“What… what are you going to do with me?”
Vale’s yellowish eyes stared at Jack, seemingly void of any emotion. “Unfortunately you pose too great a risk for us. So you might say we’re donating your body to science.”
Chapter 34
Jack felt himself being half carried, half dragged through darkness as the world spun around him. His head and jaw throbbed from where Carson had belted him, and Jack dimly added a concussion to his mental list of injuries. Only vaguely aware of his surroundings, he could tell he was descending deeper into darkness as shadow and cold folded around him and a sickly familiar scent of damp earth and stone filled his head.
Fear swirled inside his chest, though he was too groggy and disoriented to realize just how afraid he should be. Far down in his consciousness, he knew they were taking him back into the caves. Back into the horror from which he had barely escaped.
He heard metallic sounds: the jingle of keys and some kind of latch and then the dull wooden creak of a door. And then he fell flat onto a cold, hard stone floor. Human voices wailed and moaned in the darkness.
Above them all, Carson’s harsh voice muttered something, but Jack couldn’t respond; then the sound of their footsteps quickly receded into the darkness. And as Jack lay on the floor, he felt an insurmountable sense that he was completely alone.
“Hello?”
A woman’s voice echoed somewhere nearby. Jack wondered if he was dreaming. Then a male voice—also nearby—responded. Jack thought he was speaking Spanish.
Jack opened his eyes. He lifted himself off the ground and surveyed his surroundings. He could see the vague rocky surface of walls. Along one side, a pale beam of green light streamed in through an opening. Like a small window in a door. Jack squinted. A prison door.
He rubbed his head and jaw, which still throbbed, though less intensely now. Carson’s punch had packed considerable wallop. He almost thought he had heard voices calling to him.
“Hey in there… can you hear me?” The woman’s voice came again.
Jack felt his way to the door and peered out into what looked like some kind of tunnel. Across from him, he could see another wooden door with a small window cut into it. Iron bars were embedded in the wood. A sick feeling grew in the pit of his stomach.
“I… I can hear you,” he said.
There was a pause. Jack was both relieved and disconcerted to hear others down in the darkness. Obviously this was where Vale was stockpiling new victims for his monsters. Then the voice came back.
“My name is Elina Gutierrez. I’m… I used to be a police officer from Los Angeles.”
“Los Angeles?” Jack said. “How did you get here?”
“I was looking for my cousin, Javier. He’d been kidnapped and brought here. I followed their van from California but they caught me, too.”
At that point Jack heard another male voice off in the darkness, speaking Spanish. Elina responded in Spanish as well.
“Who are they?” Jack said.
“That’s Javier. They brought a whole vanload of workers—they said they had jobs in Las Vegas but then brought them here four weeks ago and locked them in this place. I think they’ve been doing this for a while.”
Jack grunted. “Huh… I guess that makes sense.”
“Why? What are they doing to them?”
Jack leaned his forehead against the bars. “You don’t want to know.”
“They said there’s something down in the caves. Do you know what they’re talking about?”
Jack couldn’t bring himself to tell them what he knew. He could barely stand to think of it himself.
After a moment Elina’s voice came again. “What’s your name?”
“Jack.”
“Jack… how did you get here?”
Jack closed his eyes for a second. He had lost track of time. It had been only a matter of days, yet it seemed like forever. “I was in the caves, trying to find some evidence of an old Indian legend….”
He gave her all the details of his expedition. How he had discovered his father’s papers and the article on the Caieche. He told her about the legends of the N’watu and the Soul Eater. He described how they had found the cave and the kiracs in the bone pit. His voice grew a little shaky as he described Rudy and Ben and how they died. He told her about his encounter with the N’watu remnant still living in the caves and his escape. And finally how he had been captured by the people in Beckon and everything he had learned about perilium and their dark history of human sacrifices to the Soul Eater.
Elina seemed particularly interested in that part. “Perilium? Well, that explains how Carson recovered from his gunshot wound.”
“Gunshot?” Jack said. “When did that happen?”
Then Jack listened as Elina told him about her own encounter—how she had followed the white van with the Nevada plates to Wyoming and how she had shot Carson nearly point-blank and he had appeared to recover.
“But the trouble is, they all have some kind of addiction to it,” Jack said. “If they ever stopped taking it, they would all die.”
“So they’ve been smuggling illegal immigrants for years,” Elina said. “Now I know why.”
“But they don’t know how to actually make this stuff themselves,” Jack said. “So they’ve been forced to keep this bargain with the N’watu.”
“Well, you said they thought it was somehow connected to these creatures.”
“Yes, but they don’t know how exactly,” Jack said, lowering his voice. “When we were inside the cave, we saw the N’watu performing some kind of ceremony where they pulled the hatchlings out of an egg sac and ate them. Then they poured the rest into a bowl and started mashing them up.”
“So you think they make perilium out of the… baby kiracs?”
“And that’s what the Soul Eater legend says,” Jack said. “The queen kirac supposedly devours a human soul and then imparts its energy back through her nectar.”
“That’s disgusting,” Elina grunted.
“Yeah, but it makes sense,” Jack said. “There must be something in the kiracs’ physiology—some type of enzyme or something, maybe active just during that stage of their development—that causes the effect on the body.”
“There’s one thing I don’t get,” Elina said. “How has this tribe been able to survive for so long? You said you only saw the one female in the cave. That’s not much of a gene pool.”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. There must be more of them that we didn’t see.”
“Or maybe they’re just like those creatures,” Elina said. “Like you said, a group of hunters around a single queen.”
“Maybe.” Jack rubbed his eyes. “I don’t care anymore. I just want to find a way out.”
Elina seemed to brighten. “There were two people who came down here earlier. I don’t know who they are, but I don’t think they’re part of all this. They said they were guests or something. They were going to try to get help.”
“If they’re guests here, I’m not so sure we can trust them,” Jack said. “I wouldn’t trust anyone connected to Thomas Vale.”
“I don’t think they knew what was going on here. They said they were going to try to contact the FBI.”
“I hope you’re right.”
Although hope was not something he sensed much at the moment.
Chapter 35
George had watched Miriam sleep fitfully throughout the night. He had tossed and turned himself, as he found he couldn’t get the vision of Amanda’s agonizing death out of his mind. And Vale leering over her, playing mind games with him. The man was clearly used to manipulating his subordinates and circumstances, all to his own advantage.