“How did we get here?”
Jeff’s voice cut through the darkness again after—how long? Fifteen minutes? Five? Two hours? Daniel had given up trying to keep track of the passage of time.
“I thought you said you rode here on a cockroach’s back.”
“No, how did we get here? All of us. To this? You and me and Crock and Theresa. Jack ought to be out pulling over a drunk driver somewhere, and Andi ought to be home in a room with a lacy pink bedspread, playing with dolls. How did we get caught up in all this? We’re normal people.”
“Theresa told me once that normal is just a setting on a dryer.”
“I caught myself a minute ago getting angry because I paid five hundred dollars for a gym membership last week and now I won’t be able to use it. It was…humbling to realize that everything I ever did or wanted or said in my whole life didn’t matter at all. Dying changes the way you look at everything.”
That struck Daniel as funny and he laughed. “Yeah, I suppose death would have a profound effect on the way you lived your life—if you weren’t dead.”
“I see a self-help book in there somewhere,” Jeff said. “Lessons From The Grave—Ten Ways to Improve the Quality of Your Life by Dying.”
“I forgive you,” Daniel said. The words popped out unbidden. Like “Emily’s having an affair” had popped out of his mouth that day in the car with Jack after they’d spoken with Mikey Rutherford. He was tempted to ask Jeff the same thing he’d asked Jack that day—did I actually say that out loud? But he knew he’d said it.
“No,” Jeff said.
“No what?”
“Save your forgiveness for somebody who cares.” Jeff’s voice was thick, but without seeing his face, Daniel didn’t recognize the emotion. “You can’t forgive me because I’m not sorry. And if you’re holding your breath waiting for me to say that I am, you can resume your regularly scheduled respirations because I—”
“You don’t have to be sorry for me to forgive you. It doesn’t work that way.” Daniel felt emotion rise in his own chest and he didn’t have to wonder what it was. “Understand what I’m saying here, okay! I didn’t say I like you. I didn’t say I trust you. I didn’t say I want to be your new best friend. I said I forgive you.”
“Why would you—?”
“I didn’t do it for you!” Daniel stopped and took a calming breath. “I did it for me. Forgiveness isn’t optional; it’s not a suggestion. And it’s not an emotion, either. It’s a decision—plain and simple. You have to make it over and over and…I’d have to decide again tomorrow to forgive you—except we’ll both be dead tomorrow.”
“Your choice, pal. Whatever gets you through the night.” Jeff was silent. Then he spoke again and the thickness had left his voice. What had replaced it was…what? Resignation, maybe. Despair.
“Emily was the best thing that ever happened to me and I won’t walk out there into the great nothingness saying I’m sorry I loved her. I’m not.”
“That’s what you think? It’s a great nothingness? Poof, you’re gone. Not with a bang but a whimper?”
Jeff barked out a sardonic laugh. “I wouldn’t have made you for a T. S. Elliot fan.”
“The Hollow Men was required reading in English 101.”
“The poof-you’re-gone part…I don’t think it’s like that. I think…I believe that your energy, your essence, your life force remains and—”
“That’s word salad, Jeff!” How many times had Daniel heard that nonsense! “Energy. Essence. Life force. What does that mean? It’s gobbledygook to make people feel better when they refuse to believe the truth.”
“And the truth is…?”
“Oh, come on, Jeff. You asked how we got here. We got here courtesy of a demon—not a life force or a magnetic ball of protoplasm or energy—a real being. You saw what it could do, for Pete’s sake. Or have you convinced yourself you were hallucinating, that all those cockroaches were looking for crumbs in your pockets?”
“I saw a thing…a beast rose up out of Chapman Whitworth!”
“Aw, that was a hologram, a computer-generated image. Jack, Theresa, Becca, Andi, Chapman Whitworth and I have conspired to perpetrate a monumental practical joke on Jeff Kendrick. Or maybe we’re all in the grip of a shared delusion.” He took a breath and spoke softly. “Maybe Emily’s murder was nothing more than ‘a random act of violence.’”
“What I saw was real. It’s all…real.”
“And it’s pure evil—unadulterated, no-additives-or-artificial-colors-or-flavors evil. If pure evil exists then—knock-knock, Jeff—doesn’t it follow that pure good exists, too? Andi can see angels. They’re as real as the demon you saw. Where do you think they come from? They’re the newest animations from Pixar?”
“I don’t know what I think about all that.”
“That wouldn’t be a bad place to start if you had the luxury of ruminating on it, of spending years ‘seeking the wisdom of the ancients’ or some other idiot thing, of wasting your life trying all the rest of it—which doesn’t work—so you end up right back where you started. But you don’t have that kind of time. Truth exists. God exists. You either believe that or you don’t. If you do, you’d better figure out real quick what that means.”
“That preacher thing. You’re doing it, aren’t you. You get paid to convert—”
“I’m not trying to convert anybody! If I were, I’d be a whole lot nicer about it. You’re going to die. I’m going to die. I know the truth and I have an obligation to tell you what it is. What you do with the truth…” Daniel paused and he could hear a smile in his own voice. “You never met Bishop Washington, but he would have said ‘that chicken’ll come home to roost in your henhouse.’”
The silence rolled back in, waves of it crashing on the shore. Again and again the surf dashed against the rocks. Jeff was in that black water somewhere, struggling with the forces of the universe. When he finally spoke, Daniel could hear the exhaustion in his voice. Wherever he was, he’d fought to get there. His words rang with absolute finality.
“Message received and duly noted,” he said. “You fulfilled your obligation. You told me. Now move on.”
Daniel’s sigh seemed overloud in the dark silence. That was it, then. On the brink of death or not, this was as far as Jeff Kendrick was willing to go. Game over.
“Billy Ray’s about to lose it,” Jeff said.
Daniel’s mind stumbled trying to catch the train of Jeff’s thought, which had pulled out of the station and headed off in an entirely different direction.
“He’s seen the real Chapman Whitworth,” Daniel said. “That’d be enough to freak anybody out and Billy Ray Hawkins wasn’t exactly the poster boy for National Mental Health Week going in. Are you making a point here?”
“I’m wondering if we could use that somehow. I don’t think it would take much to push our Neanderthal friend over the edge.”
“And you think we should start shoving.”
“Why not? It’s not like we have anything to lose.”
Becca sat very still after the conversation ended with Jack, Andi and Crock. Trying to process it all. Everything was happening too fast. There was no time to adjust to a given reality before it changed and the world was different. She wasn’t going to face the efreet again. That truth sank slowly down through her whole body. She felt it the way she used to feel hot chocolate spread heat down her throat into her belly on cold winter mornings when she was a kid.
Instead, she had to stop a terrorist.
Riiiight. Becca Hawkins wouldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds with three running jumps at the scales. How was she supposed to fight who knew how many burly madmen?
Apparently, Theresa’s thoughts were running in a similar vein because she murmured to herself, “Ain’t no way a fat black woman and a skinny white girl is gonna beat up on a bunch of Chapman Whitworth’s hired nut jobs right here in Cincinnati—so how we supposed to take on a whole herd of ’em all over the country? That’s crazy.”
She let out a sigh and turned to Becca. “It is what it is, sugar. We can only do what we can do. We here in Cincinnati, so must be we s’posed to make our stand right here.”
She seemed to shift some kind of gear.
“All righty then—it’s plain we can’t fight ’em, so we gone have to outsmart ’em.”
“And you plan to do that…how?”
“I been thinking…what if we didn’t even worry about them terrorists. Can’t do nothing ’bout ’em anyway. What if we concentrated on the crowd of people they’s plannin’ to blow up? If we could figure a way to get all them people out of that room, wouldn’t matter if a bomb went off in there—right?”
Becca nodded. “How do we get them out—call the police and tell them there’s a bomb?”
“We could do that. But if we’s to make an anonymous call, they’d blow it off. If we tell ’em who we are, then we got to tell them how we know they’s a bomb gone go off in that ballroom. And when we do that, they’s gone haul the both of us off to Saint Somebody’s Home for the Bewildered.”
“Or to jail.”
“’Sides, if I’m rememberin’ right, they said they thought the bomb that blew up the Mall of America was strapped to somebody who walked out into that crowd of children. If that’s the way these folks operate—put the bomb somewhere at the last minute—then the police could search that building top to bottom—if they b’lieved us, which they wouldn’t—and still wouldn’t find nothin’.”
“Which leads us back to my original question. How are we going to get all the people at that ball out of the room?”
There was a sudden twinkle in Theresa’s eyes. “I ain’t got it all worked out in my head yet, sugar, but I think we might be able to manage that with the resources the good Lord done already blessed us with.”
“And those resources are?”
The twinkle in Theresa’s eyes grew brighter.
“Six dozen frozen rats.”
Billy Ray was halfway across the meadow next to his house when he seen the car sitting in his driveway beside his truck.
He sucked in a gasp, but it didn’t do no good because there wasn’t no oxygen in the air he pulled into his lungs. The car was black with tinted windows so you couldn’t see inside. But he didn’t need to see to know who was inside, what was inside. It was the car that’d been parked in the alley behind that building where Jeff Kendrick fell out the window but didn’t hit the ground.
The Man was here!
Run!
No, hide!
Which?
He looked around, trying to see everywhere at once, which meant he couldn’t register the sight of anything at all. Then he heard a sound, the pitiful, whining, mewling sound of a dog you find all torn up on the side of the road, waiting to die. He jerked around, looking behind him for what was making that awful sound.
Wasn’t nothing behind him. Then he realized the whining cry was coming from his own mouth!
He turned slowly back toward the house. The car was gone.
He shook his head, closed his eyes, then opened them again. His truck was the only vehicle in the driveway.
His heart was banging away in his chest so hard he could see each individual beat through his shirt. He even halfway expected to see tire tracks where that car had been before it’d vanished, but he knew it’d never really been there at all. Just his mind playin’ tricks on him.
When he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, his hands were shaking so violently he could barely keep hold of it. Didn’t have no cell coverage in the boxcar, so he’d had to leave and get near his house, where he had reception. He tried to calm down, took deep breaths, walked around in circles. Still, it was a long time before he could hit them little buttons and make the call he’d been told to make to get “further instructions.”
He wanted nothing more in life than to drop that phone in the dirt and take off runnin’ and never look back. He didn’t do that, of course, just listened, growing more mystified and horrified with every word.
His knees felt all wobbly-like. There was so much he had to do and he’d by golly better not mess any of it up! Whitworth didn’t say nothing about what’d happen to Billy Ray if he did screw it up. He didn’t have to. Billy Ray understood that failure was not an option.
Whitworth had given very specific instructions on how he was to kill Daniel Burke and Jeff Kendrick—all kinda crazy stuff—for effect, Billy Ray supposed, to make the whole thing look even more sinister.
What he was supposed to do was troubling, but where he was supposed to do it upset him even more. Whitworth had told him he wanted the murders committed in that strange cavern the boxcar’s cave emptied into, the one Billy Ray didn’t think anybody’d ever laid eyes on but him!
When Billy Ray’d first put the boxcar in the ground, he’d taken a kerosene lantern one day and went to explore the cave that extended beyond the cavern where he’d lowered the boxcar from the field above. Folks weren’t disposed to go nosing around the caves much—afraid of getting lost or falling in a hole or something. But he still had to make sure the cave that went on beyond the boxcar didn’t have no other entrance somewhere that some fool might wander in and then stumble upon his treasure.
The cave turned east from the boxcar and went on more or less straight for what must have been near to a mile. Weren’t no tunnels branching off from the main cave to confuse him or he’d have turned back. If his sense of direction was right, he had likely gone under the mountain halfway to Milkstone, and he knew there was a cave entrance there.
Little black bats of memory beat their skin-covered wings in his mind, but he’d chased them away.
Finally, the cave had opened up into a huge chamber, way bigger than the one where the boxcar was buried—so big the kerosene lantern light didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling or the walls. This wasn’t no ordinary cave! It was like something out of a movie, so vast his feet echoed on the stone floor like he was in one of them cathedrals with high ceilings. Billy Ray had gone on a field trip with his fifth-grade class to Cave City, about a hundred miles south of Bradford’s Ridge, to visit Mammoth Cave, which claimed to be the longest cave in the world. At the very end of the tour there’d been a chamber that had stalagmites and stalactites—he always got them confused—coming up from the floor and hanging down from the ceiling and rocks that looked like a frozen waterfall.
Them stalag-things was pitiful, though, compared to the ones in this cave! They hung down from beyond the lantern light in the ceiling above and rose up from the floor taller than he was. A forest of ’em. He’d turned up the lantern as bright as it would go and shadows leapt back against the walls, creating an army of black beings that stretched up into the gloom above.
The forest of stalag-things thinned out to just a few sprinkled round on an area where the stone floor was polished so shiny it looked like the marble floor of the capital building in Columbus. He didn’t have to worry about no cave entrances on the other side of that bare spot, though! On the far side of it, the floor’d been ripped open in a huge crack with jagged edges that stretched all the way across the chamber from one side to the other—probably thirty feet across at the narrowest spot.
He’d approached it carefully, and when he’d got right to the edge, his lantern light had stretched out across it and lit the opposite wall where there was, indeed, a tunnel opening. Directly opposite the tunnel he’d come in, the cave continued past that big chamber. But he didn’t have to worry about somebody stumbling on his boxcar by coming through that cave. Wasn’t nobody gonna jump across that crack in the floor and wasn’t no way around it.
He’d peeked down into it, shone the lantern down, and it’d been dark as a well, no telling how deep. But maybe it just looked deep because the walls of the crack was black—which was odd because the cavern floor was the cream color of polished marble. So he’d picked up a piece broken off one of them stalag-things and chucked it into the crack and listened for the plunk but never heard a sound, nothing. Which meant the bottom must have been so deep the sound of the rock hitting it didn’t carry back up to him.
How did Whitworth know about that giant cavern? And when had Whitworth come and made “all the necessary arrangements” in it—the ones he’d said had been “waiting there for years”? The Man hadn’t come in past the boxcar, that was for sure! You could tell hadn’t nobody got past the rusty lock that sealed the entrance to the gate while he was in prison. Only explanation was that he’d come from the other direction, through the cave on the other side of the fissure in the floor.
Billy Ray shivered. That crack in the floor of the cavern wouldn’t even have slowed Whitworth down. He could picture the man with the scarred face rising in the air himself, like he’d picked up Billy Ray that time and threw him up against…
His mind started sliding sideways again and he giggled.
Giggled!
He’d been doing that a lot lately when his mind wouldn’t stop hopping around. It was like a kid’s giggle, a little girl’s. He didn’t like the eerie sound of it, but he couldn’t stop it no more’n he’d a’been able to stop a sneeze. It just burst out.
He giggled again.
Well, doing the killing in the big cavern would mean he wouldn’t have to clean up the mess of chopping two men’s heads off right there in his boxcar—splattering blood all over twelve million dollars’ worth of gold bars. No, two million. That was all that was left after he’d give more’n two hundred bars to Whitworth. Hauled them up out of that boxcar ten at a time ’cause they weighed two pounds each and wasn’t no way to get up out of the space in front of the butt cheek rocks carrying any more than that. It’d taken him a whole day, and that evening he loaded them bars in the back of a van driven by some flunky—which was better than dealing with Whitworth. Anything was better than that.
Billy Ray shuddered. He didn’t want to go back into that cavern again, hadn’t set foot in any cave but the one that held his boxcar since his twenty-ninth birthday when—no! Not going there. Uh-uh.
But flashes of memory leapt into his mind whether he liked it or not, and it was getting harder and harder to keep them locked up in that place where nightmares and ghost stories was supposed to be.
It’s because they ain’t kiddie stories, buddy-roe, they’re real, said the voice inside his head, the scornful Billy Ray who had taken up residence outside him and commented on what was going on like he wasn’t even Billy Ray at all but some observer watching Billy Ray.
“Hush up, you,” he said aloud. He’d taken to doing that, too, talking to himself out loud. Talking to the other self, that is.
Giggling and talking to himself. Sounded like he was losing his marbles. Might be he was.