P Deutermann - Spider mountain

“But harvesting organs? Hayes said he knew about them going to the hospital lab, but he thought it was for abortions. Carrie and I thought it was for sterilization.”

“That’d be bad enough,” Baby said, “but you’re saying they took them over to that lab, put them to sleep, and then harvested. You gotta wonder who thought that one up.”

“Three guesses.”

“Yeah, well, you have to remember, they’ve been doing shit like this for generations up here. Probably didn’t seem like a big step to them.”

“Which mystifies me even more,” I said. “If they’ve been doing evil shit for decades, how come they’ve never been taken down?”

He thought about his answer. “I think it’s because nobody cared, as long as they were doing it to themselves. We only got into it because the meth coming down out of the hills was reaching flood stage. But it’s not like we’ve been putting serious assets against them-those are reserved for the urban cocaine and heroin traffickers. You know, the guys bringing it in by container-load through Miami or over the Mexican border on NAFTA semis. Basically, DEA is just too damned busy to fool with what has been up to now a pretty low-viz and very remote problem.”

I’d thought then that if this was considered a low-visibility problem, then the rest of the nation’s drug problem must be positively galactic in scale, but I kept my silence. If anyone appreciated that, it would be a street agent like Greenberg. Some day I’d ask him if his thoughts on the “war on drugs” were similar to mine. Right now it was time to get moving.

“Pet the doggies?” I asked in a quiet voice, and both shepherds crowded around, circling my legs and rubbing hard in return for ear rubs and patting, even as I told them in my kindest voice that they were a pair of worthless, blockheaded, deer-chasing, flea-shedding hair-bags who couldn’t catch a sleeping cat it they tripped over one. They positively beamed.

Getting them down into the escape tunnel was harder than I’d anticipated, and if surprise had been the objective, we probably blew it right there. The dogs slid and scrambled their way down that slanting plank and then barked at us when we didn’t join them fast enough. We found the lanterns Carrie and I had left, lit them, and put away the flashlights. Then we regrouped at the junction of the tunnel coming up from the cabin basement and the bricked-up wall. I described where the one tunnel came from, and Baby asked if we could defend ourselves if someone was down there in that hidden room with a twelve-gauge as we climbed down out of the ceiling. I had to admit that we’d probably get our asses shot off, literally.

“How about this walled-up tunnel, then?” he asked, running his hands over the roughly mortared stones. He had to squeeze in between two of the three big ceiling support posts planted right in front of it. I had to hunch over, as the roof of the tunnel was only six feet, if that. The floor was hard-packed earth with a thin layer of dust. Everything was a dull yellow-orange in the kerosene lamplight. The air quickly began to stink of kerosene smoke.

“It may have caved in or just simply be too dangerous to use,” I said. I slapped the stone with my hand and mostly hurt my hand-it was solidly embedded. The shepherds watched us in the lantern light with a bemused expression.

Baby got out a pocketknife and began to test the edges of the stone wall. He could get the blade in about two inches all around except on the bottom. He leaned back against the center post and then grunted.

“What?” I asked.

“This post just moved,” he said, standing up and going around to the side away from the stone wall. Then he reached up and grabbed the top of the post and pulled, and damned if the post didn’t come down like a big lever arm while the stone wall lifted slowly out of the ground maybe two inches. We heard a dull snap under the door as if a ratchet had fallen into place. The post was now at a forty-five-degree angle, and it wouldn’t move anymore.

“Okay, so it lifts and separates,” I said. “But does it open?”

Baby pushed on the wall right in the middle, and nothing happened. I then stepped forward and pushed on the right-hand side, and the thing began to pivot, like a big stone flapper valve. There was obviously a pin of some kind dead center, so the wall ended up at about an eighty-degree angle to its original position. A warm flow of air came through the opening, smelling faintly of straw or hay.

I pointed a flashlight down the passage beyond, which revealed a tunnel identical to the one we occupied. There were three posts on the other side just like the ones we had on this side. The difference was that there were many footprints in the dust on the floor, and this one went down at the same angle as the one coming from the cabin.

“If anyone’s down there,” I said quietly, “that pressure release will let them know this door just opened.”

“What’s that smell?” Baby asked, sniffing the air. “Barn? Hay? Straw?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe this connects to that barn where they chained me up that night.”

“So-we go?”

“These guys go,” I said, and sent the shepherds down the passageway. If there was going to be an ambush, they’d sense it. They might not survive it, but we would. We picked up our lanterns and went after the dogs, Baby first and me in trail and still hunched over to keep from banging my head. I kept looking back, half-expecting that stone door to swing quietly shut like it always did in the movies, but it just sat there. Baby saw me looking and suggested we wedge it open. We went back through and wrestled with that post lever until we broke it off at the ground, which should keep anyone from closing it behind us.

The tunnel went straight for maybe two hundred feet and then hooked hard right, where it ended in a wooden door. The dogs were milling around in front of the door, but they weren’t excited. We could hear air whistling past the cracks around the door, and the barnyard smell was stronger here. There was a normal latch on the door, and black iron hinges on the other side. This thing had been here for a while.

“The lady or the tiger?” Baby said, drawing his Glock.

I pulled the shepherds back to me and took a position that would let me cover the opening as the door swung back. Baby put a lantern down just out of the arc the door would take when opening, lifted the latch as quietly as he could, flattened himself against the wall, and pulled the door open quickly.

Over the barrels of the shotgun I saw ten anxious eyes staring at us from a dark room. We’d found the kids.

Now: Where was the spider?

The door had opened into one of the shed barns, but not the one in which I’d been penned up. There was a double door at one end, hay piled up to the roof on one side, and a wall of farm implements on the other. There was fresh straw on the floor and a malodorous bucket in one corner. A second bucket with fresh water and a tin cup hung on one wall by the doors.

Baby stepped into the room first, and the children recoiled when they saw the gun in his hand. I followed him into the room and told them it was okay, we weren’t going to hurt them. The lantern revealed a ragtag collection of blankets on the floor. The children were all little girls, maybe eight to ten years old, dressed in plain, floor-length frocks, which were universally too large for them. They were pale, thin, and frightened. Two were sucking thumbs, a third had badly crossed eyes, and the other two had skin infections on their jaundiced faces. They all looked scared of the shepherds.

Baby put away his Glock and knelt down on one knee to talk to the kids, while I went to the doors and tried to open them. There was a good-sized crack between the doors, and I could see a heavy keeper bar across them. I got out my boot knife, slid it through the crack, and lifted. It came up and then fell off the blade when I got it past the brackets. I pushed the doors ajar a few inches and looked out. In the time we’d been walking the tunnels, the night had turned misty and colder. I could see the main cabin way off to my right; the barn where the dogs had been kept was right next door. The moon was barely visible, but it provided a diffused light in the mist.