Redheads (46 page)

Chapter Fifty-Nine

“It was the middle one.”

“What?”

“The middle one,” Westfield said. “It took her up that one. I saw.” His good eye was bulging.

Chris moved his light from Westfield’s bloody face and scanned the ceiling. He could hear the thing’s howls. They might have been filtering down from that tunnel, but it was impossible to say. The wall beneath the opening of the tunnel was rough enough to climb, maybe. He found Julissa’s submachine gun and slung it over his back. Then he found Westfield’s Glock and gave it to him.

“In case it comes back.”

“Just go, damn it. Don’t waste time on me.”

Chris went to the wall, put his flashlight in his mouth, and looked up. The tunnel entrance was twenty feet up. Rough stone, an iron hook jutting from the wall halfway up. Not much else. The thing roared again, the kind of sound you might hear coming out of the jungle at night. And Julissa was in there with it. That got him moving. He clawed his way up, his head throbbing from where the thing had hit him. When he got to the iron hook, he leaned his weight against it and adjusted the flashlight in his mouth so it wouldn’t drop. Then he kept climbing, knowing he was just at the edge of his limit and the only way to get up was to keep moving. If he came to a stop, that would be it. And if he fell and landed the wrong way, that would be it for all of them. He punched upwards, slicing his fingertips on the rock in search of holds. In fifteen seconds he was standing on the iron hook and moving up past it.

When his fingers found the lip of the tunnel entrance, he hoisted himself in a smooth chin-up, kicked his legs over the side, and rolled in. The tunnel was just high enough to stand. He took the light from his mouth and brought the gun around. He didn’t look back at the chamber below to see how Westfield was doing. He just took off down the tunnel, running at a crouch with the gun out, trying to see ahead through the shadows so he wouldn’t be caught on his flank by a side passage.

Chapter Sixty

It was going up, leading her along with its screams.

For five minutes she’d been running through switchbacks and stairs as the tunnel punched upwards through the rock beneath Edinburgh. She wasn’t too clear on what she’d do if she actually caught up to it. Maybe beat it with the bone she was holding, maybe stab it in the face with the sharp broken end. It was in a lot of pain, and thought it was dying. She could feel it thinking of its own death as it scuttled along the tunnel. But it still had the strength to outrun her. She’d given it a taste of something it had never known.

Fear.

She could feel its fear spreading through the dark tunnel in waves, could feel it as clearly as she could hear its howls. She didn’t know if it could feel her thoughts, but maybe it could. So she thought about peeling the skin off its face with a sharp rock. About using the bone in her hands to pry out its eyeballs and stomp them on their stalks with the heel of her boot. She thought about the way it would scream and twist if she and Chris impaled it on a pole and stood back to watch it die.

Ahead of her, it screamed and ran. It tried to pull out of her mind but she clamped down on it and would not let it go. Holding on to it was like having a handful of earthworms. Filthy and squirming. But she squeezed her mind down on it anyway.

What I shot into you, you’re as good as dead. But I’m gonna catch you first.

It yanked in her mind and slipped away, but it left her with an image. She knew what it knew: Chris was running up the tunnel behind them, armed.

The tunnel was narrower now, the steps finer. The stone stairs were polished, the walls were paneled with oak. She passed a locked doorway, then another. They must have been in the sub-basement of some building in Edinburgh. She could still hear the sharp slap of the thing’s hands and feet on the stone. It was a bend or two ahead of her on the stairs. And now she could hear Chris pounding his way up the stairs behind her.

It would be a hell of a thing if he came around a corner with an automatic weapon and confused her in the shadows.

“Chris!” she called. She was nearly breathless but the sound carried well in the tunnel. “Keep coming. But don’t shoot me in the back. I’m chasing it.”

He called out her name, and nothing had ever sounded so good as his voice.

Now she passed a window set in the wall. The warped leaded glass looked over a fast-running stream. Trees bent in the dawn rain, the sky a smear of gray. She kept running up, the stairs curving into a spiral. Somewhere above, she heard a door open and slam.

“It went through a door, Chris!” she said. “Hurry!”

The door was at the top of the stairs and was made of heavy hardwood, studded with bronze. It was locked. She listened to Chris thunder up the stairs and waited. When he rounded the last curve he saw her and kept running, and she saw the way his eyes moved from her head to her feet and back up again. Checking her, making sure she was all right.

“Thank god,” he said.

“Shoot it,” she said. “Shoot the lock.”

“Stand back.”

She stepped back onto the stair landing. Chris leveled the Uzi at the lock from a foot away and fired a long burst at it. Then he kicked the door in and it swung open in an arc of smoke and wood splinters and a clattering of broken metal. He put a new clip into the Uzi and handed it to her, taking the Glock from the waist band of his jeans.

“Let’s go,” she said. And she didn’t wait for him, but started for the door.

He stopped her with his hand on her shoulder.

“What’d you do to it?”

She held up her wrist and let the sweatshirt slide down so he could see the syringe.

“You didn’t tell us—”

She nodded and finished his sentence. “Because the more of us that knew, the more likely it’d find out. Let’s go.”

They stepped through the doorway together, Julissa covering the left and Chris taking the right. The room was long with a soaring ceiling. Book shelves rose to the exposed rafters. Windows between the bookshelves looked down on the stream. At the far end of the room was a fireplace big enough to walk into. In front of the fire place was a thick Persian rug. There were a couple of leather armchairs on the rug facing the fireplace. The thing was on the rug, naked and writhing.

They could see it easily now. It was in too much pain to play any mind tricks. It couldn’t cloud their vision. Standing, it would have been about six feet tall. It was leathery-looking, its face scrunched like a bat’s. As it flopped on the rug, Julissa saw its spine. Sharp protuberances came through the skin down the length of its back like something on an alligator. It looked up and saw them and went on writhing. There was a black mark on its neck where the needle had gone in; probably the drain cleaner had dissolved the blood vessels there and it was bleeding under its skin.

Julissa remembered the way the drain cleaner had smoked when she spilled droplets on floor of the janitor’s closet. The thing was flopping and jerking like its blood was boiling, like something was burning holes through its heart.

“You want me to shoot it?” Chris asked. But he sounded like he knew the answer already.

“Only if it gets up. And then just in the gut to put it back down.”

Julissa sat on the edge of the closer chair, her gun aimed at the thing’s stomach.

There was a desk in one corner of the room. A computer on the desk, some papers. No telling what the rest of the house held. Coming up from the sub-basement to the top floor, she’d gotten an idea of the size of the place. At least fifty rooms, possibly more. Plus all the tunnels and chambers beneath the city. The thing must have been living in Edinburgh since the Stone Age. Maybe that’s when it found the original Stark. After it was dead they could comb through everything they wanted, go through its files, sift through it all. They could take weeks or months and put it all together. If they wanted to.

They didn’t need it to answer any questions. They only needed one thing of it, and it was busy doing it on the carpet in front of her. It was dying.

The thing writhed and screamed and looked at her. If nothing else, it was smart enough not to ask for mercy. Or mercy was an alien concept. Either way, it just did its thing on the rug by itself, and she watched. If she had to help it along, she would. They had to get back to Westfield and she didn’t want to make him wait all day. But the thing died in five minutes, just thrashing on the floor, its mind wheeling through images of terror that it cast all around. When it was almost over, it lay still. Julissa nodded to Chris.

He knelt next to the thing and put the muzzle of his handgun to its temple.

It was alive, barely, but still crashing through images. Young women, begging for their lives. She saw Allison, Cheryl and Tara. A hundred others. The ice in the fjords from some long-ago time. Its mind quieted. It settled on a last image. Broken ice drifting across deep and black water. A scene of eerie peace.

Chris pulled the trigger and the gun blast shattered all that and sent it away.

The room was still and quiet. The thing’s final thought blinked out in Julissa’s mind, just gone. The contents of the thing’s head were splattered across the back of the fireplace. Gray and red; not so different from anything else.

Chris stood and put the pistol back into his waistband.

“We should see if we can find a rope or something to get Westfield up.”

“Will he be okay?” Julissa asked.

“He was talking when I left him. He was sitting up.”

“Let’s hurry.”

Chapter Sixty-One

When he’d been alone for ten minutes, Westfield got to his feet and leaned awhile against the table stone until the rushing in his ears quieted. His right eye wasn’t working too well but he thought it might just be swollen shut. The thing had clawed him in the face but had been moving too quickly to do any real damage. At least it hadn’t gotten into him with its teeth again.

He took the flashlight and the gun and walked out of the chamber through the arched doorway at the far end. This led into an even larger room. Cavern might have been a better word for it. The floor was humped and uneven. The ceiling soared overhead beyond the weak beam of his flashlight. It was supported in places by long stalactites that flowed into the ground.

He hadn’t heard the creature’s screams in a while now. Either it was too far away, or it was occupied doing something else.

“Get to her, Chris,” he said.

He scanned the flashlight along the floor, looking for anything that might help him scale the wall to the mouth of the tunnel where his friends had gone. The floor was littered with rocks that had fallen from the ceiling. There were a few small bits of bone that must have come from the other chamber where all the skeletons were piled. But there was nothing here that would help him up a twenty foot wall.

He limped to the back of the cavern and stood looking at one of the stalagmites rising from the floor. Something had been interred inside of this one. The calcite flowstone was translucent, the color of dirty amber. When he held his flashlight up against it he could see the shape of the thing inside. He stared at it for a long while, moving around the stalagmite until he was sure. Something had propped this thing up on the cavern floor beneath a drip of mineral-laden water. To turn it into a statue, like some kind of burial rite. The stalagmite had formed around a skeleton, but the thing inside wasn’t human. There were sharp protrusions coming from its spinal column, long claws on its feet. The skull was barely covered by the flowstone and easy to see. Its eye sockets were huge and widely spaced, its nose just two slits in the thick bone. Its lower jaw had fallen open and its many teeth sparkled, encased by calcite crystal.

There were others like it in the cavern. Two more about the same age, judging by the size of the stalagmites surrounding them. He guessed the floor-to-ceiling flowstone formations might have held even older burials. But these were so large they were opaque, so he couldn’t be sure.

His flashlight caught something near the base of the column. A droplet of fresh blood. He played the light around and found another, then another beyond that. He forgot the things entombed in the flowstone and followed the blood trail. In a little bit he came to a crevice in the far wall. The blood disappeared inside it. He dropped to one knee, aiming the gun and the light into the opening. Ten feet back there was a dirt-caked young woman. There was blood all around her, in her red hair, on her face. He thought she was dead, but then she raised her hand to shield her eyes from the light. Her mouth opened in a silent scream.

“Miss?”

There was a clatter from the other chamber. Rocks hitting the floor and shattering. Then a hint of light from back there. And a voice.

“Aaron?”

He had wheeled around with his gun raised, but at the sound of Julissa’s voice he lowered it.

“Westfield? Hey, man, where’d you go?” Chris called.

“Back here,” he answered.

“Can you walk?” Julissa asked.

“Yes.”

He started towards the sound of their voices. There was a new sound now. A hollow clatter of lightweight metal.

“Julissa hopped a garden wall and broke into a caretaker’s shed,” Chris said. “Found an extension ladder. We stole it.”