Instinct by Jason Hough (ebook reader web TXT) 📗

then I get the answer. Not in the form of a kick, or even a gunshot, but in the sound of an engine starting.

A motorcycle. Not a Harley, though. Nor a sport bike. Something in between.

I press my eyelids together as tight as I can, hold my breath, and rush across the clearing. My foot strikes one of the empty barrels, making another deep DOOM sound, though not nearly as loud as the first.

It takes a force of will to stop, but I know I have to, otherwise I’m going to go headlong into a tangle of thorny blackberry bushes from which I might never escape. I stop and blink my eyes, over and over, fighting back the burn. When I finally look up the world is blurry, seen through the awful lens of tears. My throat burns, too. My lungs.

The engine revs, and through the hazy shapes of blackberry vines, I see the man begin to move away on a big four-wheeled ATV.

I stagger after him. It’s no use, of course. I can barely breathe. My eyes are all but useless. The world looks like I’m viewing it through a window smeared with Vaseline, but that’s not even the real problem. I simply can’t keep up with an ATV on foot. My car’s too far away to be of any help, not that I could drive it through the blackberry bramble even if I wanted to. So I drop my pace, listening to the sound of the engine fade.

The broken-nosed tweaker is getting away.

In the middle of the narrow path between the thorny bushes, I stop and bend at the waist, closing my eyes and spitting into the dirt. Not quite retching, though I would if I could. After a minute or so I can see again. There’re deep tire tracks in the damp earth, easily followed. I jog along, gun still pointed at the ground in front of me. The rider—Captain Tweaker, I’ll call him—is long gone, the ATV’s throaty engine no longer audible, but I have a feeling he might not have been alone up here. Those chemical containers must have been heavy when they were full, and it seems unlikely to me that one person could have lugged them all the way up here.

As for the barrels… what the fuck? What’s a man doing in the middle of a blackberry bramble with nine big drums of—what was it?—potassium fluoride? I think that was it. I’ve heard of those two things separately, but not together. What the combination might be used for I have no idea. But given the man’s appearance and how well hidden his little hideout was, I’m pretty sure it has to do with drugs. Meth, most likely.

I reach the end of the trail, and instantly an answer presents itself. Well, more like a theory. A better one than the meth angle, at least.

The trail doesn’t so much end as become a single-lane road. Over the span of thirty feet it widens, and the ground transforms from dirt to asphalt. Old, potholed tarmac with weeds growing from its myriad cracks and wounds.

Two lines of muddy tracks go straight down the middle of this, the knobby pattern of the ATV’s big tires clearly imprinted for fifty feet at least, before they finally fade away.

But it’s not the road that provides the source of my new theory. It’s what’s beside it.

There’s a concrete foundation, fifty feet on a side, all fenced in with razor-wire topping a chain-link barricade.

And inside this, like some trapped titan, standing on steel legs three feet around, is a water tower.

It’s elevated up from the ground about twenty-five feet, the tower itself that tall again. It’s painted green to blend in with the forest. Trees surround the whole thing, blocking it from view on all sides save this one.

Stenciled in block letters across the giant container’s midsection is:

SPUD

I almost laugh. If the water tower were painted brown instead of green it would look a bit like a giant potato standing on its end, with its rounded top and bottom and cylindrical middle. But the lettering makes sense. It’s the county utility district acronym, I see it every time I get my water and natural gas bill.

That they had a water tower up here is news to me, but I suppose it makes sense.

There’s a gate at one corner of the fence, standing wide open.

“Hello?” I call out, though I’m reasonably sure I’m alone. I walk up to the gate, spotting the pair of bolt cutters on the ground beside it when I’m still ten steps away. They’re black metal with red plastic handles, the cheap sort of tool you’d find at any chain hardware store.

I kick the tool aside, not wanting to touch it in case I’ll need to pull fingerprints, and step onto the concrete foundation, then inside the fence itself.

Pipes run up into the water tower from beneath its center point, along with several others that come up from the ground at the corner opposite me. I can feel a slight but clear vibration through my feet. Water, pumping in or out. Maybe both. I wonder what the source is, and if it feeds into Silvertown. The stream coming out of the old mine is polluted, but there’s plenty of small lakes and rivers around, not to mention the snowpack when there is one. Doesn’t really matter, I guess.

Though the road outside the fence is in ill-repair, the foundation and the tower itself are immaculate. Well maintained, I suppose is the term, because it’s obvious to me at the same time that all this has been here for a while. Ten or even twenty years, I’d guess. Some cracks in the concrete, a few scratches and dings here and there. But it’s far from derelict, unlike so much else on this mountain.

Even the lettering on the tower looks freshly painted. There’s no rust on any of the pipes, either. Not a single little white blob of bird shit to be