Brood XIX

I

20 Miles Southwest of

Wren, Colorado

The words of the dying man haunted him in whispers.

You'll never find her in time.

Special Agent Paxton Carver cranked the wheel to the right, the black Caprice Classic fishtailing on the gravel road in a cloud of dust before the tires finally caught and launched the sedan down the long, rutted dirt drive toward the distant farmhouse. Fallen barbed wire fences blew past to either side, tangled with tumbleweeds and overgrown by wild grasses and sunflowers, the fields beyond a riot of vegetation, prematurely browning from dehydration.

He could barely hear the distant cry of sirens behind over the pinging of rocks against the undercarriage.

The crows were already waiting when he reached the house and jammed the brakes, lining the steepled roof of the white clapboard house, the aluminum outbuilding, and the thick black wires stretching back to the telephone poles. The setting sun beyond cast a scarlet glare over everything, limning the feathers of the raucously cawing birds as though they'd bathed in blood.

The transmission had been well masked, bouncing from one satellite to another. They had finally isolated the source, but it had taken so long... Too long.

Twenty-two hours and nineteen minutes.

Carver leapt from the car and hit the front steps at a sprint, tightening the Kevlar vest over his torso, his official windbreaker still on the passenger seat. He drew his M9 Beretta 9mm from his shoulder holster and pointed it at the front door. The porch planks were bowed and gray, pulling the nails from their moorings; the siding of the house sandblasted, white paint peeling in curls. Two rusted chains dangled from the overhang to his left where a porch swing had once been suspended, the window behind covered from within by dusty drapes and cobwebs. He threw back the screen door, hammering the wall with a bang, tried the front door, then kicked it in.

"FBI!" he shouted, shoving past the shivering door through the cracked and splintered threshold and into the living room, arms tensed in front of him, taking in the room along the sightline of the Beretta.

Single level; no stairs. Dusty sheets draped over a couch and chair to the right. Twin framed oil landscapes flanking a single window guarded by floor-length maroon drapes. Older television on a stand. Magazines on an end table, glossy covers dulled by dust. Open bedroom door to the left. Stripped, stained mattress. The mirror on the inside of the open closet door reflected a rack of empty hangers, nothing beneath. A bathroom door stood ajar beside the bedroom. Shower curtain missing, the toilet and rim of the tub stained by rust. Mirror on the medicine chest spider-webbed.

The buzzing of flies drew him toward the kitchen ahead before being drowned out by the rising sirens and the grumble of tires on gravel.

He paused at the entryway, flattening his back to the wall between the living room and the kitchen. Deep breath. In. Out. Ducking around the corner, he scrutinized the room with a sweep of the pistol. To his left: white refrigerator, ice chest-style handles; oak cabinets; gas stove; green Formica countertops freckled with crumbs. To his right: dinette, two chairs, no dust; microwave behind, green numbers flashing the wrong time.

He glanced at his watch. Twenty-two hours, twenty-one minutes.

At the back of the kitchen, the sink was overflowing with foul-smelling pots, above which bloated black flies swarmed, seething over the tarnished copper. They darted in and out of the hole to the garbage disposal. The gold sashes covering the window behind were alive with them.

Carver turned to his right and passed through the mudroom without slowing, bursting out through the rear door onto a windswept stretch of hard dirt. A worn path led to the corrugated aluminum building, the slanted roof covered by screaming crows jostling for position.

Voices rose in tumult from the far side of the house, now a black silhouette against the swirling red cherries. Footsteps thundered hollowly on the front porch and pounded the packed earth as they converged upon his position.

Twenty-two hours, twenty-two minutes. There was no time to wait for backup.

He grabbed the knob and threw the door inward, thrusting the Beretta through in front of him. The sour smell of spoiled meat and feces swatted him in the face. Frenzied talons clamored on the roof, the frantic cawing reaching a crescendo. Twin slants of mote-infested light stained the straw floor crimson, illuminating a bare room the size of the entire house, with only a single fold-out table with a laptop on it in the middle of the vast emptiness. The screen faced away from him, deeper into the vacuous space.

You'll never find her in time.

He sprinted to the table and spun the laptop so he could see the image he knew would be there. The girl had slouched forward onto the concrete floor, her face buried beneath her tangled blonde hair, her flesh a sickly shade of gray under the single overhead bulb. Her shoulders trembled almost imperceptibly with a soundless inhalation.

"She's still alive," he shouted over his shoulder.

He yanked on the computer until he met resistance. The power cord was strung to an orange extension cord and buried beneath the straw, but it was the network cable stretching deeper into the outbuilding that he sought. Following its length, he stomped as he pulled it from the straw, listening until he heard the change from solid cement to something metallic.

Carver fell to his knees and cleared away the detritus, uncovering a rusted iron hatch, secured to the concrete by an eye-bolt and a padlock. A single shot destroyed the lock and he frantically lifted the hatch, revealing a set of wooden stairs leading down into the earth.

Steeling himself against the intensified smell, he pointed the barrel toward the landing below, and slowly began the decent into hell.

Twenty-two hours and thirty-two minutes earlier, Carver had known he was close, but he had no idea just how close. He had been pursuing the monster for the last two months, since the discovery of the body of eleven year-old Ashlee Porter. A vagrant had found her right foot in the Dumpster behind a convenience store, but the resultant search had only turned up eight more parts in trash receptacles across the west side of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Fortunately, her head had been among them. Angela Downing's corpse had been found similarly dismembered in the hollow trunk of a lightning-struck cottonwood outside of Brush, Colorado three weeks later, and only two weeks prior to unearthing the right hand of Jessica Fenton from the bank of the Big Thompson River southeast of Greeley. By a stroke of luck, one of her fingerprints had escaped the claws of the crawfish, providing her identification since they never did find her head, or any of the rest of her for that matter. All three had presented with lacerations of the palmar surface of the distal phalanges, broken fingernails, and trauma to the cuticles consistent with a futile struggle against a hard surface while being pinned from behind. The two salvaged heads had exhibited bruising on the occipital and temporal regions, betraying repeated blows from behind, and areas where fistfuls of hair had been torn from the scalp. Angela Downing's left ankle had been chafed to the exposed muscle by what residual traces of metal confirmed to be an iron manacle.

The Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory had been able to conclude that all three victims had been exsanguinated prior to being butchered. The superficial strata of their skin showed elevated levels of ammonia absorption consistent with chronic exposure to urine and feces, a trait common in people held captive in close confines over an extended period of time. Unfortunately, they had been unable to separate any viable DNA from those of the corpses.

Until that point, his day had been spent following up on one dead-end lead after another and he had been both physically and emotionally exhausted by the time he returned to his townhouse that night, take-out Chinese under one arm and a week's worth of forgotten mail under the other. He had left his briefcase in the car, knowing that if he brought it in with him, he would be staring down the barrel of another sleepless night spent poring over the pictures of dismembered little girls. For a moment, he thought he had been right on the monster's heels, but he had come to the grim realization that there would be no more progress until his worst nightmare became reality.

Until they discovered the next body.

He set the soggy brown paper sack on the table and the mail on the eating bar. The sink beneath the lone window was brimming with dishes he'd at least managed to rinse, the curtains riffling gently behind. The counter beside was littered with crumpled fast food wrappers. He was about to open the fridge to grab a Killian's when he saw the note he had affixed to it only the night before: Buy Beer. Shaking his head, he shrugged off his suit jacket and drank some water straight from the faucet. He'd just head upstairs and change his clothes, come back down, choke down a little Mongolian Beef, and pray sleep claimed him before he again broke down and cracked open the case files.

Passing through the darkened living room, the light from the kitchen reflecting through the layer of dust on the TV, he ascended the stairs one at a time, feeling aches upon pains throughout his body. There were three doors at the top of the landing overlooking the great room: to the left, the master bedroom; straight ahead, a bathroom; and to the right, the second bedroom, which served as his study. He always kept them open. Always.

The door to the study was closed.

He took a deep breath to focus his senses. There was no time to hesitate or whoever was inside would realize that he knew. He pulled the Smith & Wesson Model 19 snubnose from his ankle holster and jammed it under his waistband, untucking his button-down to hang in front. Drawing his Beretta, he kicked the door in with a crack of the destroyed trim.

The room beyond was dark, as he knew it would be, but he immediately sensed someone else in there with him. He could smell their sweat, rank breath, ammonia---

Cold metal pressed against the base of his skull behind his left ear as he entered the room. An even colder, trembling hand with spider-like fingers closed around his and relieved him of the Beretta.

"Why couldn't you find them?" a voice whimpered directly into his ear. It was somewhat effeminate and dry, a freshly sharpened scythe through wheat.

"I must have been close."

"I never meant to hurt them. But I know, I know. I did. They're dead, aren't they? Dead, dead, dead!" the man said, jabbing him in the head with the barrel of the gun.

Carver staggered deeper into the room, colliding with his desk chair.

"Sit down," the man said, training both guns on him through the darkness. The mismatched pair of pistols shook in his hands. There was a rustling of papers as he sat on the desk. "I have to show you. So you'll understand. You have to see."

He turned the computer monitor on the desk toward him and pressed the power button with the barrel of the gun in his right hand. A weak glow blossomed from the screen, highlighting his face. His unblinking eyes bulged and tears streamed down his cheeks. The muscles in his face twitched spastically.

"This wasn't what I wanted," the man sobbed. "It wasn't supposed to be like this. No one can help them. No one can---"

Before the man could turn back to him, Carver pulled the snubnose from beneath his waistband, raised it, and fired. He caught a glimpse of the man's profile, silhouetted by the light from the screen, as he flipped backwards over the desk, a pinwheel of blood following him from the spouting hole in his ruined chest.

Carver lunged from the chair and leapt up onto the desk, training the revolver on the heap of humanity crumpled against the base of his bookcase. The man shuddered and tried to rise. Carver dropped down beside him and kicked both of the guns away. He was just about to drag the man back around to the front of the desk when he heard a soft voice behind him.

He turned to face the monitor on the bloody desktop.

There was a hiss of static, a droning monotone interrupted by the sound of labored breathing.

"Please," the voice whispered, barely discernible above the din. "Mommy... Please..."

A girl was sprawled on a filthy concrete floor, naked save the brown skein of refuse and blood coating her body. Her tangled blonde hair covered her face, framed by both hands, still feebly trying to push her up from the ground. A thick chain trailed from the manacle on her ankle to an eyebolt on the nicotine-yellow concrete block wall.

A single overhead bulb illuminated the room, casting a dirty manila glare over everything, turning the spatters on the walls and the dried pools on the floor black.

"Jesus," Carver gasped.

There were no windows in the girl's prison. Her respirations were already becoming jerky, agonal. She was asphyxiating.

"Where is she?"

A burbling of fluid metamorphosed into crying.

"Where is she?" Carver shouted.

The man whimpered. Blood drained from the corners of his mouth. Trembling, he tried to stand, but collapsed again.

Carver grabbed him by the shirt, lifting him from the ground and slamming him against the shelves. Blood exploded past the man's lips, hot against Carver's face. "Where is she?"

The man's head fell forward onto Carver's shoulder.

"You'll never find her in time," he rasped. The burbling tapered to a hiss as heat streamed down Carver's back, and then finally to nothing at all.

Carver eased down the stairs. They were sticky and made the sound of peeling masking tape each time he lifted a foot. There was no sound from ahead. The only light was a pale stain creeping along the concrete floor at the bottom from beneath a rusted iron door with an X riveted across it.

Footsteps stampeded behind and above him.

Carver licked his lips and seated his finger firmly on the trigger. He leaned his shoulder against the door and prepared to grab the handle, but the pressure caused the door to open inward with a squeal of the hinges, allowing more light to spill onto the landing. Cringing against the stench, he shoved the door and ducked into the small chamber, swinging his pistol from left to right.

Twenty-two hours and twenty-three minutes.

He had never stood a chance.

The laptop monitor to his left, balanced on top of a workbench crusted with blood, still showed the image of the girl collapsed on the floor, and the web camera mounted above still faced into the room, but it had all been a ruse.

Beneath the harsh brass glare, he lowered the Beretta and stepped deeper into the cell. In the middle of the floor where the girl had once been was a stack of body parts, a pyramid of severed appendages built upon her torso, her head balanced precariously on top, facing the doorway. Her lank hair stuck to the blood on her face, eyelids peeled back in an expression of accusation, lips pulped and split over fractured teeth.

She'd been dead before the monster had even revealed himself to Carver, her agonizing death previously recorded and broadcast after the fact.

Carver averted his eyes from the carnage as the sounds of voices and pounding treads filled the room.

A full-length mirror had been recently affixed to the gore-stained gray wall directly ahead. A single word was painted in blood near the top.

Killer.

Beneath the word, he stared at his own reflection.