Monster (6 page)
Beck heard the rush of a waterfall. Abruptly, the trail cut through a streambed, snaking through and over slick, sharp-edged rocks. Reed stopped, stumbling on the rocks, his legs wobbly. He bent as if searching for rocks to throw, a stick he might use as a club,
anything.
Beck just wanted to get across, get on smooth trail again. The waterfall was loud, close, just to her right—
The rocks broke away under her foot. She tumbled sideways, then fell headlong over the precipice, flipping end over end—
Her backpack absorbed some of the impact with the rocks, but she was still tumbling, her flashlight flipping in midair.
Her head hit. A blinding flash exploded in her brain.
Reed heard her go down, and he searched with his light.
“Beck!” There she was, flailed like a rag doll on the rocks about ten feet below the trail, her leg dangling in the flowing water, a streak of blood reaching down her face. He found a way down, a slow but sure course through brush, limbs, and saplings. “Beck!”
He grabbed the first limb and swung himself down, then another limb, then a fistful of brush. Lower, lower!
“Beck! Say something! Talk to me!”
There was a commotion across the stream.
Oh dear Lord, don’t let it be
—
The beam caught the silvery-green glimmer of two retinas suspended within a massive black shadow that swallowed up his light. He screamed, half out of his own terror, half to cause terror. Would nothing chase this thing away?
The shadow moved so fast he lost it. He searched, waved his light about. It caught one fleeting image of his wife’s body swept up like a toy, arms limp, long brown hair flying.
The shadow enfolded her like a blanket. There were heavy, bass-note footfalls up the bank, and then . . .
Nothing.
Reed dashed across the stream, frantic, shining his light in every direction but seeing only thick, tangled forest. The stream and waterfall made so much noise he couldn’t hear anything else. He got out of there, clambering up the other side, only guessing which way that thing went.
“Beck!” he called.
No answer.
But she wasn’t dead. No. He would not allow himself to think that. She was alive and breathing, and any moment she was going to hear his call and answer. If she screamed for help, he would hear her.
Think,
he told himself.
Don’t panic. You can’t see much at all, but can you hear anything? Can you smell anything?
There! He heard limbs snapping farther up the slope. He raced along the trail, probing with his flashlight. A broken tree limb! Then another! He slipped out of his pack and dove into the trees, probing, climbing, looking for signs, listening, then calling.
From deep in his mind came a warning:
You have no gun. No weapon. You need to find something—
Another rustling sound grabbed his attention and spurred him upward. He found a game trail where the ground was disturbed by hoofprints of elk and deer. Among these prints he found a deep, half-round impression, perhaps a heel print. With new strength he climbed, and then traversed the slope, then zigzagged as he lost, then found, then lost the game trail. With the trail gone, he followed sounds, any sound.
“Beck!” The forest swallowed his voice.
He hurried, he struggled, he climbed, he doubled back, he climbed again, then descended, then climbed, until fear and desperation gave way to exhaustion and he began to realize that he was like a mite in a carpet. As loud as he might call, this wilderness stretched farther than his voice could reach. The light from his flashlight had dimmed to a dull orange glow, but the mountains had darkness to spare, plenty to swallow up any light.
The seconds had stacked up and become minutes; the minutes had stretched into hours. Steps had become yards, and yards had become miles, but the forest had not shrunk. It was still bigger than he could ever be, with more obstacles, tangles, confusion, and dark, dark, dark!
When he broke into a meadow where the stars were visible and a waning moon was finally rising, he collapsed to the ground with a quiet whimper, limp and totally spent, head hanging, conflicting thoughts bantering in his head.
She’s gone
.
No, no, she isn’t. Just have to find her, that’s all.
Where? Where could you even start looking?
Well, some daylight would sure help.
She’ll be somebody’s dinner by then.
No. God won’t let that happen.
Look at what He’s already let happen! Remember where you are! There are different rules out here!
Reed’s hands went to his head as if he could corral his thoughts. His aimless thrashing around in the woods for hours had accomplished nothing; a mad and frenzied mind would accomplish even less. He forced himself to lie still, breathing for breathing’s sake until he could construct a coherent thought.
First coherent thought: He hadn’t found his wife.
Second coherent thought: In all his mad scrambling and searching, he could have wandered farther from her, not closer.
Third coherent thought: He’d become part of the problem. He was lost, without provisions, without a weapon.
He still had his map and compass. If the sun ever came up again sometime in his life, he could take a look around and hopefully get his bearings. For now, he was too tired and emotionally spent to work it out, and any more wandering would only make things worse. Until he got some rest and some real light, he would be no help to Beck or himself.
The dying orange beam of his flashlight found an old fallen snag just a few feeble steps up the hill, with a hollow in the ground beneath it. His heart screamed against the decision, but his mind made it stick.
He would shelter himself under the snag to maintain his body heat, and rest until daylight.
“Beck . . . Beck . . . Beck!”
Beck was dreaming, far from fear in the dark, merely puzzled by her husband’s anguished voice as he screamed her name. Beyond her dream was a faraway pain, a dull throbbing, a dizzy world tipping and turning, a body aching, but she didn’t wake up from the dream. She didn’t want to. Waking would hurt; the dream didn’t. In the dream she was floating as if in a stream, gliding past limbs and trees and leaves that went
swish
, with the ground so far below.
She was warm, as if cuddled in a furry blanket, but it was dark, like being in her bedroom at night.
Can’t wake up, won’t wake up, eyes won’t open, staying in the dream, moving fast, can feel the breeze . . .
Monsters, snorting, drooling, stomping, invisible in the dark. All around, closer, closer. Beck! Beck! His legs wouldn’t move—
“Reed! Beck!”
Reed awoke with a start.
“Reed!” That sounded like Cap.
He stirred, unclear as to where he was, but willing his legs and arms to move, to pull, push, and claw his way into the open, through tangled exposed roots and crumbled rocks into eye-stinging daylight.
The distant call came again: “Reed! Beck!”
Reed rolled out into the grass, the dew soaking through his clothes. Everything looked so different. “Hello!” he cried.
He heard Sing’s voice call, “Reed! Where are you?”
“Up here!” he called.
He leaped to his feet, but his head emptied of blood and he fell, reminded of how weak and shaken he was. They shouted again, he answered again, and that was all he was good for until his friends reached him, snapping and rustling their way through the thick undergrowth until they emerged into the clearing. They looked prepared for a week in the wilderness, with packs on their backs, hats, boots, jackets. Reed figured he must look pretty horrible, judging from their expressions.
“Reed! We found your pack down by the creek. What happened?” Cap asked.
“Where’s Beck?”
By that afternoon, the Tall Pine Resort began to see more activity than it had all season. Two squad cars from the Whitcomb County Sheriff’s Department were angled in against the meandering, up-and-down porch. On either side of them were the pickup trucks, SUVs, cars, and motorcycles that had brought the Search and Rescue volunteers. The volunteers, more than a dozen strong, wasted no time unloading and filling backpacks with needed gear, testing portable radios, and organizing survival equipment and medical supplies. Some of the guys prepared high-powered rifles and stowed cases of ammunition. A van arrived and lurched into a space at the far end of the parking lot, an eager German shepherd barking and whining in the back. Across the parking lot, hooked to an RV power outlet, was the Search and Rescue command vehicle, a converted school bus now crammed with equipment, supplies, a computer, and radios. Close to the main door was a sharp-looking King Cab pickup with an Idaho Department of Fish and Game insignia on the side.
Deputy Sheriff Patrick Saunders, in green field jacket and billed cap, walked briskly out the main door, reporting into a handheld radio, “Yeah, Jimmy Clark’s here debriefing the witness. We’ll all get rolling when he’s done. It’s a probable bear attack, so we’re lining up some hunters—”
Sheriff Patrick Mills signaled a halt right in front of Dave’s mouth and whispered sharply, “Dave, let’s not say it so loud, shall we?”
The deputy followed the sheriff’s glance to where Reed Shelton sat on a wooden bench farther up the meandering porch, just outside Room 105. He was haggard, dazed, and dirty, apparently trying to make sense to Jimmy Clark, the conservation officer who asked him questions.
“Oh, man, sorry,” the deputy said.
Sheriff Mills, a tall man weathered by experience and sporting a graying mustache, went back to a conversation he’d been having with Cap and Sing on the slapped-together porch near the main door. He was dressed for wilderness work, in the standard-issue green jacket with
SHERIFF
in large yellow letters on the back, but instead of a policeman’s hat, he wore a cowboy hat with a county sheriff insignia on its front.
“Sorry,” the sheriff said to Cap. “Now, you were saying?”
Cap stood nervously, taking deep breaths, shifting his weight, grasping the porch post as if to steady himself. The college professor’s words raced and his voice seemed weak. “We found—it was on the rocks below the waterfall.”
“Blood,” Mills refreshed him.
“Yeah. We checked all around the creek area, both sides of the trail, up and down the slope . . .”
“How wide a radius?”
Cap shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe forty feet, maybe fifty . . .” He looked at Sing, passing her the question.
She was sitting on a hand-hewn bench against the old log wall, her face troubled as she studied the LCD of Reed Shelton’s camera. She was reviewing the digital photographs Reed had taken of the splintered cabin and the shots of Beck sitting in their campsite, her cheeks plump with a mouthful of sandwich. Sing and Cap’s backpacks rested against the wall next to her, packed to bulging but never opened. Leaves and needles clung to her clothing and her braids. “I would say a hundred-foot radius. But it was difficult. The brush is thick in that area.”
Mills looked over Sing’s shoulder at the small camera screen. “Did he get any shots of Thompson’s body?”
Sing came to the end of the pictures in the camera’s memory. “No. Apparently Reed was in no picture-taking mood when he and Beck were running for their lives.”
“And you never got back to the cabin to check it out?”
Cap was obviously on edge, tiring of the questions. He wagged his head. “We only wanted to find Beck, that was all.”
“So you didn’t see whether or not there was a body up there?”
“No!” Cap lowered his voice. “Reed said Randy was dead, and that was good enough for us. Beck was the one we were concerned about.”
Sing stroked her forehead. “We weren’t getting anywhere. Reed didn’t want to leave, but we had to get back here; we had to get some help.”
Mills regarded the folks gathering in the parking lot, well trained, some specialized, all there to find Beck Shelton no matter what. “You made the right decision. Sing, you’ve been our forensics specialist for five years now. You’ve teamed up with some of these people before. You know they’re good at what they do.”
Sing nodded and gave a wave to the dog handler, who was sharing a piece of breakfast toast with Caesar, the German shepherd. “I never thought I’d be part of the case we’re working on.”
Sheriff Mills looked past Cap and Sing to where Reed was still being questioned by Jimmy Clark. “So how clear do you think Reed’s head is right now?”
Cap stole a glance. “I don’t know. He’s in some sort of shock, like he’s having waking nightmares. If he tells Jimmy what he told us . . .”
Sing shivered, putting the camera in its case. “Reed was right about the cabin. If we find Randy Thompson thrown up in a tree, we might have to believe the rest of his story.”
“Being in the dark, in the woods, can make things seem a lot worse than they are,” the sheriff suggested.
“Maybe finding Randy’s body was the thing that shocked him,” Cap offered, “and after that, well, then, Beck gets grabbed . . . I don’t know, I’d probably be seeing some pretty horrible things by then.”