But nothing she did stopped the men taking her daughter. Huckley reached up to a control box and the elevator sank into the shaft. She squinted through her tears to get one last look at her daughter. All she could see was her blond hair hanging down in front of her face, her body pressed against Huckley’s torso. As the elevator platform cleared the lip of the shaft, Lauren forced a scream from her constricted windpipe and pulled at her bindings again.
The belt cinched tighter on her throat. She felt the heat build in her face as the blood accumulated. Black shadows formed walls on all sides of her vision. The shadows grew darker and pushed toward the center of her sight.
She knew she was going to pass out, and if she did the belt would strangle her. In a sudden moment of clarity she realized she no longer cared. She didn’t want to live. She couldn’t explain why, but she believed somehow her daughter knew Jack was dead. Dr. Mansfield’s promise now seemed empty and she couldn’t bear to imagine the things about to be done to her daughter. All it would take was to let her feet slip out from beneath her and it would all be over. No more pain. No more terror. Just darkness.
She leaned forward into the tension of the belt. Her tunnel vision narrowed until only a blurry patch of light remained.
Then a free fall.
Thump. Her body hit the floor. The pain invaded her comfortable dark cocoon of semi-consciousness and filled it with the stark light from the barn’s halogen lamps. The pressure around her neck disappeared and she sucked down mouthfuls of air.
Her vision cleared with every breath. With her hands still cuffed, she sprawled awkwardly on the floor trying to make sense of what had happened. In a rush of hope, she guessed that the belt had broken, or maybe the nail had come loose from the wall. It was her chance. But she had to get away before the deputy came back.
She rocked side-to-side to get the leverage to stand up, but as she did so strong hands pushed down on the middle of her back. “Hold on,” Sorenson said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”
She kicked and twisted her body to get away, but the man was on top of her, holding her down. He was too strong. She couldn’t move. She screamed. Over and over. She screamed from the despair of losing her family. She screamed at the animal pawing at her wrists and shouting at her. She screamed until tears flowed from her eyes like blood from a wound.
The few seconds of hope given her by Dr. Mansfield dissipated like a cruel dream. There was no escape. There was no way to help her little girl. She let her body go slack, exhausted from a fight she knew she couldn’t win, resigned to the inevitable conclusion to her nightmare, so full of self-loathing for not protecting her daughter that she welcomed the humiliation about to be inflicted on her body. She stopped screaming and realized the man on top of her had been talking the entire time. She stopped struggling and finally listened to what he was saying, then burst into tears at the meaning of his words.
EIGHTY-ONE
Jack crawled over to the opening in the rock wall. The sound from inside the structure had changed. The crunching of rocks stopped. A soft rasping sigh took its place. Jack’s first thought was that air was moving through the hole in the rock, as if the internal pressure were equalizing with the outside cave. But the sigh had an unnatural cadence, like the murmuring intonations of a dying man’s last words.
That’s what the sound was, it was language. There was a person locked inside the structure.
Checking quickly to make sure no one was coming, Jack whispered into the hole. “Hello. Can you hear me?”
“We need to get out of here. The others had to hear the gunshots,” Lonetree said.
Jack ignored him. The rasping sound grew stronger. It seemed like the person inside moved closer to the hole.
“Can you understand me?” Jack said.
An eyeball appeared at the other end of the hole. The sight of it made Jack recoil. Even with the dim amount of reflected light from the halogens that entered the opening, Jack could see the eye was deformed. It was a bulging mass of exploded blood vessels and cataracts. The eyelids were gone, leaving a wide-eyed, unblinking stare.
Jack leaned forward, peering into the shadows of the hole. “What did they do to you?” he whispered.
A shrieking howl erupted from inside the structure. More animal than human.
Lonetree pulled Jack away from the wall, placing himself closest to the structure. “We have to go,” he said.
An arm shot out from the hole and claws ripped deep into his skin. Lonetree cried out in pain and grabbed his shoulder. His gun flew from his hand and skittered across the rock floor. Acting on reflex, Lonetree jumped backward. By the time the creature’s arm made its next pass he was well out of reach. The arm continued to cut wildly through the air, seeking out more flesh to tear.
Jack stepped back, horrified at what he saw. There was no skin on the arm stretching out from the hole. Only exposed muscles, soft with decay, wrapped around yellow bones. Black talons extended from the fingers, clicking against each other in their frenzied search. Blood oozed from veins ripped open by the rough edges of the hole. There was no human prisoner inside the stone structure. There was a monster.
The first bullet hit the rock wall next to Jack’s head. Sharp streaks of pain stung his face as rock shards ripped into his skin. Lonetree shoved him and he tumbled forward. He landed on the ground just as he heard the second shot burn the air next to his ear.
“Stay down,” Lonetree hissed. He crawled forward on his stomach using the uneven floor as cover. He retrieved his gun, spun around and looked for a target. “You all right?” Lonetree whispered.
“Yeah, did you see where they were?”
“No. You?”
Jack shook his head and leaned his shoulder into the boulder they were using for protection. He thought the shots came from beyond the lights in front of them but he wasn’t sure. For all he knew they were surrounded and guns were trained on his head as he sat there making a target of himself. They had to run, get out of the light. At least among the rows of stone cages they would have a chance.
“Jack, I know it’s you,” Janney called out. “Why don’t you come on out before someone gets hurt?”
Lonetree tugged at his arm to get him to move. Jack positioned himself so he was ready to scramble from behind the rock, his breath coming in quick, ragged pants. He was about to surge forward when he heard a sound that sucked the air out from him and made him sag back behind the rock.
The scream came from the other side of the lights. Terror translated into a single, trembling high-pitched note. It coursed through the still air of the cave, echoes layering on top of echoes until the terrible sound came at him from all directions. The scream left no doubt that the source of the sound was in pain. But still Jack held his ground. He didn’t run away, but neither did he run to help. He sat with his back against the rock, his body shaking, eyes clenched shut.
Janney’s voice rang out over the screams. “You can make it stop. Just show yourself.”
Lonetree grabbed his arm. “You can’t do anything for her. The only way we stand a chance is to stay hidden.”
Jack heard the words and knew they were true. He might even have been able to follow Lonetree if he had run to the safety of the black shadows only feet away from them. But then the sound changed. And with the change, Jack lost his grip on the instinct of self-preservation. He shook off Lonetree’s efforts to hold him down and he stood up from behind the rock. The bright lights made him squint. He threw his gun forward and stepped into the clearing, even as Sarah continued to scream the word over and over, her voice so full of pleading that his heart ached.