Brood XIX (15 page)

Before the man could turn back to him,
Carver pulled the snubnose from beneath his waistband, raised it,
and fired. He caught a glimpse of the man's profile, silhouetted by
the light from the screen, as he flipped backwards over the desk, a
pinwheel of blood following him from the spouting hole in his
ruined chest.

Carver lunged from the chair and leapt up
onto the desk, training the revolver on the heap of humanity
crumpled against the base of his bookcase. The man shuddered and
tried to rise. Carver dropped down beside him and kicked both of
the guns away. He was just about to drag the man back around to the
front of the desk when he heard a soft voice behind him.

He turned to face the monitor on the bloody
desktop.

There was a hiss of static, a droning
monotone interrupted by the sound of labored breathing.

"Please," the voice whispered, barely
discernible above the din. "Mommy... Please..."

A girl was sprawled on a filthy concrete
floor, naked save the brown skein of refuse and blood coating her
body. Her tangled blonde hair covered her face, framed by both
hands, still feebly trying to push her up from the ground. A thick
chain trailed from the manacle on her ankle to an eyebolt on the
nicotine-yellow concrete block wall.

A single overhead bulb illuminated the room,
casting a dirty manila glare over everything, turning the spatters
on the walls and the dried pools on the floor black.

"Jesus," Carver gasped.

There were no windows in the girl's prison.
Her respirations were already becoming jerky, agonal. She was
asphyxiating.

"Where is she?"

A burbling of fluid metamorphosed into
crying.

"Where is she?" Carver shouted.

The man whimpered. Blood drained from the
corners of his mouth. Trembling, he tried to stand, but collapsed
again.

Carver grabbed him by the shirt, lifting him
from the ground and slamming him against the shelves. Blood
exploded past the man's lips, hot against Carver's face. "Where is
she?"

The man's head fell forward onto Carver's
shoulder.

"You'll never find her in time," he rasped.
The burbling tapered to a hiss as heat streamed down Carver's back,
and then finally to nothing at all.

Carver eased down the stairs. They were
sticky and made the sound of peeling masking tape each time he
lifted a foot. There was no sound from ahead. The only light was a
pale stain creeping along the concrete floor at the bottom from
beneath a rusted iron door with an X riveted across it.

Footsteps stampeded behind and above
him.

Carver licked his lips and seated his finger
firmly on the trigger. He leaned his shoulder against the door and
prepared to grab the handle, but the pressure caused the door to
open inward with a squeal of the hinges, allowing more light to
spill onto the landing. Cringing against the stench, he shoved the
door and ducked into the small chamber, swinging his pistol from
left to right.

Twenty-two hours and twenty-three
minutes.

He had never stood a chance.

The laptop monitor to his left, balanced on
top of a workbench crusted with blood, still showed the image of
the girl collapsed on the floor, and the web camera mounted above
still faced into the room, but it had all been a ruse.

Beneath the harsh brass glare, he lowered
the Beretta and stepped deeper into the cell. In the middle of the
floor where the girl had once been was a stack of body parts, a
pyramid of severed appendages built upon her torso, her head
balanced precariously on top, facing the doorway. Her lank hair
stuck to the blood on her face, eyelids peeled back in an
expression of accusation, lips pulped and split over fractured
teeth.

She'd been dead before the monster had even
revealed himself to Carver, her agonizing death previously recorded
and broadcast after the fact.

Carver averted his eyes from the carnage as
the sounds of voices and pounding treads filled the room.

A full-length mirror had been recently
affixed to the gore-stained gray wall directly ahead. A single word
was painted in blood near the top.

Killer.

Beneath the word, he stared at his own
reflection.

Sinagua Ruins

36 Miles Northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona

Kajika Dodge followed the buzzing sound to a
small patch of shade beneath a creosote bush where the diamondback
waited for him, testing his scent in darting flicks of its black
tongue. It acknowledged the burlap sack at his side, ripening with
the limp carcasses of its brethren, with a show of its vibrating
rattle.

No matter. Soon enough it would join
them.

Kajika readjusted his grip on his pinning
stick.

The rattler seized the opportunity and shot
diagonally out onto the blazing sand away from him.

He dropped the bag and with a single
practiced stride was in position to drive the forked end of his
stick onto the viper's neck when it vanished into a circular hole
in the earth.

Kajika could only stare. A short length of
three-inch PVC pipe protruded from the ground. The white plastic
was smooth and unscarred, brand new. He wandered through this
section of the desert at least once a week. It was a spiritual
pilgrimage of sorts, an opportunity to pay homage to the desert
from which his lifeblood had sprung. The pipe was definitely a
recent addition, the only manmade interruption in the otherwise
smooth sand.

Why would someone wander out into the middle
of the Sonoran, a solid half-mile from the nearest dirt road, only
to shove a length of pipe into the ground?

He crouched and pulled the plastic tube out
of the earth. The sand immediately collapsed in its stead. He
brushed it away with the prongs, revealing a shallow system of
roots and a warren of darkness beneath.

The sand slowly slid back into place.

This was all wrong.

Wiping the streams of sweat from beneath the
thick braid on his neck, he surveyed the landscape of golden desert
painted by creosote and sage in choppy green and blue brushstrokes.
Beyond rose a rugged backdrop of stratified buttes, red as the
blood of his ancestors. Their spirits still inhabited the Sonoran
Desert, lingering in the memories of crumbling stone walls and
scattered potsherds.

He lowered his black eyes again to the
ground. Those weren't roots. Not six feet from the shrub.

Turning the stick around, he shoved the
duct-taped handle into the nearly invisible hole until it lodged
against something solid and levered it upward. A tent of what
appeared to be leather-wrapped sticks broke through the sand,
smooth and tan.

His instincts told him to grab his sack and
head back to the truck. Forget about the diamondback and the odd
length of pipe. His mother had named him Kajika, he who walks
without sound, as a constant reminder that there were things in
life from which he would be better served to silently slink
away.

But those weren't roots.

He kicked the sand aside with the toe of his
boot, summoning a cloud of dust that clung to his already dirty
jeans and flannel shirt, thickening the sweat on his brick
face.

With a sigh, he unholstered the canteen from
his hip and drew a long swig, closing his eyes and reveling in the
cool sensation trickling down his throat.

"Couldn't have left well enough alone," he
said aloud, grabbing his bag and stick and heading back toward his
truck, where there was a shovel waiting in the cluttered bed.

No, that wasn't a tangle of roots. Not
unless roots could be articulated with joints.

The sun had fallen to the western horizon,
bleeding the desert scarlet by the time he climbed back out of the
pit. His undershirt was soaked, his flannel draped over a clump of
sage. He dragged the back of his hand across his forehead and
slapped the sweat to the ground. Strands of long ebon hair had
wriggled loose from the braid to cling to his cheeks. Night would
descend soon enough, bringing with it the much anticipated
chill.

The rhythmic hooting of an owl drifted from
its distant hollow in a cereus cactus.

Tipping back the canteen, he drained the
last of the warm water and cast it aside, unable to wrench his gaze
from the decayed old bundle he had exhumed. Tattered fabric bound
its contents into an egg shape, a desiccated knee protruding from a
frayed tear, exposing the acutely flexed lower extremity he had
initially mistaken for roots, the mummified flesh taut over the
bones. Even though the rest was still shrouded in an ancient
blanket tacky with bodily dissolution, it didn't take a genius to
imagine what the leg was attached to.

"Burnin' daylight," he said at last, sliding
back down into the hole.

He slashed the bundle with the shovel, the
sickly-smelling cloth parting easily for the dull blade. The foul
breath of decomposition belched from within.

"Moses in a rowboat," he gasped, tugging his
undershirt up over his nose and mouth, biting it to hold it in
place.

Casting the shovel aside, he leaned over the
bundle and grasped either side of the torn blanket. He could now
clearly see two legs, both bent sharply, pinned side by side.

The stench of death was nauseating.

He jerked his hands apart with the sound of
ripping worn carpet from a floorboard, the shredded blanket falling
away to betray its contents.

A gaunt face leered back at him, teeth bared
from shriveled lips, nose collapsed, eyes hollow, save the concave
straps of the dried eyelids. Its long black hair was knotted and
tangled, fallen away in patches to expose the brown cranium. It had
been folded into tight fetal position, its thighs pinning its
crossed arms to its chest. Lengths of rope, hairy with decay, bound
the body across the shins and around the back, tied so forcefully
the dried skin had peeled away from beneath. There was no muscle
left, no adipose tissue. Only leathered skin and knobby bone.

Kajika was overcome by a sense of reverence.
Could this possibly be one of his ancestors? Could the very blood
that had crusted and rotted into the fabric and putrid sand now
flow through his veins?

He felt the spirits of the desert all around
him, dancing in the precious moment when the moon materialized from
the fading stain of the sunset and countless stars winked into
being.

Movement, a mere shift in the shadows,
dragged his attention to the corpse a single heartbeat before a
wave of diamondbacks poured out of the hollow abdomen where they
had recently made their den and washed over his boots.

INNOCENTS LOST

A young girl vanishes in broad daylight on
her tenth birthday. Her father, FBI Special Agent Phil Preston of
the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Team, devotes his life to
finding her and
discovers a pattern in a recent string of abductions.
Dr. Les Grant leads a group of graduate students into the Wyoming
wilderness in search of an unidentified Native American medicine
wheel photographed by an anonymous hiker. Instead,
they stumble upon a macabre tableau of suffering.
Fremont County Sheriff Keith Dandridge finds himself right at the
heart of the mystery when twenty-seven bodies are disinterred in
the Wind River Range at the westernmost edge of his jurisdiction,
with the promise of more to come.
All the while, an unknown evil is summoning the men to its killing
grounds, where the remains of the lost innocents are left to
rot...and a fate far worse than death awaits them.

(An excerpt from the terrifying novel from
Delirium Books.)

June 20
^th

Six Years Ago

Evergreen, Colorado

"Happy Birthday to yooouuu."

The song ended with laughter and
applause.

"Make a wish, honey," Jessie said. She
raised the camera and focused on the child who was her spitting
image: chestnut hair streaked blonde by the sun, eyes the blue of
the sky on the most perfect summer day, and a radiant smile that
showed just a touch of the upper gums.

Savannah wore the dress she had picked out
specifically for her party, black satin with an indigo iridescence
that shifted with the light. She rose to her knees on the chair,
leaned over the cake, and blew out the ring of ten candles.

The camera flashed and the group of girls
surrounding her clapped again.

"What did you wish for?" Preston asked.

"You know I can't tell you, Dad.
Sheesh."

"Why don't you girls run outside and play
while I serve the cake and ice cream," Jessie said. "And after that
we can open
presents
."

"All right!" Savannah hopped out of the
chair and merged into the herd of girls funneling out the back door
into the yard. More laughter trailed in their wake.

Preston crossed the kitchen and closed the
door behind them.

"So are all eight of them really spending
the night here?" he asked, glancing out the window over the sink as
he removed a stack of plates from the cupboard. The girls made a
beeline toward the wooden jungle gym. One had already reached the
ladder to the tree house portion and another slid down the
slide.

"Do you really think the answer will change
if you ask enough times, Phil?" She took the plates from her
husband, set them on the table, and began to cut the cake.
"Besides, they'll be sleeping in the family room with a pile of
movies. The most we'll hear from down the hall is a few giggles.
Could you grab the ice cream from the freezer?"

"So what you're saying is they'll be
distracted." Preston eased up behind his wife, cupped her hips, and
leaned into her.