by Edwin Dasso
Barb nodded. "I'll be great. I'm gonna take a little nap here under this tree. Don't screw the food up, Kat, especially the Spinach Madeleine and the eggplant," Barb pleaded. I’ve been waiting for those dishes for three years!”
"I promise. I’ve waited too," Kat laughed as she went inside to help Mike’s mother with Thanksgiving dinner.
Several hours later the college friends and a few of Mikey’s relatives, sat around a table for sixteen placed under the shade trees by the water. Most everyone at the table had consumed Cajun fried turkey, alligator, boudin and andouille sausage, and seafood gumbo plus numerous side dishes. Kat had stuffed down two helpings of spinach and Barb, who’d experienced a bit of nausea, had eaten mostly creamed potatoes.
It was the perfect evening. The weather was one of those magnificent days that only occur on the Gulf Coast of the United States. Kat and Mike had bid good-bye to most of their friends. Barb and Kat were staying with Mike’s parents and Barb had gone to bed. Mike and Kat sat closely in the porch swing and watched a glorious sunset. Kat felt good all over.
Mike turned to Kat and said, “Would you like to go over to New Orleans with me tomorrow and see my restaurant? We could stay in my place in the French Quarter,” he said, his voice hesitant.
Kat looked into Mike’s eyes and her heart did a flip-flop. Had she really loved him more than like a brother all these years? Had she let Liam Cross stand in the way of her true love?
“I would love that, Mike,” she said honestly as she lifted her face to his. He kissed her deeply and Kat’s day ended with fireworks. She had so much to be thankful for…
And she was.
From the author
Thank you for reading Her Biloxi Brute, a part of the In Her Shadow boxed set and more thanks for helping us raise money for American veterans. I hope you’ll leave me a review. I invite you to try my Women of Valor novels, four series about woman who make a difference in our often difficult world. Please click to read the first book in the Alexandra Destephano series. Please click here to join my mailing list. I’m always happy to hear from my readers. Please email me at [email protected].
About the Author
Dr. Judith Lucci has ridden camels in Egypt, taught health on three continents, cared for patients in third world countries, testified before Congress in health matters, and saved thousands of lives.
She is the USA Today and Wall Street Journal best selling author of the Women of Valor novels, stories about women who make a difference and the men who support them. She pens the Alexandra Destephano medical thrillers, the Michaela McPherson crime series, the Sonia Amon medical thriller series and the Artzy Chicks cozy mysteries. She relies heavily on her medical experiences in her novels.
Judith lives in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where she teaches art and painting classes and consults on healthcare.
Find & Follow Judith Lucci
Alexandra Destephano Novels
Chaos at Crescent City Medical Center
The Imposter
Viral Intent: Terror in New Orleans
Toxic New Year: The Day that Wouldn’t End
Evil: Finding St. Germaine
Run for Your Life
Demons Among Us
Michaela McPherson Novels
The Case of Dr. Dude
The Case of the Dead Dowager
The Case of the Man Overboard
The Case of the Very Dead Lawyer
The Case of the Missing Parts
Maura Robichard Psychic Thrillers
Seer of Evil
Seer of Truth
Learn More
https://www.judithlucci.com/
Other Books
Ebola: What You Must Know to Stay Safe
Meandering, Musing & Inspiration for the Soul
Beach Traffic
The Man Below
A Novel
By
Kevin Tumlinson
Contents
Author’s Content advisory
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Epilogue
Afterword
About the Author
Also by Kevin Tumlinson
Author’s Content advisory
The Man Below
Language intensity
No or mild profanity
Sexuality intensity
Possible sexual references with no details
Violence intensity
Mild violence, fairly detailed with some blood
Prologue
Run, run, don’t be slow!
Never stop running from the man below!
Anonymous, excerpted from A South Texas Ghost Tale
There had been no light for nearly six days.
Or for fifty days.
By this point, the only reference for time that Clara had was the dim display of a computer monitor on the other side of the glass—a computer that may as well have been in another universe. And the time was a digital clock screensaver in 12-hour format, bouncing from corner to corner. No date. No indication of PM or AM. Seeing 12:00 could mean noon or it could mean midnight, she could never be certain.
It was Schrödinger’s screensaver. Maddening.
She’d lost track of how many noons had passed—or how many midnights. She thought it was six, but it could have been more. It probably was more.
The door was locked. From the inside and the outside. She wasn’t sure if that relieved or terrified her at the moment.
The darkness pressed in on her, squeezing her. She could feel it in her straining eyes, in her temples, in her skin.
You don’t get used to darkness like this. The faint light of a computer monitor on the other side of six inches of lead-lined glass was not adequate for dispelling this kind of darkness.
Five miles below the surface.
Every door, in all five miles, locked.
You are in a room where no one will ever find you—no one that you want to find you.
No one could hear her screaming, and she’d given that up days ago. Or hours ago. Again, she wasn’t sure.
She had food and water. Plenty. This was a military-grade bunker, after all. Or something like one—definitely military, definitely a big secret, buried out here in the mountains of New Mexico, five miles from a former experimental aircraft test site. Fifty miles from the nearest person who might, by some miracle, hear her scream for help.
Her only hope was the cell phone.
Before she’d run in here, before she’d managed to escape the man with the face tattoo—the Comrade—she’d sent a text message. It was her last text, before dropping the phone, letting it tumble into the grate, down into the flow of water, out to God knew where. It might be lost. But it might find its way out, into some place where there was sunshine and open air and, God willing, a cell phone signal.
It was a hope. The slimmest hope. She’d gambled everything on it, and she clung to it now, cringing in the darkness, sometimes squeezing her eyes shut to stop the damned clock from bouncing.
She wasn’t an idiot. She was a scientist. She was a reasonable person and a rational thinker. She kept repeating these things like mantras, trying to convince herself that tossing the phone into the grate had been a strategy, not a mistake.
It was logical. It made sense. Even if it made no sense at all.
That grate led to a stream of flowing water. She’d heard it while she was hiding, keeping herself wedged between two large tanks, praying the Comrade didn’t hear her breathing.
There was no signal in here. She had no way to reach the outside world. But she was a scientist—she knew how this technology worked. Text messaging had a b
etter shot of getting through with a weak signal.
Of course, here, in the Pit, she had no signal at all. And no way out, with the Comrade chasing her, cutting her off from every exit.
Every exit except the grate—the tiny, narrow path that she’d never fit through in a million years. But her phone could. Her phone, with the drop-proof, shock-proof, water proof case. The floating case that had let her find it at the lake. The case that had kept it safe even that time she’d dropped it in a fountain. The case that she was counting on now to keep the phone safe, keep it afloat, straight through the drain and out into the world somewhere.
If it could be pushed out of the mountain, out into the open, it might reach some place that had a signal. And then it could send that last text.
That text could save her. It had to save her.
Because otherwise…
She whimpered, curled in on herself there in the darkness. It was her millionth whimper. It wouldn’t be her last.
She didn’t want to whimper, though. Didn’t want to hear it, echoing from the stone walls of this room, with its racks of food and its lead-lined window into another room she’d never reach, and the door that had to be three-feet thick.
Three-feet of steel. Six inches of lead-lined glass. Five miles of stone and dirt above.
She was going to die here, if that text didn’t go through. She would die here, alone in this darkness, with nothing but an aging computer monitor and an infuriating screensaver for company.
The man with the face tattoo—the Comrade—he was still out there, too.
So she was not entirely alone.
Instead of giving her comfort, this only made her guts clench worse, made the feeling in her chest tighten, made her want to vomit and scream at the same time.
Occasionally the Comrade tried to get in. Not as much as he had at first, not as loudly or frantically. But he was out there, and he kept coming back. Kept scraping that… that thing against the door.
Long. Metal. Jagged and sharp. Like a scythe, like the one tattooed on his face, but… not. Different. Less refined. More organic.
More monstrous.
It looked less like a weapon and more like some gruesome extension of the Comrade’s arm. A dark, ragged, thirsty thing.
Something hungry for her.
Clara whimpered again, and curled in on herself, hugging her knees to her chest, praying for the first time since she was a teenager. Praying to a God she hadn’t believed in, hadn’t wanted to believe in, for more than a decade now.
But now, curled and cowering in the dark, she clung to God as her only hope.
Well… God… and a text message.
The phone was in a waterproof case, bought specifically because its owner had dropped and destroyed half a dozen previous models. The phone’s owner was an active person—she put herself and her phone in a lot of precarious places. So it was inevitable that there were many phones before this one.
The phone was the latest—possibly the last—in a long line of devices that had met their fates with smashed screens, dropped from high places or run over by car tires, their electronics fried when they were accidentally put in microwave ovens, or shorted out when they were dropped into toilets. Or just plain left in the back seats of Ubers or in research libraries or at airports or restaurants or God only knew where else.
There had been many phones before this one.
The waterproof, impact-proof case had saved this phone, though, on dozens of occasions. It was a survivor.
And now it floated, carried along by a rapid stream of water, through a series of pipes running miles below the mountain’s surface. The phone was in total darkness, but that didn’t matter. It was busy, preoccupied with trying to send the last text message its owner had typed into it.
That had been three days ago—not six. Though it was still a long time. Long enough that things were starting to get dangerous.
The phone, unlike its owner, knew the exact time and date. But its time was running out. Its battery was getting pretty low. Three days of trying to send a text with no cellular service was enough to kill any battery, even the bigger, bulkier one built into the phone’s impact-resistant case.
If the message had been cat videos, this whole thing would have been over two days ago.
But the phone was still active, still trying to transmit as it bumped along in the darkness under the mountain. It hadn’t received any texts or calls or notifications in three days, and so its display hadn’t come on, casting useless light into the darkness. It hadn’t eaten up precious battery power displaying emojis or Facebook updates or dozens of calls from concerned colleagues or family members or the owner’s boyfriend.
The battery was close to its end, though. The last remnants of energy were ebbing. It wouldn’t be long now.
Suddenly, however, the phone was thrust out into daylight, and now it was bouncing along in a stream, with trees and sky and birds above. It ricocheted from a rock, spinning on the turbulent water’s surface as it floated downstream. Its screen reflected the open sky above, dappled patterns of tree leaves and limbs reflecting from it, the soft shapes of clouds breaking up patches of blue.
If it had been alive, or aware, it might have welcomed the sunny day, instead of merely reflecting it back, passive on the outside.
But active on the inside.
Still no signal. Still trying to transmit. Still, the battery dwindled.
It was down to its last electrons, the last tiny bits of power ebbing away, when the signal came.
It wasn’t much. Barely enough to generate a green bar—one of four. A half-bar. A quarter-bar, really. Not enough for a cat video. Barely enough for anything at all.
But enough for the text.
It finally went through. And just as it was finished, the battery gave up its life, taking the phone with it, just as the current was doing. The phone moved on, its work done. Maybe someday it would be reunited with its owner.
But it was doubtful.
Clara’s last message now ricocheted from tower to tower, from tower to satellite, and from satellite to even more towers. No battery power needed, now. The signal had its own life, powered by the network of communication that blanketed the whole Earth.
And finally it landed, finding its mark, alerting the user with a chime or a chirp.
It was read—another user. Kyle. The boyfriend. The first contact in Clara’s Favorites. A person she knew, trusted well enough, but might not have specifically chosen, had she not been in a hurry.
The message was interpreted. It was understood.
And then Kyle started to make frantic texts and calls of his own.
Mission accomplished, the phone bounced along with the current, until it was eventually wedged between two large stones.
It was, at least, very well protected by the phone case.
1
Dr. Dan Kotler—Archaeologist, occasional FBI Consultant, newly credentialed member of the Historic Crimes task force—was on a coffee break.
His third of the evening.
Though, he would admit, it wasn’t much of a break if you took the work with you, which Kotler had all three times.
It wasn’t that he was a workaholic. It was just that the current work was so interesting. Or perhaps engrossing was the better word. It seemed like most of the projects he’d become involved in over the past few years were of the sort to absorb every bit of his attention, to the point of obsession.
A hazard of the trade.
Over the past few years, as Kotler had started doing more and more consulting with the FBI, he’d more or less strayed from his work in academia. Which was too bad, because he frankly loved his work in academia. Or… well, he loved the work, if not academia itself. He and the established institutions were a bit at odds with each other these days. He was amicable, but the scientific community… not so much.
It might have something to do with the fact that Kotler was consistently getting involved in things that set current a
rchaeological research on its ear.
In the past four years alone, Kotler had been instrumental in uncovering a Viking presence in Pueblo, Colorado; had found a potential site for the lost city of Atlantis; had been part of the exploration of a newly discovered Mayan city; and had helped to stop a criminal enterprise from using materials stolen from Göbekli Tepe to overthrow the world governments and shift the balance of power. He’d helped to stop bad guys from unleashing plagues, mind control devices, advanced stealth technology, and an army of cloned gods.
The usual.
It was at a point where even Kotler himself was having a hard time believing all the trouble one lone archaeologist could get involved in. If he’d had a whip and a fedora, there’d be movies made about him.
Instead, his trademarks tended to be a cup of hot coffee and an iPad stuffed with translations, photos, and 3D models.
The current research was an exploration of Por-Bajin, in the Tuva Republic.
Recent carbon dating had revealed that the enigmatic island structure was not an elaborate Uighur khan palace, as current theory proposed, but was instead a Manichaeist monastery, which had gone unused due to the khan being killed in an anti-Manichaeism uprising.
