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He must be standing on something—most likely the bedframe—his head and shoulders protruding through the hatch.
“Look,” I yell and hold up the candle again.
His eyes widen at the sight of the skeleton. “Oh, shit. Who’s that?”
“How the fuck should I know?”
I’ve been focused on the remains up until now, but now I’m no longer alone, I lift the candle to look around the rest of the roof space, checking for any more human remains. To my relief, there are no others, but there are several cardboard boxes, their sides sagging. I remember the reason I came up here in the first place—to look for supplies—and get to my feet. The space isn’t tall enough to allow me to stand straight, so I move hunched, careful to tread on the rafters so I don’t go plunging into the room below. I reach the nearest box. Cobwebs hang in thick strands from every surface. I might be six-four and covered in tats, but spiders are not my favorite. All those legs creep me the fuck out.
I pull open the top of the box and hold the candle closer to see inside. I’m hoping for a shit ton of canned food, and maybe even a beer or two, but something completely different meets my eyes.
Guns. Semi-automatic, from what I can tell. They don’t look like hunters’ guns to me, and there are far too many of them, all stacked on top of one another.
I go to the next box and repeat the process. Sure enough, it contains the same.
“What’s in there?” Reed shouts from the hatch so to be heard over the storm.
“Guns. A fuck ton of guns.” I open one of the boxes and lift out one of the weapons. “This isn’t the only one. These boxes are full of them.”
“Hunters?”
“If this is hunters, I don’t know what the fuck they’re hunting.”
Carefully, I carry one down to inspect. I’m relieved to be out of the crawl space and away from my new skeletal friend. The storm hasn’t abated any, and, for the first time, I’m thankful for it. Though it means no one will be out searching for us, it also means that whoever the guns belong to and, potentially, whoever is responsible for the skeleton, also won’t be coming back for them any time soon.
I hand the gun over to Reed, and he inspects it, frowning.
“This isn’t a good sign,” he says.
“What is it?”
“The serial number has been filed off. If this gun was legal, that wouldn’t have been done.”
“People don’t keep boxes full of guns in a roof space if they’re legal,” I point out.
It had never occurred to me that they were. The moment I’d seen them, together with the skeleton, alarms had gone off in my head.
“Whose cabin are we staying in?” Reed wonders. “Who does the skeleton belong to? We probably need to get a better look at him, see if we can figure out how he died.”
I frown his way. “How are we supposed to do that?”
“Look for bone breaks, maybe, a fractured skull. What we really need to know is did he die by accident, or did someone kill him?”
I draw air in through my nose. “The samesomeonewho owns all those guns, you mean?”
Reed shrugs. “He wouldn’t have crawled into the roof space by himself and just stayed there until he died.”
I offer another explanation. “He might have been injured and hid himself up there, and ended up dying?”
“If he was hiding, who was he hiding from?”
I think again. “Or he was already dead and whoever those guns belong to hid the body up there, maybe as a warning to anyone else who finds them?”
Reed clicked his tongue against his teeth. “Anyone like us, you mean. But why wouldn’t they have taken the guns with them?”
“Maybe they meant to come back for them and something or someone stopped them?”
“Or they still plan to come back?”
