Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds (16 page)
Read Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds Online
Authors: Michael McBride
Avery smiled and blood dripped from his lips.
Crashing sounds from above him. The ground shook. Twigs and pine needles clattered onto his back.
It was all he could do to keep one eye open and above the snow. He watched the bushes fall back into place, sealing off Zeke’s passage behind him.
“
rrrrrrRRRRRaaaaaAAAAHHHHHhhhhrrrrrrr!
”
He saw movement through the trees and nearly despaired at the thought of Zeke returning, but the shape resolved into that of a woman. She wore skin-tight ski pants and a Spyder jacket. Her long blond hair blew on the wind.
Weight on his back, driving him deeper into the snow. He no longer felt the pain.
The woman passed through the shrubs and stared into his eyes.
Massive hands closed around the sides of his head, covering his ears. Claws sank into his cheeks and temples. Wrenched his neck back.
Michelle smiled and beckoned him with her index finger.
A crunching sound he felt as much as heard. Pressure in the back of his skull. The snapping sound of bone breaking. Teeth. Inside of him.
Avery took her hand and welcomed eternity.
November 27
th
Wolf Creek Pass
Today
“For Christ’s sake,” Len says.
The animal hardly looks like a dog anymore. Its snout is flattened and its tongue juts out from between its clenched teeth. One whole side of its face is destroyed.
“Damn thing ran right out in front of me. You saw it. Like it wanted to get hit.”
“It’s a dog, Len,” Ashley says. “You killed a dog.”
“Shut up so I can think, okay?”
“That’s somebody pet. They’re probably driving around looking for it right now.”
“Are you kidding me? All the way up here? In this weather?”
“Then you tell me how it got out here in the middle of nowhere.”
Len opens his mouth. Lets it close again. How
had
it gotten out here on its own? They were at least ten miles from the nearest town, three thousand feet straight down at the bottom on the pass.
He nudges its head with his toe. It rolls to the side with the grinding sound of the broken bones in its neck and reveals its collar. He crouches and leans closer so he can better see the dog’s tags. His name was Zeke and he belonged to someone named D. Crowell, whose phone number and address were engraved at the bottom of the tag.
For a moment he debates writing down the number so he can call it when he has a signal again, but figures someone else will find it soon enough, and it won’t be any less dead when they do. He doesn’t need to embroil himself in a domestic nightmare, anyway. The moment he received a summons to appear in small claims court, his wife would know he wasn’t where he was supposed to be. Nothing good could come from reporting the incident.
Nothing.
“Get back in the car. I’ll be right there.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I can’t just leave it here, can I?”
Ashley meets his stare, then quickly looks away. Len recognizes the expression on her face and understands there won’t be a second rendezvous.
He looks up at the sky as she walks away. The car door slams behind him.
“What did I ever do to deserve this?”
Len groans and grabs the dog by its hind legs. Its fur is frozen and covered with snow, beneath which he can see that it’s not entirely white. There are brown and black patterns. Not to mention a whole lot of blood. He drags it to the side of the road and kicks some snow over it for Ashley’s benefit.
He turns back toward the car and brushes his hands off on his slacks before catching himself. He’ll have to send them to the dry cleaner’s from work, or, better yet, just toss them into the incinerator and be done with it. He didn’t care if his wife noticed they were missing and wondered what happened to them; he wasn’t wearing pants with dead dog on them again.
The headlights blind him and he looks away. Something catches his eye from the opposite side of the road, near the buried guardrail. It’s tattered and orange and has the remnants of a reflective stripe.
He glances back toward the car, shields his eyes from the glare, and sees the hint of motion as Ashley leans across the seat and honks the horn.
If that’s how she’s going to be, then fine. Let her wait.
He passes the point of impact, clearly demarcated by the blood spatters on the snow, and stands over the object. The last thing he wants to do is touch it, so he slides his toe underneath it and lifts it out of the accumulation. It’s a saddlebag of some kind. The dog must have been wearing it, like it was a person or something. He’s never had patience for people who dress up their animals.
There’s an official insignia on one of the pouches. Some county seal or other. Search & Rescue. Metal prongs protrude from the pocket. It takes some doing, but he opens the pouch with his foot and reveals what looks like an old television antenna. A cord connects it to the pocket on the other side.
Len tucks his hand into his sleeve, grips the cord as well as he can, and pulls on it. A handheld monitor slides out of the pouch. It reminds him of a GPS unit, only much older. Rather than a digital map, the screen features a series of concentric rings surrounding a crosshairs. A red beacon glows just off-center, near the bottom of the first ring.
The horn blares again.
“I’m coming, damn it!” he shouts, and starts back toward the SUV.
A crash of shattering glass.
“What the hell?”
He should have known better than to piss her off to such an extent. The kind of women willing to do whatever it took to climb the ladder were notoriously unpredictable, especially the young ones. They were used to getting exactly what they wanted and became more than a little volatile when exposed to the way the world
really
worked. Breaking his window, though? This was a new low.
Ashley screams.
He holds up his hand to block the headlights.
She was throwing a tantrum in there. Hurling herself from one side of the Range Rover to the other. Kicking at the driver’s side window. If she broke that one, too, it wouldn’t matter how good the heater was, he’d be frozen solid by the time—
A spatter of fluid strikes the windshield.
From the inside.
Len stops and stands perfectly still.
The wind screams over the pass and batters him with snowflakes.
“Ashley?”
He drops the monitor and resumes walking, barely conscious of the glowing red dot approaching the crosshairs, nearly right on top of it.
A crunching sound behind him.
Len turns and sees the crushed monitor sticking out from beneath the big foot that stomped it.
He looks up. Into its face.
It opens its mouth and roars past the black box jutting from its upper gums.
“
rrrrrrRRRRRaaaaaAAAAHHHHHhhhhrrrrrrr!
”
The blizzard comes to life with a flurry of teeth and claws.
Author’s Note
In the tradition of sharing fun facts about subject matter I find fascinating, may I present a few tidbits regarding the evidence for the existence of Bigfoot. While much of what you’ll read here is largely anecdotal, I hope you’ll approach it with an open mind. Ask yourself the obvious questions. Maybe there isn’t a mysterious offshoot of the hominin tree hiding in the deepest, darkest forests, but I don’t want to live in a world where the possibility doesn’t exist.
—Despite being geographically isolated from one another, nearly every Native American tribe throughout North America has a story of a hairy manlike creature incorporated into its oral tradition.
—In the 1960s, Dr. Grover Krantz, a research scientist at Washington State University, examined an extensive collection of casts and photographs of footprints from the Pacific Northwest. One set of casts demonstrated the distinct anatomical features of an injured foot that were “either made by a real upright-walking primate, or an artist with an expert understanding of primate foot anatomy.”
—In 1965, Bigfoot was officially placed on the endangered species list in Russia. France and Germany followed suit two years later.
—From 1971 to 1974, Al Berry and Ron Morehead recorded a collection of strange noises believed to be vocalizations in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. The “Sierra Sounds” feature what many believe to be a primitive spoken language accompanied by ancillary means of communication including whistling and rapping stones. Samples are available online at bfro.net. Feel free to judge for yourselves.
—In the late 1990s, fingerprint experts examined casts of footprints from various parts of the country and discovered distinct dermal ridges. Microscopic evaluation demonstrated healed scar tissue where the skin had been previously damaged.
—In 2013, the Sasquatch Genome Project extracted DNA from 111 specimens of purported Bigfoot hair, blood, and tissue samples. According to lead researcher Dr. Melba Ketchum, the samples had “unique morphology distinguishing them from typical human and animal samples.” She concluded that the DNA represents an unclassified hominin species that diverged from the human lineage 13,000 years ago.
About the Author
Michael McBride is the bestselling author of
Ancient Enemy
,
Bloodletting
,
Burial Ground
,
Condemned
,
Fearful Symmetry
,
Innocents Lost
,
Predatory Instinct
,
The Coyote
, and
Vector Borne
. His novel
Sunblind
has been nominated for the 2014 DarkFuse Readers Choice Award. His novella
Snowblind
won the RCA in 2012 and received honorable mention in
The Best Horror of the Year
. He lives in Avalanche Territory with his wife and kids.
About the Publisher
DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.
To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit the publisher's search page at Amazon:
http://amzn.to/1JMTGip
.
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