“Don’t!” snapped Carter. “Don’t hurt her! There’s no need!”
“You ain’t takin’ me serious, Mr. Carter. There’s a need.”
“I am taking you very seriously! I—”
Keturah looked at one of the men and nodded toward Carter. The man punched Carter in the stomach without hesitation. The surprise caught him as much as the pain, and he tried to double up, his bound feet scrabbling on the floor for purchase as the two men held him up. When he finally stopped writhing and they hoisted him up straight, his eyes were streaming.
“I just want to say…” Lovecraft was speaking, her voice small and frightened. “I just want to say something. Can I say something?”
“Go ahead, sweetheart,” said Keturah. “Talk some sense into your gentleman friend.”
“No,” said Lovecraft. She was at the edge of tears herself. Carter felt desperately useless. It wasn’t right she was suffering. He should have ignored her badass act and told her to stay in the store, handled this with Harrelson. He wanted to apologize to her, but he could hardly breathe. “No, I want to talk to you, Keturah. I want to say something to you.”
“Me?” Keturah Waite smiled, very mildly surprised. “And what have you got to say to me, Miss Lovecraft?”
“I just want to say, you had better let us go.”
Keturah’s smile faded with disappointment. “That’s it?” She raised the knife again. “Okay … fair warning, darlin’, this is goin’ to hurt.”
“You’d better let us go, or you are going to die.”
The knife halted in its movement. “Did you jus’ threaten me, girl?” There was menace in Keturah’s tone now. Not her usual bored feline sadism, but something more atavistic and brutal. “Did you just fuckin’
threaten
me?”
“I warned you. Not a threat. I warned you. I’m warning you.”
“Fuck the ear. I’m cutting your nose off.” The knife shifted, changed angle, and—at the sound of a shot—stopped.
Keturah dropped the knife and it rang on a surface of exposed stone. She fell sideways and crawled away from Lovecraft, clutching at her side. When she drew her hand away, it was dark with blood.
The shot had stunned them all. Despite the closeness of Keturah’s body first concealing the sight of the Beretta Pico and then muffling its report, the sound had resonated strongly in the small cellar, bouncing from the rock walls. The man on Carter’s right made no effort to dodge, but only made an incoherent lowing as Lovecraft raised the pistol gripped firmly in her bound hands, her hands shaking and her face creased with fear, and fired again, and again.
Colt was already on his feet and out of there, his shoes clattering on the wooden steps, and the second Waite man followed him at a clumsy lope, shying from the pistol as Lovecraft tried to get a clear shot at him as he ducked behind and around Carter. He ran up the steps on all fours.
Lovecraft fired again, but the bullet struck a step and stuck in the wood.
Keturah was thrashing on the floor, screaming in an endless keening note that never seemed to break for her to draw breath. Her blood splashed and sprayed as she rolled and convulsed. Carter had seen people shot on more than one occasion in his life, but never anything like this. Lovecraft was staring at the shot woman, the Beretta gripped in her bound hands. Lines of blood spatter lay across her clothes and skin. Carter looked down at the shot man. He wasn’t dead, but he was only lying there, his head casting from side to side, as confused as someone shaken from a deep sleep.
“Emily!” he snapped at her. He had to almost shout it before she suddenly looked up at him, startled. “Get me loose! Quick!” He hopped around on the spot until his back was to her and waggled his fingers urgently.
She got up and came to him. “I can’t do it with the gun in my hand!”
“Put it down, then! For Christ’s sake, Emily, please? Hurry! They’ll be getting more men and guns!”
He heard the clatter of the gun being half placed, half dropped to the rocky floor and felt a small relief that the thing didn’t go off.
Emily fumbled at the restraint buckles, made clumsy by her own bonds and her terror. “Why is she making that noise?” she asked as she worked. “Why won’t she stop?”
Carter looked down. The corner of the room where the woman was still thrashing like a landed marlin was dense with blood. A human body carried more blood than most people liked to think about, and God knew a little of the stuff could make a fuck of a mess, but this was extraordinary. “I don’t know,” he said. “She should be in shock by now.”
His hand were free. He had never been restrained like that in anything other than bedroom games, and would have loved to have rubbed his wrists and generally felt the Indiana Jones “and in a single bound, he was free” vibe. There was no time. As soon as the wrist restraints grew loose, he shook them off, got down on the floor, and released the ankle restraints, too. Once they were off, he grabbed the Beretta and Keturah’s dropped knife from the floor.
Keturah was still screaming, still thrashing in a pool of her own blood. Carter looked away; maybe it was just the way the cheap tube lights lit the cellar, but the blood just didn’t look right. It was too dark, even for venous blood, and where it lay on the pale dirt between the exposed rock, it seemed too bluish, more a purple than a crimson. He thought of what he had seen by Lovecraft’s car earlier, and then drove the obvious corollary from his mind. This was no time for that. Now was the time for simple, visceral intent and action. If he stopped to think about what was really happening there, what the true nature of their situation was, he might never start again.
“They didn’t search you?” he asked Lovecraft. He made her spread her hands apart like an opening orchid so he could reach the cords with the knife’s blade. The edge cut the cord very easily. It wouldn’t have taken much effort for Keturah to cut off Lovecraft’s nose with it, especially given how strong she had seemed.
“It was sticking into me, the way I was lying, so I put on the ankle rig instead. They didn’t search me at all. Just took my shotgun, and my bag, and my phone.”
As Lovecraft spoke, her eyes kept flicking sideways to Keturah, and then immediately back to Carter. They had to speak loudly because she was
still
screaming. They looked down at her. Coated in her own blood, her white eyes wide and glaring at them. Carter shook his head, shook it at her vitality and the small sea of blood she had lost yet barely seemed to need. He shook his head and denied the possibility of her. “Not possible,” he said. “Not possible.” He shot her between the eyes, and the screaming stopped as if by the flick of a switch.
Lovecraft flinched and made an incoherent sound that might have been a gasp or may have been a half word to stop Carter, uttered too late.
“Look at it,” he said, and it was not plain whether he meant the scene or the body. “Look at the blood. Look at it all. The color. I didn’t kill anyone. Not anything human.”
Now in the silence, they heard the heavy footfalls above as the Waite men, implacable and entirely expendable, came to avenge their kin.
* * *
The Beretta had two rounds left in it. Lovecraft had felt nervous about having one in the chamber, but Harrelson had talked her into it. It was as well that he had, as it broadened their narrow chances from hopeless to almost hopeless. Still, the thought
We have a bullet each
came sliding into Carter’s mind like a snake. It wouldn’t come to that, he chastised himself, but then he thought of stolid, solid, reliable, last-man-who-would-ever-put-a-gun-in-his-mouth Charlie Hammond doing
exactly
that.
“Any more ammo?” He could see they’d taken her jacket, which he knew she’d stored the two spare magazines in, but he was hopeful she might have moved them to elsewhere on her person as she’d done with the pistol.
“No. And they took my bag,” Lovecraft reminded him.
“Okay.” Two bullets and a knife. He was beginning to regret delivering the coup de grâce to Keturah Waite on purely logistical grounds. They could hear that the rumbling of steps above them had quieted.
Colt’s voice upstairs was just about discernible. He sounded hysterical and muffled by at least one closed door between him and the hallway where the trapdoor stood open. Then, very clearly, somebody racked a shotgun. A live shell clattered onto the floor; there was scrabbling to recover it, and a sharply whispered admonition not to rack a shotgun when it already has a live shell in the chamber.
Carter’s face tightened. A shotgun in the confined space did not seem like a survivable scenario. Lovecraft was ahead of him.
“We have to get out of here,” she said, and she was looking at the hole in the wall as she said it.
“Take this,” he said, handing her the knife, “and go. I’ll cover us.”
She stuck the knife through her belt and clambered through the jagged hole into darkness. “Does she have a phone on her?” she called back. “Or him? It’s pitch-dark back here, we’re going to need light.”
“Fuck,” muttered Carter, and quickly searched the man. He was still alive, and watched Carter’s face with a strange, childish obsessiveness. He had no phone, but he did have a sheath knife and a battered old Zippo gas lighter. As he moved to check Keturah’s body, the man gently caught his wrist. Carter started, and gripped the knife hard, ready to strike. But the man just looked up at him and said quietly, “Thanks … thanks…” Then he seemed to lose interest, and looked away.
Unused to being thanked by somebody who had been involved in his kidnapping, Carter turned to Keturah. It was impossible not to end up with her blood on him. The pool around her was bigger than she was by a couple of feet all around her, and better than an inch deep where the depression in the imperfect floor had caused it to collect. He felt it soaking through the knees of his pants as he kneeled by her, saw it smear and color his hands as he went through her pockets. It didn’t feel warm, and Carter guessed the rock floor was draining the heat from it rapidly. But it didn’t feel like blood, either. He’d had the misfortune to get the stuff on him too many times in the past, and this blood was not what he was used to. It felt thin and oily, and the distinct and foul smell of normal blood wasn’t there at all. Instead, there was a faint acidic tang to it, like vinegar.
He pushed these observations from his mind and concentrated on the task at hand. She did have a phone, but it was an old-style handset with a gray LCD screen and a dim backlight. It would be no use as a flashlight.
As he started to get to his feet, Keturah’s eyes opened. They rolled lazily in their sockets for a moment and then settled, staring at him. The .380 hole in her forehead was clearly defined, and the dark within showed it had penetrated the skull. She couldn’t have survived it. It wasn’t possible. So much wasn’t possible.
She smiled at him, a sneering, triumphant rictus, and she said something, but the syllables were thick and liquid, and Carter couldn’t have reproduced the sounds her throat made if he had heard them a thousand times. Her eyes rolled up in her skull and she lay still. Then Carter noticed her chest moving slow and rhythmically. She had been gutshot, headshot, had bled out more than she should have had in her, and she was breathing.
Shaken, he got to his feet and backed away from her.
“Did you find a phone?” asked Lovecraft from the dark.
“I got a Zippo,” he said, working hard to keep the shakes he could feel in his legs and his guts out of his voice. “It’ll have to do.”
He climbed over the lip of the hole and into the darkness.
Lovecraft and Carter moved as quickly as they dared in the uneven and claustrophobic tunnel. Lovecraft had taken the Zippo to guide their way, but the metal casing grew hot quickly and she could only use it for a minute or so before plunging them into darkness while the brass grew cool enough to handle again. The tunnel was not at all regular in its construction, but wound both left and right, and sometimes up and down. They had lost the slightest glimmer of light from the tunnel entrance in the first minute of crouched scurrying in the low, oddly organic tube cut through the bedrock of Waite’s Bill. Carter noticed and then purposefully ignored the curious walls of the near circular tunnel, how there were no obvious tool marks but only fine striations marking the surface like ribs, as if some unimaginable machine had melted an inch or so of the tunnel and halted to get rid of the molten debris before repeating the process again and again and again. The enforced moments of stillness in the dark were unwelcome and unnerving for them both; all it left them was the sound of their breathing, the touch of the striated wall against their palms as they steadied themselves, and a faint chemical smell, musty and acrid, unlike anything else in either of their experiences.
Carter thought of the tunnel as “organic” in the first instance because of the indiscipline of its path, but presently he realized that when he thought of the “something” that had made it, that “something” had ceased to be a machine in his imagination and become a living creature. Somewhere the excavated rock had been dumped, and he feared that when he saw that spoil heap it would have more in common with a worm casting than a heap of rubble.
The flint grated, sparks flew, and the dark fled from them to await its next chance.
“Did you feel that breeze?” said Lovecraft. “Please, God, let this thing open out onto the beach. Somewhere.”
The last word told Carter she was having the same misgivings as him; Waite’s Bill was not large, yet already they had been walking as rapidly as they could for six or seven minutes in between moments of dark. Even allowing for the winding of the path, they should have passed the edge of the spit of land by now. That meant they
must
be underwater, but there was no sign of it, no coldness in the air, no condensation or water leaking through the bedrock. They might as well have been wandering beneath the Gobi Desert as the Providence River.
Then the tunnel split. It did it as easily and, yes, as organically as an artery forking.
“Keep tending left?” said Lovecraft, and went down the left-hand path without waiting for an answer.