“Can you turn around enough to slide down feet first?” he asked her.
She frowned at him. He assumed she didn’t hear him—the rush of the river behind him was loud enough to produce a good-sized headache, and Sam was developing a whopper of one himself—but then he realized it wasn’t a lack of hearing him that had induced her expression, but rather an unformed suspicion. She was scared of him now, even if she didn’t realize it herself. He imagined what a figure he must cut down here in the scarce light filtering from the flashlight beams. Bedraggled beyond description, probably bleeding himself, the creature’s obsidian fluid befouling him and making him look like some medieval convict swabbed in pitch.
“Melanie,” he said, “I need you to listen to me.”
“Uh-uh,” she answered. “I’m not listening to anything you say. I’ll only come if Eric tells me too. Otherwise, I’m going back up.”
Sam kept his voice level. “You won’t make it.”
She nodded at the corpse of the creature. “That thing is dead.”
“You see a baby?” he asked as patiently as he could. “This…thing isn’t the one that’s got the child.”
She began to shake her head.
“Which means,” Sam went on, “that there’s at least one more of these creatures running around down here. My guess is that there’s a whole lot of them running around down here. You really want to be alone when you run into one of them?”
Sam avoided referencing Larry Robertson, but when Melanie’s eyes flitted to the sheriff’s facedown corpse, he realized he didn’t need to. He was thankful she didn’t have a flashlight of her own because he certainly had no desire to see the sheriff’s exposed spine and half-eaten entrails again. Not in this lifetime.
When Melanie still hesitated, Sam glanced at Eric Florence. “You tell her.”
“Tell her what?”
“To get her ass down here before one of those things bites it off.”
Heat flared in Florence’s eyes. “What if I don’t want to?”
Jesus, Sam thought. After all the crap that had just gone down, here was the big bad basketball coach still trying to prove whose dick was bigger.
Sam heaved a sigh. “You two do what you want.” He made his way to the water’s edge.
“Where’re you going?” Florence demanded.
Without looking back, Sam said, “We’ve got to cross. Charly’s over there.”
Chapter Three
Greeley didn’t come unhinged until his roasted forearm began to ooze. He moved along in an awkward shamble. Because of Greeley and Ruth, whom they practically had to drag through the tunnel, they were making poor time.
“Awww, man,” Greeley whimpered, tilting his head to examine the juicy wound. “This is a serious burn. I need medical attention.”
“Keep moving,” Colleen said.
Jesse paused and waited for Greeley to continue on. The man had refused to be last in their procession, so Jesse got the dubious honor.
Greeley thrust his jaw at Red Elk. “Before we go any farther I want to know why we’re putting such blind faith in this moron.”
Debbie’s voice was mild. “This moron saved your life.”
Greeley held up his blistered forearm. “You call this saved? Blowing up the damn house? Endangering our lives?”
“The Children endangered you a lot more,” Red Elk said without turning.
“I’d gotten along just fine without your help, hadn’t I?”
Emma whirled, her eyes narrowed in contempt. “You’re a fool, you know that? The only reason you’re alive is because everyone else acted with more integrity than you. Jesse here, Colleen, Clevenger…”
Jesse’s cheeks burned with pride, but he kept a neutral expression. Let the others rip the man a new asshole. Jesse was more than content to watch it unfold. He only wished he had some popcorn.
“But they ran away too,” Greeley protested.
“Of course they did,” Emma said, “but not until after they got us out of that RV. Or don’t you recall cowering inside the closet?”
“I’m a naturalist,” Greeley complained, “not some ridiculous Indiana Jones—”
“Naturalist,” Red Elk said, chuckling. “That’s what a guy calls himself when he wants women to think he’s earthy.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“There’s nothing to know,” Red Elk said. “You’re about as interesting as one of those rocks over there.”
Emma moved closer to Greeley. “Why don’t you tell the others about Austin?”
Greeley made to move past. “Let’s drop it.”
Emma turned to Debbie and Red Elk, who were in the lead but had paused to watch the fireworks. “There was a frat guy named Austin. We met him last night. I thought he was cute, but I figured he was immature. This jerk,” she said, hooking a thumb at Greeley, “seemed like the more interesting of the two.”
“Can we please move on?” Greeley asked. “They might be right on our heels.”
“And you,” she said, whirling and slapping Greeley on the chest, “are the one I kissed today.” She slapped him again, on the shoulder this time, and he backed away. “I should have my—” Another slap. “—head examined.”
Debbie gave her a wan smile. “We’ve all had sex with losers, honey. Don’t sweat it.”
“All I did was kiss him, but even that was a mistake.”
Jesse repressed an urge to cartwheel around down the passageway.
Red Elk turned to Greeley. “Sounds like you blew your chance, buddy. Crying shame. I lost out on a piece of ass that nice, it’d haunt me the rest of my life.”
Clevenger gestured impatiently with the flashlight, its flicker darting along the ceiling in evanescent stripes. “Can we please move? We need to put distance between us and them.”
A calculating look had come into Greeley’s eyes. He said to Emma, “You’re so good at character assassination, why don’t you ask yourself why Frank here didn’t do something to prevent this horror from taking place.”
Debbie said, “Like anyone would’ve believed him.”
“We’ll never know, will we? After all, your preparations were limited to saving your own hide.”
“Saved your hide too,” Colleen said.
“Fess up, Frank,” Greeley said. “Why stockpile the weapons, all these provisions, and wire your house to explode when there was no threat?”
A change was coming over Red Elk’s face. “I never said that.”
“Exactly,” Greeley said, striding toward him. “You never said anything. And because you kept mum, hundreds of people are dead, some of us are badly injured and our whole party is stranded down here.”
“I told you, we just follow this tunnel—”
“I know you told us that, but so far all we’ve seen to corroborate your theory is a lightless dungeon. What happens if you’re wrong?”
“You’re a real dick,” Jesse said.
Greeley spun on him. “Don’t you want to know? This…individual constructs a bomb shelter, seals off one tunnel, and claims to have opened another—”
“It’s not a claim,” Red Elk said. “I’ve walked it.”
Greeley’s voice rose. “Then you knew about them.” He stormed toward Red Elk, who didn’t flinch. “If you were so sure about those things, why didn’t you warn anybody?”
“I wasn’t sure,” Red Elk said.
The two men, nose-to-nose, stared at one another in the near darkness, Greeley’s handsome face gone ugly with panic and rage, Red Elk’s ageless features tinged with what might have been bitterness.
Greeley flourished his wounded arm toward the others. “Then tell us why you guarded your secret from everyone else.” He glanced at Emma. “You were at his house earlier today, correct? Wouldn’t it have been nice for Frank to say, ‘Hey, you might want to be careful out there. There’s a slight possibility of monsters eviscerating everyone in the campground’.”
Clevenger was studying Red Elk close
ly. “Why didn’t you warn anyone?”
Red Elk returned the professor’s gaze. “I’ll tell you everything I know, but only if we keep moving. It’ll all be pointless if we die down here.”
“Sounds good to me,” Jesse said and cast a glance behind him.
“Agreed,” Clevenger said.
As the train of survivors reformed itself in the narrow tunnel, Frank Red Elk began to talk.
After Sam, Florence, and Melanie finally got across the water, a frightened voice cried out, “Is that thing still here?”
Sam whipped the Maglite around and was shocked to see Charly sitting bolt upright on the moist floor.
Florence shouted something, but Sam paid him no mind, was too immersed in sprinting toward Charly. God, he was glad to see her eyes open again, even if they were wide with terror.
“Sam?” she whispered, getting to her knees. “Is that you, Sam?”
He flicked the beam to the side when he realized he’d been blinding her. Then he was kneeling next to her and supporting her with both arms.
Charly’s forehead pinched. “Is it still—”
“It’s dead, Charly. It can’t hurt you now.”
She studied his face, the fearful doubt lingering. “Are you sure?”
“I’ll take over from here.” Florence bent and made to get between them.
“Get your hands off me,” Charly hissed.
Florence’s chin jutted, his eyes dangerously serene. “I’ll put my hands where I want to, Charly. You’re my wife, remember?”
Charly glared at him defiantly.
“Now,” he said, insinuating himself between Sam and Charly. “I’m going to take care of you because I took a vow to do that.”
And then Charly did something that made Sam damn near faint.
That same stubborn gleam smoldering in her blue eyes, she shoved her husband’s reaching hands away, leaned toward Sam, grasped his face with both hands, and planted a lingering kiss on his mouth.
Though it only lasted a few seconds, while their mouths were pressed together Charly had time to taste the salt on Sam’s lips from all the sweating he’d done. She imagined her lips tasted much the same way and hoped her breath didn’t stink.
Reluctantly, she drew away.
When she opened her eyes again, she saw that Sam was watching her with naked longing. She knew she should feel bad for what she’d just done, but she understood already that the mistake would have been to not kiss him, to not make clear how real her feelings were. She hoped desperately he understood it had not been a lark or some juvenile ploy she’d used to make Eric jealous. She tried to communicate all this with her eyes, to put to use whatever telepathy existed between them. She saw something flicker in Sam’s face. Understanding? Hopefulness? Whatever it was, it edified her, made her feel they weren’t fooling themselves down here. They’d find Jake, they’d save him and when they got back to the surface, things would be different. She’d take that dreary cast out of Sam’s handsome face and replace it with the liveliness she sometimes glimpsed when he looked at her.
When she turned to Eric, her first thought was, He’s going to kill me. The words flashed in her mind without any fanfare or melodrama. She’d never seen such raw hatred before, and it was all directed at her. Eric’s face was a floating white moon in the cave shadows, his glittering eyes soulless and glassy, the eyes of a discarded stuffed animal. His breath came in slow and audible tides, something primal and portentous about the sound. He was about to come unhinged, she realized, if he wasn’t there already. Charly could feel Melanie watching them with apprehension.
Want him? Charly thought without turning. Take the jerk.
Eric lunged at Sam.
At first Charly was sure he would try to throttle Sam until his eyes popped out, but rather than going for his throat, Eric grabbed for something at Sam’s side.
The buck knife.
Charly scooted involuntarily away, then felt craven for doing so. Sam and Eric grappled for the knife, but Sam, she realized with endless relief, had things under control.
Sam cuffed Eric in the back of the head. Eric tumbled forward and landed on his elbows. He went for the knife again, but this time, Sam shifted the antler handle so it jutted out a good inch from the heel of his hand and popped Eric on the crown. This time Eric went down hard, a white-knuckled hand squeezing the bump that had almost certainly begun to rise.
“Now, I didn’t want to do that,” Sam said evenly enough. His smile held the slightest bit of warning. “You got your licks in on the lawn, and I returned the favor a little while ago. So why don’t we call it a draw and simmer down, all right?”
Melanie was squatting next to Eric, a hand between his hitching shoulder blades. Eric slid a wrist over his mouth, examined it, then spat on the ground beside him. He got to his feet a little drunkenly and regarded Sam with glittering eyes.
“Your boy’s still down here somewhere,” Sam said. “We ready to move on?”
“You think you’re smart,” Eric said.
“I don’t think anything.”
“You kiss my wife in front of me, think I’m gonna let it go?”
“I kissed him,” Charly said.
“Shut up,” Eric muttered.
“All right,” Sam said. “You don’t like me, and you’re madder’n a hornet that Charly kissed another man. It’s your right to feel that way. But this isn’t about you—it’s about your child. Now let’s go get him.”
“He’s right,” Charly said.
Eric favored her with a look so black it sent chills rippling down her spine. Turning, Eric eyed the buck knife.
“Careful,” Sam said, the warning smile returning.
Uneasily, they advanced into the corridor.
Chapter Four
“There are many legends about this land,” Red Elk said. He nodded at Greeley. “Professor Nutless here could no doubt recite a few of them himself.”
Greeley’s smug grin faded.
“Most of them,” Red Elk went on, “are too far-fetched to be taken seriously.”
Clevenger said, “My concept of far-fetched has altered dramatically in the past couple hours.”
“Mine too,” Red Elk agreed. “I’d like to say I believed what I heard about the Children, that when my father told me the tale one night before bed, I swallowed it hook, line and sinker. But I didn’t.”
“But the propane,” Greeley said, “the flashlights—”
“Dad’s idea,” Red Elk said. “He was more imaginative than I am. He was a real dreamer. Course, he dreamed the cigarettes wouldn’t give him lung cancer, but there he was on life support at the ripe old age of fifty-one.”
Red Elk shook his head. “I didn’t believe in the Children any more than I believed in Santa Claus, but Dad did, and I felt like if I sold the house, it’d be like him dying a second time. So, I refreshed the food stores every now and then, checked the guns to make sure they still fired—”
“You checked them recently?” Colleen asked.
“How recent’s recent?” Red Elk said. He shook his head. “I can’t provide any guarantees.”
“You spoke of legends,” Clevenger prompted.
“The Children were one, of course. They were tied up with the Wendigo—”
“Wendigo?” Jesse asked.
“A common myth amongst North American tribes,” Greeley said, his tone suddenly pedantic. Very much how he sounded in front of his students, Jesse assumed. “The gist of the legend holds that the creature—fire-footed and winged in Canada; a furry biped in the American Northwest—can transform a human being into a cannibal with a single touch. Pioneers convicted of cannibalism were said to have been gripped by the Wendigo Psychosis.”
“What he says is true enough,” Red Elk murmured. “To me it always sounded like a way of justifying what needed no justification. I mean, if you were gonna starve, wouldn’t you eat your buddy?”
Jesse made a mental note to give Red Elk a wide berth if the provisions ran out
.
“At any rate, what always sounded like hokum to me was the notion of a giant beast that could make normal people into monsters just by touching them.”
Emma turned to Jesse, her brown eyes huge with dread. He thought of the monolithic figure they had seen striding through the rain. He tried to reassure her with a smile, but she only wandered on, her eyes fixed in that doomed, starey look.
“Did your grandpa dig this tunnel?” Colleen asked.
Red Elk chuckled. “You kiddin’? The cave was here already. He just connected it to the crawlspace.”
“How did he know the caves were here?”
Red Elk slowed, his breathing heavy in the broadening cavern. It was now possible to walk in pairs, which they’d formed unthinkingly: Jesse beside Emma, ahead of them Greeley and Ruth, then Colleen and Debbie. Red Elk and Clevenger were in the lead. The green knapsack hung low on the professor’s thin shoulders even after Red Elk had removed the Ruger ammunition and pocketed it. Jesse adjusted the red gym bag slung over his own shoulders and wished Red Elk had relieved him of the dynamite. It would be just Jesse’s luck to survive the massacre at the campground only to be blown up down here because of an errant spark.
Red Elk nodded bleakly at Colleen. “If I do have a regret, it’s not believing what my dad said about the caves. Or the creatures that dwelt inside them. I guess my grandpa scoffed at the notion too until he saw his own dad—my great-grandfather—murdered by one of those sons of bitches.”
Red Elk was silent a minute, the chuff of their breathing and the sandy rasping of their shoes the only sounds in the tunnel. Jesse was grateful for the mining helmet, but he didn’t care for the way the light beaming out of it bobbed and twisted on the scaly walls. Didn’t care for it at all.
“You gonna tell us the story,” Colleen asked, “or do we have to imagine it for ourselves?”
Red Elk eyed Colleen in the near-darkness. “You got a mouth on you, don’t you?”
Colleen beamed at him.
“I like it,” Red Elk said. Debbie gave Colleen a cool look. If Red Elk noticed that, he didn’t say. “My grandpa worked on a farm above the bluffs. The farmland stretches from there all the way to the new Indian Trails Subdivision, but that’s neither here nor there. What does matter is that he and his dad were working the field one day when they came to a good-sized rock.
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