The Knowing Box Set EXTENDED EDITION: Exclusive New Material

by Ninie Hammon

  And before the eyes of the whole world. The news crews already in town with their satellite trucks to cover the rising of Bradford’s Ridge’s dead descended on the scene like crows on road kill. Within minutes, they were set up and broadcasting the nightmare blow by blow around the world.

  Suddenly, a young man in a blue shirt broke free from the crowd. Crying, “My father’s in there!” he dodged the police line and raced up the sidewalk toward the front steps and porch. Sheriff Cunningham took off after him, but the man was so fast, he was up onto the burning porch and into the building before the sheriff could stop him. The sheriff stayed on his heels, though. Hoping to tackle him and drag him quickly back out, Cunningham leapt over the blazing pile of chandelier debris right inside the door, the pain of the burns on his legs a distant agony his mind put aside to process later.

  The young man was right in front of him, but the smoke was so thick…and then the smoke moved away, like a fan had blown it back from the man in the blue shirt. The flames moved away, too—this was crazy!—leaving the young man in a smokeless, flameless bubble, and he seemed almost not to touch the ground at all. The sheriff dived, grabbed him in a perfect tackle around the ankles and brought him down with a thump on the mosaic tile floor.

  And there was no smoke, no flames around him, around either one of them. It was like the two of them were sealed in a fishbowl and nothing could get in. The young man flipped over on his back as fast as a coiling rattlesnake. Then he offered the sheriff a resigned smile.

  “There’s only going to be one hero here today—and it’s not you.” the young man said, and now that the sheriff could see him close-up, he recognized him as that Whitworth kid—Chase or Chapman. His father had been an archeologist or something like that before he’d had a stroke a couple of years ago.

  Scrambling to his feet, the sheriff extended a hand to the still recumbent Whitworth. “Come on! I’m sorry, son, but your father’s gone. We’ve still got a shot at getting out of here.”

  “Oh, I have more than a shot at it,” Whitworth said. “But you, unfortunately, do not.”

  Then the sheriff saw an outline form around the young man—a glow that was a deeper red than the flames. The glow seemed to morph into a shape.

  The sheriff gasped, and the scream in his throat froze there behind his lips. A hideous, deformed face with cat-slit eyes and lumps of horns materialized around the young man on the floor at his feet. It opened its mouth—rows of dagger-sharp teeth—and roared at him. The sheriff did scream then, staggered backward and fell. The face grew. As Whitworth got to his feet, the face surrounding him loomed in the air above the sheriff. He looked into its eyes and saw there pure evil, all the hatred and devastation that had ever been and ever would be were in the bottomless pit of those eyes, deaths unnumbered, war and famine and pain, and a future of absolute desolation.

  Then Whitworth reached out—only it was the monster shape reaching out a clawed hand—and grabbed the sheriff’s thick beard. In one yank, he ripped most of the sheriff's face off his skull. As the sheriff shrieked in inarticulate horror and pain, his body rose up into the air, into the boiling smoke above the bubble. Then a force flung him across the atrium and into the flames in the north hallway.

  Bill Cunningham breathed fire when he tried to scream, his whole body burning. The last sight he ever saw was the shape shrinking back down into Chapman Whitworth, glowing red around him as he headed toward the stairs on the back wall.

  CHAPTER 41

  2011

  The proprietor of the Hooperton Food Mart easily recognized Jack’s description of the men in the blue car with New Mexico plates. They’d purchased beer from him several times—Dos Equis—not his best-selling brew. Before Jack even had a chance to ask, he added, “On my way home from work yesterday, I seen that car. It was parked next to a cabin about three miles from town, on the bluff above the river.”

  Jack closed his eyes and allowed a little of the wound-tight strain to ease. He’d found her! He realized then he’d been clenching his jaw so tight his teeth hurt. This wasn’t over yet, but he didn’t have to go it alone anymore. Now, he could call in the troops, return to solid police procedure. He’d call the Kentucky State Police and the Boone County Sheriff’s Department. He flinched at the thought of needing a trained hostage negotiating team from the FBI, but it could come to that.

  He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, considering as he did how much trouble he was in—an off-duty, suspended, Ohio police sergeant chasing bad guys in the woods of Kentucky. But the other law enforcement agencies would bag all those issues for later as soon as he said the magic words, “kidnapped child.”

  The food mart manager was talking and Jack tuned back in at “…almost ran me down.”

  “I’m sorry, I missed that. Who almost ran you down?”

  “Those guys you’re looking for, well two of them anyway. They came roaring through here like they’s being chased by a mad dog. Had to jump back up on the curb, or they’d have—”

  “How long ago?”

  “Half an hour, maybe. The ugly guy with the tattoo wasn’t with them.”

  One kidnapper had stayed behind with Andi.

  Jack felt like he’d reached the end of a bungee cord and had been breathlessly yanked back up. It would take at least half an hour for help to arrive and get set up. The nearest Kentucky State Police post was in Dry Ridge, thirty miles away on Interstate 75 South. The Boone County Sheriff’s Department was located near the airport—at least fifteen minutes away and more likely twenty. And right this minute, Andi was alone with only one kidnapper.

  Jack had to seize the opportunity.

  He shoved his phone back into his pocket and leapt into his car.

  Jack cruised by the cabin once, saw it was more shack than cabin, not quaint but rundown and dilapidated. A screen door dangled from a single hinge on the front of the structure, and a shiny new satellite dish grew incongruously from the north wall right below the eaves. The windows had been boarded—recently. The unpainted wood hadn’t weathered. A white van was parked in front.

  He parked his car half a mile away, snatched his M4 patrol rifle and his tactical vest with twenty-eight rounds of ammo off the backseat floorboard and cut through the woods. As he knelt behind a pile of brush and examined the building, his heart was hammering in his chest so hard his vision pulsed with each beat.

  A surgeon operating on his own child.

  He drew all his will into a single point of light and focused it on calming his heartbeat, slowing his breathing, dispelling the black cloud of panic that was impairing his judgment. Then he circled the house, out far enough in the woods that if somebody spotted him and fired a shot with the weapon of choice in this neck of the woods—a deer rifle—the bullet would likely be deflected by tree limbs or brush.

  He studied the building from the trees, concentrated, tried to remember every detail of Andi’s vision that Daniel had described to him. She’d said there was a “crack between the boards that covered one of the windows,” and she’d looked out it at the driveway. A room with two windows was likely a corner room, with windows facing two directions. The corner room by the driveway, then.

  Andi was probably alone in that room. She’d said there was nothing in it but blankets on the floor and a dangling light bulb, so the kidnapper probably wasn’t sitting in there with her on the floor, but rather had locked her alone in the room while he made himself more comfortable in another part of the cabin.

  Approaching the cabin through the trees, Jack stayed on a diagonal from the driveway-side corner. When he reached the last of his cover, he bent low to the ground, scurried to the house in a Groucho crouch and flattened himself against the wall beneath the window overlooking the driveway. Then he froze, remained utterly still. Using a military term, he made himself an LPOP: Listening Post/Observation Post. He concentrated on trying to hear any sound coming from the house. Voices. Music. A television. A toilet flushing. Even the hum of a refrigerator or the
whir of a fan. He listened with his whole body, a tautness in him like a bowstring with the arrow ready to fly.

  Nothing.

  Then he raised up by inches until he could take a quick peek through the crack Andi’d looked out. The lone bulb shone brightly in the room. Through the small strip of his visibility, he could see no one. But the bulb did reveal one corner of the pile of blankets Andi’d described.

  The blankets were bloody, and Jack could see blood on the floor, too.

  ******

  1985

  There it was!

  Oliver Marshal gave the right wheel of his chair a shove while he held the left one still, and the chair pivoted around, leaving Ollie sitting in front of the key on the floor that loudmouth punk threw away after he used it to padlock the chains holding the kid to the dolphin in the fountain. Ollie rolled closer, leaned over and picked up the key.

  Now he just had to make it back. Smoke was everywhere. He only took little sips of breath, like he’d done when they were afraid the Krauts had laid out mustard gas. It was hot, flames licked out at him from debris that had fallen from the ceiling, but the ceramic tiles wouldn’t burn, and he could make it if he concentrated, tried.

  Ollie gave both wheels of the chair a mighty shove—well, as mighty a shove as he could manage, and propelled himself toward the fountain, dodging the bodies--Harold Castleback’s, Mrs. Booth’s and Agatha Willingham's--where they lay crumpled on the floor. Another shove. Then one more and his footrest connected with the marble base.

  Water gushed down over the boy chained to the dolphin. His eyes were closed.

  “You, boy!” Ollie called out. “Don’t you give up on me!”

  A survivor to tell the world what they’d done! Yep, Ollie bet that wasn’t in the playbook of the punk monsters who’d staged this massacre. If this boy lived, he could take a royal dump in their punchbowl—a fitting memorial to Oliver Marshal.

  The boy opened his eyes when he heard Ollie’s voice.

  “I’ve got the key, gonna unlock those chains.”

  Which might prove easier said than done. Ollie would have to get up out of the chair, step over the lip of the fountain, kneel down beside the boy and unlock the padlock. Ollie literally could not remember the last time he’d stood upright.

  How hard can it be? Just stand up, that’s all. Gotta be like riding a bicycle. It’ll come back to me.

  He reached down, picked up his right leg, lifted his right foot out of the footrest and carefully set it on the tile floor. He did the same with the other foot. Then he locked the wheelchair wheels. Now, all he had to do was grab the chair handles and lift himself out of the seat.

  ******

  2011

  Like the other Harry Potter freaks seated in row after row above him, Bosko was reluctant to move when the movie was over. After the last riveting scene, it was jarring to come back to reality, to sitting in a darkened theater in a world not peopled by wizards with magic wands.

  It wasn’t as good as Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Bosko decided. Oh, it was good, but not as good as that. And nothing was as good as Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Though the house lights had not yet come up, other movie patrons had begun to rise from their seats, gather purses and sweaters and sleeping children from the seats around them. Bosko had just let go of the fantasy, exchanged Hogwarts for the reality of an October day in Ohio, when an announcement was broadcast into the theater.

  “The Dynamo Movie Theatre complex has a special prize for one lucky movie-goer today,” the voice said. “Warner Brothers Pictures has provided movie posters signed by Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson as prizes to give away to the premiere audience.”

  There was a murmur all around him. Bosko froze. He tried not to think about his movie posters, the most precious possessions he owned—gone. Whenever he thought about them, he envisioned a cartoon character banging his own forehead with a sledge hammer. Why’d he run? Why’d he shoot? The police couldn’t possibly know he’d killed Lily. It had been a monumentally stupid knee-jerk response. He’d been so on edge, he’d panicked. Bosko had hardly slept since he strangled her, and when he did, he had nightmares about her terrified face. He’d never killed anybody before, but Chapman Whitworth had told him to do it, and he couldn’t refuse. Not merely because the judge who’d “lost” the evidence against him in that bank robbery case could just as easily find it again. It was more than that. Bosko was—go on, admit it—he was terrified of the scar-faced man with the dead-fish eyes.

  But he wouldn’t allow himself to think about what Whitworth had done that day to those old people. How he had done it. It could not possibly have happened like Bosko thought it did. Whitworth couldn’t have—no, he would not go there! Now, he was on the run, everything that mattered to him gone.

  “We randomly selected a single seat in the theater before we opened the doors,” the announcement continued, “and the lucky person who chose that seat will walk out of Dynamo with more than just a ticket stub. He’ll have a signed Harry Potter movie poster to go with it.”

  Bosko could feel perspiration break out in little beads on his forehead.

  “So look down at the numbers on your seats, folks. This poster goes to the person sitting in seat number twelve in row B.”

  Bosko stared in stunned disbelief at the twelve in silver letters on the back of his seat, as the people around him searched their seats and then groaned in disappointment. The little boy sitting next to him, who’d wiggled, squirmed, whispered and spilled popcorn like confetti through the whole movie, looked at him in defiance. “I was there first!” he said.

  Bosko scowled at him.

  “I sat down there before you did. Seat number twelve was mine…until my mother”—he cast a murderous glance at the haggard woman to his right—"made me move so I wouldn’t be sitting next to Brittany. That poster’s mine!”

  “Would the person in number B12 please remain seated until an usher comes for you. He’ll accompany you to the projection office where your poster will be waiting for you.”

  The team of Clydesdales that pulled the Budweiser Beer Wagon couldn’t have dragged Bosko out of that chair. And it was about that difficult for the mother of the belligerent little boy to drag him out of the theater. The kid went into a full-bore temper tantrum meltdown, kicking his mother when she took his hand, yelling and crying.

  Then Bosko spotted a red-coated usher swimming upstream against the last of the tide of people emptying the theater, and the howling youngster became the sound of a gnat by your ear on a summer day.

  “Guess this is your lucky day,” the usher said.

  “Sure is,” Bosko said, then got up out of seat number twelve and followed the usher as obediently as a lamb to the slaughter.

  CHAPTER 42

  2011

  Jack’s heart tried to jackhammer a hole in his chest at the sight of the blood on the blankets and floor of the room where Andi’d been held in the cabin. He grabbed hold of the emotion welling up into his throat and clamped down with all his willpower on the urge to leap up and go running into the house. If she were…dead…she’d be just as dead in five minutes as she was now, but if she were only injured and he blasted in like Sherman plowing through Atlanta, he could get them both killed.

  He had to get inside the house without being seen, and he couldn’t do that through the window. Even if he could pry the boards loose without waking the dead, the window was probably locked—or more likely in a place this old painted shut. Odds were the back door lead to the kitchen or if he got real lucky, a laundry room—like a bathroom, not as statistically likely to be occupied as a living room or kitchen.

  Crossing beneath the windows to the back door, he tried the handle. It was unlocked. He pushed it slowly inward and stepped into a small kitchen, his head on a swivel, not merely scanning three hundred and sixty degrees but seven hundred and twenty. Up at the ceiling to rafters or the entrance to an attic, down at the floor where…there were drips of
blood on the floor in a line across the kitchen and out onto the porch.

  He knelt and touched them. They were sticky, still wet. They were small, too, not the kind of blood you’d see from a catastrophic wound. Jack still had to clear the house before he checked them out. Room to room, swiftly now, in a crouch, rifle extended, sweeping each room as he entered. The house was deserted. In the back bedroom, he examined the bloody blankets. If the kidnapper had stabbed her, the room would have been awash in gore. It wasn’t. So he’d hurt her, injured her in some way, and then either carried or dragged her out the back door.

  Jack returned to the blood drops. Blood was hard to follow. Where it dripped on dirt, it soaked in, leaving black marks that were almost impossible to spot. But he found a drip on a leaf and another on a rock, then spotted a trail that cut through the trees up the hill to the north. Though Jack didn’t know the exact lay of the land here, he understood the general geography well enough to know that there was nothing in that direction but the wide, muddy Ohio River, where tall bluffs overlooked the water on the Kentucky side.

  Why would the kidnapper be taking Andi to the river?

  ******

  1985

  An old man in a wheelchair emerged from the swirling smoke like some kind of apparition. He was the man Jack had asked about the telephone when he came into the building. He’d been slumped comatose in a wheelchair by the door, his chin on his chest. Now, he was upright and alert. His eyes were clear, his voice strong.

  The man said something to Jack about not giving up. Jack couldn’t hear him clearly. But he heard all four words of the second thing the man said. “I got the key.” He brandished it like a Samurai sword. “I’m gonna unlock those chains.”