He turned the computer monitor on the desk toward him and pressed the power button with the barrel of the gun in his right hand. A weak glow blossomed from the screen, highlighting his face. His unblinking eyes bulged and tears streamed down his cheeks. The muscles in his face twitched spastically.
“This wasn’t what I wanted,” the man sobbed. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this. No one can help them. No one can—”
Before the man could turn back to him, Carver pulled the snubnose from beneath his waistband, raised it, and fired. He caught a glimpse of the man’s profile, silhouetted by the light from the screen, as he flipped backwards over the desk, a pinwheel of blood following him from the spouting hole in his ruined chest.
Carver lunged from the chair and leapt up onto the desk, training the revolver on the heap of humanity crumpled against the base of his bookcase. The man shuddered and tried to rise. Carver dropped down beside him and kicked both of the guns away. He was just about to drag the man back around to the front of the desk when he heard a soft voice behind him.
He turned to face the monitor on the bloody desktop.
There was a hiss of static, a droning monotone interrupted by the sound of labored breathing.
“Please,” the voice whispered, barely discernible above the din. “Mommy… Please…”
A girl was sprawled on a filthy concrete floor, naked save the brown skein of refuse and blood coating her body. Her tangled blonde hair covered her face, framed by both hands, still feebly trying to push her up from the ground. A thick chain trailed from the manacle on her ankle to an eyebolt on the nicotine-yellow concrete block wall.
A single overhead bulb illuminated the room, casting a dirty manila glare over everything, turning the spatters on the walls and the dried pools on the floor black.
“Jesus,” Carver gasped.
There were no windows in the girl’s prison. Her respirations were already becoming jerky, agonal. She was asphyxiating.
“Where is she?”
A burbling of fluid metamorphosed into crying.
“Where is she?” Carver shouted.
The man whimpered. Blood drained from the corners of his mouth. Trembling, he tried to stand, but collapsed again.
Carver grabbed him by the shirt, lifting him from the ground and slamming him against the shelves. Blood exploded past the man’s lips, hot against Carver’s face. “Where is she?”
The man’s head fell forward onto Carver’s shoulder.
“You’ll never find her in time,” he rasped. The burbling tapered to a hiss as heat streamed down Carver’s back, and then finally to nothing at all.
Carver eased down the stairs. They were sticky and made the sound of peeling masking tape each time he lifted a foot. There was no sound from ahead. The only light was a pale stain creeping along the concrete floor at the bottom from beneath a rusted iron door with an X riveted across it.
Footsteps stampeded behind and above him.
Carver licked his lips and seated his finger firmly on the trigger. He leaned his shoulder against the door and prepared to grab the handle, but the pressure caused the door to open inward with a squeal of the hinges, allowing more light to spill onto the landing. Cringing against the stench, he shoved the door and ducked into the small chamber, swinging his pistol from left to right.
Twenty-two hours and twenty-three minutes.
He had never stood a chance.
The laptop monitor to his left, balanced on top of a workbench crusted with blood, still showed the image of the girl collapsed on the floor, and the web camera mounted above still faced into the room, but it had all been a ruse.
Beneath the harsh brass glare, he lowered the Beretta and stepped deeper into the cell. In the middle of the floor where the girl had once been was a stack of body parts, a pyramid of severed appendages built upon her torso, her head balanced precariously on top, facing the doorway. Her lank hair stuck to the blood on her face, eyelids peeled back in an expression of accusation, lips pulped and split over fractured teeth.
She’d been dead before the monster had even revealed himself to Carver, her agonizing death previously recorded and broadcast after the fact.
Carver averted his eyes from the carnage as the sounds of voices and pounding treads filled the room.
A full-length mirror had been recently affixed to the gore-stained gray wall directly ahead. A single word was painted in blood near the top.
Killer.
Beneath the word, he stared at his own reflection.
II
Sinagua Ruins
36 Miles Northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona
Kajika Dodge followed the buzzing sound to a small patch of shade beneath a creosote bush where the diamondback waited for him, testing his scent in darting flicks of its black tongue. It acknowledged the burlap sack at his side, ripening with the limp carcasses of its brethren, with a show of its vibrating rattle.
No matter. Soon enough it would join them.
Kajika readjusted his grip on his pinning stick.
The rattler seized the opportunity and shot diagonally out onto the blazing sand away from him.
He dropped the bag and with a single practiced stride was in position to drive the forked end of his stick onto the viper’s neck when it vanished into a circular hole in the earth.
Kajika could only stare. A short length of three-inch PVC pipe protruded from the ground. The white plastic was smooth and unscarred, brand new. He wandered through this section of the desert at least once a week. It was a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts, an opportunity to pay homage to the desert from which his lifeblood had sprung. The pipe was definitely a recent addition, the only manmade interruption in the otherwise smooth sand.
Why would someone wander out into the middle of the Sonoran, a solid half-mile from the nearest dirt road, only to shove a length of pipe into the ground?
He crouched and pulled the plastic tube out of the earth. The sand immediately collapsed in its stead. He brushed it away with the prongs, revealing a shallow system of roots and a warren of darkness beneath.
The sand slowly slid back into place.
This was all wrong.
Wiping the streams of sweat from beneath the thick braid on his neck, he surveyed the landscape of golden desert painted by creosote and sage in choppy green and blue brushstrokes. Beyond rose a rugged backdrop of stratified buttes, red as the blood of his ancestors. Their spirits still inhabited the Sonoran Desert, lingering in the memories of crumbling stone walls and scattered potsherds.
He lowered his black eyes again to the ground. Those weren’t roots. Not six feet from the shrub.
Turning the stick around, he shoved the duct-taped handle into the nearly invisible hole until it lodged against something solid and levered it upward. A tent of what appeared to be leather-wrapped sticks broke through the sand, smooth and tan.
His instincts told him to grab his sack and head back to the truck. Forget about the diamondback and the odd length of pipe. His mother had named him Kajika, he who walks without sound, as a constant reminder that there were things in life from which he would be better served to silently slink away.
But those weren’t roots.
He kicked the sand aside with the toe of his boot, summoning a cloud of dust that clung to his already dirty jeans and flannel shirt, thickening the sweat on his brick face.
With a sigh, he unholstered the canteen from his hip and drew a long swig, closing his eyes and reveling in the cool sensation trickling down his throat.
“Couldn’t have left well enough alone,” he said aloud, grabbing his bag and stick and heading back toward his truck, where there was a shovel waiting in the cluttered bed.
No, that wasn’t a tangle of roots. Not unless roots could be articulated with joints.
The sun had fallen to the western horizon, bleeding the desert scarlet by the time he climbed back out of the pit. His undershirt was soaked, his flannel draped over a clump of sage. He dragged the back of his han
d across his forehead and slapped the sweat to the ground. Strands of long ebon hair had wriggled loose from the braid to cling to his cheeks. Night would descend soon enough, bringing with it the much anticipated chill.
The rhythmic hooting of an owl drifted from its distant hollow in a cereus cactus.
Tipping back the canteen, he drained the last of the warm water and cast it aside, unable to wrench his gaze from the decayed old bundle he had exhumed. Tattered fabric bound its contents into an egg shape, a desiccated knee protruding from a frayed tear, exposing the acutely flexed lower extremity he had initially mistaken for roots, the mummified flesh taut over the bones. Even though the rest was still shrouded in an ancient blanket tacky with bodily dissolution, it didn’t take a genius to imagine what the leg was attached to.
“Burnin’ daylight,” he said at last, sliding back down into the hole.
He slashed the bundle with the shovel, the sickly-smelling cloth parting easily for the dull blade. The foul breath of decomposition belched from within.
“Moses in a rowboat,” he gasped, tugging his undershirt up over his nose and mouth, biting it to hold it in place.
Casting the shovel aside, he leaned over the bundle and grasped either side of the torn blanket. He could now clearly see two legs, both bent sharply, pinned side by side.
The stench of death was nauseating.
He jerked his hands apart with the sound of ripping worn carpet from a floorboard, the shredded blanket falling away to betray its contents.
A gaunt face leered back at him, teeth bared from shriveled lips, nose collapsed, eyes hollow, save the concave straps of the dried eyelids. Its long black hair was knotted and tangled, fallen away in patches to expose the brown cranium. It had been folded into tight fetal position, its thighs pinning its crossed arms to its chest. Lengths of rope, hairy with decay, bound the body across the shins and around the back, tied so forcefully the dried skin had peeled away from beneath. There was no muscle left, no adipose tissue. Only leathered skin and knobby bone.
Kajika was overcome by a sense of reverence. Could this possibly be one of his ancestors? Could the very blood that had crusted and rotted into the fabric and putrid sand now flow through his veins?
He felt the spirits of the desert all around him, dancing in the precious moment when the moon materialized from the fading stain of the sunset and countless stars winked into being.
Movement, a mere shift in the shadows, dragged his attention to the corpse a single heartbeat before a wave of diamondbacks poured out of the hollow abdomen where they had recently made their den and washed over his boots.
INNOCENTS LOST
MICHAEL McBRIDE
Now available in paperback and eBook
From Delirium Books
A young girl vanishes in broad daylight on her tenth birthday. Her father, FBI Special Agent Phil Preston of the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Team, devotes his life to finding her and
discovers a pattern in a recent string of abductions.
Dr. Les Grant leads a group of graduate students into the Wyoming wilderness in search of an unidentified Native American medicine wheel photographed by an anonymous hiker. Instead,
they stumble upon a macabre tableau of suffering.
Fremont County Sheriff Keith Dandridge finds himself right at the heart of the mystery when twenty-seven bodies are disinterred in the Wind River Range at the westernmost edge of his jurisdiction, with the promise of more to come.
All the while, an unknown evil is summoning the men to its killing grounds, where the remains of the lost innocents are left to rot…and a fate far worse than death awaits them.
INNOCENTS LOST
MICHAEL McBRIDE
(An excerpt from the terrifying novel from Delirium Books.)
PROLOGUE
June 20th
Six Years Ago
Evergreen, Colorado
“Happy Birthday to yooouuu.”
The song ended with laughter and applause.
“Make a wish, honey,” Jessie said. She raised the camera and focused on the child who was her spitting image: chestnut hair streaked blonde by the sun, eyes the blue of the sky on the most perfect summer day, and a radiant smile that showed just a touch of the upper gums.
Savannah wore the dress she had picked out specifically for her party, black satin with an indigo iridescence that shifted with the light. She rose to her knees on the chair, leaned over the cake, and blew out the ring of ten candles.
The camera flashed and the group of girls surrounding her clapped again.
“What did you wish for?” Preston asked.
“You know I can’t tell you, Dad. Sheesh.”
“Why don’t you girls run outside and play while I serve the cake and ice cream,” Jessie said. “And after that we can open presents.”
“All right!” Savannah hopped out of the chair and merged into the herd of girls funneling out the back door into the yard. More laughter trailed in their wake.
Preston crossed the kitchen and closed the door behind them.
“So are all eight of them really spending the night here?” he asked, glancing out the window over the sink as he removed a stack of plates from the cupboard. The girls made a beeline toward the wooden jungle gym. One had already reached the ladder to the tree house portion and another slid down the slide.
“Do you really think the answer will change if you ask enough times, Phil?” She took the plates from her husband, set them on the table, and began to cut the cake. “Besides, they’ll be sleeping in the family room with a pile of movies. The most we’ll hear from down the hall is a few giggles. Could you grab the ice cream from the freezer?”
“So what you’re saying is they’ll be distracted.” Preston eased up behind his wife, cupped her hips, and leaned into her.
She swatted his leg. “With a houseful of kids? Are you out of your mind?”
“I wasn’t proposing they watch.”
“Would you just get the ice—?”
The phone rang from the cradle on the wall.
Jessie elbowed him back, snatched the cordless handset, and answered while licking a dollop of frosting from her fingertip.
“Hello?”
Her smile vanished and her eyes ticked toward her husband.
“I’ll take it in the study,” Preston said. He removed the gallon of Rocky Road from the freezer, set it on the table, and hurried down the hallway.
“He’ll be right there,” Jessie said. Her voice faded behind him.
He ducked through the second doorway on the right and closed the door behind him. All trace of levity gone, he picked up the phone.
“Philip Preston,” he answered.
“Please hold for Assistant Special Agent-in-Charge Moorehead,” a female voice said. There was a click and then silence.
Preston paced behind his desk while he waited. He pulled back the curtains and looked out into the yard. Two of the girls twirled a jump rope on the patio for a third, while several others fired down the slide. Savannah and another girl arced back and forth on the swings. He couldn’t believe his little girl was already ten years-old. Where had the time gone? In a blink, she had gone from toddler to pre-teen. In less than that amount of time again, she would be off on her own, hopefully in college—
“Special Agent Preston,” a deep voice said. He could tell by his superior’s tone that something bad must have happened.
Preston worked out of the Denver branch of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, thirty miles to the northeast of the bedroom community of Evergreen where he lived. The Lindbergh Law of 1932 gave the Crimes Against Children Division the jurisdiction to immediately investigate the disappearance of any child of “tender age,” even before twenty-four hours passed and without the threat that state lines had been crossed. As a member of the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment, or CARD, team, he was summoned to crime scenes throughout the states of Colorado and Wyoming, often before the local police. It was a depressing detail th
at caused such deep sadness that by the time he returned home, even his soul ached. But it was an important job, and at least at the end of the day, unlike so many he encountered through the course of his work, his wife and daughter were waiting for him with smiles and kisses in the insulated world he had created for them.
“Yes, sir.”
“Check your fax machine.”
“Yes, sir.” Preston allowed the curtains to fall closed and rounded his desk to where the fax machine sat on the corner. A stack of pages lay facedown on the tray. He grabbed them and took a seat in the leather chair, facing the computer. “Okay. I have it now. What am I—?”
His words died as he flipped through the pages. They were copies of slightly blurry photographs, snapped from a distance through a telescopic lens. Even though they were out of focus and the subjects partially obscured by the branches of a mugo pine hedge, he recognized them immediately.
“I don’t get it,” he whispered. “Where did these come from?”
“They arrived in the mail here at the Federal Building today. Plain white envelope. No return address. A handful of partial fingerprints we’re comparing against the database now. We’re tracking the serial numbers on the film to try to determine where they were processed.”
There were a dozen pictures. One of him approaching a small white ranch-style house. Another of him standing on the porch, glancing back toward the street while he waited for the door to be answered. Several of him talking to a disheveled woman, Patricia Downey, mother of Tyson, who had disappeared five hours prior. He didn’t need to check the date stamp to know that these had been taken nearly three months ago in Pueblo, just over a hundred miles south of Denver. No suspects. Loving mother and doting father, neither of whom had brushed with the law over anything more severe than a speeding ticket. Middle class, decent neighborhood. And an eight year-old boy who had never made it home from the elementary school only three blocks away on a Thursday afternoon.
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