Scavenger

  “Enough,” Viv mumbled, staring toward the exit from the valley. “I can’t bear this any longer.”

  “Remember what happened to Bethany,” the voice said through Amanda’s headset.

  How could she not? The roaring explosion, the spreading red mist, and the flying body parts were seared in Amanda’s memory.

  “Nobody leaves the game,” the voice warned.

  Amanda put an arm around Viv. “You need to stop.”

  “No more.” Viv reached the edge of town and trudged across slush-covered grass.

  “Step away from her, Amanda,” the voice cautioned.

  “Viv, turn around. We’re going back.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Final chance,” the voice said.

  “Viv, listen to him. Go back.”

  Hands grabbed Viv, pulling her toward town. They belonged to Ray, who gripped her tightly, forcing her up the street.

  “Get away from me!”

  “Make me.” Ray tugged her farther up the street. “Try to hit me. Go ahead. It won’t matter. You can’t hurt me.”

  Viv twisted an arm free and swung, punching his shoulder.

  “Is that the best you can do?” Ray mocked.

  She swung at his jaw.

  He dodged it, moving backward.

  She pounded his chest. He shifted deeper into town. She punched him again, striking his mouth, his nose. Blood flew. With each blow, he stepped backward. They reached the middle of town and neared the shelter where Amanda and Viv had survived the night. The next time Viv swung, Ray grabbed her arm. When she swung with the other arm, he grabbed that, also. She writhed, trying to get away. Slowly, she lost strength and sank to her knees. Her chest heaved. Her sobs seemed to come from the depth of her soul.

  “I’m sorry,” Ray said.

  Amanda pulled Viv to her feet. “Come on. You need to lie down.” She helped Viv to the shelter and eased her into it. The snow she’d stuffed into a bottle was now melted. “Here. Drink some water.”

  When Viv didn’t respond, Amanda tilted the bottle to her mouth. Water dribbled down Viv’s chin, but Amanda was relieved to see that Viv swallowed most of it.

  Need to fill the bottles before the snow’s completely gone, Amanda thought. She put a bottle in each hand and held it under boards from which water trickled. Ray was suddenly next to her, doing the same thing.

  She was troubled by his changed behavior. Did he feel guilty? Was he trying to make amends for killing Derrick? But somehow, guilt didn’t seem part of Ray’s nature. The only explanation that made sense to her was that Ray’s alpha-male personality compelled him to challenge any man he encountered, but when his only companions were women, he needed to try to make them like him. If I’m right, I can use that, she thought.

  With Ray’s help, she filled seven bottles and retrieved the rubber gloves.

  “I need to talk to you,” she said. As Viv lay staring at the roof of the shelter, they avoided Derrick’s body and walked toward the fire. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but…” She had trouble saying it. “We need to bury him. If those dogs come back…”

  “I found just the place for it.” Ray wiped blood from his mouth and indicated the area outside town where he’d gone the day before.

  “What’s over there?”

  “Use your GPS receiver and find out. Maybe that’s not the right spot. Check to see if I made a mistake.”

  “You know more about these units than I do.”

  “Check anyhow.”

  She pulled her receiver from her jumpsuit. She turned it on and accessed the coordinates that had been written on the cans of fruit. A red arrow pointed toward the area beyond town.

  “It appears to indicate the same place yours does,” Amanda said.

  She and Ray walked to a connecting street and headed past more wreckage. As they neared the area, Amanda saw objects the wreckage had concealed.

  “They look like…”

  “Grave markers,” Ray said.

  Fifty yards from town, a collapsed wooden fence marked the boundaries of a cemetery. Scrub grass and sagebrush grew among wooden crosses, gray and cracked, some broken.

  The names and dates on the crosses were carved into the decaying wood. Amanda went from grave to grave, managing to decipher the words. “More women and children than men.”

  “Because a lot of women died in childbirth back then,” Ray said. “And a lot of kids died from diseases we now treat easily.”

  Amanda heard a clatter and spun. Back in town, Viv was dragging boards from the wreckage and stacking them over Derrick’s body.

  “She’s tough,” Ray said.

  “That’s why the bastard chose us,” Amanda said. “Yesterday, when you found this place, something bothered you. What is it?”

  “That line of crosses.”

  Amanda read what was carved in the wood. “Peter Bethune. Died June 20, 1899.” She moved along the crosses. “Margaret Logan. June 21, 1899. Edward Baker. June 30, 1899. All in June.”

  “Jennifer Morse. July 4, 1899,” Ray said. “Arnold Ryan. July 12, 1899. There are seventeen in a row. Each of them died between June and October of 1899.”

  “Seventeen? Dear God,” Amanda said.

  “After that, the ground would have frozen. Maybe there were even more deaths that year, but the earth was so hard that the people in town couldn’t dig graves.”

  “A place this size. That many deaths so close together. The community must have been in shock.”

  “They were indeed,” the voice said through Amanda’s headset.

  She tensed.

  “Ray guessed correctly,” the Game Master continued. “There were even more deaths before the end of the year. Eight. In those days, when people died after the earth was frozen, they were put in coffins and stored in someone’s barn. In the spring of 1900, when a search party arrived from a town called Cottonwood about a hundred miles away, they found the coffins and the bodies inside them. But that was the only sign of anyone. Over the winter, perhaps on New Year’s Eve, the people of Avalon disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?” Ray asked.

  “Several later search parties were organized, but they didn’t learn anything, either. The townspeople vanished from the face of the earth. Nor did the search parties find the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires. Some religious extremists theorized that on the eve of the new century, the people of Avalon were assumed into heaven.”

  “But that’s crazy,” Amanda said.

  “Not in context. Focus on the cluster of deaths that began in June. Peter Bethune was killed when lightning struck him as he ran from his wagon to his store. The townspeople were stunned. But after the long drought, the rain was so welcome that their emotions were divided. They treated it almost as a price that needed to be paid. That’s how Reverend Owen Pentecost spoke of it. But then Margaret Logan, age twelve, drowned in a flash flood. She was playing near a swollen creek. The ground collapsed. She was swept away. Then Edward Baker and his wife and two sons died when their home caught fire. A farmer was trampled by his horse. Another child drowned, this time in the lake. A woman was bitten by a rattlesnake. A family mistakenly ate poisonous mushrooms. The litany of disasters seemed endless. The shadow of death hovered over the valley.”

  Amanda scanned the line of graves, awed by the suffering they represented.

  “Reverend Pentecost told the townspeople that God blessed those who served Him, and God punished those who did not. Something in the hearts and souls of the town was turning God against them. They needed to look inward and examine their consciences. They needed to eradicate the stain of whatever secret sins had earned them God’s disfavor. With each mounting death, the town prayed harder and longer.”

  “The pressure would have been almost unbearable,” Amanda said.

  Ray peered toward the sky, the direction in which they instinctively addressed the Game Master. “And they just assumed God was responsible? Didn’t it occur to them there might be another explana
tion?”

  “Like what?” the Game Master asked. “Unrelenting bad luck isn’t any better an explanation than God’s disfavor.”

  “Like maybe this Reverend Pentecost was somehow involved. The town changed when he arrived.”

  “You’re suggesting Reverend Pentecost killed some of those people?”

  “How hard would it be to push someone from a hayloft or substitute poisoned mushrooms for safe ones? All Pentecost needed to do was look for an opportunity.”

  “Based on yesterday’s events, we know how easily you could have done it,” the voice said.

  “Derrick attacked me! I was defending myself!”

  “Certainly. Why don’t we save this conversation for another time? Right now, pay attention to the clues. Reverend Pentecost finally warned the townspeople to rid themselves of all vanity and avarice, to take every object they cherished and place it within something he called the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires. He told them that the Sepulcher would be an example to the future.”

  “Example?” Amanda asked.

  “Pentecost fixated on the looming new century and concluded that the continuing deaths were a sign of a coming apocalypse. ‘All is vanity,’ he told them. ‘As the new century begins, material things will no longer matter.’ But those outside the valley might not see the truth. When the Sepulcher was eventually found and opened…perhaps in a hundred years when another apocalypse occurred…it would show the path of salvation to those left behind.”

  “A time capsule,” Amanda realized. “A damned time capsule. That’s why you drugged Frank and me during the time-capsule lecture.” The memory came as a shock. Thinking of Frank, she struggled not to let grief weaken her. I’m going to survive, she thought. I’m going to find a way to get out of here and pay him back for whatever he did to Frank.

  In a frenzy, she yanked a board from the fallen fence and plunged it into the mud. “The logical place to put a sepulcher is a graveyard. We’re probably standing on it. The townspeople buried it here.”

  “Be careful of your time,” the voice said.

  Using the board as a shovel, Amanda hurled wet earth. “Help me!” she told Ray. Again, she drove the board into the mud, but this time, the board broke. “Damn it, help me!”

  “Fifteen hours remain,” the voice said.

  As Ray picked up a board from the collapsed fence, a grave marker at the end of the row caught his attention.

  “Why aren’t you helping?” Amanda shouted.

  “This cross. The numbers on it are different.”

  Amanda took a moment to react to his puzzled tone. She dropped the broken board and joined him at the cross.

  “The month isn’t spelled.” Ray pointed. “Instead, there are only numbers.”

  “But those numbers aren’t for a month, day, and year,” Amanda said.

  “No. Two sets of them. LT in front of one. LG in front of the other. They’re map coordinates.” Ray programmed them into his GPS unit.

  “They’ll take us to the lake,” an unexpected voice said through Amanda’s headset. It belonged to Viv and made Amanda swing in her direction. Viv had finished stacking the boards over Derrick’s corpse and now stared across the ruins toward them. “Whatever this Sepulcher is, they couldn’t have buried it, for the same reason they couldn’t bury coffins. The ground was frozen. What other place is there? The Sepulcher’s in the water.”

  “But the lake would have been frozen also,” Ray said.

  “That’s the point,” Amanda suddenly understood. “The townspeople could have walked onto the lake, stopped in the middle, and cut a hole through the ice. Then maybe they dropped the Sepulcher, whatever it looks like, through the hole.”

  “It must have been huge if it contained everything they cherished. A hell of a big hole,” Ray said.

  “Maybe the Sepulcher was big enough that more than it went through the hole.” Viv marched past wreckage toward them. “Maybe the ice cracked. Maybe the entire town went into the water.”

  “But in the spring, the search party would have looked for them in the water, in case somehow they’d all drowned,” Ray objected.

  “How would the search party have checked the water?” Viv came nearer. “The middle looks deep. It’s not like the searchers had scuba divers or grappling hooks.”

  “In the spring, the bodies would have bobbed to the surface,” Ray insisted. Immediately, he paused. “Unless…”

  “Unless what?” Amanda asked.

  “Maybe it wasn’t an accident.” He looked disturbed. “Could it have been a mass suicide? If the bodies were weighted, they wouldn’t have risen to the surface after the ice melted. They’d never have been found unless the lake was drained.”

  It seemed as if a breeze died. The valley became silent.

  “The lake.” Ray frowned at the needle on his GPS unit, then stared toward where it pointed. “That’s where the coordinates seem to be.”

  “Yes, the lake.” Amanda felt excitement growing in her. “That’s why the snakes are in it. To keep us from searching there.” She looked at Ray. “You said ‘unless the lake was drained.’ I don’t see how it’s possible to do that.”

  “It’s possible when you realize it’s not really a lake,” Viv said, reaching them.

  “What are you talking about?” Ray demanded.

  “When this is over, I’ll make you pay for what you did to my husband. I swear to you, I’ll get even.”

  Ray met her gaze. “You can try.”

  “But I’m not going to die here because I let you distract me. Right now, all that matters is winning.”

  “Sure. Later,” Ray said. “We need to get out of here alive. Then you can try to get even.”

  Amanda felt the latent violence between them. She interrupted. “Viv, what do you mean it’s not a lake?”

  “Did you notice its shape?”

  “It’s got water. That’s what I noticed,” Ray told her. “It’s rectangular.”

  “No. It’s shaped like a wedge. The tip points toward the western mountains, where the stream comes from. The blunt end has rocks that slope below it. The shape’s symmetrical. Too symmetrical. It’s not a lake. It’s a reservoir.”

  Ray needed only a moment to think about it. “Jesus.” He started running.

  5

  The sun baked the mud. As Balenger guided the Jeep along the narrow dirt road, he heard the crust braking. On either side were sagebrush and scrub grass. Ahead, foothills rose toward snow-capped mountains. The road showed no sign of recent use. He didn’t see any buildings. He permitted himself to hope.

  The road descended into a stream. The high chassis on the Jeep allowed him to drive through it, the four-wheel-drive gripping the slippery surface on the other side. Bumps jostled him, preventing him from going faster than twenty miles an hour. Time, he kept thinking. Near the foothills, he reached cattle drinking from a water trough next to a windmill.

  The road did not continue. He drove past the windmill and steered between bushes, aiming toward whatever open area presented itself. Rocks and holes forced him to zigzag. The ground began to rise. He avoided more rocks and sagebrush. The incline became steeper. When he crested a ridge, he faced a steep drop on the other side, so he followed the ridge, passing aspen trees. Then he reached another slope, too rocky and steep for him to drive farther. He backed the Jeep to the aspens and stopped where they screened the car.

  He changed clothes, putting on the tan boots and hunting outfit, which blended with the terrain. Feeling the strength of the sun, he covered his face with sunscreen, put on the sunglasses and the hat, and drank from one of the water bottles he’d purchased at the truck stop. After clipping the Emerson knife inside a pocket, he loaded the magazines and shoved one into the Mini-14. He buttoned the compass and the packet of Kleenex into his shirt pocket, hooked the canteen to his belt, and stuffed the knapsack with the remaining equipment. He had a memory of packing his gear to go to Iraq, an apt comparison, he thought, because he was about to enter a war zo
ne.

  When he put on the knapsack, he estimated that it weighed around forty pounds. I’ve carried worse, he thought. He pulled the bolt back on the Mini-14, arming it, engaged the safety catch, and slung the rifle over his shoulder. What else do I need to do? he thought. There’s always something.

  The BlackBerry, he realized. He took it from a pocket and set it to vibrate mode so a noise from it wouldn’t give away his position. Then he started up the slope. He was relieved that he didn’t feel any of the jitters, sweaty palms, and nervous breathing of the post-traumatic stress disorder he’d suffered for so long. After Amanda disappeared, he’d expected that his weakness would come back to torture him. Instead, his determination to save her so filled him that there wasn’t room for conflicting emotions.

  He climbed past more aspen trees, but despite their shade, sweat slicked his forehead and stuck his shirt to his skin. Finally, he crested a ridge and came to a shelf of rock that protruded from the aspens. After taking off his knapsack and rifle, he sank onto the shelf, did his best to conceal himself, and studied the valley below. Morning sunlight reflected off a lake, making its ripples glisten. The lake was wider at one end, reminding him of a long triangle.

  He removed his binoculars from his knapsack. Using his hat as a shield to prevent the sun from reflecting off the lenses, he focused on the water. An embankment of rocks resembled a dam. At once, he understood it was a reservoir, not a lake. Movement caught his attention. Redirecting the binoculars, he saw tiny figures on the embankment and wondered excitedly if Amanda was one of them. They were doing something to the embankment. Throwing rocks away, he realized. That didn’t make sense. What were they trying to do, breach the dam? Why?

  He put on his hat and shoved the binoculars into the knapsack. After he crawled back into the aspens, he hefted the knapsack onto his back and reslung the rifle over his shoulder. To his left, the ridge descended until it reached the narrow entrance to the valley. That was the obvious route the Game Master would expect him to use. But he couldn’t convince himself that the Game Master would rely on the obvious. In Iraq, he remembered, he couldn’t take anything for granted. Any street could provide an ambush. Any object along the road might be a bomb.