Torrent(4)

“If by close to nature you mean living in a trailer, playing computer games, and making spaghetti and meatballs for my addled grandmother, absolutely. As to the rest, the only thing bears in the Pacific Northwest maul are salmon, so I wouldn’t really know. These”— he waved at the cave, or maybe at the mountain or the entire state, “—are your stomping grounds.”
I pushed my bangs out of my eyes. Technically, I was from New Mexico, not Arizona, but he was right. I’d grown up in a similar climate, and I was the one with the self-sufficient back-to-the-earth family, including a grandfather who’d taken my interest in shooting bows for a desire to learn how to hunt. I’d been so impressed that he’d been willing to take me out to do “boy” things that I hadn’t admitted to the amount of puking I’d done the first time we shot an elk. I’d been more relieved than chagrinned when Yaiyai insisted that young women who wanted to get married and make babies shouldn’t be running around in the desert like savages.
“I don’t think it was a bear,” I finally said, then crinkled my nose. The queasiness hadn’t left my stomach, and the longer we stayed in the confines of the cave, the more the smell of the body was getting to me, not to mention the terror forever burned into the man’s eyes. “Let’s argue about it elsewhere, all right? After we tell someone. If not the rangers, the sheriff’s department.” All I knew was that we weren’t investigating it.
“Whatever you say.” Simon’s phone ticked as he claimed a few more pictures.
I grabbed his arm and propelled him along with me. An uneasy sense of foreboding crept over me as we headed back for the mine shaft. “What are you planning to do with those pictures?”
“Nothing.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
“You’re mistrustful by nature,” Simon said.
“Or I’ve known you too long. I’ve never seen you snap pictures unless it’s to gross out your brother or to post something for the company blog.” I scowled at him. “And this better not be about the latter.”
“I wouldn’t put pictures of bodies on our business site.”
“Good.” I climbed back up the slope of rubble, eager to see the sun again.
“But,” Simon said, “if we had evidence about the existence of some mutant animal or weird desert monster, it’d bring tons of traffic to the site.”
I nearly stumbled down the back side of the slope. “Simon.”
No way was I going to let him put something that sensational up there.
“Well, it totally would,” he said.
“We don’t need prepubescent boys who want to gawk at dead people coming to our site. They’re not our demographic.”
“You never know. Besides, any links that we can get to the site from big bloggers and newspapers will help us out. The search engines will love us and send more traffic overall. Relevant traffic.”
I waved, trying to silence him before he started explaining search engine optimization to me. Again. It’d made my eyes glaze over the first time. Nor should we be discussing marketing strategies when some guy was dead back there.
A moan whispered through the tunnel.
I swallowed. “What was that?”
“The wind?”
“Underground wind?”
“It could be blowing over a hole leading to the outside somewhere,” Simon said.
“It sounded like it came from behind us.”
I wanted him to tell me I was wrong, to convince me of this wind theory of his, but he didn’t say anything else. His fingers brushed my boot though. He was crawling along the rubble more quickly now. I picked up my pace too.
We scrambled down from the rubble pile and into the chamber where we’d found the old shovel haft. A clunk, clunk, thud sounded somewhere behind us. A rock falling. One we’d shaken free in our passing? Or had something else shaken it free?
“Go,” Simon urged, giving me a push.
“Good idea.”
He passed me and surged up the next rubble pile.
I charged after him. “Oh, sure, now you’re willing to take the lead.”
He didn’t answer. We were too busy scrambling across the rocks, our breaths loud enough to hear. Another rock fell behind us, maybe twenty meters back. One rock might have been chance, a delayed shifting after our passing, but two?#p#分页标题#e#
I whispered a few curses at the noises and at the scrapes my elbows and knees were taking. I skidded down another slope, glancing back before dropping below the top of the rubble. The glance was too wild—too quick—causing the headlamp’s beam to blur about. There might have been a dark shadow back there, something moving, but I couldn’t be sure. I wasn’t about to stop for a longer look.