Burrows

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  It held.

  The only thing left to do was release the line itself. “You want to scoot on down the tunnel in case this thing don’t hold?”

  “No, I can’t risk moving any more until we check everything around us. If I do, I’ll hang another one and we’ll be right back where we started. Go ahead on and we’ll see what happens next.”

  Tension became a physical presence. John blinked sweat from his eyes onto a rat-chewed page from The Chisum News. He leaned to the side as far as possible, hoping that if the booby trap exploded, the trash beside him would deflect the charge. He slowly relaxed his fingers.

  They waited for the detonation that didn’t come.

  John released a long breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “Made it.”

  Cody relaxed his shaking muscles that had been taut since John discovered the fish hook.

  They rested their aching necks for a moment.

  There was still work to do.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Soiled mattresses, broken furniture, dishes, boxes and boxes of unopened mail, drifts of empty tin cans and bottles…

  ***

  Outside, Sheriff Griffin ground his teeth in frustration. The men surrounding the walkie talkie watched it as if it were a television.

  “I couldn’t do it,” one ambulance driver whispered.

  Another officer shuddered, feeling his fear of tight places rise like gorge. “What are they doing?”

  “Trying to get out,” a fireman answered. “They shouldn’t have been in there in the first place.”

  Sheriff Griffin didn’t answer. He was mentally kicking himself for the insane idea of allowing the officers to enter the spooky building. They hadn’t made radio contact for the last thirty minutes, and he desperately wanted to speak with them. Griffin knew from his earlier experiences with the new untested radio that reception was temperamental at best. Cody might have turned it off so they wouldn’t be startled by an unanticipated voice. A silent radio wouldn’t give their position away if someone happened to be nearby.

  And he wasn’t sure those new-fangled radios would work from inside a building full of trash.

  But they could at least try and call every once in a while! He hadn’t heard a word since Cody reported the missing police dog. For all Griffin knew, if it hadn’t already happened, both men might soon be dead, the life crushed out of them inside the garbage-filled building.

  The tired sheriff rested amid the chaos surrounding the Exchange and his men. More television crews arrived from the towns nearest Chisum. It would only be a matter of time before the Dallas stations showed up. Radio reporters moved from one interview to the next in the hopes of finding someone with a different slant on the activities. Newspaper photographers popped bulb after bulb at the heavily armed deputies and whatever else caught their eye.

  It was a long time until dawn.

  The wind continued to batter the town, cold settled deeper, and the dark clouds spit icy rain.

  Griffin’s car radio squawked. He pushed the button. “What?”

  He was interrupted by the sound of muffled gunshots. Prepared this time, he dropped the microphone and held up his hand. “Don’t shoot! Hold your fire! Where did that come from?”

  “Sounded like from behind the Exchange,” Ned said. “Them was pistols.”

  “Get somebody around there! Go!”

  Lawmen from every branch broke from the cover behind cars and raced around the building. Cars that weren’t blocked in started up and wailed away. Another scattering of shots echoed off the surrounding buildings before fading into silence.

  “Sheriff, the tee-vee people have already broken in to the programs and announced some crazy person is barricaded up here in the Exchange. They’re going on and on about it like they did when Kennedy was shot.”

  Blair waved his arm from the front seat of his car. “Two of our officers think someone left the Exchange from the back way.”

  “I reckon we have enough men around back there. Did they get him? Is anyone hurt?”

  Blair spoke into his microphone. “Whoever it was got away. Two of our men were involved, but no one was hurt.”

  Sheriff Griffin felt his blood pressure rise and thought his head was about to explode. All the flashing lights from the emergency vehicles around him didn’t help his headache any. “Well, how the hell did that happen when we have men watching this place like a hawk?”

  “They don’t know, sir, but I think it was because they were talking to a couple of kids at the time.”

  Ned sighed with relief when he remembered Constable Williams had taken Top and Pepper to the safety of Neva Lou’s house. He was glad to get them out of danger and didn’t want to have to face Miss Becky over bringing them to a dangerous crime scene.

  He didn’t want to cross that little Choctaw woman over anything.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Used tires, boxes of light bulbs, books, and paper…paper…paper…

  ***

  Cody and John had been in the building full of twisted passages for hours. Once again they stood upright in the semi-darkness of the small pocket of space beside the booby-trapped chicken boxes. Hearts pounding, the men trembled from fear and exhaustion. Three more large treble fishing hooks, a tangle of monofilament line, and three large-bore, home-made shotguns lay before them on the tunnel floor.

  The crude but effective weapons were nothing more than pieces of iron pipe with shotgun shells forced into one end. The triggering mechanism made from a strong spring and a nail was primitive, but certainly deadly in the small confines of the burrow.

  “Zip guns. I wouldn’t-a thought of that in a million years.” John wanted to sit until his legs quit shaking.

  His mouth cotton-dry, Cody shivered and hoped George hadn’t been able to locate the necessary parts in their town to make explosives. Even a small bomb would be deadly in the tiny confines, isolated from medical help.

  “Was this son of a bitch in Vietnam?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Really wasn’t talking to you.” Cody dug grit from the corners of his eyes. “I was thinking out loud.”

  He recalled the sweating dynamite he’d found in the bottoms when he was a teenager. It was in a crumbling cardboard box tucked into a littered corner of an abandoned shack in the river bottoms. He’d been killing a boring Sunday afternoon, poking around one of the many collapsing sharecropper shacks that littered the fields.

  Cody found Ned at the store and told him what he’d discovered. With the leftover World War II army camp only a few miles away, everyone in the county grew up with warnings about unexploded shells that littered the countryside from years of artillery practice.

  Hours later, military experts from Camp Maxey detonated the unstable dynamite, blowing the house to splinters.

  Oh god I hope he didn’t pick up shells at the army camp…

  Cody had no other alternative than to climb back into the same burrow. “We move slower. I’ve got a good idea George or maybe Kendal is denned up nearby. All these traps are designed to stop an intruder before they can get to his hidey hole.”

  John noted Cody’s reference to a lair. He’d already begun to think of George as an exceedingly cunning animal.

  He’d come to think of the Exchange’s tunnel systems as an aboveground ant hill.

  It was obvious George was an experienced builder, probably from trial and error. The air was breathable, which would have been impossible without some kind of ventilation system. Without fresh air, the decomposing matter inside the burrows would have been downright deadly, if not explosive. Cody expected the vents were probably constructed with an angle to prevent rains from flooding the system. Or maybe not. He glanced up, wondering again if decades of rain had seeped into the aging building to rot the studs and joists holding the structure together.

  “Oh, man, I don’t want to do this any longer than we have to,” John sighed.

  Cody stopped and thought. “Me neither.”

>   He keyed the walkie talkie, not expecting anyone to answer.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Paper shotgun shells, black powder kegs, cylinder grease, half a shebang, canvas, canvas tents, dishes of all kinds, dozens of cracked wooden covered wagon hoops, cast iron stoves, rusty cast iron pots and skillets…

  ***

  The sheriff’s handset finally crackled to life.

  “Anybody still out there?”

  Griffin snatched his radio from the table, hearing the tinny voice from half a dozen cars within earshot. “It’s about time you peckerheads called in. We’re ready to send in gas or another team.”

  “Well, don’t do either one. We’ve been kinda busy and I haven’t had time for much visitin’.”

  Griffin grinned, relieved to hear Cody joke despite the situation. “We’ve been pretty busy out here, too. What the hell happened? What have you found?”

  “This place is a rabbit nest of shafts and aisles. Baker was right. It’s packed solid. You get the idea someone crammed this place with garbage like a trash can, and then packed it tighter and dug tunnels through the whole thing. George never threw anything away. In fact, I’d be willing to bet he brought most of it in from the outside. No one person could save this much junk in a lifetime.”

  Overhearing the conversation, Officer Baker rubbed his hands together. “Amazing!”

  “Hold on, guys,” Griffin said into the radio. He turned to the academic. “What is so amazing about junk?”

  “This individual switches back and forth between predictable symptoms and mental afflictions. He’s both a hoarder and a pathological collector of rubbish. The clinical name for the disease is Diogenes Syndrome.” He waited, as if expecting Griffin to try and pronounce the difficult word. When he didn’t respond, Baker continued. “With this individual’s past life experiences and his acute anxieties from various types of psychosis, he may be nearing maximum overload.”

  “I don’t know what the hell he said,” Ned told O.C. “But you need to get him an office in the courthouse tomorrow morning. Thissun might replace you one day.”

  Hands in his pockets, O.C. frowned. “I swear.”

  Griffin didn’t understand, either, but he didn’t let on to Ned. He did understand one word. He chewed the inside of his cheek, wishing he hadn’t stopped smoking last year. “What type of overload?”

  “Any number of possibilities may exist. We might find he’s even more violent than merely placing a booby trap at the entrance. He’s going to control his life, protect himself and his possessions at all costs. The line has blurred between garbage and what’s essential to sustain life. To them, it’s all essential. These people can’t throw anything away, and if even a family member tries to throw out one bag of what is literally garbage, the hoarder will accuse them of throwing away his or her ‘stuff’ and will retrieve it and actually redistribute it across other piles of trash. Have they encountered any more traps in the burrows?”

  Griffin keyed the mike and repeated Baker’s brief lecture. “Have you boys found any more traps?”

  Cody snorted, his voice tinny over the radio’s tiny speaker. “The damn place is full of them. I don’t have time to give you a list right now, but you can bet we’re being extra careful after the last hour or so.”

  “That’s right.” Baker spoke directly to Sheriff Griffin. “George is living in another world. Now he’s trying to find meaning in the mire. The chaos he’s created is his and his alone. This isn’t clutter in the traditional sense. This is a massive building turned into a fortress and what they find in there is probably incomprehensible to a rational mind. I can’t believe we have this here, right in our own backyard. I can see it in a big city like Dallas, or Chicago, but here in Chisum? This is classic, and it’ll be studied for years.”

  Griffin stared at the young patrolman for a long moment before turning back to the radio. “Can you give me any idea whereabouts y’all are in there?”

  He heard Cody breathing heavily in the musty air. “It’s hard to tell exactly, because these tunnels backtrack on themselves and wind around. They go up and down without any particular reason, except to get around big pieces of crap he’s got stored in here. I swear, I think we crawled around a steam engine a while ago. This is like a red ant hill and for all I know we’re close to where we started. We followed one tunnel and it led us back in a big circle.” He paused to think. “We might be near an outside wall.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because we have a pretty fair radio signal. Deeper inside, I doubt we’ll get any signal at all, but I can’t tell you I’m right about that, either.”

  “Any sign of George?”

  “Not yet, unless you mean the traps. He hasn’t dropped by to introduce himself.”

  “Well, he might have got out. Somebody left the back of the Exchange and traded shots with a couple of my officers. We’re sealing the city right now while we root him out.”

  “So while we’re crawling around in here, the person we’re after is out in the fresh air?”

  “Yep, and fresh ain’t no name for it. We’ve had a norther blow through and it’s trying to sleet. So, all right. What’s your plan? I know you aren’t going to listen to any of my suggestions.”

  His immediate anxiety subsided and John grinned, knowing the younger man better than Cody would have believed.

  “Suggest all you want. It won’t make any difference to us. He wants to keep us confused and disoriented. We’re not exploring, we’re trying to find a way out and if I don’t make it soon, I’m gonna lay here and die.”

  “Got it. Can you think of anything we can do out here?” Griffin felt he had to offer some kind of support, however futile it might be.

  Cody’s voice crackled out into the darkness. “Yeah, get us some roach spray.”

  The anxious men beside the radios chuckled nervously and continued to watch the building. They were frightened by the entire horrific night, the Ghost Man, a demented murderer who had already taken one man’s life, and a frightening building that was possibly digesting two friends at that very moment.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Furniture piled to the ceiling, lamps, dozens of new caskets and the crates they’d been shipped in…many more used caskets…and some still crusted with crumbling dirt…

  ***

  Cody rolled his head to relieve the tension. “You ready to go partner?”

  John directed his flashlight through the gloom and into the hole. “Not really.” They waited for a long minute. “I sure could use a drink of water.”

  “Me too. In fact, I’d even settle for a sip of Doak Looney’s moonshine.”

  John’s smile flashed. “We’re liable to find a quart or two in all this mess before long.”

  “Ain’t that a fact? Well, now’s as good a time as any if we’re gonna go.”

  “No choice. Let’s do it.”

  Cody once again leaned into the gaping hole and entered another burrow. John followed after a few moments, giving Cody time to gain some distance.

  The burrow angled to the left. They grunted and wormed their way forward, making slow time in a building as full of holes as Swiss cheese. Unknown to them, at several points during their exploration, even more burrows crossed their path mere feet above and below, depending on their location. No sane person could imagine the extent of the tunnel system.

  They progressed without conversation, each with his thoughts and fears. John’s world encompassed only the sight of Cody’s feet and the peripheral view of the surrounding garbage. Progress was slow in the musty shafts, nothing more than inches at a time. It was move the elbows, pull and shuffle a few inches, and do it all over again.

  Cody stopped when he reached a relatively clear rise of damp wooden stairs. The entire area was suddenly wet, indicating years of water percolating through the building.

  “I’m telling you. This feels more and more like a cave. This wall is wet.”

  John waited. “What do
you want to do?”

  “This ain’t right. Give me a few minutes.”

  “Go ahead on. I’ll read this cereal box right here.”

  The burrow in front of Cody rose at a sharp angle, following the steps as if someone had installed a drain pipe on the staircase. The plain wooden banister supports on his right seemed to hold up a tenuous ceiling only inches above. The tunnel split halfway up and after breaking through the supports, angled downward. Cody knew for certain that it led deeper into the bowels of the Exchange.

  No way was he going down there.

  The wall beside the stairs appeared to be solid enough, but the plaster and lath had bulged outward. Cody couldn’t tell if it was due to the burden from above, or intense compression on the other side. Peeling remnants of wallpaper hung slimy with mold.

  Two of the nearest splintered steps seemed to be more warped than the others. He gently tapped the wood with a knuckle to test the step.

  “This don’t sound right. I’m pretty tight here. Hang on while I see if I can reach my pocketknife.”

  He worked his knife free, snicked the blade into place, and slid the sharp edge into a crack between two boards. “Let’s see what we have here.”

  Minutes later Cody stared at a gaping hole revealed by the newly removed tread. At first, the step’s wood appeared normal, but had been roughly chipped away on the bottom side so the piece was as thin as a fingernail.

  The trap was simple. Anyone wriggling through the burrow would break a knee or elbow through the thin veneer, dropping onto ragged pieces of glass and sharp slivers of broken mirror standing on edge.

  Cody wiped his face. “That could hurt.”

  “What’s that?”

  He broke the shards with the butt of his flashlight and described what he’d found. Still worried about the glass, he carefully collected great handfuls of paper and clothing from the walls, and stuffed the mass into the gaping step. “Now be careful when you crawl across here, in case I didn’t get this packed good.”