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 mountain 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.
He nearly dropped the rifle in his hurry to turn away.
Blood.
The rocks were crisscrossed with arcs of blood.
***
It was unnerving watching Oscar squatting there on the rock, licking and licking, the fur surrounding his mouth turning a rich shade of red. Gabriel had no way of knowing whether the blood had come from a human or an animal. Regardless, whatever had met its demise in that dead end had done so badly. He was no forensics expert,
