Remains Page 7

  “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—”

  “W
e 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.

  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 mo
untain 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.