Rising Fears (3 page)

This year, he was empty handed. For the first time since he had begun this strange hideaway practice, he had yet to see anything more than a few small squirrels and rabbits, game that would make no sense to kill, and would provide him with little meaning in his hunt. Sometimes he felt like the food he brought back for the poor was the only real reason he had for going on.

He looked down at his rifle, a Browning A-bolt that gleamed in the trace scratches of daylight. It was a bolt-action rifle, one round already chambered and ready.

Ready.

Almost without thought, Jason tilted the rifle and pressed the barrel against the hollow of his jaw, where his neck and head joined. He could just reach the trigger with his thumb.

Ready.

He had no conscious thought of wanting to die. Indeed, that was perhaps the worst thing: the absolute lack of feeling, the complete sense of isolation from everything that had wrapped him like a thick shroud ever since he had seen his wife and son lowered into the ground.

He felt himself as though watching another person. He felt himself turn off the safety. He felt himself whisper a last "I love you" to a wife long-dead. He felt his hand clench, and felt his thumb pull on the trigger....

It was the sound that almost killed him. It was a sharp, brittle snapping sound that reminded Jason of the noise a perp's arm had once made when Jason had caught him in the act of robbing a corner liquor store. The perp had been a kid, only sixteen, but he had had a gun and drug-crazed eyes that clearly shouted his intentions to kill anyone who stood between him and his next score. Jason had rushed him, grabbed his gun, and ended up breaking his arm across the counter of the liquor store. The sound the arm had made when it broke, the bone itself exploding out of the man's - no, the
boy's
- skin like a yellowed stick, had haunted Jason's dreams for weeks after. And the sound he heard now was just as unpleasant.

Jason jerked, and nearly pulled the trigger.

He did not, however. Not quite. He didn't pull the rifle away from its resting spot, but looked around for the source of the noise.

He saw it almost instantly.

The buck was beautiful. Tall and graceful, a survivor of countless battles for supremacy, a warrior of its kind. Its antlers almost glistened in the dawn's waxing glow, the many points illuminated like stars. Its chest heaved, bright white against the green of the forest, its breaths measured and strong.

It looked at Jason. Their eyes locked.

It was a moment out of a storybook, out of a fairy tale. A magical moment. For a split-second, Jason truly understood what "communing with nature" meant: not some hippy retreat into the woods to defecate into leaves and eat grubs and concentrate on "finding yourself," but a real sense of...of...Jason struggled to find the right word and finally settled on one that he almost never used any more, a word as alien to his existence as almost any other:
connection
.

He and the deer were connected. He could almost feel the wind through his fur, the clash of antlers as mating challenges issued, the rutting flesh as the prizes were taken. He could feel himself running noiselessly over the earth, the ground almost goading him on to ever-greater speed.

He felt himself...
alive
.

The tears came now, the tears that Jason had successfully quelled after The Dream, falling from cheeks that had not known such moisture since the funeral. He saw the deer, he felt the deer, and he wept for all that it was, because he knew that the deer was more a part of the world than he was, and would be more sorely missed when gone.

The moment shattered, though, when the deer did something Jason had never seen such an animal do in all the time he had lived in the small rural town of Rising, Washington: it
snarled
at him. At first, Jason couldn't believe his eyes. Deer, even the large ones, would almost uniformly flee when confronted. The only reason they wouldn't was when one of their offspring was threatened, and even then such a visible outpouring of viciousness and rage was something the likes of which Jason had never heard of before.

The deer mewled, a cold, ugly sound in the crisp air, then stomped its hooves...and charged.

Suddenly, the magic of the moment became dark magic. Twilight was not blessing, but curse. Jason felt the rifle fall from fingers made numb with sudden terror.

The huge animal was only ten feet away.

Jason scrambled to right himself and grab the fallen rifle at the same time; scrambled to get into position to save himself while at the same time marveling that he suddenly cared so much about living.

(No, don't think of that, not now, not here.)

The tips of the stag's antlers still shone in the light, no longer like gleaming stars but now more like daggers that had been dipped in blood.

One....

***

***

The sun was still rising when Jason had finished getting the deer on his truck, and the sun was even now casting its first pale light over the slit in the forest that passed for a road.

The truck jounced and bounced along the dirt path, the truckbed almost entirely filled by the deer whose throat had been destroyed by Jason's single shot. The deer had shuddered to a stop only inches away from his feet, the glitter on its antlers dying as it did, as though they had been kept alight by the same life force that had dimmed and died as the blood pumped out scarlet onto the undergrowth.

The truck gave a large shudder as it jumped the small lip of asphalt that marked the main road into town. Sure enough, a moment later Jason passed the familiar sign: "Rising, Washington. Come and sit for a spell."

Only a few short minutes later he was pulling up next to Rising's small town hall, a single story building with a short clocktower that managed to seem like it was looming over everything even though it was only about forty feet high. The clock chimed quietly, haunting notes that glided through the early morning mist. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Six a.m.

Jason stopped his truck and got out. He checked the deer carcass, though he knew full well that it had not moved - how could it? - and then went into the small brick building beside the town hall.

The office inside the building was barely twenty feet to a side. A five foot by five foot reception area, a doorway that led to the three holding cells in back, and another door that was simply marked "Sheriff" were the only real accoutrements. Jason picked up the phone in the reception area, an old black rotary dialer, and frowned as he heard static interfering with the dial town. He jiggled the switch, trying to get a better link, then shrugged and dialed a number.

A phone answering machine picked up, as he knew it would, and George's pale, wispy voice breathed out, "George here. You know what to do." Jason was surprised to hear how weak sounding the voice was: usually the man's voice was a deep bass, full of life and vigor. And this, though still recognizably George's voice, seemed as though it must be the voice of some funhouse George: a twisted caricature of the real thing, shrunk and distorted by trick mirrors and failed perception.

Jason chalked the change up to whatever was interfering with the phone reception and spoke into the phone. "George, it's Jason Meeks. I'm back from my hunting trip. Shot a twelve-point that I need you to put in the freeze until I can get settled and take care of him. Could you come by the station and pick it up when you get in?"

Jason hung up, assured that George - the town butcher and one of the most conscientious workers that Jason had ever met - would be along as soon as business had opened to take care of the buck. The charitable giving of the best cuts of meat had become a shared ritual between them, a time of sharing between the two men that neither spoke of but that Jason suspected meant as much to the butcher as it did to him.

After concluding his business with the butcher, Jason went through the door marked, "Sheriff." His office was as drab and basically uninteresting as was the rest of the place: a desk, a computer, a few filing cabinets, and a fan were all that would tell a visitor that the place was inhabited.

And the picture. Meeks purposefully did not look at it. Rather, he opened one of the file cabinets and pulled out a spare uniform. He had bathed and shaved in a cold river the night before, so he knew he was reasonably clean, and anyway he rarely felt like going home after his yearly hunt, so he had prepared this uniform for his return after the ten day isolation. He slipped out of his hunting fatigues and into the uniform, a green and brown outfit that was pleasing to Jason, or at least, was as pleasing as anything was these days. Which wasn't saying much.

He took a moment to adjust the Sheriff's star on his chest, then sat down.

He glanced at the digital clock on the desk. It said eight twenty two. He frowned. The clock was off. Either that or the one on the clocktower was, which was unlikely.

A moment later, however, he heard the clock outside ring again. Eight rings followed by a short melody: eight thirty. Jason shook himself. What had happened to the time? Occasionally when he was alone, he did lose track of time, and it always both annoyed and frightened him: just one more example of his growing lack of connection to life and the universe in general.

He finally looked at it. The photo was on his desk, as it always was and always would be. Elizabeth and Aaron, smiling as though nothing could ever touch them. As though they would live forever and would not be gunned down in cold blood by a man who simply wanted to kill someone that day. Jason touched the picture gingerly. Family.

Gone.

He drew his service pistol, a nine-millimeter Beretta, and laid it on the desk before him.

He felt at his pocket. Withdrew a single object: a bullet. It was golden, gleaming with wicked beauty appropriately reminiscent of the day that his family had died: surely a day graced with their beauty before it had ended in such wicked senselessness.

He chambered the bullet. Stared at the gun.

But as it had with the deer, it seemed fate would not allow Jason the respite of death this day: there was a knock at the door. In a smoothly practiced motion, Jason ejected the bullet and pocketed it a half-second before the door swung open.

On the other side of the door was Hatty Cooper, his receptionist. Hatty was in her late sixties, an ex-schoolteacher who had taught most of the children in Rising - including Jason before he had wandered into the fairyland of the Big City and become a police detective with the LAPD and been happy for a time before the fairy tale ended in darkness, as all true fairy tales did. Hatty was a surly soul, a brittle, no-nonsense exterior that hid - barely - a heart the size of the Olympic Mountains and a brain that was every bit its equal. If anyone told you the mayor was in charge of this town, they were either lying or they hadn't met Hatty yet.

Jason opened his mouth to greet her, but before he could she said, brusquely, "Thank the Lord you're finally back."

"Why?" asked Jason, more than a little surprised at Hatty's tone. Usually she had a kind word or two for him upon his return from the hunt.

Her next words explained instantly to him why the normally imperturbable woman was acting so uncharacteristically stressed: "Little Sean Rand's gone missing."

Jason instantly went on full alert. "What?" he said.

"We tried to find you," said Hatty, "but you can be tough to reach when you're communing."

Jason felt the breath leave his body. Sean Rand? Jason knew the boy, as everyone in Rising knew everyone else, and was still reeling inside. The boy was a beautiful, precocious child of seven or eight, he knew. And from what he had seen, the boy was not the type to go wandering off, which was the usual case when someone went missing in Rising - usually to be found only a few hours later. But everything in the way Hatty was speaking, her posture, the way she pursed her lips as she waited for Jason's next words, it all added up to something much worse than a case of a child who had wandered down the wrong path and been lost for a few hours.

"When did this happen?" asked Jason.

"A week ago," said Hatty simply.

"A week?" Jason almost shouted. Before he could follow up with a "What happened?" Hatty was already speaking again. She glanced at the wall clock and said, "Memorial service is about to begin at the cemetery."

Jason blinked. This was all coming at him too fast. "Memorial service?" he said. "You said he was missing, not dead."

Without waiting for a reply, Jason hurried out the door. "Fill me in on the way," he said, and then left the Sheriff's station, Hatty at his heels.

He hustled around to the driver's side of his truck as Hatty opened the passenger's side and got in. Then Jason stopped in his tracks before touching the door.

The truck bed was empty.

No deer.

Bloody ropes lay coiled in messy piles: ample evidence that the buck had been there. But wherever it was, it was no longer in the truck. Nor would the butcher have taken it already. George typically did not do his pickup until help had arrived at the store, usually around ten or eleven in the morning.

But Jason had no time to do more than be disturbed by the absence of the corpse. He hopped in the truck, joining a visibly impatient Hatty. They drove in silence for a short time, a few moments that allowed Jason to notice the funereal gloom that had settled like a fog over the town. Corner store, post office, feed barn, all closed. The houses were shut as well, and there was an unusual absence of children and their mothers playing and walking along the streets.