The rest of his body came into view as he rose from his lawn chair. Too late, Darger realized he wasn’t just shirtless. The man was completely naked, and she couldn’t help but notice that the carpet matched drapes.
Darger half-gasped, half-giggled at the Lil’ Smokey set in a thatch of red pubes like an acorn in a bird’s nest.
“You act like you’ve never seen a naked man wielding an AK-47 before,” Loshak said drily, which only made Darger giggle harder.
Loshak rolled down his window.
“What’s yer bidness?” the naked man asked.
“We’re here to see Curtis.”
“Curtis don’t have any visitors on the roster today, and I don’t know you, so that’s a no.”
With a sigh, Loshak reached into his jacket and pulled out his badge.
The naked man scowled at the ID for a beat before hocking a loogie into the grass.
“Feebs,” he growled. “Shoulda known you’d come sniffin’ around here sooner or later. Always think everythang’s your business, doncha?”
“We’re only here to talk,” Loshak said. “We have some questions about a man named Stephen Mayhew. You know him?”
The naked man frowned. His jaw worked up and down like he was chewing on the question. Without a word, he swiveled back to the guard booth and picked up a walkie-talkie from the chair set beside the door. He muttered something into the black box, but it was too low to hear.
They waited.
Naked Guy had a bit of a back and forth with whoever was on the other end of the radio, his unblinking stare never leaving Loshak’s car. After a minute or so of this, he came back out.
“Curtis will see you,” he said. “You gotta park here and walk in, though. We try to keep motor vehicle traffic to a minimum inside the gates, else the road in gets all tore up and muddy. Over there is good.”
He waggled a finger to a place just off the driveway where the grass was matted flat. Loshak put the car in gear and steered it into the makeshift parking area.
They stepped out into the breeze and the sun. It felt good to be out of the car. Darger stretched. Insects chirped everywhere, a many-voiced sound that never let up.
Naked Guy approached. Darger noticed for the first time that the only item of clothing he wore was a pair of work boots. No evidence of even socks.
“There are no digital devices allowed on the premises,” he said. “You’ll need to surrender all phones, tablets, laptops, and the like here at the gate. You can collect them when you leave.”
Darger looked at Loshak, who shrugged. He handed his phone over, and Darger followed suit. She’d left her jacket in the car, and Naked Guy’s eyes zeroed in on her holster.
“Firearms have to be surrendered, too.”
“No can do, pardner,” Loshak said. “That is quite literally against federal regulations, and I figure you know that. Do we look like fresh-out-of-the-Academy rubes who would actually fall for that?”
The naked man’s top lip quivered, and then he grumbled something unintelligible. He turned on his heel and stomped back into the booth, various body parts jiggling and shaking. There was a mechanical whir, and the big gate began to slide out of the way.
“It’s about a mile and a half up the road,” Naked Guy said, gesturing with his rifle. “Can’t miss it.”
They started down the dusty track, and Darger was thankful for the canopy of trees that kept the way shaded. A walk like this in the city would have been a nightmare, with all that concrete and metal absorbing the heat and reflecting it right back at you. They would have been baking.
Even with the benefit of the shade, Darger felt beads of sweat forming along her brow and the back of her neck after a few minutes. Loshak tugged at the collar of his jacket, and she was glad she’d left hers behind.
They’d been walking for about ten minutes when the trees on the right opened up, revealing rolling hills in a patchwork of dazzling colors — red and purple and orange and yellow. The flower fields.
Darger paused, her eyes studying the near-perfect rows of plants.
“I still think it’s an awfully big coincidence that the cult our dirt-covered corpse came from happens to have a working farm.”
Ghostly white shapes flitted along the tilled paths, and it was a moment before Darger realized they were women in white dresses tending the plants. The breeze shifted and she caught a snippet of someone singing.
“But it sure is peaceful out here,” she admitted. “Looks like something from another century.”
“Yeah it’s all wholesome and old-timey until they re-enact a human sacrifice under the full moon, right?”
Darger snorted.
“You think they starved Stephen Mayhew as punishment for bringing along an outsider who interrupted their fake ritual?”
“I don’t know. It sounds far-fetched, but then so does finding a bunch of malnourished bodies in a landfill.” Loshak wiped the back of his neck. “Anyway, I guess we’re about to find out.”
They moved on down the driveway, veering away from the fields and deeper into the trees again. The wind kicked up, causing branches to creak overhead.
Their footsteps carried them up a slope, and when they crested a low hill another clearing came into view. This one was situated directly in the path of the drive, and Darger saw a scattering of small buildings — cabins and yurts and even some tents. A plume of smoke arose from a small fire near the center of it all.
Darger opened her mouth to comment on the seemingly random assortment of buildings when a blood-curdling scream stopped her in her tracks.
Chapter 22
Darger and Loshak made eye contact for a split second, as if to confirm with one another that they were indeed hearing what they thought they were hearing.
A woman screaming bloody murder. Shrill sounds ringing out from the bottom of the hill. Pained or terrified or both.
Without exchanging a word, the agents took off running toward the awful noise. The ragged sound of the woman’s voice made the hair on Darger’s arms stand straight up.
Beside her, Loshak drew his weapon. Darger unholstered her Glock as well, keeping it pointed at the ground as she ran.
They drew up on the camp, and Darger spotted people milling around the camp fire at the east end of the clearing. She caught a whiff of fried onions and saw coils of smoke and steam rising from a skillet. She glanced around and saw smiles on most of the faces. Heard the sing-song lilt of upbeat chatter.
Surely they could hear the woman’s agonized cries? She and Loshak had noticed the wailing from all the way back down the road. These people seemed totally oblivious to it.
Her mind whirred, searching for an explanation. And the simplest answer was that the sound of someone screaming was common enough that they’d all learned to ignore it.
That thought sent another wave of chills through Darger’s flesh. For now, she needed to focus on finding the woman and putting a stop to whatever was happening. The people around the fire, as disturbing as their apathy was, didn’t seem to be any kind of threat.
Darger’s lungs began to burn as they crossed the last stretch of road, hot and cold and stinging in her chest. She could hear Loshak huffing for breath alongside her.
She followed the screams to a small modular shed tucked beneath a copse of chestnut trees on the west side of the camp. They sprinted to the door and paused outside, both crouched beside the entrance.
The screaming had taken on a strangely rhythmic quality now. The woman let out a long, drawn-out wail, and then there was a pause.
Another long wail.
Pause.
The sound seemed sharper this close up. Even through the walls of the small building, it was piercing.
Loshak was positioned on the side of the door closest to the handle. He gestured that he’d open the door and allow Darger to enter first.
She gave a nod to indicate that she was ready.
Loshak took a big breath, shoulders heaving. In one fluid motion, he t
urned the handle and shoved the door wide.
Darger entered low and swept the room, swiveling the Glock in front of her, eyes scanning everything.
One, two, three, four people sitting on the floor in the small space. Three women and a man. Their legs folded up beneath them, the lotus position or something like it, Darger thought.
“Hands,” she said. “Let me see your hands.”
The screaming cut off suddenly and a pile of pillows on the floor shifted, thrashed as though this collection of cushions was coming to life.
Darger squinted at the shambling heap and realized she’d counted wrong. There were five people in the room.
The pillows bulged around a woman in a floral dress on the floor, laying in the fetal position. Her red and splotchy complexion told Darger that this was the one who’d been screaming.
The woman spun around. Sat up. She had red-rimmed eyes, but she didn’t look in pain or injured. Wasn’t bleeding. Wasn’t even being touched by anyone. The woman clutched one of the pillows to her chest and stared at Darger, a confused expression on her face.
Darger lowered her weapon and sensed Loshak do the same.
“What’s going on in here?” Loshak said. His voice still had a little edge of adrenaline in it, but it already sounded more unsure than authoritative.
“Uh, maybe you should tell us who the heck you are, first,” the man asked. There was a lilt in his voice, the tone of each sentence going up at the end, almost as if he were asking a question. “Like, you can’t just burst in here.”
Darger studied him. His sandy hair was styled in dreadlocks, and he wore a white t-shirt that was so dirty it looked as brown as a rotten apple. Darger had a feeling she was about to lose her bet with Loshak. Why hadn’t she picked dreadlocks?
“I’m Agent Darger from the FBI. This is my partner, Agent Loshak.” Darger flashed her badge. “We heard screaming.”
“Uh, yeah,” Dreadlocks said, mouth agape. “This is the Primal Scream shed, bruh. What did you expect to hear?”
“Primal…”
“Scream.” The voice came from behind them.
Darger turned and found another man standing in the door frame. He had shoulder-length blond hair and a beard roughly two shades darker.
“You must be our visitors from the FBI.”
“Curtis, man,” Dreadlocks said. “They just, like, burst in and totally harshed the vibe. Citrine was really making some progress, too. I could hear the past-life trauma in her screams.”
Darger had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. So Dreadlocks wasn’t the cult leader, after all. And Curtis was looking pretty Jesus-y. Loshak owed her twenty bucks.
“It’s alright, Sonny. The interruption was my fault. I fully intended to meet our guests, but I got held up in the kitchen with Juniper. Another plum butter incident. You know how she is.” Curtis smiled, but there was a tension there. “Coming upon our camp and hearing screaming, well… they probably thought poor Citrine here was being tortured.”
Everyone but Darger and Loshak chuckled at this.
Curtis let his gaze sweep the small room before locking on Darger. He had pale blue eyes. Clear and intense.
“I understand you have questions about Stephen,” he said. “Why don’t we let this little group get back to it, and we can go somewhere… quieter to talk.”
The group tittered again, and Darger wondered if Curtis had brainwashed them all into thinking he was funny. She didn’t think mere narcotics, even in copious amounts, would be enough to explain laughing at these comments.
“Lead the way,” Darger said, and then she and Loshak followed Curtis out of the shed.
Chapter 23
Cora curled up in a tiny ball in her cage, wrapping herself in the blankets as best she could. Down there in the dark, she had very little sense of how much time had passed. Hours? Days?
Despite it being the middle of June, there was a permanent chill in the underground space. And a dank earthen smell that reminded her of the cellar at her grandpa’s house.
Adrenaline kept her awake for a time. She couldn’t stop worrying that the cowboy would return, and she didn’t want to be caught unaware. But eventually she grew tired, and there was nothing to do there in the dark but close her eyes and nestle a little deeper in the blankets.
Sleep came in brief shards and fragments. Dreams flitting through her head off and on, mind-made images breaking up the endless dark with vivid color and shape.
She dreamed of Chase, her imagination reanimating him just as he was. Dark stubble speckled his jaw, drawing stark the chiseled lines of his square chin. He squinted and smiled and drove them down endless city blocks in his piece of shit Toyota, cigarette smoke spiraling around his head like a gray halo. He chain-smoked and talked about all his big plans. His schemes and impossible dreams. About how they’d spend all the cash — champagne and lobster and gold-plated everything.
He talked about a better life, dreamed out loud of a better world. Talked about an escape from the dreary way of living they’d both been born into.
Maybe that was why she’d loved Chase despite all else. He’d dared to dream of a way out of the trailer park hole, dared to fight back against what had felt like a certain fate — brutal poverty meant only to span another generation through them. Everyone else she knew seemed so ready to submit to that force, resigned to let the preexisting way of things bend them to its will, slot them into their place in the world like being poor was some destiny or birthright. But Chase had fought against it like hell.
Then she dreamed of the knife entering Chase’s gut. Punching home and retracting. Sliding in and out with such ease. Wet scraping sounds that whispered and hissed.
His blood spattering the tile, runnels of red winnowing into the grout lines as the puddle spread ever outward from the point of impact.
It couldn’t be real, but it was.
When she woke, she wept. Hot tears drained down to touch her chin, seemed to make the skin of her cheeks soggy.
The loss had finally caught up with her, overtaken the sense of shock that had numbed and awed her mind to the point of blankness at first. But now it hurt, and the pain only seemed to grow.
Grief was the mind grasping along the edges of a hole, she thought — the hurt of trying to understand an absence like it was an object.
Cora scooted forward in her cage. Wrapped her fingers around the cold metal of the frame again. Thin bars. Smooth to the touch, that glossy black enamel coating them, which she remembered but could not see in the dark.
Her fingers reached out. Stretching toward the latch. Finding that thick bulk of the padlock dangling from the ring of metal there.
She could touch the lock. Feel the different smoothness of its brushed metal. Push it so its hooked shank pivoted against the hasp, hear it slap back against the body of her pen. But that was it.
She pulled her fingers back inside the cage. Breathed. Blinked and then stared into the dark around her, feeling that faint sting of her eyes straining against the blackness.
She closed them. Held still. Focused on her breathing until it cleared her mind.
Her chest rose and fell for a while, and finally, she let her mind reach out. She listened to the silence beyond the sounds of her respiration, listened to the space stretching out around her, somehow calmed instead of panicked by that awareness now.
Space. Stillness. The world beyond her being, beyond her tiny physical form, beyond these walls. So much space.
The stillness seemed to grow, inside of her and outside of her. She drifted in it. Found peace in it.
Her eyes snapped open when she heard the woman’s voice in the distance.
“Are you there?”
Chapter 24
Outside the shed, they paused briefly to make formal introductions before moving on. Curtis was younger than Darger had imagined. Maybe thirty at the oldest. A little taller than her, but shorter than Loshak. His lean arms were deeply tanned. He wasn’t handsome, bu
t he wasn’t ugly, either. Physically, he was what Darger would describe as a Ted Bundy type. Normal-looking, possibly deceptively so.
His body language seemed to adjust as they moved out into the open. Whatever tension Darger had detected in him inside the shed quickly giving way to a calm, assertive way of carrying himself. For better or worse, that put her somewhat at ease as well.
Curtis ushered them further down the two-track road, past more of the small buildings. A man with graying hair squatted on the front steps of one of the cabins strumming an acoustic guitar that was badly out of tune. Two women sat near him, one braiding the other’s hair and swaying to the music.
“This area is really the backbone of our community. It all started right here. When it began, there were only ten of us with a handful of tents, an outhouse, and a communal fire.” He stretched his arms wide. “And in just a few years we’ve built this.”
There were two more men and four women clustered around another fire pit. One of the women wore a baby sling with a sleeping infant tucked inside. Darger was starting to notice a pattern here. A much higher ratio of women to men.
“I truly regret that your first taste of the camp was the Primal Scream shed,” Curtis was saying. “It must have been jarring. Then again, sometimes that’s exactly what we need. A shock to the system.”
“If you’re sincerely worried about first impressions, I’d maybe address the naked man with the assault rifle guarding the front gate,” Darger said.
Curtis threw back his head and laughed. His teeth were straight and white, with prominent canines.
“I only hope the confusion back at the shed won’t color your view of this place. As you can see, we’re quite a peaceful lot.” Curtis thrust his hands into the pockets of the linen pants he wore. “It’s just that we all need outlets. We keep ourselves so bottled up out there in what I call The Material World. All the rules. The formalities. The mores. It’s quite stifling. But I don’t need to tell you that. I’m guessing the FBI is its own universe of codes and regulations. Meetings and interviews and evaluations. And sometimes, don’t you just want to scream?”
Violet Darger | Book 7 | Dark Passage Page 11