Chapter Nineteen #3
Johnny Washington felt like a new man as he slipped out the kitchen door, closing it carefully behind him.
Testing its latch. Fledgling sunlight hadn’t warmed up the day yet, so the air gripped his face like a frigid mask.
His rifle swung from his shoulder as he walked with a lighthearted jaunt.
In a few hours, they would be home in Southern California, where it might hit seventy degrees today.
Tasha always joked that his favorite part of vacation was going back home. Touché.
Johnny surveyed the RAV’s tires, which still had the chains on.
He had planned to take them off overnight, but he’d been too wiped out and hoped for the best. The tires looked fine.
The chains were still snug. He climbed in to make sure the engine would start—check.
The snow hadn’t completely covered the stone driveway markers, so he moved the RAV from the side of the house closer to the living room for easier access.
Johnny could practically taste the freeway to Redding.
After he shut off the car, he walked down the driveway to see how much snow had collected on the road.
And hot damn! It wasn’t bad at all. Three inches might have fallen overnight, but he could still plainly make out the two lanes between the ditches piled with snowdrifts on either side.
He probably could have made the drive last night, but why take the risk once the power was back on?
The Jeep was still there too.
No one had moved it, as he’d hoped they would. It sat parked there, abandoned, an enigma. None of your business now, Johnny thought. He could tell Hollman to hire a tow truck first thing Monday, when he was back in town. Just leave it alone.
But he couldn’t. This Jeep had incited anxious questions about squatters that had made his night more hellish than it needed to be.
Now that he had centered himself, the demon thoughts put to sleep, he wanted to find a clue about the owner who had left his car door unlocked, his keys in the ignition.
Like he planned to come right back, one demon thought persisted.
Now that Johnny had stopped framing the Jeep as a potential threat, he felt the first tendrils of worry for the driver. Maybe it had been an entire party—a family like his. And if so, where had they gone? And why hadn’t they come back?
Uneasiness returned for the first time since dawn.
The possibility yawned open that he had made a mistake to ignore the Jeep for so long.
Someone might be missing. A family or group of friends might have come to use the ski trail—Hollman said he used to do it when he was a kid, with or without Mazelle’s permission—parking outside of the gate so they wouldn’t be obviously trespassing. And something might have gone wrong.
Johnny returned to the driver’s-side door, this time opening it without hesitation.
He’d left the keys on the seat for the driver instead of in the ignition to prevent battery drain, and they hadn’t been moved.
This time, Johnny scanned the car for any sign of children and was relieved when he only found the half-empty coffee cup from Joltz, the shop in McCloud where he had first met with Hollman, and rumpled old copies of The Sacramento Bee.
He avoided the glove compartment because it felt too personal, as if someone would interrupt him while he was rifling through it.
Instead, he picked up the white notebook on the passenger seat and flipped it open.
A professional flyer in royal blue was laminated on the notebook’s first page with a photo of a thin, middle-aged white man holding a magnifying glass and a logo in elegant script: The Yearning Skeptic: A Podcast for Would-Be Believers.
The flyer identified the man as Rory A. De Santo, Investigative Reporter.
He didn’t recognize the name or the podcast, although the flyer bragged that it was in the top fifty podcasts worldwide, but who could keep up with them all?
Flipping through the notebook, Johnny found a mixture of handwritten scribbles and printer pages, clearly a reporter’s notes.
Some pages had printer-streaked photos of odd-shaped objects in the sky.
What the hell? Johnny flipped back to the first page after the flyer, where the owner had written BEAR CREEK LODGE in blocky letters, but with no other information except his address and rudimentary directions from Route 89.
Dated on Thursday. Jesus—had the Jeep been parked here since then?
The uneasy feeling solidified in Johnny’s middle, a cramp.
He climbed out of the Jeep, feeling exposed.
The woods around him were silent except for mild wind disturbing the treetops.
No rustling in the snow. Still, he held the rifle in a defensive stance as he closed the door, stepping away from the Jeep.
He tried not to infer too much from the idea that an investigative journalist had come to the lodge and vanished, but the notebook begged the question of why the hell a glorified UFO hunter had sought out his property.
Hollman had told him that a lot of tourists believed Mount Shasta was a hidden haven for aliens, but this was the first sign he’d seen of the local folklore.
It felt all kinds of wrong. Every instinct roared to Johnny that he should go rouse his family and pack up the RAV. Once again, this was none of his business.
Instead, he walked around to the passenger side of the Jeep, which was precariously close to a ditch. A snowdrift there had a gap and spilled underneath the Jeep’s front tire. Like something burst out of it, a demon thought whispered, defying the daylight. Johnny’s heart jogged.
His eyes caught an odd-looking branch barely in sight near the front tire, which looked like a claw.
Or was it a branch? The color was all wrong, a pale white, but a different shade from the snow.
Because he spent so much time staring at it, it took a while before he saw the frozen bright red pool smothered in shadows beneath the Jeep.
Johnny squatted, in part because his knees felt as weak as they had at the generator.
From that lower position, he found the right angle and shard of daylight to see the human hand.
Because it was severed from the context of an arm, he might not have recognized it as a hand if not for a thick class ring glistening on the ring finger.
Knuckles sprayed with thin dark hair. Blue-black fingernails swollen with blood.
Fingers petrified as if they were reaching for him.
Johnny let out a surprised puff of air, losing his balance to fall back on his ass.
He had heard the phrase I couldn’t believe my eyes all his life, but this unexpected appearance of a severed human body part gave him more cognitive dissonance than any experience with strange noises or animal tracks.
For a time, he could only stare. His realization that the ground beneath the Jeep was slicked with a layer of frozen blood—and he might find more body parts there if he looked closely enough—made Johnny lean on his rifle like a cane to bring himself back to his feet, breathing in gasps.
Jesus. Jesus Almighty.
His ears amplified every sound. His sneakers crushed snow as he stepped back. His lungs rattled oddly with his excited breaths. And a swishing sounded from somewhere—not close, exactly, but close enough, from the stands of pines bordering the road.
Johnny flung himself away, running as fast as he could on legs that felt like vapor.