This isn’t my first encounter with one of the wild pigs. Technically, they don’t exist in the Yukon, but years ago, Rockton experimented with livestock, including a crossbreed for northern climates. The herds had escaped and gone feral.
I keep my gun aimed at the fleeing porcine as it crashes through the undergrowth.
“Hey, Casey,” Petra says as she tramps toward Dalton. “You had a perfect shot there. Could have caught us some bacon.”
“I don’t think anyone would have wanted it,” I say, cutting my gaze toward where the boar had been feeding.
“Why—?” Another step, and she can see what I meant. “Oh God. I … I don’t think I’m going to be eating forest-pork ever again.”
A man lies on the ground. A stranger with a bloody gaping wound at his stomach where the boar had begun eating.
It’s a hostile. The clothing, the rudimentary tattoos, the mud-smeared face and matted hair—they all leave no doubt. The man’s face is scored with deep gouges and there’s a bloody divot in his temple, where someone struck a fatal blow.
My chest tightens, and I spin toward what I’d seen earlier. The sight I’d almost forgotten.
A boot protruding from the undergrowth. Tan khakis over that boot, a leg ending in the heap of a human body. A second body.
“Fuck,” Dalton exhales.
I move toward the man on the ground. It is a man. A stranger, I can see that from here. He’s covered in blood and dirt.
Despite the modern clothing, he could be a hostile or settler, having stolen the clothes from the Danish tourists. His hands tell me otherwise. So does his hair—worn a little long, but fashionably so. Despite the blood and dirt, it’s not the hair of someone who lives in the forest and makes their own soap.
The clincher, though, is the hands. There’s blood under his nails, those nails have been manicured, and his fingers are smooth. Not the digits of a man accustomed to chopping logs or hauling water.
The man lies on his back, eyes half open, mouth agape. Staring up at the forest as he breathed his last. Blood plasters down his hair. His shirt is bloody and shredded. A knife attack.
There’s also a rock clenched in one hand.
The hostile attacked with a knife. The man managed to hit him in the head with a rock and kill him, then collapsed over here and died alone in the forest. He defeated his attacker, but too late to give him more than a moment of satisfaction.
“Two feet,” Dalton says.
I blink up at him.
“He’s got two feet. Two boots.”
That means he’s not the missing fourth member of the Danish tourist party. This man is dark-haired, and the leg we’d found seemed to have lighter hair, but that wouldn’t have precluded it being the same guy. This man, though, clearly has all his appendages.
He seems dressed like the Danes, but on closer inspection, I amend that. He’s dressed in a similar manner. Khakis, hiking boots, lightweight shirt. Except the brand name is one I wear myself, the kind of good-quality outerwear worn by serious outdoors types, unswayed by trendy brands.
I tell Dalton.
“Shit.” He rocks back on his heels, looking down at the dead man. “Searcher?”
“I really hope not.”
I reach into the man’s pocket, leaning over him to get my fingers in at the odd angle. When I touch something like an ID wallet, I tug … and the man jerks up, gasping.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I yelp and scramble back, crablike. Dalton swings his gun on the man, and Petra does the same. The man is flat on his back again, his eyes half open, mouth open, exactly as he’d been a moment ago.
“We … all saw that, right?” Petra murmurs. “The dead guy leaped up.”
“Yes.”
“Like something in a horror movie?”