Chapter 24
At some point had the elk looked like this? Before the creature that stalked the mountains eviscerating living things had scraped its bones tidy?
Maybe the avalanche had interrupted the predator. Maybe it was watching them, red-toothed and furious that Ginny had been snatched away by the rush of snow.
Or maybe it had been buried, too.
The things that might be under the snow beneath him manifested ghoulishly in Zach’s imagination. Knotty blue intestine and ragged cartilage, stiff with ice. Clean, cauterized cuts like the elk. Bulging, fly-covered, side-of-the-highway carrion things.
Zach scanned the destroyed mountain around him. Nothing moved but the flakes still falling from the sky. The snow fell on Ginny, too, drifting down on the exposed cavity of her middle as if trying to hide it again, reclaim her.
The gruesomeness of the body, the carnage of the blood and missing skin and the pain it all spoke to made Zach cover his mouth with his hands.
His fault. His fault.
He shouldn’t have hid like a baby in the outhouse.
He’d heard the faraway yowl of the creature as he trembled in the cold and the thing passing by had paused at that sound, too.
Because it had been Ginny, and Ginny had been pursued by the monster.
Instead of calling out, helping her, rescuing her from the cold, from the awful thing that had destroyed the elk, he’d stayed silent.
Too scared of the monster. Scared of his father.
Of getting in trouble. In trouble! That was nothing, compared to this.
And because he’d been a coward, the monster had caught her. Killed her. Torn her apart.
A pained moan squeezed from Zach’s lungs.
Pike—drawn close again by the way Bram and Dave had turned from Ginny, by the stretch of their horrified expressions, drawn by the way Dave retched now, into the snow—peered down at the body.
He spoke in a whisper. “Who did that?”
Dave only spat into the snow. Bram dropped his shovel. He shook out the hand that had held it as if whatever had destroyed Ginny might have crept up its handle to penetrate his glove with a contagion that would unseam his stomach, crack his ribs.
The men had gone almost unrecognizable, eyes overbig, mouths agape, their expressions twisted as if their skin had been pulled taut and puckered by strange things sprouting or cratering underneath it.
Did Zach look like that, too?
He stroked his own face. Everything moved so very slowly around him, each snowflake separate from the others, and the trees, the rocks, Ginny’s body, seemed cast into a bizarre high definition.
Maybe they were all losing their minds. Maybe this was what it felt like. Looked like. Madness seemed a reasonable response to the madness of the bones clawing up at them, here, in this impossible place, from this impossible body.
“How did this happen?” Pike asked, and he was in slow motion, too, voice muddy, vowels long.
The monster, Zach thought, and with instant regret he realized he’d whispered it aloud. He clapped a hand to his mouth as if he could snatch the word “monster” from the air, stuff it back into his lungs.
“The monster, a monster?” Something uncoupled behind Pike’s eyes.
He lunged at Zach, swung a fist. Zach felt the ghost of the punch as a breeze on his cheek.
Pike had swung from an awkward, sideways angle, too far away to connect, then tripped forward, barely managing to stay standing, his immense fist still tight on a loose arm by his side.
It was as if Pike’s mind couldn’t gauge distances quite right. As if his muscles weren’t taking cues.
Bram roared and came at Pike chest first, like some enormous, strutting bird. Zach sealed his mouth even tighter with his mitten, trying not to let loose the frantic laugh that bubbled so inappropriately in his throat.
Pike reeled backward, and fell.
“A monster, he said, like this is all some joke! You think this is funny you stupid little—”
“My son!” Bram said. “Mine. You get that? You don’t touch him.”
Zach roused himself, scrambled behind the wall that was his father.
“He’s just a kid.” Dave stepped between Bram and Pike, held his palms out, nervous but trying to soothe.
“He isn’t laughing, Pike. You can see he’s scared.
And it’s my fault—the story I told about the bull and all.
Zach saw that elk and now this? Of course he’s scared!
We’re all scared, okay? And he saved your life! He dug you out. Don’t forget that.”
“You have no right,” Bram spat down at Pike. “No right.”
Pike’s face creased into a tearless expression of hurt. He drew his knees to his chest, laced his fingers behind his head and put his head between his knees, muttering incomprehensibly and rocking back and forth.
Bram whipped around to face Zach, who beamed up at him.
His father had intervened on Zach’s behalf; had protected him. No matter how he cast his mind back Zach could remember no precedent for it.
Bram seized his son’s chin and wrenched Zach’s eyes to his. “Not another word out of you.” Zach held his expression hard and smooth so as not to betray his feelings, focused instead on the stale heat of Bram’s breath. “No more of that nonsense.”
The roughness of his father’s touch, the cold cruelty of those Underself eyes, killed the grateful worship that had surged through Zach. By the time Bram released him Zach was soaked in cold fear and frantic hate, his eyes flying to the others to see if they’d witnessed his humiliation.
Pike still rocked on the ground. Dave stared uphill, pulled out his radio and said, “Russ, you okay?”
A staticky “Yup.”
“This is going to sound weird, but I think there’s maybe an animal out here? Something big. A mountain lion or a bear or—”
“Bears hibernate, Dad. It’s winter.”
Dave closed his eyes at Russ’s know-it-all tone as if to remind himself to be patient. “Just, listen, okay, Russ? Keep an eye out for any animals, all right? Keep your radio close. Make a lot of noise if you see movement.”
Silence.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” Even through the radio, Russ sounded as though he was rolling his eyes.
“We need to get Russ back to the hut. This”—Dave gestured in Ginny’s direction—“we don’t need to be doing this. She doesn’t even have a pack on. If she had a way to call for help she would’ve used it when she got lost. We’re just wasting energy. And time.”
Bram frowned. “I’m gonna—I’ll check her pockets. Just in case.”
He kneeled beside Ginny and gingerly patted the area below the carnage of her ribs, searching. “Let me just—let me see—”
Dave turned his back on Bram. Hands shaking, he struggled to break down his shovel, and swore quietly to himself.
Bram fumbled, averting his eyes from the places he patted down. When he sat back he held a pink-cased phone. “This is it. This is all she had on her.”
Dave glanced back. “So let’s go.”
Bram hesitated, then slid Ginny’s phone into his own pocket. “Yeah.”
“Pike? Time to get a move on.”
As they strapped shovels to packs, stepped into skis, Pike joined them, quiet now and unprotesting, but his eyes darting furiously around the group as he put his gear back on and readied to leave.
Zach, giving Pike a wide berth, went to retrieve his own shovel from where he’d dropped it beside the body. He checked over a shoulder to be sure no one was watching before pausing to stand solemnly over Ginny, one hand holding the other tight.
The men’s digging had freed the platinum sheath of Ginny’s hair so that it no longer partially hid her face the way it had when Zach first uncovered her.
He focused on that face, trying to remember it as it was, mentally erase the icy crust, the way the whites of the frozen eyes had gone red.
Maybe Ginny, the real Ginny, not this left-behind shell, was still nearby, and if he formed his thoughts very carefully and deliberately she might hear them.
Might take his words with her wherever she was headed next.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I’m so sorry.
But his repetition skidded. Stopped.
There was a diamond earring in Ginny’s right ear.
Zach started to reach for the jewel, mind briefly short-circuiting into the assumption that somehow he’d brought along and then dropped the diamond he’d found between the hut’s floorboards. Before his fingers grazed it he recoiled, clutching his hand against his chest as if he’d been burned.
Because Ginny’s other earlobe was ripped and bloodied, its earring missing. Because above it, a brown patch the size of a dime showed that a piece of her scalp and hair had been torn away.
Because whoever, whatever, had ripped that earring, that hair and skin, away from her, had been inside the hut, and had left the matching earring behind.