It was snowing in earnest as Patty Tyson drove up the hill in her green state-issued truck and through the gates into the multi-building ranger station at Emigrant Gap. She’d stopped by the flagpole and took down the Stars and Stripes and the California Bear flag because of the coming storm. She set the flags on her desk and picked up her ringing desk phone.
“Emigrant Gap ranger station,” she said.
“Patty. It’s Quentin.”
“Quentin?” Patty’s heart sped up without her wanting it to. She grabbed the old-school telephone line and slid the phone closer to her.
“Patty, I’m calling because a friend of mine is missing. Well, not officially missing, yet. No one has filed a missing-persons report, but I think he’s in the park, north of the Army’s training center at Snake Creek. That’s where I think he is, probably in that canyon under Mount Baldy.” Patty grabbed a yellow pad and took down the coordinates. “He was in the Marine Corps with my older brother. He’s a funny guy, but a friend of the family, you could say.”
“Funny, ha ha? Or funny peculiar?” Patty said, while writing.
“Well, I guess funny peculiar. He sticks to himself,” Quentin said. “But he’s a good guy.”
“When did he come into the park?”
“I don’t know exactly. But I’d say in the last two days. I think he’s at Snake Creek because I know the locals deer hunt up there. It’s the best place and none of the city people can find it.”
“Do you want me to start a full scale S and R?” she asked.
“No. No, not yet. I don’t think Chuck is that kind of problem. He grew up out here. He’s a pretty tough ex-soldier. I don’t think it’s serious. But I thought you could have a helicopter from the Army’s base come down and fly over the canyon, down say to the highway. Tell them to look for a broken-down blue snowmobile. I think he probably had a breakdown and is walking out. He could be hurt, though, and not able to walk.”
“Of course,” Patty said.
“Thanks. I’ll call you.”
“Quentin—I had fun, this morning.”
“Me too,” he said.
“I’ll call your cell as soon as I hear anything,” she said. “What’s his full name?”
“Chuck Phelps. Thanks, Patty.”
She put down the phone and called the Army’s winter proving ground. They had a chopper in the air twenty minutes later.
* * *
“What the hell happened to him?” the lieutenant said.
The two helicopter pilots could see the disemboweled carcass of a man in the creek. The snow at their feet was stained red. Bits of flesh and guts led to the man’s body in the water. The carcass, held together by pieces of a jacket, had floated down and got caught on a thick snag of tree branches. The jacket’s fur-lined hood bobbed above the surface of the water. Two flesh-peeled human hands stuck out from the sleeves and broke the water line. The body had no head.
“We need a body bag or something,” the sergeant said.
“We’ll use the coat,” the lieutenant said.
The lieutenant, a tall, thin redhead from Mississippi, looked down the creek. Beyond the floating carcass, the creek had a straight run of about a hundred yards before it moved off to the right. Lieutenant Bell turned back to look across the snowy field they’d hiked over, then down at the blood-stained snow at his feet. “I don’t get it. All those people we saw. I don’t get it,” Bell said. They’d flown over a group of twenty or thirty people. The people had all run away into the tree line and disappeared. “The ranger didn’t say anything about other people,” Bell said, trying to keep a certain disinterested tone in his voice.
“They didn’t move like regular people,” the sergeant said.
“Well, sergeant, God is our copilot,” Bell said dryly. “Now I’m going down into that creek and pull what’s left of that poor bastard out of there. I could pull rank on you right now and make you go in there, but I won’t do that, Sergeant.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The lieutenant climbed down the bank. He thought he could reach down and hoist the headless body over the snag of logs and rocks, but realized it might all pull apart and decided against it.
“How do you end up like that?” the lieutenant asked, stepping back onto the bank. “Something attacked him. Maybe a bear, or coyotes. Something,” Bell said, answering his own question.
“Well, that must have been one pissed off fucking bear,” the sergeant said.
The lieutenant climbed around to the front of the snag and stepped into the creek. His brain went blue-hot from the cold as soon as the water flooded into his boots. He stepped up to his knees in the icy water. He slipped, but caught himself on a huge boulder jutting out of the rushing water. He heard the sergeant laugh behind him. The sergeant had been in Somalia, at the famous Battle of Mogadishu, and was not quite right in the head.
“I’m going to make you carry this guy on your fucking lap all the way back, Sergeant Whitney,” Bell said.
“You have to pull what’s left of his ass out of there first, sir,” the sergeant said.
Bell walked further into the water, the creek up to the waist. He felt nothing; his lower body had gone numb from the cold. Bell made his way toward the mass of tree limbs and dead branches in front of him, the current trying to knock him down as he went.
He slipped and fell again, this time face down into the fast-moving water. The current drove him quickly into the bobbing carcass of what had been Chuck Phelps. Bell pushed himself off the body, horrified.
“You okay, sir?” Bell heard the sergeant’s voice as soon as he broke the surface of the icy water. But he was in a panic and didn’t answer. Something was holding him against the body.
“I’ve fucking stuck myself on something,” Bell yelled. He ran his right hand down into the water and felt a small tree branch shoved into his side and puncturing his flight suit and skin. He pushed himself off the sharp point of the branch. A sharp pain ran down his legs. He backed away toward the bank to get the wound above the water line. He fought the current, which seemed to want to run him through again. He managed to turn around, the blood dribbling from a puncture wound in his side. The sergeant had jumped in the water and was coming toward him.
That was when they heard the first scream, like a hyena, a wild guttural howling, and screaming, somewhere above them.
“What the fuck was that?” Bell said, trying to stand up.
* * *
Patty looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. Bits of snow were caught in her hair. She’d come back from lunch and gone into her cabin just behind the station’s front gate. She examined the fine wrinkles around her eyes. Thirty-three years old, she told herself. Time to get out the Oil of Olay?
She heard a knock on her cabin door. She went out into the cabin’s small living room and opened it, expecting it would be one of the rangers she worked with.
“Well, sweetheart, how are you?” Dillon said.
“What are you doing here?” Patty said.
“I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d drop in and say hello to my ex-wife,” Dillon said.
Patty stared at her ex-husband, shocked. “Why didn’t you write the lawyer?” she said finally.