Beast

by William V. Burns

It was stinking hot when he pulled the police cruiser off the road. The park Rangers were waiting for him in their Land Rover. They roared along a rutted dry wash until they reached the campsite. Lieutenant Allen Thoreson climbed out and walked over to the collapsed, slashed tent. The young woman’s torn body lay inside, blood staining much of the nylon material. She was dead, and looking down at her he knew… it had been a screaming, tortured death. He felt old.

The crime scene techs photographed the items found near the tent, and at the Lieutenant’s direction, bagged many of the objects. Thoreson slowly came to a conclusion he had dreaded.
“Jenkins. I need to ask you a question.”
The Ranger stepped back to the tent.
“Look at these clothes. They don’t all belong to one woman. They’re two different sizes, two completely different styles.”
“That explains what I was just looking at. Come on over to the side here.”
The Ranger pointed at the ground.
“Here you see some marks in the sand. They’re not well defined, but they lead away from the tent. Here, farther on, you can see they are footprints – spaced far apart, and driven into the soil with some force. Running. Small footprints, a boy or girl, not an adult. And there, just before that brush, you can see there’s a struggle, the ground is all thrashed up. There’s blood spatter, and some drag marks.”
Thoreson shouted back at the techs, and soon they were photographing the markings and scooping up the bloody soil.

The body had been gathered into the black zipped bag, labeled, and wrapped in a plastic sheet. Thoreson watched one of the techs tape the shrouded body to a stretcher. The Lieutenant and two of the park Rangers quietly picked up the stretcher and loaded it into the back of the Land Rover. Ranger Jenkins wiped his forehead with a big red handkerchief.
“We’ve got aerial search up until dark, and two teams of Rangers in the brush looking for the girl. We might not find her. Her body could have been dragged into a crevice or under some chaparral.”
The hot sun reddened as it sank down to the horizon.

It was night in the semidesert, and she hunted. Her flanks were thin, her tongue leathery, and she hungered. It was burning in her stomach, driving her forward.

She came to the top of a small hill, and moved silently in the shadows mixed with the moonlight. She lifted her head and sniffed the air delicately. Her prey was near. She licked her lips and crept down the slope. Her eyes, if anyone had been in the right place to see them, glowed in a reflected light. There was a fire, and she would not approach closer to her prey this night.

Consumed by her hunger, her thirst, and the drive to kill, she did not sleep that night. In the dark, she found a lizard and killed it, crunched its small body in her jaws, and took what small nourishment she could. She licked off the blood and lowered her head for a while, panting. She knew he was there, just a few paces away, and the proximity of her prey gave her a perverse comfort.

Two days earlier she had picked up his trail, coming across a small buried cache of food remnants and another of his urine and feces. Cautiously in the dawn she followed the line of his marks, here an impression in the sand of one foot, there a broken twig, and a hint of some scent that did not belong in the wilderness. She sensed he was traveling quickly, so she ran lightly along the sand and rocks, sniffing and looking for trail. A day and a half she had no sight of her prey, but the sign was fresh and clear.

Dawn broke, and the blue glow on the horizon woke him. He rolled out of the sleeping bag, stood up, and stretched. Time to get moving, before the sun came over the horizon. He made his best time before noon. The hiker loved the wilderness. The air was so clean, and he felt free here, as in no other place. No rules, except those of nature. The hiker felt it was his world, where he was the ruler, the sovereign. He held his arms out wide, and surveyed his realm.

His goal was to make sixty miles in three days, not in a straight line, of course. The hiker would follow no trail, but the course would be a curve, from the area he had just left back to where his truck was parked off the shoulder of Old Highway 80 – where his vacation had started four days earlier. He prided himself on being in shape – all year he trained for this, jogging with a backpack on, and building strength and endurance in the gym. How else could he break all the rules of society without being the strongest, most powerful living thing in the wilderness?

He buried the trash from the night before, anything which would decompose. The hiker wanted to leave the site as he had found it. Wrappers and containers packed out. He checked his boots and headed out. Another beautiful day in the wilderness. The sky had thin lines of clouds, the wind was light, and he could hear birds. The hiker had his bush hat for later in the day when it got hot.

The day was unbearably hot, and she yearned for shelter from the sun, but her prey moved on, and so she did too. When she could, she would trot down into a wash, or pass slowly under a tree or bush, for the moments of shade, but they were never enough. As the sun rose towards its highest point, her tongue became dry, and she could feel the heat on her head. She walked on through the pain and her thirst, following the trail. Once there was a muddy drool at the bottom of a creek bed, and she bent her tongue to it, and lapped up a few drops of milky liquid. She rolled in the mud for what relief she could take from the heat, and then continued her hunt.

Only the instinct to kill kept her alive that day. Her flanks ached, her vision was blurry, and her senses dulled as she tracked him. The sun seemed to stay at the top of the sky forever. She was already too dry to sweat much. Then she had fortune. A small rodent popped out of its burrow, spurred by some unknown event, and she made a quick kill. The protein in its small body and the taste of blood invigorated her, and she found new energy. The sun descended from its zenith, and her luck was complete, for she caught a flash of movement at the top of the next hill, a movement that repeated itself a few seconds later. Her prey had shown himself. She quickened her pace, mouth still painted with blood.

The hiker paused at the crest of the hill, and rested a few minutes. How beautiful the semidesert was, what a jewel this national park was – he could see a hawk circling far above, and the clear sky for miles around shone with a clear, deep blue, with a hint of indigo. The days alone in the wilderness brought him close to the life around him. He felt a kinship with the hawk, a creature that could silently view, glide on the breeze, and then stoop and kill without warning. Magnificent. He poured some water on his hat to cool his head, and then set his pace down the slope, into the flats.

Thoreson and the Rangers smelled the same, felt the same. Failure. Two exhausting days of a fruitless search for the girl. They knew her name now, and the older woman had been her aunt. Nothing mattered except their failure. They returned to the small dusty town with its single gas station and stucco motel. Even with a shower and clean sheets, sleep would not easily come.

She could smell him now, the same fragrance she had scented before, fruity, musky, unmistakable. She was full in the stalk, and every sense was locked on the prey now. Nothing short of her own death would stop her. She panted softly as she ran. The air was slightly cooler now, as the sun cast longer shadows on the sandy ground. Each bush and dune, each boulder and bluff trailed cool areas where she could pause, check her prey, and remain unseen. She took care to make no noise, creeping over branch and rock, gaining inches now, rather than feet, sliding in and out of cover as her prey walked along the trail.

The hiker crested the hill. There it was. A bit disappointing, really. The truck parked in the shade of the bluffs would transform him. No longer would he be the lawless, free adventurer, mystically connected to the wild – but just another accountant in a nameless building in a nameless large city. He smiled. It was time to be Nobody again, at least until next year, and next year’s pilgrimage. The hiker moved down the slope.

She circled, and came back up the bluff, and waited, still as the stone itself. Her eyes narrowed, and her haunches tightened, ready. He came back into sight below her, and put his pack down. She became a rigid spring and her vision narrowed to a small circle, with the hiker all she could see. Her back came up slowly. The hiker unzipped the pack, and drew out his keys.

He paused a moment, and felt uncomfortable for some reason. The hiker looked up, and was slammed to the hard ground instantly by her full weight as she sprang from the bluffs above him. He screamed for only a few moments.

The phone in the motel room buzzed. The Lieutenant stopped brushing his teeth, spat out the residue, and walked over to the receiver.
“Thoreson.”
“Lieutenant. We need you to come downstairs. There’s another body for us to look at.”
Thoreson dressed quickly and went downstairs.
Ranger Jenkins sat in a plush chair. He scrambled to his feet when Thoreson entered the lobby. “We have some more information now. We’ve got a unit on the scene out on Highway 80. There’s a dead male Caucasian, naked, with his skull caved in. There’s a bloody rock next to his head. The officers on the scene report a backpack with the usual hiking gear inside – and a few extras – earrings with blood on them, and what appears to be human body tissue wrapped in plastic. The whole mess is more than fifty miles from the first crime scene.”

The Land Rover screamed along the highway. The radio crackled and buzzed. Jenkins talked into the mike, set it back in its holder. The driver stood on the brakes, and turned the wheel. They flew over the median and roared back in the direction they had come from.
“We’re going to the hospital. They found the girl, alive. Highway Patrol pulled her over on old Highway 80 doing more than a hundred miles an hour, headed north in a silver Ford F-250. She’s not talking much… seems very traumatized.”

The hospital was a small one, tidy gray concrete and smoked glass. The Lieutenant and the Ranger entered through the Emergency Room to find two local police officers and the other Ranger, who spoke up when they came in.
“Looks like she killed him, took his clothes and his truck. We don’t think he brought her along with him. I’d say she broke away and hid after the attack on the campsite, then followed him all the way to his truck. She’s in 103.”

She was small for a fourteen-year-old girl, maybe ninety pounds. The hospital bed seemed gigantic by comparison. There was an IV holder with a saline drip.

Her drawn, scratched face was covered with a clear oxygen mask. Her short blonde hair was draggly and matted. The door opened, and a cheerful middle-aged nurse rolled in a cart with glass tubes in plastic racks. She took the girl’s hand, and drew a few tubes of blood. The girl’s eyelids fluttered open. Thoreson bent over to ask a question, but found he could not speak. Her eyes were shiny, dark, wild, and terrifying.

–William V. Burns