Buried Alive

by J. A. Kerley

  The farmer turned to me, his face a mask of terror. “I was in the field, saw smoke, drove over on my tractor. I pulled this man from the van. There’s another man in there, a driver. I couldn’t get to him, the flames …”

  I looked into the fully engulfed van. A lost cause. I saw Mix-up in the corner of my eye, grubbing in the hay atop the trailer. The farmer started to touch the man, give comfort, but his hands couldn’t cross the distance to the dying guard. He looked at me, helpless, almost in tears.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Help’s coming,” I said, hearing the sirens, loud now.

  5

  Months passed with no new details added to Crayline’s escape, save that the farmer mentioned hearing a motorcycle racing away in the distance as he arrived. It was theorized that a motorcyclist passed the lumbering Holman van and fired a shotgun into the windows. The speed limit on the stretch of road was thirty-five miles per hour. No matter what the van did when the driver lost control, the chances were Bobby Lee – strapped in from several angles – wouldn’t get hurt too badly. I always pictured him laughing as his rescuer pulled him from the broken vehicle, like a guy getting off a roller-coaster.

  It was a brilliant plan, probably hatched in Holman when Crayline discovered his upcoming trip to the Institute. Prisons had “alumni associations”, and someone with the demonic charisma of a Bobby Lee Crayline would have outside connections, men who’d risk their lives to say they’d helped him escape.

  In the meantime, people in Mobile were bludgeoned, stabbed, poisoned, shot and, in one memorable case, vacuumed to death. Harry and I investigated, putting in a lot of eighteen-hour days. Then, good news. Financial stimulus funds reached the understaffed Mobile Police Department and sparked the hiring of new officers. This allowed the promotion to detective of several deserving uniformed men and women. The workload decreased.

  I was thinking about taking some time off, when my supervisor, Lieutenant Tom Mason walked to my desk. Tom had been trying to get me to take a lengthy vacation for years. I’d get close, but the caseload would balloon and I’d truncate my plans to a long weekend getaway. At least that’s what I told myself. My partner muttered that I was an investigation addict afraid of missing a fix, but he muttered a fair amount.

  But in truth, even I felt increasingly frazzled. Cases were becoming less a rush than a drudge. The slackening of pressure had me thinking it was finally time to take a break and get my edge sharpened.

  “You and Harry have had a tough year,” Tom said. “He got his head banged like a gong. You put in eighty-hour weeks on that case with Sandhill. Not to mention this current crop of madness.”

  “The point being, Tom?”

  “The Department owes you forty-three days of accumulated vacation, Carson. Now, I can’t order you to take time off, but I think it would be good if you gave it some thought and …”

  “I’ll do it,” I said, clapping my hands.

  “Do what?”

  “Like you just said. Go on a vacation. What a great idea!”

  Tom paused. “You will? Just like that?”

  “It’s brilliant, Tom,” I said, standing to do a little shuffle-foot dance. “I’ll start making plans.”

  Tom nodded and turned back to his corner office, stricken mute. I could tell he’d prepared an entire lecture on Why Carson Ryder Should Take a Vacation.

  Tom paused at his doorway, fingers tapping the frame. He turned.

  “You’d planned to take some time off, right, Carson? Is that it?”

  I did cherubic innocence. Tom waved the question away and went inside his office, his long face heavy with puzzlement.

  Which explains, in a roundabout way, how I ended up in Eastern Kentucky, hanging off the side of a mountain while being yelled at by a gnome.

  6

  “Hey Carson!” called a voice from way below my feet. “You get lost again? Yoo-hoo, Earth to Carson Ryder.”

  “I hear you, Gary,” I called over my back. Above me I saw two hundred feet of Corbin sandstone, the leavings of untold millennia of alluvial flooding. I was climbing through the compressed floor of an ancient sea that flowed during the Mississippian era, 400 million years ago. My fingers clutched small handholds. My toes were wedged into clefts. At my back lay nothing more than air.

  “Others are waiting their turn, bud. Come on down.”

  I pushed away from the rock face, dropping a foot until the rope through the bolt jolted me to a stop and I was lowered thirty feet to the ground. Gary, the twenty-five-year-old rock-climbing instructor, a diminutive guy who was part gnome, part mountain goat, grinned as my feet hit the ground. Pete Tinker, the other instructor from Compass Point Outfitters, grabbed the control rope and launched another aspiring climber up the cliff face. Gary patted my back.

  “You seem to get lost up there, Carson. How was it?”

  “I’m sweating like a sprinkler,” I said, pulling my soaked tee from my chest to put air over my skin. “My muscles are quivering. My fingers ache. But I’m ready to go back up right now.”

  “I’m not surprised. A lot of folks don’t have the physicality for rock climbing, the strength and elasticity. You do. But even more, you have an intuitive feel. You don’t waste motion.”

  “I’m surprised to hear that. I feel clumsy as a first-step toddler.”

  Gary grimaced toward the young woman just sent up. She’d lost her grip and was spinning in the air as Tinker belayed rope and shouted instructions.

  “These folks are toddlers, Carson. Four days of lessons and you’re up and running. But you’ve done this before, I take it?”

  I grinned. “I dated a climber a few years ago. She gave me the basics.”

  “She done good. But you’re ready to move past the basics. You’re coming back, right?”

  “Try and keep me away.”

  I packed up my rented climbing gear and began coiling ropes. The eight other climbing students did the same under Gary and Pete’s watchful eyes. We heard the labored grind of an engine and turned to an SUV arriving on the old logging trail connecting the main road to our cliff face. The insignia on the door read US Forest Service. We were on their turf, inside the Red River Gorge Geological Area of the Daniel Boone National Forest.

  The high-sprung vehicle crunched to a stop and two occupants exited, a big, square-built county cop about my age, mid-thirties. His face was a broad, flat plain centered by a button nose, as if a normal nose had been sectioned and only the tip pasted to his face. The man’s eyes were a gray wash and his mouth so lipless and tight I couldn’t imagine it smiling. His belly rolled three inches over a wide belt hung with police implements. The cowboy boots were alligator and the hogleg pistol he carried would only be standard issue in a Wild West wet dream. His uniform was too many hours from an iron.

  Beside him, in visual opposition, was a trim and tall older guy in a hard-creased green uniform that looked ten minutes from the dry cleaners. It took a second to register that he was a forest ranger. He had a relaxed and dreamy smile on a tanned and ruggedly pleasant face, leaning back to stretch his spine. But I noted his half-closed eyes vacuuming in his surroundings. It was interesting.

  The cop went to talk to Pete and Gary. I carried on coiling rope and watching from the corner of my eye. The ranger had nodded to the instructors before leaning against the trunk of a hemlock, whistling to himself and studying the sandy ground.

  I looked up and caught a hard and cold appraisal from the sheriff, like he found something offensive in my bearing. I feigned indifference and walked my coil of rope to the van. Turning, I saw the ranger cross my path to pick up a tiny foil wrapper, as if collecting errant litter. He tucked the foil in his pocket, looked down again, headed back toward the SUV.

  I knew what he was doing, and it had little to do with litter collection.

  “Sheriff Beale,” the ranger said.

  The cop turned from Gary, pushed back his hat. “E-yup?”

  “We’re done.”


  The big cop shot me another hard glance, then nodded and followed the ranger. They climbed in the Forest Service vehicle, pulled away slowly, the ranger at the wheel. As he passed in front of me, I smiled.

  “Not the shoe prints you were looking for, right?”

  His eyes held mine for a two-count. Then the eyes and the SUV were moving away and I tossed my second coil of rope in the van with the gear of the other students. They’d driven six miles from the outfitters in Pine Ridge. The cliff we’d been using for practice was only three miles from my lodgings, so I’d driven over on my own.

  Gary shot a thumbs-up out the window, said, “See you later,” and the van rattled away.

  I stared up the wall of rock – for a brief moment wondering how far up I could get on my own – then came to my senses and climbed into my pickup, pausing to enjoy the view and the strange journey that had led me here, a pas de deux with fate, or perhaps blind luck.

  After talking with Lieutenant Mason, I had been sitting at home and shuffling through a lapful of travel brochures snatched from rest stops over the years. They were heavy on entertainment-oriented venues: Branson, Orlando, Gatlinburg, and other places that made me break out in a cold sweat. I was wondering if I should just put Mr Mix-up in the truck and start driving à la Steinbeck when the phone rang.

  “Mr Ryder? This is Dottie Fugate at RRG cabin rentals up here in the Kentucky mountains. Feel like a little vacation getaway?”

  “I, uh … What?”

  “You stayed with us a while back, right?”

  My family had lived in the area for four months when I was a child of seven, following my father in his job as engineer and bridge-builder. Then, almost a decade ago, at age twenty-seven, I’d returned before joining the MPD, a self-imposed weekend retreat to sort out a jumble of warring factions in my head. It hit me that I must have stayed at an RRG cabin.

  “The last I was in your neighborhood was nine years ago, Miz Fugate. You keep records that long?”

  She laughed. “Yep. An’ ever’ year we drop all the previous guests’ register cards in a hat and my daughter pulls out a winner of free use of a cabin. She plucked out your name. I sure hope you can come back and stay with us.”

  Clair Peltier, a pathologist for the state of Alabama and my significant sometimes other, believes in the concept of synchronicity, thinking a webwork of logic underlies the fabric of the visible world, a fluid and spiritual mathematics with a sense of humor. She would have explained that my seeking a vacation spot and one arriving via phone was synchronicity: it was not luck, but an item on the universe’s to-do list.

  To me it was just weird. But it had dropped in my lap, and it was free.

  “You got any cabins available, say, next week?” I asked.

  I heard pages flipping, Dottie Fugate checking a calendar.

  “Choice is tight, cuz it’s summer tourist season, but we got one open starting Saturday. It’s in a holler in the backcountry and damn remote, to tell the truth.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  I started the engine and my truck ascended from the valley through pine and hemlock and maple, passing sheer rock faces where vegetation wouldn’t grow. I saw huge house-sized chunks of rock that had toppled from the ridges eons ago. The dark boulders sat in the forest like sentinels, and I recalled that during my brief childhood stay in the mountains I had imagined the boulders whispering to one another during the night, not through the air, but the ground.

  I headed back to the cabin, stomach growling, breakfast burned away by hauling my ass up rock faces. The road was asphalt, potholed, crumbling at the edges, but a main county road nonetheless, the shoulders dappled with wildflowers. I curved past a cliff face and cut on to a tight lane, the truck’s springs squealing as the tires dropped from asphalt on to rutted double track of dirt and gravel.

  Directly ahead, the road seemed to disappear, the effect of a precipitous winding drop into the tight cleft between two mountains, a hollow, or what locals called a “holler”. I eased down until the lane flattened out. Another few hundred feet and the road forked. To the left was the only neighboring dwelling, a sizeable log cabin visible through the trees.

  The right-hand path took me a half-mile deeper in the hollow to my cabin, slat-sided and roofed with dark green metal. Behind, three towering hemlocks pushed into the blue sky, taller by a third than the surrounding white pines and oaks. The dark, raw-wood cabin looked native amidst the forest, as if it had sprouted on its own.

  I climbed the porch and pulled my key, for the first time noting that the keychain had a label with the cabin’s name. Vacation retreats were given names – Rocky Ridge, Timbertop, Braeside and so forth – mine apparently named by its remote placement.

  Road’s End.

  I heard a hellacious din from inside and saw a blur of frenzied motion at the window. I sighed and opened the door.

  A tornado blew out.

  “Jesus, ouch, damn … calm down, Mix-up.”

  Having saved my dog from the euthanasia needle with about a half-hour to spare, many would have figured his wild-eyed, slobbering delight was joy at greeting his savior, but jubilant chaos was his default setting: spinning in circles, bumping my legs, rolling on his back, a dog that delighted in everything.

  Mix-up thundered between my legs, and I went down. When my head was on his level he began licking it like a beef roast.

  “Stop, dammit. No, Mix-up. Sit! SIT!”

  A strange thing happened, something I didn’t expect in a hundred years.

  He sat.

  His body twitched, but his haunches stayed glued to the ground. I stood, staring at the phenomenon. For a year I’d been working on commands, Mr Mix-up immune to my imprecations. I’d say Sit, he’d thunder in circles. I’d say Stay, he’d follow me like my pants were made of bacon. I’d throw a stick and yell Fetch, he’d roll on the ground and pedal his legs at the sky.

  A couple months ago I’d spoken about Mix-up’s recalcitrance to his day-care lady, Lucinda Best, who volunteered at the animal shelter from which I’d rescued him. She’d recommended a nearby obedience school and I’d taken him thrice-weekly for a month, a hundred and fifty bucks’ worth of watching other dogs learn to heel, fetch, sit and stay while Mix-up went his merry way.

  It appeared he’d managed to learn something, though. Did one of his many breeds have a learning lag time? I held up my hand and quietly said, Stay. I backed away. He stayed. I back-stepped down the drive for fifty paces, hand up, repeating my command every few seconds. I stopped, gestured my way, said, Come here.

  He exploded toward me. When he was two dozen feet away I thrust my hand out, said Sit.

  He skidded to a stop in sit position. I backed away again, keeping him in place with the Stay command. I found a foot of busted branch on the ground, threw it down the drive yelling Fetch!

  He tipped over and began pedaling his paws at the sky.

  “Two out of three ain’t bad,” I told him, rubbing his belly. “Let’s go grab some chow.”

  I opened the cabin door and went inside, the air cool and smelling of wood and my breakfast bacon. The walls were pine decorated with cheap buys from local flea markets: a red-centric quilt, a sign advertising Texaco Gasoline, calendar-style photos from the Gorge stuck in a variety of dime-store frames. The living room had a vaulted ceiling, with loft space above. Dormers let light pour in. The dining room and kitchen made one long unit.

  I showered away the morning’s sweat and grit. Afterwards, I went to the kitchen area and lashed together two sausage and jalapeno cheese sandwiches. I cracked open a cold Sam Adams and dined in a rocker on the sun-dappled porch, serenaded by insects, birdsong and the tumble of water over rock in the nearby creek. Swallow-tailed butterflies skittered through the warm air. Somewhere on the ridge above the cabin a woodpecker drilled for bugs.

  I leaned back in the rocker and set my bare heels on the railing as something puzzling happened in my neck and shoulders. At first I didn’t recognize the feeling, then it
came to me.

  They had relaxed.

  7

  I spent the remainder of the day hiking in the Gorge, watching Mix-up bark after squirrels and turkeys and splash through the creeks. With the wide blue sky a constant companion, we pushed through green thickets of rhododendron, crossed slender ridges no wider than my truck, yawning drop-offs on both sides. We climbed up and down the steep grades until my knees went weak and we had to return.

  I hit the mattress at eight thirty, worn and weary and happy as a clam.

  In the morning a strange chirping roused me from my dreams, the sound resolving into the cellphone beside the bed. I thumbed the device open and put it to my ear.

  “Hello?”

  “—ot a police emer—cy,” bayed a female voice, the lousy reception chopping out half of her words.

  “I can’t hear you,” I said.

  “We have—lice emerg—” the woman repeated in a twangy mountain accent, giving no sign she was receiving me.

  The phone showed a half-bar of reception. I’d quickly learned cell signals were haphazard in the mountains, wavering. I sprinted out the door and up the hill beside the cabin, yelling, “Hang on!”

  When I’d put fifty or sixty feet on my altitude, I looked at the phone and saw another strip of bar on the meter.

  “This is——Cherry of———of Kentucky. We need you——mergency.”

  “I can’t hear you!” I yelled.

  “GPS—ordinates are …” I pulled out my pen, focused on nothing but hearing. The coordinates were spoken twice and I managed to get them, I hoped.

  “Who is this?” I yelled. “Identify yourself.”

  The call warbled, howled, beeped and died. No caller number had registered. My head whirled with questions as I stumbled down the hillside. Who had my caller been? Who knew I was vacationing in Kentucky?

  Wait… the caller thought I was in Alabama. That made a lot more sense. Just to be sure, I grabbed my brand-new, bought-for-the-trip GPS and entered the coordinates.