by David Risen
Instead, he was just pissed.
No sign of any activity, and it looked like this was going to be a colossal waste of his time. He saw no sign of a mine entrance.
His left shoulder ached from the constant bouncing of the rifle strap against his neck muscle. His thighs screamed from the exertion of the day, and he simply wanted a warm and dry place to lie down and rest.
How’s it coming? said Amelia’s voice in his head.
I’m standing in the fuckin trees lookin at a giant goddamn mud hole, and no mine entrance. Where’s the douchebag?
He said he had to go scan his checkpoints for the day.
Rider frowned.
You’re alone?
I’m not interested in skulking about on this accursed mountain, and I wanted to stay close in case you have an issue.
Rider peered back through the trees at the still, ruddy water in the natural basin that the former locals once called Rusty Lake.
I don’t trust that motherfucker, he thought.
You saw his memories. Thoughts don’t lie.
Rider shook his head and looked down at his mud-coated hiking boots.
An angel or a demon might be able to fake it, he retorted.
I’ve encountered at least five of these so-called celestial entities over the course of my life, and none of them projected any thoughts or memories.
Rider shook his head. Keep your eyes open.
Amelia’s voice laughed in his head.
Less than a year ago, you insisted that I was paranoid, and now you’re insisting that I be more vigilant? I’m a big girl. I’ve got this.
Crying from the brush.
Rider’s head snapped up, and he peered in the direction of the sound.
Less than a hundred feet out and on the right side of the bank of Rusty Lake, he heard the gentle swishing of foliage rustling.
A woman stumbled out of the thicket with her arms thrust out before her as if she couldn’t see.
Her dark hair with blond highlights was short, and looked as though she styled it in keeping with the fashion of the 1920s – loose curls with her hair plastered to the sides of her face. But her hair was slightly unkempt as though she had slept on it recently.
She wore a red flannel nightgown with a square neck decorated with white lace. The bottom hem of the garment, which dangled at her ankles, was torn and coated with mud as if she had walked barefoot through the woods and managed to snag it on briars and brush.
Gray mud coated her bare feet as if she left her domicile in such a rush she forgot to put on her shoes.
Each step she took was uncertain, and clumsy as if she couldn’t see.
“Trevor? Owen? Glen?” she called. “Somebody help me,” she cried. “I’m so lost.”
She planted her left foot in deep mud just before the water and recoiled.
“Help me,” she cried.
Rider hunkered low.
His hands found his rifle, but then he thought better of it.
He crept between the trees and inched out into the clearing by Rusty Lake like a hunter advancing on prey.
The woman stumbled right and away from the muddy banks, and she ambled drunkenly away from him – directly toward the cliff.
Rider followed slowly behind her keeping a distance of at least twenty feet between them.
“Somebody please help me. I woke up and I can’t see!”
She sank to her feet crying.
Rider felt badly for her, but he was so afraid that his hands and knees quaked with fear.
After a moment, she rose to her feet again and started once more in a meandering line toward the cliff.
Rider watched her taking deep breaths – trying to steel his nerves.
She drunkenly stumbled closer to the cliff.
Two steps before the fatal drop, Rider made his decision.
He stood.
“Stop,” he said.
The woman froze. “Who’s here?” she cried.
“Take two steps backwards, and turn around to face my voice slowly.”
The woman took two stumbling steps backward and then turned. She looked left and right. Her eyes bulged, but by the aimlessness of her gaze, Rider knew she saw nothing.
“Who are you?” she said again – her voice quivering with fear.
Rider nodded. “My name is Blake Rider. You were about to walk off the edge of a cliff.”
“Where in the world am I?” she shuddered.
“Rusty Lake. Are you blind?”
She shook her head vehemently. “Not until I woke up this morning. I was trying to find my husband or my boys. They weren’t home. I got lost.”
Rider took a step toward her. “What can I do to help you?”
She clasped her hands together at her chest. “I’ve been walking forever. I just want to go home.”
Rider nodded. “Do you think you can tell me how to guide you there from Rusty Lake?”
She nodded.
Amelia stood from the wooden table and looked around the old cabin.
By all appearances, the cabin was old. It was a single room dwelling. At some point, someone added a kitchen sink and a crude and small panel of cabinets to the left wall. On the other side of the table, a single military style bunk bed unit stood against the wall with wooden, black footlockers on either side.
The gun cabinet that housed the rifle that Gage loaned Rider stood against the back wall. It was a relatively new cabinet, and it looked as though someone may have brought it in recently. A scratched-up red Coleman Cooler sat at the foot of the gun cabinet.
To the right of this cabinet, an old-fashioned wardrobe that looked a bit crude and homemade rose against the wall.
Amelia squinted at the wardrobe, crossed the cabin, and touched its lumpy, uneven surface. Then she opened the left door.
Someone taped a poster made by the National Park Service on the inside of the door:
National Park Service
Hiker’s Safety Shelter:
This shelter is intended for use by hikers on the trails in the case of medical emergency, sudden inclement weather, and any situation in which the need arises to contact the nearest Ranger Station.
Included in this cabinet:
A first aid kit
Bottled water
Blankets
Canned food
Maps of The Great Smoky Mountain National Park
Flair guns.
In the case of emergency, a red hotline phone to the nearest ranger station is located behind the cabin in the lean-to where you’ll find a gasoline generator.
Amelia frowned and re-read the document.
Now she was concerned.
She opened the footlocker at the foot of the bunk that Gaged called his.
No personal items.
An unopened plastic bag containing a wool blanket.
Unopened bag containing a pillow.
Sample box of toiletries.
What she didn’t find was equipment that a person would need to track wildlife. No laptop. No tranquilizer darts. No tags. No satellite phone charger.
The cabin wasn’t the dwelling of someone who worked for the National Park Service at all, but a shelter.
Who the hell was Gage Kinder?
Abel Teal struggled against his restraints.
Ten yards away, the Park Ranger truck, a white crew cab F 250 with a green stripe down the side announcing PARK RANGER in white letters, still sat with the driver’s side door open.
Abel’s friend and partner, John Dawson, lay motionless and cold on the broken pavement that was once the road to the town of Skitts Mountain, his motionless, gray intestines lying on the ground to his left protruding from the deep, jagged chasm the tall and lanky blond man ripped in it this morning.
When they arrived to check out the tip on the black, Nissan Pathfinder parked outside the gate along the old access road, they found a large, and strange device in the middle of the road. It was shaped like a coin, and it opened in the center like a lock
et.
Inside, they found what appeared to be an occult symbol etched into the metal surface and traced in inlaid gold. Metal shackles at both ankles and both wrists held a naked and writhing gangly blond man inside.
Abel bolted from the truck and approached him.
The man peered at him with wide, terrified eyes. “THEY WERE GOING TO KILL ME,” he screamed.
“Which way did they go?” Abel demanded.
The blond man nodded toward the woods off to his right.
Abel pulled his gun and barreled off into the woods after them leaving John to free the victim.
With the adrenaline pumping and his pistol drawn, he must have plunged at least 500 feet into the deep slope of the mountain woods, but he found no sign of anything other than a few black bears disturbed the foliage.
Better judgement prevailed, and he started back for the truck to call for help.
As Abel approached the road, he saw John release the shackles that bound the man to the vault-like contraption. The naked blond man fell to the broken chunks of pavement and gaped down at the grown-up weeds between the chunks of ruined asphalt.
“I’ll get a blanket,” John said turning back for the truck.
But once John’s back was turned, the blond man looked up. Something about the feral look in his eyes stopped Abel.
The nude blond man rose to his feet and casually ambled toward him.
The blond man touched John’s left shoulder.
John spun around placing his hand on his pistol
The blond man grasped the skin of his stomach on both sides as if he were about to rip his shirt open and yanked.
But it wasn’t just his shirt.
Blood spurted from John’s stomach. His twitching intestines fell to the ground.
The look on his face asked the blond man why he would do such a thing to the man who just freed him.
The Blond man smiled knowingly and wagged his bloody left index finger at John, and then he gently took John’s pistol from the holster with his other hand.
John fell to the broken ruins of the old road, his arms and legs twitching and writhing – pushing himself away from his attacker little like a kid escaping a brutal spanking.
The blond man cocked his head and stared at the writhing ruins of John Dawson with a wistful smile on his face.
Then he approached him, and squatted caressing John’s iron gray handlebar mustache.
“Shh,” he said. “We’ll be done in a minute.”
He pushed John’s bristly jaw up with his bloody hand.
And then he dropped his head toward John’s neck as if he were going to kiss him and clamped down on his Adam’s apple with his perfect ivory teeth.
John squealed like a stabbed pig.
The blond man jerked his head backward taking a chunk of John’s throat with him.
The scream drowned as blood rushed into his larynx. All that was left was an awful gurgling sound.
Abel snapped out of it, drew his pistol again, and charged the blond man.
The beast looked up as he sprang out onto the ruined road, and rose lazily as Abel assumed a firing stance.
Before Abel could squeeze the trigger, the blond man waved his hand.
Abel flew sidelong and spinning from his feet, and his back slammed into the hard, metal surface of the vault-like contraption.
The shackles snapped around his wrists and ankles, and Abel’s pistol clattered to the ground uselessly. The blond man squared himself before him – his eyes smiling like a demon’s.
But then, he frowned suddenly and looked back over his shoulder.
After looking for a moment, he turned back to face Abel with a sober expression.
“I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to cut this short. I’m having guests this afternoon. We’ll talk later.”
And just like that, he turned and sauntered into the woods. He picked up a blue backpack from behind one of the trees, unzipped it, and pulled out a pack of baby wipes. He used them to wipe John’s blood from his face and hands, and then he reached back in the pack and took out a bundle of neatly folded clothes from within.
He dressed on the side of the road in jeans, a vertical blue pinstriped white shirt, and a brown leather bomber’s jacket. Then he ambled over to John’s body, which had stopped moving, and picked his glasses off his face.
He removed a rifle from the cab of the truck, and then he disappeared into the fog behind the truck.
Abel had no idea how long he had been here, but judging by what little he could see of the sun through the dense fog, it was sometime after two.
He heard the CB in the truck key in a few times, but he couldn’t understand what the speaker was saying. The satellite phone in the truck rang about a half dozen times.
He hoped that the Ranger station would send someone out before the beast returned.
But all his hopes were dashed as soon as the blond man – still wearing John’s glasses and the clothes that he took from the backpack stepped out of the trees. His mannerisms were different now. He seemed a bit contrite.
“Hello, Abel,” he said. “My little brother had a son by the same name. He was an effeminate, wispy thing, but he was family.”
“Don’t kill me,” Abel begged. The sound of his voice sounded weak and childish. He instantly hated himself for it.
The blond man gave him a sad look. “Maybe if the situation were different.”
“I’ll leave and never come back. I won’t tell anyone,” Abel said, with his voice cracking.
The blond man made a wry face and stuffed his hands in his pockets.
“I wish that were true. You and I both know that you’d make a B-line back to the nearest Ranger station and call in the cavalry. I have a rather important event taking place on this mountain at present, and I generally don’t like to call that much attention to myself.”
“Why’d you fucking kill him?”
The blond man looked down at the ruined Park Ranger by the driver’s side door of the truck and sighed.
“That was incidental. I don’t like to kill people. I would much rather see a man live in suffering than die, but if I’d allowed him to continue, I wouldn’t have made it to my meeting.”
“Who the fuck are you?” Abel cried.
The blond man gave him a sad look. “I would tell you, but I’m afraid you wouldn’t like me very much.”
Abel shuddered.
The blond man offered him a blanched smile. “There’s a whole lot of unfair bullshit out there about me.”
“You’re a sick, crazy sombitch.”
The man inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly, and then he looked at him.
“I’m really not.”
Before he could say another word, the satellite phone in the truck rang. The blond man nodded and started briskly toward the truck. “Hang on a minute, this call is for me.”
He reached inside the truck, fished the satellite phone out of the console, and pressed send. Then he cleared his throat, and pressed the handset to his ear.
“This’s Dawson,” he said in John’s throaty, cigarette roughened voice.
Abel’s mouth fell open.
“Naw, we’re fine. We was up in th’ woods trackin a poacher. I just came back to th’ truck, because I realized I didn’t have th’ phone. We’ll probably be up here a while.”
Abel couldn’t believe his ears.
The Beast winked at him from the truck.
“Yeah, we will,” he said.
The Beast raised his left hand and made a chattering mouth motion.
“Yessir.”
He pressed end and stuffed the phone in the pocket of his bomber jacket, and pointed his eyes back at Abel.
“Now, where were we?”
He stepped over John’s body and stopped again.
“Oh, yeah. I’m crazy.”
The man shook his head. “No, I’m not, and this time, I’m here to do the right thing, for once.”
He took another step towa
rd him.”
Abel pressed his back hard against the metal surface of the vault.
“I’ve got kids and a wife. Please, just let me go.”
The Beast nodded and paced right.
Abel stared back at the lunatic with wide eyes.
The Beast gave him a knowing look.
“Death has no real victory. And when you are all older, you’ll realize that dying isn’t scary at all, but the reward for a task well done – like a nice, soft bed at the end of a twelve-hour day at work.”
“Please?” Abel pleaded.
The Beast sighed, and gave him a sad look.
“When we’re all children, we don’t like to go to sleep. It’s almost like we’re afraid of it, but as you get older and nothing bad happens, one begins to crave sleep.”
“No,” Abel cried.
His aggressor shook his head.
“Listen, I had to put your friend down because something very important is happening here on this mountain, and your friend would have mucked it up. The same is true of you.”
“But what about my kids and my wife?”
The lunatic smiled. “Your wife is a smart woman. She’ll be fine. As for your children, they’re young and agile. It would be better for them to lose you now as opposed to when they’re middle-aged, and they’ve grown attached.”
He shook his head. “I’ll leave here and never come back. I swear!”
He stretched his hand forth and caressed Abel’s cheek.
“I’ll make a small concession. I’ll see to it that you don’t go very quickly which will allow you time to come to terms.”
He turned and eyed the woods to the right and waved his right hand through the air.
The top of a young tree snapped off cleanly leaving a sharp-tipped trunk no taller than ten feet from the ground.
The Beast eyed it, and then he turned back for the truck. When he reached it, he lay flat on the broken road and pushed himself under the nose. He milled about beneath the truck for a moment, and then he rose with a handful of motor oil.
He flicked his right hand over the handful of oil, and the oil flew across the road and perfectly coated the sharp tip of the trunk.
Then he smiled – almost compassionately – and looked back at Abel.