Chapter 7
“Miller, stay with me!”
The deputy’s eyes rolled violently toward the ceiling, his jaw working frantically, trying to chew the dark froth filling his mouth. His fingers clamped tighter onto Kit’s arm, pulling Kit down until the federal liaison was inches from the dying man’s face.
The smell coming from Miller’s mouth was unbearable—rotted vegetation, copper, and the raw, chemical ozone of the Class-IV buffer.
“I waited… two months…” Miller wheezed, his voice dropping into a desperate, weeping hiss that clawed at Kit’s ears. “I couldn’t… hold the count… the marrow was turning… it was Eli’s week… Eli was supposed… to get the buffer… not me…”
Kit froze. “Eli? Eli from the timber mill?”
“I took his… his share…” Miller’s chest rattled, a sound like dry gravel being shaken in a bucket. His body began to shudder, small, violent tremors rippling through his quadriceps and belly. “The math… Desmond keeps the ledger… you can’t skip the turn… the dosage has to… to hold the town… Kit…”
Miller’s glazed eyes suddenly locked onto Kit’s face with terrifying, crystalline awareness.
The fury was gone. The cunning was gone. In their place was a look of pure, unadulterated, infant-like terror—and beneath that terror, a horrific, reverent awe.
Miller lifted his other hand, trembling, his grey, split-nailed fingers reaching up toward Kit’s cheek.
Kit flinched back, but the dying deputy’s fingers just brushed the collar of his coat, touching the fabric with the same desperate, worshipping tenderness Mrs. Gable had shown on Main Street.
“Our… our boy…” Miller whispered, a tear of pale, serous fluid cutting a clean path through the dark sweat on his grey cheek. “Don’t… don’t let us… melt…”
A massive convulsion tore through Miller’s spine.
His back bowed violently off the floor. A sharp, wet crack echoed inside the cabin—the sound of ribs cracking under the sheer force of his own muscular contractions. His jaw locked open, emitting a high, whistling hiss of escaping lung-air, and a heavy surge of black, tarry fluid poured from his mouth and nostrils, pooling around his neck.
Then, his fingers went slack.
The iron grip on Kit’s sleeve released. Miller’s head fell to the side, striking the dirt floor with a dull thud. His chest did not rise again.
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Kit remained on his knees, breathing hard, his hands trembling as he stared at the corpse.
Miller’s skin was already changing. Before Kit’s very eyes, the cellular structure of the deputy’s face seemed to lose its hydrostatic pressure, the skin sagging into the bone structure, the grey discoloration deepening into the dark, leaden hue of old slate.
Kit reached out and pressed two fingers to Miller’s neck.
No pulse. The tissue beneath his fingers felt spongy, as if the cellular walls had dissolved into a loose, liquefying slurry.
Kit scrambled backward, his boots sliding in the spilled fluid.
*It wasn’t my turn.* *It was Eli’s week.* *Desmond keeps the ledger.*
The words spun through Kit’s mind like shards of broken glass.
This wasn’t a cartel sale. This wasn’t an outside buyer.
Miller hadn’t stolen the four pints to sell across the state line. Miller was dying of something—some horrific, rapid cellular degradation—and had injected the Class-IV stabilizer directly into his own arm in a desperate, botched attempt to save himself.
And he had stolen it from someone named Eli.
Kit’s gaze whipped around the cabin.
On the overturned wire spool, sitting right beside the sputtering kerosene lantern, was a ruggedized, military-spec handheld terminal.
It was connected via a short ribbon cable to a portable lithium battery pack. On its small, monochrome LCD screen, an amber LED was blinking furiously.
``` LINK ESTABLISHED: MUNICIPAL RELAY INTERCEPT DATA SYNC: COMPLETE ENCRYPTION: AES-256 [LOCAL MUNICIPAL KEY REQUIRED] FILE: SUSTENANCE_SCHED_Y5.DAT ```
Kit stood up, his legs feeling like lead.
He crossed the dirt floor, unhooked the terminal from the battery pack, and jammed it into his satchel alongside his diagnostic tablet. He looked down at the floor. The fourth ampoule of Class-IV stabilizer—the only intact one remaining—was still rolling against the dirt.
Kit scooped it up, wrapped it in a piece of clean canvas from his pocket, and shoved it deep into his coat.
He turned toward the door to leave—and froze.
Faint, distant, but unmistakably clear through the howling mountain wind, came the low, throaty rumble of a heavy diesel engine climbing the lower switchbacks.
Kit slipped out of the cabin, pressing his shoulder against the corrugated tin wall.
Down on the lower terrace, two miles below the quarry gate, two pairs of headlights were cutting through the dense mountain fog.
One was Desmond’s heavy flatbed timber truck. The other was the county maintenance van driven by the town mechanic.
They weren't rushing with sirens. They were driving steadily, climbing in tandem, boxing in the only switchback road leading off the ridge.
They knew Miller was up here.
Or worse—they knew Kit was.
Kit remembered the faint GPS ping logged on his truck’s undercarriage. They hadn't just followed tire tracks; they were tracking his government vehicle.
If they found him here with Miller’s corpse, the shattered ampoules, and the encrypted municipal terminal, he would never make it off this mountain. Desmond’s gentle smiles, the warm bowls of stew, the fatherly hands on his shoulder—it all felt suddenly, violently inverted, like an iron bear-trap disguised as an embrace.
Kit didn't run to his truck.
He knew the ridge. He had spent three years surveying every drainage ditch and logging culvert in this quadrant.
Kit turned, dashed across the shale yard toward the old dynamite sluice, and threw himself into the brush. He slid down the steep, forty-degree scree slope on the northern face of the mountain, pine branches whipping across his face, shale gouging through the knees of his trousers.
He hit the bottom of the ravine, soaked in mud and freezing water, but he didn't stop.
He had to get to the municipal relay station.
The handheld terminal Miller had left behind was encrypted with a local municipal cipher. Kit’s field tablet didn't have the processing power or the hardware keys to break AES-256 in the wild. But down at the annex, tied directly into the federal microwave relay and the high-speed regional node, Kit could run a brute-force decryption dictionary against the file in less than ten minutes.
He needed to see what was on that drive before Desmond’s truck came down from the ridge.
He needed to know what the hell was happening to the people of Blackwood Hollow.
***
The municipal annex was dark when Kit stumbled out of the woods forty-five minutes later.
His coat was torn at the elbow, his boots crusted with black mountain mud, his lungs burning with every freezing breath.
Blackwood Hollow was quiet. It was just past two in the afternoon, but the heavy storm clouds pressing down between the two ridges had turned the valley into a dim, twilight world. The streets were deserted. Smoke rose from the bakery chimney down the block, and the amber lights of the general store glowed through the fog, but nobody was walking the timber sidewalks.
Kit slipped around the back of the annex, using the heavy evergreen hedges for cover.
