They had found the missing children.
II
Dandridge pulled his undershirt up over his mouth and nose. He not only smelled, but tasted, a scent he remembered far too clearly. The foul stench of decomposition. Just like before. The rotten smell of the inside of something that hadn’t been designed to be opened. Tears rolled from the corners of his eyes, stinging his wind-abraded cheeks. He hated himself for what he’d allowed to happen to his daughter, and for what he’d been forced to allow to happen to the children after her in order to track the monster to his lair.
It all ended right here. Right now. This he vowed. Even if it cost him his life, Grant was not leaving this forest.
A shuffling sound from ahead.
A shadow passed across the ground between a pair of twisted trunks about ten yards away.
He glanced at Preston and nodded to his left. The agent darted away from him and ducked behind a clump of shrubs, while he dashed to his right and hid behind a gnarled fir. Before they could burst into the clearing, they needed to establish what they were up against. They needed to evaluate every possible scenario, to anticipate Grant’s strategy, to determine whether or not they were stumbling into a trap. And most importantly, they needed to establish if the girl was still alive, even though both of them understood on a primal level that she was already dead.
Dandridge eased around the side of the trunk and risked a quick peek. A small ring of stones, perhaps fifteen feet in diameter. Twenty-eight spokes radiating outward from a rusted iron post. A miniature recreation of the medicine wheel near Lander. Shadows danced on the ground, elongated by the solstice sun, which reached through the shifting gaps overhead. He looked up at their source. Bodies. Five children suspended from hooks driven into the thick branches of the lower canopy. Hung like slabs of meat. Wired together in a circle. On the ground, a circle of electric fence, identifiable by the plastic clips holding the wires, powered by a series of batteries in square plastic housings. A rusted length of iron was planted in the center. Near the perimeter, six tiny mounds of darker soil.
Dandridge caught a flash of movement and ducked back.
Grant limped from around the far side of the clearing to his right toward the center of the medicine wheel. He struggled with the weight of something heavy draped over his shoulder like a roll of old carpet. His legs were visibly deformed, bent backward just below his knees. He walked with a staggering gait and grunted with each step. The sunlight momentarily caught his face and illuminated not the awful smile that haunted Dandridge’s dreams, but bared teeth and deep creases around his eyes, an expression of great pain. The professor turned his back to them and hefted his cargo up from his shoulder with a groan. He raised the naked girl by her armpits, aligned her with the last available hook in the ring, and shoved her back against it with the sound of snapping ribs. He stepped back, appraised his work, and gave the girl’s ankles a sharp tug to make sure she was properly seated. Blood rolled down her torso and spiraled around her legs from the laceration across her throat, which was nearly hidden by her lolling head and the locks of dark hair hanging over her chest. The droplets shimmered as they dripped from her toes and pattered the forest floor with an arrhythmic tapping noise.
Dandridge looked toward Preston. Their eyes met. He saw the expression of resignation on the agent’s face. They were too late to save the girl, but there would not be another. There would never be another.
Preston gave the nod and they swung out from behind the trees, pistols raised.
Grant still faced the opposite direction. His posture stiffened. Slowly, his right hand sought the pocket of his filthy jacket.
“Don’t move!” Preston shouted, his words reverberating through the valley. “Hands where I can see them!”
“I figured the bear would do the trick,” Grant said. His voice was different. He sounded old, beaten, pained. But there was something else, something that made Dandridge’s skin crawl. “Can’t even leave wild animals to their own devices anymore, can we? Have to control them like everything else in this pathetic world.”
Grant’s hand paused near his pocket. After a moment, it resumed its movement.
Dandridge aimed his weapon and fired.
Grant’s elbow exploded in a cloud of blood and bone fragments. He howled beneath the echoing thunder of the report and fell to his knees, cradling his nearly severed forearm to his chest. Slowly, he scooted away from them and reached for something on the ground in front of him. There was a click and the hum of an electrical current.
The ground trembled subtly.
Preston’s weapon discharged to his left with a deafening blast. A scorched hole appeared in the shoulder of Grant’s jacket as an arc of blood slapped across the ground in front of him. The impact tossed the professor forward onto his chest.
There was an electrical snap and Grant’s body convulsed. He rolled inside the circle and onto his back on a short row of stones.
Dandridge crossed the clearing, stepped over the wire and ducked around the lifeless legs suspended from above, their feet livid with settled blood, and stood over Grant, who merely stared back up at him through dead eyes that radiated a palpable coldness.
Preston walked up beside him, his shadow falling over Grant.
“I’ve done nothing but think about this moment for nearly a decade,” Preston said, leveling the barrel of the pistol between Grant’s eyes. “I only wish I could make this last longer.”
Dandridge felt the same way. He had built up this confrontation in his mind to the point that it felt like the culmination of his entire life. No matter what they did to this man, it would never be enough. There was no physical way of inflicting enough pain to compensate for the loss of his daughter, for the horrors she had endured at the end of her far-too-short life. He wanted to violate this man in a way that would send shivers of agony through his very soul.
But no matter what he did, there would be no healing his broken heart. This man had cost him everything he loved in this world, everything that made life worth living. And still, there was one thing he needed to know.
“What are you?” Dandridge whispered.
Grant looked up at him, his face crumpled by pain, distorted by the rippling air between them, and in his eyes Dandridge read his answer.
The professor laughed, a horrible, gut-wrenching sound that echoed through the wilderness like the cries of dying children.
III
The air wavered around Preston and the ground shuddered. He trained his pistol on Grant’s forehead. All around him, bright points of light rose from the freshly turned sections of earth, the same optical illusions he remembered from before. Slowly, they began to swirl beneath where the bodies hung. This time there were fewer of them, six in total, one for each of the children. Their captured souls, Preston now understood, only now being set free from their imprisonment on the recordings of their deaths.
Grant’s laugh died with a choked sob. Preston saw a momentary expression of terror cross his face. His eyes widened with fear.
A concussive blast from his right and the professor’s forehead imploded, spraying blood across the stone design and the dirt. His jaws worked up and down a moment longer. His legs scraped at the ground. Slower and slower, until finally they stopped.
Preston turned toward Dandridge, who still held the smoldering pistol in front of him. A twirl of smoke drifted from the barrel. The spent casing glinted off to his right.
The small lights winked out of existence.
Dandridge lowered his pistol to his side and stared down at Grant’s body for a long moment. He finally shook his head as if to break the trance that held him and kicked one of the battery packs across the clearing, killing the electrical current with a crackle.
The movement around them ceased. The air, the ground, the entire forest became still.
“It’s over,” Dandridge said, and turned away from the corpse.
“Yeah,” Preston whispered. “It’s finally over.”
&
nbsp; Together, they headed back in the direction from which they had come. Preston took the lead and ascended the slope toward where he could barely see Wylie struggling against his tether through the shrub. There was still much to be done. There would be questions to be answered, statements to be made, and most importantly, there were the remains of the children to return to their parents for proper burial. He hated to think about the pain they were about to endure.
But there was still one more thing he needed to do first.
Wylie barked as they approached. He rose to his full height to gain leverage and tugged against his leash.
“So what are you going to do now?” Preston asked.
“I don’t know.” Preston heard the crackle of Dandridge’s tread on the detritus behind him. “I still can’t believe he’s really dead. I think I’m going to need some time for it to sink in, to see if there’s even anything left for me out there.”
Preston nodded.
Wylie dropped to all fours, lowered his head, and pricked his ears. The coarse fur on his haunches rose. He released a growl through bared teeth.
“I’d be surprised if there’s anything left for either of us,” Preston said. The footsteps stopped behind him, but he continued to walk. “You remember our deal?”
“Yeah. I remember.”
Again, Preston nodded. He readjusted his grip on his weapon, and in one swift motion, spun around, raised his pistol, and fired.
In that split-second, he saw surprise register on Dandridge’s face. His gun had been trained on Preston’s back.
Blood burst from the right side of Dandridge’s upper chest as he toppled backward. He managed to squeeze off a shot that careened harmlessly into the forest before his heels caught in the grass and sent him sprawling to the ground.
Wylie continued to growl.
Preston walked toward Dandridge, kicked the gun away from his hand, and stared down at him for several seconds.
Dandridge sputtered blood and tried to sit up.
Preston shot him below the opposite clavicle. The upper lobes of his lungs punctured, they would slowly fill with blood until he could no longer breathe.
“The deal was we save the kill shot until after we make him suffer,” Preston said. He turned his back on the man, whose heels dug into the dirt in an effort to push him toward his pistol. Preston heard the scraping sounds and the wet, rasping inhalations as he returned to the tree where he had tied his dog. He ruffled the fur on the dog’s head and whispered, “Good boy.”
He leaned around the trunk and grabbed the handle of the hatchet he had hidden there when they arrived.
“You see,” Preston said as he tromped through the scrub oak and walked downhill toward Dandridge, “if you were actually Dandridge, you would have known that.”
The man tried to speak, but only ended up coughing out a mouthful of blood that ran down his cheeks and around his ears.
Preston stood over him, watching him kick at the earth, moving in increments of inches. He held up the hatchet so the man could get a good look at it, so he could clearly comprehend what was about to happen. Preston wanted to see the expression of fear on Dandridge’s borrowed face when he did.
The man raised a trembling hand and gurgled what Preston hoped was a nasty epithet.
Preston raised the hatchet and swung it down on Dandridge’s right ankle. The blood rushed out from the wound. It took another chop to sever the foot.
He studied the man’s face, the pinched eyes and bared teeth of his former friend, and tried to memorize it for both of them. Dandridge would soon be with his family again. Preston firmly believed that. He had no choice but to, as one day he hoped to be reunited with his.
“Her name was Savannah Marie Preston.” He raised the hatchet and brought it down on the opposite ankle with a crack. “She was ten years old.” Again, the blade whistled through the air and relieved the man of his opposite foot. “And I loved her more than anything in the world.”
The fires of hell burned behind Dandridge’s eyes, windows through which Preston could see a fathomless past filled with the infliction of unlimited pain. An eternity of suffering as ancient as the ground upon which he now stood. A parasitic consciousness of pure evil that until this very moment had never known fear.
He stepped on Dandridge’s forearm to hold the wrist in place.
The sound of breaking bones echoed through the forest well into the afternoon.
The shadows of the twisted firs grew longer.
Eventually, the sound of distant sirens reached the valley.
And somewhere behind the rocky peaks of the Big Belt Range, the sun finally set on the longest day of the year.
About The Author
Michael McBride is the author of Bloodletting, Brood XIX (from Sideshow Exhibits, with Gene O’Neill and Gord Rollo), Remains, the God’s End trilogy, and The Infected. Innocents Lost contains his millionth word of published fiction. He lives with his wife and five children in Westminster, Colorado, where he works as a radiologic technologist and clinical instructor. For more information about the author or to explore his other works, please visit: www.michaelmcbride.net.
Join The Darkside!
DRM-Free
EPUB, MOBI, & PDF
Get Up To 50% off on titles by buying direct
Support An Independent Publisher!
Located virtually inside The Horror Mall at:
www.horror-mall.com/darksidedigital
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Epilogue
About The Author
Table of Contents
INNOCENTS LOST
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Epilogue
About The Author
Join The Darkside!
Innocents Lost Page 17