Walt Longmire 07 - Hell Is Empty (18 page)

He smiled as he stood and approached me. “I am. How do you like yours?”

“Couldn’t you have just told me I was going to be rich someday?”

He considered it. “No. Now, do you have something you wish to tell me?”

I chewed on the inside of my lip. “Not just yet.” I readjusted my hat. “And now, if you’re through gazing into your crystal ball, how about we get going?”

He stared at me a few moments more with the smile still in place and then raised his arm, inviting me to take the lead. “I’ll assist you for as long as the Old Ones tell me to.” With the next statement, the smile faded a little but was still there. “Pax?”

I smiled back till I was sure my teeth were going to crack. “Pax.”

Rather than follow the trail and face the drifts, Virgil decided that we would make better time crossing the frozen, windscrubbed flat of Lake Marion or Dead Horse, depending on your Maker.

After climbing over a few boulders, I removed my snowshoes and attached them to the pack. We stood at the precipice of the expanse, and I studied the ridge at Mistymoon that appeared and disappeared with the changing cloud currents. “We’re also going to make some pretty majestic targets out there on the ice if somebody, and I mean Raynaud Shade, is aiming a laser sight at us from up on that ridge.”

Virgil had draped the remnants of a wool trade blanket across his face for protection against the wind, and pulled it down with a forefinger to address me as he scanned the deadstand, beetle-killed trees. “No one there.”

I stepped off onto the slick surface under the skim layer of snow that the wind had left as change. “Fine with me; you’re a bigger target than I am.”

He muffled a laugh as he re-covered his face with the red cloth and then wrapped one of the grizzly arms across it and over his shoulder with the panache of a high-fashion model. “Like a tin bear in a shooting gallery?”

Boy howdy.

After a couple of hundred yards I came to the conclusion that the surface was slicker than I’d thought, and the light layer of driven snow made ball bearings under my boots, causing me to slip and catch myself with each step. It was getting to be like a tightrope act, and I was about to turn and tell Virgil to forget about this route when I took a long split and rolled to my right, the weight of the pack and rifle forcing the side of my head to strike the ice with full force.

“Where are we going?”

“If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise.”

He watches as the almost-man drives the truck, newer than his grandfather’s. The truck is loud and he watches the strange territory pass by the window, growing higher and more rocky—mountains unfamiliar to him.

There was a time when his grandfather took him to a place like this, telling him stories of the mighty warrior that had helped the Thunderbirds in their battle against the Water Monsters. He said the man had gone so far that he had forgotten who he was and from where he came. This will never happen to you because you will find the hard edges of the earth rounded by those who love you, he had said.

After many miles the boy begins to cry, softly at first and then stronger.

“Shut up or I’ll really give you something to cry about,” the almost-man said.

I lay there for a few seconds and fought against the concussion, but my eyes refused to focus. I closed them for a moment and thought I could hear something in the ice as though the plates of frozen water were colliding underneath me, grinding like glaciers. I opened my eyes and watched the snow skim across the surface toward me and could feel the warmth of my face adhering its skin to the lake.

I peeled my face away and looked at the sky, half expecting Virgil to yank me back up to a standing position, but nothing happened.

I stared at the lower part of the clouds that raced overhead and could hear a thumping noise, loud and insistent. The noise was steady, but it wasn’t coming from above—rather, from below. I could feel it in my back, through the expedition pack, as it set up a rhythm. It was a song in counterpoint, one that I’d heard before but was unable to identify.

The noise settled into my heartbeat and the pounding in my head. My legs moved okay, but when I pulled my hand away from my temple, there was blood. The pain was tremendous and once again reminded me of the headaches I’d had only a few months ago, before my eye operation. I stretched my jaw and probed the wound under my hat—more blood. “Well, hell . . .”

My hat fell off as I rolled onto the pack on my back and sat there looking for Virgil.

There was no one.

As far as I could see, there was no one on the ice of Lake Marion but me.

I immediately felt panic, disconnected the breast strap, and shrugged the pack and rifle from my shoulders. I wrestled myself to my feet, assuming that with Virgil’s weight he had hit a soft spot in the ice and had broken through.

I kneeled, sweeping my arms across in an attempt to find the hole that must’ve been covered by the snow, but there wasn’t anything. I scrambled my way back along my tracks but could see only the dull, opaque sheen of the flat surface with not so much as a crack.

My head was still killing me, but I couldn’t stop jerking it from left to right in an attempt to find him. I took a deep breath and stood, turning three hundred and sixty degrees, but there was nothing except undisturbed lake. I walked in a spiraling circle emanating from where I’d fallen, fully expecting the giant Crow to be somewhere in my field of vision, either approaching or disappearing into the blowing snow, but he wasn’t there and there were no prints.

I stretched my jaw again and blinked my eyes. “Virgil!”

“Virgil. Virgil . . .”

My voice ricocheted off the cliffs, and I swallowed and stood there for a moment more before noticing that my hat was skimming away on the surface of the lake. Carefully, I trudged across the smooth, hard surface and had just begun to lean over to grab it when a ripping gust carried it out toward the center until it lodged in a small drift a good twenty yards away toward the ridge. I sighed and thought about how I’d lost my last hat and how I damn well wasn’t going to lose this one.

Figuring I’d not have to backtrack if I took the entire load with me, I gripped the strap of the pack and hoisted it, picked up the Sharps and examined it to see if I’d done any damage, but it appeared intact. I put the rifle on my shoulder and looked through the binoculars.

All I could see were the acres of beetle-kill pine that spilled over the ridge and down the valley toward me. I followed the trail to make sure Virgil hadn’t gone ahead and then followed it behind to see if he’d retreated.

I lowered the binoculars and looked around just one more time, forcing his name from my lungs like a bullhorn. “Virgil!?”

Nothing.

I approached my hat and watched as it started to flip up again. I scrambled over and got ahold of the crown and tried to pull it up, but it stuck to the ice, probably from the warmth of my head.

I yanked at it this time, scattering the snow and revealing a freeze-dried, mummified hand.

I blinked hard to clear my head, thinking that it must’ve been a frozen branch, but it was still there when I opened my eyes. I knelt down and used my hat as a fan to scatter the snow that had built up around the thing.

There was a lot of skin left, with a few tendons, and the nails were purpled and black. The wrist was bent, the thumb contracted toward the palm, the forefinger extended and the other three digits slightly curved, almost as if that one finger were pointing up the trail.

I was sure this had to be the hunter that Virgil had mentioned in his story about the dead horse, though it seemed odd that the body of the man had drifted north, away from where the accident had occurred.

There was a ring on the one finger, so I thought I should retrieve it for identification purposes and reached down to carefully remove it, but when I did, the entire hand broke off in mine. Kneeling there holding it, the whole situation felt rather surreal, not to mention macabre, and I was beginning to think that I’d hit my head harder than I thought.

“Jesus . . .”

To make matters worse, my disturbing the hand had loosened the ring so that it was now sliding back and forth on the bony finger. More carefully this time, I placed the ring between my own thumb and forefinger and slid it off the end. It was silver with coral and turquoise wolves chasing each other around the band, and I couldn’t help but feel that I’d seen it before. There was an inscription on the inside, but the print was far too fine and worn away for me to see what was engraved.

I dropped it in the breast pocket of my jacket and then looked at the hand in my hand.

It seemed somewhat disrespectful to just throw it into a snowbank and walk away; then there was the DNA that might give us the name of the poor, missing hunter in case the ring didn’t narrow the field.

I stuffed the gruesome remains into a different outside pocket and figured since it was my lot in life to be the Bighorn Bone Collector, I might as well gather up all of them.

I tightened my hat onto my head and kicked off north toward the gully of trees that led up the creek that fed Lake Marion, which connected with the ridge. Maybe it was Virgil’s sudden disappearance or maybe it was my growing collection, but I felt very alone and hoped I wasn’t going to eventually add to the assembly.

12

It was a ragged forest decimated by the bark beetles—a standing forest of the dead. They say that if you’re quiet and you listen, you can hear them chewing.

They’re only about an eighth of an inch long, like a grain of rice, which is appropriate since they’re indigenous to China, Mongolia, and Korea. Word is they hitched a ride over on truck pallets, crates, or some such—and so far they’ve eaten more than 1.5 million prime acres of our woodlands. The forest service figures that in a few years the bark beetles will have killed every mature lodgepole pine in Wyoming; by then the epidemic will be under control, because there won’t be anything for the little monsters to eat.

The other thing that will kill them is an extended cold snap of subzero temperatures that lasts more than ten days. Now, I figured that this winter alone we’d already accomplished that many times over, but evidently some of the little buggers were frostproof.

The effects of beetle-kill on water flows, watersheds, timber production, wildlife habitat, recreation sites, transmission lines, and scenic views is already horrific, but the thing that’s got everybody really nervous is that, if given half a chance, there will be a forest fire unlike anything ever seen—Smokey Bear’s worst nightmare, a wildfire that would run from New Mexico to Colorado, through Wyoming, all the way into Montana.

When I saw those standing lifeless brown streaks of dead trees running through my forests, I always thought that I could hear the chewing, too.

But maybe that was just in my mind.

The northern tip of Lake Marion was fed by a healthy amount of water that also filled a couple of kidney-shaped ponds that had no names. The snow was deep in the gullies, but the wind had polished the banks, making the footing pretty good; with recent developments, footing was foremost of my priorities, so I took the shortcut that would help me gain ground on the party ahead. I could still see the ridge trail they followed—it wasn’t as if I was going to cut them off, but I’d be gaining ground.

When I got a little higher, I turned and looked for Virgil in the valley below, but there was still no one there. What I could see was where we’d diverged from the path and started across the northern part of the lake from the peninsula. The odd thing was that there appeared to be only one set of tracks in the portions I could make out.

It was possible that the giant had been careful to walk in my prints, just to make sure the ice would hold him, but it seemed odd.

I shook my head, immediately regretted it, and slipped a hand up under my hat. The blood was congealing in my hair, and it was hard to make out the damage by fingers alone. The lump on the front of my head still hurt, but it was nothing in comparison to my newest wound. The pack straps were biting into my shoulders, and the muscles in my thighs were really starting to ache. Running for exercise is one thing, but carrying a pack at altitude on broken ground through snowdrifts on snowshoes is something altogether different.

I looked back up the rise. I could cut left and find the trail, but that would be where Shade would be expecting me, so I decided to take the more direct, if exhausting, route. I knew once I got to the glacial moraine at Mistymoon Lake there would be alpine meadows that trailed to either side, one leading toward Florence Lake, Solitude Trail, and the Hunter Corrals, which would be the only way out, and the other leading toward the dizzying heights of Cloud Peak and no exit.

The weight of the snow had felled a number of the trees leading up the slope; where the bark had sloughed away, I could see the crazy-quilt patterns that the beetle larvae had made in pursuit of the soft cambium underneath.

I was studying just such a log when I got to the second of the two pools and stepped onto the ice. When I put my full weight on the surface, there was a discernible crack, and the water rushed underneath complete with multicolored bubbles crowding against the underside; I eased back on my rear boot.

The larger of the ponds had been rock solid, but this, being the shallower of the two, didn’t have the capacity to maintain a thickness. I decided to follow the right bank in an attempt to stay with the creek and give myself a little relief from climbing over logs.

The storm had let up, but the wisps of fog and intermittent snow were still driven by the wind, and visibility was still negligible. It felt like I was pushing up from under the clouds through half-shadows and hazy-looking stands of eaten-alive trees. I was starting to think that Mistymoon Lake had come by its name honestly when I got that sensation that I was being watched again.

I froze and felt it full force when I thought I saw something beside a stand of the dead trees up and to my left. Someone was there—a small, slim someone.

I scrambled to get my .45 out of my holster since it was the easiest weapon to get to, snapped off the safety, and held it ready as the vapor between us grew stiffer. I could’ve sworn that directly where I was pointing, someone laughed like a child.

The front sight of the .45 wavered a little with the exertion of holding my arm steady. I took a deep breath but kept the pistol pointed at the spot ahead. When the elongated streams of mist cleared a little, I glanced to my left and then my right, but there was nothing. The rows of monochromatic lifeless trees stretched away like bars on a universal and reminded me of something from my past, something important—the Old Cheyenne.

I lowered the Colt and reassessed. If I was getting to the point where people were appearing and disappearing in front of me, then perhaps I needed to holster my weapon and wait for some backup.

I thought there was some movement to my right, and I snapped the sights of the .45 on it and waited, but once again there was nothing. My heartbeat reminded me of the bubbles struggling against the underside of the ice, and I just stood there, finally lowering the semiautomatic pistol and laughing.

A second later, I heard a giggle to my right.

This time I didn’t even raise the Colt—but I did laugh again.

He mimicked me in triplicate, and I leaned my head against a tree. You fool—you’re aiming at your own shadow and attempting to shoot your echo.

I punched the safety, holstered my sidearm quickly, and tried to remember if I’d laughed first before hearing the echo—but I must have.

Must have.

I took a deep breath and looked around at the bursts of fog surging past the trees like the flow of a river. The effect pulled me forward, and I left a hand on the tree to steady myself. Maybe it was the altitude, maybe it was the exhaustion, or maybe it was cracking my head open on the ice, but I had to get a quick grip on things.

I met up with the creek feeding the small pond and started climbing the hill again. There was a large log lying over the area where the water spilled in under the ice, and I could gain some more yardage by stepping up and crossing over. I placed a hand on it and could feel its structural integrity.

It was massive, still sturdy, and unlikely to move. Scrambling onto the rooted end, using some of the larger limbs as a handrail, I stepped onto the log and started across. I kicked the snow off as I went, clearing a path so that I could see the wood and make sure I didn’t slip.

It was a balancing act, and I felt like Errol Flynn in
The Adventures of Robin Hood
, but where was my Little John, let alone the rest of the Merry Men? I turned and looked at the drifting currents of fog erasing Lake Marion; no Virgil, nobody.

As I stood there, I noticed that the mist had turned from white to gray to black, which only reinforced the two-color landscape, and it took a while for me to realize that something was not specifically right about this.

Black fog.

Then there was the smell.

I tasted the tang of smoke in those glands at the front of my throat, and when I took another breath, I choked and my eyes underneath the goggles began to tear.

I swung around and almost lost my balance, especially when a cabinet-size sheath of bark fell off onto the ice. I caught myself, careful not to let the weight of the pack and the rifle pull me over the side, but what I saw on the ridge above me almost dumped me anyway.

It was a wall of fire with an inverted layer of smoke below and flames at a height of over two hundred feet above, arching down the hill with the forty-mile-an-hour gale-force winds.

The tops of the dead-standing trees were on fire, and I could see the ones along the ridge and the ones that surrounded it on both sides lean forward and start to collapse down the hill toward me.

It was a ground fire that had crowned, every firefighter’s worst-case scenario, the one that the old hands used to say you’d fight by finding an ash pile, curling into a fetal position, and praying for hard rain.

I’d worked as a smoke jumper in Greybull in my youth with the advantage of being big for my age—ten feet tall and bulletproof. The largest fires I’d fought were a few class Ds in the sixties and then helping with the evacuation during the Yellowstone fires in the late eighties, but none of them had looked anything like this, and I’d never been anywhere near this close to any of them.

It was as if the immediate world was like some giant coliseum suddenly on fire.

I looked to my left. It was a good hundred yards to clearance—a death trap, with fallen trees and dry brush between here and there. I yanked my head to the right, but the forest was denser in that direction and I couldn’t even see how far it was before I would be able to get into a clearing. Straight ahead was sure burning death, so the only avenue of escape was back down the hillside.

Some wildfires have been clocked at over six miles an hour, able to bridge gaps and jump rivers and fire blocks; this one, with the advantage of fuel in the dead treetops and plenty of oxygen from the ferocious wind, seemed alive and was leapfrogging, transforming from a crown fire to a whirl. The vortex of flame, preceded by the poisonous gases, superheated air, and reflected heat, would be on me in less than two minutes—well before that, it would cook my lungs.

I looked down the hill.

Never make it.

I looked back up the hill. The black fog had changed direction, pulling the oxygen from the arching wind that continued to blast its way down the valley, the fire using the ridge as a jumping-off point, not even backing up for a run at it. Lodgepole pines were exploding with the heat, and a crisscross of timber fell down the incline. The darkness lifted long enough to reveal massive logs exploding as the resin inside them reached boiling levels, branches, pine cones, and needles swirling in armies of winged fire devils.

The tower of flames reached out from the top of the forest with a sound like a freight train, and the vacuum pulled at my chest, trying to topple me from the log where I stood as live ash struck at me from the dead trees. I stood in a spot where flammable material, oxygen, and a temperature above the point of ignition would spontaneously combust and essentially detonate.

I twisted my hat down tight on my head; in the next few seconds, I could die, still erect in a state of astonishment, or I could tuck in my arms and legs and . . . I clutched the binoculars to my chest and stepped off the log.

The expedition pack on my back absorbed the majority of the shock just as I’d hoped it would. I’d thought of leaving the rifle on the bank, but it would’ve been nothing but a smoking husk of charred wood and burnt metal if I ever got back to it, so it went into the drink with me as well.

I’d felt water this frigid just over a year ago when I fell through the ice in Clear Creek Reservoir, but I didn’t remember the chest-seizing cold that struck me like a ball bat and forced the air from my lungs; all I could think was that I was going to need that air in a matter of moments.

I felt the pack hit bottom and estimated that the pond must’ve been only about four feet deep, hopefully enough to insulate me from the coming hell above. I stood and fully inhaled.

The steam vapor rising from the expanse of ice made the entire pond look as if it were being whipped away up the hill and lifted into the pitch-colored sky. The noise was deafening, and as I looked back at the log that I had been crossing, I could see the smoke beginning to pour off the thing.

I unsnapped the pack, shifted it around and over me, and heaved myself backward into a cleft of rocks where the water spilled into the pond, any sort of shelter being an advantage.

Generally, except for the very heart of the inferno, there would be a stratum of oxygen up to about fifteen inches from the ground. I didn’t know how the water would affect this pocket, but my hopes were that the vapor would provide added insulation without parboiling my lungs.

I forced a massive amount of air into my chest, hoped there was enough there to suffice, and plunged into the water again.

The fire’s heart struck it like a cannonball, and I could feel my ears deaden with the brunt of the blow. Tiny explosions of blue, white, orange, and finally red covered the surface, and it was only when I noticed the temperature of the water rising that I realized it was attempting to boil.

I was sure I was in the belly of the beast now. Those fire devils were circling above, hunting for me, hoping to turn me into a hairless, bloated, purpled, and slick-skinned corpse—a collection of blackened bones wearing nothing but a charred leather service belt with all my extra ammunition exploded.

As I buried my face into the pack and slunk deeper into the crevasse, I thought about the phones in my pockets and all the calls I should have made to all the women in my life. I thought about Cady, about her wedding and what she was going to look like standing in the golden grasses of the Little Big Horn country in July. I thought about my wife, how long she’d been gone, and how she wouldn’t forgive me for not being there to represent us at our daughter’s wedding. I thought about Ruby, who would want to know exactly where I’d died. I thought about Vic, who would likely pound her fists on the chest of my corpse for being such a dumb ass.

I couldn’t die—I had too many women who would kill me.

The log I had been standing on exploded like a pipe bomb, the resin inside finally reaching the temperature of napalm, the dead husk no longer able to contain its fury. The force of the eruption hit the pond like a depth charge, the pressure making it feel as if my mouth, nose, ears, and eyes were being pressed back in my head. I stifled the scream that would kill me; instead, I crammed my face against the backpack and just lay there, crushing it against me.