A Forest of Corpses (23 page)

The ground sloped down, making it easier to move forward. I knew the sun was on my back, I knew it must be hot, but I didn't feel it. Instead I was wracked with shivers and I have never felt so cold. Then the next minute it was like I was in a sauna with sweat pouring off me, drawing more stinging and sucking insects to my face, tormenting me.

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They'd be all over my wound too, but mercifully I couldn't feel or see that.

Over my head birds sang and wind soughed through the interlaced branches. All so normal sounding. Somehow I figured things would be darker. After all I lived my life in the dark. It was fitting I die that way. Not in bright sunlight surrounded by some birds singing like they were in a fucking Disney cartoon. Jason would have named all of them and laughed and handed his binoculars to me so I could share his find. I'd look, for his sake, but we both knew I didn't care.

I focused my eyes on a slender twig that still had a few green needles attached to it. That was my goal. I would reach that. An hour later, give or take an hour, I made it. Closing my fist over it, I squeezed it between my bleeding fingers.

Breaking needles released a piney smell that reminded me of Christmas. Jason and I had missed last Christmas. We never talked about what we would do for this one. I wasn't much into seasonal cheer, but maybe that would have changed this year. Maybe we could have gone so far as to put a tree up and Jason would cook us a real Christmas dinner. I dropped the broken needles to settle my gaze on a new target that might have been a yard away and crawled toward it.

I was getting nowhere fast. The option was a lot less attractive.

I tried not to notice where the sun was or what darkness would bring.

* * * *

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Tree bark flaked from under my Merrells as I pushed myself onto the next branch. I figured I was high enough here. I stared down at the sleek black form sniffing around the half a granola bar I'd broken up and scattered around the base of a nearby tree. Her cub was nowhere in sight. Probably in the thick brush the sow had come out of ten minutes ago. I was sure she caught my scent, but since I wasn't posing a threat she didn't look for me too hard. The food interested her a lot more.

Over my head a blue jay screamed. Whether at me or the bear, I couldn't tell. We both ignored the irritable bird.

She chuffed and snorted, rooting through debris for more tidbits. When she found nothing, she widened her search.

Now and then she would stop and paw through the pine needle covered ground where I knew she would find grubs and other tasty creatures.

But they weren't very satisfying. It took more than a few invertebrates to satisfy a four-hundred pound bear. She swung her broad black head from side to side, testing the air for food or danger. Finding neither, she ambled back into the bush and within minutes the sound of her passing faded.

I waited another ten minutes before climbing down from my perch. Back on the ground I brushed off my jeans. A futile gesture since they were past dirty. I could smell my own sweat and taste a mouth that hadn't seen a toothbrush in days. My hair was matted, alternately clinging to my sweating 219

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head or stood up in disarranged clumps I couldn't get my fingers through. Stubble covered my face and itched. Hell, I itched everywhere. It felt like a thousand insects crawled over every inch of my skin and all the scratching in the world wasn't getting rid of them. Not a pleasant experience.

The bears were easy to follow. My biggest worry at this point was getting too close. If the sow sensed I was near, she might backtrack on me. I didn't dare risk that. At the same time I needed to stay in a position where I could lead the bear where I wanted her to be.

I was getting close to the area where Alex and I had stumbled over the grow-op and heard the engine.

Preternaturally alert, I picked up my pace. My nerves hummed. I wasn't sure who posed the greater danger to me, the bear or the man with a gun. I didn't dare run into either, yet I had to figure out a way to get the two together.

I knew I was coming up on the marijuana patch when the light grew stronger. The break in the trees allowed sunlight to bathe the plants in the light they needed to grow tall. The brief glimpse I'd had of them when we first found the clear-cut area, left me with the impression of plants that were around four feet tall. While I'd smoked my share of the stuff in my pre-Alex days, I had never seen it in its raw form in the ground, so I had no idea how big they got. A few news broadcasts I'd seen where cops hailed a massive pot farm bust always showed them standing around piles of the stuff, after it had been cut down, readied to be destroyed. But I thought they were tall, taller than what we had seen. If I was right, then what we had seen wasn't ready to harvest. But I'd 220

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bet it was close. Did that explain why the man with the gun had been there? Protecting his cash crop?

I smiled grimly. Let him protect it from momma bear. Like I told Alex, no handgun in the world was going to do more than piss off an angry bear.

I pressed on. Growing more attuned to the world around me. Birds chittered and trilled, and the electrical whine of cicadas climbed in volume as the day waxed. I listened for the warning call of a jay ahead of me, knowing it would signal something that alarmed them. Like a bear or a human.

Or me. I had to assume the shooter didn't know what screaming jays meant. The sound shouldn't alert them like it would me.

It didn't stop me from having to be careful. Because it would tell the bear something was near.

I moved silently through the heaviest part of the brush.

Fortunately, pine needles make great sound mufflers, so my passage was relatively quiet. If the drug dealer was a trained tracker, I was in shit, even deeper than the stuff I was in already.

For Alex's sake I had to operate on the assumption he wasn't.

Up ahead a jay screamed. I froze, straining to hear what had upset the jay. Nothing but cicadas singing. I kept walking, spotting the odd strands of black hair twined in twigs, claws marks in a rotting stump of a black cottonwood where she had ripped it open for the feast inside. I spotted a couple of squirming grubs she missed.

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A hundred feet past the log I found another steaming pile of scat so fresh the flies had barely found it. Using a twig I dug through the reeking mess and was glad to find it was firmer than the last one I'd found. There wasn't any sign the bear had found new meat. I knew I was getting close. I became hyper vigilant.

At first I could barely hear the sound, it blended in with the whining cicadas. Only when it didn't modulate like the singing insects and grew more guttural as it rose to a throaty rumble, I knew what it was. The same engine Alex and I heard earlier, before he was shot.

Then a whisper of voices over the growling engine. One talking in rapid Spanish, the other in broken Spanish, definitely an Anglo. I knew enough of the language to make out that they were talking about clearing out. But first they wanted to find the assholes they shot. They knew we were out there and someone called Dominguez wanted us found.

We were unfinished business.

So Alex hadn't been found yet. My heart soared. He was still alive. He had to be. I couldn't think otherwise, not if I wanted to stay sane.

And I had to find him before those two did.

I crouched low, hugging the gnarled side of a pine, the stink of resin filling my nose. My cheek stung as I pressed against the bark, trying to pinpoint the sound more precisely.

It was left, north. On the other side of the field of rustling stalks of marijuana.

Trying to figure out how close I was to where I left Alex, I scanned the visible trunks, looking for familiar markers.

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There, that crooked bough, with the fringe of needles. That was where Alex was hidden. Assuming he was still there.

My nightmare came back to me. The horror of crawling through Alex's blood, the torn earth, the worms. I shuddered and pushed the image away.

Crawling worm-like myself over the rough ground, I ignored needles and sticks digging into my bare hands, working up under my shirt and even into my hair. My muscles cramped up. I had to roll onto my back and dig fingers into my thighs to stop them from knotting up on me completely.

I shut my eyes against the savage pain. I had to bite my lip to keep from crying out. When I opened them again I blinked against the sudden burst of sunlight streaming directly down on me. I'd been in shadow so long it was a shock.

Then I saw the new shadow drift across my vision. I tracked its flight, not sure I wasn't hallucinating. A condor.

The one bird on the top of my wish list that I never imagined seeing, though I knew we were in its territory. But there it was, ten foot wingspan unmoving in the rising thermals, looking graceful and ethereal. It banked and circled, moving lower and with an icy certainty I knew what it had come for.

California condors were a magnificent, rare animal, with maybe a hundred and thirty still alive in the wild, but they were essentially giant vultures. They fed on carrion. And they could smell it miles away. What had brought it here? The bodies Alex had literally stumbled over? Or Alex?

I squeezed my eyes shut again, blocking out the sight of the spiraling bird. It was still there when I reopened them, 223

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close enough to see the white, covert flight feathers under its broad, unmoving wings and the wing tags, with the tracking number on them. Three-forty. If this had been part of the hike I had wanted to go on with Alex, I would be recording all this and I'd take it home with me to check it against the online Condor Spotter, which would tell me the name, release date and territory of the bird. I could have added my sighting to the growing database charting where the birds were.

But the wonderful hike with my lover had turned into a nightmare I couldn't seem to wake from. Instead of marveling at the sight of this raptor, I feared it. It meant this was a place of death. A charnel site. The bird kept drifting down. I wanted to shout at it to leave. Instead, I bit my lip to keep from making any sound that would give me away.

The sound of the truck engine grew nearer. More Spanish that could barely be heard over the guttural roar of diesel. I backed away from the clearing until I was shielded by clusters of intertwined branches. Movement in the still stalks of marijuana turned out to be a trio of machete wielding Latinos.

They were harvesting their crop. Spooked by Alex and me getting away from them? I was glad to see their attention was on getting the harvest out, instead of looking for us.

Then a fourth Latino man stepped into view, passing less than a yard from my hiding place. I swallowed past a sudden rush of fear. A deadly looking Uzi hung around over his chest from a strap over his shoulders. One hand rested comfortably on it, and I knew it would take him less than a half a second to put it to use. He'd cut me in half with the thing if he found me.

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I shrank back into my leafy cubbyhole, praying he'd pass me by. His alert eyes scanned everywhere, momentarily looking right at me. My heart was beating so hard I thought for sure he'd hear it. I broke out in a cold sweat that stung my eyes. I couldn't hear anything but the roar of my own blood pounding through me. I stopped breathing. His dark gaze kept moving, then he slowly moved away, circling back to where I suspected the truck was.

How long would it take them to clear this field of their product? They were working in a frenzy, and every so often one of the workers, all young men with faces drawn and ravaged by bad diet and neglect, would look over at the Uzi man. It wasn't my imagination when I saw fear there.

What were they? Illegals forced into servitude because of their status? Hard to complain to the authorities when you weren't supposed to exist. They were all gaunt from malnutrition. Sweat poured off their shaved heads, not even covered with bandannas, soaking their chambray shirts. They were surrounded in clouds of insects that I knew from personal experience were biting and sucking. The torment must have been excruciating, but not one of them even paused to brush away the mosquitoes and biting flies.

Uzi came back, this time in the company of an Anglo, a lanky, tattooed dirty blond-headed man with a mouth barely visible behind a sweeping beard and mustache. No sub-machine gun on this one. He had an old fashioned Beretta. At least that's what I thought it was, having handled a similar handgun when Alex took me shooting. Like his duty weapon.

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I wished I could get my hands on one of them now. It might not be much firepower when faced with what an Uzi could do, but it would make me feel a whole lot better. I stayed perfectly still until they passed out of sight again, then I eased backward, keeping the screen of brush between me and the open field. I felt around in the zippered pocket of my safari jacket. Both of them were full of my bars and granola. I wiggled one out and held it in my hand as I moved further and further away from the armed men.

I made my way back to the last bear sign I had passed less than half an hour ago. The scat was now crawling with flies and beetles. I studied the area around it, finally spotting where I thought the bear had gone next. Disturbed ground, bent and broken branches, some still with black hair clinging to them. I had to circle around ahead of them, so I could lay my trail of sweet treasures to lure her closer to the grow-op, and her meeting with the killers.

The jay, or another one, screamed northeast of me. Close.