Tess Gerritsen - Ice Cold

The scream was piercing, every echo flying back from the mountains like shards of glass. Jane bolted straight in alarm and saw Cathy standing at the far edge of the ruins. Her gaze was fixed to the ground, her gloved hand clapped over her mouth. In jerky robotic steps she began to back away.

Jane started toward her. “What is it? Cathy?”

The other woman did not answer. She was still staring downward, still in a stumbling retreat. As Jane drew closer, she spied bits of color on the ground. A scrap of blue here, a fleck of pink there. Fragments of cloth, she realized, the edges shredded. As she moved beyond the last burned foundation, the snow became deep and more riddled with scavenger tracks. The prints were everywhere, as if coyotes had staged a hoedown.

“Cathy?”

At last the woman turned to her, and her face was drained of color. Unable to speak, all she could do was point to the ground, at one of the dead coyotes.

Only then did Jane realize that Cathy was not pointing at the animal, but at a pair of bones poking up like slender white stalks from the snow. They might have been the remains of wild animal prey, ripped apart and gnawed on by predators, except for one small detail. Encircling those bones was something that did not belong to any animal.

Jane crouched down and stared at the pink and purple beads strung on a loop of elastic. A child’s bracelet.

Her heart was pounding as she rose back to her feet. She looked across the snowy expanse that stretched toward the trees, and saw craters in the snow where the coyotes had been digging for treasure, fresh meat on which they had begun to feast.

“They’re still here,” Cathy said softly. “The families, the children. The people in Kingdom Come never left.” She stared down at the ground, as if seeing some new horror at her feet. “They’re right here.”

BY NIGHTFALL, THE CORONER’S RECOVERY TEAM HAD EXTRACTED the fifteenth body from the frozen ground. It had lain entangled with the other corpses, buried together in one communal pit, limbs mingled in a grotesque group hug. The grave had been shallow, covered with only a thin layer of soil, so thin that even through a foot and a half of snow scavengers had detected the trove of meat. Like the fourteen bodies before it, this corpse emerged from the pit with limbs frozen and rigid, eyelashes encrusted with ice. It was only an infant, about six months old, dressed in a long-sleeved cotton sleeper decorated with tiny airplanes. An indoor outfit. Like the other bodies, this one bore no marks of violence. Except for postmortem damage by carnivores, the cadavers were strangely, disturbingly perfect.

This baby was the most perfect of all, eyes closed as if in sleep, its skin as smooth and milky white as porcelain. Just a doll was what Jane had first thought when she’d glimpsed the tiny corpse in the pit. It’s what she’d wanted to believe. But soon the truth was apparent as the coroner’s team, biohazard garb covering their heavy winter clothes, gingerly freed the body from its grave.

Jane had watched the steady succession of cadavers emerge, and the infant was what upset her most, because it made her think of her own daughter. She tried to block out the image, but it had already sprung into her head: Regina ’s lifeless face, the skin feathered with frost.

Abruptly she turned away from the pit and walked back to where the vehicles were parked. Cathy was still huddled inside her SUV. Jane climbed in beside her and swung the door shut. The vehicle stank of smoke, and Jane saw that the ashtray was full. Hands shaking, Cathy lit yet another cigarette and took a trembling puff. The two women sat for a moment without speaking. Through the windshield, they watched a member of the recovery team place the pitifully small bundle inside the morgue vehicle and swing the door shut. There was too little daylight left. Tomorrow the digging would resume, and they would certainly find more bodies. At the bottom of the pit, workers had already glimpsed an adult’s rigid limb.

“No knife wounds. No bullet holes,” said Jane as she watched the morgue vehicle drive away. “They look like they just fell asleep. And died.”

“Jonestown,” murmured Cathy. “You remember that, don’t you? The Reverend Jim Jones. He brought nearly a thousand followers from California to Guyana. Established his own colony. When US authorities came to investigate, he ordered his followers to commit suicide. More than nine hundred people died.”

“You think this was a mass suicide, too?”

“What else would it be?” Cathy stared out the window at the burial pit. “In Jonestown, they made the children drink first. Gave them cyanide mixed in sweet punch. Flavor Aid. Imagine doing that. Filling a bottle with poison. Picking up your own baby. Slipping the nipple in its mouth. Imagine watching him drink, knowing that it’s the last time he’ll ever look up at you and smile.”

“No, I can’t imagine that.”

“But in Jonestown, they did it. They killed their own children, and then they killed themselves. All because some so-called prophet told them to.” Cathy turned to her with a haunted face. The deepening shadows of the vehicle emphasized the hollows of her eyes. “Jeremiah Goode has the power to command them. He can make you surrender your possessions and turn your back on the world. He can make you give up your daughter and cast out your son. He can hand you a cup of poison, tell you to drink it, and you’d do it. You’d do it with a smile, because there’s nothing as important as pleasing him.”

“I asked you this question before. I think I know the answer. This is personal for you, isn’t it?”

Jane’s words, spoken so softly, seemed to stun Cathy. She went very still as her cigarette slowly burned down to ash. Abruptly she stubbed it out and met Jane’s gaze. “You better believe this is fucking personal,” she said.

Jane asked no questions, made no comments. She was wise enough to give her the time and space to say more when she was ready.

Cathy broke off eye contact and stared out at the fading light. “Sixteen years ago,” she said, “I lost my best friend to The Gathering. She and I were as close as sisters-even closer. Katie Sheldon lived next door to us, and I’d known her since we were two years old. Her father was a carpenter, unemployed a lot of the time. A nasty little man who lorded it over his family like a two-bit emperor. Her mother was a housewife. Such a blank personality, I hardly remember her. They were just the kind of family The Gathering seems to attract. People who have no other connections, who need a reason for existence in their purposeless lives. And Katie’s father, he probably liked the idea of any religion that gave him full rein to lord it over his family. Not to mention the young girls he’d get to screw. Multiple wives, Armageddon, the end times-he happily embraced it all. All of Jeremiah’s bullshit. So the family moved away from our neighborhood. To Plain of Angels.

“Katie and I promised to write each other. And I did. I wrote letter after letter, and never got anything back. But I never stopped thinking about her, wondering what became of her. Years later, I found out.”

As Cathy took a calming breath, Jane remained silent, waiting to hear what by then she knew would be a tragic conclusion.

“I finished college,” Cathy continued. “Got a job as a social worker in a hospital in Idaho Falls. One day, an emergency obstetrical case came in through the ER. A young woman who was hemorrhaging after giving birth in Plain of Angels. It was my friend Katie. She was only twenty-two when she died. Her mother was with her, and she happened to let slip the fact that Katie had five other children at home.” Cathy’s jaw tightened. “You do the math.”