by Chris Carter
They drove for another mile before the road turned into a bumpy dirt path. Hunter shifted down and wondered if he should engage the four-wheel-drive just in case.
‘We’re lucky,’ Lucien said, ‘it looks like there’s been no rain lately. These roads can easily turn into a nightmare of water pools and deep mud when rain comes.’
Hunter slowed down a little more, moving from one side of the road to the other, choosing the best path, trying to avoid making the car jerk too much.
‘There’s a right turn coming up,’ Lucien announced, tilting his head to one side to get a better look at the windscreen. ‘We’ve got to take it, Robert.’
‘This one?’ Hunter asked, pointing to a turn about twenty-five yards ahead of them.
‘That’s it.’
Hunter took it.
They were now clearly driving through the middle of nowhereland. The last sign of human life they’d seen had been miles back. If a bomb exploded right where they were, no one would hear it. No one would care. No one would come.
The road got bumpier still. The next mile seemed to take them an eternity to cover.
‘One more left turn coming up,’ Lucien said, ‘and we’ll be almost there, but keep your eyes open, Robert, it’s a tiny path, and it’s quite hidden away.’
Hunter saw it after another fifty yards, but he almost missed it. It really was a minute path. If they weren’t specifically looking for it, no one would ever notice it.
Hunter veered left. The trail was barely wide enough for the Jeep to fit through, and everyone heard the shrubs and bushes scrape the side of the vehicle.
‘Ooh,’ Lucien commented, ‘I don’t think the air traffic controller back at the airport will be happy about this, but then again, since his car was commandeered by the FBI, I’m sure it will be federally insured.’
This time, Hunter had nowhere to go to swerve away from the bigger bumps and holes. Good thing that they were in a brand-new car and the suspension was strong and steady.
They had to sit tight inside the shakemobile for another half a mile, until the road came to an abrupt end. Hunter put the car in neutral and looked around him. Taylor did the same. There was nothing but forest surrounding them.
‘Did we take a wrong turn somewhere?’ Taylor asked.
‘No,’ Lucien replied. ‘This is it.’
Taylor looked out the window again. The Jeep headlights reflected on the shrubs and trees.
‘This is it? Where?’ she asked.
Lucien nodded toward the front of their vehicle. ‘We have to walk the rest of the way. You can’t get there by car.’
Ninety-Two
Hunter was the first to leave the Jeep. Once he was out, he unholstered his weapon and opened the back door for Lucien. Taylor followed shortly after.
‘Now what?’ she asked, looking around her.
‘Through there,’ Lucien said, indicating a few loose tree branches that’d been piled up against each other just ahead and to the right of where the Jeep was parked.
‘We’re going to go deep into this forest with no light and no shoes?’ Taylor asked Hunter, looking down at their bare feet.
‘Not much I can do about the shoes,’ he replied, before reaching back inside the car for the glove compartment. He came back with a Maglite Pro Led 2. ‘But we do have light.’
‘That’s handy,’ Taylor said.
‘I knew night was approaching,’ Hunter said. ‘And I wasn’t counting on Lucien’s hiding place being very straightforward. So I also asked the air traffic controller for a flashlight.’
‘Robert Hunter,’ Lucien said, nodding and pursing his lips as if he was about to whistle. ‘Always thinking a step ahead. Too bad you didn’t foresee the shoe problem.’
‘Let’s go,’ Hunter commanded.
They assumed the same formation as when they were leaving the plane. Hunter took point, Lucien came second, and Taylor stayed four to five steps behind Lucien, her weapon always trained on his back, just a couple of inches below his neckline.
Hunter quickly removed the branches Lucien had indicated, and it revealed a well-worn trackers’ trail.
‘Just follow it,’ Lucien said. ‘The place isn’t very far from here.’
Despite already being in a hurry, Hunter’s gut feeling filled him with an extra sense of urgency, as if something he couldn’t quite pinpoint was off, but he didn’t have much time to dwell on it.
‘Let’s move,’ he said.
The flashlight had an ultra-bright and wide beam, which made things a little easier.
They took to the trail and, surprisingly, Lucien didn’t try to slow them down with the excuse of his shackled legs. He didn’t have to. Pebbles and little rocks and sharp-edged dried sticks forced Hunter and Taylor to move a lot slower than they would’ve liked.
They had covered only about thirty yards when the track swerved hard right, then left, and then it really felt as if they had crossed some sort of twilight gate. All of a sudden the bushes, trees and scrub gave way to a plain field – a clearing in the middle of nowhere.
‘And here we are,’ Lucien said with a proud smile.
Hunter and Taylor paused, their eyes looking around in disbelief.
‘What the hell is this?’
Ninety-Three
Hunter shone his flashlight on the structure standing before them.
It was a stiff and squared, ivy-covered brick house, with white Romanesque columns that must once have been imposing outside the front entryway. Now, only two of the original four were still standing, and those had cracks running from top to bottom.
The house had been built one hundred years earlier, and then reconfigured again twice after that, so whatever remained of its first incarnation as someone’s grand hillside home was now merely memory. Add to that the disfiguration caused by the elements and a total disregard and lack of care for a property, and you’d end up with the carcass of a house they had in front of them – a battered shell of a home of long ago.
Three out of the four outside walls still remained, but they all had several holes and major fissures in them, as if the house belonged in a warzone somewhere in the Middle East. The south wall, on the right side of the house, had almost entirely crumpled onto a pile of rubble. Most of the internal walls had also collapsed, giving the place nearly no room separation, and filling it with what looked like destruction debris. The roof had caved in almost everywhere, with the exception of the old living room at the front of the house, the corridor beyond it, and the kitchen on the left, where it was still partially in place. Weed and wild vegetation had grown through the floorboards and among the debris just about everywhere. The windows were all broken, and some of the window frames had been ripped from the walls as if by some sort of internal explosion.
‘Welcome to one of my favorite hiding places,’ Lucien said.
Taylor blinked the surprise away. ‘Madeleine?’ she yelled out, taking a step to her right.
No reply.
‘Madeleine?’ she yelled again, this time even louder. ‘This is the FBI. Can you hear me?’
She got nothing back.
‘Even if she’s still alive, she won’t be able hear you,’ Lucien said.
Taylor looked at him with fuming eyes. ‘This is bullshit. There’s nobody here.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Lucien questioned.
‘Look at this shithole. This is not a hiding place. How can you hide or keep anyone locked in a place without doors or walls? Where anyone can simply walk in, or out?’
‘Because no one knows this place exists,’ Hunter said, trying to analyze the area surrounding the house. ‘And no one will ever come looking for it out here.’
‘Right again,’ Lucien said, looking at Taylor. ‘Hence the term hidden place.’
‘This is bullshit.’ Taylor couldn’t hide the anger in her voice. ‘You’re telling us that you left Madeleine somewhere in this ghost shell of a house – no windows, no doors, no walls, and she never walked out?’<
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Lucien’s gaze went to Taylor and right then his eyes looked like dark vials filled with venom.
‘Not somewhere inside it, Agent Taylor.’ He paused and ran his tongue over his bottom lip like a lizard. ‘Buried underneath it.’
Ninety-Four
Lucien’s words sent fear crawling like a rash across Taylor’s skin. Her now confused gaze immediately returned to what was left of the house, before moving to the soil surrounding it.
‘Well, not exactly buried,’ Lucien clarified. ‘Let me show you.’ He lifted both cuffed hands and pointed toward the north side of the disfigured structure. ‘Through there.’
In a hurry, Hunter and the flashlight took point again. Lucien and Taylor followed.
‘My friend’s grandfather,’ Lucien said, as they started walking, ‘and by friend, I mean the person I got this place from, was a hardcore, old-school patriot. I was told that he had his best years in this house during the USA versus USSR era. You know, “death to all communists” kind of thing. And he really subscribed to that ideology. And there was plenty of talk about a very possible atomic war.’
As soon as they reached the side of the house, Hunter and Taylor understood what Lucien was talking about.
On the ground, halfway along the north wall, they could see a very large, external, thick metal, basement-entry double door. The doors were locked together by a Sargent and Greenleaf military-grade padlock, very similar to the one they’d found in the house in Murphy.
‘My friend’s grandfather,’ Lucien continued, ‘in his paranoia and deep belief that an atomic war was inevitable and imminent, refurbished the whole place, extending and adding a substantial bomb shelter to the original basement.’ He nodded at the padlocked doors. ‘The house might look like an earthquake site, but the shelter has more than lived up to its expectations.’ He indicated the padlock. ‘The key for that is on the keychain.’
Taylor immediately reached for it.
‘Which one,’ she asked urgently, holding up the bunch of keys.
Lucien leaned forward and squinted at them for a second. ‘The sixth one starting from your left.’
Taylor selected the key and reached for the padlock.
Hunter and Lucien waited, and as they did, Hunter’s awkward sensation that something wasn’t quite right came back to him. He looked around him for an instant.
‘What’s at the back of the house?’ he asked.
Lucien studied him for a moment, and then let his gaze move toward the far end of the house.
‘A very badly treated backyard,’ he replied. ‘There’s a large pond as well, which now looks more like a deep pool of mud. Would you like me to give you a tour? I have all the time in the world.’
Click. The padlock came undone. Taylor unhooked it from the doors and threw it away before grabbing one of the handles and pulling it toward her. The door barely moved.
‘Heavy, aren’t they?’ Lucien commented with a smirk. ‘As I’ve said, this isn’t a regular cellar, Agent Taylor. It’s a fallout shelter.’
‘I’ll do it,’ Hunter said.
Taylor stepped back while Hunter first pulled the right door open, then the left one.
They were immediately hit by a breath of warm, stale air. The doors revealed a concrete staircase that took them down a lot deeper than one would’ve imagined. There were at least thirty to forty steps.
‘Deep, isn’t it?’ Lucien said. ‘It’s a well-built shelter.’
Hunter went down first, and they all moved down in a hurry.
At the bottom, they were greeted by another heavy metal door with a very sturdy lock.
‘The seventh key,’ Lucien announced, ‘the one to the right of the one you used on the padlock.’
Taylor moved forward and unlocked the door before pushing it open.
The air inside the dark room beyond it was leaden with dust, and felt even staler, but there was something else in the air, something that both Hunter and Taylor could easily recognize because they’d been around it too many times.
The smell of death.
Ninety-Five
Sometimes sour, sometimes putrid, sometimes sickly sweet, sometimes bitter, sometimes nauseating, and most of the time a combination of everything. No one can tell you what death really smells like. Most would say that there’s no specific smell to it, but anyone who’s been around it as many times as Hunter and Taylor had been would recognize in just a fraction of a second, because as soon as you smell it, it chokes your heart and saddens your soul in a way that nothing else does.
As they sensed death, Hunter and Taylor were filled with a disquieting fear, and the same thought exploded inside both of their heads.
We’ve wasted too much time. We’re too late.
Hunter shone the beam of his flashlight into the room and moved it around the place almost frantically.
It was empty.
There was no one there.
Lucien took a healthy deep breath, like a hungry man taking in the aroma of freshly cooked food.
‘Wow, I’ve missed this smell.’
‘Madeleine?’ Taylor called into the room, her gaze chasing after the beam of the flashlight. ‘Madeleine?’
‘It would’ve been very stupid of me if I had left Madeleine locked inside the very first room one comes to in the shelter, wouldn’t it?’ A cryptic smile graced Lucien’s lips.
‘Where is she?’ Taylor asked.
‘There’s a light switch on the wall to the right of the door,’ Lucien told them.
Hunter reached for it.
A feeble yellowish bulb at the center of the ceiling flickered a couple of times, as if in doubt whether it would come on or not. It finally did, and it brought with it an electronic hiss that echoed annoyingly around the room.
They found themselves in a semi-bare room, twenty feet square. Two of the thick, solid concrete walls were adorned by a few handmade bookshelves, all of them loaded with books that were covered by a thick layer of dust. The wall to the left of where they stood had a single steel door set right in the center of it. The door had a dappled gunmetal look to its surface, as though it were meant to draw the eye. Against the wall directly in front of them was a console desk that must’ve been at least fifty or sixty years old, where a multitude of buttons, switches, levers and old-fashioned dial gauges could be found. A switched-off computer monitor hung on the wall just above the console desk. This was definitely the shelter’s main control room.
The floor was simple polished concrete. A plethora of metal and PVC pipes of different diameters crisscrossed the ceiling in all directions, disappearing through the walls. A couple of medium-sized square cardboard and wooden boxes were piled up one on top of the other in one corner of the room. They looked to be supplies.
Hunter’s eyes began searching the room.
How many victims has Lucien tortured and killed locked away in this hellhole, he thought.
‘Madeleine is through that door,’ Lucien said. ‘I suggest you hurry.’
‘Which key?’ Taylor asked, holding the keychain up to Lucien once again.
‘Second to last key on your right.’
Taylor holstered her weapon and moved purposefully toward the gunmetal door. Lucien and Hunter followed and the formation inverted: Hunter took the rear, three steps behind Lucien.
Taylor slotted the key into the door lock and twisted it left. With two loud clicks, the lock chamber rotated 360 degrees once, then twice.
Taylor’s heart picked up speed inside her chest as she turned the handle and began pushing the door open.
Police instincts, hyper-sensitivity, training and experience, psychic ability, whatever it is that one has in these situations, Hunter and Taylor both sensed it at the same moment – a new life, a new presence, as if unlocking the door had given the cue for their cop’s intuition to kick in.
Once again, an identical thought crossed both of their minds: Maybe we’re not too late. There’s still hope.
But that hope vanished
fast, because that new life, that presence they’d sensed, wasn’t past the door ahead of them. It was behind them.
Ninety-Six
Click.
They felt the new presence, but before Hunter or Taylor had a chance turn around, they heard the sound of a bullet being chambered into a 9mm semi-automatic handgun.
‘If any of you two fuckheads move, I’ll blow your fucking heads off. Is that clear?’ The voice that came from the opposite end of the room was sharp, firm and young. ‘Now get your goddamn hands up above your heads.’
Hunter tried to identify the specific direction where the voice was coming from. He was positive that the bullet chambering sound, together with the first few spoken words, had come from the general direction where the piled-up boxes were – probably the perpetrator’s hiding place, but there was barely enough space behind them for a midget to hide. His next sentence, though, had come from a different direction all together, which meant he was moving, but the reverberation inside the room coupled with the incessant light-bulb hiss made pinpointing the perpetrator’s exact location an almost impossible task.
Hunter was pretty sure that he could spin around and squeeze out a shot before the perpetrator realized what was happening, but that would only work if he knew exactly where to place the shot. Guessing wouldn’t cut it – if he missed, he’d be a dead man. He decided not to risk it.
‘Did you all fucking hear me or what?’ the young voice said again, but this time with a much more disturbed edge to it. ‘Hands above your heads.’
Hunter and Taylor finally lifted their hands.
Lucien turned and smiled triumphantly at Hunter as he moved past him.
‘I did good, didn’t I?’ the young voice asked. ‘I followed the instructions just like you taught me.’
‘You did great.’ Hunter and Taylor heard Lucien reassure whoever else had joined them in that room. ‘OK,’ Lucien said, now addressing them, ‘this is when I have to ask you both to put your guns on the floor, and without turning around, kick them back toward me, one at a time. Robert, you go first. Nice and easy. And let me add that my friend here has a very itchy trigger finger. And he never misses.’