She saw no one, but she did see a large area of disturbed soil, soft and damp. It hadn’t been there the last time she had stood in that spot, when she was looking for Kali’s hiding place. Her skin prickled. This didn’t look good.
Pressing her hands hard into the top of the bluff, she reached up a knee to rest on its lip. With one shove, she was on level ground and moving fast. Something was very wrong with the way this soil had been dug out and replaced, then carelessly covered with dry leaves and pine needles.
Faye didn’t like the size of the filled-in hole, six feet long and two feet wide. It was the shape of a bed. Or of a grave.
She liked it even less when the soil shook and moved, disturbed by something beneath. The roiling dirt looked like something out of a cheap horror movie, but it was real. Something underground was alive.
Dropping to her knees, she stared at the unnatural shivering of the earth. The leaves strewn over its surface stirred and rustled, even though there was no wind to move them.
Then a hand rose through the dirt and leaves like a plant sprouting from seed. Its fingers were bloody, with broken fingernails, and they grasped at the empty air inches from Faye’s face. She lurched back and screamed. In answer, a raspy voice sounded from underground.
She needed to call 911, but she couldn’t spare the time to talk to a dispatcher while someone was smothering to death in front of her. Her Solomon-like solution was to dial the numbers, then toss the phone on the ground and hope that the dispatcher could use the signal to home in on her location.
The hand clenched into a fist and shuddered, then a second hand pushed through the dirt. The wordless groaning that had brought Faye to this place came again and it made the skin between her shoulder blades crawl. She wished for her trowel, but there was no time to climb back down and fetch it. The person buried here—this woman buried here—was suffocating before her eyes. For these were a woman’s hands, small, slender, with tapered fingers. There were eight rings on each of her hands, one for each finger, including the thumb, with an extra three stacked on each index finger.
Faye allowed herself an instant to think, “Thank God. It isn’t Kali,” then she got to work.
Faye used one forearm to rake the leaves off the makeshift grave, then began clawing at the dirt with her bare hands. Her own fingers were instantly bloody, like the hands of this woman trying to dig herself out of her own grave. Judging that the 911 dispatcher would have picked up, she yelled, “I’ve got a woman buried alive here. Send help while I dig her up. Sweetgum State Park, south side, near the creek.” Then she forgot about any help that might or might not come, and concentrated on digging.
Checking the location of the woman’s hands, she made a guess as to where her face was and started scraping at the dirt. It was hard-packed, as if the person doing the burying had stomped on it, but Faye made headway out of sheer persistence. Her frenzied digging forced dirt deep under her splintering fingernails, but there would be time later to think about how much it hurt.
When a single one of Faye’s fingertips made contact with something quivering and alive, she worked her hand through the dirt to palpate it. The flesh vibrated with the buried woman’s voice, and this told Faye that she had misjudged when she aimed her digging for the groaning sounds. She’d imagined that this would take her straight to the woman’s mouth and nose. Instead, her hand was on a throat gasping for air. Grateful that she’d dug gently enough to avoid crushing the woman’s windpipe, she shifted her efforts further away from the struggling hands.
A chin emerged from the soil, then a mouth, relentlessly opening and closing. Faye used her dirty finger to clear it of dirt, hoping that this was enough to open her airway, then she kept working upward.
A nose emerged and Faye did her best to clear that, too, of the dirt blocking the air that might save this woman’s life. It was bleeding, broken, perhaps by the feet stomping the dirt into a hard layer above her face and body. She did her best to bring the bleeding nose to light without hurting the woman even more.
Again, she yelled in the general direction of the phone, “She’s breathing now, but she’s hurt. Get somebody here quick.”
Gently, she cleared the buried eyes and forehead of their burden. The woman’s eyes didn’t open and the writhing of her arms didn’t slow, but her face was in open air and she was breathing, so Faye finally felt safe to stop digging and pick up her phone.
The dispatcher was saying, “Ma’am? “Ma’am? Are you there? I can barely hear you.”
“I’ve got a woman in distress, apparently the victim of an attempted murder who was buried alive. She’s hurt bad. I’m just inside the southern boundary of Sweetgum State Park.”
The 911 operator made a choking sound. Faye figured that terrible stories were a daily part of this guy’s job, but that this one shocked even him. He took a long snort of air like it was a bump of cocaine that might give him the jolt he needed to get through this.
It must have helped, because he rallied and said, “Buried alive, you say? Okay. Okay, I’m sending somebody right now. That’s a big park. Can you give me some details about where you’re at?”
“I’m about five hundred feet upstream from the south parking lot, across the
