Scream Catcher Page 23

  If I try to swim it, I’ll drown.

  He moves his way upstream for maybe thirty yards, then downstream until he comes to the edge of the pool. Despite the search he comes up with nothing that would allow him an easy means of getting across the open water. No big rocks, no felled tree, no shallow land bridge.

  He makes his way back to his original position.

  In the back and front of his mind he feels the allotted time growing tighter with each passing second. Even with the additional ten Life Points he guesstimates that the remaining minutes have dwindled down to six or five. Maybe less.

  Question: why am I wasting time?

  Answer: the demon.

  The time for thinking has come to an end.

  Jude knows there’s no alternative other than to go for it. Having made the decision, he stuffs the end of the Maglite into the waistband of his jeans. He approaches the edge of the whitewater, gulps down his dread like bad medicine, jumps.

  Feet first.

  * * *

  The swiftly moving whitewater acts like a giant hand that drags him downstream in a direct path for the drowning pool. He holds out his hands for anything he can grip. Body twisting and turning in the water, he grabs on to a rock with both hands and arms. For maybe a second or two, he manages to stop his downstream progress towards the pool. But it doesn’t take long for the smooth, moss-covered rock to betray him. As the frigid water pulls at his body and the rock slips out of his hands, Jude feels his body once more being carried away.

  But instead of panic, an explosion of anger erupts inside of him.

  It builds up inside his skull like steam inside a pressure valve. It builds up and up until nothing matters anymore. There is only the need to beat the stream, to beat his fear, to put an end to Hector “the Black Dragon” Lennox and the kill game; to get his wife and son safely off the mountain.

  Despite the pull of the rushing water, Jude yanks the Maglite from out of his pants, flicks it on. He ducks under the stream’s surface, shines the light in the direction of the opposite bank. An instant passes before he locates a felled tree that’s been completely submerged by heavy water. A tree and a hand-hold he might have missed if he kept his head safely above the surface.

  As he comes upon the tree, he takes aim at one of its thick branches.

  With a quick but sure grip, he grabs hold of the branch, grasps it tightly. Pulling himself in towards the tree, he plants his right foot in the secure place where the branch meets the tree’s thick trunk. Then, with his last breath, he heaves his torso up and over the stream bank.

  * * *

  He stands.

  Despite dwindling time and the water and sweat pouring off his body, Jude feels oddly proud of himself. He swears he must be smiling. He can feel the muscles in his jaws constricting, tightening.

  For certain a smile … Despite everything. Damn his demon.

  At the same time his rain-soaked body shivers. He shines the light upstream, maybe sixty degrees to the right of the stream bank. Even from twenty-five or more yards he can make out the narrow, prone bundle that lies on the forest floor. The bundle reflects the bright white light—a human-sized bundle that has to be Rosie. From where Jude stands he can see that it is located in the center of a well worn trail.

  Just lying there, waiting for me … I’m beating this son of a bitch at his own game.

  He bursts into an all out sprint along the trail in the direction of his wife.

  For the first time since having woken up inside the forest, he feels home-free. He feels the adulation that comes from beating the kill game. Or at least, one of its levels. He is certain of succeeding; at winning his wife’s life back; at beating the demon.

  Not ten feet of trail separates Jude from Rosie when the earth beneath him collapses.

  73

  Assembly Point Peninsula

  Friday, 2:21 A.M.

  Having pulled the black Chevy Suburban onto the gravel drive, Lino immediately spots a wide open front door. The open door confirms that the worst has occurred. Coming to a full stop, he draws his sidearm, bolts up the slate walk, enters into the large, three-story, split-level log home.

  With a black penlight Maglite gripped in the same hand as his .9mm Glock, he aims both barrel and light beam to his immediate left, in the direction of the living room. While at first the light shines on the big wood ceiling beams and then the big stone fireplace that makes up the entire opposite wall, it settles on the clear vase that lay on its side atop the coffee table in a pool of its own water. For a few seconds he allows the light to remain on the vase as if waiting for it to do something—magically raise itself up maybe. Until he lifts the light just a little and spots a birdcage, its barred door sprung wide open, the little yellow bird lying lifeless on its back.

  The L.G.P.D. Lieutenant raises his free hand, smooths out his Wyatt Earp mustache handles with index finger and thumb, takes a couple of careful steps inside the empty room. Everywhere he looks he discovers thick white candles that have burned down to almost nothing, the wax having melted and hardened onto the flat wood surfaces that support them like lava from a volcano.

  The smell of smoke pervades the air.

  The acrid, toxic smoke begins to burn his eyes and the interiors of his nostrils. Still Lino turns, follows the acrid odor across the stone vestibule floor and up the short flight of stairs that leads to the upper floor. He enters the first bedroom on his left, sees right away that some of the room has been burned out, the bed completely destroyed, still smoldering.

  He leaves the room, makes his way into the master bedroom at the end of the hall. It’s there he makes out the now cutaway ropes that have been tied to each of the bed’s four posts. He can’t help but make out the pair of discarded panties that rest on the wood floor. They are the large panties of a pregnant woman.

  Just the sight of them gives him pause.

  When he steps inside, the pointy tip of his right cowboy boot butts up against the fat end of a baseball bat. Further on inside the room he spots a wide open, empty rifle or shotgun safety case laid out plastic-side-down on the floor, the double-barrel twelve gauge it stored lying only inches away, its breaches cracked, both live shells scattered beside it.

  It doesn’t take a whole lot of detecting talent for Lino to know precisely what has happened here. Standing up straight and facing the open door, he cups his mouth with both hands.

  “Parish!” he shouts. “Jude Parish!”

  But as expected, he gets no response.

  He resumes the check on the rest of the home’s interior anyway, does it quickly and efficiently, finds nothing other than a shattered cordless phone inside the kitchen. Heading back out front in the light rain to the Suburban, he sits his tall, wiry body half in and half out of the open driver’s side door. He’s about to close the door when out the corner of his left eye he spots the small, square-shaped piece of white paper floating in the middle of a rain puddle.

  74

  Tongue Mountain

  Friday, 2:29 A.M.

  Jude never saw it coming.

  The pit’s opening was carefully covered over with a Viet Cong-style trap door camouflaged with dirt, pine needles and green leaves—disguised to appear precisely like a typical section of well-worn trail flanked on both sides by forest floor. Immediately he yanks himself onto his knees, sucks a breath to fill the diaphragm-crushing void where the air has been knocked out of him. It takes maybe a couple of seconds for the breathless panic time to elapse. But when it does, he forces himself painfully back up onto his feet.

  Raising his head he looks up and out of the roughly rectangular-shaped hole onto the rainy night. When he shines the Maglite against the sides of the narrow pit, he can plainly see that the four neatly excavated walls extend approximately ten feet above him on all four sides. He sets hands flat against the muddy clay walls, looks for something to grip, something that will allow him the chance to inch his way up and out. But the rain makes the walls a slick impossibility for
climbing.

  There is nothing to grip other than mud; layer upon layer of wet clay.

  Jude feels an ever-deepening frustration, flat out panic. He feels demoralized, defeated. Just when he’s come so close to rescuing Rosie in the time allotted, he’s failed her miserably.

  Jude presses chin against sternum.

  He releases a resigned breath as if it were his last.

  How can he possibly help his wife and son if he can’t help himself?

  Dropping to his knees, he collapses into a sitting position on the drenched, mud-covered floor. He presses his back up against the wall, makes a fist, raises it high, swings it down fast. But the fisted hand doesn’t slap against solid rock or wet mud pack as expected. Instead the fist hits something that feels more like flesh and bone.

  Startled, Jude bounds up fast, shines the Maglite onto the flat pit floor.

  75

  Tongue Mountain

  Friday, 2:31 A.M.

  The severed head sends Jude careening back against the far pit wall. He doesn’t want to look at it. But then he can’t help but shine the light onto the lifeless white face, as if his curiosity is stronger than revulsion. The wide open eyes, the frowning, almost disappointed expression: it somehow calls him closer.

  He immediately recognizes who the head belongs to.

  In his overheated mind he recalls the cell phone pictures. Images of Ray Fuentes’s abandoned Jeep Cruiser and the old cop himself bound with duct tape, down on his knees, knife pressed up against his neck.

  He can still hear Ray’s screams.

  Jude shines the bright Maglite onto the white, blood-drained face and he stares into his old friend’s milky eyes. He can’t say why he does it, or how he works up the courage to get himself to do it. But he takes a step forward, bends down, reaches out with his right hand, slowly brings his fingers to Ray’s eyelids. He’s only an inch or two from touching them when the snake crawls out from behind the head and, with its jaw wide open, lunges at his arm.

  Jude rears back abruptly, collapses onto his backside.

  By luck or by divine providence he has somehow evaded the strike.

  Heart thumping, Jude eyes the gray-black rattlesnake as it slides its way towards him along the pit floor. He knows he can’t give the snake a chance to reach him, pin him into a corner, strike at him a second time. He must try to kill the snake the easiest and quickest way possible or he will be no better off than Ray Fuentes.

  Standing, Jude waits for just the right moment when it is nearly upon him.

  That’s when he raises up his boot heel, brings it down hard onto the snake’s head.

  Grinding skin and cartilage into the earth, he eyes the dead snake. He sprays the Maglite onto its crushed head, its blood-streaked skin and the thick white froth that oozes from its mouth and nostrils. Kicking its now lifeless, rubbery body into the far corner of the pit, Jude steps back over to Ray’s head. He bends down at the knees, reaches out with his left hand, closes his eyes. The skin feels cold and damp against his fingertips. Just touching the dead skin makes his stomach jump and twist inside out.

  When it is done, Jude pulls himself up off the dirt floor.

  He raises up his head, faces four walls and a hopeless black night.

  He screams.

  76

  Tongue Mountain

  Friday, 2:35 A.M.

  Night vision scope strapped to his head, pressed tight against eye sockets, Black Dragon attempts to zoom in on the first-person Player. From his angle high up on an open rock face, he can easily make out the radiant green pit opening. But what he cannot do is see directly inside it. Still, he can’t help but imagine the wide-eyed, open mouthed Help-me-Christ-oh-help-me-somebody-please! expression that surely must paint the Player’s face. Black Dragon pictures the supercop’s severed head! He contemplates the fun the Player must be having down deep inside the pit. It’s a shame he had to give the order to mutilate Fuentes. It’s a shame the old cop had to go and lose his head. But sometimes murder becomes a necessary component of a better kill game. And no way is Black Dragon about to drag all two-hundred-thirty pounds of doughnut-bred policeman all the way out into the woods. So in the interest of the grand design, he instructed his kill game student, T-Bred, to make certain that Fuentes gave up his head, but not before catching his screams.

  A glance to his Tutima wristwatch reveals that the game’s first level of play is nearly completed. Black Dragon knows that the time has come for the Player to use its brain, think of a way to free itself from the pit, start the rescue of objective number two. This will be the part of the game in which the Player must ignore the emotions swimming through its veins. Namely the sadness and desperation it feels for its soon to be dead wife.

  Wiping spittle from his injured mouth, Black Dragon jumps down off the rock, lands squarely on two feet. He pulls the satellite phone from the utility belt, depresses Send.

  * * *

  Office of the Warren County Prosecutor

  Friday, 2:37 A.M.

  The County Prosecutor’s world is falling apart before her eyes. As she surely knew it one day would. In the deep night of an early blacked-out morning, she sits alone in her dim eighth-floor village office, working on what is left of the Chevis, sinking deeper and deeper into her nightmare with every tug on a quart bottle that is quickly approaching bone dry.

  If only I could sleep … sleep forever … sleep the sleep of the dead.

  But she knows that for the remainder of this night, rest will prove impossible. It was power and respect she sought when she ran for County Prosecutor and won. It was approval, love and an escape from her redneck past that made her want to win that election no matter the cost.

  Now it’s her inbred sense of responsibility that keeps the blond-haired, hazel-eyed woman bound to her office chair, makes her unlock and open the top desk drawer to set a signed and sealed plain white No. 10-sized business envelope inside. It is certainly responsibility that makes her draw up the one page, single-spaced apology the envelope contains—an apology that took six drafts and eight hours to perfect. An apology that details her fall from grace—from her initial contact with Hector Lennox back when she was putting together her run for County Prosecutor to his first arrest for the tanning factory kill game to his second arrest for the murder behind Sweeney’s Gym to this final night just hours before the Preliminary Hearing. It’s all there—the details of her relationship with the scream catcher—neatly spelled out in a one-page, handwritten apologia.

  She closes the drawer back up, locks it with the gold key.

  Turning completely around in her swivel chair, she faces the massive Tongue Mountain that overlooks the village rooftops from a distance of a mile away. Maybe it is completely hidden by darkness, but she knows how the mountain valley and gorge rises green/brown and foreboding over the town. Like Vesuvius over Pompeii, the mountain represents protection and security for some. But for others it evokes a sense of doom and fright, especially during the annual summer rattlesnake migration.

  From where she sits, she makes out the thin pitch-forked lightning that strikes the peak’s rocky surface. And something else too. Something that resembles a light. Man-made light. Like a flashlight only brighter, flickering on and off and on again. A single, insect-like spec of light that cuts through the rich darkness.

  Could somebody actually be up there on a night like this? Could some stupid fool be braving the snake migration? Or is it just the whiskey playing tricks on my brain?

  Then it comes to her that someone might be trapped up there on Tongue—someone who has no hope for communicating with emergency officials. Not in this severe storm; not in this blackout. She might be finished as the Warren County Prosecutor, but the least she can do now is attempt to place a call to the authorities on behalf of the poor soul or souls trapped up there on the mountain.

  Lifting the phone from the cradle, she drunkenly attempts to finger 9-1-1. But the best she can manage is 0-#- and following that, a complete whiff.
Still she waits for a response and an operator to come on the line. But all she calls up is a good dose of dead air.

  Blackout …

  “Damn,” she slurs.

  Gripping the sides of her swivel chair, she tries to lift herself out. If she can’t get the authorities on the phone, she will go to them in person. After all, someone’s life is at stake on Tongue Mountain.

  Putting all her strength into lifting up her body, her brain feels as if it were soft ice cream oozing out her ears and nostrils. Her eyes roll back into her head. She falls back into the chair, nearly spills over onto her head.

  Sucking in a deep breath she whispers the words to an old Talking Heads song, “My God, what have I done?”

  Lowering her head into her hands, she tries desperately to sob.

  But there are no more tears for the proud and the damned.

  77

  Tongue Mountain

  Friday, 2:47 A.M.

  Skin shredding, tearing itself away from his bones: Jude swears that’s what it feels like when the cell phone vibrates and screams Ray’s voice in his pocket. He pulls the phone out, juggles it in his good hand, nearly drops it before thumbing Send.

  Time’s up, reads the Text Message.

  He can’t help but feel the pit floor dropping out from under him as he places the mouthpiece up against his face.

  “Kill you. I am going to kill you.”

  It’s supposed to be a scream. But his voice proves far less powerful. It emerges from his gaping mouth like a teeth-chattering whisper. Jude has proven himself a failure. He pictures Rosie’s face.