Just Fire

by Dawn Mattox

  More time passed in amicable silence, when a sleek black Mercedes-Benz pulled up to Taylor’s house, looking as misplaced as a bottle of champagne next to a Happy Meal.

  We weren’t the only ones watching the road. Taylor immediately exited the house clutching a large box. The porch light was off, as was the interior light on the Mercedes. Taylor opened the back door of the car and shoved the box into the backseat, then slid in next to it.

  Forest seemed to know his stuff as he carefully tailed the Mercedes from a distance. We didn’t have far to go. Their destination was a short hop to downtown Oroville.

  The Mercedes pulled up in front of the newest business in the oldest part of town—a motorcycle shop specializing in custom paint detailing and design. A string of very nice cars and expensive motorcycles lined both sides of the street. Oroville usually rolls up the sidewalks at ten p.m., yet there seemed to be a major party going on at the shop. Neon lights were flashing out the door like an 80’s disco dance floor, and heavy metal music was thrumming in the night air. We could see through the window as we drove past; people were drinking inside, and a few others were staggering outdoors.

  Something was wrong with this picture. There had to be a mistake. This was no ritual gathering in the backwoods under a full moon, speed-dialing Satan with incantations and the blood of a ram. This looked like high society—not necessarily the drug type. More likely to speed-dial their stockbroker as they sipped red wine, which seemed incongruent with the music, to say the least, but times and customs changed.

  “Let’s park and have a closer look,” I said to Forrest.

  “I’m on the clock. It’s your dollar,” he replied with youthful enthusiasm—which wasn’t exactly accurate, as he was actually on the county clock and not costing me a cent.

  We parked the truck around the corner, out of sight from mainstream traffic, and got out. Pulling my head deep beneath the hood on my coat, Forrest and I strolled down the cobbled sidewalks of Old Town, past numerous little shops with colorful awnings that lined the road toward Bad Boyz Bikes and the sound of voices and music. Forrest jumped when I took his hand.

  “We need to look like a couple,” I told him, “not like a couple of cops.”

  His eyebrows bobbed up and down, followed by a sly wink—which was followed by my venomous warning, “Seriously,” which was followed by his grin . . . followed by a look of pain as I crushed his fingers in my hand.

  Men!

  We stopped in front of the Bad Boyz display window that showcased an impressive antique motorcycle. “Do you see what I see?” I asked Forrest.

  “Yeah, a 1930 three-cylinder Czechoslovakian motorcycle named Satan,” Forrest read from the plaque in front of the bike that went on to identify it as being “extremely rare.”

  It occurred to me that the bike might be the equivalent of a trail of luminous quartz rocks like the ones that guided the participants down to the gathering in the woods. It clearly signaled to me that we were in the right place.

  I was peering through the windows from every angle looking for Taylor when a tap on my shoulder nearly triggered heart failure.

  Shane?

  “Shane. What the heck are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.” Shane’s eyes drifted pointedly from my face to my hand that was still firmly clasped to Forrest’s. I dropped Forrest’s hand like a shoplifter with more items in his pants than his cart. “I was invited here because this is Ben’s grand opening, and in case you forgot, I happen to own a Harley shop,” said Shane.

  My best friend’s husband and I stood there eyeing each other suspiciously.

  I took a chance. “I’m working.”

  Shane took a chance. “I can see that.”

  I rolled my eyes and took a confused Forrest by the hand once again to prove my point. “I’m looking for someone.”

  Shane bent forward as if to hug me goodbye and whispered in my ear, “Get out of here, Sunny. You aren’t the only one looking for someone tonight.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” I said, indignant that Shane would still think that Forrest had the hots for me. I pushed my way past Shane, dragging Forrest behind me, and entered the showroom still hoping for a glimpse of Taylor.

  “What was that about?” Forrest asked under his breath.

  “Nothing. Just keep your eyes open for anything unusual,” I said as we strolled from one motorcycle to another, genuinely admiring the precision work while watching for anything out of the ordinary.

  “That’s unusual,” said Forrest, nodding appreciatively toward a heavily tattooed young woman with purple hair. She was wearing a lot of skin under a little black leather dress and purple spiked thigh-high boots.

  “You’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Who’s Toto?”

  It means I am old. “It means you’re in California, and she is normal.”

  Forrest gave me a pained expression that was not the result of any hand squeezing this time. “Not her—them,” he said, nodding toward two people partially hidden behind shelves in back of the counter. There was a man—a striking albino—standing next to a stunning woman whose skin was as black as the leathers the albino wore.

  I hung on to Forrest for a moment as the floor shifted beneath my feet—not a California earthquake—but a burst of comprehension that sent me reeling.

  It was him—the man from the cabin who had trailed me to the lake high in the mountains.

  It was them—the man and woman from Paige’s funeral—the ones from the floral shop—just before the bomb went off. The same people that had been hooded and cloaked, leading the blood moon mass.

  Probably the same woman caught on camera leaving the nursery the night Quincy disappeared.

  Hurrying out to the sidewalk, I sucked in the cold night air, trembling. My missing toes and foot were cramping, but my head and everything else grew crystal clear.

  “It’s him . . . them,” I kept repeating to myself. “God. Why didn’t I see it? It’s really him.” I walked down the street back toward the truck.

  Forrest kept repeating “Who?” sounding like an audio loop of an owl as I frantically dialed Chance on my cell phone. Chance had gone dark. His phone was turned off. No time to explain everything to the local police—and I wasn’t about to let them get away.

  “Hey,” Forrest was clearly annoyed, “can you stop a minute? I thought we were going after some cult that was going to sacrifice animals?”

  “We are. Hang on—” I turned off my phone and put it in my pocket. “As soon as we figure out how to get into the back of the bike shop without getting caught. The action has to be behind the front counter, somewhere in the back of the building.”

  Forrest frowned in thought and then got a huge smile. “No problem.” His eyes danced. “How about we bring a goat to the back door?”

  “That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Where are we going to get a goat at eleven o’clock at night?”

  Forrest grinned. “This is Oroville. Let’s go.”

  Twenty minutes later we were in the alley behind the bike shop with an unhappy goat anchored in the back of the pickup truck. Forrest knew every livestock owner in the county and had no problem “borrowing” a ram from a nearby breeder. Forrest was in his element, clearly enjoying himself as he boldly knocked on the back door of the bike shop while I waited in the alley with the truck.

  My heart hammered as an unidentified male opened the back door with a rough, “Whadda ya want?”

  “I have it in the back of the truck,” said Forrest, gesturing at the goat who was bleating pitifully from the truck bed. “I need your help getting him out.”

  The man paused to consider. “Miasma didn’t say anything about a stinkin’ goat,” he complained as he followed Forrest to the truck.

  “He stinks alright. Grab his chain,” said Forrest as he unlatched the tailgate.

  The man from the shop jumped up on the step side, leaned ove
r, and reached across the bed. I popped open the door and hit him with Forrest’s cattle prod, dropping him to the ground like a side of beef, where I zapped him until he stopped thrashing.

  “Did I kill him?” I asked.

  “Nah—probably just sterilized him.”

  We shoved the biker up on the front seat of the truck and drove to the lot next door and parked under a low-hanging tree to keep the goat happy. Forrest cuffed the biker to the steering wheel while I slapped a strip of duct tape across his mouth and taped his ankles together. Then Forrest and I stretched our suspect across the front seat, grabbed a pair of flashlights, hurried back to the bike shop and slipped inside.

  CHAPTER 40

  It was too dark to see without a flashlight, but I was sure we were alone since it was bone-breaking-black when we closed the door. We flicked our flashlights on low. The place smelled of damp warehouse and something else that tangled with my senses. Forrest was armed and looked dismayed when I pulled out my Glock.

  “You got a license for that thing?” he whispered. I nodded my head up and down. The flashlight deepened his frown lines into a scowl. “You know how to use it?” I nodded yes, but he looked doubtful. “You better not shoot me.”

  I gave him a dirty look and gestured with my gun to indicate that if he didn’t get moving, I might be tempted. He moved.

  Shadows seemed to tiptoe on our heels as our narrow beams of light swept back and forth across shelves stacked with boxes of motorcycle stuff that reached to the ceiling. No sign of any people, but there were a few doors to choose from. We eased up on them one at a time.

  Softly turning the knob on the largest, most obvious door first, we cracked it open enough to let in the noise from the showroom and the demonic sounds of Marilyn Manson screaming:

  “Erotic sensations tingle my spine.

  A dead body lying next to mine.

  Smooth blue-black lips

  I start salivating as we kiss . . .”

  I drew back with the same disgust that I’d felt at a meth house, looking at moldy food bubbling over the lip of a frying pan and slithering across the stove to floor.

  I shook my head no, and Forrest shut the door. We moved on to the next door, easing it open with the same great care, when a loud rustle and the sound of scurrying made me spin in panic, drawing my flashlight like a lightsaber to face the enemy. I expected Darth Vader but saw nothing more sinister than a hideous black rat with beady eyes that glowed red in my beam. The rat from hell. He paused to bare his teeth and make a hissing noise before scuttling off, holding his gray tail stiff in the air as he ran. I exhaled and then tensed again as the doorknob to the main room turned.

  Forrest and I switched off our lights as we dove, flattening ourselves behind a pallet of boxes where the rat had taken cover. The door swung open to admit a few people and then closed behind them. The warehouse was quiet except for the repeated flicking of a lighter. The room bloomed with flickering candlelight. Rattling noises returned nearby.

  “What’s that?” A woman raised her voice in consternation. She lifted her candle and we pressed our bodies to the floor. The sound of approaching steps, followed by girl-shrieks, curse words, and laughter as the rat bolted from the pallet and blitzed across the room.

  The laughter faded, drifting across the warehouse toward the third door. They passed through and closed it with a resounding click.

  Forrest and I exhaled. The night was cold, but I was sweating. Fear of the rat, fear of getting caught, and fear of whatever lay behind door number three.

  “Come on.” Forrest switched his flashlight back on and gestured for me to follow.

  The door led to a small bathroom—the kind one might expect to find in the back of a motorcycle shop—small and greasy with the toilet seat up beneath a picture of a naked female vampire straddling a “Kiss of Death” Harley. A tall, narrow stall shower stood in the corner. We looked around in dismay. The people had vanished. We turned our flashlights into each other’s eyes looking for answers, temporarily blinding each other before sweeping the room one more time. The floor started to vibrate. Forrest stepped back and I opened the shower door.

  At my feet gaped a yawning mouth to a dark tunnel that bent at a steep angle under a low ceiling. A narrow set of wooden stairs led down into even blacker shades of night that quickly absorbed the beam of my light.

  Holy . . . wow! I thought, swallowing my fear.

  A beam of light danced across mine and I knew that Forrest was behind me. He tapped me on the shoulder with his gun, indicating that he would go down first and I was to follow. There was no point in calling the police. The only crimes being committed at the moment were ours: assault, kidnapping, and false imprisonment of the guy we’d left in the pickup truck.

  The smell I had first noticed upstairs increased with every step: earthy and dank, mixed with some kind of chemical. A cloying odor that smelled like death and made me shudder. Down, down, down. Forrest’s beam bounced off the walls, ceiling, and floor, making me feel like a drunken sailor trying to focus on a lighthouse just before the shipwreck.

  We were deep within the mysterious Chinese tunnels beneath the city—where Chinese gold miners had engaged in the legal activities of gambling and smoking opium, and the illegal activities of possessing guns and mining for themselves. Only American citizens could own gold mines, but legend spoke of clever Chinese who carried out illegal mining operations from beneath the city. A legend that local government had vigorously quelled for more than one hundred and fifty years—and yet, here we were.

  After the stairs, we continued down a narrow corridor until it opened into a large cavernous room that could easily hold fifty or more people. Boxes and crates lined the walls—I recognized gun crates—I didn’t know what was in the boxes. Machinery of some sort dominated one side of the chamber. Above the equipment were shelves stocked with chemicals. A long work table stood on one side of the machinery with lab equipment tucked beneath. I was pretty sure we had stumbled into a meth lab, and my heart picked up speed, hammering in my chest as though I’d vicariously ingested the drug.

  There were entrances to two more tunnels on the far end of the cavern, both were dark and narrow and looked like a vacant stare from a giant skull.

  “Which one?” Forrest whispered. We stood shoulder to shoulder, and I could feel him vibrating. Apparently, the meth was affecting him too.

  “The left one,” I whispered.

  “Why?” he whispered back.

  “Because Jesus sits on the right.”

  I didn’t wait for his reply but moved forward, the tunnel turning at both right and left angles as we proceeded. Ahead, the tunnel opened into another chamber filled with the pale glow of flickering lights and the chant of voices rising and falling in rhythmic, hypnotic incantation. We switched off our lights and inched forward, hidden within the hallowed shadows, and crept down the tunnel and backward in time. A full-blown Satanic High Mass was in progress.

  The voices rose in a mounting crescendo as I caught a glimpse.

  The room was lit with the luminous blue-white glow of black lights and on the forehead of each robed figure was a glowing pentagram, just as Nina, my first ritual abuse victim, had tried to tell me—white tattoos that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye.

  The albino stood before the congregation wrapped in ethereal light, exhorting and crying out unintelligible phrases that excited the participants escalating into a frenzy. His black female accomplice stood at his right side holding Taylor’s box in her arms. A thin wail from a baby pierced the tumult in the room. To the albino’s left—unbelievably, impossibly—stood Logan.

  A familiar whine and prod came from behind.

  “Mercy . . . wha . . . ?”

  “Good God.” Chance froze at the sight of me crouching before him with my arms around Mercy’s neck. His face paled as white as the albino’s. “What are you doing here?” he hissed.

  I looked into Chance’s eyes as he proclaimed the name of God, and a
s I did, a bright red splotch flowered and bloomed along his neck, just above the top of his bulletproof vest.

  Erc whined and I threw myself on the floor, clutching her fur as all hell broke loose with shots coming from every direction.

  Forrest grabbed Chance who had fallen to his knees, lifted him from under his arms and dragged him back into the tunnel. Men in SWAT gear swarmed up from behind, calling out directives and pushing us aside as they surged past. More gunshots, followed by the whine of bullets ricocheting through the chamber as screams and shrieks of panicked participants shattered the night.

  A minute later a voice called out, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”

  I looked up across the cavern to see Travis leading a second assault team into the chamber from a different direction. Travis was crouched down with one arm up in the air, the other holding his gun up in surrender. His eyes were trained on the black woman who now held a wailing baby to her chest with a knife pressed tight against its throat.

  Moans and sobs echoed from the wounded. I heard Chance struggling to breathe. Crawling to him, I eased his head onto my lap, crying and begging, “Oh God, oh God, oh God.” Forrest pressed his hand tight against Chance’s neck to form a compression, but the blood continued to flow, leaking through Forrest’s fingers and dribbling across my lap.

  Voices receded as the walls of the tunnel fell away. Sunshine streamed through a shimmering white sky. Had we been in the tunnel that long? I thought it only minutes, but judging from the angle of the sun, it must have been the dawn of a new day. All the shouting, screaming people—even Mercy—seemed to have faded away. There was only Chance. Only me.

  Looking into the face of my beautiful husband—the love of my life—his ice-blue eyes melted into mine. Chance looked radiant. I had never seen him look so completely happy. He whispered, “I found her. Quincy. We’re going . . . ta be . . . a fam . . . ly.”