Chapter 40
Whip-whip-whip.
For a moment Zach thought the sound was indicating some new brokenness in him, that his complete and abject fear had ruptured something.
But his father’s eyes searched the sky, too. Together, father and son caught a glimpse of the distant, shining red beetle of a rescue helicopter before its path dropped below the line of trees around the clearing.
Their eyes met in a bizarrely mutual instant of panic. What was next, what would come now? Bram broke the moment, frowning down at the mine’s opening before sliding a few more feet away from it.
Already Zach felt himself falling, understanding before his father seemed to that he would toss Zach into the mine, throw him into blackness to snap apart next to the miner’s bones and join his ghost. And yes, when Bram looked at him again, Zach saw only the hard, cruel, and resolved expression of an Underself that had chosen its weapon.
“They’ll know,” Zach said. “Mommy, and your other family, and Pike, and—and me? All gone? That many—they’ll know. They’ll figure it out.”
“No,” Bram said, calm now, the act already in his past, because once he decided a thing it was as good as done.
“They’ll blame Pike. He killed Ginny. He tried to kill me.
He knew you had evidence. He found you. Attacked you in that cabin.
I’ll toss his glove in with you. I kept it. Where’s the earring?”
“I—I don’t know.”
“Hm. Keep it to yourself, then. It doesn’t matter. They’ll find plenty of evidence on Ginny that points to Pike without it.”
“I saved your life. After the avalanche.”
“That was Dave.”
Bram said this with such conviction Zach knew he fully believed it, had edited his memory to make it true and absolve himself of any debt.
Maybe all gifted liars were gifted because they believed their own lies.
A flat smile, Bram elsewhere, already cleaning up any evidence left behind in the miner’s cabin, heading downhill toward rescue, alone.
“But you did do it, you killed Mommy, you—”
A dismissive shrug from Bram before he said, “Your mother was killing herself. I didn’t do anything but expedite the process.”
“Was she awake? When you did it?”
Bram looked almost puzzled by the question, the answer so obvious to him it wasn’t worth asking at all. “When it actually happened? Of course. Otherwise she wouldn’t have understood what she’d done wrong. Wouldn’t have understood it was her fault.”
A new kind of devastation cleaved Zach apart, the canyon of it filled to brimming with a cold river of shame, regret, horror, and fury.
“Her fault?”
Bram frowned. “She tried to destroy me.”
“How could you,” Zach choked out.
His father nodded as if the question wasn’t rhetorical, as if it was a thing he’d considered and was willing, even eager, to explain; one final, fatherly lesson.
“You believe a lie, kid. Your mother, the world, told you some things are bad, immoral, or whatever. But these things—I’ve only been rewarded for them.
Because the truth is, the rules don’t apply to everyone.
Anyone successful, if you dig deep enough, you’ll see they got that way by breaking rules.
And once you understand that, really understand that truth? These things get easier.”
“The fire,” Zach breathed out. “Abraham Junior.”
Bram swept a hand gently through the air as if sweeping away the ashes of his first wife, his first son.
“If you’re weak as she was, but tried to keep away everything your husband had earned, that he was owed, no logical person would expect him to sit there and just take it.
It’d be unnatural. I thought maybe this time…
but they’re all the same. And I tried to toughen you up.
Tried to teach you how things are. You never listened.
But maybe now you get it.” Bram gestured toward the mine.
“Some part of you must have heard me. Because you tried to break rules, too.”
“Monster,” Zach said.
“No.” His father’s eyes had gone spider dark, his gaze utterly focused on his son. “The only difference between us is that you failed.”
At this Bram lunged toward him and Zach’s shocked, instinctive recoil caused him to fall sideways into the snow.
So stupid. So uncoordinated. He clawed wildly to right himself, thinking only of Bonnie, her tiny form asleep beside him. Bonnie laughing, Bonnie sticking out her tongue annoyed at him, Bonnie serious over her homework.
At least the note Zach had written was in the hut, hidden, saying something was wrong with Bram’s business, that there was something to do with insurance. At least there was a chance someone would find it, report it, ask questions that might keep Bonnie safe.
Zach managed to sit up, sure his father’s hands were about to bash his skull, fold over his throat, wrench him from the snow to fling him under the earth.
But Bram stood still, eyes staring to Zach’s left, mouth agape. “What is that?” he breathed, barely hearable.
A creature loped across the clearing, clearly fleeing from the approaching sound of the helicopter. The thing stopped some ten feet away, arrested by the unexpected sight of the two humans.
About two feet tall, it was flat-bodied and wide.
Four feet long from nose to tail. An amalgamation of dog, bear, fox, yet none of those, the bits and pieces of recognizable things making it unlike anything at all.
It stood atop the powder without sinking, its back legs oddly bent as if it had not one but two ankle joints there.
Heavy, thick fur went brown, then gold, then black as it shifted slightly.
It was an animal. Not some blue-skinned alien or supernatural, ravening monster, yet equally unidentifiable.
Were it not for the intense black beads of the thing’s hooded eyes, its part-dog, part-bear face would have seemed friendly; the kind of creature a prehistoric human might have lured into a ring of firelight with meat, and bred to tame.
“What the—”
At the sound of Bram’s voice, the creature’s head swung away from Zach and it fixed on his father, who went to an open-mouthed silence as if the thing had devoured his ability to speak.
The creature drew back a lip to reveal a long canine tooth.
Zach, not daring to draw its attention, said nothing, and didn’t move. Though the thing was familiar, somehow, from a show, a book? He couldn’t grasp it.
But he knew that this was his monster. The animal appeared smaller than it had when Zach had seen it in the woods beneath the circling crows.
More compact than when it had frightened him out of his hiding spot and up the mountain the day before.
But it had the same shifting coloring. The same gliding, lightweight way of moving that made it seem to hover over the snow.
And while the sight of it made Zach go still, the thing was so distant from his monstrous imaginings, had so effectively interrupted his father’s attack, that he felt strangely calm even as Bram’s hulking mass still loomed close by with its promises of pain and an infinite fall through darkness.
Bram switched on his headlamp, as if that might scare the animal, or clarify it. But all the light did was cause the creature’s eyes to flash an otherworldly green in the morning’s half-light.
A braiding together in Zach’s mind. The vague whisper of a memory: the family watching a superhero movie years before.
His mother had thought it might be too violent, but this concern had only encouraged his father to say they should all watch it.
Seeing Zach averting his eyes from a scene, his mother had snuggled him close and whispered, “You know that character’s named after a real animal?
I’ve always wanted to see one. Supposedly they don’t live in Colorado, but I don’t believe it!
I know people who have seen them, way up high.
They look like a small bear. I hope I’m lucky enough to see one someday. ”
Ginny’s ribs. The elk’s leg. They were carrion feeders, weren’t they? Hunted small game but otherwise consumed the already dead with jaws that broke bone. Elusive. Long-pawed. Able to quickly vanish up trees.
A wolverine.
Bram’s eyes flicked to his frozen, silent son, then back to the animal. His lips narrowed into a decisive line.
The air went quiet in a way that made Zach’s ears ring. The rescue helicopter must have landed somewhere and cut its engine.
A wolverine explained the tracks in the snow where the crows had circled what Zach was now sure had been Ginny’s body, dumped by Pike in the woods before he’d been forced to move her due to Russ’s curiosity, his insistence they investigate later.
It explained the leg of the elk, yes, but those precise cuts, the elk’s bones stripped bare?
Dave’s words swam back, and Zach saw swarming flies neatly digesting meat before the freeze, elkskin splitting in the sun.
It was all so simple, really. One thing died, or was killed, and others ate it.
The result looked different from anything you could have predicted, because you didn’t have the right knowledge to understand what to expect.
Soon the wolverine would move on and his father would do the same as any other predator.
Kill Zach, consume him, feed himself in a way Zach had never expected but logically always should have.
Bram squared his feet, his shoulders. He leaned forward and stared dead into the wolverine’s small, flat eyes.
“Rah!” he yelled, Zach yelping in surprise at the volume of it, the threat in that single syllable. “Yah! Get out of here!” Bram’s chest puffed forward, whole body taut with aggression, as he swung a ski pole in the wolverine’s direction.
A low rumble as the creature peeled its lips back. Its snout wrinkled to retract the nose toward the green mirror of the eyes. It split its jaws to roar, a noise primordial, and yes, monstrous, a sound dripping with saliva, blood, one that came ripping out from somewhere deep.
The little round ears that had given Zach the sense the animal might have a friendly potential flattened to its head.
It doubled in size as its fur stiffened outward.
Its fangs extended, disproportionately long for its head.
The wolverine’s whole jaw, raw with blackish gums, bristling with those teeth, protruded from its skin in an otherworldly sneer.
And the never-ending sound that whipped from it, tore from its wet mouth, was a horror that promised gulped blood and cracking bone.
“Yah!” Bram yelled again, but the wolverine’s cry had siphoned the power from his voice, turned his skin sallow, rounded his shoulders.
The animal slowly lifted a front paw from the snow. Long, curved claws, thick and yellow in the dawn light, splayed from that foot. The imagined sound of these bird-of-prey talons click-clacked over a hard surface in Zach’s brain as it took one step, then another, toward Bram.
Zach watched his father retreat from the creature, saw the terror turn Bram’s handsome face to a contorted rictus of fear as he stared at those teeth and claws.
For what might be the first time in a very long time, Bram had unknowingly picked a fight with something stronger; something ready for him.
Bram stilled. His head tipped to the side, as if listening to a frequency Zach couldn’t hear, and his eyes locked on Zach’s, betraying a plaintive confusion.
A rushing sound—that’s what his father must have already heard. Around Bram the snow, the ground, was falling, disintegrating, disappearing.
“No.” His father shook his head, as though he could make the cave-in untrue. “No.”
Zach saw his father’s disbelief. None of this could happen. He wasn’t like other people. He was precious, special, chosen. The destroyer, never the destroyed.
The beam of his father’s headlamp flung up to the white dawn sky.
Bram was there, then not there, devoured by the jaw snap of the man-made nothingness below.
Only his scream stayed, backgrounded by the soft rip of falling snow and earth.
The hole opened wider and wider again until it stopped two feet from where Zach lay.
Zach looked toward the wolverine, the only other witness, then back to the mine.
Together they heard the scream fall, heard it fade down the mine shaft.
Listened to it cut off, and heard the utter silence in its wake.
They watched as little piles of snow, little rocks and chunks of dirt, released along the chasm’s edges.
Watched them delicately tumble into the void, until the ground seemed to, at last, fully settle.
The creature retracted its teeth. Shrunk down in size. It moved a few steps away from the cave-in before it paused to stare at Zach. Now that it wasn’t being threatened, the wolverine appeared tentative, even frightened. Zach broke eye contact with the animal. Lifted his arms slowly above his head.
Out of the corner of his eye, he could only see the wolverine as an indistinct blot against the snow. They both waited, the sun rising to spread light through the trees.
“I am a person,” Zach said low, voice quavering. “I am not prey. My name is Zach.”
He remembered his mother saying those same words. Remembered her worried but proud expression the year before as she’d let Zach and Bonnie move forward across the open space in the trail alone, without her.
When he spoke again his voice rumbled from him even and soothing. “I am a person. My name is Zach. You don’t need to be afraid. He’s gone now. It’ll all be okay.”
The creature stood for one, two, three more seconds. And then it padded quietly into the forest.