The Mad and the MacAbre (22 page)

“
Maura?” Cavenaugh called,
his voice taut.

“
Will found something,”
Maura said. “Give me just a minute. It’s covered with this red
slime. I’m scraping it off as fast as I…Jesus.”

“
What?” Cavenaugh nearly
screamed. “What is it?”

“
It’s a bone,” she
whispered. “Rounded and smooth on one end. Blunted and widened on
the other. About the length of an upper arm.”

“
Where did you find it?”
Jess asked. “Are there more?”

“
Will found it right at the
edge. Just under the water, wedged between some rocks. He was
looking for another stick to test the depth…”

There was a crackle of static.

“
Maura?” Cavenaugh asked.
“Maura!”

Jess’s face paled and she hurriedly donned
the backpack.

“
Jess,” Cavenaugh said.
“You guys are the closest. Get moving!”

“
There are more,” Maura
said. The tremor in her voice was evident even over the underlying
fuzz of white noise. “Dear God. There are so many more. Will’s
pulling them out of the water one after another. More long bones.
What are those? Jesus. Ribs. A spine. Is all of that still
connected?”

“
Maura,” Cavenaugh said.
“Leave everything where it is. Stop pulling it out and wait for us
to get there. Do you copy, Maura?”

“
Yes. Don’t touch the
bones. Now that Will’s pulled the ones with all the sludge on them
off the top, we can see a whole pile of them. We’ll leave them
where they are until you get here. What do you want us to do in the
mean—?”

“
Maura?”

“
Shh.” Her voice was so
soft it could have been static. “Did you hear that?”

“
Maura, I can barely hear
you.”

“
Shh. There it was
again.”

“
Get out of there!”
Cavenaugh shouted. “Now!”

Gabriel sprinted to the north, away from the
spring, leaping over boulders and slaloming between tree trunks. He
slipped, hit the ground, and propelled himself to his feet
again.

“
Please,” Maura whispered.
“You have to be quiet. There’s somebody—”

She screamed so loudly through the
walkie-talkie that it echoed off into the forest.

There was a clattering sound, a burst of
static, then a dying hiss that bled away into nothingness.

***

Gabriel’s legs burned and the altitude had
stolen his breath, causing him to double over as he walked. He was
panting, trying to steal enough oxygen to prepare himself to run
again. His head was light, disconnected. Maura’s scream played over
and over within on a continuous loop.

“
Maura? Will?” Cavenaugh’s
voice called from the walkie-talkie Jess held in her fist. His
words were ragged, his breathing fast and haggard. “Do you read
me?”

There was a crashing sound behind Gabriel
and he turned to see Jess crumpled in the snow amidst a scattering
of broken branches. By the time he reached her, she had already
pushed herself to all fours. Her shoulders shuddered, and when she
looked up at him, tears streamed down her red, chafed cheeks. She
reached into her jacket pocket and removed the emergency
transceiver, scanned through channels of static, and screamed in
frustration.

“
It’s going to be all
right,” he said, helping her stand. “They probably just saw a
mountain lion and dropped the walkie-talkie in their hurry to find
cover.”

“
Maura said she heard
‘somebody.’”

“
Who else could possibly be
up there?”

The answer hung in the silence between
them.

“
We need to keep moving,”
Jess said. She shoved the transceiver back into her coat and
stumbled away from him through the calf-deep accumulation. The wind
rose with a howl, shaking the upper canopy and dumping clouds of
snow all around them. They remained partially shielded by the dense
forestation, but the wind that managed to find them lanced right
through their gear.

“
How close are you?”
Cavenaugh panted.

“
I don’t know,” Jess said.
The panic sharpened her voice.

“
Don’t go in without us.
You wait for us before you get to the spring. Am I clear? You wait
for us. Copy?”

“
Loud and
clear.”

A steep valley opened before them, a
vertical scar formed by centuries of spring runoff from the exposed
summit. The descent wasn’t sheer, though neither was it graceful.
They were going to have to carefully choose their route to navigate
the clusters of pines and limestone cliffs. Progress would be slow,
but on the other side of the canyon the forest bent to the right,
following the western slope of the peak as it gradually became the
northern.

And somewhere, just out of sight over the
jagged horizon and beneath the seemingly impenetrable masses of
trees, was a steaming cauldron full of human bones.

***

They ascended from the forest onto a
windswept slope of bare granite. The ground was uneven with sharp
boulders as though the mountaintop were in a perpetual state of
decay, sending large chunks of rock tumbling down to meet the
resistance of the trees. There was no longer anything to save them
from the wind, which battered them with fists of snow and bitter
cold. They had hoped to be able to see the steam from the spring
from this higher vantage point, but the worsening storm choked
visibility down to fifty yards at best, and even then they could
only look for so long before the snow that pelted them in the face
forced them to turn away.

How much time had passed since Maura’s
communication had been abruptly terminated by her scream? Two
hours? Three? Time had lost all meaning. There was only the
mountain and the elements, which warred against each other with
stone and ice, creating a treacherous battlefield to cross.

Gabriel tried to tell himself that Maura had
just been startled by an animal and had dropped the walkie-talkie,
which had broken on the rocks surrounding the spring and
short-circuited in the warm water. He imagined that even now she
and Will were pacing nervously, waiting for the rest of them to
arrive so they could apologize for worrying them and explain away
Maura’s clumsiness, but deep down, Gabriel knew that wasn’t the
case. There was something in the air, something callous and
unfeeling, a deadness that seemed to radiate from the earth beneath
their feet and whisper promises of suffering on the breeze.

Jess brushed the snow off of a boulder in
the lee of another larger stone and sat down. She brought the
emergency transceiver to life with a squawk of feedback. The only
response was static, but it changed in quality as she scanned
through the bandwidths. Rather than a harsh crackle, it produced a
more subdued buzz.

“
Is someone there?” she
asked. “Can anybody hear me?”

She fine-tuned the knobs and elicited more
feedback. When it faded, there was something else beneath it. A
voice.

“…
you copy?” a man’s voice
asked from a million miles away. “I repeat: This is Alpine Ranger
Station. Do you copy?”

“
Oh my God,” Jess blurted.
“Can you hear me?”

“
Yes, ma’am.” The voice
sounded bored, distracted, as though the ranger had been stolen
away from a good book and a fresh mug of coffee. “Is everything all
right?”

“
This is an emergency.
We’ve lost contact with two members of our group on the northern
face of Mount Isolation.”

“
What the hell are you guys
doing up there in this storm? We’re under a winter storm warning
and all roads up the mountain are closed. How in the world did you
get up there anyway?”

“
We’re staying in the old
cabins on County Road 432. We started hiking—”

“
I didn’t receive
notification that anyone would be staying there. Standard protocol
dictates that the owner or leasing agency contact us regarding all
off-season rentals, and no one ever—”

“
There’s no time to argue,”
Jess snapped. “Our friends might be in big trouble up
here.”

“
There’s no way anyone can
reach them until the storm breaks. Even with four-wheel drives, we
can only get as far as the main road. You’re talking about hiking
for miles up into the mountains in this weather. We’re better
served waiting it out and sending up a Search & Rescue
chopper—”

“
We found human
remains.”

“
Please repeat,” the ranger
said, now all business.

“
We found human remains. Do
I have your attention now?”

“
Are you
certain?”

“
They’re in the hot spring
on the northern slope of the mountain. Our friends had just
discovered them when communications were cut off.”

“
Where are you now? State
your position.”

“
Maybe a quarter to a half
mile southwest of the spring.”

“
Are you in any immediate
danger?”

“
No, but our
friends—”

“
Stay on this channel,” he
said. Gabriel could hear the ranger talking away from the radio,
but was unable to make out his words. “I’m patching you through to
the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department.”

The wind erupted with a scream and a new
siege of snowflakes commenced, isolating them even from the rocks
surrounding them. Gabriel had to duck his head and walk closer to
Jess just to keep her in sight.

“
We need to keep moving,”
he said. “Maura and Will might need our help.”

Jess held up a finger to signify that she
only needed another minute. The transceiver crackled. Jess brought
it right next to her ear in order to hear over the wind and static.
There was a loud squeal and a faint voice emerged in bursts from
the overpowering fuzz.

“…
Deputy Ross, Morgan
County…Department. What is…on the way…twenty-four
hours…”

The static silenced the voice like the
closing of a coffin lid.

“
Are you still there?” Jess
shouted. “Can you hear me?”

“
We can try again when the
storm dies down,” Gabriel said. He took her by the hand and guided
her down off the rock.

Jess screamed in frustration, but the
blizzard swallowed the sound before it could echo.

They hurried back into the relative
protection of the trees and again continued east along the northern
face of the peak. The wind tore right through the forest, bringing
with it the assault of flakes and the reinforcements from the
accumulation in the branches above. Visibility was fading fast. All
either of them could see was the thickening sheet of white
underfoot and the dark silhouettes of tree trunks.

Even the sweat under Gabriel’s clothing had
chilled to the point that his skin positively ached with
goosebumps. They were going to have to seek shelter from the
elements soon before their body temperature began to plummet.

Jess walked with one of the communication
devices in either hand. The grainy buzz from both in stereo and the
churning white dots of snow lent the impression of walking through
television static.

“
Cavenaugh,” Jess said into
the smaller of the two units. “Do you read me?”

She depressed the button and waited for a
response.

There was nothing but dead air.

***

Gabriel knew how quickly the weather in
Colorado could turn, but he had still been caught off-guard. Down
along the Front Range of the Rockies, six inches could accumulate
in mere hours from formerly blue skies. Traffic would slow to a
crawl. Businesses and schools would close early or not open at all.
People would hunker down in their houses with central heat and
fireplaces, enjoy hot cocoa and freshly baked cookies, and watch
the forecast on their big screen TVs while dreading the prospect of
brushing the snow off the satellite dish or shoveling the walk. But
this…this was something different entirely.

This was survival.

It had taken him until now to recognize that
simple truth. The only fireplaces were nearly a four-mile blind
hike over a nightmare terrain of ice, where every tree looked just
like the last and the only directions not masked by the blizzard
were up and down. There was the very real possibility that if they
didn’t find somewhere to ride out the storm, they could end up
walking to their deaths. He had read in the newspaper about hikers
vanishing a couple times every year for as long as he could
remember, but he had never realized just how easy it could be. If
they didn’t find the others soon—

And then he smelled it, the faint hint of
salty marsh.

He turned around and looked at Jess, who had
taken to walking in his boot prints from sheer fatigue. Her entire
face was chafed and red, the skin cracking on her cheekbones and
peeling in strands from her lips. She acknowledged that she had
noticed the scent with a nod.

Cavenaugh had told them not to approach the
spring until he arrived, but they couldn’t just hang out in the
woods waiting from him. They needed to make sure that Maura and
Will were all right, and then they needed to seek shelter. The plan
was to come upon the site slowly, cautiously, to study it from the
anonymity of the trees to ensure that everything was fine. Once
they determined it was safe to do so, then they were just going to
walk right down there and figure out what they were going to do.
Cavenaugh could kiss their asses if he thought they were going to
stand around in this blizzard waiting for him to announce his grand
arrival.