Fatal (34 page)

Now, for the first time, Matt caught the pungent aroma of the chemical dump. Four days had passed since he and Lewis had penetrated the cavern—probably not enough time to empty it even if Armand Stevenson had decided to do so. Hiring killers and bribing officials was so much cheaper and more efficient—especially with the chief of police already on his payroll. Matt found himself momentarily wondering about the person—man, he suspected—who had slipped the note about the toxic dump under his door. Whatever ax the writer had to grind with BC&C was about to be made razor sharp.

“Smell it?” he whispered.

“Oh, yes,” Nikki said.

“Toluene,” Carabetta opined. “Toluene and maybe creosote.”

“Cameras ready,” Hal ordered. “Mr. Sutcher, would you please take the point.”

“Be happy to,” Sutcher said, tightening his grip on the submachine gun.

“Straight ahead,” Matt said. “Keep your flashlights turned off as much as possible and your voices low. If there is any interference, it’ll come from the entrance on the far side.”

Cautiously, with Sutcher now in the lead and Hal bringing up the rear, the column moved through the narrow, stygian tunnel, following the increasingly potent chemical smell.

“There,” Matt said.

Not far ahead, a faint, gray light pierced the darkness.

“Go ahead,” Sutcher urged. “I’ll be watching for trouble.”

Matt led the way into the cavern. The rushing underground river, the huge, three-dimensional pyramid of barrels, stretching upward twenty feet or more, the unpleasant, sickly sweet odor, the protective gear hanging along one rock wall—all seemed unchanged from the way he and Lewis had seen it a few days ago. Using his flashlight, he motioned Carabetta to move closer and led him, then Nikki, around the perimeter.

“Okay,” Matt said, “let’s take some pictures and get some samples.”

“Rutledge,” Carabetta exclaimed, pointing past the barrels, “what’s that lying over there?”

Matt never got the chance to answer. With a deafening roar, brilliant light, and a force unlike anything he had ever experienced, the two entrances to the cavern simultaneously exploded. Instantly, the entire space filled with acrid smoke and choking dust. Boulders the size of automobiles and all manner of rock hurled through the air. Flung sideways, Matt was slammed viciously against the wall. He collapsed onto the floor as dust filled his lungs. Rocks rained down upon him. A basketball-sized boulder thudded against his back. Other chunks buried his legs and pelted his arms with enough force to shatter bone.

In just moments, the explosions were over. The pitch-black cave was filled with suffocating silt and the smell of chemicals freshly released from their drums. Matt lay there, his face half-buried in rubble. The only way he could get enough breathable air in was to force his mouth and nose against the shoulder of his shirt. His ears were ringing mercilessly, and he sensed that his nose was bleeding. Then, through the darkness, he thought he heard whimpering.

“Nikki?” he tried calling out, but his dirt-covered vocal cords barely made a croak.

He coughed, then spat, then coughed again until it seemed like some of the grit cleared from his throat. He also noted that the pain in his back was bad, but not incapacitating. Probably nothing but bruises there. He rubbed his hand across his nose. It wasn’t broken, but it was definitely bleeding—how much was hard to tell. Quickly, he tested his arms, which seemed intact, and his legs, which were totally buried beneath many pounds of stone.

“Nikki?” he called out again.

“Matt?”

He thought he heard her voice, faint and strained, from somewhere to his left, but he wasn’t certain. His damaged eardrums muffled the sound, but the lack of intense pain made him believe that, while the membranes and ear bones were swollen and bruised, neither drum had been torn. It had to have been Nikki’s voice.

He pulled his shirt up over his mouth and nose, making breathing much easier. With great effort, he managed to roll over enough to begin moving debris off his legs.

“Nikki?” he tried once more.

This time there was no answer.

The backs of his hands were raw, and he felt battered all over, but stone by stone he was able to free up his legs. It seemed logical that the people who had blown up the cave had counted on the roof collapsing and sealing the whole deal instantaneously. Clearly, since he wasn’t permanently pancaked under a few dozen tons of rock, that hadn’t happened. He pulled his legs free and flexed them. Aches, but none of the pain that would have indicated a broken bone. Given what he had just been through, he was as intact as he had any right to be.

“Nikki? . . . Hal? . . . Anybody?”

The sound barely echoed. There was no way to tell how much of the cave—how much air—was left. He rolled onto his hands and knees and crawled over the sharp stones toward where he sensed Nikki’s voice had come from. He hadn’t moved more than a few feet when he hit against a body. It was a woman, lying facedown, covered with dust and debris. Her hair was much longer than Nikki’s, and her body, clothed in jeans and a T-shirt, was very slight—not much more than a hundred pounds. A girl, he thought, not a woman. He checked for a pulse at the carotid artery in her neck and found one easily. At that moment, the girl took a breath.

“What in the hell?” he muttered. “Can you hear me?” he said into her ear. No response.

Gently, careful to stabilize her neck as best he could, he turned her over. Reaching through the absolute darkness he brushed her hair and some of the dust off her face.

“Oh, God,” he moaned the moment he touched the hard, neurofibroma nodules scattered over her face and scalp. “Oh, God, no.”

 
CHAPTER
31

THE DARKNESS IN THE CAVE WAS TOTAL, 
oppressive, and, for Matt, claustrophobic as well. The fumes were pungent, though not caustic in the way that chlorine fumes were—at least not yet. He sat for a time, composing himself, breathing through his shirt, with the unconscious girl resting beside him. Clearly, Armand Stevenson and his confederates had chosen to bury the human evidence of their transgressions along with their accusers. How many others like this girl were in the cave? Matt wondered.

His ears were continuing to buzz unpleasantly, but from what he could tell, the bleeding from his nose had subsided. Every few seconds another chunk of rock dropped from someplace in the cavern. The roof hadn’t caved in but clearly it was unstable. For a time, Matt knelt there, listening to the rattle of falling rock, unable to shake the image of the delayed collapse of the World Trade Center towers. He was finally able to orient himself by focusing on the churning and splashing of the river, which ran behind where the chemicals had been stacked. The continuous white noise of the moving water echoed through the midnight blackness, and had a strangely calming effect.

“Nikki?” he called out. “Hal?” From somewhere to his right, he was sure he heard a man groaning. “Fred?”

He brushed some more dust and shards of stone from the girl’s face and hair. Her narrow face seemed intact, although there was no doubt she was badly disfigured.
Poor baby
. Clavicles, chest wall, arms, hands, abdomen, pelvis, legs. From what little he could tell, she had sustained no major injuries.

“Nikki?” he called again. “Anyone?”

For a few seconds there was only the sound of the river, then, “Matt? . . . Matt, it’s me.”

This response was definitely not his imagination. Nikki’s voice, weak but composed, came from his left, some distance away.

“Nikki, it’s Matt, are you hurt?”

“I . . . I hear you, but I can’t make out your words. My ears . . .”

“I know,” Matt said, speaking slower, louder, and more distinctly, “mine, too. I asked if you were hurt.”

“I . . . I don’t think badly. My ears are messed up. They won’t stop ringing. I got hit on the head pretty hard, too. I don’t think I was knocked out, but I’m a little dizzy.”

A second concussion,
Matt thought. The word was often thrown around casually, especially in the ER, where head injuries weren’t considered serious by most unless there was a period of unconsciousness, X rays showing a fractured skull, or a CT scan demonstrating a hemorrhage or brain contusion. But he had seen many lives ruined and families torn apart by post-concussion syndromes, sometimes with as little trauma as a minor fall or fender-bender. He pushed himself up from the stone floor. His back and legs throbbed, and the backs of his hands were stinging, but the discomfort was tolerable—especially now that he knew Nikki had survived.

“Nikki, can you stand?”

“I think so.”

“Walk?”

“Let me see. . . . Yes, yes, I can walk.”

“Wait!” he cried out suddenly. “Don’t move! Do you have any idea where your flashlight is?”

“Pardon?”

“Your flashlight.”

“I . . . I was holding it when the blast went off. There’s so much rubble. I have no idea where it might be. I’ll look around and—”

Her words dissolved into a fit of coughing.

“Pull your shirt over your mouth to breathe. It helps. Nikki, just stay where you are and keep talking. I’m going to walk toward your voice. We’ll look for the light together.”

Matt guessed she was twenty-five or thirty feet away. Shuffling through boulders, arms extended like Frankenstein’s monster, he inched his way through the blackness, guided by Nikki’s recitation of a country song he knew well.

“Silver threads and golden needles cannot mend this heart of mine . . .”

Matt twice dropped to all fours to negotiate piles of rock.

“. . . and I dare not drown my sorrow in the warm glow of your—
Hey, I found it! I think it’s okay.”

An instant later a beam of light filtered through the suspended silt, panning about until it locked on him. Seconds after that, they were together.

“Oh, baby,” Matt said as they held each other. “I was so frightened you were hurt or—or worse. I can’t believe they would do this to us.”

He took the light to check her. Blood was flowing from a gash not far from her healing gunshot wound. He pulled off one of his socks and used it to apply pressure to the cut.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “There’s a lot of blood on your face.”

“My nose has been bleeding but I don’t think anything hit it. Probably the shock from the blast. No bones broken anyplace as far as I can tell. Weird as it sounds, we’re lucky. I think they expected the ceiling of this vault to collapse. From the way the rocks keep dropping, it still may.”

Nikki swung the beam around the void. Because of the dust, visibility was limited.

“What about the others?” she asked.

“I don’t know. But there’s a girl over there—at least I think it’s a girl and not a woman.”

“What?”

“She’s unconscious. I bumped against her while I was crawling around. And guess what her face and scalp are covered with.”

“Neurofibromas. Matt, this is awful. Could you tell if she was badly hurt?”

“I don’t think so, but she’s unconscious. And I think I heard a man out there moaning as well.”

“Hal?”

“No idea. I’m worried sick about him. Wasn’t he right behind you?”

“From what I remember, yes.”

“Well, that would put him someplace over there, not where the sounds came from. Hal? Hal, can you hear me?”

Nikki panned the flash along the wall. If Hal Sawyer had been standing behind her, he would have been virtually under the entrance from the tunnel, which was now an impenetrable pile of huge boulders and debris that extended up to the roof of the cavern.

“I don’t see how he could have avoided being buried under that,” Matt said. “Hal? Hal, it’s Matt.”

Silence.

“Let’s try to find him, Matt.”

They shuffled to the pile and moved a couple of rocks. Then they looked at each other and shrugged helplessly. If he was buried beneath this mass, there was nothing they would accomplish by digging except to exhaust themselves.

“He was such a good egg,” Matt said finally. “Eccentric and quirky, but a real good guy just the same. He was so kind to Mom, and . . . and he loved me to pieces.”

“I know he did.”

“I just can’t believe this. Hal? Dammit, Hal, answer me. It’s Matt.”

She put her arms around him and pulled him tightly against her.

“Stevenson and those other bastards are going to pay for this,” he said.

Nikki was reluctant to point out the obvious—that at this moment, their chances of surviving to make anyone pay for anything seemed remote.

“Listen,” she said, “let’s get back to that girl.”

The dust seemed to be settling a bit, making the beam of light more effective. The girl was there, twenty or so feet away, lying on her back, still unconscious. She was eleven or twelve, with long, corn-silk hair. Her narrow, distorted face, possibly pretty at one time, was filthy and battered. Matt was checking her more thoroughly than he had initially been able to, when they heard a groan from off to their right. A man lay there, supine, semiconscious, buried from the waist down. His head was lolling from side to side, and every few seconds his arms flailed impotently at the jagged rocks that pinned him down.

“Oh, my God, look!” Nikki exclaimed.

Not ten feet away from the man lay the lower half of a body—men’s work boots and overalls, protruding from under a huge pile of collapsed rock. And not far from him, lying faceup, only partially buried in rubble, was yet another man, minimally covered with debris, unconscious but clearly breathing. Nikki rushed to him, leaving Matt temporarily in darkness.

“Oh, no, Matt! Quick!” she cried, setting the light down to remove dirt and stones from the two. “He’s another one.”

Matt hurried over, took the flash, and knelt down. The man’s silt-covered face was badly disfigured by neurofibromas. Probably in his twenties, he had a gash and a deep bruise on his throat where a rock had apparently hit. His respiration was labored and accompanied by stridor—the whooping noise produced when air is drawn in past a significant obstruction.

“Well?” Nikki asked.

“Hell, I don’t know, except that it’s a miracle any of us are alive. This cave was supposed to be a mass grave for all of us. We have at least one person dead and three—my uncle, Vinny, and Carabetta—missing. We have three people that we know of who are unconscious. That man thrashing around over there looks like he might be badly hurt, and this guy’s breathing doesn’t sound good.” Matt reached into the man’s hip pocket, produced a thin billfold, and withdrew his driver’s license. “Colin Morrissey,” he read. “Age twenty-two. From Wells.”

“Where’s that?”

“Thirty miles south of here.”

“So now we have two with neurofibromas. Do you think there are more?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. I can’t make much sense of this yet. But I do know one thing. We have a limited amount of air that’s loaded with fumes that are probably toxic, and one meager source of light with batteries that could last an hour or a minute.”

“Not so good,” Nikki said.

“We need to find some more light. If your flashlight goes out before we come up with something, we’re finished. We’ve got to find the one I had.”

“Think we should try and help that poor guy over there first?”

“Your call.”

“Let’s see if we can free him up. He’s more awake than the rest. After that we can decide whether to help the others or look for your light.”

“Okay. Once we’re oriented, let’s shut the flashlight off and move the rocks in the dark.”

The man, heavyset and balding, kept crying out as Nikki and Matt cleared the fallen rocks off of him. They both knew the potential for disaster from his situation. Pelvis, abdomen, groin, legs, spine, muscles—in addition to fractures and internal injuries, there was the possibility of sudden death, usually from the release of clots formed in injured legs.

By the time they had removed enough rubble to pull the man free, he was beginning to speak. His invective-laden babble was disjointed and garbled, but there was no mistaking his anger.

“Fuckin’ double-crossers . . . you die, you die . . . Tracy . . . I love you, Tracy . . . can’t move . . . bastards . . . fuckin’ double-crossers . . . ”

“Hey, calm down, fella,” Matt said. “Easy does it. We’re doctors. We’re here to help you. Nikki, put the light on my face, maybe that’ll help.”

Another minute passed as first Matt and then Nikki attempted to get through to the incoherent man. It was Nikki who succeeded. She held her hand under his head, and had Matt hold the light away so that it illuminated both her face and the victim’s.

“My name is Dr. Solari,” she said kindly. “Do you understand?”

“Doctor,” he murmured.

“Yes. What’s your name?”

“Name . . . Sid,” he replied sluggishly, shaking his head as if to clear it.

“Sid, what happened? How did you end up here?”

“Double-crossed . . . bastards . . .”

Nikki lifted his head slightly and brushed some of the remaining dust from his face. He responded to her touch. His head stopped moving and his gaze fixed on her.

“Sid, what do you do? Who double-crossed you?”

“Are you . . . really a doctor?”

“I am.”

“My legs . . . don’t think I can feel my legs.”

Matt checked both of the man’s legs, then looked up at Nikki and shook his head grimly.

“We’ll go over you and do what we can,” she said.

“Wh . . . what happened?”

“There was an explosion. We’re in a cave where they store chemicals. The entrances are sealed off. Whoever did this meant to kill us, but the ceiling hasn’t collapsed. So here we are. We have only this one flashlight, so we’re going to have to keep turning it on and off. Do you understand?”

“There are . . . plenty of flashlights. . . . Big ones.”

“What?” Nikki and Matt exclaimed in unison.

“Cabinet on other side of . . . river. Gloves, lights, gas masks, first-aid kit, tools.”

Sid began coughing spasmodically. Nikki lifted him and propped him against her knee, taking pains not to move the area around his lower thoracic vertebrae where it seemed his spinal cord was compressed or severed.

“Who are you?” Nikki asked.

“I’m . . . a guard here. Tommy . . . Where’s Tommy?”

Nikki glanced over at the motionless lower body protruding from beneath a ton of rock. Sid followed her gaze.

“Oh, shit! Oh, no! Double-crossing bastards. Sonofabitch. He had a little kid.”

“People from the mine double-crossed you?” Matt asked eagerly.

“No,” Sid said vehemently. “It was Grimes. . . . Fucking Grimes, and some guys.”

“What did they pay you to do?”

“Just look the other . . . way while they worked inside this place. I thought they were just going . . . to bury it all because of those guys who showed up here last week. . . . No one said nothin’ about people being in here when it blew . . . especially not us. . . . They shot us up with something to knock us out and left us to . . . Doc, my legs. You got to help me.”