John Miller - Too Far Gone

New Orleans, Louisiana

The Garden District

September 1979

Crashing thunder woke the child.

Casey lay still, taking deep breaths, huddling with the teddy bear as the storm’s fury assaulted her ears. Running bolts of lightning slashed the black sky.

Wind blasted the rain hard against the window’s panes.

The massive oak tree outside flailed its branches-like furious arms reaching out for the lace curtains.

She clenched shut her eyes.

“There’s nothing to fear,” her mother had said on other stormy nights. “You’re perfectly safe in your bed, Casey.”

Each dazzling flash made the familiar objects in her room both strange and malevolent. The stuffed animals perched on the window box instantly became monsters on the shadowy wall.

She listened for some sound to let her know if her parents were awake and perhaps moving around somewhere in the house. They will come tell me it’s all right.

The bedroom door was cracked open, the hallway a dark and endless tunnel.

Bam! A shutter on a nearby window, suddenly unhooked, slapped at the side of the house like an angry fist against a door. Bam! Bam! Bam!

The four-year-old pushed back the covers, slid off the mattress, and shot to the door, thinking of the safe, warm nest between her parents in their bed.

Throwing open her door Casey ran across the hallway to her parents’ bedroom, clutching the bear to her chest. They won’t be mad. She turned the knob and slowly crept into the bedroom, where lightning illuminated the crumpled bedding.

They’re not here!

The bathroom was dark.

They have to be downstairs.

Casey hurried to find them. On the stairs, between the peals of thunder, she could hear loud noises below, like dogs barking, or seals at the zoo.

One hand on the banister, the other clutching the soft animal to her, the child slipped down the wide staircase one step at a time. The noises stopped before she reached the first floor, and the sudden silence scared her more than the sounds.

In the den, flashes formed into trapezoidal slivers by the windows lit the room eerily. The chair her father always sat in when he was in the room-it was vacant. Not in here.

She padded off down the hallway toward the rear of the house. Mommy? Daddy?

Casey saw a yellow band of light at the far end of the hallway under the swinging door to the kitchen and she ducked her head and ran for it. She imagined that something large was rushing at her in the darkness-something that would pounce at any second and sweep her up in its jaws like the lion on the television always did to the deer.

“Mommy!” she yelled out. “Mommy!”

Reaching the door, she pushed at it, and because it didn’t swing open but a tiny bit, her chest and her forehead struck it hard, and she whimpered in pain. She fought to push the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. In her panic she dropped the bear and slammed her hands against the wood, beating, beating, beating, and hollering for her mother.

Little by little, as whatever was making it stay shut moved, it opened just a bit. The kitchen lights poured out into the hallway through the growing crack.

Casey heard an odd sucking sound and a loud grunting.

Something warm and wet touched her toes and she looked down to see a pool spreading from under the door, and her bear was lying there on the floor, his black eyes staring up at her as the puddle swallowed his head and arms.

Casey pushed again, hard.

The door swung in abruptly. Casey pitched headlong into the brilliantly lit kitchen.

She was lying facedown in the warm red liquid that was everywhere.

She looked around and found herself staring into her mother’s face, and it was not at all the right face. So many boo-boos. She knew her father was there, too, but she wouldn’t look at him. She squeezed her eyes shut and screamed and screamed.

“STOP IT!” a voice boomed. “STOP IT RIGHT THIS MINUTE!”

Casey quit screaming, turned, and saw two bare feet inches from her face, and let her eyes follow the legs to the hem of a dress. Casey sat bolt upright and looked up into the eyes of a witch wearing a wet dress. The witch’s blond and crimson hair stuck out from her head like twisted garden vines. The unfamiliar face, smeared with red, smiled down at her. Two of her front teeth were missing. The witch knelt and put the cook’s meat-chopping thing down on the floor.

Casey couldn’t move. She stared at the gory hands that reached out for her and she squeezed her eyes shut tight as the witch embraced her, pressing Casey’s cheek-wet with tears she didn’t even know she was shedding-against her heaving chest.

“What a good baby girl you are to find me,” the husky voice told her. “I was just getting ready to come get you.”

Saturday, August 27, 2005

Using her SureFire flashlight in the dark to prevent tripping over tree limbs, FBI Special Agent Alexa Keen followed the string of Day-Glo plastic that had been run tree to tree by responding officers to lead the way to, then to form a bordered trapezoid around, the crime scene. Carefully, she entered the crime scene, illuminated by portable quartz floodlights. The corpse appeared to be wrapped tightly in a rust-colored blanket-a covering Alexa realized was comprised of tens of thousands of fire ants. As she squatted for a better look, the dead man’s lids suddenly opened and he stared at her through eyes of wet obsidian. His mouth formed a silent, screaming circle.

Alexa jerked awake and lay in the darkness, piecing the shards of reality together. Hotel room. New Orleans. Law-enforcement seminar. A real siren outside had clawed its way through the gossamer walls of her dream about a dead man she had seen only in photographs until his naked corpse had been discovered in the Tennessee woods two days after his family had paid a quarter-million-dollar ransom. Charles Tarlton had been her first case-involving the murder of an abducted individual-and it played in the theater of her dreams with some frequency. As Alexa’s nightmares went, this one was hardly a two-a ten was being awakened by labored wheezing and lying frozen in terror as a pair of clammy hands explored her prepubescent body. Alexa shuddered.

The bedside clock had the time at five past twelve. Alexa slid her hand beneath the pillow beside her to feel the knife. It was always there in case she was ever again surprised by anyone climbing into her bed. The knife’s edge was razor sharp, and Alexa Keen knew how to use it.

Except for her shoes placed beside the bed, Alexa was still dressed in the clothes she’d worn to dinner with two other agents, who she’d never met before. They’d all checked into the Marriott-each presenting the “new and more user-friendly” FBI to the law enforcement seminar. Alexa always slept in her clothes when she was away from her own bed. She lay awake for several more minutes with her eyes closed-her mind speeding through a dark forest of troubling thoughts. The most disturbing were of her sister, who was sitting in a military safe house, waiting to testify at a string of court-martial proceedings, which involved several high-ranking members of U.S. Army intelligence, all facing disgrace and terms in military prison, and in one case possible execution. Some of them also faced federal and state charges when the Army was done with them.

Beyond that stack of mind manure, Alexa’s brain started going through the cases she’d worked that had ended badly, wondering what she’d missed, how she should have done things differently. Everybody made mistakes, but when Alexa Keen made one, the consequences could be devastating for a family and deadly for the victim.