Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds

by Michael McBride

  Seaver clenched his fists. Poachers. It had to be. The animal had still been running when it went down and made no effort to rise once it did. He turned in a circle in hopes of seeing the footprints of the poachers in the snow or smoke rising from a distant campfire, but instead saw only an eternity of mountains and forests where they could easily hide from him for the rest of their lives if they wanted to.

  He waved away a handful of flies and stood over the remains. Its belly was distended with the gasses of early decomposition, making its fur appear to stand on end. He removed the digital camera he’d brought for documentation’s sake from his backpack and snapped pictures of its right flank, its lifeless face and clouded eyes, and finally of its left flank and the blood-crusted fur surrounding the entry wound. He zoomed on the entry wound, only what he saw was all wrong. The bullet from a large-caliber rifle produced a fist-size crater, from which the tattered skin peeled back, but this…it looked almost like the ram had been attacked by wild dogs. The tissue was macerated and raw, the muscle beneath the grayish layer of connective tissue partially torn. The clotted blood was black and sparkled with a layer of ice. The sharp edges of broken ribs protruded from beneath its left front leg, where they’d pierced the hide.

  Seaver looked down at the ground beside the dead animal for several seconds before crouching and brushing away the snow. The weeds and dirt were discolored by blood, although in insufficient quantity to suggest that the animal had bled out here.

  He stood and shielded his eyes against the sun. The unmarred white led straight downhill to the tree line. From this vantage point, he could see the faint indentations where its hoof prints had yet to fully vanish beneath the fresh accumulation.

  There weren’t any wolves up here. He’d been part of the initial survey of predatory species to determine the viability of the location and they hadn’t even come across any anecdotal evidence, let alone spoor. If a pack had roamed into the San Juans, then he suddenly had a really big problem on his hands.

  He followed the ram’s tracks down toward the forest. He slipped and caught himself. Lost his traction and slid twenty feet down the slickrock. The snow churned up in his wake was marbled with pink.

  The ram had been bleeding as it bounded up out of the forest. It appeared to have run clear up until the point where it simply dropped dead in full stride.

  Wounded deer and elk were known to lead hunters on chases covering many miles. Lord only knew how far away this animal had been attacked or how it had ultimately managed to elude its pursuit. When he reached the tree line, he understood why.

  The dense canopy had captured the vast majority of the snow, allowing only sparse swatches to accumulate on the mat of dead needles and aspen leaves. He had to stoop to walk under the lower canopy. Once the slope vanished from sight behind him, he realized how easily he could lose his bearings and become irretrievably lost. The tracks and blood that had led him here vanished in the shadows and detritus. He only caught the occasional glimpse of the sun through the branches and snow overhead. The ground grew steeper, the footing more treacherous. He was just about to turn around and attempt to pick up the trail again when he saw a gully through the trees to his right. Someone had carved an arrow into one of the trunks.

  Seaver hopped down the abrupt bank and picked his way toward the bottom. The slope was steep and lined with boulders. Tree roots stood from the ground where the seasonal runoff eroded the dirt. The tree with the arrow stood apart from the others. The bark had crumbled and the sap was old and crusted. He chiseled the amber with his thumbnail. It had to be several years old. Maybe more.

  The arrow pointed to the west. He turned in that direction and saw another arrow, pointing deeper into the valley. They were haphazardly carved using a dull instrument. Definitely not a knife. Maybe a rock?

  The second arrow led him to a third, which, in turn, guided him into a dark ravine and a fourth arrow, only this one pointed straight down.

  Seaver approached the broad pine tree slowly. It leaned forward from the bank as though preparing to fall. Its upper canopy was long dead and it was only a matter of time before it came down. Its roots protruded from the dirt. Something had burrowed into the ground between them. There was no scat near the mouth of the warren or tracks in the dirt. It was too big for a ground squirrel and too small for a fox.

  Again, he looked up at the arrow, which appeared to be pointing directly at the burrow.

  He knelt and craned his neck to see inside the hole. At first, he saw only darkness. He leaned closer and saw just about the last thing he expected to find. Rather than a pair of small eyes looking back at him, he saw his own distorted reflection on the circular lens of a video camera.

  * * *

  The Archuleta County Sheriff’s Department was responsible for more than 1,300 square miles and a seasonal population of as many as forty thousand clustered in the town of Pine Springs and scattered through the surrounding wilderness. Crime was largely of the domestic variety and generally involved wives and livestock, although not necessarily in that order of priority. This time of year, it was either feast or famine. In the summer, they could always count on the revenue from issuing speeding tickets, but the roads were rarely nice enough to go the speed limit in the winter, which meant that rather than patrolling, the deputies were often reassigned to ancillary duties, from working with emergency management to assisting animal control, issuing permits, and serving warrants. Considering even that was barely enough to keep two men busy, Sheriff Wayne Dayton gave his staff his blessing to moonlight wherever they could find the hours. Most worked night or weekend security at the college over in Durango or drove armored transport for Wells Fargo. Very rarely did he need to call for all hands on deck, but it was starting to look like today might have potential.

  He stared at the video recorder on the corner of his desk. It was an older RCA model with a cracked viewscreen that folded out from the side and recorded onto a mini cassette with actual tape inside. There was still mud embedded in the seams and it had taken the AV kid from the library fifteen minutes with swabs and alcohol to clean out the sockets well enough to connect the cables so they could view the recording on the TV. Like the game warden sitting across the room and staring blankly out the window onto Main, he’d seen several seconds of the recording played back on the camera, and the last thing either of them wanted to do was watch it again, let alone in full color and on the big screen. The sheer terror on that woman’s face…

  Dayton had no doubt in his mind that wherever this woman was now, she was long dead.

  “I cleaned it up as well as I could, but you have to understand these old cassettes weren’t designed to hold up to the elements,” Thom Harvey said. He was more than just the AV guy for the library. His mother was the librarian and had homeschooled him right there at such an advanced pace that by the time the other kids were ready to graduate high school, he was already starting his senior year at MIT. The first app he designed hit iTunes the week before his twentieth birthday and now, at age twenty-two, he was so rich he could spend the majority of his time in-game or online, except when his mother summoned him to the library to make their computers, archaic microfiche readers, and various media players work like they were supposed to. “Think of each of these creases on the tape as a scratch on a DVD; they’re areas of lost data that can’t ever be retrieved. These data could represent video or audio or—”

  “Will it play?” Dayton said.

  Thom looked up from where he knelt in front of the TV, making the final connections. The sheriff hoped his expression conveyed how little he cared about the technology involved.

  “Yeah. It’ll play.”

  “I don’t want to watch this,” Seaver said. They were the first words he’d spoken since he’d shown Dayton the short segment he’d been able to make play. He crossed the office without another word and closed the door behind him.

  “You want me to stay?” Thom said. “You know, just in case anything happens during the playbac
k?”

  Dayton said nothing. He was already fixated upon what he would have to do once the video ended. They would need an image-capture of the woman’s face to feed it through the missing persons databases. Search and Rescue would need to be coordinated. They’d have to call for the cadaver dogs from Alamosa. That she might still be alive never occurred to him. He’d seen her eyes; they were those of a woman who already knew her time had come.

  He’d seen them before. Inside the old Alferd Packer Grill. The day the hunter stumbled out of the blizzard, a human head hidden inside his jacket. He would never forget that man’s eyes.

  Dayton pressed the tiny PLAY button on top of the camera with a gloved finger. The digital counter was broken and both the FAST FORWARD and REWIND buttons were missing. Thom had rewound the cassette by hand while he cleaned and straightened the tape, of which roughly a third of the sixty-minute reel had been used.

  The screen filled with horizontal bands of static that bucked up and down. He heard voices, slow and distorted, like he remembered a record sounding when he put pressure on it and slowed the spin. The voices sped up until they sounded like chipmunks, then, with a crackle, resolved into normal tones. The static settled over the top half of the screen. Beneath it, he saw a woman’s torso squared to the camera. She wore a Spyder jacket over ski bibs. At least three other people moved in the background, apparently either loading or unloading whatever was on the rack of the green Subaru Forester.

  “…the five of us on the greatest Christmas Break adventure ever!”

  One of the guys in back whooped and pumped his fist. He wore an ugly gray sweater and had his hair tucked up into a slouch cap.

  “Not if we don’t actually leave,” the driver said, and punctuated his statement with a beep of the horn.

  “Okay. Gotta go.”

  The girl raised her hand into the static, made a kissing sound, and held out her palm. She turned and started for the car.

  “Wait.”

  The view swung down toward the ground and there was a loud clattering sound as whoever held the camera handed it off to her.

  “Last chance,” she said, and turned the camera upon a kid who couldn’t have been more than twenty. His face quickly vanished into the static.

  “Some of us actually have to work, you know.”

  “Call in sick.”

  “We’ve been over this. You know I can’t do that.”

  “Then tell me how much you’ll miss me.”

  “Are you still recording?”

  “Tell me.”

  “More than the moon and the stars.”

  “Now tell me you love me.”

  The driver honked the horn again.

  “You’d better get going.”

  “Nuh-uh. Not until you say it.”

  “I love you. Now get out—”

  “How much?”

  “They’re going to leave without you.”

  “Are you embarrassed to say it in front of my friends?”

  “Jesus, Michelle. I love you to eternity and back—”

  The audio deteriorated into the roar of static, which consumed the entire screen.

  “See what you can do,” Dayton said.

  “I’m on it.”

  Thom ejected the cassette and attempted to straighten the tape, which had once again folded back over itself along the same crease. He wound it ahead, past where the crease terminated, and replaced it in the camera.

  “Cross your fingers.”

  A part of Dayton hoped it wouldn’t work.

  The TV filled with darkness, from which fuzzy red and yellow lights bloomed. He at first mistook the snow blowing sideways across the screen for static, until the focus rectified and revealed dozens of stopped cars, the glare of their brake lights creating diffuse coronas that made it hard to tell what was happening. The person holding the camera stood outside the passenger door, filming over the hood of the Forester.

  “What do you—?”

  The voice became garbled, the reply even worse.

  The cameraman stepped away from the vehicle and into the thigh-deep snow plowed to the side of the road. He lost his balance and fell, but managed to keep the camera out of the accumulation. He pushed himself up with a gloved hand, staggered toward a bend in the road, and zoomed past dozens of cars lined bumper-to-bumper, toward a tractor-trailer jackknifed across the highway, surrounded by orange flares so bright the image lost focus. The cameraman shouted something incomprehensible and ran back toward the car, snow churning up from his knees.

  Dayton caught a glimpse of the man in the driver’s seat, but not well enough to discern any distinguishing characteristics. There was more talking, but the words were all warped and blended together. The picture degenerated into a dark miasma of grays marred by static. He pressed the tip of his pen into the hole where the FAST FORWARD button had been and watched the static jump against the dark backdrop.

  “Careful.” Thom snatched the camera away from him. “You can’t do that or you’ll end up twisting the whole thing beyond repair.”

  Dayton stood and paced behind his desk while the kid wound the tape forward by hand. He was wired with nervous energy and a knot of tension had worked its way into the base of his skull. He’d only felt like this a handful of times before, and none of those times had ended well. If he’d learned one thing in his life, it was that when his instincts kicked it, he’d damn well better listen.

  Thom inserted the tape once more and pressed PLAY. The image on the screen was of a steep, snow-covered hill carved by serpentine, sliding tracks. It was leveled at the top, as though for a road, on the other side of which stood a wall of pine trees. The camera swung around and revealed the Subaru, half-buried in a thicket of scrub oak. Steam billowed from beneath the crumpled hood. The whole car canted sideways. A tree trunk that had impaled it through the undercarriage, from which all sorts of dark fluids sprayed onto the snow. The girls stood off to the side, raising their cell phones above their heads as though trying to locate a signal. Like the camera, they were older models. The clamshell variety, popular before the advent of smart phones. Coupled with the boxy nature of the Forester’s design, he estimated the video had to have been made seven, maybe eight years ago.

  The footage cut to an image of a map spread out in the back of the trunk before quickly disintegrating into static. A full minute passed before Thom ejected the tape and wound it again.

  Dayton continued to pace as he contemplated the locations he’d seen. The blowing snow made it impossible to identify the highway and the road they’d slid off looked like any of the thousands winding through these mountains. For all he knew, the scenes could have been filmed clear up by Aspen, or even in Utah, and not anywhere near where the ranger found the camera.

  He forced himself to sit when Thom resumed playback. His feet tapped restlessly beneath his desk.

  An old house materialized on the screen, a dilapidated shack made of weathered wooden slats. It vanished back into the blizzard as quickly as it appeared. The picture cut in and out through long stretches of static. There was a shot of one of the girls silhouetted against the snow in an open doorway. Several shapes warming themselves over a campfire. An image of the smoke filtering through the needles of a pine branch protruding through the collapsed roof. A pantry filled with rusted canned goods. A glimpse of several words carved into aged wood: They come at—

  And then nothing but darkness and static that went on for several minutes, even though it was obvious that the recording was jumping from one scene to the next. Either the original footage was too dark or the tape too damaged. The voices were all garbled and sounded like they came from miles away.

  Dayton stood and started to pace again.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and fast-for—”

  A scream from the television cut him off.

  It was loud and clear and filled with so much raw terror that the hackles rose along his shoulders and neck.

  A clattering sound and the view swung violent
ly across what appeared to be a smooth stretch of snow and the powder kicked up before the feet of whoever held the camera. She fell and screamed again. Scrambled to her feet. Cast a quick glance back. A blurred silhouette between the trees behind her. Another scream and she ran again. Pleading to God, to her mother, until words failed her and she could only sob.

  A view of the forest floor. A pattern of dark fluid. Dozens of droplets streaked straight down like rain. The camera panned upward to reveal a body suspended from the trees by its heels.

  “Jesus,” Thom whispered.

  Another unendurable segment of static passed. When it dissipated, he recognized the same scene the ranger had shown him, only some unknown amount of time earlier. The girl’s voice sounded hollow from speaking so close to the microphone and took on an electronic quality that seemed to modulate in rhythm with the static. The camera was turned in such a way that it was focused on the lower half of her face. Her lips were chapped and bleeding, her nostrils red and abraded, her philtrum glistening with mucus. When she spoke, her breath formed clouds upon which the aperture tried to focus.

  “…only hope someone finds this…need to know what happened…dead, all of them…don’t have much more time. They come at night.”

  A distant sound like thunder and she glanced back over her shoulder.

  When she looked back, there were tears on her cheeks and her lips quivered. Her voice wove in and out of the static.

  “…my parents I love them…that I’m sorry…and John Avery…tell him—oh, God, I can’t do this…”

  A crashing sound and she drew a sharp intake of breath.

  “Tell him I love him to eternity and back.”

  She killed the recording with a sob and Dayton stared at the blank screen until it dissociated into static. He sat down again and pressed the intercom button on the phone.

  “Judy? Can you see what you can find on a man named John Avery for me?”