Her Silent Shadow: A Gripping Psychological Suspense Collection

by Edwin Dasso

  Kotler sat back, shaking his head.

  The things Alex Kayne could do. They were astounding.

  It was no wonder the government was after her. She was genuinely good at this.

  Which, of course, made her genuinely dangerous.

  He turned his iPad face down, and stood to open the curtains, leaving the white noise to run. His hotel room gave him a view of the distant mountains, and the lights of Los Lunas.

  The town was small, and a bit dreary, but it was Kotler’s experience that towns like this held a lot more intrigue than one would expect.

  Night had fallen on Los Lunas. Darkness had descended. Somewhere out there, an agent from Historic Crimes was in trouble. And it looked like Kotler and the rest of the team would be descending into something mysterious and dangerous, in an effort to find her.

  Kotler wasn’t sure if Kayne was onboard or not, but he found himself hoping she was.

  His gut was telling him that they might just need her.

  3

  Deep under the mountain, the man with the face tattoo—the one some called “the Comrade”—moved like silence itself.

  He had long ago become accustomed to the darkness—not as complete as it might seem to one coming in from the surface world. To the Comrade, it was radiant. It was a world of vivid detail, shadows within shadows. Home.

  The Comrade rarely visited the surface world.

  He didn’t find it appealing. Too much noise. Too much motion. Too many people, with their dramas and stories and relationships. The longer he lived in his underground domain, the more he found that the surface world was less and less necessary.

  Here, in the silent dark, was good enough. It was everything.

  He had food. Food for a millennium, under the right circumstances. Certainly enough food for his lifetime. Many lifetimes.

  He had water. It flowed from an underground source, filtered through miles of rock, and then filtered again through an acre of algae followed by a network of carbon-filtered PVC channels. The carbon filters had to be changed once per month—a task that took him the better part of a day, working by himself. But changing them was as simple as removing the old filter and putting in the new one. The old filter was then placed in an oven, baked until it was clean of bacteria and debris again, and then re-shelved, waiting to be the next round of filter once again.

  The Comrade had clothing, and blankets, and artificial sunlight. He had music. He had photographs. He had miles and miles of corridors to wander and more rooms to spend time in than he could get to in a dozen lifetimes.

  He had practically everything he could ever need or want, here in the Pit.

  What he lacked was books.

  He had a lot of books, but not nearly enough. Not at the rate he consumed them.

  When he’d first come to the Pit, he’d found the modest little library tucked into a wing of the third level. It had almost seemed quaint, considering that the US military had thought this would be enough books to keep an entire base mentally occupied for the duration of some decades-long experiment.

  The Comrade had plowed through the entire library in less than three months, even with taking time away from reading to do routine maintenance on the Pit. Or to engage in… other tasks.

  Now that he had things more or less running on autopilot, his leisure time had increased exponentially, but his supply of books had dwindled just as much.

  And so he found, to his dismay, that he had to make trips away from the Pit. He had to go into Los Lunas, and sometimes further out, to bigger towns with more people. Sometimes as far as Albuquerque.

  He dreaded those trips the most, avoided them for as long as he could stand to go without new books. And then, inevitably, he went.

  Towns were challenging. He had no money—none other than what he could find and take, from time to time.

  Money confused him, at any rate. He’d done things without it for so long, it was nearly a mystery to him how it all worked. He hated the whole idea of it—the capitalistic greed, the consumption mentality. He hated that there was a price tag on the things he needed. Why should anyone pay for what they needed? It was barbaric. It was disgusting. It was America.

  Even with money in his pocket, he would steal. Simply take the books he wanted, a couple at a time, from grocery stores and drug stores and libraries. No one paid much attention at the libraries, but if he went there too often, he’d be recognized. So he had to be careful. Had to do things in a measured way.

  He would sneak as many books as he could find into the aging pickup truck, fueled by gas siphoned from locals, and then drive home with his bounty. He’d arrive back at the Pit with crates of books, pilfered from dozens of locations, two or three per trip. He’d tote them in from the surface, crate by crate, and leave them on the floor until they could be shelved.

  When the work was done, he’d drive the pickup into the tunnel, pull the doors closed, double-check the chains and locks and mesh fencing. And when he was satisfied that the Pit was secure again, he’d eagerly make his way to his new stash. He’d read them all within a few months, and would have to make the whole trip again.

  This was how his collection had grown.

  The modest library occupying one wing of the third level was now the entire third level. Soon it would spill over into level 4. At that point, the man might consider re-reading. At that point he would, by his count, have more books than even the big public library in Albuquerque had on its shelves. Surely that was enough?

  Though, he had to admit, he would likely still make book runs until there was no more space on level 4.

  After all, it was all living quarters on that level. He had his own quarters on level 4, and he didn’t need much space. There were plenty of empty rooms, waiting to be filled. And it wasn’t like he was going to have guests.

  Not until recently.

  The Comrade was content with the Pit. It was the perfect home, the perfect hiding place. And it was all his. No one else even knew it existed. He’d made sure of it.

  He’d found the Pit while doing research, working a government job that made him sick—long hours, little pay, and dealing with the public the whole damned time. Disgusting. Horrific. Untenable.

  He hated it. Hated it.

  Hated it so much that he’d turned on the government itself. Turned on the whole idea of America. He embraced a different idea, a better idea. An idea that had gotten him a lot of nasty comments and people just flat out torturing him, day to day.

  He took it. Embraced it.

  The torture simply fueled his hate for the world he lived in, and extended that hate from America to its people, and then just to people in general.

  People could all go to hell.

  He would go to the Pit.

  He’d first come across a reference to it while doing a property records search for a boisterous, annoying Texas billionaire—a man wearing a cowboy hat so big and so clean, he seemed like a parody. But he was dead serious about wanting to stake his claim on a piece of property in the hills of Los Lunas. He wanted to know who owned it, and how much they wanted for it.

  Because to the man in the cowboy hat, everything was for sale.

  And this patch of land was, too, as it turned out. But Comrade had no intention of revealing that. He’d decided it was a secret worth keeping. A secret that had to be kept.

  Because in his searching, the Comrade had uncovered records of a government-run facility in the region—a place that was no longer technically in use, but was still on the government’s books, albeit not something anyone bothered to elaborate on much.

  The things the Comrade learned should not have been his to learn. They were secrets he should not have been privy to.

  The Pit.

  The name was given to the facility by a bunch of soldiers who had worked there for a time, men who had hated having to guard the place. Had, in fact, hated everything about it.

  “A hole in the ground,” one soldier said of it, in a letter to his super
iors. The letter had been included as part of an official reprimand, after the soldier had gone AWOL for a weekend, turning up drunk and arrested in Albuquerque.

  “Middle of nowhere” was another phrase. “No one for miles.”

  The Comrade had been intrigued.

  The Pit was so secret, the government itself seemed to have forgotten about it. Every file was marked “eyes only.” Every document was stamped “for redaction.” Every scrap of paper on the subject of the Pit was something meant to be a buried secret.

  The Comrade realized that none of the records he had in his possession should have existed. And yet, here they were.

  And they told the Comrade everything.

  The Pit had been decommissioned in the 90s, the research had been sealed, and the entire facility had been boarded up. All personnel were carted way, moved out of town, reassigned to new roles, their homes and possessions sold or simply abandoned.

  Everyone who knew anything about the Pit was brushed away like crumbs from a table cloth.

  The Pit was supposed to be an off-book, black operation. No records. Nothing official, nothing that wasn’t redacted to the point of looking like a photo of midnight.

  And yet, the Comrade had found records of it, anyway.

  Someone had screwed up. Someone had filed public papers about a dark op facility. Someone had left a door open to the place—a portal to something rare and wonderful.

  The Comrade recognized a rare opportunity when he saw one, and no one—especially not a blowhard in an oversized cowboy hat—was going to rob him of it.

  He had walked out of his office and driven to the site that very day. Arriving as evening settled on the area, he had climbed out of his already aging pickup, and had used a flashlight to explore as much as possible.

  It had taken some time, but he had managed to find a way in—a door that wasn’t locked or covered with half a mountain of blown rock.

  His entrance was a service garage, hidden on the far side of the hills from the main entrance to the Pit. It had been covered in brush and dirt and stone, most of it placed there deliberately, but with just a bit of effort the Comrade had unearthed it, and discovered that there was a hangar-sized garage on the other side of a large set of swing-out doors. Peering through the doors revealed a space where he could pull his truck inside, which he’d promptly done.

  And then he’d gone exploring.

  For a top secret, formerly secure government facility, it had been surprisingly easy to get inside. Basically, someone had left the back door open. And as the man explored, he discovered there was a lot more left behind as well.

  The place was a treasure trove.

  Everywhere the man went there were computers and offices and sleeping quarters. There were tools of every description in the garage, and throughout the complex there was equipment he couldn’t even being to fathom.

  Clothing, personal affects, office supplies—an endless array of resources.

  And then there were the stores of food, the water treatment facility, the whole damned bunker.

  The perfect space.

  The perfect home.

  All he had to do was keep it hidden.

  Which turned out to be his life’s work.

  Over the next few years, the man worked hard to erase the Pit from living memory. One computer at a time, one database at a time, one former occupant at a time—delete, delete, delete. He used his limited access to public records to find and destroy every public scrap of info, and he used that info to find every living soul who knew about the place.

  He’d gone to them. He’d questioned them. He got answers from them.

  He eliminated them.

  The Comrade hadn’t had much of a taste for killing at first, but it had grown on him. He’d gotten creative about it, which made it interesting and even fun. Finding new ways to protect the secret of the Pit, new ways for those who knew of it to die, was a hobby of sorts. It presented him with both intellectual and physical challenges.

  It was stimulating.

  For a time, he tried to make every death look like an accident, mostly to keep it covered up. But after a while he realized, no one was paying attention.

  Sure, the police were always interested. Dead bodies were always a red flag. There were investigations. But none of it ever led back to the Comrade.

  How could it?

  The deaths were too disparate, too scattered, too seemingly random. There was frankly nothing to connect them to the Comrade. And certainly nothing to connect them to the Pit—that classified piece of real estate that only the Comrade had access to, had records for.

  Records went missing, destroyed so that only the man was left to know the secret. And, the Comrade knew, in government, if it wasn’t on paper, it didn’t exist. Erase it from the minds of those who experienced it, and it was truly gone.

  Over time, and with a lot of blood, the Comrade had managed to create a blank spot where the Pit used to be.

  He’d done it. The secret was now his.

  His secret, and his alone.

  And with this secret came freedom. Not the cloying, bigoted, disgusting “freedom” Americans liked to crow about—the sort of liberty that lets one class thrive while another starves. This was freedom as each man was meant to have it! Freedom from others.

  The Comrade could disappear into this new home and never have to deal with people again.

  Well, except for the book runs. Those meant going into town. If he could just be satisfied with the books he had, he could end those, close the doors of the Pit, and rest in peace there, five miles below the world, far from the interference of humanity.

  Except, of course, for the damned girl.

  He had been on one of his book runs when the girl found the place.

  He still wasn’t sure how, but she’d somehow managed to track the facility down. Worse, she’d managed to unlock the place, coming in through one of the front doors—the doors that the Comrade himself had been unable to open.

  All these years, all the tries, all the hammering against the other doors, the man had never managed to get them open. He’d tried drilling, but that had gone nowhere fast. He’d even tried ramming his truck into one set, resulting only in losing the front bumper. Those doors—those thick, impossible doors—they could never, ever be opened. Which, as he eventually realized, was perfect.

  And yet here came the girl, waltzing into his home, right through those thick doors, like it was nothing.

  When he had returned from his book run, he’d known right away that someone was in the Pit. He saw the marks, the evidence, the trail. He saw her car, parked down by the hill, and had covered that. But it was here, inside the Pit, that her presence was easiest to detect.

  He could somehow sense her in there—he could practically smell her. The scent of body soap and perfume, of laundry detergent and fabric softener. The scent of outside.

  It was the scent that drove him to hunt her.

  He didn’t like strangers in his home. Over the years, the decades, there had only been a few—perhaps less than five. They’d usually come in the same way he did, through the back door, in through the hangar.

  He didn’t know how many. He’d forgotten. Their deaths blended with other deaths, and he hadn’t kept records.

  But it had been a very, very long time, he knew that much.

  He disliked strangers and worked hard to keep the Pit as buried as any place could be. So when he learned that the girl was here, when he smelled her, his first instinct was to find her, to kill her, and to turn her into food for his food. Fertilizer for his crops. Slice her up—he had a special tool for it. Grind her up. Spread her in the algae fields. Her rot would add nutrients to the garden.

  There were many others there to keep her company, spread like fine soil, their blood feeding the algae, their flesh becoming his own food. Sometimes without the wait for decomposition.

  Meat was meat.

  But the smell of her.

  The smell drove h
im to distraction. It filled him with something—a sensation within that he hadn’t experienced in so very long. A yearning for something he couldn’t even name. Something he’d given up on, even before he’d come to the Pit.

  The smell reminded him of something lost, forbidden, cursed. Something that had driven a stake into him, brought bitterness into his life, caused him hurt beyond comprehension, and yet…

  It was something he wanted.

  Want and desire were emotions left behind for the Comrade, long ago. They held nothing good for him. Promises were always broken. And for years now, he’d wanted for nothing, and didn’t miss the experience.

  But now, here, in his own home, was a thing that stirred a long-lost urge within him—desire.

  He didn’t fully know what he wanted to do to her, but now that it burned inside him, he couldn’t resist it. The one use he had for another human being, beyond food, beyond prey. The one thing any of them was good for.

  He hunted her.

  He tracked her through the levels—down, down, down.

  She must have been here almost since the moment he’d left for the book run, because she’d gone deep into the Pit. She’d gotten further than any other stranger before her. She’d gotten to the levels even he was hesitant to enter. The places where things were strange, where the technology was incomprehensible, where the darkness was nearly complete.

  The levels where the men who came before had done their darkest work.

  She had some courage, and the Comrade liked that. It made things sweeter.

  She was deep inside the Pit, and she’d been messing with the machines, with the computers. She’d done something. The Comrade wasn’t sure what.

  When he’d found her, she’d screamed. She’d fought him. She’d managed to get the upper hand, and to run.

  She had made her way into the sixth level, where there were stores of food and water—the spaces that he’d converted into a larder, attaching shelves to the walls, stocking them with a backup supply of food, gathered from his runs into town. Food and goods beyond the stores of rations and MREs that had been stocked throughout the facility.

  Not all the man’s supply—but enough there to keep someone alive indefinitely.