‘The police are almost here,’ Ares said.
We pulled back so that by the time Al and the others arrived we weren’t cuddling, just standing waiting for them. Nope, no snuggling going on here, no kissing, and then I realized I’d been wearing red lipstick. I had time to glance at Nicky and see the lipstick tracing the inside of his lips. He was wearing the go-faster stripe. We’d kissed neatly enough that I wouldn’t even be smeared, but there was no time to hide the evidence. If he wiped at it now it would just smear worse. Maybe they wouldn’t notice in the dark? Of course, they came with the sweep of flashlights, ruining our night vision and theirs. Did some of the lights go back to Nicky’s face more than once, or was I just being paranoid?
‘I’ve never seen anything move like you all did,’ Al said, as he walked up to us.
‘Sorry you had to wait so long for the rest of us mere humans to catch up,’ Travers said, ‘but I guess it just gave you time to make out a little bit instead of looking for the missing men.’
We couldn’t explain, so the only option was a bold front. ‘We could just stand here and twiddle our thumbs while you guys catch up, if that would make you happier?’
‘Little Henry is a friend of mine, and the thought that you were up here kissing while he could be hurt, or worse, instead of looking for him … yeah, that bothers me and it’s damned unprofessional.’
Nicky stood up a little taller, and Nathaniel made a harsh sound low in his throat, not exactly a growl, but not a happy noise either. Ares moved a little between us and the police, hands to his side, feet placed to move, but it wasn’t that kind of fight.
I took in a lot of air and let it out slow. ‘You’re right, it was unprofessional. It won’t happen again.’
Travers didn’t seem to know what to do with the apology. ‘I heard you had a temper and never backed down from anything, Blake.’
I shrugged. ‘I do have a temper, but when I’m wrong, I’m wrong.’
‘While we’re on the wrong thing,’ Horton said, ‘could you all stay with the group a little bit more? It’s hard to coordinate our resources if they’re scattered all over the woods.’
I nodded. ‘Agreed.’
All the flashlights, even pointed at the ground, gave enough light for me to see Horton frown. ‘Officer Travers is right; you have a reputation for being harder to get along with than this.’
‘When I was younger I was grumpier,’ I said.
It made him smile, and then he tried not to. He looked perplexed as he said, ‘You can’t be more than twenty-five now; how much younger could you have been?’
‘I’m thirty,’ I said.
‘I saw your age on paper, but you still look younger than me.’
‘It’s because you’re tall and I’m short; tall looks older and short looks younger, just does.’
He smiled again. ‘True enough.’
‘Can we actually start looking for my friend again?’ Travers asked.
I looked down at the big leopard sitting at my side. He gazed up at me with the pale leopard eyes. I said, ‘Find them; find the scent.’
The leopard gazed up at me. I thought, visualized what I wanted him to find. I pictured the jacket and the rag he’d smelled, just in case words weren’t that important to him right now.
He got to his feet, turning in a graceful half-circle to head the way we’d been running. He didn’t even put his face to the ground, or scent the wind, nothing, as if he knew where we were going.
25
The body lay in a grove of aspens so that the bare white trunks rose around the dead man like ghostly sentinels. It was a pretty place to leave the body; sadly, what they’d done to the body wasn’t pretty at all. It was one of those crime scenes where the eyes don’t want to make sense of it at first. If you look away and don’t look back, then your brain will protect you. It will keep you from seeing the true horror of it, but it was my job to look, my job not to look away, my job … I gazed down at what was left of one of the missing men. I’d never known either of them so I had no idea which it was, only that it was one body, not two. I tried to believe that meant that one of the missing was still alive, but looking down at the remains it was really hard to be hopeful.
From the build and size of the body it was male. The clothes were disarranged as if someone had redressed him after he was dead, or because they’d only moved the clothes enough to get to his flesh. Either way, zombies didn’t do that. Ghouls didn’t do that. Wereanimals could do it, but why? They could just eat the evidence. Vampires could redress a corpse, but again, why? Also, hunks of flesh had been bitten off of the body. Vampires didn’t eat flesh; they couldn’t digest it. People could have done it, but even when you had humans who bit flesh off bodies, it would be a few bites. I counted at least ten bite marks. I couldn’t be certain, but it looked like at least two distinct bite marks, so two different monsters. Was it the two that had attacked the people in the morgue? The worst was the face; it wasn’t there anymore. I’d need to look closer to be sure, but it looked like they’d bitten off everything that made a face a face. Disfiguring didn’t begin to cover what they’d done to him. The techs would be here with floodlights soon, so I’d been told. We’d have enough light that we wouldn’t be able to unsee anything.
I’d made Nicky take Nathaniel to sit where he couldn’t see it, though I wasn’t willing for him to be far enough away from me for the smell not to reach him. For all I knew it told him more things than my eyes told me. I’d compare notes later when he could talk again. Right now, I just didn’t want my boyfriend to see the really bad stuff I had to see on the job. Nicky had agreed only if Ares stayed beside me. I didn’t argue. Ares was a combat veteran; either he’d seen as bad, or worse, or he’d take it and not bitch. Make all the jokes you want about the Marines, but they won’t pussy out. I like that in a person.
He stood at my left, because Deputy Al was to my right. Ares and he were the same height, but where Al looked like he’d been stretched too thin for his body, Ares wore it well. He was thin-framed, too, but he’d put on enough muscle so that he just looked tall, lithe, and strong. His brown eyes had gone empty. I would have said he was wearing his cop face, but he’d never been a cop. Was there a Marine face?
A lot of the police and rangers had taken any job that would keep them at the periphery of the crime scene and farther from the body. There’d damn near been a stampede to go back and tell their respective branches and see if there were other duties that needed them. I didn’t blame them, but I kept track of who couldn’t take it, a little mental list of tough enough, or not.
‘Oh, my God,’ one of the younger police officers said in a breathy voice.
I glanced at him. Al put his flashlight on his face. ‘You okay, Bush?’
I said, ‘Go over there,’ and pointed.
He looked at me, his eyes bulging a little, throat convulsing. I grabbed him and turned him the other way. ‘Don’t you fucking throw up on my crime scene! Go!’
He stumbled toward the dark edge of the trees but started throwing up before he made it.
‘How did you know?’ Al asked.
‘I see a lot of bad stuff,’ I said.
Someone else started throwing up on the other side of the clearing. Crap. The sharp smell of vomit joined with the smell of drying blood. The body had been fresh enough that it hadn’t really smelled that bad. We had two more officers throw up in the woods.
I heard Al swallow convulsively.
‘You okay?’ I asked.
He nodded, but I watched him struggle. There was something about other people throwing up that can bring it on. Once I’d have been puking my guts up, too, but that had been years ago. I didn’t throw up at crime scenes anymore.
Horton came up on the other side of Al. ‘Your crime scene?’ he said.
‘You’ve got preternatural shit killing people and I’m from the preternatural crimes branch.’
‘We didn’t invite the Feds in,’ Horton said.
‘No,’
I said, ‘you didn’t.’ I was suddenly tired.
‘I think it’s our crime scene until we say otherwise.’
‘Fine, knock yourself out.’
He frowned at me. ‘You know, you are not the hardass that some of the other staties said.’
‘I’d rather get back to Micah and see how his dad is doing than stand here and have a pissing contest over the body.’
‘Yeah, sorry again about Sheriff Callahan.’
‘Me, too,’ I said.
Travers yelled at me across the clearing. ‘You’re supposed to be some hotshot expert. What killed Crawford, and where the fuck is Little Henry?’
I looked at the big man where he stood in the near dark, hands in fists at his side. He was trying to be enraged, but there was a flinching around his eyes that said the anger might be hiding other emotions. I remembered him saying that he and the son were friends. He had to be looking at the mess on the ground and thinking about that being done to his friend.
I said softly to Al and Horton, ‘Could this be your missing hiker?’
‘He wasn’t this tall,’ Al said.
‘Okay, how do we know which Crawford this is?’
‘Little Henry has shoulder-length hair. His dad is almost bald.’
We all looked down at the corpse. Even through the blood it was obvious that the head was almost bald. ‘Okay, this is Henry senior then.’
‘Looks that way,’ Horton said.
‘Why did they eat his face?’ Al asked, and it was the kind of question that senior police officers don’t ask, because it’s a rookie question; there is no why to the atrocities that the bad guys do. There may be motive, pathology, but it’s not really a why, because the only real answer is always the same. Why did the bad guy do the really bad thing to this victim? Because he, they, it, could. That’s the real and only true answer; all the rest is just lawyer and profiler talk.
‘One of the corpses in the morgue had its face attacked,’ I said.
‘That was one bite. This is … this is not just one bite.’ Al had asked a question that most cops stop asking by his age, but the understatement, that was all cop.
‘No, it’s not,’ I said.
‘I haven’t seen all the bodies in the morgue,’ Horton said.
I saw Travers moving this way out of the corner of my eye. Ares moved a little ahead of me, so the taller man would have to come through him. ‘No, Ares,’ I said.
He glanced at me, eyebrows raised. ‘He’s five inches taller than me and outweighs me by at least fifty pounds.’
‘Yeah, and twenty of that fifty isn’t muscle,’ I said.
‘But thirty of it is,’ he said.
‘Doesn’t matter, you only get to protect me from bad guys, not other cops.’
He looked like he wanted to argue, but he stepped to one side and let me meet Travers on my own. ‘Come on, hotshot, dazzle us.’ He was half-shouting, but his voice was thick with unshed tears. He hadn’t even let his eyes shine with them yet, but I could hear them in his voice. He was fighting so hard not to cry, and anger could help you do that. It had been my coping method of choice for years.
‘He wasn’t killed here,’ I said, voice calm.
‘Yeah, there’s not enough blood. This is their dump site. Tell me something I don’t know.’
‘Is Little Henry as big as his dad?’
‘Yeah, it’s one of the reasons we were friends, because we were both big guys. We were either going to hate each other or be friends. We were friends.’
‘Al said that they called out, said they’d found something, and then nothing.’
‘Yeah, I was there; why are you telling me shit I already know!’ He yelled it at me. I just let the rage wash over me. This was the father of his good friend, who was still missing. I’d cut him slack.
‘Did you hear fighting, shouts, cry for help?’
He shook his head. ‘No, nothing.’
‘Were they trained fighters?’
‘Henry was a recon Marine and he worked out at the gym. He was the one who taught Little Henry and me to box. Little Henry was special forces.’
‘Two big men – six-five.’
‘Little Henry was taller – six-seven.’
‘Okay, two very big guys, both trained to fight. There’s no person, or zombie, that I know of that could take them both out so quick that neither had time to shout for help or shout a warning.’
Travers seemed to think about it. ‘No, they wouldn’t go quiet. They’d both fight. Little Henry was different when he got out of the military. He never talked about it, but something bad happened and he didn’t like people so much. I think that’s why he went into business with his dad. Fewer people and a lot of time out here; they both loved being out in the woods, on the mountain.’ I wondered if he realized he’d used past tense for his friend; probably not.
‘Then why did they go with the monsters?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know!’ He yelled it at me and came close enough to loom over me. At six-five to my five-three he loomed good, but I’d been the smallest kid in class all my life; I was used to being loomed over.
I did have my hands loose to my sides and had put one foot ahead of the other. It wasn’t enough of a stance to give Travers a reason to up the violence, but I was ready to move if I had to. He was a cop, but he was also a big guy, and he was processing the loss of the man on the ground and his missing friend. Grief fucks with you; it makes you do things you wouldn’t normally do, like take a swing at a coworker.
Horton stepped up. ‘Officer Travers, let’s take a walk.’
‘No, Blake is supposed to be the monster expert. She hasn’t told us anything. She’s asked questions, fucking questions, and Henry’s lying there … like that.’ He turned away and started walking so we wouldn’t see the tears.
Horton started to follow him, but Al said, ‘Let him go.’ Horton looked like he’d argue and go after him, but in the end he let the older man’s advice stand.
Ares asked, ‘How did you know he wouldn’t take a swing at you?’
‘I didn’t,’ I said.
Ares raised eyebrows at me again and gave me the look the comment deserved. ‘You know, it’s hard to protect you if you order me off every time large, angry men start getting up in your face.’
‘This is the first time I’ve done that.’
‘To me, but I’ve heard stories from the other guards who do your detail more.’
‘Yeah, I’m a pain in the ass.’
‘No, well, yes.’ He smiled, shook his head, frowned. ‘Anyway, you are a bad mark.’
‘Yeah, I am.’
‘This has to be our killer zombies,’ Al said.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because if it’s not the zombies that hurt the sheriff we’ve got a whole new problem, and I just can’t believe we have two different kinds of flesh-eating monsters up here. It’s an isolated area. Don’t you need a population to turn into your monsters?’
‘If they started out human, yes.’
‘Are you saying that something nonhuman, as in never been human, did this?’
‘No.’
‘Then what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that I don’t know what did this. If it’s a zombie it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen. The only flesh eater I ever personally took out ate bodies almost completely, much messier and more complete eating than this, more like shapeshifter kills. This looks almost human.’
‘You mean a person did this?’ Horton asked.
I shrugged. ‘I mean people.’
‘People did not do this, only monsters could do this,’ Al said.
‘You know that human rapists and serial killers bite chunks out of people sometimes.’
‘Yes, a bite mark, maybe two, but not like this.’
‘Some serial killers take enough to cook later,’ I said.
‘Yes, but not one bite at a time. When they cook their victims’ flesh they butcher the meat off the body.’
&nbs
p; ‘You’ve done your research, so you know that human beings do horrible shit to each other all the time.’
‘I’m not saying people couldn’t do this; I’m saying I don’t think they did.’
‘Why, because you don’t want it to be people?’
‘No, because human beings couldn’t make the Crawfords leave the search for the hikers and go off with them. It has to be something supernatural to have taken them totally quietly and so fast. There were members of the search party who were only yards away from them, Marshal. I don’t believe that human beings could have done that.’
I nodded. ‘Zombies are just walking corpses, Deputy. They have no special abilities other than being harder to kill, and some flesh eaters are super-fast, and they’re all stronger than human-normal.’
‘Why is that?’ Horton asked.
‘Why is what?’
‘Why are all the human undead stronger than living humans? I mean, they start out as us; why does being undead make them stronger than we are?’
It was an excellent question. ‘Great question, wish I had a great answer, but I honestly don’t know. They just all are.’
‘I don’t mean to complain, but you are supposed to be the expert and so far I’m not hearing a lot of expertise.’
‘The attack isn’t like anything I’ve seen. It’s not even like the bodies in the morgue, except for the bite marks, but even there it’s not the same. Those bodies had one bite apiece. They both died of an infection, a weird infection, but still that’s what killed them. Henry Crawford didn’t die of a disease, not even a supernatural one. I can tell you it wasn’t shapeshifters because the bite marks aren’t animal teeth; they look human. A flesh-eating zombie could take chunks, but they eat the body, too. I’m seeing at least two different bite radiuses, and that’s without getting down close to the bites. Flesh-eating zombies are solitary. They don’t work together.’
‘Don’t ghouls run in packs?’ Horton asked.
I nodded. ‘Yeah, but they are tied to the cemetery that contains their graves. It’s very rare for them to be able to go outside those boundaries and usually requires some sort of necromancy, or spell, something.’
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