Nothing. A few remaining shards of broken wood fell into the shaft, creating faint echoes as they dropped into the blackness.
The collapse had taken away Falcon’s bag, too.
Instinct had warned him that agreeing to Emily’s attempt to retrieve the bag was a bad idea. But he had let her do it anyway. Now she was gone.
Deacon closed his eyes. I let this happen.
Groaning, he rolled onto his back. Water trickled from the ceiling and onto his cheeks, feeling like cold tears on his skin.
Beside him, Hannah sobbed quietly. In their short time together, the two women had forged a bond. Deacon felt bad for her, too, responsible for her pain.
It was nothing but bad news for them, all around. This half-baked plan of his to bring Kent Falcon to justice was an unmitigated disaster. Perhaps the wise move was to get up, lick their wounds, and take their asses back to Falcon’s estate to hide out until everything blew over. Stop trying to be heroes. Trying to be heroes was killing them one by one.
He shifted to face Hannah. “We should go back.”
“Go back?” Hannah raised her head, stared at him. In the backsplash of the flashlights, her dark eyes were like darts. “You mean, quit?”
“Jim . . . now Emily. We’re losing this, Hannah. I don’t see a way forward that ends well for us.”
“No.” Hannah wiped her eyes with her thumb, clearing away tears and grime. “I’m not going back. With or without you, I’m finishing this.”
As he gaped at her, she pushed to her feet with a determined grunt. She gathered her flashlight and the shotgun that Emily had left behind.
Deacon got up, too. “You’re serious, aren’t you? About going on alone?”
“Welcome to the story of my life.” She brushed dirt off the lens of the flashlight and played the beam across the wood-patched section of the corridor floor. “I’ll be careful. You take care of yourself, too.”
She turned away from him and inched forward. The wood creaked beneath her footsteps, but held firm as she reached the other side.
She didn’t even look back to see if he were coming.
Deacon dragged his hand down his face. He spat in the dirt.
Then he picked up his flashlight, and followed her.
***
They didn’t speak for a while as they navigated the tunnel, moving nearly shoulder to shoulder, the beams of their lights guiding the way. A couple of times, they ducked to avoid rocky outcroppings that almost nailed them in the head. As they traveled, they passed a series of rusted tools that littered the walls and ground: a pick-axe, a wheelbarrow, long spear-like items that Deacon assumed were old drill bits, left behind from the mine’s operational days.
“Sorry for that back there,” he finally said. “I lost my way for a minute.”
“You of all people don’t need to apologize,” Hannah said. “What you’ve been through today . . . well it’s amazing that you’ve come this far. I couldn’t do it.”
“You gave me the kick in the ass I needed. Thanks for that.”
“Sure, that’s me, you know. Dispensing kicks in the asses whenever they’re required.”
A chuckle slipped out of him.
“It’s funny,” he said. “My cardiologist says I need to be careful with my heart, not exert myself too much. That’s why I left the force after I took a round in the chest, and accepted the job here. Security guard commander in a ritzy neighborhood? No problem. I thought every day would be a cakewalk.”
“If only you had known, right?” Hannah laughed.
He decided that he liked the sound of her laughter, musical and pure. Like him, she had seen terrible things in her line of work, but she still had a perspective that allowed her to take a step back and see the humor in the world. A woman with such a quality was a rare find.
Maybe, he thought. Maybe, we’ve got something good here, something worth exploring if we can get through this night alive.
“Look at that,” Hannah said. She focused her light on an object on the floor.
It was a large crossbow, painted in camouflage colors.
“That belongs to Mr. Falcon,” Deacon said. “We’re definitely heading in the right direction.”
“He wouldn’t have left it behind intentionally,” Hannah said. “Just like the bag of his.”
“I don’t think things went as planned for him, either.” Deacon scanned the immediate area. On the rock wall not far from the discarded crossbow, he saw a crimson smear that looked like blood. He touched it.
“Still wet,” he said.
“He can’t be far,” she said.
Deacon knew what she meant. She expected to find Falcon’s body, soon. A man bereft of weapons and tools, leaking blood from wounds, could not have made it much farther in this tomblike place.
They followed the tunnel around a bend in the rock. Ahead, an old mine cart stood in the center of the track.
There was more blood, too. It covered the inside of the cart, and droplets spattered the ground. A couple strips of a torn shirt lay on the dirt, too.
“Falcon was in this cart,” Deacon said. “But he got out. Possibly he bandaged his wounds with his shirt.”
Hannah whistled. “Tough guy, huh?”
They continued on. Ahead, dim light glowed at the edge of the corridor. They hurried forward, their footsteps echoing.
They found themselves in a large, cleared out area. Along the far wall, a glass-fronted chamber stood, light glowing within.
“It looks like a lab,” Hannah said in a soft, awed voice.
Both of their two-way radios crackled.
“I’m okay, guys,” Emily said.
***
Emily told Hannah and Deacon that she was fine, but she wasn’t, not really.
She had fallen down a shaft for an indeterminate distance, perhaps twenty feet. It wasn’t a free fall—she had bounced against some stones along the way. Bumping against the rocks had broken what could have been a deadly fall, but her head had banged against an outcropping, and she had blacked out.
When she awoke with a pounding headache, it was so dark it was impossible to verify that her eyes were actually open. The blackness was like a solid material surrounding her.
Coldness seeped into her bones. She was lying in cold water. It had a depth of a few inches. She heard the persistent trickle of running water nearby, sounding like a broken toilet.
By touch alone, she located the flashlight clipped to her belt. She thumbed the switch.
The light flared on. The contrast of the electric whiteness against the extreme darkness stung her eyes.
Blinking, she sat up. A dozen pain points throbbed throughout her body. Slowly, she panned the flashlight around her.
She had fallen into some sort of cavern. It was a small space, with a low, jagged ceiling, and a dirt floor covered with rocks and shallow pools of still water. Rivulets of water streamed down the walls, feeding the pond.
The strap of Falcon’s bag was twisted around her ankle. The discovery made her chuckle, but laughing aggravated the pain that throbbed throughout her muscles and joints.
She pulled the bag toward her, unwinding the strap from her foot. A check inside confirmed it held six units of plastic-wrapped explosives.
She was lucky that the tumble down the shaft hadn’t set off a detonation. Perhaps all of them were lucky.
She grabbed the walkie-talkie Deacon had given her, which she’d clipped to her waist. She told Hannah and Deacon she was okay—banged up, but fine, though she honestly felt like total crap. They wanted to know where she was, but she couldn’t tell them exactly. She promised to keep in touch and urged them to move forward with their plans.
“Now to find a way back,” she muttered.
The ceiling was so low that couldn’t stand up. She had to crouch. As she shone the light around, she located various miniature tunnels in the rocks, large enough for small animals but much too small for her to fit through.
But the stream of water flowed
toward a small passageway near the floor that might have been promising. It was small, too, reminding her of a tunnel on a children’s playground.
She got on her knees, water drenching her legs and hands. She shone the light into the aperture.
Small creatures with dark, leathery bodies shifted away from the light with a rustling sound. She lowered the flashlight.
Wonderful, she thought. I’ve got to crawl through a tunnel full of bats.
She pulled in several deep breaths. She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt over her head.
When she lifted the light again, the bats had shifted toward her. Their marble-like eyes were blood-red, swollen with infection.
Oh, God, no . . .
Screeching, they funneled toward her.
***
Deacon and Hannah hurried toward the lab like kids on Christmas morning rushing toward a tree surrounded by gifts. Deacon wanted to believe that, finally, momentum had shifted in their favor. Emily was alive. They had discovered this laboratory. They had to seize advantage of the run of good luck.
“After me,” Deacon said once they reached the glass doorway. Beyond the door, he saw several wire cages, of various sizes, clustered inside. Computer equipment stood on a small desk.
He drew the .357. The door lever yielded, and the door swished open with a soft gasp.
Nothing rushed out at them. All of the cages were empty.
“The smell in here is god-awful.” Hannah coughed. She went to the laptop computer, began tapping the keyboard.
Deacon tried to ignore the cocktail of malodorous odors. A stainless steel door stood at the opposite end of the room. He crossed the space, opened the door.
An overhead light flickered on, and it was like a horror show back there: three perfectly preserved human cadavers lay on morgue-style steel tables, each of them in various stages of dissection, like test subjects in a gross anatomy class. Their disfigured faces rendered them unrecognizable. Deacon saw glass jars standing on wire shelves, packed to the brim with extracted organs floating in preserving fluids: hearts, brains, livers, kidneys, eyes.
Disgust roiled Deacon’s stomach. What in the hell had Falcon been doing in here? Had he deliberated infected these people and then run his experiments on them?
The only thing that didn’t inspire disgust was the large glass terrarium in the corner. Exotic-looking plants thrived inside the sealed environment. Deacon read the label on the case, “Warning – Do Not Open!” and wondered about the terrarium’s contents.
A thick black cable snaked through a small aperture on the floor at the corner of the room. Deacon surmised that all of the equipment in the lab—the computer, the lights, everything—was hooked to an alternate power source.
He headed back to Hannah. She was hunched over the laptop, fingers racing across keys.
“Find something?” he asked. “Because I’ve got a thing or two to show you in the back room.”
“Say hello to Kent Falcon.” She turned the computer to face him.
Deacon wiped his face with the back of his hand, and gazed at the laptop display.
A man in his early sixties stared back at him. He had a lean, longish face, a wooly white beard that flowed down to his neck, and thick white hair drawn back into a man-bun. He wore wire-rim glasses that framed piercing blue eyes.
From those eyes alone, Deacon knew he was looking at Kent Falcon. He and his older brother shared those penetrating baby blues.
The date of the video recording blinked at the upper right corner of the media viewer application: May 4th. Over two months ago.
“I am Dr. Kent Falcon,” he said into the web camera. He had a soft Southern accent; he sounded a bit like a genteel professor, someone who might have taught a lit class on Faulkner. “This is the first in a series of video log entries that I’ll be recording for Project Wilding.”
“Project Wilding?” Deacon said, and Hannah shrugged.
“I don’t imagine that anyone else will ever view these journals,” Falcon continued. “That’s irrelevant to me. This work—this manifesto, if you will—is for my own edification, not posterity. I intend to watch these from time to time. Sometimes I like to be reminded of my own genius in laying bare the ills that plague our species.”
“Clearly, humility isn’t a character trait of his,” Hannah said, shaking her head.
“Humanity is a cancer upon the earth,” Falcon said. “We’ve raped the planet, all in the name of industrial advancement, technological mastery, and corporate greed. Unimaginable amenities are at our beck and call. Climate-controlled homes. Genetically-modified foods. Mobile phones that are the modern equivalent of supercomputers. Automobiles that virtually drive themselves.
“The average American has no survival skills whatsoever. They’re estranged from nature. Who among them, if abandoned in the wilderness, could select edible plants? Who could locate drinkable water? Kindle a fire without matches and other artificial tools? Gather raw materials to construct a place of shelter that keeps them safe and warm? Hunt for food without a firearm?”
“Sort of has a point there,” Deacon said.
Falcon leaned toward the screen, his eyes afire as he warmed to his subject.
“We must be re-introduced to our feral natures,” he said. “We must strip away the accoutrements of our cluttered, pointless modern lives and recapture our connection with the planet, with the animal kingdom, with one another. We’re lost, and we must be found. I’ve discovered a vehicle to facilitate this transition back to the wild, for all of us. It will not be without pain. There are side effects that must be considered. But the overall benefit to our species, to our planet, outweighs any disadvantages . . .”
“He’s insane,” Hannah said. She clicked to another log entry: there was a list of perhaps forty files, arranged chronologically.
In the next journal, Kent was ranting again, his cheeks flushed cherry-red.
“. . . my elder brother, Ronald, is one of the most disgusting capitalists the world has ever seen, a man obsessed with profit and self-aggrandizement to the exclusion of all else. He erects glittering monuments to his own ego on each of his environment-destroying properties. This travesty of a community, South Haven, was erected out of a misguided sense of nostalgia, and serves as nothing more than a walled-off, artificial paradise for one-percenters who worship at the altar of materialism . . .”
“No love lost between the two of them,” Deacon said.
“It’ll take days for us to comb through all of these videos,” Hannah said. “He’s a man who loves the sound of his own voice.”
“We’ll just take the computer with us, then. It’s evidence.”
“And this.” Hannah flipped through paperwork stashed in a manila folder next to the computer. “These papers are mostly related to inventory, shipments.”
“For experiments?” Deacon said.
“Clearly, he was deliberately infecting animals with our friendly Peruvian tick,” she said. “Presumably, he was conducting tests before he dispersed the eggs throughout South Haven.”
“What kind of animals was he using?” He was thinking about the largest cage he had seen.
“Several chimpanzees. Raccoons. Bats. Mice. Coyotes. A black bear.”
“A black bear.” He didn’t want to think about the possibility of such an immense creature, infected with the neurotoxin, roaming in the mine. “Let me show you what’s in the back.”
She rose from behind the desk and followed him. She grimaced at the sight of the corpses and stored organs, but the terrarium intrigued her the most.
“I’m not going to open that case,” she said. “Because I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts that it contains live specimens of ixodes insanus.”
Deacon stared into the sealed case but couldn’t see a thing except the colorful plants. “Kent Falcon would have had the resources to do it all on his own. His family’s real estate empire spans the globe. Going to Peru, throwing some cash around and picking up a rare specimen li
ke this? Just another day for our boy.”
“Still incredibly risky,” Hannah said. “Risky and stupid.”
“So Kent brings the tick here,” Deacon said. “And like a mad scientist, he begins running tests on animals, and soon moves on to people.”
“Which he happens to do in his brother’s prestigious real estate development, South Haven,” Hannah said. “A brother he obviously despises. It’s a perfect environment for him to exercise his anarchist theories, this Project Wilding.”
“Forcing people to become feral again,” Deacon said.
“Which is working, more or less. The infected are stripping off their clothes and howling and generally behaving like a sub-human species, minus the nasty side effects, which includes wanting to rip out your neighbor’s throat.”
“We got what we wanted.” Deacon patted his backpack. “We’re taking the laptop with us, along with any other paperwork that supports our case. Once we get out of here, we go public. Anyone involved in this needs to go down.”
“Kent Falcon most of all,” she said. “I can’t wait to watch the rest of those videos.”
“Yeah,” Deacon said, and unconsciously slid his hand to his gun. “And I can’t wait to meet him in the flesh.”
***
As the infected bats converged on her in a dark, screeching funnel, Emily bowed her head and protected her face with her arms.
Their tiny teeth and claws tore at her exposed hands, like little razors ripping into her flesh. Screaming, she swung the flashlight like a baton. The metal thwacked a couple of the creatures and sent them smashing against the rocks. They collapsed with a whimper.
Charged with adrenaline, she gripped the flashlight in both hands and kept swinging. Another bat fell, skull crushed against the edge of the lens.
Hair hanging in her eyes, she whirled around, taking on all comers. Light panned wildly throughout the chamber as she fought. Water splashed around her feet, and blood dripped down her cheeks, like tears.
She eventually realized that nothing else was biting her. The crushed animals littered the floor, or squirmed weakly in the water.
At some point she had stopped sobbing, too. But she was breathing so hard her lungs ached.
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