The students nodded, solemn looks of grief on their faces. It was as if they suddenly understood the horrible massacre they were standing in. It wasn’t the peaceful, silent death of twenty-seven men and explorers they’d come across. It wasn’t a simple gravesite; one created when the group died of starvation, natural causes, or both.
The men that lay beneath their canvas tents, caught in eternal sleep, weren’t men who’d given in to their fate. It was the site of men who had been taken by something sinister that had been hidden away for so long.
It was the site of a massacre.
Chapter Ten
“David Livingston,” Julie said to Ben as they walked across the parking lot, “is pretty much exactly what you think of when you think ‘bureaucracy by the book.’ He’d rather fail doing it the right way than succeed by not following the rules.”
Julie turned left and started walking down a row of parked cars, Ben in tow. He could see only sedans and small station wagons and wondered which was Julie’s.
“He’s not exactly the easiest person to work with, either,” she continued. “Actually, you don’t work with Livingston at all. You work for him. In his world, that means everyone’s working against him, and it’s up to him to right all our wrongs.”
“Sounds like a stand up guy,” Ben said as they passed yet another Subaru Outback. “Which one’s yours?”
Julie laughed, then clicked the button on her key fob. A beep sounded from down the row, and Ben stopped short. Ahead of them lay a monstrous Ford pickup. A lifted F-450, extended cab Lariat, from what he could see. It was dark gray and loomed over the minuscule cars around it.
Julie threw him the keys. “You drive,” she said. She reached for the back door on the driver’s side and opened it, grabbing a laptop case and bag. “I’ve got some work to do. You, uh, think you can handle her?”
Ben grinned as he opened the door to the driver’s seat and stepped in. He tried not to seem impressed. He turned on the engine and waited for Julie to enter on her side. Once seated, he threw the truck in reverse and backed out of the spot.
“Anyway, Livingston’s making us do these reports.” She opened the laptop. “He’s got this idea that if we write everything down and email it to him, he’ll be able to ‘crack the case,’ or figure out whatever it is we’re supposed to figure out. It’s pretty annoying, to say the least.
“Then, just now, he called to tell me he wants an in-person report every forty-eight hours. Can you believe that? He said if we can’t make it face-to-face, we have to call in. I’m already up to here with processing, reports, and government forms, not to mention actually doing my job. And he thinks if I’m too busy to actually get to the office I have enough time to give him a play-by-play update over the phone?”
Ben listened as she vented, guiding the truck out of the parking lot and down the curved path leading from the staff facility. As he turned onto the main park road, he turned to Julie. “Where exactly are we going?”
She looked back at him. “Oh, uh, I guess I should ask you first.” Ben waited. “You have plans? I could use your help back at the office.”
Ben couldn’t hide his surprise. “The office? You mean, back in Billings? That’s, what, an hour and a half drive?”
She shrugged. “Just over two, actually. I didn’t think you had anything going on, what with the park needing to be closed for a while. I’ve got more questions to ask you, but I can’t wait until after I get back — Livingston will want to know as soon as possible.”
He was silent for a few minutes as they drove toward the park’s eastern boundary. “I need to swing by my place for a bit to pick up some clothes. And I don’t want to get involved, Julie. I’m serious — I’m here to help you out for a few days, tops. Just because I don’t have anything else going on doesn’t mean I want to play chauffeur for you forever.”
“I promise. Just to the office, and then I’ll buy you a plane ticket home — I can get my report prepared and sent on the way, and if anything comes up I can just ask.”
“Deal, but hold the plane ticket. I’ll rent a car.”
Julie frowned, but didn’t question him. They drove on in silence for another twenty minutes, finally coming to a gas station on their left. “One other thing,” Ben said. Julie jumped, then looked over.
“What’s that?”
“You get to pay for gas.”
Chapter Eleven
David Livingston sat in his executive leather office chair and cracked his knuckles — an old habit. He ran his hands through his thick, oiled black hair and shifted in his seat. His computer dinged once — the sound of an incoming email — but he ignored it.
Clicking away from the news site, he read through the dossier on Juliette Alexandra Richardson, native of Montana. Other than a brief stint in California during and after college, she’d lived in Montana her entire life. He’d had the data center send a copy up to his office, where he scanned it and shredded the paper — a wasted tree and no doubt a waste of productive time. After five years at the CDC, he still had no idea why it was so difficult to just email everything through a secure connection. The data lead, Randall Brown, had tried explaining it to him several times, but it never took.
He reached the end of the dossier, not finding anything unusual or out of place. He shouldn’t have been surprised — this was the third time he’d read it. It was similar to what his own looked like five years ago. Clean, simple, and without a black mark.
He had reached this point in his career through determination, hard work, and then bad luck. At first, he’d applied to the CDC as an investigator, hoping to land a job that allowed him to travel, study, and research the kinds of terrifying things the rest of world paid them to keep hidden. He’d started out following a team of scientists and biologists into the Andes, but couldn’t get his name in the paper that was eventually written. After graduating and finishing his internship, he was passed over three times before landing a desk job at the Atlanta campus — CDC headquarters. He toiled there for four years, e-signing his boss’s expense reports and preparing meeting agendas.
Then his boss died. A man of sixty-one, a sudden heart attack left the department without a manager. Rather than replace him, Livingston found his and his coworkers’ jobs outsourced and the department all but shut down. Floating around, he landed a brief position as a “research specialist,” effectively a news and media junkie who speculated on which outbreaks and natural disasters would lead to the next Mad Cow Disease or Bird Flu.
During his tenure, there were none.
Finally, his luck turned — or so he thought. What appeared to be an opportunity to lead a brand new, recently brainstormed section of the CDC became the mind-numbing middle management job in which he currently served. They’d been relegated to the backwaters of the CDC — southern Montana — and asked to “provide guidance on environmental and biological threats to the nation.” To Livingston, it was the worst place in the entire world.
In other words, he and his team were glorified storm chasers.
Julie, on the other hand, had come through his doors as a young CDC employee three years ago, still wet behind the ears with the usual “change the world” mentality. He wouldn’t have picked her himself, but she had come highly recommended by people above his own pay grade.
Plus, her looks certainly didn’t hurt her chances.
Livingston pushed back from the desk and stood up, stretching his back and popping his neck. He pressed a button on the small intercom next to his computer and waited a moment.