by DG Wood
William pulled his rifle out of the pack on his back and took aim at the bear’s head. He was too far to guarantee accuracy, so he began running towards the bear. Well, the bear ran. Its paws were designed for it. The snow was compacted enough, that William didn’t need his snowshoes. But, this wasn’t a suburban jogging route. William’s feet in snow, however hard, were not going to cover ground with any significant speed. Plus, William had his sweat to contend with. Work up too much heat, and he’d have clothes to dry out.
This was going to be close. The bear was just ten seconds from its willing prey. William slid into a kneeling position. Nine. He raised the rifle. Eight. He found the bear’s moving head in his sight. Seven. The polar bear was galloping, causing its tongue to flap from cheek to cheek. It was salivating. Six. Let it get a little closer. Five. Take the safety off. Four. Finger on the trigger. Three. Fire.
Two. The bullet found its way into the brain of the bear, and the animal’s forward momentum kept it moving. The head went down, and then the front legs. The torso fell over the head. One. The polar bear did a summersault and landed inches from the body of another natural killer.
William slid the rifle back into his pack, got up and walked the remaining distance to the bear. One of its front paws was touching the head of the man it had almost eaten for a meal. He was a tall man, muscular and wiry. He was dressed in a hide tunic and pants. Remarkably, he was alive, but hypothermia had set in. William had little time to act.
The Mountie pulled a knife from a belt around his leg and thrust the point into the polar bear’s navel. With extreme effort, William sawed his way up to the ribs of the bear. He turned his head away, while he pulled the skin and muscle apart. The guts fell out onto William’s prisoner. He covered the man with internal organs. They would not retain their heat long.
The next morning, William emerged from his pup tent. The unconscious serial killer was weak, but alive, and recovering in a Mountie-issue sleeping bag. William had stripped down naked and kept his suspect alive with body warmth. He had taken the opportunity to perform a physical examination. The man’s back was broken. Someone or something had broken him in two, carried him across the arctic and then left him to die from exposure. Retribution, clearly. But, delivered from who?
William knew the killer would heal quickly. His kind did. So, he’d keep the man tranquilized and carry him out of the wilderness on a litter of ice and rope. William lit his can of sterno and began melting ice in a tin cup. It was then that he saw it. In the distance. A large brown bear on two legs. Only, it wasn’t a bear.
Darkly had never run so fast in her life. She sprang on two legs out from the trees and into the clearing that overlooked the Moon river. There, before Darkly, were the torches she saw flickering from a distance, and Wyatt, whose legs and arms were tied to two tree trunks rammed into the ground to form a letter X.
Wyatt looked up, shaking away the sweat, blood, and hair that blocked his vision.
“Whatever you do, don’t sing,” he said weakly, and then passed out.
Darkly turned and pointed her gun into the forest. That is how she stood until dawn.
Darkly studied the giant footprint a few feet into the forest. A bare footprint. An extremely large, bare footprint. A bear? One bear following in the footsteps of another? She turned for a split second to check on Wyatt. The hairs on the back of her head leapt to attention, and her head shot back around to face nothing. There had been a puff of breath on the back her neck. She was losing it. She had to pull herself together and figure out what happened in the last few days.
Darkly walked over to Wyatt and cut him down. Her mouth was afire with the killer’s infliction of death. He collapsed unconscious to the ground. She’d need a vehicle to get him back to town. Fortunately, the Korean War jeep that the film crew had shuttled around town in was abandoned along with the crew circus of trailers and gear. Twist a couple wires together, and Darkly had her gurney.
It was morning when Darkly pulled Wyatt into bed and threw the dusty bedspread over his body. Marielle, who had been wandering the halls like a specter, peered around the door. She then became fascinated with the door frame, running her fingers along it, recollecting her past through touch.
“Do you want to keep an eye on him for me?”
Marielle withdrew from Darkly’s sight for a moment, then stepped fully into the frame.
“Come get me when he wakes up? I’ll find us some food at the diner.”
Marielle nodded her head and sat down cross-legged on the bed. She began a staring contest with the comatose psychopath, while Darkly began her investigation.
In the town, Darkly found meals left on tables, now feasts for flies. Drawers of clothes were dumped on beds. The air in the abandoned homes was charged with fear, like the moments before a storm, when God appears over the horizon, falling to earth in flashes of brilliance and rivers of destruction.
Darkly also searched Buck’s office. Paperwork and file folders were strewn across the floor. The rifles missing from the cabinet that was the town’s arsenal. Doc’s surgery was wiped clean of any useful item. This was an immediate exodus. Panic. A last resort. She gathered up the paperwork and settled herself into Buck’s swivel chair. There had to be some indication of what had transpired after the night of her escape. If not in what she examined before her, in what might be missing.
The papers were a jumble, though Darkly quickly learned that the type of paper corresponded to the year it was made use of. Yellowed paper the thickness of onion skin came from the days before Buck assumed the role of sheriff. She looked over at the manual typewriter consigned to the end of Buck’s desk and then at the letter B that adorned the corners of many of the pages. Buck was a meticulous man.
It was late morning when Darkly had begun sifting through the records of domestic squabbles, livestock deaths, and updates to town statutes. Now, with lunchtime behind her, she was getting hungry and finding it difficult to concentrate. She needed to eat, as did Marielle. And maybe Wyatt.
Darkly gathered the paperwork up and shoved it into a leather bag she found in Buck’s desk and made her way to the Moon River Diner. She could study Buck’s records better over a full stomach.
She took a look back at Buck’s desk, as the door was shutting behind her. Darkly found herself longing for the sheriff. One her way back to Wolf Woods, Buck had become the new foundation of normalcy in her mind. He was to be the center of a new world she would belong to. A world she had always belonged to but just not known it.
The diner was, from all appearances, abandoned like the homes of the townsfolk. The diner counter had half-empty glasses of water sitting on it. Darkly stepped behind the counter to examine a lone beef patty on the grill. She pushed her index finger into the partially-cooked meat and smelled it. It wasn’t worth taking the chance, so she moved on to the refrigerator.
Devastation greeted her when she turned the corner. The floor was covered in broken glass from jars of preserves. Among the sparkling shards, were pickled onions, gherkins, preserved peaches and gooseberries. But, there was something else. She thought it was jam at first. Or was it ketchup? Where the vinegar from the jars pooled in places, like lakes on a map, this substance had dried a brownish hue. She flaked it with her fingernail. This was blood. A trail of blood.
Darkly stood back. She needed a more aerial view to distinguish the blood from the edible debris. The counter next to the sink full of dirty dishes would do. She pushed more dishes into the water, disturbing the layer of scum that had formed on the top, and lifted herself up.
Darkly focused on the brown drips and smears, and the way they spread themselves out across the floor. A pattern emerged of rows of five smudges moving in a flock towards the walk-in refrigerator. They were toes.
She hopped off the counter and tip-toed through the minefield to examine the toe marks more closely. In a couple she could make out the rings of toe prints. The widths from big toe drip to little toe drip was almost a foot wide.
Darkly looked up at the walk-in. She followed the prints until they disappeared under the door. She placed her cheek to the surface of the door. It was cool. The lights were on in the diner, as they were in Buck’s office. So, generators were still going strong for the two hearts of the town.
“Hello?” she called.
What was she thinking? If someone had crawled in here more than a few hours ago, they would have died of hypothermia by now. Darkly reached for the handle.
CRASH. Something heavy slammed up against the door from the inside, knocking Darkly onto her ass from the shock of it. A glass shard dug into her thigh. She stifled her scream with her hand.
“Shit.”
Darkly looked around her for a clear spot of floor to plant her palms on the ground and lift herself back up. She pulled the shard of glass from her flesh and placed it silently on the floor, while not taking her eyes off the refrigerator door. Then she stood there, waiting for the next crash. It didn’t come.
What if that was the last desperate action of someone on the verge of succumbing to hypothermia? Well surely, she corrected herself, a local would have turned to wolf to stave off the cold. That would explain the power behind that door. A big wolf from the look of the prints on the floor. She couldn’t just leave them to starve to death, and behind that door may be the answer to what happened to Buck and everyone else in Wolf Woods.
She reached for the handle without hesitation, stepped to the side, out of the way of whoever would come charging out, placed her free hand on her gun, and swung open the door. But, once again, she waited for nothing. Ten seconds passed before she drew her gun and peered around the door.
The light from the diner revealed the walk-in’s contents. A side of beef hung in the center of the small room, and the walls were lined with jars of fruits, vegetables, and unidentifiable ingredients. The floor was littered with torn burlap, onions, potatoes and strips of fatty bacon. A turnip came rolling from a dark corner of the walk-in, and Darkly took the safety off her gun. She inched her way toward the corner, where burlap bags were stacked one on top of the other. She kicked the lowest bag. The top bag toppled down, and turnips scattered across the floor. Nothing was hiding there.
At that moment, the sound of destruction erupted from the restaurant. Darkly rushed out to see tables and chairs lying where they had been thrown against the walls of the diner. And a seven-foot pane of glass, upon which the words Moon River had been painted, lay in smithereens on the ground outside. It wasn’t just a big wolf. It was a quick one. Too quick to be seen. What the hell?
Darkly set the burlap bag down at the foot of the bed. She reached in, pulled out a jar of string beans and handed it to Marielle, who twisted the lid off immediately and began devouring the beans several at a time.
Wyatt was still asleep. Darkly slapped him hard across the face. He didn’t stir. She sighed and took a seat on the floor next to Marielle and opened a jar of peaches. Marielle took the briefest of breaks between shoving her mouth with beans to speak.
“He’s infected. He’ll die.”
“How do you know?” asked Darkly.
“You can tell from the color of his skin. Blue.”
Darkly looked up at Wyatt. She stood up and went to the window to open the curtains fully. With the increased light, Darkly could make out the blue tinge around his pale nostrils, eye sockets and lips.
“What is he infected with, Marielle?”
“Silver,” Marielle replied with the satisfaction of a full stomach.
“How did he become infected?”
Marielle set down the now empty jar and climbed up onto the bed. She pulled the covers off Wyatt and pulled his shirt up over his face. She traced her fingers along his stomach and chest, then rolled him over onto his back and repeated the examination. Then, she proceeded to strip Wyatt naked and work her way down to the soles of his feet.
Marielle was stumped. She sat next to Wyatt’s prone body, clearly thinking hard. Already, this was not the mindless waif Darkly found wandering the hotel. Then, Marielle sprang back to life, and grabbed Wyatt’s head so forcefully that Darkly thought his neck would snap. She ran her fingertips through Wyatt’s hair, picking apart the strands like a preening monkey to examine the scalp. Then, she peered inside his left ear, and whipped his head around to examine the right ear. She looked into Darkly’s eyes. Bingo.
Darkly grabbed Wyatt’s head and looked into his ear. There was a silver ball. She hooked the ball with her fingernail and pulled it out. The ball was on a string and connected to another ball and then another ball and then another ball. Darkly removed a strand of bloodied silver beads from Wyatt’s ear with the help of a handkerchief. The simple square of fabric had proven as useful to her work as a gun. When the last bead was free, Wyatt gasped once and returned to his deathly quiet state.
Darkly examined the beads closely. There were engraved characters on the beads. A raven, a wolf, a moon, and a distorted human mask.
“It’s Haida art.”
Marielle touched her fingertip to one of the beads and recoiled in pain.
“A shaman’s weapon against werewolves.”
She looked down at Wyatt and scowled.
“You should put them back, Darkly.”
As much as she would have liked to, Darkly didn’t follow Marielle’s advice.
CHAPTER FOUR
Darkly searched through Buck’s records. There had to be something about the town’s relations with the local First Nations tribe. Marielle was asleep in a corner of the room, covered in a blanket. Wyatt, the color returning to his face, was sleeping soundly in the next room. The fact Darkly could hear his snoring indicated to Darkly more than anything else that he was on the mend. Marielle had told her the first thing Wyatt would do after waking was turn to hunt. God help anyone who crossed his path in those hours.
So, Darkly felt distance was best for all. But, not too much distance. The thought had occurred to her to kill Wyatt or at least re-insert the beads until she had a better grasp of the situation. He deserved death after all the suffering he had inflicted on others, including her own family. But, her instincts told her he had a part yet to play in all this. She could always kill him later. The taste of death had waned in Wyatt’s and Marielle’s presence. A natural desensitization she welcomed. Darkly had experienced it before with a trigger-happy instructor she couldn’t avoid during her academy days.
The paperwork was far from engrossing reading. Buck seemed to relish the bureaucratic element of running a self-imposed prison state. Most of his notes were about rationing, patrols of the town’s boundaries and chasing off curious hikers. Marielle’s name caught her eye. What followed was a decidedly unemotional half-page account of a young woman being told to leave the only home she had ever known and to never come back. Buck’s notes indicated she had been chosen as one of those who would lay the groundwork for exodus. What Buck described as her aggressive interest in sex made Marielle an ideal candidate. That was it. Darkly could find only brief references to exodus in the other papers.
There was no mystery in the meaning. Exodus means leaving. A town that could no longer provide mates for its young people had to kidnap outsiders, as they did with Darkly and the film crew. Or, their young people must set out to find mates, and create new wolves and safe homes for future colonists. But, what would inspire an entire town to evacuate? The old, the sick, the infants. All of them gone.
Darkly ran the Haida beads in the handkerchief between her thumb and fingers. Wyatt was defeated and left to rot on the hilltop. So, no threat there. Something happened in a very short space of time that forced Buck to lead his people out of Wolf Woods. Darkly suddenly realized that the snoring next door had stopped.
She placed her ear to the wall and then crossed to the window. Below it, a wolf looked up at her, then turned and ran for the river. Wyatt crossed the ford and disappeared into the trees on the other side.
Sing, thought Darkly. Don’t sing, to be precise. What did Wyatt mean? And wou
ld he come back to her after hunting? He would. She couldn’t explain why, but of that she had no doubt. The wind blew in through the window. A storm was brewing. The draft blew her stack of papers across the room.
As she collected the records once again, she found it. A Haida sketch. A sketch that matched the mask on one of the beads. An angry man. No, bloodthirsty man? Well, that surely described the good people of Wolf Woods. Around the mask were little stars. They formed an arch over and to the sides of the mask. The sky? She looked out the window at the dimming light. Maybe. But, the drawing reminded her of something.
Darkly leaned her head out the window and watched the clouds roll in and cover the brightest stars in the galaxy that were beginning to shine. She looked out over the quiet streets and then turned her attention to the Moon River and followed its winding way until it disappeared around a corner in the forest. She ducked back in and grabbed the sketch. Of course. The cave of bones. The one filled with faux diamonds that shone like the night sky. The First Nations tomb.
The sun had completely fallen when Darkly crossed the ford in the Moon River. The light rain made a soothing sound as it hit the pebbles around her. The pebbles would soon be covered, as the water level rose in the storm. She climbed onto the bank and began the trek along the river. Darkly pulled the hood of her jacket up over her head and wiped the damp from her cheeks. She looked back at the dark shadows of buildings across the river and then pointed her flashlight into the sheet of water that was falling heavier by the second.
The bank grew muddy, slowing Darkly’s way. It was an hour later when she reached the entrance to the cave. Half of the boards had been ripped away since she had last been here. There was room enough for a large bear to climb inside, and Darkly had only to duck to escape the rain.