Ladd walked around a column and directed his beam into a darkened corner. Dozens of tiny eyes flashed red before the rats fled with an indignant racket of squeals. He had been right about the source of the smell, just not the mechanism of demise. The brown bear was suspended from the ceiling and the walls by a series of ropes, which drew its arms and legs away from its body, spread-eagle. Its hide was stretched beside it from floor to ceiling to tan. The carcass still wore fur on its clawed paws like mittens and socks. Its diminished form seemed disproportionate to its savage head, from which dull eyes stared blankly past him. Its dry tongue protruded from the right side of its contorted jaws. Its neck had been torn open to such an extent that it appeared to be held in place by the spine alone. Connective tissue shimmered silver over its broad chest muscles. There was a massive gap where it had been absolved of its viscera. The sloppy wounds where the rats had helped themselves were readily distinguishable from the gouges where something much larger had stolen bites.
Someone had hunted this bear and dragged it in here. Very recently. And that someone could still be in there with them at this very moment.
“We should get out of here,” Ladd whispered.
“Over here,” Rivale called.
Ladd spun around at the sound of her voice. She was in the opposite rear corner, silhouetted by the glow of her flashlight, which she focused upon the ground.
“There has to be another entrance,” Pascual said from behind him as Ladd crossed the cavern.
His guts tingled. Something was definitely wrong here. The sudden urge to sprint from the cavern nearly overwhelmed him.
He passed a dark orifice filled with shadows impervious to his light on his left. His beam barely penetrated the darkness.
Rivale nearly knocked him over in her hurry to retreat. She had shoved aside a heap of desiccated flowers, leaves, and grasses to reveal a foul puddle of concentrated urine and feces. The brownish-black logs were well-formed and undeniably human.
Someone was definitely living in here. Several people, most likely. One man couldn’t haul, hang, and skin a bear. So where were they hiding? And better yet…why?
“I don’t like the looks of this,” Nelson said. “We shouldn’t be in here.”
“We can’t risk the climb back down after nightfall,” Rivale said.
“We can hole up in that cave up there and set off at first light.”
“There’s another option,” Pascual said. He stood in the mouth of the tunnel that branched from the back wall, shining his light deeper into the mountain. “That bear had to weigh at least a thousand pounds. Whoever dragged it in here didn’t scale the mountain like we did. There has to be an easier way out.”
“We don’t know who’s in here with us or where they might be,” Ladd said.
“You’re letting your imagination get the better of you. There’s no reason to suspect that whoever’s here is hostile. It’s probably just a nomadic Kyrgyz tribe riding out the winter. They’d probably even be willing to show us the way out of here.”
“This doesn’t feel right, Carlos. You saw the bear. It looked like someone had been gnawing the meat right off the bone.”
Pascual waved off his concern and started into the stone passage. He was probably right, but Ladd couldn’t dismiss his unease so quickly. He had tapped into his survival instincts, which screamed for him to get out of there before it was too late.
Ladd forced his legs to move and followed Pascual. Rivale and Nelson fell in behind him. The clatter of crampons and their haggard breathing echoed in the confines. Nelson flashed the camera repeatedly, more for light than for documentation’s sake. The narrow walls were covered with writing. It would have taken lifetimes to carve so many symbols. Ladd hurried to catch up with Pascual as he exited the passage into another chamber. Were it possible, this one smelled worse than the last. The musty, sour aromas of body odor, ammonia, and festering meat made his eyes water.
His cleats made a crunching sound as he stepped from the bare stone onto a more forgiving substrate. He crouched and shined his light at the ground. Sand. He scooped up a handful and allowed it to cascade between his fingers. The grains were small and powdery, as though individually they had no substance at all, like the sand from a tropical beach or the most remote desert. Whatever the case, it definitely wasn’t from around here. He again thought of the cuneiform and its Arabian origin as he stood and followed Pascual deeper into the mountain.
* * *
The tunnel opened into a chamber much smaller than the last, perhaps the size of a two-car garage, but the ceiling was much higher. As with all of the others, the walls were covered with the cryptic writing. A mound of sand filled the room, drifted against the far wall, as though a dune had been magically transported into this one cave.
Nelson flashed his camera. Ladd glimpsed what had to be thousands of bats suspended overhead between the stalactites. They wavered from side to side as though blown by a breeze only they could feel.
Their flashlight beams crisscrossed the cave like spotlights at a movie premier, showing them random pieces, but never the whole.
“There’s another passage over here,” Pascual said.
Ladd turned toward where Pacual stood in the opposite corner, silhouetted by his flashlight, which diffused into another pitch-black corridor.
“How in the world did all of this sand get in here?” Nelson whispered.
“I feel a faint breeze,” Pascual called. His voice echoed from the orifice. “At least we know we’re heading in the right direction.”
Ladd skirted the edge of the dune. His reluctance to walk on it was irrational, he knew, and yet he simply couldn’t bring himself to step on any more of it than absolutely necessary. There was something unnatural about it. Not the sand itself, per se, but the fact that it simply shouldn’t be here. He felt a swell of relief when he ducked out of the room and into the tunnel.
“Amazing,” Pascual said from somewhere ahead, his voice hollowed by the acoustics.
“What is it?”
“You have to see it to believe it.”
Ladd wasn’t in the mood. The feeling that he needed to get out of this mountain this very second nearly overwhelmed him.
The stone corridor opened into another domed cavern. Pascual stood in the center, directing his light at the walls as he slowly turned in circles. Another dark channel exited the far side.
Ladd followed the beam with his eyes. The walls weren’t covered with writing. Hundreds of recesses had been meticulously carved into them instead, small arched shelves separated by a finger’s width of granite. They were barely large enough to accommodate the skulls wedged inside them. More shadowed eye sockets than he could count stared directly at him.
“It’s an ossuary,” Ladd said.
“Of sorts. There aren’t any other bones. Only the skulls.” Pascual’s voice positively trembled with excitement. “Notice anything interesting about them?”
Ladd directed his light at the nearest arch to his left and stumbled backward in surprise.
“Jesus.”
“Tell me about it. I’ve never seen anything like them on a hominin. A Great Ape, maybe, but not on a proto-human.”
“What in God’s name do you think—?”
“Ramsey!” Rivale shouted from behind him. He spun toward the tunnel leading back to the room with the sand. “Ramsey!”
Something in her voice awakened the panic inside him. He took off at a sprint, made awkward by his crampons. Something was definitely wrong. Everything was wrong. They shouldn’t be here. No one was ever meant to be here.
Ladd burst into the cavern to find Rivale kneeling beside Nelson on one of the dune’s peaks, waving her hand, palm-down, over the sand. He hurried to her side. She glanced up at him, eyes wide.
“Hold your hand right here. Just like this,” she said. “Can you feel it?”
Ladd removed his glove and waved his hand over the ground just as she had. The tip of a reed reminiscent of the stalk of
a cattail stood several inches above the sand at a slight angle. Warm air caressed his palm when he passed over it.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Nelson found it. And several more just like it.”
“At least four more,” Nelson said.
“There’s something under here.” Ladd brushed the sand away from the base of the thin reed, only to find that it extended deeper than he had suspected. The fine grains slid back into place. “What could possibly—?”
“Quit screwing around and just do it already,” Pascual said. He shouldered Ladd aside and shoved scoops of sand away from the reed. “For someone in such a rush to get out of here, you’re sure taking your sweet time about it.”
Ladd glanced back toward the tunnel through which they had initially entered. Suddenly, the prospect of descending the sheer, icy face of Mt. Belukha wasn’t nearly as intimidating, even blindly in the darkness and the blizzarding snow.
“Stop, Carlos.”
“I can feel something down there.”
“For Christ’s sake, stop digging! Let’s get out of here while we still—”
“What the hell is that? Someone. Give me some more light.”
Rivale shined her beam into the bottom of the foot-deep hole as Pascual brushed away the grains that trickled back down the sides. He jerked his hand back and scrabbled away.
Ladd saw a prominent brow over eyelids dusted with sand, the ridge of a slender nose, a pair of lips pursed around the base of the reed.
“It’s too late,” he whispered.
The eyes snapped open at the sound of his voice.
TWO
Seattle, Washington
Thursday, October 11th
12:06 a.m. PST
(1:06 p.m. NOVST)
“It seems cruel to be doing this, especially in the middle of the night,” Officer Elena Sturm said. She directed her Maglite into the rubble and appraised the treacherous descent through eyes so blue they appeared almost translucent. Her midnight-black hair was pulled into a short ponytail through the back of a ball cap with the department logo, her uniform impeccably pressed beneath her rain-beaded “Seattle PD” windbreaker.
“No cameras,” Officer Dave Henley said. Her new partner, who wore his uniform a size too small to showcase his ripped physique, offered a smirk. “Last thing the mayor wants is to see this on the news. You know the kind of thrashing he’d take in the press. Besides, he wouldn’t want any of these sewer rats crawling up here and spoiling his precious little soirée.”
Still doesn’t make it right, Sturm thought, but didn’t share the sentiment with her partner, who was far too enthusiastic about their assignment for her tastes. She surveyed what was left of the Maritime Industrial Center, which had once been a thriving commercial fishing operation steeped in the rich seafaring tradition that had spawned the greatest city in the Pacific Northwest, which itself had given rise to the foundation of modern American society in the form of Microsoft and Starbucks. The entire commercial district bordering Salmon Bay, which glimmered in the moonlight a hundred yards to the west beyond the decrepit and crumbling piers, had been condemned and gated off behind a fifteen-foot chain link fence more than a year ago to make way for progress. Where once fisherman had hauled their catches directly from the ocean to these processing, packaging, canning, and shipping factories, there would soon be upscale flats, trendy shopping and dining establishments, and office space for the dozens of burgeoning software enterprises the city hoped to entice to the region. All that would remain of its heritage were the memories captured in the bronze statues and placards that would line the modern boardwalk rimming the bay, and the lone finished project, the eighty-million-dollar Bertha Knight Landes Cultural Center, a ninety-thousand square-foot affair of burnished brass, smoked glass, and polished marble, which featured convention space decorated with salvaged relics and photographs of a bygone era. Its grand ribbon-cutting ceremony, a week from this Saturday night, would play host to Seattle’s elite, who, for two thousand dollars a plate, could don their tuxedos and gowns for an evening of dancing hosted by the Seattle Philharmonic and get an exclusive peek behind the emerald curtain. The entire waterfront renewal project was slated for completion in five years, but in the meantime, an urban nightmare of ruin on an almost apocalyptic scale surrounded this lone architectural jewel.
The perimeter fences were draped with tarps painted with an artist’s rendition of the “Future of Seattle,” which depicted stylized, futuristic high-rises of tinted glass and glinting steel, nothing like the crumbling hulks that lay behind it. Tractors, earthmovers, dump trucks, and a ten-story crane with a wrecking ball lorded over buildings so old and dirty they appeared somehow contagious. Trailer homes with the names of the various construction companies stenciled onto their weathered façades were stationed in parking lots of broken asphalt, from which waist-high weeds proliferated. Smokestacks had long since grown cold and stood like tombstones over the bodies that had once given them fiery life. Roofs had fallen in sections, allowing the rain to puddle inside and rot the wooden frames. Graffiti dominated soot-stained red brickwork and concrete block walls. Broken glass and trash littered the ground. The windows of the once proud factories were either broken out or boarded over, and “Keep Out” signs were posted on every flat surface. Mounds of fractured cement, broken bricks, and cracked timber, heaped twenty feet high, rotted where they had been felled while the process of hauling them away moved at a snail’s pace. It was no different than any other abandoned industrial district, with the notable distinction that it reeked of fish guts.
“Fist time under?” Henley asked. Again with the smug grin.
Sturm nodded and returned her attention to the dark maw in the foundation of the demolished fish processing facility, where chunks of debris had been rolled aside to widen the makeshift opening.
“It’s like a maze down there.” Henley removed his cap and slicked back the water from his shaved scalp before donning it once more. “Until you’ve been under, you have no idea. These warehouses and factories were built more than a hundred years ago, back when things were made to last. Half of this basement stood up to the demolition, and most of these buildings along the waterfront are connected from when they used to share some kind of forced-air heating system. There have to be tens of thousands of square feet of tunnels and rooms for people to hide in down there.”
Better get used to it, she thought. She’d be doing this each of the next ten nights, until after the fancy fundraiser dinner to celebrate the opening of the cultural center, named for the first female mayor of Seattle. Sturm imagined society’s elite: drinking champagne, fluted glasses clinking, the clamor of superficial conversation, dapper tuxedos, glimmering jewels, shimmering gowns. Heaven forbid one of these poor homeless souls scurry out of the hell to which cruel life had damned them in hopes of scavenging the leftover pate and caviar.
“So, we doing this or what?” Henley asked.
“It’s not going to collapse while we’re in there, is it?” she asked as she ducked into the darkness. It was meant to sound flippant, but she heard the tone of worry in her own voice.
“I wouldn’t wager a vital organ on it.”
“You’re supposed to say something a little more reassuring.”
“How ‘bout this? Keep your pepper spray handy. These rats don’t like it when you shine your light in their eyes.”
Five steps in, Sturm had to drop to all fours and crawl. Concrete shards prodded her palms and bit into her knees. A stray lance of rusted rebar scraped her shoulder. Sometimes she absolutely hated this job. She had to remind herself that it was only temporary. Joining the force out of college had seemed like a good idea at the time. It paid well enough and she could work the third shift, which left her free time during the day to pursue her Masters Degree in Criminalistics from the University of Washington while she earned the necessary practical law enforcement experience. Now that she was within months of completing her internship at the Wa
shington State Patrol crime lab and she already had an actual paying job lined up with the Crime Scene Response Team, a partnership between the Crime Laboratory and Criminal Investigation Divisions, she could finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Soon enough, she would be part of the CSRT, an elite team of forensics experts who specialized in everything from biochemistry to microanalysis and firearms to forgery, the cream of the crop in the state of Washington, who were loaned out to various law enforcement entities from the smallest rural sheriff’s department right up to the Federal Bureau of Investigation when prompt resolution was of the essence. And then she could leave all of this bureaucratic nonsense behind her.
It couldn’t come soon enough, she thought as she wriggled deeper into the darkness, which seemed immune to the glow of her flashlight. If only her parents could see her now, the Queen of the Ambrosia Apple Festival, crawling through a tunnel that reeked so badly of piss and sweat that it overrode even the vile fishy aroma. Had the loss of their orchard, after so many years of fighting against the elements and infestations, the plummeting barrel prices, and then finally the bank, not driven them to early graves, they could have found themselves down here, among the lost souls she now prepared to mercilessly roust.
Because it was her job.
“Not for much longer,” she whispered. She reached the terminus and maneuvered her body so that her feet were in front of her in order to drop down into the sublevel.
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 2