Claw Page 2

  Jerry jumped as another bubble of sap in the green wood exploded with a pop, sending more embers churning high into the shifting fog. He was happy to see that he was now far enough away to no longer be a target of flying cinders, but still close enough to feel the warmth of the fire. He turned off the GPS unit to conserve its battery and placed it back in his jacket pocket.

  Leaning over, Jerry reached down and grabbed the beer in the snow next to his chair. He took a small sip and watched the wandering fog rolling in waves out of the darkness toward him. It washed over him and merged with the billowing smoke from the green wood burning on the fire, making him cough. Looking around the camp with somewhat watery eyes, he saw that apart from the circular oasis of light and warmth that the bonfire provided, the rest of the camp now lay encrusted under a glistening white frost of ice.

  Jerry placed the almost full beer back into its snowy cup holder. Thanks to his current lack of interest in pounding back the booze like the rest of the Bros, when he’d informed them of his new, healthier lifestyle, they had enthusiastically nominated him as the designated driver for the trip before they'd even left Vancouver. Jerry had no problem with that.

  ***

  On the drive up from the coast, they’d encountered a little bit of thick, patchy, low cloud on a couple of the mountain passes as well as some compact snow and slushy roads. It was nothing too concerning as Tyler’s massive Dodge Ram 3500 pickup was a four-wheel drive. Still, Jerry was glad the roads had been good. He wasn’t a huge fan of driving through inclement weather in a monster truck loaded with loud, sloppy drunks, so that had been a relief.

  But it had been a long trip. The drinking and rowdiness had started almost as soon as they’d left. Tyler had brought along a flask to share with Nick and Matt, getting them pre-lubed for the party like he was. When they stopped that afternoon at the Osoyoos Holiday Inn, Jerry had felt relieved to be out of the pickup truck and the eye-watering whiskey fumes that filled the cab. Almost before the truck stopped, Tyler and the boys were stumbling out the door and heading to the hotel bar for a few dozen more drinks and an evening of partying. Of course, trying to get everyone awake and moving before five o’clock the next morning had been quite a challenge. But thanks to the three large double-doubles from the local Tim Hortons, he’d managed to pour the boys back into Tyler’s Dodge and had them underway again before sun-up.

  After several hours of following scenic Provincial Highway #3, Jerry turned off onto Highway #4 and headed north toward the Kootenay Glacier and Lawless. Just after nine o’clock, they crested the apex of the Golden Mile pass. Taking a break, Jerry pulled off of the highway onto an adjacent viewpoint overlooking the valley.

  The view was breathtaking. Snow-covered mountain peaks jutted like broken teeth through the dense fog that filled the valley bottom — a blanket of grey that smothered the city of Lawless below. Sitting majestically in the distance at the back of the valley, the Kootenay Glacier poked its head through the clouds, its ancient ice shining a brilliant white as it bathed in the morning sunshine.

  Continuing their journey, they descended into the grey twilight toward Lawless, heading for the sporting goods outlet where they’d reserved their snowmobiles. After a few wrong turns in the fog, they arrived at an ageing aluminum Quonset hut on the outskirts of town.

  As they finished up the rental paperwork, the tall, bald-headed proprietor behind the counter asked Tyler, “Did you boys come prepared?”

  With amusement, Jerry watched Tyler, who had been at the cash register preparing to pay. Ty greeted the man’s question with a blank expression as if he were wondering whether the guy behind the till was also trying to sell him a pack of prophylactics or something.

  But then the shopkeeper had continued and clarified things by saying, “Despite the many standout geographical features of Lawless and the lovely Kootenay Glacier area, using any of them to navigate in the middle of winter around here is about as helpful as a driver’s licence to a blind man, thanks to all this goddamned fog!”

  Tyler continued to stare at the man.

  “So I’d recommend you carry, at the minimum, at least one other GPS unit for redundancies sake, in case something happens to your friend’s there,” the proprietor finished, looking over at Jerry, who had been fiddling around with his own GPS unit while he waited.

  Caught off-guard, Jerry took a second and then agreed, explaining to Ty that his cell phone-based GPS was crap out in the backcountry and that he’d better listen to the man.

  Tyler stared at the shopkeeper and then Jerry with the same blank expression for several more seconds as if deciding whether they were bullshitting him or not — or perhaps thankful that he hadn’t said the first thing that had popped into his head about the pack of condoms. He sighed as if relieved, saying, “All right, add one on to the bill.”

  The smiling shopkeeper said, “A wise decision, my friend.” He turned and looked at the small inventory of shrink-wrapped GPS receivers hanging on the wall behind him and grabbed the top unit, which, from what Jerry could see, was also the most expensive one. Ringing up the total on the till, the proprietor said, “These things sell like hotcakes every winter when the fog hits. You’re really lucky you came when you did since I just got more of these units back in stock last week!”

  Looking rather unimpressed with his good fortune, Tyler briefly glanced out the foggy window toward the last stop they would be making before heading up into the mountains for their vacation. Barely visible across the street, a tall blue lotto sign revolved atop a black and white marquee advertising a small, squat cinder block convenience store next to it. The flickering letters proclaimed The Gas ‘n Gulp to be the proud purveyor of 'Liquor, Lotto and Groceries'. Tyler was no doubt already checking off items on his mental shopping list once they got across the road to the convenience store. Jerry looked through the window himself, thinking without a shadow of a doubt that when Tyler checked out at the convenience store, there would be plenty of the first two advertised items in his basket and very little of the third.

  Tyler turned his attention back to the shopkeeper and said, “Gee, thanks. Seeing as I’m that lucky, maybe I'd better pick up a couple of 6-49 tickets across the street.”

  The shopkeeper said nothing, and only grinned, ringing up an impressively high total on the cash register’s LCD screen.

  ***

  Smiling lightly as he recalled their morning at the rental shop, Jerry reached down and grabbed his beer in the snow once more, taking another small sip. He grimaced from the Lucky Lager’s slight aftertaste, and placed the can back on the ground. A twinge in his lower back reminded him how stiff he currently was from the long drive over the last couple of days, and he was paying for it now. Thinking of the day ahead of him tomorrow, he started making mental notes of things to check the next day. His eyeball-searingly yellow snowmobile was at the top of the list. If there were any mechanical problems with the machine, he didn’t want to be in a situation where he’d be snowshoeing it back to camp. Number one, he didn’t have any snowshoes, and number two, the snow was quite deep, easily up to his waist and over his head in some places. GPS unit or not, he’d be slogging through kilometres of this clammy crap if something happened, and that was definitely not on his list of fun things to do on vacation.

  Looking to his left, Jerry saw that Tyler was nodding in and out of consciousness as well now. Sprawled in his camp chair, Ty’s legs stuck out, his head nodding forward onto his chest. Every few seconds, his head would snap up, and his eyes would fly open. After a brief, myopic glance around the camp, he would gradually close them once more as his chin slowly sank back down onto his chest.

  Though he’d moved farther back from the bonfire that Tyler and the boys had built, thanks to the comforting warmth of the blaze, Jerry felt like he, too, might just fall asleep if he weren’t careful. He stifled a yawn. This wasn’t where he wanted to sleep tonight; no, he’d rather be in the warm, cosy confines of his sleeping bag, which just recently began c
alling to him with its siren song of sleep.

  Jerry’s eyelids began to droop, on the edge of nodding off himself, when he heard what sounded like someone struggling, quickly followed by the rustling of dry brush. His eyes snapped back open, and he looked across to where Nick had been doing his wobbling act moments before. A brief gap opened in the swirling smoke over the fire. Nick’s camp chair was laying on its side in the snow, with Nick nowhere in sight. “Nick!” Jerry called, thinking that his friend may have finally succumbed to alcohol and gravity and tumbled into the campfire.

  “Shit!” Jerry jumped up from his canvas chair and stood to see if Nick’s smouldering body lay in the muddy slush next to the fire, but the fog and smoke had stopped cooperating -- he couldn’t see anything through the haze.

  Moving quickly, Jerry rounded the fire, calling out, “Nick! Where are you, brother? Are you okay?” Next to Nick’s overturned camp chair, the bottle of JD lay on its side in a small pool of its golden contents, most of which had already disappeared into the slushy mud. Only a few drops of the tan fluid from Tennessee remained in the jug now.

  Jerry righted the bottle, saying “That’s going to put a damper on the party!” Standing, he called out to the forest, “Nick! What’s going on, big fella? Did the Jack catch up with you finally?”

  The thick brush behind the campfire remained mute to his enquiry. Sighing, Jerry decided to give Nick a few more seconds, just in case he was puking, or maybe back there playing with his bait and tackle in the dark. In the meantime, he would walk over to Tyler, give him a good swift kick and tell him it was time to pack it in for the night. As he turned, another rustling noise came from the bushes at his back, followed by what sounded like muffled screams of pain.

  Jerry moved toward the gap in the brush that lead to the forest beyond. The grey mist seemed to thicken as he approached as if trying to foil his investigation. “Nick, what in the hell are you doing, man? Are you trying to scare me? Cause it’s not work…” His voice faltered as he moved beyond the fire’s light, the frigid fog enveloping him as he edged forward into blackness.

  The light from the campfire had given Jerry temporary night blindness, and his eyes were having a hard time readjusting. He thought briefly of using his phone’s flash as a light source in the fog but knew from experience it would only illuminate everything around him as a diffuse grey mess, making it even more difficult to see.

  Reaching out with his hands in the hope of touching something bush or tree-like, he paused for a moment when he felt twigs scraping along the back of his right hand. He continued moving forward using that as his guide and edged into the thickening mist. After seconds that seemed like minutes, Jerry’s eyes gradually started adjusting to the lack of light, and he was able to discern the vague shapes of trees and brush in the swirling fog ahead.

  “Nick! Stop screwing around, bro!”

  After taking several more slippery, stumbling steps, the churning mists parted for Jerry, seeming to draw back like the curtain at a carnival sideshow. It was as if an invisible barker were showing him an amazing new attraction, saying, “Hey! Come check this out, my friend! You won’t be disappointed!”

  Jerry stopped, his mouth dropping open as he rubbed his eyes in disbelief. “What in God’s name?”

  It looked like something had fallen on Nick. Jerry moved a bit closer and could see his friend’s snow boots sticking out from under the edge of this humongous, grey rock, his legs spasming in pain. “Jesus, Nick…” He inched forward, hesitant, knowing that what he was seeing was impossible. How could this slab of stone have fallen on top of his friend out here in the middle of this forested plateau, with no rocky overhangs anywhere in sight? There was no way this could be happening! It just Did-Not-Compute. He moved forward to aid his friend.

  A sudden spasm of movement shuddered through the slab of stone and Jerry stopped dead in his tracks, his breath catching in his throat.He finally saw the thing for what it was. The rough, stone-like texture of this ‘boulder’ was actually grey, matted fur. The thing on top of Nick had a rough, angular head the size of a Mercedes-Benz smart car. Broad, sinewy muscles contracted beneath the creature’s tangled, filthy pelt. Gore-stained fangs nearly twice the length of the World War One bayonets that Jerry collected at home tore into Nick with a savage fury. Jerry knew he should be running, but he stood transfixed and rooted to the spot.

  The beast slowly rose from the ground, revealing legs the diameter of thick tree trunks. Nick’s torso hung from the corner of its mouth, a river of bloody drool washing over it and spattering onto the frozen ground below. In one practised motion, the creature flicked its mouth open, jerking its head up and back at the same time, drawing Nick’s body even farther into its nightmarish maw. Now, only a single, blood-soaked leg hung from one, dripping corner of the creature's mouth. Finishing its current bite with a brief, snapping crack of its jaws, dozens of razor-like teeth amputated Nick’s protruding leg as surgically as any scalpel. The severed limb, still encased in Gortex, dropped to the frozen ground with a soft thump as dark, venal blood flowed out of it onto the red-smeared snow.

  As Jerry struggled with his rising gorge, he began paying attention to a small voice inside his head. The little voice was very quiet at first, but it gradually became louder and louder, growing ever more insistent that he listen to it. Jerry's brain finally provided him with a bingo and he realised that this little internal voice was trying to tell him to get his ever-loving ass out of this place, while the getting was good and the monster was still ignoring him, preoccupied as it currently was eating Nick (no offence, bro — RIP).

  Spinning on one boot heel, Jerry tried to speak a single word of warning aloud, but his fear-tightened vocal cords refused to cooperate, and the word remained dammed-up inside. But fear demanded that he keep trying, and after several more desperate seconds, he found his voice, and the word gushed from his mouth, “Monster!”

  With his verbal dam ruptured, Jerry was finally able to access the rest of his fear-flooded vocabulary, and a string of colourful metaphors poured out, growing louder and louder the closer he got to camp.

  “Holy shit! Jesus Christ! Sweet Mother Mary! It’s a goddamned monster!” Scrambling and slipping in the ice-covered snow, he could barely see his hand in front of his face. He ran for his life toward the sanctuary of light and safety that the glow of the campfire promised.

  “Tyler! Matt! Wake up! Something just ate Nick!” Jerry crashed through the brush, stumbling to a stop near the bonfire between the two men. He wasn’t particularly surprised that his verbal early warning system had had little effect, seeing how drunk everyone currently was.

  On Jerry’s right, Tyler was now completely slumped over sideways in his chair, snoring loudly. To his left, Matt was still out cold on top of his air mattress, drool coming from one corner of his mouth.

  Panic made Jerry decide to upgrade his attempts to rouse his friends from verbal warnings to feats of actual physical violence, at no extra charge to either of them. He grabbed Tyler, pulling him upright in his chair at the same time. “Ty! Wake up! There’s some kind of monster here, and it’s eaten Nick!” He gave Tyler several hard shakes. The man stirred for a moment and grumbled something to the effect of Jerry going away and leaving him the fuck alone; then his head dropped forward onto his chest once more.

  “Shit!”

  Jerry sprinted around the edge of the fire to check on Matt, squelching through the mud, almost slipping and falling into the fire himself. He jammed his muck-covered boot into his sleeping friend’s thigh several times with increasing vigour. “Matt! Wake up, dude! We have to go! Nick’s dead!” Matt continued to rock his impression of a dead octopus at the beach, snoring softly.

  “Son of a bitch!” Jerry said, looking back over to Tyler. He saw that the man was slumped sideways in his chair once more, showing no signs of consciousness. Giving Matt one last, good kick, he ran around the fire and grabbed Tyler, this time by the collar of his parka. Pulling the man upright with his l
eft hand, Jerry began slapping his friend repeatedly with the open palm of his right.

  Sputtering and swearing, Tyler came back around, grabbing at Jerry’s hands. “Shit! What in the goddamned hell do you think you’re doing, bro?”

  “There’s a huge goddamned monster over there, bro, and it’s eaten Nick!” Jerry shrieked at his friend.

  “What? What kind of gag do you think…” Tyler said, feeling pissed at Jerry’s goofing around after everyone had already started chilling for the night.

  “Ty, it’s not a fucking gag!” Jerry said in exasperation. He turned around and saw Matt still sound asleep. “Goddammit!” Jerry raced back and proceeded to kick his comatose comrade once more, this time with a renewed fervour, alternating between shouting, then kicking, “Wake!” — Kick — “The!” — Kick — “Fuck!” — Kick — “Up!” — Kick.