Remains Read online

  In his mind, he envisioned a younger version of himself stumbling blindly through the wilderness, shouting for his sister, dirt thickening the trails of tears on his cheeks to mud. He had hoped never to feel that helpless again, and yet here he stood now.

  Gabriel was just about to head back to the cabin when he noticed a series of tracks in the fresh snow. They looked like those of a small dog, or more likely, a fox. Now that he really thought about it, he might have seen a flash of orange darting out of sight into the forest.

  He watched for any sign of movement for another minute before returning to the cabin to unpack his belongings.

  * * *

  Half an hour later they were all assembled in the front cabin, where they shared an awkward silence over a pot of strong coffee. In the time it had taken Gabriel to unpack his belongings, Cavenaugh had converted the main room into a kind of command center. Satellite images were tacked to the walls, overlaid with grids marking latitude and longitude in minutes and superimposed with topographical maps. There had to be twenty of them in all, and surely covered every inch of the National Forest. The corner of the room was filled with stacks of equipment Gabriel had never seen before. There were electrical boxes reminiscent of the components of a stereo tower, coils of coaxial cable, and what appeared to be two fancy metal detectors.

  Gabriel hovered in front of them, away from the others. He paced from one wall to the next and back again. The coffee only seemed to amplify his nervous energy. He wished someone would crack a window despite the storm. It was starting to feel like a gym locker room in there.

  Cavenaugh stood in the doorway to the kitchen. He waited for all of them to absorb their new surroundings. Gabriel couldn’t believe the amount of time and money Cavenaugh must have invested into the project. Now that he really thought about it, no one had asked him to contribute a single cent. His first thought was that Kelsey must have financed everything, but one glance confirmed that he was every bit as awed as the rest of them. He sat on the arm of the couch, attired in the newest and trendiest winter gear from L.L. Bean: a navy blue ski jacket, black snow pants, and furry Sorel boots. His pale gray hair had thinned over the last year, but he had taken such good care of himself that it was impossible to pinpoint his age at a guess. The fire reflected from the wire-framed glasses perched on his aquiline nose as he surveyed the room. Will Farnham slouched on the couch beside him, a stark contrast to Kelsey. He wore an old flannel shirt, dirty carpenter jeans, and Wolverine boots that betrayed the steel inserts over the toes. Long johns peered out over his collar and from his pant legs. He had a thick black beard and a shaved head, and brown eyes that appeared to track a little too slowly. Maura Aragon sat beside him, nervously tapping her feet and doing her best to avoid making direct eye contact with anyone. Her long black hair hung over a face which would have been unmemorable were it not for her crystal-blue eyes. She wore a heavy, knitted sweater featuring teddy bears and hearts, jeans that clung to her wide hips and thighs, and padded boots with faux fur lining the tops. Jess MacAuley leaned on the wall behind them by the front door, sandy blonde hair pulled into a ponytail. She had wide blue eyes, a slender face, and plump lips. Even without makeup she was striking. Her azure sweater brought out her irises, and her faded Levi’s traced her long legs into waterproof hunting boots. She and Gabriel had already exchanged clipped formalities in their cabin while they unpacked, but he had yet to speak with any of the others.

  “All right,” Cavenaugh finally said. “I assume none of you need introductions. So let’s just get started. First off, thank you all for dropping everything in your lives back home to come here. I can only imagine the kind of sacrifices you’ve had to make to do so. With any luck, we won’t have to do make this pilgrimage again, and this will be the last time any of us see this place or each other ever again.”

  “Where did you get all of this?” Kelsey asked, gesturing around the room.

  “The maps came directly from NASA’s Terra satellite. I had them blown up and printed. The originals are still on my laptop, which allows digital manipulation and zoom capabilities. They were generated just under a year ago, so they aren’t one hundred percent precise, but they’re the best available.”

  “They must have cost a fortune,” Kelsey said.

  Cavenaugh offered a weak smile and sighed before continuing. The firelight made his eyes appear recessed into darkness and highlighted wrinkles Gabriel hadn’t noticed previously. “Behind Gabriel over there are two GPR—ground-penetrating radar—machines capable of detecting remains buried up to fifteen meters beneath the ground under optimal conditions, and our communications and analysis equipment, all of which are on loan from the Denver Police Department.” He turned to Gabriel. “I trust you were able to secure an electron microscope.”

  Gabriel nodded and tried not to imagine what the university would do to him if they found out he had borrowed it. Granted, it was an older model he had procured from storage, but he was still going to keep it in the trunk of his car until he absolutely needed to use it for fear someone might break it.

  “Excellent,” Cavenaugh said. “So what we need to—”

  “What is the deal with the microscope and the germs?” Will interrupted. “I don’t understand what you were saying about those germs on Nathan’s leg bone. How is that supposed to help us find out what happened to them?”

  “Gabriel?” Cavenaugh said.

  In a heartbeat, all eyes in the room were upon him. He took a final slug from his coffee and set aside the mug. Cavenaugh had prepared him for this eventuality, and had cautioned him that there was one key piece of information he intended to withhold in order to convince the others to join them. Specifically, he made no mention of the similarities between the bacteria found on Nathan’s femur and their fossilized twins on the Mars meteorite. Gabriel still wondered why the evidence techs at the Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, the FBI forensics lab that shared resources with the local police, weren’t tearing apart the hills in search of the almost mythological extremophile.

  Gabriel cleared his throat and began. His gaze wandered restlessly around the room as he spoke.

  “The organisms they found on Nathan’s femur bear an uncanny resemblance to a kind of extremophile called haloarchaea, which has several unique characteristics we feel could help us isolate the region where the mountain lion encountered the bone. Extremophile is the name given to microorganisms that require extreme environmental conditions to thrive. In the case of haloarchaea, they need at least a ten percent salt concentration in water to survive, preferably more, which implies that we’re looking for a small body of saltwater or a solar saltern.”

  “There’s no saltwater in Colorado,” Will said.

  “That’s not exactly true. There are specifically no bodies of water one might consider similar to seawater or that of the Great Salt Lake, but these mountains are rife with mineral springs with high contents of naturally recurring salts like sodium chloride, carbonate, and sulfate, and additional carbonate salts from calcium, magnesium, potassium, and lithium. If you’ve ever been to the hot springs in Glenwood or Idaho Springs, you know what I’m talking about.”

  “So if we can find this hot spring, we should theoretically find this microorganism,” Jess said from the back. “And that should confine our search enough to presumably locate the remainder of Nathan’s body, and hopefully our family members as well.”

  “Exactly,” Cavenaugh said. “Of course, that theory is predicated upon the assumption that Nathan’s femur wasn’t moved from another location to begin with. If it had simply been discarded there by someone or some other creature like a bear, then it may just be a wild goose chase.”

  “There’s another interesting fact about haloarchaea we suspect may apply to this microorganism. They have an inordinately high concentration of carotenoid pigments for protection from ultraviolet rays, which cause them to take on a reddish or rust-colored hue. If we find our spring, we should know it right away.”<
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  “And from there,” Cavenaugh said, nodding toward the equipment behind Gabriel, “the real work begins.”

  * * *

  They had spent the afternoon learning how to use the equipment. The GPR had taken some serious practice, but by the time dinner rolled around, they all had a pretty decent understanding of the various signals on the readout and were at least able to recognize the differences between ice, packed dirt, and various rocks. Human remains would be a different animal entirely, but there were no test subjects available. They could only hope they would be able to identify them when the moment of truth arrived.

  After a meal of boiled hotdogs and baked beans, during which conversation had been sporadic at best, they had decided to retire early and gather again before sunrise to formulate their plans. They were all eager to begin, but the storm had intensified to the point that the blowing flakes obscured even the major landmarks. The first thing they were going to need to do was study the satellite images in hopes of finding the hot spring, and then make notes of the clues in the Bible verses that might have led their missing family members to it. For now, Gabriel was content to allow the day to end. Granted, they had accomplished nothing, but simply being there in the cabins again had taken a physical and emotional toll on all of them.

  Gabriel closed the outhouse door and threw the hood of his jacket up over his head to shield it from the onslaught of snow on the shifting wind. If for nothing else, he was thankful the flies had died off for the season. He had horrible memories of the buzzing sound and the tapping of insect bodies against his bare rear end. As he trudged through the accumulation, he tried not to wonder what the coming day would bring.

  He was nearly to the back door of his cabin when he noticed a figure standing at the edge of the forest, staring off into the trees. At the sound of his approach, the figure turned and gave him a halfhearted wave. He was able to see just enough to identify Jess by her profile.

  “This wasn’t what I had in mind,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  She wrapped her arms around her chest and walked toward him.

  “The snow,” she said. “It was in the fifties when I left Denver. I nearly didn’t pack all of my winter gear.”

  “This is definitely going to make our search more challenging.”

  Silence hung between them for a long moment. Gabriel was just about to excuse himself when she finally spoke.

  “What aren’t you telling us?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Earlier, when you were talking about the bacteria they found on Nathan’s bone, you said they were ‘similar to’ haloarchaea, ‘like’ haloarchaea.”

  Gabriel nodded.

  “You never once said this microorganism was haloarchaea.”

  “I don’t know where you’re going with this,” he said, but it was obvious.

  “I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon, and I can only come up with two options: either you don’t know what kind of bacteria they found, or you’re just not telling us.”

  Gabriel didn’t know how to proceed. He had promised Cavenaugh he wouldn’t mention their theory about the origin of the microorganism, but he had only done so because they agreed the others might not join them if they did so prior to arrival. Now that everyone was here, though…

  “This is hard enough on all of us as it is,” Jess said. “We don’t need secrets between us to make it worse.” She took his hand and looked directly into his eyes. “I lost my sister here, too.”

  He took a deep breath and glanced back over his shoulder toward the cabin. Before he consciously made a decision to do so, he started to talk.

  * * *

  Gabriel stared at the exposed wooden planks of the ceiling above. His mind wouldn’t keep quiet long enough for him to sleep. Cavenaugh’s clock ticked monotonously from the other side of the bed, metering the rhythm of his wheezing exhalations. The light from the wood-burning stove in the main room had faded to a weak glow through the open doorway, and if he turned just right, he could see the cloud of his breath. He rolled over and pulled the covers up over his face, primarily to drown out the sounds of the man lying on his back scant inches away in the queen-sized bed. With any luck, Jess was having better luck on the couch.

  She had responded to the details of the halophile about as he had expected, as he was sure he would have had their roles been reversed. Had he not seen it with his own eyes, he would have shared her disbelief. They had left the conversation in such a way that he still didn’t know exactly what she thought. Whether the microorganism had once originated on a different planet or not was irrelevant anyway. It was merely a tool to help them locate the bodies. Maybe once he was able to formally close this chapter in his life, he would be able to convince the university to write him a grant to study it in the field. Or perhaps he would be happy enough to never return to these godforsaken mountains again.

  There was a scratching sound, faint at first, like a bare branch raking the siding outside the window. But there weren’t any trees within ten feet of the cabin.

  He pulled down the covers to better hear. Even over Cavenaugh’s snoring, he could discern it, louder now.

  It stopped abruptly.

  Gabriel sat up and craned his head to listen. Was there someone outside the cabin trying to get in? His heart was pounding, his breaths coming shallow and fast. He leaned over the side of the bed and grabbed his flashlight from the floor.

  Thump.

  The hollow sound originated somewhere behind a wall, or possibly under the floorboards. It was hard to tell. He could only be sure he had heard something bump a wooden board in some sort of recess.

  A minute passed. Then two. The sound didn’t repeat.

  Gabriel climbed out of bed, slipped on his boots, and shrugged into his jacket. He switched on the flashlight and directed it around the room. Nothing. Mustering his courage, he exited the bedroom, passed through the living room and kitchen, and opened the back door. The wind buffeted him with a swarm of snowflakes as he stepped out into the night. He swept the column of light across the glimmering white mat, spotlighting large flakes that cast strange, shifting shadows. Easing along the side of the building where the snow had begun to drift, he continued moving the beam from side to side until he was nearly directly under the window, and stopped.

  There were tracks in the snow.

  He knelt and examined them. They belonged to some sort of animal for sure. The prints were too deep to clearly see the imprint of the paws, but he could tell it couldn’t have been more than a foot tall based on the uneven sweeping marks the fur on the animal’s belly left atop the snow between the tracks. They probably belonged to the fox he had seen earlier.

  The snow had been cleared away from the base of the cabin wall, where there was a small, dark opening between the ground and the siding. He flattened himself to his stomach and shined the light into the hole. Weathered planks, upon which the wooden interior floors were braced, stretched off into the darkness beyond the reach of the flashlight. The ground beneath was bare, leveled dirt. He smelled mildew and turned earth, and underneath, a foul organic stench that suggested something had crawled under there to die.

  He pointed the light to the right and caught a flash from twin golden rings. There was a hissing sound and something slashed his cheek. Dropping the flashlight, he rolled away from the hole in time to see a furry orange animal dart across the clearing and disappear into the storm.

  “Jesus,” he whispered. He dabbed his left cheek with his fingertips. They came away damp, and only caused the pain from the wounds to intensify. He retrieved the flashlight from the snow and shined it on his hand to confirm what he already knew. His fingers were covered with blood and he could feel it beginning to run down the side of his neck.

  Did that thing bite him? All he remembered was the reflection of eyes and a blur of movement. He had barely managed to close his eyes before it struck his cheek.

  At least that accounted for what he had
heard from inside.

  Cautiously, he shined the beam back into the hole, half-expecting to see an entire litter of those monsters waiting to tear off the rest of his face. There was only a small burrow worn into the dirt, a shallow cavity filled with short, knobby sticks. He tipped the light down just a touch and gasped.

  Those weren’t sticks in that nest.

  He took several deep breaths to steady his nerves, reached under the house, and closed his fist around the first object he felt. Rolling away from the hole, he directed the light onto the object balanced on his open palm.

  Three small bones, articulated with rotting knots of cartilage. No sign of the flesh remained, and the cortices were scarred by grooves from an animal’s teeth.

  There was no mistaking what he held.

  It was a human finger.

  November 14 th, 2013

  Sunday

  “Ouch.” Gabriel winced as Maura swabbed his cheek with alcohol. It felt as though he’d been attacked with a series of dull, rusted razorblades. Fortunately, the lacerations were fairly superficial, but that didn’t mean they didn’t sting like hell.

  “I may not be a doctor,” Maura said, “but I think you’re going to live.”

  She opened the medical kit Cavenaugh had had the foresight to bring and taped a couple squares of gauze over the side of his face. It was frightening how well-stocked the kit was. Not only were there bandages, but syringes, splints, vials of lidocaine and epinephrine, and enough needles to make an acupuncturist jealous. What kind of trouble did Cavenaugh anticipate they would get themselves into up here?

  Again he pondered what Cavenaugh might know that he hadn’t divulged.

  Maura closed the kit, took it back into the kitchen, and set it on the counter. Gabriel remained seated in the doorway, oblivious to the snow blowing in his face as he was too busy watching the others where they crouched beneath the window. They had widened the hole under the house substantially, and were now excavating the small recess. Cavenaugh wore a pair of non-powdered latex gloves, and wriggled in and out of the orifice. Each time he returned with a few more small bones, which he set on the pillowcase Kelsey held stretched open in front of him. Will pointed the flashlight over Cavenaugh’s back and directed the beam under the floorboards, while Jess stared intently at the growing collection of skeletal remains.