“I know what you’re saying. But there were six of them against five of us. Four and a half with Zane not at full capacity. They could have waited us out. Let us freeze or starve. That’s if they didn’t just rush us from all directions.”
“I agree, boss,” Jack said. “Something about those guys, the way they moved felt, I don’t know, soldierly. You know what I mean?”
“Yes. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here, but I think this tunnel wasn’t meant to be found by us. I think our odds are better taking our chances with it rather than waiting for them to come to us. Agreed?”
Three heads nodded in unison.
“Let’s go then.”
Pablo preceded his crew down the claustrophobic passageway. He held the flashlight in one hand and his shotgun in the other. It had served him well all this time, and he had no intention of upgrading. Besides, he was no sharpshooter. His contribution to the group was his intellect.
“Looks like there’s a wall up ahead. The passageway goes left and right.”
The next moment they stood at the T-intersection. The air smelled different here; top notes of something pleasant mingled with the fragrance of earth and lumber. Pablo had a flash of Sunday afternoons at his abuela’s casita – plates of cabrito, heavy with cumin and other Mexican spices placed around the dinner table. He inhaled deeply, noticing an underlying aroma of something else...something that evoked unwelcome memories of the time shortly after Chicxulub.
It was the smell of death.
“Which way, boss?” Bobby asked, pointing his flashlight down the left passageway while Pablo’s beam illuminated the right. Nothing but more tunnel could be seen in either direction.
Faint sounds of gunfire echoed from behind.
Four people exchanged knowing expressions. With his own life, Zane was buying them the precious gift of time. They damn well better make the most of it.
“You smell that, Missy?”
“Yeah. It smells like stew. Beef or goat, maybe. Something else though, too. I can’t place it. There’s also wood smoke...hickory? Might be apple. Not sure.” In Missy’s former life, she had been the youngest Michelin-starred chef in the country.
“Can you tell which direction it’s coming from?”
The petite woman stepped from behind the men and walked several feet into the tunnel on the left, then into the one on the right.
“It’s hard to tell. There’s something bad too.” She closed her eyes and repeated the process, lifting her freckled nose upward like a bloodhound.
She opened her eyes and said, “Dead bodies on the left. Stew on the right.”
“That means we go right, right?”
Pablo hesitated, struggling to interpret the meaning of the disparate aromas. There were too many unknowns; both brain and gut were drawing blanks.
“We’re splitting up,” Pablo said finally.
“No way,” Bobby said. “We’re a team.”
“Think about it. If one door is the Lady and one door is the Tiger, then at least two of us will survive.”
Jack nodded in understanding. “I remember that story. Makes sense, boss.”
“Who gets the stew and who gets the dead bodies?” Bobby asked. A thin ring of brown surrounded his dilated pupils. The eyes were no longer sad. They were unhappy and afraid.
“I think first we need to decide teams.”
“What do you mean? I’m staying with my brother.”
Jack shook his head. “We gotta split up, bro. We’re the best shooters,” he said. He had grasped Pablo’s logic.
“That’s right. Missy is safer with one of you two than she is with me.”
“Hey, I’m right here. I resent the implication that I need to be protected.”
All three remaining members of the HG crew began talking at once. He gave them exactly five seconds before cutting them off.
“That’s it. Time’s out and the decision is made. Jack, you take Missy down the stew tunnel. Bobby and I will take the other. This isn’t a democracy. Now let’s hurry the hell up. If you escape, go back to the truck and hide somewhere in the surrounding area where you can keep an eye on it. If the others don’t show up within an hour, go get reinforcements. That’s the plan.”
A minute later, Missy and Jack were out of sight, gobbled up by blackness.
“The smell is getting worse,” Bobby said from behind him. The lug soles of their boots made no sound on the compacted earth.
“Yes, it is. There’s another turn coming up.”
It was an L-intersection this time. No decisions to make other than going forward or backward. When they rounded the corner, the stench of death intensified; they walked into a miasma of putrefaction tinged with sulfur, ammonia, and feces.
He heard Bobby slide the clip out of his handgun, then clicked it back into place.
“Full mag?”
“Yep. Twelve rounds in the Glock and twelve in the Remi.”
“Good.” Pablo himself carried a dozen shotgun shells in the pocket of his down jacket. He could get to them quickly there. “Stairs up ahead.”
The next moment they tiptoed up the cinder block steps. He aimed the flashlight’s beam on a second trap door, identical to the one in the barn.
“Ready?”
“Ready, boss.”
He pressed against the rough wooden surface. It lifted. Nothing was weighing it down, nor locking it in place. He peered through the two-inch opening. A scene from the goriest of slasher films awaited him.
Meat hooks lined two sides of a ramshackle structure. Enough dust-moted sunlight slivered through the weathered boards to illuminate the dangling carcasses. He identified a cow, four deer, a goat, two tusked feral hogs, and several large dogs. Flesh had been neatly removed from some; others were intact. None of these were what drew Pablo’s attention.
Three carcasses at the end of one of the rows were human.
As with the animals, they were in various stages of being processed; the genitalia revealed two females and one male. Thankfully they were all adults. That fact was what kept Pablo’s breakfast in his stomach.
“What do you see?” Bobby whispered from below.
“Your worst nightmare.”
He raised the door a few inches farther and stuck head and shotgun through the opening. In addition to the carnage hanging from hooks, there was a large wire cage in one corner. He couldn’t see what was inside. He pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped onto the floor of the death house; the soil was fouled and mucky with viscera, urine, and shit.
If there was indeed a hell, it wasn’t at the center of the earth. It was right here in Concordia, Kansas.
Bobby stood beside him now, silent and horrified. A mouse-like stirring came from the cage. Both firearms swiveled toward it. Pablo clicked the flashlight on.
Two pairs of eyes gazed back at him.
“Close the door and stand on it. I don’t want anyone coming up behind us. Keep your gun on the other one.” He indicated a large double door on one side of the building, its wooden planks appeared to be a new addition to the ancient structure.
When he got closer to the cage, the occupants crawled to the farthest corner. The original tenants might have been chickens, but the door was heavily reinforced with barbed wire. A length of chain and a grimy padlock secured it well beyond the requirements of containing poultry. He stepped a few feet away to vomit, wiped his mouth with the back of a hand, and shined the light upon the two blinking humans huddled there.
“We’re here to help,” he said, clenching his teeth against a rebellious gag reflex. He could make out their ragged clothing now, sadly inadequate to protect against the cold weather, and hair so matted it was impossible to discern its color. The most disturbing detail was their size.
“My name is Pablo. What’s yours?”
“Are you here to eat us?” The child’s voice was strong. Defiant even.
“No. We’re here to rescue you.”
“If you’re here to ea
t us, there’s not much meat on us. You’d be smart to wait a bit longer. Let us grow up and make more meat.”
Pablo felt hot tears coursing down his cheeks. “What is your name, child? Is that your sister? I promise we’re not here to eat you. We’re here to save you.”
Even through the layers of filth, he could see a transformation on the small face: the dawning of hope.
“I’m Rebecca and this is my big sister, Tiffany. She doesn’t talk any more. If you mean it, about the rescuing, you better hurry. One of them comes to bring us food about this time of the day.” The wide eyes darted toward a patch of sunlight on the mucky floor, an improvised sundial.
He studied the padlock, wondering how he would get it off.
“The key is above the door. See that ledge? You may need to get something to stand on. The guy that usually gets it is the tallest one. I think he might be a giant.”
He found a rusted metal bucket by the door that would serve as a stepstool, then ran his fingers along the ledge until they connected with an object. The padlock key.
He fumbled with the lock on the cage door, snapping it open after several attempts. His hands were shaking, making him clumsy, and his eyes were blurry with tears that he didn’t have time for.
The children crawled through the opening, the shorter girl leading the taller one by the hand. Tiffany looked about twelve-years-old; Rebecca, no more than eight. Despite the height and age difference, she was the one in charge. The big sister didn’t look at him, but rather through him, with the vacant stare of someone who had shut down.
“She hasn’t said anything in a long time,” Rebecca said. “I miss her talking, but mostly I miss her singing. She has a beautiful voice. Well...had. The problem is going to be the big door. They take that key with them.”
“We could go back down the tunnel, boss,” Bobby finally spoke up. His face was wet too.
“Whatever you’re going to do, you need to do it soon.” She might have been commenting on a school bus rounding the corner.
Pablo tried the latch handle of the double door. It was locked. The heavy-duty hardware displayed Schlage embossing at the top. “They could be coming up the tunnel,” he said.
“Yeah, or they could be twenty feet away from that door,” Bobby replied.
The smaller child watched the discourse between the adults, then blew out an exasperated breath.
“Just kick through one of those boards in the wall. They can’t be very sturdy. See how old this building is? But you need to hurry up. If I was big enough, I’d do it myself, but I’m just a kid.”
Pablo grinned, despite the horrific circumstances.
Three minutes later, he broke through a segment of weathered lumber. All four squeezed through the opening into a thicket of winter-bare cottonwood trees. He could the red paint of the barn fifty yards away.
“This way, girls.” He took off in the direction of the pickup, followed by the children and Bobby bringing up the rear. “Stay close to the ground and be as quiet as possible.”
“Duh,” Rebecca whispered.
###
A half hour had passed waiting in some brush, and still there’d been no sign of Missy or Jack. Pablo felt exposed here. He could only hope that Zane had been successful in taking out most of the hunters. Otherwise, it was just a matter of time before they were discovered hiding next to the pickup with the attached trailer.
“Boss, we gotta go back.”
“You know that wasn’t the plan. If they’re not here it’s because they’re in trouble. If they’re in trouble, it’s because they couldn’t handle the situation themselves, which means we should go get help. We’ll bring back a dozen people armed to the teeth and eradicate these abominations from the face of the earth.”
“And in the meantime, they could die. Jack is alive now. It’s a twin thing...I can feel it in my bones. It’s a four-hour round trip back to Liberty, plus the time it’ll take to gather everyone up. My brother could be murdered any minute. Or worse.” The brown eyes glanced in the direction of the death house, no longer visible from the farm-to-market road.
Pablo understood the young man’s urgency. If it were Maddie, he would feel the same way. But he had a responsibility as the leader to make logical, non-emotional decisions, especially when it came to their safety.
“Going back down that tunnel would be reckless. We don’t know how many of those guys Zane got, nor how many are still out there.”
“You don’t have to go into the tunnel,” Rebecca said between bites of the shoestring potatoes and bean dip Pablo had given her. Her sister sat silently on the ground, wrapped in a blanket and oblivious to the food.
“What do you mean?” He squatted down to the child’s level.
“If they went down the other side of the tunnel...the one that doesn’t go to where we were, then they’re in the house. The one where all the food gets cooked.” She swiped two small fingers in the can and stuck them in her mouth.
He tried not to think about how filthy those fingers were. “You mean the one with the crooked chimney and the sagging roof?”
The matted head nodded. “Yep. It looks nicer on the inside than it does on the outside. I was in there once just for a minute. It smelled really good. There were ladies cooking all kinds of stuff on two big stoves that had blue fire coming out of them. I’ve never seen stoves like that. The one we had at home had the rings that turned orange when they got hot.”
“What about the men, Rebecca? Do you know how many there are?”
“I didn’t see any men in there. Just the ladies. The only men I saw were the ones who caught me and Tiff and took us to the meat house. That’s what they call it.”
“So you didn’t enter the cooking house through the tunnel?”
“Nope. They took us through the back door, but then we went down the tunnel later to get to the meat house. That’s also how the guys bring us food. They use it as much as possible, I heard them say. It’s to keep from being seen. Anyway, they wanted the ladies to look at us first. I didn’t know why they felt all around our bellies and squeezed our arms and legs...and pinched our bottoms too. But I know now. They were checking to see how much meat we had on us.”
Pablo’s stomach lurched.
“Pretty awful, huh?” she said casually, as if noticing a broken shoelace.
“Yeah, pretty awful.”
“I had a lot of time to think when me and Tiff were in the cage. I figure these people are like the witch from Hansel and Gretel. Except there’s more of them, and that house sure isn’t made out of gingerbread.”
“I think you’re right. What else can you tell us?”
The bean dip-covered fingers paused in the can while the child pondered the question.
“I think if you want to find this guy’s brother and that other girl, you better not wait. I think the witch people will have them up on hooks in no time.”
###
“If we go back to the barn to see about Zane and find out how many of those bastards he got, we could trip the same motion detectors, or whatever they’re using, that told them we were there the first time. We should go straight to the cook house.”
Pablo nodded, distracted. He was trying to think through all the possible scenarios, but there were just too many. Cannibalism wasn’t terribly surprising given the food shortages now that more than a year had passed since Chicxulub. But the systemization of it, from the initial luring and trapping of humans, to their grisly demise in the meat house, and then their final resting place in a stew pot, was unfathomable.
Good god. How could people be so evil?
“Bobby, I hate to say this, but I think we should split up. One of us should go back to the barn, then through the tunnel. The other flanks the barn, giving it a wide berth, and hits the back door of the cook house. That way they can’t get us both at the same time and the other still has a chance of saving Jack and Missy.”
The young man nodded. “I agree. Which are you taking?”
“You’re better with firearms. You take the house.”
Another quick nod. “Good luck, boss. I hope to see you soon.”
The next moment he was gone. Pablo squatted down beside the girls where they sat on the cold ground. The older child gazed serenely at a spot above his head, never tempted to make the journey two inches down to his face. Julia would have her hands full with this one, assuming any of them got out of there alive.
“Rebecca, you two stay here and stay hidden. If none of us come back in an hour, take your sister and run as far away from here as you can. Will you do that?”
A bob of the filthy head. “Got any more food? I’ll try to get Tiff to eat something.”
He removed the keys from his pants and pressed them into the small, grimy hand. “Be quick about it. Every second that you’re near that truck, you’ve got a big target on your back. Do you understand that?”
“Duh. I know what a target is.”
“Take care of your sister, then. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”
As he trudged off in the direction of the barn, he heard a melodic child’s voice.
“Are those two men going to eat us?”
The little sister replied, “No, I don’t think so. I think they’re good guys.”
The melodic voice again, “I don’t think there are any of those left.”
Soon he was out of earshot. He shifted focus back to the dangers at hand, dismissing thoughts of the two huddled children and the horrors they had endured. Dismissing thoughts of the baby – his baby – that Maddie carried inside her. Dismissing thoughts of what he would do to anyone that hurt that baby or its mother. He needed to concentrate on the task at hand: saving his people and keeping himself alive for his family.
But if he found any of those cannibals still breathing, he would not hesitate to execute them.
###
Five minutes later, he was back at the barn. The door stood open. The pungent scent of gunpowder mingled with the metallic tang of blood. He squatted next to the door for a few seconds, took a deep breath, then charged through the opening.
Zane had done a thorough job.
Five men lay spread out on the compacted dirt floor. A quick check revealed they were all dead. A bullet hole in the forehead of four of the men explained their demise. The fifth sprouted an enormous bowie knife from his chest. Vacant eyes stared back at Pablo as he went from body to body. When he reached Zane slumped against a wall in the corner near the trap door, he could see a barely perceptible rise and fall of the skinny chest. He touched the hand that still clutched the Smith and Wesson. Eyes fluttered open.
Beauty and Dread Page 15
