Perfect Victim

by Jay Bonansinga

  Then Grove got lucky once again, maybe for the last time, because John Q had reached the point where he needed to expose Grove’s lower legs, expose them in order to complete the masterpiece, and the buckles came off first, which set off a chain reaction unraveling at the surreal speed of an ancient silent film running through a broken projector, black-and-white scenes cutting at awkward moments, impossible to track and yet inexorable, unstoppable—

  —all of which started when Grove summoned every last ounce of strength he had in his body and drove his knee up into the killer’s chin—

  —and the killer reared back suddenly with a grunt, the force of the impact driving his jaw up hard against the roof of his mouth—

  —which gave Grove enough time to quickly lean down as far as he could lean, simultaneously bending his leg upward, to the point where his fingers could dig inside the bunched fabric of his pants, until he got his hand around the grip of that little Derringer—

  —Maura’s little .22 caliber single-action pistol that she kept hidden away, almost superstitiously, in the Swisher Sweets box on the top shelf of the front coat closet back in Pelican Bay, hidden behind the Monopoly and Yahtzee boxes, which Grove, in all the excitement, had forgotten was taped around his ankle, taped there in his living room the previous evening, taped there in the rush to prepare for whatever he might encounter in hell, and now he had it in his hand—

  —but he only had it in his hand for a single split second, just long enough to thumb back the hammer, before the monster got his bearings back and then pounced on the table with the speed and savagery of a large feral animal drooling with kill-lust—

  —and Grove felt the raw strength of John Q’s big callused fingers grasping his right hand, which was still shackled, and now the killer was forcing the tiny barrel upward toward the ceiling when suddenly—

  BANG! The Derringer barked in the darkness, making Grove flinch at the dry balloon pop and the silver photo-strobe flash in the dark—

  —and then the sensation of rock chips biting his exposed hip from the ricochet chewing through the corner of the slab registered in his stunned brain, and the killer was recoiling suddenly, flash-blind from the crackling sparks spreading along the walls, the dense fog of gas almost catching, almost, the dust in his monster’s face, stinging his eyes, his inarticulate baritone howl giving Grove one more millisecond of time—

  —enough time to thumb the hammer a second time and blindly fire off the second and last round—

  —missing John Q by a mile but inadvertently hitting the wall at the perfect angle to kick up a bright silver spark of magnesium light hot enough to bring an end to the dark legacy of Wormwood Mine.

  FORTY-NINE

  The fireball sucked the remaining oxygen from the bottom shaft in one great paroxysm of searing heat, flinging the killer to the ground with the certainty of a battering ram, reverberating up through two miles of sediment, rocking the surface with a thunderclap heard across six counties, and for one brief horrifying moment filling hell with daylight.

  Grove slammed his eyes shut, his wrists still shackled around the topmost edge of the stone, the jet-engine noise rupturing his eardrums. He expected the heat-storm to consume him along with the rest of the labyrinth, hopefully as quickly and as painlessly as possible—

  —but instead, the force of the sudden convection current kicked up the edge of the stone slab and flipped it onto its side.

  The impact cracked Grove’s molars. He couldn’t see, he couldn’t breathe; he let out a breathless shriek that was lost in the gargantuan surge of fire. The flames, fed by the methane and nitrogen and damp-black gases, pitched the slab sideways—Grove still lashed to it—as though it were a sail tacking on a squall of wind.

  The shackle on Grove’s left wrist snapped, his body flopping one way, the slab spinning the other. The remaining shackle ripped free at the precise moment the slab smashed into a buttress, shattering the monolith into countless shards of hot smoking stone.

  Grove slid, curled into a fetal ball, into an adjacent buttress, the impact sending comets across his vision. Rock particles sleeted down on him, his ears deafened now.

  He lost consciousness then.

  He had fully expected to die in that frenzied instant of blinding heat and pain, as everything was going mercifully black and silent, but that strange feverish sensation, as he would soon learn, had other plans for him, not to mention further pain, because he gasped awake moments later in a cold pocket of muffled noise and light. Lungs heaving, eyelids fluttering open, he realized instantly, with mounting horror, that he was underwater.

  With sudden involuntary spasms he coughed and coughed and coughed, expelling water from his lungs, the noise of his gasps a muffled mewling sound in his ears. The fire flickered above him like a lightning storm.

  He kicked off his pants and pushed and fought his way out of the broken pieces of shale, his wrists still tangled in their long leather shackles. He wasn’t necessarily thinking straight at this point, merely struggling for air, instinctively seeking oxygen.

  Clawing in the only direction that made any sense.

  Up.

  His head burst out of the water only to bang against the low stone ceiling, stars bursting in his field of vision, his face instantly sunburned by the furnace of superheated toxic air. Flames curled along the surface of the water, which was flooding into the mine at the rate of a half a million gallons a minute.

  Grove tried to tread water and fill his lungs with the smoldering stew. The water level sloshed and eddied around him, swiftly rising.

  Through his blurred vision he madly searched for the only way out: the back shaft.

  In his peripheral vision he saw a long pale object undulating on the currents about twenty feet away, and he swam toward it, realizing with his last molecule of sanity that the object might be his only chance of survival. The water spumed over his head, making him gag and gasp, but he kept on, completely nude and greasy with tattoo ink, only a few more inches now, reaching out for the thing, clawing at it—

  —until he finally got his hand around the collar of the duster.

  All at once the water covered him, filling the tunnel, ominously muffling all the noise at the precise moment he got his hand around a thin membrane of plastic stuffed into one of the duster’s pockets.

  Grove knew he had only a matter of seconds—even a healthy person is able to go without oxygen for no more than a minute or two, and Grove was weak and hurting and out of air—so he tore the slender object out of the duster pocket and slammed it over his face. The oxygen mask was designed for first responders and paramedics who get caught in dangerous chemical fires, a small, plastic, cup-shaped mask attached to a half-liter bottle of oxygen, and not recommended for breathing underwater, but now it was Grove’s only chance.

  His last chance.

  He pressed it tightly over his nose and mouth with one hand while he spun the small valve with the other. Darkness was closing in again, the flames boiling and sputtering above him. He breathed in moist, cold, ammonia-smelling air and spun around, madly searching the surface of the water for any sign of the shaft.

  Twenty feet away an oval shadow flickered above the ceiling of water.

  The shaft! There it was! The phone booth–size enclosure lay beneath it, leaning against the adjacent stone wall, scorched and dented by the maelstrom.

  Grove swam toward it through the dense stew, holding the mask in place with one hand, frantically paddling with the other. His raw flesh scraped an outcropping of stone, and he cringed at the seething pain, but he soldiered on. He felt the water around him begin to vibrate.

  He reached the bottom of the shaft and got his free hand around the cable. It took every last shred of energy to yank himself up, but somehow he managed it with one hand. The water level had already encroached into the shaft, boiling upward with the intensity of a turbine. As Grove scaled the cable—using the jagged wall of the shaft for footholds—he gazed up.

  A curtai
n of black lay behind the billowing, rising water. How much oxygen did he have? How long would it take to climb over ten thousand feet with only one free hand? His brain struggled with the math like a clockwork jamming. Could he make it?

  That strange unnamable warmth rose in him again as he scaled the shaft in slow, painful, lurching gasps. It tingled in his upper vertebrae, crawling hotly across his newly shorn scalp and sparking images across his mind screen—the tiny fingers of an infant curled around his index finger, a spring flower blossoming in the Chalbi Desert. The unexpected surge drove him on so profoundly that he broke through the surface of the water.

  Gulping air into his singed lungs, the mask falling from his face, Grove kept climbing, faster and faster, galvanized by the eerie warmth, so galvanized, in fact, that he ignored the violent currents beneath him, coming toward him.

  At last he glanced down at the rising, bubbling surface of the water.

  A charred hand burst out of the water and grabbed hold of his ankle.

  FIFTY

  Grove let out a strangled, involuntary cry, and the hand tightened with the pressure of a boa constrictor. The monster connected to the hand, his face bursting out of the muck, was a charred husk of a human being that used to look just like Grove but now resembled a blackened leech, so ravaged by fire the tissue was peeling away from his face in gelatinous wet flakes. Glistening, bloody eyes locked onto Grove with primordial hate.

  In that one frozen tableau the two souls again regarded each other. A wave of pure denatured hate crashed up against a tide of sorrow—sorrow for an endless cycle of grief that would never—ever—come to an end.

  Something shifted inside Grove then—invisible and inchoate—way down in the depths of his being, that eerie warmth erupting in him like a fragment bomb, cauterizing every molecule, every atom, and all that he knew, all that he was, all that he loved and cherished, the entirety of his soul, his very goodness, all of it suddenly sparked around him like an armature singing with electricity, forming an envelope of neon-blue voltage—

  —until a single notion filled his brain, distilled down to a single phrase, spoken in all languages, past and present, all at once: I will never stop.

  The monster froze.

  The balance of power changed.

  It occurred over the space of a single moment, the water level pitching and sluicing and rising. The killer convulsed in the heat of Grove’s implacable gaze and the darkness seemed to turn inside out.

  It was as though the earth itself had suddenly rejected this cancerous parasite known as John Q Public in a peristalsis of ectoplasm coming off the stone walls, ghostly synapses of pale antimatter the color of festering wounds, sparks the color of sickness, penetrating the killer, piercing him, instantly metastasizing in him, eating away at what remained of his life force.

  The killer’s mouth gaped, helpless with ghastly agony, hinging open so wide it threatened to dislocate the jaw of his scorched cranium.

  Grove let out a wail of primal rage, the sound of it blending with the roar of floodwaters.

  Then he slammed his bare heel down on the killer’s face. The killer’s neck whiplashed, his grip slipping. Grove slammed his heel down again and again, and at last the killer lost his hold and plunged back into the rising waters.

  Something ruptured then in the deepest core of the labyrinth.

  Veteran miners have a word for what happened next. They call it a “bump”—a laughably insufficient word for a catastrophic mine collapse when ceiling and floor crash together in a chain reaction not unlike a tremendous earthquake. Grove saw this occur directly beneath him in that frozen moment after the monster plunged back into the black mire.

  The very walls of the shaft trembled. The water surged explosively upward, and the bottom of the shaft contracted upward toward the ceiling.

  Grove gawked down at the horrible spectacle, momentarily rapt, the spectacular noise like an airliner crashing inside the mine. The bottom of the shaft imploded, slamming together, crushing the burned, mangled remains of the killer.

  Grove turned away when he saw the man’s skull crack underwater, extruding a cloud of pink bubbling brain matter like the meat of a smashed gourd.

  It was a sight that would stay with you the rest of your life. Unfortunately he had no time to even register the horror of it now. The greasy waters were boiling upward, fissures forming in the shaft walls.

  The bump had set off an earthquake.

  FIFTY-ONE

  What happened next—transpiring over the course of roughly twenty-three minutes—would for years to come be partially shrouded in mystery for all those involved in the Wormwood event. Especially for Grove. He would remember tremendous cracking noises down there like a glacier shifting all around him, the fissures opening in the shaft, the cracks traveling up the walls of the well on either side of him. He would remember shimmying frantically up that elevator cable for several frenzied minutes as the mine disintegrated beneath him and the earthquake rent the ground. All the while Grove was clawing and scraping his way up through the smoke and steam as swiftly as his ruined arms would carry him. He also would remember not being fast enough, because the water finally caught up with him, shooting him up the shaft with the force of a cannonball.

  At that point, his memory started getting sketchy because he became a virtual projectile, naked and flailing in the rising piston of water. He probably lost consciousness more than once, intermittently coming back to awareness only to upchuck a lungful of water, gasp for air, and then resume his frantic shimmy up that pulley-line before the furious currents could swallow him.

  One of the things that saved him was that ancient cable, which somehow managed to stay intact during the event and keep Grove oriented in the right direction: upward toward the surface.

  He had no idea how long he flailed and slashed his way upward, upward, upward through the black chaos, the very structure of the earth giving way around him, but at one point he felt the strangest sensation engulfing his greasy nude body in the darkness. It felt like a cushion of air rising beneath him, levitating him, pushing him upward toward the surface. In Grove’s scattered brain he saw it as an impassive act of God, a juggernaut of magic, propelling him upward into another earthly purgatory—wifeless, childless, friendless, loveless—into another hell from which he would never escape.

  But as it turned out, the source of that force was far more prosaic.

  Geologists studying the aftermath of the event weeks later would discover that the little-known fault line that lay beneath the Wormwood mine, awakened by the firestorm, had caused the century-old excavation to undergo what is known as an “inversion quake.” Rather than shifting the earth sideways, as do standard earthquakes, the inversion quake buckles underground strata deep below the earth’s crust, setting off a chain reaction that causes landmasses to crack open like giant eggshells. Biblical historians believe that this rare phenomenon occurred in the first, second, and fifth centuries—signaling epochal changes, even informing the creation of The Revelations to St. John—which might explain the phenomenon’s legendary status. Plagues of locusts and rivers of blood were nothing compared to this “Rending of Paradise,” as the phenomenon had come to be known in occult circles.

  For Grove, the effects of that inversion quake would ultimately take on mystical proportions in his memory and imagination. Since Wormwood had been sunk so deep into the driftless shale, the result of the event was a sort of evacuation of the mine’s contents, a shitting out of its foreign bodies. Grove was pushed out of that main shaft like toothpaste squeezed from a tube.

  Which is the point at which Grove completely lost consciousness.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Somehow—and Grove would never know the true sequence of events that followed—he was disgorged like a chicken bone gagged up by the earth, hurled into the explosive dust and crumbling, churning rock pillars of that first level. In his stupor he had the vaguest sense of being buffeted by violent waves, his traumatized mind transfor
ming the flooding chambers into raging seas, the jagged fingers of rock gouging at his exposed flesh into man-eating sharks. In this dream state he saw a lighthouse dead ahead, a dull spot of light on the liquid horizon. Out of air, bereft of blood, drained and delirious, he swam toward it, refusing to die.

  Refusing to ever stop.

  Although nobody will ever know what happened then, it is highly likely that the surging floodwaters had wedged Grove inside a piece of machinery—a five-foot-long tangle of twisted metal from a bolting machine—and carried him two hundred yards across the first level, the mine collapsing behind him, his luck holding out long enough for the wreckage to reach the vacuum of the front shaft, which sucked the mangled metal up into the whirlpool.

  The inversion phenomenon had caused the entrance of the mine to collapse into itself, a catastrophic landslide that registered on seismometers from Louisville to Memphis, opening up a vast trench in the landscape around the Green Ridge Barrens.

  The floodwaters roared up into the chasm with enough force to tear the mine buildings from their foundations, break window glass across Valesburg, and rip two-hundred-year-old live oaks from Avery Mountain by their roots. Not since Deacon Pritzker had delivered his famous End Days sermon at the Gunstock Pentecostal Church four decades earlier—evoking apocalyptic images of match flames multiplied a million times and the earth opening up to swallow the sinful—had Valesburg citizens encountered such a cataclysm.

  By the time Grove’s broken body had reached ground level—still entangled in that wreckage, careening on the floodwater for a few hundred yards before tangling in a mass of deadfall trees—he had sunken into a semicomatose state. He was barely alive, his respiration so slow a first-year resident might mistake him for dead.