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It was a busy night. The team chased trap cams and howling noises through the trees for hours. Lauren sat by the fire, her laptop on the stump as she sat cross-legged on her sleeping bag. Rob and Bahati hovered around watching the camera feed over her shoulder.
“Dang it. One of the perimeter cameras went down,” she snapped. “We’re completely blind without that camera.”
“Did something break the beam?” Rob asked.
“The alarm would have sounded if it had. It just went dead,” she said. A second quadrant of her screen went blank. “Shoot! There went #2.”
“What the hell?” Rob moved in. “I’ll go check them.”
“You can’t go alone,” Lauren said. “Bahati, go with him.”
“What about you?” she asked. “I can’t leave you alone.”
“I’ll be fine,” she waved them off. “Nothing will come near so large a fire,” she added.
Bahati and Rob stood looking at one another, not sure what to do. “You know Rowan would kill us if we left you here alone,” Bahati objected.
“I’m armed,” she, said setting the dart pistol up on the stump by her laptop. “Please. Go fix that camera.”
“Team One to Base Camp,” the walkie-talkie interrupted the argument, and she shooed them off as she reached for it. “We found a deer stand in one of the trees; we’re going to send Jean-René up with the night-vision and see if we can see anything.”
“Sounds good. There’s a problem with the perimeter cam, but we’re going to get it reset. Hopefully it’s just a dead battery.”
“I checked those batteries myself,” Rowan said. “They were fine a few hours ago.”
“We’ll keep you posted.”
“Over and out, Base Camp.”
* * *
“What happened here?” Rob found the perimeter sensor on the ground by the tree where he’d secured it a few hours before. The bark on the tree was damaged. He picked up the remains of the alarm and held it up to the light for Bahati to see that it was nothing but a bunch of broken plastic and dangling wires. “What the hell?”
“I don’t have a good feeling about this.” Bahati shook her head. “Let’s fix it and get back to base camp. The longer we’re out here, the more likely we are to end up like Lauren.”
“Or worse,” Rob agreed. “Did you bring a replacement?”
“Yeah,” she said.
* * *
It took less than an hour to fix both damaged sensors and return to camp. Neither could explain what had happened to them.
Lauren’s laptop screen shone brightly, and the fire had died down to glowing coals, twinkling red beneath the char and ash. Nothing seemed out of place, but someone was obviously missing. Lauren’s coffee cup lay on the ground next to the tree stump upended in the dirt. The sleeping bag she’d been sitting on was disheveled. The lantern lay on its side a few feet away near the edge of camp.
“Lauren?” Bahati called.
“Surely she didn’t go off into the woods to pee,” Rob said. “Look, her tranq gun is still here. She wouldn’t leave without it, would she?”
“Surely not.” Bahati agreed. “Lauren!” She yelled even louder. “Lauren?”
There was no response. “Where is she?” Rob paced, searching the tree line for her, his flashlight swinging wildly in the darkness.
“Check her transponder.”
Bahati sat down at her computer and pulled up the tracker. “I’m not getting anything on her.” Bahati picked up the walkie-talkie. “Base Camp to Team One.”
“Team One here.” The response came a moment later.
“Have you talk to Lauren recently?”
“It’s been a while,” Chance answered. “Why? We thought she was with you.”
“We went to fix the perimeter alarms. When we got back, she was gone.”
“Well maybe she went to pee,” Chance suggested.
“Bahati...” Rob called out, his voice cracking. Bahati walked over to see what Rob was looking at by the edge of the clearing.
“Team One ... you better get back here.”
* * *
The footprint was nearly 20 inches long. It was deep, too. The ground wasn’t particularly muddy, but whatever had made the print was big ... and heavy.
“There’s no sign of a struggle. No other prints,” Rowan rose from his examination of the depression. It was twice the size of his hand.
“Do you think she took off after it?” Jean-René asked. “Or away from it? Maybe she was scared, and she ran.”
“I’ve never seen her run from anything,” Rowan said. “Never.”