There was a long pause in which nobody spoke. Then Fisk cleared his throat. “This is first-rate work, Sheriff. What’s the next move?”
Hazen stood up, his face set. “The town’s been crawling with law officers and press. You can be sure McFelty’s still laying low in those caves, waiting for a lull so’s he can escape. Now that he’s completed his job.”
“And?”
“And so we go in there and get the son of a bitch.”
“When?”
“Now.” He turned to Larssen. “Conference us into state police HQ in Dodge. I want Commander Ernie Wayes on the horn himself. We need a well-armed team and we need it now. We need dogs, good dogs this time. I’ll head over to the courthouse, get a bench warrant from Judge Anderson.”
“Are you sure McFelty’s still there, in the caves?” Fisk asked.
“No,” said Hazen. “I’m not sure. But there’s going to be physical evidence in there at the very least. I’m not taking any chances. This guy’s dangerous. He may be doing a job for Lavender, but he’s been enjoying himself just a little too much—and that scares the piss out of me. Let’s not make the mistake of underestimating him.”
He looked out the window at the blackening horizon, the rising wind.
“We’ve got to move. Our man may use the cover of the storm to make his exit.” He glanced at his watch, then looked once again around the room.
“We’re going in tonight at ten, and we’re going in big.”
Forty-Eight
The darkness was total, absolute. Corrie lay on the wet rock, soaked to the bone, her whole body shivering from terror and cold. Not far away, she could hearit moving around, talking to itself in a singsong undertone, making horrible little bubbling sounds with its lips, sometimes cooing, sometimes laughing softly as if at some private joke.
Her mind had passed through disbelief and stark terror, and come out on the other side cold and numb. The killer had her.It —she supposed it was ahe —had tied her up and thrown her over his shoulder, roughly, like a sack of meat, and carried her through a labyrinth of passageways, sometimes climbing, sometimes descending, sometimes splashing across underground streams, for what seemed like an eternity.
And through darkness—always, through darkness. He seemed to move by feel or by memory.
His arms had felt slippery and clammy, yet strong as steel cables that threatened always to crush her. She had screamed, begged, pleaded, but her protests had met with obliviousness. And then, at last, they got tothis place —this place with its unutterable stink—and he had dropped her sprawling onto the stone floor. Then the horny foot had kicked her roughly into a corner, where she now lay, dazed, aching, bleeding. The stench—the stench that before had been faint and unidentifiable—was here appalling, omnipresent, enveloping.
She had lain, numb and unthinking, for an unguessable period of time. But now her senses were beginning to return. The initial paralysis of terror was wearing off, if only slightly. She lay still, forcing herself to think. She was far back in the cave—a cave much bigger than anyone imagined. Nobody was going to find their way back here to save her. . .
She struggled with the panic that rose at this thought. If nobody was going to save her, then she’d have to save herself.
She shut her eyes tight against the darkness, listening.He was busying himself in the blackness somewhere nearby, gargling and singsonging unintelligibly to himself.
Was he even human . . . ?
Hehad to be human. He had a human foot—though as callused as a piece of rawhide. And he spoke, or at least vocalized, in a high, babylike voice.
And yet, if he was human, he was like none other that had ever walked the earth.
Suddenly she felt him near. There was a grunt. She froze in fear, waiting. A hand seized her roughly, dragged her to her feet, shook her.
“Muh?”
She sobbed. “Leave me alone.”
Another shake, more violent this time. “Hoooo!” went the voice, high and babyish. She tried to wrench free, and with a grunt he flung her down.
“Stop . . . stop . . .”
A hand seized her ankle and gave a sharp jerk. Corrie screamed, feeling pain lance through her hip. And then she felt his arms around her, grabbing her by the shoulders, lifting her bodily. “Please, please stop—”
“Plisss,” squeaked the voice. “Plisss. Hruhn.”
She feebly tried to push him away, but he was holding her close to him, his foul breath washing over her.
“No—let me go—”
“Heeee!”
She was flung down again, and then she heard him shuffle off with a low, murmuring sound. She struggled wildly, tried to sit up. The ropes burned her wrists and she felt her hands tingling from lack of blood. He was going to kill her, she knew that. She had to get away.
With a great effort, she managed to flop herself upward into a sitting position. If only she knew who he was, or what he was doing, or why he was there in the cave . . . If only she understood, she might have a chance. She swallowed, shivered, tried to speak.
“Who . . . who are you?” she said. It came out as a bare whisper.
There was a momentary silence. This was followed by a shuffling sound. He was coming over.
“Please don’t touch me.”
Corrie could hear him breathing. She realized that maybe it hadn’t been such a good idea to attract his attention again. And yet her only hope was to engage him somehow. She swallowed again, repeated the question.
“Who are you?”
She felt him leaning over her. A wet hand touched her face, broken nails scratching her skin, the huge fingers callused and warm. She turned away with a stifled cry.
Then she felt a hand on her shoulder. She tried to lie still, to ignore it. It squeezed her shoulder, then moved down her arm, stopping to feel here and there as it went, then sliding further: horny and rough, the broken nails like splintered ends of wood.
The hand withdrew, then came back, sliding and slipping up the ridge of her backbone. She tried to twist away but the hand suddenly gripped her shoulder blade with a horrible strength. Involuntarily, she cried out. The hand resumed its crawl. It grasped the nape of her neck, squeezed. She felt paralyzed with terror. The squeezing grew harder.
“What do you want?” she choked out.
The hand slowly relaxed. She could hear breathing, and then some humming, and an undertone of rapid, singsong words. He was speaking to himself again. The hand caressed the back of her neck and reached up and rubbed her head.
She wanted to twist away but she forced herself not to. The hand kept rubbing, sliding down now over her forehead. It rubbed her face, stroked her cheek, pulled at her lips, tried to open her mouth, stinking horny fingers like a golem’s claw. She turned, but the hand followed the movements of her head, poking, always poking, as if inspecting a cut of meat.
“Please stop it!” she sobbed.
The hand stopped, and there was a grunt. Then the fingers slipped around her neck, from the front this time, and squeezed, first lightly, then a little harder. And then harder still.
Corrie tried to scream, but the squeezing had already closed off her windpipe. She thrashed, struggled, saw stars begin to flash in front of her eyes.
And still he squeezed. And as consciousness flickered and her limbs began to relax involuntarily, Corrie desperately tried to reach out, to claw the darkness, to push him away . . .
His hand gradually relaxed and released her. She fell, gasping, drawing in air, her head pounding. His hand went back to her hair, petting it.
Then he suddenly stopped. His hand withdrew, and he stepped back.
Corrie lay there, terrified, silent. She heard a sniffing noise, then another, and another. He seemed to be snuffling the air. She noticed then that the faintest of breezes was moving through this section of the cave. She could smell the outside world: the ozone and moisture from the storm, the earth, the cool nocturnal smells, pushed aside—if only a little—the stench of th
is nightmarish place. The smell seemed to beckon him, call him away.
And he was gone.
Forty-Nine
It was 8:11P.M. : normally the hour of sunset. Except that to western Kansas sunset had already come, four hours early.
Since early afternoon, a front of cool air one thousand miles long, pushing down from Canada, had been forcing itself across a region of the Great Plains that for several weeks had remained parched and dry. As the front moved, rising air before it began to pick up fine particles of dust. Soon this manifested itself in the form of dust devils: spiraling vortexes of dirt that rose sharply into the dark air. As the front moved on, it grew in intensity, raising the dry topsoil, feeding off itself until it had formed a massive wall of whistling, roiling dust. Quickly, it mounted to a height of ten thousand feet. On the surface, visibility was decreased to less than a quarter of a mile.
As the front moved from west to east across Kansas, dust storm warnings preceded it. The dark brown wall bore down on town after town, engulfing one after the other. As it went, the cold front, laden with dust, drove itself like a wedge into the hot, dry, dead air that had been suffocating the Great Plains. As they collided, the air masses of differing density and temperature struggled for supremacy. This disturbance caused a massive low-pressure system to form, wheeling counterclockwise over almost a hundred thousand square miles of the High Plains. Ultimately, the warm air rising from the ground penetrated the cooler mass above, boiling into towering cumulonimbus clouds that rose taller and taller, until they appeared as dark angry mountains against the sky, larger than the Himalayas. The great mountain chain of clouds flattened against the tropopause, spreading out into a series of massive, anvil-shaped thunderheads.
As the storm matured, it broke into several cells that moved together as a disorganized yet single unit: mature cells forming at the storm’s center, with newer ones developing on the periphery. In the cells that approached Cry County, the anvil-shaped top of a cell began to bulge upward. This “overshoot” indicated that the rising torrent of air at the storm’s center was so powerful it had broken through the tropopause into the stratosphere. On the underside of the storm, ugly, bulging mammatus pouches appeared: bellwethers for heavy rainfall, hail, windbursts, and tornadoes.
The National Weather Service had been tracking the system with radar, satellites, and the reports of pilots and civilian “spotters.” The dust storm and thunderstorm bulletins were upgraded to include tornado watches. Regional offices of the National Weather Service began advising local authorities of the need for emergency action. And always it remained vigilant for that rarest, yet worst type of storm: the supercell thunderstorm. In this far more organized event, the main updraft—known as a mesocyclone—reaches speeds of close to two hundred miles per hour. Such storms could create three-inch hail, eighty-mile-per-hour downbursts of wind, and tornadoes.
And already, virgas of rain were hovering over the landscape, evaporating as quickly as they fell, blasting the ground with localized microbursts that uprooted trees, flattened fields, and peeled the roofs off trailers. Hailstones spilled from the sky, stripping corn ears from their stems and ripping up fields, tearing the dry stalks to tattered sticks.
Many thousands of feet below this cell, almost lost in the approaching storm front, a lone Rolls-Royce hurtled along at one hundred miles an hour, two and a half tons of precision-engineered steel cutting the darkness of a long and lonely ribbon of tar.
Inside, the driver kept one hand on the wheel while glancing at the laptop open on the seat beside him. The laptop showed the real-time progress of the storm, a composite downloaded by a mosaic of weather satellites orbiting high above.
Coming from Topeka, he had exited Interstate 70 just past Salina, and was now passing the outskirts of Great Bend. From here on, the road to Medicine Creek would become far more local. That—and the approaching storm itself—would force him to slow dramatically.
And yet time was of the essence. The killer would soon kill again. In all likelihood he would be attracted to the storm, the violence and darkness of it, and he was almost certain to kill again that night.
He picked up his cell phone and dialed. Once again a recorded voice told him that the party he was trying to reach was out of range.
Out of range. He pondered that phrase: out of range.
And he pushed the Rolls ahead even faster.
Fifty
Ever since he’d seenThe Wizard of Oz as a child, Tad Franklin had been fascinated by tornadoes. It was a source of secret embarrassment that, living all his life in western Kansas, the very center of “tornado alley,” he had never managed to see one. He’d seen the aftereffects more often than he’d liked—twisted trailer parks, trees blasted into toothpicks, cars lifted and thrown across the road—but somehow he’d never seen an actual funnel cloud with his own eyes.
Tonight he felt sure that was going to change. All day long there had been weather advisories. Every hour, it seemed, the weather service alerts had grown in intensity: thunderstorm watch; severe thunderstorm warning; tornado watch. A brutal dust storm had come screaming through an hour before that had torn away placards and shingles, sandblasted cars and houses, knocked down trees, and reduced visibility to a few hundred yards. And then at 8:11 that evening, with Tad alone in the sheriff’s office, the news came: the whole of Cry County had just been placed under a tornado warning until midnight. F-scale tornadoes of magnitude 2 or even 3, with two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds and devastating force, were possible.
Ten seconds later, Sheriff Hazen was on the radio.
“Tad,” he was saying, “I’m in Deeper, about to head back.”
“Sheriff—”
“I don’t have a lot of time. Listen to me. We’ve made a lot of progress on the case. We believe the killer is hiding in Kraus’s Kaverns.”
“The killer—?”
“For chrissakes, let me finish. It’s most likely McFelty, Norris Lavender’s henchman. He’s been holed up in that moonshine room back of Kraus’s Kaverns. But we’ve got to move fast in case he decides to pull out under cover of the storm. We’re putting together a team to go in at ten o’clock. But we also just got word from the NWS about a tornado warning for all of Cry County—”
“I just got the call.”
“—and I’ve got to put you on the tornado side of things. You know the drill?”
“Sure do.”
“Good. You get the word out, make sure everything’s battened down in Medicine Creek and the outlying areas. We’ll be arriving around nine, and then all hell’s going to break loose—and I don’t mean the weather. Just be sure to have a couple strong pots of fresh coffee. You’re not going in with us, so don’t worry. Somebody’s got to hold down the fort.”
It was only when Tad felt himself relax that he realized hehad begun to get a little nervous. He didn’t mind handling a tornado alert—he’d done that often enough before—but the idea of going after a killer in a dark cave was something else.
“Right, Sheriff,” he said.
“Okay, Tad. I’m relying on you.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tad hung up the radio. He knew the drill, all right. First thing, warn the citizenry. If there were any outside, get them indoors or into shelters.
He pushed out the back, careful to face away from the wind. The gusts, full of sand and grit, felt as if they had teeth. He opened the door to his squad car, slipped in, shook the dust from his hair and face, started the engine, and ran the wipers a few times. Then he started the siren and turned on his flashers. He slid out onto Main Street and cruised along, slowly, speaking into the horn. Of course, most of them would already have heard it over the radio, but it was important to go through the motions.
“This is the sheriff’s office. A tornado warning has been declared for all of Cry County. Repeat, a tornado warning has been declared for all of Cry County. All citizens should take shelter immediately, below ground or in concrete-reinforced buildings. Stay away from wi
ndows and doors. I repeat, a tornado warning has been declared for Cry County . . .”
He hit the edge of town, drove past the last houses, stopped, and looked down the dust-covered road. The few farms he could make out were already shuttered up tight, no activity anywhere. The farmers would have had their ears glued to the radio for hours already, and they knew what to do better than anyone: move livestock, especially the young, to sheltered areas; haul extra feed; make sure they were well stocked with provisions in case of a power loss.
The farmers knew what to do. It was the damn-fool townies one had to worry about.
Tad ran his eye down the road until it reached the level of the horizon. Above, the sky was black, intensely black; the sun must have set already, and what little light was left was completely blocked by the storm. The wind was gusting fitfully, pushing shreds of corn shucks and dust-covered stalks past his windows. To the southwest he could see a deep reddish flickering that looked more like the front of a war than lightning. In Cry County, tornadoes almost always moved from southwest to northeast. It was so dark that if a tornado were coming they couldn’t even see it. They wouldn’t know it was on them until theyheard it.
He turned around quickly and headed back into town.
The windows of Maisie’s were twin rectangles of cheerful yellow standing against the murk. Tad pulled up in front and got out, holding his collar against the wind. The air smelled of dry earth and tree roots. Fragments of corn sheaves peppered his jacket.
He pushed through the door and looked around. The place fell silent as they realized he wasn’t there for a cup of coffee.
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