She wondered where the man had gotten another truck, but then her thoughts turned to the idea of him charging blindly into the tunnel after Barnes. Where did Charley Wilson suddenly find courage, if not in a bottle?
She recalled his feat of withstanding torture out at the National Guard depot, and decided to give the man an easier time of it, the next time they met. There was more to Charley than met the eye. Frost glanced in the rearview mirror at Dodge, as she put the car in park and killed the engine. She’d misjudged him, too.
If there’s one good thing coming out of this mess, it’s that people are showing their true colors. Although with Barnes, that hadn’t been a good thing.
Griffin got out of the car, rubbing one of his shoulders. “So where’s this bunker?”
Dodge slid out of the car on Griffin’s side and pointed across the field.
Suddenly there was a brilliant flare of illumination, and everyone threw their hands and arms up in front of their faces to ward of the hideous glare. When Frost lowered her hand, the smoky air was white instead of dark.
“Holy crap, I think that was just dawn,” Turkette said. The woman squinted and peered across the hazy field.
“As abrupt as nightfall,” Dodge commented.
“But that was just a couple of hours ago,” Frost looked at her watch. “Two and half hours, to be exact.”
“The answers are this way,” Griffin said, gun in hand as he stalked across the field, taking the lead. Frost didn’t mind. She was still getting the hang of filling Becky’s shoes, but she definitely felt more comfortable organizing people than she did on the hunt. She had known all along that she would take a back seat to Griffin when it came time to confront whoever or whatever was behind the shifts.
She raised her service pistol, and walked after him, Dodge and Turkette joining her, each armed with an M-16. It was cold, and despite the smoky haze, a light snow began to fall. At first Frost cringed at the thought of it, after the falling ash in one of the previous shift-worlds, but a flake landed in her outstretched hand and she was sure it was normal snow. The cloud of her breath was more assurance.
Griffin stopped, and Frost caught up with him near the tunnel door. The rusted metal slab was ajar, the mouth to the tunnel yawning open in darkness. Spewed around the area in front of the door were several splotches of dark crimson blood—some of them where Cash had been sitting—but most were new additions to the landscape.
Hideous chimera creatures, part bat, part human and who knows what else, littered the overgrown grass around the concrete structure. Human limbs were merged with three-foot-wide bat wings. The bodies in the center, where the wings came together, resembled feathered birds. Long gums, like raw red meat, pushed through the dark feathers. An odd assortment of oversized teeth—some sharp, others not—erupted from the gums. It was like a wide open mouth that attempted to swallow a giant bat, a raven and two full grown men.
Each creature was different, but each, wounded and crumpled in on itself, occupied no more than a four foot radius. There were seven of them. All dead. One looked like it had been bashed against the inside of the metal door. The others all had small bleeding wounds. She thought of the savage version of Griffin, but the injuries didn’t look like the wide puncture wounds of a javelin. No. Except for the one against the door, the others all had gunshot wounds.
Someone had killed seven of the creatures.
“Charley couldn’t have done this, could he?” Dodge asked.
“Truck is gone. Maybe he made it to safety,” Frost said.
Griffin squatted down, and pulled a black knife from a sheath under his jacket. He flipped over the body of one of the dead creatures. It had two white human legs, about two feet long, like the legs of a short woman. Or maybe a child. Where there should have been genitals and hips, the legs were joined to a spherical mass of black feathers. On one side, a three-foot-long brown bat wing stretched out. The wing on the other side was missing. Like a Mohawk up the center of the thing’s body, was a single row of rotted fangs or claws. It didn’t seem to have any eyes or ears, or even a nose. As far as Frost could tell, it didn’t have a mouth either. Just the spikes.
Griffin looked up at Frost. “When I painted these things, I never thought they could actually fly.”
“Not funny,” she replied.
“Wasn’t trying to be,” Griffin said. “These things are either all dead or if there were more, they bolted.”
He stood up, and the radio on his belt crackled to life. Frost’s did the same, and hearing the stereo burst of static made everyone jump.
“Griffin, come in.” Winslow’s voice, and he sounded panicked.
Griffin holstered his gun, and quickly sheathed the knife, before snatching the radio from his belt. “What’s up?”
“I’m sorry, Griffin. We think something took Lony.”
Frost stopped breathing. Oh no.
“What?” Griffin said. “Tell me. Where is she?”
“She had gone up to the tower on the roof. But the telescope is smashed, and we found her water bottles. Something took her. The guards at the station’s front door saw her...in the sky. She was being carried. Toward the city. I’m sending more men to meet you at the border…”
But Griffin had already dropped the radio and started sprinting across the field. Frost and the others watched as he mounted the Ducati, jammed the key in the ignition, and brought the engine to life with a roar. The back wheel slid around, spraying gravel at her cruiser and into the field, and then he was gone.
16
“Should we go with him?” Dodge asked.
Frost turned toward the rusted door. “We’ll never catch him, and I think we’d just slow him down anyway. As much as I’d love to help him, and Avalon, we’ve got a whole town to save. Let’s go.”
Suddenly Frost whirled back on Turkette. The short woman took a step backward. Frost stepped forward and right into the woman’s face. “I don’t know you. But I’m telling you, I have had enough of this bullshit. Do you read me, lady? You’re either with us, or I’ll put a bullet in your face myself. I want everything. Everything you know—about Ellison, this tunnel, and all this—” Frost waved her hand in the air behind her, “—this hellish frikkin mess around us. Spill!” She was gratified to see that Dodge had actually raised the barrel of his rifle and pointed it at the woman.
Turkette raised her hands, motioning for calm. “I was hired as his nurse and his bodyguard. As you might guess, there aren’t too many of us with the right kind of qualifications for such a job. I had no idea what he was up to. Only that he was working on a project with DARPA and it fell apart, but he kept working on it anyway. He’s in his seventies, and he’s in a wheelchair—I didn’t think he was a threat to anyone. I knew he had a bunker under the church, but I thought it was a paranoid survivalist thing. I didn’t know about any of this.” Turkette’s eyes filled with tears.
“Were you in the military?” Frost asked.
The woman nodded. “Army.”
“Can you kick some ass?” Frost was practically spitting in anger.
Turkette’s head bucked up, almost as if she had accepted the question as a challenge. She frowned and took a deep breath. “More than you can imagine.”
“Then you kick ass for my team now. For the people of Refuge. For the last of us. We need to find that old man, and get the fuck out of here, or we’re all going to die. Do you read me?”
The women silently locked eyes for a moment.
“Let’s go get that prick, Boss.” Turkette said. “You going to deputize me?”
Frost turned back to the door and walked in. “You have a rifle. You’re deputized.”
Turkette followed her into the tunnel, and Dodge took up the rear, stepping over the chimera corpses as he went. There were three more of them inside the tunnel.
Frost turned on a long Maglite flashlight, filling the tunnel with a cone of yellow light. The walls of the tunnel were bare—no lights, no pipes, no electrical cables. As
far as she could tell, the tunnel floor just sloped slightly. The end of the tunnel was farther ahead than she could see with the light.
“So, what? This probably goes all the way down into town, and that bunker under the church? Will this door be locked too?”
“I didn’t know there was another door. I haven’t been in the bunker; I just knew it was under the church,” Turkette said quietly.
“What I can’t figure out,” Dodge added, “is how he could build a bunker under my nose, without me knowing about it.”
“Mr. Ellison said it was built as a fallout shelter in the 50s, but he’s had people keep it updated and modern.”
“Huh,” Dodge said. “I’ve been pastor here for twenty years now. I never would have suspected.”
Thirty minutes of walking later, they reached a wide room with a huge, shiny metal vault door. Up in one corner of the room, looking down at them, was a single CCTV camera, with a small red LED illuminated, indicating they were being watched.
Frost turned to the camera, pointed the flashlight under her face, and said out loud, “Mr. Ellison! Sheriff Helena Frost and company. I think it’s time we had a talk, don’t you?”
Nothing happened, but Frost waited, staying in the same position.
A deep thunking sound echoed through the tunnel. Both Dodge and Turkette snapped their weapons up at the vault door. The huge circular slab of metal budged outward away from the wall by an inch, then slowly began to swing open.
Frost stepped back and pointed her light at the door, but there really was no need. Warm amber light flooded the chamber, seeping out of the bunker on the other side. She quickly switched off the flashlight and slipped it into a holster on her police belt. She holstered her gun, but kept the heel of her hand on the butt of the weapon, just in case.
When the door finally came to a halt, she cautiously stepped inside. What she saw made her so angry she wanted to pull the gun and start firing.
17
Griffin Butler took the last looping turn on South Main Street slowly, even though every part of him cried out for more speed. The snow had started to pile up, and he’d already had two near crashes. So he would take it slowly until the straightaway, and then he would speed up to the edge of town. He wasn’t sure what he’d do then, because there was no way he could take the bike off road. It was all power and style, but was meant for glass-smooth roads.
He needn’t have worried. As he came ripping down the last straight piece of road, he saw a group of four men standing near a pickup truck with ramps leading down from its bed to the ground, and Radar and Lisa standing near a blue four-wheel ATV. Radar frantically waved at him.
Griffin slowed to a stop and killed the engine on the bike.
“What happened to her?” Griffin heard himself shouting at Radar, even though he knew it wasn’t the kid’s fault that something had taken Avalon.
“We don’t know; Carol says she went up to the roof for air, but when we went up to find her, she was gone. Come see this.” Radar turned and walked toward the Humvee, which was parked at the very edge of the road. The four men stayed over by their pickup watching the scene but saying nothing.
As Griffin got closer, he could see something black sticking out of the front of the Humvee. It stood almost ten feet in height. When Griffin got up close to it, he thought it looked familiar—a three-sided black lance tapering to a point, similar to the one the alien creature in the desert world had, when it had tried to kill Rebecca Rule. But not exactly the same.
Someone or something had plunged this thing vertically down through the chest of one of the men from the Humvee patrol, and straight down through the hood and the engine block. The lance effectively pinned the torso to the hood of the vehicle. The man’s head and limbs were gone, so Griffin didn’t know who it had been. The top of the torso was ragged, making Griffin suspect the head had been ripped off, instead of sliced away.
He glanced around but saw no sign of the head or the missing limbs. The other men posted here were missing, too, either scattered, dead or taken. The blood on the road suggested the more dire of those options.
He turned his head back to the destroyed Humvee. Across the rest of the vehicle’s hood, a message had been scrawled in five-inch swaths of streaky blood. It was instantly apparent to Griffin that whatever had done this had used the dead man’s head as a brush to paint the gruesome note:
COME GET HER
“We, uh, we brought the ATV for you. We can all go if you want,” Radar started.
Griffin turned on the boy, about to lash out again, his blood seething with anger over the horror of the scene and panic for Ava. But he caught himself at the last second. None of this was Radar’s fault. “I’ll go alone. You did fine, Joshua. Here,” Griffin handed him the keys to the Ducati. He nodded his head toward Lisa. “Get her back to the station and stay in there. Too many things in this place are trying to kill us.”
Lisa stood back by the ATV, and Griffin got the impression she hadn’t seen the front of the impaled Humvee. He hoped for her sake she hadn’t. “All of you, get back to the station. I’ve got this.”
Radar handed him the keys for the four-wheeler. Griffin rushed over to it and climbed on. Lisa hesitantly handed him a small backpack. It had the handle of the collapsible javelin sticking out of it. Avalon’s pack. He nodded and quickly slung it over his shoulders. Then he revved the engine of the vehicle and was about to take off.
“Griffin! Wait!” Radar ran over and spoke softly into Griffin’s ear. The information was unusual, but just might be helpful. The boy’s way of helping, the best way he knew how. Griffin patted the kid’s shoulder and then launched the vehicle off the end of the road and down the sloping scree and rock, heading toward the labyrinthine city and whatever monster had taken his daughter. He was going to show it what a true monster was.
18
Griffin made it most of the way to the labyrinth unimpeded. The bonfires roared on the sides of his path, and up close, he could easily see the charring bodies of chimera creatures and human beings alike, sizzling in the flames of each inferno. The fires were scattered around the landscape like decorative boulders in a Zen garden.
The screaming wails of anguish and pain grew louder as he neared the white walls of the labyrinth’s entrance. As he passed one of the fires, the heat prickling his skin, he realized that most of the people and creatures nearer the top of the burning conflagration were still alive. They were the source of the mysterious screams. None of the bodies moved or flailed, but all of their mouths hung agape, howling in terror and agony. They were all too far gone for him to try to save anyone.
Further away he could clearly see the curving rows of towers for what they were—the rib bones of long-dead leviathans that would have made Godzilla crap his lizard drawers. Between the fires, Griffin could see the huge tooth-like boulders rising and falling in the soil. They only moved up and down, but he gave them a wide berth, while keeping the ATV on track for the labyrinth’s entrance. He knew that was where she would be.
A figure suddenly stepped from behind a fire and into Griffin’s path. When he saw who it was, he was tempted to gun the throttle and run the figure down. Or to pull his pistol and start firing indiscriminately.
But he did neither.
The man standing in front of him wore a blue t-shirt, and ratty, torn, canvas painter’s pants. His feet were bare, but the soles were so thick with dark callous, it looked like he had painted a thick slab of liquid rubber on the bottom of them. The man’s right arm was withered and black, the hand missing entirely. Strapped across his back was a makeshift quiver holding four of the collapsible javelins, like the one Griffin had in his own backpack. A scraggly beard covered the man’s face, but Griffin knew the features. He’d been looking at them in the mirror for forty-five years.
The only thing that stopped him from trying to kill this savage incarnation of himself was what the man held.
A scrap of cotton from a t-shirt or something similar, torn asu
nder. The fabric was white. The man waved it in the air as Griffin approached.
A white flag of surrender—or a request for parley.
It was a tradition almost two thousand years old, and while Griffin was in a hurry to rescue his daughter, he wasn’t about to break the tradition by firing on the man, especially if there was a chance the savage knew what had taken Ava. Then again, it could be a trap.
He rolled the ATV to a stop a good thirty feet from the doppelganger, keeping his hand on the throttle.
“Talk!” he shouted.
The savage snarled what might have been a smile, showing rotted teeth and black stumps where teeth had once been. The mouth might have been smiling, but there was murder in the man’s eyes. Griffin knew the look.
“He took her in there,” the savage indicated the labyrinth over his shoulder. “She’s not my daughter. I know that…” the man seemed confused, like maybe he didn’t know that. “You won’t be able to face him alone. He’s too big. Plus, you’re bleeding.” The savage pointed at Griffin’s chest and he glanced down, seeing the blood that had seeped through his shirt at the shoulder. It was nothing. The punctures from the lizards. He must have popped one of Kyle’s stitches. He looked back up at the man.
“Who?” Griffin asked, already tiring of the savage and the conversation. Every nerve in his body was yelling at him to move, to get in there, to find Avalon. “Who took her?”
The savage grinned again, but this time there was no mirth in it. “You know who I mean.” He slid his blackened stump up his other arm, pushing up the sleeve of the pilfered blue t-shirt, revealing a tattoo on his arm. The same tattoo Griffin had on his. “I painted him, the night I got this.” He squinted at Griffin. “I can see it in your eyes. You have the tattoo, as well. You know his name.”
Refuge Book 5 - Bonfires Burning Bright Page 7