Unidentified Read online

  Table of Contents

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  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  UNIDENTIFIED

  Michael McBride

  First Edition

  Unidentified © 2017 by Michael McBride

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  PROLOGUE

  November 19th

  Now

  Three words.

  Eric Devlin has written this letter a hundred times in hopes of expressing all of his thoughts and feelings, only to erase everything but the same three words. None of the rest of it matters. Certainly not now. These three words purvey everything he could ever hope to express in a way that no combination of others ever could. The recipient will understand, even after so many years, and he’ll understand why Devlin has to do what he intends to do.

  The computer monitor glows in the darkness, washing out his features in the mechanical blue glare. He wipes the tears from his cheeks and the snot from his upper lip. Runs his trembling fingers through his sweaty hair. Takes several deep breaths to summon the courage. Clicks “Send.”

  The email races into cyberspace with a whooshing sound. He’s passed the point of no return. Probably had forty years ago, if he was being completely honest with himself. All of the intervening years were just stolen time, and, as with any crime, there have to be consequences. Fortunately, they no longer scare him, or so he tells himself. The way each breath shudders and his feet tap uncontrollably beneath the desk gives lie to his assertion.

  He stands so quickly that he knocks over the chair. Stumbles through the mud room and out the back door. The wind hammers the screen door against the siding behind him. His boots scuff the hardpan leading to the barn. Crows line the roof, watching him through cold black eyes. The buzzing of flies from the pasture is so loud he can hear it even from this distance. The smell makes him regret filling his belly with alcohol.

  The old hinges squeal when he draws open the flimsy door. He inhales the scent of desiccated hay and motor oil. The talons make scratching sounds overhead. He passes the tarp covering the tractor and plops down in the hay.

  Devlin takes a long moment to appraise the net sum of his life. His grandfather built this barn with his own two hands and his father modernized all of the equipment. His lone contribution was running the ranch into the ground. There’s no wife sleeping in the house or children to worry about waking. There’s only Eric Devlin and, as far as he’s concerned, he never stood a chance.

  He leans back into the straw and closes his eyes. An eerie sense of calm settles over him. He feels the weight of destiny, as though he’s finally gotten his life back onto the right track after it was derailed so long ago. He clenches the object he found in the field in his left fist, savors the sensation of it pressing sharply into his palm and the memories of an old friend.

  He opens his eyes and finds the shotgun propped beside him, right where he left it. He swings it around in front of him and braces the stock between his feet.

  The crows scrabble and squawk. Their shadows pass across the gaps between the gray planks where the shingles have blown off.

  The barrel is slick with oil and tastes like furniture polish in his mouth. The sight on the tip prods his palate and stimulates his gag reflex. He eases it back a hair and closes his lips around it. Breathes through his nose, speckling the barrel with mucus.

  The cawing grows frantic.

  He clicks off the safety with his middle finger and seats his thumb against the trigger. Closes his eyes one final time.

  The three words return unbidden.

  I remember everything.

  He rids himself of the images they conjure by pushing the trigger.

  ONE

  July 26th

  40 Years Ago

  The pain wrenched Karl from the darkness with a scream on his lips.

  The light burned his eyes, forcing him to close them again. Crows cawed from all around him at once. Beaks speared his flesh. The sensation of blood trickling down his skin set his nerve endings on fire.

  Crying.

  Someone else was crying. The sound was so close, yet impossibly far away. He tried to reach toward the source of the sound, but the mere attempt sent electrical waves of pain rocketing all the way into his fingertips.

  “Help…”

  The word burned his throat and opened the cracks in his lips. He didn’t know where he was or how he had gotten there. He existed solely in a world of agony, one from which there was seemingly no escape.

  The feet of the flies felt like needles tattooing him. His face. His scalp. His eyelids.

  He shouted in pain. It felt like someone had ripped a tangle of barbed wire out of his lungs and through his mouth. Even he couldn’t hear his cry over the infernal racket of the crows.

  A beak lanced through his palm and latched onto a tendon. It tugged and tugged until he screamed and jerked his hand away.

  The movement ignited pain beyond his ability to bear. His eyes snapped open of their own accord and he screamed up into the sky. The sun stained his vision red, turning the awful birds circling overhead into amorphous black shapes. They flapped for balance on the swaying cornstalks encircling him.

  His back ached and his mouth was bone-dry. How long had he been lying out here under the sun? He couldn’t remember anything.

  The crying grew louder. He tried to stand, but couldn’t even seem to raise his head. It took all of his strength to roll onto his side.

  The ground was scorched black and thick with soot. The wind whipped it up and swept it past him like tumbleweeds made of smoke. The grit burned his eyes and formed a gray layer on his skin. The blood flowing from the puncture wounds clotted into a black paste.

  There was another hand beside his, just out of reach. A crow hopped closer and stabbed the
meat between its thumb and forefinger.

  The crying intensified.

  Karl dug his fingertips into the soil and dragged himself closer. Swatted at the blasted scavenger. It squawked and flapped up onto the chest of the body beside him, which shook with each pitiful sob.

  “Val…” he whispered.

  The sight of the crow perched on her breast and the flies buzzing around her face stirred him to rage. He pulled himself onto her and shielded her body with his. The crow flew up into the tassels on the cornstalks with its brethren, while the flies explored the crusted blood in Karl’s hair. He smeared the tears and soot down her cheeks. Brushed her hair back from the clotted laceration on her forehead.

  “Are you okay?”

  The tips of her eyebrows and eyelashes were brown and curled, as though she’d come too close to a flame. It seemed to take considerable effort for her to open her eyes, and even then she barely managed to part her eyelids wide enough to see him. She moaned when she recognized him and hugged him as tightly as she could.

  A scream from behind him.

  A handful of crows erupted from another body. Eric sat up and pawed at the blood on his face. The flies swarmed in an effort to return to the open wounds on his cheeks. He stared right at Karl without seeing him. Another scream and he kicked at the ground until he scooted himself all the way back into the corn.

  Bruce was sprawled on the ground beside him, a pair of crows squabbling over what looked like a chunk of flesh from the gash on his shoulder. One of them yanked the meat away from the other and led a chase into the sky.

  Karl couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

  “Bruce?”

  His friend’s chest rose and fell ever so slightly. Blood burbled from his lips and dribbled down his cheeks.

  Eric screamed again and lashed out at the empty air.

  Karl pushed himself up to all fours, but the ground tilted underneath him and he toppled to his side. The detritus stuck to his face. He clawed it from the corner of his eye and tried again. Crawled closer to Bruce and shook him.

  “Come on, man.”

  Bruce gurgled and sputtered. Turned his head and let the blood run from his mouth.

  “What happened?” he whimpered. He curled into a fetal position and wrapped his arms around his head. His whole body shook when he cried.

  Karl glanced back over his shoulder. Where was Wyatt? If the rest of them were here, then he couldn’t be too far away.

  “Wyatt?”

  He turned in a complete circle. Glanced left. Right. Scurried frantically across the burnt clearing, kicking up clouds of ash and soot.

  There was no sign of his best friend anywhere.

  “What happened?” Val sobbed over and over. “What happened?”

  Karl’s pain metamorphosed into anguish. He stood and shouted.

  “Wyatt!”

  The crows erupted from the corn and took to the sky, momentarily turning day to night.

  TWO

  November 21st

  Now

  Karl Doering bangs on the front door and steps back from the porch. He can barely hear himself think over the racket of the crows perched on the telephone wires and circling the fields. He can see into the living room through the gap between the curtains drawn over the front window. A slant of light illuminates a swatch of worn carpet and a couch that has seen better days. The bulbous shadows of flies trace the wall above it, passing across framed photographs that strike him as strangely familiar.

  He dials the number he’s called seemingly nonstop since the email arrived two days ago. A green light flashes from the cordless phone on the end table and ringing echoes through the house. He terminates the call when the computerized voice tells him to leave a message.

  Karl walks around the side of the house and beneath a skeletal cottonwood. Its branches rake grooves into the asphalt shingles. He remembers climbing the tree when it was lush and green. By the look of it, it’s been dead for a good long time. As have the shrubs that used to bloom through the spokes of the decorative wagon wheels, but now serve only to collect tumbleweeds. The twin metal crossbars between which clotheslines had once run are orange with rust, as are the great arches of the irrigation system in pastures overgrown with chest-high brambles and briars that sparkle with ice. They’d played hide and seek in the cornrows on the far side of the pastures in the summer and hunted prairie chickens among the stubs in the winter. The feeling of loss is sudden and overwhelming.

  The back door of the house stands open. The screen is bent and rests on the windswept dirt, which has blown inside onto the linoleum in the dark mudroom. There are no tracks in the accumulation.

  The shrieking of crows echoes from inside the barn. Flies swirl amid the motes of dust at the verge of the light, beyond which he can barely discern the outline of baled hay against the rear wall. The smell tells him everything he needs to know.

  Karl waves away the flies and enters the barn, startling the crows. Their wings clap as they fly up into the rafters, where they caw their indignation. The remains on the straw are definitively human, but that’s about all he can tell with any kind of certainty. The flesh has been plucked to the bone in spots. The eyes and ears are gone, which causes him an almost paralyzing sense of déjà vu. The missing lips and cheeks reveal what little is left of the upper row of teeth. The lower jaw is unhinged and there’s a hole in the top of the head that reminds him of a baked potato. There are chunks of bone and gray matter stuck to the blood spatters climbing the back wall. The planks are pocked with buckshot. The shotgun rests at an angle across his left thigh and forearm.

  “Christ, Eric.”

  His voice silences the crows, although he still feels the weight of their hungry eyes upon him.

  Something metallic glints from inside Devlin’s partially closed hand. The sight of it causes Karl’s chest to tighten. He pockets it before he can change his mind.

  There is no note. Not that he expects to find one. If his old friend had wanted to say anything else, he would have done so in his email.

  Karl walks out of the barn and into the sunlight. He shivers and looks toward the eastern horizon, where storm clouds rise from the plains like roiling black mountains. His knee aches at the prospect of snow.

  He holds up his cell phone and walks away from the power lines until he finds a signal. Dials 911. The operator’s voice cuts in and out.

  “You’re going to want to send the coroner’s people to County Road 29.”

  He stares out across the feral fields and notices gaps in the weeds.

  “That’s right. The Devlin place.”

  His phone loses the signal as he shoves through brambles that leave burs in his slacks and prick the skin under his socks.

  Crows erupt from ten feet ahead of him and join those circling lazily overhead.

  Karl covers his mouth and nose with one hand and swats the flies out of his face with the other as he crashes through the weeds toward one of the clearly delineated gaps where the bramble’s been flattened.

  He stops dead in his tracks when he sees what has attracted all of the flies.

  The world tilts on an unseen axis and he has to grab the briars to steady himself. The thorns pierce his palm. Blood dribbles from his fingertips as he staggers back toward the house and dials a number he hasn’t called in at least twenty years.

  He looks up at the carrion birds swirling against the gray sky until someone finally picks up.

  “It’s starting again,” he says.

  THREE

  July 24th

  40 Years Ago

  “How the hell did it get all the way up there?” Eric asked.

  Karl could only stare. There was no explanation, at least not one that made a lick of sense. With everything else going on, it was more than a little unsettling. Two kids had gone missing in as many months, and while most people figured they must have run off together, Karl didn’t think that was the case.

  “We should really try to get it down,” Val said
. She had to shield her eyes against the rising sun, which made her red hair appear to burn.

  “And just how do you propose we do that?” Bruce said. “It’s got to be fifty feet up there.”

  “More like twenty-five.”

  The distribution transformer on the telephone pole sizzled and popped. Sparks rained down onto the dirt in front of them.

  “You think you can do it? Be my guest. There have to be fifteen thousand volts running through those wires.”

  “They’re telephone wires,” Eric said. “They don’t need breakers.”

  “It’s a transformer,” Val said.

  “On a telephone pole.”

  “Just because they call it a telephone pole doesn’t mean it only carries telephone wires,” Bruce said. “What, you think they’re like strings run between tin cans?”

  “We can’t just leave it up there,” Val said.

  “We should call the sheriff,” Wyatt said. They were the first words he’d spoken since they found it, and the last words any of them expected to come out of his mouth. He unconsciously rotated the silver skull ring on his right ring finger with his thumbnail, which made an annoying clicking sound.

  “And tell him what?” Bruce said. He mimed talking into a phone. “That’s right, Sheriff Patterson. Up on the telephone pole. No, sir. I haven’t been smoking anything funny. How, you say? Probably trying to jump over the moon as far as I can figure—”

  “Would you shut up for thirty seconds so I can think?” Karl said. He rubbed his temples to ease the throbbing. It was a gesture he’d inherited from his father, along with the thick blond hair that couldn’t feather like everyone else’s and the freckles covering darn near every inch of his body.