The Ghosts of Varner Creek (30 page)

BONUS

PROLOGUE TO
BORDER CROSSINGS
,

Michael Weems’ Second Novel

Prologue

The afternoon lay quiet except for the crunch of dirt beneath tires on an old worn out trail.  A white and green Ford Explorer bounced along the dirt road, kicking up the desert floor and scattering it to the wind.  In the passenger seat a young man’s hazel eyes peered out from under the shadow of his green ball cap towards the searing sun.  “Awful hot,” he said.  It was more a premonition than a comment on the weather. 

In the driver seat sat a squat man, brown-skinned with a wispy mustache that flickered with the air blowing in on high through the vents.  He raced along the road with an eerie calm of someone right at home despite being so consistently close to a cataclysmic crash at any second, skipping and sliding the suv around each bend like a seasoned drift racer.  He glanced down at the temperature gauge on the dashboard - 94 degrees.  It could be well over 150 degrees in a confined metal space, making it an oversized oven.  “Yeah,” he agreed, “May already be dead.”  He reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out a well-worn toothpick and placed it between his teeth as he continued slipping along.     

In front of them, Guadalupe Peak, the highest point in Texas at an elevation of 8,749 ft, rose up in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park.  Before them lay the dirt road designated for 4 X 4 vehicles only, and somewhere out in the canyon region sat an abandoned metal trailer which had six young women locked inside and left for dead. 

As they passed a campground sign the ranger in the passenger seat pulled the crudely drawn map from his shirt pocket, a fax they’d received not ten minutes ago.  He matched up the line drawn on the map with a trail he saw ahead.  “There,” he pointed.  “That’s it.”  The SUV made a sharp turn that sent him sloshing against the door while the driver barely shifted his weight.  They turned on an offshoot where a sign that read “No Vehicles Beyond This Point” sat crooked on an old post protesting the trespass and a few of the park’s smaller inhabitants scurried out of the way of the charging Ford.  A Gila monster sat flicking its tongue on a rock, curiously watching the great green and white beast roar past him.

 They followed a trail along McKittrick Canyon just south of the New Mexico border.  There lay the only natural source of water in the park in the form of a small creek on the Eastern side of the massif.  After about a mile and a half they came to a ridge they followed until it ducked down into another miniature canyon.  There, they saw the small pull-behind trailer, old and discolored, not much bigger than the discount economy size available at any local U-haul.  The sun was glinting off the less worn parts of its metallic exterior and rust was eating at its joints.  The SUV rolled to a halt, its catalytic converter crackling as though desperate for breath after the race it’d just run.   The two rangers exited quickly, yet apprehensively.  They’d found a dead hiker several months back and both knew now it took some roots under their feet when greeting death out in the desert heat.  The combination of sight and smell the desert could render remains in just a short time could easily bowl over the unprepared.

And death’s handiwork there was.  Before they even approached the trailer they saw their first victim.  A man’s body lay stretched out on the ground, blood soaking his chest and iridescent green-bellied flies buzzing the newly dead flesh.  The passenger approached but didn’t have to go far, “Oh, yeah, this one’s done,” he announced, seeing the man’s open eyes staring unnaturally at the blazing sun, a few flies licking the wetness of his pupils. 

The driver took his toothpick out of his mouth and tucked it away.  
Shit,
 he muttered.  It wasn’t a good sign for the rest of them.  He headed to the back of the trailer, but there was a massive padlock securing the door.  “Hey!” he called.  “Anyone in there?” he asked loudly in Spanish.  He rapped on the side of the trailer but heard nothing.  Then he put his hand on the trailer door and was nearly burned by the heat.  
Chinga madre! 
He cursed.  “Too late,” he told the other.  “Like a hot grill.”
  
He imagined what lay inside.  Bodies littering the floor of the trailer like a remnant of the holocaust ovens, charred grotesquely like a cannibal’s memorial weekend barbecue celebration.  He turned and headed back to the suv to call it in.  As he did the other ranger strolled to the trailer and palmed the padlock, feeling its weight and heat. 

“Can you believe this?” he asked. “What a terrible way to go. “ As he spoke he thought he heard a faint clunk from within the trailer.  Then, from a small hole in the rust near the bottom, a finger poked out.  It was painted in crimson from its tip down to where it disappeared within the crevice, and as it poked out the rusty edges of metal cut against it like tiny teeth.  The ranger noticed that some of what he thought had been rust around the hole was instead dried blood, someone’s efforts to expand the tiny little opening with their fingers.  Then a voice, if it could be called such, called out weakly.

“Hey!” he yelled excitedly.  “Hey!  They’re still alive,” he called to the other.  “I got a finger over here.”  He called to the people inside, “Hold on, we’re going to get you out!” He bent down quickly and touched the finger.  It immediately curved and tried to grip him and he heard the faint sounds of someone trying to talk, though he could not make out the words.  “I think maybe there’s some bolt cutters in the truck,” he told his partner. 

 “No, bolt cutters no good.  Lock’s too thick.”  The driver was now doing his best to run to the truck in an odd sort of gait from a hip that’d been a bit off most all his life, although he’d never bothered to get a medical opinion on the matter. 

The other stayed holding to the finger and tried his best to say something helpful, “We’re going to get you out, just hold on.” 

The driver returned from the Explorer with a shotgun.  Besides buckshot, they had a box of deer slugs in the glove box, which he had loaded.  He walked back towards the lock with a determined grimace, pushing the shuttle of the gun to place with its distinctive clicking.   

“You think that’s a smart idea?” asked the other ranger.

 He shrugged.  “Better move on out of there.” In a loud voice he called out to those inside the trailer in Spanish, “Stand away from the door!  I’m going to shoot the lock.”  There was no response, but the finger retreated and he heard the faint sound of movement.  He angled his shotgun down in such a way that it would only catch the lock and the very right edge of the door.  Then he pulled the trigger and the shotgun let off a blast, which resounded off the rocks around them.  In the distance the Gila monster retreated to a shadowy crevice.  The lock thudded in its place but the ring of the loop unclasped, freeing the latch.  He put down the shotgun and grabbed the handle of the doors, which was also burning hot, and swung them open.

A wave of heat poured out as though cracking open a broiler, followed by the sickening stench of urine, vomit, and skin that had begun to burn slowly against the metal.  The ranger with the shotgun held his arm up to his nose in an effort to block the odor.  His younger peer came around his side and his heart froze a moment with what he saw. “Christ.”

Inside the trailer were six young women, all lying next to each other.  Their clothes had been stripped off in an apparent effort to cool themselves and spread out on the floor of the trailer in an attempt to provide some protection from the surface heat.  The rangers could see some of them not only had heat blisters on their arms and faces, but burn marks on their arms from prolonged exposure to the metal.  The walls of the trailer were covered in dings and dents and along the bottom edges where tiny pinpricks of light marking holes where the rust had eaten through the container were painted in blood.  They had struggled against their prison before succumbing to the heat.  The inside of the trailer looked like a trap in which the prey had flung itself against the walls over and over, beating itself with every effort of escape.

Two were undoubtedly dead, their faces sunken in and eyes staring forward in similar fashion as the corpse on the ground outside . . . the death stare looking beyond the mortal world.  Three others lay completely motionless and the rangers didn’t know if they were alive or dead.  The sixth and final, the only one conscious, peered at the rangers, her nude body withered and a greenish discoloration, drained of an unnatural amount of fluid.  She had the skin appearance of an old woman, and the gaunt and lethargic bend of a withered reed before it breaks.  Her arms were wrapped around one of the other girls.  Her tortured hands, swollen and splayed awkwardly revealing dozens of cuts, rested on the other’s motionless chest.   Her cracked and bleeding lips quivered as she tried to say something, “Water,” she managed to beg in her native tongue.    The cooler outside air brushed against her face and she held her head up to its breeze as her eyes rolled back and she lost consciousness.

Border Crossings
is now available in ebook format everywhere.