The Calm Before The Swarm

by Michael McBride

  He approached the hole in the ground slowly, taking in even the most seemingly insignificant sights and sounds with each step. This was the part that he loved the most, those first eager steps toward a discovery held captive by the earth for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, as if patiently waiting for the perfect moment to reveal her secrets. Or perhaps for the perfect person to whom to reveal them. So what if he hadn't instigated the dig or troweled out the loam one scoop at a time? It still belonged to him. Of that there was no doubt. It called to him like a mother's song only remembered subconsciously through the memory of a child.

  His hands trembled as he shed his backpack and withdrew his digital camera.

  "We discovered it almost by accident," Phuong said. "A monsoon swept through here just over a month ago. The rain exposed the hint of a brick wall built into the hill. It took a while to clear the dirt from around it, but after that, the bricks were easy enough to unstack."

  "What am I looking at?"

  Reaves walked a slow circle around the clearing, taking pictures of the linga from every possible angle.

  "It's a Sivalinga, which symbolically represents the god Shiva himself. The Champa built these all across the countryside before they abandoned the region in the early fifteenth century to the Viet. This one's similar to those back at the ruins where you met me, only much more elaborate. The chamber beneath it, however, is completely unique."

  "The photographs you sent me...they were taken down there?"

  Phuong nodded and gestured toward the shadowed orifice. Reaves couldn't quite read the expression on her face.

  He leaned over the hole and took several quick pictures. The flash limned decomposing brick walls crawling with roots and spider webs, and a decrepit stone staircase leading downward into the pitch black. He removed his flashlight from his pack and followed the beam underground. Dust swirled in the column of light, which spread across the brick-tiled floor riddled with moss and fungal growth a dozen steps down. He smelled damp earth and mildew; the faintly organic scent of the tomb. His rapid breathing echoed back at him from the hollow chamber.

  When he reached the bottom, he snapped several more shots. The brief strobes highlighted stone walls sculpted with ornate friezes, a scattering of bones on the ground, and a central altar of some kind, upon which rested what he had traveled all this way to see in person. He walked slowly toward it, taking pictures with each step. The carvings on the wall were savage. Each depicted a malevolent Shiva lording over a scene of carnage with his adversaries lifeless at his feet or suspended from one of his many arms. The bones on the floor were broken and disarticulated and heaped into mounds, aged to the color of rust, and woven together by webs that housed the carcasses of countless generations of insects.

  His heart rate accelerated. This chamber was similar in so many ways to the one back in Chaco Canyon, which had dominated all of his thoughts during the last five years.

  He finally brought the flashlight to bear on the altar.

  "It gives me the chills every time I see it," Phuong said.

  Reaves felt it too, almost as though the object seated on the rounded platform radiated a coldness that was released by the exposure to light.

  "Carbon dating confirms that it was sealed in here more than five hundred years ago, about the time that the Champa vacated the area." She wrapped her arms around her chest and shivered. "It's just like the others, isn't it?"

  Reaves could only nod as he approached. His beam focused on the skull seated on the dusty platform and threw its shadow onto the far wall, which made the hellish designs waver as though the many Shivas were laughing with a sound his mind interpreted as the crackle of flames.

  "Jesus Christ," he whispered.

  Fissures transected the frontal bone, the orbital sockets given sentience by the reflected light from the spider webs inside. A large stone had been thrust between its jaws with such force that the mandibular rami to either side had cracked.

  And then, of course, there were its teeth.

  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 Pres
ton," 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 that 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.

  "This doesn't make sense," Preston said. "Why would anyone take these pictures, let alone mail them to us?"

  He parted the blinds again and looked out upon the back yard. Nine girls still giggled and played. Savannah swung high, launched herself from the seat, and landed in a stumble. She barely paused before clambering back into the swing.

  "Look at the last one," Moorehead said.

  Preston's stomach dropped with those somber words. He shuffled past a series of pictures that showed him walking back to where he had parked at the curb after the hour-long interview with the Downeys.

  "Jesus."

  His heart rate accelerated and the room started to spin.

  In one motion, he removed his Beretta from the recess in his desk drawer and jerked open the curtains again. Little girls still slid and jumped rope, but only one swing was occupied. The one upon which his daughter had been sitting only moments earlier swung lazily to a halt. As did the branches of the juniper shrubs behind the swing set.

  "No, no, no!" he shouted.

  The phone fell from his hand and clattered to the floor beside the faxed pages, the top image of which featured a snapshot of his house from across the street, centered upon Savannah as she removed a bundle of letters from the mailbox.

  He ran down the hall and through the kitchen.

  "Phil!" Jessie called after him. "What's going on?"

  He burst through the back door and hit the lawn at a sprint, nearly barreling into one of the girls twirling the rope.

  "Savannah!"

  The activity around him slowed. Two of the girls stared down at him from the top of the slide, faces etched with fear. He ran to the girl on the swing, a dark-haired, pigtailed slip of a child, and took her by the shoulders.

  "Where's Savannah?"

  Startled, the girl could only shake her head.

  Preston shoved away.

  "Savannah!"

  He shouldered through the hedge and hurdled the split-rail fence into the small field of wild grasses and clusters of scrub oak that separated the houses in this area of the subdivision.

  "Savannah!"

  A crunching sound behind him.

  He whirled to see Jessie emerge from the junipers down the sightline of his pistol.

  "What's wrong?" she screamed. "Where's Savannah?"

  She must have read his expression, the panic, the sheer terror, and clapped her hands over her mouth.

  Preston turned back to the field, tears streaming down his cheeks, trembling so badly he could barely force his legs to propel him deeper into the empty field toward the rows of fences and the gaps between them where paths led to the neighboring streets.

  "Savannah!"

  His voice echoed back at him.

  He fell to his knees, rocked back, and bellowed up into the sky.

  "Savannah!"

  ONE

  June 20th

  Present Day

  I

  22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

  "How much farther?" Lane Thomas asked. He swiped the sweat from his red face with the back of his hand.

  Dr. Lester Grant had grown weary of the question miles ago. These graduate students were supposed to be the future of anthropology, and here they were braying like downtrodden mules.

  "We're nearly there," Les said, comparing the printout of the digital photograph to the surrounding wilderness.

  It was the summer session, so rounding up volunteers had been a chore, even though the opportunity to be published in one of the academic journals should have had them chomping at the bit. Granted, they had left the University of Wyoming in Laramie several hours before the sun had even thought about rising and driven for nearly three hours before they reached the end of the pavement and the rutted dirt road that wended up into the Wind River Range of the Rocky Mountains. Another hour of navigating switchbacks and crossing meadows where the road nearly disappeared entirely, and they reached the foot of the game trail that the hiker who had emailed him the photographs had said would be there. That was nearly two hours ago now. They'd taken half a dozen breaks already, and would be lucky if they'd managed to reach the three mile mark.

  "Can we switch off again?" Jeremy Howard asked in a nasal, whiny tone. "Breck's making it so that I'm bearing all of the weight."

  "Give me a break," the blonde, Breck Shaw, said. She hefted the handles of the crate they carried between them for emphasis, causing Jeremy to stumble.

  "That's enough," Les snapped. They were adults, for God's sake. Sure, the crate containing the university's magnetometer was quite heavy, but they all had to pay their dues, as he once had himself.

  They proceeded in silence marred by the crackle of detritus underfoot.

  The path had faded to the point that it was nearly non
-existent. At first, it had been choppy with the hoof prints of deer and elk, but after they had crossed over the first ridge and forded a creek, it had grown smooth. Knee-high grasses reclaimed it in the meadows. Only beneath the shelter of the ponderosa pines and the aspens, where the edges of the trail were lined with yellowed needles and dead leaves, was it clearly evident. How had that hiker found this path anyway? They were hundreds of miles from the nearest town with a population large enough to support a WalMart Supercenter, and at an elevation where there was snow on the ground eight months out of the year. And this was so far out of the commonly accepted range of the Plains Indian Tribes, a generic title that encompassed the Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Crow, and Lakota, among others, that it made precious little sense for the site in the photographs to exist in the first place.

  Which was what made the discovery so thrilling.

  Les didn't realize how accustomed he'd grown to the constant chatter of starlings and finches until the sounds were gone. Only the wind whistled through the dense forestation, the pine needles swishing as the branches rubbed together. The ground was no longer spotted with big game and rodent scat. Patches of snow clung to the shadows at the bases of the towering pines and beneath the scrub oak, evidence of what he had begun to suspect. The air was indeed growing colder.