Lindsay Buroker - Torrent

I sighed. He’d nag it out of me eventually. Or guess it. He wasn’t one of those obtuse guys who had the perceptive acumen of a rock. “The night before she left, we might have…”

“Fought?” he guessed.

“No.”

“Wrecked your dad’s car?”

“No,” I said, giving him an exasperated look. Did he want the story or not?

He seemed to be having fun guessing though, for he leaned forward, grinned, and tried, “Accidentally killed someone, then buried the body together, where nobody could find it?”

What a lunatic. “Yeah, that was it. And now that you know, we’ll have to kill you too. Have you filled out your will yet?”

“Nah, I don’t have anything to leave.”

“You have your thriving app business,” I said. “Sure, you only sell four apps a day right now, but I bet they’ll take off once you’re dead.”

Simon shook his head. “You’re thinking of art. Apps don’t work that way. The world forgets about you thirty-seven seconds after you stop promoting your work.”

“Ah. So, are you going to log in and play, or what?” I waved to his computer, hoping to distract him from his original inquiry. “Drizzt and Strider are asking where you are. Or shall I tell them you’re in the shower?”

Simon prodded at his crusty hair. He claimed to have used three canteens of water to wash up, but it wasn’t all that evident. At least we’d both be flame-retardant if someone’s campfire got out of hand tonight.

“We’re going to see her again tomorrow,” he said. “I guess I can ask her why she stopped communicating with you.”

I winced. So much for distracting him. “Don’t do that,” I said, turning the “don’t” into a drawn out whine.

“If you’d enlighten me, I wouldn’t have to.”

I glowered into my keyboard. “Look… I kissed her, all right?”

In the stunned silence that followed, I had ample time to admire the crickets chirping outside and the distant hoots of an owl. A Great Horned or a Spotted? My grandfather would know. I should probably get up and close that window. The temperature had dropped since sunset.

“You kissed her?” Simon finally asked. “On the lips?”

“No, on her elbow.” Funny how sarcastic I became when I was uncomfortable.

“But you like guys. I’ve seen you date lots of guys. Well, okay I’ve only seen you date two, but you mooned after at least five others while we were in school.”

Seriously? He’d been counting? I needed to clean him up and find him a girl. Not Temi though. Even with her checkered past and her uncertain future, she was out of his league. “Yes, yes, I moon after guys now.”

“Now? Does that mean you used to…” His eyebrows quirked. How had I known he’d be intrigued by this sort of thing?

“No. Yes. I don’t know. I was fourteen. I was trying to find myself. That’s all.”

His forehead scrunched up like the skin on a Shar Pei.

“Could we drop it?” I asked.

Simon lifted a hand. “Sh.”

It was only then that I realized the scrunched forehead wasn’t turned toward me but toward the window I hadn’t gotten up to close. “Do you hear that?”

A set of ghostly fingertips played the piano on my spine. “What? And you better not be screwing with me. I won’t find it very funny after the day we’ve had.”

When Simon looked at me, his usual mischievousness was absent from his eyes. “It got quiet, really quiet.”

The crickets had stopped chirping, and the owl had disappeared. A faint crack came from a campfire across the way, but nobody was talking. I leaned toward the window, but didn’t see anyone about. “Maybe people have gone to bed,” I said, though that didn’t explain the silent crickets. “Or maybe there’s a coyote or javelina out there. We are in the forest.”

Prescott had a population of forty thousand, with another sixty in the nearby towns, but it also backed up to national forest on multiple sides. Three miles out of downtown to the south or west, and you were in woods filled with all sorts of critters. Granted, we hadn’t seen anything fiercer than deer yet at the White Spar, but we hadn’t been roaming around at night either.

The image of that mauled body had popped into my head again when the first shriek came from the other side of the campground.

Simon and I stared out the window, trying to pinpoint the source of the shriek. It came again, reminding me all too much of the cry we’d heard from the man in the tunnel, though this one belonged to a woman. The notes of terror and pain… they were the same. I hoped I was wrong, that it was unrelated. Maybe there was some domestic abuse going on in one of the trailers. Not that I’d be a fan of that, but it’d be less disturbing than another decapitation.

Flashlights appeared at the far end of the campground, the beams streaking around, moving too wildly to be effective. I caught glimpses of trees and grass in their light but not much else. A man and a boy jumped out of the big camp host trailer. The man waved the boy back inside.

“We should do something,” I whispered, feeling like a coward for huddling in the van.

“Like get out of here?” Simon pointed to the driver’s seat. His face was ashen, and I knew he was thinking of the dead man too.

“I thought you’d want to run out and take pictures.”

“You take pictures in the aftermath not in the… math. That’s how you get killed.”

One more scream came, but this one halted in the middle, cut off abruptly. The man charged into the woods. If he had a gun or anything useful for fighting a… big animal, I didn’t see it. I hooked my whip onto my belt and grabbed the bow and quiver. What I thought I was going to do out there I didn’t know, especially given how ineffective I’d been in the skirmish with the motorcycle riders. I grabbed a flashlight and slid open the van door anyway.

I’d like to say I strode confidently toward the camp host’s site, but it was a furtive I-hope-nothing-notices-me sneak with many glances toward the trees on either side of the road. A car rumbled past on the highway, its lights momentarily piercing the forest. I peered in the direction of the scream and spotted the man charging into the woods toward… my stomach twisted. That wasn’t a body, was it? It was too far away to be certain. It was probably a log.

“Yeah, tell yourself things like that,” I muttered, “and maybe that’ll make it true.”

Simon’s voice floated after me. He was standing in front of the van, talking to a 9-1-1 operator on the phone. Good idea, and probably smarter than charging into the woods. I hesitated. It shouldn’t take long for the police to get out here. Maybe I’d be better off waiting. A few car doors were slamming in other camp sites, and I heard a number of harsh whispered conversations. Other people were watching, but nobody else was running out to help.

“Oh my god, oh my god,” came the man’s voice from the woods.

“Dad?” called the boy from the camper, a quaver in his tone. “What happened to Mom?”

A loud rustling came from the man’s direction, and he didn’t respond.

I clenched my fist tighter about the bow. Someone had to do something . I jogged toward the camp host site.

A car started up behind me. People leaving? Not surprising. I wished I could see more of what was out there. The lack of electrical hookups meant nobody had anything stronger than flashlights and battery-operated camping lamps.

A heartbeat before I reached the picnic table beside the trailer, another scream erupted from the woods. It was the man this time.

“Dad!” the boy shrieked out a window two feet from my head.

I jumped, almost dropping the bow. I groped for something reassuring to say to the kid, though who was I that he would believe me? “It’ll be all right,” I tried. “Wait inside.”