1.16

The sun still isn’t up by the time Austin pulls into the motel parking lot, and the adrenaline is starting to wear off, and he feels sick to his stomach all over again. He nearly wipes out trying to park his motorbike. 

It isn’t cold out here. Well - it’s cold like it should be, cold like it is in the mornings when fall is trying its best to become winter. It’s not oppressively cold, not the way it was when he talked to Myra and Jeffrey in the woods. Not the way it’s supposed to be when a spirit is lingering around. Which might mean that the spirit in the forest can conceal its presence, or just that it’s busy with something else at the moment. Austin’s not sure which is worse.

His thoughts are cut short by a sleek, black car pulling up on the side of the road in front of him. Austin watches it as it idles, not sure it’s really there until he approaches it and sees SHERIFF emblazoned in gold letters on the side. Sheriff Maxwell must have had a longer drive to the motel than he did. Or she didn’t come here going nearly eighty miles an hour.

Austin pauses in front of the passenger door. The windows aren’t tinted, and he can see the sheriff in the driver’s seat, contemplating an unlit cigarette. She looks even worse for wear than he feels. He wonders how long she and Mac have known each other, have worked together. Years, maybe? And he only knew Mac for a few days. It feels selfish to be so shaken up over her disappearance, when everyone else in town has probably known her for much longer.

“Hey, Sheriff,” he says, opening the passenger door to make himself known. “Do you have another one of those?”

“Monty, please.” Sheriff Maxwell - Monty - grunts, shuffling a crumpled box of cigarettes out of the glove compartment and shaking one loose for Austin to grab. She watches him closely, tying her kinky hair back into a ponytail. “You smoke?”

“Only on special occasions,” Austin says dryly. He roots around in his pockets for his lighter, and finally finds it, igniting the cigarette in a surprisingly fluid motion. “Keeps me from, uh, freaking out sometimes. You?”

“Not usually. Same principle.”

Monty is avoiding his gaze. Her eyes are red, and Austin can’t tell if that means that she hasn’t slept, or that she’s been crying. Maybe it means both. He knows what he wants to ask her next, but he can’t quite get the words out - they’re stuck like a lump in his throat, like he might choke on them if he tries to force it. He closes his eyes and takes a couple drags on the cigarette before popping the question.

“You want to check out the woods?”

“We might as well,” Monty says, with a sigh, finally opening the driver’s side door of her car. She steps out, and motions for Austin to follow.

As they make their way around the back of the motel, towards the construction site and the mouth of the woods, Austin stays on high alert, looking around for any sign of movement, any indication of a body lying just out of sight somewhere. He gets even twitchier as he and Monty enter the construction site. By the time they reach the woods, his stomach is clenched as tightly as it was back at Otter’s apartment, and Austin feels on the verge of vomiting again.

“Something’s wrong,” he says, only to be met with a questioning look from Monty. He tries his best to breathe deeply as they walk through the trees, though the air tastes sour suddenly, the sickly sweet roadkill stench wafting over him in waves. “I just - I get these feelings sometimes, when something bad is about to happen, and I’ve been sick to my stomach with it since yesterday. It woke me up this morning, even before you called.”

“And you’re feeling it right now?” Monty asks, looking at him more intensely than before.

Austin nods. “Yeah.”

“Me too,” she says, to his surprise. “I woke up with a horrible gut feeling. I don’t like to believe the worst, but -”

“I get it,” Austin says.

They walk through the woods for a long time in silence, so long that it feels like they should have come out the other end already, or at least seen some sign of civilization. The air is just as still and quiet as Austin remembers it - eerily so. No birds or bugs chirping, no sound of any other animals crashing through the underbrush. Austin does his best to stay alert, looking around every now and then to make sure he and Monty aren’t being followed. He sees nothing. No deer, no dog-thing, no sign of any spirit. Until -

“Hang on,” Austin says. There’s something lying on the ground about ten yards away, a prone figure in the leaves. “What’s that?”

He and Monty approach the figure carefully, though Austin is sure he knows what it is before they even take their first steps in that direction. It doesn’t feel good to be right. Mac’s body is pale and cold, covered in blood and dirt, deep gouges raking down one side of her face, over her eye. Her uniform is slashed and torn in places by some animal’s teeth and claws, a bite mark easily the size of Austin’s head in her stomach. The leaves beneath Mac’s body are saturated with blood.

“Fuck,” Austin says, once again swallowing down the taste of bile. He’s seen dead bodies before, but he’s never prepared for it. Especially not when it’s someone he knows. Even if he can’t prove as much, it seems like Mac’s body was intentionally left out here, like a warning to whoever finds it. The spirit remembers. It knows what she did to the buck.

“I’ve never lost a deputy before,” Monty says numbly, staring down at Mac, at the pool of blood underneath of her. “I…”

“It’s not your fault,” Austin says. The sentiment is as much for his own benefit as it is for Monty’s. There was no way they could control this, not if the thing that lives in the forest was strong enough to possess Mac and bring her out here alone. There was nothing they could do. He feels sick about it, but it’s the truth. “It’s not anybody’s fault, except this thing that’s been attacking people. Okay?”

“I don’t know what to do,” Monty says. She sounds just as small now as she did over the phone.

“Take Mac back to town,” Austin tells her, firmly. He knows what he has to do, and he wants Monty to be as far away from the woods as possible when he seeks out the forest spirit. “Tell her parents, and whoever else you need to, about what happened to her. I’m going to see if I can take care of the thing that killed her.”

Monty gives him a sharp look. “Alone?”

“It wants me,” Austin says. “Or it did last night. It might even come to me, if I stay out here long enough. I’m going to find it, and figure out how to stop it before it kills anyone else.”

“And what if it kills you?” Monty asks. She still sounds numb - and looks numb, as she stoops to pick up Mac’s body in a fireman’s carry, getting blood all over her own uniform in the process.

“It won’t,” Austin says, with as much false confidence as he can muster. He’s shaking, and he can’t tell if it’s from adrenaline, or from the sudden chill he feels in the forest. Maybe both. “I won’t let it kill anyone else.”

Monty shifts on her feet, maybe adjusting to Mac’s weight in her arms, and studies Austin for a long time. Her eyes almost seem to look through him, like she’s thinking of something else entirely. Then, finally, she nods.

“I don’t understand the things you can do, but I hope you can prevent any more casualties,” she says. She turns back towards the direction of the construction site, where she and Austin came from. “Good luck, Austin.”

“Thanks,” Austin says. He’s not sure luck will have any bearing on what he’s about to do, but he can appreciate it all the same.