Snowblind II: The Killing Grounds Read online

  SNOWBLIND:

  THE KILLING GROUNDS

  Michael McBride

  First Edition

  Snowblind: The Killing Grounds

  © 2015 by Michael McBride

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  Copy Editor: Steve Souza

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Other Books by Author

  Ancient Enemy

  F9

  Snowblind

  Sunblind

  Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:

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  For H Casper, Paul Nelson,

  Jason Phillips, and Matt Pontiff

  November 27th

  Wolf Creek Pass

  Today

  The Range Rover slews sideways as it rounds the bend near the first scenic overlook east of the Continental Divide. The driver pumps the brakes and manages to regain traction on the ice. Only a guardrail separates him from plummeting into the deep valley and to his death. The lodgepole pines clinging to the sheer slope are brown from the assault of pine beetles.

  This second storm had descended out of the blue. It was forecast to pass well to the southwest, through northern Arizona and New Mexico, but the El Niño winds kicked up off the Pacific and hurled the front against the western slope of the Rockies without warning. The road crews had barely had time to plow the pass from the last storm before the snow added a fresh dusting to the lingering ice. They’d already passed two cars that had slid off the road and were now buried under drifts, their taillights peering out like malevolent eyes, their occupants riding out the storm.

  Len Badgett wasn’t about to join them. He didn’t pay seventy-five grand for an SUV with the expectation of sleeping in it. He’d narrowly made it through before the Colorado Department of Transportation closed the pass and locked the gates behind him. A half-dozen long-haul truckers had been camped at the top of the pass. He briefly entertained the notion of pulling off and joining them, but he had a 10 a.m. deposition and wasn’t about to have his fast track to partnership derailed by Mother Nature. He’d driven this stretch of road a hundred times since his years as an undergrad and knew every bend and straightaway like the back of his hand.

  He wouldn’t be able to justify another night away, anyway. His wife thought he was attending a conference in Dallas and would kill him if she found out about the woman asleep in the passenger seat beside him.

  Ashley Gale was an intern at Halsey, Pruitt, and Kline and had claimed she could dust him on the slopes any day. They never found out, though. They didn’t make it out of the lodge once during the entire weekend. She wore yoga pants and a baggy wool sweater and had her legs drawn up to her chest. The curvature of her thighs and her butt, the way they tapered to her tiny waist—

  The rear of the vehicle kicks out. Len taps the brakes to straighten it out again. He stretches his fingers, then grips the wheel even tighter. He needs to focus. He can barely see the fresh white sheet that passes for the road through the onslaught of snowflakes. There are no brake lights to guide him, no tracks through the virgin snow. He keeps one eye on the guardrail to his right and eases closer to the center of the road. If any cars made it through before they closed the other side of the pass, he’ll see them coming with plenty of warning. At least he hopes he’ll be able to. The way the clouds have settled into the valley, he can barely see more than fifty feet ahead of him, let alone into the forest uphill and to his left, at the top of the twenty-foot embankment where they cut the highway into the side of the mountain.

  He passes a diamond-shaped sign, its face crusted with ice. It’s there to caution him that the road ahead has a seven percent grade, which means that for every hundred feet of travel, the road descends seven feet beneath him. Three hundred seventy feet for every mile. He eases off the gas and crosses farther into the oncoming lanes, away from the guardrail slowly vanishing under the snow.

  The windshield wipers flap back and forth.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  The blades are thick with ice and the arcs on his windshield seemingly narrow by the second. He turns up the blower on the defrost until it feels like the fires of hell blow directly into his eyes.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  Ashley stirs and mutters something unintelligible. She turns her face toward him. A lock of her long blond hair clings to the corner of her mouth.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  Len returns his attention to the road. His eyes are dry, tired. He turns up the radio and cracks the window. The cold air bites at his ear and clears the fog he hadn’t noticed forming at the periphery of the windshield. His fingertips are cold from gripping the wheel so hard. He makes a conscious effort to relax his grip and taps the brakes to slow even more.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  He glances at the speedometer.

  Twenty-five.

  Twenty.

  It’s a six-hour drive back to Denver under ideal conditions and it’s already quarter past ten. If he goes straight to the office, he can shower and change and be ready in half an hour, but he can’t show up with Ashley. He’ll have to drop her off—

  The ABS kicks in with a grinding sound and still the car slides around the curve. His heart rate accelerates and his bladder reminds him that the coffee was only ever on loan.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  The road widens to his right and he recognizes another overlook. Far below, the West Fork of the San Juan River flows beneath a sheet of ice. For the briefest of moments he considers pulling off, but he knows the roads will only get worse and his nerve is beginning to fade. There are no bars on his cell phone, so he can’t even call his wife to make up an excuse. If he stops now, she’ll end up calling his office when he doesn’t come home and learn that Dallas was a lie. She’ll check his credit card account online and see the charges for the lodge and an absurd amount of room service.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  He pushes on. The more snow that accumulates on the road, the better the traction will get. And with the weight of the car and the new all-season tires, he might as well be driving a tank.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  White rainbows begin to form where the blades fail to clear them, further narrowing his field of view. The snow intensifies and the world closes in around him.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  He eases off the gas.

  Twenty.

  Fifteen.

  He can’t ride the brakes or he’ll lose traction. Gravity encourages the speedometer to creep back up to twenty. He taps the brakes and slides.

  Tap, slide.

  Tap, slide.

  His breathing comes shallow and fast. The road winds to the left and he feels the car drifting farther and farther to the right, toward the bank of snow hiding the guardrail and the open air beyond it. He overcorrects and the car sli
des. He turns into it and steers toward the steep embankment to his left. The tires catch and he rounds the bend into a straightaway, his heart beating in his throat.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  Ashley shifts in the seat beside him. Her sweater falls from her shoulder, revealing her pale ivory skin, the curve of her collarbone, and the strap of her bra.

  Len forces his attention back to the road. The wind blows the snow downhill from the top of the mountain. The entire world seems to move sideways. The road vanishes and he’s forced to navigate by the evergreens and skeletal aspens to either side. When he can see them, anyway.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  He struggles to keep his tired eyes open against the heat, which is the only thing preventing his windshield from completely icing over. He taps the brakes again and again. The car bucks sideways each time, but the car barely slows. They can’t take the next bend with a head of steam like this.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  A blur of motion from the corner of his left eye.

  He turns to see a shape knifing through the blowing snow. He hits the brakes and a white form materializes in his headlights. The Range Rover slides sideways. He catches a final glimpse of it as the car goes into a spin.

  Thud.

  Thump-thump.

  The car whips around and comes to a stop, facing in the opposite direction. Its headlights reveal its own serpentine tracks through in the snow.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  “What was that?” Ashley says.

  Len looks at her, but only sees the spatter of blood on the passenger window behind her.

  “I don’t know.”

  He watches the snow blow through the headlights, sweeping the accumulation from the ground as quickly as it settles, burying their tracks before his very eyes.

  “Did we hit something?”

  Len doesn’t answer. In his mind, he’s running through every possible scenario and how he’s going to explain the potential damage to both his insurance company and his wife.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  He must have hit a deer. There was no other explanation. But he hadn’t seen antlers, and a deer would have put a crater in the side of his car.

  “Wait here,” he says.

  He opens his door and the light floods out onto the snow. The windswept crust crunches when he steps away from the vehicle. He ducks his head against the wind and walks around to the front of his car. A wash of fluid sizzles on the hood. His shadow stretches across the shin-deep snow toward a broad swath of crimson. He walks toward it on numb legs. There are spatters and droplets in no recognizable pattern, already turning pink as the snow covers them.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  “Christ,” he whispers, and looks up the road toward where he can barely see a dark hump on the ground, at the edge of sight. The trail of blood grows darker and more apparent as he approaches it.

  “What is it?” Ashley calls from behind him.

  “Get back in the car.”

  He hears her hop down into the snow and close the door.

  “Jesus. Is that blood? It’s all over the side—”

  “I said get back in the car!”

  The shape in the road doesn’t move. It’s too dark to see anything more than the pattern of blood around it.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  His entire body sags with relief when he’s close enough to see the animal’s fur blowing on the wind. If it had been a man, there would have been no way out of this situation, not while he had a witness with him. Life as he knew it would have come to an end. He would have lost his job and his wife and—

  Len stops in his tracks.

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  The animal’s fur is long and white, nearly indistinguishable from the snow.

  Another step closer and its shape begins to draw contrast.

  “What is that?”

  Ashley’s voice surprises him. He whirls to find her right behind him, limned by the glare of the headlights.

  “I…I don’t know.”

  Thoomp-shraa. Thoomp-shraa.

  He turns around and leans over the carcass. He reaches for it. Quickly retracts his arm.

  Takes a deep breath and tries again. Grips it by the flank. Rolls it over.

  “Dear Lord…”

  November 23rd

  Archuleta County

  Four Days Ago

  The GPS collar had transmitted an automatic emergency alert after twenty-four hours of inactivity. Usually, such an alarm was preceded by multiple alerts regarding diminishing activity suggestive of a sick or injured animal. In this case, however, the animal’s movement had coincided with that of the herd clear up until the moment it stopped moving entirely, which could mean one thing. The ram had fallen victim to either predation or poaching. Then again, the transmitter could have fallen out of its casing. They’d already experienced several incidents when the screws meant to bind the casing to the leather collar had disengaged and ended up on the forest floor or embedded into the flesh of the animal’s chest. Their hook-like ends were nearly impossible to disengage and had to be surgically removed.

  The bighorn sheep relocation project was Trey Seaver’s baby. Conservative estimates suggest that as recently as forty years ago there were two million bighorns scattered throughout the American and Canadian Rockies. Now there were maybe forty-five thousand in geographically isolated herds. Following the pneumonia epidemic that swept through the northern part of the state, they’d been forced to take drastic measures to ensure the survival of the most threatened populations, especially the herds in the RBS-9 range. In the last five years alone, twenty-six of the thirty-two radiocollared sheep died, twenty-two of them from pneumonia, and that was after the herd was cleared by a veterinary virologist. The problem was due to the contagion passing from herds of domesticated sheep, despite the animals never coming into direct contact with one another.

  It was Seaver who introduced the proposal to relocate the remaining herd—fourteen animals total, six of them collared—to the San Juan National Forest, clear down in the southwestern corner of the state. As a conservation biologist, it was his job to ensure the survival of the animals in their new habitat. It had only been three months and already he was facing the prospect of a second dead animal before the first breeding season. The first wandered onto Highway 160 and met with the grill of a Peterbilt hauling raw lumber for Pueblo. If he lost another ram, they’d be lucky to produce more than a couple lambs in the spring.

  While the GPS tracking software worked perfectly to log the positional data of the herd from a global perspective, it was essentially useless in the field. They’d only been able to narrow the signal to an area of one square mile of nearly vertical mountains and valleys, and hence he was reduced to using an old-school UHF tracker, like a real ranger.

  He raised the three-element antenna and watched the signal on the monitor of the radio telemetry unit, which consisted of three concentric circles around a crosshairs and a solid red beacon to mark the signal. The origin of the beacon was just over the rise to the west.

  The slope was slick with talus buried beneath several inches of fresh snow, rerouting him around the sheer escarpments and through the trees. The sheep might have been well suited for this environment, but he certainly wasn’t. If he slipped, he’d be a hundred feet downhill before he could even let out a yelp.

  He found a crevice between two granite cliffs and used the sides for leverage to climb up to the summit. It was hard to believe poachers would have gone to the effort to get all the way up here. He was five miles from the end of a ten-mile dirt road with a padlocked gate at the turnoff from a road few knew existed, and yet still he wore an orange vest over his black winter jacket with the Colorado Division of Wildlife patch on the sleeve. You never knew when you might pop over the top of a hill and find yourself staring down the barrel of a rifle, especially during hunting season. Most hunters he knew were except
ionally careful people, but it was staggering how many entered these mountains and never made it back out. Seaver chalked it up to alcohol and idiocy, two things that should never be combined in the vicinity of lethal weapons. After once watching an accountant from Boise look straight down the barrel of his loaded rifle in an effort to figure out why it wasn’t firing, he figured out that stupidity was likely a terminal condition.

  Seaver crowned the butte, from the top of which he could survey nearly the entire county. There wasn’t a single house as far as he could see, only impenetrable pine forests and snowcapped peaks. Devil’s Creek meandered through a slim meadow at the bottom of the valley, although the stream itself wouldn’t reemerge from beneath the accumulation until sometime in March. Having grown up on the East Coast, it always amazed him to find such vast expanses of nature completely untouched by man. Today, however, the last thing he wanted was to navigate a veritable maze of pine trees to find a dead ram.

  Fortunately, he didn’t have to look that hard. The animal’s tan body stood out against the snow below him, in the lee of the butte.

  He found a game trail to the south and half-scurried, half-slid to the base of the rock formation, which towered twenty-five feet over his head. The steep hill was as slick as glass, so he stayed right up against the embankment as he worked back north toward where the ram lay, its fur dusted with frost. Its head was crumpled forward in such a way that its forehead was braced against the ground, as though butting it. The tips of its curved horns were embedded in the dirt. Its front legs were pinned underneath it, its rear legs stiff and stretched straight out behind its white rump.