The Catacombs (A Psychological Suspense Horror Thriller Novel) (39 page)

After discovering that the doors of the
church were locked, Katja and I had no option but to return to the
nave—where Zolan was waiting for us. He aimed the pistol at me.

I froze, adrenaline roaring through my veins
as I waited for him to squeeze the trigger.

“Papa!” Katja cried, stepping in front of me
protectively. “Don’t kill him! He’s my friend!”

“Your friend?” Zolan chuffed. “He only used
you to escape.”

“He told me the truth about Paris! Something
you’ve kept hidden from me my entire life.”

“I did that for your protection, my mouse.
This world is not for you.”

She touched her face. “Did you do this to
me?”

“No, of course not.” He shook his head, and
he genuinely looked pained. “Of course not.”

“Then who did?”

“Your grandfather. He was a sick man. He did
that to all your uncles and aunts. I was too late to save you, but
I did everything I could for you. I raised you like my
daughter.”

“Like? I’m
not
your daughter?”

“This isn’t the place for such a discussion,
Katja,” he said curtly. “Now, if you want Will to live, you will do
as I say. Do you understand me?”

She looked at me for guidance.

“We should do as he says,” I told her.

“Smart decision, Will.” Zolan waved the
pistol. “I want you both ahead of me, get going, that way.”

He directed us back to the museum. My mind
was racing to figure out what he had planned. The best I could
surmise: he was either taking us to the catacombs again, where he
would kill me, or he was taking us to the dead guards, where he
would kill me. Neither option, of course, was acceptable, but there
was little I could do. I was sure if I tried anything he wouldn’t
hesitate to put a bullet in my back. I said, “You’re not going to
get away with this.”

“With what?” Zolan replied.

“You killed two guards.”

“Three.”

I swallowed. That had been my last hope—that
the third security guard and Danièle were still alive.
Nevertheless, I hadn’t put much faith in this, for if they were,
they would have heard the gunshots and returned by now. “And
Danièle?” I asked, needing to know for certain what happened to
her.

“Keep walking.”

“Is she dead?”

He didn’t answer me.

Katja glanced over her shoulder. “Are we
returning to the homestead, Papa?”

“That’s correct, my love.”

“But I haven’t seen Paris yet!”

“I will still show it to you.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Do you promise?”

“Cross my heart.”

Katja faced forward again, and I thought she
might be smiling. Her innocence, her blind trust, her forgiveness,
were nearly incomprehensible to witness.

Suddenly a person darted from the shadows
thirty feet ahead of us. I couldn’t make out who it was in the dim
lighting.

Zolan shouted and fired the pistol. The
round shattered the glass of a display case.

I didn’t think, I acted on instinct,
spinning around and charging him, my shoulders lowered, trying to
make the smallest target possible.

He fired at me. I felt the bullet whizz past
my left arm. A second later I drove a shoulder into his gut. We
crashed to the floor together. I lunged at him, trying to bite his
face. He rammed the butt of the pistol against my skull.

Everything went hazy as I slid to the
floor.

Jörg!
Zolan thought.
It was only
Jörg!
And who was that who followed him? Karl? And Lorenz and
Leo and Odo and Franz and Erich… They were all there now, in the
distance, all of them running around like headless chickens,
wailing in excitement and fright.

They were ruining everything.

“Go back!” Zolan ordered them in German.
“Jörg! Go back right now!”

He glanced Zolan’s way but didn’t obey him.
Instead he shook his femur in the air, either in triumph or
rebellion, then he was gone, around a corner, howling and smashing
display cases.

Zolan fought his panic and thought:
There’s still time
. He would have to skip his tryst with
Danièle, and he would not be able to give Katja a proper goodbye
and a painless death, but there was still time to burn the
homestead and be gone by the time it was discovered.

He leveled the pistol at Will, who was
folded into a crumpled heap at his feet.

“No!” Katja screamed, coming toward him.

Clenching his jaw tight, saying a silent
prayer for her soul and his own, Zolan swung the gun at his adopted
daughter and squeezed the trigger. The round struck her in the
stomach, stopping her as surely as if she had hit an invisible
wall. She fell to her side.

“I’m sorry, my mouse,” he whispered. “I’m so
sorry—”

His knees disappeared beneath him.

The gunshot cleared the darkness from my
vision, and for a split second I waited for the pain that would
surely follow. When it didn’t come, I realized I hadn’t been shot.
Then I noticed Katja, a few yards away, motionless on her side,
like a wilted rose.

I brought my knees to my chest and kicked my
legs out. My feet smashed into Zolan’s kneecaps. He cried out and
fell on top of me. The pistol struck the tiles and clattered away
from us.

Zolan tried to reach for it. I locked my
legs around his torso, but I could do little else with my hands
secured behind my back. He swiveled toward me and kicked me in the
groin. I groaned and released him.

He lumbered to his feet, took two lurching
steps, swiped up the pistol.

Scowling, he aimed the barrel at my
chest.

Danièle burst from the stairwell and saw
Zolan twenty feet away, about to shoot Will. She raised the gun and
squeezed the trigger three times. One of the rounds clipped Zolan
in the shoulder, spinning him around so he faced her. She squeezed
the trigger three more times. A bullet smashed through his teeth,
blowing away half his face in the process, and he collapsed
lifelessly to the floor. She ran to Will. Katja was next to him, on
her side.

Had Zolan killed her? The monster!

“Will!” Danièle said, rolling him over so
she could access the handcuffs. Her hands were shaking so badly it
took her several goes before she could get the cuffs unlocked.

“Katja…” Will said, crawling toward Katja.
He held the girl’s head in his hands. “Katja?” he repeated.
“Katja!”

Her eyes fluttered open.

I don’t know how I managed it, I’d never felt
so weak in my life, but I scooped Katja up in my arms and sprinted
through the museum, searching frantically for an exit. After
several wrong turns and dead ends I discovered a door that led
outside.

Dawn was breaking, the sky an otherworldly
red streaked with orange and lighting to pink in places. Across a
sprawling, landscaped garden rose a large concrete building that
had to be the hospital.

“Sky…” Katja mumbled.

I looked at her. “What?”

Her brilliant eyes were lidded but intense,
staring past me. “Sky…”

“Hold on, Katja,” I said. “We’re going to
get you help.”

“Sky…” she said a final time.

Her eyes glassed over.

“No!” I said, and ran toward the
hospital.

Five Dead in France in Val-de-Grâce Murder
Mystery (LIVE UPDATES)

Officials in France are scratching their
heads after five people were killed at the Val-de-Grâce complex in
central Paris, which includes a modern military hospital, a baroque
church, and a former Benedictine convent that has since been
converted into a museum dedicated to the history of military
medicine.

The killings occurred in the museum.

Nine suspects have been arrested, but no
charges have been made at this point. Speaking to reporters, a
military spokeswoman said that all suspects are being held at the
hospital to receive medical treatment for unspecified injuries.

According to one witness at the hospital,
the suspects were “horribly disfigured” and “acted like mindless
animals,” stoking wild speculation on social media sites that the
French military may have been conducting covert human genetic
engineering experiments at the hospital.

This was immediately dismissed by a leading
military official, who told French media outlets that it was
“absolutely not true” and “ridiculous.” He also dismissed claims
that the killings were an act of terrorism. However, he refused to
comment on a possible motive.

At the moment museum officials do not
believe anything was stolen from the collection. The museum and
church, which are popular tourist attractions, will be closed to
the public until further notice.

1:54 PM – 05/05/2014

At an afternoon press
conference, Interior Minister Alain Villechaize confirmed that the
three soldiers killed were members of the
National
Gendarmerie
, a branch of the French armed forces
in charge of public safety with police duties among the civilian
population.

Law enforcement officials say they are
focusing their attention on a French national named Zolan Roux, one
of two civilians who were killed at the museum. Mr. Roux, a welfare
recipient, was unemployed at the time of his death. He had
previously been convicted twice on first-degree murder charges and
had served more than twenty years in state prison.

French news agencies, quoting sources close
to the investigation, reported that Mr. Roux and his accomplices
gained access to the facility via the catacombs. The network of
ancient quarries beneath Paris have been closed off to the public
for decades, but police have been locked in a game of cat-and mouse
with underground urban explorers, who enter the tunnels illegally.
Although once commonplace, most access points connecting the
tunnels and public buildings have been sealed off, and it is
unusual that one would go unnoticed in the basement of what is
classified as a military facility. A French intelligence service
has called for a complete security review of all of their military
facilities.

According to the French
newspaper
Le Monde
, the intruders were armed with human femurs, presumably
obtained in the catacombs, which is home to more than six million
dead, and not firearms like some media channels have reported.
“There is no evidence that they had their own pistols in their
possessions,” a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defense said.
“Instead, it is believed that Mr. Roux gained access to a guard’s
handgun…and after that he began shooting.”

Despite the identification of alleged gunman
Zolan Roux, many questions still remain, namely what prompted him
and his accomplices to break into the museum in the first
place.

11:45 AM – 06/05/2014

More details have emerged in the
investigation into the killings at Val-de-Grâce early Wednesday
morning.

Authorities have now confirmed that Zolan
Roux and the other intruders accessed the
former-abbey-turned-medical-museum through an underground tunnel
that connected to the catacombs.

After a preliminary exploration into the
tunnel, investigators believe that Mr. Roux and his accomplices
lived permanently in the catacombs for what Paris public prosecutor
François Duris says might have be a “substantial amount of time.”
He added that investigators are working around the clock to learn
more about the suspects’ motivations, backgrounds, and family
environments. He also hinted that the death toll in this ongoing
mystery could be higher than the five initially reported.

These revelations have led some news pundits
to make comparisons to the “mole people” said to inhabit the
abandoned subway tunnels and sewer systems below New York City.
French police are downplaying this comparison amidst fear the
sensationalism of the evolving story could encourage more people to
illegally visit the catacombs.

On the French television
channel i-Télé,
police captain Vincent Reno
warned potential adventurers to “think twice about entering
the underground” and that “they did so at their own
risk.”

I was seated at a table in Manhattan’s
Chinatown McDonald’s, sipping the dregs of my large cappuccino and
thinking about Paris.

My mind drifted to those days often. I could
be doing anything—standing in line at the bank, sitting in front of
my computer at work, taking a shower—and then I would find myself
in an imaginary conversation with Danièle, or running through the
dark from Zolan, or listening to Katja tell me about the characters
in her books.

It was crazy that those two days I spent in
the catacombs could consume my thoughts so completely as to reduce
the previous twenty-five years of my life to a footnote.

Time wasn’t helping much. It’d been six
months since I left Paris, and I wasn’t sure I was any better now
than I was then. I still had nightmares. I couldn’t sleep without
nightlights. And I was talking to myself more and more. I wasn’t
one of those guys you saw shuffling down the street cackling to
themselves one moment and screaming obscenities the next. But when
I was alone I’d occasionally find myself mumbling something that
sometimes made sense and sometimes didn’t. It would usually only be
a word or three, such as “stupid” or “why the fuck,” but it was
occurring with enough regularity to start concerning me.