by C. J. Box
Joe nodded. “Unless the purpose was more general.”
Nate caught Joe’s meaning. He said, “Like a warning to everybody out there that if you try to go after the brothers, they’ll come around behind you and destroy your property. They’re saying, Stay the hell out of these mountains.”
“Just like the message they gave Sheriff Baird,” Joe said.
Nate started to say something but didn’t. He swallowed and made a face as if he’d tasted something bitter.
As he rode, Joe continually scanned the trail up ahead of him and shot hard looks into the trees lining both sides. His shotgun was within quick reach. If the brothers didn’t know they were being pursued, it was possible he and Nate could simply ride up on them. He wanted to be ready.
The afternoon sun lengthened the shadows across the trail and enhanced the fall colors of the aspen into almost blinding acrylic hues. It would be effortless for the brothers to simply meld into the throbbing colors of the trees and for Joe not to see them, he thought.
A doe mule deer and her fawn stayed ahead of them on the trail and Joe kept seeing her at each turn. She’d graze with the fawn until the horses came into sight, then startle with a white flap of her tail and bound ahead again and again. Joe wished she’d move off the trail for good, because each time she saw him and jumped, his heart did, too.
An hour later, as dusk muffled the eastside slopes and the acrylic colors muted into pastels, Joe again spooked the doe and fawn. But rather than running ahead along the trail where it narrowed and squeezed through the trunks of two massive spruce trees, the deer cut into the timber to the right. Joe was pleased the deer had finally got out of the way, but then he saw them reappear yet again on the trail farther up the mountain slope like before.
Instinctively, he leaned back in the saddle and pulled back on the reins. He said, “Hold it, Nate,” quietly over his shoulder.
Nate rode up alongside. “Are you wondering if the packhorse and panniers are going to fit through that narrow chute?”
“No,” Joe said. “I’m wondering why those deer went around in the trees instead of staying on the game trail.”
Joe and Nate approached the trap from behind after tying off their horses in the trees. The design of the trap was a brutal work of art, Joe thought. And if it weren’t for the deer, he would have ridden right into it.
The brothers had cut down and trimmed a green lodgepole pine tree about as thick as Joe’s fist near the base. The base was wedged into the gap between two branches on the large spruce, then bowed back almost to the point of breaking before being tied off with wire. The wire was fed through a smooth groove around the tree trunk and stretched ankle-high across the trail. It was tied off to a set of ten-inch lengths of wood that were notched back and fitted into one another. A thick foot-long sharpened stake was lashed to the tip of the lodgepole. If the wire was tripped, the notched lengths would pull apart sideways and release the tension that held the cocked arm and stake back.
“Chest high for a rider,” Joe said, absently rubbing a spot just below his clavicle.
Nate found a stump in the timber and carried it toward the trap from behind. “Stand back,” he said, and threw the stump with a grunt. It landed on the wire, which yanked the notched sticks apart and sent the lodgepole and stake slicing through the air with surprising speed and velocity.
While the pole and stake rocked back and forth, Joe said, “This was more than a warning to stay away.”
“That it is,” Nate said, inspecting the cuts on the lodgepole where branches had been trimmed away. With his fingertip, he touched an amber bead of sap that oozed from one of the cuts. “Fresh,” he said. “The boys probably put this up within the last couple of days. Maybe they’re expecting us.”
At that moment, far up the mountainside, was the harsh crackle of snapping branches. Joe and Nate locked eyes for a moment, then dived for the ground. They lay helplessly while a dislodged boulder the size of a small car smashed down the slope leveling small trees and splintering big ones along its path. The boulder rolled end-over-end, coming within ten yards of where they were on the trail. Remarkably, the horses didn’t snap their tethers and run away.
When the boulder finally stopped rolling and settled noisily below them, Joe stood up. The sharp smell of broken pine trees was in the air, along with the damp odor of churned-up soil.
“Man. ” Joe whispered.
“They’re real close,” Nate said. “And they know we’re right behind them.”
When they rode to the edge of the tree line, Joe and Nate paused on their horses before continuing up. The sun had sunk behind the western mountains an hour before. The moon was narrow and white, a toenail clipping, and the wash of stars was so bright and close as to be almost creamy. Ahead of them was a long expanse of treeless scree. The trail they were on switchbacked up through the scree, but dissolved into darkness near the top of the summit.
“I can’t see what’s up there,” Joe whispered. “But we’ll be in the open. This would be a great place to get ambushed.”
Nate said, “If we can’t see them, they can’t see us, right?”
“I wish there was a way to get over the top some other way,” Joe said, trying not to ascribe powers to the Grim Brothers that they didn’t realistically possess.
“There isn’t,” Nate said, nudging his horse on.
Joe had rarely ever felt as vulnerable, as much of a target, as he did riding up through the talus. He urged his horse to keep him walking fast, hoping the herky-jerky gait would make him less easy to hit if someone was aiming. There was nothing quiet about his ascent; his horse’s lungs billowed as it climbed, the gelding nickered from time to time to call to Nate’s horse and the packhorse, and the gelding’s steel shoes struck some of the shale rocks with discordant notes and tossed off sparks from time to time. By the time he made it to the summit and the ocean of mountaintops sprawled out before him to the west, his horse was worn out from the forced march and Joe had a slick of sweat between his skin and his clothing.
But no one fired, and nothing more happened.
He pushed the gelding on, over the top, so they’d no longer be in silhouette against the sky if the brothers were somewhere in the timber below them looking back. Nate was soon with him, his own horse breathing hard as well. They tucked away to rest the animals in a stand of aspen.
In the shadows of the trees, Joe’s boot heels thumped the hard ground as he dismounted to let his horse get his breath back. Nate did the same. They stood in silence, holding the reins of their horses, eyeing the dark timber and meadows out in front of them, wondering where the Grim Brothers were.
It was approaching midnight when Joe’s gelding stopped short. He recognized the horse’s familiar signals of fear or agitation: the low rumbling whoof, the whites of his eyes, the ears stiffly cocked forward. Joe’s horse took several steps back, nearly colliding with Nate’s mount.
Nate whispered, “What’s wrong?”
Joe shook his head. “Don’t know. Something’s spooked him.” He managed to get control of his horse after spinning him back around.
When Joe looked up, he could see Nate grimacing, his face illuminated by a splash of starlight.
“Jesus,” Nate said. “Look.”
Joe leaned forward and peered ahead on the trail, willing his eyes to see better in the dark. Something hung across the trail, reminding him of gathered curtains hanging from a rod. He slipped his Maglite out of its holster and adjusted the beam on a moon-shaped human face-eyes open but without the gleam of life, a dried purple tongue hanging out of its mouth like a fat cigar.
Joe twisted the lens of this flashlight to increase the scope of the light. While he did, he forgot to breathe.
Three male bodies, two in black tactical clothing and one in camouflage, hung from ropes tied to a beam that crossed the trail. The bodies were hung by their necks, but it was obvious they hadn’t died from hanging because of the wounds on them. One of the men in black had a hol
e in his chest, one’s skull was crushed in on the side like a dropped egg, and the third had an arrow shaft sticking out of his throat.
Joe recognized the make of the arrow.
He squelched the light of his flashlight and reached out for the saddle horn to steady himself because he felt suddenly light-headed.
“Oh, God,” he said, fighting nausea.
Nate said, “I think we found the boys from Michigan.”
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5
29
One by one, the glassy surfaces of the alpine cirques Joe and Nate rode past mirrored the stars and slice of moon. When a trout rose and nosed the water at the second cirque, Joe found himself unexpectedly heartened as he watched lazy ringlets alter the reflection.
They’d cut down the bodies and stacked them on the side of the trail. Joe rooted through their pockets and found no personal items or identification of any kind. He and Nate covered the bodies with dead logs and sheets of bark to try to prevent predators from feeding on them, and Joe bookmarked the location in his GPS so he could later direct search teams to the exact place to recover and identify the bodies. Dave Farkus had not been among the dead.
It was two in the morning when they rode by the last cirque and Joe clucked and pulled his horse off the trail to parallel the meandering outlet stream.
Nate said, “Is this the creek you followed out of the mountains last time?”
“Yup.”
“What’s the name of it?”
“No Name Creek,” Joe said. “Really.”
“Seems fitting,” Nate said, clucking his horse forward.
“Stay alert,” Joe said to Nate, although he was really talking to himself. “Those brothers could be anywhere.”
Deep in the timber and far down the mountain on its western slope, Joe almost rode by the dark opening where the cabin had been. He didn’t so much see it as feel it-a creeping shiver that rolled from his stomach to his throat that made him rein to a stop and turn to his right in the saddle.
“Here,” he said. He nosed the gelding over, and the horse splashed through the shallow stream and to the other side. As he rode through the opening, the familiarity of it in the starlight made him relive his escape from the cabin. When he reached the clearing where the cabin had been, he rode around it, puzzled. Ghostly columns of pale starlight lit the opening. But there was no sign of the burned cabin, just a tangled pile of deadfall.
Nate asked, “Are you sure this is the right place?”
“It’s got to be,” Joe said. He probed the deadfall with the beam of his flashlight.
Sweeping the pool of light across the dead branches, he noted a small square of orange.
“Ah,” he said with relief, and dismounted. With the flashlight in his mouth shining down, Joe tugged at branches and threw them away from the pile. He kicked away the last tangle to reveal a square foundation of bricks, which was where the woodstove had been.
“The Grim Brothers hid the scene,” he said to Nate. “They carted away whatever was still here and covered the footprint of the cabin in downed timber. No wonder Sheriff Baird and his men never found this.”
“I was starting to wonder myself,” Nate said with a grin. “I was thinking maybe you made it all up.”
“Ha ha,” Joe said sourly.
Joe and Nate sat on opposite ends of a downed tree trunk at four in the morning, facing the slash pile that covered up the remains of the cabin, each with his own thoughts. Joe tried to eat some deer jerky he’d brought along, but every time he started to chew he thought of the faces of the three bodies hanging from the cross pole, and he lost his appetite. He could hear Nate slowly crunching gorp from a Ziploc bag on the other end of the log, and their horses munching mountain grass. There was no more reassuring sound, Joe thought, than horses eating grass. Their grum-grum chewing sound was restful.
If only everything else were, he thought.
That’s when he clearly heard a branch snap deep in the timber. The sound came from the north, from somewhere up a wooded slope.
There were distinctive sounds in the mountains, Joe knew. He was never a believer of trees’ falling silently in the forest if there was no one there to hear it, because he didn’t believe it was all about him, or any other human. Nature did what nature did. To philosophize that acts occurred in the wild in the presence of people and for their benefit was to acknowledge that humans were gods. Joe knew that not to be the case, and always thought anyone who bought that line of thought to be arrogant or new to the outdoors. In fact, from his experience, the forest could get downright loud. Trees, especially pines, had wide and shallow root systems. Hard winds knocked them over, where they’d fall with a crash and expose the upturned root pan. Dead branches blew off and fell down. One tree fell into another. Sometimes a bear or cat tried to climb one of the inferior high-altitude trees and the weight of the animal toppled it over. A herd of elk moving through dry and down timber sometimes sounded like a freight train that had jumped the tracks.
But there was a unique sound to a dry branch snapping under the foot of a man. It was a deep and muffled crack, like a silenced gunshot. It was a different sound from that of a twig breaking under the hard cloven hoof of an ungulate-an elk or moose-that produced a sharp snap like a pretzel stick being halved. At the sound, Joe rolled to his right and he sensed Nate roll to his left. Joe had no doubt Nate was on his knees with the.454 Casull drawn by now. For his own part, he had the shotgun ready. He slowly jacked a shell into the chamber to keep the metal-on-metal action as quiet as possible, and when the live shell was loaded into the chamber he fed another double-ought round into the receiver. He held his shotgun at the ready and felt his senses straining to determine if whoever had made the sound was closer, farther, or standing still.
Joe turned to his left to ask Nate if he could hear any more sounds, but Nate was gone. Joe squinted into the darkness, trying to find his friend.
When he couldn’t, Joe settled back on his haunches behind the downed log, his shotgun muzzle pointed vaguely uphill.
There was another muffled snap, this one closer than the first. He estimated the sound coming from fifty feet away.
He raised the shotgun and lay the doused Maglite along the forward stock. His heart pounded in his chest, and he thought if it beat any harder, everybody would be able to hear it.
As he stared into the shadowed darkness of the trees, he saw a single small red dot for a moment six feet off the ground. It blinked out. Then he saw it again. Joe was sure that he was close enough that if he fired he’d probably hit the source of the light. He remembered Nate’s admonition to shoot first, but he couldn’t simply pull the trigger. Not without knowing who it was.
The roaring of blood in his ears nearly drowned out the voice of the man who said, “Joe, is that you?”
Then, “For Christ sake, Joe, don’t fucking shoot me!”
Joe said, “Farkus?” And he heard the hollow sound of the heavy steel barrel of Nate’s.454 smack hard into the side of Farkus’s head, toppling him over.
“Don’t kill him, Nate,” Joe said, sighing and getting to his feet. “I know this guy. He’s the local who owned one of the burned-up trucks back in the campground. The one who didn’t seem to fit into all of this.”
“Night vision goggles,” Nate said with contempt, nudging Farkus with the toe of his boot, “and unless I’m wrong, he’s wearing body armor, too. I’m thinking this Farkus guy isn’t quite what you and Baird thought he was.”
Farkus moaned and reached up to put his hand over the new gash and bump on the side of his head.
Joe stepped over the downed log and fixed his Maglite on Farkus. The bright light through the lenses of the goggles must have burned his retinas as if he were looking into the sun itself, the way Farkus winced and pulled the goggles off. He threw the equipment away from him, saying, “It’s like you blinded me.”
“You didn’t shoot,” Joe said to Nate, ignoring Farkus.
“No reason to,” Nate said. �
�I watched him come down through the trees focused totally on you. He was watching you every second. I was behind a trunk and he never even turned my way.”
Farkus croaked, “Why’d you smack me?”
Nate squatted down next to Farkus. “Because we’ve nearly been killed twice tonight by people who more than likely had night vision gear. And because you were lurking around in the dark, you idiot. You’re lucky I didn’t blow your head off. Where did you get those goggles?”
Joe kept his flashlight on Farkus’s face, trying to read it. Farkus said, “I stole them. The vest, too.”
“Who’d you steal them from?” Nate asked.
“I took them off a dead guy,” Farkus said, sitting up. “He didn’t need them anymore. Being he was dead and all.”
Said Nate, “Who was the dead guy?”
“His name was Capellen. He was with the other guys from Michigan up here to find the Cline Brothers. Capellen was killed first, and I took his stuff.”
Joe said, “Start from the beginning, Dave. How did you get from the other side of the mountain to here?”
“They kidnapped me,” Farkus said. “The men from Michigan, I mean. I drove up on them at my elk camp, and they took me along with them because I know the mountains. They were tracking those damned brothers, but everything went bad for them. The brothers ambushed us and I was the only one left alive. Them brothers, they ain’t human, I tell you. They ain’t. You guys should turn around and get the hell out of here while you have the chance.”
Joe said, “What are they if they aren’t human?”
“Wendigos. Monsters. They can move through the trees like phantoms or something, and they can just appear wherever they want. I told you back at the trailhead, remember?”
“I remember,” Joe said.
“So how did you get away from them?” Nate asked with a smirk. “Did you hold a cross up and just walk away?”