Snowblind (2 page)

The other rooms were in marginally better condition. A small chamber with a rust-ravaged tin roof must have served as dry storage. Moldering leaves and dead aspen saplings dominated the frosted floor amid a scattering of opaque broken glass. There were still mason jars and cans of food rusting in the back corner beside a small square entryway that led into a stone-lined cellar excavated into the hillside. It looked more like a tomb than cold storage, and barely had enough room to contain all of the spider webs and insect carcasses. There were rusted brass bullet casings from the days before mass commercial loading on the stone floor, along with clumps of desiccated fur that suggested some animal or other had made its den in there. It smelled faintly of decomposition and feces, as though something had crawled in there to die and rotted to dissolution.

The final room, a bedroom to the right of the main room, showed signs of somewhat recent habitation. Sections of the fallen roof had been propped up with sturdy branches and there was a carbon-scored fire ring near a window that had been boarded over long ago. Shore had scrounged enough kindling to reignite the charred remains of what must have once been a four-poster bed. Vigil was resting reasonably comfortably in the opposite corner from the fire, away from the swirling smoke, which funneled up through the small holes and cracks in the blackened ceiling. Coburn watched Vigil’s chest rise and fall rhythmically beneath a silver tarp that reflected the orange and gold of the crackling flames.

It was reassuring to know that they weren’t the first to have been forced to hunker down in here to ride out a storm, although that didn’t change the fact that one of them was going to have to strike out in search of the camp and the temperatures were already plummeting as the sun began to set behind the peaks to the west. Not that the darkness caused more than a subtle diminishment of visibility through the blizzard.

Coburn checked the pulse in Vigil’s dorsalis pedis artery one last time, then set off in search of the others. He found Shore and Baumann standing outside in the snow, hunched against the wind, mere shadows in the waning light. Both gestured wildly in opposite directions as they argued at the tops of their lungs to be heard over the screaming gusts tearing through the valley. Beyond them, a shifting wall of white and gray masked the forest and the sharp descent into another invisible valley.

This was their fourteenth annual elk hunt. What at first had been a grand adventure into the wilderness had become more of an escape than anything else. The ties that bound them to their everyday lives had grown so strong that there wasn’t a man among them who couldn’t feel their pull even during this one week a year. As eighteen-year-olds with their whole lives ahead of them, this had been a magical excursion into the unknown. Who was he kidding? It had been an excuse to blow off a little steam and drink a lot of beer. They’d stumbled upon a bull by accident on their final day and had been lucky to hit it once between them. It was hard to believe that those four kids had ever existed. This trip was now more about trying to find those distant shades of themselves than bringing down any mythical twelve-point behemoth.

Coburn couldn’t even envision the younger versions of Baumann and Shore as he approached. Blaine Shore had been a tall skinny kid then, and had grown into a tall skinny man, but all that remained of the long, stringy hair was a horseshoe around the sides and back. He was now the kind of guy who looked out of place without a tie and managed money market accounts or securities or some kind of funds, which essentially boiled down to investing other people’s money and taking a percentage off the top when he so much as thought about making a trade.

Baumann was, and always had been, the diametric opposite of Shore. How they had ever gotten along would forever remain a mystery. If ever a man had lived a charmed life, it was Todd Baumann. The good-looking kid had grown into a good-looking adult. He never exercised, but looked like he lived in a gym. He was the kind of guy who could get lucky just taking his trash to the curb. The teenager who had aced his classes without ever going and spent days on end playing computer games had written a program as a twenty-two-year-old grad student that had revolutionized some sub-platform of an existing matrix of…Coburn didn’t really understand what it was, but it had made Baumann the kind of rich that boggled the mind and allowed him to do pretty much whatever he wanted to do, whenever he wanted to do it.

Vigil had always been the most grounded of them. He had grown from a stocky kid into a portly man, but he wore his weight well, like he had always been meant to wear it and was just fulfilling his biological destiny. He lived a normal life with a normal wife and two stocky little boys who would undoubtedly grow up to do the same. He was a genuine kind of guy who said what he meant and did what he said and could always be counted on to lend a hand when a hand needed to be lent. He was the regional director of a national network of pharmaceutical suppliers, sat on just about every charitable board, and coached baseball in the summer and soccer in the fall.

Coburn had been the driven one. He had wanted to be a doctor, so he had busted his hump to make it happen. He had studied while the rest of his buddies were sleeping or out on dates or at the bars. Since things had never come particularly easy to him and he had never been especially intuitive, he had been forced to accede to the notion that he was just going to have to outhustle and outwork everyone else around him, which he had done through college, medical school, and his residency. And now that he was on-staff at the largest and busiest trauma center in the entire Rocky Mountain Region, he carried that same attitude into his daily work. He often wondered how the others had seen him back then, wondered if he’d ever really been a kid at all. He found it next to impossible to give up the responsibility and the dedication and the motivation, even for a single annual hunt with his old buddies. Pathetic as it was to admit, the “No Pagers and No Cell Phones Rule” had been his. Not because he didn’t want the outside world to be able to find him, but rather because the better part of him did.

“I’m telling you,” Shore shouted, “that peak over there is Mt. Isolation!”

“You can’t see a peak through this storm, let alone well enough to tell which one it is!”

“Just because
you
can’t see it doesn’t mean that I can’t! I can see it plain—”

“We were heading southeast when Vigil fell—”

“We were heading due east.”

“Southeast. We were about two miles northwest of camp—”

“We were closer to a mile and a half west of camp.”

“So when we diverted east to help Vigil—”

“Northeast.”

“We needed to head to the southwest to get back to camp.”

“No! We needed to head west.”

“But instead we followed the bottom of the valley due south.”

“You’re out of your mind! We were headed north!”

“If we were on
either
the southwest or the south face of the mountain—as you claim—before Vigil fell, then there’s no possible way we could have headed north! We would have been walking straight back into the same damn mountain!”

“We were following the same valley we crossed maybe an hour before—”

“There’s no way we doubled back!”

“Guys!” Coburn interrupted. They both turned to face him, obviously surprised by the sound of his voice. They’d been so caught up in their argument that they hadn’t heard him approach. “We need to take a step back and look at this objectively.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing!” Shore shouted. “If it weren’t for Todd contradicting every damn word I say—”

“If anything you said made a lick of sense, I wouldn’t have to!”

“Guys! We’re wasting time we don’t have arguing. We need to figure out exactly where we are so that one of us can head back to camp and call for help. The last thing we want is to set off walking in the wrong direction and end up totally lost.”

“I’ve got news for you, Will. We’re already totally lost,” Baumann said.

Shore couldn’t help but chuckle.

“We can figure this out,” Coburn said. “All we have to do is trace our steps back to where we were when—”

“Shh!” Shore tilted his head away from the wind and closed his eyes. “Did you guys hear that?”

“Hear what?” Coburn said.

“I’m not sure. It sounded almost like…almost like someone screaming.”

“It’s just the wind,” Baumann said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re smack-dab in the middle of a blizzard.”

“No. No…It wasn’t the wind. I don’t think so anyway.”

“Did you hear anything, Will?”

“No…but that doesn’t mean—”

“I’m certain I heard something.” Shore headed toward the ramshackle house. “And it came from this direction.”

Coburn caught up with Shore at the entryway to the wooden structure. He hadn’t been out there for more than five minutes, and already his eyes were watering and the skin on his face stung from the cold. His toes felt like icicles and his flesh prickled with goose bumps. The flickering glow through the gaps around the door and the boarded windows had to be the most inviting sight he had ever seen. He was already anticipating the warmth when he shouldered open the door and followed Shore inside.

The smell struck him immediately.

He stopped dead in his tracks.

“Oh, God,” he whispered and broke into a sprint toward where he had left Vigil.

* * *

Blood was a like a fine wine: the bouquet grew more powerful and pungent with age. Coburn was intimately acquainted with the smell, throughout the duration of its cycle. The residua in a cadaver’s liver smelled vastly different than either arterial or venous blood. Fresh blood was more metallic than biological. He remembered his first surgery, his first incision into the skin of a living, breathing human being, and how the smell reminded him more of opening up a machine than a man. It was a taste as much as a scent, really. An almost electrical tingle at the back of the palate. It was a smell he experienced nearly every single working day, a smell that he found disorienting and out-of-context in this cabin. A smell that he understood on a primal level meant very bad things had transpired.

Even though he knew what to expect when he burst into the small room, he was unprepared for what he saw.

There was blood everywhere. Arcs and spatters on the bare wood walls. Dripping in syrupy ribbons from the ceiling. Pooled on the exposed dirt floor. All of it glimmering with reflected firelight. The flames whipped back and forth, chasing the smoke on the violent wind blowing through the open window.

He tried to call out for Vigil, but no sound came out. It took every last ounce of effort to force his legs to guide him forward into the room. The blood was cooling and congealing as he watched. The glimmer faded and the streaks and smears darkened. Snowflakes turned to rain in the fire’s heat and spattered his face and jacket. At least he hoped that was water striking his face. He kept expecting to find Vigil sitting on the other side of the fire, behind the flames and the smoke where he couldn’t be seen from the doorway, but Coburn knew better. He had seen the blood glistening on the windowsill the moment he noticed the snow swirling in from the darkness outside. When he reached the window, he shielded his eyes and leaned out into the night.

The weathered sheet of plywood was half-buried in the snow to his right, at the extent of the light’s reach. The accumulation directly below him was a crimson mosaic of suffering. He recognized arterial spurts originating from a human-shaped impression, and the packed channel where Vigil had obviously been dragged off into the night and the dark forest.

The bloodstained snow was stamped with a riot of large, deep footprints.

Coburn turned and looked back at Baumann and Shore, who had barely managed to cross the threshold from the main room. He saw the unvoiced question on their faces.

What in the name of God happened here?

* * *

“We have to go after him,” Baumann said.

“He’s lost so much blood…” Shore said. “There’s no way…”

“Would you rather we just leave him out there? Is that what you would expect us to do for you?”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I—”

“Give it a rest,” Coburn interrupted. “There’s nothing to debate. We’re going after him. And we’re bringing him back alive.”

Coburn ducked back into the main room, grabbed his rifle, and shoved between Baumann and Shore on his way to the window. He glanced down at the earthen floor. There were distinct grooves carved into the dirt where the blood had turned it to mud. It looked almost like someone had clawed at the ground to prevent being dragged toward the open window. There were other scuff marks, but no clear, recognizable prints or animal claw indentations. It had to have been a bear, though. No other animal worked in this scenario. It must have smelled Vigil’s fear or somehow sensed that he was injured, and come straight through the boarded window.

As Coburn expected, he found distinct claw marks in the wood of the frame amid the reddish-brown smears of Vigil’s hand and fingerprints. The wood was lighter at the deepest point of the scratches, at least the freshest ones. Some definitely appeared much older, the wood darker, which was surely just a trick of the dancing firelight or maybe the timber was so old it was close to being petrified.