by CJ Lyons
The steam pipes overhead whispered their agreement, sounding eerily like voices. The dog let loose with a guttural noise that was almost below my hearing threshold and lunged against his lead. The hairs on my arms leapt to attention. Primitive fight-or-flight reflexes heightened all my senses.
“Do you hear that?” I asked Devon. He had stopped, was listening. “I don’t think we’re alone.”
The dog went silent, his teeth bared, lunging and about to yank my arm from its socket.
“It’s not Esme,” Devon whispered. “Turn out your light.”
I clicked my flashlight off, and he did the same. Silently, we let the dog lead us through the darkness. Up ahead there was a wide, T-shaped junction. A dim glimmer of light slithered from the right-hand side. “That leads to the hospital.” Devon’s voice was barely a breath in my ear. “The left leads to the Tower.”
The noise came again. It sounded like footsteps but not that regular. More like shuffling. It was impossible to tell which direction they came from. The echoes sounded from all directions at once. Even above us.
Then came the sound of heavy breathing. Not strained, more like excited. Bad porno breathing.
The dog’s fur wrinkled beneath my palm like canine goose bumps. I tightened my grip on his collar. His head pivoted, first left, then right, then left again.
“Which way?” I whispered as we reached the junction.
About thirty feet down the tunnel on the right, light sliced across it. Sharply angled as if a door had been left open. Shadows fled, twisted inhuman shapes stretching toward that scratch of light.
The tunnel to my left was completely black, just like the tunnel we’d come from.
The sounds of breathing hushed. I imagined they were still there, only stifled. Someone holding their breath, watching, waiting to see which way we would go.
The dog pulled left, into the darkness. Despite the fact that my hospital, safe haven that it had always been, was in the opposite direction, I was inclined to agree. The black was less frightening than the gray.
We’d gone only a few steps when Ozzie jerked to a stop, turning back to nose my palm. Low, throbbing bass notes wormed their way into my marrow. Warning, warning, the ponderous chords sang. I wanted to ask Devon if he heard it as well, but my body was frozen.
Colors flooded my vision. Firecracker bursts that shimmered into blackness. Shit. Not again. I could feel everything—the dog pressed against my legs, offering me support; a whisper of air sighing against the back of my neck as if a door was being closed behind me; the weight of the flashlight in my hand. Even more, I felt the strain of my muscles, locked into place around the flashlight’s rubber grip, the spit gathering at the back of my throat, the cramp in one quadriceps as my weight settled unevenly on that leg.
Underneath it all, a slow, crescendo of panic as I lost control of both my body and my mind.
Time slowed in me, around me. Except for my brain. That was on hyperdrive, whirling like a computer processing too much information, every sense at full alert. The path we’d taken from the church, details of the tunnels that I hadn’t paid attention to—shelves filled with boxes labeled potassium iodide; plastic jugs of water; cartons of medical supplies with recent dates on the shipping labels; metal cases large enough to carry weapons, sporting heavy padlocks; cartons of MREs with expiration dates in the next decade. This place might have been built during the Cold War, but it was clear someone was preparing for a new war.
And one more thing: the subtle, citrus scent of a man’s cologne.
That explained the lack of dust. And the heavy breathing. You wouldn’t leave a fortune in supplies unguarded.
“What’s wrong?” Devon’s voice barely blipped onto my mental radar screen. I was too busy processing the barrage of information pounding through my brain. How was this happening? It was the same feeling I’d had when Patrice had poured her memory into my brain, yet I wasn’t touching anyone.
My mind continued to spin, scanning all the data my senses had gathered even though I’d been conscious of only the tiniest percentage. Until now. Sights, sounds, smells thundered through me, accompanied by that weird subliminal music that made my bones ache. It was as if for the first time in my life, I saw the world the way it really was, uncensored by my brain’s internal editor.
Devon shook me, waved his hand before my eyes, aimed his light at them. It hurt, but I couldn’t blink. The dog pushed against me, harder now as my muscles trembled with the effort to stay locked in a position that was totally unnatural.
Then, with a rush of heat, my weight plummeted forward into Devon’s chest, and I was released.
He caught me, spun me against the nearest set of shelves, and sat me down on a crate of bottled water. “What the hell was that?”
Ozzie wasn’t so rude with his concern. He settled for pushing his way below my arm, snuggling between my arm and chest, and licking my face.
“How long?” I asked. It had felt like no more than a second to me. Or maybe a decade. Like being in a dream where time collapses and stretches simultaneously.
“I don’t know. Three minutes or so. Scared the shit out of me.”
Me, too. I blinked hard and fast. My eyes felt dried, scratchy, but I didn’t think my corneas were damaged. My muscles ached worse than after playing a marathon session with the band, burning with lactic acid. I was going to be sore in the morning.
“What is it? Epilepsy or something?”
“Or something.” My mind whirled with a list of possible diagnoses: temporal lobe epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, aneurysm, tumor, encephalitis…and that was just the top five. Louise was going to have a field day when I finally found the courage to tell her.
“What should I do? You going to have another one? Do you need medicine?” The sudden string of questions seemed out of character for Devon, who until now had acted like the king of macho one-liners. I figured he was as freaked out as I was.
“I don’t know,” I uttered the three dreaded words. My admission tasted like acid, burning my throat.
“What do you mean you don’t know? Has this happened before?”
“Started tonight. While I was working on Patrice.” I told him about hearing her, about freezing, mid-resuscitation, her heart in my hand. It felt good to tell someone, safer to tell a stranger—plausible deniability if he ever repeated it—as if I was rehearsing for when I’d have to explain this all to Louise.
“Shit.” He stared at me for a long moment. “Is that what killed her?”
“Wish I knew.” Tired of not having any answers, I struggled to my feet, using the shelf for support. Ozzie nudged me with his nose, as if trying to convince me standing wasn’t a good idea. The head rush that followed agreed, but I ignored it. “We have to find Esme.”
“Didn’t your vision or whatever show you where she is?” He sounded irritated. I understood. With a little girl’s life at stake, if my episodes weren’t helping us find her, that made me a liability.
Devon pulled me alongside him, and we let the dog lead us. Devon had his gun out. He carried it casually but alert, as if he was used to carrying a weapon. I wondered again about him.
Apparently, he was having second thoughts about me as well. “What if you have another… spell, whatever, and something happens?”
“Leave me. Find Esme, get her out of here.”
We continued for several minutes. There were no more weird sounds of breathing, no disembodied footsteps. Somehow, that only made the darkness stretching in all directions all the more oppressing.
“So, what’s wrong with you?” he asked. It sounded more like a request for information—like a patient filling out a triage form—rather than because he cared about me. Why should he? He didn’t know me.
I wasn’t about to admit to ignorance. So I exercised my right to remain silent.
“If you’re sick, what are you doing working in the ER? Not very smart for a doctor.” He was playing dumb to goad me, and it worked.
“I
told you, these… spells… didn’t start until tonight. No one knows about them.”
“Don’t you think they should?”
“Then I’d have to stop practicing medicine. I couldn’t be a doctor, all I’d be is…”
“A patient. Human, just like the rest of us poor slobs.”
“It’s not that—”
“Sure, it is. When you’re a patient, you’re vulnerable. You lose control of your life, of everything.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “You’re scared.”
Of course I was. Saying it out loud wouldn’t make it any easier to swallow. “Is that why you don’t tell people you’re Esme’s father? Because you’re scared, too?”
Silence as we both slowed our steps. It wasn’t just a guess. Somewhere in that last dizzying spate of information my brain had processed, it had overlaid an image of Devon’s face with Esme’s. They had to be closely related. I almost hoped I was wrong. There are treatments for things like temporal lobe epilepsy or hallucinations.
But I’d never even heard of anything like what was happening to me. I wished we were back up on the surface where I could call Louise—to hell with the late hour or holiday—and ask her opinion.
He turned to me, the gun pointed casually in my direction, muzzle aimed down at the concrete floor. Then he surprised me and nodded, as if making up his mind about me. “Yeah. She’s mine. And, yes. I’m scared shitless. If the wrong people find out…”
I could fill in the blanks. “I won’t tell. Does she know?”
He shrugged. “No. It was the price we paid for her safety. Eleven years I’ve been gone. I thought when Jess, her mom, called me, begged me to come home… Hell, guess for a moment I was that seventeen-year-old kid again, wanting to play knight in shining armor. Stupid.”
“You’re from here?” I remembered Father Vance saying Devon had known the tunnels as a child.
We turned another corner, and he reached past me to tug Ozzie to a halt. “Hold on a minute. We’re under the Tower. Entering Tyree’s territory.”
Right. Tyree, who liked to play with meth labs and booby traps. “Surely he’d keep any traps farther away from the Tower,” I said. “Like the one we found back near the church in the room where the fire was.”
“Took him too long to get there after his early-warning system went off.” He sounded like he’d thought about it. A lot. “He’ll keep things close to home now.”
I was sweeping the area with my light. “I think you might be right.”
Less than a foot in front of Ozzie, the glint of fishing line filament crossed the tunnel at knee height. Sister Patrice’s voice echoed through my mind, warning Esme to climb high. Now I understood what she meant. I hauled Ozzie back, but Devon didn’t seem surprised.
“Good. I was worried he’d go all high-tech, get motion detectors or the like.” He knelt, tracing the line with his light. It ran through an eye hook and behind a set of metal shelves. Devon peered between the boxes that lined the lower shelf, taking care not to move them. Then he pocketed his gun and pulled out a switchblade. He stretched his arm into the space behind the boxes.
I backed off, holding my breath and the dog. Couldn’t help but flinch when the fishing line snapped, whipping through the air.
We were still there. I relaxed and joined Devon as he crawled out from under the shelving. In his hand he held a sawed-off shotgun with a length of fishing line hanging from the trigger. “Good thing Tyree hasn’t changed his ways much.”
“Good thing.”
He handed me the shotgun. “You know how to use one of these?”
“Yes.” My little sister, Eve, a girlie girl, hated tramping through the woods or the idea of hunting, so that left me and my dad, alone in the silence of the dawn, hunkered down in our stand. The best times were the long walks back to where the truck was parked, hauling a field-dressed deer or brace of birds more often than not. We’d talk then. About everything—crazy things Mom would have rolled her eyes at. Like how every culture has the same mathematical basis for its music, but it all sounds different. Same with food. Or about religions. Or stories about Dad’s time in the Army when he’d traveled all around the world—well, really just to Panama and Germany and someplace I couldn’t pronounce in Turkey. But to a girl from Cambria, it had seemed like he’d seen the world.
I never asked him why he came back here. Maybe I should have.
I checked the gun, made sure both barrels were loaded, and snapped it shut. Looping the dog’s lead around my hand with the flashlight, I motioned for Devon to go on.
We found two more booby traps, both easily dismantled. One, another shotgun. The second had several M-80s wired together with some kind of detonator. That one pissed Devon off. All I could think of was how much damage an M-80 could do to a girl Esme’s size. And how easily a fire could be started down here. With the tunnels acting as chimneys, it would spread blocks in every direction, fast as lightning.
The shuffling sounds and loud breathing returned. I was certain someone was following us, but every time I looked, the space around me was empty. Still, I felt better having the shotgun.
Ozzie was getting as impatient as I was. It was hard to keep him in check, so I finally gave up on the leash and grabbed hold of his harness instead. I knew from his anxiety that we must be close to Esme.
Devon stopped in the middle of another T-intersection and placed his flashlight on one of the ubiquitous metal shelving units so that it shone down one tunnel. He pulled his second light out and waved it down the opposite tunnel.
“Esme?” he called, stepping into the light so he could be seen. These shelving units were lined with boxes and plastic containers stacked on top of each other. Myriad places for a skinny kid to hide behind or between the crates. “Esme, you can come out now. It’s safe.”
His words bounced off the walls, sounding more ominous than reassuring.
I gave it a try. “Esme. I’m Doctor Rossi. I’m here with Ozzie. He misses you. Won’t you please come out?”
Ozzie yanked against my hand. He led us down the left-hand tunnel where three sets of shelves filled with blankets had been pulled away from the walls and clumped together, creating a bottleneck we couldn’t see past. Ozzie danced in front of the shelves, tail wagging, barking.
“Esme, are you there?” I called. “Are you hurt? Do you need help?”
Devon let me do all the talking. I glanced back at him and realized he’d taken a defensive position behind me, gun drawn as he scanned the space behind us.
Ozzie sat, his nose aimed up, tail thumping the floor. I looked up as well, aiming my light at the top of the shelves, just below the pipes. I squinted into the blackness. Barely made out the metal catwalk suspended above the pipes. Then a blur of motion came from the top of the middle set of shelves.
“Esme, is that you?”
My light caught more movement as a shot sounded, followed by a girl’s scream.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Ryder wanted to pull his hair out by the roots. Would have if he hadn’t been busy coordinating thirty men, if he’d had two seconds to breathe, and if his scalp hadn’t been held together by office supplies. Damn staples. Itched like hell. He settled for pacing in front of the dark maw that was the entrance to the tunnels.
Water sluiced off his overcoat, creating rivulets that ran inside his collar and between his lapels, soaking him inside and out. His trousers, heavy with the wet, sagged against his belt.
Such was the glamorous life of a detective.
CSU and Major Crimes had taken over the homicides, leaving him free. Finding that little girl was now his priority.
Darkness beckoned from the door leading into the tunnels. He’d been lost in the black himself, too many times to count. Paktika had been riddled with tunnels and caves so deep and dark that even with modern night vision gear, some guys lost it down there. It’d been Ryder’s job to bring them back up into the light.
Rainwater swirled over his shoe tops. Daggers of his old frostbi
te stabbed through his toes. Hospitality gift from the Taliban. He remembered the early days in Afghanistan—no support, endless duty, no relief, no frame of reference, just slogging from one bottomless hole to the next, dropping wearily into the black, wondering what piece of yourself you’d leave behind this time. Soul-sucking bitch of a country.
He’d brought all his men home, but he hadn’t really brought any of them back whole.
Most of his time there was a blur. Except for the fear he’d had to swallow each and every time he’d entered the black. He’d kept count at first, but after the first dozen times, it hadn’t seemed to matter—the fear became part of the routine, like double-checking his gear, taping down anything that jangled, triple-checking the batteries on his lights and NVG, clearing his weapons of the god-awful dust that crept into everything.
The fear was always there. It never left. It simply became part of the weight they all carried. One more thing to be stowed and secured.
The kid lost inside these tunnels didn’t have Kevlar or NVG. She didn’t have a team with her. She was all alone in the black. Maybe hurt. Maybe dead already.
The thought weighed more than the memories.
Petrosky appeared at the far end of the alley, hauling Tyree Willard along with her. Tyree’s hands were cuffed behind his back, but otherwise he looked none the worse.
“Let me go! I know my rights!”
Ryder waited for them to come to him and released his scowl, exposing a few of his more raw emotions. The ones with fangs. “Rights? You don’t have any rights. Not when a little girl’s life is at stake.”
“You found Esme?” Tyree lunged forward. Petrosky yanked him back. Impressive work, given Tyree’s bulk. “Is she okay? Where is she?”
“What’s she to you?”
“She’s my niece, you shithead. Where the hell is she?”
“In there.” Ryder pointed to the open door.
Tyree sagged, just for a moment, then straightened. “You got to let me in there, man. It’s not safe for her, wandering the dark.”
“He clean?” Ryder asked. Petrosky nodded. “Uncuff him.”
