Grimm: The Chopping Block
Read Grimm: The Chopping Block Online
Authors: John Passarella
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Also Available from Titan Books
Grimm: The Icy Touch
by John Shirley
Grimm: The Chopping Block
Print edition ISBN: 9781781166567
E-book edition ISBN: 9781781166574
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP
First edition: February 2014
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Copyright © 2014 by Universal City Studios Productions LLLP
Grimm
is a trademark and copyright of Universal Network Television LLC.
Licensed by NBC Universal Television Consumer Products Group 2014.
All Rights Reserved.
Cover images © Universal Network Television LLC.
Additional cover images © Dreamstime
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, not be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
To my wife, Andrea, for understanding my need to dive down the rabbit hole of odd hours, frequent distractions and occasional forgetfulness.
This novel takes place between “The Waking Dead” and “Goodnight, Sweet Grimm.”
“He called them to the grand feast and gathered them in celebration, to remember and enjoy the finer things.”
Brian Mathis wondered if he’d made a mistake bringing Tyler, his twelve-year-old son, to Claremont Park. Their little adventure had been fun and cheerful and full of father-son-bonding promise until they left behind the paved path and picnic tables, and wandered into the woods on a course prescribed by the virtual compass in the GPS app on Brian’s smartphone. The overnight rainfall had turned what would have been a reasonable hiking path into a treacherous endeavor. Lagging behind his father, Tyler had already fallen twice on gentle inclines slick with mud. And now the boy was coated with the stuff—hands, knees, shoes, and a caked spot on his chin he’d rubbed the same moment his patience had expired.
Victim of his own clumsy misadventure, Brian proceeded on a twisted ankle—which continued to throb in counterpoint to his heartbeat—and reminded himself to take his eyes off the compass now and then to pay attention to his footing. Minutes later, head down and cursing under his breath, he walked right into a low-hanging branch. Hell of an example he was setting for his kid.
“You said we were close, Dad,” Tyler groaned, prefacing that indictment with a prolonged sigh.
“We
are
close,” Brian said. “But I told you before. The coordinates aren’t exact.”
“So what’s the point?” Tyler hurled a rock the size of a ping-pong ball at the nearest tree trunk. The
thwock
of the impact startled a squirrel, which scampered along one branch, jumped to another nearby and scurried out of sight.
“Don’t throw rocks.”
“Nothing else to do.”
Ignoring the boy’s complaint, Brian explained, “The coordinates take us to the general vicinity, then we look around until we find it.”
“Why?”
“Because… it’s like searching for buried treasure.”
“I’m keeping it.”
“No,” Brian said. “We sign the logbook and leave the container where we found it. The honor system. If we take it, the next person will go through all this trouble for nothing.”
“You said I could take something,” Tyler reminded him.
“Swap something,” Brian said. This particular geocache supposedly contained small toys. If you took something, you were supposed to leave behind an object of equal value. “You brought a soldier?”
“Yeah,” Tyler said, rolling his eyes at his father.
It had been years since Tyler played with toy soldiers, which was why he had no qualms about leaving one behind. Tyler hoped for an upgrade, maybe a used video game or something equally unlikely. So his father had spent most of the car ride to the park trying to quash those expectations.
“The search is the fun part, not the prize at the end.”
“Some fun,” Tyler grumbled loud enough for his father to hear.
Secretly, Brian regretted not selecting a cache with the lowest level of difficulty for their first attempt. Instead, he’d chosen a cache closer to home, but with the next highest level of difficulty. A cache with toys, even cheap toys, he’d thought, would appeal to the boy. Brian’s second mistake was misjudging the rapid pace of Tyler’s maturity. At his current age, things transitioned from “cool” to “lame” in a hurry. Since the divorce, Brian saw his son less than he would have liked. The boy’s growth spurts took place in the uncompromising strobe light of his meager custody schedule.
As a bank of rain clouds passed overhead, the woods became prematurely dark. Shadows deepened like an ink spill soaking the ground around them. The odor of moist earth rose like a clinging mist, enveloping them.
Brian stopped, rubbed the back of his forearm across his damp forehead and said, “We’re here.”
Tyler stood beside him, turned in a circle and shrugged. “Nothing.”
“It’s here somewhere,” Brian assured him, but worried somebody before them might have removed the cache in violation of the honor system. If they left the park without finding anything, his son would never let him forget it.
“Remember that time you dragged me through the woods in waist-deep mud for nothing?”
Because exaggeration would become a key component in this particular trip down memory lane.
“What about the clue?” Tyler asked.
“Oh—right! The clue.” In his growing paternal anxiety, Brian had almost forgotten about the clue associated with the cache. He checked his phone. “It says, ‘Fall up the hill.’”
They both cast expectant gazes around, as if expecting a hillside to magically rise from the surrounding forest, crowned with a glowing treasure chest like a reward in one of Tyler’s video games.
“That hill?” Tyler finally asked, pointing straight ahead. Brian looked behind them, then straight ahead. They had been following an incline for a bit, something he might have noticed if he hadn’t been mesmerized by the compass on his cell phone. Ahead of them marked the top of the rise, surrounded by an irregular ring of deciduous trees in various states of decay.
“Must be it,” Brian acknowledged. “So how do we ‘fall up’?”
We both figured out the falling down part easily enough
, he thought, with a chagrined shake of his head.
Tyler scrambled up the slope, littered with broken branches, twigs, and clumps of dead leaves well on their way to mulch that nevertheless rustled underfoot. He slipped once and caught himself on both hands before his knees touched the muddy ground again.
“Careful,” Brian said, making his own way upward, mindful of his tender ankle.
Tyler picked up a stout branch the length of a cane and swung it around to disperse the leaf mounds. When he reached down to flip over a football-sized rock, Brian caught his shoulder.
“Watch out for snakes,” he cautioned.
The possibility of encountering a snake, poisonous or otherwise, seemed to excite the boy’s imagination, but he took extra care as he grabbed the edge of the rock and flipped it over, poised to spring away to avoid the threat of fangs. Instead, he grunted in obvious disappointment as several freshly exposed worms coiled in the dirt.
Tyler circled to the left, poking and sweeping with his branch, while Brian wandered into a tangle of dried brush and broken tree limbs at the edge of the clearing. Brushing away twigs and dried leaves, he discovered a jagged tree stump and, angling away from it, on the far side of the rise, the decaying length of the entire tree trunk, which retained only a few scattered branches.
“A deadfall,” Brian whispered, then again, louder. “A deadfall.”
“What?” Tyler called, glancing briefly over his shoulder.
“This downed tree,” Brian called to his son. “It’s a deadfall.”
“So?” Tyler replied, more preoccupied with a section of tangled underbrush and loose mounds of dirt—excavated, no doubt, by some burrowing woodland creature—than his father’s pronouncement.
“Don’t you get it?” Brian asked. “The clue: ‘Fall up the hill.’ It’s a deadfall—on this hill.”
“You found it?”
“Not yet…” Brian pocketed his phone and swept both hands across the brittle and decaying debris piled around the deadfall. He omitted telling Tyler that this was a more likely spot for a hidden snake than the underside of a rock. Besides, if Brian had unraveled the clue to the cache’s location, he wanted to find it before leading the boy to yet another disappointment. Once he unearthed it, he’d call Tyler over to claim the prize. He might just salvage the day after all.
Crouching, Brian caught a glint of color in the natural pocket formed between the tree stump and its fallen trunk; something metallic, painted bright red.
Gotcha!
he thought in an unexpectedly strong moment of satisfaction.
Before calling his son over to claim the small square tin, he leaned forward to examine the shadowy depression. He swept the ground with the beam of his keychain flashlight. Though he doubted he’d find broken glass or rusty nails or even an irritable snake, he wanted to be sure, lest their excursion end on a sour note—or a trip to the emergency room.
“Tyler, come here,” Brian said. “Think I found something.”
“Me too,” Tyler said, his voice hushed with something akin to awe.
“No,” Brian said, standing and brushing off his knees. “Pretty sure this is it over here.”
He looked at his son, who was poking and prodding something with his makeshift cane. Brian’s first thought was that his son had found a snake after all and that poking a snake with a stick was a very bad idea.
“Tyler,” he called. “Step away!”
“No, Dad,” Tyler said. “It’s okay.”
The boy crouched beside the tangled brush and mounds of dirt and clawed at the earth with the tip of the branch, deepening the hole and exposing a length of something white. As Brian circled around his son cautiously, a dark thought began to form. A thought that was confirmed when Tyler reached down into the hole and gripped the length of dull white in his mud-caked hands and pulled it free.
“Look,” he said, eyes full of pride at his discovery. “Animal bone. A big one.”
Brian was an investment accountant, not a doctor, but he’d seen enough skeleton illustrations over the years to entertain the disturbing possibility that his son was not holding an animal bone. The rational part of his brain kept suggesting and rejecting other explanations: maybe the leg bone of a large mammal… a deer or a bear or…?