limestone chamber groaned like a living thing.
Dust flew everywhere, gritty and stinging, clouds of it, coating hair and skin and clothes. Ally shook with terror.
Trish pulled her still closer, wishing she could hug the girl but unable to do so with her chained hands, and then her back sizzled with a hot wire of pain.
One of the hailstones had slashed a horizontal wound across her shoulder blades. She hissed through clenched teeth.
Other, larger debris tumbled down the sinkhole, thudding and bouncing. A fist-sized projectile smacked into the wall a few inches away.
Ally screamed.
“There, there.” Trish pressed her mouth close to the girl’s ear. “There, there.”
Earthquake.
The thought registered distantly in Charles Kent’s mind as the closet shook and Barbara and Philip and Judy cried out in distress.
Around them, a bedlam of clashing noise: rattle of bifold doors, groan of walls, squeal of floorboards, and the clothes hangers coming down in a clattering cascade.
Another hanger pole was jostled free of its mounting. An overhead shelf tipped forward, spilling shoe boxes and hats and scarves. Judy was screaming.
An hour ago Charles would have been afraid. Now he was past fear, past feelings of any kind. He was very tired. He’d never been so tired, not even after pulling all-nighters at law school, cramming for finals, shoveling knowledge into his skull with the joyless fervor of compulsion.
Back then his exhaustion had been temporary, certain to be relieved by rest, but now there could be no rest ever again.
Ally was dead.
The gunshots Barbara had heard-there could be no other explanation.
The tremors died away. Sudden silence, broken only by Judy’s fitful sobs. Her husband comforted her while the beam of his flashlight traced an unsteady course around the closet, passing over heaps of fallen clothes and swirls of dust and a broken scatter of light bulbs that had been stored with other emergency supplies.
“What … what in God’s name … what …” Judy’s question was a moan of fear.
“Quake,” Barbara stammered, her voice raw from her earlier shouting.
Philip shook his head. “I’m not so sure. Felt more like-well, like an explosion.”
“Explosion” Barbara made a hiccupping noise. “Why would they set off an explosion Charles already opened the safe. Didn’t you, Charles”
He heard his name and understood that some sort of answer was expected.
“Opened the safe,” he echoed. “Yes.”
“Then they wouldn’t need to blow it open. So it must have been a quake.”
Philip touched her arm. “It was. Of course it was.”
Barbara stood staring blindly at the damage, her eyes wide and wild, and then she sagged, giving up.
“Or maybe not,” she whispered. “Maybe you’re right. First shots, now this. Oh, dear God, what’s going on out there”
All the life seeped out of her, and she dropped her head, too weary for tears.
Charles paid little attention to the exchange. He was thinking of the Weimaraner named Toto the family had put to sleep last year after the heartrending discovery of cancer. He remembered watching death creep into the dog’s eyes, remembered seeing the alert stare blur into glazed emptiness.
Ally’s eyes must be glassy like Toto’s, her gaze unfocused and unblinking.
Hard to face that fact. Hard to make it real. But there was something worse.
He would survive.
There it was: the blunt and simple truth. He would go on. He would put all this behind him. He would spend his wife’s money and after a time, rarely think of Ally at all.
Cain was a monster, but he was not the only one. Charles knew that now. He had peered deep inside himself, and at his core there was nothing. Simply nothing.
An earthquake, even the detonation of a bomb, seemed of trifling consequence when compared to that.
42
Trish didn’t know how long she huddled with Ally, whether it was thirty seconds or thirty minutes, but finally the noise diminished and the debris settled.
Her ears rang. Her cheeks were wet with tears. Her whole body shook. She remembered sitting on the beach near the dock, racked by shivers and nausea. This was like that.
Come on, keep it together. No medals for quitters.
She decided she was okay. She wasn’t going to faint or vomit or fall apart.
And she and Ally were alive. They’d made it. They’d escaped from the cellar, survived a bomb, for God’s sake, an actual bomb.
Good job, Robinson.
The voice in her mind was Pete Wald’s. She wondered if he had been grinning when he said it-that smug, patronizing grin.
She didn’t think so.
Lifting her head, she looked around, beaming her flashlight through a gray sea of dust.
The ray, fanning wide, illuminated a limestone gallery opening on negotiable passages to her right and left. Winding conduits, lumpy and folded, glossy in the light, impenetrably dark elsewhere. She thought of a TV documentary she’d seen: a fiber-optic camera inserted into somebody’s digestive track, snaking through intestinal corridors.
In the belly of the beast, she thought, not knowing quite where the words came from or what they meant.
She felt weirdly isolated from her environment-deafened by the blast, barely able to see in the dusty gloom, smelling and tasting only the chalk that clogged her nostrils and mouth. With her hands manacled, she was restricted even in what she could reach out and touch. She was a prisoner in some bizarre dream without the reality of physical sensation.
Except for pain. No shortage of that. Pain in her every protesting muscle-and her left ankle, injured in the fall-and her back, slashed by one of the hailstones.
Not really hailstones, of course. But what
She aimed the flashlight lower. Littering the cavern floor were chunks of concrete and dislodged limestone, intermingled with sticks of blackened wood. Remnants of the Ashcroft heirlooms, glowing feebly, logs in a hearth.
And everywhere, strewn like seeds, were fragments of metal.
She picked up the closest one, dropped it instantly. Red hot.
It appeared to be part of a knife’s serrated blade, mangled by the blast and by multiple ricochets.
Only a few had trickled into the cave through the drainage hole, but the things must have been thick as locusts in the cellar.
If she and Ally had been up there …
Pincushions. Dartboards.
Handcuffed, she couldn’t reach behind her to examine the incision across her shoulder blades. But she hadn’t lost any mobility, so apparently no major muscles had been severed.
Rest would be nice right now, a long rest after a hot shower and something cold to drink.
No such luck. Despite exhaustion, despite the pain making multiple claims on her body, she had to keep going, had to get away from here-before Cain arrived to confirm his kills.
She turned toward Ally, curled like a shrimp, floured in dust. Cuts crosshatched her legs and arms.
Gently she shook the girl alert. Ally stirred, saying something, but Trish couldn’t hear it over the clangor in
