Trent simultaneously felt the monster’s impact and his blade penetrating deep into his attacker’s hard flesh. The creature’s momentum carried it forward, effectively skewering it in an instant.
By the time the giant stopped, its belly was touching Trent’s two hands that were still wrapped around the sword cane’s hilt in a white knuckled grip. Even though the creature must have weighed twice as much as Trent, he did not struggle under the girth of the giant.
Trent looked up and saw the thing’s face only inches from his own—a look of disbelief and shock had replaced its previous fierceness as its life quickly receded.
The smell of the creature was so foul, that Trent retched and had to concentrate on not throwing up. He looked into the milky white eyes of the creature that were now also glassed-over and blank. This close up, he concluded that the fierce thing in front of him actually had some of the subtle characteristics of a young man—with just the hint of whiskers forming on its chin and smooth skin that lacked wrinkles in key spots that marked most adults.
Despite the fact that this…creature was close to seven-feet tall and bigger than any man Trent had seen in person, he realized that it had been indeed just a boy.
Trent rolled out from under the young creature, extracting his sword blade as he did so, and let the body collapse to the floor.
Although relived to be alive still, the darkness that had filled him only minutes ago slowly seeped away as Trent’s logical mind took over once again. As his mind cleared, he processed the fact that he had just killed again. He had taken another’s life. Even though he still wasn’t sure whether the creature was all human or not, he had still killed. Before last month, Trent had never killed anything bigger than a mouse, but now death by his hands was becoming all too commonplace.
The one redeeming factor was that if this was the Troll Zana had been talking about, then Trent had accomplished the one thing she had wanted all along.
But he doubted that the creature he had just killed was indeed the infamous Troll.
If for no other reason, it had been defeated too easily. Trent couldn’t have been the only person to have fought back before, nor was it likely that he had just gotten lucky and taken down the legendary Troll with only a desperate trick and a single lucky blow.
Stepping around the motionless body, Trent looked up and saw a small camera with a red flashing LED mounted on the tunnel’s wall.
He cursed out loud.
Whether it was the two big men in suits or someone else, whoever operated those cameras had digital proof of what he had just done, recorded for posterity. Was it self-defense? Yes. But film footage could still lead to an investigation and maybe even a trial.
Despite his rising anxiety, Trent refocused on the reason he was down in the tunnels in the first place. It wasn’t to kill a Troll that had been murdering homeless people. He was here to find Zana.
He sheathed his sword cane and started marching back toward the larger tunnel.
This had been the second time that the creature had tracked him after leaving Zana’s camp. Maybe the thing had a crush on her, or maybe it had just been stalking her as potential prey. Either way, Trent was sure that somehow there was a connection between Zana and the creature. And if he listened fully to his intuition, he had to believe that the creature and the men in suits could be connected as well, perhaps through Zana, but maybe in other ways as well.
With no other clues to follow, he set out to see what he could find by re-tracing the creature’s tracks to see where it had come from before it had started following Trent.
As he walked along, Trent checked his cell phone to see what time it was. It was close to 4 p.m., and the way his day was going, he was beginning to doubt that he would make it back in time for his show that night. Both his agent and the owner of the Lucky Imp were going to be royally pissed, but that was unavoidable.
Finding Zana was more important.
He contemplated calling the hotel owner just to give him a heads up, but as he suspected, he had no bars this far beneath the city. He powered off his phone to conserve battery power in case he might need it later and slipped it into his pants pocket.
When he made it to where the narrow tunnel connected with the larger tunnel, Trent bent down, retrieved his bloody knife and wiped the blade off on his pants leg.
He looked across the tunnel and saw another wall-mounted camera come to life, again activated by his motion.
Without a thought, he pulled out his sword and stabbed the camera through the slits of its wire cage, sending sparks into the air until its blinking red light went dark.
He knew the video camera had already recorded video of him and had transmitted it to a database somewhere, but destroying the blasted thing still felt good.
Now that he wasn’t being watched, he studied his surroundings and saw that both his footprints and those from the creature were imprinted in the dust and grit that covered the tunnel floor. It looked like it hadn’t rained in a while, and he felt confident that if he was careful enough, he could follow the creature’s trail with little problem.
As he sniffed the air, he could still smell the rotten odor that had emanated from the creature, and he figured that if he lost its tracks, he could always just follow the trail of its awful stench.
As he started down the tunnel, Trent reminded himself that although he might discover a clue about Zana’s whereabouts by following the creature’s trail, the most likely outcome was that he was delivering himself right into the angry clutches of the real Troll.
For once, Trent hoped that he was wrong.
Chapter 27
IT HAD BEEN a long day, and although the Hunter continued to be impressed by the mentalist’s ingenuity and resourcefulness, the man was also beginning to annoy him.
It was one thing to be resourceful and inquisitive, but now that Mr. Walker had killed the Troll’s pup, he was interfering with the Hunter’s future profits. And although he was a gambling man by nature, the Hunter did not treat his finances like a game.
He knew the Troll would not live forever, and he was counting on the creature’s offspring to grow up and take dear old dad’s place when the time came.
And the Troll only had one real talent—the hunt.
The Troll was good at what it did, because in a land of darkness, it could sense and smell its prey more like an animal than a man. It hunted like a bloodhound and killed mercilessly—and just like a dog, it performed its tasks to please its master and for the promise of sweet reward.
Sometimes the treat was a hot meal from the Hunter’s hotel kitchen, and sometimes it was something more tempting, such as the company of one of the prostitutes who owed him a favor in one way or another.
At least there was one thing that intrigued the Hunter about the situation in which Mr. Walker had placed him. He had never seen the Troll kill in anger before. Watching the creature work was like observing a vicious, wild animal do what it was designed to do, but there was never any hatred or human emotion involved.
The hunter suspected that this time would be different.
When the Troll found the mentalist, he imagined that the meeting would be brutal beyond anything he or his clientele had witnessed before.
A rare grin spread across the Hunter’s face. He could almost count the money he was going to make by brokering the million-dollar wages on the details of that final battle.
Still, after this hunt, he would have to start looking for another suitable subject to mate with the Troll, and that took a special woman. The pup’s mother had been of hardy stock imported from Russia, but she had still died during childbirth.
It was one of the least pleasant endeavors the Hunter had undertaken in his life—essentially breeding his prize dog with a human—but it had been necessary, and he had been proud of his foresight.
Being prepared and thorough were traits that set him apart from men of average ambition and ability, and because Mr. Walker had now ruined all of his hard work, the H
unter would have to start over. But at least he could take some pleasure in knowing that the mentalist would soon pay for his actions with his life.
Chapter 28
TRENT WAS NOT a professional tracker, but he had trained his mind to observe even the tiniest of details. That discipline served him well as he went from tunnel to tunnel, back-tracking while also looking for footprints or other signs the creature might have left behind while following him.
At times it was easy to tell where the young creature had stepped, but periodically its footprints just disappeared, and Trent had to spend sometimes up to fifteen minutes scouring the tunnel floors and the walls for any signs of the creature’s passing.
At one point, after having just destroyed another closed-circuit video camera, Trent laughed as he wondered if the cameras could perhaps belong to the city of Las Vegas and be used by maintenance crews instead of by insidious men in suits to track nubile young victims.
If that ended up being the case, he was making some civil servant’s life completely miserable instead of hindering his enemy’s ability to track him in the future.
Trent had been following the creature’s large footsteps for what seemed like miles and had traveled far away from where he had entered the tunnels earlier. He continued to memorize every turn he took, despite how convoluted the trail was turning out to be, and from maps of Vegas he had studied before, his best guess was that he was currently far beneath Caesar’s Palace or the Bellagio.
Even as he thought this, Trent lost the creature’s trail again.
As he continued searching for signs of its passage, all he found was disappointment.
After half an hour of looking, he was almost at the point of giving up and returning to the hotel to question Buddy about the men in suits.
At one point, Trent ventured into a tunnel he had never before entered and found himself standing at the edge of what appeared to be a living room of sorts with a thin man and woman sitting on a queen-sized bed sitting on top of cinder blocks.
Trent felt as if he had just barged into someone’s home.
Even though his first reaction was to be wary of the middle-aged couple, he could clearly tell that they were the ones who were afraid.
The man was wearing boxer shorts and no shirt, and the woman was wearing tan shorts and a tank top. Neither of them were wearing shoes.
Since the couple’s living area was lit with kerosene lamps and a few candles, Trent switched off his flashlight.
He made sure to remain where he was and to not approach them so that it would be obvious he meant the couple no harm.
“Good afternoon,” Trent said. “I’m very sorry about intruding like this. My name is Trent Walker, and I’m looking for a friend of mine who’s lost down here. Maybe you know her. Zana?”
As he waited for a reply, Trent scanned the living space cobbled together from milk crates, planks of wood, and sheets of cardboard.
“John’s the name,” the mostly naked man said in a voice just above a whisper. “This is my fiancé, Helen.”
“Hi John. Helen.” Trent said. “Nice to meet you both. Have you seen a girl down here recently? About five feet four inches. Black hair. Pretty.”
“Don’t know any person like that down here,” Helen piped up, her eyes flitting about the room as she spoke.
“She usually wears this,” Trent said, pulling out Zana’s Ankh necklace from his inside jacket pocket.
John shook his head, but Helen looked nervous.
From the woman’s posture, her evasive glances, and the tone of her voice, Trent could tell that she was lying about something.
He looked above their bookcase and saw another one of the caged cameras, but this one was covered with a piece of black cloth.
“Get tired of them watching you?” Trent said, nodding toward the camera. “I’ve been breaking them whenever I find one down here. I have a feeling the people who took my friend are the ones on the other end of those. Maybe if I break enough of them, they’ll come after me and save me the trouble of hunting them down.”
The man and woman looked at each other, their eyes slightly wide.
“It ain’t a good idea to mess with those,” John said. “We just cover ours up when we want a little privacy. They can still see through the cloth sort of, but it makes it a little better. Especially when…you know.”
“Why build your home here by the camera then?” Trent said.
“Camera wasn’t here when we moved in,” John said. “Came back one day, and there it was.”
“You ever see who installed it? Ever see anyone do maintenance on the camera?”
“Nope,” John said. “Never seen anything, except the blinking red light when they’re watching. At least it makes it easier to see in the dark when the lantern’s off.”
They all looked over to the camera.
The red light was flashing behind the black cloth.
Trent wondered if the cameras were wired for sound. He hadn’t thought of that before, since he hadn’t been saying anything out loud until now.
“Can they hear us, too?” Trent said, his voice now lower, like John’s.
“Don’t know…” John said.
“We think so,” Helen interrupted, whispering to John. “Remember when we were talking about smashing the darned thing, and then the next day, our place was all messed up. Like they were giving us a warning or something.”
John just looked at his fiancé and then back to Trent.
“Don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Walker, but me and Helen got some things we have to do…around the house. It’s probably time for you to get moving along,” John said in as nice a voice as Trent had ever heard while still clearly being told to leave.
“One last question, and then I’ll be on my way, I promise,” Trent said. “You ever hear of or seen a creature down here that folks call the Troll?”
Both John and Helen noticeably stiffened.
“I saw what I think was a younger version of the Troll a ways back, maybe about two miles away from your house here. I figure he’s not alone, and that if there’s any more like him, they probably live down here as well. Any idea where that might be? Could you at least point me in the right direction?”
“You need to be going, like I said,” John said as both he and Helen inadvertently glanced in the direction of the tunnel that Trent had been following before turning into the one that John and Helen called home.
It was a standard cold reading trick. Ask a person where something was, and they would usually tell you with their eyes without even realizing it. At least Trent now knew that he was still heading in the right direction.
Trent thanked them for their time and turned to leave.
Thinking about it again, he pulled out his wallet and took out a twenty-dollar bill.
“Thanks again for talking with me. Hope this helps you out a little,” Trent said as he offered the cash to John.
John hesitated, but only for a micro-second, before taking the bill.
Helen got up and walked over to a basket that was sitting on top of a stack of milk crates. She pulled out a banana and a protein bar and held them out to Trent.
“I really couldn’t,” Trent said, but Helen insisted.
In the end, Trent’s hunger and his sense that this was the way things were done under Vegas took over.
As he walked away, he peeled the banana and ate it, while pocketing the protein bar for later. He hadn’t gone more than a dozen steps when he heard quick footsteps closing in on him.
Trent turned around ready to fight, but instead he found Helen coming to a stop a few feet away from him.
“One more thing, Mr. Walker,” she whispered. “We ain’t seen the Troll ourselves, but of course we heard of him. Found a friend of ours about a month ago, a few miles away in one of the big tunnels. Name was Merle.
“He was dead when we got to him. All ripped up like someone…like something just tore him apart. When I took a closer look, I saw this patch of swollen
, raw skin up between his shoulder blades, like someone had actually branded the poor man, like he was some kind of a cow or something.”
“What did the brand look like?” Trent said.
“Like a…poker chip, I think. It was a circle, and in the middle there was a diamond like the one on the Welcome to Las Vegas sign.”
“Any idea why someone would do something like that?” Trent asked.
“Not at all. But I can tell you this—I known Merle for five years, even before we moved down to the tunnels. And he never once had any ink on him, much less a brand like the one I saw on his neck. Merle had class. He was a real gentlemen like they don’t make no more.”
“Thank you, Helen,” Trent said, putting his hand gently on her shoulder. “I appreciate you telling me all of that. And thanks for the food, too. You and John take care. I’ve got to go find my friend.”
“Good luck, Mr. Walker,” she said as she turned to walk away. “Good luck finding your friend, and even better luck once you do.”
Chapter 29
TRENT CONTINUED down the same tunnel he had been traveling before meeting John and Helen. With no other tunnels connecting to it, there was no question about whether to turn left or right, and he was able to move along quickly without having to check for footprints along the way.
He could feel the tunnel sloping downwards as he moved farther away from the main strip above. As best as he could tell, he was heading east, in the direction of Lake Meade.
After another half a mile, the tunnel opened into a large chamber. The tunnel continued on at the other end of the large room, through a much smaller passageway that looked to be only about four-feet high.
Trent walked across the chamber, stooped down, and shone his flashlight into the darkness. The smaller tunnel triggered something inside him—not fear, but something familiar and safe.
Wary of a potential trap, he listened at the small entranceway as hard as he could, but he heard nothing—no detectable movement or shuffling of footsteps. He listened equally for the roar of water. Up above, the sky had seemed like it might open up with rain at some point, and it did not escape Trent that he was miles below Las Vegas and walking through tunnels that could, at any time, transform into raging rapids. The last thing he wanted was to be stuck in the tunnels when a flash flood came roaring through on its way to the reservoir.
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