Shattered (23 page)

One time, when Maura County was a little girl growing up in a small town in Northern California, she managed to get herself lost in the Muir Woods.

That terrible day had started like any other lazy Saturday afternoon, a family picnic at Stinson Beach, and then a quick drive down Highway 1 to the park entrance for a hike in the forest. But by the time the County family had reached the trail head near Muir Beach, the weather had turned mean. The wind had kicked up, and the sky had drooped and darkened over Bolinas Bay. Maybe that's why her father hadn't heard little Maura stop at the first hairpin to ponder a caterpillar. She was only seven years old at the time, and her voice didn't carry very far in the best of circumstances, but on that day, with the woods chattering, and the wind whistling and rustling through the boughs, her father hadn't heard her little cry of delight when she saw that colorful little inchworm on the big maple leaf and paused there. “Lookit, Daddy!” she enthused in her little peep of a voice. “I wonder if he can play har-monica like the one in that cartoon!”

No answer.

She turned and saw that her father had vanished. He had probably proceeded on down the trail, oblivious to the fact that his daughter had momentarily dawdled. And the sad thing was, if Maura had simply stayed calm and thought things through, she more than likely could have merely trotted after him, staying on the trail, probably catching up with him in a matter of minutes. But seven-year-olds are not known for grace under pressure, or thinking things through, or even common sense. And on that day, at that moment, Maura's little psyche erupted with terror. She started calling out.

“Daddy?—Daddy?—Daddeeeeeeee!”

She spun around and around as she shouted, her gaze taking in every shadow, every branch. The wind swallowed the sound of her voice. Raindrops began to sift down through the trees, peppering the foliage. Every sound became sinister to Maura's hypersensitive ears. A rustling limb became a monstrous whisper, a gust became the laughter of demons. Maura turned and started running back down the twisted path the way she had come, and suddenly slipped on a mossy root sticking out of the hardpack.

She sprawled to the floor of the path. She fell so hard she saw stars and the breath was knocked out of her.

By that point she was sobbing and heaving and choking with terror, as she rolled onto her back and gazed up into the dark canopy of Douglas fir.

In the seconds before her mortified father came trotting back into view, frantically calling her name, young Maura County had the first dark epiphany of her life. She was only alone that day for a few frenzied minutes. But the horrible solitude of that moment, as she peered up at that chimney of ancient redwoods—some of them over a thousand years old—gave Maura her first taste of the existential cruelty of nature. These hard primordial woods, where Miwok Indians trembled in ritual supplication, where Conquistadors died, where missionaries foraged and perished—
these same woods
—could squash a little girl in a split second. Lying in agony, helpless, tears streaking her guileless little face, she felt lower in the order of things than that caterpillar. But in her innocence, she saw things with unprecedented clarity: Here was a universe so gigantic and senseless and downright mean that it made her shrink and shrink until she felt as though she were dissolving into the earth. The last horrifying thought flickering across her young mind: Maybe that's what dead people feel.

Over thirty years later, that memory was still as vivid as a garish pop-up book in Maura's brain, as accessible to her as if it had happened a week ago.

In fact, on that bloody night in Indiana, fleeing the safe-house basement through that endless escape shaft, Maura felt those same childhood sensations of existential terror. She felt the same sense of plummeting, the same feeling of shrinking into a tiny cold nothing.

This primal panic was a mere undercurrent, of course, since she was currently in the midst of the fight of her life.

She moved through the narrow, dimly lit passage-way as quickly as possible, considering the fact that she was now clutching her caterwauling baby in her arms. In her right hand she carried the .22 Ruger that she had retrieved from the iron sink during her escape from the cellar.

Her mouth was bleeding where she had lost two of her teeth, and she was panting profusely as she bounded along the subterranean dark, a darkness broken only by the intermittent reddish glow of an emergency lamp encased in a filthy cage. Her fingertips throbbed with excruciating pain, half her fingernails torn away from wrestling herself and her baby out of the duct tape bondage.

Sounds echoed wildly—Aaron's keening, her footsteps, her gasping, hoarse voice. “It's okay, honey, it's okay, Mommy's here, Mommy's with you….”

The tunnel seemed to go on forever, hewn from ragged planks and moldy mortar, rank with the stench of roots and offal. In the darkness it virtually shimmered with slime, the floor constructed out of some kind of cheap surface so fuzzy with mold that Maura kept slipping and losing traction, nearly falling at every juncture. The ceiling was lined with ancient conduits, fringed with unidentifiable stalactites hanging so low they brushed the top of her head. The worst part was the inexorable reach of the thing. Even though she had only been in the tunnel for a few minutes, the claustrophobia pressed down on her like the walls of a coffin.

Another pink light materialized dead ahead, and Maura fixed her sights on it, hoping it might be a way out, a ladder, a chute,
something
.

A skittering noise made her jump. She jerked to her left, and she saw movement out of the corner of her eye. Something low, creeping along the floor, behind her, moving with insectile speed in the shadows. She let out a little yelp, her free arm coming up on instinct, raising the gun like a shield. Her trigger finger had a mind of its own.

She squeezed off four quick blasts at the thing coming at her in the darkness.

Each successive bark of the Ruger made Aaron twitch in her arms, shrieking louder than ever. In the photo-strobe of the muzzle flash Maura saw the huge rat behind her erupting in a bloom of fur and entrails, the vermin coming apart in a spray of guts against the tunnel wall.

Maura staggered sideways, ears ringing, slowing down to a hobble. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, honey—I'm sorry—sweetie, I'm here, I'm here.”

The baby shrieked, its little voice so fatigued and scoured by the constant crying it was beginning to diminish into breathy little honking noises. Maura cradled him to her breast—her arms aching unmercifully from hauling the child all this way—and she moved on.

In the gloom, Maura caught fleeting glimpses of Aaron's little caramel face, contorted in distress, wet with mucus and residue from the plumbers tape which she had hastily ripped off him during their escape. His legs kicked with tiny convulsive jerks, making it difficult for Maura to hold on to him. The terror made her woozy, unsteady, but the deeper maternal rage drove her onward. She would die for this little bundle of tears and flesh in her arms. She would kill. She would do anything. Aaron had been a colicky baby, hard to sleep, up at odd hours, always with some kind of stomach ailment. But in a way, all the hardships over the last year and a half or so—from her pregnancy on—only bonded her more permanently with the child. She would not allow this monster near her baby. She would not allow the tall dark redwood trees to swallow the boy up.

As though triggered by her dark thoughts, a shape materialized in the gloom ahead of her. Maybe a hundred feet or so away.

At first, Maura kept lumbering toward it as though uncomprehending, as though homing in on a mirage, but soon the reality of it hit her, and she shuffled to a stop. She stood there for a moment, panting, holding the baby. Aaron kept writhing in her arms, still crying, albeit now in a halting, hoarse sort of wheeze, making Maura's ears ring. Her flesh rashed with goosebumps, and her heart jiggered in her chest, as she gaped at the end of the tunnel.

She was staring at a dead end.

The tunnel simply stopped without warning or markings of any kind. The terminal wall, constructed out of the same cracked mortar as the rest of the passageway, looked almost green with mold, bearded with moss and roots.

Maura backed away from it like an animal with its hackles raised, disbelieving, dumbstruck, but
seeing
nonetheless, seeing the wall of ancient masonry: the end of the line. She commanded herself to stay calm and think and be smart,
be smart about this
, when all at once she heard the most horrendous noise in the universe reach her ears through the shrill din of her baby's cries.

Way off in the depths of the tunnel behind her came a shuffling noise.

It was coming toward her.

 

Grove reached the bottom of the bungalow's basement staircase, two-handing his .44 Bulldog, his gaze scanning the dark cellar. Three black-clad officers were down there, rummaging at opposite corners of the cellar, their weapons drawn, shining flashlights into corners, nosing behind the furnace, under the sink basins. Grove also caught a quick glimpse of a fourth officer—a big man in black Kevlar, thick beard, stocking cap—vanishing through a small doorway embedded in the wall behind the washing machine.

“Hold it! FBI! Everybody stand by a second!” Grove's taut voice made all heads turn, flashlight beams seizing up. The men seemed to recognize Grove. Their expressions tightened and they stood there for moment, waiting. The man in the tunnel paused.

The section chief appeared on the staircase behind Grove. “Nobody touches anything down here,” Geisel ordered.

Grove saw that the basement definitely showed signs of a struggle, and thank God there was no blood spatter anywhere, at least none that was immediately apparent. Grove smelled the earthy odors of rock dust and old laundry soap, and he saw several things at once that worried him, that immediately registered on his mind-screen, his innate profiling gift suddenly shifting into gear.

“Nobody move, please.”

He came down the remaining steps and made a quick visual sweep of the basement. Sweating inside his damp flight jacket, his eyes burning with concentration, he kept his gun gripped in both hands as he scanned the room, looking at everything, every shred of physical detail, no matter how seemingly trivial. Tangles of duct tape littered the cracked cement floor and hung from the wall joists. An unidentified wet spot lay beneath the smaller of the two tangles. (Grove would discover later that this was Aaron's urine.)

Behind him, Geisel descended the steps and looked around with a feverish intensity. On the far wall, a knot of plumbers' tape hung at about shoulder height. Grove went over to it and took a closer look. The tape appeared to have been fed through a shredder. A couple of human teeth were embedded in the adhesive like two kernels of corn.

“Ulysses—”

“Nobody move.” Grove turned to the bearded man lurking inside the tunnel. “Is that the escape tunnel?”

“Yes, sir.” The bearded officer hovered in the narrow doorway, slumping to keep his big square head from hitting the lintel. “Marshal Pokorny said I should—”

“I'll go.”

“Sir, we're supposed to—”

“Out of the way, please.” Grove nudged the man aside and stuck his head into the tunnel. The passageway stretched into the shadows and reeked of decay. “Where does it lead?”

No answer came from the officers.

Grove turned back to the room. “Somebody answer me, goddamnit—where the hell does it lead? Somebody has to know where this goddamn thing leads!”

The silence spoke volumes.

Without a word Grove turned and plunged into the unknown darkness of the tunnel.

In the dim, sickly pink light, Maura pressed her back against the rancid plaster wall of the tunnel and took deep breaths, trying to figure out what to do. She still had her Ruger tucked into her jeans. The ammo magazine was half full. How many rounds was that? Four? Three? She couldn't remember. If only she had brushed up more on handguns.

The baby wriggled in her sore arms. Maura could feel the heat from his body—he was probably running a fever, his sobs deteriorating into little hitching gasps. “It's okay, honey, it's all right, Mommy's gonna get us outta here.”

Aaron pressed his face into the moist canyon of her breasts and sobbed.

Maura swallowed a flinty taste in her mouth and tried to focus. In all the confusion she had lost track of the distant shuffling noises. They had abruptly stopped, then started up again. But how far away were they? How far had she come? Three city blocks? Seven football fields? She had no idea. She felt lightheaded. The front of her football jersey was soaked through with breast milk.

What was happening to her? She was about to kill somebody in self-defense and she was
lactating
. Aaron started writhing again, and Maura began to murmur to him, when all of a sudden she saw something in the darkness of the tunnel that she hadn't noticed before.

She also realized, almost simultaneously, that she was smelling something odd. Something
new
. Something she hadn't noticed until now. “Wait a minute, look at this,” she said, speaking as though she were sleepwalking, addressing her baby. “Look at this, look at this!”

She went over to the dead-end wall, and ran her fingertip along a crack that wasn't a crack after all, it was a seam, a
seam
!

“Oh, my God!”

The handle was recessed into the mortar panel, disguised by layers of grime and mold, invisible at first glance, but now Maura screaming silently at herself for missing it. It resembled the kind of release you might find on a submarine hatch, a round, concave dimple with a bar in the middle. Holding the baby on her hip, she reached down and brushed away the moss, then got a decent grip on the handle.

She pulled.

The door would not budge.

A voice called out behind her in the far reaches of the dark tunnel, echoing, bouncing off the tunnel walls. It was impossible to discern what it was saying. It sounded mad, it might have been a foreign language, it was too far away, and things were happening too quickly.

She put the baby down on the grit and filth, then put all her might into loosening the hatch. There was a cracking noise, and a creaking sigh like paper tearing, and the door finally squeaked open an inch or two.

On the other side, in a greasy shaft, barely visible in the dark, rose an iron ladder.

The odor she was smelling—which she hadn't been able to identify until now—engulfed her.

Manure.

 

Grove charged through the reeking tunnel, passing through pools of salmon-colored light, moving at a steady sprint, his breathing labored yet steady, his revolver gripped tightly in his right hand.

“Maura!”

His frantic bellowing cry wobbled slightly as he ran, betraying his fear and his tenuous hold on his sanity. The irregular blips of pink light in his eyes began working on his brain, the odors of earthworms and festering rot penetrating his sinuses, making him dizzy. The tunnel seemed to be narrowing, darkening, as he plunged deeper and deeper.

“Maurrrrrahhh!”

Slowing down to a walk, out of breath, mind racing with clashing sensations and thoughts, he felt a palpable sense of being followed, watched, pursued. Was it the other officers? He whirled around with the gun aimed at the darkness behind him and called out.

“Identify yourself!”

The silence teased at him. He could see nothing down the dark length of tunnel but scarred mortar walls, moldering overhead pipes, and progressively smaller pools of dim light. He turned back around and looked dead ahead. He could have sworn the tunnel was wider than it now appeared. He continued on. His heart felt cold and fragile as it thumped in his chest, thumped for his wife and his infant son.

“Maura!”

He picked up his pace again, the back of his neck bristling with the sensation of being followed. It was as though there were other footsteps overlapping his own—stealthy, cunning footsteps—and they were mirroring his every movement. He moved faster. He couldn't believe the length of this goddamn tunnel. He must have already traveled a quarter mile down its narrow reaches. How the hell was that possible? He picked his trot up to a run, and every painful stride exploded in his skull.

To make matters worse, the deeper he traveled into the tunnel the more the walls kept closing in on him. He started jerking at sounds, flinching the gun barrel at every creak, every crunch of grit under his feet. He had that terrible vertigo one gets when one reaches the midway point of a great bridge, the point of no return, the windswept threshold. Dante felt that feeling in the seventh circle. He felt it descending the steps into the labyrinth. This was the lowest ebb of human life, the netherworld of worms and bare lightbulbs and the beast who would destroy Grove's family.

“
Splet, I will twist your goddamn head off your neck if you harm one hair on their heads—Do you hear me Splet? Do you hear me Splet?”

The outburst stole his balance and he stumbled over his own feet. He went down hard on his knees and felt something in his chest snap, something buried deep in his core. What good was yelling doing him? He was acting like a goddamn rookie, giving himself away, giving the killer all the time in the world to escape. Grove felt his eyes welling up. He felt the madness overtake him like a dark net drawn over his face, and he began to weep. He wept silently on the grimy floor of that dark tunnel for several agonizing seconds, his sobs echoing, bouncing off the leprous plaster and filling his own ears with horrible feedback. He began to crawl, the gun still clutched in his sweaty grasp, his lungs heaving as he tried to stop crying and get back on his feet and behave like a goddamn professional.

He had half risen to a kneeling position when he heard the first faint sounds of a baby crying. It was muffled, and almost sounded like it was coming from
inside
the walls, but it banged on Grove's nervous system like a gong.

Aaron
.