Night Chill

by Jeff Gunhus

  Jack squared his shoulders to the huge man. “If you get in my way of taking care of my family, I won’t think twice either.”

  Lonetree broke the tension with a broad grin. He was starting to like this guy. “O.K. Pissing match over. We don’t have much time and it takes some work to get where we’re going.” Without waiting for an answer he headed up the trail leaving Jack behind.

  Jack hesitated. Even though he still had the gun in his hand, he was reluctant to blindly follow this strange man into the woods.

  Then again, his other option was to fill the prescription for lithium still in his pocket and pretend none of it had happened. Faced with a choice between action and medication, Jack knew what he had to do.

  Jack followed Lonetree down the trail. He laughed out loud when the Robert Frost poem popped into his head, something he used to have on a plaque in his office.

  I chose the path less traveled and that has made all the difference.

  In the back of his mind, he wondered at his choice. On what path was it that he now traveled?

  That of discovery?

  Or the path of madness?

  He worried that the two had somehow become one and the same.

  FORTY-THREE

  The nurses at Midland General rotated floors every few weeks. Officially it was for cross training, but Anna Beaufort didn’t care what they called it, as long as she got to be on the third floor every so often. Most of the nurses thought this was the worse rotation because nothing ever went on, except when someone died, of course.

  But Anna loved it. Being on the third floor gave her time for her real passion, reading. She always had a book with her, tucked under the pile of charts as she did her rounds or hidden in the drawer of her desk when the docs showed up unannounced to check on a patient. With her books she went on journeys across the globe, fell in and out of love several times a week and, best of all, solved mysteries. Her new discovery was Catherine Coulter. Not enough graphic sex for her taste but the quality of the writing more than made up for it.

  Down the hall from the nurse’s station where Nurse Beaufort sat solving the latest murder in her book, old Mrs. Haig was dying. It was the cancer. In her lymph nodes this time, they told her. A few years before, she gave a breast to the disease, but it hadn’t been enough. The voracious disease wanted all of her. And this time she had decided to give it.

  With her husband dead six months now, Ruth Haig no longer felt the pull of the world to keep her alive. There were her children and grandchildren, all healthy and loving, but she missed her Daniel. And she was tired. So tired. She had endured the pain and sickness that went with the chemotherapy treatment for breast cancer. Endured it to stay with Daniel. She couldn’t stand the thought of leaving him behind and making him manage without her. But now it was almost time for her to go. Time for her to meet her husband and the let the new generations go on without her.

  So when the cancer was discovered a month ago, she refused treatment. Both of her sons begged her to change her mind, but eventually they came to understand her decision. Or at least accept it. With the decision came a sense of peace that Ruth hadn’t felt in months. It was a familiar sense of comfort. The feeling of being curled up next to Daniel, his arms wrapped around her. She knew she would be in those arms again soon.

  Ruth smiled in her sleep, tucked under her blankets, deep into a dream where she and her lover were together, young, with a lifetime ahead of them. It was the younger version of Daniel that came to her in these dreams. But she had always seen him that way when he was alive too, even in the last days when he walked with a bent back and shuffling feet. For her, he was always the youth that courted her, romanced her, loved her. She could stay forever in this dream world if she were allowed.

  But the pain would not allow it. Always her constant companion, the pain scratched on the door of her mind, demanding entrance. She blocked it out, not willing to leave her delicate fantasies. But the scratching became a knock. And soon the impatient visitor was banging on the door as waves of pain wracked her frail body.

  Her eyes flitted open, the sweetness of her dream lingering for only a second before it evaporated under the heat of the pain. She lolled her head to the side. Her left hand moved automatically, stiffly patting the bed until her fingers closed around a round plastic pad with a large button on it. Her thumb pumped away at the button, signaling the device next to her bed to pour morphine into her system.

  It didn’t take long. Almost immediately, the edge wore away. As the seconds ticked off, the pain continued to fade until it was once again manageable. The pain never left completely. It always hung nearby, a reminder of the disease eating away the flesh inside her. She knew the end was near. She only needed to hang on for a few more weeks, she told herself. One more Christmas and then she could go.

  She settled back in her bed, trying to take deep breaths and relax her body on each exhalation. Her mind wandered, as it often did these days, back through the stacks of memories stored within her. She enjoyed thinking about the good times of her life, her wedding day, the kid’s birthdays, so many happy times.

  Her favorite memories were of Christmas. Even though her sons lived all over the country now, they nearly always managed to make it home for the holidays. And it had only gotten better over the years as the flock of grandchildren grew. A new generation of kids had stared in wonder as Daniel walked across the front lawn in his Santa suit. She took pictures as her sons put their kids on the same sleighs they used when they were growing up and sledded down the hill in the back yard. Afterward, they’d all thaw out by the fire, chomping on her famous cinnamon sugar cookies as they laughed at the stories of the day.

  Now they were all coming home one last time. Everyone knew it was her last Christmas. It was the last thing she wanted to do before she passed on. One last time to see all the faces. Hear their laughter. Listen to the stories one more time. She mumbled a regular prayer to her late husband. One more Christmas, Daniel. One more Christmas with the children, then I’ll come to you.

  She caught a movement from the other side of the room. She craned her neck forward to see what it was.

  “Hello Ruthie,” said a man’s voice, soft and gentle.

  “Who’s there?” Ruth asked.

  In the corner of the room, from the dark shadows, came a soft glow of light. Pale at first, but growing in intensity, it throbbed as if keeping time with a pulse. Ruth squinted as the light became bright enough to illuminate the entire room. Within the light, she could see the outline of a form, but it wasn’t until the light started to move toward her bed that she realized what she was seeing.

  “Oh Daniel,” Ruth whispered, knowing that it was her husband come to collect her. “You’re beautiful.”

  The man said nothing. Light streamed around the edges of his body, obscuring his face. He continued toward the bed.

  “Daniel, honey, I can’t come yet. It’s not time. I need one more Christmas. Please. Can’t I just have that?”

  A hand reached out from the light and hovered over the bed. Ruth reached out to touch it, mesmerized by the luminescent skin, in rapture over the idea of holding her Daniel’s hand once more.

  The hand seized hers. It closed, in a claw-like grip, crushing the bones in her hand. Ruth cried out, first in pain and then in terror from the face that leered in front of her.

  “You’re not Daniel,” she whimpered.

  “Sorry, Ruthie,” Huckley hissed. “Nothing personal. But you have something I need.”

  Ruth tried to pull back her hand but the man’s grip was too strong. Huckley squeezed harder, his lips turning up in pleasure as she groaned.

  “Don’t hurt me,” she begged. “Oh God, please don’t hurt me.”

  A buzzer went off next to Nurse Anna Beaufort. The sudden burst of noise in the silence made her jerk back in her chair and nearly drop her book. A quick look at the monitors arrayed in front of her explained the cause for the alarm. The heart monitor in room 302 was flat-lined. She
felt a pang of sadness. It was Ruth Haig’s room, one of her favorites. She had grown quite fond of the tough old bird.

  The nurse opened a binder positioned on the shelf next to the monitors. She already knew the answer to her question, but she felt obligated to look it up to be sure. The binder had tabs on the side listing the patient’s names that were on the floor. She flipped open the book at the tab designated for Ruth Haig. She used her finger to trace the space between the heading and the written entry on the page. She was right. There was a DNR order, ‘Do Not Resuscitate.’

  “Aww, that’s a shame.” Nurse Beaufort had come to know Mrs. Haig a little over the past couple of weeks. She knew how much she was looking forward to Christmas with her family.

  She picked up the phone and dialed an extension. The doctor picked up on the third ring. “Dr. Brendel.”

  “This is Nurse Beaufort on the third floor. Ruth Haig just passed.”

  There was a pause. Anne thought maybe the news had hit the young doctor hard. But then she heard him answer a question put him by someone else in the room. He wasn’t even listening. Then he was back on the line. “Ruth Haig? She has a DNR, right?”

  “Yes doctor.”

  “All right. I’ll be up when I can. Wait until I come up before we notify the family.” Then the phone went dead.

  Nurse Beaufort snorted. Docs were all the same, pompous asses every one. That Dr. Tremont was better than the male docs, but she still had an attitude.

  The nurse reluctantly marked her page in her book and headed down the hall to Room 302 to start to prepare the body. There was no one else there to cover the desk for her but she didn’t think twice about it. It was a slow day. Nothing much really happened on the third floor anyway.

  FORTY-FOUR

  They hiked through the forest along a narrow deer trail, just wide enough to permit them passage through the prickly underbrush. The crunch of dry leaves and small twigs accompanied every step. Squirrels chattered nervously above them, hopping from branch to branch, alarmed by the intruders and uncomfortable with the lack of coverage afforded them by the naked branches of the winter trees. In the distance came the unmistakable honking of Canadian geese. The asynchronous chorus grew louder until the flock heard the tramping men below and veered away, their angry calls fading quickly into the air.

  Lonetree set the pace. The only supplies they had were whatever contents Lonetree carried in the pack strapped to his back. The large man had refused any of Jack’s attempts to pry out more information about Huckley so he had finally quit trying and resigned himself to walk in silence.

  After ten minutes, Lonetree stopped and shrugged off the backpack. He pulled out a black handheld device with a LCD screen above a series of buttons.

  “Is that a GPS?” Jack asked.

  “Uh huh,” Lonetree acknowledged, working the buttons for the global positioning system. The device was a little different from those found at the local Radio Shack. Even with its compact size it could pinpoint their location to within one meter. That in itself was no technological wonder. What made the unit special was its ability to withstand being run over by an armored division and come out of it unscathed. That and a special signal dispersal algorithm that ensured anyone interested in his whereabouts couldn’t trace him back from the GPS contact with the satellites. It was one of the little toys that had gone missing when he left the SEALS.

  “You’re quite an outdoorsman,” Jack baited. Lonetree grunted but otherwise ignored the comment. “And quite a conversationalist,” Jack muttered.

  Lonetree threw the device into his backpack and slipped the straps over his shoulders. “We’re a couple of minutes away. Let’s go. I want to get you back before they notice you’re gone. I don’t want to make them nervous.”

  Before Jack could question his last statement, Lonetree turned sideways and pushed into the thicket guarding the side of the path. Jack could hear the branches snapping but Lonetree himself disappeared completely from sight, as if the forest had swallowed him whole. He walked up to the point the big man had disappeared and saw that there was another path faintly traced on the ground running perpendicular to the path they were on. Jack put his hands up to guard his face from the scratching thorn bushes and pushed forward.

  Twenty yards later, the bushes thinned and it was possible to walk without the dry thorns snagging his clothes and skin. Lonetree picked up the pace again and Jack struggled to keep up. He thought he was in good shape, but he realized that he was no match for the man he was following. Jack estimated that Lonetree had him by five inches and at least sixty pounds, yet the man wasn’t even breathing hard.

  Finally Lonetree stopped and waited for Jack to catch up. He pointed in front of him. “This is it.”

  Jack looked carefully where his guide pointed. Behind a thin cover of vines he saw a black gaping hole that opened up into the earth. He crept down the slope that led to the opening and pulled back the vines. Jagged rocks hung suspended in the dark earth that ringed the fissure. It was a rough circle about twice the width of a man. The floor of the cave disappeared in a dark slope littered with loose rock. Jack’s eyes could penetrate no more than a few feet into the gloom. It reminded him of an animal’s lair. The kind of cave he threw rocks into when he was a kid. Right before he and his friends ran like hell in case something came out after them.

  Lonetree slapped a huge hand in the middle of his back. “Hope you’re not claustrophobic.” Jack looked down and saw Lonetree’s other hand in front of him. It held a hardhat with a miner’s lamp attached to the front.

  “Welcome to the entrance of Hell.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  Lonetree dumped out the gear from his backpack on the ground between them. He separated the equipment into two piles, stuffing some of the items back into the pack for later use. He threw Jack knee and elbow pads, a hardhat with a miner’s lamp attached, and a pair of overalls to put over his clothes. Jack pulled on the overalls, fighting back the rising panic he felt over going into the cave. He didn’t like to label himself as claustrophobic. He just didn’t like tight, dark spaces where he couldn’t breathe. The prospect of crawling into a cave did not appeal to him at all.

  Lonetree looked him over, tightening the elbow pads until they pinched at Jack’s skin, and demonstrating how the miner’s lamp worked. “Ever been spelunking before?”

  “Yeah, I took my kids to the Luray Caverns.”

  “The big cave with the concrete sidewalks for tourists and the little light show? That’s not spelunking. That’s walking.”

  “O.K. So I haven’t been spelunking before. Anything I should know?”

  “Yeah,” Lonetree scrambled into the cave opening, “don’t get lost. And don’t get stuck.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” Jack said but he doubted the big man heard him. Lonetree was through the opening and out of sight. With a deep breath, Jack followed.

  Past the mouth of the cave the temperature dropped several degrees. The air was moist, like after a thunderstorm, and smelled of freshly tilled soil. In fact, after the bed of loose rock at the opening, the floor of the cave turned to slick mud. The cave, more like a tunnel, slanted down at a sharp angle. Jack followed Lonetree’s example and used the mud to slide down on his backside, steadying himself by dragging his hands along the tunnel walls.

  When the tunnel curved enough to block out the little light that had been filtering down from the cave opening, Jack had to fight back a wave of panic. Gravity was pulling him down into the earth but it seemed to push the walls of the cave in around him as well. He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths, blocking out the horror images flashing through his mind. Trapped underground. Running out of air. Buried alive.

  He focused on Lonetree’s back moving away from him, surrounded by a halo of light from his miner’s lamp. The image of the space closing in around the descending figure only made it worse. He tried to take his mind off the constricted space by examining his new environment more closely.

 
The miner’s light attached to his helmet danced around as it illuminated the space in front of him. He saw that the mud ran up the sides of the wall. He realized it must be from runoff from recent rains that had carried soil down the tunnel like a drain.

  Jack tried to remember details from a semester of college geology wishing that he had actually paid attention. The sides and ceiling of the tunnel were solid rock. He assumed that the walls were limestone. There were entire networks of limestone caves throughout the area, especially over in West Virginia, where the ex-miners made a cottage industry catering to adventure tourists from around the country.

  Every now and then the local paper ran a short story about spelunking. Occasionally there was a piece about some new system being discovered, or a human interest story on a local guide. Most of the stories were about deaths. Usually amateurs who went down for a short afternoon and never returned. The local writers failed to hide their contempt for the out-of-towners who tromped through the caves every year decked out in their brand new Patagonia outfits and shiny helmets.

  Search parties made up of guides and serious cavers were organized and sent out with every disappearance. The success rate for search parties was not good. Going against the basic tenets of survival, the lost cavers never stayed put after they realized they were lost. Whether from panic or optimism, the amateurs kept on looking for a way out and kept going, as if thinking that if they traveled far enough, they’d walk out of their nightmares. In reality, all they did was walk deeper into them.

  It suddenly struck Jack that he was no different. Wasn’t he just going farther and farther into this crazy story on the slim chance of stumbling across something that might help?

  He stopped in his tracks. What the hell was he doing? It was crazy to follow this lunatic down this tunnel. Crazy to have even gotten into the car with the man. What he needed to do was get back to the surface and get back to town. He needed to get down to Baltimore and make sure the kids were safe. He had to get out of there.