by Greg Hunt
“It’s all right, ma’am. I’m not hungry. Tell me about the girls. Did some bad men take them to the caves?”
“Them bats can make you sick, you know. Even the guana can. It does wonders for tomatoes and cucumbers and squash. But you got to be careful how you handle it, same as chitterlings, and wash up after with some strong lye soap. It’ll make you throw up like a buzzard.”
“How long ago was it, Miss Henrietta?” Mel asked urgently. Frustrated, he wanted to shake the information out of the addled old woman. But that wouldn’t work. Her brain was too mixed up already. Her thoughts seem to flitter around from one thing to the next like a mosquito.
“They kept coming and coming, like the armies of David, and during the fight they killed my husband Zeke. Might near. When they moved on they took almost everythin’ we had, including my boy Ham. And when that last bunch come they took the little bit we had left. Took my girls too, and them crying and begging and fighting whilst they was drug off.”
“I’m so sorry, Miss Henrietta,” Mel said quietly, stroking her dirty wrinkled hand.
“They was three chickens that ran away in the bushes. We ate one yesterday, and now this one.”
Henrietta Adderly turned away from Mel and lay flat on the ground in front of the low entrance to their little den. She crawled out awkwardly, dragging the pot of raw chicken along with her.
Mel considered what she had told him. After the main army left, some other men, the “black-hearted” ones, came along to scavenge whatever they could, including Rochelle and her younger sister. They must have mentioned caves in front of Henrietta, which would be an ideal place for them to hide out until the armies cleared out of the area. And with one chicken cooked yesterday, and one in the pot today, that meant one or two days had passed since they were here.
That was time enough to do some pretty awful things to two young girls.
His thoughts were interrupted when Ezekiel Adderly moaned out in sudden pain. His face was gray, his features contorted with inexpressible suffering. His lips moved silently as if he was praying, which he probably was. Mel could see the black lines of infection and decay creeping up his bare belly, and wondered how he had managed to live this long.
The humane thing to do would be to end his suffering now. But he could not bring himself to do that any more than he could end his own father’s life during those final agonizing days on earth. Suddenly Ezekiel Adderly flung his hand out, and his work-roughened fingers locked around Mel’s wrist. Mel endured the pain of the old man’s iron grip and allowed himself to be pulled close.
“Melvin Carroll, you must be my blood avenger,” Ezekiel said in a pulpit voice filled unexpectedly with righteousness and authority.
“I don’t know what that means,” Mel admitted uncomfortably, although he knew the old man wouldn’t hear his words.
“In the Lord God Jehovah’s almighty and righteous name,” Ezekiel proclaimed, “I give you holy commission to do for me what I cannot do for myself.” The rush of strength and will required to make that high-sounding proclamation took its toll. Ezekiel’s grip on Mel’s arm weakened and his hand fell away. His eyes drifted closed, and the breath left his body in a prolonged hiss.
Mel sat there for a moment, thinking he had witnessed his neighbor’s last seconds of life. But then, eventually, Ezekiel’s chest rose slightly, taking in new air, then hissing it back out again. Ezekiel Adderly’s time wasn’t up, not quite yet, which was probably unfortunate for him in many ways.
Mel crawled back outside and sat for a moment to let his eyes adjust to the midday brightness. What the devil was a “blood avenger” he wondered. Knowing old Ezekiel’s religious bent, it probably had something to do with olden Bible days, but he didn’t know the scriptures well enough to sort it out.
A few yards away, Henrietta Adderly had built a fire inside a circle of stones, and was on her way down to the river to fill the cooking pot with water. Her wits might have gone completely queer on her because of everything that had happened to her family, but the practices of a lifetime still guided her.
Mel knew he had to find the girls quickly, but his conscience wouldn’t let him walk away and leave these two people, neighbors and friends of his family for much of his life, in such a sad state. There was one more chicken left for tomorrow and that was it for them unless he helped them out. There wasn’t much left in the family’s garden, but after scraping around in the dirt with a board for half an hour, he managed to dig up several sweet potatoes and turnips. There were a few green apples in the upper branches of the family’s apple trees that the soldiers managed to overlook. Mel hacked the branches free and let them fall to the ground, then picked a bucket full of the hard immature two-inch fruits.
There were blackberries aplenty in the thickets at the edge of the woods, and while picking them, he also managed to shoot a young rabbit that had ventured out into the edge of the field. All these simple provisions he stockpiled by the entrance to the Adderlys’ nest under the fallen-down barn.
Henrietta Adderly had long since taken the boiled chicken back inside, but she could hardly miss the provisions he had gathered when she came back out. Mel thought about crawling back inside to tell them where he was headed and what he planned to do, but he saw no real use in it. Henrietta wouldn’t understand a word he said, and Ezekiel had already given him his marching orders. The day was more than half gone already, and there was no time to spare.
He found an old lantern alongside the barn which still contained enough oil to serve his purposes. After checking it and shouldering his pack of armaments, he started away with long urgent strides toward the rugged hill country which lay close by to the Adderly farm.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Mel knew where to look. Northwest of the Adderly farm there was a steep, narrow gorge called Meat Holler, named for the fact that any hunter who ventured up that way was likely to return home with fresh game. There were two caves up in Meat Holler, both toward the upper end. One was a large, gaping hole in the side of a mountain, visible from a long way off, dark and foreboding like the mouth of hell. The other, farther along, looked like nothing more than a three-foot-wide split in the solid rock face. But anyone who ventured deep enough in discovered that, after a dozen yards or so, the gap widened, the floor leveled, and its dark passageways probed deep inside the mountainside.
During his boyhood Mel had explored the caves a few times with Jaipeth, the older Adderly boy, and other friends, usually probing into the big cave only a few hundred feet, no farther than the daylight permitted. But it was with his Indian friend Pook that the reckless daring of adolescence nearly led to both their deaths. The two of them decided that it would be their quest to confirm the legend that the two caves were actually separate entrances to the same underground system. Unwisely using bundles of burning brush as torches they recklessly explored deep into the larger opening, heedless of the fact that they would need light to find their way out as well as in. When their torches burned out, they might have easily become two wretched skeletons waiting to be found someday by future adventurers.
Mel still remembered the terrifying feeling of being lost in the utter darkness, completely disoriented, never knowing whether the next step would plunge him into a bottomless chasm or leave him facing a solid stone wall. For a long time they had yelled like maniacs for help, knowing the whole time that there was not another soul within miles, and certainly no one else in the cave, to hear their cries.
Only the calm thoughtfulness of his friend eventually saved them. After what seemed like hours of aimless wandering, they begin to hear the fluttering and squeaking of the bats far off in the distance, and they stumbled in that direction. When the sound stopped, so did they.
“Night go out, day in,” Pook had explained. “We wait. Show us.”
Countless harrowing hours passed in the numbing darkness between the bat flights. They slept when they could and Pook frequently passed the time chanting quietly under his breath. Mel didn’t un
derstand the words, but decided it was his friend’s way of praying to whatever gods his tribe held sacred. Mel spent his own share of time praying to his Almighty, making promises of honesty and charity and clean wholesome living if only God would send his angels to lead them out of this mess. They had no food but there was water enough in the shallow puddles on the cave floor. They found them by touch, and lapped the water up like dogs.
After three maddening days and nights, the young Indian’s simple logic had worked for them. The bats guided them to the narrow upper cave entrance, to fresh air and open spaces, to wonderful, glorious daylight.
Well before he came in sight of the lower cave entrance, Mel realize that the old woman had been right. He knew there were men there because he could smell their fire. As he crept closer, he could hear them moving around inside and talking from time to time. When he had moved as close as he dared, Mel crouched in the brush for a long time, listening and watching. There were several of them, he couldn’t tell how many, but ten or more he thought. They were preparing for the approaching night, dragging in deadfall for their watch fires, and cooking slabs of venison cut from a carcass that lay in the dirt near the cave’s mouth.
There was no sign of the Adderly girls, and no mention of them in the scraps of conversation he overheard. It was possible that Rochelle and her sister weren’t even here, Mel realized.
But Henrietta Adderly had talked about the caves. She must have heard those men mention caves when they came to pillage the farm and carry off her daughters, and these were the only caves that Mel knew of for miles around. If Rochelle and her sister were here, they were probably somewhere deep inside where they couldn’t run off.
Mel considered possibilities. He could pretend to be a straggler himself and try to join up. But they might decide it was easier to kill him and steal what he had than to take him into their band. Or he might wait until late at night and try to slip in. But wouldn’t a pack of runaway soldiers be likely to post guards? He could fight his way in, but how would that work if he wasn’t able to kill all of them? The second he fell they’d finish him off, and Rochelle and Becky’s last hope for salvation would be gone.
Only one other way seemed open to him. He’d have to try the upper entrance, if he could find it in this failing light after so many years.
Far off to the southeast Mel heard a series of distant rumbles which he no longer mistook for thunder. He wondered briefly what little scrap of land they were fighting over now, and how many more men would be planted in the ground of a battlefield that would only be abandoned tomorrow.
Judging by the direction and distance, they may have even turned back to complete the destruction of what little was left of his own farm. He hoped someone would take the time to bury the dead like they had before. The idea of returning to a home place littered with mutilated, rotting corpses made him feel like his skin was crawling with spiders.
He had trouble finding the upper cave entrance. Years had passed since he was in these parts and there were plenty of similar clefts in the rocks to confuse a man. But the bats came to his aid once again. As night fell, they poured out in a fluttering, eerie, squeaking cloud, seeming to appear like magic from the vertical stone wall of the mountain. Mel stayed well clear until the last stragglers had made their exit.
As he neared the cleft in the rock he felt the perpetual rush of cool damp air, sucked in through the lower entrance and forced out here through this narrow opening. It bore familiar smells remembered from his youth—mustiness and decay, and the ammonia tinge of centuries of accumulated bat guano. But there was another smell on the breeze as well, the smell of wood smoke from the deserters’ fires. That smell would guide him to where he needed to go.
Once inside he lit the lantern and looked around. Nothing seemed familiar. There was nothing there that resembled a floor. He had to scramble over piles of stone rubble, and step across chasms that would surely be bone-breakers if a man fell into one of them. After a few dozen yards he shrugged out of the heavy pack and left it behind, taking along only one handgun in the holster and another tucked in his belt.
Even when the rushing air diminished, he realized that the flicker of the lantern’s flame would show him which way the air was moving, and which way he should head.
Before long Mel reached a massive chamber, so large that the weak light of the lantern didn’t reach the other side or the towering ceiling somewhere far above. In the center of the chamber was a jumbled mass of broken stone at least fifty feet high. Away in the distance somewhere he heard the rushing sound of an underground waterfall. This was a place he did remember vaguely because he and Pook had the devil of a time working their way around the huge pile of fallen stone in total darkness. The lantern made the job a lot easier this time.
On the other side of the enormous rock pile, the vertical stone wall was split by cracks and openings of all sizes and descriptions, and none seemed familiar. Again he relied on the lantern and his own nose to find the way.
The air and the smell of smoke came out from between two flat layers of rock with about three feet of clearance between them, showing him the way. This was the long crawl that he remembered clearly, and dreaded most, when he thought about returning to the caves. As a careless teenage boy it had taken all the courage he could muster to go down on hands and knees and start that long, terrible crawl to who-knew-where.
Now as a grown man, and with the added advantage of light that the lamp provided, he still found the prospect of this crawl between the slabs of stone nearly impossible to face. Horrible images of the two stone layers slamming suddenly together entered his head uninvited. In an instant muscle, flesh, organs and bone would be flattened into a bloody mess no more than a tiny fraction of an inch thick, and for all time, no one would ever know, and few enough would probably even wonder, what had become of him.
But Rochelle was on the other side, and this seemed the only way to reach her.
As he moved forward, the space between the two rock slabs began to narrow until, for a time, he was scooting along on his belly like a reptile. His elbows and knees were scraped raw, and the muscles of his arms, neck, back and legs were on fire. He kept the lamp ahead of him, inching it along carefully, fearfully aware that that flickering flame embodied his only hope of making it back to the surface of the earth alive.
During those torturous minutes, fresh air, open sky, and blessed sunlight seemed like the most precious of all God’s gifts to humankind.
Images of when he was buried alive under the dead soldier a few days before began to creep uninvited into his thoughts, and with them came the same desperate animal panic he had felt in the mass grave as the dirt began to cover him.
The clammy, damp stink of fear was all over him, and the strength and will seemed to drain from his cramped muscles. A man could easily slip into madness in a place like this, Mel thought, and it wouldn’t take long.
Then in tantalizing slowness, the crawl space began to increase in height until at last he was back up on his hands and knees, moving at least like a dog now instead of a snake or a lizard. Then eventually he was back on his feet again, as a man should be. The tension began to drain away as his muscles and joints limbered, and he tried not to think about the fact that he might soon be facing that same awful crawl going back. But if he had to do it again, at least he would be up against a known terror, one that he had already beaten on the way in.
The cave floor was again flat under his feet, sloping down ahead. Water dripped from tens of thousands of cones made of smooth, cream-colored stone. Some hung from the ceiling like icicles, smaller than his little finger. Others stood as strong, sturdy columns that a dozen men couldn’t have put their arms around. He hadn’t seen any of this when he was here before, but he did run into a couple of those columns as he stumbled around in the pitch dark. The air was thick with moisture, and a thin layer of slime on the floor made walking treacherous.
As he squeezed through a narrow gap between two rock walls, the ru
shing air intensified, thickly laced with the smell of wood smoke and roasted meat. He was close now.
Mel trimmed the lantern wick down to a low flame and moved forward cautiously. He was reasonably sure he was at the back of the main entry chamber now, and he scoured his memory for details of the place.
To his best recollection, the chamber was more or less circular, about a hundred feet across. The gaping entrance on the far side was lower than the back side where he was. Chaotic tumbles of stone were all about, but there were dirt pathways among them. On the lower side where the men were camped, the cave floor was flat and clear of rubble.
He moved forward, risking detection by leaving the lantern dimly lit. The embers of two dying fires spaced twenty feet apart glowed and crackled below. The usual snorts, coughs, mumbles and snores of sleeping men were reassuring to him. There was no sign of a guard, or maybe the guard was hidden or asleep. Maybe this useless lot didn’t even bother to post one, he realized. They probably felt safe enough in this remote hiding place, knowing that the opposing armies had moved on.
But the big question now was how he would find Rochelle and her sister. As he continued to move carefully forward, it occurred to him that they might not even be here. Or worse, they might be murdered and disposed of already. That thought lit a flame of anger that pulsed through his veins like melted lead. If he found out that that was the case, not a man here was likely to survive the night. It came to him then that this vengeful fire inside of him might be what Ezekiel Adderly expected of his “blood avenger.”
He reached the center of the chamber easily enough. Some of the sleeping men were as close as thirty feet away, snoring and shifting restlessly on their stone beds. As he suspected, no man remained awake to watch out over the others.
Then he heard a faint noise close at hand on the right, different than the mix of sounds made by the sleeping men. It was a soft whimpering sound, one like a child might make. He only had to walk a few feet in that direction before a horrible, disgusting scene began to define itself in the dim lamplight.
