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.
