“Hello?” called Trooper Southerly, the confidence draining from his voice. “Ma’am, do you need a hand?”
The woman did not respond.
Southerly’s mind raced. How had she gotten out here? What was wrong with her eyes? How could someone be an EMT if they couldn’t see?
Then the woman took another stumbling step out into the early evening sunlight, and the men realized that there was something beside her. She was dragging a dead park ranger, wounded about the head. He looked scalped, and part of his skull had caved in. The woman had stuck two fingers into this hole in his head, and was using it to drag him.
“What the—” Leonard began to say.
“Put your hands up!” shouted Southerly. “Put your hands up right now!”
Nothing happened. The woman teetered forward, still holding the park ranger by his head. Suddenly, the ranger’s body shook. His whole length trembled as though he were freezing cold. His legs spasmed wildly. It was almost—both troopers realized—as if he were not quite dead.
The sight was too much for Leonard, who screamed and squeezed his trigger twice. Despite his hangover, his aim was true. The EMT’s shirt puffed out as the rounds careened into her chest. She teetered slightly, but did not fall. Her expression never changed. An awkward beat passed. Then she took another lumbering step.
Southerly shouted: “Vest! Vest!”
Yet even as the words escaped his throat—already dry and metallic with terror—he knew that this was not right. That no bulletproof vest could account for this woman’s reaction to being shot two times. (Or, more accurately, for her lack of reaction.) There was a wrongness here that was pervasive and deep and felt like a blind EMT dragging a flailing park ranger by a hole in his head might be only the tip of the iceberg.
Both troopers adjusted their aim and prepared to fire again.
***
Back inside the caverns, James Nolan rowed along a subterranean river that smelled like water and lichen and cave moss. The permanent lights—the ones affixed to the cave wall at regular intervals—provided just enough illumination to keep it creepy. The rock formations beside Nolan cast long, dark shadows that seemed occasionally to move. His oars played tricks with the reflections on the surface of the water.
Nolan remembered his own tour of these caves as a Cub Scout, back in the late 1980s. Maybe not these exact caves, but definitely ones that looked—and smelled, and felt—pretty much the same. There were caverns like this all over the southern part of the state, and who knows how many generations of Hoosier youngsters had been subjected to educational trips through them? How had it become such a tradition? Nolan was sure that he didn’t know.
“Hello! Anybody there?” Nolan called as his oars dipped again and again into the night-black water. Along most stretches of the waterway, Nolan could see no more than twenty feet ahead; the twists and turns of the cave kept anything in the distance a complete mystery. Yet Nolan still felt confident that he was not rowing into a nest of kidnappers or terrorists. The most likely scenario, he imagined, would involve some students who had decided to take off exploring down a side passage and gotten lost, cave tour be damned. (Rich kids were like that, Nolan reasoned. Thought there never were any damn consequences.) Teachers and park rangers were probably at this very moment frantically exploring every nook and cranny looking for the errant teens—who, Nolan felt sure, would afterward avoid any substantive form of punishment.
Nolan rowed at a good clip, but did not think to check his watch. Because of this, he had no real sense of how much time had passed when he heard—or thought he heard—the distant report of firearms being discharged back at the mouth of the cave.
Nolan dropped his oars and cupped his ear to the sound. It came twice more. Then once again . . . what sounded a whole lot like an Indiana state trooper’s 9mm Glock 17 being fired just a few paces past the cave entrance. Nolan waited and listened. No further shots came. The only sound was the water lapping against the sides of the metal rowboat.
Nolan took out his radio.
“Hello!” he called. “This is Sergeant Nolan. You guys okay up there? I thought I heard shots.”
He waited a moment.
“Hello?”
Only static came back.
Ever the optimist, Nolan took out his cell phone on the off-chance it might work. The screen said “No Service” and showed zero bars.
For the first time since he’d arrived, Nolan became slightly concerned that something might actually be wrong. He produced his own sidearm and placed it on the seat beside him. Then he snatched up the oars and began rowing once more.
He reached a bend in the waterway where the nearest lighting fixture had obviously gone out. Or been extinguished. He rowed closer to it, and closer still. The area beyond the light was a new level of blackness—subterranean blackness—that he had seldom seen.
Then something in the water. Something floating at the edge of the space where the lights refused to shine.
Nolan put his hand on his gun.
To the untrained eye, the mystery item might have momentarily looked like old clothes bobbing in the water. An errant sweatshirt. A discarded pair of jeans. But Nolan had seen enough floaters to recognize one on sight. This was an older, heavier woman in a white sweater. Her grey hair was pulled back into a bun, and most of her scalp had been torn away. She was unquestionably dead.
Silently, Nolan’s boat drifted toward the body. With his free hand, he found his Maglite and turned it on. Parting the blackness before him, the flashlight revealed a scene of utter destruction.
Detritus floated everywhere. Bits of torn clothing, backpacks, and purses bobbed up and down noiselessly. A couple of sweaters and sweatshirts had stayed whole, but most had been reduced to shreds. Above these scatterings, three overturned metal boats floated silently in the water. There were also bodies. Lots and lots of bodies. Most of them, Nolan noted in horror, did not appear quite fully grown.
It was one of the school groups, he realized. And it had been ripped apart.
Nolan carefully rowed into the shredded remains of the field trip until he was surrounded on all sides by the debris. A severed hand bumped against the side of his boat with a soft clunk. An iPad floated past in a rubber case that was apparently buoyant. Nolan’s flashlight probed from body to body, watching for any twitch that might betray a sign of life. He saw nothing. The carnage appeared complete. Some bodies merely looked drowned, but most bore evidence of having had their flesh hacked or ripped apart. Alarmingly, there were also bite marks. Indentations clearly caused by human teeth, especially around the heads and faces.
Nolan rowed nearer to the three overturned tour boats. A bloody handprint was smeared down the nearest. Nolan used his oar to right it.
Instead of finding survivors hiding underneath, there was only a severed arm. It was covered with translucent crawfish, feasting on the gore. Disgusted, Nolan smacked the arm with his oar, and the tiny beasts scuttled back beneath the water.
Working methodically and carefully, Nolan overturned the two remaining boats. More body parts. No survivors.
In a fool’s errand, Nolan tried his radio once more. He kept his voice low.
“Hello. Hello. Can anyone hear me? This is James Nolan. Come back. Anybody?”
No response.
Nolan set down his flashlight, ran his fingers through his hair, and took a very deep breath. He tried not to think about what this meant. He tried not to picture himself in front of a review board, explaining what procedures he had followed . . . or failed to follow.
“How did you know that no one was still alive when you left the cave?”
“How could you have been certain that there were not students who still needed your help?”
“Did you check everyone?”
Nolan had seen these kinds of questions kill careers. He tried to block them from his mind.
He also tried not to think about the teenaged corpses all around him, or to imagine what had done this to
them. It was unfathomable. Sickening.
There was only one course of action, and Nolan knew it. Row like hell back to the dock. Get to where cell phones and radios worked, and call in the goddamn Marines. Call in everybody you possibly could. Turn this whole cave into a crime scene.
This would be national news, Nolan knew. Hell, international. Seventy-five dead teenagers? No question. Everybody would come calling. All sorts of media. The President of the United States would issue a comment on the tragedy. It was the kind of story that would linger. That would get made into TV movies. That would spawn generations of urban legends and conspiracy theories.
Nolan wondered what could have possibly done this. Bears? A murderous gang? A particularly energetic psycho killer? Whatever the ultimate cause, it was going to be a black eye for everyone involved. No police officer associated with this was going to be remembered for anything else. This was going to define careers.
Nolan gripped the oars and took his first powerful stroke back toward the jetty. He knew he had to get help, and get it now. He rowed like an automaton, not allowing himself to think about the cavern around him that had suddenly become a slaughterhouse.
Then, from somewhere even deeper in the cave’s ebon folds, Nolan heard a single high-pitched scream.
He stopped rowing.
It came again. Piercing. Reverberating across the walls of the cave. It projected true, animal terror. Yet it was undoubtedly human.
Nolan turned his boat around, and with a few sure strokes sent himself careening past the floating bodies and into the all-consuming darkness beyond. The river curved. Nolan steered quietly with one oar. With his other hand, he held his firearm at the ready.
He listened for the scream to come again.
It did not. Instead, he heard a scuttling, like a huge insect clattering against the rocks ahead. Nolan piloted his boat toward the odd noise. He did not know what to expect, but understood that once he betrayed himself, he might have only an instant to act. Whomever or whatever lurked beyond would know he was there the moment he used his flashlight.
The scuttling got louder. Nolan waited for the scream again—hoped for it, in fact—but nothing came.
Soon the scuttling was close, so close he felt sure he could reach out and touch it with an oar.
Nolan took a very silent, very deep breath. He balanced himself in the seat of the boat. Then he brought up the Maglite and turned it on.
In the brilliant white beam, the police sergeant beheld a sight beyond understanding. In a crawlspace to the side of the cave—just above the waterline—a pink Hello Kitty backpack, held by an unseen person, was being used to block the entrance to a tiny nook in the cave. Outside the nook was a jet-black human skeleton missing its legs. It was held together by a thick dark material that might have been mud . . . or rotted, waterlogged tendons. And it was moving. It scrambled against the rocky floor, aware and alive. Its thin, inky fingers explored the face of the backpack, looking for a way past. Its rotted nose sniffed the air. It had no eyes.
Suddenly, a female voice came from beyond the backpack.
“Hello?”
Whoever it was, she had noticed the flashlight.
The skeleton-thing rocked on the bottom of its ribcage, galvanized by the sound. (Though Nolan saw no ears, apparently it could hear.)
The voice came again: “Hello?”
The backpack lowered for a moment, and Nolan saw a scared-looking girl. She was black, with short dark hair and big, Disney-princess eyes. She winced at the light from the Maglite. Then she saw the teetering skeleton, released another shriek, and quickly raised the backpack again.
Nolan hefted his double-action Ruger and drew a bead on the skeleton’s forehead.
“Hey,” Nolan called. “Hey, you. Behind the backpack. Hold your ears. Put your fingers in your ears right now! Do you understand me?”
After a moment, Nolan saw the backpack adjust itself as the young lady complied.
Nolan steadied his weapon and pulled the trigger.
5
In the wet, claustrophobic expanse around her, the report seemed more like an explosion than a gunshot. Even with her fingers stuffed hard into her ears, the pain in Kesha’s eardrums was palpable. Yet in the silence that followed, the clicking of the scum-covered skeleton seemed to have stopped. She risked lowering the backpack.
In the space beyond, Kesha saw a brilliant flashlight beam and a man in a boat. A giant of a man. (Probably a man, anyway. His voice had sounded masculine. With the beam in her eyes, it was hard to discern much more than an outline.)
Directly in front of her, the horrible thing lay silent and immobile against the cavern floor. It looked even more disturbing than Kesha had imagined it would. A human skeleton covered in sickly dark goo, it was legless and appeared held together only by the thinnest sinews. Its long fingernails were like the alien legs of an arthropod. Its fleshless mouth presented a horrible rictus of tobacco-stained teeth. And now, the back of its skull had been blown apart by a bullet.
Kesha eased her way out of the nook. Her legs were cramped and her stomach felt sick from adrenaline, but there seemed to be no permanent damage. She raised one hand to shield her eyes from the flashlight’s glare. The tall, hulking man carefully stepped off his rowboat and onto the ledge beside her. He lowered the flashlight, and the illumination became less overpowering.
The stranger, indeed male, was probably in his mid-thirties. He had short brown hair and playfully arching eyebrows. He smiled down at Kesha and proceeded to confidently prod the skeleton-thing with his foot. The creature did not respond.
“Did it hurt you?” the man asked.
Kesha inspected herself and found several scrapes and bruises, but nothing was broken. She shook her head no.
“I think I’m okay.”
“It’s like some kind of insect, almost,” the man observed, giving the thing a second prod.
Kesha nodded.
“Was this the only one?” the man asked.
“No, there were a lot of them,” Kesha replied softly, her voice hoarse from screaming. “I don’t know where they all went, but there were a lot.”
“What happened?” the man asked. His voice was calm and kind.
“I couldn’t really see when it started,” Kesha said. “They turned off the lights to do cave thunder—the ranger did—so it was dark. Then something started rocking the boats. We thought it was a kid playing a joke. But then the boats turned over. Then things—like this—started coming out of the water, scratching and biting us. I saw them opening people’s heads. A lot of us got pulled under.”
The tall man nodded thoughtfully.
“Is anybody else from my class alive, do you think?” Kesha asked.
The man looked downcast.
“From your group, I think not,” he said.
“Oh,” Kesha said in a small voice.
“Yeah,” the man replied.
“But there are two other groups!” Kesha said hopefully. “They were ahead of us on the tour.”
“Yes,” the man said carefully. “I don’t know about them yet.”
“My name’s Kesha Washington,” she said. “I’m a sophomore. Maybe you already know that. Maybe . . .”
She trailed off. Just stopped talking. Nolan had seen this kind of shock before. The kind where people simply “turn off” mid-sentence.
He did not press her for anything further.
“My name’s James Nolan. I’m a police officer from Indianapolis. I’m going to get you out of here. We’re going to get in this boat, and then I’m going to take you back to the entrance of the cave. Does that sound okay?”
Kesha managed a nod.
Together, they got into the boat.
Nolan rowed.
After just a few strokes, they could see artificial light ahead of them, coming from one of the permanent fixtures. Soon after, Kesha began to see things floating in the water.
“Look!” Kesha said, pointing to the bobbing detritus.
“No,” Kesha insisted. “I mean, look to the right. Over there, next to where the boats are . . .”
Nolan stopped rowing and trained his flashlight in the direction indicated. Something was indeed thrashing about in the water ahead. The movements were stiff and strange. No part of it seemed human.
“It’s more of those things,” Kesha whispered.
The boat drifted closer. Nolan saw that she was right.
Seven or eight bodies in various states of decay walked or stumbled to one side of the river. Some were little more than skeletons covered in black-green rot. Others, however, were disturbingly whole. These wore clothes, had hair and teeth, and managed to look almost alive. Yet it was clear to Nolan that they were not. An alien undeath possessed them. Whatever powered their limbs, it was not a heart and lungs. They jerked in short bursts of enthusiasm, like alligators signaling their presence.
Kesha saw that some of the teenaged corpses in the water were also beginning to twitch. One kicked its foot rhythmically, like a drummer tapping out a beat. Another rolled its eyes as though looking for something with manic intensity. Yet another opened and closed its puckered lips like a half-hearted impersonation of a fish.
“We shouldn’t go this way!” Kesha insisted.
Some of the jerking, gibbering things in the water heard this. They began, very slowly, to move in the direction of her voice.
“These things can tip over a boat,” Kesha continued, growing frantic. “That’s how they did it before. They can turn us right over. Please, let’s turn around!”
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