The Mad and the Macabre

November 15th, 2010

Monday

Gabriel had barely fallen asleep when Cavenaugh’s alarm woke him. The crushing feeling of dread followed within seconds. Today would potentially be one of the worst days of his life, and as much as he hated to begin it, the sooner he did, the sooner it would be over.

The bed shook as Cavenaugh climbed out, and Gabriel could hear rustling from the adjacent room as Jess slipped out from under the covers. After a long moment of hesitation, Gabriel finally followed suit. He dressed in a fog, adding layer after layer of clothing until he felt as though he were smothering.

Cavenaugh passed him and exited the room as he donned his coat and snowcap.

With a sigh, Gabriel joined the others in the main room and waited while Jess bundled into her massive coat, pulled the hood over her head, and cinched the ties tight to hold it in place.

Cavenaugh left through the back door without a word.

“Are you ready to do this?” Gabriel asked.

Jess looked him squarely in the eyes.

“No.”

***

Jess shouldered the backpack while Gabriel slung the rifle over his back. He was surprised by how light it was. Between the two of them, he was the only one who had ever fired a gun, and not since his father had died. Even then, he had only ever shot on a range. What were the odds that he would have to use it though?

The others appeared ready, but none of them were in a hurry to head out into the storm. All wore matching expressions of apprehension, save Cavenaugh, whose mouth was a tight line of determination. Gabriel couldn’t remember seeing him blink.

Will and Maura had been assigned the spring on the northern slope of Mount Isolation. It was the farthest trek, but the trail looked to be the easiest. Cavenaugh and Kelsey had chosen the northern slope of Mount Haverstam based on the spring’s proximity to the mountain lion’s charted range. Considering his police experience, it made the most sense to gamble that Cavenaugh would make the discovery so it could be handled by the book. Jess and Gabriel had been relegated to the southwestern slope of Mount Isolation, which meant they would follow the stream through the bottom of the valley before scaling the heavily-forested hillside. That placed them in a position to be the second party to reach either of the other sites should problems arise or if they found the bodies.

“Are there any final questions?” Cavenaugh asked. He paused just long enough to slide his Project 25-capable, digital walkie-talkie into his outer jacket pocket. “Good. Now let’s get a move on before—”

“Who’s carrying the emergency transceiver?” Jess interrupted.

Cavenaugh flashed her an angry glance, but it quickly disappeared.

“It’s in Kelsey’s backpack.”

“I want to carry it.”

“It’s most logical to bring it with us based on the probability of our destination.”

“We’ll be in constant radio communication. Any one of us can use it just as well as another.”

“If I give you the goddamned transceiver, will you let us leave now?” Cavenaugh’s face grew bright red.

Jess nodded.

Cavenaugh stomped over to Kelsey, spun him around, and unzipped the backpack. After some digging, he extracted the transceiver, which looked like a long walkie-talkie with a small digital readout and a miniature keypad, and threw it to Jess. She caught it and shoved it into her jacket pocket.

“Can we go now?” Cavenaugh asked through bared teeth.

“After you,” Jess said, gesturing to the door.

Without a backwards glance, Cavenaugh opened the door and stepped out into the storm with Kelsey right behind him. Will and Maura followed, leaving Jess and Gabriel to close up behind.

The snow had slowed noticeably. The flakes were smaller and more sporadic, and the wind only rose in occasional gusts. There was still no sign of the night sky through the thick cloud cover, but at least it no longer felt as though the storm was sitting right on top of their heads. Maybe there was actually a chance they might see the sun at some point during the day. Gabriel couldn’t help but think of that as a good omen.

He and Jess stood on the porch and watched Will and Maura disappear down the driveway behind the island of evergreens. They were to head north once they reached the road before finally branching from it at the designated trail.

Cavenaugh and Kelsey had already disappeared to the south.

“Ready?” Gabriel asked.

“Just a minute,” Jess whispered. She walked away from the cabin and looked around before returning. Gabriel was just about to ask her what she was doing when she pulled the emergency transceiver out of her pocket. She switched on the power and there was a hiss of static.

“Try a different frequency.”

She turned dials and pressed buttons, but the quality of the static never changed. When the steady hiss began to grate on her nerves, she clicked it off and shoved it back into her coat.

“It should be working,” she said.

“We’ll try again at a higher altitude. I’ll bet it’s a combination of the storm and this location.”

“You’re probably right,” she said, forcing a smile. “Just interference.”

They started their journey to the north, prepared to intercept the path that would lead them northeast into the valley.

***

The sun rose somewhere above the rocky peaks to the east, but did little more than cast a gray pall over the forest. At least it was now light enough to watch their footing more carefully. Neither of them could afford to so much as sprain an ankle or their journey would be over. The maze of pines protected them from the majority of the snow and wind, and the accumulation was only half of what it was in the thin meadow lining the stream, which was nearly invisible beneath a rugged sheet of ice. Soon, even that would vanish until spring.

Gabriel had known his physical prime was well behind him, but he hadn’t been remotely prepared for this kind of exertion, especially in the thin air so high into the mountains. His lungs burned and his legs ached. It felt as though he were trudging through peanut butter. Whether Jess was any better off or not, she did a better job of hiding it. Her cheeks and nose were scarlet, and clouds of steam burst past her lips in a panting rhythm, but she waited for him to call the breaks, which he had begun to do with increasing frequency.

They sat on a fallen tree in a small enclave beneath the protective canopy, momentarily shielded from the wind. Jess slipped out of the backpack and set it on the ground beside her. She removed one of the bottles of water and passed it to Gabriel, who tipped it back and took two long swigs, savoring the second. He debated taking off his jacket for a few minutes as he was dripping with sweat beneath, but he knew he needed to preserve his body heat. His best guess was that they were roughly halfway there, and the going on the easy leg had been even more challenging than he had speculated. He was dreading the prospect of scaling the hillside on the opposite side of the stream, which appeared to grow even steeper farther to the east. If they could barely maintain their traction on level ground, how were they supposed to do so on the sharp incline?

The radio crackled before Cavenaugh’s voice emerged from the static.

“How’s everybody doing out there?”

“We’ve reached the trail that leads away from the road,” Maura said. “With all the snow, it took us a while to find it, but we can see timberline from where we are now. Will thinks we should reach our destination within the next two to three hours, barring anything unexpected.”

“Good. Gabriel? Jess?”

“We’re still down in the valley and the mountain looks a lot steeper than it did on the map, but I’d imagine we should reach the spring around the same time Will and Maura reach theirs. So long as neither of us fall and break our necks,” Jess said. “How about you guys?”

Gabriel heard something rustle in the scrub oak behind him and turned toward the sound.

“Same here,” Cavenaugh said. “We would have been there already if it weren’t for the blasted accumulation. Now that we’re into the forest where it’s not as deep, we’re making decent progress.”

There was only the gentle swaying of the disturbed branches.

“I’ll check in on you guys again in an hour,” Cavenaugh said. “Out.”

Gabriel reached into the bag and removed a granola bar. He unwrapped it, took a bite, and climbed over the log toward the bushes.

“We should probably get moving again,” Jess said. “The worst is still to come.”

Gabriel looked back at her and pressed his forefinger to his lips, then crouched in front of the tangle of branches, beneath which the fallen leaves were merely dusted with snow. A crunch of the detritus drew his attention to the right, where a pair of green eyes stared directly at him. There was Oscar, body pressed flat against the ground, partially concealed by a cluster of thin trunks. His one good ear stood erect.

Gabriel broke off a section of the granola bar and slowly held it out for the cat, which visibly tensed at the movement. He reached deep into the brush. Oscar licked his scarred nose, but held his position.

There was the sound of footsteps approaching from behind.

Gabriel saw the cat’s eyes tick upward, and in one swift motion, Oscar dashed away into the forest.

“Damn it,” Gabriel whispered. He scooted back out of the branches and rose to his feet.

“Is that cat following us?” Jess asked.

“I managed to get him to eat a hot dog out of my hand last night. I thought maybe he’d take some granola bar, but…”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare him off.”

“Hopefully we’ll see him again.”

He was angry she’d startled Oscar to flight, but if she hadn’t done it, he probably would have. After surviving in the wild for so long, the cat had become feral, tapped into his primitive instincts. The idea of catching him was a fool’s proposition.

“We will,” she said, wrapping her arm around his back beneath the rifle.

Gabriel hugged her around the shoulders. Without having said so, he knew she understood what he was trying to do with the cat. He gave her a gentle kiss on the bridge of her nose.

“I suppose we should hit the trail again,” she finally said.

“Yeah,” he said, reluctantly releasing her from his embrace.

He helped her into the backpack and followed her to the edge of the woods toward the path. She turned around and smiled. His heart fluttered. He couldn’t help but wonder what the future might hold for them back in the real world.

***

Just over two hours later, they were both beyond the point of exhaustion, but they were too close to stop now, and in no position to do so regardless. The sharp, snowcapped peak loomed over them from above, a fin of white blowing from the pinnacle. Their zigzagging ascent had brought them to the point where they now had to crawl around tree trunks that grew at bizarre angles from the steep embankment. If a path existed somewhere beneath the snow, they had long since lost it. They had to be close to the hot spring by now. The abrupt transition from forest to bare rock at timberline was perhaps a quarter-mile above them and the satellite image had shown just a hint of water through the overhanging branches.

Gabriel’s heartbeat was racing and his thoughts were a blur. He both hoped to find some sign of his sister and dreaded the possibility at the same time. The urge to turn around was now more pressing than his will to continue on, but one glance back over his shoulder, down what appeared to be a deadfall into the valley now hidden by snow, and he knew he had no choice but to proceed.

The wind shifted and pelted him in the face with ice crystals, and something else…the familiar stench of rotten eggs. Sulfur.

“Do you smell that?” he called to Jess, who was just up the slope to his right. Beyond her was a cloud of mist. No, not mist. It was steam.

She turned at the sound of his voice and he saw the look of recognition on her face. She had seen it too.

They scrabbled over the crest of a stony knoll and stared down into a small crater, at the bottom of which was a pool of murky gray water, barely visible through the swirling steam. Sliding down the slick, granite slope, they stood at the edge of a small pool no more than twelve feet in width and twenty feet long. The smell of salt and dissolved minerals washed over them, something of a cross between a marsh and the ocean. Tiny bubbles rose to the surface, like a pot of water only beginning to boil. Uneven stones lined the bottom, covered with a thick layer of hairy moss. The snow melted in the steam and fell to the spring as droplets of rain.

“How hot do you think it is?” Jess asked.

“Most geothermal springs are between ninety-seven and ninety-nine degrees.”

“Were it not for all the slime on the bottom, I’d climb right in.”

Gabriel thought of the strange bacteria they had found on Nathan’s femur and shuddered at the idea of them crawling all over his skin. He walked around the side, careful not to slide off the uneven rocks into the water. If he did and his boot became soaked, there would be no way to dry it and he’d end up losing his foot to frostbite. He scrutinized the choppy surface and the crevices between the stones beneath for any of the telltale signs of the presence of haloarchaea. Granted, they were making an assumption about the unique microorganism, which appeared to be the same as that which had arrived fossilized on the meteorite from Mars, based largely on the physical resemblance to haloarchaea, but the composition of the celestial rock and the known qualities of the soil on the fourth planet made it a sound correlation. Perhaps this new species didn’t have the same need for ultraviolet protection, and hence wouldn’t necessarily produce the same red-tinged pigments. After all, if they were correct about its origin, Mars was hundreds of thousands of miles farther away from the sun, the source of the radiation. Maybe it simply didn’t need to—

Gabriel stopped and crouched right at the edge. Steam billowed in his face, momentarily warming his cheeks and stinging his eyes. He waved it away and looked deeper into the water. There was a crevice between two jagged rocks, a slash of blackness from which a steady stream of bubbles flowed. And lining the rocks was a thin layer of scarlet, tight lips around the mouth of the geothermal fissure.

“Well, what do you know,” he whispered.

Jess knelt beside him and followed his gaze into the murky water.

“That red stuff,” she said. “That’s what we’re looking for, isn’t it?”

Gabriel nodded. He wished he had some way of excising a sample of the bacterial growth so he could study it up close. It was staggering to think that these microscopic creatures may have originated across space on a planet that hadn’t seen water in eons. If that was indeed where they had been spawned, then how had they managed to survive the journey? The only other example had been fossilized in a chunk of rock. Maybe what they were looking at now was simply a variation of a naturally occurring species of haloarchaea.

“Do you think this is where the mountain lion found Nathan’s bone?” Jess asked.

“It’s possible.” Until that point, he had been specifically looking for the proliferation of microorganisms, and not for human remains. “I didn’t see any other bones right off, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any down there covered in algae.”

They walked a complete circuit of the spring, often stopping and crouching to get a better look at something on the bottom, until they finally returned to where they started.

“Nothing,” Gabriel said. Though disheartening, it was still a relief not to have found any skeletal parts. It allowed them to cling to the grain of hope that somewhere their sisters might still be alive.

***

Gabriel sat on a stone at the edge of the steaming pond and poked a long branch down into the water. He scraped a section of the red growth off of one of the rocks and held it up so he could take a closer look. It was just like any sample of pond scum in texture: slimy, phlegm-like. There were striations, almost as though countless organisms had aggregated into long strands that stuck together to form a sludge. Part of him wanted to believe that these microorganisms had traveled from a distant planet to populate this spring, but they appeared too ordinary. And generally, the answer to any scientific question was the most obvious one. He was probably just staring at an unnamed species of haloarchaea, and nothing more mysterious than that.

Tossing the stick back into the water, he remembered the verse Jess had quoted from the blog. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth; and I have set thee so; thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Even studying the red rocks in the water now, he had a hard time imagining anyone calling them “stones of fire,” even metaphorically.

He rose and ascended the slope to where Jess stood between two tall pines, staring out over the valley through a gap in the branches while talking to Cavenaugh on the walkie-talkie.

“That’s right,” she said. “There’s nothing here.”

“You’re sure you found a geothermal spring and not just a freshwater pond?”

“Please.”

“And you’re certain you can see that red bacteria down there?”

“For the hundredth time, yes. We found the hot spring. There’s all kinds of red slime around what looks like where the water comes in, but no sign of human remains.”

Only a crackle of static responded.

“We’re almost to our destination now,” Cavenaugh finally said. “Maura, how far out are you guys?”

“We’ve got to be close. We can’t see anything yet, but we can definitely smell it.”

“Excellent. Report back as soon as you’re there,” Cavenaugh said. “Jess. You and Gabriel hold your position until we both check back in, and be ready to move in either direction should we find anything. Out.”

Jess sighed and shoved the walkie-talkie into the backpack again. She looked out over the distant stream a moment longer before turning to face Gabriel. A gust of wind blew a sheet of snow between them.

“Looks like the storm’s getting—” Gabriel started, but Jess silenced him with a sharp look.

Their eyes locked and she steered his gaze to his right. She whispered the word “Slowly.”

He nodded his understanding and unhurriedly turned around. At first he saw nothing but the cloud of steam rising from the spring, until the wind shifted and he momentarily had a clear view of the water and the far bank beyond. Heavily-needled pines shivered loose a shower of snow, which descended as sparkling bits of glitter onto the shrubs beneath. And there, under the cover of a juniper, was a small orange shape with green eyes and one pricked ear.

“Toss me one of those granola bars,” he whispered, fearing even the slightest movement would send Oscar hurtling into the underbrush. He heard the rustling sound of Jess rummaging through the bag, and then the soft tap of something hitting the ground at his feet.

Gabriel never allowed his eyes to stray from the cat’s as he crouched and grabbed the bar. He had to glance down at the wrapper to tear it open. When he looked back at the forest, Oscar was gone.

He cursed under his breath and watched the tree line a while longer before returning to Jess, who must have read the expression of disappointment on his face.

“He followed us this far,” she said. “You’ll get your chance sooner or later.”

He smiled at the sincerity of her words and squeezed her hand. She smiled back, and he caught a glint of what might have been mischief in her eyes.

“Don’t look now,” she said, “but I think our furry friend’s overcoming his shyness.”

Gabriel turned to his left, and there was the orange tabby, standing right at the edge of the forest, thick winter coat spotted with clumps of snow.

Oscar sat on his haunches, cocked his lopsided head, and let out a meow.

***

The cat cautiously crossed the icy rock ledge to where Gabriel knelt with a chunk of granola held as far away from his body as he could manage. Jess crouched beside him with another piece of the broken bar at the ready. As Oscar drew near, his haunches trembled, but he pressed on. Once he was within three feet, he paused, then darted in, took the granola, and scampered back out of range. Only this time, he didn’t disappear into the woods. He dropped his meal onto the ground and positioned himself so he could watch them while he ate.

After he crunched down the last morsel, he inspected Gabriel, who was already offering another bite.

A burst of static from the walkie-talkie, and Oscar was gone.

“Shoot,” Gabriel said.

“It’s progress,” Jess said as she produced the communications device from the backpack.

The buzzing sound continued until she walked away from the thicker canopy toward the valley slope where the trees thinned significantly.

“…here now.” Cavenaugh’s voice took form from the white noise. “It’s roughly the size of a swimming pool, but I can’t tell how deep it is. The water’s fairly cloudy. I can maybe see the tops of some rocks…and they’re red. We definitely have confirmation of the bacteria.”

“We’re here now too,” Maura said. “This one is much smaller. Roughly ten feet in diameter, but it looks really deep. There are all kinds of tiny bubbles, like the water’s carbonated or something. I just…can’t see the bottom. There’s a lot of red stuff though. There’s a ring on the rocks all around the spring. It looks like some kind of sludge. Even the water has a pinkish tint to it.”

Gabriel looked at the spring behind him and then back at Jess. A knot of tension tightened in his gut.

“They’re only on the other side of the mountain,” Jess said. “Why would there be so much more bacterial growth?”

“Did you say pink?” Cavenaugh asked. “We’re getting a lot of feedback on our end. There are only a couple rocks with that stuff growing on them here. Do you see anything else, Maura?”

“It’s too deep to tell. Will broke a branch off a tree and tried to reach the bottom, but just ended up losing the stick. The spring itself is recessed into what almost looks like a crater. There are fairly steep, slick rock walls all around it. We’re surrounded by a ring of pine trees so large their branches nearly touch across the water.”

“Do you see any bones, Maura? Any sign that they might have been there?”

“No. Nothing. Wait…”

Gabriel heard the muffled sound of Will’s voice, too far from the microphone to be intelligible, a click, and then dead air. He looked at Jess, whose eyes reflected the anxiety that rose within him.

“Maura?” Cavenaugh called, his voice taut.

“Will found something,” Maura said. “Give me just a minute. It’s covered with this red slime. I’m scraping it off as fast as I…Jesus.”

“What?” Cavenaugh nearly screamed. “What is it?”

“It’s a bone,” she whispered. “Rounded and smooth on one end. Blunted and widened on the other. About the length of an upper arm.”

“Where did you find it?” Jess asked. “Are there more?”

“Will found it right at the edge. Just under the water, wedged between some rocks. He was looking for another stick to test the depth…”

There was a crackle of static.

“Maura?” Cavenaugh asked. “Maura!”

Jess’s face paled and she hurriedly donned the backpack.

“Jess,” Cavenaugh said. “You guys are the closest. Get moving!”

“There are more,” Maura said. The tremor in her voice was evident even over the underlying fuzz of white noise. “Dear God. There are so many more. Will’s pulling them out of the water one after another. More long bones. What are those? Jesus. Ribs. A spine. Is all of that still connected?”

“Maura,” Cavenaugh said. “Leave everything where it is. Stop pulling it out and wait for us to get there. Do you copy, Maura?”

“Yes. Don’t touch the bones. Now that Will’s pulled the ones with all the sludge on them off the top, we can see a whole pile of them. We’ll leave them where they are until you get here. What do you want us to do in the mean—?”

“Maura?”

“Shh.” Her voice was so soft it could have been static. “Did you hear that?”

“Maura, I can barely hear you.”

“Shh. There it was again.”

“Get out of there!” Cavenaugh shouted. “Now!”

Gabriel sprinted to the north, away from the spring, leaping over boulders and slaloming between tree trunks. He slipped, hit the ground, and propelled himself to his feet again.

“Please,” Maura whispered. “You have to be quiet. There’s somebody—”

She screamed so loudly through the walkie-talkie that it echoed off into the forest.

There was a clattering sound, a burst of static, then a dying hiss that bled away into nothingness.

***

Gabriel’s legs burned and the altitude had stolen his breath, causing him to double over as he walked. He was panting, trying to steal enough oxygen to prepare himself to run again. His head was light, disconnected. Maura’s scream played over and over within on a continuous loop.

“Maura? Will?” Cavenaugh’s voice called from the walkie-talkie Jess held in her fist. His words were ragged, his breathing fast and haggard. “Do you read me?”

There was a crashing sound behind Gabriel and he turned to see Jess crumpled in the snow amidst a scattering of broken branches. By the time he reached her, she had already pushed herself to all fours. Her shoulders shuddered, and when she looked up at him, tears streamed down her red, chafed cheeks. She reached into her jacket pocket and removed the emergency transceiver, scanned through channels of static, and screamed in frustration.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said, helping her stand. “They probably just saw a mountain lion and dropped the walkie-talkie in their hurry to find cover.”

“Maura said she heard ‘somebody.’”

“Who else could possibly be up there?”

The answer hung in the silence between them.

“We need to keep moving,” Jess said. She shoved the transceiver back into her coat and stumbled away from him through the calf-deep accumulation. The wind rose with a howl, shaking the upper canopy and dumping clouds of snow all around them. They remained partially shielded by the dense forestation, but the wind that managed to find them lanced right through their gear.

“How close are you?” Cavenaugh panted.

“I don’t know,” Jess said. The panic sharpened her voice.

“Don’t go in without us. You wait for us before you get to the spring. Am I clear? You wait for us. Copy?”

“Loud and clear.”

A steep valley opened before them, a vertical scar formed by centuries of spring runoff from the exposed summit. The descent wasn’t sheer, though neither was it graceful. They were going to have to carefully choose their route to navigate the clusters of pines and limestone cliffs. Progress would be slow, but on the other side of the canyon the forest bent to the right, following the western slope of the peak as it gradually became the northern.

And somewhere, just out of sight over the jagged horizon and beneath the seemingly impenetrable masses of trees, was a steaming cauldron full of human bones.

***

They ascended from the forest onto a windswept slope of bare granite. The ground was uneven with sharp boulders as though the mountaintop were in a perpetual state of decay, sending large chunks of rock tumbling down to meet the resistance of the trees. There was no longer anything to save them from the wind, which battered them with fists of snow and bitter cold. They had hoped to be able to see the steam from the spring from this higher vantage point, but the worsening storm choked visibility down to fifty yards at best, and even then they could only look for so long before the snow that pelted them in the face forced them to turn away.

How much time had passed since Maura’s communication had been abruptly terminated by her scream? Two hours? Three? Time had lost all meaning. There was only the mountain and the elements, which warred against each other with stone and ice, creating a treacherous battlefield to cross.

Gabriel tried to tell himself that Maura had just been startled by an animal and had dropped the walkie-talkie, which had broken on the rocks surrounding the spring and short-circuited in the warm water. He imagined that even now she and Will were pacing nervously, waiting for the rest of them to arrive so they could apologize for worrying them and explain away Maura’s clumsiness, but deep down, Gabriel knew that wasn’t the case. There was something in the air, something callous and unfeeling, a deadness that seemed to radiate from the earth beneath their feet and whisper promises of suffering on the breeze.

Jess brushed the snow off of a boulder in the lee of another larger stone and sat down. She brought the emergency transceiver to life with a squawk of feedback. The only response was static, but it changed in quality as she scanned through the bandwidths. Rather than a harsh crackle, it produced a more subdued buzz.

“Is someone there?” she asked. “Can anybody hear me?”

She fine-tuned the knobs and elicited more feedback. When it faded, there was something else beneath it. A voice.

“…you copy?” a man’s voice asked from a million miles away. “I repeat: This is Alpine Ranger Station. Do you copy?”

“Oh my God,” Jess blurted. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” The voice sounded bored, distracted, as though the ranger had been stolen away from a good book and a fresh mug of coffee. “Is everything all right?”

“This is an emergency. We’ve lost contact with two members of our group on the northern face of Mount Isolation.”

“What the hell are you guys doing up there in this storm? We’re under a winter storm warning and all roads up the mountain are closed. How in the world did you get up there anyway?”

“We’re staying in the old cabins on County Road 432. We started hiking—”

“I didn’t receive notification that anyone would be staying there. Standard protocol dictates that the owner or leasing agency contact us regarding all off-season rentals, and no one ever—”

“There’s no time to argue,” Jess snapped. “Our friends might be in big trouble up here.”

“There’s no way anyone can reach them until the storm breaks. Even with four-wheel drives, we can only get as far as the main road. You’re talking about hiking for miles up into the mountains in this weather. We’re better served waiting it out and sending up a Search & Rescue chopper—”

“We found human remains.”

“Please repeat,” the ranger said, now all business.

“We found human remains. Do I have your attention now?”

“Are you certain?”

“They’re in the hot spring on the northern slope of the mountain. Our friends had just discovered them when communications were cut off.”

“Where are you now? State your position.”

“Maybe a quarter to a half mile southwest of the spring.”

“Are you in any immediate danger?”

“No, but our friends—”

“Stay on this channel,” he said. Gabriel could hear the ranger talking away from the radio, but was unable to make out his words. “I’m patching you through to the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department.”

The wind erupted with a scream and a new siege of snowflakes commenced, isolating them even from the rocks surrounding them. Gabriel had to duck his head and walk closer to Jess just to keep her in sight.

“We need to keep moving,” he said. “Maura and Will might need our help.”

Jess held up a finger to signify that she only needed another minute. The transceiver crackled. Jess brought it right next to her ear in order to hear over the wind and static. There was a loud squeal and a faint voice emerged in bursts from the overpowering fuzz.

“…Deputy Ross, Morgan County…Department. What is…on the way…twenty-four hours…”

The static silenced the voice like the closing of a coffin lid.

“Are you still there?” Jess shouted. “Can you hear me?”

“We can try again when the storm dies down,” Gabriel said. He took her by the hand and guided her down off the rock.

Jess screamed in frustration, but the blizzard swallowed the sound before it could echo.

They hurried back into the relative protection of the trees and again continued east along the northern face of the peak. The wind tore right through the forest, bringing with it the assault of flakes and the reinforcements from the accumulation in the branches above. Visibility was fading fast. All either of them could see was the thickening sheet of white underfoot and the dark silhouettes of tree trunks.

Even the sweat under Gabriel’s clothing had chilled to the point that his skin positively ached with goosebumps. They were going to have to seek shelter from the elements soon before their body temperature began to plummet.

Jess walked with one of the communication devices in either hand. The grainy buzz from both in stereo and the churning white dots of snow lent the impression of walking through television static.

“Cavenaugh,” Jess said into the smaller of the two units. “Do you read me?”

She depressed the button and waited for a response.

There was nothing but dead air.

***

Gabriel knew how quickly the weather in Colorado could turn, but he had still been caught off-guard. Down along the Front Range of the Rockies, six inches could accumulate in mere hours from formerly blue skies. Traffic would slow to a crawl. Businesses and schools would close early or not open at all. People would hunker down in their houses with central heat and fireplaces, enjoy hot cocoa and freshly baked cookies, and watch the forecast on their big screen TVs while dreading the prospect of brushing the snow off the satellite dish or shoveling the walk. But this…this was something different entirely.

This was survival.

It had taken him until now to recognize that simple truth. The only fireplaces were nearly a four-mile blind hike over a nightmare terrain of ice, where every tree looked just like the last and the only directions not masked by the blizzard were up and down. There was the very real possibility that if they didn’t find somewhere to ride out the storm, they could end up walking to their deaths. He had read in the newspaper about hikers vanishing a couple times every year for as long as he could remember, but he had never realized just how easy it could be. If they didn’t find the others soon—

And then he smelled it, the faint hint of salty marsh.

He turned around and looked at Jess, who had taken to walking in his boot prints from sheer fatigue. Her entire face was chafed and red, the skin cracking on her cheekbones and peeling in strands from her lips. She acknowledged that she had noticed the scent with a nod.

Cavenaugh had told them not to approach the spring until he arrived, but they couldn’t just hang out in the woods waiting from him. They needed to make sure that Maura and Will were all right, and then they needed to seek shelter. The plan was to come upon the site slowly, cautiously, to study it from the anonymity of the trees to ensure that everything was fine. Once they determined it was safe to do so, then they were just going to walk right down there and figure out what they were going to do. Cavenaugh could kiss their asses if he thought they were going to stand around in this blizzard waiting for him to announce his grand arrival.

It was snowing so hard that Gabriel didn’t notice the steam through the flakes, or perhaps the wind was blowing so hard that it simply dissipated. He barely saw the iced granite rim of the crater in time to keep from stumbling out into the open. Crouching behind the wide trunk of a ponderosa pine, he motioned for Jess to do the same. He wanted to call out for Maura and Will, but something prevented him from doing so. It wasn’t as though he had expected to find them standing right there at the edge of the spring, but he had hoped to find some sign of them. He could only shake his head at the seemingly irrational thoughts and fears.

Surely nothing had happened to Maura and Will. They had probably found somewhere out of the wind to keep from freezing to death like any sane person would have done under the same circumstances. And yet still Gabriel couldn’t bring himself to leave the cover of the forest.

Jess leaned over his shoulder and whispered into his ear, “Do you see anyone?”

He shook his head, silently pulled the rifle over his head, and held it in front of his chest. It took a moment to find the safety by the trigger guard through his thick gloves. He pressed his right index finger onto it in preparation.

The water was still hidden from sight, but he could see the majority of the eastern side and the wall of forest beyond through the thick steam when the gusting wind shifted. There was no sign of Maura or Will, no movement at all.

He crawled through the scrub oak toward the clearing. The Styrofoam crumpling of snow and the snapping of branches announced his advance to whomever may have been lying in wait, but it was still preferable to walking unguarded into the open. He tried not to think about what might be lurking only feet away. There was no chance of outrunning either a mountain lion or a bullet. The words of an old high school friend rushed to the forefront of his mind. I don’t have to be able to outrun trouble. I just have to be able to outrun you.

The tangle of branches opened in front of him and granted an unobstructed view of the clearing. Snowflakes and steam swirled in the center, creating a dense fog that churned at the mercy of the wind. To his left, the mountain fell away from the rock embankment like the edge of a dam, and pines crowded against it to bar even a glimpse of the valley below. The bank directly ahead was coated with a skin of ice that had to be several inches thick, and he could barely see the red crescent of water four feet down against the granite. The summit rose steeply to the right in sheer formations of slate, between which pines and scrub oak battled for root space.

He held his breath and scrutinized the scene down the barrel of the gun, wishing it had a scope rather than this strange arrangement of steel sights. But this weapon hadn’t been made for hunting. This was an assault weapon. What had Cavenaugh suspected they would find that he had felt it necessary to bring such firepower? Gabriel couldn’t imagine one could sign out a case of semi-automatic assault rifles from the police armory either. What was really going on here?

The radio screeched behind him and he heard Cavenaugh’s voice.

“…copy me, dammit?”

The sudden burst of sound made Gabriel cringe. He waited for the white and gold streak of a mountain lion to leap at him with his finger on the trigger. When nothing moved, he crawled out of the brush onto the slick rock. He heard Jess answer Cavenaugh, but he couldn’t make out her words over the pounding of his pulse in his ears. There could have been packs of feral creatures hiding in the wilderness just beyond sight, but he was completely alone in the clearing.

If Cavenaugh’s voice hadn’t brought every predator in the forest running, then he figured it was probably safe to risk calling for Maura and Will, but neither answered.

He scooted to the precipice of the crater and looked down. Maura hadn’t exaggerated. The spring was so full of the bacteria that it had a pink cast and the edges were thick with it, a ring of crimson sludge, except for one small stretch where a pile of bones jutted from the surface. His breath caught at the thought that they might have belonged to his sister. Suddenly, he wasn’t sure he wanted to know. He wanted to remember Stephanie as the glowing young girl with the world stretched out before her, not as a collection of broken and disarticulated bones.

The tears stung as they ran down his cheeks. He looked up to stall their descent and caught a blur of movement from the corner of his right eye. There. At the top of a stone outcropping, nestled against the twisted trunk of a spruce, was a small orange face with green eyes and one stiff ear.

“Oscar,” he whispered. “You nearly scared me to death.”

Gabriel stood and walked slowly toward where the cat crouched about twenty feet up the rugged slope. He was nearly to the end of the spring when Oscar scurried down the granite toward him. Gabriel froze.

Oscar stopped halfway down, lowered his head, and lapped at the rock with his tongue. The tabby’s eyes never left Gabriel as he approached in what he hoped were non-threatening steps.

He was almost close enough to consider trying to pet the cat when he recognized what Oscar was gleaning from the slanted stone surface.

“Oh, God,” Gabriel whispered.

He nearly dropped the rifle in his hurry to turn away.

Blood.

The rocks were crisscrossed with arcs of blood.

***

It was unnerving watching Oscar squatting there on the rock, licking and licking, the fur surrounding his mouth turning a rich shade of red. Gabriel had no way of knowing whether the blood had come from a human or an animal. Regardless, whatever had met its demise in that dead end had done so badly. He was no forensics expert, but long spatters of blood that stretched more than a dozen feet up a nearly vertical surface implied an attack of unimaginable violence. And they hadn’t been caused by a firearm. A shotgun would have created a large blot spatter; a pistol or a rifle a similar high-velocity starburst. In either case, the mess would have been surrounded by a mist composed of droplets of various sizes. These arcs had been caused by a blade, and one wielded with frightening strength.

Gabriel tried to convince himself that Will must have encountered a cornered mountain lion and been forced to battle it with a hunting knife, but Will had been carrying a rifle with which he was intimately acquainted. If push had come to shove, he would have shot the animal and its skin would have been tanning between the trees while its carcass rotated on a spit over a roaring blaze.

“They should be here within half an hour,” Jess said. “Or at least they hope so.”

Gabriel nodded. He couldn’t force himself to look away from Oscar. The cat was like a machine, showing no sign of tiring, licking over and over and over and over—

“Are you okay?” Jess asked.

“They died here.”

“Maura and Will?”

“All of them. They all died right here. Where we’re standing at this very second.”

“You can’t know that for sure. These bones could belong to anyone and that blood—”

“Is still fresh, Jess. It hasn’t even frozen yet.”

The wind shifted and blew the salty steam between them.

“What are we doing here then?” Jess asked. “We should just leave.”

“Don’t you want to know what happened here? Don’t you want to know how your sister died?”

“Of course I do. I loved Deb, but she would never have wanted me to risk my life for that knowledge.”

“They obviously risked their lives for the sake of knowledge. What’s the difference?”

He felt her hand close around his, but she said nothing more.

Together they watched Oscar slather his sandpaper tongue on the steep granite outcropping without any indication of slowing.

***

Gabriel sat at the edge of the spring and scooped gobs of slime out of the water with a branch. Were it not for the striking red color, it could have been any pond scum from anywhere in the world. And maybe it was. Haloarchaea certainly didn’t aggregate like this. Without a microscope, he couldn’t determine a blasted thing about the microorganism. He was stalling anyway, postponing the task he had originally sat down here to begin. And he only had a few minutes to do it while Jess was still up the slope, out of the trees, trying in vain to reach the sheriff’s department again on the emergency transceiver.

She had promised not to go very far and to stay within earshot. He could see her perched on the top of a rock to the left of Oscar, who seemed to have forgotten they existed as he tried to consume every drop of the rapidly freezing blood. The barely audible hiss of static and the occasional squawk of feedback told Gabriel everything he needed to know.

He had to be quick. Cavenaugh had told Maura to leave the bones where they had found them. Obviously, she and Will had shoved them back into the spring. Gabriel understood he would have no idea which bones may have belonged to his sister, but he held out hope that none of them did, that he would pull them out and recognize immediately that they weren’t human at all, but instead belonged to some deer or wolf that had fallen into the water and drowned while trying to get a drink.

A glance in Jess’s direction confirmed she was still battling the transceiver.

Gabriel jabbed the stick down under the surface and dragged out an interlocked tangle of bones to where he could reach them. They were unmistakably human and belonged to at least two distinct individuals. Some were longer and thicker than others, most evident in the curvature and width of the ribs and the height of the vertebrae in the red-stained columns. Rolling the first pile away from the jumble beneath, he dragged several more long bones toward the surface. One was clearly a humerus, another a tibia through which a vertical fracture coursed. There was another, this one still articulated in spots despite the rotting cartilage. The radius and ulna were still connected at both the proximal and distal joints, and the carpals held the rest of the skeletal hand to the wrist. But there was something wrong with the arrangement. The wrist and the hand were contorted, twisted.

He reached down and examined it in his gloved hands. The carpals were fused, making the wrist curl in upon itself, and the metacarpals and phalanges appeared too short and thin in proportion to the rest of the forearm. The fingers were curved inward in such a way that they were more reminiscent of a bird’s claws than—

The truth struck him, but it was too late to throw it back into the spring.

Jess moaned behind him and he turned to see her face contort with pain. He watched a part of her die in her eyes.

It was a palsied hand.

He remembered the picture on the website, of all of the kids smiling on their first day at the cabins, and the girl to the right with her stunted hand held to her chest.

Deborah MacAuley.

Jess’s sister.

***

“I’m so sorry,” Gabriel said. He stood, still holding the arm, unsure of what to do with it. Jess couldn’t look away from it. He didn’t want to throw it back into the water right in front of her, nor did he suspect offering it to her was the right thing to do.

Jess nodded. She appeared to have disappeared somewhere inside of herself. Her eyes no longer shimmered, but drained a steady stream of tears. She reached out tentatively, then jerked her hands back to her sides.

“What are you doing?” Cavenaugh snapped.

He and Kelsey emerged from the forest with the racket of snapping branches.

“I told you to wait for us before coming down to the spring,” he said. His face flushed purple-red when he saw the bone in Gabriel’s hands. “And I said I don’t want anyone touching or moving those bones in the slightest. Jesus Christ! That’s evidence of a crime! We can’t risk anyone contaminating—”

Cavenaugh fell silent. He looked from the forearm to Jess and then back again. The color drained from his cheeks. When he resumed speaking, his voice was even and calm.

“For the time being, why don’t you put that back where you found it.” He turned to Jess. “We’ll make sure that everything is handled with the utmost care and respect. She’s somewhere better now. You and I both know that.”

Jess stared through him with a glazed expression of shock. Gabriel used the distraction to return Deborah’s arm to the pile under the water, where it mercifully sank beneath the bacterial sludge.

“Any sign of the others?” Kelsey asked. He alone appeared unaffected by the significance of the finding. His jaw was thrust forward, his lips a grim line, reflecting a frightening measure of determination.

“We couldn’t reach you on the radio…” Jess whispered.

“Where are they?” Kelsey asked. “Will? Maura?”

“The blood,” Gabriel said. “There’s blood all over the rocks. It was still warm when we arrived.”

He pointed toward the stone abutment.

When Oscar saw all of them turn in his direction, he abandoned his meal, bolted up the slope to the right, and vanished behind a sharp crest of stone.

“That’s the same cat, isn’t it?” Cavenaugh asked, but Gabriel was already walking away.

Gabriel affixed his stare to the point where the cat had disappeared, passed the spring, and began to scale the cliff. He should have seen Oscar emerge from the other side of the rock. Maybe the cat was still hiding behind it, but he had been moving so fast it would have been nearly impossible to stop so suddenly, even for a clawed feline. Gabriel clambered over a granite pinnacle and had to drop to all fours to maintain his balance on the slick stone. Behind and below him, he heard the others calling to him. Cavenaugh had found the spatter patterns and cursed him for allowing the cat to disturb them while Jess cautioned him to be careful. He made no reply as he crawled toward the jagged slate fin.

Oscar wasn’t crouching behind it, nor were there any footprints leading away on the snow-dusted ice.

There was only a deep black crevice under the slanted rock that led down into the ground.

Gabriel leaned closer, expecting to see the cat wedged down in there, staring back at him with terrified green eyes, but there was only darkness and a faint, warm breeze that smelled simultaneously of dust and mildew, salt and biological decay.

He reached down into the hole with his right arm until it was all the way inside and his shoulder was lodged in the opening.

And still couldn’t feel the bottom.

***

They had uprooted a six-foot aspen sapling, stripped the branches to the three-inch trunk, and now Cavenaugh knelt above the hole, prodding the darkness below. He had forced the tree all the way into the ground and had encountered no resistance. Gripping it in one hand, he added the length of his arm and thrust. He grunted and swept the trunk from side to side, but only succeeded in losing his grip. After a moment they heard the hollow clatter of wood striking the ground.

Cavenaugh leaned back and stared down the slope toward the spring with a look of confusion.

“That hole has to be at least fifteen feet deep,” he said. “And did you hear the sound it made? There has to be some sort of cavern directly under us.”

He gnawed his chapped lower lip, then brushed away a patch of snow until he found a rock about the size of his fist, and dropped it down into the crevice. It pinged off one of the slanted sides before ricocheting from the stone surface below. He grabbed another rock and did the same thing again, only this time, after striking the cavern floor, it hit something that sounded like metal.

Cavenaugh looked at the others where they huddled for warmth. The expression on his face had metamorphosed into excitement.

“There’s something in there,” he finally said. “And if someone could find a way to get a sizeable metal object in there, then we can get in there too.”

“We shouldn’t do anything until the police are able to get here,” Jess said. “The signal cut out, but I’m sure he said they could be here in under twenty-four hours.”

“What if Maura and Will are hurt? What if they need our help? Are you suggesting we should allow them to bleed to death while we wait?”

“There was so much blood—” Gabriel started.

“All the more reason to find them now. We can’t sit on our thumbs if there’s a chance we can help them.”

“They could be dead already.”

“Then whoever killed them probably already knows we’re here. How long until they come after us?”

The words chilled Gabriel on a level even the storm couldn’t. Until Cavenaugh had vocalized them, the concept had been an abstraction. He suddenly realized that someone could be watching them that very second, hiding in the branches of a tree, crouching behind a boulder, or simply standing there at the very edge of sight, cloaked in the blizzard. Jess was right. They needed to get the hell off that mountain, but would they be any more difficult to overcome on the steep descent through the dense forest and deep valleys? But at the same time, what if the others were lying somewhere in desperate need of help? And the most horrifying thought of all…

“The rifle,” he said. “Where’s Will’s rifle?”

“Jesus,” Kelsey whispered.

They were all exposed on the face of the peak and the range of the rifle exceeded the extent of their visibility through the storm.

Jess clicked on the emergency transceiver again, but there was still no hope of finding a functional channel.

With the click of a disengaging safety, Cavenaugh was on his feet, rifle at the ready.

“We need to seek cover,” he said. “Now.”

***

They stood in the cul-de-sac on the south end of the spring with the steep, bloodstained granite wall at their backs. The steam was a living cloud that seemed to move with their eyes, alternately concealing and revealing the snow-blanketed trees and the shadows wrapped around their trunks. They were sitting ducks.

“We should head back to the cabins,” Jess said. “Even if we can’t reach the highway in our cars, at least we’d be inside where we can defend ourselves.”

“We’d still be alone on the mountain,” Kelsey said. “If someone wanted to hurt us badly enough, they’d find a way.”

“You’re assuming we could even make it back to the cabins in this snow,” Gabriel said.

“What do you suggest then?” Jess asked. She was barely holding the panic at bay. “Should we just stay here and wait for whoever got to Maura and Will to come back for us?”

“Whoever did it is undoubtedly still here,” Cavenaugh said. He’d given his rifle to Kelsey, and was now crawling on the ground, sweeping the snow off the layer of ice. “I’d lay odds they knew exactly where we were staying and have been watching us the entire time. Probably the same thing that happened two years ago. They just waited until we split up and followed Will and Maura.”

“Will’s an experienced hunter,” Kelsey said. “He wasn’t the weakest link.” He looked pointedly at Gabriel and Jess.

“You keep saying ‘they.’ Do you really think there’s more than one of them?” Jess asked.

“I don’t see one person being able to overcome Will and Maura at the same time. Even Will by himself,” Cavenaugh said. He crawled closer to the edge of the water, still clearing away the accumulation. He paused and chiseled at the ice with his fingertips, then smoothed his palm across the surface. “I’ll bet they have us flanked right now.”

“Why do you think that? They could easily be miles away by now. For all we know they could have had a truck waiting down on the road and they could be anywhere.”

“These are the same people who killed our sisters, Jess. And probably Maura and Will as well. That’s nine people. Just that we know of. Why do you think they would run? They obviously have no qualms about killing, and they know these woods a hell of a lot better than any of us. Right now, they’re just playing with us, hunting us. They want us scared, and they want us to make the first move, to begin the chase. That’s the sport of it. And these aren’t the kind of people who are hoping to get a clean shot at three hundred yards. If that blood belongs to Maura and Will for sure, then these are men who thrill in working up close and personal. They enjoy the ritual of the kill, the feel of blood on their hands.”

“Or maybe they just feared we’d hear the report of a rifle,” Kelsey said.

“Possible, but I don’t think so. Those spatters indicate a startling level of savagery. No hesitation. No remorse. They’ve killed that way before.”

“So you’re saying we’re screwed regardless,” Gabriel said.

Cavenaugh looked up at him and flashed a crooked grin.

“That’s not what I’m saying at all.”

***

“Look here,” Cavenaugh said. He swiped away the wet snowfall that had accumulated on the ground in front of him in the last few minutes since he’d cleared it last. “The ice is uneven in spots. See? Some sections are elevated as though more water had been added on top of the frozen parts. Everywhere else, the ice is smooth and even. Why then should these sections be raised more than the rest?”

He looked up at them expectantly and waited for them to make the connection he apparently already had.

“We don’t have time to mess around,” Kelsey said. “They could be coming for us—”

“Bear with me,” Cavenaugh interrupted. “And if you look over here…”

He scooted closer to the edge of the water and brushed away more snow.

“Blood,” Gabriel said. It was barely discernible from the dark color of the rock under the frozen sheet, yet the way the droplets and smears were arranged, it was unmistakable.

“Right. Now if you run your palm across it, you can feel how it’s elevated from the ice. Just a little bit. What happened is that since the blood was still warm, it began to melt into the ice before transferring all of its heat, creating a kind of dimple for the fluid to rest in, a miniature cup to hold the blood. Once it cooled enough it couldn’t continue to melt through the ice, it started to freeze. And now that it’s frozen solid, there’s an uneven bump over the rest of the ice around it. You can tell this happened a while ago based on the amount of ice that has since frozen over the top of it. That’s why you can hardly see it now, but it still leaves a palpable lump.”

“We already know someone bled here,” Kelsey said. His eyes narrowed with impatience. “The evidence is spattered all over those rocks. We’re wasting valuable time. Time we don’t have.”

“You’re missing the point.” Cavenaugh was growing frustrated as well. “All that blood over there. The smaller spatters here by the spring. They were killed over there.” It was the first time one of them had phrased it as such. The impact served to silence whatever objections Kelsey had opened his mouth to make. “And they were carried, not dragged, over here to the edge of the spring, where they were thrown into the water.”

“That doesn’t change anything,” Jess whispered.

“Of course it does,” Cavenaugh said. “Where are their bodies? Corpses tend to float, especially in a saline body like this. That’s why you always hear about murderers weighting down their victims with stones and concrete blocks.”

“So that’s what they must have done,” Kelsey said. “The water’s deep enough that we couldn’t reach the bottom, and with as cloudy and bacteria-riddled as it is, we can’t see very far down into it at all. For all we know, there could be a whole pile of bodies on the bottom.”

“It’s possible, however unlikely. Something would end up floating to the surface, especially considering the constant influx of water from the underground source of the spring. These things have to exchange hundreds of gallons of water a day to keep up with evaporation from the heat. No, I don’t think their corpses are in the spring at all.”

“But you just said that whoever attacked them threw their bodies into the spring,” Gabriel said.

“Exactly.”

There was that strange smile of excitement again. Coupled with the way he contradicted himself with every word, Gabriel suspected Cavenaugh teetered on the brink of a breakdown.

“You aren’t making sense,” Kelsey snapped.

“You’re missing the obvious,” Cavenaugh said. That smile was starting to grate on Gabriel’s frayed nerves. “Look back here, where we started. I showed you how the blood made the ice so that the surface wasn’t level. What do you think caused this?”

He gestured to several oblong stretches where the ice was thicker, almost like melted candle wax. There were dots where drops had fallen and other long lines of spatter, but in the center of each was a distinct shape that appeared the same to a large degree with each repeat occurrence.

“Don’t you see?” Cavenaugh asked. His smile faltered and he appeared exasperated. He turned to each of them in turn before finally shaking his head. “Watch.”

He raised his right foot and stepped down on the raised section of ice, then did the same with his left on the next instance. Then his right again on the third.

“Jesus,” Jess gasped. “They’re footprints.”

***

“So whoever dumped the bodies in the spring got in there with them, weighted them down, and then climbed back out,” Kelsey said. “That can only serve to help us. There’s no way they’re walking around out here with wet legs. They’d have frostbite long before they were able to either change out of their clothes or find shelter.”

“You’re right about that,” Cavenaugh said, “but you’re working under a faulty assumption. Look at the prints again. They’re narrowest here, on the end closest to the water, and wider on the leading edge. They were made by someone coming out of the water just like you said, but I believe they were made before the bloodstains.”

“What’s the difference? It doesn’t change the fact that we need to get off this mountain right now.”

“How do you think it’s possible that someone snuck up on Maura and Will without either of them noticing? You made the point yourself about Will being an experienced hunter. Once they found those bones, he would have been acutely alert and watching the forest like his life depended upon it. And we would have heard the report if he’d managed to fire the rifle,” Cavenaugh said. He unzipped his jacket and shed the hood.

“You’ve lost your mind,” Kelsey said.

“Give me the backpack.”

Kelsey pulled off the backpack and thrust it at Cavenaugh, who opened it and dumped the contents onto the ground at his feet. He removed his jacket and shoved it in, then followed with a light jacket, a sweater, and a flannel shirt, until he was down to a single undershirt.

“What are you doing?” Jess asked.

“We know there’s a cavern underneath this mountain,” he said as he slipped out of his boots, then his snow pants and jeans. “We also know that the geothermally-heated water flows into this spring from somewhere. The footprints are coming out of the water, and we know that no one could survive very long out here if they were sopping wet.”

Cavenaugh now stood before them in only his undershirt, long johns, and a single pair of socks. The rest of his clothes were stuffed into the zipped backpack.

“You’re going to freeze to death if you do this,” Gabriel said.

“Someone just did this exact thing before we got here. There has to be a way to warm up, or at least dry off, inside the cavern.” Cavenaugh shrugged. “Worst case scenario, I’ll have to sit in this spring until help arrives if I’m wrong.”

“Are you willing to take that chance?” Kelsey asked. “You know that could exacerbate your condition.”

Cavenaugh cast him a sharp look.

“What condition?” Jess asked.

“It’s no one’s business but my own.”

“The former Detective Cavenaugh here has esophageal cancer.”

“Former detective?” Gabriel asked.

“You didn’t really think any of this was sanctioned by the police, do you?” Kelsey asked. “The assault rifles, the communications system, the gear. Do you think the Denver Police Department just opened up the armory for Cavenaugh’s little shopping spree?”

“We don’t have time to do this now,” Cavenaugh said.

“That’s why you wouldn’t let me call the police,” Jess said. “You lied to us and jeopardized all of our lives—”

“Listen to me,” Cavenaugh snapped. He pulled off his long underwear and socks, and stood against the wind in nothing but a tee shirt and a pair of boxers, visibly shivering. “That doesn’t change anything. Run away if you want, but I, for one, intend to find out what happened to my sister before I die. Even if it kills me.”

He donned the backpack and snatched the rifle from Kelsey with a look that could have stopped a charging bull. A moment later he was sliding down the icy embankment into the spring. Two steps away from the edge, the ground fell away beneath him, and he plunged out of sight.

***

“Thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire,” Jess whispered.

They stood at the edge of the spring, watching the burbling surface of the pink water and the red rocks beneath through the swirling steam. Cavenaugh had been down there for at least three minutes, and all of them knew there was no way he could have held his breath that long. Gabriel pictured Cavenaugh with his feet snared in a tangle of bodies on the bottom, struggling to free himself before finally taking that fateful inhalation of fluid. Somewhere down there, Gabriel imagined the stocky man’s lifeless body swaying on the current like a leaf of kelp. Worse, if Cavenaugh’s theory had been correct, he just might have found an underwater entrance to the cavern where the killers waited for him. Will hadn’t been able to fire a single shot in defense. There were no guarantees that Cavenaugh would be any luckier. Gabriel envisioned Cavenaugh crawling out of a small pool into a dark chamber where a shadowed form leaned over him from behind, grabbed him by the hair, and yanked his head back to expose his throat. A flash of steel and twin arterial sprays painted the walls.

Gabriel scrutinized the spring for any darkening of the already reddish water, half-expecting a rush of crimson from the intake that would dissipate—

The crown of a head broke the surface and there was a loud gasp.

Gabriel nearly squeezed off a shot, would have had his hands not been shaking so badly.

Cavenaugh paddled toward them, but as soon as his back crested the water, he thought better of it. The barrel of the rifle pointed over his right shoulder as the broken wing of an angel might. The strap crossed his chest. Steam twirled from his head in the cold air like a recently extinguished candle.

“I was right,” he said, still panting for breath. “There’s a tunnel down there. Leads right out from the bottom. Barely wider than my shoulders, but it goes…all the way into the cavern. Without light, I can’t…can’t tell how big it is, but I’d guess it’s pretty large by the acoustics.”

“Was there anyone inside?” Kelsey asked.

“Like I said. I couldn’t see a thing, but I could smell…” Cavenaugh paused and dunked his head again to replenish his warmth while he formulated his words. “There was definitely something dead in there. Once you’ve worked a homicide, you don’t forget the smell.”

“So what now?” Gabriel asked.

“We do some spelunking.” Now that Cavenaugh had regained his breath, his smile returned. “I don’t know what kind of geothermal vents heat that cavern, but it’s like a sauna in there. The backpacks are waterproof, so we can carry all our clothes through the tunnel and change once we’re in there. I already dumped mine.”

He produced the empty backpack and tossed it at Kelsey’s feet.

“You’re crazy if you think I’m going in there,” Kelsey said.

“Fine. Stay here. I’m going back in regardless. How about you two?”

Gabriel opened his mouth under Cavenaugh’s intense gaze, but no words came out. The prospect scared the hell out of him. He heard a zipper behind him and turned to see Jess shrug out of her coat.

“I’ll go,” she whispered.

“Gabriel?” Cavenaugh asked.

Gabriel stared down at the rifle for a long moment before passing it to Kelsey. He reached for the zipper on his coat with trembling hands.

“You can’t leave me out here alone,” Kelsey said.

“It’s your choice, doctor,” Cavenaugh said. His grin now had teeth.

“What if they come back? How could I possibly—?”

“If I’m right, they’re already inside. You’ll have nothing to fear unless they get past the rest of us.”

“You think they’re in there, waiting for you, and you still want to go in after them? After they’ve already proven their willingness to kill?”

Cavenaugh’s face remained stoic.

“You’ve lost it.”

“The floor of the tunnel is littered with bones, Kelsey, and the current runs directly toward the end of the spring over there where all the rest are piled. Are you following my logic? If you want to figure out what happened to Levi…the only way to do so is by going in there.”

“Where there are people waiting to butcher us.”

“The rifles are waterproof as well.”

“I don’t share your death wish. I have a wife, and a respectable practice—”

“Suit yourself,” Cavenaugh said.

Gabriel stood in his underwear and tee shirt, the rest of his clothing stuffed in the backpack beside his socked feet. He shivered and his teeth chattered. What in the name of God was he thinking?

“Make sure to pack both flare guns,” Cavenaugh said. “We’re going to need them.”

Gabriel wedged the bulky gun and spare cartridges into the bag and zipped it closed again. The frigid wind felt as though it blew right through him. The time had come to decide. Either he unpacked his clothes and got dressed again before he froze to death, or he forced his legs to propel him forward into the water. Jess emerged from his peripheral vision in only her bra and panties, a mismatched set of pink and white, and slid down the rocks into the water, dragging her backpack by the strap. She waded out a couple steps and dropped into the deep water with a startled cry. A heartbeat later, she returned to the surface, coughing and spitting out the vile liquid.

One step at a time, Gabriel eased closer to the spring. He felt a sense of detachment, as though he had somehow separated from his body and were merely watching himself inching toward the spring from afar. At the edge of the bank, he lowered himself to his rear end and slid down into the water. He scooted forward to the edge of the rocks and plunged into the depths. About eight feet down, his feet met the bottom, which he used as leverage to launch himself back up into the cold air.

“The opening to the tunnel is pretty much right under us,” Cavenaugh said. “It’s roughly fifteen feet long and the current will be pushing you right in the face. You’re going to need to take the biggest breath you can hold and use your arms to pull you through.”

“What about the backpacks?” Jess asked.

“Loop the straps around your ankle.”

“What if it gets stuck?” Gabriel asked.

“Then ditch it and we’ll go back for it.”

“What if—?”

“It’s now or never,” Cavenaugh said. “Follow me if you want, or stay if you don’t. At this point, I don’t care. Either way, I’m going now.”

He took a deep breath and was about to dive under when Kelsey spoke.

“Wait.”

***

Gabriel waited a moment after Jess dove, drew as much air as his lungs could hold, and dove under the water. The salt content stung his eyes so badly he could barely keep them open, but he managed to see Jess’s feet before they disappeared into the rocky mouth of the tunnel. The red bacterial sludge grew over everything, covering the uneven rocks and the scattered, strangely shaped objects he assumed were bones. He couldn’t help but wonder about the consequences of exposing his bare eyeballs and the sensitive membranes to the foreign microorganisms.

Gripping the stones at the edge of the opening, he pulled himself ahead into utter darkness. His shoulders scraped against the walls, ripping his shirt. The skin on his fingertips threatened to peel away and he was certain he was going to lose a nail, but the pain was nothing compared to the pressure in his lungs. He already needed to take a breath. It felt like his chest was full of smoldering coals. The irrational panic cut through what little semblance of control remained, and he began to thrash. Tearing open the skin on his elbows and knees, on his scalp and toes. Colored amoebae floated across his vision and the entire tunnel rotated around him. He clawed forward, faster and faster, not caring if he flayed every inch of flesh from his bones, until his head slammed into something hard.

Gabriel opened his mouth to scream. Something struck his back between his shoulder blades and jerked him upward. He sputtered with the influx of air, retched, then rolled away from the opening and vomited onto the stone floor.

“Shh!” Cavenaugh hissed into his ear.

Gabriel continued to gasp until he calmed down and rationalized the situation. The darkness in the cavern was lighter than the underwater tunnel by degree, but only enough to limn the silhouettes of the others. His harsh breath echoed hollowly in the large, unseen room.

“Hurry back,” Cavenaugh whispered.

With a soft splash, Jess crawled down into the water and headed back for Kelsey. She was obviously a better swimmer and had handled the journey far better than he had.

Gabriel sat up and tried to get a feel for his surroundings. The blackness was claustrophobic, and even though he couldn’t see the stone walls, he felt confident they were about to collapse and bury him alive.

There was a rustling noise, then a metallic snapping sound.

“This won’t last long,” Cavenaugh whispered. “Memorize everything you see.”

Gabriel wasn’t sure what Cavenaugh meant until with a whoosh and a scream, a fireball streaked off into the darkness with a startling flash.

***

The resultant glow stained the room orange from where the ball of fire burned against the stone wall ahead and to the left. Already it was beginning to fizzle and fade. Gabriel was shocked by the sheer enormity of the cavern, which more closely resembled a highway tunnel through a mountain than any sort of natural formation. The walls were smooth, with few outcroppings, and rounded to create an elliptical room perhaps twenty-five feet wide, but only a dozen feet high. It almost appeared man-made. Beyond the leading edge of the fading light, a section of the roof and walls had collapsed into a pile of rubble.

Gabriel tried to absorb every detail before the crackling flame extinguished. Rivulets of water trickled down the walls and dripped to the ground from the condensation above. A small channel of water cut through the middle of the floor, whisper quiet, and emptied into the pool from which they’d emerged. There was a stack of red aluminum containers to the right, presumably what they’d heard the rock strike from the hole through which the cat had crawled. They were rusted and dented, but one still bore the faded letters KER SENE. The smooth stone floor beside the small stream was wet and sloppy. Maybe it was the orange glare, but the long smear that led deeper into the tunnel glimmered scarlet.

The flare diminished to a wan glow of embers, and finally to nothing at all. In the dying light, he thought he had seen movement ahead near the mound of rocks, a shadow passing across shadows. The darkness wrapped around them again with humid arms.

Gabriel felt Cavenaugh’s breath on his ear before the other man whispered, “They dragged the bodies through here. There’s blood all over the ground in front of us.”

There was a muted metallic clatter as Cavenaugh ejected the spent metal flare casing and chambered another.

“We should have brought flashlights,” Gabriel whispered.

“You think?”

He’d obviously hit a sore spot. Cavenaugh had gone to great lengths to outfit their expedition, but apparently hadn’t foreseen every contingency.

Gabriel heard a shuffling sound beside him and realized Cavenaugh was getting dressed. Following suit, Gabriel stripped out of his wet clothes, unpacked the dry, and had only begun to get dressed when a slosh of water and a gasp announced Kelsey’s arrival. His reaction upon crawling out of the spring was the same as Gabriel’s. He was still retching when Jess slipped out of the water.

They dressed in a silence marred only by the occasional zip of a zipper and scratch of Velcro.

“Ready?” Cavenaugh whispered. When no one immediately spoke up, he detailed his plan. “We advance in a diamond formation. I’ll take the lead. Jess and Gabriel, you’ll stay right behind and to either side of me. You’ll carry the flare guns. Only fire one off on my signal. Kelsey, you’ll bring up the rear. Walk backwards. Make sure no one tries to sneak up on us from behind. Anything moves, shoot it. Got it?”

Whispers of assent.

“If you see or hear anything—anything at all—stop where you are and tap the people to either side. Keep the formation close, and no one strays away. Understood?”

The stream hissed past them, an indifferent serpent in their midst.

Kelsey checked to make sure a load was chambered in the rifle with a clack.

The sound of their breathing grew harsh, tense.

Something pressed into Gabriel’s stomach and he took the flare gun from Cavenaugh. His palm was sweating so badly it took several attempts to find the proper grip. A thought struck him like a bullet to the temple.

They were all going to die in there.

“Move out,” Cavenaugh whispered, and took the first step forward into the darkness.

***

The clatter of rock against rock signaled Cavenaugh had reached the section where the roof had fallen. A faint slant of mote-riddled gray light cut through the darkness from a hole in the ceiling mere feet above the top of the pile. Judging by the distance from the spring, Gabriel could only assume that was where Oscar had entered from above.

“Be careful and quiet,” Cavenaugh whispered, and began his ascent.

Gabriel leaned onto the mound and tested the boulders with a shove, but they didn’t budge in the slightest. He reached out and found purchase on a rock. His hand slipped when he tried to pull himself up. The surface was slick and damp. He prayed it wasn’t blood from a body being dragged over them, and resumed his climb. When he crested the top, he looked up into the hole in the fractured ceiling, but couldn’t see the more than a few feet before the passage bent to the right. Cold air blew in his face.

The descent was more challenging as he refused to turn his back to the unseen chamber beyond in order to properly use his hands. Instead, he picked his way down on his rear end, testing each step with his heels. At the bottom, he stood beside Cavenaugh, where they waited for the others to join them.

“Jess,” Cavenaugh whispered. “Flare.”

Again there was a whoosh and a scream as the ball of fire sped into the darkness. It hit the ground and bounded down the tunnel. Its momentum petered out after about fifty yards.

Gabriel gasped. Nothing could have prepared him for what he now saw.

“Holy crap,” Kelsey whispered.

The thin stream on the ground divided the cavern into halves. To the left, a stained and aged mattress rested against the rounded rock wall. Two rumpled sleeping bags were spread out on it. The pillowcases at the head of the bed looked like they hadn’t been washed in ages. There were two backpacks on the floor, overflowing with clothes. A kerosene lantern rested beside the bed. A bench had been constructed from tree trunks, still round and flaking with dried bark. A black leather book sat on the planks. It was embossed with three white words: The Holy Bible. The pages were dog-eared and tattered. Another lantern had been positioned next to it beside a reserve tank of kerosene.

The right side of the room was something else entirely, as though the occupants had created their version of heaven on one side, and hell on the other.

There was a pallet composed of uneven tree trunks lashed together with various thicknesses of rope. A rusted ax stood at an angle from where the blade was buried in the wood. Chips and wedges had been stolen from the trunks through repeated use. Its function was no mystery, as Maura’s and Will’s bodies were sprawled across it. They had been stripped, their wet clothes piled beside them in twin heaps. Their flesh had paled dramatically in stark contrast to the vicious red wounds across their chests and throats. Oscar sat in the crook of Will’s neck, worrying at a sizeable gash with his teeth. He secured a mouthful and darted deeper into the tunnel without a backwards glance.

Various animal carcasses were scattered on the floor, the bones bleached, presumably from being boiled in the carbon-scored pot sitting on the charcoaled remnants of an extinguished campfire.

Gabriel caught a reflection from the wall above the carnage and looked up to see a half dozen necklaces hanging from the imperfections in the stone. His eyes were drawn to one in particular, from which a small golden cross dangled. There were five small diamonds set into the design, one in the center, and one at each end.

He recognized it immediately.

The flare died, and again the darkness enveloped them.

Gabriel stifled a sob, but couldn’t prevent the tears from streaming down his cheeks. He felt like someone had reached inside him and torn out all of his bowels. His stomach roiled and his head spun. Whatever hope he had held out that Stephanie might still be alive had been crushed. Rage and anguish warred within him. He wanted to rip the rifle out of Cavenaugh’s hands and run screaming down the tunnel, to make someone pay for his sister’s death. All he could see was an image of Stephanie’s naked, lifeless body spread across that hideous chopping block, covered with blood, while a faceless shadow stood over her, raised the ax, and—

Thuck. Followed by an angry hiss.

“What was that?” Jess whispered.

The sounds had come from deeper in the mountain, where Oscar had just fled.

“Someone’s down there,” Kelsey whispered.

“They’ve been leading us in that direction the entire time,” Cavenaugh whispered. “They’re waiting for us.”

***

Cavenaugh led them through the pitch black, slowly, silently. The ground began to slope upward ever so slightly. Once they reached the point where the flare had died, they halted and closed rank.

Gabriel heard a rustling sound behind him and turned. Something warm and wet slapped him across the face. A salty, metallic taste filled his mouth and he had to swipe the fluid from his left eye. He froze. His mind raced in an effort to comprehend what had just happened. His first thought was that Kelsey had stomped into the stream, but there hadn’t been a splashing sound to match.

Gabriel spat out the foul substance, then whispered, “Kelsey?”

There was a scraping noise mere feet away from him, but he couldn’t see a thing.

“Kelsey?”

“Gabriel,” Cavenaugh whispered. “Flare. Now.”

Gabriel pointed the blunted gun back in the direction from which they had come and pulled the trigger. The tunnel bloomed orange as the fireball streaked away into the darkness with a shriek and collided with the wooden pallet where the corpses still rested, and burned, hot and fast.

The ground at Gabriel’s feet was sloppy with blood, and, as he could now see, so was he. A wide smear led back down the tunnel, terminating in a pair of boots. Kelsey was sprawled on his stomach, his head and shoulders under the water, arms pinned beneath his chest.

Jess ran to him, rolled him onto his back, and cradled his head to raise it out of the stream. The laceration across his neck opened like a second mouth into a soundless scream.

A shadow darted along the wall to Gabriel’s left in the dying light, but by the time he turned, there was no sign of movement.

The flame fizzled and extinguished, stranding them in the impregnable blackness.

There was the clatter of rock on rock and the soft sound of footsteps, and then nothing at all.

Jess whimpered and started to cry.

Gabriel spun in a circle. It felt like he was surrounded, as though there were people so close he could feel their breath on his face.

“Fall back,” Cavenaugh whispered.

“What about—?” Jess whispered.

“Leave him. There’s nothing any of us can do for him now.”

“But I just saw someone—”

“I said fall back.”

Gabriel felt a hand shove him between the shoulder blades from behind and started walking. He could no longer tell if his eyes were open or closed.

There was a splashing sound from his right. A few seconds later, a wet rifle was thrust into his abdomen. He shoved the flare gun into his jacket pocket and cradled the rifle across his chest, sweeping it in front of him in jerking motions.

“Jess,” Cavenaugh whispered. “Fire another flare.”

Light exploded from the barrel and hurtled away into the living quarters. The flare struck the mounded rocks and bounded back toward them. The area was momentarily illuminated by a wavering peach glow, casting shadows from every object like black flags, before the ball of flame bounced into the stream and darkness raced back in with a hiss.

“Give me the flare gun,” Cavenaugh whispered.

A dozen more echoing footsteps and the light blossomed again. With a scream, the flare flew into the corner of the dead end, ricocheted from the boulders and then from the wall, and came to rest beside the bed. Cavenaugh passed the smoldering pistol back to Jess and walked directly toward the lantern on the ground.

“What are you doing?” Gabriel asked.

“What we should have done from the start.” Cavenaugh picked up the lantern, removed the glass housing, and held the broad wick to the flare until it lit. After dialing up the flame, he replaced the top and held it up to light the room. “I thought we’d make easy targets walking with the lantern. Apparently we did a good enough job of that without it.”

The dancing flame and the refractions through the glass brought the furthest reaches of the lantern’s light to life with shifting shadows.

“How many flares are left?” Cavenaugh asked.

“I have one,” Jess whispered.

“Same here,” Gabriel whispered.

“Then we don’t have much margin for error,” Cavenaugh said in a normal tone. The lantern was a handheld bull’s-eye. It didn’t matter now if their voices betrayed their location. “Jess, do you think you can carry that red canister?”

She lifted the container easily by the handle and sloshed the fluid. It sounded like there was maybe half a tank. Cavenaugh passed her the lantern, which she held aloft in her free hand.

“Gabriel,” Cavenaugh said. “You stay in the rear. Walk backwards. I’ll lead. Jess, stay between us and keep the lantern raised high enough that we can see.”

He started walking back toward Kelsey’s body.

“What are you doing?” Gabriel asked.

“I just told you.”

“We need to get out of here. I thought that’s what we were doing.”

“No,” Cavenaugh said. He turned. The expression on his face was frightening. “This ends here and now.”

“You’re out of your mind. Think about what just happened to Kelsey. We need to get the hell out of here while we still can. Let the police and the FBI come in here after them.”

“We leave now and they’ll be gone before reinforcements arrive. If we don’t do this now, we’ll never know what happened here.”

“It’s pretty obvious,” Gabriel said, gesturing to the corpses on the other side of the stream. “What more do you need to know?”

“I need to know why!” Cavenaugh shouted.

Gabriel retreated a step. Cavenaugh’s eyes were wide and wild, his red face contorting awkwardly with emotion. Gabriel was debating the merit of turning his rifle on Cavenaugh when the man spoke again, this time more softly.

“I’ll be dead inside three months. The cancer’s metastasized to my stomach and lungs. In a matter of weeks, I won’t be able to breathe without oxygen or swallow anything solid. Radiation will just prolong the process. There’s nothing I can do to change that. And I can’t go back empty-handed. There isn’t anything for me to go back to anyway. All of this equipment? These guns? You’d better believe someone’s noticed they’re gone by now. The department’s probably pretty anxious to have a little chat with me, one that starts with ‘You have the right to remain silent.’ So, as you can imagine, this is my last chance. My little sister died here. She never had a chance to get married or have children, to find happiness. All I want from the time I have left is to make sure that Jenny’s life mattered, that it counted for something. I don’t care if you come with me or not. Run away. That’s fine by me. But there’s something I want you to think about before you do.”

Gabriel looked at Jess, then back at Cavenaugh.

“Whoever killed Kelsey snuck up on him from behind. From the direction you want to go,” Cavenaugh said. “We probably walked right past him in the dark.”

Gabriel felt a sudden chill at the thought. Neither option appealed to him in the slightest. He wanted to just sit down and wait for someone to come rescue them, but he knew that if none of the search parties had found this tunnel before, they weren’t about to any time soon.

Cavenaugh turned away and struck off deeper into the mountain. After a moment’s hesitation, Jess followed.

Gabriel glanced back at the mound of rocks and the passage over them that led to the spring one final time before he joined the others. He spun around and walked in reverse, pointing the barrel of the rifle at the moving shadows cast by the lantern.

He slid his trembling finger onto the trigger.

***

Gabriel watched Kelsey’s body fade behind them until the darkness advanced from beyond the lantern’s reach and claimed it. He could barely breathe. The terror had conspired with the heat and humidity to compress his chest. Were it not for the prospect of someone with a wickedly sharp knife lying in wait in the darkness, he would have gladly succumbed to the panic and run screaming out of the cave. As it was, he was slowly losing the battle with his nerves. Every shift in the shadows nearly summoned a fusillade of bullets. With his hands shaking as badly as they were, he wondered if his aim would be remotely accurate if he had to put it to the test.

He had been so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn’t notice Jess had stopped until he backed into her.

“Sorry—”

“Shh!” Cavenaugh whispered.

Gabriel listened, but couldn’t hear anything over his ragged breathing and the thrum of his pulse. After seeing nothing ahead, he risked a glance back over his shoulder. About twenty feet past Cavenaugh, illuminated by just the faintest glow, were twin mounds of rock to either side of the tunnel where another section of the earthen roof had collapsed. The passage narrowed to a bottleneck. They would have to pass through single file, becoming sitting ducks as they emerged on the other side one at a time.

“They’ll be ready to ambush us at the end of that passage,” Cavenaugh whispered.

“There’s no other way through,” Jess whispered. “We should turn back now. I don’t want to die in here.”

“You think any of our sisters did?”

“Don’t you dare use my sister against me. You have no idea—”

A shadow darted across the tunnel at the peripheral extent of the flame’s light and Gabriel jerked the trigger. The bullet flew high and wide, struck the wall with a spark and a ping, and careened off into the darkness.

“What did you see?” Cavenaugh asked.

“Something. Someone. I didn’t get a good look.”

“We need to keep moving.”

“We’re being herded,” Jess whispered.

“Do you have a better idea?” Cavenaugh asked. “If you want to wait here for them to come for you, I’m not about to stop you.”

“What are our options?” Gabriel asked.

Cavenaugh was silent for a moment. The corners of his lips curled upward into an uneasy smile.

“We’re going straight through that bottleneck.”

“But we all know it’s the perfect spot for an ambush,” Gabriel said. “You already said someone will be waiting for us at the end of the passage.”

Gabriel looked down the tunnel and then back at him. Cavenaugh’s face was a miasma of churning shadow and light. The smile had turned into a maniacal grin. Without a doubt, Cavenaugh had snapped.

“I hope so,” Cavenaugh said.

***

“How accurately can you shoot with that flare gun?” Cavenaugh asked.

“I don’t know,” Gabriel said. He couldn’t see where Cavenaugh was going with that line of thought, but the ever-present smile was unsettling.

They should never have gone through that spring, not without the police. And Kelsey had paid for their folly with his life.

None of them would ever see the light of day again. They were all going to die in there.

“We only have one shot at this, so you’d better not miss,” Cavenaugh said. He leaned closer and explained his plan in a whisper while constantly peering through the darkness for the first sign of movement like a prairie dog emerging from its burrow. “So do you think you can do it?”

“Are you sure this will work?” Jess asked.

“No,” Cavenaugh said. He took Gabriel by the shoulders and drew him closer until their faces were only inches apart and enunciated each word carefully. “Can you do this?”

Gabriel hesitated. Could he? He wasn’t sure. Thus far he’d only been firing the flares in a general direction without taking aim.

“This is our only chance,” Cavenaugh said. “If this doesn’t work, then we’re all dead. So I need to know. Right now. Can you do this?”

“I think so.”

“You think?”

“Yes. Yes, I can do this.”

Cavenaugh clapped him on the shoulder. “Give Jess the rifle.”

Gabriel held out the weapon for Jess, who set the canister of kerosene and the lantern on the ground, and took it from him. She turned and faced the length of tunnel they had already traversed. The barrel visibly shook in her grasp.

Cavenaugh transferred his rifle to his left hand and hoisted the red container in his right.

“Everyone know what they’re supposed to do?” Cavenaugh asked. Gabriel and Jess whispered that they did. “Then on my mark… Now.”

Jess fired indiscriminately down the tunnel, sweeping the semi-automatic from side to side. Bullets ricocheted from the ground, walls, and ceiling with a showcase of golden sparks.

Under the deafening ruckus of suppressive fire, Cavenaugh hurled the canister through the mouth of the bottleneck into the eager shadows, readied the rifle, and began to shoot.

Gabriel heard the faint metal chorus of bullets striking the container, steadied the flare gun, and pulled the trigger.

The shriek of the streaking fireball was barely audible over the echoing gunfire as the thin corridor between the fallen rocks turned orange.

There was a flash of light, and then flames everywhere. A black cloud of smoke billowed into the passage.

Cavenaugh charged forward into the smoke, the discharge from his rifle like a strobe in fog.

Gabriel tugged Jess by the hood of her jacket, and she started to walk in reverse, following him into the corridor. Once inside, she stopped firing as she had been instructed, saving what few bullets remained until she could see their assailant coming.

There was a scream from ahead through the smoke.

Gabriel coughed. His lungs hurt and his eyes felt as though they were on fire. The tears made it so even the little he could see ahead was refracted through the saline. Cavenaugh was a vague blur, his form silhouetted by fire. A puddle of burning kerosene advanced along the ground from the shredded tank, which now looked more like a sea urchin.

The shrill screaming grew louder with each step.

Gabriel stepped out of the passage into a confusion of smoke and fire. Liquid flames poured down the cavern walls and dripped from the ceiling. The smoke swirled with nowhere to go.

The tortured cries pierced his right ear and Gabriel turned to see Cavenaugh charging toward a creature of fire. A mane of flames rose from the figure’s head and all of its clothes burned amber. Fingers of fire crawled over its blackened face. Its wide eyes and teeth were a sharp contrast of white, the cries a contortion of pain and rage.

Cavenaugh strode directly toward it, shoved it back against the stone wall, and pressed the barrel of the rifle to its forehead.

The figure seemed not to even notice as it slapped its hands across its face and chest in an effort to smother the flames.

“Look at me!” Cavenaugh shouted. “You killed my little sister. Why? For the love of God, tell me why, or so help me, I’ll let you stand there and burn to death. Tell me and I can make the pain stop.”

A pair of milky eyes rolled upward to meet his.

Cavenaugh gasped and took an involuntary step away. He shook his head in disbelief.

Gabriel saw the flash of the knife in the flaming hand a heartbeat before the figure thrust it into Cavenaugh’s abdomen.

***

Cavenaugh fell to his knees. He held his attacker’s wrist in a firm grasp, and dragged the figure down in front of him, their faces a breath apart. Gabriel heard Cavenaugh whisper a single word.

“Jenny.”

Gabriel dashed to where Cavenaugh had dropped the rifle and leveled the barrel at the scorched face. All of its hair had burned back to its skull and the cracked skin wept blood and pustulates. The clothes still crackled, but the flames had diminished. The figure’s black features tightened and there was a sucking sound as it jerked back the knife and stabbed Cavenaugh again.

“Let go of the knife!” Gabriel shouted. The rifle trembled so badly the barrel tapped against the thing’s temple. “Do it now or I shoot!”

The eyes rose and looked at Gabriel.

Shamrock green eyes.

Suddenly he understood.

“Why are you doing this?” Cavenaugh asked. His voice faltered and a rivulet of blood drained from the corner of his mouth. His brow crinkled and his eyes narrowed as though trying to read the answer in her face. “I’ve been looking for you for so long….and now I…. What have I done?”

Cavenaugh’s shoulders shuddered and tears streamed from his eyes. Despite the blade embedded in his gut, he wrapped his arms around his sister’s shoulders and drew her into his embrace.

Jenny’s screams turned to sobs as she buried her face in the crook of his neck.

“Please forgive me,” she whispered. Her voice was garbled by the pain and her closing windpipe.

Gabriel didn’t know what to do. A moment prior he had been prepared to blow a hole through the side of her head, and now…. If Jenny was still alive, was it possible that…?

“No one can ever know,” Jenny whispered. “None of us can ever leave here.”

She withdrew the knife and stabbed her brother again.

“Anything can be forgiven,” Cavenaugh whispered. “You…you were the one who told me…God forgives everyone.”

“That’s the problem.” She started to cry harder. “There can be no forgiveness. There can be no more—”

Gabriel stepped forward and pressed the barrel against her head behind her ear.

“—hope.”

He stared down at Cavenaugh, whose jacket had already begun to burn. Tears streaked through the soot on his cheeks and blood trickled from his mouth and down his chin. The expression on his face reflected a level of pain the likes of which Gabriel had never seen before. Cavenaugh turned his attention back to his sister and stroked her cheek softly.

“I love you,” he whispered, then turned and gave Gabriel a single nod.

Gabriel squeezed the trigger.

***

The report echoed through the cavern, and beneath it Cavenaugh’s gut-wrenching cry. Gabriel could only stare at the body lying on the ground beside Cavenaugh. The entire upper half of Jenny’s head was gone, replaced by a sloppy mess of tattered skin, bone fragments, and gray matter, from which blood poured into an ever-expanding pool. Flames spread from her shoulder over the side of her face, where they took root and began to consume her.

As Cavenaugh watched, his features twitched and twisted while he ran the gamut of emotions. His hands worked at the hilt of the knife until they were finally able to pull it free. He wavered in place before finally toppling onto his side. He reached for his sister’s hand, and closed it within his.

Gabriel grabbed Cavenaugh’s other hand and tried to drag him away from the fire, but the stronger man jerked it away.

“Get up!” Gabriel yelled. He looked to Jess for help, but she just stood there, paralyzed by shock.

A shadow separated from the smoke and flames behind her.

“Jenny!” it shouted. The figure shoved Jess out of the way and threw itself to the ground beside the smoldering corpse. It tried to lift her head, but only succeeded in dumping the remaining contents onto the ground. With a pitiful moan, it whirled to face Gabriel. The firelight exposed a face masked by a scraggly beard and wild hair. The man’s eyes narrowed to slits and he bared his teeth.

Gabriel stumbled backwards and aligned the barrel of the rifle with the man, whom he recognized with a start.

Levi Northcutt. Kelsey’s son.

He had slit his own father’s throat.

“Stay right where you are!” Gabriel yelled. His mind was reeling. Levi and Jenny had been alive all this time. Was it possible that his sister was somewhere nearby in the darkness? But there had been so many bones…and her cross was hanging from the wall over the pallet where the carcasses were butchered. What could possibly have transpired that would have led Levi and Jenny to kill all of their friends, and then the family members who had come to search for them? What could have happened that would have forced Levi to kill his own father and Jenny to repeatedly stab her brother?

No one can know, Jenny’s voice repeated in his head. None of us can ever leave here.

What did they find in this cavern?

There can be no forgiveness. There can be no more hope.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Levi said. He rolled to a crouch and tensed in preparation of launching himself at Gabriel. “You don’t understand. No one can find out about this place. Ever.”

Gabriel didn’t want to ask the words that came out of his mouth next, but he had to know. He needed to hear it.

“Did you kill my sister? Did you kill Stephanie?”

The expression of anger on Levi’s face never faltered.

“She would have told.”

Gabriel felt his heart break, and in that instant he wanted nothing more than to shoot Levi in the face. Not just shoot him, but destroy him, obliterate every last inch of him.

“For God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment,” Levi said.

Jess drew close to Gabriel and stood at his side. She raised her rifle and pointed it at Levi.

“Do you think we wanted this burden?” Levi asked. “Without faith there can be no God, and without God there can be no hope. What would happen if you stole the hopes of millions, the hope for the entire world?” He pulled a long, serrated hunting knife from his jacket pocket. “There would be no reason to exist.”

“Don’t move!” Gabriel shouted.

“If you kill me, the responsibility falls to you.”

Levi adjusted his grip on the hilt of the knife. The blade pointed downward from his closed fist.

“Don’t,” Jess said. Her voice quivered.

“Once you’ve looked upon the face of God, there’s nothing left to live for but the perpetuation of the lie. The lie upon which all of our lives are built. Everything’s a lie! The bible?” He scoffed. “That’s what led us here. To the fallen angels. They were right where it said they’d be.”

“You’re insane,” Gabriel said. Something had broken inside Levi’s mind, splintered into incoherent pieces. There were no angels and this had nothing to do with God. This man had killed his sister and her friends. His own father, for Christ’s sake!

“Drop the knife,” Gabriel said.

“I can’t let you leave here. No one can ever learn the truth.”

Levi sprung from his haunches like a panther. Gabriel saw a flash of reflected fire from the blade of the knife, the crazed look on the younger man’s face. Wide eyes. Screaming. Gabriel pulled the trigger at the same moment Levi slammed into him. The rifle clattered from his grasp and Levi’s weight drove him to the ground. His head slammed against the rock floor. He barely had time to throw his hands up to ward off the coming attack.

Another flash from the knife and Levi raised it high over his shoulder.

Gabriel grabbed for it, but it was well outside his reach.

A small shape leapt from the pile of rocks and landed on Levi’s back. He whirled in surprise and a flurry of claws tore into his cheek. Hissing and slashing, Oscar turned the entire right side of Levi’s face to a sheet of blood before he was able to grab the tabby by the scruff of the neck and hurl it against the wall.

By the time Levi turned back to Gabriel, Jess had brought the barrel of her rifle to bear on his forehead.

There was no look of fear on Levi’s face. Only resignation. Or perhaps relief.

One second Levi’s head was there, the next it was gone, and Gabriel was wiping warm fluid from his eyes. The body wobbled and then fell down onto him.

Gabriel tried to scream, but his mouth was full of Levi’s blood.

He scurried out from under the corpse and looked up at Jess, who stood frozen in place, a twirl of smoke rising from the barrel of the rifle, her face pale.

The weapon fell from her hands.

***

Cavenaugh burned where he had fallen. There was nothing left of his clothing but ash and charcoal, and his skin had already blackened and cracked. He still held his sister’s rigid, clawed hand within his own.

Gabriel had to look away. The beauty was painful to behold.

Jess took his hand. He had never been so grateful for such a simple gesture in his life. So many years of constant torture and longing and hoping, and now it was over.

Now he would have to truly mourn the loss of his sister. No more deluding himself, no more hoping for a miracle. He faced the daunting task of collecting her remains and committing her to the earth in the Christian fashion she would have wanted.

There was so much death. All around him. So much loss. And for what?

Oscar limped away from the cavern wall. His right rear leg was broken in such a horrible way that it pointed straight behind him like a second tail.

Gabriel crouched and held out his hand, which only startled Oscar, and sent him hopping deeper into the cavern.

“Damn it,” Gabriel said.

He released Jess’s hand, walked into the smoldering fire, and found where they had abandoned the lantern. When he turned, he could read the expression on Jess’s face, but he couldn’t forsake the cat now. Oscar was the only part of his sister left in this world. The tabby had saved him. It was only right that he return the favor.

Raising the lantern, he staggered away from the smoke and flames, the scent of burning flesh, and pressed further into the mountain.

***

Gabriel felt dead inside. The sense of loss he now experienced, the horror over so much death, was sending him into a state of shock. He could only focus on finding the cat. Once he had done so, he knew he would fall apart.

His legs moved of their own volition, leading him into the rapidly cooling depths of the earth. The air was still and dusty, as though even the breeze feared to violate the darkness. After several minutes, or it could have been hours, of stumbling on numb legs, he found himself before another collapsed section of the tunnel. There was only a small black gap between the rocks and the ceiling through which to crawl. Considering he hadn’t encountered the cat, that left only one option.

He turned at the sound of footsteps to find Jess staring at him with the same distant expression he was sure he must have worn. Without a word, he started climbing the haphazard pile of stones. He held the lantern out before him and slithered through the gap.

I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north.

His mind failed to rationalize the scene before him as he descended the other side. The flickering lamplight played off a rounded chamber, only rather than highlighting the imperfections on a granite surface, it died on smooth walls thick with a layer of dust. Cobwebs were strung from the ceiling and walls as though some great spider had filled the room with an intricate network of webs. The dust in the air hung like a mist. Suddenly Gabriel felt as though he couldn’t breathe.

Thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.

He raised his other arm and brushed away the cobwebs, which clung to his skin and jacket.

“What is this place?” Jess whispered from behind him. She reached to her left and ran her hand along a straight edge that resembled the side of a doorway. Her hand came away gray with dust, but the surface she had just cleared shone like stainless steel.

Thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

Gabriel turned back to the room before him and held up the lantern. The walls weren’t as smooth as he had initially thought. He walked all the way across the chamber and brushed off another section of the wall to reveal an instrument panel with a flat-screen display, beneath which was a series of buttons resembling a keyboard.

His heart was pounding so hard he could hear his pulse.

He was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

Gabriel headed left, the ground beneath him making a sound like buckling metal under his weight. The lamp highlighted several large mounds of dust-covered debris in the middle of the room. As he approached, the lantern drew contrast on the shapes. It looked like a cluster of high-backed chairs with headrests and—

There was a crackling noise ahead of him and a soft meow.

Gabriel followed the sound around the first seat and glanced down at it. There was Oscar, curled up not on the chair, but on a pair of spindly, desiccated legs. The cat looked up at him, the reflections from his eyes twin golden halos.

Jess drew a sharp inhalation.

Gabriel followed the legs to a collapsed abdomen. The hip bones poked through the mummified gray flesh. A five-point harness crossed a bare chest, thick with dust. The parchment skin peeled away from the buckle to reveal the thin manila bones of a ribcage.

For God spared not the angels that sinned…

He reached across the harness with a trembling hand and tipped the head up by the chin.

“Oh my God,” Jess whispered.

Gabriel couldn’t find any words for the face upon which he now stared.

…but cast them down to hell…

The orbital sockets were far too large, ovular rather than circular, and set too low on the face, to creating an abnormally long and broad forehead. The eyes themselves were absent and the skin had peeled away from the deep black pits. A triangular ridge of bone between them formed a nose far too small for the face. And beneath was a thin mouth. The lips had shriveled and retracted from the bared teeth, which were small like kernels of corn to fit the tiny mouth. There was only a bump of bone at the base of the weak chin.

…and delivered them into chains of darkness…

He wanted to jerk his hand back, but he couldn’t tear his gaze from the face.

The bible had led his sister and her friends to the location where the angels that had been cast out of heaven struck the earth.

…to be reserved unto judgment.

Where they were bound for all eternity, not in chains of darkness, but in their harnesses.

He understood now the secret that had been important enough to kill to protect.

No one can know, Jenny had said. None of us can ever leave here.

Their entire existence was built upon the perpetuation of a lie.

There can be no forgiveness. There can be no more hope.

These weren’t just the fallen angels of Christian lore, the defeated faction from the insurgence in heaven, that his sister and her friends had found high on the northern slope of the mountain after following the stones of fire into the very mouth of hell.

The face into which he now stared was not that of a mystical angel, but that of a being from another world entirely. A being whose existence had provided the foundation for the greatest lie ever told, a lie upon which countless lives depended.

“It doesn’t even look human,” Jess whispered. “What do you think it is?”

“An angel.”

“If this is an angel, then…”

Her voice faded to nothingness.

Gabriel turned away from the remains, looked into her eyes, and finished her thought for her.

“Then what the hell is God?”