Operation: Yukon

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53° 19.44’ North Latitude 131° 57.31’ West Longitude

Graham Island, British Columbia

July 1996

McKinney wasn’t sure how long the two of them had been fighting their way through the island’s dense forest wilderness – but it seemed like an eternity. A sharp salty burn around his face told him that there must surely be several deep scratches across the delicate skin of his cheeks and forehead; wounds and contusions caused by the thickly entwined branches they had been forced to fight their way through as they had fled in abject terror.

The man was close to exhaustion. He weaved unsteadily forward, forcing himself onwards, desperately grasping any protruding branch or foliage that was available to aid him – dragging himself up yet another interminable rise on the undulating forest floor – spurred on by a glimpsed promise of a small, rare area of clearing in the trees – a space he had spotted scant minutes earlier when they were higher up a previous slope. He reached it, finally staggered to a stop and held up trembling hands before him – he wanted to know what condition they were in. What McKinney saw made for a grim picture; they were lacerated, raw; fingers and palms had been flayed and were bleeding – the wounds on his hands mute evidence of the herculean effort to tear a path through dense copses and tangled undergrowth on a rough roller coaster terrain. Yet, strangely, despite their appearance, they barely hurt him at all.

His lungs, however, were quite another matter. A pair of shredded, fluttering balloons barely contained within the fiery cavern that was his chest. The clean, fresh smelling shirt he had put on seemingly a lifetime ago, now adhered stickily to his flesh – a stained mangy hide that he had begun to shed – comprised of filthy, ripped wet cotton infused with the pungent stink of acrid sweat and fear.

McKinney desperately needed to rest even if it was for just a few moments. He dazedly looked around at his surroundings, trying to control his ragged breathing and triphammer heart – wait! They were finally in luck! McKinney noted the tree line that bordered the small clearing in front of him. It looked manmade – a firebreak maybe? It didn’t matter – all that did matter was it revealed what looked to be a clear path leading down from the tangle. They had miraculously, or so it seemed to him at this moment – stumbled upon – or had been guided to – what must be a well-defined loggers’ trail.

His body was trembling with sheer fatigue and adrenal overload, especially the muscles in his calves and thighs. Putting out a hand, he supported himself against the nearest cedar. The bark felt rough to the touch, unyielding; yet somehow it comforted him with its ageless, solid strength. His trembling form oozed copious amounts of sweat from every pore he had, giving any exposed area of the skin an oily, unpleasant sheen. The clouds of midges and other buzzing insects – tiny, hateful denizens of the forest, closed in on him instantly now he was no longer moving, sensing a tasty salt feast.

McKinney was too fatigued to even attempt to bat the miniature whining harpies away. He just let them be. They happily fed off him.

The young girl, Bobbie, who had been several yards behind him in the tree-festooned, nightmarish tangle finally caught up to him. Noisily she staggered up to join him, coming to a swaying stop beside McKinney, and tremulously leaned her tall willowy form against his sodden back; the sounds of her breath were tortured gasps.

He was so exhausted that even this simple act of elicited comfort from the girl was almost enough to push him down to the forest floor. With grunting effort, he straightened, forcing himself away from the cedar tree’s welcome respite – in doing so he unceremoniously shoved his female companion back and away from him. With some slight vestige of chivalry, McKinney did manage to turn around in time to support Bobbie’s sagging form so she didn’t end up falling onto the moist mulch. Going down now would have meant certain death for the young woman. In his present condition, McKinney wouldn’t have been physically able to lift the girl onto her feet. Their pursuers, he reasoned, couldn’t be far behind. He glanced back and up into the forbidding timberland in the direction they came from. They had to keep moving, McKinney instinctively understood. It was their only real hope of survival.

There had been a total of fourteen people on the university field trip – thirteen men and one woman who had tried to make a stand against the horrors that had relentlessly pursued them. The others were gone now – their efforts to fight back a futility – they had been horribly killed. McKinney and the girl had only survived the massacre because he had grabbed Bobbie’s hand and they had fled for their lives.

McKinney believed in God. He did. With every fiber of his being and soul. In the Holy Father and his infinite mercy. So why had He let these appalling things happen to them? Why?

He attempted to close his mind off to block the memory of the terrible ways in which he saw and heard his fellow students and their professors die. But he couldn’t quite manage it – the grotesque images and sounds he had witnessed would not leave him. They echoed in his mind…ripples on a bottomless blood-red pool of abomination – unspeakable things that no one should ever have to see or hear. It made him glad though in a bizarre kind of way. It was that abhorrence and his utter dread that kept McKinney running on despite his utter exhaustion – desperate to try to escape – so that the others’ gruesome fate wouldn’t become his or Bobbie’s.

The light was fading fast now as it did at this latitude on the Queen Charlotte Islands. Even in the summer months the hours of daylight never overstayed its welcome.

After the daylight, such as it was, there quickly came a barely perceived twilight – then that short-lived dimming was quickly followed by a deep, stygian blackness. And within the dark, deep in the vast forests, McKinney now knew there was contained a dreadfulness – a horror no one could have ever imagined dwelled within. As the night began to swiftly creep and seep through the canopy of dense trees that surrounded them, his hopes began to wane with equal alacrity.

Oh God… he thought…they were going to die here. Screaming out in their death agonies, just like the others. He shook himself mentally to shun the feelings of defeat that threatened to engulf him…no, darn it, no! This wasn’t going to happen to them, or at least not to him. He had a home to go back to. Dear close friends in his church – people who truly loved him – mother and father, two younger sisters… he was determined that he was going to see them all again. Whatever he had to do to survive the terror that had been foisted upon them he would do. He was not going to perish here! This was not his time to be called. McKinney willed himself to believe that he was going to live. He was going to live!

As if to purge any last negative thoughts from his mind, he shook Bobbie as hard as his remaining strength would allow. As he did so, the pain finally now registered sharply in his damaged hands, making him wince. The young, tall, wispy girl merely sagged dispiritedly within his arms. The filthy and disheveled woman barely even registered his violent action. McKinney spoke roughly to her, his voice ragged with the effort – an intended shout that emerged as a hoarse whisper from a throat dried out from lack of water and excesses of adrenaline and fear.

“Come on, Bobbie, we have to keep moving! The Dinan Bay logging camp is close – must be. Only a few short miles. We’ll be safe. Don’t give up. Come on Bobbie, for Jesus Christ’s sake, and in His name – we can make it!”

His short tirade ended, and the girl finally tilted her head up, seemingly half acknowledging his presence. Bobbie’s once bright green eyes, so alluring to McKinney since their freshman year at SMU, were now dull and dispirited – lifeless in fact. Perhaps a precursor of the fate that she felt certain soon awaited her – them. No real recognition was apparent within their dim depths, only cattle-like resignation of what was to be. The girl slumped even farther forward, becoming a dead weight.

McKinney’s weakened muscles couldn’t support the woman’s burden any longer. Without him propping her up, the haggard girl slowly collapsed to the soft ground in slow-motion; a tall, yet slender young pine that had been felled.

Once there amongst the dead leaves and forest floor detritus, she briefly became animated, curling herself up into a tight fetal ball, angular arms and skinny legs tucked in to wait for what must inevitably follow. McKinney noticed Bobbie was singing in a low, childlike voice. Her mind had retreated into childhood – a place where she obviously had felt the safest, where reassurance had always been within easy reach. It was pitiable and yet terrible. McKinney could hardly bear to listen to her pathetic little voice that had taken on a childlike quality:

“Jesus loves the little children…”

McKinney looked down at her huddled form with a feeling of incredible sadness. Bobbie had given up. Her struggle to stay alive was over. He resigned himself to the grim fact that he’d done everything he could to try to save her. She had given up. However, it certainly wasn’t over for him yet. He could still save himself and if God was willing, he would. Maybe if he got help quickly enough, he could still save her too.

With sphincter-loosening suddenness, a soulless inhuman snigger came from somewhere very close, back in the darkening tree line. He could smell the foul rank stink that he now associated with violent death. McKinney’s head shot up away from staring at Bobbie’s recumbent form – eyes wildly glaring into the gloom, searching in the direction the awful sound emanated from, attempting to visualize the threat that he could only smell and hear. McKinney’s weak watery legs suddenly found a new lease of life. Without his conscious volition he took a diffident, foot dragging, backward step. Then another – another. He had covered six hesitant steps in this manner when he suddenly stopped, frozen to the spot.

An obsidian dimness seemed to detach itself from the deeper darks of the trees. An amorphous shadow snaked out towards Bobbie’s tucked in feet. A growing, unsubstantial mass encompassed her exposed shins easily. Still feebly singing in that wretched childlike voice, the woman was slowly, almost imperceptibly dragged backward away from the logger’s trail and into the impenetrable darkness. All McKinney could do was be a silent, motionless witness to the scene that was unfolding before him. In the last few seconds, before the young woman’s face completely disappeared into the blackness, Bobbie seemed to briefly come to herself and comprehend the horror of what was happening to her.

Her eyes were suddenly alive and animate once more. Her gaze locked with his. There was no mistaking the expression. Desperation – pleading with McKinney to help her. Save her from the unspeakable thing that was pulling her away… but even that final, silent plea was lost to him as she slid from his view and into the encompassing dark.

The last thing he saw of poor Bobbie were her starkly white arms and hands semi-bright in the gathering gloom – fingers outstretched, clutching and clawing desperately with an inevitable futility for any anchor they could find within the soft loam of the trail. She was pointlessly casting her hands out, seeking a firm purchase to prevent herself from being dragged away. At this last horrific sight, McKinney was suddenly freed from the invisible force that had rooted him to the spot. He turned jerkily on his heel and staggered down the path for his life.

The well-worn trail turned to the left and headed in a generally downward direction. Away from the overhanging trees, the ambient daylight all around him was fast fading away now as red dusk bled away and gave over to blacking night. McKinney could barely see more than a few feet in front of him as he tore along, but what his human eyes lacked, his ears made up for. They were now pursuing him in earnest, he realized in dread. Yet still content to toy with their prey, they were combining their efforts to bring him down. He could hear their massive scampering forms crashing within the trees in the blackness; their unclean stench gagged him, cloying his nostrils with the foul combined odors of corruption, blood, and musk.

The certain knowledge that they weren’t yet in front of him, as far as he could tell, spurred the young student on to redouble his efforts. That logging camp had to be close now. Please God…It had to be! Please let it be!

The path suddenly took an unexpectedly sharp turn to the right, then started up a gentle incline. The trail frustratingly seemed to get steeper with each passing second, considerably slowing McKinney down. The trees on either side of the trail now crowded in, filtering out what little ambient light there had been. Darkness was nearly upon him – metaphorically and literally. The young student knew he was almost at the limits of his endurance. He just couldn’t physically go on much farther. His heart was now pounding so hard he thought it might burst from his exertions. The air that McKinney was forcing in and out of his lungs felt like it had a consistency of a molten liquid – heavy and scalding, it tortured the abused tissues within. It was beginning to be an agony to pull it in and out of his wheezing chest. He noticed dully that he could now taste the rusty flavor of his own blood at the back of his throat.

With a suddenness of a switched-on bulb in a dark room he realized he had reached the apex of the path. Through hazy, blurred vision he was looking down into a small but steep valley. There were signs of humanity down there! Bright shining fixed points of light that meant a chance of help – the Dinan logging camp – a sight as beautiful to him as the most majestic stars in the Creator’s black velvet heavens! He’d found it, thank the Lord! He could still actually make it!

With only the briefest of hesitations he stumbled forward, willing his leaden legs and numbed body into one final, last ditch effort. He was beyond pain – an automaton – a flawed being of torn muscles and bloodied flesh that could only limp and crab along. McKinney had become a creature with one single abiding thought – just one purpose to his whole existence… to reach the safety of the Dinan Bay camp.

Then suddenly he was on the ground.

He realized he could taste the rich earth of the worn trail in his mouth because he was face down on it. He collapsed when the wrenched muscles and pulled ligaments of his abused body no longer obeyed his insistent brain’s instructions to move. McKinney just lay there. The spirit was no longer willing, and the flesh was very, very weak.

He smelt them. He heard them. They were all around him. He closed his eyes in terror of what he knew would come but a part of him was strangely relieved. God would have him soon enough. The growls were soft, almost human. Almost.

He felt an enormous elemental strength lift him up high by just his left arm – the shoulder joint instantly dislocated – McKinney was too much in shock to even scream. He dangled for a few seconds being shaken like a rag doll, then he was on the ground again. His face was planted back firmly in the earth of the trail. Now that soil had a muddy, nauseating consistency. Warm and gluey against his cold skin.

He weakly opened his eyes to look. With horror he understood the reason he now lay in a thick sludge, – even in this light he could see that his own blood had provided the medium to make it that way. His left arm had been torn away, ragged and ripped at the socket and lay just a few feet away from him.

Before he could fully take in that entire gruesome discovery, something was already yanking at his wet denim jeans, moving his torn-away limb from his line of sight, tearing and stripping away the last vestiges of the material from his numb legs. The strength used to achieve that was such that his thick leather belt snapped like rotten twine. He couldn’t even resist as his underpants were torn away from him, the force of that cruel action lifted his whole body off the ground for a second and then slammed it back onto the wet trail floor as his drawers were ripped off. Dizzy, sick and unresisting, McKinney dimly accepted that the same something was tugging hard now at his genitals, pulling, twisting at them eagerly with a vicious animal force; their efforts were sliding him bodily along the rough ground. He lifted himself up weakly on his remaining arm just in time to see a huge, misshapen hand reach in, twist and completely tear away his scrotum and penis from his body in a shower of hot, stinking fluids.

Then he did scream. McKinney’s high-pitched screech was a signal to the others.

They were upon him at once in a writhing frenzy, greedily tearing out greasy loops of wet intestine and warm succulent organs that they gained access to by simply ripping open his soft belly. They were eating him alive. And he knew it.

And as McKinney slipped into final oblivion; traveling unresistingly to that darkness from which there can be no return – with an odd sense of wonderment he heard an awfully strange last thing….

“Jesus loves the little children…”