David Wiltse - Into The Fire

"I don't want to see that," he said, annoyed. "Why do you think I leave your face to last? I want you to look good "

He leaned towards her to wipe at her chin, and Aural stabbed at him with her fork, aiming for his eye. The fork missed and struck him harmlessly in the cheek, but the steel of the handcuffs hit the target. It was a reflex action, totally unpremeditated, and she was unable to follow up her advantage because she was as shocked as he was.

Swann recoiled, clutching his eye, holding up his other hand to fend off further blows. By the time Aural thought to strike again he had already scrambled out of her reach and was on his feet.

"You dirty bitch," he moaned.

Aural looked at the remnant of the plastic fork, which had snapped off in her hand. A tiny trail of blood was seeping down his cheek from where the fork had penetrated the skin, and Aural thought that was the wound which had hurt him. She thought of hitting him again while he was disoriented, but she realized there was no chance as long as he was on his feet and she was shackled.

She would have had to hop after him; he could knock her over with the slightest shove.

"You son of a bitch, you dirty fucker," Swann was saying. "You hurt me."

"Oh, I hope so."

"You really hurt me," he said. He kept backing away from her as if he expected her to leap up and renew the attack.

"It was only a fork," she said. "Don't be such a whiner."

"Oh, Jesus," he said, and he rocked back and forth, holding his head.

"JESUS." He screamed in pain, lashing his head from side to side, then collapsed abruptly onto the cavern floor.

Aural started to drag herself towards him, moving backwards with her weight on her heels and hands to keep her blistered legs off the ground.

If she could only get to him while he was passed out, if she could get the key to her chains, she didn't need much of a head start, just give her a minute and he'd never catch her…

Swann groaned and rose to his knees. Aural froze, hoping he would be too distracted by his pain to notice how close she was but he looked at her, snarling.

"Stay away. Stay away."

He lurched to his feet, swaying, and backed away from her again. To her astonishment he held a large chef's knife in his hand. He must have had it concealed on him all the time, she realized, or else it was tucked away in the golf sack and she had not seen it. Whatever the source, he had it now. The long blade glinted brightly in the light.

Aural moved slowly back the way she came, heading toward her boots.

Swann positioned himself with his back against the fat cone base of a stalagmite and sat down, facing Aural across twenty yards of space. He had already shifted his focus away from her, thinking now only of his own pain. elp me, Jesus," he said, clasping both hands to his head and rocking slightly. "Help me, sweet Jesus." The knife lay in his lap.

Aural reached her boots and settled back so that her feet were just touching them. She knew her own knife was still in its crevice but had to resist the urge to touch it to reassure herself. It was vital not to do anything too soon. She had to do it absolutely right this time, she told herself She would not get another chance. The existence of his weapon changed it all.

As Swann moaned and cried out in his pain, Aural leaned her back against the stone and rested. And thought.

Sunrise was still minutes away when Becker led them by flashlight to a ridge that folded back on itself, forming a crease in the landscape.

They were on a steep hillside among the foothills of the Cumberland Mountains, less than twenty miles from where the Cumberland gap pierced the Appalachian massif, tucked into the corner where Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee met. Two hundred and fifty miles to the east the underground skein of holes and tubes and tunnels that leached its way under the mountains erupted into one of its more spectacular orifices, the Great Mammoth Cave. Less than fifty yards from where they stood was another opening to the subteranean honeycomb, but Becker knew he had no real hope of finding it in the dark. He was as close as Browne's map could take him.

The land surrounding them was scruffy second-growth forest that had reasserted itself among the rocks-without great enthusiasm-after the original stand had been cut and carted and dragged down the mountain to form the fledgling 19th century settlements in the valley below.

The hillside was too steep and stony to farm, the area not yet sufficiently upscale to serve as building sites for overpriced chalets.

It was a form of wasteland, belonging to an absentee owner, used occasionally by boys hunting for squirrels. If the entrance to the cave had ever been marked, the marker was too obscure to find in the dark.

Light, however, was only minutes away and Becker would be ready for it.

Pegeen regarded him as he squatted just below the crease in the hillside, too agitated to even sit. He reminded her of a cat waiting outside a mouse hole, ready to pounce.

"What now?" she asked.

"We wait until we can see enough to find the entrance — unless we hear it breathing first."

"I can still radio for assistance," she said. She knew he would not allow it, but if things went wrong, Pegeen wanted to be able to say she had tried to do the right thing.

"We'll ask for assistance if we need it," he said.

"Right now we don't need it."

She watched him for a moment, then sat on the ground, folding her legs under her. Her body was sore in spots; she could still smell him, taste him, almost feel his hands upon her. She knew it wasn't smart to say anything right now, but she said it anyway.

"Should we talk about last night?"

She thought she caught him trying to stifle a sigh.

"Later," he said.

"I just want to clear up one thing," she said. When he didn't respond, she continued, "Was last night the reason you brought me along on this case?"

Becker turned to her, his brow wrinkled quizzically.

"You said you asked for me to work with you for a special reason," she said. "Was last night it? Was last night the special reason?"

"No," Becker said, surprised. "I didn't expect last night until it happened… I love Karen, you know. I didn't mean to mislead you otherwise."

Pegeen gasped inwardly. Mislead her?

They experienced it first as a change in air pressure, as if the shock wave of some great cataclysm had swept over them, and then, almost immediately, they heard it-the sound of something enormous coming right at them, swooping down at them with a rush of wings. A great column of moving blackness was overhead, moving very fast, and then it whirled and poured into the ground be hind them with a noise unlike anything Pegeen had ever heard. The column assumed a funnel shape as it drained into the earth, accompanied by a cacophony of beating wings and shrieks and pounding air.

"Bats," Becker said, but Pegeen did not need to be told. The swooping, swerving flight of the stragglers on the edges told her what they were; bats, millions of them, flying as if in the vampires' panic to beat the sun to their resting place. As they disgorged into the hillside, vanishing into the solid ridgeline as if by magic, they looked like the ominous whirling wind of a tornado, touching down only yards away from them. Underbrush waved and whipped about in their wake, and the closer trees bent under the pressure created by millions of leathery wings.

It seemed to Pegeen to last for hours, but in reality it was over in a few minutes-the moving cloud thinned to a wispy trail of black smoke tendrils, and then to the few latecomers, each one exposed and vulnerable away from the flock. As if on a signal, the sun's rays hit the sky overhead as the last of the bats vanished into the earth.

"I think we found our breathing hole," Becker said, moving to the spot where the bats had disappeared.