Michael Koryta - Last Words

Mark wished for a gun.

The tracks led along the driveway but behind the trees, as if whoever left them had wanted to approach unseen. They led all the way up to the garage. Mark was thirty feet from the base of the exterior stairs when he saw the blood.

There were vivid splashes of red on each riser of the steps and on down into the yard. There the footprints continued but the blood died out, washed clean by the snow. Two sets of tracks led to the garage. Three led away. And one of them had left bloodstains. That set of tracks came from the biggest footprints.

Cecil went after them, Mark thought. Ridley roughed him up and probably got what he came for, but Cecil went after them.

He followed the tracks as far as the blood went, then stopped and stared ahead. The frozen creek was lost to shadows but the footbridge and the cave entrance were illuminated with floodlights. He could see a figure on the footbridge, descending toward the cave. Cecil Buckner. Mark shouted at him, but Cecil didn’t hear; he stepped through the open door and vanished. It was not a good sign that the door was open, and Cecil didn’t appear to be the one who’d unlocked it. Ridley had gotten in ahead of him.

Trapdoor was open for visitors once more.

Mark glanced up at the big house, where even more lights were on and Danielle’s car was parked in front. Did she have any idea what was happening here? Or was she waiting, clueless, as her bloodied caretaker staggered after Ridley Barnes into the cave? Mark took out his phone and called her as he doubled back toward the drive. Five rings, voice mail.

He came out of the woods beside the garage, intending to run up to the big house and tell Danielle to call the police just as she’d threatened to, when something moved in his peripheral vision and he pivoted to look.

Motion again, and this time he saw it clearly — a scarlet bead fell from the top of the stairs and hit the snow below. Another fell, and then another. Mark lifted his head to look at the apartment. From this angle, he saw that the door was ajar and the wood in the center of it was splintered, puckered with small holes and jagged fragments.

Numbness crawled up his spine and spread along the back of his skull.

Too much blood. That is too much blood.

He went up the steps slowly, taking care to avoid the blood, which grew thicker with each riser. Now he could see a stream of it working through the cracked-open doorway. He felt just as he had when he’d opened the hidden door in Ridley’s house, certain of the horrors that waited. This time, though, he wasn’t going to be rewarded with maps.

He pushed the door open, which allowed more blood to rush out and pool against his boots, and he saw what remained of Danielle MacAlister.

She lay on her back in the center of the floor, close to the door. She hadn’t been standing that close to it when she’d died, though. The impact had blown her back several feet. It was a shotgun wound. Twelve-gauge at least. Maybe a ten. Fired at close range, the load heavy enough to obliterate most of her left side and shoulder and rip a hole through her throat. Her right hand was curled toward her throat, as if she’d tried to close the wound.

Mark stood absolutely still and looked at her and thought, I will kill you, Ridley. I will find you in whatever hole you’re headed for down there, and I will kill you.

There was paracord on the floor, snipped into several lengths, and a pair of kitchen scissors lay in Danielle’s blood. A few feet farther on was a long piece of duct tape, tangled and stuck together.

Was this how Ridley had brought Julianne inside? It didn’t have to be Julianne with him, but Mark felt certain it was. She was the only one Ridley wanted. She was the fated one in Ridley’s warped mind, the one who had to join him belowground. He would have brought her here and demanded access. Because of this, she was possibly still alive.

He called 911 from the doorway. He wasn’t very aware of the words that he offered, but they seemed to make sense to the operator. He heard snippets of her questions back to him: Were there any other victims? Was there an active shooter? He answered as best as he could. Told her that he believed the shooter was in the cave and that he might have a hostage. Told her that someone else had probably gone in after the shooter. He said Ridley Barnes’s name several times. Heard his voice rising when he said it. There were too many questions. Why hadn’t Cecil called them? What was he thinking following Ridley into that cave, where Ridley held every advantage?

The same thing you are. He wants to end it himself. Not wait on the police. He wants to end it.

The operator was still talking but Mark had stopped responding. His eyes were on the gun cabinet in the corner of the room. He stepped over Danielle MacAlister’s body without looking at her and went to the cabinet. He set the phone down while he opened the cabinet. Two shotguns and a lever-action .22-caliber rifle with a scope. No handguns. He wanted a handgun if he was going into the cave. Easier to move with, easier to shoot with. The shotguns were bad options. A wide spray pattern in a contained space was likely to hit more than the intended target, and Ridley was not alone. Mark didn’t like the .22 either, but at least it gave a shooter a chance to deliver in a tight window. Down there, it was going to be tight.

He removed the .22 and checked it for ammunition. It was loaded. The scope was a cheap infrared model, one that projected a red dot onto its target. Cutting-edge technology when Mark was a kid, now available at every Walmart. There was a flashlight at the bottom of the cabinet, resting against the stock of one of the shotguns. Not a big light. A small Maglite, probably powered by two double-A batteries. It was going to seem very weak in the cave, but there was no time to look for another option. Cecil had made the right decision, trying to stop Ridley before he got deep into the cave. If he was allowed to get far enough, there’d be no catching him. Not in Trapdoor.

Mark put the flashlight in his jacket pocket and shifted the rifle to his left hand. The voice was still coming from his cell phone. Loud and urgent. He picked it up and put it back to his ear.

“Sir? Sir, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Sir, we have officers en route. I need you to stay where you are and stay on the line until they arrive.”

“Tell them to go to the cave. There’s nobody left here but the dead. The live ones are in the cave. For now, at least, there are live ones left.”

“Sir, I am instructing you to stay where you are and stay on the—”

Mark disconnected. The phone began to ring again almost immediately and he silenced it. He left the apartment with the .22 in his hands, walking around Danielle MacAlister’s body.

“I’m going to kill him,” he said to her. Maybe somewhere, somehow, the promise mattered. Mark wasn’t sure, but he felt it needed to be said. Just in case.

He walked down the stairs and followed the tracks out to the creek as far-off sirens became audible and fat, soft snowflakes wafted down. Ahead of him, the gate to Trapdoor stood open, and the darkness beyond beckoned.

The cave was as it should be, still and silent and soothing. Ridley had permitted Julianne to use the full strength of her headlamp for navigation, an undesirable intrusion but one he would not deny her because it allowed them to travel faster. They were walking on a ledge beside the deepwater channel. The channel was runoff from Maiden Creek that formed an underground tributary that Ridley had named the Greenglass River. In 2004, Pershing had run boat tours into the cave on the Greenglass, and Ridley hated those. He’d been in a boat in the cave only once, and he hadn’t lasted long in it that time, gone just far enough to ferry himself and his gear to the regions of the cave that fell off the maps, regions that had been dismissed by previous searchers because of the high water. Nobody could believe that Sarah Martin would enter a passage filled with water so high that she barely had clearance to breathe between the surface and the ceiling. All that Ridley had known was that they hadn’t found her yet and that people did strange things during spells of panic.