Thinking was impossible. I was having a hard time sleeping back south but in Utah it was impossible. I got sleep for sure every two days for six hours. I was no longer in control of my sleep cycle. It was manageable before but now I had to make certain I was somewhere safe four hours before the 48th hour mark.

  The thing was trailing me, I still didn’t know what it was, but I could feel it stocking me it was the faintest of faint feelings. I spent the first day driving spreading my cent in and around Tooele Valley. I walked through every store, restaurant and church, I could fine, then I parked out on a gravel strip and waited.

  Having the Rocky Mountain horror, the Sinew less than a state north of me, was not helping me focus. It should still be in Idaho, but it didn’t have to be. If it was the Rocky Mountain horror that was killing the people in Tooele then it would without question pick up my cent. If it did come for me, I would be ready, out running it should be more than possible in my truck. Breaking my cent trail was another problem entirely.

  It didn’t come that the first day or the next. I spent a week parked on long flat strips waiting to be found by a Horror that never came. Something else was terrorizing this valley. So, I left town and started driving down box canyons listening for the echoes of the dead.

  More than halfway up my second canyon of the day; I came to where the road was washed out. The canyon continued up for five or so miles past the washout, not usually a problem I would just grab my extra gun, my bag and hit the pavement but I didn’t want to be far from the truck, it was my only solution for the Sinew that might be hunting me.

  But I needed to get this job over quickly, I needed to go back south where I could think. I turned the truck around and backed it up to the wash, I would walk around the next bend maybe a little further, then I would come back to the truck if I didn’t feel anything.

  The washed-out road was deep, and I slid down the side and had a little trouble getting up the loos dirt with my pack and twelve gage slung over my chest. I walked up the warm road past desert shrubs and small trees that thrived in the sheltered environment. A zip caught my eye as a hummingbird darted into a bush, I took a closer look and saw it sitting in a nest. I didn’t know they lived in the desert. The bird seemed too small too delicate to survive in such a dry and wind-swept place.

  Passing the humming bird’s home I turned the corner in the canyon and was immediately hit by the sweet smell of rotting body’s. Every dead decomposing thing has a smell, people have the most recognizable cent. The smell was strong, and coming down through the canyon. I checked my shot gun and continued my walk. The road narrowed and came to a fork in the canyon. To the left the road wound on up the canyon, to the right, the canyon narrowed and flattened out, the walls constricting together. Giving the winding narrow space an unstable feel. The smell of the dead was coming drifting from the narrow passage.

  I took a long breath letting the fear I had been living in for the last two weeks wash over me, then I locked it out. Whatever was down there needed killing, and I was here to help it on its way. I stepped between the canyon walls embracing the cool sent of rotting dead.

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  The first body echoed from beneath a thicket of scraggly bushes. He was mostly skeleton surrounded by a rope, the remains of a climbing harness around his waist.

  Continuing for a few minutes I found another body, this one hidden beneath a thin layer of gravel also mostly skeleton with a ripped and shredded winter coat and ski paints. They had clearly been killed months apart from one another.

  Coming to a large overhang I crouched, stooping beneath it twenty or so feet, coming out on the other side I was in an oval bowl formation, around fifty feet wide and eighty feet long. The echoes throbbed at me from the ground, they were all mixed and overlayed with one another, more than twenty individuals, I guessed. The ground was raised higher in the oval section as well. The smell was unbearable. A small spring fed down a crack in the canyon wall dampening the stones beneath my feet, the congenator of the rot I was smelling.

  Looking up through the oval in the canyon I could see torn cloth from a flannel shirt, ski goggles hanging off a shrub, a pair of large pink sunglasses discarded in the back corner of the oval in a bundle of sticks deposited by the last flood.

  Listening, I watched and waited but there was no sound other than the fresh wind that was coming from further down the canyon. I was relieved, whatever had killed these people was not the rocky Mountain horror. There were no bark strands hanging from crude stick structures with the dead remains slopped in piles beneath them. Whatever was doing this killing was trying to hide the fact. The rocky mountain horror didn’t hied it’s pray, it simply eats it somewhere it won’t be disturbed.

  I walked over the collection of the dead. Not ten feet from the oval the canyon took a sudden two-foot drop, were stones and gravel had been removed for thirty or so yards forward. I looked back the way I came, it to was lower than the center oval, but flooding had washed away the apparent shift in the canyon floor. The sound of rocks falling over my head made me dive beneath an overhang in the canyons wall. A rock the size of a tire landed three feet away. I peered up pointing my shot gun, looking up the sides of the canyon, all I could see was a leather work glove, sun bleached, snagged in a crack of the cliff face at the top of the canyon.

  I was on edge, certainly the cascading rock was intentional attempt to hit me. I slipped out from under my slight overhang and scanned the canyon above. Nothing, no movement. Eyes now scanning the top of the canyon more than the front I made my way to the back were the wall rose in a hundred or so cliff face. Finding a suitable lip in the wall to sit under, I settled down and waited for something more to happen.

  After the sun set, I retrieved my night vision goggles from my pack. It would be very hard for someone to see me down in this pit, but I would easily see them skyline against the bright stars.

  Another hour of waiting and I decided I had waited enough. I kept scanning up and down, side to side. I didn’t see any movement. Getting back to my truck I noticed the washed-out bank was inches away from my truck’s back tires instead of five or so feet and the slop was very loos and runny. It seemed like someone had been digging towards my truck. I walked around and found all four tires deflated, punctured. Yep, something had been digging towards my truck.

  The popped tires didn’t stop me from getting in and pulling it fifty more feet down the road and away from the “eroding” washout. Something had been digging as I sat in the back of the canyon. I didn’t know what or how long. It didn’t really look like digging more like the hard compacted dirt was crumbling apart and falling down the hill side of its own accord, something it could not be doing on its own. I would settle down and wait, see if the thing came back.