Monster (44 page)
She stared at him blankly.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. This does take a bit of explaining, doesn’t it? Well, have you ever heard how we’re all 98 percent chimpanzee?”
Reed ran, ducked, swerved, jumped, ran some more, jamming more cartridges into Kane’s rifle as he went. He still didn’t have Blip Number 6 on his screen, but he had to be getting close. He’d entered a familiar stretch of old-growth forest; the terrain descended toward Lost Creek.
Sing’s eyes were so heavy she could hardly keep them open. “Too far downhill. You want . . . 355.”
Reed’s blip changed course, but its progress seemed agonizingly slow.
“Sing, is Beck moving at all?”
Sing closed her eyes. The motor home was rocking again, heaving like the ocean. She was getting nauseous.
“Sing!”
She opened her eyes. “Uh, now it’s, uh, 350.”
“Anyway,” said Burkhardt, replacing his hat and eyeing Beck with a strange look of pity, “what we’ve taught people to believe, we have yet to prove, and now . . .” He indicated the beast at his feet. “Some could even say we’ve proven the
opposite,
which would be very difficult for us, to say the least. We wouldn’t want that fact to become too, uh, noticeable. Am I making any sense?”
Beck could only shake her head.
He stood, wringing his hands, obviously agitated, nervous. It made
her
nervous. “Well, here’s the situation: many, oh, at least half of the search party, thought it was a bear, and when they shot a large bear, they thought they had the villain, and they all went home. That was excellent! That took care of half the problem!”
He stepped closer to her, his hands out in front of him as if gesturing. “And then there was a really wonderful hoax by some Bigfoot fanatics—oh, you should have seen it, footprints and everything! It provided an excellent dismissal of that contingent as crackpots that no one would take seriously!”
He came so close that Beck took a step backward.
“But then there were the people who actually saw our
creature
but were not killed—people like your husband, Reed . . . and you.” He grimaced. “If you just hadn’t been in the woods, things could have been different! As it is, you and your husband became a liability, and now, with your husband no longer a factor, that leaves you.”
Beck pressed backward into the tangle, dismay becoming dread, and dread becoming terror.
Reed no longer a factor?
What did that mean? Then it occurred to her—she was not back in her own world. This was not a human being come to save her, but an articulate, educated beast. She could see in his eyes what she’d seen only moments before in the eyes of his creature.
He was there to kill her.
She turned and bolted into the bushes.
He dove, grabbed her by her collar, and jerked her backward, off her feet. She fought, striking and flailing, as he dragged her out of the thicket by her collar, by her hair. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he kept saying.
Reed heard a scream, very close. He checked his GPS.
He was picking up Blip Number 6, uphill, bearing 005, not more than 200 yards through dense, young growth. “Sing! I’ve got her! 005! Can you confirm?”
Sing saw both blips on her screen, with Reed converging. The image was fuzzy, fading in and out of her awareness, becoming meaningless to her. “Go to her, Reed.”
She backed her chair away from the computer and put her head between her knees. The pain made her whimper. She checked the towel she’d been using, and fresh blood dripped on it the moment she lifted it from her head.
She didn’t remember toppling to the floor. She only remembered seeing the ceiling as high as the sky above her and hearing the faint sound of a helicopter before she fell asleep.
Beck was facedown in rocks, needles, and grass, trying to squirm free, flailing her arms at nothing, struggling for breath as Burkhardt’s knee pinned her to the ground. He clamped his hands on either side of her head; she peeled them loose. He gripped her forehead and the back of her head and began twisting. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to do this.”
She grabbed, clawed, kicked, but couldn’t resist his strength. Her neck twisted, twisted some more. Her scream became a gargle. He was going to snap her neck, kill her like all the others, carry out what his beast couldn’t. Abruptly, his grip forced her head backward, and then—
He was gone. His weight lifted from her body as if a huge eagle had plucked him up. She got her arms and legs under her, ready to dig in and get away—
The sky was blotted out by blackness that moved, roared with anger, and held Burkhardt aloft as if he weighed nothing. With long, tree-trunk arms, the monstrous shape hurled Burkhardt across the clearing.
Burkhardt hit the ground, tumbled, struggled to right himself—
He looked up—
way
up—and the sight paralyzed him.
Beck was amazed, relieved, and terrified.
It was Jacob, vicious and defensive, taking position between Beck and Burkhardt with black hair bristling, fangs bared, and arms ready to dismember.
Burkhardt’s rifle was only a few feet beyond his reach. He noticed it, tried to ease toward it.
Deputy Dave Saunders had an iron grip on the wheel and a determined set in his jaw as he drove his squad car through Abney, lights flashing, and veered onto Service Road 221. Behind him came another squad car carrying two more deputies, a squad car carrying two Idaho State patrolmen, an ambulance with four paramedics, and behind that, a light-green rig carrying three shotgun-toting forest rangers.
Cap rode in the squad car beside him, hand on the dash, eyes intent on the road. “How far?”
Dave got on the radio. “Chopper Oh-9, we are entering road 221 at Abney. Any fix on the motor home?”
High above, piloting a National Guard helicopter on loan to Idaho Fish and Game, Jimmy Clark eyed the old road that snaked through the rolling, forested terrain. Two sheriff’s officers rode with him. Where the road began to fade from brown dirt to green weeds, Jimmy spotted the silver rectangle he was looking for. “Car 12, I have the motor home, about four miles up the road. No activity, but we’ll stick around. Drive safe, everybody.”
Dave drove as fast as “safe” would allow, the wheels pounding over ruts and potholes, the car nearly bottoming its springs. The other vehicles stayed right behind him.
Burkhardt had just grabbed his rifle when Jacob plucked him off the ground by a wad of his jacket. The scientist dangled in the air, legs kicking, face stretched with horror, trying to chamber a round, trying to aim his rifle. Jacob didn’t wait for Burkhardt to resolve such issues but threw him into the brush, where he tumbled and thrashed out of sight in the tangle.
Beck was suddenly surrounded by reddish-brown hair as huge arms enfolded her and pulled her in. She fell against a familiar bosom, felt a sweaty heat, inhaled a disgusting stench, and for the first time in a week, felt perfectly, wondrously safe.
“Mmm!” Rachel grunted, looking down at her. Beck had seen that expression before, when she awoke in Rachel’s arms in a patch of huckleberries.
Jacob tromped halfway into the brush, watched Burkhardt’s still body for a short time, growled a last word, and then he was satisfied. He stomped out of the bushes and started to leave, but not without an obligatory glance in Beck’s direction.
She wanted to smile, to thank him, to give him a hug, but of course, he would not understand such things. She only hummed her thanks, looking just below his eye line.
He huffed back at her as if to say,
This doesn’t mean I like you
, and vanished into the trees.
Beck tried to relax. She had to deal with Rachel somehow, had to—
Rachel tensed, her arms closing tightly against Beck.
Danger
. Beck could read it clearly in Rachel’s manner. Was Burkhardt still—
The brush across the clearing opened, and Beck gasped audibly. Her legs weakened and her hands began to shake.
It was Reed, hard-run and sweating, holding a rifle, suddenly motionless at what he saw.
She couldn’t express what she felt in words, only a Sasquatch sound, a long, mournful cry as she hung in Rachel’s arms, trying to believe.
Reed was prepared to confront anything, but the scene before him was impossible to fathom. It was as if time had folded back on itself and he was below the waterfall again. The creature he never quite saw that night stood across the clearing plainly visible, a reddish version of Arlen’s photograph, but so much bigger in real life. Just as before, it held Beck—but what had happened to her? The pitiful woman in that creature’s arms was dirty all over, smeared with mud and . . . it looked like manure! Her face was bruised, and one eye was puffy. Grass and weeds hung from every chink in her clothing, the front of her shirt was stained with blood, and now she was making sounds like an animal.
In the center of the clearing lay a grotesque, fly-infested corpse that shattered all of his previous assumptions.
Rachel growled low in her throat and began to back away.
Beck shot a hand toward Reed and cried out like a Sasquatch, pleading, “Ohh, oh-oh-oh, Reeeeed!”
Rachel hesitated, huffing air through her nostrils, her arms like steel, on the verge of fleeing. But something held her here; maybe, just maybe, she recognized this stranger.
Beck detected Jacob’s stench. He hadn’t left.
Reed didn’t move, but he had a round in the chamber and his finger on the trigger.
Beck had cried out his name. He said hers, very quietly. “Beck.”
“Look at me,” she said, her hand extended toward him. “Don’t look at her; look at me.” Beck was
talking
!
“Are you all right?”
The big red beast was huffing, nervous, spooked, ready to attack, or ready to run—Reed couldn’t tell which it would be, but he would shoot either way.
He heard a low growl coming from the trees behind the beast and recalled the multiple footprints, especially those of the alpha male. He forbade himself to be afraid, but his hands were getting icy.
“Reed,” Beck called quietly, “you have to bow. You have to show them you’re not a threat.”
Reed had to be sure he’d heard her right. “Bow?”
Beck sensed that Rachel was warily checking out this intruder, which was a good sign. In a different situation, Rachel never would have stuck around at all. Beck kept her hand stretched out to show friendship and connection, hoping Rachel would read it that way.
“Bow, Reed.” She pantomimed a slight bow. “Bow down.”
Reed bowed only a few inches, his eyes taking in his target, his rifle pointing only slightly away.
“Yes, yes, that’s right.” He looked up. “
Don’t look at them; look at me!”
He dropped his eyes and met hers. “We have to show them we know each other. Just look at me—and don’t smile!”
He wasn’t smiling anyway, but he relaxed his expression as best he could. “Good, good, good. Don’t show your teeth; that’s a threat. Now maybe you’d better put the rifle down.”
No way.
“Can’t do it, Beck.”
There came that growl from the trees again. Reed saw something moving back there—if that was the top of the thing’s head, it was a lot taller than Reed would have expected.
Beck made that weird guttural sound again, reaching out with both hands, “Ohhhhh, oh-oh-oh!” Then she clicked her tongue. “
Tok! Tok!
”
Now
what was he supposed to do?
“Reach out to me, like I’m doing.”
Reed cradled the rifle in his left hand and slowly reached with his right, an eye on those trees.
“Look at me, Reed!”
How far do I trust her?
The big red creature huffed, eyeing him with obvious suspicion as the trees behind her quaked.
Come on, Big Red,
he thought.
You know me. We’ve met before.
Beck pushed to get free of Rachel’s arms but was held tight. As for Jacob, Beck recognized his breathing from the last time Reed came too close. “Reed? Reed, listen to me. I don’t think they’re buying it.”
He tightened his grip on the rifle.
“No! No, just put it down.”
“Can’t do it!”
“They’ve seen hunters before. It scares them.”
Reed had to trust Beck or shoot. He looked into Beck’s eyes one very long, final time.
“Reed . . .”
He found her. He finally saw, under all that filth, the Beck he’d known was there all along—the confident, competent woman he’d grown to love. He slowly stooped over and set the rifle down.
“Stay there now,” she said. “Stay bent over. Don’t look up.”
He bent low, eyes to the ground, every bit of common sense telling him this was death for sure.
The growling behind the trees stopped.
Beck forced herself to relax. She looked up at Rachel and hummed in as calm and happy a tone as she could. Rachel gazed down at her, then cocked her head, eyes troubled.
Beck reached for Reed again, not pleading this time, but expressing happiness. “Hmmm . . . hmmmph.”
Across the clearing, Reed sank to all fours.
Rachel’s arms relaxed. “Hmm.”
Beck told her, “Friend. My friend. Hmm
. Tok! Tok!
”