Black Mountain (29 page)

Matt burst out laughing, feeling his anxiety lift a little, and patted Charles on the shoulder. ‘See, he likes your idea as well.’

Charles pulled a face before resting the long-barrelled dart gun on the seat beside him. ‘Very funny, Chief. At least I came prepared. What did you bring – some more magic spells and woofle-dust?’

‘Yes, Mr Schroder. I brought the dust of my ancestors, magic bones from Geronimo, and a spirit amulet made from the hair of a wild buffalo.’

Matt sat forward. ‘You’re shitting me. Really?’

‘No, you pair of assholes, I brought a .45 Colt Anaconda.’ Thomas looked into Charles’s face. ‘I do not intend to study this creature, Mr Schroder. It is the slayer of my ancestors. I intend to put a hole in it the size of a dinner plate.’

Sarah stopped the car. ‘That’s as far as we can go.’ She turned and raised her eyebrows. ‘Okay, I guess that’s the team-bonding session out the way. Anyone for a nice freezing hike?’

*

The three men returned to their vehicle. They had stuffed the veterinarian’s body into one of the cages at the rear of the surgery. It would be hours before anyone found his beaten and tortured remains, and by then they would be out of the city and closing in on their target.

The man in the back seat removed his sunglasses and cap and examined his ulcerated hands in the semi-light that came in through the tinted windows. ‘It hurts.’

‘Graham will fix us,’ said his colleague in the front passenger seat. ‘Put your gloves on, we need to hurry.’

The man in the back nodded and slowly pulled his gloves back on over the oozing flesh.

*

Casey Franks narrowed her eyes as the enormous chopper settled onto its three sets of double tyres. Beside her, Officer Markenson pulled his hood up to protect his ears from the biting down-draught.

‘Holy shit, do you think you could have gotten anything bigger?’ he said disagreeably, folding his arms against the swirling icy air.

The single pilot gave Hammerson a thumbs-up; the HAWC leader nodded in return.

Franks felt a surge of pride as the behemoth settled into the cold earth. At nearly 100 feet in length, the CH-53 Stallion had been one of the US army’s most formidable transport machines when in service. Despite the fact that Hammerson had raised it up from one of the aeronautical boneyards where newly retired equipment went to be deconstructed and recycled, the chopper still bristled with rocket tubes, machine-gun pivots and sensory equipment, and the tilted rear fin gave it a modern appearance.

She and Hammerson trotted to the open door, climbed in and waited just inside the frame. Logan took this as a sign to load his own officers and pointed to the door, his words lost in the swirling wind. His men ran towards the chopper in a hunched jog, even though the still spinning propeller was at least fifteen feet over their heads.

Franks dropped her duffel bag and flexed her hands to get the circulation going. Inside, it was warmer, but only just. Most of the equipment had been removed from the cavernous interior, leaving a row of attached metal seats down each side of the hold, a few small steel cabinets and netting on the walls, and two powerful-looking winches at either side door.

Hammerson motioned for Chief Logan to join him in the cockpit. Franks watched with amusement as Markenson and his fellow officers took seats along the opposite side of the craft from her. She doubted Logan’s men were keen on opening up the social lines anytime soon. Suited her; she wasn’t here to make friends.

As Hammerson passed her, he said briefly, ‘Suit up.’

She nodded and lifted the duffel bag to the metal seat and unzipped it. She caught Markenson looking at her and paused to smile at him and slightly purse her lips. The moustachioed officer mouthed,
Fuck off
, and stuck his hands in his pockets to keep warm, using his legs to hold his rifle.

Franks kept up her smile – she loved these hard cases. She turned to face him and started to remove her clothing. In no time she was down to her underwear. Most of the men acted like she was invisible, but Markenson shook his head and made a sour face at one of his fellow officers.

She caught one of the men sniggering and leering at her, and turned square on to him, her hands on her hips, displaying her muscled body, its skin crisscrossed and dotted with scars and burns and the swirls of multicoloured tattoos, her flattened breasts that were more like a weightlifter’s pectorals, the thick white bush crowding out of her underwear. She thrust her tongue out in an aggressively lewd gesture and the man quickly dropped his head to examine something on the floor.

Tiring of the game, she turned to pull her cold-terrain suit from the bag. The dark, close-fitting overalls looked like a combination of wetsuit and insulated body armour, with inch-thick flat ribbing around the torso, thighs and upper arms. The ribbing allowed for maximum movement, while its overlapping structure provided protection. The suits had built-in thermal controls and were fully woven through with a Kevlar fibre; they’d keep the wearer warm in temperatures down to twenty below and also stop a high-calibre slug.

Franks pulled on gloves with similar impact-resistant material over the back of the hand and knuckles. Then, machine-like, she slid two guns into holsters built into the low hips of her suit. She sheathed a long-bladed Ka-Bar into a holster on one thigh, and put a short-bladed Ka-Bar into a holster on the other. Finally, she inserted numerous electronics into concealed pouches and pockets.

She felt good, the suit’s warmth immediately infusing her muscles with mobility. She rolled her wounded shoulder, and threw a few air punches, her hands up in a fighter’s stance. She spun quickly and punched a metal cabinet, her fist making a deep dent in the steel.

She smiled and nodded to herself. ‘Oh yeah.’ Then winked at Markenson. ‘Let’s go do some damage.’

*

Jack Hammerson tapped the pilot on the shoulder and held up three fingers:
Three minutes until take-off.
The pilot nodded and began his pre-take-off check.

The blocky HAWC commander sat down, placed some earphones over his head, and motioned Logan to the seat next to him. The police chief strapped himself in and put on his own phones.

Hammerson’s voice came through the headset. ‘We’re in your hands, Chief. Where to?’

Logan pulled from his pocket a small map that had been folded open to show a topographic contour chart of greater Asheville. He placed the map on Hammerson’s leg and pointed. ‘Far as we can tell, everything seemed to start here.’ He jabbed his finger at the centre of a series of tight green circles that indicated a high, steep mountainous area. ‘The Black Dome. It’s where the Jordan couple were initially attacked. If we work through our incident timeline, everything seems to radiate out from that event.’

Hammerson read some of the numbers on the map, then looked out the window. ‘The Dome peak is over 6000 feet, and that cloud cover looks down to about 5000. We’re gonna have to do some climbing if we need to get to the top.’

Logan pointed at the map’s grid lines. ‘Too steep to set down up there. I’m guessing we’ll need to jump?’

Hammerson grinned and nodded.

Logan grinned back. ‘Pick-up?’

Hammerson shook his head. ‘Chopper’s heading back. We’ll be walking home, big fella.’

Logan laughed, then looked around the large military machine, and back at Hammerson’s hand where it rested on the map. The knuckles were raised and callused, the fingers large and blunt.

‘You’re not really city Feds, are you?’ he asked.

Hammerson seemed to think over his answer for a few moments, then smiled and shook his head.

‘Military?’

Hammerson shrugged.

‘What’s going on? Why are you really here?’

Hammerson handed back the map and his face became serious. ‘To capture a beast . . . before too many people get hurt.’

TWENTY-SEVEN

Alex switched off the engine and sat staring at the small house. He’d seen it before – the bed of flowers bordering the front deck, the swing seat on the porch with a pillow at one end, the worn blanket on the boards in front of it that had once held a large dog. Everything was still there and he remembered it all.

He got out of the car and walked trance-like towards the front door, where he stopped to look back at the slopes, now bathed in midmorning sunlight. There was a large rock up on the hill; he had lain there looking down at this very spot . . .
When? Months ago
. . .
years?

He ripped away the police tape at the door and grabbed the handle, pushing hard until he heard the crunch of old wood separating as the metal tongue of the locking mechanism tore through it. The door swung open and he stood for a few seconds inhaling the scents of the house, each one familiar – old smoke and cold ash from the fireplace, his mother’s perfume and soap, biscuits. He stepped inside, then half-turned to look at Adira, who was still on the front deck, carefully scanning the slopes surrounding the house. He ignored her and went into the living room.

The pictures on the mantelpiece drew him like powerful magnets. He lifted two. The first was a picture of himself, much younger, with hair falling over his forehead and smiling as if every day held nothing but sunshine. The other was an older photo of a man, shirt off and strongly muscled. He was about the age Alex was now, and it could have been him except the man’s features were slightly different. He stared hard at the image, willing the memories to come faster.

There was momentary pain and then they came flooding – he saw a very young boy, himself, and the man pushing him on a swing. He loosened his grip on the chains for a second and flew to the ground, landing face first in the dirt. The man lifted him up and brushed him off. ‘You’re not hurt, you’re strong,’ he said. Alex remembered that he hadn’t cried, that he’d felt proud at managing to hold in the hurt. The man was his father . . . Jim Hunter. What happened to him?

Alex lifted a third picture from the mantelpiece – his father again, but here he was standing with another young man. Alex recognised the square jaw and angular-shaped head, even though the man he’d recently seen was much older. He and his father had their arms around each other’s shoulders, friends. Alex shook his head.
Always there in the background – who are you?
He stared hard at the face.
Next time we meet, you’ll tell me
, he thought.

He heard Adira moving from room to room. Judging by the short time she spent in each of them, she was satisfying her security concerns rather than exploring. He replaced the pictures and went quickly around the room, pulling open drawers and cabinet doors. A small cardboard box tingled beneath his fingers, demanding his attention. He carefully opened the lid: it held papers – Kathleen and Jim’s marriage certificate, his own birth certificate, some school reports, and a death notice from the American government. Alex read it slowly; the language was bureaucratic and cautious, giving little information other than the fact that Lieutenant Jim Hunter had served his country honourably and had been killed in action. No remains were returned for burial.

His mother’s voice came to him then, her tone sad:
His job was to protect us, all of us. There was
. . .
an accident, Alex. He was a hero. Be proud of him
. . .
remember him.

As he touched the last piece of paper in the box, his head began to swim and the air in the room seemed to distort and blur. It was if his own body was warning him, readying him for the shock. It was another death notification, almost a duplicate of the one he’d just read, except this one was written nearly thirty years later and showed his own name. Alex Hunter, killed in action; again, no body retrieved.

Kathleen Hunter would have been devastated; first her husband killed in action, and then her only son. Except he wasn’t dead. Why had the US military lied to her; caused her so much pain?

He let the box fall and looked around the familiar room. ‘What happened to me? Why did they make me a ghost? Now I don’t exist.’ He looked across at the photos. ‘We’re all gone, all dead now.’

Adira appeared beside him and tried to take his arm. ‘Alex, are you okay?’

He pushed past her and went out into the yard. He wanted to yell, to explode.

There was a pile of logs, freshly cut, and more tape wound around the outside of a small outbuilding. The ground was trampled there, and he was drawn to it. As he approached, a smell rose up around him, lifted by the morning’s warmth – rank, acrid and bestial. It was the same stench he’d smelled on the dog’s fur in the animal hospital.

His head pounded, and he reached down to grab some of the dirt and rub it between his fingers.
It
had been here. The ground had been raked clean, probably by the police forensics clean-up crew, but he could still sense the creature’s presence.

He moved quickly to the edge of the tree line, and entered a few paces. He turned back to look at the small cottage. The beast had stood here, watching the house – watching
her
. He looked up at the trunk of the nearest large tree; about twelve feet up, a section of bark had been torn away. Alex visualised the creature hanging onto the tree in the dark, watching his mother inside the house, its blood lust building, its fingers closing on the outer layer of wood and ripping it free.

The impressions started to become more solid. Alex moved to the centre of the trampled clearing. He saw Adira watching him from the back deck, but she kept her distance. To her, he was undoubtedly seeming more and more manic. He crouched down and closed his eyes. The impressions became images . . . and then he saw his mother, saw her lifting her arms to protect her head, terrified of the thing that loomed over her. It attacked, lifted her body only to throw it to the ground, smashing her like a bundle of twigs. It lifted her rag-like body again to sniff it, then carried her away under its arm. She might have still been alive, but it was unlikely . . .

The images faded and Alex stood up, his teeth gritted, a boiling anger exploding up from his belly. He lifted his head and roared. He had been kept from her; they had told her he was dead and then hidden him away. He doubled over as if in extreme pain.
If I’d been here, she might still be alive.