Vigil had always been the most grounded of them. He had grown from a stocky kid into a portly man, but he wore his weight well, like he had always been meant to wear it and was just fulfilling his biological destiny. He lived a normal life with a normal wife and two stocky little boys who would undoubtedly grow up to do the same. He was a genuine kind of guy who said what he meant and did what he said and could always be counted on to lend a hand when a hand needed to be lent. He was the regional director of a national network of pharmaceutical suppliers, sat on just about every charitable board, and coached baseball in the summer and soccer in the fall.
Coburn had been the driven one. He had wanted to be a doctor, so he had busted his hump to make it happen. He had studied while the rest of his buddies were sleeping or out on dates or at the bars. Since things had never come particularly easy to him and he had never been especially intuitive, he had been forced to accede to the notion that he was just going to have to outhustle and outwork everyone else around him, which he had done through college, medical school, and his residency. And now that he was on-staff at the largest and busiest trauma center in the entire Rocky Mountain Region, he carried that same attitude into his daily work. He often wondered how the others had seen him back then, wondered if he’d ever really been a kid at all. He found it next to impossible to give up the responsibility and the dedication and the motivation, even for a single annual hunt with his old buddies. Pathetic as it was to admit, the “No Pagers and No Cell Phones Rule” had been his. Not because he didn’t want the outside world to be able to find him, but rather because the better part of him did.
“I’m telling you,” Shore shouted, “that peak over there is Mt. Isolation!”
“You can’t see a peak through this storm, let alone well enough to tell which one it is!”
“Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean that I can’t! I can see it plain-”
“We were heading southeast when Vigil fell-”
“We were heading due east.”
“Southeast. We were about two miles northwest of camp-”
“We were closer to a mile and a half west of camp.”
“So when we diverted east to help Vigil-”
“Northeast.”
“We needed to head to the southwest to get back to camp.”
“No! We needed to head west.”
“But instead we followed the bottom of the valley due south.”
“You’re out of your mind! We were headed north!”
“If we were on either the southwest or the south face of the mountain-as you claim-before Vigil fell, then there’s no possible way we could have headed north! We would have been walking straight back into the same damn mountain!”
“We were following the same valley we crossed maybe an hour before-”
“There’s no way we doubled back!”
“Guys!” Coburn interrupted. They both turned to face him, obviously surprised by the sound of his voice. They’d been so caught up in their argument that they hadn’t heard him approach. “We need to take a step back and look at this objectively.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing!” Shore shouted. “If it weren’t for Todd contradicting every damn word I say-”
“If anything you said made a lick of sense, I wouldn’t have to!”
“Guys! We’re wasting time we don’t have arguing. We need to figure out exactly where we are so that one of us can head back to camp and call for help. The last thing we want is to set off walking in the wrong direction and end up totally lost.”
“I’ve got news for you, Will. We’re already totally lost,” Baumann said.
Shore couldn’t help but chuckle.
“We can figure this out,” Coburn said. “All we have to do is trace our steps back to where we were when-”
“Shh!” Shore tilted his head away from the wind and closed his eyes. “Did you guys hear that?”
“Hear what?” Coburn said.
“I’m not sure. It sounded almost like…almost like someone screaming.”
“It’s just the wind,” Baumann said. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re smack-dab in the middle of a blizzard.”
“No. No…It wasn’t the wind. I don’t think so anyway.”
“Did you hear anything, Will?”
“No…but that doesn’t mean-”
“I’m certain I heard something.” Shore headed toward the ramshackle house. “And it came from this direction.”
Coburn caught up with Shore at the entryway to the wooden structure. He hadn’t been out there for more than five minutes, and already his eyes were watering and the skin on his face stung from the cold. His toes felt like icicles and his flesh prickled with goose bumps. The flickering glow through the gaps around the door and the boarded windows had to be the most inviting sight he had ever seen. He was already anticipating the warmth when he shouldered open the door and followed Shore inside.
The smell struck him immediately.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
“Oh, God,” he whispered and broke into a sprint toward where he had left Vigil.
* * *
Blood was a like a fine wine: the bouquet grew more powerful and pungent with age. Coburn was intimately acquainted with the smell, throughout the duration of its cycle. The residua in a cadaver’s liver smelled vastly different than either arterial or venous blood. Fresh blood was more metallic than biological. He remembered his first surgery, his first incision into the skin of a living, breathing human being, and how the smell reminded him more of opening up a machine than a man. It was a taste as much as a scent, really. An almost electrical tingle at the back of the palate. It was a smell he experienced nearly every single working day, a smell that he found disorienting and out-of-context in this cabin. A smell that he understood on a primal level meant very bad things had transpired.
Even though he knew what to expect when he burst into the small room, he was unprepared for what he saw.
There was blood everywhere. Arcs and spatters on the bare wood walls. Dripping in syrupy ribbons from the ceiling. Pooled on the exposed dirt floor. All of it glimmering with reflected firelight. The flames whipped back and forth, chasing the smoke on the violent wind blowing through the open window.
He tried to call out for Vigil, but no sound came out. It took every last ounce of effort to force his legs to guide him forward into the room. The blood was cooling and congealing as he watched. The glimmer faded and the streaks and smears darkened. Snowflakes turned to rain in the fire’s heat and spattered his face and jacket. At least he hoped that was water striking his face. He kept expecting to find Vigil sitting on the other side of the fire, behind the flames and the smoke where he couldn’t be seen from the doorway, but Coburn knew better. He had seen the blood glistening on the windowsill the moment he noticed the snow swirling in from the darkness outside. When he reached the window, he shielded his eyes and leaned out into the night.
The weathered sheet of plywood was half-buried in the snow to his right, at the extent of the light’s reach. The accumulation directly below him was a crimson mosaic of suffering. He recognized arterial spurts originating from a human-shaped impression, and the packed channel where Vigil had obviously been dragged off into the night and the dark forest.
The bloodstained snow was stamped with a riot of large, deep footprints.
Coburn turned and looked back at Baumann and Shore, who had barely managed to cross the threshold from the main room. He saw the unvoiced question on their faces.