Call the dark a thriller, p.3
Call the Dark: A Thriller, page 3
The “technically survivable” crashes.
Although airline manufacturers want you to believe that any seat is as safe as another, the numbers again suggest you’re around 40 percent more likely to survive a crash if you’re sitting near the tail, and royally screwed if you’re in the first-class rows. While commercial airliners are nominally safer than private planes and jets, that’s only because those smaller private jets are nothing but first-class rows.
She knows numbers, knows, too, just how easily they can be folded, spindled, and manipulated. That’s why she’s so pessimistic about the survivability chances of anyone on the jet she witnessed crash into the West Virginia wilderness. More than that, she felt it, the impact and flames and spiraling pieces. Most fatalities are fire or impact related, or from smoke inhalation, postcrash.
So, she’s not surprised when the screaming stops before she gets to the crash site itself. She’s relieved.
She’s also not surprised when she discovers the first severed arm hanging from a tree. It’s not even the arm that draws her attention.
It’s the burning paper.
Infinite flecks of fiery paper, or maybe seat cushioning or insulation, drifting, dancing on the dark wind, churning amid the snowflakes. A miasma of floating ash and drifting hot smoke.
Bits and pieces of something bright and shiny—aluminum or tinfoil—all mixed up in the night air, too, reflecting and refracting and burnishing the falling firelight. It’s like being trapped inside a wheeling kaleidoscope.
Like being in a snow globe. It’s beautiful.
Her dad once gave her an antique snow globe, a gold-leaf dome so old the artificial snow inside was still made of bone chips. It was from Romania or Hungary or Poland, or so he claimed, and it held a tiny blonde girl with a great red scarf ice dancing away from a massive, feral, black wolf. Because of the snow globe’s age, the girl’s painted eyes and bow tie mouth had long disappeared, worried away, leaving her blank and expressionless. Blind and mute. But the wolf’s eyes looked as fresh as if they had been painted on just yesterday, as ruby red as the skating girl’s scarf, both menacing and piercing.
Even without seeing a face, Maggie assumed the girl was laughing, had to be laughing, wind in her hair and cold on her cheeks and wolf at her heels. One leg kicked high, so that a turn of the snow dome’s bronze key would send her twirling en pointe, round and round and round.
Maggie loved that snow globe, like she loved all the weird gifts her dad unearthed. She’d shake it up and sit and study that frozen tableau for hours on end, that gothic wolf forever unable to catch the endlessly spinning, waltzing girl.
Dancing so delicately in a blizzard of bones.
She now grabs for one of the larger pieces of floating paper, a magazine ad that immediately turns black in her fingers, burned up and gone before she can read it.
The cold air is oily, slick, acidic. The stink of fuel and fire is full-on sensory overload, leaving Maggie breathless, her eyes tearing and stinging. But she clearly sees that severed arm caught in the crook of a red spruce, palm up, fingers wide, like it’s beckoning her forward.
It’s been sheared off midhumerus, an awful, ragged cut. And although it’s too high up for Maggie to know for certain, she can almost make out the delicate hair—whatever hasn’t been singed off—and the constellation of tiny, near-perfect moles near the elbow. The small rose or bird or fish tattoo on the casually bent wrist and even the coral nail polish.
The gold band on the ring finger.
Part of Maggie urges her, yells at her, to climb that tree, retrieve that wayward arm, and bring it down. But she can’t do that, won’t do that. She doesn’t have time for respect or burials or grace. She should be running like hell the other direction, just like she planned.
That earlier scream still draws her, though . . . tugs at her . . . and she can’t walk away from that.
She knows the numbers, knows the odds, but still needs to be sure. So, she moves onward through this bizarre snowfall of floating ash and paper, threading her way gingerly over bits and pieces of twisted metal and melting rubber, past the serrated slivers of painted steel embedded in the surrounding trees, beyond the flotsam and jetsam of shredded tree limbs and dead leaves and pine needles and boiling bits of glass and oil, until she finds the next body part—
A naked leg still wearing a cap-toe dress shoe, both blackened by ash . . .
Until she gets to the wide, burning clearing itself . . .
Until she finds the girl.
4
Marcus sits at his desk at the Wolfe County Sheriff’s Office and spins the dead man’s gun, a Springfield XD Sub-Compact, a weapon just as serious as the knife that killed him.
Marcus checked the mag, finding it fully loaded and unfired. Beyond minor trigger and rear-sight modifications, the gun might as well be brand new, just out of the box. Well oiled and well kept.
He also entered the gun’s serial number into the ATF’s National Tracing Center eTrace System—negative so far—and used the office’s latent print kit to process what he now fears will either be worthless or, more likely, nonexistent prints. A perfect complement to the man’s barren pockets and missing wallet and keys.
As far as Marcus can tell, neither this gun nor the man he pulled it from exists. It’s as if both fell from the damn sky.
His earlier rundown at the Briar didn’t turn up much either.
Torri Lampley, the Briar’s owner, told him three of the inn’s rooms were occupied. First one, a couple by way of Washington, DC; the second a more elderly couple up from Charleston to visit their nephew—Torri talked extensively to that pair earlier in the day, and both she and Marcus know the nephew in question—and the third, a woman, apparently traveling alone. In any other place, he might’ve needed warrants or subpoenas, but Torri was more than happy to share everything she had on her three guests, including the Washington couple’s reservation and credit card information.
The lone woman—an M. Roby . . . NFI, no further information—checked in three days before, paying cash in advance for a two-week stay.
A possible red flag, but of what exactly?
Fortunately, the Washington couple proved easy to track down, still sharing a Goldeneye pinot noir in the Big River, just two tables over from Andy Parsons and Donnie. When Marcus and Donnie talked to them, they were at first sketchy, even evasive, but their nervousness had nothing to do with the mysterious murder. Both were young and recently married, just not to each other.
But the lone woman wasn’t in either the Big River or her room, and despite Torri’s willingness to slip him the key, Marcus wasn’t prepared to cross that threshold yet, literally or figuratively. Having already threatened the integrity of whatever case he thought he was building with shoddy crime scene preservation and half-assed evidence collection, he still wanted to preserve the illusion of a legitimate police investigation. Instead, he pulled license plates off a handful of cars in the lot and left Donnie staking out the Briar itself, sitting in the inn’s lobby, passing the time with Torri, drinking coffee, trying to stay awake. That was two hours ago.
Leaving Marcus alone now with the dead man and the dead man’s gun. Both riddles, ciphers. Too many questions and not enough answers.
There are only two identifying marks on the dead man at all. The tattoo Marcus spied at first, proving to be some sort of tribal thing inked heavily on the man’s left shoulder and down his left arm . . . and an old shrapnel wound on the same.
Once upon a time, artillery shrapnel was considered the most effective type of ammunition to use against troops out in the open. Nowadays, with micro wars and global terrorism on the rise, more and more blast injuries are a product of IEDs—improvised explosive devices—like the one that took Marcus’s own leg. Marcus knows all about those injuries.
Knows all about the immediate barotrauma and rarefaction . . . you’re burning . . . the blast-wind debris and penetrating shrapnel . . . you’re boiling . . . the physical displacement and blunt trauma of flying into immovable objects so much bigger than yourself, like cars or buildings . . . you’re falling . . . and the inevitable crushing and smoke inhalation.
Bang . . . you’re dead. Most of the time.
But Marcus didn’t die from his wounds, and neither did his tattooed stranger. And although Marcus isn’t an ME or coroner, he’s intimately familiar with those wounds and the scars they leave behind. Scars deep and eternal, scars that never fully heal. Intimately familiar as well with the stories scars can tell, and the one secret such scars do reveal about his dead man.
He was likely a soldier once too.
After Marcus locks up the gun, he retreats upstairs and takes a long look out one of the big second-floor windows, studying tiny Pullens under the veil of night.
A blur of light, a hazy nimbus surrounded by a black ring of mountains.
He never thought he’d return here, never imagined he’d ever carry a gun of his own again. He’s been the sheriff for two years and hasn’t pulled his duty weapon once in that time. He doesn’t hunt, doesn’t even fish. Deidre questioned why he ran for sheriff, why he came home at all, just before she left him and went back to Virginia to teach at Norfolk State University. He didn’t have a good answer then and doesn’t have a better one now.
It might be easy to say he left a lot of himself over there, and coming home was a way to reclaim what he’d lost, to somehow ground or find himself again. But that’s too easy, too simple. Marcus deep down suspects, fears, he came home because Pullens has always been small and safe, hemmed in and closed off by the rugged mountains and wilds. In fact, the greatest danger is all that untamed wilderness itself. With a population of less than two thousand, Pullens hasn’t had a violent crime in five or six years. Hasn’t been a murder in twice that long. Until now.
Marcus came home because he was done with the world at large. Had done enough, served enough, given enough, sacrificed enough. He ran for sheriff because the job was easy and available, and as a combat veteran and certified hometown hero, it was one of the few things he was truly qualified for. He took it because he hoped it would be quiet, uneventful—hell, just say it, boring—and before tonight, he’d been proven right.
In fact, it was so quiet, so uneventful, so isolated, that Deidre decided she couldn’t take it anymore. Worse, she couldn’t take him anymore either. She accused him of hiding out here, and she wasn’t wrong.
Pullens is a damn good place to hide.
5
The girl is standing in a ring of fire, eyes open, staring but unseeing.
Maggie knows this because the girl doesn’t flinch, doesn’t acknowledge Maggie or the angular, wicked rifle in Maggie’s hands as she approaches from the trees.
The girl just . . . stands there . . . hair singed and dancing with embers, face blackened by smoke, by blood.
A burning body at her bare feet.
Maggie circles once before approaching, taking it all in, figuring out just what the hell to do.
The plane has left a fiery smear through the trees, a ragged impact crater . . . no, a scar . . . thirty or forty yards long in the hard mountain earth. Wreckage and oil burn everywhere, air all fuzzy with that constant floating ash and paper. Plane pieces scattered like a minefield—twisted metal, unrecognizable detritus—and even more body parts. But none of that shocks Maggie anymore. Not as much as the sight of that lone girl, at least fourteen or fifteen, standing upright in the middle of it all. Clearly injured, although exactly just how bad is hard to say. Clearly in shock too. But more importantly, clearly very much alive.
Not impossible, Maggie knows, not even unlikely.
Crashes have a 95 percent survival rate . . .
But not a crash like this. This plane imploded on impact, was already burning, coming apart in the air, even before it hit trees. It shredded like the paper now blowing in the wind, torn into Christmas tinsel like the red and silver garlands that were decorating Pullens.
Maggie saw it, saw all of it. No, her initial instinct was right. No one could survive this crash. No one . . . no way. And even if someone did, they shouldn’t be able to just up and walk away from it. But that’s exactly what this young girl was doing when Maggie arrived. Her shoes blown or burned off, lost in the crash, but still, somehow, walking, with her hair on fire.
Maggie drops the rifle and closes the distance between them, scooping up loose snow and dead leaves to pat the girl’s hair out. On instinct, she kicks what thin ground snow there is over the burning body at the girl’s feet, too, but neither the body nor the girl reacts to her efforts.
The girl doesn’t stop her or push away, doesn’t resist, doesn’t shirk away, even as Maggie checks her for serious wounds and then walks her a few more steps and sits her down out of the smoke and flames.
The girl is so thin, so delicate. The wind itself, or even Maggie’s ragged breath, should be more than enough to knock her down. Touching her leaves Maggie’s hands ashy, bloody again.
She knows you shouldn’t move an accident victim like this—the internal, unseen damage could be serious, severe, still fatal—but Maggie figures all bets are off when the victim herself is conscious and moving on her own.
With the girl on the ground, out of the way, Maggie returns to the other body, still smoking, too, but no longer fully aflame. It’s a man, tall and thin as well—near emaciated—arms spread, facedown, so Maggie can’t see his features. His suit is mostly burned away, large swatches of it burned into him, melted like awful, bloody candle wax. But there’s a leather belt clearly visible around his waist, and a bright-silver analog watch on his wrist, too hot to touch.
Maggie wonders if it still shows the time of the crash, that last eternal moment when the plane went down, and she was looking up at it.
The plane falling from the sky like a shooting star.
Like the girl, the man’s hair was burning, too, but it’s mostly gone now. Bare wisps of it remain, little more than ashes, tiny fading embers glowing in the blood haloed around his skull.
She can’t bring herself to touch this man, won’t dare turn him over. There’s something so eerie and awful and off putting about the way he’s lying there dead and unmoving, long fingers clawed deep into the earth, as writhing smoke snakes around his painfully thin body. She’s afraid to flip him over, only to have him claw at her. To blink those awful, dead, torched eyes—fume-filled hollows seeing nothing at all—because she knows she’ll finally scream.
She’s been holding it in, but it’s right there in her throat now. A hot torrent of tears, too, threatening with each new horror.
It looks like the man died crawling away from the crash . . . crawling after the girl.
Maybe he was her father, protecting her with his own body, his last bit of strength, his final dying breath.
Maggie wants to believe that as she turns away.
6
Walton Landry never sees the plane, just hears it.
A roaring, desperate whine, like the mountain itself is calling out to him. When you spend as much time out here alone as he does, you get to know the mountain’s sounds intimately, all those longing whispers and desperate sighs of the deep wilderness, raw wind in the trees and cold rainwater working its way over rocks. Falling leaves and snow. The night—the very dark—telling itself secrets, a constant black susurration, like breathing.
In the wild, everything has a story to tell, even the dead and dying. You just need to listen.
At the first sound of the low-flying plane—a small commuter jet or other private craft—Walton abandons his big stone fireplace and races outside, trying to catch a glimpse of it. But at his age, north of seventy, he doesn’t race anywhere fast enough, it seems, and he’s too late to spy a goddamn thing. But standing out in the cold, wrapped in a plume of his own breath, there’s no mistaking the echoes of it crashing.
He estimates the plane went down three, four miles north of his cabin. Still too far to see, given the tall trees, the leading edge of the old growth. There’s no name for it on any map, but for years, he and Kell gave places and things out here names of their own, and they called that dark, tangled spur Kellan’s Hollow, after his only son. It’s the southern flank of about two hundred acres of yellow poplar and hemlock, chinquapin oaks, bitternut hickories, rhododendron thickets, and pine stands. Up in Kellan’s Hollow, the trees are three or four hundred years old, and given the lack of skid trails and invasive species—other than old Walton himself—there hasn’t been a significant human disturbance there since the War of 1812, if not longer.
Not a place to get lost, to crash and burn.
He doesn’t bother telling all that to the new sheriff, Marcus Austin, when he makes the call a few minutes later. Just the facts: that a small plane crashed in the Cranberry Wilderness, at the foot of Black Mountain. But the kid’s clearly distracted by other things, clearly disbelieving. He goes on and on about the FAA and flight plans and radio reports, as if Walton doesn’t know all that, as if Walton hasn’t heard what he heard.
As if Walton is too old and losing it.
Austin isn’t a kid—hell, Walton thinks, he’s a war hero—and he isn’t even exactly the “new” sheriff anymore, holding the job for nearly two years since Walton himself abandoned it. But to folks in Wolfe County, truthfully to even Walton himself, Marcus Austin will always be the “new sheriff,” least until Walton passes or Austin proves otherwise.
And as Walton angrily cuts short the satellite call with Austin—the Iridium an unwanted extravagance Kell bought him—the worst of it is not that the war hero doesn’t believe him or dismisses him so easily out of hand. It’s that Walton already started wondering months ago about his own sanity, about losing his goddamn marbles.
Worrying about truly going crazy out here alone, listening to the wilderness, and all the sounds he started hearing, or imagining, out in the dark. But Walton knows he didn’t imagine the plane. Standing out again on his wraparound porch, he can still smell the smoke, the stink of jet fuel.
