Free Alien Hunter (Flynn Carroll) by Whitley Strieber

had taken roughly ten minutes and had been accomplished without a sound, without a trace of anything being left behind and without a hitch. In this .
    He reached the garage and shone his light through one of the small windows that lined the two doors—and felt a shock with the power of a fist in the face. There was blood everywhere, blood and ripped clothing. He saw a hand, a leg—pieces of two people, maybe three.
    The Hoffmans? The team? All of them?
    He raised one of the doors, which came up with a massive creaking and a tinkle of shattering ice.
    This door hadn’t been opened in at least an hour, and the other one was caked with ice. So who were these people?
    Stepping in, gun in one hand and flashlight in the other, he went to where a bloody jacket lay against the door of an old pickup.
    North Face, black. High-intensity penlight in the right pocket.
    Mike had worn a black North Face. The light was the same one all the team members carried.
    Against the back wall, there was an old-fashioned pitchfork. On it was a rounded mass of bloody hair. It was Charlie, his distorted face just barely recognizable in the mess.
    The perp may have originally intended to take the Hoffmans in the usual way, leaving behind evidence that they’d departed on their own. Flynn’s best guess was that these two men had somehow succeeded in surprising him—whereupon they had paid the same price as Louie.
    So this was now a major crime scene. There could be forensic studies done here. Maybe there would be prints, bits of hair, even blood. DNA, even.
    Looked at one way, this was a scene of extraordinary violence and tragedy. Looked at another way, it could be a treasure-trove of evidence, the first one in the history of this case.
    A quick survey of the remains turned up evidence of only the two men. Diana was not here. He made a quick decision to report this crime first and worry about her later. His guess was that she was beyond saving anyway, probably back there in those woods right now, in the form of frozen remains.
    His duty was very clear. He had to get out of here alive and give the state criminal investigators all the help he could.
    But how to accomplish that? The perp was going to definitely want him dead. He had effective weapons, including the lion, and probably skills and capabilities that Flynn knew nothing about. Given that he was able to train a wild animal to near-human hunting skills, it had to be assumed that he was well provided with extraordinary assets.
    Could Flynn manage to walk out of here? No, the perp would not let that happen. At some point, the lion would reach him or something else would reach him.
    Even if he did reach the Cherokee, which was half a mile back along the road, he didn’t have keys. So he would need to wire it. Not difficult, but it would take a few minutes that he was unlikely to have.
    He was trapped here, that was clear. But he wasn’t going to give up. That was also clear. The odds were against him though, seriously against him. In fact, he didn’t really think he had any measurable odds. So what he had to do was to leave a record behind, giving all the details of the crime as he had observed them.
    A moment’s thought brought him an idea. He set about searching the ruins of the two men for a phone. He could use it to record a detailed account of the crime as he had seen it unfold. He’d return it to the pocket it had come from. At some point, forensics would find the recording and listen to it.
    Handling the corpse of a person who has just died is as intimate an experience as there is. Not many people do it—nurses, policemen, emergency medical service personnel—and those who do never get used to it. It’s as if a living person has surrendered himself to you so completely that he is lost to your touch.
    Largely because Charlie’s corpse was the least maimed, Flynn approached it first. He’d taken a shattering blow to the head and sustained deep gouges. A man had delivered the blow,