by Brian Harper
Gasping, Trish hauled the board away from the frame. “Where’d you learn all that”
“I’m into anthropology. Digging. You know.”
Trish beamed the flash into the well. Twelve feet deep. Round walls, studded with rocks of all shapes and sizes set in troweled cement. A grate at the bottom, big enough to imply a negotiable sinkhole.
Maybe. Or maybe there was no sinkhole, no network of tunnels, no last chance.
Think positive, Trish.
Overhead, the sudden pounding of footsteps. The killers, approaching the cellar once more.
She waved Ally forward. “Down you go.”
The girl descended, finding ready handholds and footholds among the larger stones. Trish tucked the flashlight under her belt, the beam angled downward, and followed.
The handcuffs made it hard for her to maneuver. She lowered herself by slow degrees.
“Take off the drain cover,” she gasped to Ally, already at the bottom.
“It’s stuck.”
Trish glanced down at the grate, splashed by the flashlight’s beam. Iron bars crosshatched in a square frame. Rusty and old, like a relic from a shipwreck.
“It’s just heavy,” she told the girl. “Get some leverage.”
No further noise upstairs. The deadly silence of a snake poised to strike.
Cain reached up and wrenched the smoke detector out of the kitchen wall, snapping the wires. It dropped on the floor, a useless thing.
Tyler, Gage, and Lilith waited by the side exit. Cain ushered them out. Lilith was last to leave.
“Looks like you get to spread that little girl’s legs after all,” she said playfully.
“Do I”
“Yeah.” Giggle. “Spread ‘em all over the ceiling.”
She kissed him, a hot, probing kiss that shot a thrill of excitement through his groin, then hurried outside to take cover by the garage.
Alone in the hallway, Cain turned toward the cellar door.
The M-80’s fuse was too long. He took a moment to trim it to a blunt, lethal stub.
Robinson and the girl would barely have time to scream.
Trish dropped to the bottom of the well. Crouching beside Ally, she hooked her fingers around the drain cover’s iron grillwork.
Muscles popped in her back as she strained to lift the heavy grate. Irrelevantly she thought of blasting her lats on the rowing machine.
Ally pulled with her upper body, bending backward at the hips. Her face reddened, freckles standing out.
Together they dragged the grate clear of the opening. It clattered heavily on the well’s cement floor.
Through the aperture, some sort of cavern was visible. Chalky walls. Rough floor. White encrustations of stalagmites.
Overhead, in the dark-a squeal of hinges.
The cellar door was open.
Leaning through the doorway, Cain lit the fuse and pitched the bomb like a softball in a looping underhand throw.
He had a momentary impression of red spirals traced in the dark as the bomb flew over the banister into the center of the room.
Slam.
The door had closed.
An instant later-thump of impact, jingle of loose metal.
Keys, coins, something like that.
Whatever it was, it had landed near the well.
“Go!” Trish screamed.
Ally wriggled feet first into the hole.
Trish swung both legs over the side.
And the world exploded.
41
Cain flung himself outside, onto the paved path between the house and the garage, and a shock wave shuddered through the yard in time with a bellowing blast.
He looked back. The house’s exterior wall flexed, networks of veins crisscrossing the puckered stucco. Windows cracked in the dining area, the living room. The side door was wrenched off its hinges in a cloud of greasy black smoke.
“Cain!” From somewhere far away, Tyler’s yell rose above the roar. “God damn it, I knew you used too much!”
Wild slide through a limestone funnel, rough rock chafing her exposed skin, then another hard landing, a blade of pain knifing her ankle.
Trish hardly felt it.
Over the echoing thunderclap of the blast she heard something like hailstones pelting the well, ringing on the rocky walls and cement floor directly above her.
She dived clear of the sinkhole. Behind her, a sudden metallic clinking.
Some of the hailstones-whatever they really were-had ricocheted into the cave.
Sprawling on her stomach, she fumbled the flashlight free of her belt.
The beam found Ally huddled in a corner. Trish threw herself at the girl and covered her protectively as the limestone chamber groaned like a living thing.
Dust flew everywhere, gritty and stinging, clouds of it, coating hair and skin and clothes. Ally shook with terror.
Trish pulled her still closer, wishing she could hug the girl but unable to do so with her chained hands, and then her back sizzled with a hot wire of pain.
One of the hailstones had slashed a horizontal wound across her shoulder blades. She hissed through clenched teeth.
Other, larger debris tumbled down the sinkhole, thudding and bouncing. A fist-sized projectile smacked into the wall a few inches away.
Ally screamed.
“There, there.” Trish pressed her mouth close to the girl’s ear. “There, there.”
Earthquake.
The thought registered distantly in Charles Kent’s mind as the closet shook and Barbara and Philip and Judy cried out in distress.
Around them, a bedlam of clashing noise: rattle of bifold doors, groan of walls, squeal of floorboards, and the clothes hangers coming down in a clattering cascade.
Another hanger pole was jostled free of its mounting. An overhead shelf tipped forward, spilling shoe boxes and hats and scarves. Judy was screaming.
An hour ago Charles would have been afraid. Now he was past fear, past feelings of any kind. He was very tired. He’d never been so tired, not even after pulling all-nighters at law school, cramming for finals, shoveling knowledge into his skull with the joyless fervor of compulsion.
Back then his exhaustion had been temporary, certain to be relieved by rest, but now there could be no rest ever again.
Ally was dead.
The gunshots Barbara had heard-there could be no other explanation.
The tremors died away. Sudden silence, broken only by Judy’s fitful sobs. Her husband comforted her while the beam of his flashlight traced an unsteady course around the closet, passing over heaps of fallen clothes and swirls of dust and a broken scatter of light bulbs that had been stored with other emergency supplies.
“What … what in God’s name … what …” Judy’s question was a moan of fear.
“Quake,” Barbara stammered, her voice raw from her earlier shouting.
Philip shook his head. “I’m not so sure. Felt more like-well, like an explosion.”
“Explosion” Barbara made a hiccupping noise. “Why would they set off an explosion Charles already opened the safe. Didn’t you, Charles”
He heard his name and understood that some sort of answer was expected.
“Opened the safe,” he echoed. “Yes.”
“Then they wouldn’t need to blow it open. So it must have been a quake.”
Philip touched her arm. “It was. Of course it was.”
Barbara stood staring blindly at the damage, her eyes wide and wild, and then she sagged, giving up.
“Or maybe not,” she whispered. “Maybe you’re right. First shots, now this. Oh, dear God, what’s going on out there”
All the life seeped out of her, and she dropped her head, too weary for tears.
Charles paid little attention to the exchange. He was thinking of the Weimaraner named Toto the family had put to sleep last year after the heartrending discovery of cancer. He remembered watching death creep into the dog’s eyes, remembered seeing the alert stare blur int
o glazed emptiness.
Ally’s eyes must be glassy like Toto’s, her gaze unfocused and unblinking.
Hard to face that fact. Hard to make it real. But there was something worse.
He would survive.
There it was: the blunt and simple truth. He would go on. He would put all this behind him. He would spend his wife’s money and after a time, rarely think of Ally at all.
Cain was a monster, but he was not the only one. Charles knew that now. He had peered deep inside himself, and at his core there was nothing. Simply nothing.
An earthquake, even the detonation of a bomb, seemed of trifling consequence when compared to that.
42
Trish didn’t know how long she huddled with Ally, whether it was thirty seconds or thirty minutes, but finally the noise diminished and the debris settled.
Her ears rang. Her cheeks were wet with tears. Her whole body shook. She remembered sitting on the beach near the dock, racked by shivers and nausea. This was like that.
Come on, keep it together. No medals for quitters.
She decided she was okay. She wasn’t going to faint or vomit or fall apart.
And she and Ally were alive. They’d made it. They’d escaped from the cellar, survived a bomb, for God’s sake, an actual bomb.
Good job, Robinson.
The voice in her mind was Pete Wald’s. She wondered if he had been grinning when he said it-that smug, patronizing grin.
She didn’t think so.
Lifting her head, she looked around, beaming her flashlight through a gray sea of dust.
The ray, fanning wide, illuminated a limestone gallery opening on negotiable passages to her right and left. Winding conduits, lumpy and folded, glossy in the light, impenetrably dark elsewhere. She thought of a TV documentary she’d seen: a fiber-optic camera inserted into somebody’s digestive track, snaking through intestinal corridors.
In the belly of the beast, she thought, not knowing quite where the words came from or what they meant.
She felt weirdly isolated from her environment-deafened by the blast, barely able to see in the dusty gloom, smelling and tasting only the chalk that clogged her nostrils and mouth. With her hands manacled, she was restricted even in what she could reach out and touch. She was a prisoner in some bizarre dream without the reality of physical sensation.
Except for pain. No shortage of that. Pain in her every protesting muscle-and her left ankle, injured in the fall-and her back, slashed by one of the hailstones.
Not really hailstones, of course. But what
She aimed the flashlight lower. Littering the cavern floor were chunks of concrete and dislodged limestone, intermingled with sticks of blackened wood. Remnants of the Ashcroft heirlooms, glowing feebly, logs in a hearth.
And everywhere, strewn like seeds, were fragments of metal.
She picked up the closest one, dropped it instantly. Red hot.
It appeared to be part of a knife’s serrated blade, mangled by the blast and by multiple ricochets.
Only a few had trickled into the cave through the drainage hole, but the things must have been thick as locusts in the cellar.
If she and Ally had been up there …
Pincushions. Dartboards.
Handcuffed, she couldn’t reach behind her to examine the incision across her shoulder blades. But she hadn’t lost any mobility, so apparently no major muscles had been severed.
Rest would be nice right now, a long rest after a hot shower and something cold to drink.
No such luck. Despite exhaustion, despite the pain making multiple claims on her body, she had to keep going, had to get away from here-before Cain arrived to confirm his kills.
She turned toward Ally, curled like a shrimp, floured in dust. Cuts crosshatched her legs and arms.
Gently she shook the girl alert. Ally stirred, saying something, but Trish couldn’t hear it over the clangor in her head. Squatting close, she read Ally’s lips.
What happened
Trish formed one word in reply: Bomb.
Ally nodded, registering no reaction.
You okay Trish mouthed.
A shaky nod. You
Trish’s ankle hurt worse than before, but she merely showed a tight smile, then indicated with a sideways motion of her head that it was time to go.
Awkwardly they got to their feet, Ally rubbing dust from her eyes.
Trish tested her ankle. Though tender, it supported her. The ligaments had been stretched but probably not torn. She could walk.
Digging in her pocket, she produced the compass she’d taken from the boat. The handcuffs made it impossible for her to beam the flashlight at the dial.
She handed both the compass and flash to Ally, mouthing: Northwest.
Ally had said the other well lay in that direction. The girl turned in a half circle, then pointed toward the right-hand passage
Trish: You lead. I’ll follow.
Ally managed a smile. That’s a switch.
They walked single file. Entering the passage, Trish struck her head on a low stalactite. Just what she needed. More pain. No wonder spelunkers wore helmets.
Her bad ankle and the uneven floor made every step a challenge. She had to crab along the wall to keep her balance. The limestone was rough and yellowish brown and crusted with muck that slimed her uniform in gray-green stripes. She was already so dirty that an additional layer of filth hardly mattered.
At a bend in the corridor, she glanced back, alert to the possibility of pursuit. No one was there.
Cain wouldn’t give up, though. She was sure of that.
43
In the aftermath, a surreal stillness.
Tyler sat on his haunches on the grass, breathing hard, listening to the night. Somewhere in the distance a coyote bayed, the weird ululant cries like the wail of a ghost. An Arizona sound, stirring childhood memories that left him feeling briefly lost and old.
“God damn.” That was Gage, kneeling beside him. The kid’s mouth hung open, his jaw loose-hinged as a puppet’s.
Flakes of stucco began dropping off the side wall onto the grass. The exterior door listed, then fell with a thump.
Clap of gloved hands. Cain’s voice, brusquely businesslike: “That’s all she wrote.”
The four of them stood slowly. Tyler glanced at Lilith. Her lips wore a cold sheen; her eyes were dazed with pleasure. He wouldn’t be surprised if she’d had herself an orgasm-a little bang to complement the big one.
The police radio at her hip squawked madly as the dispatcher named Lou reported a burst of 911 calls. People in the foothills were phoning in news of a loud noise and a sharp jolt.
“Damn,” Gage muttered, addressing everyone and no one. “The cops’ll be on us now.”
“No, they won’t.” Cain shrugged. “Listen to what’s coming in.”
Lou was reading off the calls’ points of origin. “Dodson Lane … Hibiscus Terrace … East Pinewood Drive …”
“That covers a ten-mile radius,” Cain said with satisfaction. “It’ll take our friends in blue all night to pinpoint the source, if they ever do. Now let’s move.”
Gage obeyed, voicing no more objections.
On the doorstep Cain paused, coughing as curls of gray smoke scarfed his face. “Better put on your masks,” he said, plucking his own from his back pocket. “You’ll breathe easier.”
Tyler obeyed, donning his black ski mask, then followed Cain inside.
Just across the threshold, Tyler aimed the nozzle of his dry-chemical canister at the fuming remains of the cellar door, scattered on the floor like so much driftwood. Through his boots’ heavy soles he could feel the heat of the floor tiles, buckled and cracked, peeling back in scorched flaps.
“Shut off the extinguisher,” Lilith said abruptly.
“Hey, I’m just doing my-“
“Shut it off.”
Grudgingly he silenced the hiss of aerosolized powder, then turned to Lilith. She was frozen in a pose of listening, the police
radio in her hand.
“Eight-one. Four-Adam-eight-one … you guys still code seven We need all available units…. Come in, four-Adam-eight-one …”
Cain swore. “Tremor probably set off every burglar alarm in town. Cops are running out of warm bodies to answer the calls.”
“What do we do” Lilith asked.
The gray eyes in the mask’s slits favored her with a cool stare. “You respond … Officer Robinson. I’ll tell you what to say. In the meantime-Tyler, Gage, make sure the closet’s secure. The prisoners will be going crazy. Try to quiet them down.”
With a nod, Tyler moved off, Gage at his back.
Quickly they made their way through the kitchen, circling around the fallen refrigerator and the strewn contents of the cabinets. Cain’s black duffel lay on the floor, flaps open, gear spilling out like drool from a panting mouth.
Remarkably little smoke in here. Most of it had already exited via the side doorway, fanned by the breeze from the kitchen window.
They cut through the dining area into the hall of the east wing. It had been lit by fluorescent panels, but the tubes had shattered, and the hallway was dark.
This part of the house lay directly above the main force of the blast. Damage was extensive. Horizontal cracks ran like jagged graphs through the walls. The doorway of Ally’s bedroom had collapsed, the lintel fallen, studs leaning drunkenly.
In the master suite, both bedside lamps had broken. The only illumination was a spill of light from the bathroom, where twin sconces over the sink remained intact. The furnishings had been tossed like laundry in a spin cycle, but there was a clear path to the closet.
Tyler and Gage crossed the suite. On the floor a telephone, jostled off the hook when a nightstand toppled, was shrieking like a wounded thing. Impatiently Gage ripped loose the handset and pitched it into a corner.
“Is somebody there” Philip Danforth’s voice, edgy with panic.
Tyler reached the closet, checked the hinges. “Yeah, it’s okay, it’s okay.” He used the same tone of reassurance that had worked on Gage when the kid was losing control.
