took the jump seat behind the pilot. When asked
, he did his best to explain what had happened, without mentioning the creature he was certain he had seen. As the chopper lifted off, he found his gaze returning to the spot in the meadow where he’d seen it. Nothing but blank snow remained.

  * * *

  “Welcome to the Madigan Army Medical Center,” a voice over said the com an hour later. “This is the top trauma center in the region.”

  “Why didn’t we go to Seattle?”

  “We had orders,” a voice squawked in his headphones.

  Rowan was reminded of his days as a paramedic in Estes Park, Colorado, when he found it common to get strange calls from the Stanley Hotel. The hotel had inspired Steven King to write The Shining. Rumor was, the hotel was haunted. It always gave him the creeps.

  One time, a group of paranormal researchers filming a television show at the Stanley ran into some trouble. Someone was hurt.

  His partner laughed when they got the call but the look on everyone’s faces when they arrived told him they’d experienced something that none of them could explain. For them, it was very real.

  Their lead investigator had been pushed down the narrow staircase and had landed at an awkward angle, her leg broken badly. It was so bad no one had dared move her.

  “I’m going to go ahead and start an IV and get you some morphine.” Rowan spoke in a soft voice. He was trying to calm her. She was in tears as he cut up the leg of her jeans, finding a compound fracture where the bone stuck out. Her color was sallow. “I won’t move you until the morphine kicks in. Then I’m going to stabilize your leg and get you onto a back board. I’ll have to put you in a collar, just until we’re sure your neck isn’t injured.”

  “Please.” Lauren shivered, her teeth chattering. “Just hurry ...”

  “That’s what all the ladies say,” he flashed a smile. She laughed, then winced in pain. “You’ve still got your sense of humor. That’s a good sign. You’re going to be all right.”