Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

“Larssen? Larssen? ” Brast clutched at him as if to make sure he was real.

“Quiet.” Larssen listened carefully. There was no sound of splashing behind them. The thing was not following.

Had they gotten away?

He checked his watch: almost midnight. God knows how long they had been running.

“Brast,” he whispered. “Listen to me. We’ve got to hide until we can be rescued. We’ll never find our way out, and if we keep wandering around we’ll just run into that thing again.”

Brast nodded. His face was scratched, his clothes muddy; his eyes were dumb, blank with terror. Blood was running freely from a nasty gash in his crew-cut scalp.

Larssen looked forward again, shining his infrared headlamp around. There was a crack high up on the wall, larger than the others, vomiting a frozen river of limestone. It looked just big enough to admit a person.

“I’m going to check something. Give me a hand up.”

“Don’t leave me!”

“Keep your voice down. I’ll only be gone a minute.”

Brast gave him a fumbling hand up, and within moments Larssen was into the high crack. He looked around, bare arms shivering in the chill air. Then he untied the rope from around his waist and dropped one end back down to Brast and hissed for him to climb up.

Brast fumbled and pulled his way up the slippery rock wall.

Larssen led them deeper into the crack. The floor was rough and strewn with large rocks. After a few yards, it became a tunnel that opened up enough for them to proceed in a crouched position.

“Let’s see where it leads,” Larssen whispered.

Another minute of crawling brought them to the edge of blackness. The tunnel simply ended in a sheer drop.

Larssen put a steadying hand on Brast. “Stay there.”

He peered carefully out over the edge of the hole but could see no bottom. He reached for a pebble, lobbed it in, and began to count. When he reached thirty, he gave up.

Overhead was a sheer chimney, with a thin thread of water spiraling down at them through space. There was no way the thing could come at them from that direction. He could come up only from the crack through which they’d just come.

Perfect.

“Stay here,” he whispered to Brast. “Don’t go any farther, there’s a pit.”

“A pit? How deep?”

“As far as you’re concerned it’s bottomless. Just stay put. I’ll be right back.”

He returned to the crack’s entrance and, lying on his stomach, began dragging over the surrounding rocks and fitting them into the hole. In five minutes he had piled the rocks high enough to completely seal off the crack. The killer, if he even got to the broken-up cavern below, would see only rock. No opening. They had found the perfect hiding place.

He turned to Brast, speaking very quietly. “Listen to me. No sound, no movement. Nothing that could betray us. We’ll wait here for a real SWAT team to come down and clear that bastard out of the cave. In the meantime, we stay put, and keep quiet.”

Brast nodded. “But are we safe? Are you sure we’re safe?”

“As long as you keep your mouth shut.”

They waited, the silence and darkness growing ever more oppressive. Larssen leaned back against the wall, shutting his eyes and listening to his own breathing, trying not to dwell on the madman roaming the caverns beyond.

He heard Brast next to him, restless, shifting. He felt irritated: even the smallest noise might betray them. He opened his eyes, adjusted the goggles, and looked over.

“Brast! No!”

It was too late; there was a brief scritch and a match flared into light. Larssen smacked it out of his hand, and it dropped to the ground with a hiss. The sulfurous smell of the match lingered in the darkness.

“What the hell—?”

“You son of a bitch,” Larssen hissed. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I found matches.” Brast was weeping openly now. “In my pocket. You said we were safe, that he couldn’t find us. I can’t take this darkness any longer. I can’t. ”

There was a faint scratching noise, then another match flared into light. Brast sobbed with relief, his eyes wide and staring.

And suddenly, Larssen, half-naked and shivering, realized he didn’t have the will to douse the friendly yellow glow anymore. Besides, he had piled the rocks pretty deep. The feeble light from a tiny match surely wouldn’t leak out into the cave beyond.

He pushed the goggles onto his forehead and looked around, blinking his eyes. For the first time, he could see things in crisp, clear detail. Tiny as it was, the flame gave out a welcome glow of warmth in this awful place.

They were in a small, compartmentlike space. Five or six feet beyond, the sheer drop began. Behind them and past the low ceiling was their exit, blocked with rubble. They were safe.

“Maybe I can find something we can burn,” Brast was saying. “Something to give a little warmth.”

Larssen watched as the state trooper felt among his pockets. At least it kept Brast quiet.

Brast cursed under his breath as the match burnt his fingers. As he lit a third, there was a faint sound from behind Larssen: the clink of a rock being moved. Then the sound of falling, rolling; first one rock, then another.

“Put it out, Brast!” he hissed.

But Brast had turned and risen with the match in his hand, and was now looking behind Larssen, his face slackening with fear. For a terrible moment, Brast did not move. And then, very suddenly, he turned and ran blindly, mindlessly, off the edge into the pit.

“Noooo—!” Larssen cried.

But Brast was already gone, into the abyss, the burning match that had been in his hand dancing and flickering on an updraft before winking out.

Larssen waited for what seemed forever, heart hammering, listening in the pitch blackness to the rough breathing that echoed his own. And then, with numb fingers, he slowly put his goggles on and turned inexorably to stare, himself, into the face of nightmare.

Seventy-One

R heinbeck sat in the darkened parlor, rocking back and forth, back and forth in the old, straight-backed chair. He was almost glad the house was so dark because he felt ridiculous: sitting here in his blacked-out raid wear, Kevlar vest, and bloused BDU pants, surrounded by lace antimacassars, crochet work, and frilly doilies. Assignment: little old lady.

Shit.

The big old house still groaned and creaked under the howling of the storm outside, but at least the shrieks of the old lady from the basement tornado shelter had subsided. He had double-locked the massive storm door and it was pretty clear she wasn’t going anywhere. She’d be safe down there, a lot safer than him if a tornado came along.

It was well past midnight. What the hell were they doing down there? He watched the feeble glow of the propane lantern, turning over various scenarios in his mind. They probably had the guy trapped and were negotiating him out. Rheinbeck had seen a couple of hostage negotiations in his time and they sometimes went on forever. Communications were down, trees lay across most of the roads, and nobody was going to respond to his call for an ambulance and doctor for the old lady: not with Deeper shredded and the whole county under a Force-3 tornado alert. This was a medical situation, not a law enforcement one; and damned awkward at that.

Jesus God, what a shitty assignment.

There was a shriek and the sudden pop of glass. Rheinbeck sprang to his feet, chair tilting crazily behind him, before he realized it was just whipsawing tree branches and another window getting blown out by the wind. Just what the place needed: more ventilation. Now that the cold front had passed over, it was remarkable how chilly the air had grown. The rain was already pouring in one broken window, puddles running across the floor. He righted the chair and sat back down. The boys back at HQ would never let him live this one down.