Chris Holm - The Big Reap

If they only knew how much weirder the truth really was.

It was six days in to the Monster Mavens’ search — our search, I should say — that we’d found the cabin.

We’d been hiking in a haphazard zigzag — something Topher (never Christopher , a rule even Nicholas-not-Nicky obeyed, though neither Topher nor Zadie extended him such courtesy) cooked up between sips of Early Times straight from the bottle as he hunched over our maps beside the fire at camp one night. “The cops don’t know what the eff they’re doing, man,” he’d told me conspiratorially, the sheer paint-blistering offensiveness of his whiskey breath making me wonder whether it might be prudent to be sitting farther away from open flame. “The sorts of things we’re looking for, they don’t follow lines or grids, you get me?”

I didn’t. Luckily, Topher was too drunk, and too comfortable in his role as alpha-male to require — or even expect — a response.

“We gotta, like, listen to our souls , bro. They’ll lead us true, you wait and see.”

And as stupid as that sounded, it kinda sorta worked.

We’d been on the trail for hours. Lungs hoarse in the thin mountain air, Topher and Zadie snapping at each other all day in the benign way all couples do when their company runs brittle. They’d been pushing hard to find some scrap of fame-stretching evidence ever since the calls started drying up a few days after the discovery of the old woman, and they were both haggard, tired, and grumpy as all get-out. Not that I had a ton of sympathy for them. They had each other, after all, while I had no one, and on a pettier note, they got to walk all day with those ski-pole-looking thingys that helped with balance or whatever, while I was stuck pretending to be their cameraman. That meant hauling thirty pounds of camera around on one shoulder and maneuvering by viewfinder, which in turn meant I’d experienced several days of stumbles, backaches, and motion sickness. But I’d gotten my revenge, I guess. I was supposed to be editing and uplinking the footage of our mystical snipe-hunt every night from camp, but in fact, I’d been doing no such thing. Wouldn’t even know how, to own the truth. Hell, there was a pretty good chance this camera I was carrying wasn’t even on . Not like I could tell the difference either way. Best I could hope for was to remember to take the lens cap off.

But that goddamned camera was good for one thing, at least: it could see the fucking cabin. Which is more than I could say for the three of us. Though whether we couldn’t, or just wouldn’t , I’m not entirely sure; Lord knows how Brethren mojo works. The sensation was not unlike the one I’d experienced when I’d first arrived at the shuttered public bath house Magnusson had been using as his laboratory. But while that building simply resisted looking at, causing my eyes to slide right off it with nothing more than the scantest of impressions, the cabin flat-out would not show itself to my — or Topher’s, or Zadie’s — naked eye.

I’m getting ahead of myself. First I should tell you about the almost-murder.

We’d been trudging along for what seemed like forever, on jagged nerves and terrain to match. The afternoon was getting on, and the long shadows cast by the mountain ridge to our west bathed us in chill gray half-light like crushing depression, dulling colors, numbing limbs to sluggishness, and settling creaky into our every weary joint. My feet were blistered. My camera-shoulder ached. And my head was throbbing, on account of Topher and Zadie’s bickering, which had begun as the occasional potshot a few miles back, only to escalate to a vicious barrage as the afternoon wore on.

Topher, early on, all brittle false-cheer: “C’mon — pick up the pace back there, woman! We got monsters to catch!”

“Quit hogging the water!” Zadie, later, whining.

“What’re you, stupid? We’re not going that way, it’s too steep.” Topher, evening the score a few paces later. And then they were off to the races.

“You’re the one who marked the route, dumbass. Can’t you fucking read a map?”

“Better than you can read a fucking sonar readout.”

“Jesus, does it always have to come back to that bullshit in Loch Ness?”

“Bullshit?” Topher got up in Zadie’s face, all pointy and indignant. “How can you stand there and call it bullshit? That sonar image was definitive .”

“Definitively a piece of driftwood.” As Topher got closer, Zadie made a face, squinching up her nose and eyes. “Holy hell,” she said, “when’s the last time you washed that shirt? It smells like gym socks soaked in Patchouli and bong water. I’m gonna lose my fucking lunch here.”

“More like both our lunches, the way you’ve been packing it in.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m just saying, I thought I made it pretty clear I packed the ostrich jerky for me .”

“Well then maybe you shouldn’t have put it in my pack. Oh, wait! You needed room in your pack for that goddamned travel guitar, because God forbid I go one night without having to hear your horrible playing. You’d think in seven years, you would have learned one chord.”

“You never complained before .”

“You sure about that? Or is it that you couldn’t hear me over the fucking racket you were making? Long as you insist on torturing me with that thing night in and night out, I’ll finish the goddamn jerky if I goddamn well feel like it. And you’re one to talk about putting on the pounds; your gut looks like fucking cookie dough pouring out over that stupid-ass belt buckle of yours.”

“You sound just like your mother. And you told me you liked this belt buckle!”

“I swear to Christ, Christopher , if you tell me I sound just like my mother one more time, you’ll be bunking with Nicky, you hear me? And believe you me, there’s plenty of stuff I’ve said I liked that I’m mostly just enduring.”

“You know I hate it when you call me Christopher! Christopher is my dad’s name. And anyways, it’s fucking rich, you teasing me about my name — your given name is Susan . You stole Zadie off the cover of a book, one you never even finished , for shit’s sake.”

At that last, Zadie looked directly into my camera, worried that she’d been outed to the world. (No chance: it wasn’t recording, and anyway, I’d been zooming in on a cool-looking bird some twenty feet behind her.) Then, after one stricken moment of paralysis, she wheeled on Topher, and smacked him square across the jaw.

I was surprised. In my time with Topher and Zadie (Chris and Susan?), I’d seen ’em bicker plenty, but nothing ever came of it. They were peas in a pod, or whatever the hippie drum-circle equivalent would be. Macho and hembra bongos, I guess. (What? That’s what they call the big bongo and the little one, respectively. Or maybe it’s the little and the big. Okay, I may’ve been spending way too much time with these two.) Point is, I’d never gotten a whiff of violence repressed in their prior interactions. Which made the slap surprising, and what came next goddamn terrifying.

Topher looked at her a moment, shocked silent. Then he shrugged out of his pack in one quick motion and tackled her, his hands around her neck.

Zadie let out a squeal that became a gurgle as his thumbs pressed against her trachea. I belted out an involuntary “ Hey !” and moved toward them to stop Topher from killing her. In my astonishment, I clung stupidly to the camera on my shoulder. It had become so much an extension of this meat-suit in my mind — so accustomed was Nicholas to carrying it — I simply never thought to drop it. It was a stupid move, because the weight of the equipment slowed me down, and could have cost Zadie her life, but in retrospect, my idiocy proved helpful. But not before we three tumbled down the embankment.