She stood at the window and thought about the Duke and their current project. She’d been tracking the reporter and researching other incidents that might be connected, aside from the bombing in Miami. For the most part, she was coming up empty, and she hoped the Duke was having better luck. He was famous in the digital world as a brilliant hacker. Heather had only just met the Duke online a few weeks before, after spending years hearing about him. And ever since they began chatting online about the incident in Chicago, and the possible conspiracy there and in Miami, she hadn't been able to stop thinking about him. It was silly, she knew, because she hadn't even seen the guy. Yet there was something about him that she connected with. Maybe it was his love for data, and the digital universe to be explored, she wasn’t sure, but she liked him. She liked how he thought and how he approached problems.
Heather returned to her computer, and opened her email. At the very top of her inbox, was an encrypted email from a sender she recognized. The subject line read, simply, Lit Dragons. She felt a flutter of excitement and dread as she opened the email, knowing exactly what it would say.
It was time for a new game.
Chapter Thirteen
The latch on the front door of the cabin was broken, as if it had been kicked in. Paul briefly wondered again about calling the cops, but again thought better of it. Morales was a cop, after all, and that hadn't ended well for him.
He pulled on the door, and it swung outward with a low groan until it caught on a ridge of ice and got stuck. Paul pulled harder, but the door wouldn't budge. He leaned inside and looked around before he entered. He wasn't sure what he was looking for.
Booby-traps? he scoffed at the idea, but then maybe it wasn't such an outlandish idea. After all, he had been shot.
The area around the door seemed to be clear of anything, so he squeezed through the doorway and into the living room.
It took a few seconds before his eyes adjusted to the dimness in the living room, and when they did, it was about what he expected to find in an old abandoned cabin in the woods. The room was empty save for a few pieces of moldy furniture that he wouldn't have touched if his life depended on it. Streams of sunlight filtered through holes and cracks in the wall, illuminating swarms of dust in the air.
Just beyond the front room was a staircase that led to the second floor of the cabin. Paul looked up at the ceiling, and while the plaster was cracked and sagging, he didn't see any holes where the floor on the second level had collapsed through.
Paul walked into the room, carefully examining everything for any sign that the woman had been there. He came to a low table in the corner and noticed the dust had been disturbed. Paul bent down for a closer look. It looked as though someone had set something on the table, and then lifted it off, rubbing through the pile of dust and brushing it away.
Well, someone had been here recently, he thought, but just couldn't confirm that it was the woman who he'd supposed to have met on that night. Paul walked into the kitchen area and saw that cupboards and counters had been ripped from the walls and taken away. Only the sink remained, an old metal basin attached to the wall.
He heard something scuttle across the floor. He jumped and turned to toward the sound, catching a glimpse of something small and furry disappear into a hole in the floorboards.
A rat. He shuddered at the thought of rats in here with him. Paul wasn't exactly afraid of rats, he just didn't like them. He remembered something his mom had told him when he was younger. If you see one rat, she had said, you can bet that there are hundreds you can't see.
He shuddered again and wondered just how many of the squirming little rodents filled the walls and floors.
When he turned back to the front room, his eyes were still on the floor and he noticed something he hadn't seen before. The floor had been covered with thin, ragged carpet.
Had been.
A large square of carpet had been cut from the center of the room, leaving only the edges and the portion of carpet by the kitchen. Only bare floorboards remained beneath the area where the carpet had been cut away, but for the most part, the boards were not as discolored as the rest of the wood throughout the cabin. The carpet had only been recently cut away, exposing the wood beneath.
Except, the boards weren't entirely clean of discoloration. Near the center of the area of exposed floor boards was a large stain. Paul knelt down and examined the discoloration, noting that the boards seemed to have been scrubbed clean, removing as much of the stain as possible.
He stood up and took a step back. Someone had removed the carpet because of the stain, and then cleaned the floorboard beneath. It was almost entirely clean too, but not quite. Given a few more weeks with the wood exposed to the moisture and cold winter air, he would not have noticed the stain.
It was a bloodstain, he decided. Why else remove the carpet and clean the wood? And there had been enough blood here that someone had probably died, or killed, given the amount of blood. Someone had been killed here in this cabin, and whoever did the killing didn't want that to be known. Paul took a deep breath and looked around the room. Nothing else caught his attention, so he started up the stairs, taking each step slowly to test his weight.
On the second level of the cabin, he found a bedroom. Inside the bedroom was a mattress covered with mildew and black splotches of mold. He kicked a rusted bedspring when he walked into the room, barely noticing it as he crossed to the window. Pieces of wood that had been nailed across the window opening were torn away and laying on the ground. He saw the same splintered blasts in the wood that he'd seen on the trees below. The cold wind blew through the window and he shivered.
Shotgun, he thought, touching the jagged holes in the wood.
He studied the floor and walls for splatters and stains, but couldn't find any.
So, someone had been killed downstairs, bleeding out on the floor, but up here, someone had escaped. He was becoming more and more convinced that the woman he was supposed to meet had died in this cabin on that night. If she'd escaped, he was sure that she would have made contact again. No, she had to be dead. She was gone and her secrets with her.
But if the woman had died, then who had escaped from the window? He peered outside through the window at the snow covered forest. Paul remembered the multiple sets of footprints leading to the forest. Hunters searching for their prey.
***
A few minutes later, Paul was up to his knees in snow, following the tracks deeper and deeper into the forest. He looked over his shoulder at the cabin, making sure he had his bearings. The taxi driver was still sitting in his taxi, the engine running and the radio blasting.
The pain in his leg was throbbing, and Paul didn't know how long he could follow the tracks. Already, the forest was getting so thick that he was having trouble walking in a straight line.
Paul tried to imagine running in the dark, away from hunters trying to kill him, the fear and panic so strong you could taste it. But why the hunt? Why had the woman been killed in the cabin? None of it made sense, especially when combined with the attack in Miami and his visit to Morales in the hospital. The woman had said that she would shed light on the attack in Miami, and then she ended up dead herself. The shooting at the airport, a bus driver ends up dead and Morales ends up in the hospital. So many pieces to a puzzle, and he couldn't see the full picture. He chuckled to himself and watched the puffs of his warm breath mist in the cold air. He literally couldn't see the forest for the trees.
He came to a clearing and stopped walking. The tracks continued through the clearing and disappeared beneath a fallen tree trunk. Paul turned around and saw that he couldn't see the cabin anymore. From somewhere close by he heard running water. Probably the river they'd crossed on their way to the cabin, he thought.
His leg throbbed and he was no longer sure that he was going to find anything out here in the forest. He was cold and he wanted to go back to his place, pour himself a glass of Wild Turkey and go through Morales' papers again. Maybe learn
something else about this girl they'd been looking for.
And then it hit him. He gasped, and the sudden intake of freezing air hurt his lungs.
The girl that Morales had been talking about had escaped. She must have been the one to climb out the window and run off into the forest. When they couldn't find her out here, they tracked her to the airport. And the dead bus driver? The forest preserve ran right up next to the bus route. Maybe he'd picked her up, and she'd killed him?
Maybe so, but he didn't think that was right. The hunters were after the girl, not the other way around. She was running for her life.
But then who was the woman he'd spoken to on the phone, his contact? He remembered the fear in her voice, but not fear for her own life. He remembered distinctly thinking that she was already resigned to her own imminent death. She had known that the hunters were close, and she was scared. Not for herself, but for the girl. A daughter maybe? A daughter would explain why she'd been so afraid, and apparently she had reason to be afraid. She was dead, and probably her daughter was dead by now as well.
Snow flakes began to fall from the sky, fluttering slowly through the clearing. His toes and fingers were ice, and he shivered as he pulled the coat tighter around his body. Even with that realization, he didn't know where to go from there. Sure, they'd killed a woman to keep their secret, and probably the woman's daughter. They'd also tried to kill him to keep their secret, and who knew when they might show up to finish the job?
But he did take solace in his discovery of the place where the woman had probably died. It was all just speculation, but it meant that he wasn't crazy. Something was going on, and the enemy behind all of this was a powerful force that he couldn't understand. All he knew was that whoever these people were, they would kill to protect their secret. They would cover their tracks at all costs.
Paul turned to start his trek back to the cabin and the waiting taxi, but something caught his eye. Something was off about the fallen tree in the clearing. He followed the tracks until the place where they disappeared under the branches and trunk. Snow covered the tree, but there wasn't as much snow as there would have been if the tree had been lying on its side for the entire winter. And then there were the tracks. Multiple footsteps leading through the snow, to the tree, where they simply stopped. The tree had fallen on top of the tracks, which meant that it had fallen within the last few weeks, after the girl had escaped.
Paul knew that it wasn't entirely uncommon for trees to fall during the winter, especially after heavy ice and snow storms. The added weight to the trees sometimes proved to be too much. But it wasn't the fact that the tree had fallen that had caught his attention. It was the giant ball of earth, rocks and roots that seemed out of place. Paul had seen plenty of fallen trees, and it was normal for the roots to pull up some dirt and rocks when it fell, but this was different. The amount of earth still attached to the base of the tree was enormous, almost like a small island and there weren't just rocks entangled with the dirt, but boulders the size of beach balls. The most disturbing thing about it though, was that there was no hole near the base of the tree from which the root ball had come. The tree was lying on its side in the clearing as if it had been plucked from the ground and dropped into the clearing.
Even now, Paul was noticing more and more about the clearing that did not make sense. Branches had been ripped off the trees surrounding the fallen tree, as if it had dropped from the sky into the clearing, destroying everything in its path. The snow around the tree was relatively undisturbed, such that he could follow the tracks through the snow, right up to the point where they disappeared under the trunk of the tree.
Paul realized that the tree had literally fallen from the sky on top of the tracks he'd been following. He stared at the tree and the clearing, the tree and the tracks through the snow, dumbfounded. This didn't make sense. How could it make sense? He glanced longingly back in the direction of the taxi cab with its engine running and the heater blasting, but knew that his investigation wasn't over. He climbed through the branches, up and over the trunk of the tree and continued on through the forest. After a few minutes of searching, Paul found where the tracks picked up again. He followed the trail through the snow for several minutes, his head down and concentrating, until he pushed through some brush and drifts into another clearing.
Paul looked up and froze. He hadn't stepped into a clearing, but what looked like a blast zone. For an area the size of a football field, the entire forest was demolished. Trees had been ripped from their roots and thrown about, boulders torn free from the ground and scattered like so many feathers in the wind. Islands of earth pulled free from craters that stood empty. The river that he'd heard earlier passed directly through the center of this destruction, trees on their side and upside down in the water in a tangle of branches and roots.
The forest and everything in it was destroyed for this area alone. All around the edges of the destruction, the forest continued on as if nothing had happened, completely untouched. An utter wasteland with perfect edges.
How is this possible? He wondered. It was almost as if a bomb had gone off...
Paul caught his thought before it was fully formed as he realized that it looked strikingly similar to something else he'd seen.
A bomb that wasn't a bomb.
Paul didn't so much sit, as he fell to the ground, deep in thought. He didn't even notice how his leg pounded with pain as he sat in the snow and studied the forest, considering the blast of power and sheer force that would have been necessary to cause this annihilation.
And no matter what, Paul couldn't shake the thought that the area of decimated forest was strikingly similar to the fallen skyscraper on the corner of Biscayne Blvd. and 5th Street. In Miami, the destruction was limited to the building, with piles of bodies and debris, steal beams with jagged edges jutting out from the rubble of cement boulders and broken glass. But then the destruction had stopped, just like the forest. As if only one building amidst the entire skyline was destroyed, and nothing else. An utter wasteland with perfect edges.
For the first time since arriving on the press bus at Ground Zero in Miami, he glimpsed the bigger picture. A bomb without a bomb. Whatever force had destroyed that building in Miami had blasted through this forest. They had covered it up in Florida, and now they were trying to hide it here. Well, they had covered up as much as they could. How could they possibly hide this destruction of trees and rocks and earth?
No, they would have allowed this to sit. Maybe close off the forest for a few seasons until it had started to regrow. If they could have hidden the attack in Miami, why not something in the middle of a forest preserve in rural Illinois?
But who were they? And who was the girl that had escaped from the cabin. The girl they'd tracked through the forest to this... How had this happened?
So many questions swirled, but it didn't matter. For the first time since Miami, Paul was on to something, and despite the creeping numbness in his body, the biting cold, and the worsening pain in his leg, he smiled. He pulled a small camera from his pocket and began to take pictures.
Chapter Fourteen
It was the first game that Heather had planned since that night in Chicago, even though there had been several requests for games from the firms that represented the auto manufacturers, but she’d politely declined. Her research with the Duke had taken up most of her time, and after losing one of the drivers during the last set of games, she felt guilty about it.
But the games had been around for a long time, and they’d called themselves the Lit Dragons long before Heather had come along. They had started out as a group of teenagers and young adults, crashing cars for fun. They came from wealthy families with good insurance, and when one car was totaled, they’d just buy another. Soon, simply crashing the cars wasn’t enough, and the group formed games out of the activity. They would pick different cities to stage their games. Only three or four cars would be involved, all tracked by GPS, and they would race around the city,
crashing into each other until the cars were destroyed, the last one standing declared the winner. The Lit Dragons would abandon their cars in crumpled pieces around the city, then disappear into the night, leaving a mystery for the local law enforcement to try in vain to figure out.
It didn’t take long for auto manufacturers to notice that their cars were turning up in multiple cities, wrecked and without anyone taking responsibility for the damage. Several gathered resources and sent out feelers in the Deep Web for someone who could discreetly solve the mystery of who was crashing their cars, and that’s where Heather came into the picture. It took her a few days to figure out that the group referred to themselves as the Lit Dragons, and after that, she located most of the people involved.
When she reported back to her employers, they wanted her to pass along a message to the Lit Dragons. Through several clandestine companies, the auto manufacturers would provide the cars if the Lit Dragons would provide the data that came from their games. The manufacturers wanted the raw data from real life road tests, but especially the data from real life crashes.
It was an arrangement that benefited all parties involved. The Lit Dragons kept doing what they were doing, but were now getting paid for it. When someone grew tired of the games, or was hurt or killed, there was always someone new and willing to join. The manufacturers were gathering data that was impossible to get in testing labs, and Heather got a fat paycheck with each game. Aside from being the go between, she organized and ran the games, monitored emergency personnel and delivered the data to the manufacturers.
It was also her job to keep it all a secret. She scrubbed police records, news articles, and any mention of the games in social media. She ensured the Lit Dragons kept quiet about their involvement in the games, and erased any connection between the wrecks and auto manufacturers.
The Snow Swept Trilogy Page 29