hunting and some of the villages on Nias had switched over to taking the right hands of their enemies, a captured warrior’s hand was often lopped off while he was still alive, and that death invariably resulted within a predictable period of time: two to three minutes.
And the glee, the pure bubbling elation of P and E when they put B’s hypothesis to the test and found he was right, struck Pender as more purely, repulsively pornographic than all the sex scenes that had preceded it, even the ones that didn’t have a murder for a centerpiece. P was as boastful of the way E developed the ability to predict the precise moment of death as he was of her “overdeveloped female attributes,” to which he couldn’t help referring every two or three pages.
By the time the manuscript ended, with a secondhand description of what sounded convincingly like Fran Bendt’s murder at the hands of Lewis Apgard, Pender had reached the boiling point. He didn’t always hate the serial killers he pursued. Sometimes he felt sorry for them, especially the schizophrenics. They couldn’t help themselves, couldn’t have stopped themselves if they’d wanted to. But he hated this batch with a white-hot passion. And in a way, Apgard was the most revolting of the four. The other three were clearly psychopaths, but if the manuscript was to be believed, Apgard had his wife killed out of sheer greed, of which the Bendt murder was merely an offshoot.
Suddenly the worst part of Pender’s current predicament became not knowing whether any or all of the others in the cave had survived the explosions. There were no bodies in this chamber and no blood save for his own. The possibility that any or all of the killers had survived, and that they had the little girl, was troubling enough, but the possibility they might get away with it was maddening, and made the prospect of waiting passively to die or be rescued, without knowing, seem unbearable.
Without any way to gauge how long his air supply would last, or even if there was really any danger of running out of oxygen, Pender began to consider the likelihood that he might be backing the wrong horse. Because if he had only hours left, he was going to die anyway, and if he had days, then all he’d accomplish by lying there doing nothing would be to
But he could dig. By God, he could dig. If there were rescuers, he could meet them halfway. And if he didn’t make it, they’d find dirt under his fingernails and know he died trying. And he’d take the incriminating manuscript along with him. They find him, they find it; they find it, they take down Apgard, Bennie, and both Epps. Hang ’em side by side. Man, thought Pender, it’d be worthwhile staying alive just to see those bastards swing.
7
The Fire and Rescue Chief, Toger Erlaksson, took charge of the rescue effort as soon as he arrived. The Erlakssons were one of the Twelve Danish Families, but there wasn’t much Scandinavian DNA left by Toger’s generation. He and Chief Coffee got along well, except at budget time, when they were competing for pieces of the same limited public safety pie.
It was decided to go in from the side, through the original tunnel, using hand tools and shoring up as they went. If there were any signs of mudslides, it was agreed, they’d have to pull their people out, sink an air shaft from above if possible, and wait for the rain to stop before proceeding.
Meanwhile Dawson went exploring on her own, looking for the hole through which she’d seen the bats exiting last summer. It wasn’t easy to find, in the dark, in the rain, especially as she was looking for a vertical shaft, a literal hole in the ground. Later, she would realize she had passed the spot at least once, because it wasn’t until the second time she smelled the funky, acrid smell of the guano that she realized she had to be close to the entrance to the bats’ cave. She shined her lantern around in a full circle and spotted the dark hollow in the side of the hill.
The closer she approached, the worse the stench. The hole was a few feet high, but only a foot wide; the shaft traveled horizontally a few feet, then dived straight down. “Anybody in there?” she shouted. “Pender? Any-”
A leathery rustling of wings, a cacophony of high-pitched squeaks and squeals. Dawson threw herself flat against the ground and covered her head with her arms as the huge creatures came streaming out of the hole, filling the sky above her with swift, darting, angular shapes so flat against the dark sky that they seemed two- dimensional, like swooping kites. Suddenly the phrase
But at least she’d found another entrance to the cave system, if it was a system. She left her spare flashlight behind as a beacon and made her way back to the scene of the rescue efforts to let the others know.
Bennie froze. He thought he’d heard someone shouting. The sound was not repeated. He shrugged and went back to work. Rather than hack Ina Emily’s hand off with the saw blade of the Swiss Army knife, he was working the cutting blade through the radiocarpal joint between the wrist and the hand, slicing easily through muscles and tendons instead of trying to saw through bone.
When the hand came free, he slipped it into the freezer bag containing Mrs. Apgard’s hand and resealed the bag.
So: six hands altogether, and three freezer bags stuffed with hundred-dollar bills-a worthy tribute, when the time came to cross the bridge to the other side. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Ama Phil was fond of saying. Bennie had always taken it literally, and made it his motto. He’d cross that bridge when he came to it, but he hoped that wouldn’t be until he’d returned to Lolowa’asi, to reclaim the rest of his legacy.
The path forked. Bennie followed it to the left, to the Bat Cave. The bats, which had been coming and going all night, were no longer there. He leaned into the chamber. The stench was unbearable. He ducked back out, held his breath, leaned in again, twisted his head around to direct the narrow red laser beam of his helmet lamp up the chimney. He saw that it narrowed to a diameter of less than a foot before turning horizontal. No exit there-he turned back.
8
Digging continued through the night. There had been no mudslides. Apparently Apgard’s grenade (they knew it was a grenade-they’d found the pin in the first hour of digging, and continued to find fragments of shrapnel) had already brought the more unstable sections of the hillside down to their angle of repose.
By dawn the rain had turned to a steady drizzle. The tunnel, shored by timbers supporting a platform of interlocking iron pipes, was deep enough by then for four volunteers to lie head to foot on their backs, passing buckets of newly excavated earth over their heads to the bucket brigade waiting outside the mouth of the tunnel. Every fifteen minutes, the personnel changed and more shoring was added. It was a slow process but a steady one.
At the other end of the blocked tunnel, Pender had cleared a few feet with his bare hands, dredging at least his own weight in dirt and rocks and piling them in a cairn at the bottom of the tunnel.
But the farther up the tunnel he went, the worse the air quality. His breathing grew deep and labored, the pressure in his head seemed to be building, there was a ringing in his ears, an acid taste in his mouth, and a burning in his nostrils.
Pender, who knew far too much about far too many ways to die (an occupational hazard), recognized these as symptoms of carbon dioxide poisoning. Still he refused to give up. Instead, every time he dragged a pile of debris back down to the cave, he’d fill his lungs, crawl back into the tunnel, and continue digging for as long as he could hold his breath, then crawl back out with the debris for another gulp of good old Oh-Two.
The time came, however, when he just couldn’t make that uphill crawl one more time. Back to Plan A: conserve oxygen. Pender dragged his makeshift pallet to the bottom of the tunnel, where the air quality seemed to be a little better, aimed his flashlight up the tunnel, lay on his back with his head pillowed on the Epp manuscript, closed his eyes, and waited for rescue or death.
