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
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.
Beneath the word, he stared at his own reflection.
II
Kajika Dodge followed the buzzing sound to a small patch of shade beneath a creosote bush where the diamondback waited for him, testing his scent in darting flicks of its black tongue. It acknowledged the burlap sack at his side, ripening with the limp carcasses of its brethren, with a show of its vibrating rattle.
No matter. Soon enough it would join them.
Kajika readjusted his grip on his pinning stick.
The rattler seized the opportunity and shot diagonally out onto the blazing sand away from him.
He dropped the bag and with a single practiced stride was in position to drive the forked end of his stick onto the viper's neck when it vanished into a circular hole in the earth.
Kajika could only stare. A short length of three-inch PVC pipe protruded from the ground. The white plastic was smooth and unscarred, brand new. He wandered through this section of the desert at least once a week. It was a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts, an opportunity to pay homage to the desert from which his lifeblood had sprung. The pipe was definitely a recent addition, the only manmade interruption in the otherwise smooth sand.
Why would someone wander out into the middle of the Sonoran, a solid half-mile from the nearest dirt road, only to shove a length of pipe into the ground?
He crouched and pulled the plastic tube out of the earth. The sand immediately collapsed in its stead. He brushed it away with the prongs, revealing a shallow system of roots and a warren of darkness beneath.
The sand slowly slid back into place.
This was all wrong.
Wiping the streams of sweat from beneath the thick braid on his neck, he surveyed the landscape of golden
