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“Stand aside, Miss Swanson,” Pendergast said to the girl. “Weeks, nudge some of those boulders into the pit. Try not to brain one of us. And keep a careful eye on that tu
With his foot, Weeks pushed half a dozen large rocks over the lip of the pit. Then he watched as the girl, who understood immediately, stacked them against the wall and clambered to the top. Now Pendergast was able to grab her hand. He hoisted her upward, planted his free arm beneath her shoulders, brought the hand back to the chain, and slowly climbed up the stone face. Pendergast looked scrawny enough, but the strength it took to climb up that chain while carrying another person was remarkable.
They emerged from the pit and the girl immediately fell to her knees, clinging to Pendergast, sobbing violently.
Pendergast knelt beside her. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he gently wiped the blood and dirt from the girl’s face. Then he examined her wrists and hands. “Do they hurt?” he asked.
“Not now. I’m so glad you came. I thought . . . I thought—” The rest of the sentence was lost in a sob.
He took her hands. “Corrie? I know what you thought. You’ve been very brave. But it’s not over yet and I need your help.” He spoke gently but rapidly, in a low, urgent whisper.
She fell silent, nodded.
“Can you walk?”
She nodded, then broke into a sob once again. “He wasplaying with me,” she cried. “He was going to keep playing with me, until . . . until Idied. ”
He put a hand on her shoulder. “I know it’s difficult. But you’re going to need to be strong until we get out of here.”
She swallowed, eyes down.
Pendergast stood and briefly examined his map. “There might be a quicker way out. We’re going to have to risk it. Follow me.”
Then he turned to Weeks. “I’ll go first. Then Miss Swanson. You cover us from the back. And I meancover, Officer: he could come from anywhere, above, below, beside, behind. He will be silent. And he will befast. ”
Weeks licked dry lips. “How can you be so sure the killer will be coming after us?”
Pendergast returned his gaze, pale eyes luminous in the darkness. “Because he won’t give up willingly his only friend.”
Seventy-Four
Hazen moved fast, pausing only briefly to reco
This bastard was as good as dead.
He passed another little arrangement, then another, tiny crystals and dead cave animals placed on a rock ledge. A psychopath. The cave was where he’d practiced his craziness before going topside to do it to real people.
The son of a bitch was going to pay. No Miranda rights, no call to a lawyer, just two loads of double-ought buck in the chest and then a third to the brainpan.
There was such a confusing welter of footprints that Hazen wasn’t sure what trail he was following anymore, or even if it was fresh. But he knew the killer couldn’t be far away, and he didn’t care how long it took or where he had to go to find him. The corridors couldn’t go on forever. He’d find him.
The rage prickled his scalp and made his face feel hot and flushed despite the clammy air of the cave.Tad . . . It was like he had lost a son.
His grief was checked, at least for now, by a tidal wave of anger. He felt tears streaming down his cheeks but didn’t feel the emotion behind them. All he felt was hatred. He was crying with hatred.
The tu
Hazen charged his way up the debris slope, head down, shotgun pointed ahead. He came out into a soaring vertical space. Overhead, feathery crystals hung on long ropes of limestone, swaying slightly in an underground current of air. Passageways wandered off in all directions. He sca
After a few minutes he realized something was wrong. The tu
After returning to the chamber yet a third time, he stopped, raised his shotgun, and fired. The blast rocked the room, and feathery crystals tinkled gently down on all sides like giant broken snowflakes.
“Motherfucker!” he screamed. “I’m here, come show your face, freak!”
He fired a second time, and a third, screaming obscenities into the darkness.
The only answers that came back were the echoes of the blasts, rolling insanely through the honeycomb of chambers, again and again.
The magazine was empty. Breathing raggedly, Hazen reloaded. This wasn’t helping, hollering and shooting like this. Just find him. Find him.Find him.
He plunged down yet another passageway. This one looked different: a long, glossy tu
And then, off to one side, he saw a dark, hulking figure.
It was the merest glimpse, just a shadow flitting across his goggles; but it was enough. He spun, dropped to one knee, and fired—long practice at the range paying off—and the figure dropped, tumbling to the ground with a crash.
Hazen followed immediately with a second shot. Then he scuttled forward, ready to pump out the final round.
He stared down, the red glow of the night-vision goggles revealing not a dead body but a lumpy stalagmite, cut in half by his gun, lying shattered on the cave floor. He resisted the impulse to curse, to kick the shattered pieces away. Slowly and calmly, he raised the shotgun and continued down the echoing tu
He saw movement ahead, heard a faint sound.
He moved forward more carefully now, gun at the ready. He swung around a rocky corner, dropped to his knee, and covered the empty tu
Seventy-Five
Perhaps, Corrie thought, it was all just a dream: this breathless, desperate dash through an endless gallery of caverns. Perhaps Agent Pendergast had never arrived and she hadn’t been rescued, after all. Perhaps she was still down at the bottom of the pit, in a nightmarish half-doze, waiting to be awakened by the return . . .
But then, the ache in her wrists and ankles, the throbbing pain in her temple, would remind her that this was, in fact, no dream.
Agent Pendergast raised his arm, signaling for them to stop. His flashlight bobbled as he consulted the strange, soiled map. This hesitation seemed to greatly agitate the man who was accompanying them. It had taken Corrie several minutes, in her near-stuporous state, to even notice that somebody besides Pendergast had been ru