Hunter enters as the (ex_gravedigg366) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-05-03 20:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | syrena, tate langdon |
Who: Hunter and Loren and dead!Hannah
What: Finding the body
Where: Way out in the desert somewheres
When: A little while ago.
Warnings/Rating: ...dead bodies?
The directions were basic, and Loren was on the road within minutes of his conversation on the forum. He wasn't worried about this being a trap, a trick, or some sick joke.. the only thought at the forefront of his mind was that it couldn't be her. Even if all of his searching and interrogating had got him nowhere in the endless plea for one glimpse of Hannah, Loren refused to believe that she was dead. It didn't make sense. Who would have a reason to kill her? Of course, Tate knew exactly the kind of person that would have a reason.. but Loren was doing a more impressive job of tuning the kid out these days. He didn't want to hear it, he wouldn't listen to it. It seemed so fucking impossible, ridiculous to even consider, laughable really. Loren just couldn't explain the clawing anxiety in his chest as he raced down the highway, devouring sunbleached asphalt beneath a Cadillac's bald tires. Eventually the road's curves smoothed out to blackbellied oblivion, and he watched wind turbines rise like armies of ants amongst the cacti. Counting them helped him not to think, he felt like just one of the machines. They rolled by in fast forward, the golden trademark smear of a death valley postcard. It almost distracted him from the gnawing ache in his chest, the fleeting clutch of panic that fondled the vulture in his heart.
A truck loomed on the horizon, just off the road, and it snuck up on him before he really thought about scoping the plates. Some part of him wished he could just daydream his way out of here, but then the plate said Idaho and it all came slamming back into place. There was a squeal of brakes to startle the rattlesnakes before he threw the boat into park and tore loose from his seatbelt.
In a normal situation, Hunter would have been pissed at the way the guy was driving, putting up a cloud of dust visible from half a mile back, driving like a bat out of hell, and putting up beacons to every cop and ranger within fifty miles. This was not a normal situation. He’d just come out from the ranch and before that he’d come out of a hellish morning ride that featured the desert sun and a dead girl’s head, and he wanted the whole thing to end, just not with him in a jail cell. He’d read back far enough to know that this Loren guy was the one who had been all wrought up about the girl being missing, and he was willing to cut him yards of slack as long as this ended up being his problem.
Hunter was sitting in the shade of his truck, accompanied by only one dog. She was a medium sized, indistinguishable mutt the same color as yellow dirt, and she’d been with him for years, patient as the hills. He’d left the collie puppy behind because he didn’t want a repeat of this morning, and he’d stationed the Great Dane he’d found in a dumpster at his sister’s yard without telling her why. He stood up out of the dirt as the Cadillac skidded to a stop, relieved to see that the man that exited the driver’s side was not one he recognized. “You’re gonna wanna take a breath,” he said, eying the dust cloud. “We got a ways to go yet.”
They stowed the truck and the Cadillac in a hollow off the road to avoid attracting attention, and two trail horses were waiting by some water pans in a canyon about a quarter mile’s walk. Hunter looked at Loren, assessing. “She’s in a cave thing. Could be a mine shaft. Take us all night to get there on foot, too rocky for a car or truck once we get closer.” He pointed at the darker of the two horses. “Jack,” he said, introducing it. “Trail horse, not going to run off on you, get us there faster.” Then after a short pause, he said, “You gonna be able to do this?” He wasn’t talking about the horse.
Loren had brought the items as requested, and without question. You couldn't spend two days in Nevada without appreciating the merits of a hat and a bottle of water. This hat in particular was something he grabbed for a quick ten bucks out of the gift shop in Caesar's. Appropriately enough, it was cowboy in style, even if blue sequins proudly proclaimed Fabulous Las Vegas. The car was borrowed from one of his neighbors, a leather-skinned old woman fond of neon lipstick. She'd been a showgirl in the sixties and liked to lament about the good old days with Loren, even though he couldn't even remember the turn of the millennia.
The air was straight out of a convection oven, but it didn't bother him as much as it maybe should have. His blood was used to warmer climates and heavy gear, whether he knew it or not. Still, the sweat poured down the back of his neck instantly and the dusty breeze gave it a chill that matched his nerves. Loren was silent while the man spoke, eyeing the endless desert with a grim turn of mouth and iceberg eyes so intent they must have been trying to pick up a forensic trail in microscopic dirt patterns. It couldn't be Hannah.. who would come out this far? It didn't make sense, he refused to let it. Loren acknowledged the horses with a nod of his head, even though he'd never been atop one(that he could recall). At this point, riding a horse well was the least of his concerns. It was the young man's question that brought him back to the moment. It wasn't a question he could remember ever being asked before, but he knew what it meant. He swallowed the acid taste of worry(it didn't belong here, it wasn't her), and his jaw went to steel bravado. "I don't think it's her," there was confidence in this. Then he tugged the gaudy brim of his hat down to shield the sun, and after a couple of tries, situated himself atop the horse, prepared to follow. "I just need to see."
It was never too serious a time for Hunter to smother laughter at dumb hats with sequins, but it was better than a burnt neck. With a little shrug of his shoulders after that, he swung up into the saddle himself. Hunter didn’t bother with the niceties of trail riding. Loren didn’t need to control the horse, and trail animals were taught nose-to-tail following, so he just set out across the desert with a casual set of heels to his horse. The dun mutt set out at a trot to follow. The afternoon was dying out quickly, setting the rocks ablaze with orange fire, and it didn’t take long to acquire the sway of the saddle, though the ride was not a comfortable one after the first hour. It was quickly obvious why Hunter thought horseback necessary. Eventually they started down a red slash canyon that was steep and set with pebbles and boulders that would have confounded almost anything but an animal--human or otherwise--on legs. The dog went first and disappeared into the brush, but Hunter didn’t call him back.
The desert was turning pinkish and it would be purple in two hours, black in three. Hunter stopped his horse beside a boulder and dismounted with a lift of knee and a soft puff of dust under his boots. He squinted up at the heap of rock that made up the side of the canyon. “He must have some other way in. Dunno how you’d get a body up here.” He didn’t look back for the icy look in Loren’s eyes, he just started moving up the rock, hoisting himself about four feet from the place where the horses stood. He whistled and the dog barked, and he adjusted accordingly before putting an arm down to help Loren up. “Had a dumber dog with me before. Was up here digging at something, so I came to see what.”
It wasn’t really a cave. It was a cut in the rock, with dirt on the floor and the walls of the canyon going up on either side. It wound back and forth like a highway, and there were enough rocks and overhangs that it was cool in the craggy space. Around the first bend, there was newly upturned red dirt and the entrance to the mine shaft. The collie puppy had revealed a spread of tangled dark hair. The smell was unmistakable this close. Hunter obviously had no desire to get any closer, and he backed away. “She’s in there,” he said, quietly.
This deep in the dusty deadlands, there were no trails. It didn't even seem like the vultures dared to venture this far, where the rocks burned like hibachi slabs and even the cacti brush were mirages. The uneven plane made it impossible for any vehicle to maneuver, and Loren couldn't imagine how somebody would have gotten somebody all the way out here. It couldn't be Hannah, how? Why so far? Why at all? Loren listened intently to everything that the young man said, every detail about heat and dog and landscape, but he said nothing in reply. He wanted to ask how decomposed the girl was, because that could instantly disprove that it was Hannah. Loren swallowed down steel, let it settle in bolts around his stomach and his heart as he swung his leg over the horse and hopped down upon reaching the cave-like formation.
He followed his scout into the damp, haunted interior. At the cowboy's direction, Loren noticed the upturned dirt, still fresh and splayed with a dark fringe of matted hair. There was a quick glance to the man when he began to back away from the smell, and Loren offered him distance if he wanted it. A gentle tick of his head back in the direction of the cave's mouth, if the kid needed to get away. It's strange how anxiety could die completely in a moment like this, leaving Loren feeling more machine than man. He jerked the hat from his head and dropped it into the dirt at his feet before he began to stride closer. The stench was overwhelming, and somehow he knew - some internal part of him that had yet to forget such horrific things - knew this was what a dead body smelled like. Different than rotten meat, different than road kill. Something gut wrenching, something that crawled into every pore. Loren hauled his t-shirt over his head and twisted the gray fabric around his nose and mouth as a makeshift mask. He was dogfight muscle, somebody that had forgotten to eat right for the past days of this search. Too many scars, each one of them old and white. That wicked tattoo curling like a screaming skull down his arm when he knelt in the dirt. Loren pushed some of that dead girl's hair aside. Chill as a coroner in this inspection until he saw her face. Hannah's face. "...Oh God.. no..."
Loren waited at the curve of the bend. He thought it pretty unlikely that this girl wasn’t the one Loren had been looking for, there were too many coincidences, and the sensation of grave agreement from the girl in his head only solidified this opinion. She did better with death than he did (he wasn’t sure yet why) and she’d had him go all the way in and make sure the decomposing face wasn’t just a trick of his mind or some animal the dog had dug up. It was she who said the face was feminine, since by this point, so shallowly set in the dirt, there was not much of it left. The scraping started by the puppy had revealed most of her face, but she was not on her back; either she was standing up, or it was just the head. Hunter didn’t want to think about it.
“Hey.” It occurred to Hunter he hadn’t asked the guy’s name. “Hey... that’s her?” and he didn’t need an answer, because then he said, uneasily, “What are we gonna do? I don’t want to talk to the cops.” He wasn’t sure if the broad scarred back even heard him, and he eased a little to one side to see what he was doing.
Loren had never seen a dead body (not that he could recall). Sure, there'd been that one pedestrian hit by a bank truck off Fremont a few months back, but this was different. This was Hannah. This was starshine and angel dust and fucking innocence. This was a church burning to the ground, it was a nun stoned to death, it was saints with their heads on plates. He said nothing as he knelt there in the dirt beside her sandy killing grounds. Her eyes were glassy and gray, filmed over like fishbelly with hollow pockets where the bugs and critters had already begun to eat at her. But still recognizable. The t-shirt drawn tight across his nose and mouth barely helped. Nausea threatened to get the best of him, but he didn't know if it was more attributed to her decay or the awareness that she had been tortured and killed.
Loren didn't say anything for a moment, but his bare hands dug grooves in the dirt as he struggled with his inhale. "We can't just leave her here." The words were muffled by his makeshift mask.
Hunter watched Loren’s hands with real, black worry coloring his eyes. The brim of his hat, bleached by sweat and sun into an empty fawn color and as used and nearly shapeless as his boots, hid his expression for a minute. “She’s not going to mind where she is,” he said, trying to be persuasive, edging a little to the side again, treading in his own boot prints. “We can’t dig her up, we’re gonna look guilty. I don’t want to look guilty. I just come into town and the first thing they’re going to do is make it me.” It wasn’t paranoia talking, it was real concern and a normal, honest bad citizen kind of fear. Hunter hadn’t killed anybody, but he’d done the kind of stupid that-ain’t-mine shit that made him want to avoid anybody with a badge.
"Then fucking leave!" Loren shot the words back over his shoulder, and despite the mask's muffle, his voice was crushed and sour as grapes in the sun. Not caring anymore, guncarved fingers wrenched the tshirt out of its knot and tossed it aside so he could breathe better. Even if breathing meant having to dry heave every few moments because the smell.. god, the smell. "Get out of here, you chicken shit bastard, but I'm getting her out of here!" Loren's voice was strained from the heat, or the guilt(it really was her.. how long had she been in this fucking hole praying for her life? Praying for somebody, maybe him, to find her?) Loren's shouting wasn't rational, he'd never find his way back to that borrowed car alone.
The insult rolled off Hunter entirely. He had been called many names, and though he had some vestiges of a certain kind of pride, it certainly didn’t sprout from a defensive of courage. The storm of grief was mostly alien to him, but he didn’t want to get into a fight with Loren, who could probably beat the hell out of him. Hunter didn’t come any nearer, nostrils flaring with indecision as he looked from Loren’s face to the shadowy shape in the ground. If she really was buried standing up, they’d be here for hours. There was a long pause as the echoes of Loren’s voice tapered out among the rocks. “...It’s gonna get dark in a couple hours,” Hunter said, trying in one last ditch effort to get the man to see reason.
They had no shovel, and Loren's hands were already raw from digging their way into dirt and clay. There was no way he'd unearth her and have the time to dig another grave. Hunter was right, the sky was already growing dark, and it was with a choked sound that Loren hunched over. She was rotting, he could smell it, and if there had been anything in his stomach, Loren might have lost it just then. But he didn't. He just leaned over her on hands and knees with a struggling, almost keening sound breaking loose from the back of his throat. WHY? Fucking why her? Was it because she'd started working at that shithole sleaze club? Loren knew bad things happened to girls wearing price tags. But Loren couldn't think about it now.. there was nothing to be done. Nothing to be fixed. Nothing to ever, ever be forgotten about this moment. It was over, but it would live on in him like some sickening horror movie reel that just wouldn't stop spinning. Loren didn't have it in him to draw another fetid breath when he pushed himself to his feet. There was nothing to be done here. T-shirt clutched in a dusty hand, quick and silent strides past Hunter and back to the horses. "Let's go."