The tattered wind sock hangs limp against its pole. Weeds erupt through fissures in the runway where she stands, and in the distance, support beams rise from heaps of twisted metal—three hangars, long since toppled upon a half dozen single- and twin-engine airplanes. She watches the Beechcraft that brought her here lift off the ground, props screaming, and climb to clear the pines a quarter mile past the end of the runway. She walks into the field. The midmorning sun blazing down on her bare shoulders. The grass that grazes her sandaled feet still cold with dew. Someone jogs toward her, and beyond them she can see the team already at work, imagines they started the moment the light became worth a damn.
The young man who has come to greet her smiles and tries to take her duffel bag, but she says, “No, I’ve got it, thanks,” and keeps walking, her eyes catching on the colony of white canvas tents standing at the northern edge of the forest. Still probably an insufficient distance to avoid the stink when the wind blows out of the south.
“Good flight in?” he asks.
“Little bumpy.”
“It’s great to finally meet you. I’m using two of your books in my thesis.”
“Nice. Good luck with it.”
“You know, there’s a few decent bars in town. Maybe we could get together and talk sometime?”
She ducks under the yellow crime-scene tape that circumnavigates the pit.
They arrive at the edge.
The young man says, “I’m doing my thesis on—”
“I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
“Matt.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, Matt, but could you give me a minute alone here?”
“Oh, sure. Yeah, of course.”
Matt heads off toward the tents, and she lets her bag slide off her shoulder into the grass, estimating the dimensions of the pit at thirty-five meters by twenty meters, and presently attended to by nine people, seemingly oblivious to the flies and the stench. She sits down and watches them work. Nearby, a man with shoulder-length graying hair buries a pickax into a wall of dirt. A young woman—probably another intern—flits from station to station, filling a bucket with backfill to be added to the mound of grave dirt near the southern edge of the pit. Everywhere that human remains have been exposed, red flags stand thrust into the earth. She stops counting them after thirty. The nearest anthropologist is on the verge of pedestaling a skeletonized body, down to the detail work now—poking chopsticks between ribs to clear out the dirt. Other skeletons lie partially exposed in the upper layers. The remnants of human beings with whom she will become closely acquainted in the weeks to come. Deeper, the dead are likely mummified, possibly even fleshed depending on the water content of the grave. Next to the autopsy tent on the other side, tables have been erected in the grass, and at one of them, a woman she recognizes from a previous UN mission is at work reassembling a small skeleton on a black velvet cloth to be photographed.
She realizes she’s crying. Tears are fine, even healthy in this line of work, just never on the clock, never in the grave. If you lose control down there, you might never get it back.
Approaching footsteps snap her out of her reverie. She wipes her face and looks up, sees Sam coming toward her, the bald and scrawny Australian team leader who always wears a tie, even in the field, his rubber boots swishing through the grass. He plops down beside her, reeking of decomp. Rips off the pair of filthy, elbow-length gloves and tosses them in the grass.
“How many have you taken out so far?” she asks.
“Twenty-nine. Mapping system shows a hundred and seventy-five still down in there.”
“What’s the demographic?”
“Men. Women. Children.”
“High-velocity GSWs?”
“Yeah, we’ve collected a ton of .223 Remington casings. But this is another weird one. Same thing we saw in that mass grave in Denver. Maybe you heard about it.”
“I haven’t.”
“Dismemberment.”
“Have you determined what was used?”
“In most instances, it’s not a clean break, like a machete or ax strike. These bones are splintered.”
“A chainsaw would do that.”
“Yeah. So I’m thinking they cut everyone down with AR-15s and then went through with chainsaws. Making sure no one crawled out.”
The blond hairs on the back of her neck stand erect, a rod of ice descending her spine. The sun burns down out of the bright June sky, more intense for the elevation. Snow still lingers above timberline on the distant peaks.
“You okay?” Sam asks.
“Yeah. This is my first trip out west. I’d been working New York City up until now.”
“Look, take the day if you want. Get yourself acclimated. You’ll need your head right for this one.”
“No.” She stands, hoisting the duffel bag out of the grass and engaging that compartment in her brain that functions solely as a cold, indifferent scientist. “Let’s go to work.”
*
There is no decent place to stand in a massacre. —Leonard Cohen
The president had just finished addressing the nation, and the pundits were back on the airwaves, scrambling, as they had been for the last three days, to sort out the chaos.
Dee Colclough lay watching it all on a flatscreen from a ninth-floor hotel room ten minutes from home, a sheet twisted between her legs, the air-conditioning cool against the sweat on her skin.
She looked over at Kiernan, said, “Even the talking heads look scared.”
Kiernan stubbed out his cigarette and blew a river of smoke at the television.
“I got called up,” he said.
“Your Guard unit?”
“I have to report tomorrow morning.” He lit another one. “What I hear, we’ll just be patrolling neighborhoods.”
“Keeping the peace until it all blows over?”
He glanced at her, head cocked with that boyish smirk she’d fallen for six months ago when he’d deposed her as an adverse expert witness in a medical malpractice case. “Does anything about this make you think it’s going to blow over?”
A new chyron appeared across the bottom of the screen— 45 dead in mass shooting at a church in columbia, south carolina.
“Jesus Christ,” Dee said.
Kiernan dragged heavily on his cigarette. “Something’s happening,” he said.
“Obviously. The whole country—”
“That’s not what I mean, love.”
She looked at him.
For a moment, he just sat there, smoking.
“It’s been coming on now, little by little, for days,” he said finally.
“I don’t understand.”
“I barely do myself.”
Through the cracked window of their hotel room—distant gunshots and sirens.
“This was supposed to be our week,” she said. “You were going to tell Myra. I was—”
“You should go home, be with your family.”
“You’re my family.”
“Your kids at least.”
“What is this, Kiernan?” She could feel an angry knot bulging in her throat. “Are we not in this together? Are you having second thoughts—”
“It’s not that.”
“Do you have any concept of what I’ve already sacrificed for you?”
She couldn’t see all of his face in the mirror on the opposite wall, but she could see his eyes. Gaping into nothing. A thousand-yard stare. He was someplace other than this room. He’d gone deep, and she’d sensed it even before this moment, in the way he’d made love to her. Something held back. Something missing.
She climbed out of bed and walked over to her dress, where she’d thrown it against the wall two hours earlier.
“You don’t feel it?” he asked. “Not at all?”
“Feel what?”
“Forget it.”
“Kiernan—”
Copyright © 2024 by Blake Crouch. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
