Innocents Lost

by Michael McBride

  He was now secured to the wall.

  There was a scraping sound from somewhere out of sight. He craned his neck as far as it would go and caught a glimpse of the man restacking the crates he had toppled in his hurry to reach his daughter. The man rounded them, leaned under the edge of the table, and slid his camcorder back out where he could reach it.

  Dandridge’s head throbbed. He was certain he could feel his blood pumping in time with his pulse out of what felt like a crater in his skull. A wave of dizziness nearly made him vomit. Even thinking hurt. He was so groggy that his thoughts had become disconnected, threads unraveling faster than he could grab the ends. His eyes closed of their own volition, but he managed to force them open again.

  The man now stood behind the crates. He set the camera on the top crate, snapped out the small viewing screen, and tilted the camcorder so that it faced the table where his daughter shuddered as she cried. A tiny red light bloomed from above the lens and there was a soft whirring noise. He held a small chalkboard in front of the camera.

  “No,” Dandridge whimpered. “Please, God. You promised…”

  The man made no reply. He merely set down the chalkboard and walked around to the other side of the table toward Maggie.

  She sobbed and shook her head from side to side, strained against her bindings.

  Dandridge struggled to his knees and threw himself forward, but the ropes held fast. He worked his wrists back and forth, the braid tearing through his skin. Blood trickled into his palms, and still he jerked. His shoulders popped and it felt like he might de-glove the flesh on his hands.

  “Don’t do this. Let her go. Do whatever you want to me. Just don’t hurt her. Don’t hurt my daughter.”

  The man tilted his head and offered a tight-lipped, placating smile, not without an element of sympathy, and lifted the scalpel from where he had set it down on the blood-crusted particleboard beside Maggie.

  “No!” Dandridge shouted. “We did what you wanted! You said you wouldn’t hurt her! You promised to let her go!”

  The man sighed and slowly rolled his eyes to meet Dandridge’s.

  “I said I’d set her free. I never once said anything about letting her live.”

  Dandridge bellowed and hurled himself away from the wall. Over and over. Joints cracked. Bones snapped. Skin tore. Blood flowed freely from his wrists. He screamed and thrashed. Begged. Pleaded. Cursed. Vowed. Right up until the moment the man opened his baby girl’s neck with a flick of his wrist.

  A hollow gasp, and the crying ceased.

  A whistle of air.

  A gurgling sound.

  Dandridge collapsed to his knees in tears. From the corner of his eye, he saw a strobe of golden light, and Maggie’s small, naked body fell still on the table. He lolled onto his side and sobbed.

  He heard the patter of fluid on the ground, as though someone had left a faucet running.

  Bare feet crossed in front of him again and he lunged for them, trying to trip them with his shoulder, to latch onto them with his teeth. He was going to kill this man if he had to rip off his own arms to do it.

  The man stooped, grabbed Preston by the shirt collar, and dragged him toward the doorway, trailing a wet smear in his wake.

  “I’ll give you a moment to say goodbye,” the man said, and with that, pulled the unconscious agent into the dark tunnel, leaving Dandridge alone with his pain and his sorrow…and the lifeless body of his daughter.

  VII

  Les resisted the urge to call down the tube, and instead paced around the central cairn, careful not to trip over the short walls that formed the spokes of the wagon wheel design or step in any of the blood. What in the name of God was he doing here anyway? He wanted to run away, yet the thought of being alone in the woods with a killer who was intimately more familiar with them than he was frightened him. But if the man who had done all of this was down there, somewhere underground, then walking away would be the safest thing he could do. However, if there was more than one man involved, his theory fell apart. At least out in the open, he would be able to see anyone approaching with enough advance warning to get a head start. Of course, that also left him uncomfortably exposed.

  He simply didn’t know what to do, so he continued to pace and hoped the right choice would present itself.

  The sun cast strange and shifting shadows from the twisted trees onto the shivering ground as it neared its zenith. The air around him wavered as though the earth had begun to bake. There had to be some outside force stronger than the sun’s rays acting upon the clearing, but for the life of him, he couldn’t imagine what.

  He looked heavenward again and noticed something he hadn’t seen before. Nearly hidden by the branches over the stone well was a web of ropes a shade lighter than the bark. They’d been strung between the upper reaches of the trees in a crisscrossing fashion. He had to climb up onto the stones to clearly see them. Several black carabiners hung in the middle.

  A metallic clang rose from the hole beneath him.

  He gasped and leapt down from the stone ring.

  Someone was climbing up the ladder.

  It was probably the sheriff and the other man, but he couldn’t afford to take the chance. Everything about the situation felt wrong. Why had there been no voices preceding the sound of footsteps on the rungs?

  He stumbled when he hit the ground, righted himself, and sprinted toward the forest. Behind him, the sound faded to nothingness, and was replaced by a humming noise that seemed to originate from both inside of him and all around him at once. It coincided with the vibrations underfoot, as though his body somehow conducted it. Hurdling stones and round-ing the rotting remains of a young boy, he plunged into the underbrush and flattened himself to the dirt. He could barely see into the clearing through a clump of wild grasses and the overhanging branches of scrub oak. After a moment, a head emerged from the well, followed by a pair of stooped shoulders.

  Les closed his hand over his mouth and focused on slowing his breathing.

  It wasn’t the sheriff or the man in the suit, or any sort of officer for that matter. The man was far older. From this distance, he appeared to be well into his seventies, and yet he moved like a man half his age. He had greasy white hair and a black suit jacket so filthy it could have been peeled off a recently disinterred corpse. There was no physical way this man could be the killer, but if he wasn’t, then who in the world was he and what was he doing here?

  Les unconsciously shrunk back into the shrub.

  The old man climbed up onto the top of the ring of stones, took a moment to steady himself, and then stood up. He reached into the needled canopy. In his right hand, he held a long rope, similar to those strung through the branches. He struggled with something for nearly a minute, both hands working out of sight, and then jumped to the ground, still holding the rope, which angled up into the trees, and then straight down into the hole. He must have run it through the carabiners.

  The ground vibrated with such urgency under Les’s chest that he was certain it affected the electrical impulses in his heart, its very beat. His watch shifted on his wrist, the hasp opening of its own accord.

  Slinging the rope over his shoulder, the old man grasped it in both hands and walked away from the central cairn. His face clenched with the exertion. He was hauling something up the tunnel, something heavy. When he reached the outer ring of cairns, no more than fifteen feet diagonally to Les’s right, he kicked aside a stone to expose a metal eye ring staked into the dirt. With obvious difficulty, the old man fed the end of the cord through the hole and then continued to tug. His eyes bulged and he bared his decayed teeth with the exertion. He abruptly turned toward the middle of the clearing.

  Les followed his gaze and watched in horror as a pair of bound hands rose over the lip of the cairn, followed by a pair of arms wearing a suit jacket, and then a head, which nodded limply against a white shirt and loosened tie. The man’s shirt was covered in blood, his hair wet with it. He continued to rise until his e
ntire torso was up in the branches, leaving only his legs hanging over the hole, twirling in slow circles.

  It was the same man he had met in the forest with the sheriff less than an hour ago.

  If he was here, then where was the sheriff?

  The old man groaned as he tied off the end of the rope. He gave it a sharp tug to test its strength. With a satisfied nod, he ran his fingers along the length of the rope as he returned to the trees from which the man now hung.

  Les felt his keys shift in his pocket.

  When he reached the central cairn, the old man glanced over his shoulder.

  Les closed his eyes and pressed himself into the dirt. He was sure that the old man had looked directly at him through rheumy, cataract-blotched eyes. Les forced his lids open just in time to see the crown of white hair vanish down the mouth of the well.

  He listened for the sound of footsteps on the iron rungs, but heard only the humming in his head.

  If he made a break for it now, there was no way the old man would be able to catch him. Les was no world-class athlete, but he felt confident he could outrun the hunched man. However, they had all underestimated the old man, and if he’d been able to overcome all of the police that had been here, then Les might not prove as much of a challenge as he thought.

  And then there was the man strung up in the trees. His body wavered through the ribbons of heat as though roasting over an open fire in the pit. He couldn’t just leave him there, could he?

  His mind shoved forth an image of the petroglyph. He envisioned the larger man in the sky connected to the one in the bottom of the pit by a series of squiggly lines.

  He had no idea what was about to happen, but the sinking sensation in his gut told him he didn’t want to find out. The air around him was alive, positively crackling with energy.

  Les pushed himself up to all fours and crawled cautiously out into the clearing.

  He needed to get the man down.

  VIII

  Dandridge stared at the lifeless body on the table in front of him. Maggie’s skin continued to pale before his eyes, passing from stark white to translucence. Bruises blossomed through the smeared dirt and the spatters of blood. The pain was more than he could bear. He wanted to die, to escape the torture by any means possible. He had failed in the only responsibility that had mattered, and now his baby girl was dead.

  His moans and sobs echoed back at him in the confines and haunted the tunnels leading deeper into the warren, but he no longer heard them.

  In his mind, he was holding his swaddled child to his chest. Margaret had been so red and wrinkled, her tiny hand barely able to wrap around his index finger. He remembered that she had kept her eyes closed against the light, that her lips had quivered, then she cried, exposing bare rows of gums. He remembered holding this tiny, fragile part of him in his arms and vowing that he would never let anything happen to her, that he would protect her from the world and its evils.

  And now the only thing he wanted was to free her from her bindings, cradle her in his arms one last time, and beg God to transfer his life force into her. Or else allow him to follow her into the grave.

  He no longer deserved to live. He had forfeited that right.

  An image of his wife’s face rose unbidden. He saw pain and anguish beyond anything she had ever experienced, and he saw the blame in her eyes. Even as she sat at home, waiting by the phone for him to call, he knew he had killed her as well.

  A distant, hollow series of clanging sounds reached his ears, followed by scuffing footsteps.

  Anger boiled inside of him, his thoughts a burbling cauldron of incoherence. He lusted for blood. He was going to kill this man with his bare hands. He was going to subject him to pain beyond the capacity of human suffering. He was going to strip him of his black soul and send him straight to hell.

  The footsteps grew louder until the old man stepped into the bronze glow from the dark channel.

  Dandridge roared and lunged at him, over and over, no longer feeling the strain in his shoulders and wrists, the blood flowing over his hands.

  The man paid him no heed. He simply removed the video recorder from the top crate, tucked it into his jacket pocket, and walked over to the end of the workbench. One by one, he untied the ropes that bound Maggie’s wrists and ankles, and let them fall away from the particleboard. As though she were nothing more than a sack of grain, he hefted her from the table and slung her over his shoulder.

  “Leave her alone!” Dandridge shouted. “Don’t take her from me again! I’ll kill you! No matter where you go, I will find you, and I will destroy you!”

  “You will try,” the man said with a sigh, and cast a forlorn glance over his shoulder as he entered the tunnel. Maggie’s long blonde hair and limp arms swayed against his back.

  And then he was gone.

  Dandridge bellowed so loud it felt like his throat tore. He braced his feet and pushed away from the wall with everything he had. His shoulders cracked, but remained seated in the joints. The rope cut off the last of the feeling in his hands, and still he couldn’t pull them through the knot.

  The footsteps faded into the resultant silence and he screamed in agony.

  There was no way he was going to allow his daughter to be wrapped in barbed wire and posed like the others, to be violated even more in death.

  He turned and studied the wall behind him. The rope was secured to a rusted eyebolt with a knot the size of his fist. He scanned the floor for anything he could use to cut it. The only possibility was his pistol, but even if he managed to reach it and maneuver it into firing position behind his back, there was no way he would be able to shoot with any kind of accuracy.

  Again, he focused on the eyebolt.

  He walked toward it and studied it closely. There was a small gap in the ring around the rope. It just might be wide enough…

  Turning around, Dandridge grappled with the knot until he was able to force his thumbs down into the eyebolt. He wedged them in there all the way past the base, until he knew they wouldn’t be able to slip out too soon.

  An odd calmness rippled through him. He became acutely aware of the current in the air, of the trembling ground beneath his feet, of the static electricity that raised the fine hairs all over his body. Of the pain that was soon to come.

  He drew a deep breath, steadied his shaking legs, and fell forward to his knees.

  The bones in his thumbs dislocated with a resounding crack. Pain raced up his arms and into his shoulders, where it burned, white hot, in the torn cartilage.

  He screamed and fought to retain consciousness, while his body simply wanted to shut down.

  Using his fingers, he folded his bloody, misshapen thumbs into his palms and threw himself forward. The bindings snagged on his wrists. He drove himself away from the wall, pushing harder and harder, until the rope fell away and he slammed into the table. The particleboard fractured under his weight. He slid on the wet surface, his daughter’s cold lifeblood soaking into his clothing, and collapsed to the floor.

  Dandridge held out his mangled hands and evaluated the damage. His thumbs protruded at obscene angles. Streams of blood drained into his palms from the lacerated skin. Getting them back into their sockets was going to be a bitch, but he didn’t have time to screw around. He flattened his left hand on the ground, formed an awkward fist with his right, and aligned it with his crooked left thumb. His struck it with all his might and bellowed as he slammed it back into the socket. It hurt even more now, but when he flexed it, at least he could see it respond. Encouraged, he repeated the process on his right thumb, then hurried back across the chamber to where his Px4 Storm lay, and lifted it from the dirt floor.

  It took a moment to find a solid grip with the ferocious pain in his thumb.

  Holding the pistol in front of him, he crept into the shadowed tunnel, heart racing in anticipation of the kill.

  Chapter Five

  I

  22 Miles West of Lander, Wyoming

  The pain
roused Preston. He felt like he’d been hit by a truck. His first thought was a splash of ice-cold water in the face.

  The sheriff’s daughter was dead.

  Those five words brought clarity to his shattered thoughts and cut through the humming sound in his head. He opened his eyes a crack, but the light was too bright, staining his vision scarlet. The sun beat down on him, burning his scalp. Blood trickled along his neck from the source of the searing pain. He tried to wipe it away, but his hands were unresponsive. He had no feeling in either upper extremity. He could barely breathe with the way his shoulders pressed against his head and neck. With a groan, he spat out a mouthful of blood and tried to open his eyes again.

  The world of red resolved into a forest of green. There were pine needles everywhere. He tried to turn his head, but only managed to twirl in a slow circle. Raising his head summoned a fresh stream of warmth from the wound on the base of his skull and an explosion of pain that nearly chased him back into unconsciousness. He swung his feet in hopes of finding purchase, but found none. Calling for help only produced a dry rasp that stung his throat.

  Slowly, the details around him came into focus. He was handcuffed with his arms above his head, secured to the trees. Below his dangling feet, which throbbed with the accumulation of blood, he saw the ring of stones that formed the cairn in the center of the medicine wheel. Somewhere down there was the hole leading into the series of chambers, but he couldn’t quite see it. The ground surrounding him wavered like a desert mirage, surely a symptom of the concussion the blow to his head must have caused.

  He attempted to pull himself upward in an effort to evaluate the mechanism by which he was suspended, tried to wrench his hands out of the cuffs, but nothing worked.

  A shape darted into view below him. It took his eyes a moment to track it. The professor climbed up onto the rock ledge, swayed until he found his balance, and grabbed him around the legs. He wrapped Preston’s knees to his chest and lifted.