by C. J. Box
“Come here,” he said, pulling her to him.
She came.
18
Dave Farkus rode in the dark with his left arm up in front of his face in case the fat horse walked under a branch. He couldn’t see a thing, and he was terrified. He was also severely chilled, because the temperature had dropped once the sun went down behind the clouds.
“I’m freezing,” Farkus said.
Ahead of him, Smith turned and said, “Shut up, Dave.”
Smith, like the other three, had put on night vision goggles to ride by. Where Smith’s eyes should have been, there were dark holes. Only when one of the other riders looked directly at him could Farkus see a dull ball of red deep inside the lenses, which unnerved him. It was as if the twin eyepieces were drilled into their brains. Occasionally, if the riders adjusted their goggles or briefly removed them, he could see their faces bathed in an eerie green.
Farkus said, “I feel like I’m in a goddamned zombie movie.”
Earlier, Parnell had ordered them all to put on body armor and night-vision goggles-except for Farkus, of course. Smith and Campbell had dismounted and dug in the panniers and handed out the bulletproof vests. Farkus could hear the soft clink of ceramic plating as the vests were strapped on. Then, in the last few minutes of dusk, he watched them check lithium batteries and adjust the straps of the goggles in a well-practiced way. Campbell and Smith debated the merits of their goggles, and Farkus listened carefully.
“I was hoping for generation fours instead of these ATN gen threes,” Campbell told Smith. “There’s hardly any moon at all and the gen fours will reach out a thousand yards in these conditions.”
Smith said, “But we’re still talking one hundred fifty to four hundred yards with these babies at two grand a pop. Not too bad.”
Farkus said to them both, “Obviously, this ain’t your first rodeo.”
Campbell began to say more-he was obviously a gear geek-but after Farkus spoke he caught himself.
But Farkus learned plenty from the short exchange, if little to do with night vision goggles. The expedition was well financed by a third party, and the men were well trained even if they were seeing some of the equipment for the first time. Which meant, as he’d suspected, that the men were mercenaries-hired hands. So it wasn’t personal with either them or their target. That could work in his favor, he thought. He’d have to play it cool, but he was used to that. Avoiding hard work meant learning the motivation and proclivities of those around you. It’s what he did.
Occasionally, Farkus was brushed by a pine bough on his head or leg and he cursed his fat horse. But she could see better than he and there was no choice but to simply hold on and hope she didn’t walk under an overhanging branch that would knock him out of his saddle or poke his eye out.
The arrangement of the goggle-eyes behind him was interesting. Campbell rode erect and invisible in his saddle, and his eyes were level with Farkus. Capellen, though, slumped forward head down and moaning, goggles askew and leaking green ambient light.
As they rode, Farkus could see Parnell consulting his equipment. Based on the reading of his electronics, Parnell would subtly shift direction. The others would adjust as well. Farkus simply trusted his horse to want to stay with the others. He was grateful horses were such needy and social creatures, and glad he wasn’t riding a cat.
Parnell said, “They’re on the move.”
“Which way?” Smith asked.
“Away from us. And they’re moving at a pretty good clip.”
Said Smith, “I’m surprised they’re moving at night. Do you think they know we’re coming?”
“Who knows what they’re doing or why?”
“Those guys have always been unpredictable,” Campbell said from behind Farkus. “They’ve adapted well.”
Okay, something new, Farkus thought. They know their targets pretty well.
Parnell said, “Not well enough to turn off the sat phone they took off that game warden.”
Ah, Farkus thought, that’s what he’s tracking.
“Is the signal still strong?” Smith asked.
“Strong enough. We’ve closed within three miles and we seem to be holding at that distance as they move. Those guys can cover a lot of ground, as we know.”
So, Farkus thought, we’re after the Brothers Grim after all. But why?
“Hold it,” Farkus said. “If it’s just a matter of tracking these guys down through their sat phone, why couldn’t the sheriff and his boys find ’em?”
Said Parnell, “Because the brothers didn’t turn it on until just a day or so ago. They’re smart, those bastards.”
Farkus had got used to his own odor when a stronger and more pungent smell wafted through the trees. Parnell and Smith pulled their horses up short and the fat horse followed suit.
“What is that?” Smith asked.
“Something dead,” Parnell said.
“This way,” Campbell said, peeling off from the line of horses and riding into the trees to his right. “Stay here, Mike,” he said to his sick companion. “No reason to get any sicker smelling this than you already are.”
“I’ll stay with him,” Farkus volunteered.
“Nice try,” Smith sighed, and reached out and slapped the back of Farkus’s head as he rode by. Farkus was heartened by the gesture. The slap wasn’t hard or mean-spirited. It’s what males did to each other to acknowledge that the other guy was sort of okay after all.
Stifling a smile in the dark and complimenting himself on his reliable charm, Farkus spurred the fat horse into the trees with the others.
The smell got stronger. Farkus winced and pulled his T-shirt collar up out of his shirt and tried to breathe through the fabric. It didn’t help.
Back on the trail, he heard Capellen cry out with a short, sharp yelp.
“Probably getting sick again,” Campbell said. “Poor guy.”
“Here they are,” Smith said up ahead. “The game warden’s story checks out so far.”
“Here what is?” Farkus asked. “I can’t see anything, remember?”
“At least two dead horses,” Parnell said. “Maybe more. I can see skulls and ribs and leg bones, but it looks like the carcasses are cut up. Some of the bones are stripped clean of meat. They must have had to cut up the bodies to move them in here so the sheriff’s team wouldn’t find them. Since these guys were butchers, it probably wasn’t a big deal to cut the horses apart.”
Farkus could detect the smell of fresh soil mixed into the stench of decomposition. “Butchers?” he said. No one replied.
“And they buried them,” Smith said. “So they probably didn’t stink at the time those other guys were up here. But something’s been digging them up.”
Campbell said, “Probably a bear. They’ve got bears here-black and grizzly. Mountain lions, too. They’ve got lots of critters that like horsemeat.”
Farkus said, “Or wolves. The game warden said he saw wolves. Look around you, guys, do you see any wolves?” His voice was tight. He had a pathological fear of wolves that came from a dream he’d had when he was a small boy. In the dream, a pack of wolves dragged him down as he ran toward school and ate him. He’d never seen a live wolf before, and he didn’t want to see one now. Or, worse, to not see a wolf sneaking up on him in the dark. He tried to make his eyes bigger so he could see into the trees around him. He wished they had an extra set of night vision goggles, and he vowed to take Capellen’s if the sick man wouldn’t use them properly.
“Don’t panic,” Parnell said to Farkus. “I’d see ’em if they were here.”
“Whatever it was eating on this horse, it hasn’t gone far,” Smith said, shifting in his saddle. “The damage looks fresh.” Farkus saw the dull red orbs of Smith’s goggles sweep past him as the man looked around.
“Let’s get back,” Parnell said. “And see how Capellen is doing.”
“That’s a good idea,” Farkus said.
“Damn,” Campbell said as they walked their h
orses through the trees back to the trail, “Capellen fell out of the damned saddle. We should have tied him in it, like he asked.”
Smith said, “There’s something sticking out of him.”
The way he said it made Farkus hold his breath.
“It’s an arrow,” Parnell whispered. “Those fucking brothers found us.”
Farkus couldn’t see Parnell, Smith, or Campbell, but he could sense from the leather-on-leather creaking that all three men were turning in their saddles trying to get a panoramic view of what might be out there in the trees.
“This is when we could have used those gen fours,” Campbell muttered.
Capellen was alive, but the arrow was buried deeply into his chest. His breathing was harsh, wet, and heavy. The shot had been perfectly placed in the two-inch gap between the ceramic shoulder pad and the armored strap. Farkus stayed on his horse while the others tried to lift the wounded man back onto his mount. As they pushed him up, his arm flopped back and knocked Smith’s goggles off his face. In the sudden pool of bouncing green light from the eyecups, Farkus watched as they shoved Capellen onto the saddle like a sack of rocks. Capellen simply fell off the other side of the horse into the dirt, snapping off the shaft of the arrow in the fall and possibly driving the projectile farther into his chest. In the glow of Smith’s goggles, Capellen’s bloody clothing under his armpit looked like it was soaked in black motor oil and his open eyes showed white from rolling back in his head.
“Oh, shit!” Campbell cried, and reached up to readjust his goggles. As he did so, the light blinked out and doused the macabre scene.
Farkus said, “Put him behind me. This old horse is stout enough to carry us both. I’m sure he can hold on.”
The men didn’t pause or talk it over. They gathered Capellen up, and Farkus felt the weight and heat of the man behind him. Capellen leaned into Farkus with his arms around his ribs and dropped his face into his back.
“Get his gun,” Parnell said. Smith pulled Capellen’s weapon out of his holster, and Farkus fought an urge to mouth, “Damn.”
There was a wet cack-cack-cack liquid sound when Capellen inhaled. Farkus recognized the sound from hunting. The arrow had pierced a lung, and probably collapsed it. Capellen’s chest cavity was filling up with blood. He would drown from the inside, like an elk hit in the same place. It was a miserable and drawn-out way to die, Farkus guessed. If Capellen was a game animal, there would be no question but to stop the suffering with a bullet to the head or a slit across his throat.
Farkus thought: This is just like hunting and these men are just meat and organs, sacks of bones, like elk. It’s time to quit being scared of them.
But he didn’t feel the same way about whoever had shot the arrow and had taken them all by surprise.
“Let’s move back to where we’ve got an advantage,” Parnell said, turning his horse around and riding past Farkus and Capellen, back down the trail they’d come on.
“Are we headed back to the rock face?” Smith asked, turning his mount.
“Absolutely,” Parnell said.
Farkus remembered it well, and it made sense. Just below the summit, the trail had switchbacked through a massive rock slide where it looked like an entire wedge of the mountainside had given way and fallen like a calf from an iceberg, leaving a long treeless chute of rubble and scree. And a few room-sized boulders. It would be a perfect place for them to go: treeless so they could see for half a mile with their night vision goggles. And well beyond arrow range from an archer in the trees.
Parnell had kicked his horse into a canter, and they retreated quickly.
Farkus had his reasons to take Capellen. The first was his hope they’d forget about the handgun, which they didn’t. But Capellen still wore his night vision goggles, and Farkus reached over his shoulder and snatched them off. After fumbling with the straps, he managed to pull them on. The pitch-black night turned ghostly green and he could see everything! The clarity was astonishing, even though the color scheme was largely green and gray. When he glanced up at the sky, the few stars that peeked down between the clouds looked like Hollywood spotlights. He was shocked how dense the forest was as the trees shot by on both sides. Up ahead, he could see Parnell and Smith pushing their horses, and he could see the big butt muscles of their mounts contracting and expanding with their new gait. When he saw how tight the trees were that he’d come through earlier, he wondered how it was he hadn’t been knocked off.
“When we get to the rocks,” Farkus said to Capellen, whose head bounced on Farkus’s back as they rode, “we’re trading pants. You look like my size, and why should you care if your pants are clean or dirty?”
The fourth reason he’d volunteered to take Capellen was still forming in his mind, Farkus thought. But by taking their buddy, they might decide he, Dave Farkus, was all right after all. He was on their side. And they might forget about him and quit telling him to shut up every time he spoke.
And he could work the new angle and get the hell away from them before the Grim Brothers killed them all.
“They must have split up,” Parnell said, a note of puzzlement in his voice. He adjusted the dial on his equipment. “One of them has the sat phone and has finally stopped moving. The other one is down there somewhere.” He motioned toward the dark wall of trees. “They split up so we’d march right toward the guy with the sat phone while the other one waited for us here.”
“Do you think he’s still there?” Campbell asked.
“I doubt it,” Parnell said. “He knows we have the high ground and a clear field of fire. He’s not stupid enough to try to take us on up here in these rocks.”
Smith nodded. “He waited until we left Capellen alone before he attacked him. That way, he had the odds on his side as well as the element of surprise. I wonder how long he’s been tracking us?”
Parnell shrugged.
“Maybe all night,” Smith said.
Campbell turned. “Farkus, what the hell are you doing back there?”
Farkus said, “Trying to make Capellen more comfortable. I took his vest off so he could breathe easier. I’m sure he won’t mind if I wear it for a while.”
“What are you doing with his pants?”
“What is it with those guys?” Smith asked no one in particular. “We couldn’t see a damned thing without our night vision equipment, but whoever went after Capellen didn’t seem to have that problem. And I seriously doubt those guys have any real technology to use.”
“They’re not human,” Farkus said.
“Bullshit,” Parnell spat.
They’d made it to the rock slide without being attacked. The horses were picketed on a grassy shelf above them, and Capellen lay dying in Farkus’s jeans with his back to a slick rock. There had been no movement on the scree beneath them or in the wall of trees below since they’d arrived an hour before.
Smith said to Farkus, “If they aren’t human, then what the hell are they?”
“They’re Wendigos,” Farkus said, pleased to finally be able to introduce his theory.
Smith said, “Jesus. But that doesn’t work because these guys used to be human.”
“That’s exactly how it works,” Farkus said. “They start out human, but something goes wrong. It’s usually related to terrible hunger, but sometimes it’s like a demon enters into them and turns them into monsters.
“I know it sounds crazy, but things have been happening up here in these mountains for the last year that don’t make sense. It’s common knowledge in town that something’s going on up here.”
Hearing no objection, Farkus forged on, keeping his voice low. “One night, in the Dixon Club, I asked an old Indian I know. He’s a Blackfoot from Montana by the name of Rodney Old Man. That’s the first time I heard about Wendigos. Then I did some research on the Internet and checked out a couple of books from the library. It’s scary stuff, man. These people who turn into Wendigos look like walking skeletons with their flesh hanging off of their bones. They stink lik
e death-like those horses we found back there. And they feed on dead animals and living people. They’re cannibals, too, but they’re really weird cannibals because the more human flesh they eat, the bigger they get and the hungrier they are. And they can see in the dark.”
Farkus said, “You guys are from Michigan, which is close to Canada, where most of the Wendigos come from. Do you know the story of an Indian named Swift Runner?” Farkus asked. No one spoke. “Now there was a man filled up with the spirit of the Wendigo. Killed, butchered, and ate his wife and six children.
“You hear of a guy named Li just a couple of years ago? Up in Canada? He cut the head off a fellow bus passenger he’d never met before and started eating him right there on the bus.”
Parnell hissed, “Shut up, now,” and put the muzzle of his weapon against Farkus’s forehead. Parnell’s face was flushed red with anger. The soundtrack for his rage was Capellen’s wet breathing, which had got worse.
“Gotcha,” Farkus said.
As the eastern sky lightened enough for Farkus to shed his night vision goggles, Capellen died with a sigh and a shudder.
“Poor bastard,” Parnell said. “There was nothing we could do to save him.”
Farkus didn’t say, Except maybe take him to a hospital.
Parnell stood up and peeled his goggles off, said, “We’ll pick up his body on the way out. He’s not going anywhere.”
Then: “Let’s get this thing over with so we can go home.”
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
19
It had been a long time since Joe had got up earlier than the rest of his family and made them breakfast. He cooked what he always cooked, what he knew how to make, what he thought they should want even though he wasn’t sure anymore that they did: pancakes, scrambled eggs, and bacon. He’d drunk half a pot of coffee and his nerves were jangling by the time Marybeth came down the hall in her robe.