“So much death.” Arnold took a seat beside Joe, lowering his head into his hands. Arnold was not an emotional man by nature. He looked more like a thick tree trunk with a face, carrying a stone-cold expression without the wrinkles caused by smiles and tears. But he lost himself; releasing emotions he’d kept in check since he’d been asked to join Dale on this little expedition. He’d gone fishing with Bob and Fred not too long ago, all three of them standing in hip waders along the shore of the Beaverhead River in Montana, laughing as they hadn’t caught a thing. Now they were dead, murdered by some nightmarish creature right before his eyes.
“We have a very difficult choice to make.” Joe spoke slowly, taking his time to say it right. He had thought it over, mulling over such a sick and twisted notion, yet somehow he knew this was right. “We need to dispose of these bodies.”
“What exactly are you suggesting?” Dale took a seat beside him, leaning forward with his fingers laced together. He kept his voice level despite the idea brewing in his mind, steaming like a fresh pot of coffee.
“We can’t let this incident destroy this park any further.” Joe took a deep breath and collected himself. “We need to dispose of these bodies.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Arnold looked up from his hands, tears streaming down his face. “You think we should bury our friends out in the woods and disgrace their memory with a lie?” Arnold stood and closed the distance, punching Joe hard across the face, knocking him off the bench and onto his back. “How about we bury you out there?”
“Cool down!” Dale stepped in front of Arnold, pressing a firm hand to his chest. “Calm yourself and have a seat. Now.” Dale gave a firm look, pushing him back with his eyes. “Sit!” Dale waited until Arnold took a seat across from them, his body language screaming out in anger, his shoulders heaving. Dale reached down and took Joe’s hand, not really sure if he should be helping him up. The notion had made him quite angry, perplexed really. “Now be specific. What the hell are you suggesting?”
Joe took a seat on the bench, taking a moment to catch his breath. The punch from such a large man had more than rang his bell, but the pain in his back and arm upon impact far outweighed the throbbing of his jaw. It hurt to open his mouth, burning the hinges of his jaw.
“Our friends deserve a more honorable death than being mauled by that creature, I do agree.” Joe closed his eyes and willed away the pain, pushing his jaw back into place with mental hands. “I’m suggesting an alternative to the truth. Something that will give our friends the dignity they deserve while preserving the park.”
“Preserving this precious park from what?” Arnold spat.
“If we let friends and family members, including any authorities that might ask, know the particulars of these deaths we’ll have this park swarming with archeological surveyors. Government agencies will demand we scout the holes while biologists dig through that creature’s cavern. The tourists will be replaced with monster and UFO freaks, camping all along the highway with bright lights shining into the forest. I refuse to let this place become a sideshow.”
“So what then?” Arnold’s shoulders had dropped.
“I say we take your men and my rangers out into the woods and offer them a respectful funeral. We bury them in the woods nice and deep. We pick a beautiful, secluded part of the park, say a prayer and let them rest. We then tell their families that they lost their lives as heroes, that Andy and Rita smelled a gas leak inside the Inn. They got Bob and Fred to help them, but it exploded. They died protecting the Inn.” Joe straightened, feeling Rita and Andy deserved to be remembered as such. “Let them be a part of this park.”
Arnold looked to Dale, searching for fuel to feed his anger, but there was none. He pushed it back and listened to Joe’s plan, nodding with Dale as they reluctantly agreed. Dale didn’t want to deliver the news to anyone, but he felt this lie would help the families carry on; much easier to look past a hero lost in the flames as he fought gallantly than looking down on a mangled corpse that used to be a husband or father. It still felt wrong, but a better kind of wrong.
“I don’t know.” Dale shook his head, picturing the mounds of loose dirt and lightly covered leaves in the heart of the woods. “It just seems so wrong to lie.” Dale took a seat, feeling the pressure of too much weight on his shoulders. “These men, and Rita, deserve so much more.”
“They do. But I can’t risk the outside world knowing about this thing.”
Dale nodded, looking to Arnold. Arnold nodded but looked away, not wanting to look him in the eye. He felt as Dale did. “But what about them?” Dale pointed to the bodies beneath the tablecloths just a few inches from their shoes. “Did they all die fighting the fire as well? Just a bunch of employees so eager to volunteer?”
“No. We pack up their cabins and put them in the hole.”
“What about their families? What do we tell them when they ask where their children are?” Dale’s anger resurfaced.
“Nothing. Just that we ordered the evacuation and they took off as so many of these kids do.”
“This is wrong,” Arnold spoke up, his voice wavering with emotion.
“They weren’t supposed to be here anyway.” Joe pointed to the body at their feet. “Every year these kids either drive off a cliff or simply leave, tossing their old life to the wind. Now they remain dead whether we hold a memorial to their honor or dump them down some hole. Personally, I would rather bury them down there and let this whole incident be closed.”
Arnold looked down to the tablecloths with a heavy heart. He remembered the camera falling between them, smashing into a dozen pieces before Stew’s body had come down. That young man had been hiding up there ready to capture their heroics for profit, or maybe even just a few minutes of fame; pretty much spitting on the protection his friends had died for. So he looked at Joe and met his eyes, replacing his heated rage with a calm nod of his head.
“How do we do this?” Arnold asked softly.
“We have a backhoe parked behind the ranger station. We can use that to dig the graves for our friends. There’s also an ATV we can use to pull the bodies into the woods. Maybe lay them on some kind of small trailer. I won’t be able to do much lifting.” Joe placed his good hand to the wrapping about his arm, wincing from even the slightest pressure. “But I’ll stay behind and do the detailing. Cleaning up the blood and whatnot.”
“What about the damage to the Inn?” Dale leaned to his right and peeked down the hallway, seeing the debris scattered about the wood floor.
“We’ll just tell them some stupid tourist went off and left a hotplate plugged into the wall. No one will question us.”
They nodded in unison, looking from one to the other, none of them getting up. No one wanted to go through with this, not after they’d already gone through the strenuous task of defeating the beast. That should have been it; the creature’s death, followed by a clap on the back and then a celebratory beer or two at the local pub. But this wasn’t a happy ending. There was a mess that needed attending too.
“First things first. We need to search the Inn and find the bodies.”
45
S
onia had been the first body they found, stuffed into a tight corner up in the rafters. Arnold put on a rain slicker he’d found in the supply closet and some plastic gloves from the kitchen and he was thankful he had. He gripped the poor girl beneath the slashed remains of her arms and pulled her out from between two thick beams. He dragged her along the fourth floor walkway, uncomfortable with the distance between him and the floor.
“Got one coming down!” Arnold yelled over the railing.
“Okay, hold up!” Dale yelled back, running out into the center of the room to angle the tarps as close to her projected impact as possible. “Okay, let her go!” Dale immediately turned his head and plugged his ears, closing his eyes. He braved himself for that wet smack, the sound of Stew’s body plopping down on the hardwood floor still echoing through his mind.
Arnold took three quick breaths and rolled her over the side, turning his head and plugged his own ears. He counted to five and removed his fingers, looking down at the ravaged remains of the young girl, grateful she’d landed dead center in the tarp. He gave Dale a small nod as he continued his search, seeing Kelly’s folded body just to the right of where he’d found Sonia. The position of the body brought a sick taste of stomach acid to his throat. Her head was between her toes with her hands stretched out toward him along the ground. It looked like someone stretching before a run, but this was not a natural position. He took hold of her hands and turned away as he pulled her toward the railing. His stomach churned at the sound of her body unfurling, dragging along the ground until he reached the drop point.
“Have another one!” Arnold looked over the railing as Dale wrapped up the previous girl and slid another tarp into place.
Joe was spared the awful sound of raining corpses. He’d volunteered to clean the blood from the stairwell. Not his most favorite way to spend an afternoon, but with only one functional arm he was the perfect candidate for scrubbing. Unsure of the best way to get blood off the tacky carpet on the stairs or the hardwood floor, he’d gone out the emergency exit of the stairwell and headed down a short path to the storage shed where they kept the maids’ carts. He loaded one up with every cleaner on the shelves and pushed the cart up the trail. He gripped the cart with his good arm and bumped it with his hip, yelping every now and then from a jostle of the arm or a twist in the wrong direction. But it was still nice to be out in the open air with the sun beaming down on him. A little reminder that no matter how insane life may sometimes be, the sun will still shine and the world will still spin.
It was more of a chore to get the cart up the stairs and into the door. He stepped up onto the bottom stair and pulled it up after him, clenching his teeth while using the limited strength he had left. One small stair at a time, the words of Neil Armstrong echoed through his mind, mocking him for such a little chore. But he got it up the stairs and through the door, collapsing against the wall to catch his breath. His hand went to his coat’s inner pocket out of habit, but those days were over. No amount of liquor could wash the memories of last night from his mind. Nor should they. He wanted to remember as much of the bad as the good, otherwise he’d eventually wash out the memories of his son as well.
The sun moved across his legs through the small rectangular window in the emergency exit, a subtle reminder that he was once again fighting against the light. He pushed off the wall and began scrubbing the blood, thankful it was rather easy to remove from hardwood. The walls would prove to be a much larger challenge, eventually involving a ladder, but that wasn’t their top priority. Arnold had already done a thorough search of the first two floors circling the lobby. Now he would clean as much as he could while Arnold and Dale loaded the four bodies onto the carts, making their way up to the hole.
46
J
oe stood back and watched as Dale and Arnold took hold of the last tarp, grabbing it at both ends to get a better hold. Sonia, Stewart, and Richard had already been tossed into the hole. All four of them had been wrapped up in blue painter’s tarps like life-sized crapes. Dale got down on his knees and angled his end of the tarp into the hole, letting gravity pull Kelly’s remains down into the darkness. Joe couldn’t help but think back to Rita, finding her folded in half under a table in the restaurant. Her sweet face had been one of the only things to get him out of bed most mornings. Now it will haunt him for the rest of his life; looking into those glossy, lifeless eyes as they stared back at him from beneath the tablecloth, her chest torn open and her heart removed. He’d broken down, crying into his hands like a lost child, thankful he’d found her alone.
“It’s such a shame.” Dale stood, wiping his hands on his pants. “This would have never happened if these idiots had just left with the others.”
“I’m sure if they’d have known what they were in for they would have gone.” Joe couldn’t take his eyes off the hole. As hard as he squinted, there was nothing but darkness; no tiny hint of blue from the tarps, nothing but pure black. He looked up to the sky and marked the sun’s location. “We’d better get a move on. We’ve only got a few more hours of sunlight and I’d hate to bury our friends in the dark.”
“I think I’d hate to do anything out here in the dark, even with that thing being dead and all.” Arnold grunted as he and Dale slid a metal plate over the hole, covering it with a good four inches to spare on all sides. “Just kind of gives me the willies, you know?”
“I hear you.” Dale nodded, the same uneasy tension creeping up his spine. Never again would he willingly sit beside a campfire to hear a scary tale.
“What about the other holes throughout the park?”
Joe shook his head, wishing he had a better answer to give. But unless he went back down into the creature’s lair and sent smoke signals up through each hole, there was no way he could ever find them. Animals and wandering tourists would have to just watch their step.
Dale looked up to Joe. “What is it?”
“Nothing, just some dark thoughts.”
“Enlighten us.” Dale stood, hopping up onto the small wooden cart they’d borrowed from the gardener’s shed. “I think we’re beyond all shocks and scares at this point, at least while the sun’s still up.” Dale smiled without the humor touching his eyes. He hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours and his face showed it.
“What if there are more of them out there?” Joe kept his eyes glued to the metal plate, watching the dull gray disappear beneath the loose dirt and leaves Arnold was pushing over it. He half expected the plate to come flying off as a larger creature, the dead one’s father or mother, came leaping out to pull them down into its subterranean torture chamber. But the plate stayed where it was. “How can we be sure?”
“You saw the damage just one of those bastards caused. If there were more we would have seen them by now. Can’t contain that much malice beneath the earth and not be seen.”
“True.” Joe nodded, his eyes distant.
“But…”
“I don’t know.” Joe looked up for the first time since the first body had been fed into the hole, looking Dale directly in the eyes with grave sincerity. “I mean, how often do you really notice a shadow?”