Authors: Jeff Gunhus
Huckley pushed Lauren to the ground and blocked out the light as he stood over her. He pointed over to one of the horse stalls and grunted for her to move. When she hesitated, Huckley brought the heel of his boot down on her hip, followed by another kick into her rib cage. The pain flooded through her. A voice came from further back in the barn. Janney. He was shouting at Huckley to take it easy.
She gasped for air. The last kick had knocked the breath from her. A dull pain spread from her side and radiated through her torso. A broken rib, she thought, maybe a couple of them.
The blows caught her off guard, not just because of the pain but because of the suddenness of the violence. She always knew she was in danger, especially since Huckley’s instructions to the young deputy and the last ten minutes of his leering glances at her, but she held out hope that her deal with Dr. Mansfield would save her. She wondered if the doctor had changed his mind. The optimism she had felt only minutes earlier -- that she at least had bought her daughter some more time -- was gone, kicked out of her by Huckley’s boot. Then again, Dr. Mansfield did say he couldn’t look weak in front of the other men. She clung to the hope this was all part of the act.
She played the supplicant and crawled across the wood floor on her hands and knees, sliding on the thin layer of straw that covered the barn floor. The pungent odor of animal feces and machine oil filled her nostrils. She ignored the smell and searched the floor for a weapon. A screwdriver. A nail. Anything sharp. But there was nothing.
Huckley kicked the bottom of her foot to get her moving faster. Once in the stall she turned and huddled against the wall as far from Huckley as she could get. He grinned and swaggered closer. She noticed for the first time that his belt was unbuckled. As he walked he slowly pulled at one end and slid the belt from his jeans. His tongue darted out from between his lips and flicked the air in a crude sexual gesture.
Huckley’s pale face leered over her as if breathing in her fear. He threaded the belt back through the buckle and cinched it together. The resulting noose went over Lauren’s head and Huckley pulled until it was snug on her throat. He stretched the other end of the belt high up on the wall where a thick nail stuck out from the wood. Forcing the head of the nail through the belt hole, it created a taut hangman’s noose that choked Lauren unless she stood up straight and motionless. Huckley pulled her hands behind her back and snapped handcuffs around her wrists. He stood back to inspect his work.
“Think you can handle this?” he said to the deputy.
Sorenson stepped into Lauren’s field of vision. His eyes tracked over her body, looking everywhere except her eyes. His interests were elsewhere.
“Yeah, I can take care of this.”
Dr. Mansfield walked by on the edge of her peripheral vision. She tried to turn to look in his direction but the noose around her neck tightened at the movement. She heard his voice though, “Grab the girl and let’s go.”
Huckley patted the deputy on the back and gave Lauren a wink. He wished he could sense her thoughts, sure that they would be a delicious mix of terror and hatred. But like always, the Source produced a background of white noise that made it impossible for him to sense anything else. He had to make do with the look on her face as opposed to the content of her mind. Not quite as satisfying, but still fun to look at. He walked over to Sarah, once again sedated after her earlier outburst, and hefted her off the floor. He carried her under his arm like she was a duffle bag, her arms hanging limply to the ground.
Lauren lunged toward her daughter only to have the belt noose tighten around her neck. She backed off, the belt cutting off her air supply. She wanted to scream at the three men as they boarded the elevator platform but she could only stomp the floor in frustration. She twisted her hands against the handcuffs until she felt the warm slickness of blood cover them.
But nothing she did stopped the men taking her daughter. Huckley reached up to a control box and the elevator sank into the shaft. She squinted through her tears to get one last look at her daughter. All she could see was her blond hair hanging down in front of her face, her body pressed against Huckley’s torso. As the elevator platform cleared the lip of the shaft, Lauren forced a scream from her constricted windpipe and pulled at her bindings again.
The belt cinched tighter on her throat. She felt the heat build in her face as the blood accumulated. Black shadows formed walls on all sides of her vision. The shadows grew darker and pushed toward the center of her sight.
She knew she was going to pass out, and if she did the belt would strangle her. In a sudden moment of clarity she realized she no longer cared. She didn’t want to live. She couldn’t explain why, but she believed somehow her daughter knew Jack was dead. Dr. Mansfield’s promise now seemed empty and she couldn’t bear to imagine the things about to be done to her daughter. All it would take was to let her feet slip out from beneath her and it would all be over. No more pain. No more terror. Just darkness.
She leaned forward into the tension of the belt. Her tunnel vision narrowed until only a blurry patch of light remained.
Then a free fall.
Thump
. Her body hit the floor. The pain invaded her comfortable dark cocoon of semi-consciousness and filled it with the stark light from the barn’s halogen lamps. The pressure around her neck disappeared and she sucked down mouthfuls of air.
Her vision cleared with every breath. With her hands still cuffed, she sprawled awkwardly on the floor trying to make sense of what had happened. In a rush of hope, she guessed that the belt had broken, or maybe the nail had come loose from the wall. It was her chance. But she had to get away before the deputy came back.
She rocked side-to-side to get the leverage to stand up, but as she did so strong hands pushed down on the middle of her back. “Hold on,” Sorenson said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
She kicked and twisted her body to get away, but the man was on top of her, holding her down. He was too strong. She couldn’t move. She screamed. Over and over. She screamed from the despair of losing her family. She screamed at the animal pawing at her wrists and shouting at her. She screamed until tears flowed from her eyes like blood from a wound.
The few seconds of hope given her by Dr. Mansfield dissipated like a cruel dream. There was no escape. There was no way to help her little girl. She let her body go slack, exhausted from a fight she knew she couldn’t win, resigned to the inevitable conclusion to her nightmare, so full of self-loathing for not protecting her daughter that she welcomed the humiliation about to be inflicted on her body. She stopped screaming and realized the man on top of her had been talking the entire time. She stopped struggling and finally listened to what he was saying, then burst into tears at the meaning of his words.
Jack crawled over to the opening in the rock wall. The sound from inside the structure had changed. The crunching of rocks stopped. A soft rasping sigh took its place. Jack’s first thought was that air was moving through the hole in the rock, as if the internal pressure were equalizing with the outside cave. But the sigh had an unnatural cadence, like the murmuring intonations of a dying man’s last words.
That’s what the sound was, it was language. There was a person locked inside the structure.
Checking quickly to make sure no one was coming, Jack whispered into the hole. “Hello. Can you hear me?”
“We need to get out of here. The others had to hear the gunshots,” Lonetree said.
Jack ignored him. The rasping sound grew stronger. It seemed like the person inside moved closer to the hole.
“Can you understand me?” Jack said.
An eyeball appeared at the other end of the hole. The sight of it made Jack recoil. Even with the dim amount of reflected light from the halogens that entered the opening, Jack could see the eye was deformed. It was a bulging mass of exploded blood vessels and cataracts. The eyelids were gone, leaving a wide-eyed, unblinking stare.
Jack leaned forward, peering into the shadows of the hole. “What did they do to you?” he whispered.
A shrieking howl erupted from inside the structure. More animal than human.
Lonetree pulled Jack away from the wall, placing himself closest to the structure. “We have to go,” he said.
An arm shot out from the hole and claws ripped deep into his skin. Lonetree cried out in pain and grabbed his shoulder. His gun flew from his hand and skittered across the rock floor. Acting on reflex, Lonetree jumped backward. By the time the creature’s arm made its next pass he was well out of reach. The arm continued to cut wildly through the air, seeking out more flesh to tear.
Jack stepped back, horrified at what he saw. There was no skin on the arm stretching out from the hole. Only exposed muscles, soft with decay, wrapped around yellow bones. Black talons extended from the fingers, clicking against each other in their frenzied search. Blood oozed from veins ripped open by the rough edges of the hole. There was no human prisoner inside the stone structure. There was a monster.
The first bullet hit the rock wall next to Jack’s head. Sharp streaks of pain stung his face as rock shards ripped into his skin. Lonetree shoved him and he tumbled forward. He landed on the ground just as he heard the second shot burn the air next to his ear.
“Stay down,” Lonetree hissed. He crawled forward on his stomach using the uneven floor as cover. He retrieved his gun, spun around and looked for a target. “You all right?” Lonetree whispered.
“Yeah, did you see where they were?”
“No. You?”
Jack shook his head and leaned his shoulder into the boulder they were using for protection. He thought the shots came from beyond the lights in front of them but he wasn’t sure. For all he knew they were surrounded and guns were trained on his head as he sat there making a target of himself. They had to run, get out of the light. At least among the rows of stone cages they would have a chance.
“Jack, I know it’s you,” Janney called out. “Why don’t you come on out before someone gets hurt?”
Lonetree tugged at his arm to get him to move. Jack positioned himself so he was ready to scramble from behind the rock, his breath coming in quick, ragged pants. He was about to surge forward when he heard a sound that sucked the air out from him and made him sag back behind the rock.
The scream came from the other side of the lights. Terror translated into a single, trembling high-pitched note. It coursed through the still air of the cave, echoes layering on top of echoes until the terrible sound came at him from all directions. The scream left no doubt that the source of the sound was in pain. But still Jack held his ground. He didn’t run away, but neither did he run to help. He sat with his back against the rock, his body shaking, eyes clenched shut.
Janney’s voice rang out over the screams. “You can make it stop. Just show yourself.”
Lonetree grabbed his arm. “You can’t do anything for her. The only way we stand a chance is to stay hidden.”
Jack heard the words and knew they were true. He might even have been able to follow Lonetree if he had run to the safety of the black shadows only feet away from them. But then the sound changed. And with the change, Jack lost his grip on the instinct of self-preservation. He shook off Lonetree’s efforts to hold him down and he stood up from behind the rock. The bright lights made him squint. He threw his gun forward and stepped into the clearing, even as Sarah continued to scream the word over and over, her voice so full of pleading that his heart ached.
Daddy.
Daddy.
Any other word and he might have made a run for it with Lonetree. Might have tried to fight it out. But not that word. That he couldn’t take.
“I’m here, honey. Daddy’s here,” he shouted.
The scream stopped in an unnatural break, as if the cave floor had opened and swallowed her whole. The echoes reverberated for a few seconds more but they too died down. The silence in the cave, broken only by the hum of the powerful lights, was almost as unnerving as the screams.
“Jesus, look at Jim and Scott,” Janney said from behind the lights. “Look what they did to them. I think they’re dead.”
There was a disapproving grunt from further to the right, closer to where Sarah’s scream had come from. Janney must have understood the message because he shut up. Jack could almost feel Lonetree’s eyes boring through him at they tried to pick out targets in the shadows. “Janney,” Jack called out, “you know I wouldn’t come down here without calling the police. The real police, I mean.” Even Jack didn’t think his shaking voice sounded believable. “Let Sarah go. She’s only a baby, for God’s sake.”
“Tell Lonetree to get out here where I can see him,” Janney yelled back.
Lonetree answered. “Fuck you. Come and get me.”
“Jack, you better talk to him. If you need some encouragement, I can arrange it.”
Janney didn’t have to spell it out. Jack knew they would torture Sarah until he did whatever they told him. Once that started Jack knew that he would shoot Lonetree himself if it would make them stop hurting her. What did it matter, anyway? His last glance at his wristwatch showed they had less than twenty five minutes before the explosives detonated. There was no chance of escape. No way Lonetree could manage to fight the three men hiding in the shadows and still get out alive.
Sarah wailed in pain from a spot beyond the lights, just to his right. Her cry ramped up to a higher pitch as though someone were squeezing the sound from her. Jack’s stomach tightened. He knew they wouldn’t kill her. Not yet, anyway. But he couldn’t stand to hear her in pain.
“Lonetree. Give yourself up. They’re hurting her.” He wanted to scream,
The cave is going to blow up soon, so give yourself up. Don’t make my baby suffer more than she has to!
But even as he thought it, he realized that Lonetree didn’t need to give up. No more than he needed to fight. He could run. Crawl away in the dark and escape through the tunnel they first came through. Moving fast, he could make it back to the surface just in time to be safely out of the way when the cave system started to collapse. Chances were, Lonetree had shouted at Janney to make them think he was staying and then turned and sprinted through the maze of cages on his way to the exit.
Sarah screamed again, her voice cracking from the intensity.
“Stop it. Leave the little girl alone.”
Jack spun to his left to track the source of the voice. Lonetree walked out from a dark shadow only fifteen feet from where Jack stood. It seemed impossible that the big man had been able move undetected from the spot where they had been pinned down but there he was, walking with his hands extended over his head. His eyes moved over to Jack as if to say,
Are you
happy now?
and then returned to the shadows where his enemies remained hidden, watching their adversary enter the light.
“Turn around,” Janney called out. “Raise your shirt. Any weapons you have, I want on the ground right now.”
Lonetree did as he was instructed. His face cast like a death mask, his eyes never leaving the spot where Sarah’s screams had now been replaced with soft whimpering. Jack wanted to tell the man he appreciated the sacrifice he had just made. He wondered though if Lonetree really had given himself up for Sarah, or if it was that he wanted to look into the eyes of the devil he had hunted for so long. The Boss was on the other side of the halogen lights. Maybe he had decided it was worth his life to stand face-to-face the man who had killed his brother and father.
“Cover me, Huckley,” Janney said before sliding out from behind the rocks beyond the lamps. He walked carefully toward Lonetree, his gun trained on the big man’s chest. The sheriff’s face puckered from the stress of the moment, as if he were walking up on a sedated animal, not quite sure if the drugs had taken all the fight out of him yet. Jack, too, wondered if Lonetree was playing with them. He felt detached from the situation, just a spectator hoping something big was about to happen.
Janney patted Lonetree down, always watching his face for a sign he was about to attack. Finding nothing he called out over his shoulder, “He’s clean.”
Huckley appeared first, looking like an animal that had maimed a bird and was now eager to have some fun with it. He clapped his hands together as if the sheer enjoyment of having Lonetree unarmed in front of him was too much to contain. But Lonetree didn’t look at him. His eyes were focused beyond the lights, waiting for the Boss to appear.
Sarah came running out from the shadows first. She screamed and sprinted to Jack with her arms out wide. Jack hadn’t expected to see her free. He staggered a few steps toward her and sank to his knees to scoop her up in a bear hug. She jumped into his arms. He held her tight as her body heaved from crying. Jack rubbed her back and lied to his little girl over and over. “Everything’s going to be all right. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.”
“Hello, Jack. I can’t say I expected to see you here.”
Jack looked up, not ready to believe the voice he heard until his eyes confirmed the sight for him. Next to a stone pillar, his grey hair neatly combed back, stood Dr. Mansfield.
“You?” Lonetree said, giving a voice to what Jack was thinking. “You’re the Boss?”
“That’s right.” Dr. Mansfield walked toward them, smiling at Sarah hugging her father.
“I don’t get it,” Jack said. “It’s not possible.”
Dr. Mansfield smiled. “You’d be surprised what’s possible when it comes right down to it.” He turned to Lonetree. “So now you know. This was what your brother died trying to find out. Even at the end, I don’t think he ever guessed. Both you of you might have come closer if you ever stopped to understand what I am trying to accomplish here. Your brother never appreciated what this was all about.”
“Killing little kids? No, he knew exactly what you fuckers are all about,” Lonetree said.
Dr. Mansfield shrugged. “Drug abusers, runaways, teenage prostitutes. These are society’s throwaways. No one wants them. No one misses them when they disappear. I gave them something they would never had whoring and drugging their way across the country. I gave their lives meaning. I gave their lives a purpose.”
“You took their lives. For this…this thing locked in that stone cage.”
“This all is for mankind’s progress. Years from now these children will be heralded for their role and honored for their sacrifice. They were part of a process that will change the world.”
Jack squeezed Sarah tighter against him. “Why Sarah? Why are you doing this to her?”
Dr. Mansfield walked nearer, careful to keep his distance from Lonetree even though Huckley still had a gun aimed at his chest. “We have made so much progress, but there is a lot we don’t understand about the Source. We have reason to believe this little girl, with her special abilities, can open a new world to us. To all of us.”
“Don’t talk about her like she’s some kind of lab animal,” Jack said, desperately trying to think of how to keep Dr. Mansfield talking. If his little girl had to die in this cave, he wanted to be able to hold her in his arms up until the last second. He willed Lonetree’s explosives to go off sooner and end their nightmare.
Then Janney cried out and pointed toward the stone structure.
In slow, jerking movements, Scott Moran crawled toward the group, trailing a swath of blood behind him.