Then she saw something different. Not a canthor carcass–a door. It was a small metal door set into the back wall.
Hope flared hot and sharp in her chest.
“Oh thank God!” she mumbled through numb lips.
She half—ran toward it, slipping and staggering over the slick concrete…only to find when she got there that it wasn’t an exit at all. Just another storage room—locked, with a heavy mechanical seal and no handle on the inside because it wasn’t meant to be opened from this side.
Kiera leaned her forehead against the freezing metal and nearly burst into tears.
“Damn it! Damn this stupid, f-fucking p-place!”
Her breath fogged on the door and instantly froze into a patch of white crystals.
She pushed away from it before it could leach any more of her precious warmth and kept going. What else cloud she do?
The aisles of hanging meat seemed stranger now…narrower…darker. The carcasses looked less like butchered livestock and more like bodies hanging in rows.
Bodies…
The thought came and stayed in her tired mind.
Kiera slowed and looked around. Now that she was deeper inside the warehouse, she was beginning to notice something.
The hooks back here weren’t all carrying canthors. Some of the hanging shapes were smaller.
At first she told herself they were juveniles—young animals slaughtered before full growth. But as she got closer, her stomach dropped.
The shapes weren’t canthors–not at all.
They were too narrow in the shoulders…too long in the legs. Too…wrong.
A terrible chill went through her that had nothing to do with the freezer.
“No,” she whispered. “Oh my God, no–it can’t be.”
She took one more step and came into the light–there, hanging in the harsh white light and rimed with frost, was a body–a woman’s body–or what had once been one.
Kiera made a sound she would later never be able to describe—something between a gasp and a moan and a scream that never quite made it all the way out. She stumbled backward, hit a row of frozen carcasses, and nearly went down.
The body hanging from the hook was naked and blue—white with cold, its hair hanging stiff with frost, its features shrunken and terrible and half—hidden by ice. There were marks all over it. Bruises, cuts, old violence–the signs of a death that had not been clean or merciful.
And it was not alone. Kiera looked around wildly. She saw another body…and another…and another.
Women–at least a dozen of them. They were frozen hard in the back section of Higgs’ warehouse as casually as he stored meat.
Kiera’s skin crawled like it was trying to get off her body and run away.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God.”
It hit her all at once, then. The women who had gone missing from nearby settlements…the drifters…the ranch hands’ girlfriends who had “run off.” The one or two transient workers nobody could ever seem to find once the season ended.
Higgs had them here. Higgs had killed them.
And now he had her.
The warehouse suddenly seemed even colder than before…more silent…more hopeless.
The “girlies”—he said the girlies were nicer to him after they spent some time in the deep freeze. This is what he meant. He’s been at this for a while–he’s a fucking serial killer!
