Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

THE RIVERBANK felt different today. Darryl Hollis didn’t know why exactly, but there was no mistaking it. Last time it had been peaceful and calm here, but now…

The sun was already quite high. They’d docked, and the six of them were walking on the creek’s north side. In jeans and a red-and-blue checked shirt, Darryl felt his rifle’s heft, glad he had it. Craig was carrying as well.

Stomping over tall grass, Darryl suddenly turned to the woods. “What is that?”

Before anyone could answer, he walked in. “Oh.” It was a campground: a dozen wood picnic tables, steel trash drums, barbecue pits, Porta Pottis… But no people, not even rangers, like a summer camp without the campers. Was the park closed? Beyond the campground, he noticed a wide walking trail. He glanced at it for a curious moment, then joined the others. As they continued up the embankment, Darryl didn’t know why, but he felt even more nervous.

THE RANGER station was miles away and nearly empty. In pressed khaki pants, matching long-sleeved shirt, and a hard-rimmed hat, fortysomething Ranger Allen Meyer was seated at a steel desk that looked like it belonged in a DMV. With darting, beady blue eyes, Meyer was an uptight guy by nature, and this phone call was making him even more so.

His calmer blond wife, Laura, also a ranger and wearing an identical outfit, was at another desk, watching their eleven-month-old, Samuel. The baby was swinging happily in his favorite chair, a battery-operated portable with a blue seat covered with tiny bears. Laura smiled at the baby’s outfit. She especially loved the navy sweater with the little sailboat on the chest. Allen had barely noticed it. Whoever he was on the phone with was making him even more agitated than normal. The two rangers had been doing paperwork all morning, and it was now early afternoon. Time to go. They’d been just about to do that when the phone rang.

“Mrs. Abbott, I’m a ranger here. My wife and I were just about to leave ourselves, so believe me, the park is closed. Right, for prescribed burns… Of course they’re controlled by experts…. No, just scheduling difficulties… Huh?… No, no one. Literally, just my wife and me and our baby. We’re the only ones in the entire park… What? Honestly, I’m amazed your call went through at all. The co-location switch has been having problems for a week…. That’s right, cell calls too, once they hit the ground from the towers. I know we should get it fixed; it’s on the list… Sorry?…” Allen Meyer suddenly gave his wife a deadly serious look. “What do you mean your son didn’t come home last night?”

He paused. “He was jogging in the park? At night?… He snuck in?”

“THAT’S WHY there’s no one here.”

Well off the embankment and draped in shadows, Phil Martino photographed a yellow diamond-shaped sign: PARK CLOSED FOR PRESCRIBED BURNS.

“Didn’t you used to do prescribed burns, Phil?”

Phil glanced back at Jason. “Good memory, genius.”

What the hell’s your problem? Jason thought. He knew that “assistant fire ranger” in Lake Arrowhead near L.A. had been one of the many jobs Phil Martino had held during his hopscotch career. If Jason’s memory served, Phil had actually stuck to that one for some time and even gotten good at it. Jason didn’t know what a prescribed burn was exactly, but he thought it had something to do with intentionally starting small fires so a major one didn’t burn later.

Without another word between them, the two men returned to the sunny riverbank and joined the others. Jason caught up with Darryl and right away saw he was extremely ill at ease.

“What’s wrong?”

Darryl didn’t answer at first. He glanced at Lisa, trailing them by just ten or twenty feet. He didn’t want to frighten her unnecessarily. “Walk with me, and I’ll tell you.”

“HE PROBABLY just twisted an ankle, honey.”

Allen Meyer had just hung up the phone. He wasn’t sure what could have happened to the woman’s son. “You think so?”

Laura Meyer nodded confidently. “Jogging at night? He probably didn’t see something, stepped wrong, and twisted it really bad.”

“Well, we got to find him. Forget clearing out of here, Laura; we got to find him right now.” Tense, Allen glanced out a tiny window. “There’s probably not more than four hours of light left out there.”

Laura was perfectly calm. “No problem. We’ll search the appropriate trails, find this guy, and just leave a little later than we thought.”

Allen rapidly opened a park map. They talked it over, quickly decided where the jogger must have entered the park, then divvied up trails to search. As Allen went outside, Laura put Samuel in a chest Snugli, grabbed his chair, joined her husband, and headed toward a massive parking lot within the trees.

“Taking the chair?”

“Just in case, Allen. You know how crabby he can get.” Samuel was prone to screaming fits, and the swinging chair could calm him down like nothing else.

“You’re still charging your walkie-talkie?”

She nodded. “It’s in the truck.” Neither bothered mentioning cell phones. Even under normal circumstances, coverage here was spotty, but with the recent problems with the co-location switch, fewer than one in ten calls went through.

As they entered the parking lot, they passed a pair of helicopters, one enormous, one small, gifts to the park after the Gulf War to assist in fighting forest fires. They passed their own jam-packed Honda Civic and walked toward a pair of ancient white Chevy Blazer SUVs with green park emblems on every door.

Laura strapped Samuel into the back of one, confirmed the walkie-talkie was still charging, then waved to her husband and drove off.

Allen Meyer turned in the opposite direction on a double-yellow-lined road, then sped away amid the trees. Where the hell’s that jogger?

THE GREAT body twitched. Once, then again and again.

Unseen in the depths of the blackened central cavern, the predator was asleep. Its entire body, from the tips of its horns to the end of its torso, twitched repeatedly, an enormous sleeping dog.

In its semiconscious state none of the animal’s sensory organs was tuning per se, but just like any animal, it would awaken if it heard, smelled, or otherwise sensed something.

It continued to sleep.

DARRYL WALKED faster. “What’s wrong is this trail we’re walking on.” Earlier, the trail had been in the woods, near a campground, but now it had twisted.

Jason looked down, realizing they weren’t walking through untamed tall grass anymore but on tilled black soil. Still, he didn’t understand why Darryl was so agitated. “So you’re saying…”

“This trail’s on the water, Jason. So people could be on the water. And if someone was on this trail at exactly the wrong time… I don’t know if one of those things would know to distinguish between a person and a bear cub.”

Jason scanned ahead with renewed unease. “I get your point.”

Darryl tightened the grip on his rifle, and they all walked forward quickly.

LAURA MEYER pulled over. Moving very quickly, she got out, put Samuel in the Snugli, slung his chair over her shoulder, and started walking. When she entered the first trail, she immediately noticed. It was quiet here, more so than normal.

Tough. She walked forward, the only sound from the occasional twig snapping under her boots.

She continued for a few minutes when she heard something off the trail. She froze, staring toward it.

The sound had come from near a huge patch of redwoods. But now there was no movement of kind, no sign of life.