Dave Freedman - Natural Selection

“MONIQUE?” LISA knocked on the Hollises’ bedroom at 7:50 A.M. No one answered, so she pushed it open. “Oh, excuse me.”

In black sweats and a gray tank top, Monique was on the floor, covered in sweat and doing rapid push-ups.

Lisa turned to go.

“Stick around,” Monique ordered through deep breaths.

Lisa did. She couldn’t help but notice the woman’s flexing muscles. Boy, she’s ripped! And intense. Lisa knew Monique’s background, of course—former ROTC and active duty in the army—but in all the time she’d known her, she’d never seen this side of her. She’d always thought of Monique Hollis as tall and elegant yet totally down-to-earth. But watching her now—her eyes. There was no fashion model behind those eyes, no vapid insecurity of any kind. Monique was a different person—tough, even brutal.

She ripped off forty more push-ups and smiled, suddenly her old friendly self again. “Hey, Lisa.” She stood. “Didn’t mean to scare you; just doing a little morning exercise.”

“You been doing this for a while?”

Monique wiped her face with a fluffy white hand towel. “I took a month off actually; just getting back into it.” She’d started the previous night, right before Darryl returned to the cabin.

Lisa eyed her muscular arms. “Look at you! You’re a total roughneck!”

“Darryl’s a lot rougher, believe me.”

“How come you’re getting back into it now?”

Monique’s relaxed demeanor disappeared. “Did you see that jogger?”

Lisa paused. “Of course.”

“There’s your answer.”

Lisa noticed a serrated hunting blade strapped to her calf. “You’re not taking any chances, are you?”

“Are you, Lisa?”

Another pause. “I didn’t think so. I’m about to do some rifle practice with Craig. What are you up to?”

“Checking the forest with Darryl. Showering now. See you out there.”

Lisa walked to the door.

“Oh, and Lisa?”

She turned back. “Yeah.”

“Practice hard.”

“NICE SHOT, Lisa!”

It was just after eleven in the parking lot and they’d been shooting for hours, their targets—empty plastic water jugs—on top of a spindly-legged table.

Jason and Phil had already shot, and Craig thought their progress was respectable. But Lisa’s progress was nothing short of stunning. She had taken to shooting like a fish to water. She fired again. Bam! One jug down. Bam! A second. Bam! A third. She was very accurate. And she paid attention. No matter what the directive, she needed to hear it only once. How to hold the rifle. How to load it. How to unload it. How to deal with the recoil.

And her attitude was suddenly fantastic. Craig didn’t know what change had taken place in her psyche, but it was sure as hell something. He could see it in her eyes: she knew there was a deadly animal out there, and she had no intention of getting killed by it. With a rifle in her hand, Lisa Barton didn’t look like a dark-haired damsel in distress at all. She looked like a killer.

Bam! The last jug flew off the table.

“Excellent, Lisa! OK, that’s it for shooting practice, guys. Let’s just clean this stuff up, then head out there and set up the equipment.”

Jason and Lisa nodded.

“Sorry, but I don’t have time to set up equipment, Craig.”

Summers turned to Phil Martino. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

“What do you mean you don’t have time?”

“I’ve got things to do.”

Jason couldn’t believe this. “What things, Phil? Typing more notes? Since we’ve been here, there haven’t been any more notes to—”

“I don’t have to justify what I do to you, Jason.”

Jason was stunned into silence.

Craig wasn’t. He threw his hands into the air. “You know what? I don’t want you coming. Stay here. Lisa, Jason, come on.”

Phil walked back to the cabin, and the other three headed for the storage shed. They were about to enter when Darryl and Monique walked silently out of the woods. They approached quickly, Darryl shaking his head. “It’s not out there.”

Craig gave him a look. “What do you mean it’s not out there?”

“Just what I said.”

“With all due respect, Hoss, we’ll set up this equipment and see what’s really out there.”

“FINISHED.”

Craig, Jason, and Lisa were near the edge of the forest, close to the cornfield. Draped in dark shadows, they’d just finished setting up sixteen big white radar guns and twenty even bigger black thermal cameras. Sweating in his undershirt, Craig nodded in satisfaction. If the killer returned to the scene of the crime, they’d see it. Then find it and kill it. He noticed Jason, at the very edge of the forest, and he walked over to him.

“What’s up, Jason?”

“Just wondering. If Darryl’s right and that thing’s not here, where is it?”

Craig glanced at the black mountains in the distance. “Well, Darryl’s not right. Now let me show you how this equipment works. Lisa, you too.”

They walked toward an enormous duffel bag, on top of it a pair of monitors, one radar, one thermal. Turned on and operating on batteries, the radar’s screen was divided into sixteen credit-card-size boxes, each with its own sweeping green line, like miniature spotlights. The thermal’s screen was divided into twenty boxes, separate monochrome images of the forest.

“Now this radar is tuned to filter out stationary objects and pick up moving ones, so to show you how it works…” Craig turned. “Lisa, can you walk toward one of those radar guns?”

“Sure.” As she did, Craig pointed at the screen. “Look what happens, Jason….” Just then, in the bottom-right sweep, a blinking green dot appeared. Craig touched the image, blowing it up to full screen. As Lisa continued walking, the blinking dot moved across the sweep, reached the edge of the screen, then the next sweep popped up and the dot continued. “Get the idea? OK, come on back, Lisa.” When she returned, Craig pointed to the thermal monitor. “OK, now this is the thermal. As you can see, everything’s in monochrome.”

Indeed, all twenty forest images were in blacks, grays, and whites.

“Now, these cameras are tuned to ‘white-hot,’ and that doesn’t refer to my dance moves. It means anything that’s physically hotter than the air—you, me, a skunk, a car engine—will appear in white. Just watch this image right here”—he touched it, blowing it up—“then see what happens when I come into the frame….”

As he trotted off, Lisa eyed the image and thought it looked like a twisted Ansel Adams photograph come to life, with a dark gray redwood trunk, lighter gray ferns, black soil, and then… Craig Summers. Only it wasn’t Craig exactly but a ghostly approximation of him. His face, hands, and visible forearms were all colored in eerie bright white light, his T-shirt a much darker gray. Then the ghost spoke. “Get the idea?” He trotted back. “Anyway, that’s it. Let’s get out of here. I bet this stuff will turn up something; you watch.”

Jason glanced at the distant looming mountains once more. He wondered.

“WHY WOULDN’T it be out there?”

It was late afternoon, pieces of a bright blue sky peeking through the treetops. Craig, Jason, Lisa, and Phil had just returned from another round of shooting practice, and everyone was gathered on the cabin’s front porch.

Arms crossed, Darryl turned to Craig. “You haven’t spent much time in the woods, have you, my little friend?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means cameras, radar guns, and tripods aren’t exactly part of nature. It means animals see things. Smell things. In some cases, detect things electronically. You think seeing a thermal camera on top of a tripod in the middle of a redwood forest is normal? No way in hell does that stuff pick up what we’re looking for. A smart animal wouldn’t go anywhere near it. Besides, I don’t think we’ve got the right weather now anyway.”