CLAWS 2

by Stacey Cochran

  When he reached the cell’s bars, he immediately saw the blood pooled out onto the floor in the corridor.

  “Jesus,” he said. Quickly, he looked into the cell. “Aw, shit,” he said.

  He had never seen skin so white in all his life. The man was dead. It looked like he’d stabbed a shank through his neck from the front left side. He saw it protruding from the back right side of the man’s neck, and the man’s hands were curled up in front of his chest with strangely claw-like rigor mortis.

  The man’s face looked weird. His mouth was slightly open as though permanently frozen in an expression of disgust. His eyes were wide. There was blood everywhere.

  Rudy turned to shout up the corridor for help, but he felt an acidic burning at the back of his throat. His knees buckled, and he almost fell down.

  His hands came down to his knees. He managed to stay on his feet, and he vomited up the three bowls of Lucky Charms he’d had for breakfast.

  Thirty-three

  “Something has happened to Dalton,” Angie said.

  She stared into Jonas’s eyes. He was at his patrol car’s door. People struggled merrily up the sidewalks on either side of the street. The snow fell furiously. They carried skies and poles and snowboards, and they were all headed towards the gondola at Telluride four blocks up.

  “It’s gonna have to wait,” Jonas said.

  The road was white with snow. Cars were backed up out on the street like they were trying to exit a rock concert. No one was moving anywhere. Horns kept blaring.

  One would sound off, then another would retaliate, and then one somewhere in the distance would sound off as though part of the peanut gallery. The flashers atop Jonas’s car spun. He was parked up on the curb at the corner of two downtown streets.

  “Which way to the lifts?” one guy asked stepping around his car. His wife and three kids were with him. They each carried skies.

  “That way.” Jonas pointed.

  “Thanks,” the man said.

  Jonas looked at Angie. “We’re just totally swamped,” he said. “They’re not getting this storm further north towards Aspen, Vail, or Breckenridge. It’s concentrated everyone to our resort here.”

  “Dalton took his gun, Jonas. He left on foot last night in the middle of cooking dinner.”

  “What are you talking about? How do you know all that?”

  “I went to his place,” Angie said. “He had left dinner burning on the stove. His truck is parked in the driveway. It’s covered with snow like it’s been sitting out there all night. His gun rack above the fireplace was empty, and I found shells in the laundry room.”

  Jonas paused, looking into her eyes. He hadn’t slept in three days, but he was really trying to listen to what she was telling him.

  He said, “He took his gun, and he left dinner cooking. And his truck is in the driveway?”

  “Right,” Angie said. “Exactly. And nobody’s heard from him since yesterday afternoon.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do about it?” he said. Jonas looked up and saw a guy trying to drive his Ford Excursion through oncoming traffic up onto the curb across the street. “Hey! You can’t park there!”

  He waved at the driver. Traffic on the two-lane downtown street was snarled, and a driver in the oncoming lane honked his horn at the Excursion. The driver of the Excursion responded, blaring his horn right back at him.

  Jonas stepped out onto the snow-covered road, got in front of the hood of the Excursion. The driver looked at him.

  “Get this damn thing back in the right lane!” Jonas shouted.

  The driver threw up both of his hands apologetically. Jonas turned and looked at the car that’d honked its horn. He pointed a forceful finger at him to tell him to back off. The Excursion wheeled back out into the right lane, but traffic was a total crawl.

  The driver rolled down the window and said, “Where am I supposed to park?”

  “Both the public lots are full,” Jonas said. “Your best bet is to find a spot out on the street. Parallel park.”

  The guy nodded. Angie watched all this from the curb. Jonas walked back over to her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is just a nightmare. We don’t have enough police to handle all these people at once. Dalton’s gonna have to wait.”

  Angie nodded her head. “I understand,” she said. “Is there anything that I can do to help?”

  Jonas looked into her eyes. He felt bad for dismissing her. He said, “Why do you think he took his gun?”

  Angie said, “Maybe he saw something.”

  “Like?”

  “Like a bear,” Angie said. “There’s no way to know.”

  “Dalton lives on this side of the mountains, Angie,” Jonas said. “If he saw a bear that means we got a bear within a couple miles of us, within a couple miles of our resort.”

  Angie stared intensely into his eyes. All of this had the eerie feel of a situation she’d found herself in a few years ago with another wild animal in another state.

  “We need to alert the ski patrol,” she said. “If for no other reason than to have them keep an eye out. If there’s a grizzly up there and we got all these people skiing on backcountry trails through the woods, we could have trouble on our hands.”

  Jonas stared at her. He knew she was right.

  “I’ll make the call,” he said.

  Thirty-four

  The four horsemen rode through the woods weaving in and out trees and snow like spirits crossing back and forth between corporeal and incorporeal worlds. Foxwell led them. None said a word. They scanned the forest through the snow looking for their prey. Or signs of their prey.

  The horses walked in single file order.

  Their hot breaths steamed in the air. The men were dressed in trench coats and dark cowboy hats. Their heads were drawn down, but their eyes constantly scanned the trees.

  There was a bear there waiting for them, the largest carnivore in the Western Hemisphere. Each man knew it. Each man was filled with resolve to find it and kill it.

  The land was worth too much money to Foxwell to have some animal, some lower order on the evolutionary chain, keep him from actualizing it. His resort would bring pleasure to people, jobs to southwest Colorado. Once the resort was up, there would be no more controversy.

  People would gladly walk from parking lot to ski lift. They’d pay hundreds of dollars for their slope-side steak dinners at fine dining restaurants. They’d gather at bars, drinking, laughing, enjoying one another’s good company, and no one would give a damn about these four or five damn grizzly bears in five years time.

  Damn fool biologist. Damn fool Governor.

  Hotels were more important than grizzly bears. Hotels made money. Grizzly bears didn’t make anything but trouble.

  Foxwell brought his horse to a stop, held up his left hand. The three horsemen stopped behind him. Each man stared at Foxwell’s hand. They scanned the woods. They saw something moving. They saw something through the trees.

  Snow blew toward them for a moment.

  Whatever it was, they were downwind from it.

  Foxwell stared hard a moment more, then with calm silence, he reached back behind his saddle and removed his rifle.

  The snow continued to fall.

  The object they saw was a good fifty yards up the hill through the trees. Because of the snow and the forest, it was at the furthest reach of their line of sight. If it was seventy yards away, it would have been completely obscured by the trees and snow and they could not have seen it.

  The thing in the woods stopped. It seemed to be listening, to have heard them.

  Was it a bear? Was it a grizzly?

  Foxwell raised his rifle to his shoulder. He peered down the length of the barrel, found his sight, and slowly moved it left-to-right through the trees looking for the creature.

  He exhaled and steam rose from his mouth out into the cold mountain air.

  The creature had moved on. He could not find it with his rifle’
s sight. His horse shook its mane, and Foxwell removed his rifle from his shoulder. He turned in the saddle and looked at the three men behind him.

  Without a sound, he pointed to the two men at the back. He made a motion with his hand for them to veer out to the right along the ridgeline and go up the mountain. Then, he jabbed his index and middle finger at the other man and his own chest.

  They would go straight up the mountain.

  The three men nodded, and a moment later, the four horsemen split into two pairs and proceeded up the mountain through the snowy woods.

  Thirty-five

  Standing atop a snow-covered picnic table outside the base lodge, Angie Rippard scanned the slopes with binoculars. There were a lot of people on the mountain by ten-thirty A.M. The area between the lodge and the chairlifts swarmed with people walking awkwardly in ski boots, carrying skies held over their shoulders. They wore brightly colored ski suits, strange hats and goggles.

  “See anything?” one of the ski patrolmen asked.

  Angie handed him the binoculars. “It’s hard to see anything in this snow,” she said.

  Three guys with the Telluride ski patrol stood next to the table. The one to which she’d handed the binoculars now scanned the slopes. The other two tried to see what they could see.

  “It’s most likely nothing,” she said.

  They were silent a moment, gazing up the hill beyond the gondola. There were a good one hundred people coming down the hill right that instant. The trail was wide, but as a non-skier, Angie could hardly see how they kept from hitting one another.

  “You really think there’s a grizzly bear up there?” one ski patrolman asked.

  “Well, there’s definitely a grizzly bear somewhere up there,” she said. “What we don’t know is whether it’s on the Durango side of those mountains, or our side. They tend to keep to themselves, but if forced out of its native habitat, a grizzly is liable to behave erratically.”

  “What would do that?” he asked. “Force it out of its habitat?”

  “Any number of things,” Angie said. “Forest fire, deforestation, construction, hunters. An animal like a grizzly bear will leave you alone as long as you don’t mess with it. You scare it or threaten it, though, and it will attack. It’s just like any other wild animal. It’s just like you or me.”

  Thirty-six

  The two men were like ghosts moving through the falling snow. Silent as death itself, their horses walked slowly. Each man eyed the forest hillside. Steam billowed from their mouths, which were tucked down behind collars. The men seemed faceless, but it may well have been that their faces were enshrouded in shadows, hidden under cowboy hats tucked down low.

  Their eyes shined like steel.

  Forward, they moved. Forward.

  Up the hill, through the cold.

  Pain was not a factor.

  They would have their prey. They would have their bear.

  The men didn’t care that they were drawing closer to the resort at Telluride. They didn’t care that they were driving the creature from the hills. They didn’t care for the trappings and failures of the civilized world.

  They were machines. Killing machines.

  The beast, the bear, Ursus arctos. It was their subordinate, and they would have its hide.

  Their companions, Abraham Foxwell and the other man, had separated from them an hour ago. They were somewhere on the same mountain. They would cross paths again. On another ridge. Through the trees.

  Forward, now. Forward up the hill.

  Suddenly, one of the men brought his horse to a stop. The other man continued up the hill through the trees. He did not stop until he was fifty yards ahead. He turned and looked back down the hill.

  The first man to stop sensed something, smelled something, something in the trees. Something was watching them.

  Steam puffed out into the cold snowy air from the man’s mouth.

  He could not hear it, could not see it, but he knew that the bear was watching them. It was somewhere up the hill through the trees, watching them.

  Its eyes were trained on them right that very moment.

  Thirty-seven

  Angie Rippard’s eyes scanned the hillside. It was nearly noon, and the snowstorm had only grown more intense in the past hour. Why didn’t all these people go home? she thought. Why did more and more people just keep coming?

  The lift lines at the base of the mountain were forty and fifty people long. There were six rows, but everyone seemed excited and happy. They all seemed to feel lucky to be out in the biggest early season snowfall in years. They didn’t seem to mind the wait.

  She heard the commotion before she saw it.

  Someone was screaming. Others were yelling.

  Both of the guys with the ski patrol looked at her. Angie raised the binoculars to her eyes. At first, she couldn’t see anything. The snow was too heavy. She couldn’t find the spot with her lenses.

  Then, she saw it.

  “Oh, shit,” she said.

  She saw red-streaked snow. A crowd was gathered about two hundred meters up on the left side of a trail. They were screaming and shouting down the mountain. Others from the group skied away, racing down the hill toward the base.

  Angie trained her lenses on the woods to the left of the trail.

  “What is it?” one of the ski patrolmen asked.

  She only caught a glimpse of it. It was big.

  “Get them off the mountain!” she shouted, lowering the binoculars. “Everyone, off the mountain!”

  She leapt down from the picnic table and ran through the snow toward the chairlifts. Everyone standing in line began to realize something was going on. She was shouting and waving, running toward them.

  “Everyone, get out of there!” she shouted.

  She raced past them and started up the hill. A few of the skiers who had been near the group on the hill reached her. They were panicked.

  “It’s a bear!” one shouted. “It got someone!”

  “It got a kid!” another shouted.

  Angie shouted at everyone coming down the mountain. A bunch more had gathered toward the group that was screaming and shouting for help. Everyone wanted to see what was going on.

  Angie’s lungs burned, but she continued running up the hill over the snow. People screamed and raced away from the group on the left side of the trail. She was only fifty yards away.

  “Get out of there!” she shouted.

  One man had unlatched his boots from his skies and was tromping toward the woods waving his ski pole. Everyone looked up at Angie running up the hill toward them.

  “Oh, my God,” one woman shouted. “It attacked my son! My son is in there! Oh, my God!”

  “Everybody, get back!” Angie shouted.

  Another man had stepped out of his skies and was trying to get closer to the woods in order to snap a photograph. Angie saw the blood on the snow. It streaked in a trail from the edge of the slope into the woods.

  She grabbed the guy with the camera and threw him to the ground. He cursed at her, and she roared, “Get the hell back!”

  She stepped over to the edge of the woods. The man who had run into the trees waving his ski pole was climbing up a hill on the opposite side of a creek. Angie glanced back at the group. The two ski patrolmen reached them.

  Angie said, “I want everyone down the mountain. Everyone down the mountain, now!”

  The ski patrolmen started pushing the crowd back, making everyone turn around, but more and more people skied over to the side of the slope to see what was going on. Many were pointing. Others were explaining to new arrivals what had happened.

  Angie turned back toward the woods.

  She could see the trail of blood descended down the hill toward a creek. It climbed up a steep hill on the other side of the creek, and then quickly vanished out of the sight.

  She could see the man’s footprints in the snow—the man who had run into the woods waving his ski pole. Apparently, a boy had been attacked. His
mother kept screaming, “It got him! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Help!”

  It took several men to hold her back.

  Angie turned and screamed at the ski patrolmen, “Get her down the mountain!”

  The woman shrieked.

  From somewhere in the woods, a scream carried over the wind to them. Several people gasped. The scream was blood curdling. It sound like someone was being disemboweled. The man with the ski pole perhaps.

  Angie turned and ran down the hill. Everyone shouted at her to come back. She leapt over the creek and started climbing the steep, bloody incline. She glanced back once, saw the people standing at the edge of the woods watching her, and then vanished over the hill out of their line of sight.

  She found herself standing alone in the woods. She could see the broken and bloody snow in front of her through the trees, but there was very thick brush up ahead and she could not see beyond it.

  The snow was up to her knees, and it was difficult to move forward very well.

  “Is anyone there?” she called into the thicket.

  Silence. She could hear the people back over the hill shouting, but there was nothing in front of her.

  All her life, she knew it would come down to something like this. Standing alone in the woods, a deadly animal a few away from her.

  Suddenly, someone screamed, “Heelp meee! Pleeease, God!”

  It was the most violent scream Angie had ever heard. She lumbered forward in the deep powder towards the thicket. She could see the broken snow through the branches and bramble shooting up from the snow. She clawed her way through it.

  “Where are you?” she cried. “I’m here!”

  Thorns ripped at the skin on her hands. Snow was up to her knees.

  Angie followed the tracks through the snow. She heard something moving through the thicket. It sounded heavy like a bear. It was over to her left.