Under the Beetle's Cellar

by Mary Willis Walker

  “That’s why I had to leave—before he knew.”

  “Before he knew you were pregnant?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “He’d sacrifice his own child?”

  “It would never grow up anyway—with the world ending. That’s what he taught. We believed it. This way it would stay innocent. It would go right to God without the suffering.”

  Infanticide—The grisliest of Molly’s fears. She forced herself back to the questions she had to ask: “Annette, how would you go about rescuing the children? Mordecai says he’ll kill them the second there’s an attack. Will he?”

  Annette took several deep breaths to calm herself. “I’ve been watching on TV. And thinking. He has to do it himself—in this certain, special way. Rapture of Mordecai. No one else can. See, he’s the Prophet Mordecai. Last of the line. And perfect martyrs of the Apocalypse—no one but him can do it, so if—” She turned her head toward the wall as a big white car came up the ramp.

  Instinctively, Molly stood so her body blocked Annette. The white Cadillac pulled into an empty place near the elevator. The engine died. A woman in spike heels and a red suit got out and clicked across the cement. When she disappeared into the elevator, Molly exhaled slowly. “It’s all right. She’s gone.

  “You were saying he’s the only one who can sacrifice them,” Molly said. “So if he—”

  She stopped. The noise of another car coming up the ramp. A dark blue van appeared and paused, looking for a space. Then it suddenly accelerated toward them. Annette gasped. Molly grabbed her by the arm and pulled her to the truck. They reached the passenger door just as the van squealed to a stop behind the truck.

  Two men jumped out and dashed toward them. Molly jerked on the door handle. Locked. She dropped the tape recorder into her bag and rummaged desperately for the keys and the Mace. One of the men grabbed her arm and wrenched it behind her. She screamed and tried to pull away. In front of her, the other man had already lifted Annette off the ground. She was kicking and screaming, but he was carrying her toward the van. An arm, hairy and huge, caught Molly around the head. It blocked her vision. She tried to bite it, but the arm grabbed her neck in a choke hold and jerked her back.

  Then a freight train hit. She crashed forward, falling hard, the man on top of her. Her breath exploded from her body. She saw only gray cement. Heard violent noises—screeching and grunting and the fury of a hundred snarling demons. Panicked, she tried to move. The man on top was hot and heavy, writhing, grinding her into the cement. A deep bellow of pain from above. The thick arm around her neck relaxed. She dragged herself a few inches forward, and a few more. Until she was out from under.

  She looked back. It was the dog, transformed into a blur of hissing, snarling black fury. He was on top of the man, dancing on his back, trying to rip his arm off. The man roared, tried to hit out with his other hand. Droplets of blood and foam flicked through the air.

  Winded and aching, Molly pushed up to her hands and knees. She looked for Annette. The girl was being lifted into the van. A third man inside was pulling her in. “No, no. Don’t! Help me,” Annette cried.

  “Stop! Help!” Molly called. Tried to call. Her voice was only a croak.

  The van door slammed shut.

  Suddenly behind her, the man rose to his knees, grunting, flailing, trying to pull away from the dog. Then he staggered to a crouching position, the dog still hanging from his arm. He screamed, “Shoot! Shoot the fucker!”

  The van door opened. The bleeding man staggered toward it, but the dog pulled him back, snarling and snorting, nails scraping the cement. From the van, another man jumped out and ran toward Copper. He had a shotgun. He held it by the barrel and lifted it over his head. Like a club.

  “No,” Molly screamed. “Copper!”

  The dog let go and dodged to the side.

  The shotgun cracked down hard—on flesh and bone. The man who’d attacked her screamed in agony, hugged his shattered arm to his chest, and crumpled to the floor. Molly managed to pull her key out of her bag, which miraculously still hung from her shoulder. She zapped the door with the remote and staggered to it. She opened it and scrambled in. “Copper. Come,” she called. Her command sounded like a plea. But now the dog had the man with the shotgun by the upper arm and was dragging him to his knees. The gun clattered to the cement.

  Molly slammed the door and with shaking hands managed to fumble the key into the ignition. She was blocked by the van, parked two feet behind. She started the engine and slammed it into reverse. Then she closed her eyes and accelerated. The truck jerked back two feet, smack into the side of the van. There was a crunch. She drove forward a few feet and did it again. Smash. Then she leaned into the horn. The blare was deafening, echoing off cement walls. She held it down.

  She was afraid to look behind. But she did. One man was dragging the other to the van, with the dog jumping at him, trying to get hold of his arm. The arm was dripping blood. Molly kept leaning into the horn, with all her might, as if the harder she did it, the louder it would blare. Where the hell was everyone?

  The men managed to get into the van. With the door still open, it took off. It headed down the up-ramp, squealing around the sharp corners.

  Shaking so hard she could barely grip the wheel, Molly backed up and headed after them. She caught a glimpse of movement in the rearview mirror—a black blur streaking into the back of the moving truck.

  My God, she thought, sweat running down her face. My God. That dog is a hellhound.

  When she got to the entrance, a man in a brown uniform was talking into a radio. He glanced at Molly. “The police are on the way. What the hell happened up there?”

  “Which way did the van go?” Molly demanded.

  He nodded up Rio Grande, where there was no dark blue van to be seen. “Let the cops do it, lady. They’re already on it. You wait here.”

  Molly did as she was told. Until she looked at herself in the mirror, she didn’t know that blood was trickling from her left temple or that she was crying.

  Molly kept having shivering spells, and she couldn’t stop talking. “I’m not usually so mean,” she said to the woman cop who was driving her out to Jezreel, “shouting like that. It’s just that I need to get this tape out there to Lieutenant Traynor, and you were all wasting my time when all it really took was a call to him. So I was just trying to get you to act quickly. There’s hardly any time left. What’s your name again?”

  “Rhinebeck. Julie Rhinebeck.”

  “Right. Officer Rhinebeck. Julie. I’ve always hated parking garages,” she said, touching the bandage over her left temple to monitor the swelling in progress there. “Nothing ever happened to me before to make me hate them. I just did. I always park at meters even if I don’t have enough quarters and it means getting tickets. And it’s not that I’m scared of everything. It’s just parking garages. I don’t know, it’s like—” Molly was shivering again. She kept seeing tiny Annette Grimes being thrust screaming into the van. She wouldn’t let herself think beyond that, to imagine what might be happening to her now.

  Officer Julie Rhinebeck reached across the seat, over the shotgun that stuck up between them, and took hold of Molly’s hand. She drove with one hand and held tight to Molly with the other. “Sure, it was like a premonition you had,” she said. “That’s happened to me, too. And I don’t like garages much either. Last year a guy pulled a knife on me in the City Bank garage. Turned out he was only twelve years old, but he looked twenty-five with that knife, let me tell you. Afterward I had the shakes like you wouldn’t believe. I was so relieved I didn’t shoot him. I almost did. I thought about it.”

  Molly glanced over at the officer’s profile. With her freckled face and her glossy black hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked like a teenager. This girl was younger than Jo Beth. When did they get so young?

  “Will they let you know here in the car if they find the blue van?” Molly asked.

  “Yes. They promised to call when anything bre
aks. Don’t worry.”

  Molly turned to look in the back of the patrol car where Copper was sleeping on the seat. No wonder—it had been a big day. Molly had insisted he come into the station with her while they took her statement and called Grady Traynor. She had them locate a former canine unit cop, who looked the dog over and washed the blood off him. To Molly’s relief, none of the blood turned out to be Copper’s.

  Julie Rhinebeck turned off the Interstate onto U.S. 79. “I haven’t been out here before, but Lieutenant Traynor gave me good instructions.” She glanced over at Molly. “He said to take extra-special care of you and the dog.”

  “Did he?”

  “Uh-huh. And he said you both like to ride in patrol cars.”

  Molly laughed and the shivering subsided.

  They turned onto FM 3419 and drove two miles in silence. “My God,” Rhinebeck said, slowing as they passed the dirt road that led to the Hearth Jezreelite compound, “look at that. It’s like a state fair or a circus or something.”

  Molly looked at the hodgepodge of structures rising up from the flat, treeless plain. Over the past six weeks, that landscape had become as familiar around the world as the White House. Certainly it was etched into her brain: the main building, a massive flat-topped two-story wooden box with tiny windows, and the two flanking stone towers with crenellations and little slit windows all around the top. It was geometric, un-softened by trees or bushes.

  To the right of the main structure stood several small outbuildings and a green water tank. To the left rose the huge white barn, its ridged tin roof gleaming in the sun. “Stop a second,” Molly said. She wanted to look at the barn. It was a prefab structure connected to the main building by a crude plywood breezeway. In the bright sunlight, on this gorgeous sky-blue spring day, it was hard to imagine it as the scene for the horrors Annette Grimes had described.

  Federal agents wearing camouflage jumpsuits and bullet-resistant vests, carrying rifles and radios, patrolled just outside the chain-link fence, which Molly knew surrounded the entire twelve acres. A corridor several yards wide had been designated as the inner perimeter by local law enforcement when they set up on the first day. No one but federal agents were allowed there. Samuel Mordecai had told the world on the day he took the school bus that if anyone—cop, federal agent, reporter, parent—set foot on Hearth Jezreelite property, the children and the bus driver would be immediately executed. From the start, the negotiators had believed him; in forty-eight days, no one but a few squirrels had set foot past the fence.

  At the outer perimeter squatted two Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Beside them were two huge M-1 tanks borrowed from the Texas National Guard. Several DPS Rangers manned the outer perimeter, checking press cards and turning curiosity seekers away.

  Beyond this ring was the press encampment, a media city which had sprung up instantly after the hijacking, like an ant mound pushing up from the dirt: huge satellite trucks, news vans with antennas shooting up into the sky. There were two high scaffoldings with platforms on top for filming the compound, trailers with awnings and barbecues and lawn chairs. Campers. A volleyball net. Picnic tables. On the road behind a police barricade, tourists snapped photographs and stood around pointing. It was a bizarre combination of war zone and beach party.

  At the top of each tower hung a tattered red banner about which the world had speculated. Was it a coat of arms? Some cult symbol? No one knew and Samuel Mordecai was not saying. Right now both flags hung limp, defeated, in the still air. No matter how this turned out, Molly thought, Samuel Mordecai would be defeated. But everyone else would lose, too. It was costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, burning up thousands of man-hours. And even if the children got out alive, they would have nightmares for the rest of their lives.

  Molly said in disgust, “All this for a nutty eighth-grade dropout like Samuel Mordecai. Only in America. Let’s go.”

  Officer Rhinebeck resumed speed. “Lieutenant Traynor said a mile and it’ll be on the right—a white house with lots of cars in front. There it is.”

  It was a large, dilapidated frame farmhouse. The front lawn had become a parking lot. Cars and pickups, two Austin police cars, and several Ford Tempos that Molly recognized as unmarked units were parked at odd angles. When Molly opened the car door, Copper instantly leapt up and whined. Molly handed the leash to the policewoman. “Will you walk him, Julie?”

  “You bet.”

  A uniformed Austin cop slouched in a lawn chair on the front porch. He stood as she approached. “Miz Cates? They’re waitin’ on you. Communications room—on the right.”

  Inside, Molly was hit by a strange mixture of smells: the mustiness of an old uninhabited house combined with the slightly burned, acrid smell of electronics. The room on the right was a Victorian double parlor with elaborate wood moldings and a tiled fireplace. So much electronic equipment was crammed into the room that it looked like a Radio Shack at Christmas, with everything inside turned on: computer monitors glowing, radios, televisions, a bunch of phones, and a fax machine churning out a heap of curled paper. One television was tuned to CNN with the sound off. Two men with earphones sat in front of a switchboard and another stood drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. There was no air conditioning and they all wore dark suits in spite of the heat.

  On one wall hung a huge diagram of the compound. On another wall were tacked photographs of the eleven children and Walter Demming. Around the fireplace were pictures of Samuel Mordecai, Annette Grimes, and about thirty of the other cult members.

  Grady Traynor, his shirtsleeves pushed up, his collar button undone, his gray pants rumpled, was clearly not FBI. Sitting in a lopsided armchair that had tufts of yellowed stuffing hanging out of it, he was reading what looked like an endless scroll of paper.

  “The seven seals?” Molly said, resting a hand on his shoulder.

  He looked up. “No, a file the Cult Awareness League just faxed us. On the Hearth Jezreelites. Basically, it says they are secretive, dangerous, fanatical, and apocalyptic in orientation. Like we didn’t know that already. How’s my dog?”

  “He’s outside. Taking a walk, sniffing trees.”

  “So what do you think of him now?”

  “Now I know he’s a maniac.”

  Grady stood up, letting the papers drop to the floor. “In an eight-year career, he was injured thirteen times and made more than a thousand apprehensions.” He touched the bandage at her temple and ran his fingertips around the swelling. “How are you?”

  “It’s just a flesh wound.”

  “You know better than that, Molly. An encounter like that always hits deep below the surface. Let’s try again. How are you?”

  “Shaky. And I can’t seem to stop talking.”

  He kissed her gently on the lips. “Later I will listen endlessly. Let me have the tape. We’ll make a quick copy before we play it.”

  Molly gave it to him and he handed it to a husky young man in a dark suit. “Copy it, Holihan. We’ll play it as soon as Lattimore gets back from his run.” He turned back to Molly. “We haven’t released this information yet, but we talked to Walter Demming forty minutes ago. After we’ve played yours, I’d like you to listen to ours. It’s exactly seventy seconds long.”

  A man wearing running shorts and a wet T-shirt entered the room. He was sweating profusely. He scooped up a towel from a chair, used it to dry his face and gray crew cut, then draped it around his neck. “Is this Molly Cates?” he said to Grady.

  “Yes, sir. Molly, this is Patrick Lattimore, FBI assistant special agent in charge.”

  Molly knew his face from the nightly televised press briefings. In person Lattimore looked even more like a Doonesbury character than he did on the tube. He had a big broken nose and heavy black circles under his eyes. His creased, jowly face looked thirty years older than his body, which was lean and fit.

  He shook Molly’s hand. “When we finish with you here, Miss Cates, we’d appreciate your spending some time upstairs with our intelligence st
aff so they can show you some photos of suspected Sword Hand of God members. And we borrowed a composite artist from Dallas. Lieutenant Traynor says the Austin police will need you back at some point, but we’d like your help while you’re here.”

  “One of them, the one who pulled Annette into the van—I never saw his face. The other two I can have a go at.”

  “Good.” Lattimore glanced at her temple. “You’ve had that looked at?”

  “The nurse at APD cleaned it.”

  He waved a hand toward the other agents in the room. “Special Agent Andrew Stein, primary negotiator—you’ve probably seen him on TV—Bryan Holihan, George Curtis.”

  Molly shook hands with them, paying particular attention to Andrew Stein, who was reputed to be the dean of hostage negotiators. He was a cherubic, unfocused-looking man with white hair that looked as wispy as a baby’s.

  “We’re in a hurry here,” Lattimore said brusquely. “Let’s hear what you got. Holihan, is that tape ready?”

  Holihan flipped some switches and Curtis closed the sliding door.

  From speakers placed around the room came Annette Grimes’s voice, shaking and weeping. “I can’t believe I’m doing this. I’ve been with him since I was fourteen.” Molly found herself cringing as the tape played. When Annette got to the part about the babies, Patrick Lattimore started to talk under his breath. “Holy Christ,” he muttered. “Holy Christ on the cross.”

  Molly had never turned the recorder off, so it caught all the sounds of the struggle: the van squealing to a stop. The screams, the snarling, the thumps, more screams and groans. Annette crying out, “No, no. Don’t! Help me.” Molly’s croaks of protest. A man’s voice yelling, “Shoot! Shoot the fucker!” The van roaring off.

  When it was done, Lattimore turned to Molly. If he was shaken by what he’d heard, his face gave no sign of it. “If that dog wasn’t retired, I’d hire him. Christ, that’s the kind of agent we need. Now, first off, a few questions: Are you certain the woman speaking on that tape is Annette Grimes?”