by CJ Lyons
“Any problems?” Hector asked one of the men as he retrieved his sidearm and an AK-47 along with ammo.
The man shook his head. “No. But we found this one outside.” He nodded to his comrades, who dragged in a man with long, sandy brown hair, his wrists and ankles in restraints. They threw him at Hector’s feet.
He moaned and rolled over, exposing his face.
Caitlyn sprang to her feet, her hand going for her weapon—a weapon that wasn’t there. “Carver!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Maria should have run. She wanted to run. Everything that had happened since seeing Prescott killed collided in her brain, and nothing made sense. She couldn’t trust anyone; she had to save herself.
The look on Kevin’s face mirrored her own panic. Could she leave him behind? As she’d left Prescott?
Her fingers found the door handle and grabbed it, the cool metal jarring her from her stunned paralysis. She yanked the door open and fled back into the hallway.
To the right lay the stairwell and escape. To the left lay more rooms with who knew what horrors waiting behind their closed doors.
Her feet turned her body to the right. But she couldn’t stop looking to the left.
Finally she ran. To the left. Searching for something to free Kevin. Then, together they could escape this nightmare.
The next room she came to was filled with large steel vats with thick gaskets, each plugged in to its own outlet. The room was freezing. When she brushed against a vat, cold burned through her clothing. Each barrel had a clipboard hanging near it. She glanced at one and cringed as she read it. Row after row, identifying donor tissue types of heart valves stored at 200 degrees below freezing.
She recognized the HLA tissue identification types from her parents’ work. The histocompatibility antigen matches decreased the risk to recipients of organ and bone marrow transplants. One of the reasons behind BioRegen’s success was that it had such a large tissue bank, it could provide tissues that had a high degree of HLA matching.
Her mother had explained to her that it wasn’t important in most tissue use, but that anything to decrease tissue rejection would increase safety for the patient and allow BioRegen to charge more for its unique services. All Maria had wanted was some basic info for a biology project, and as usual her mother had reduced it into boring dollars and cents.
And they wondered why she wanted to study archeology.
Maria turned to the next vat. Umbilical cord stem cells. Another had tendons. A fourth, corneas. She remembered Prescott’s body: they’d removed the eyes. For transplant?
What was Dr. Carrera doing here? Did he want Maria to blackmail her parents into helping him run some kind of black market tissue factory?
She spun in confusion, but forced herself to focus. There were no tools here that could help Kevin escape his bonds. Hugging herself against the cold, she left the tissue inventory behind and returned to the hall. The next room was a storage closet filled with surgical tools. She rummaged among the shelves, searching for something heavy enough to break Kevin’s chain.
The best she came up with was a set of stainless steel chisels and an orthopedic mallet. She ran back to the operating room where Kevin was. He huddled on the floor as far away from the corpse as his chain would allow. He’d cleaned off most of the blood covering him, although red still streaked his blue surgical scrubs.
“You came back,” he cried out when he saw her.
She couldn’t help but smile. It felt weird, as if her face muscles had been stretched too tight, trying to hold back her panic. As terrified as she was, being able to help him, to do something—anything—to take control of the situation made her feel better.
“Of course I came back.” She showed him the tools she’d found. “Will these work?”
A wide pair of handcuffs were fastened around his ankle and through the one of the chain’s links. The other end of the chain was secured by a padlock. They decided the best spot to use the chisel was on the link connected to the cuffs.
Maria’s hands shook so badly that with three tries, she still couldn’t hit the chisel. Kevin took over from her, his steady surgeon hands able to hold the chisel in place while Maria stabilized the chain.
Kevin aimed the chisel at the joint in the chain link, and after a few hard blows a chink between the two ends of metal appeared. Maria looked up at him, feeling hopeful. But with the next blow the chisel cracked down the center, the hammer bouncing off the floor as Maria ducked flying metal.
“Are you okay?” Kevin asked, taking her hand in his. A small shard of metal stuck out from the flesh between her thumb and index finger. Funny, she didn’t feel it until he drew her attention to it. “Hold still, let me.”
He gently eased the shard out. It hadn’t gone very deep and there was almost no bleeding, but still he frowned over the small puncture. “Can’t let that get infected. We need to flush it out.”
Kevin climbed to his feet and reached a hand out to Maria. She took it, letting him do the work of leveraging her upright, her legs suddenly feeling wobbly. He put his arm around her waist and led her to the scrub sink.
“Why were you taking her heart out?” Maria nodded over his shoulder to the corpse on the table.
“I wasn’t taking it out, I was putting it in. Carrera has me practicing doing a heart transplant with only a rudimentary team—somehow he’s gotten all the equipment, but the donor hearts he keeps giving me look like they were harvested by a gorilla and I can’t do both the harvest and the transplant myself, not without losing precious time and cardiac viability.”
“Wait. He kept you here to give Michael a heart transplant? Why does he need to keep you prisoner for that? Why not just fly Michael to a hospital?”
His hands soaped hers, his touch warm and comforting as he worked. “First he had me place the LVAD to buy time. But now with the LVAD working as well as it is, Michael won’t be on the top of the transplant list. Plus, he has a rare HLA type. Usually we don’t worry too much with cardiac transplants—there used to be no time to get HLA results before we needed to commit. But now we’re realizing that it can make a big difference in organ rejection and with the newer tests—” He stopped himself, looked down at her. “You realize this is the first semi-normal conversation I’ve had in a month? I feel like I’ve fallen into some terrible B movie horror film. Psycho meets The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.”
“You think he’s crazy? He’s just trying to save his son.” She wasn’t defending Dr. Carrera as much as she was Michael. She didn’t want to see him die. Of course, that didn’t give his father the right to murder people.
“The man is nuts. More than that, he has some kind of neurodegenerative disease. Huntington’s, I’d guess, given the psychotic and delusional tendencies mixed with his muscular symptoms.”
Michael had mentioned the doctor’s illness growing worse—obviously whatever disease he suffered from had affected his mind as well as his body. “Do you think he’d really kill us?” she whispered.
“We know too much. Once I save Michael, I’m toast.” He rested his hands on her shoulders and looked down at her. “But why does he want you?”
*
Hector’s men shoved Caitlyn back from Carver, sending her sprawling until she hit the cavern wall.
“He’s a federal agent. Release him,” she ordered in her best command voice. She knew it was probably fruitless—it was clear Hector had his own agenda—but it was worth a try.
“Did you bring the charges?” Hector asked one of his men.
“Sí. What about the federales?”
Hector was halfway to the exit. He glanced over his shoulder at Caitlyn and shook his head. “I told you not to get involved.”
The guards covered his exit; then they left as well. Caitlyn was torn between running after them—what good would that do, Hector would never listen to her anyway—and freeing Carver and the others. She went to Carver and, using a rough-edged carving knife from near where the women ha
d been cooking, sawed through his ankle ties.
She’d just finished cutting him free when a tremendous boom shook the ground. And the ceiling. And the cistern. Chunks of rocks fell from the ceiling, water splashed over the side of the cistern, people screamed and cried out, the adults calling for the children who were dangerously close to the water. Smoke and dust clouded the air.
Caitlyn ran to the children, scooping up the smallest ones and covering them with her body as a second blast, this one even louder, rocked the ground. The sound of stones crashing shook the air, followed by a wave of compressed hot air that buffeted her like a tornado.
Her ears filled with pressure, then popped painfully, a small trickle of fluid warm against her skin on one side of her neck. The children were crying, she could tell from the way their bodies shook, but she couldn’t hear them. She swallowed, it tasted of dust, coughed and choked on the thick air.
Stunned, she finally stood and looked around. The floor felt tilted beneath her feet, and she wasn’t sure if that was reality or because her equilibrium was so skewed. She staggered across the space, glad to see that no one had been hit by any falling debris and everyone seemed okay. Jake had cut Itzel free. Together they worked to release the other adults from their restraints.
Caitlyn stumbled up the steps leading to the surface. It was dark here, all the candles and lanterns destroyed. She felt her way up one step, two, tripped on the third that was cracked, the fourth was filled with chunks of debris, and the fifth … the fifth was gone. As was the opening above it. Half the mountainside and what was left of the church had fallen to now occupy the space.
They were sealed in.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“I don’t know why Carrera wants you here,” Kevin said, holding Maria’s hands in his and looking into her eyes straight on, as if they weren’t standing in a den of horrors with a mutilated corpse beside them. He looked at her as if she was more important than the danger they faced or his own freedom. Maria felt a warmth creep up her throat but couldn’t look away. “But whatever the reason, we need to get you out of here. Now. Before the guard comes to check on me.”
“No. I can’t leave you.”
“You must. Breaking me free will take too long. Someone has to get help, tell the authorities what’s going on here. These corpses he’s bringing me to practice on, they’re all women, all have suffered severe mutilations. The man is mad, a serial killer. Maria, you need to get out of here.”
“We’ll try again with your chain. The link opened the tiniest bit before the chisel broke—”
“The strongest chisel we have. I can keep trying with the smaller ones you found, but I’ll need to do it slowly, it might take time. Too much time for you to stay here, in danger.”
She hesitated, glancing from him to the door to the thick links of chain dragging on the floor, and finally back to him. His eyes were bloodshot with fatigue, stray flecks of blood stained his forehead, but she’d never seen a man more handsome. That wasn’t why she made her decision. After all the running and panic of the past few days, for the first time, she knew the right thing to do.
“No. I’m staying. I’m not leaving without you.”
She dried her hands, grabbed the next size of chisel, and they resumed work. Between hammer strokes, he kept arguing and she kept ignoring him. After all, it wasn’t like he could stop her from staying. If they heard anyone coming, she’d hide behind the machine he told her was the heart-lung bypass pump. It was big enough that as long as no one moved it, it would conceal her from view.
The hammer blows rang through the room as they found their rhythm. He told her about Toronto and his work there, asked her about her studies. He seemed truly interested when she told him about discovering the temple and how the jungle had consumed so many important sites like the city of El Mirador, thought for generations to simply be a collection of forested hills until explorers discovered beneath the jungle growth a pyramid larger than any in Egypt.
He had his arm raised to swing the hammer when they heard footsteps. Close, very close. Maria gathered the tools and dashed for cover behind the bypass machine. Too late she realized that she’d left a trail of footsteps crisscrossing the corpse’s blood. They had dried already, there was no way to erase them, and they clearly didn’t belong to Kevin. Especially not the ones leading in and out of the room.
Kevin saw them as well. They both stood, scrambling to find a sheet to throw over the footprints. Too late. The door swung open.
It was Michael. He stood wide-eyed in the doorway, staring at first the corpse, then Kevin, and finally Maria. “Dr. Cho—I don’t understand—” Then he saw the chain. “Oh my God, he’s gone too far. I had no idea.” He glanced over his shoulder down the hall and then entered and closed the door behind him. “Maria, are you okay?”
“I’m fine. But what the hell is your father doing?”
Michael didn’t answer right away. Instead he ran to the pipe with the large padlock holding the chain in place. “I stole his keys. Help me find the right one. We have to hurry. Pablo will be here anytime now.”
Maria didn’t bother to ask who Pablo was—obviously someone she’d rather not meet. As Michael fumbled through the large ring of keys, he explained, “I had no idea he kept you, Dr. Cho. I never asked for any of this. And Maria—”
Kevin interrupted him. “She needs to go. Now. You and I can take care of this.”
Maria didn’t want to leave them—there was safety in numbers. “Michael, are you okay? Your heart—”
“I’m fine.”
“With the LVAD, you should be able to do almost anything you want,” Kevin said. “As long as the pump is connected to the batteries and you keep them charged.”
Michael patted his shirt. Maria realized it was different from the one he’d worn earlier. This one was like a T-shirt but with two pockets sewn below the armpits. Both bulged with the outline of a battery and had wires connecting them to the small bag across his chest that contained the LVAD pump. “I think my father—the doctor—wanted me to stay in the house, so they kept me in the chair with its power supply for the LVAD. But I realized that if I could use the battery for short trips out of the chair, there was no reason I couldn’t go farther. And I feel better than I have in months. Thanks to you, Dr. Cho.”
“Get us the hell out of here, and I’ll consider that thanks enough.”
Maria moved to keep an eye on the door. “How long will your batteries last, Michael?”
“A few hours, give or take,” Kevin answered.
“Then you can come with us.”
Michael didn’t answer. Instead he straightened, the open lock in his hands. “Got it.”
Kevin unraveled the chain and slung it between his hands since they couldn’t do anything about the cuff around his ankle. At least not anytime soon. “Let’s get out of here.”
Maria held the door for them. Kevin led even though Michael was more familiar with the floor plan. It just felt right to have him lead them. Maybe because he had the confidence of a surgeon or because he was older or because he had the length of chain to use as a weapon. Their only other weapons were the hammer and chisels that Maria still carried. She offered one of the chisels to Michael. He took it but held it tentatively, like it was a piece of charcoal to sketch with. She slid the remaining chisel into her jacket pocket and hefted the hammer.
“Which way?” Kevin whispered after they climbed up to the first floor and reached the door to the corridor where Maria had found Prescott’s body.
Before Michael could answer, footsteps came from above. “Alto!” a man shouted. Maria glanced up. He held a machine gun on them. He climbed down the stairs and she saw his face.
A scar ran down the right side. It was the man who had killed Prescott.
Kevin raised the chain, but the stair landing was too cramped, he couldn’t twirl it to use as a weapon, and the man had the high ground. Then the door to the corridor opened and Dr. Carrera appeared. Two men behind him raised
their rifles, aiming at Maria and Kevin.
“Don’t shoot,” he ordered. “We need them alive.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Is everyone all right?” Caitlyn asked as she came back down the steps, her voice much louder than it needed to be. Jake rubbed his aching head and wondered why she was asking him; he’d just gotten to this party and quite frankly he wasn’t getting his money’s worth. He didn’t bother voicing the joke out loud. They had more important things to attend to.
What amazed him was how quickly the civilians responded. As if bombs and guns and hiding in caves were the norm.
The children had all been gathered together by one of the younger women while the others tended to the wounded. Yes, there were tears and frightened looks in the direction of the cave-in, but no hysteria. Just determination. They weren’t going to let Alvarado beat them.
Caitlyn ran her hands through her short hair, clearing it of dust and debris. She seemed fine, just a few small cuts on her forehead. He followed her, wanting to check her out more thoroughly, but she waved him off as she dug her travel pack from the rubble.
“Itzel,” she introduced him to the woman who was obviously the group’s leader. “This is Jake Carver with the FBI. He’s here—Well, actually, Carver”—she looked up, a grin slicing through the dirt and dried blood on her face—“why the hell are you here? Not looking for another three-way, are you?”
And that’s when Jake knew everything was going to be all right. He grinned right back at her, “You offering?”
Caitlyn winked, then turned serious again. “Sorry about the welcoming committee.” She gestured to the cave in.
Jake shrugged and began collecting weapons and ammo and searching for anything that might help. A sat phone, radio, bazooka …
