The Calm Before The Swarm

by Michael McBride

  An unusual tree to the left of the path caught his attention. The trunk of the pine had grown in a strange corkscrew fashion, almost as though it had been planted by some omnipotent hand in a twisting motion. He fingered the pale green needles, which hung limply from branches that stood at obscene angles from the bizarre trunk.

  "Can we take a quick break so I can get my coat out of my backpack?" Breck asked.

  Les didn't reply. He was focused on an aspen tree several paces ahead. It too had an unusual spiral trunk. What could have caused them to grow in such a manner? He was just about to run his palm across its bark, which looked like it would crumble with the slightest touch, when he noticed the large mound of stones at the edge of the clearing ahead.

  "We're here," he said.

  He slipped out of his backpack and removed his digital camera.

  "It's about time," Lane said. "I was starting to think we might have walked right past..."

  Les's student's words were blown away by the wind as he walked past the first cairn and began snapping pictures. The clearing was roughly thirty yards in diameter. More corkscrewed trees grew at random intervals. They weren't packed together as tightly as in the surrounding forest, but just close enough together to partially hide the constructs on the ground from the air. There were more mounds of stones in a circular pattern around the periphery of the clearing, all piled nearly five feet tall. He paused and performed a quick count. There were twenty-seven of them, plus a conspicuous gap where there was room for one more. Short walls of stacked rocks, perhaps a foot tall, led from each cairn to the center of the ring like the spokes of a wagon wheel. The earth between them was lumpy and uneven. Random tufts of buffalo grass grew where the sun managed to reach the dirt, which was otherwise barren, save a scattering of pine needles.

  "Why don't you guys start setting up the magnetometer," he called back over his shoulder as he stepped over the shin-high stack of stones that had been laid to form a complete circle just inside the twenty-seven cairns, and approached the heart of the creation.

  At the point where the spokes met, more twisted trees surrounded a central cairn, which was wider and taller than the others. As he neared, Les could tell that it wasn't a solid mound at all, but a ring.

  The formation of stones was a Type 6 Medicine Wheel like the one at Bighorn in the northern portion of the state, only on a much grander scale. Medicine wheels had been found throughout the Rocky Mountains from Wyoming all the way north into Alberta, Canada. They predated the modern Indian tribes of the area, which still used them for ceremonial rituals to this day. No one was quite certain who originally built them or for what purpose, only that they were considered sacred sites by the remaining Native American cultures, all of which had various myths to explain their creation. If this was a genuine medicine wheel, then it would be the southernmost discovered, and the most elaborate by far.

  The emailed photographs had given him no reason to question its authenticity, however, now that he saw it in person, he was riddled with doubt. The stone formations were too well maintained. Not a single rock was out of place, nor had windblown dirt accumulated against the cairns to support an overgrowth of wild grasses. No lichen covered the stones, which, upon closer inspection, appeared to be granite. And the pictures had been taken in such a manner as to exclude the odd trunks.

  Here he was, standing in the middle of what could prove to be the anthropological discovery of a lifetime, and he suddenly wished he'd never found this place. It was an irrational feeling, he knew, but there was just something...wrong with the scene around him.

  He reached the center of the clearing and used the coiled trunk of a pine to propel himself up to the top of the ring of stones. The ground inside was recessed, the inner stones staggered in such a way as to create a series of steps. And at the bottom, in the dirt, saved from the wind, was a jumble of scuff marks preserved by time. The aura of coldness seemed to radiate from within it.

  "Dr. Grant," Jeremy called from the tree line. "We need a little help setting up this machine."

  "You're just trying to force that piece where it doesn't belong," Breck said.

  "Then you do it, Little Miss Know-It-All."

  Les sighed and climbed back down from what he had unconsciously begun to think of as a well, and headed back to join the group. For whatever reason, he dreaded assembling the magnetometer.

  He suddenly feared what they would find.

  II

  Evergreen, Colorado

  Preston sat in his forest-green Jeep Cherokee, staring across the street toward the dark house. He couldn't bring himself to go in there. Not today. But he couldn't force himself to leave yet either. Once upon a time, it had been his home, a place filled with love and laughter. Now it was a rotting husk, a shadow of its former self. The white paint had begun to peel where it met the trim, and there were gaps in the roof where shingles had blown away. The hedges in the yard had grown wild and unkempt, the lawn feral.

  His life had ended in that house. The world had collapsed in upon itself and left him with nothing but pain.

  And it had been all his fault.

  His child, the light of his life, had been stolen from him because of his involvement in a case, and he still didn't know why. Over the last six years, he had begun to piece together a theory. Unfortunately, that's all it was. A theory. Grasping at straws was what his superiors had called it before his termination. Over the past year, nearly eight hundred thousand children were reported missing. While most were runaways, more than a third of them were abducted by family members or close friends. Many of these children resurfaced over the coming weeks, while still others never did. It was the smallest segment, the children who vanished at the apparent hands of strangers, that was the focus of his attention. At least privately. Professionally, he performed his job better than he ever had. After Savannah's abduction, he had thrown himself into it with reckless abandon, and at no small personal sacrifice. On a subconscious level, he supposed he hoped that by helping to return the missing children to their frightened parents that the universe might see fit to return his to him. But there was more to it than that. It was a personal quest, an obsession, and it had finally led him to a pattern.

  Factoring out all of the kidnappings for ransom, the abductions by estranged parents or family friends, and the crimes of opportunity, where the child was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, left Preston with a much smaller field to investigate. By narrowing his scope further to encompass only missing children from stable, two-parent, at least superficially loving homes, he winnowed the cases in his jurisdiction down to a handful each year. And of those, if he set the age range at Savannah's at the time of her disappearance, plus-or-minus three years, he was left with four cases annually over the past six and a half years. Not an average of four. Not three one year and five the next. Exactly four. And they were spread out by season. One child each year in the spring, another in the summer, a third in the fall, and a fourth in the winter. And all within two weeks of the four most important dates on the celestial calendar---the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, and the summer and winter solstices.

  The kidnappings were the work of a single individual: The man who had stolen his daughter from him. The same man who had sent the photographs of him at the Downey house, who had been within fifty yards of him at a point in time when if Preston had known, he could have prevented the abduction of his cherished daughter, and the twenty-three children who came after her, with a single bullet.

  Why could no one else see it? Why didn't they believe him?

  Because he knew all too well that the parents of missing children would say or do anything if there was a chance of learning the fate of their son or daughter, even if it meant formulating a theory from a set of points that on paper appeared completely random, like forming constellations from the stars in the night sky.

  Preston focused again on the house, but still couldn't bring himself to press the button on the garage door opener and pull the id
ling Cherokee inside. There was only solitude waiting for him within those walls, and the heartbreaking memories he was forced to endure with every breath he took. The house was a constant reminder of the greatest mistake of his life, but more than that, it was a beacon, the only location on the planet that Savannah had ever called her own. He still held out hope that wherever she was, one of these days she would simply appear from nowhere and return to her home. To him. It was the reason he would never allow himself to sell it. The one wish he allowed himself to pray would come true.

  It was all he had.

  He slid the gearshift into drive and headed south, pretending he didn't know exactly where he was going. Ten minutes later he was on the other side of town, parked in front of a Tudor-style two-story, upon which the forest encroached to the point of threatening to swallow it whole. Light shined through the blinds covering the windows. With a deep breath, he climbed out of the car and approached the porch.

  The house positively radiated warmth, reminding him of what should have been. He pressed the doorbell and backed away from the door.

  Shuffling sounds from the other side of the door, then a muffled voice.

  "Just a second."

  The door opened inward. A woman stood in the entryway, cradling a swaddled baby in the crook of her left arm. She brushed a strand of blonde bangs out of her eyes with the back of her right hand, which held a bottle still dripping from recently being heated in boiling water.

  "Hi, Jessie," he said.

  She still had the most amazing eyes he'd ever seen.

  "Philip," she whispered. "You shouldn't be here."

  "He's beautiful, Jess." He nodded to the baby. "How old is he by now?"

  "Phil..."

  They stood in an awkward silence for several long moments.

  "You remember what today is?" Preston finally asked.

  "Of course," she whispered. "Do you honestly think I could ever forget?"

  He shook his head and looked across the lawn toward the forest.

  "What happened to us, Jess?"

  "I'm not getting into this with you again."

  "Does he at least treat you well?"

  "Who? Richard?" Anger flashed in her eyes. "He's emotionally stable, physically available, and isn't hell-bent on his own systematic destruction. And I don't cringe when he touches me. What more could a girl want?"

  "But does he make you happy?"

  She sighed. "Of course, Phil. I wouldn't have married him if he didn't." The baby started to cry, and quickly received the bottle. Jessie shuffled softly from one foot to the other in a practiced motion Preston remembered well. Only it had been with a different child, in a different lifetime entirely. "Why are you really here?"

  "I needed to know that you were okay." He glanced back at her and offered a weak smile before looking away again. It was still impossible to think of her as anything other than the woman he had loved for the better part of his life, since the first time he had laid eyes on her. It hurt deep down to think of her as anything other than his wife. "That's all."

  He had to turn away so she wouldn't see the shimmer of tears in his eyes, and used the momentum to spur his feet back toward his car.

  "Phil."

  He paused, blinked back the tears, and turned to face her again. Even with the recent addition of the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes, she was still the most stunning woman he had ever seen. And the baby seemed to make her glow. He couldn't bring himself to ask her his name.

  "Are you all right?" she asked.

  He shook his head, releasing streams of tears down his cheeks. No, he would never be all right ever again.

  "Do you still blame me, Jessie?"

  "You invited the danger into our home, whether intentionally or not," she whispered. "I will always blame you."

  "So will I," he said, and struck off toward his car again. "I hope you have a good life, Jess. You deserve to be happy."

  He heard her start to softly cry as she closed the door.

  "Don't ever let him out of your sight," Preston said. "Ever."

  His heart broke once more as he walked away from the love of his life.

  III

  22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

  Les stood beside one of the cairns in the outer ring and watched his students perform their tasks as they had been taught. Jeremy guided the magnetometer in straight lines between the short walls that formed the spokes of the wagon wheel design. He wore the sensing device's harness over his shoulders and held the receptor, which looked like an industrial vacuum cleaner, a foot above the ground. It interpreted the composition of the ground based on its magnetic content, and forwarded its readings into a program on Les's laptop that created a three-dimensional map of the earth to roughly ten meters in depth. Every type of rock had varying content of ferrous material and left a different magnetic signature, as did extinguished campfires, the foundations of prehistoric ruins, and various artifacts lost through the ages. Often, one ancient site was built upon another when a more modern culture eclipsed its forebear, like the Acropolis in Athens rose from the rubble of a Mycenaean megaron. If there was an older structure beneath this one, they would be able to find and map it without so much as brushing away the topsoil, but of greater importance were the relics left behind by the Native Americans who had meticulously crafted this ornate design. Hopefully, these buried clues would provide some indication of the function of the medicine wheel, the identity of its creators, and the reason it had been erected in the first place.

  The magnetometer would also serve a secondary function he had chosen not to vocalize. Primitive societies often built cairns to mark the burial mounds of individuals of significance. If there were indeed corpses interred under their feet, then the magnetometer would reconstruct their unmistakable signals as well in hazy shades of gray. Fortunately, they had yet to isolate any remains. Based on the condition of the stones and the level of preservation, he feared any bodies they discovered might not be as ancient as he might prefer.

  So far, the only signals had come from rocks under the soil, in no apparent pattern and of varying mineral content, save one square object roughly a foot down, midway between where he stood now and the central ring of stones. Breck and Lane had cordoned off the square-yard above it with string and long metal tent pegs, and had begun to excavate in centimeter levels. They were only six inches down, and had yet to sift through anything more exciting than the coarse dirt.

  "I still don't think this thing is working right," Jeremy said. "I can't seem to get rid of that strange, streaky feedback a couple yards down."

  "I told you that you were putting it together wrong," Breck said.

  "You could always switch with me and lug this thing around, princess."

  Les rolled his eyes and tuned them out. Their bickering was grating on his nerves. Besides, he needed to try to sort out his thoughts, to figure out exactly what was so wrong with this site.

  "There's another one over here!" Jeremy called. "Same size, same shape, and same location within this section."

  "Mark it and try the next section over," Les said. Two could be a coincidence. Three was a pattern. "Let me know immediately if it's there."

  What was roughly five inches square, half an inch thick, and crafted from metal? He would know soon enough, he supposed, but the objects made him nervous. The Bighorn Medicine Wheel predated the development of Native American metallurgical skills. If what they uncovered was manmade, then this site wasn't nearly as old as it had been designed to appear.

  The wind shifted, bringing with it a scent that crinkled his nose. It smelled like something had crawled off into the forest to die. He stepped around the cairn and walked into the wind, but the smell dissipated. A cursory inspection of the forest's edge didn't reveal the carcass he had expected to find. Perhaps the detritus had already accumulated over it. The breeze waned, and he returned to his post, where he resumed his supervisory duties.

  "Right here," Jeremy said. "Just like the o
ther two. What do you want me to do?"

  "For now, just mark it and keep going with the magnetometer. I want to map as much of the site as we can before sundown."

  "I could just dig it up really quickly."

  "That's not how it works and you know it."

  Les sighed. The impatience of youth.

  "Can't blame a guy for trying," Jeremy said with a shrug, and went back to work.

  Another gust of wind brought the stench back to Les. The breeze made a whistling sound as it passed through the stacked stones of the cairn.

  He crept closer and the smell intensified. The source of the vile reek was definitely somewhere under the cairn. He leaned right up against it and tried to peer through the tiny gaps between the stones. At first, he saw only shadows, so he crouched and inspected the lower portion, nearer the ground. He gagged and covered his mouth and nose with his dirty hand.

  There was a dark recess behind the stacked rocks. He could barely discern a smooth section of something the color of rust. A rounded segment of bone through which thin sutures coursed. Just the barest glimpse and he knew exactly what was entombed within those stones.

  "We've reached the artifact," Breck called. "What do you want us to do?"

  Les couldn't find the voice to answer. He craned his neck to see through another gap below the last. An eye socket in profile, the sharp stub of the nasal bones, crusted with a coating of dirt and blood.

  A spider scurried over the cheekbone and disappeared into a small fissure in the ridged maxilla above a row of tiny teeth.

  There was no doubt it was human. And it definitely wasn't thousands of years old.

  His legs gave out and deposited him on his rear end in the dirt. He scanned the forest, expecting to find whoever had done this watching him from the shadows.

  "Dr. Grant? What you want us to do with this?"

  He whirled in her direction. These kids were his responsibility. He needed to get them out of here this very second.