A Cold Dark Place

by Gregg Olsen

  This is the way in, she thought, hoisting herself up to the opening and fishing her feet through it. She swiped her light at the floor to make sure the drop wasn’t so severe as to cause an injury. She slid herself into the opening, and slumped to the wet concrete floor. She dropped to her knees. She was inside.

  Once more, her light moved across the floor.

  Blood? Oh God, no! she thought as she caught the sight of red spatter that had marked the middle opening. Oh no, please. The words nearly slipped from her lips as her freezing fingertips felt the red color. It was hard. Even under the layer of wetness from the rain, Emily Kenyon could feel that it was a dried pigment. Not blood. Paintball, she thought, momentarily relieved.

  She pointed the beam into the depths of the bunker. It looked empty, dark, hollow. The space was surprisingly large—maybe as much as two thousand square feet. She trained her light all around. There were sodden boxes full of garbage. It smelled of bat guano. A rat or maybe even a raccoon lurked on the other side of the darkness.

  “Jenna?” Her voice echoed in the darkness. “Are you here?

  “Help me! Get me out of here,” called a faint voice—her daughter’s voice.

  Emily felt a jab at her heart. Toward the back of the bunker, the wall farthest from the ocean, there was a steel door. The voice was coming from there.

  “Honey, I’m here.”

  The wind howled outside, the storm was moving at break neck speed from the gloomy waters of the Pacific. She wondered if she’d heard anything at all. The wind was messing with her. A whistle, then a shriek. There had been no answer to her call.

  She tried again, inching toward the door. “Jenna?”

  “Mom? Mom?”

  It was her! “Yes, it’s Mom!” Her gun now drawn, Emily reached for the door and lifted the lever handle.

  “Help me,” said the weak voice as Emily swung open the door to a small room. File boxes filled with county records were packed in rows that had once likely been neat. Right now they were a shambles. More paintball spatter. The smell of moldy paper permeated the air.

  “Help me,” came a voice once more. It was male this time. Young. A teenager.

  Nick? Or was it Dylan, toying with her once more?

  Emily aimed her light at the direction of the voice and scanned the room. A leg. A torso. A face. It was Nick Martin. He was on the floor, his legs bound by cording. His skin was ashen, and his eyes glittered like wet stones. His gaze sliced through the air. He looked so different from his photograph, even more so, Emily thought, from when she’d seen him last. With his mother. His dark hair, so carefully highlighted by Peg, was gone. Even his youth failed him right then; his handsomeness was no longer evident. He was caged. Angry and weak at the same time.

  “Mrs. Kenyon, help me,” His voice was a rasp. “We gotta get Jenna out of here.”

  “Where’s my daughter?” Adrenaline was now a flood through her body.

  Brown eyes stared back. “Get me out of here,” he said.

  Emily bent down and began to untie the ligature that was wrapped around his surprisingly muscular body. She’d thought that he was slighter. A runner or something. But he was bulkier than she remembered. Much more so. She started to loosen the cording, but something struck her as terribly wrong. It was already loose. Oddly so. Anyone could take this off. A kid this strong could break this cord with a half-assed tug.

  “Mom! Don’t!” It was Jenna’s voice, this time, muffled.

  Emily peered over Nick’s shoulder. Was Jenna right there? She looked into his eyes, but it was already too late. A pipe or steel rod came down on her, grazing her temple and striking her shoulder. Then another, this time dead on. The small musty room closed in. And as she began to fall only one thing came to mind: Jenna and I are going to die.

  From the other side of the bunker, a cigarette glowed.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Thursday, exact time unknown, in the bunker

  When Emily regained consciousness, two things were on her mind. Her daughter, and a gaping hole in her right temple that sent a rivulet of blood down her clammy skin. She shook her head, trying to startle herself into being fully awake. Where am I? Where is Jenna? Her mouth was like cotton, so dry, that at first she thought she’d been gagged. What happened? She tried to speak, but her words came out in a whisper. “Jenna?”

  A voice came at her like a dream, like the sweet song of an angel. If words could be uttered like a hymn, they had been just then.

  “Mom, I’m here.”

  The phrase brought a smack-down bump to Emily’s awareness. It was a spark. It rekindled a flash fire of memory. She’d been in the bunker. She’d been tracking Nick and Jenna. Jenna was there. She’d been helping Nick get free. Then a curtain of darkness, sudden and complete.

  A battery-powered lantern glowed a few yards away. Within the yellow light was the silhouette of two figures. One was standing, a cherry ember hanging from his lips as he smoked. The other was sitting on the cement and clay floor. It was a much slighter figure. Jenna.

  Emily found her voice again. “Nick, what’s going on here? What are you doing to us? Jenna, are you all right?”

  “Shut up!” Nick said. “She’s okay. But she can’t talk.”

  Emily tried to lean forward to get a better view, but her body was frozen. “What have you done with her?”

  Nick sucked on his cigarette and exhaled, sending a sliver of smoke into the air, then, like a whirlpool, out into the drafty bunker. “Nothing. Nothing compared to what’s been done to me.”

  Emily struggled even harder to stand, to get a better look, but it was useless.

  “What are you talking about? Let me help you.”

  Nick looked at her, blank eyed. “I’m not helping anyone. No one ever helped me.”

  He continued to smoke and Emily strained to get a better view of her daughter. Jenna was within a few yards of her, and she could see in the dim light that her breathing was rapid and shallow. But she was alive. Relief mixed with the fear that seized Emily. She wriggled in the cording, but it was too tight. “Look,” Emily said, her tone gentle, “I know about Bonnie and Dylan. No one will blame you for any of it. You’ve been through so much. I’ll help you.”

  “You don’t have a clue about what I’ve been through. I’ve been alone my entire life.”

  Emily was unsure how to play it. Play him. Her instincts failed her. Her head hurt. Her heart ached. What to say? “That’s not true. Your parents loved you. They wanted you. They chose you.” It was weak and she knew it. She was firing off a list, hoping that she’d trigger something that would bring him back to what she hoped was really there. “You were wanted.”

  “You didn’t live in my house with my family,” he said. He dropped the cigarette butt and twisted it with the heel of his shoe.

  “I know. But I did know your mother.”

  “You think you knew her. She was ten times worse than my dad. Everything was about Donny. Donny reminded Dad of his father. Donny had Mom’s eyes. Donny was a chip off the old block. I was nothing to them. I was the boy they picked up from an agency because Mom couldn’t get knocked up.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Nick.” Emily felt wetness at her temple. She couldn’t reach it, of course, but as it dripped down she wondered if it was blood or sweat. She was unsure of how badly she was hurt by the scuffle. She saw a length of rebar by his tennis shoe–clad feet.

  “Why are you doing this to me, to Jenna?”

  “Dan says that Jenna’s collateral. Just like you. He’s just pissed off at you for screwing up everything.”

  “What? His place in the serial killer hall of fame?”

  Nick laughed. “It’s a little like that. Dad says that God told him that he had a special plan for him and that his son, me, would help him get there. I’m willing to do for him what needs to be done.”

  “But killing Jenna, me? What’s that?”

  “Collateral, Mrs. Kenyon. You ruined my dad’s rhythm. You cost him what
was rightfully his when you killed that dumbass Tuttle.”

  “What are you talking about? That was an accident. I was trying to save Kristi. She was just a little girl. She didn’t deserve to die.”

  Nick Martin was unmoved. His eyes, cold like a doll’s eyes.

  Like his father’s.

  “Maybe so,” he said. “But you’re really the one responsible for her death anyway. You killed her by killing Tuttle. When you did that you messed with my dad. You stole from him.”

  “Stole what?”

  “His rhythm, his plan to be more famous than Bundy.”

  There was no point in arguing the merits of his bio dad’s sick run to be some kind of serial killer superstar. She’d heard of people like that, people who sought infamy over fame. People who cared to make a mark, no matter how dark, how evil. There was no arguing. No defending the other side of it.

  Emily changed the subject. “Jenna needs water,” she said. “Please give her some.”

  “Water? She’s gonna die. Why make her comfortable? That’s stupid. You researched me. You know I’m no dummy. Yeah, my grades weren’t as perfect as Donovan’s, but he wasn’t an artist.”

  The wind whistled through the bunker. Emily didn’t want the conversation to track there. Talking about Jenna not making it was not anything she’d even ask about. No fuel for whatever sickness drives this boy.

  “Nick, that’s right,” she said stiffly. “You’re special. You’re an artist. What’s going on here isn’t you. I know that.”

  His eyes, his father’s eyes, were black voids. “But it’s who I want to be.”

  “No, it’s who you’ve been forced to be. This is wrong. It doesn’t have to be. I’ll help you. We can repair all of this. Nothing’s gone too far. Yet.”

  Jenna’s breathing had appeared to slow and muffled sounds of her coughing came through the gag. Every neuron in Emily’s body fired. She was hyper alert, with the kind of rush that allows a desperate mother to pick up a car crushing her child.

  “Nick! Take that out of her mouth right now! Jenna can’t breathe!”

  He dropped his cigarette. “Jesus. Where did that come from?” He winced at the increased volume of Emily’s voice—the “mom” voice that women can summon when they needed it. “All right. I’ll get her some air. She’s gonna die anyway, but you don’t have to yell at me.”

  He loosened the gag and Jenna coughed.

  “You don’t have to yell, you know. I can hear all right.”

  Emily detected the tiniest fracture in the teenager’s practiced veneer and she went for it.

  “Yelling? Did your parents yell at you?”

  He blinked. “No shit. Every chance they got.”

  “How did it make you feel?”

  “Like I was worthless.”

  Chipping away. Making him feel something. If not for Jenna, for himself. Good.

  “You aren’t worthless. You know it. Didn’t Jenna see it in you? See your worth? Your talent?”

  Nick’s eyes were downcast. “I don’t want to talk anymore,” he said. “You’re not some school counselor trying to make me happy. My dad’s coming. My real dad. We’re getting out of here.” He sat down next to Jenna, her pale, pasty skin now alarmed her mother even more.

  “Please,” Emily said, “let my daughter go.”

  “Shut up. That’s not the plan.”

  “What is the plan, Nick? I wasn’t aware of a plan.”

  He shot her his best FU look. His eyes were cold, his stare hard. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” He allowed a brief smile come to his lips. “You’re gonna die. Just like Kristi Cooper. You’re gonna die because no one can find you.”

  “You know about Kristi?”

  “I know what my dad tells me.”

  “Which dad?”

  “The one that matters, Dylan Walker.”

  “Don’t you know he killed all those people? Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “You killed someone.”

  He was referring to Tuttle, of course, maybe even Kristi Cooper. But Emily didn’t go there. She couldn’t. She had to keep him talking so that just maybe she could find a way to talk them out of the bunker. To daylight. To freedom. To safety. The wind sent another blast of air against the bunker’s openings. It sounded like the whistle of a train, the rolling of the tracks.

  “I never meant to kill anyone.”

  “Good for you. I never killed anyone.”

  “Not even Bonnie.”

  “Dad took care of her.”

  “But she was your biological mother.”

  “She was a breeder and that’s all. She was stupid, too. My dad tried to get rid of her for years. I would have killed her, but instead, I just helped clean up the mess. Dad never liked working alone.”

  Emily was reeling. It was as if all that Dylan Walker had done was now being revealed by his biological son, a son no one knew about.

  “There were others, too. Bonnie took care of them. Just like she did to the Martins. Other mistakes he made that he wanted cleaned up.”

  “What others?” It struck a nerve that he now had referred to his family by its surname. His split from them was so complete. Emily wondered if he held any emotion for Peg, Mark, or Donovan.

  “What happened to your family,” she asked, hesitating, before shifting her words, “to the Martins?”

  He looked downward. A trickle of feeling? Emily studied him through the murky light of the bunker. What was he thinking? What was he feeling?

  “It was planned,” he said. “Everything. But the storm. The storm wasn’t planned.”

  Jenna was wide awake, listening to Nick Martin spin a slightly different—and darker—version of what had happened in the hours before the tornado. She listened without moving a muscle while her mother surreptitiously struggled to break free. Jenna knew she’d been played. It had been a setup from the beginning. Nick hadn’t just come home to find them dead.

  Nick had known what he was going to find.

  “Okay,” he continued, “I didn’t know that Donny was going to be home.”

  As she fought her binding, Emily’s eyes beamed through the darkness at Nick. It was as if she willed his attention to hold on her face only, not her hands. “But your mom called him to come home,” she said.

  “No. Peg didn’t call him. Bonnie did. Dylan, Dad, said that Bonnie really messed up. She came to get me. Take me out of Cherrystone. My dad was important. Famous. She was my birthmother, but the Martins didn’t want anything to do with her.”

  He called his parents by their names, Emily thought, no longer Mom and Dad. It was like he’d dissociated himself from them. No ties. No connections.

  “By the time I got home, they were all dead.”

  Tears welled in his eyes. Emily saw it as a hopeful sign. Maybe this kid has a soul after all, she thought.

  “I don’t know why that bitch called Donny home,” he said, sniffing a little.

  “Maybe she didn’t want any loose ends to worry about?” Emily tried to sound unthreatening and helpful. She was more mom than cop just then, at least she hoped that’s what Jenna’s friend-turned-captor would think.

  Instead a little defiance followed. “He wasn’t a loose end. Even though the Martins couldn’t stop yapping about how great he was, he was my brother.”

  “Right. And you loved him.”

  “I love my dad. He’s coming for me. We’re going to live in Mexico. He says I get my creativity from him.”

  And your taste for blood, she thought. “He’s not coming for you. You were a loose end. All of them. The kids. The families.”

  “You don’t know anything,” he said.

  Emily caught Jenna’s eye. She could see that Jenna had made some progress. No words were needed, just the look of desperation giving way to hope.

  “I know enough,” she said, her calming tone barely in check.

  “Too bad. You’re gonna die, Mrs. Kenyon. Jenna, too. ’Cause you’re my loose ends.”

&nbs
p; “No,” Emily said firmly. She wouldn’t allow one drop of fear color her words. He was just a goofy kid. A mixed-up, goofy kid. In another time or place he could have been a Columbine student skulking under a table as bullets sprayed over a cafeteria. He could have been a chess champion, making his final move, winning the prize. Or just a plain old kid waiting at a bus stop or laughing and pushing and shoving his friends in a movie line at the Cherrystone Cinema. Anything . Anything—but a monster.

  He was a lost boy.

  “Yeah, that’s what you are,” he said, looking for a smoke, then pulling one out of a twisted pack and poking it into his mouth. “A loose end.” He spat out the words as he felt for his lighter.

  Jenna’s hands were free now. She tried not to let her excitement show on her face, or become audible through her breathing. As quickly as she could, Jenna untied the bindings that held her legs. The cords had cut so deeply into her skin that the wave of pain that came with their release was nearly unbearable. It felt as if she’d been cut with the jagged edge of a hunting knife. Her feet were numb. Had she lost blood? Had gangrene set in? She wanted to cry. It took every bit of strength she had to just swallow that pain as she scanned the darkened space of the bunker.

  Where did Nick put my mother’s gun?

  Jenna saw the rebar by Nick’s feet. While his hands were in his pockets searching for his lighter, she lunged for the metal rod.

  “Jenna!” Emily screamed.

  Still on her knees, Jenna grabbed the bar, started to swing. Nick looked down, his eyes fixed with terror as the bar smashed into his kneecaps.

  “Hey! Damn you. Leave him alone!” a voice, a man’s voice called from the other side of the bunker.