Run Away

Sheriff Broadmoor removed his hat. “We got to the cabin.”

Andrea glanced over the sheriff’s shoulder at his cruiser’s empty back seat. “And?”

“Do you mind if I step inside?”

Checking her watch, Andrea huffed. “Fine.” She stepped away from the door and turned off the ring light around her webcam. “You want coffee? Something stronger?”

“No, thank you.”

“Mind if I do?”

“Ma’am—”

“Ma’am,” Andrea mimicked, bending over to survey the open fridge. “Listen to Mister Official.”

The sheriff coughed and tapped the side of his body cam. “Ma’am, I have some serious news.”

Reviewing the footage later, some of the online audience would be confused by the persistent clicking on the audio feed. The sound was coming from the sheriff’s thumbing up the strap over his sidearm, and popping the snap closure down again, up and down, up and down, a morse code of anxiety. “Listen,” he said. “We got to the cabin, and there was no one there.”

“Oh.” Andrea cracked open a Natty Bo. “Really? Empty? Maybe they went south.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Sheriff Broadmoor said. “There was no one there…anymore.”

The next few seconds became the most featured clip of their conversation, with Andrea breaking down in heart-wrenching sobs, spilling beer all over her acrylic carpet. A voice-over would explain how, at this stage, Andrea’s jailbird boyfriend and her fourteen-year-old daughter were still officially missing, but samples of blood found in the cabin revealed where they had once been. The sheriff’s department released four photos of the scene, high-res images of upturned furniture, a door hanging from its hinges, a spatter of red. The most newsworthy photo was of the boyfriend’s rifle, mangled and crushed like it had been run over by a Mac truck.

“But that’s all?” Andrea sobbed. “No…bodies?”

The sheriff studied her face. “Not yet.”

Andrea put a hand over her shocked mouth. Sheriff Broadmoor turned off his body cam and said, “Andi, seriously, you can’t go on protecting Tom like this.”

Andrea tossed her hair back from her unstained face. “I don’t know where Tom is. Haven’t seen him for weeks,” she said, putting a hand on the sheriff’s leg. “Some awful lonesome weeks.”

Shaking her off, the sheriff clicked the strap back down over his gun. “Listen to me. On our way up the mountain, we found an elk split open. Throat to haunches, insides painting the moss. Not officially related, but there were footprints.”

A genuine frown reported for duty on Andrea’s face. “Size twelves?”

“Maybe.”

An acrylic nail traced Andrea’s lip. “I think you’re lying. You’re trying to scare me.”

“I am trying,” Sheriff Broadmoor said. “To find Tom before he finds you. No matter what you say to your fans, we both know Casey’s dead.”

There were very few photographs of the skinny fourteen-year-old, even her school picture obscured by a lank curtain of stringy hair. When pressed, Andrea presented to her online followers a heavily photoshopped picture of Casey at age twelve, the last documented time the girl smiled. Andrea would wistfully remember Casey as a sweet, sensitive girl who was creative, quiet, a little naïve, and absolutely adoring of her mother.

Sheriff Broadmoor remembered picking Casey up last fall, less than five miles from town, when she’d stolen Tom’s pick-up and immediately run out of gas. “I won’t tell him you took the truck,” the sheriff promised the sullen delinquent in his cruiser’s back seat. “But running away is not the answer. The big, bad world is dangerous for a little girl all alone.”

Casey’s dark eyes stared out the window as the rolling landscape dragged her back to town. The sheriff stopped at the only traffic light, studying the rearview reflection of the hollowed-out kid while the strap on his holster snapped and unsnapped. “You eating enough, kiddo?”

The light changed, and Sheriff Broadmoor coaxed the cruiser over the crossroads, feeling the slip of summer tires he didn’t have the budget to change. Aware of the body cam pointed at the road ahead of him, Sheriff Broadmoor asked, “Something in particular made you want to run?”

Shifting lower in her seat, Casey muttered, “You got eyes, doncha?”

Many of Andrea’s online followers would spam the sheriff’s department with that same question. When Tom and Casey were reported missing after a torrential storm, Andrea suspected they were holed up in her family’s cabin, and urbane commenters couldn’t understand why it took so long to clear the mud-covered, spruce-strewn mountain roads. Once Andrea shared her scripted worries, into a camera centered a few inches below her neck, none of her viewers could understand how the abuse remained behind closed doors in a town of only a thousand houses. None of them had been there when Sheriff Broadmoor went to Andrea, asking after Casey’s well-being, and the young mother just laughed in his face. No one had been there, fourteen years ago, when Broadmoor and Tom had been two of five boys who could never be sure if they were Casey’s father or not.

“Seriously, Tom,” Sheriff Broadmoor said, on a day his body cam was turned off. “If you lay a hand on that kid, I will have you back in jail so fast.”

Tom laughed at him. “If that scrawny brat throws a punch, then she can take one. Her mother knows that.” Those were the last words Tom said to the sheriff.

A mutilated grizzly was found by a pair of hikers, who had to leash and drag their dogs away from the bloody mess before finding, after a mile, the other half. Footage from Broadmoor’s body cam would record the large footprints and long stride mirroring the elk’s assailant, but that was not the clip amateur investigators replayed again and again. As Broadmoor bent over the matted brown fur, wondering what would drive his childhood friend to such obscene violence, a sudden sound made him whirl and duck, heart pounding, his service weapon in his hand with the safety off. Staring into the wilderness, the grey sky conspiring with the mountain mist to erase the barren trees, Broadmoor felt his hand begin to shake.

A howling cry echoed through the valley, wailing, resonant, a single, consuming bellow that buzzed in Broadmoor’s teeth, reverberating in his chest. The Alpine note swelled in the woodsmoke air, pressing into the unevolved core of Broadmoor’s brain, and lingering as the lone call faded, the primal scream succumbing to the sloped, oppressive stillness. Every living creature held its breath, every frightened heart pounding, until reality felt safe to resume again. Online, comments would remark on the sound’s clarity, its penetrating tone, and intelligent, complex emotion. But to Broadmoor, running for the shelter of his cruiser, it just sounded hungry.

The most controversial footage connected to the case started as a livestream, and was later taken down and scrubbed along with the rest of Andrea’s account. Andrea started the camera right after finding a gift on her doorstep, then changing her outfit and fixing her hair.

“This is obviously some kind of threat,” Andrea told the lens. “These are Tom’s shoes. What kind of sick joke is that?” She shook her head and pulled her phone into frame. “I am calling the sheriff right now, and saying this is harassment.”

Andrea dialed and held the phone to her ear, casting her perfect eyelashes upward and using one arm to nonchalantly elevate her bra-bound assets. Those watching the livestream live would say she frowned, glanced over her shoulder, then shook her head. For what reason, they could not agree.

When Andrea had seen the shoes, she didn’t think about the elk, did not know about the bear. She did not know about the strange call billowing through the woods. However, she did know that the discoloration on one of the warped rubber soles was brought on by prolonged freezer burn.

Stuffing Tom’s body into the cabin’s chest freezer had been to obscure the time of death, and Andrea was thinking only of her alibi when she told her daughter to drive Tom’s truck up the pass. She reported Casey missing mere hours after sending her on the terrible errand, expecting the juvenile to take the fall, but a sudden storm swept over the mountain. Wind and rain sliced across the landscape, unleashing a deluge of mud and detritus washing over the narrow road, trapping Andrea’s unwitting teenage patsy with the corpse.

As the weeks went on, Andrea expected two corpses to be found in the bare-pantried cabin, which she would of course have to explain. But the empty rooms and photographs had sown fears that, with the arrival of the shoes, were bursting into rancid bloom.

“Hello, sheriff?” Andrea said to her phone. “I have received a disrespectful and threatening—”

Three loud bangs against the door made Andrea jump, a little pants-wetting yelp escaping her as the phone clattered to the floor. She had to leave the glow of the ring light to scoop it up off the sticky carpet, and with her hand hovering above the glowing screen, she froze, eyes wide and staring at the doorframe. “Hello? Andi?” was very faintly heard under the sound of a house key turning in the lock.

The screaming on the phone propelled Broadmoor across town, speeding through the town’s one red light and raising a blister on the finger snapping and unsnapping the strap on his gun. Andrea’s nearest neighbors were a quarter mile down the road, pressed against their front windows as the sheriff sped past. Screeching to a rolling halt on worn-out tires, Broadmoor jumped out of the car with his door wide open, the engine still running as exhaust plumed into the gathering mist.

Andrea’s front door yawned into darkness. Broadmoor pulled the flashlight from his belt, deaf to the clicking of his holster strap as he crept up to the entrance. Stepping over the threshold, glass crunched under the sheriff’s heel, crushing the cracked and ruined ring light. His own cold halogen circle swept over the stained carpet, touching and lingering on Tom’s discarded shoes.

A clatter of cheap chairs on the slick kitchen floor. Broadmoor crept closer, lightheaded with rapid, shallow breath, blooms of electric nerves singing in his fingertips. Silhouetted in the dim silver starlight creeping across the countertops, a hunched shape shuddered, wreathed in sodden sucking sounds. Inch by trembling inch, Broadmoor reached forward, and turned on the light.

Andrea’s eyes, blind and glassy, stared up at Broadmoor from a spreading pool of apocalypse red. Her bent neck dismissed any possibility she could be alive, an accusatory finger jerking and twitching as it pointed skyward. The rest of Andrea’s body had been ripped away, the wet crunching sounds a viscous indication of where she’d gone, and Broadmoor’s insides liquified as he turned his eyes toward the architect of his horror.

Long, skeletal limbs painted with layers of gore were draped in coarse fur that could have been elk, or grizzly. The ridged spine curved in a keeling arc, the great head swiveling on a sinewed neck. The creature was masked with the antlered skull of a decaying buck, black sockets casting an abyssal stare. Skin and bone, Broadmoor thought. With fleeting nerve, he grabbed his sidearm, but the strap had been snapped shut.

There was some debate over the dark, blurred figure on the surviving body cam footage. Some internet sleuths suspected aliens, others theorized hell-born demons. A persuasive sect of online speculators described the wendigo, a tragic and vengeful beast of American folklore, a betrayed cannibal cursed with eternal hunger. Although suspicious subscribers considered each of these theories, the dismembering predator was never identified.

The creature turned its armored skull toward Broadmoor, stringy hair clinging to its boney crown, limbs unfolding as its antlers brushed the skylight. It loomed over the sheriff, close enough to share its fetid breath, shreds of the fresh kill still clinging to its fingertips. In a hollow, rib-rattling voice, it said, “You got eyes, doncha?”

Sheriff Broadmoor grasped the monster’s blood-stained hand in his blistered fist, and brushed back the lank curtain of unwashed hair from the moon-bleached face. “Casey.”

He turned his camera off.