Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds

by Michael McBride

  Zeke’s trail had become an indistinct trench in the snow, nearly smoothed over by the wind. They occasionally heard him barking in the distance, but never got close enough to see him. Not that they would have been able to anyway with the way the snow was blowing. At least not until they were right on top of him.

  The buzz of static followed him. Dayton had cranked up the volume on his transceiver in hopes that he’d hear the moment it got a signal. Every so often he stepped out into a clearing or climbed to the top of a hill in an effort to get reception. He was off to the left now, a silhouette through the driving snow, shouting into the two-way.

  Seaver tried not to think about the passage of time. With as much blood as Crowell had lost, and considering there was only a finite amount…

  He chased away the mental image. Maybe the blood wasn’t all hers. She was as tough as they came. She would have put up a good fight.

  The missing girl’s boyfriend walked behind him. He could feel the man’s eyes over his shoulder, watching the monitor and the signal that appeared with decreasing frequency now that the antenna was mangled. He thought about how the transmitter in the collar worked. The only way the signal could have appeared exactly where they were was if it had been up in the trees, mere feet above their heads and completely concealed by the shadows.

  He’d ruled out a malfunction based on the consistency of the signal, which meant that if the beacon was still broadcasting as designed, it had to have been removed from the ram’s carcass. The collar itself was essentially a wide leather belt that cinched around the animal’s neck. Its electrical components were housed in a box roughly two inches wide and an inch tall. Inside was a battery with an operational life of three years, a sensor that registered heart rate in beats per minute, and both GPS and VHF transponders. By itself it weighed a mere forty grams, approximately the weight of the sugar in a can of Pepsi, and was affixed to the collar by a leather pouch and metal screws. Surely whatever animal it monitored wasn’t still in possession of the ram’s forequarters and couldn’t possibly have put it on by accident, so how was it carrying it in such a way that it was still transmitting a viable signal?

  For the first time he considered the notion that it wasn’t an animal at all. Only man was capable of that kind of deception, but there was no way any man could move through the canopy with such speed and fluidity.

  “You were the one who found the camera?” Avery said from behind him.

  Seaver answered without turning around.

  “Yes.”

  The wind arose from the north with a howl and assailed them with snowflakes. There already had to be close to six inches on the ground inside the dense forest, and Lord only knew how much outside of it.

  “You saw her. You saw Michelle.”

  Seaver hoped his silence communicated that he didn’t want to talk about it.

  “I just need to know how you knew to contact me.”

  The pain in the man’s voice was palpable. Seaver felt a pang of remorse when he answered.

  “You should talk to the sheriff.”

  A full minute passed before the man spoke again.

  “I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to find out what happened to her. I’ve lost everything in the process. Look, I know…I know there’s a good chance she’s dead, but I can’t give up until I know for sure. Put yourself in my place. What would you do?”

  The sound of static grew louder. Seaver glanced uphill and briefly saw Dayton through the snow before it hid him once more.

  “She said to tell her parents she loved them. And she said to find you and tell you she loved you to eternity and back.”

  There was no response from behind him, so he continued walking. He knew he should have kept his mouth shut.

  The ground sloped downward toward the bottom of a deep ravine. Even Zeke had been forced to take a zigzagging course to keep from losing his footing. He heard the faint sound of water flowing somewhere beneath the ice at the bottom.

  “She knew, didn’t she?” Avery said from behind him. “She knew she was going to die.”

  There was nothing Seaver could say.

  Dayton caught up with them near the bottom of the valley, where the trees opened onto a narrow meadow, through the middle of which Devil’s Creek flowed sluggishly beneath the ice. The wind battered them from the side as they abandoned the cover of the trees. The dog’s trail was nearly swept flat. All that remained was a shallow trench and beside it—

  Seaver stopped and stared from one side of the snow-covered meadow to the other. There had to be a dozen other trails that looked just like Zeke’s, only wider and far fainter. They appeared to start at the edge of the forest, beyond which there wasn’t so much as a dimple in the accumulation.

  There was a point where the dog’s trail veered sharply toward one of the others. He knelt beside the point of intersection, set down the antenna, and brushed aside the snow in incremental layers until a faint pink pattern appeared against the white.

  A red light bloomed from his right hand. The beacon had reappeared on his monitor, maybe a quarter mile to the southwest. He looked up toward the distant ridgeline and the crown of trees, little more than shadows through the storm.

  Again, he returned his attention to the trails and wondered what in the name of God was out here with them.

  * * *

  Avery wrapped his arms around his chest and tried to keep his teeth from chattering. He hadn’t dressed for this kind of weather. His winter jacket was thick enough, but he was only wearing jeans and a pair of hiking boots. His feet were frozen and his toes had passed from the point of numbness to throbbing with each step. His ears and the tip of his nose stung, and he couldn’t seem to sniff enough to hold back the flood of mucus. He’d been able to concentrate on anything other than the cold beneath the cover of the trees, but out here in the open, with the wind lancing right through him and the snow striking his bare face, he couldn’t think about anything else. It had to be well below zero with the wind chill, and now that the sun had set, the temperature was going to fall even faster.

  This wasn’t the first time he’d been caught out in a storm like this, but he was generally better prepared. He’d been in such a hurry he’d forgotten to bring what he thought of as his survival kit—a backpack full of odds and ends he’d accumulated out of necessity through the years—so he had no means of making a fire and nothing to eat or drink. All he had was his cell phone, which had lost its signal before he even turned off the highway, and his car keys, neither of which was any use to him now.

  She loved you ‘to eternity and back.’

  The ranger’s words haunted him. He remembered the first time he’d said those words to her. It was the first time he’d told her he loved her. They’d been just kids back then, a lifetime ago now, lying on the hood of his car and staring up into the night sky. He hadn’t known he was going to say it; the words just kind of slipped out, but they’d felt so right, so natural, that he hadn’t regretted saying them for a single moment.

  Her response had been playful.

  “How much?”

  “More than the moon and the stars.”

  “That’s not really very much if you think about it. They’re up there every night, but how often do you take the time to appreciate them. You wouldn’t even have said that if you weren’t looking right at them.” She’d smiled and kissed him. “Try again.”

  “I love you to eternity and back. How’s that?”

  “It’s a start.”

  They’d made love on the grass after that, and, being a teenage boy, he’d repeated the phrase as often as he could in the hopes of achieving the same results, until it became something he said to her because he meant it with all of his heart.

  The barking of a dog roused him from his memories. It was a distant, forlorn sound. A monotonous woof…woof…woof…woof…Not the frenzied barking from earlier, but what he remembered the dog’s handler calling his “alert bark.” The others stood from where they knelt
over another pattern of frozen blood beneath the accumulation and together they stared up into the storm, toward the top of the hill and a leveled section where—

  He remembered the picture the sheriff had shown him, the one with the tire tracks sliding downhill through the snow. Could this possibly be the place?

  Avery charged through the shin-deep snow, churning it up before his knees. He hit the slope. Immediately lost his footing and slid back down. Tried again, thrusting his bare hands into the accumulation for leverage and scampering like an animal. He slipped again and again, but each time caught himself and struggled onward until he reached the top.

  If there was a road beneath the snow, it wasn’t much of one. It was maybe ten feet wide and deeply rutted. His feet snagged on the matted vegetation that had grown up from the center hump and were now buried under the accumulation. No one must have driven on this road in quite some time for the weeds to have proliferated to such an extent. From behind him, he heard the sheriff ask the ranger if he’d come across this road before, but the wind drowned out his answer.

  He looked over the side every few feet as he ran, until he reached a bend in the road and stopped. At the bottom of the slope was a thicket of scrub oak, its branches bare and thick with ice, and an enormous mound of snow nearly as tall as the trees themselves.

  Avery threw himself down the slope. He slid sideways and lost his balance. Tumbled all the way down and climbed to his feet, his bare skin red and covered with snow, and scurried to the top if the mound. He frantically brushed away the snow. When he reached the ground, he leaned back and appraised it.

  Nothing but dirt and weeds.

  He rocked back onto his haunches and bellowed in anguish. He’d thought for sure he’d found Dylan’s Forester. The size and shape were just about right, and coupled with the sheriff’s photograph, which he’d interpreted as the point where the car must have slid off the road—

  A tiny metal knob stood from the ground. It was maybe an eighth of an inch wide, topped with a silver cap, and half an inch tall, but he would have recognized it anywhere.

  “Down here!” he shouted.

  He attacked the ground with his bare hands, prying back the dirt and gravel with fingertips already cut to hell from doing the same thing earlier.

  By the time the others again made their way down, he’d excavated the upper six inches of the car’s antenna and was kicking at the ground with his heels several feet away in hopes of finding the roof of the vehicle. He heard a hollow thump and saw the forest-green metal through the dirt. It was the work of five minutes to find the sunroof. He barely took a second to appraise it before stomping it repeatedly until it shattered.

  He held out his hand to the sheriff.

  “Give me your flashlight.”

  Avery shined it down into the darkness, then stepped back, turned around, and lowered his legs into the car.

  * * *

  Dayton crouched beside the broken sunroof.

  “What do you see?”

  The way the vehicle was buried wasn’t natural. The earth couldn’t have swallowed the car whole in just seven years. Someone had to have deliberately buried it. He thought about William Coburn, the man who’d walked into the Alferd Packer Grill with his friend’s head under his jacket. They’d never found the rest of Todd Baumann’s body, or the remains of the men who’d accompanied them on their hunting trip. Nor had they found their vehicle. He couldn’t help but wonder if it was still up here, similarly concealed under a mound of dirt.

  “It’s Dylan’s car! I’m sure of it!”

  Dayton lowered himself to his belly and craned his neck to better see. The entire cab was covered with dust and absolutely riddled with spider webs. Insects had burrowed into the seats, leaving tiny holes in the foam. The seats were covered with moldering leaves and dirt. The smell of mildew was nauseating.

  Avery shined the light across the dashboard. There was so much dust on the inside of the cracked windshield Dayton could barely see the earth packed against it. The light settled upon the glove box. Avery popped it open and dragged everything inside out onto his lap. He rummaged through it until he found a small folder with the insurance card and registration and shined the beam on it.

  “This is it!”

  He cast aside the card and folder, the owner’s manual, and a baggie of what looked like marijuana, leaving him with a folded map with writing on it, a pile of napkins from Taco Bell, and a lighter.

  The barking grew louder, more insistent.

  Dayton stood and turned toward the source of the sound. Seaver was facing in the same direction. The red beacon on his handheld monitor had returned and damned if it didn’t look like it was in the same place as where the dog was going on.

  He tried his two-way again, but there was still only static. Maybe he’d be able to find a signal from the top of the next ridge. Thom should have made it back to the truck by now. Considering one of their own was in trouble, Search & Rescue would surely dispatch the chopper. It should be overhead any minute now, its spotlight streaking through the treetops.

  Avery climbed out of the buried car and thrust his shaking hands into his pockets. They were bloody and raw and must have hurt something fierce.

  “What are we waiting for?” he said, and started back up the hill.

  “Yeah.” Dayton watched the man scrabble up the slick slope with his flashlight. “What indeed.”

  “I don’t like this,” Seaver said.

  “You and me both.”

  “No, I mean, my old man and I used to hunt raccoons and bobcats back in Maine. We used a bluetick hound to tree them. That’s exactly how he barked when he did.”

  Dayton drew his pistol, checked the clip, and slammed it back into the butt.

  “Good. It’s about time.”

  He holstered his weapon and picked his way up the hill, using Avery’s footprints as a guide of where to step and where not to. Avery was already scaling the hill on the other side of the road when he reached it.

  Dayton found it hard to believe there could be any road in these mountains he hadn’t driven, and yet here was the proof to the contrary. A lot of circuitous trails had been created by horse-drawn wagons back during the westward expansion, many of them carrying the laborers who worked under abhorrent conditions to lay the rails that tunneled and wound through the Rockies. With as deep as the ruts were, he figured that was likely the case. He just couldn’t imagine how those kids could have gotten so turned around that they wound up all the way out here, fifteen miles as the crow flies from the highway. He’d follow the road back to its origin some other time; for now, he needed to stay moving, if only to maintain some semblance of warmth.

  He crested the ridgeline and again tried to find a signal on his transceiver. Visibility diminished by the second. The valley below him disappeared into the clouds and the blowing snow to the tune of crackling static.

  At least he knew Crowell was still alive. It wasn’t much as far as proof went, but the droplets of blood on the snow meant that she was still actively bleeding. After death, the blood stopped flowing and started clotting. It settled to the lowest point in the body and pooled in the capillaries and surrounding tissues. Theoretically, if they could find her and stop the bleeding, there might still be time to get her to the hospital.

  But only if the infernal chopper showed up.

  The barking grew louder with each step. The sound came from a fixed location. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Seaver just might be right, and he didn’t much care for the prospect of facing down a treed mountain lion that undoubtedly had a good thirty pounds on him.

  The wind waned to a gentle breeze. His breath hung in a cloud around him. He blew into his hands, but only warmed them long enough to get them back into his pockets again. The darkness descended from the treetops and filled Avery’s tracks with shadows. He looked for the glow from his flashlight. Surely he hadn’t fallen so far behind that he shouldn’t still be able to see it.

  All he could hea
r was barking. Zeke couldn’t have been more than twenty feet ahead. Just on the other side of a wall of junipers—

  Dayton saw the silhouette just in time to keep from walking right into it. He drew a sharp breath in surprise. Avery spun around and shushed him before he could ask him why the hell he was standing there in the dark with the light off. The younger man’s eyes locked onto his and he inclined his head to the right. Dayton looked in that direction and through the junipers saw a clearing.

  It was a swatch of snow maybe ten feet in diameter and positively dotted with footprints. Zeke turned in circles as he barked. One way and then the other. He intermittently stopped, jumped straight up, and then went back to pacing and barking.

  Dayton parted the branches and was just about to step out into the clearing when he saw what had the dog so worked up. He let the branches fall back into place and drew his pistol.

  His heart pounded so hard in his ears he could hear it even over the incessant barking.

  Thoosh. Thoosh. Thoosh. Thoosh.

  He took a deep breath. Steadied his hands. Tried to swallow. Failed. Raised his gun and stepped out into the open.

  Crowell was suspended from the upper canopy by her ankles. Her outstretched arms twirled a good foot above where Zeke jumped in an effort to reach her. The skin on her arms was pale and striped with dried blood. Her features were distorted by countless fractures that totally altered their shape. Her shirt was bunched against her chin and her crimson-streaked bra stood out against the bare skin of her abdomen, which had been torn from her pelvis to her—

  Dayton averted his eyes, but not soon enough. He’d seen enough to know that not only was she not alive, she hadn’t been in quite some time. Blood never lied, though. That was one of the universal truths of crime scene investigation. Something had been bleeding onto the snow, but if not Crowell, then what?