Blood! It’s your blood, Robert! His brain screamed at him to get up and fight back before it was too late, but his body refused.
After several moments, his ears began to ring. It was a high-pitched whine that drowned out everything. Just as he gained enough control to move his arm, the men were back. They hoisted him roughly up and threw him into the bed of a pickup. Landing on his back knocked the air from his lungs, but it cleared his vision for a moment.
The engine rumbled to life and panic seized him. Where the hell are they taking me? He wondered as he rolled to his side.
The mechanic’s gruff voice said, “I’ll ride back here with him just to make sure.” And then the bed of the truck sank under the big man’s weight.
Robert shut his eyes as the mechanic sat on the upswell of the tire well. It wouldn’t do for him to see that Robert was awake. The truck roared out from under the flickering, buzzing fluorescents and bounced through the ruts leading to the road. When the driver gunned the gas and turned sharply to the left, the momentum rolled Robert’s limp body to the other side, pressing his face against the other tire well.
With the mechanic at his back, he worked on bringing his vision back to focus and wiggling his toes and fingers. His extremities tingled and he wondered if there had been nerve damage. Another turn rolled him to his back. He was careful to remain limp as possible. His only chance was to catch them off guard. If he lost the element of surprise, there was no way he could possibly get away from those two.
Tensing the large muscles of his thighs and butt, he worked until he thought he was in full control of his faculties. The mechanic rammed his foot into Robert’s shoulder, but he didn’t react. The truck slowed and Robert raised his lids just enough to peek up at the mechanic. He was looking past the cab.
Taking it as an opportunity, Robert raised his head. The truck turned right, off the road, and bounced through a pothole. Robert’s head slammed back to the metal and his vision grew blurry around the edges. Like some old movie fading out, the last of his vision was a tiny speck at the end of a long dark tunnel. He fought the creeping unconsciousness, but it did no good. He passed out again.
He didn’t think he had been knocked out very long because the jostling of the truck running over rough terrain brought him back around. Loud rattling drew his attention. Just above his head, a large chain bounced and rattled. It was the kind used for pulling motors. It was darker in the woods and Robert worked his hand toward that chain until it was in his grasp.
In one fluid motion, he rolled toward the mechanic and swung the chain with all his might. Hitting his intended target, he pushed to his knees and hit him again with the chain. The second time, he let go of it and turned toward the opposite side of the truck. He gauged their speed to be non-lethal to him if he jumped out. Grabbing the side for support, he pushed to his feet, intending to do little more than fall over the side.
The driver slammed on the brakes and Robert was thrust backward. He hit the cab and crumpled to the bed again. The mechanic kicked him in the side of the head, cursing.
Sometime later, in pitch blackness, Robert came to again. He surprised himself by still being alive. Though he was in a hell of a predicament. The men had grabbed him by the feet and were dragging him deeper into the swamps.
The slimy smell of swamp water mixed with the rich odor of the black dirt and he nearly gagged. Thinking they meant to throw him into the swamp, he struggled. The mechanic laughed and looked over his shoulder at Robert.
“Not this time, fucker.” He yanked up on Robert’s foot. “Next time you fight, I won’t just tie your hands together, I’ll chain you to a fucking tree out here and leave you for the ’gators.”
Rocks and roots bit into his shoulder blades and neck. They dragged him at an elevated angle that disallowed him to lift his head. The twine around his wrists felt like the rough, prickly kind used to tie bales of hay. After only a few moments of twisting and turning his hands to loosen it, the material had cut both wrists.
The blood trickling from his forehead oozed into his eye. Squeezing it shut, he was momentarily still as his body tensed from the discomfort of having his vision blotted out.
“You reckon he’ll be good enough? Hell, he’s almost dead already.” The attendant asked.
Robert’s eyes flew open. Good enough for what? He wondered.
The mechanic snorted laughter. “Shit, that thing don’t care how close to dead he is. He’ll be good and dead in a little while and the monster will stay away from all of us.”
Grunting with effort, the attendant agreed. “That’s what it’s all about—keeping it out here and away from everyone else.”
Dragging him down an incline, his head caught jutting rocks and hard, thick roots. His vision blurred and soon he was out cold again.
The next time he woke, the men were tossing him away from them. He briefly made eye contact with the mechanic. His face was contorted with the effort of throwing Robert’s weight and something else—fear? He thought so. The big, brawny mechanic was afraid of something.
The concrete on which he landed roughly, knocked the air from his lungs. The attendant stepped to the doorway and threw Robert’s shoe into the room before backing out.
The sounds of heavy iron doors being chained shut broke through the scrim of unconsciousness that clung to Robert. He tried to shake it off and stand, but the world tipped him back to the floor. The room was completely blacked out. There was a paper-thin shred of light painted onto the ground from the miniscule gap between the doors.
The foul smell of stagnant water and rotting vegetation was overwhelming and the heat was stifling. Following the strip of light on the ground, Robert crawled to the doors. The sound of the men running away from the place was all he could hear, and that only faintly.
Pulling himself upright, he tugged on the door handles. The chains had been secured so tightly that there was barely any movement at all. The men had left him there for something they called a monster. He could only imagine they meant a giant alligator.
With his head throbbing in time with his heartbeat, Robert squeezed his eyes shut and slid to a sitting position at the bottom of the doors. The darkness was unrelenting. There were no windows, no skylights, nothing through which even the scantest bit of sunlight could fall.
Recalling his Zippo, he dug it and his cigarettes out of his pocket. He crammed a cigarette into the corner of his mouth and flicked the lighter. He squinted against the bright burst of flame and lit up. There was no need to worry about trying to quit smoking under the current conditions.
He inhaled deeply and began coughing. After twelve years of smoking, and only a couple months of trying to quit, his body was already beginning to reject the strong tobacco smoke.
Determined, he took another drag and then another, hoping the nicotine would relax him and quieten the jackhammer in his skull. Between coughing fits, he held the Zippo’s flame high and took in his surroundings.
The room was completely made of concrete and cinderblocks, except for the doors at his back. It was a small room, full of musty, moldering papers that had long ago ceased to be of any use. He tried to pull a random stack loose and it was useless; the paper came away in soggy clumps from years of absorbing the humidity.
An open doorway on the other side of the room led into more blackness. Testing his balance, he used the doors to leverage his weight onto his reluctant feet. After a moment, the vertigo passed and he moved slowly toward his discarded shoe and put it on, grimacing at the pain it caused in his head.
Gingerly, he touched the gash above his eye and was rewarded with a fresh gush of warm blood. Closing his lighter, he pulled his shirt off and ripped off a swath to make a bandage, which he tied tightly at the back of his head.
He sat to finish his cigarette and let the nausea pass again. Keeping alert for any sounds, he heard only the light crackling of his cigarette as
he took long drags. The nicotine didn’t have the intended effect, and the room spun slowly for a few moments as he dry heaved. He crushed out the cigarette on a pile of the soggy papers and forced his breathing to a slow, steady pace.
He knew he would have to go through the doorway and into the darkness if he hoped to ever find his way out, but he didn’t think it wise to venture out there into the unknown while he was fighting the dizziness and nausea. He had no way of knowing where he was or what might be hiding in that darkness.
Julie and Lilli were at home. They were alone. The thugs who had tried to kill him had taken his wallet, so they would have his home address. They could go there at their leisure, thinking him dead, and then a simple robbery would turn into something much worse. He could imagine Julie’s fright, and her fierceness as she tried to protect Lilli. He could hear their distressed screams for him to help them.
After several minutes, he stood, the darkness suddenly was not quite as scary as the scenarios his mind had conjured. Holding the Zippo’s flame above his head, he eased as quietly as possible toward that doorway and the intimidating darkness beyond.
He had to get out of that room and back to Julie and Lilli. He had to protect his family.
Chapter 4
The Bunker
Disoriented and still bleeding badly from the head wound, Robert peered into the corridor beyond his small room. It seemed to go in both directions far beyond the scope of his little flickering light.
The papers had filtered out into the hallway, making the passage from room to corridor slippery and squishy. Outside the room, he looked in each direction. His instincts told him to turn right but remembering an old survival book he had read as a teenager, he turned left. The old book had stated that a lost man would instinctively turn toward his dominant hand, causing him to go in a large circle, so, Robert decided to quell that instinct from the start. He wondered if it would make much difference in a manmade structure, but he didn’t want to take any chances.
The Zippo’s flame guttered and burned lower as he moved slowly down the corridor. The passage ended with hallways running to each side again. There were doorways down each hall, but the closest one on his left stood open. He moved toward the opening, his heart racing.
There were no windows in the hallways, only evenly spaced grates in the ceiling. He figured they had been for the air system. His light wouldn’t penetrate the darkness farther out.
Stepping through the open doorway, all his attention was on the floor. His vision blurred and cleared randomly, making the debris underfoot seem to move in slithering waves before his eyes. Cobwebs hung heavy from every surface and clung to his bare, sweat-slicked skin. Large spiders dangled in the webs and Robert did his best to avoid them. The swamplands fostered things deadly to humans; more than most other places, anyway, and people were the least of one’s worries there.
The walls were lined with large metal shelves from floor to ceiling. Some of the shelving had rusted apart, dropping the contents into unstable piles on lower shelves and the floor. Moving close to some shelves, he could make out lanterns and bottles of lamp oil, farther down that shelf were big boxy flashlights with the handles on top and a row of six-volt batteries, most with their little springs rusted off and a few broken.
Grabbing a flashlight, he held his breath and pressed the button on top. Nothing. He tried the others and none of them worked. Balancing his Zippo on a high shelf, he rifled through the supplies, most of them as useless as the flashlights. With shaking hands, he filled a lantern with oil and submerged the wick for several seconds.
The brightness of the lantern, after using only his lighter, was intense. With the brighter light, he moved more quickly through the items on the shelves. There were stacks of first-aid kits in army green metal boxes stacked in a corner. The top three had rusted shut. The fourth one opened with some prying, but the contents were ruined. The seventh one down held a roll of gauze still in its plastic packaging.
Pressing his fingers against his makeshift bandage, he saw that he was still bleeding. He removed the bandage and formed a thick pad from the gauze, securing it in place with the strip of shirt he had turned into a headband.
At the door, a small map of the facility had been fastened behind glass. It was unreadable. The years of growing mold had obscured all but a tiny portion, which was too faded to make out. Even with the lantern, the hallways seemed to go forever in both directions beyond the light.
Back inside the supply room, he searched for anything to mark his path. The walls were pale and bare except for the occasional vine or streak of moss. He found a few buckets of white paint, and all had succumbed to the ravages of time and environment.
As he opened flat boxes with indecipherable markings, a scurrying, shuffling sound drew his attention and nearly stopped his heart. Something was in the hallway. He had no idea what sounds an alligator roaming the dank halls would sound like, and he was certain he didn’t want to find out. Whatever moved out there, moved swiftly. Listening carefully, he thought the creature was moving on two feet.
He doused the lantern flame and was thrust back into blind darkness, relying solely on his sense of hearing to track the creature’s progress. It drew closer to the open doorway, stopping just outside. A dog-like snuffling sound sent shivers of panic throughout his entire body.
What would a dog be doing out here in the pitch blackness by itself? He wondered fearfully. And what sort of dog walks around on two feet?
Easing his hand into his pocket, he closed his fingers around the Zippo. Holding his breath, he listened to the creature sniffing around the doorway. The sound was coming from high up; much higher than a dog or alligator could reach. Just as he withdrew the lighter from his pocket, the animal moved away from the door and went back to the right.
When the sounds had completely faded, he breathed a sigh of relief. The thing had come from same direction he had. He thought it might have been tracking him. Maybe the intense moldy odor of the supply room had masked his scent.
At least he hoped that was what had happened. The smell of blood might have drawn the animal to him. If that was the case, he wondered, then why did it go away?
As he relit the lantern, he nearly dropped the globe. The glass chattered against the metal prongs, sounding much like a set of those annoying chattery teeth that kids get at Halloween.
Using the gauze, he removed all the blood he could from all his cuts and scrapes. There were a lot more than he had thought at first, and he used the entire roll of gauze. Discarding it in a far corner, thinking it might draw the animal in there instead to him, he turned back to the flat boxes.
He found what he was looking for buried behind stacks of boxes that contained old stationary. The large permanent markers were still in their packaging. He tore it open and found that most of the pens were okay. Their marks might have been less bold after years of being stored, but they marked well enough to be easily seen by lantern light on the bone-white walls, even if the walls were partially covered in mold.
Giving the room one last quick look, he saw nothing to use as a weapon, and he moved to the doorway. He wanted to leave before that animal returned. If it was tracking the scent of his blood, it would be back.
Turning left again, he drew a crude arrow on the wall, pointing in the direction he walked. With more confidence, he held the lantern high and walked a bit faster, still listening for wayward noises. He kept expecting to hear sounds from outside; wildlife, running water, motorcycles, anything. But no sounds came. Not even the calls of birds or the chittering of insects. The most prominent sounds were his ragged breathing, the scuffing of his shoes against the concrete when he stumbled, and the low gutter of the lantern flame.
Robert had the sensation that he was walking downhill at a very slow incline, but the way the world tipped and yawed from his head wound, he couldn’t be sure. It felt the same even when he walked in the opposite
direction. The hallways were impossibly long and bisected with other corridors, some were wide enough to accommodate a car, while others were narrow enough that he could stand in the center and touch both walls with his outstretched hands.
Keeping his turns to a minimum, he came to a wide tunnel. There was no doubt that it had been used as a vehicle access at some point in the past. The concrete was slightly rutted where the tires had traveled and there were tire tracks set in hard mud. Stopping in the tunnel, he closed his eyes and tried to imagine which direction the vehicles had come from, but it was no use. He didn’t have the lay of the land outside, and both directions looked identical. Unless he found an abandoned vehicle, he would never know where they came from or where they exited.
Being a military installation, though, he supposed there would have to be an opening at either end of that tunnel, or at the very least, a place large enough to facilitate turning a vehicle around so it could go back the way it had come.
“I’ll go left.” The sound of his own husky voice breaking the heavy silence didn’t have the desired effect of soothing his jangled nerves. Instead, it made him jumpier. The way it bounced off the concrete and echoed was disconcerting. He hadn’t meant to speak so loudly; any noises could draw that animal back to him, and he had nothing for protection other than his lantern.
Without his watch, he could not properly gauge the passage of time in the sameness of the dark tunnel. He thought he had probably walked a half-hour without seeing any other hallways or doors. No vehicles, either, just the remnants of the tracks, of which there were fewer the farther he walked. The sensation of walking downhill had also subsided, so he marked it off as a symptom of his banged head.
He reached the terminus of the tunnel after what seemed an eternity of wandering and stumbling. A large security gate prevented passage into what looked to be an enclosed parking lot. There were two army jeeps and one small truck, which was on scotches and had no wheels. The canvas covering the back of the truck flapped listlessly in a breeze that he could not feel. The lantern lit the room poorly, but he thought those were the only vehicles there.
S79 The Horror in the Swamp Page 5