And maybe she is.
An hour ago, he might have believed in telekinetic powers. But now the rules seemed to be changing minute by minute, and the White Horse Inn no longer belonged to the realm of physics and logic.
This was now Demon Country.
The flickering flames cast long fingers of light across the basement and onto the scared faces of the group members. Wayne could see the maze of pipes around him, cast iron, lead, and polyvinyl in different sizes. Twenty feet away was a shadowed recess that suggested a door.
The furnace inhaled—that was the only word Wayne could use to describe the action—and the flames subsided to a dull glow. Wayne took advantage of the lingering glow to move forward.
“Come to me,” Amelia said. “Use me if you need it. Take me.”
Amelia’s husband eased a couple of steps away from her, unwilling to be caught in the crossfire of her spiritual recklessness. “Honey, maybe you should—”
“Kill you,” she bellowed, lowering her hands from their uplifted, summoning position and reaching for her husband with curled fingers.
“Christ, lady,” Gelbaugh said. “The cameras aren’t working so there’s no need for a show.”
“Open this damned door,” said the man on the stairs, now yanking on the handle with the force of his ample weight.
Wayne hurried to the recess, which blended with the larger shadows when the flames weakened. He ducked under a rusty drain pipe that disappeared into the dirt, and came up ready to reach for the door he hoped would be there. His hand struck soft, yielding flesh.
“Digger,” wheezed a voice.
The furnace breathed again and the basement flashed orange and red. In the fleeting light, Wayne made out a bruised, bleeding face, the eyes swollen nearly shut and the grin missing a couple of teeth. But it was the uniform, and the night-vision goggles perched atop the soggy mess, that clenched his guts.
“Rodney?” Wayne whispered.
The light dimmed again, but Wayne assembled the memory of the glimpsed image: The Roach’s dark jumpsuit was soaked with blood, the equipment belt empty. The Roach held his thumb over the jagged end of a copper pipe.
Wayne squinted into the shadows. “What happened?”
“You wouldn’t believe.” The Roach’s voice cracked like an ice sculpture under an axe blow.
“Are you hurt?”
“You wouldn’t believe.” A sob in it.
“Is that a door behind you?”
“You wouldn’t fucking believe.”
“You might have a concussion.” Wayne moved closer as the furnace pulsated again, throwing a lunatic sheen onto Rodney’s bloody, sweating, filthy face.
“I have proof now, Digger.”
“I know. But right now we need to get these people out of here.”
With his free hand, Rodney slid his night-vision goggles into place. “They won’t allow that.”
The basement went dim again, and Rodney released the copper line. Wayne smelled propane. The line must have run from an outside tank to the kitchen stoves. Rodney must have found the ruptured pipe, and maybe he’d stayed down here holding it closed until someone could shut off the tank. That would explain his absence, but not the gashes and bruises.
“Got a light?” Rodney asked.
As if in answer, the furnace roared again, and the propane fed it.
Whooosh.
“Mission accomplished,” Rodney said, just before the concussive blast stole the air and shot an expanding fireball across the basement. The heat slapped Wayne like a volcanic tidal wave and shoved him against Rodney, and they fell together against the door as support timbers groaned and splintered.
In the chaos of collapse, Wayne thought he heard Beth’s voice, or maybe it was the muffled screams of Amelia George.
Chapter 46
Kendra was pitched against the stair rail when the explosion sounded, and Cody grabbed at her as he lost balance in the dark.
She took a step forward, but the stairs seemed to give way beneath her, and her stomach took that same queasy somersault as when she’d fallen through the ceiling.
The subdued thump reached them a split-second later, and by then Kendra was gripping the rail, hugging her sketch pad to her chest as if it were a sacred text that would solve the crazy riddles of the night.
“Dad,” Kendra said, probing a foot out to see if the stairs still remained.
“Hear that?” Cody said.
On the floor below, people were shouting and scurrying in the dark. Deeper, the squeal and snap of straining wood mixed with a rumble of loose stones and a faint crackling sound. The hotel shifted again, as if knocked loose from its moorings and sliding down a slope.
“We need to get out of here,” Cody said. “This place has got a bad case of the shakes, and it was matchsticks and glue to begin with.”
“I can’t leave without Dad.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.”
“Who’s there?” someone yelled from the landing below, a man with a gruff, clipped voice.
“SSI,” Cody responded.
“One of your—our guy—I think he’s dead.”
Kendra and Cody headed toward the commotion, aided by light that leaked from a distant window that had broken open during the tremors. “Please don’t be Dad,” Kendra whispered.
“What’s going on?” Cody said, trying to project authority, though Kendra could hear the suppressed panic in his voice.
“This—thing—like a big lizard or something—”
“It was a black woman,” someone else cut in. “She had a knife.”
“It wasn’t a knife—”
“And then all our flashlights went out at once—”
Kendra couldn’t tell how many people were gathered on the landing, but by the time she and Cody reached the body, five had offered opinions. From the description, the victim didn’t sound like Dad. They bent over him, Cody checking his pulse. Kendra was afraid to touch the body but she forced herself to put her palm near his mouth. She felt no breath of wind.
“Did anybody report it to the front desk?” Cody asked. “The land line ought to get 9-1-1 even if there’s no cell signal.”
“You kidding?” said the gruff man who’d originally hailed them. It was too dark to make out his face, but he was tall and heavyset and Kendra remembered he’d put “West Virginia” on his registration address. He spoke with a rural Southern accent. “You reckon any of us wants to wander around in the dark when some nut has a knife?”
“It was a lizard,” a woman insisted. “I saw its scales and it had...it had....”
“Had what?” Cody said. “Nothing could be crazier than what we’ve already heard.”
“A tail,” she finished.
“Lord, help us,” another said.
“Ain’t the Lord’s doing,” said Gruff. “Somebody with a knife. See?”
A metallic skritch was followed by a small flame erupting, and Gruff bent down with the Bic lighter, illuminating Burton’s corpse. “Yuck,” he said, wiping at his ragged moustache. “Took his tongue, looks like.”
Wet, dark gore surrounded Burton’s lips and his mouth was a torn maw. His eyes were open and staring, blank with death and already losing their luster. His left arm was ripped and his jumpsuit was blotched with dark stains. A rusty, cloying odor hung over the landing.