Massing armies of white flakes marched in the headlights as Winnie pushed the vehicle to its limits. The tires spun frantically in the unstable ash, rarely biting down to pavement. Snow and ash accumulated so rapidly the front bumper began to plow the filth rather than sweep over it wherever the wind sculpted drifts.
Half an hour west of Chokio, telephone poles became the only guideposts heralding the path of asphalt somewhere below. A business sign spelling out Chamberlain Lumber, Graceville, Minnesota emerged from storm. The Jeep Liberty couldn’t reach it. The vehicle bellied up and packed sludge beneath the undercarriage, sufficient to thwart the tires from gaining traction. It could go no further. Small matter, the rig would soon die of thirst.
Now what? Stay with the car and run out of gas in minutes? Burrow into the sleeping bag and wait until morning? And if the storm worsened and drifts piled up, what then? No one would be along on this miserable thoroughfare, and probably hadn’t been for weeks.
Winnie slammed a fist down on the steering wheel. Circumstances had careened out of control. She couldn’t abide the situation she had fostered and reacted against it, not in fear but in rage.
“Do something, you idiot,” she bellowed to the car’s interior. Action was better than inaction, she chided herself, movement better than stasis. She resolved to abandon the vehicle and strike off into the wind and pitch in an attempt to reach the sawmill huddled in the storm somewhere ahead in the night.
Bundled beneath layers of clothing, the woman pushed out the door of the vehicle and stepped into a raging gale as if she had dropped down into a late summer storm on Baffin Island in the Canadian high arctic. Ferocious gusts funneled down the buried highway, winging snow and ash on the horizontal.
Winnie trekked northwest against the tempest, burrowing through the brute force of howling air. Head ducked down, hunched over to present less body surface to the wind, she descended into an autonomic state. Push hard, she instructed her legs. Find the entrance to the mill somewhere ahead. Move and stay warm. Stop in this wind and lock rigid with cold.
Midnight brought no lull in the snow or wind. Caked white with driven rime frost and steaming sweat vapor from exertion, Winnie walked far longer than she had anticipated. Getting her bearings among the swirling ground clouds was difficult. The night illumination was flat at all compass points, rendering every image in two-dimensions. The environment around her was a cacophony of noise, wet cold and stinging precipitation.
Between gusts of wind-driven crystals, a smudge on the horizon materialized into the shapes of small industrial buildings. Frantic for safety, muscles in her thighs burning, she grappled for the nearest doorway in a structure to find a way out of the elements. She rammed an elbow through a pane of door glass, reached for an interior lock, found it, manipulated it, and fell headlong into the building.
The interior was as raw as the night air. In minutes she was shivering. Sweat soaked her clothing from head to foot. The garments had lost their insulating powers and were wicking body heat into the atmosphere faster than her metabolism could manufacturer it.
Frantically, she fumbled for a light switch, found one and flipped it. The darkness did not part. The space she had fallen into seemed to be a small office outfitted out with several desks, computers, a few chairs and a small sofa. In one corner stood a cement-block hearth and a massive wood stove, fabricated large to keep frigid Minnesota winters at bay. She groped the stove and objects near it. She ran her hands over a hewn log mantle, found a glass jar candle, and nudged a box of wooden kitchen matches. She shook the box. A single match remained. Pulling it out, she struck the flint strip hard, snapping the head of the match off the stick. The match head flew off into the black.
Chapter Eighty-Two
Farm manager Oleg Knudsen hurried through an armored morning, cut through with edgy black shadows. In the horizontal white light of the emerging cold sun, frost and snow crystals flashed as if reflecting light from a junkyard of shattered mirrors. The day had the look and feel of the first week of December, not the last days of summer.
The man approached the traditional red-painted barn, built in the style of a nineteenth-century Pennsylvania Dutch farm building. As he rounded the northeast corner, two piles of offal greeted him, glistening in the early hard light amid dark stains and clots formed by blood seepage in wind scoured snow.
Kneeling, Knudsen probed the intestines with a finger. They were hard to the touch, nearly frozen solid from long exposure to night air. In seconds the man formed a mental image of what had transpired sometime after the barns were shut for the night. One or two people had entered the barns late, he calculated. Two nannies were led outside, trying to get at a handful of grain used lure the animals to their deaths. The throats of the animals had been slit and they had been bled out on the spot and gutted.
Knudsen ran through the large equipment port on the rear of the building but stopped abruptly before the first massive square upright timber ten feet into the building. Affixed to the wood at chest height were two white ovoid shapes. Heads. Goat heads were pinned to the timber with small spikes driven through the once quick ears. The gold eyes, with their friendly rectangle bar irises, would not follow the human’s movements. They reflected no light.
Knudsen went to the severed heads and carefully lifted them from their crucifixion timbers, pulled them down and carried them into the barn office to locate a cloth or box and a shovel. He wanted to bury them right away, the offal, too.
Under a large tree, the farm manager cracked at the earth with a shovel and broke through the frost frozen film in the top inch of soil. He let fly heavy shovel loads of earth until he had descended thirty inches. Without a word, he placed the remains at the bottom of the little pit, returned the soil to it, then gathered leaf litter from the forest edge and covered the spot. When he was done, he couldn’t readily tell where the burial plot lay.
Chapter Eighty-Three
Thrusting a knife between the tibia and fibula of a lower leg, Andy Regas punched a narrow slit. The young man, a chewing tobacco wad between the cheek and teeth in his heavy jaw, hoisted a small caprian carcass up with one hand. Spreading the rear legs, he hooked the appendages onto driven nails. Now the beast could hang upside down. He did the same thing to a second carcass so he could work easily on the two freshly killed animals.
From the gaping hole in the goats’ abdomens, where the man had eviscerated the animals the night before, he slit the skin from the centerline out to each leg and up the inside of the thighs to the ankle joints, where he had severed the cloven-hoofed feet. Working deftly with his thick fingers, as he had done to hundreds of deer carcasses over many years, he peeled the hides back, guiding the knife to slice connective tissue so the skins would slip free of the muscle tissue without disturbing the flesh.
In a few minutes, he had stripped the goats of their pelts and nailed the wet skins to a wall to dry. The muscle tissues cast a purple hue beneath thin slips of membrane, tallow and small bead clusters of yellow fat. In the cool temperatures, he’d let the meat hang for a while to age and soften.
Regas turned to leave the shed but arrested himself, startled. Someone stood behind him, had come up on him without making a sound. He recognized the being once the startle reflex faded: his foster father, Harland.
“You scared the crap out of me, man,” sputtered Regas caustically.
Harland glowered at the strapping young male.
“Where’d you come from, old man?”
“The lake. I took Jim’s bass boat over.”