Lindsay Buroker - Torrent

“I’m glad you’re leading the way,” Simon muttered.

I continued forward, keeping my eyes trained on the darkness ahead. “You’re not living up to all those stories about Native Americans being brave warriors.”

“You’re thinking of the Comanche. My people have always been peaceful fishermen. We rocked at throwing parties and giving gifts too. You’ve heard of potlatches, right? If you want me to make a gift for whatever is attacking that person, I’ll be happy to do so.”

Usually his chatter made me smile, but I found myself licking my lips and wondering if we should leave. I hadn’t heard a peep in several minutes. Maybe it was too late. Or maybe we could pretend we’d never heard anything to start with. Despite the cowardly thoughts, I kept going. If we ended up injured or in trouble on one of our excursions, I sure hoped someone would come help us.

The rubble pile sloped downward until I could stand again. Ore cart tracks came into view, as well as our first branch in the tunnel system. Three options stretched before us, all dark. I thought we might spot some footprints, but rocks and gravel dominated the ground, nothing that held tracks.

“Got an app that can tell us which way?” I asked.

But Simon had tucked away his smartphone. He sniffed the air a couple of times, then pointed to the leftmost passage. I tried a few experimental sniffs myself. That faint taint of blood or meat still hung in the air, along with… It almost smelled like the ocean. Salt? Seaweed? Odd. We were a six-hour drive from the Pacific.

I was tempted to make Simon go first since he’d picked the route, but he truly was unarmed. At least I had sharp, pointy things on my multi-tool. And I’d taken those three years of Tae Kwon Do during college. Both of which were sure to be useful against a pack of rabid wolves.

Ahead a support beam had broken and lay diagonally across the tunnel. Before clambering over, I peered under it, half expecting the person who’d screamed to be crumpled there, but the passage beyond was empty.

His eyes on the tunnel ahead, Simon climbed past the timber and continued into the darkness. I caught up with him when he stopped. The shaft had ended, opening up into a natural cavern. My headlamp beam played across stalactites and mounds of rock. It reminded me of the Colossal Cave near Tucson, if a smaller version. But there weren’t supposed to be any caves in the mountains around Prescott, at least not that I’d learned about when researching the area online. We weren’t on private property-this was part of the national forest-so it was hard to imagine something like this not having been turned into a tourist trap. Maybe, like the rubble-filled mine shaft, it wasn’t structurally sound enough. I grimaced at the ceiling.

Simon must have had something besides tourist traps on his mind, for he wandered into the cavern, climbing over mounds and slipping past stalagmites. He stopped, his back rigid.

“Find something?” I asked casually, though my heart rate had quickened.

“Yeah.” His voice came out choked.

I summoned some fortitude and climbed over the rocks to join him. The scent of blood-of freshly butchered meat-grew stronger, and so did the smell of the ocean. Before I could remark on the weirdness of the seaweed odor, I saw what had made Simon halt.

It was a young man’s head. Just a head.

It’d been removed from his body, the severing gory and uneven, as if it’d ripped off with one’s bare hands, if anyone’s hands were strong enough for that.

Mutely, Simon pointed to the side. A few meters away, crumpled between two mounds of rock, lay the rest of the body, a khaki shirt torn and saturated with crimson. Blood pooled beneath the torso, blood that hadn’t yet had time to dry.

I stared at the body for a long stunned moment, then stumbled backward, my stomach roiling. I closed my eyes and pressed a fist to my mouth, struggling to tame my gag reflex. I needed to figure out what was going on-and if we were in danger-not throw up all over a crime scene.

“You don’t know it’s a crime,” I muttered to myself. It was hard to believe someone could have accidentally been decapitated, but maybe there was some kind of… natural explanation.

But what if whatever had done this was still in here? We’d heard the man scream not ten minutes ago. I peered about the dark cavern, my headlamp doing a pitiful job of illuminating its recesses. Nothing stirred in the depths of the chamber, and I didn’t hear anything except my own breathing. Odd how loud that can sound in utter silence.

Simon was staring at the body, his headlamp unmoving. He wasn’t in shock, I didn’t think, but horrified. He started eyeing our surroundings too.

The dead man-what was left of him-wore a backpack with a coil of rope strapped to it, though neither item had been removed. I pointed my lamp upward. Maybe if he’d dropped from above and onto a sharp cave protrusion… but there was nothing to fall from, nor were there any gore-covered rock features. Besides, people’s heads didn’t get torn off when they fell. I rubbed my face with a shaking hand.

A flash of light assaulted my eyes, and I lurched sideways into a stalagmite. Simon was snapping pictures.

“What are you doing?” I whispered harshly. All right, that was obvious. What I meant was… “ Why are you doing it?”

“There’s a smudge here, like part of a bloody footprint. Or paw print.” He shrugged.

“You shouldn’t be standing that close. Your foot is in blood, that guy’s blood.” That disturbed me almost as much as the presence of the body for some reason. I’m sure it was the only reason there was a hysterical edge to my voice. “Don’t touch anything. We’ll go tell the rangers.”

Simon lowered his phone to frown at me. “The rangers? You think they’re up for murder investigations?”

“This isn’t a murder. This is a… a… mauling . By… a… bear .” I didn’t believe that-I’d seen bear work before, and tearing heads off people wasn’t their style-but I wanted to believe it. Bears were normal. Normal was good. Or at least-I glanced at the body again-less disturbing.

“A bear? You… believe that?”

“You tell me,” I said. “Didn’t you spend your youth close to nature, learning to hunt and track and identify what bodies mauled by bears look like?”

“If by close to nature you mean living in a trailer, playing computer games, and making spaghetti and meatballs for my addled grandmother, absolutely. As to the rest, the only thing bears in the Pacific Northwest maul are salmon, so I wouldn’t really know. These”- he waved at the cave, or maybe at the mountain or the entire state, “-are your stomping grounds.”

I pushed my bangs out of my eyes. Technically, I was from New Mexico, not Arizona, but he was right. I’d grown up in a similar climate, and I was the one with the self-sufficient back-to-the-earth family, including a grandfather who’d taken my interest in shooting bows for a desire to learn how to hunt. I’d been so impressed that he’d been willing to take me out to do “boy” things that I hadn’t admitted to the amount of puking I’d done the first time we shot an elk. I’d been more relieved than chagrinned when Yaiyai insisted that young women who wanted to get married and make babies shouldn’t be running around in the desert like savages.

“I don’t think it was a bear,” I finally said, then crinkled my nose. The queasiness hadn’t left my stomach, and the longer we stayed in the confines of the cave, the more the smell of the body was getting to me, not to mention the terror forever burned into the man’s eyes. “Let’s argue about it elsewhere, all right? After we tell someone. If not the rangers, the sheriff’s department.” All I knew was that we weren’t investigating it.