The Mad and the MacAbre (23 page)

It was snowing so hard that Gabriel didn’t
notice the steam through the flakes, or perhaps the wind was
blowing so hard that it simply dissipated. He barely saw the iced
granite rim of the crater in time to keep from stumbling out into
the open. Crouching behind the wide trunk of a ponderosa pine, he
motioned for Jess to do the same. He wanted to call out for Maura
and Will, but something prevented him from doing so. It wasn’t as
though he had expected to find them standing right there at the
edge of the spring, but he had hoped to find some sign of them. He
could only shake his head at the seemingly irrational thoughts and
fears.

Surely nothing had happened to Maura and
Will. They had probably found somewhere out of the wind to keep
from freezing to death like any sane person would have done under
the same circumstances. And yet still Gabriel couldn’t bring
himself to leave the cover of the forest.

Jess leaned over his shoulder and whispered
into his ear, “Do you see anyone?”

He shook his head, silently pulled the rifle
over his head, and held it in front of his chest. It took a moment
to find the safety by the trigger guard through his thick gloves.
He pressed his right index finger onto it in preparation.

The water was still hidden from sight, but
he could see the majority of the eastern side and the wall of
forest beyond through the thick steam when the gusting wind
shifted. There was no sign of Maura or Will, no movement at
all.

He crawled through the scrub oak toward the
clearing. The Styrofoam crumpling of snow and the snapping of
branches announced his advance to whomever may have been lying in
wait, but it was still preferable to walking unguarded into the
open. He tried not to think about what might be lurking only feet
away. There was no chance of outrunning either a mountain lion or a
bullet. The words of an old high school friend rushed to the
forefront of his mind. I don’t have to be able to outrun trouble. I
just have to be able to outrun you.

The tangle of branches opened in front of
him and granted an unobstructed view of the clearing. Snowflakes
and steam swirled in the center, creating a dense fog that churned
at the mercy of the wind. To his left, the mountain fell away from
the rock embankment like the edge of a dam, and pines crowded
against it to bar even a glimpse of the valley below. The bank
directly ahead was coated with a skin of ice that had to be several
inches thick, and he could barely see the red crescent of water
four feet down against the granite. The summit rose steeply to the
right in sheer formations of slate, between which pines and scrub
oak battled for root space.

He held his breath and scrutinized the scene
down the barrel of the gun, wishing it had a scope rather than this
strange arrangement of steel sights. But this weapon hadn’t been
made for hunting. This was an assault weapon. What had Cavenaugh
suspected they would find that he had felt it necessary to bring
such firepower? Gabriel couldn’t imagine one could sign out a case
of semi-automatic assault rifles from the police armory either.
What was really going on here?

The radio screeched behind him and he heard
Cavenaugh’s voice.

“…
copy me,
dammit?”

The sudden burst of sound made Gabriel
cringe. He waited for the white and gold streak of a mountain lion
to leap at him with his finger on the trigger. When nothing moved,
he crawled out of the brush onto the slick rock. He heard Jess
answer Cavenaugh, but he couldn’t make out her words over the
pounding of his pulse in his ears. There could have been packs of
feral creatures hiding in the wilderness just beyond sight, but he
was completely alone in the clearing.

If Cavenaugh’s voice hadn’t brought every
predator in the forest running, then he figured it was probably
safe to risk calling for Maura and Will, but neither answered.

He scooted to the precipice of the crater
and looked down. Maura hadn’t exaggerated. The spring was so full
of the bacteria that it had a pink cast and the edges were thick
with it, a ring of crimson sludge, except for one small stretch
where a pile of bones jutted from the surface. His breath caught at
the thought that they might have belonged to his sister. Suddenly,
he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He wanted to remember Stephanie
as the glowing young girl with the world stretched out before her,
not as a collection of broken and disarticulated bones.

The tears stung as they ran down his cheeks.
He looked up to stall their descent and caught a blur of movement
from the corner of his right eye. There. At the top of a stone
outcropping, nestled against the twisted trunk of a spruce, was a
small orange face with green eyes and one stiff ear.

“
Oscar,” he whispered. “You
nearly scared me to death.”

Gabriel stood and walked slowly toward where
the cat crouched about twenty feet up the rugged slope. He was
nearly to the end of the spring when Oscar scurried down the
granite toward him. Gabriel froze.

Oscar stopped halfway down, lowered his
head, and lapped at the rock with his tongue. The tabby’s eyes
never left Gabriel as he approached in what he hoped were
non-threatening steps.

He was almost close enough to consider
trying to pet the cat when he recognized what Oscar was gleaning
from the slanted stone surface.

“
Oh, God,” Gabriel
whispered.

He nearly dropped the rifle in his hurry to
turn away.

Blood.

The rocks were crisscrossed with arcs of
blood.

***

It was unnerving watching Oscar squatting
there on the rock, licking and licking, the fur surrounding his
mouth turning a rich shade of red. Gabriel had no way of knowing
whether the blood had come from a human or an animal. Regardless,
whatever had met its demise in that dead end had done so badly. He
was no forensics expert, but long spatters of blood that stretched
more than a dozen feet up a nearly vertical surface implied an
attack of unimaginable violence. And they hadn’t been caused by a
firearm. A shotgun would have created a large blot spatter; a
pistol or a rifle a similar high-velocity starburst. In either
case, the mess would have been surrounded by a mist composed of
droplets of various sizes. These arcs had been caused by a blade,
and one wielded with frightening strength.

Gabriel tried to convince himself that Will
must have encountered a cornered mountain lion and been forced to
battle it with a hunting knife, but Will had been carrying a rifle
with which he was intimately acquainted. If push had come to shove,
he would have shot the animal and its skin would have been tanning
between the trees while its carcass rotated on a spit over a
roaring blaze.

“
They should be here within
half an hour,” Jess said. “Or at least they hope so.”

Gabriel nodded. He couldn’t force himself to
look away from Oscar. The cat was like a machine, showing no sign
of tiring, licking over and over and over and over—

“
Are you okay?” Jess
asked.

“
They died
here.”

“
Maura and
Will?”

“
All of them. They all died
right here. Where we’re standing at this very second.”

“
You can’t know that for
sure. These bones could belong to anyone and that
blood—”

“
Is still fresh, Jess. It
hasn’t even frozen yet.”

The wind shifted and blew the salty steam
between them.

“
What are we doing here
then?” Jess asked. “We should just leave.”

“
Don’t you want to know
what happened here? Don’t you want to know how your sister
died?”

“
Of course I do. I loved
Deb, but she would never have wanted me to risk my life for that
knowledge.”

“
They obviously risked
their lives for the sake of knowledge. What’s the
difference?”

He felt her hand close around his, but she
said nothing more.

Together they watched Oscar slather his
sandpaper tongue on the steep granite outcropping without any
indication of slowing.

***

Gabriel sat at the edge of the spring and
scooped gobs of slime out of the water with a branch. Were it not
for the striking red color, it could have been any pond scum from
anywhere in the world. And maybe it was. Haloarchaea certainly
didn’t aggregate like this. Without a microscope, he couldn’t
determine a blasted thing about the microorganism. He was stalling
anyway, postponing the task he had originally sat down here to
begin. And he only had a few minutes to do it while Jess was still
up the slope, out of the trees, trying in vain to reach the
sheriff’s department again on the emergency transceiver.

She had promised not to go very far and to
stay within earshot. He could see her perched on the top of a rock
to the left of Oscar, who seemed to have forgotten they existed as
he tried to consume every drop of the rapidly freezing blood. The
barely audible hiss of static and the occasional squawk of feedback
told Gabriel everything he needed to know.

He had to be quick. Cavenaugh had told Maura
to leave the bones where they had found them. Obviously, she and
Will had shoved them back into the spring. Gabriel understood he
would have no idea which bones may have belonged to his sister, but
he held out hope that none of them did, that he would pull them out
and recognize immediately that they weren’t human at all, but
instead belonged to some deer or wolf that had fallen into the
water and drowned while trying to get a drink.

A glance in Jess’s direction confirmed she
was still battling the transceiver.

Gabriel jabbed the stick down under the
surface and dragged out an interlocked tangle of bones to where he
could reach them. They were unmistakably human and belonged to at
least two distinct individuals. Some were longer and thicker than
others, most evident in the curvature and width of the ribs and the
height of the vertebrae in the red-stained columns. Rolling the
first pile away from the jumble beneath, he dragged several more
long bones toward the surface. One was clearly a humerus, another a
tibia through which a vertical fracture coursed. There was another,
this one still articulated in spots despite the rotting cartilage.
The radius and ulna were still connected at both the proximal and
distal joints, and the carpals held the rest of the skeletal hand
to the wrist. But there was something wrong with the arrangement.
The wrist and the hand were contorted, twisted.

He reached down and examined it in his
gloved hands. The carpals were fused, making the wrist curl in upon
itself, and the metacarpals and phalanges appeared too short and
thin in proportion to the rest of the forearm. The fingers were
curved inward in such a way that they were more reminiscent of a
bird’s claws than—

The truth struck him, but it was too late to
throw it back into the spring.

Jess moaned behind him and he turned to see
her face contort with pain. He watched a part of her die in her
eyes.

It was a palsied hand.

He remembered the picture on the website, of
all of the kids smiling on their first day at the cabins, and the
girl to the right with her stunted hand held to her chest.

Deborah MacAuley.

Jess’s sister.

***

“
I’m so sorry,” Gabriel
said. He stood, still holding the arm, unsure of what to do with
it. Jess couldn’t look away from it. He didn’t want to throw it
back into the water right in front of her, nor did he suspect
offering it to her was the right thing to do.

Jess nodded. She appeared to have
disappeared somewhere inside of herself. Her eyes no longer
shimmered, but drained a steady stream of tears. She reached out
tentatively, then jerked her hands back to her sides.

“
What are you doing?”
Cavenaugh snapped.

He and Kelsey emerged from the forest with
the racket of snapping branches.

“
I told you to wait for us
before coming down to the spring,” he said. His face flushed
purple-red when he saw the bone in Gabriel’s hands. “And I said I
don’t want anyone touching or moving those bones in the slightest.
Jesus Christ! That’s evidence of a crime! We can’t risk anyone
contaminating—”

Cavenaugh fell silent. He looked from the
forearm to Jess and then back again. The color drained from his
cheeks. When he resumed speaking, his voice was even and calm.

“
For the time being, why
don’t you put that back where you found it.” He turned to Jess.
“We’ll make sure that everything is handled with the utmost care
and respect. She’s somewhere better now. You and I both know
that.”

Jess stared through him with a glazed
expression of shock. Gabriel used the distraction to return
Deborah’s arm to the pile under the water, where it mercifully sank
beneath the bacterial sludge.

“
Any sign of the others?”
Kelsey asked. He alone appeared unaffected by the significance of
the finding. His jaw was thrust forward, his lips a grim line,
reflecting a frightening measure of determination.

“
We couldn’t reach you on
the radio…” Jess whispered.

“
Where are they?” Kelsey
asked. “Will? Maura?”

“
The blood,” Gabriel said.
“There’s blood all over the rocks. It was still warm when we
arrived.”

He pointed toward the stone abutment.

When Oscar saw all of them turn in his
direction, he abandoned his meal, bolted up the slope to the right,
and vanished behind a sharp crest of stone.

“
That’s the same cat, isn’t
it?” Cavenaugh asked, but Gabriel was already walking
away.