CLAWS 2

by Stacey Cochran

  She didn’t see them in the crowd. She and Jonas walked up toward the street. She didn’t see the cowboys there either.

  “There were four of them,” she said. “One of them is Abraham Foxwell.”

  “Foxwell’s here?” Jonas said.

  “I think so,” she said. “Three of his boys shot a man dead in the street, in front of the New Sheridan.”

  Jonas looked hard into her eyes. Angie looked absolutely crazy. There was a blankness to her eyes that didn’t seem normal, a slow disconnect between her response and his questions. Jonas had never seen anyone who was actually in the midst of a nervous breakdown, but this was as clear an example as he had ever seen.

  He looked at her bloodied, bandaged arm.

  “And there’s something else,” she said.

  Jonas just stared into her eyes. He wanted to try and convey compassion, but she was frightening him. She’d been in the hospital twice already in the past few days, and it looked like she’d be going back again tonight.

  “The bear,” Angie said discordantly. “That’s not the bear.”

  “What?” he said.

  “That bear,” Angie said, pointing.

  The National Guardsmen towed the body all the way up to their truck. The crowd gathered around it was thick with thirty to forty pedestrians. The Guardsmen were trying to get them to back away.

  Angie said, “It’s got all of its claws. The bear that attacked those kids down in Durango, it left its claw in the side of their SUV.”

  Jonas didn’t understand. “What’re you telling me?” he said.

  “There’s another bear,” she said. “There’s another bear out there that has killed eight people.”

  Forty-six

  The storm was unrelenting, and Angie was not going to the hospital. For starters, the National Guard wasn’t letting anyone out of town, and even if she could have gotten past them, she would have had to make it over two mountain passes that topped out in elevations over eleven thousand feet.

  With the storm beating down on the mountains, all of southwest Colorado was locked up tighter than a drum. Nobody was moving anywhere.

  But it wasn’t only that. Angie didn’t want to go to the hospital. She wouldn’t have gone to the hospital if she could.

  After Jonas walked her back up to the hotel, she asked at the front desk about the cowboys. The front desk clerk said he hadn’t seen them, and when Angie asked about their rooms, he gave her and Jonas their room numbers.

  Jonas was relieved to see that they did, in fact, exist, but when they got up to their rooms, they found the hundred-year-old doors open and the rooms vacated.

  “It looks like they’ve cleared out,” Angie said.

  “Cleared out to where,” Jonas said. “It’s snowing like crazy outside.”

  Angie checked the closets. She checked under their beds. She checked the bathrooms, and she found no sign that they had been in the room whatsoever. It was like they had just flat-out vanished.

  “I’ve been in natural disaster situations like this before,” Angie said. “I’ve seen people killed like that man out there, and no one ever had to stand trial. It’s like being in a war zone or something. If we don’t stay on this, they’re going to get away with killing that man.”

  Jonas looked across the hotel room at her and wondered if she hadn’t just made the whole thing up.

  Where was the body? he thought.

  If a man had been killed, there would be some evidence, some interest, some investigation. But he hadn’t heard anything about anyone being shot.

  Angie looked at him with a wildness in her eyes that made Jonas uncomfortable. “We’ve got to make them accountable,” she said. “They can’t get away with this!”

  The skin of her face looked taut and tense, the lines around her eyes strained. Her lips were open slightly in an expression that was not quite a grimace but was not like anything else he had ever seen. It was the expression of a madwoman, someone who had finally gone off the deep end in a life that had always bordered closet insanity.

  Angie had lived with the guilt of her brother’s accident from childhood driving her forward, and now when the reality did not meet with the destiny she had striven for all her life, she was having a schizoid tear right through the core of her being.

  She was not a successful biologist. She was a penniless beggar, so crazed no university would give her a job. She was a witless pawn that a desperate governor had thought she could use to gain evidence against an enemy. But the shit of it was, she’d actually been right.

  The situation that the governor had hoped for had played out with devastating consequences, and now Angie was left holding the pieces. She was locked into a town in a terrible snowstorm with the blood of a bear on her hands.

  She wasn’t seeing things clearly. Or was seeing things that were not there altogether.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any way that you could rest,” Jonas said.

  “Rest?!” Angie said. “There are four men who killed a man on the loose. Four men who drove that bear down here into town. Four men who rallied an angry mob around them. They’re not ghosts, Jonas!”

  She was shrill.

  “What’re you talking about,” he said, “an angry mob?”

  “They split up in front of the hotel,” Angie said. “They drove that bear toward me.” She looked into his eyes, nodded her head. “They made me kill it.”

  “They made you kill it,” he said, not exactly a question.

  “They didn’t make me kill it,” she said. “They drove it toward me. It was an accident. But accidents don’t really exist. Everything happens for a reason. It’s part of the quarks and gluons that make up the space that we occupy.” She said matter-of-factly, “This stuff happens for a reason.”

  “Angie, you’re not making any sense,” he said.

  “You’re not listening to me!”

  “I’m listening to you,” he said.

  “No, you’re not,” she said. “You’re not hearing me. We’ve got to stop them. They made me kill this bear. Who knows what they’ll do next. They’re not men that you can trust, Jonas. They’re not!”

  Jonas stared at her and realized the depth of how gone she was. She had killed the bear. Maybe some part of her had even wanted to kill the bear. Maybe it was subconscious frustration at having lived her whole life thinking she could study and understand animals in an altruistic way, coming to a head with the fact that that very study had led her into professional suicide. Maybe she had struck back at the very thing she had spent her life so nobly wanting to understand, and now she couldn’t admit it.

  Maybe it had just been an accident.

  Whatever the reason, she wasn’t really living in the same reality as Jonas, and he wasn’t sure what to do about it.

  “I think it would be really good if you could get a good night’s sleep,” he said.

  She looked at him with a liar’s blank face. “Yes, you’re probably right,” she said.

  He stared at her. “You wouldn’t do anything rash, would you?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said believably enough.

  He looked into her ice blue eyes, searching out whether she was lying. What he saw in her eyes was the truth that she wouldn’t have known whether she was lying or not. She was that far gone.

  “Which one is your room?” he asked.

  He led her out of the cowboy’s room. They stood in the hallway. He glanced at her ragged and bloody arm.

  “I’m not going to my room,” she said. “I’d go crazy in there. I’m not going to sleep.”

  “What’re you going to do?” He started walking up the hallway. The old hardwood floorboards creaked underneath them.

  “Maybe I’ll see if I can get some food,” she said.

  “That sounds like a good idea.”

  “They have a restaurant down on the first floor.”

  “Why don’t I meet you there in fifteen minutes,” he said. “I need to make some calls anyways
. You need to at least put some alcohol on that arm, put on a clean shirt. You’ve got blood all over you.”

  Indeed, she did have blood flecked on the skin of her face and on her shirt. She nodded.

  He said, “So, I’ll meet you downstairs in fifteen? We’ll see if we can get some food.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  They reached the stairwell down to the first floor. Jonas turned and looked into her eyes. He managed a smile.

  “See you,” she said.

  He frowned.

  “What?” she said.

  He stared at her. “Nothing,” he said. “I’ll see you in fifteen.”

  She nodded in an eerily childlike way. He turned and vanished down the stairs.

  Forty-seven

  Angie wasn’t planning to eat anything. After Jonas left her on the stairwell, she walked down the hallway and found a fire escape. She opened the door and trotted down the stairs until she came to a steel door. The door had “Do Not Open” and “Fire Alarm Will Sound” warnings on it.

  She opened it, and there were no alarms.

  She glanced out into the street from the side of the New Sheridan. The snow had picked up in the past hour, and the street was completely white. She walked over to where she had seen the cowboys’ horses tied up earlier.

  Sure enough, she saw their tracks in the snow.

  “Another hour or two, and they’ll be filled,” she said.

  Go get them, the voice said inside her head.

  The voice was so clear and so well realized that she thought she had actually heard it. She turned around and looked for the source of the sound.

  It was dark back toward the fire exit.

  Go get them, the voice said once again.

  “Hello?” Angie called to the darkness. “Is anybody there?”

  The voice had a gravelly, working-class Irish accent.

  Go get them and kill them, Angie. It is your professional responsibility.

  “Who’s there?” she said.

  She listened for a moment but only heard the sound of the wind and snow. She turned and looked at the tracks in the snow once more. They led away to the left as she stood facing the street. They led away to the east.

  Telluride was positioned in a narrow pie-shaped valley that closed to a point on its eastern side at a ghost town called Pandora. Ore mines at Pandora had been revitalized in recent years after two decades of closure, and aerial trams carried men and ore down the mountain to the historic Pandora Mill.

  Kill them, Angie. Kill the bloody bastards.

  She stared at the tracks in the snow. They led up the street to the east. There was no question about it.

  Suddenly, something out of the corner of her eye—something at the edge of the darkness through the heavy snowfall—ran across the street.

  “Who’s there?” Angie said.

  We’ll show them who can hunt. The voice laughed.

  We’ll show them, Angie. Won’t we?

  Angie stared into the darkness up the street. She strained her eyes to see. The snow was so thick it was like a fog.

  “Yes,” she said. “They deserve to die. We’ll show them. We’ll show the bloody bastards.”

  The voice in the darkness smiled, clearly pleased with her decision.

  Forty-eight

  Angie used the shadows to cross the street and make her way along the sidewalk to the broken window of the Gun & Pawn. Snow had blown in over the windowsill and coated some of the knives in the display. She reached down and picked one up.

  Very good, Angie, the voice said. I would have picked that one myself.

  She glanced over her shoulder. No one saw her, and so she climbed through the window.

  Straight back.

  “There?” Angie said.

  Yes, towards the back of the store.

  She reached the gun counter at the back of the darkened store. Her pulse quickened, and her hands became to shake. Guns had always made her nervous.

  She leaned down and strapped the knife in its sheath to her right hip. She tied the thin black lace at the bottom of the sheath around her thigh.

  “Kill you,” she said.

  She stepped around the back of the counter and pulled a sawed-off shotgun down from the rack. She swung around toward the front of the store and eyed down the barrel.

  She pumped it.

  “Nice,” she said.

  She shopped the rest of the gun rack with her eyes, and nothing caught her attention, until she reached the end. A black semi-automatic assault rifle stood at attention.

  “What do we have here?” she said.

  She placed the sawed-off on the counter, and gently took the black semi-auto down from the rack.

  She was surprised at how light it was and said, “Wow.”

  It had a black shoulder-harness strap. She stuck her head through the strap, so that the gun rested diagonally on her back and the tip of the gun pointing toward the ceiling.

  She spun around and grabbed the sawed-off from the counter.

  Then, she continued to shop.

  Toward the front of the store, she found a black duster-style trench coat. She removed the semi-auto from her back and tried it on. It didn’t fit, but the one on the rack beside it did. She slid the semi-auto over her shoulder and head again.

  “Shells,” she said.

  Middle of the store. Tan shelves.

  She followed the voice’s guidance and found the shelves with the ammunition. The shotgun held twelve-gauge shells. She loaded seven into the chamber and filled the pockets of her trench coat with an additional twenty or thirty.

  She wasn’t sure about the semi-auto, but the voice inside her head said: M855.

  “M eight fifty-five,” she said.

  Second shelf down from the top.

  Her eyes saw the red box, and she popped the top. She swung the assault rifle around and unclipped the magazine. She tried sliding one of the cartridges into the magazine, and it was like she had been doing it all her life.

  She grabbed another from the box and loaded it into the magazine. Then, another. And another.

  All total she loaded thirty cartridges into the magazine. She grabbed three more boxes of ammunition and dropped them into the pockets on her trench coat.

  Then, her eye caught a machete hanging on the wall to her left. Its chrome steel blade glinted in the darkness.

  Perfect.

  Forty-nine

  Angie left the gun shop fully loaded. She exited through the broken window and saw the lights from the hotel across the street. The snow continued to fall, and she stayed with the shadows on the sidewalk and made her way down the street.

  Kill them. Kill them.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Kill them.

  She followed the tracks in the snow toward the end of the town. She turned back once and saw that she could no longer see the lights from the hotel through the snow. The tracks, however, led away into the storm, as though beckoning her to move forward.

  The machete was sheathed like a sword on her left hip. The hunting knife sheathed on her right thigh. She carried the sawed-off shotgun in her right hand, and the assault rifle was strapped on her back.

  The snow on the ground was thick and deep, and the further she walked east from downtown Telluride the more difficult it became to walk through it. It was not packed at all.

  Still, she trudged forward. In ten minutes, she’d made it a half mile from the homes at farthest edge of town. It was dark and windy, and the snow flew at her from on front. She sensed trees and woods on either side of the road, which narrowed and crossed over a little wooden bridge.

  Midway across the bridge, she stopped and looked over the side at the creek. It glistened in the darkness and made a rushing sound over damp black rocks, some of which were topped with pure white snow.

  Angie was cold and exhausted, but staring at the water in the creek energized her.

  Kill them.

  “Blow their brains out,” she said
.

  Yes.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  It is your professional responsibility.

  “Kill them,” she said.

  Kill them all.

  The tracks grew fainter in the snow, and this far from town, there was no light. Angie could barely make them out in the snow, but she continued onward. She could feel no pain.

  The narrow, deserted road was completely white with snow, and it steadily climbed uphill. She switched the shotgun from her right hand to her left. She listened to the wind, and she continued walking.

  Forward. One step at a time.

  You will be blessed for your actions in heaven.

  “Yes,” Angie said. “I will kill them all.”

  It was the sound of a horse that she heard next. It froze her in her tracks. There was more than one. They were coming toward her.

  She swallowed hard. “What do I do?” she said.

  Kill them all.

  She raced over to her right off of the narrow road. The snow was very deep, and she immediately realized her mistake. It was almost three feet deep beyond the road, and it made it nearly impossible to walk.

  “It’s over here,” the voice said. It was one of the cowboys.

  Angie crouched down and tried to see up toward the road. They were about fifty yards away.

  “The sign’s broken,” another said.

  He climbed down from his horse. Angie couldn’t be certain what he was doing, but he walked away from the road.

  Then, her eyes widened because she saw her tracks in the snow. If they came any further toward her, they’d see her tracks for sure. In the otherwise untouched snow, they stood out like a neon sign: Someone is following you! Someone is following you!She switched the shotgun to her right hand and stayed low to the ground. She watched the cowboy pick up a sign. It had fallen over, and he brushed it off.

  She was too far away to see what it said.

  “The mill’s that way.” It was Abraham Foxwell. “Come on.”

  Foxwell was on a horse up front, and the road must have forked because the horses turned and the cowboys started walking away from her.