Jackman's Peak

Alex continued pedaling his rickety red mountain bike along the south side of the tracks. The sun was hot, dry and relentless. There wasn’t a tree around for miles, just large sagebrush scattered all over and the mirage of waves covering the brown, treeless mountains in the distance.  The old railroad hadn’t been used in many years, and the smell of the oily, wooden railroad ties and rusted metal rails brought him back to the early memories of his childhood. The large rocks and bits of wooden debris made it hard to pedal.
“It never used to be this shitty,” he hopped off his bike and his feet hit the ground in a stride as he came to a halt. He looked around, squinting to see the brown, bald mountains in the far distance. He looked up ahead and whistled for his dog.
“Roxy!” he yelled.
Nothing.
“Roxy!” She was nowhere to be found.
“Roxy!” he yelled again.
“Damnit, fuckin’ dog.” the heat and lack of food was making him irritable. You’d think losing a dog in such a flat place would be hard. Nope.
“Not much farther,” looking up ahead he could see the base of Jackman’s Peak--a small hill with a ravine on the backside, that’s where the old mineshaft hang-out spot was. They used to hang there all the time back in high school. It’s been years since he last visited here and he was really excited to check it out after so many years.
Fifteen more minutes of pedaling through the heat and he was walking into the shade of the ravine. Just ahead he could see the entrance of the mineshaft. He had forgotten the eeriness of the place. It was spooky. Lonely. Such a desolate place--but that’s what partly made it so special. “Roxy!” he yelled again for her.
“Uggh, what the hell is she doing?” he whistled again before slumping down and pulling out her water dish and his canteen from his backpack. “Here, girl!,” he yelled as he poured water into her dish. He sat back against the rock wall of the ravine, nice and cool in the shade.
“Ahhh,” leaning back he relaxed and closed his eyes.”that heat‘l git ya.”  he mumbled. Before he knew it, he was fast asleep.
Ten minutes later he woke to Roxy licking his hand.
“There you are,” he slowly sat up and gave her a good pat on the head.
“You know not to run off. Where’d you go?” Roxy wagged her tail and licked her empty bowl. She had finished the water while he napped.
“Ahh, so that’s what you came back for. I see how it is.” he chuckled and refilled her bowl. She lapped up the water like she was dying of thirst, “geez, take it easy girl.” Alex looked around and had a flush of memories as he looked at the place where he and his friends had spent so much of their teenage summer nights. The mound near the center of the ravine showed where the bonfire spot used to be. It was now grown over with weeds. Who knows how many beer cans are buried in there.
The entrance to the mineshaft was black and eerie, as it always had been. In high school, they dared each other to go inside at night and nobody ever would. It was like an ornament to their spot and nobody really went inside it. Some couples would go in there to make out and escape the noise of the party. Alex chuckled at how silly they were back then. “Come to think of it, Dale lost his virginity in here, haha!” he laughed out loud.
From a few feet outside the entrance, he peered into the mineshaft and couldn’t see a thing.
“Can’t leave without at least going inside. Could be ages before I come back again.” He grabbed the rickety wooden frame of the doorway and poked his head and upper body inside. His eyes slowly adjusted and he could kind of see to the back where it was collapsed. It was much cooler in there and still had that old, musty smell, as well as a rank, rotten smell.
“Fuck, that stinks like shit. Did someone fucking die in here?” He said sarcastically. He steeped in anyway and looked around. There were still old spray paint tags on the walls. “Hotshot,” was in big red on the left side next to “KD and TR forever, with a big heart around it,” and “Class of 1987, 1999, 2001, 2004.” randomly painted here and there. A bunch of trash was piled up towards the back.
“Are you kidding me?” he scoffed. “‘-the fuck is wrong with people?” he kicked a can towards the pile of garbage. “Fucking assholes.”
The can landed beside the garbage pile. Which drew his attention to a blanket among the trash. It was wrapped up like a burrito and had rope all over it. Alex inched towards it as his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he could see it better. It was on top of the garbage pile, neatly placed there. He felt a little excitement thinking he might have found someone's hidden “treasure.”
“yeah , right.” jokingly, he reassured himself he was never that lucky. He kicked the blanket and it felt kind of hard, soft. He untied the knot on top and pulled the rope off. The blanket was kind of stiff and didn’t move when he pulled the rope away. With one hand he opened the blanket.
Alex jumped back in horror, “holy fucking shit!” covering his mouth, he looked at what he found in total shock and fright.
Under the blanket was a severed human head sewn to the chest of a dismembered body, the limbs stuffed inside the body cavity. The eyes of the head were cut out and the mouth was sewn shut. It was hard to tell if it was a man or a woman. The hair had been cut off from the scalp and you could see most of the skull.
Alex stepped slowly stepped back and chills ran over his body, “What. The . Fuck.”  He couldn’t help but look closer for a minute. The body was tightly wrapped in barbed wire. The wire was coming out of the nostrils and ears, wrapped around the head and through body cavity. On the stomach, there was a carving from a knife in the skin-- a star and five strange symbols near each point of the star. Deeply carved into the forehead were the words, “Vivo Demonio.”
Alex quickly left the mine shaft in horror, he felt an unexplainable uneasiness come over him. He felt sick. He had never seen anything like that before.
“Oh my god, you sick fuck. Who the fuck. Who could, do that?” All he could think about was getting out of there.
“Jesus,” he started to panic. “Roxy! Let’s get the fuck out of here. ‘C’mon.”
“Roxy?” she was gone again. “God damnit.”
“Roxy let’s go!”
He grabbed his bike and took off, yelling her name as he rode, “she’ll catch up. I’m not sticking ‘round.” She always goes off somewhere and then catches up later.
“Roxy!”
Alex rode off down the trail, a rooster tail of dust behind him. Not far from the mineshaft spot, just ahead, Roxy was on the trail, sniffing something off to the side. Slowing down he asked, “hey girl, what is it?” Approaching her as he dragged a foot in the dirt to come to a stop, his adrenaline was still wildly pumping through him from what he saw in the mine shaft.
As he approached Roxy, he could tell something was “off.” Trembling and sweating profusely, Alex inched closer to Roxy, gripping his handlebars like a scared child.
Among the massive sagebrush bushes, nearly completely hidden behind them, was something so shocking it made him nearly vomit. Very openly exposed and standing upright, was a man buried up to his knees, nailed to a wooden cross. His legs and the bottom of the cross were both buried a few feet, and that’s what held it up. The horde of flies buzzing around the carcass was as thick as a raincloud. The sun had absolutely cooked him repeatedly. Who knows how long he’d been there. His head was shaved and large, yellow blisters blanketed his exposed skin.. Some of the blisters had already popped and recooked under the sun. It looked disgusting. From the guy’s knees to his belly button, it was gone, no flesh remained, ripped apart by wild dogs or coyotes. His bones were exposed and tiny bits of flesh hung on them. Ants covered almost every inch of his deteriorating body and some of his intestines were hanging out. Most of them had been carried off by the birds. There were an excessive amount of nails in his wrists. Not one, not two, not three, but probably ten or more in each wrist. His throat was cut and his head was held upright by long screws through the lower sides of his jaw, screwed right through to the wood. His tongue had been pulled through his slit throat. Carved into his chest was the phrase, “oh come, all ye faithful.”
Alex didn’t say or do anything and took aff as fast as he could down the trail.
“Fuuck! Holy shit!”
“C’mon Roxy! Let’s go!”
He went as fast as he could, nearly wrecking as he sped across the rocky trail next to the tracks. Faster and faster he went, scared to death. Roxy was right behind him.
Pedaling until he nearly collapsed, he finally slowed down, hoping Roxy was still behind him. Sure as shit, there she was, right behind him.
“Good girl... good girl, c’mon. I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but we can’t ever come back here.” Alex never felt so scared in his life. It felt like someone was watching him. He kept pedaling and eventually reached the dirt road. After 10 minutes on it, he reached the paved road and eventually, the gas station. He pulled up to the station in a hurry, put down the water bowl for Roxy and went inside. Pulling open the door of the gas station, something caught his attention from the corner of his eye. An old, rusty, ugly, beaten, mangled farm truck parked near the front door, with a rusty role of barbed wire in the bed. He froze in fright and wonder, “could, that, be….holy fuck.” A small wooden cross was hanging from the rearview mirror of the truck.

If it was just a coincidence that this truck resembled the scene of the two mutilated bodies he just found, it would be astonishing. Alex felt this truck belonged to the monster whoever did that to those people. His hands started shaking and the color dropped from his face. He was ghost white and scared to death. It seemed as if the person who owned the truck would come sprinting out of the store and attack him just for knowing what he had found out at Jackman’s Peak. It would have been just as bad if he had, “I found the bodies you tried to hide,” across his forehead. "Not like he tried to hide them very well," he thought.
Alex let go of the door and walked back to where his bike and Roxy were, just around the corner of the building, in the shade. There, he waited. He says to Roxy, while petting her for comfort and to ease his anxiety, “good girl, just you wait ‘til he gits and we’ll be outta here. That sick fuck...” Thinking that it was actually the same guy who mutilated those bodies was terrifying. The last thing Alex wanted to do was make eye contact with this person if he did see him, or her. The horror and terror was written across his face plain as day. You can’t hide fear like that, well he couldn’t.