Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2) by Jack Lively (reading well TXT) 📕

When I arrived at the junction there were three choices. But only two of them were viable. Left and right were official roads, straight ahead was a logging trail. Ellie would have taken the left turn, back to town and Dave. To get to Ellie’s I would take a right turn. Problem was, it was blocked off by pylons and a big temporary Alaska Department of Fish and Game sign. The sign had the departmental logo on top, a circle divided into three horizontal areas: a goose above, a moose in the middle, and a Coho salmon on the bottom. The sign read ‘Road Closure: Accident Ahead’.

I remembered Ellie saying that she had been delayed by a ‘wildlife situation’, I figured this was it. Who knows what had gotten hit by a truck up here. The logging trail was my best option.

The trail was wide for several miles, before pinching in and getting rough. I put the pedal to the metal and maxed out the four-wheel-drive, taking the turns hard and rollicking over bumps. I had the windows down and felt a surge of exuberant energy, which made me lean my head out the window and holler into the night.

The trail descended and the headlight beams got sucked into mist before they could project more than a yard or two. Making it only a touch better than driving with a blindfold. I flipped up the high beams. When the road dipped again, I was flashed in the eyes by another set of high beams reflecting in the rear-view mirror. Another vehicle was following close. I punched the gas and got some separation. But the mist was tough to penetrate. Which only made me want to push the Toyota harder. The vehicle behind maintained its distance, set back a couple of hundred yards.

After a couple of minutes the lights behind me were gone. But there hadn’t been any other roads for it to go on. Maybe the car behind had turned off their lights to follow me in the dark.

I smiled to myself in the darkness of the Land Cruiser’s cab, which must have looked wicked in the dim light from the dashboard. I was enjoying the thought of Deckart attempting to use his brains. The guy had put together some kind of a plan.

Bring it on.

Forty-Seven

I was cruising down the track at a considerable speed when I saw the thing, about three seconds before crashing right into it. A grey hump emerged from the low hanging gloom, right in front of the Toyota. A mound almost as wide as the trail itself. Three seconds was enough to hit the brakes and turn three into six. The big old Land Cruiser fishtailed like an angry rattlesnake until it came to a stop right up against the thing.

Which, in the strong light from the vehicle, was obviously a very large animal.

I looked in the rear-view. No more lights following. I came down from the Toyota and approached. The animal musk was there. Similar to what I’d sensed at the creek with the bears, but stronger. A close and thick stench. The thing was not dead, it was agitated and moaning and grunting.

And then I saw the distinctive antlers and knew that it was a moose. A moose isn’t some kind of overgrown deer. It is another kind of thing altogether. Not on the level of an elephant, but maybe halfway there.

This one looked to be about ten feet long, which made it an adult male of the species. Standing, he would come up about six, seven feet at the shoulders. The moose was struggling, he was definitely not having a good day. My initial thought was that he had been hit by a car and come down through the woods from the main road, wounded and spooked. I looked for signs of damage by the light of the Land Cruiser’s high beams.

But then I got up close and saw two things. One was the bright pink feathering of a tranquilizing dart in his neck, which had been hidden from view by the antlers. The other was the moose’s enormous front leg, and the blood spilling all over the gravel trail. But the bright blood told only one part of the story and didn’t attract my attention so much as the cut from which it spilled. Which was clean and vivid in the hard light, splitting the flesh unnaturally. I was able to see the cross-section of muscle, and the white tendon, severed too perfectly. The moose was floundering in a pool of his own blood, heaving and shifting on the gravel, unable to stand, but trying desperately to do so. The blood didn’t come from a single cut, but four. Each of his limbs had been cleanly scored by a razor sharp blade wielded by a human hand. This intentionally cruel person had severed tendons to hamstring the moose, leaving him alive but incapable of getting up or moving.

I could think of only two reasons why someone might want to do that. One was to block my path and prevent me from continuing down the trail, and the other was for the pure psychopathic enjoyment of cruelty to another living being. Those cognitive processes took about a half second, and during that half second I detected another sound. Another, because it wasn’t the humming car engine or the moose, who was making enough noise all by himself, grunting and groaning and heaving. It was a distinctly human sound, that of a foot stepping on gravel. Specifically a booted foot. And then there was a flicker in the murky dark beyond the headlights, as the high beams from the Toyota glinted off dull metal.

There was no time, so I lurched to my left and dropped. I allowed my body to relax and let gravity do its work, tucking my head under. I heard the abrupt and brutal sound of a shotgun