Chris Mooney - The Soul Collectors

Clark had pulled up a body and was checking for a pulse. His partner, Reggie, was kneeling on the ground, digging.

She moved on to the next set of hands when Clark said, 'I have a young female vic, deceased, with blonde hair.'

Darby felt as though her stomach had been rolled across shards of glass. Please don't let it be -

'It's not Sarah Casey,' Clark said. 'Vic appears — '

Screaming cut through the air and she whipped her head around, bringing up her weapon. In the beam of her tactical light she saw Reggie writhing on the ground, his gloved hands working furiously at something wrapped around his knee — the clawed metal jaw of what she was sure was a bear trap. It had clamped around his left thigh and shin, trapping his leg at a 90-degree angle. His knee had been spared. He must have knelt on the ground and triggered the trap's spring with his knee.

Clark had bolted over to help his partner. Darby ran too, Reggie's screaming and painful blubbering as loud as gunshot reports against her ears. The hands sticking out of the ground were bound by rope at the wrists. She dropped to her knees and helped Clark prise away the trap, her bare fingers slipping across the rusty metal jaws slick with blood.

Out of the corner of her eye she thought she saw the bound hands move. Darby turned to them and saw moving fingers.

Reggie slid his shredded mess of a leg out of the trap. Darby got to her feet, wrapped her hands around the wrists and pulled.

A dirty oxygen mask covered Taylor Casey's mouth and nose; a tube ran from the bottom of the mask into the ground. Her body swayed, limp and useless, and Darby pulled her out of the hole and laid her back against the solid ground. She checked for a pulse, found one and removed the mask.

Blood bubbled from her nostrils and the woman's left eye and her entire forehead were swollen. Darby remembered the video, snapshots flashing through her mind — the woman strapped to the operating table and her eyelid being pulled back and the grimy hand holding the long, surgical ice pick — and she yelled over the awful howling:

'I have Taylor Casey, need immediate EVAC.'

'Stand by,' Knowles replied.

Darby stood perfectly still by the woman's body as new sounds filled the woods: the rattling of chains and thumping. She turned along with Clark, who had his HK back in his hands. He swung the tactical light in the direction of the noise — it was coming from the path — and she saw a tangled mess of pale arms reaching out from underneath the hatch. Hands gripped the edge of the hatch, trying to push it up. Emaciated bodies and scarred faces with shaved heads and frightened eyes, oh Christ there were dozens of them fighting to escape through the gap and they were screaming and howling.

'Command,' Darby yelled. 'We're going to need additional support. We have people trapped down here, underneath a hatch.'

A spotlight came from high in the air directly in front of her, from the fast-approaching Huey, and it lit up the clearing. In the space left by Taylor Casey's body Darby saw skeletal remains, bones and skulls stacked on top of each other.

The Huey hovered over the treetops, its engines drowning out the awful howling. Leaves kicked up and spun around her in the powerful wind, and she caught sight of a shadow rappelling down a rope. Looked up and saw the heavy orange stretcher swinging underneath the copter's black steel belly, being lowered by a rescue hoist.

Now Farrell screamed over her headset, his voice nearly drowned out by the copter's engine. 'Command, this is Bravo One. We have a possible IED situation.'

Darby turned around holding the woman's limp body and almost dropped her when she saw Farrell standing at the edge of the clearing, his hand gripping a nest of multicoloured wires that ran in different directions, each one disappearing underneath the ground where she stood.

Clark had Reggie on his shoulder and was making his way around the edge of the clearing, heading to where Jack Casey now stood. Darby, wary of any additional bear traps, backtracked.

Knowles said, 'Can you disarm it?'

'I have to find it first,' Farrell said, staring down at the wires in his hand like they were a puzzle he could solve.

Casey had already unbuckled the straps for the stretcher. He wore a combat helmet but not night-vision goggles, and his face was pinched into a fist, his eyes wet. He took his wife from her hands. Darby held the stretcher to keep it steady and Casey's face broke when he saw her. His stomach hitched and the tearing sound that erupted from his mouth rode down her spine like a bolt and made her want to turn and run.

Casey didn't seem to know what to do with his hands. She went to work buckling the straps around his wife while Reggie sat on the ground, hissing in pain and putting pressure on the bleeding wounds of his shattered leg. Clark helped secure the rope to Reggie's harness and then he secured himself.

Darby reached around her back for the bolt cutters.

'I'm coming with you,' Casey yelled, and his face nearly broke again. 'My daughter could be somewhere down there. If she is, I want to be the — '

The explosion came east of their position, a low, thunderous boom from deep within the ground. She heard trees splitting and the night sky bloomed with dirt and rock and wood.

The helicopter started to climb, while Reggie and Clark tried to climb up the swinging ropes. Casey turned to look at his wife's stretcher, saw it dangling in the air and almost seemed to want to grab it, as if he could keep her safe. Darby took his arm and pushed him north, screamed at him to run like hell.

A second explosion, closer, like God's mighty fist had punched up from underneath the ground, sending up earth and stone and splintering trees high into the air. The copter's searchlight crossed through the woods directly in front of her and she sprinted, trying to see the terrain up ahead, trying to commit it to memory. Branches whisked past her face and her hands released the clips of her tactical vest so she could cast off the additional weight. Another explosion and the force of it rocked the ground and she stumbled sideways against a tree. Darby regained her balance quickly and sprinted, as debris rained down through the woods. BOOM, another explosion, too close, from the clearing packed with bones, it had to be. The shock wave slammed into her and sent her spinning into darkness.

Darby's eyes opened to a tunnel of bright light, the heavenly kind people reported in near-death experiences. She didn't see God, though, just a big hand holding a medical penlight directly above her right eye.

The light shut off and the hand moved away and she saw slants of revolving blue and white and red lights moving across a scratched white metal ceiling. A helicopter roared somewhere outside and when it died she heard beeping sounds and, from the south, voices.

She found she could turn her head and she did, to her right, and saw IV lines and Jack Casey. He lay next to her, unconscious, an oxygen mask strapped across his swollen, bloodied face. Nose broken and left ear mangled. A steel frame had been mounted across the front of his torso so he couldn't move — it was a Stryker frame. You put someone in that when you suspected possible paralysis and didn't want the body to move.

She wiggled her toes, felt them move along with her fingers and arms. She craned her head — a pain like nails being hammered through her skull — and saw her body lying on a simple stretcher. Her boots had been removed but the rest of her clothing, torn and dirty and bloodied, remained. Her wrists were strapped. Two more straps covered her chest and she saw one across her thighs. They had strapped her down to keep her body from moving in case she had suffered a spinal injury.