Perfect Victim (19 page)

Night rolled in with the subtle menace of a plague. The chatter of crickets and katydids filled the dusky air, and darkness crept down into the village from the hilltops. A thin wisp of methane glowed faintly in the distant trees like dull purple neon.

“This here's as far as we go.” The old man paused on the weed-whiskered shoulder of the dirt road, the legs of his walker crunching in the gravel. “Folks around here are awful superstitious—guess I ain't no different.”

Grove set down his duffel bag and surveyed the deepening shadows off to his right.

It was half past six and already the dense hardwood forest to the north—that raw stretch of wilderness the locals called the barrens—was immersed in shadows. As far as the eye could see, a dark ocean of treetops rolled up the front range of the Green Ridge reservation. The air had turned gelid and fragrant with pine.

It braced Grove like a blast of smelling salts. “How about GPS?” he asked the old man.

“Ain't no good.” The old retired miner, Jamie Lou Clinger's grandfather, slowly shook his head, his deeply lined face creasing with a frown. His name was Ryland Clinger, and in the twilight his leathery skin looked almost blue, as though six decades underground had permanently stained his skin. “Once ya get below a hundred feet, the mineral layer throws off the satellite. Let me see your piece.”

“My what?” Grove looked at the old man.

“Your piece, your iron—whatever you're planning on carrying in there.”

“Um, I don't—”

“I assume you're plannin' on bringin this shitheel down with something a little harsher than strong language?”

Grove knelt down and unzipped the duffel. He had not yet loaded the Bulldog. He pulled it out and handed it to the old miner.

The old man flung the pistol across the shoulder and into the shadows. It landed in the weeds with a thud. “Won't be needin' that,” he muttered.

“What the hell—?!” Grove stared, aghast. “What are you doing?”

Clinger looked up at Grove with saggy, red-rimmed eyes flashing with anger. “I already told y'all, she's like an unlit fuse down there.”

“Okay, but—”

“What's left of the air's got more damp-black gas in it than a dadburned Molotov cocktail. You start a shootin' match, you're gonna end up on the moon.”

“All right!” Grove angrily zipped the duffel shut. “I get it.”

“You're not still going down.” Drinkwater stood behind the old man, next to Jamie Lou, wringing her hands. “This is fucking crazy.”

Grove rose to his feet, slung the duffel's strap over his shoulder. “You're probably right.”

Drinkwater pushed her way past the girl, around the old man's walker, and up into Grove's face. “What do you really want here?” She spoke softly, intensely, drilling her gaze into his eyes.

“Drinkwater—”

“Answer the question. You want to take this cocksucker out?”

Grove nodded in the darkness. “That would be good.”

“Then call in the goddamn cavalry.” She grabbed his arm, squeezing. “It's your best shot. Listen to me. Get the TAC guys in there. They have remotes they can send down, cameras, you can flush the guy out.”

“Getting him's only part of it,” Grove said after looking into her eyes for a moment.

“Don't do this.”

“I
have
to, I'm supposed to.”

“That's just mumbo jumbo.” She said this last phrase in a broken voice, her eyes welling. Grove had not realized until this very moment how far Drinkwater had fallen for him. “At least take your .44 and a speed-loader,” she pleaded.

Grove gave her a squeeze. “I appreciate the thought, I really do.”

“Ulysses—”

“I'll see ya soon, Drinkwater. And don't worry so much, it's bad for your health.” Grove turned and started across the weed-clogged ditch toward the trail.

“Young fella!”

The old man's voice made Grove pause and glance back at the threesome standing in the deeper shadows of the roadway. “Yes, sir?”

“I ain't sure you fully understand what it is yer about to do.”

“Again, you're probably right…but if it's all the same to you I'm gonna go ahead and do it anyway.”

The old man leaned forward on his walker, making it creak, as though punctuating the seriousness of his point. “This here is the U. S. of A., and the last time I checked, American citizens were free to go and get theirselves killed any old time they wanted to.”

Grove looked at Drinkwater. “I'm not going to get myself killed.”

Ryland Clinger let out a grunt, then trundled closer to where Grove was standing, across the ditch, in the shadows, near the trailhead. The old man was shaking with rage now. “Young fella. You listen to me. What yer about to do, you might as well count on gettin' yourself killed.”

“Duly noted,” Grove replied with a nod. “Now if you'll excuse me I gotta—”

“That mine is special in a lotta ways,” the old man said, fire in his eyes. “Ways that ain't necessarily on no map. It's more than just bad luck. It's sour. The part of the earth, it's cursed.”

“I understand—”

“No, I don't think ya do, I don't think ya got no idea what I'm talking about. But you will. When you go down there where it's permanent midnight, you will.”

Grove looked at the old man. “I don't have any choice in the matter.” Then he looked at Drinkwater. “Maybe I never did.”

And with that, Grove turned and plunged into the darkness of the woods.

In the hours after Grove entered the mine, Drinkwater went through a sort of modified five stages of grief back at the old man's battered RV.

The camper was parked less than a mile from the Wormwood trailhead, in a little scenic cul-de-sac along Rural Route 24, featuring a blacktop turn-off and a single picnic table overlooking a wooded gorge to the west of Valesburg. But that night, in the impermeable darkness that seemed to draw down on the valley like a great shroud, the primeval beauty of eastern Kentucky turned inside out with the grotesque grandeur of bat wings, unfurling in the silence, feeding Drinkwater's dread and guilt and remorse.

Would she ever see Grove again? Would they find him dead at the bottom of a coal mine? Would Drinkwater be blamed by the Bureau for Grove's erratic behavior after it all hit the fan? The questions plagued her throughout most of that night, despite the old man's and his granddaughter's best efforts to distract her. They played gin rummy on a little fold-down table in the reeking camper, they finished the old man's bottle of Jack Daniel's, and they studied old blueprints and maps of the Wormwood mine as it had been in its last year of operation—1972—discussing escape routes and possible exit points up north in the Green Ridge preserve through which Grove might emerge.

Grove's two handguns sat on the table next to a bowl of pork rinds like dead soldiers.

Drinkwater spent a lot of time staring at those two handguns, and the ammo magazines lying next to them—bad-luck charms taunting her. The longer she stared at them, the more sick to her stomach she felt. How could he leave his guns? She wanted to scream. She was getting drunk. She didn't want to play cards anymore. She felt as though fire ants were crawling all over her body.

At last, at around 2:05
A.M
. that morning—and seismic readings across the eastern United States would later verify the exact time—Drinkwater rose from her seat to go to the bathroom when an enormous boom rang out from the east.

It was so sudden, so deep and immense—almost like an enormous depth charge rattling the sky—that Drinkwater was thrown right back onto the tattered bench seat next to a yelping Jamie Lou Clinger, who slammed against the window at the shock wave, banging the side of her head and cracking the glass. The entire six-ton camper shuddered sideways onto two wheels, nearly toppling over, throwing the old man—along with his walker—out of his chair and onto the corrugated floor. Cabinet doors flapped on their hinges. Glassware toppled, fell to the floor, shattered, and the entire chassis groaned before slamming down onto four wheels again with a massive bone-rattling thud.

For one horrible instant, the threesome lay there, paralyzed in the silence, gaping at one another, not a single word being exchanged, while puffs of insulation floated down from the cracked ceiling. They all knew where the explosion had originated.

Drinkwater's ears were ringing unmercifully and she felt her entire midsection seizing up with icy panic as she did the awful math in her head. Grove had been in the mine for almost seven hours. Nobody could have survived an explosion of that magnitude—not even the mysterious, resourceful, mystical Ulysses Grove. The RV was parked more than a mile from the mine, and it had felt as though someone had just set off a million sticks of dynamite right outside its door.

“Oh Lordy, no,” the old man uttered in a toneless voice then, as he rose on trembling legs, using the bent walker to prop himself up. He was looking around the trailer as though it were filling with demons. “No, no, no, no—”

“You gotta be shittin' me.” Jamie Lou struggled to her feet next to the table, her voice breathless with awe. “Holy fucking
shit
.”

“Here it comes,” the old man mumbled in a warning voice, gripping the handles of his walker with knuckles so white and arthritic they looked petrified.

“Here comes
what
?” Drinkwater held onto a cabinet for balance.

“This ain't possible.” Jamie Lou's eyes were huge and aimed up at the ceiling as though she were watching for some dark miracle.

Drinkwater spun toward a strange sound suddenly coming from outside—actually it was the sudden
absence
of sound: all the droning crickets and insects and burbling tree frogs, so omnipresent in the Allegheny Mountains, abruptly ceased with the violent suddenness of a CD cutting off. “What?
What is it?!”

The old man closed his eyes and braced himself. “Hell's been opened up,” he murmured.

Drinkwater gawked at the old man, and was about to scream something else at him when she felt the first vibrations resonating like the tines of a tuning fork beneath her feet. The sensation made her freeze.

When Drinkwater was a kid, she used to visit a cousin in Chicago who lived by the elevated train tracks. Every night, Drinkwater would lie in a bunk near the window and count the seconds before another deep vibration would begin gently shaking the darkened bedroom. The shaking would rise and rise as the train approached, until little Edith had to slap her hands over her ears and brace herself against the bed frame for fear she would be vibrated right out of her bunk and onto the floor. When the train finally passed in a magnificent clamor of sparks and noise, it felt as though the walls were going to fall down on top of her. This feeling—magnified about a billion times—was exactly how Drinkwater felt right at this moment: as though a gargantuan train was headed for the RV.

“Get under something!”

Jamie Lou's scream reached Drinkwater's ears like the echo of a pistol shot, slightly out of synch with what she was seeing: the teenager lurching under the table, her mouth moving, but sounds getting jumbled all together. The noise swirled around Drinkwater now, glass breaking, the distant crack of timbers like mortar fire, and a roaring waterfall sound getting closer and closer, louder and louder, until the rushing white noise started sounding like a runaway train, a mad broken runaway train, as the vibrations made the RV convulse and buckle and crack down the middle.

Drinkwater dropped to the floor, curling into a fetal position and shrieking.

The floor shifted beneath her. Something popped like a firecracker in the wall, a gout of sparks spitting from an electrical outlet. The old man was under the table now next to his granddaughter, who was sobbing uncontrollably, but Drinkwater heard very little of their voices, the noise of broken pipes and groaning metal pounding in her ears. The chassis buckled beneath them.

Drinkwater slammed her eyes shut then, as cold greasy water came spraying down on top of them, and she started praying like crazy, she prayed to God that Grove had not unleashed something unnamable down there, something vast and inexorable—a genie that could never be put back. God would answer her frenzied query soon enough.

Over the next few moments, in fact, Drinkwater would begin to learn the true nature of what Grove had done in that mine—

—which began six hours and fifty-seven minutes earlier, with Grove's journey into darkness.