The Winter People

by Bret Tallent

  Mike looked at Nick and raised his eyebrows, then gave Hayden a side long glance. "Jesus!" he thought, this guy's a rock. And he did look like one. His face was chiseled and hard, angular with a square jaw. Although it had softened with the few wrinkles that graced it, they did little to detract from the Iron-man image he projected. Mike's first impression was that this guy was a real Jar-Head. He had the typical cut and blocky build. At least from what Mike could tell from under his bulky parka.

  His eyebrows were bushy peaks above each eye that angled sharply downward to the bridge of his nose. His nose looked somewhat Indian with a bulbous, rather than sharp end. His cheeks sat high, with what his mother had called laugh lines, below them, framing them. His eyes were an icy blue and Mike had felt them bore into him a moment ago. Mike felt that in that brief instant, the Sheriff knew everything there was to know about him, even when he stole the candy bar from the grocery store when he was ten.

  Mike looked back to Nick and it was obvious by the calculating look on his face that he had judged the man pretty much the same. He decided that he would let Nick do the talking. The thought of being drilled again by those eyes did not appeal to Mike. It was a long moment before Nick did speak though; he seemed unusually preoccupied with his face mask. Trying to collect his thoughts, Mike figured. Finally he was ready, just as they pulled out onto Route 14.

  Nick had seen that look before. In one instant he had been surveyed, judged, and sentenced. He only wished he'd known what the verdict was. For some reason, he liked this man. He couldn't really explain it. He had just met the man and hadn't even spoken ten words to him. Nick finally decided that it was the air he generated. It was in the way he conducted himself and scrutinized others. It reminded Nick of his own father. He had the same general build and features, the same haircut, same demeanor.

  It was strange, Nick thought. Some people you can meet once and instantly dislike them. Even hate them. For no real reason you can give either. There's just something about them that rubs you the wrong way. Like that Ranger Mead guy back in the station. Nick didn't like him at all, and he didn't think Johnny and the other Ranger did either. Then, other people, you are immediately drawn to with no explanation, instant like. Like that Johnny fellow, or like Sheriff Hayden Smith. Nick decided that he liked the man, and after what he realized was much too long of a pause, he began to speak.

  "Well, Sheriff. . ."

  "Call me Hayden. Never did like being called Sheriff." Hayden's eyes never left the road. His voice was deep and commanding, fitting his figure perfectly.

  "Okay. Hayden. We all came up to go skiing for a couple of weeks. My Uncle Bud has this cabin up here."

  "Yeah, I know him. He's a good man. We've gone fishing a time or two . . . Who’s we?"

  "Mike here," he said, motioning to him, "my sister Sarah, Marty, and Taylor." Hayden only nodded. "Marty. Martin Mayher and Taylor Verner are the two guys that are missing." Nick cleared his throat, fighting down the lump that had climbed up in it. "My Uncle met us up here a couple of days ago and we've been skiing over in Steamboat every day, then we'd drive back at night. It's only about a ninety minute drive or so," he stated rather matter of factly.

  "It's been colder than hell since we've been here though!" Mike added.

  "Yeah, it's been one of those winters, colder than usual. Go on," Hayden prodded.

  "Anyway, tonight we hung around for dinner and stuff and got a late start back. My car moves a lot better than Marty's Jeep and I left him a ways back. When we got to the cabin and he didn't show, we decided to go look for him. He sort of has a reputation with us for finding snow banks." Nick caught on the last thing he said. The present tense seemed wrong to him. He felt as if he should have said, "he had." The fear was rising up in him again that something terrible had happened to his friends. He had to fight it down, pull it out of his throat and push it back into the far reaches of his mind.

  Hayden cast Nick a glance, "Take your time Nick." His voice was soft yet still commanding. It was reassuring and compelled genuine regard. "We don't know anything is seriously wrong yet. Give me a chance to check it out."

  "You haven't seen the Jeep!" Right away Nick knew he shouldn’t have yelled. He touched his left forefinger to his forehead then made a gesture with the opened palm up and a shrug of his shoulders, "I'm sorry. This whole thing has me stressed out, that's all. I've just got this gut feeling that something bad has happened."

  "No need to apologize. I'd be the same way if it were my friends." Hayden never lost composure. His tone never changed except to convey some feeling of understanding. "Go on with your story, Nick." He afforded a quick glance at Mike, noting that he didn't appear to want to add anything.

  Nick sighed heavily, and then continued, "So we went back to look for them and found them," he caught himself again, "and found their Jeep, four miles from the Ranger Station. We couldn't have been separated for more than forty five minutes. It must have happened really fast! We found the Jeep turned on its side with the windshield busted in. Not out, but in. So they couldn't have been thrown!" expecting that this would be his first thought, like Mike's.

  "The driver side door was ripped off its hinges. I mean torn off!” emphasizing this. "There was no sign of it anywhere, like it had been thrown away, out of sight. The worse thing was the tuft of hair and part of the scalp attached to it, stuck in the window frame. …And then the trail of blood across the hood and out into the middle of the road, then nothing. The trail of blood had run down the hood towards the ground so it had to have been put there after the Jeep was on its side. Somebody dragged them out of there!" he concluded.

  Nick stopped and stared at Hayden. He wanted to be sure that what he was saying was getting through to him. This was an emergency. Hayden simply stared at the road and nodded, his jaw tightening and relaxing as he was clenching his teeth. Nick felt that he understood.

  "It doesn't sound good, that's for sure."

  "Something else Hayden, they were, are. . . They're both strong guys. Taylor lifts weights and works out, and does all kinds of sports. And Marty is real athletic, and big! He cycles, swims, runs and hikes . . . ," Nick's mind was muddled and confused. He wasn't sure which tense to use, somehow, either way of talking about them seemed wrong. He finally just stopped trying altogether and looked over at Mike. Mike was looking back sympathetically, and then they both lowered their heads.

  ***

  Nothing more was said as the three men drove on in silence, broken only by the rhythmic thumping of the snow chains. Its noise mixed with that of the wind to produce an eerie symphony of sounds that induced anxiety. The closer they came to a point of light in the void before them, the more apprehensive they became. Even Hayden's stoicism seemed feigned.

  The Suburban crested the last hill and came upon the Jeep. Hayden's eyes widened, Mike and Nick were sullen. Hayden maneuvered the vehicle so that its headlight illuminated as much of the other as possible, parking about twenty feet away. He looked over and found the other two staring at him intently, probingly. He flashed them a hard scowl.

  "You two stay here. I'm going to take a look." Hayden didn't wait for a reply or argument. And from the looks on their faces, they understood. He zipped up his parka and donned a face mask, then pulled the hood of his coat over his head. Lastly, he grabbed the large flashlight off of the seat next to him and opened his door.

  A blast of Arctic air rushed in and nearly pulled the door from his grasp like a living thing trying to open the door for him. Its cold bit through his clothing in places and he could feel it on his skin. He stepped down and slammed his door shut against the protest of the northern current. Hayden knew that it was damned cold out here and he couldn't stay out for long. He turned on the light in his left hand and began to walk quickly towards the Jeep.

  As he reached the overturned vehicle, it had the image of a dinosaur that had died and fallen, becoming a part of the land around it. It eventually became the tank of gas he had put in his truck this morning.
The blowing snow had begun to form drifts against the hood and top, covering over any traces of blood that Nick had said he'd seen. There was, however, the frozen rivulets if blood on the hood. And their position was consistent with what Nick had surmised in his recounting of the story.

  Hayden looked down and saw the tuft of hair and scalp caught on the jag of glass. It wavered frenzied and maniacal in the gusts assailing it. His breath caught in his throat for a moment, and then he took a deep breath that made his lungs ache. He stepped closer to see onto the side of the vehicle, now facing up, to get a look at the driver side door area. Its hinges were twisted and bent and jagged pieces of metal were all that remained of the door. He shone his light to the latch and could see a bright reflection from the recently scored metal surface. Its catch mechanism was pulled and bent outward, a bit of cloth snagged and torn on it waved like a flag in a warm summer breeze.

  It did indeed look like the door had been ripped off its hinges. He scanned the field around him with the flashlight but could see nothing. Shadows and lumps and irregularities in the surface were completely incomprehensible in the flashlight beam. He looked at the door frame again and slowly shook his head. This not only didn't look good, it looked very, very bad.

  Hayden bent down into a crouch and peered into the Jeep. It was a shambles. He looked down at the passenger door window and saw the pool of blood already coated with frost. His stomach turned once, partly in revulsion to the entire scene, partly in dread. As he turned to move away from it his light flashed off something and he caught a glimpse of it from the corner of his eye. He jerked back to locate the brief glimmer, and then found it.

  The closer he looked the more he saw. Mixed in with the fragmented glass were spent casings. He'd almost missed them, he wasn't prepared for them. He reached into the opened window frame and picked one out of the rubble. He turned it over in his gloved hand and decided that it was a 9mm shell. He held it up to his face mask and breathed deeply. The frigid air burned his nostrils, but there was the strong acrid scent of gunpowder on the brass object. This had been fired very recently, he decided.

  This excited Hayden momentarily. Almost with enthusiasm, he sifted through the broken glass and came up with thirteen more. He searched harder still, determined. Then, behind the passenger seat and lodged in the jumble of skis and other equipment, he found the gun. He immediately saw that the slide was opened, indicating that it had been fired until it was emptied. As he held it in his hand and inspected it, he also found that the grip and part of the barrel was bathed in now frozen blood.

  A lump caught in his throat and he had to swallow hard. Hayden fell to one knee and grabbed onto the window frame for support. His hand barely missed the hair fluttering in the wind. He stared at it hard, but it wouldn't come into focus and he had to quell the desire to vomit. The whole grisly scene had drudged up an old memory that he had not thought about for years. That he had in fact purposely forgotten, until now.

  Near the end of the Viet Nam War Hayden had been drafted in to the army, along with several of his buddies. Two of them, Tom Jenkins and Malvin McDee had gone to Nam. Tom had been killed his second day there and Malvin had been paralyzed by a sniper's bullet a few months later. Hayden hadn't seen him since. He and Lloyd Gates had been allowed to stay together though, and ended up in the Aleutian Islands.

  “A great place to fight the Viet Cong from,” Hayden thought sarcastically. He and Lloyd and a few of the others they had met up there had become pretty good friends. There wasn't a whole hell of a lot to do up there, so they spent a good deal of time together. One fine spring day, when it had warmed up to about five degrees, Billy Barton had an idea.

  Billy was a fairly wild young man from somewhere in Montana. Hayden couldn't remember exactly where, or if he ever really knew. Billy always bragged of killing a Grizzly bear, or hunting a Grizzly bear, or doing something with a Grizzly bear. But, that was old news. So he thought it would be great fun to go after a Kodiak. He'd heard somewhere that they were the meanest, biggest, ugliest bears alive. And, they just happened to be right up here where they were.

  So Billy had talked a couple of the others into going on a bear hunt with him, Lloyd included. Four of them left that morning in a Jeep, all carrying automatic weapons and sack lunches. About the time it had begun to get dark and they hadn't returned Hayden had become worried. He went to the C.O. and told him what they'd done. Captain Stillman ordered up a search party with Hayden heading it.

  They had searched most of that night before the cold made them quit, then continued the next day. At about half past one on the following day, just two miles from camp, they found the Jeep that Billy Barton had been driving. It was turned upside down on a flat trail near the mountains. They found all four sub-machine guns too, emptied. Spent shell casings and empty clips were scattered over a fifty foot radius. The stock on one rifle had been shattered and its barrel was bent nearly forty degrees. And caught between the trigger and the guard was a finger, torn off of the hand from the second knuckle down.

  There had been bear tracks in the snow all around the Jeep and blood was spattered everywhere. It was as if someone had slung red paint around with a bucket. They continued to search until it was well into the night and found nothing. The bear tracks and it looked like only one set, headed off into the woods towards the ragged peaks where the Jeep had been headed. But they soon lost them as blowing snow had devoured any evidence of their passing.

  For three full days they searched for the missing men but they were never found. And so went the only casualties of the Viet Nam War in the Aleutian Islands. Lloyd Gates, Billy Barton, Fred Preston, and Tim Gassman had found their bear.

  The numbness in Hayden's knee was giving way to a burning pain. He blinked several times, shook his head, and looked down. Its contact with the pavement had allowed the bitter cold to seep in. He sniffed in a deep breath, exhaled, and then put the gun in his coat pocket. He stood and walked around behind the Jeep, his flashlight guiding him. There seemed to be nothing more. Almost as an afterthought, he ran the beam down the side of the car.

  On the back rear quarter panel above the wheel well, was a scratch. Four deep grooves about two inches apart ran up the side from the wheel well to the side window frame. Not just gouges either, Hayden thought. They literally ripped the metal, parted it like a large nail split old dried wood. Hayden trembled in a wave that lasted only seconds, but he would feel cold for a long time.

  Hayden had seen enough, and though he was certain he knew what had happened here, it didn't make him feel any better. Somehow, he knew it wasn't over. He knew, in fact, that this was only the beginning. At least that's what his gut was telling him, and he'd learned to listen to it in the last sixty years. He turned and headed back to the Suburban.

  On his way there, Hayden noticed the sky. The front was nearly upon them and he could actually feel the wall of snow that connected the clouds to the land, out before him. Though it was too dark to see detail, he knew that it was there. And the clouds were somehow different as well, preternatural. He could feel something in the storm that was moving to envelope them, malevolence. It was evil.

  He looked up at the surreal darkness that was blotting out the sky and the stars and all that was rational, and he shivered. Hayden didn't have the slightest idea why, but he was afraid. This storm would be like no other he had ever seen. This would be a storm he would not forget. He jogged back to the Suburban and climbed inside, risking one last glance at the sky before he closed the door. Evil.

  ***

  Nick and Mike watched the sheriff intently. He had found something in the Jeep that had made him excited but they couldn't see what it was. Then he looked like he was going to be sick. Next, he had slipped something into his pocket. He had just stayed there for a long time and Nick had nearly gotten out. But the thought of seeing that scene again prevented him from doing anything. He simply looked at Mike, who was looking back at him.

  Finally the sheriff had finished with his i
nvestigation and headed back to where they were waiting. On the way he paused to look at the sky. This in turn, caused Nick and Mike to look out the windows as well.

  "Jesus Nick! Would you look at that? That's a hell of a storm coming in, isn't it?" Mike's eyes widened as he looked up at the dark mass in the heavens.

  Nick felt that it was more than a storm, he could sense it. "Yeah," his voice was barely a squeak. His throat was dry and his tongue felt thick and heavy. "Yeah," he repeated.

  The driver door opened and they were assaulted by a biting gale. They jerked around, startled. Climbing into the cab was Hayden, fighting to close the door against the pull of the wind. Nick instantly noticed the small bulge in his coat pocket and could stand it no longer. But Mike had beaten him to it.

  "What'd you find?!" Mike blurted out.

  Hayden ignored the question with a question of his own. Pulling down his hood he asked, "Did either of your two friends own a gun?" He could see that both men were taken aback.

  "What gun?" Mike asked, puzzled.

  "Yeah, Marty's got a couple…a shotgun, a rifle, and a hand gun. Why?" Nick offered.

  Hayden pulled the gun from his pocket and showed it to them, "Is this the hand gun?"

  Neither on said anything, Nick only nodded. Their eyes focused on the weapon. After a moment Hayden put it back in his pocket. He could see that they were visibly shaken and said no more so that they could accept what was happening. He released the Velcro of his face mask and pulled it off. His face was flushed and wet where the mask had been. He unzipped his coat as well, Hayden was beginning to sweat.