Then, the seatco passed into the light, and she saw it fully for the first time. Its massive head was an amalgamation of heads pushed together like someone had used Play-Doh to construct it. But it was no longer three heads, but four. Someone else had joined the group, and she wanted to throw up simply by gazing at the oversized Frankenstein-like creature. The police detective. God.
“Pa-nel-o-pee,” it said. “Don’t fight.” The voice was suddenly Jeremy’s, and then it became someone else’s. It was the rough sound of someone who drank too much coffee and got too little sleep. “Don’t move. Don’t f-fuh-fight.”
Penelope stepped back again. She was backing outward on a slimy catwalk that overlooked the bottom of the silo. The spots illuminated the areas where Anthony had begun digging through to the earth. Nothing moved in this wretched place.
“Jeremy,” she said, reaching inside her pocket. “You don’t have to do this.”
The seatco’s cloak-covered figure rippled in response. Now she finally understood why it seemed so odd. There were at least four bodies in there, all competing for space, all absorbed into this awful evil spirit that the American Indians told stories about. And although they were dead, just enough of them remained to taint the monster’s figure. Another voice came out, and it was the voice of an older man. “Must not kill you. Must capture…thief.”
Well, that’s reassuring, said the inner voice caustically. You’re only going to have to smell it for the next day or so until they stick an Aztec knife into your breastbone and take out your still-beating heart.
Then a woman’s voice said, “Capture thief. Thief.”
The seatco took a step forward. Penelope took a step back. It was a thing. It was a thing under Anthony’s command, and Anthony didn’t seem to be around for the moment. She had thought about what she could do to a thing like this ever since she’d undergone the vision quest.
Its multiple faces distorted into a parody of anger at Penelope’s lack of response. A blue eye glared while a brown eye rolled upward. Another blue eye watered near its forehead and narrowed with fury. A fourth eye was gray and it looked blankly at her.
A fraction of a second after she had thrown herself to one side, a massive fist came down where she had been standing. Her hand came out of her pocket with Nahkeeta’s bone in it, held like a knife. She stepped forward and plunged the bone into the monster’s colossal chest. Her hand went through the decaying flesh like she was sinking it into warm slush. Gagging, Penelope twisted the bone.
The seatco struggled for a moment. One fist hit Penelope in the face, and she saw a cloud of black spots appear as a result. But she grimly held onto the bone, and then when it screamed, it was with four voices. When it began to melt into a mess of waxy substance, Penelope wanted to yank herself away from it with a cry of horror. The shrieking of the dying evil spirit drowned her out and echoed unforgettably around the yawning chamber.
When it was nothing more than a pile of decomposing flesh that had blended into one with terrifying results, she pulled her hand out. Nahkeeta’s bone was gone. Penelope wiped her hand off on the thing’s cloak. It had taken something from another world to effectively kill an evil spirit. But she had lost a valuable weapon.
Penelope stared down at the putrid goop at her feet and knew that Jeremy was finally gone. But she also knew that someone else was waiting for her.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Friday, July 18th
You shred it, wheat (slang, origin unknown, probably 1930s American) - You said it.
Anthony drove the black Suburban back onto the Gumbrell Ranch with quiet efficiency. He got out to open a gate and then returned to the Chevy to drive the large SUV through it. He exited the vehicle again to close the gate behind him, locking it with a heavy chain and a new padlock. He didn’t want unwanted visitors. It seemed too many people were interested in an old, moldering missile silo for his taste.
Penelope Quick hadn’t been at the Durfrene Row house at midnight, but Anthony wasn’t surprised. Anticipating some sort of trick, the witch had been left there in preparation for the thief’s early return. Penelope knew that Anthony couldn’t simply make a trade of the diamond for Jessica Quick and then let them go. It wasn’t realistic. It simply wasn’t possible. Besides which Anthony had never promised that Penelope would be released or even allowed to live.
Smart girl. Anthony considered it. For a white girl, she’s remarkably adaptive. She doesn’t stop to question why things like the seatco and the witch and the shadow people exist in her concrete world. She moves on, finds out what information she can, and proceeds about a plan. Luckily for Anthony that plan hadn’t included William. What it had included was for her to find a way to rescue her mother without endangering the lives of herself or Jessica Quick.
Anthony took the Suburban down the fork that led to the missile silo instead of the Gumbrell ranch house. There wasn’t anything up there but some decaying pools of blood, all that was left of George Gumbrell and his lawyer.
Merri the witch had come up against the thief, he thought sardonically. And the witch lost. The witch had actually lost the battle, through some means that I can’t even guess at. It spoke volumes about how determined the thief is. Penelope. Penelope Quick had an astute mind and a willingness to put her guts against any glory available. Had he been a betting man, he would have thrown his odds down on the witch any day. Her beauty and deceptive shape were camouflage for her gory nature and her rabid enthusiasm to destroy humans. Trickery had been second nature to the witch, and she had underestimated the thief’s resolve.
But Merri’s body was decomposing on an upper floor of the Durfrene Row house, and the witch most likely had been destroyed forever. It didn’t really matter. She had been a useful convenience and a tool to thwart William especially.
The thief was not so useful, but she was necessary, and Anthony knew that she was probably already in the area. The seatco had been excited and agitated in the last day, as if its incredible sense of smell had located her presence. Anthony didn’t need confirmation to know that Penelope had put together what William had told her and what she had gleaned from independent sources to find Anthony’s secondary location. After all, he knew that his tracking of the meteor site had left multiple markers for her.
Anthony parked the Suburban beside the missile silo gates and left it there. As he stopped, the shadow people flowed out of the vehicle and out of the deepest darkness of the buildings. They preferred the exterior at night and stayed outside the silo for hours at a time. Their eyes were crimson holes of light, and not for the first time, he wished they weren’t so quiet.
He stopped a few of them before they surged away like a clan of ravenous hyenas hunting some hapless beasts like his neighbor’s cattle. “There’s one thing more I need you to do.”
A loud groan sounded from the still-open doors of the Suburban. Anthony grinned wickedly to himself. When Penelope finally arrived she was going to have a surprise.
*
The bottom of the silo was a tomb. Water dripped along pipes, and the muck smelled like the rot of ages. Only the dead lived here.
Penelope didn’t care much for the errant thought because it reminded her of her weaknesses. Plans like this always had snags and obstacles. A thousand things could go wrong, and there was little she could do to anticipate their occurrence. It wasn’t like her standard creep of the average crooked individual’s pad.
But this, this was different with a capitol “D.” It was the paranormal. This was all unexpected. This was beyond any realm of understanding that Penelope had had before July the fourth. It did, however, fit in with one of her father’s favorite sayings of all time. “Shit happens.” Shit happened, and a good thief dealt with it or went down.
After the commotion that had occurred in the brief struggle with the seatco, Penelope expected someone to come rushing to see what the matter was. She systematically surveyed the interior of the silo. The spotlights were laid out to view the bottom where Anthon
y had directed excavations. Hanging chaotically over the various catwalks were the hoses that had been used to drain the water out of the well. No generator was running because 99% of the water was gone, leaving a layer of mucky silt that had settled on the bottom over the last few decades. The warped, rusting railings and stairways hugged the walls and avoided the central area where the Atlas missile must have once sat. But no one came to see what was up.
Sharp eyes scrutinized the bottom and found the entrances to the bunkers. Seeing as no one or nothing was about, she was going to take a look-see and possibly find someone there. Perhaps Jessica Quick. Perhaps a little child or two or four. Hopefully alive.
It all seemed a little too easy, and she stopped to peer over her shoulder a half-dozen times as she made the descent into the lowestmost part of the silo. She had to hold onto a twisted railing for support because the stairs were slick and ready to sweep the feet out from under any unsuspecting soul. A minute later she was wading through ankle-deep mud on the very bottom.
Penelope paused before the short hallway that was a duplicate of the one she had exited two flights up. A dim electrical bulb had been installed on the outside and caused a piercing blackness to fill the inner section. She used her flashlight and saw that nothing waited for her. Contrary to what she felt in the deepest part of her bones, the place was still and quiet. The witch was dead. The seatco had become a melting pot of the bodies it had used to construct its massive frame. Anthony was conspicuously absent. So were the shadow people.
It felt wrong. She hesitated and looked around the silo again, searching for the something that was out of place, the thing that was causing the hair on the back of her neck to rise in warning hackles. However, she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The upper echelons of the silo were motionless, and not even a single red eye stared down at her.
Anthony had left the seatco to guard the silo, and it had sniffed her out. Very likely it still had her scent imprinted. It had probably smelled her a full mile away and come running to lie in wait for her. Upon reflection, she was surprised it hadn’t battered down the door and tied a bow with her steaming entrails. All because it knew what her blood smelled like.
Penelope should have thought of that. It’s dead, isn’t it? interjected her sarcastic inner voice. Chalk one up to the winner’s side. Pen two. Psychopathic enders of the world, zilch.
The door waited. It was locked on the outside with a sparkling new Yale lock. It looked promising. Why lock a door in the bottom of a creepy missile silo when you’ve got your very own seven-foot monster to guard the place?
She extracted the small container of liquid nitrogen again and reattached the slender nozzle that would direct the spray in the way she wanted. Stepping closer to the door, she knew that she didn’t dare call through to the inside for her mother. After all, there was no guarantee that Jessica Quick was even in this room. Or even that her mother was alive for that matter.
Directing the nitrogen at the curving hasp of the padlock, she sprayed until the metal began to change its composition. The color changed, and the metal began to flex minutely. Dropping the bottle of liquid nitrogen, she reversed the end of the flashlight and struck the stout lock once. The noise echoed out behind her and made her wince in reaction. Another solid strike with the flashlight, and the lock neatly broke in half.
Penelope removed it and gently released the remnants to the floor. Her stomach swirled like a thousand maddened butterflies were contained within. Trusting Anthony to keep her mother alive for days was not something that she would have normally done. He was not the trustworthy type. He had his own agenda and to hell with anyone who got in his way. And Jessica, with her dogged personality, would have gotten in the way, blind or not.
And just where did you think you got your stunning qualities from, slick?
Ignoring the voice, Penelope thought that the room could be empty or it could have a dozen shadow people inside or it could have the bodies of her mother and four children all laid out like the ritual sacrifices they were supposed to be. She pulled gently on the knob and was relieved to see it come open easily. Someone had been using this room for something.
Penelope peered into the crack and saw a dim light further back. There were cots in the room and the sight made her shake with relief. Dead people didn’t need cots. She reversed the end of the flashlight and used the narrow beam to inspect the large room. Beyond the last cot were four sets of very frightened eyes staring back at her. They were smaller eyes, opened very wide in tearful expectation of the horrors they had seen to return to them.
The children, she thought. They cowered behind the cot and hid there as if a simple contraption of metal and musty canvas could protect them from the things that had taken them.
Penelope abruptly realized they didn’t know who she was or that she could possibly be there for their well-being. She stepped into the room and started to say something to them. “Hey, it’s…”
Then someone clocked her.
As Penelope fell down the flashlight slid out of her hand and revealed to her just who had the deadly aim. Her head felt like someone had used a bazooka on a piñata. Distantly she felt her shoulder connect with a solid surface. She would have blinked, but she couldn’t bring herself to perform the voluntary action. Instead, just before her eyes came to a crashing closure, she saw her very own mother, Jessica, standing above her, holding an extremely large, rusting wrench.
But that wasn’t the part that really alarmed Penelope. From her position on the floor, she could clearly see the ceiling, and a black-covered shape wiggled across the expanse, avoiding the stronger light. Its shining red eyes flashed fleetingly at them before shooting out the door. Before Jessica or the children could move again, the door slammed shut behind it, and Penelope lost consciousness.
*
Penelope’s head felt like it was going to explode. It thundered like the strongest lightning storm on record. She brought her hands up to the back of her head and felt the bump there. It didn’t seem as though she had fractured her skull, but anything was possible. Opening her eyes she ascertained that she was lying down, the room was very dim, and shapes that came in duplicates were moving around her at a befuddled pace. Penelope closed her eyes and hoped that the double vision would mercifully go away after a minute.
When she reopened her eyes, a very small girl was staring intently into them not three inches away from Penelope’s face. She jumped and immediately relaxed once she realized that it wasn’t the horrible something she was expecting. Her head fell back down.
“She’s awake, Miss Jessica,” the little girl said loudly, blonde hair flying into the air as she twisted her head about. Then she poked Penelope painfully in the ribs. “You. You’re awake, aren’t you?”
Penelope glared. “Poke me in the ribs again, and I’ll hit you with whatever my dear mother hit me with.”
Jessica appeared beside the little girl, and her blind eyes looked unseeingly in Penelope’s direction. She absently patted the six-year-old girl on her head and said, “It’s all right, Jenny. Penelope’s a little cranky when she first wakes up.”
Jenny screwed up her little face and stuck her tongue out at Penelope before retreating to the subsequent bunk. Three other children huddled there, looking at Penelope in varying expressions. Two were boys. Two were girls. All were young. She guessed blonde-haired and blue-eyed Jenny’s age at about six. The other girl was about seven years old, with dark hair done in careful pigtails, honey-colored eyes, and skin the color of chocolate milk. One boy appeared a year older with brown eyes and brown hair and Harry Potter-inspired spectacles. He was abnormally pale in the dim light and had a spray of freckles across his cheeks and nose. The last boy was approximately six years old and had red hair the color of carrots. He was small and thin and was shaking with nervous apprehension.
“Penelope,” Jessica said. “You’ve met Jenny. The other young lady is Danica. Then the young man with the glasses is David, and the other young ma
n is Jeffrey. We’ve gotten to know each other very well over the last few days. I’m not sure exactly how long it’s been.”
Penelope eyed the group. They looked like they’d been in a grimy pit for weeks, but it had only been since Monday. At least the children had been down here since Monday. Her mother had been Anthony’s captive possibly a day or two longer. “Five days for them,” she said. She didn’t need to tell Jessica how long she’d been held captive.
“Oh, yes,” Jessica mused. “I seem to have lost my Braille watch.”
Penelope looked at her watch, and the Indiglo features revealed that it was after 6 PM. She had been unconscious the better part of a day. She glanced around her, ignoring the roaring pain in her skull. “Did they leave my backpack?”
Jenny spoke up. “We took it off you and hid it before he came in to see you.”
“He?”
“He says his name is Anthony. The children tell me he’s about half a foot taller than I am and has long black hair. We think he’s Hispanic or American Indian. They don’t like the way that he looks at them, but I don’t think he’s a pedophile.” Jessica touched the side of her face in a troubled manner. “I don’t think he’s interested in any of us that way.”
“Peachy,” Penelope said. “Did you have to hit me, Mama?”
“Well, dear, I thought it was Anthony or the other one. The other one is particularly frightening. He’s very large, wears a mask, and smells to high heaven.” Jessica’s voice lowered so the children couldn’t hear her and curled her lips distastefully. “Like a corpse.”
“You don’t have to worry about him anymore,” Penelope said. She almost shivered and resisted the reaction to her own news.
“Who, Anthony or the smelly one?”
“The smelly one,” she said and added, “Help me sit up, Mama. It’s the least you can do since I came to rescue you, and you laid me out like a prize fighter.”
Jessica sighed exaggeratedly. “Do I need to bring up who got me kidnapped in the first place? Or can we have this conversation later?”
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