Fair Chance

by Josh Lanyon

  “I know. It’s okay.” Was it? Probably not.

  The framework was certainly manmade. He couldn’t think of a single good reason for an underground storage unit in the middle of the woods. But maybe it was something else. Something harmless and ordinary.

  Like...?

  This was mining country, but that looked pretty narrow to be a mine shaft. And it was hard to believe anyone had dug a well this far in the middle of nowhere. A well or anything else.

  It wasn’t a bomb shelter.

  It might be a pit cave that had been sealed off for safety’s sake. That made the most sense.

  Yes. A potential hazard to hikers. It might be nothing more than that.

  But Sheba seemed to think it was something more as she returned to whining and clawing at the sphere.

  And watching her, Elliot decided she was right. This was not a cap. Not merely a cover. This was an entrance.

  He pulled his gloves off and felt carefully around the edge, trying to figure out how the heavy lid fit into the framework. At last he identified what seemed to be grips. By turning the disc counterclockwise, he was able to lift the heavy plate up and out of the frame.

  He set it aside and peered down.

  A cold breath of dank, dead air rose up and his stomach knotted. That was not a healthy smell.

  How the hell far down was that drop? He could not see anything below. He appeared to be looking down a long black tunnel straight into the ground.

  A pit cave. He had been right the first time.

  But as he studied the walls, he noticed thin, irregularly spaced bars—metal rungs—built into the sides for hand or footholds. Not something you found in most caves. Not a natural geographic feature. At some point in time someone had used this wilderness space often enough, regularly enough, to create a ladder in and out.

  Sheba leaned in, sniffing mightily, and then put her head back and howled. The mournful wail raised the hair on Elliot’s neck.

  “Christ. Shhh.” He put his hand around her muzzle and listened.

  He could hear the wind shushing through the pines. Nothing else.

  He let go of the dog and pulled his phone out.

  Bars. Not many. The signal was weak, but he did have a signal.

  Sheba began to scratch and dig at the edge of the framework. The soft soil above started to give way in showers of dirt and gravel. The dog slid forward, paws scrabbling. Elliot hauled her back. “Stay.”

  No cute perching on her haunches and covering her eyes today. Her ears were flattened to her head, the pupils of her pale eyes were dilated and huge. She nervously licked her chops.

  “Stay,” he repeated sternly, and then went back to figuring out how to get down to the bottom of whatever this was without killing himself.

  It went without saying that it was a bad idea. The smart thing to do was phone for help. Phone... Woll or Dannon. Except he didn’t trust either Woll or Dannon. Maybe that was paranoia, but that was where he was now. He could call Pine to update him on what he’d found on this morning’s hike, but this was not Pine’s jurisdiction and by the time Pine cut through the red tape and got up here with a support team...

  Well, would it really make a difference? There might be absolutely nothing in the bottom of that hole. Or, if what he suspected was at the bottom of this shaft really was at the bottom of this shaft, a few hours wouldn’t make a difference.

  “Be smart.” He could practically hear Tucker whispering it to him. “Be safe.”

  No. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt instinctively that if he waited, if he tried to get help, whatever proof was down in that pit would vanish. He needed to get in there and see for himself.

  He texted a quick message for Pine explaining where he was and what he was about to do, and then, without waiting for an answer, started down.

  The first step was the worst. Fingers knotted in grass and weeds—a very insecure hold—feeling with his foot...finding air...scooting a little farther...and feeling the first narrow rung beneath his foot.

  It felt pretty solid.

  He put his weight on it, leerily half turned, and realized that there was a handhold right below the frame. He gripped it and took another step down...except there was nothing there.

  Sweat broke on his forehead despite the chilly air.

  There was a sick roil in his stomach as he stretched a little farther, still not finding a foothold. He needed a rope or a cable ladder because this was just...really dumb...

  Ah. There it was. The second rung.

  The bars had been pounded into the side of the cave without recognizable rhyme or reason, but if you knew where they were, if you were used to climbing up and down...well, even then, this was unsafe.

  An excellent deterrent though. Because no one in their right mind would climb down here if they didn’t have to.

  He tested the next rung cautiously, afraid to put his full weight on it, but it did not budge.

  He took another step down, feeling with his foot.

  He was not claustrophobic. Not afraid of the dark. Didn’t have a problem with heights. But this was unnerving.

  Sheba made another attempt to start down. Rocks and dirt rained down, and Elliot tried to shelter his head with one arm.

  “No!” he yelled. “Sheba, no!”

  She ducked back again and he continued his painstaking descent.

  Christ, it was cold and the air was stale and tainted. With each slow, careful step, his heart thudded heavily with dread.

  Down.

  Down.

  Down.

  How the hell deep was this? He looked back up at the opening.

  Maybe the height of a two-story house. Say twenty feet?

  His hands felt slick and sweaty on the skinny rungs. He paused to wipe his palms thoroughly on the canvas sleeve of his barn coat before continuing down.

  His knee was starting to feel the strain. He paused to rest and looked upward.

  Sheba was still looking down at him as though she were trying to judge the jump.

  “No,” he called.

  The fall would kill her—and probably him, as well.

  Fifty feet.

  What in the hell was he doing? This was crazy. He should stop now. Climb back up and call for help.

  Help with what?

  So far all he had was a very deep hole in the ground.

  A bad-smelling, scary-ass hole in the ground.

  Another step down.

  Another.

  Another.

  Jesus Christ, how the hell deep was this fucking hole?

  One hundred feet?

  He was guessing, but as he stared up, the sun looked as tiny as the beam of a faraway flashlight.

  He took another step and was disoriented when he kicked solid ground. He had reached the bottom.

  Elliot let go of the ladder and reached for his phone to use the flashlight.

  Something slammed into him, knocking him to the ground hard. His head banged down on the packed earth and lights flashed before his eyes. He dropped his phone, and put up an arm, trying to protect his head from the blows coming his way.

  One kick landed in the middle of his back. Another to his tailbone.

  For crucial seconds, he couldn’t quite catch up to what was happening. He had expected to find something very different at the end of this quest. Alive and kicking had not figured into his calculations.

  He rolled over and away, reaching for his pistol. Dimly he could hear Sheba’s barking echoing down the tunnel.

  His assailant, huge and ferocious and terrifyingly silent, dragged him up and hurled him into the rough wall of the cave. Elliot’s knuckles cracked against rock and he dropped the pistol. He dropped down, groping for it, trying to block the punch
es raining down on his back and shoulders.

  His hand closed on the butt of his pistol. He could hear the heavy, strained breathing of the other. As he brought the gun up, a crazy thought flashed into his brain.

  “Tucker?”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The next blow didn’t fall. Elliot could hear struggling, shuddering gulps for air, and somewhere overhead a cracked voice said, “Elliot?”

  Elliot dropped his pistol and launched himself at the black mass looming over him. “Tucker?” His arms locked around Tucker, and even in the dark he could tell it was Tucker. He had lost weight. The outline of his body, the contours of his chest were subtly, worryingly different, but it was him. It was definitely, unmistakably him.

  Tucker. Alive.

  Until that blazing shock of relief, he hadn’t realized how close he’d been to losing hope. “Tucker. Christ.” He couldn’t seem to get past that word, that revelation. He tried to peer through the gloom to see Tucker’s features. He needed to see him.

  “How are you—What are you—How did you—” The words were muffled, incoherent. Tucker was crushing him close—but also maybe hanging on to him for support because he was shaking, weaving a little.

  They were talking over each other. “I thought you were dead.”

  “How can you...”

  “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

  Elliot wasn’t completely sure he hadn’t fallen and cracked his head. Was this a dream? A hallucination? Had he finally snapped under the weight of so much grief and fear?

  “Is this real?” That wasn’t a question for Elliot. Tucker seemed to be consulting some internal meter. He sounded wary, as though this was something he had had to ask himself again and again.

  “It’s real,” Elliot said. “Unless it’s my dream. I was looking for—” He couldn’t even remember what he had been looking for. Why the hell had he hiked out here if not to find Tucker? “I decided to follow the dog. We found the entrance to this place. I couldn’t tell what it was.”

  “Yeah. You have to see,” Tucker said. The words were thick, not quite clear. “It’s here. It’s all here. You have to know. You can’t protect yourself if you don’t know.”

  He sounded, well, a little crazy as he pushed Elliot toward the wall.

  “I can’t see anything,” Elliot said.

  “You’ll see.”

  “Hold on.” Elliot let go of Tucker and began to search for his phone and pistol. He found them and switched on the flashlight. He could see Tucker, looking oddly, terrifyingly shrunken in the rags of his clothing, stumbling toward the wall and then seeming to vanish.

  “Tucker!”

  A white grimy hand reached beckoningly out of the darkness. “Come here. You have to see it.”

  Elliot followed that beckoning hand and saw that there was a smaller chamber leading off the pit. He couldn’t tell if it was natural or manmade, but what were certainly manmade were the torch holders built into the rock wall.

  “What happened? How did you get in here?” Elliot asked. “We saw the van. Who grabbed you?” He was spilling questions, not even waiting for answers, all the bewilderment and fear of the past week pouring out even as he tried to assess and evaluate Tucker’s condition.

  Dragging speech, unsteady movements, weird behavior. It was obvious Tucker was suffering from everything from shock to hypothermia. All Elliot wanted to do was get him out of here and back to safety and proper medical care. But could he climb?

  The thought of leaving him here even for a couple of hours was unbearable.

  The smell of the second chamber stopped him in his tracks, halted all words. If they hadn’t been so far underground that the cave was naturally refrigerated, he’d have realized the truth a lot faster.

  He had to force himself to follow Tucker, who didn’t seem to notice at all, ducking down and disappearing from sight.

  Elliot ducked down too and knocked over a pail of something that sloshed messily over the stone floor.

  Inside the chamber he was able to straighten up. He turned his phone flashlight toward Tucker and sucked in a breath.

  Tucker looked gaunt and filthy. His eyes were red-rimmed, his lips chapped and peeling, his face gray. There were contusions on his wrists, though the bruises on his face were already starting to fade.

  Tucker put his hand up to block the light.

  Elliot opened his mouth to say...well, probably more of the same. Who did this to you? Why were you taken? What was the plan? But his gaze finally focused on the wall of white stone behind Tucker.

  His mouth went dry.

  Not white rocks. Or not entirely. Some of those jutting rocks were skulls.

  Hollow-eyed and grinning, the skulls stared back at him. They looked like skeletons about to step out of the wall.

  “See?” Tucker said grimly. “You see?”

  “Yes.”

  But then Elliot realized Tucker wasn’t talking about the wall of skulls. He was looking at something that lay near their feet.

  Elliot looked down and his stomach gave an alarming and completely unexpected heave.

  Not like he hadn’t seen dead bodies before, but something about this one—though not unanticipated—was weirdly jarring, coming on the tail of the discovery that Corian had been building his own wilderness catacomb.

  He recognized the blue parka and red plaid scarf—he’d seen Todd Rice wearing them in numerous photos on his Facebook page.

  “I...know him.”

  “He was here when I arrived,” Tucker said in an eerily conversational tone.

  The bizarreness of the circumstances faded and Elliot remembered there were things that had to be done. Practical things. Starting with getting Tucker out of here. He’d let Pine know where he would be, but had he been specific enough? He had certainly not indicated he needed help or backup.

  He couldn’t secure or protect this crime scene. He wasn’t even 100 percent sure of finding it again, although Sheba could probably be relied on for that. All he could do was snap a photo of Todd’s remains and then a couple of photos of the wall studded with skulls.

  “Enough. That’s enough. We’ve got to go,” Tucker told him. “Elliot.”

  “Yes.” Elliot took another photo.

  “Before they come back.”

  Elliot’s heart froze. He looked at the shadow that was Tucker. “They? What do you mean they’re coming back?”

  “They’ve come back twice. They’ll come back.”

  “You saw who grabbed you?”

  “Yes.” Tucker was leaning against the wall, eyes shut against the hard bright flashlight beam, as though he no longer had the strength to stand.

  “Tucker, listen.” Elliot went to him. Put his hands on Tucker’s shoulders. “It’s about a hundred feet up to the top. Can you—I don’t know if you should risk it. I can get help. I can leave my pistol with you—”

  Tucker’s eyes flew open. “The hell!” he roared. “I’m not staying in this goddamned hole one minute longer.”

  He turned—it was more of a controlled roll off the wall—and staggered out of the side chamber and into the tall chamber. He went straight to the wall and began to climb.

  “Tucker, for Christ’s sake. At least let me go first,” Elliot said, following.

  Tucker ignored him. He was breathing in pained grunts, as he reached for the next rung, but he was climbing.

  Elliot swore quietly. But maybe it was safer this way. If Tucker’s captors returned before Elliot could get back, gun or no, Tucker would be in trouble. But if he fell?

  Elliot broke into a sweat just thinking about it.

  But it was probably easier going up than it had been climbing down. And if Tucker got into trouble maybe Elliot could keep him from falling.


  Or maybe not, but it didn’t look like he had a choice. He climbed after him.

  “Tell me if you think you can’t make it.”

  Tucker muttered something inarticulate. He was moving with an almost desperate speed.

  “You’re going to need my sunglasses before you get to the top,” Elliot called.

  “It’s raining,” Tucker called back. He sounded breathless but happy. “Feel that?”

  After the angry energy of his start, Tucker’s ascent slowed to a painful and terrifying crawl. He had to stop many times to catch his breath or just steady himself, and each time Elliot would crowd up close, trying to find a way to brace him.

  He could feel Tucker’s muscles shaking and Elliot was convinced the only thing keeping him moving was that ferocious willpower.

  He wanted to ask Tucker if he knew his attackers or if he could describe them—with anyone else he would not have allowed them to climb without getting that information first—but it wasn’t in him to push Tucker. Or to confront the reason for demanding that information up front. Having let Tucker begin to climb, he could not afford to distract him now. Tucker did not have extra breath or energy to waste.

  Their slow progress grew even slower as they reached the halfway mark.

  “You okay up there?” Elliot called.

  Tucker didn’t answer, but he kept reaching for the next rung, stepping up.

  Three quarters of the way, they had slowed to a creep, and Elliot’s heart was in his mouth.

  “Not even another twenty feet,” he called. “We’re just about there.”

  Tucker stopped.

  “What do you need?” Elliot called. “What can I do?” He could hear the sharp note of fear in his voice. And Tucker probably could too.

  The answer was a surprisingly calm “Your shades.”

  “Coming.” Elliot leaned into the wall, breathing cold earth and wet stone as he felt around for his sunglasses and then stretched up, pushing them into Tucker’s icy hand.

  “You okay?” Tucker asked, sounding so much like his ordinary overprotective self that the back of Elliot’s eyes stung with untimely emotion.

  “Yep. Great. Let’s do this.”