The Trail Read online

  The ceiling sloped back up to a regular height. Before him, a clean, varnished door stood, strangely out of context in the muck of the underground lair. Red light seeped from underneath its frame.

  Adams approached the door, took a deep breath, and turned the knob.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Susan cried. Tears gathered along the rims of her eyelids and plopped down on the dead leaves. She felt Scott’s sleeping bag one more time, running her hands up and down the nylon, just to be sure he wasn’t sleeping in the folds. It was empty. The flannel liner felt cool to the touch.

  She’d worried about Kim when she first saw her pull up with Jack. She’d worried about Kim’s black hair. Skinny waist. Large breasts. But she hadn’t thought Scott would actually do anything. It wasn’t that Scott was husband-of-the-year. Faithfulness was not his greatest quality. She knew his trips abroad were trips “with a-broad,” as one of Scott’s colleagues drunkenly joked at a work party. The comment stung, but Susan knew the deal. Over the past few years Scott’s infidelity had become an unspoken agreement. A don’t ask, don’t tell situation. But what were the terms of the agreement?

  It hurt Susan to consider the depth of their relationship, but she had to figure out how things really worked. If she planned to dump Scott, and right now she did, she needed to know what she was leaving—so she would never make the same mistake again. The arrangement was partly her fault, and Susan knew it, and hated herself for it. She never confronted Scott about sleeping with other women because Scott bought her lavish things. The house, the car—hell, even all the camping equipment. You can sleep with other people, as long as you continue to take care of me, had become the unspoken assumption.

  At first it had seemed like a good deal. Particularly considering the fact that Susan’s job as a fledging financial analyst paid her next to nothing. Scott had the glamorous job and the money, and if she had to overlook a few of his flaws to make it work, she’d smile and do just that.

  Still, she wasn’t happy. Not really. It wasn’t about the sex, either. It was all about trust. Respect. She had the feeling that they were on different teams. Yes, they had a nice, new-construction home in a desirable development that their friends sufficiently envied, but they were still on different teams. Disconnected. The house didn’t change anything. Susan felt that they were merely projecting the illusion of a marriage, of friendship even, when they were at dinner parties or evenings in the city with friends.

  That was another problem. Scott never wanted to hang out with her alone. Just the two of them. She felt like she was just a prop he dragged around from one party to the next. The blonde wife. Never really a partner, just an object. Scott had probably married her because he felt it would help his career. A married journalist suggested a degree of seriousness and drive that a bachelor writer could not convey.

  The camping trip was a perfect example of never being alone with Scott. Why did Jack show up? Did Scott call him? Was this all set up beforehand? Did Scott just pretend to be surprised? Who knows? The only thing that Susan knew for sure was that she would never be able to understand her husband. Or trust him.

  It’s strange, she thought. I came to the woods to be closer to Scott, and right now, I’ve never felt so apart from him.

  Susan found a flashlight next to Scott’s sleeping bag. She flipped the switch and started hiking down the trail. The beam bobbed up and down in the darkness. She made up her mind to confront Scott in the act. To screw this bullshit “unspoken agreement” and speak loudly. She knew Scott was a pig, but she’d never thought he’d have the audacity to have sex with someone while she slept so close by.

  The moonlight bathed everything in a blue half-glow, which made the walking fairly easy. Soon, Susan heard the gentle splashing of a small creek. Next to the water she could discern two figures, one on top of the other. She turned her flashlight off and crept closer.

  When she was only ten feet away, she hid behind a tree and observed the two figures. Kim was on the ground, and Scott was on top of her. Tears formed in Susan’s eyes again, only this time she refused to acknowledge them. She felt a slow rage building in her soul. She was about to step out and confront them when she noticed something strange. She peered closer and she began to scream.

  Kim’s legs and arms were thrashing wildly. Scott had his hand over her mouth—suffocating her.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Jack woke up in the darkness and found himself alone. He unzipped the tent and shambled outside.

  “Scott?” he called. “Kim? Susan?”

  His lower back hurt from sleeping on the ground, and his head throbbed from too many Yuengling Lagers. He felt around the campsite, drowsily looking for a flashlight and a bottle of water. His mouth was dry and his tongue tasted of old leather. He groped around in the dark. The moonlight faded under a blanket of low hanging clouds.

  “Hahaha…”

  Jack froze. The laughter came from a small outcropping of trees not far away.

  “Haha…”

  Who the fuck would be out in the woods now? In the middle of the fucking night? It wasn’t Scott. He could tell right away that it wasn’t Scott. Something about the laugh suggested a much larger, more powerful person.

  “Scott? Kim? Susan?” he called again, this time more feebly. Jack wasn’t sure if he wanted to draw attention to himself or remain silent. His instincts told him to shut up.

  Jack kept looking for a flashlight. Glass clattered and cracked; he’d knocked over a couple empty beer bottles. He froze. He could still smell the charred nylon of the tent, now just a blackened husk on the ground.

  “Haha…” The weird laugh came again. This time from much closer.

  “Who is it? Who’s there?”

  Branches twitched and cracked in the darkness.

  “Who the fuck is there?”

  For a fraction of a second Jack thought about bears. He almost smiled. For all the wilderness camping he’d done in the woods, he always thought it was funny that he’d never actually known what to do if he encountered a bear. Now, this was not a bear. A bear doesn’t fucking laugh. Still, the same rules applied to a bear encounter as a crazy person in the woods.

  Jack had heard two theories on bears. One said climb a tree. The other said bang pots and pans. Pots and pans wouldn’t scare a human away…but Jack knew what would.

  He lunged back into the tent and pawed frantically through his backpack. Finally he found what he was after: Kim’s gun. The pistol felt heavier than he remembered. When he emerged from the tent, the movement in the woods intensified. Tree limbs thrashed and bent in all directions. The low laugh increased to a high-pitched wheeze.

  “Who is it? Who are you?” shrieked Jack. “What do you want?”

  God, I wish I could find the flashlight, he thought. Jack kept his eyes on the enigmatic form in the woods.

  “Who are you?”

  The branches parted and a figure emerged through the brush. Jack raised the gun and pointed it at the center of the shadowy silhouette. Clouds drifted aside; moonlight glinted off something in the figure’s right hand.

  Knife. It’s a knife!

  Jack squeezed the trigger. The sound of the shot echoed through the woods and reverberated off the trees. The figure careened backwards, sprawled to the ground, and tried to pull itself up again.

  Jack fired a second shot that blasted off the top of the person’s skull. After catching his breath, he moved forward uncertainly and saw the beer bottle near the dead man’s right hand reflecting cold starlight.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  The door was stuck. Adams rattled the handle. Nothing happened. He took a step backward and prepared to throw his weight into getting it. The academy taught rookies about breaking down doors. Adams was good at it. That skill had come in handy a number of times. Arresting meth heads. Illegal searches for evidence.

  Never in a million years did Adams think his training officer could imagine him now: beneath a supposedly abandoned church, missing
his firearm and flashlight, fleeing from a pedophile priest who was possibly resurrecting a cult that involved half the town. No, Adams had never quite been trained for this…

  He looked at the door again.

  Fuck, he thought. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. He didn’t want to do it. Didn’t want to enter this room. Didn’t want to know what machine screamed behind the door. Didn’t want to know its purpose. It felt like a crossroads in his life. Would he turn around and find a way out? Or attempt to break down the door?

  Adams took three steps backwards, then barreled at the door with all his force. The door didn’t break, but he could tell that it would give with a couple more strikes. He smashed again and again at the barrier. Inside, the grinding of the machine intensified.

  Bam! Bam! Bam! He thrust with his right shoulder repeatedly until the hinges bent and broke away.

  The first thing Adams noticed was the smell of blood. Not cold, dried blood, like what he was used to in the autopsy room. No, this was the thick, earthy funk of actual human blood, condensed and contained in a windowless, airless room.

  He almost fainted. Almost vomited. Stood shaking, nearly insane with fear at the sight before him.

  The room was shaped in a perfect circle. Hooks hung from the ceiling along the perimeter, roughly three feet apart. Each hook featured a corpse. Newly dead. Some still twitching. Adams estimated twenty bodies in all. Men. Women. Children. Old. Young. All dead. A few faces he recognized: Ethel Saunders, the teller at the local bank. Greg Faust, cashier at the weed and seed store. Most were strangers. They had that L. L. Bean catalogue look of weekend adventurers, out to explore the wilds of central Pennsylvania.

  Adams finally did vomit. He staggered, spit, and vomited again. It was too much. Too unreal. The room pitched and spun. The corpses twirled in the red light. He stumbled to the center of the room, where the machine bleated maddeningly. Adams peered into the center of the machine.

  “Oh, my God!” he screamed.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  “Scott! What the hell are you doing?” Susan screamed. She burst forward from her hiding spot behind the tree. Scott, fully clothed, was on top of Kim. Kim, also clothed, was on the ground. Scott’s hands covered her mouth.

  He jerked his head around. “Susan! What are you doing here?” He released his hands. Kim heaved up and down, rubbing her face, slowly regaining her breath.

  “What are you doing here?” Susan demanded. “And what the hell were you doing to Kim?”

  Scott glanced at Kim, and in the half second exchange, he determined a number of important things. First, he would get away with it. Kim wouldn’t tell. And he knew that Susan would believe him. He’d been caught in more incriminating predicaments before. Okay, this one was pretty bad, but he’d been in worse situations. Luckily, they were clothed, and only starting the third time.

  “Kim was screaming. I had to quiet her down. She was screaming her goddamn head off. I didn’t want her to wake everyone! I did it for the rest of you.”

  Kim sat on the ground. She had a blank look on her face.

  “I didn’t hear her screaming. Why would she scream, anyway? I’m sure the sex wasn’t that good.”

  Ha! Scott had to hand it to Susan. She was funny sometimes, in her own sardonic way. When Susan made zingers like these, at parties, or particularly in the moment of crisis, like now, Scott wondered if Susan was smarter than he thought. He believed he had Susan all figured out, but there was a part of him that wondered if he was being played. He sometimes felt like a poker player sitting smugly on a full house, while the person across the table held a royal flush.

  “Sex? What are you talking about, Susan? You’re ridiculous. I just woke up and found that Kim was missing. I got worried. I started to think about the talk in the newspaper of those missing hikers. And that hick sheriff that tried to scare us. I thought that I should go look for her. Isn’t that what you would’ve wanted me to do?”

  “And you just happened to find her out here? In the middle of the night?”

  “Yes, I found her. And thank God I did, too.”

  Susan laughed. “And what about the screaming?”

  “The screaming? Jesus, Susan, I told you. Kim just started screaming her head off. She said she saw someone or something.”

  Kim suddenly broke in. “I did see someone. He had a red shirt on. And curly black hair.”

  “How did you see someone, Kim?” Susan asked. “It’s completely dark out.”

  “My flashlight. He was in the beam of my flashlight for just a second, and then he was gone.”

  Scott looked at Kim. She really did believe she’d seen something.

  “I had a gun,” Kim said, quietly, almost to herself. “But now it’s gone.”

  Scott turned to her. “What do you mean you had a gun but now it’s gone?”

  “I packed a gun in my suitcase, but I went to get it earlier today, and it’s gone. Missing.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Scott screamed. “You brought a gun? You’re crazy. You’re fucking crazy.”

  The sound of a pistol shot ripped through the forest.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Jack stood motionless with the gun in his right hand. Smoke wisped from the barrel. He looked at the beer bottle next to the dead man. Oh, my God! Who did I kill? Who is this? Jack bent and rolled the body over. He saw all the telltale signs of an average weekend hiker: the small backpack, the trail map, the plastic water container.

  This wasn’t a murderer. This wasn’t a killer. This was just a drunk hiker in the woods.

  Then a thought entered Jack’s mind that nearly made him faint: I’m the murderer.

  He shone the flashlight beam on the head of the hiker and saw the exposed brain mass. I’m a killer.

  Jack ran from the tent to the man’s body, back and forth with blind adrenaline, but seemingly no clear plan. His first instinct was to run away. His next thought was to bury the body. He groped in the tent, searching for a spade or shovel. He tried to remember if he’d used one setting up the tarp, but he couldn’t remember anything now. That seemed so long ago. He remembered daylight. He wanted daylight now. Wanted this nightmare to end.

  No time for that shit. Gotta get it together. Gotta do something. He found a small spade next to Scott’s backpack and started driving the blade into the ground. Digging so hard and fast that his hands began to bleed.

  “Jack!” someone called from the woods. “Jack, where are you? Jack?” A flashlight beam bounced down the trail. Soon, Scott, Susan, and Kim emerged from the shadows.

  “Jack—what happened?” Scott asked. “We heard a gunshot.”

  Jack stood up and shrugged. Slowly the attention of the others settled on the dead body on the ground. Kim lurched sideways and retched in the bushes. Susan grabbed Scott’s shoulder and buried her face in his chest.

  “What the hell happened, Jack?” Scott demanded. “You shot someone? You fucking shot someone?”

  Jack looked down at the ground, away from the body. “No, it’s not like that. It’s not like that, man.”

  “Yes it is,” Scott persisted. “You fucking shot someone. Oh, my God!”

  “No, it’s not like that.”

  Susan pulled away from Scott and screamed, “Then what happened? Who is this person? What did you do?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack replied. “I don’t know. He scared me. He was laughing in the bushes. I thought he was gonna kill me. I asked who was there, but he just kept laughing.”

  “Oh, my God,” Susan said. “I can’t believe this is happening!”

  “You shot him because he was laughing?” Scott demanded.

  “No, not just that. I guess I started thinking about those missing hikers. I thought that guy was here to get me. To kill me.”

  “Jesus Christ, he’s not a killer. Look at him. Look at him, Jack. He’s just a regular guy. Missing hikers, Jesus!” Scott said.

  There was silence for a moment as the reality of the situation began to sink in. Susan brok
e the silence with a question: “Where’d you get the gun, Jack?”

  “Kim’s suitcase.”

  “Why’d you take it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I saw something earlier. Like some Satanic shit carved in the trees. I guess I freaked.”

  “Yeah, no shit you freaked!” Scott yelled.

  Susan interrupted, “Okay, Scott, enough! Jack screwed up. The question is…what are we gonna do now?”

  Scott took a deep breath and rubbed both temples. “Alright…well…alright.” He took another deep breath and exhaled. “Okay, the way I see it. We can either tell the police. Or bury the body and pretend this never happened. Any votes?”