Stirred (34 page)

Just caught a glimpse of it ten feet away out of the corner of my eye.

I turned and sprinted toward it, crashing into the old metal hard enough to bruise my arms.

It rose straight up the brick into darkness, and I grabbed the rungs above my head, hoisted myself up onto the freezing, lowest rung, and began to climb.

The bear crashed into the ladder with enough force to set the whole thing shaking.

I glanced down, saw it rear up onto its hind legs, roar, and swipe one of its claws, just missing my right leg but tearing the ladder off the lower prongs that bolted it into the wall.

I tightened my grip as the ladder shook, but kept climbing, now twelve feet off the ground, which was becoming lost in the swirl of fog and wind below.

The bear was gone.

I clung to the rungs, my legs shaking with exhaustion and fear. The ladder led to a hatchway, secured with a rusty padlock. Not the exit.

I had no desire to go back down onto the floor, but I couldn’t stay on this ladder. Already, the joints in my hands had begun to tighten, fingers going numb from the cold.

The noise of the wind machines was softer here, and the visibility better.

I looked around. When the strobes flashed, I thought I saw a door twenty-five or thirty yards away. I also saw two other people, chained to opposite walls. A woman and a man.

I didn’t recognize the man and was again selfishly relieved it wasn’t one of my friends.

Nothing else to do…

I descended.

Ten rungs put me back on the floor.

The grizzly roared, but I couldn’t pinpoint its location or distance amid the gusts of wind. I heard another terrified cry for help—a cry that was silenced in midbreath. Patricia had said there were four people in the room. By my count, the bear had already gotten three.

If I was to save the fourth, I needed a weapon. Maybe there was one in the next room.

I must’ve pulled a hamstring running because I felt a twinge down the back of my left leg as I jogged toward the door, pushing through thick clouds of fog and a torrent of sudden wind that nearly knocked me on my ass.

Breathless, I stumbled into the door, grabbed the handle, and turned it down.

Nothing happened.

I waited for another moment of darkness to pass, and when the next burst of light came, I saw the keypad. It had been installed upside-down.

Punched in
666
, waited for the green light, but it blinked red instead.

Had I keyed it in wrong?

I tried the number again, made sure I got it right, and got another red light.

Think, think, think.

Shit.

It’s upside down. The number 6 upside down is 9.

I tried 999.

Red light.

What was I missing?

There’d been a plaque in that house that exploded. CIRCLE 1: LIMBO 666.

There had also been a plaque in this room, around Patricia’s neck. But it hadn’t contained any numbers on it. Just the word SIZZLE in capital letters.

I heard the grizzly growl again.

Closer than before.

Followed by another agonized scream. The final victim.

Final, except for me.

No time to stand here and brown my pants. I needed to keep moving.

I trailed one hand across the brick and started walking along the wall.

With Luther in my ear, I’d been distracted on my approach to the warehouse and had no real concept of its dimensions.

It seemed to take years to reach the intersection with the next wall. I turned the corner, waited for another burst of light, and saw smooth, unadorned brick for the next fifteen yards—no sign of another plaque anywhere.

I picked up the pace, jogging now, the pain in my hamstring expanding and intensifying.

A new scream grabbed my attention, and I stared out into the raging wind and ice, saw a half-second glimpse of the illuminated grizzly feasting on someone thirty feet away, its jaws buried deep in their chest.

The next decent jolt of light glimmered off something shiny hanging on the wall up ahead.

I reached it but had to wait ten seconds for enough light to read by.

It wasn’t a plaque. It was a sign that read HARD HAT AREA.

I turned to head back to the door and found the bear standing between me and the wall where I needed to be.

This time, I didn’t wait for the charge.

This time, I just turned and ran like hell in the opposite direction, pain in my leg be damned, kid in my belly be damned, veering away from the wall, into the fog, passing through a heavy spray of super-cooled water droplets blowing hard into the side of my face.

A cluster of objects loomed straight ahead, and I threaded my way through ancient oil drums, risking a glance back over my shoulder to see the grizzly inside of twenty feet and closing fast.

I pushed over every drum I passed, and the boom of hollow barrels crashing to the concrete floor added the sound of thunder to the chaos all around me.

Cutting a hard left, I plunged into the howling mist, no walls, no door in sight, heard the bear careening through the oil drums behind me, and hoped I’d bought myself a few extra seconds.

I had no idea if I was even running toward the exit now, felt more like I was flying through an electrical storm.

My shoes suddenly lost traction on the concrete, but instead of falling, I managed to torque my feet to the side and slide. Glancing down at what I’d run through, I saw that I was skidding across a pond of red.

I fell onto one knee, feeling warmth soak into my pants, the warmth of someone’s blood. Incredibly, I’d wound up back at the upside-down panel.

Behind me, a roar.

The grizzly within a few yards.

I stared at the keypad, tried 666 again.

Nothing.

999.

Nothing.

The strobe light flashed, throwing up the giant shadow of the bear across the door. It was so close I could sense it, though I dared not look.

SIZZLE.

That was the only capitalized word in the Paglia quote.

Why had it been capitalized?

And then it came to me. Luther had studied the killers I’d chased. He obviously knew about Mr. K, and letters that looked like numbers had been an integral part of that case.

SIZZLE.

If you looked at it upside-down, it would be the numbers
.

I typed the numbers in.

Green light.

Heard the deadbolt turn.

The bear bumped me from behind, its cold, wet nose pressing into my back.

I spun around, its face right at my chest.

It sniffed my belly.

No!

NOT MY BABY!

I cocked back my hand, and smacked it across the snout.

“BAD BEAR!”

The bear stepped backward, its ears flattening against its skull, and for a moment it looked like a giant, scolded puppy.

Then I grabbed the handle and scrambled through the door—

—slamming it behind me just as the bear pounded into it with a gigantic shudder.

H
e watches Jack on the monitor, tinted green from the night-vision camera.

That was a close one.

In his hand, Luther clutches the master remote control. His finger had been hovering above the button that would have detonated the explosive collar on the bear. Several times, he’d almost pressed it. Much as the bear had cost him, Jack was more valuable. The goal is to teach her something, not kill her.

Although there is a very real possibility, which he has to acknowledge, that it could ultimately come to that.

There were several close calls, and it has been quite exhilarating to watch. But as Luther had hoped, Jack prevailed.

Time to make it harder for her. He presses the microphone button, activating her headpiece.

“Nice job with Teddy, Jack. I commend you. Was I seeing things, or did you get maternal there for a moment? The mother wolf, protecting her pup?”

“I’m done playing games with you, Luther.”

“No. Actually, you’re just getting started. Do you see that water tower, a hundred yards ahead of you?”

“Yeah.”

“I need you on top of it. There’s a ladder at the base.”

“No way.”

Luther has anticipated this. He leaves the control room, walking toward the seventh circle where Phin and Harry wait.

“I suppose I can’t force you. But maybe I can persuade you. Who would you like me to burn first, Harry or Phin?”

Jack’s voice comes so low it’s hard to hear. “Leave them alone, Luther.”

“Then do what I say. Climb to the top of the water tower, or you can listen to me roast both of them alive.”

Jack doesn’t say anything for a moment.

Finally, she utters a defeated, “Fine. Just don’t hurt them.”

Luther smiles.

It would have been a shame to play that card this early. No doubt Jack would have been horrified listening to her friends fry.

How much worse it will be for her when she stands in their circle of hell and is forced to
watch
them fry.

I
t was cool outside, but a welcome relief from the frigid temperature of the bear cave.

I reached the outskirts of a metal fence topped with razor wire, which enclosed the base of the water tower.

“You seriously think I can climb over that, Luther? You do realize I’m eight and a half months pregnant.”

“Walk around to the other side. I’ve cut a hole.”

I circumnavigated the fence, moving over pieces of broken glass that crunched under my tennis shoes.

When I finally arrived at the opening, I stopped. He’d cut a segment out of the fencing three feet across and four feet high. I ducked through and walked the last few yards to the tower’s base.

It was an older structure, the kind that looked like a rocket ship—big metal cylinder on stilts with a pointed cone roof. A walkway circled the perimeter of the tank. The four metal struts stood bolted and buried in a foundation of crumbling concrete. For some reason, I’d expected a spiral stairway that would access the tank at the top of the tower, but there was only a narrow ladder whose bottom rung stopped six feet above the ground. A rope ladder extended down from this lowest rung, bridging the gap. It swayed in the breeze.

I froze, my stomach coiling into knots.

“Luther, please.”

“Start climbing.”

“I can’t.”

“I’m getting bored with threatening your friends.”

“I can’t do this.”

“Fair enough.”

“Wait.”

He snorted. “Make up your mind, or I’ll start—”

“Just give me a second,” I said.

Walking over to the rope ladder, I took hold of it, thinking of the oft-repeated story of Chinese women in the rice paddies, working hard up until they gave birth, then clutching their newborns to their breasts and going right back to work.

If they could do it, why couldn’t I?

I stared up the ladder, felt butterflies swarming in my lower intestines, and then something like an electrical current shot all the way down the length of my legs and through to the tips of my toes.

The ladder must have soared between seventy-five and a hundred feet into the sky, which seemed to be no more than a half hour away from full-on dusk. The low deck of clouds streaming over the tank spit a steady drizzle of cool rain, and though I couldn’t be sure, I felt certain the tower itself was swaying. Imagined I could hear the rusty metal creaking.