Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

Larssen was blind. In desperation he crawled around on his hands and knees, feeling the ground, and then with enormous relief felt his hands close on the goggles. He slipped them back onto his head with thick stupid fingers and looked around.

Cole was on the ground, yelling and clutching his arm. Brast was on his hands and knees against the cavern wall, scrabbling around for his goggles just like Larssen had been a second before, cursing and gasping.

“My arm!” Cole screamed. A spear of bone protruded from his arm at a strange angle and hot blood poured from the wound, almost white in the sheen of the goggles.

Larssen tore his eyes from the sight and looked around wildly for whatever had attacked them, shotgun at the ready, but there was nothing—nothing but the grim artificial glow of the cavern walls.

A single sound, like a hoot of laughter or perhaps triumph, came from the darkness somewhere. Larssen tightened his grip on the shotgun. Exactly where it had come from was impossible to tell.

He was sure of only one thing: it was close.

Sixty-Six

C orporal Shurte of the Kansas Highway Patrol fingered his shotgun and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. He checked his watch: eleven-thirty. Hazen and the rest had been gone for over an hour. How long did it take to corner McFelty, cuff him, and drag his ass out? It was unnerving, standing out here without any contact. Part of it, of course, was the weather. He’d lived in this part of Kansas all his life but he couldn’t remember ever seeing a storm like this one. Usually, the really ugly weather came and went pretty quick. But this had been going on for hours, it seemed, and it was only getting worse. Unbelievable wind, pelting rain, lightning like to split the sky. Before radio communications had finally gone down there’d been early reports of an F-3 tornado chewing toward Deeper, all hell breaking lose, FEMA trying to get in, the highways blocked.

And the power: usually you’d get one grid segment, maybe two, down at a time. But tonight it had been like a giant hand pulling the plug on one tiny town after the next. After Medicine Creek it had been Hickok, DePew, Ulysses, Johnson City, Lakin, and finally Deeper, before his radio had stopped working altogether from the loss of repeater stations. Shurte was from Garden City and he was glad the other side of the county seemed to be taking the worst of it. Still, he worried about his wife and kids. It was a hell of a night to be away from home.

The hooded propane lamp they’d set up cast a faint glow around the mouth of the cave. Williams, standing on the far side of the cut, looked like a zombie, hunched against the rain, big dark hollows where his eyes should be. The only thing that made him look remotely human was the glowing cigarette that dangled from his lower lip.

Another bolt of lightning cracked the sky, tearing almost from horizon to horizon. Beyond the cave, it flashed a brief image of the big old Kraus mansion, all alone and dilapidated, darkened by the rain.

He glanced over at Williams. “So how long are we going to stake out the entrance? I mean, I’m getting soaked.”

Williams dropped his cigarette, ground it under his boot, shrugged.

There was another flash. Shurte glanced at the dark slot that led down into the cave. Maybe they had the perp holed up and were trying to persuade him to come out . . .

And then from the mouth of the cave, over the sound of the wind, he heard the heavy galloping of feet.

He took a step forward, raising his shotgun. “You hear that?” he began sharply.

A dark form suddenly came hurtling up the passage toward them: a huge dog, running like mad, chain twitching and lashing behind like a whip, feet drumming.

“Williams!” Shurte shouted.

The animal blew out of the cave mouth and into the open. Just then there was another terrific rip of lightning, followed instantaneously by an earth-shaking crash. The dog hesitated, confused, turning around and around, snapping at the air, eyes rolling and wild. In the livid lightning Shurte saw that it was bright red, wet and glistening.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.

The dog crouched toward the light of the lantern, still trembling violently—all without making a sound.

“Son of a bitch, ” said Williams. “You see his mouth? Looks like he caught a load of buckshot.”

The dog staggered, the blood pooling underneath him, and then righted himself, massive limbs shaking uncontrollably.

“Catch him,” said Shurte. “Grab his chain.”

Williams crouched and slowly picked up the end of the chain. The dog just stood there, still now, trembling with pain and terror.

“Easy, boy. Easy. Good dog.”

Williams slowly lifted the end of the leash toward the only suitable tie spot: a protruding pin on the door hinge of the cave. Suddenly the dog, feeling the gentle tug on his neck, whirled with a screech of fury and slashed out at Williams. The man went down with a howl, dropping the leash, and in a second the dog was gone, a black shape hurtling away into the cornfields.

“Son of a bitch bit me!” Williams cried, holding his leg.

Shurte rushed over and directed his flashlight at the fallen trooper. The pants were torn and blood welled from a gash in his thigh.

“Jesus, Williams,” Shurte said, shaking his head. “And to think he did that with only half a jaw.”

Sixty-Seven

L arssen bent over Cole, who was sitting on the ground, rocking back and forth and whimpering to himself. It was an ugly compound fracture, the jagged end of bone sticking out just above the elbow.

“I can’t see!” said Brast loudly from somewhere behind him. “I can’t see!”

“Cool it,” Larssen replied. He looked around, scouring the ground with his own set of goggles. They had all lost their goggles in the attack. He saw one of the sets lying in a puddle of water, one of its lenses broken. The other set was nowhere to be found. Was he the only one still able to see? It seemed so.

“Help me find my goggles!” Brast cried.

“They’re out of commission.”

“No, no! ”

“Brast? Cole’s hurt. Pull yourself together.”

Larssen took off his shirt and tore it into strips, doing his best to ignore the chill dampness of the cave. He looked around for something that would do as a splint but saw nothing usable. Better to bind the arm to the torso and leave it at that. The important thing now was to get the hell out of there. Larssen wasn’t particularly frightened—he’d never had quite the right imaginative equipment for fear—but he perfectly understood the seriousness of their situation. Whoever attacked them, it was someone who knew the cave inside out. Someone who’d been down here a very long time. Someone who could come and go at will, and very quickly. He’d seen his outline: big, shambling, with a hunched back from years of living under low ceilings . . .

Hazen had only been half right. The killer was in the cave, but it sure as hell wasn’t McFelty—or anyone connected with Lavender, for that matter. This was something a lot weirder and deeper than that.

He forced himself back to the problem at hand. “Cole?” he asked.

“Yes?” Cole’s voice was weak and he could see the man was sweating. Shock.

“I don’t have anything to splint your arm with, so I’m going to immobilize it by tying it to your chest.”

Cole nodded.

“It’s going to hurt.”

Cole nodded again.

Larssen tied two of the strips into loops and hung them around Cole’s neck to form a sling, and then, as gently as possible, took hold of his arm and slid it in. Cole winced, cried out.

“What was that?” Brast shouted in a panic. “Is he back?”