Cavern Of The Damned, page 2
“Victim #2 in Zombie Quarantine. Sophia in Orca Attack,” she monotoned.
“She screams,” Frazier said.
“I kind of got that,” Grant said.
“A good scream is hard to find,” Frazier said. “And she delivers on demand.”
“She also appeals to females who need to feel better about themselves by comparison,” Willie said, “and males who value boobs over brains.”
“Piss off,” Phoebe said. She stopped short of hissing it.
“Children,” Frazier said. “Let’s play nice.”
Phoebe shot Willie a glare, then began to file her nails with a vengeance.
“So,” Grant said to Gil, “you’re Switzerland in their little war?”
“Gil doesn’t talk much, Doc.”
“I record sound,” Gil said. “I don’t make it.”
“Until it’s time for special effects,” Willie said. “He’s a master of the minor explosion, the creepy sound effect.”
“There’s an audience to satisfy,” Gil said.
“So if we don’t find anything interesting?” Grant said
“We still find something interesting,” Willie said. “I’ve been on three shoots with Frazier. He doesn’t disappoint.”
Grant sagged against the warm wall of the van. There’d be no career-enhancing anything coming out of this experience. He could discover a new species of proto-human but any proof he presented would be swept aside as the byproduct of this carnival show.
The van rolled onto Highway 101 out of Bozeman. Grant peered around into the front seats. What little there was of the town evaporated into farmland. “Where is it we’re going?”
Frazier tapped a navigation unit suction cupped to the windshield. “Wherever this tells me. The GPS coordinates are loaded in.”
“You don’t know where the cave is? You showed me pictures.”
“I downloaded those. I haven’t been to the exact site, but I have an experienced caver there now scouting it. He sent the coordinates.”
Grant wished for a time machine so he could go back two days and warn himself to face starvation and homelessness instead of signing up for this half-baked excursion.
Twenty miles down the increasingly more desolate highway, the nav unit beeped. The red line superimposed over the highway on the map terminated. Frazier stopped the van. With two taps he zoomed out on the map display. On the screen, the green destination dot glowed out to the right, in the midst of an expanse of roadless gray.
“And here we go,” Frazier said.
He spun the wheel and took the van off-road into a dry wash heading west. The setting sun touched the horizon and lit the scrubby land afire in red light. The van’s headlights snapped on. They blinked off once, as if the vehicle got a look at the terrain it was woefully unsuited for, and did a double-take.
The good news was that Frazier had the common sense to keep his speed low. The bad news was that it didn’t make the ride much smoother. The van rocked and crashed over the stone-strewn sandy soil. The trailer tongue clanked and yanked against the hitch with every shift in the ground. By the time the green dot had worked its way to the center of the nav unit screen, it was pitch black outside and Grant felt like he’d spent time in a blender.
The van lurched to a stop. Frazier killed the lights. To the left glowed a pattern of neon green glow sticks.
“There’s our spot,” Frazier said. “We’ll unload the gear tomorrow morning.”
Grant stepped out of the van. The heat of the day had already begun to dissipate under the clear star-strewn sky. There were no visible lights, even over the horizon, and the darkness engendered an unnerving sense of foreboding, and eruption of man’s primal fear of things hidden in the dark. Gil and Will stepped out with a chorus of moans as they stretched for the first time in hours.
Phoebe exited the van, shivered and wrapped her arms around her oversized breasts. “Ugh, isn’t summer in the States supposed to be hot?”
Out of the darkness stepped a wiry man in dusty blue coveralls. He flipped on a headlamp that illuminated his face and a good portion of the ground around his feet. A lantern jaw framed his square face and his nose looked like it had been broken at least once. A two-day salt-and-pepper stubble coated his cheeks.
“Could you be any later?” he asked.
Frazier stepped up and shook his hand. “Delayed flight. Everyone this is Colton Whitney, caver extraordinaire.” Frazier introduced the rest of the crew to him. Everyone but Phoebe shook hands. She just managed half of a forced smile.
“Welcome to the cave, or at least its entrance,” Colton said. He handed everyone a caver’s headlamp like his own. “Wear these. They have high and low setting. High is bright as hell and sucks down the battery so keep ‘em on low. That said, the batteries are rechargeable so don’t get too paranoid and stumble around in the dark with them off. Watch where you’re going. The site isn’t prepared at all.”
Grant was familiar with these. He fitted the elastic band around his head and switched the light on low power. Similar lights blinked on around him and the film crew’s faces floated in the darkness. Except for one.
“Not a chance in hell I’m wearing this,” Phoebe said. “Do you know what this will do to my hair?”
“You have to see where you’re going, Phoebes,” Frazier said. “Don’t want that gorgeous face running into a cactus in the dark.”
Grant rolled his eyes at Frazier’s concern about towering cacti, as if they were in Arizona, not Montana.
“A drop-dead face is nothing framed with matted hair. Not going to happen.”
“Okay, no headlamp on camera,” Frazier said. “And if you’ve been wearing it, Willie never rolls video until you say your hair’s perfect. Willie, you good with that?”
“You’re the director,” Willie said.
“There. Deal, Phebes?”
Phoebe exhaled an exasperated sigh. “Fine.” She still didn’t put on the headlamp, instead holding it in her hand and turning it on. She pointed the beam up at her own face, winced at its brilliance, and then pointed it down at the ground.
Grant thought how long and unproductive this trip was going to be if every event was going to play out like this with Princess Phoebe.
“I’ve got tents set up on site,” Colton said. “You’d best get in them. We have a hell of a day coming tomorrow.”
Chapter Four
Frazier had told Grant that he didn’t need to worry about bringing any camping-type gear. He said all that was taken care of, best of the best, first class.
Frazier had obviously never travelled first class.
Grant’s accommodations consisted of a one-man nylon tent, a thin sleeping mat, and a kid’s size sleeping bag that only came up to his neck. His suitcase took up a good chunk of the space, but he wasn’t leaving all his personal items in the van and making commutes to brush his teeth and change his socks.
He was used to living in the field on digs, but he always planned them better than this. Willie and Gil fared no better, but seemed to roll with it. It could also have been that after sitting in the back of that van all the way from Los Angeles anything that didn’t move or reek of body odor was living at the Ritz.
Phoebe was a different story. The U-Haul trailer wasn’t stocked with equipment and food. Its sole purpose was Phoebe’s rolling dressing room. It housed makeup, clothing, and even a small bed. As soon as she knew the van was parked for the night, she went inside the trailer and pulled the ramp up behind her.
Grant hadn’t eaten since lunch and his stomach was telling him about it. He went back to the van where a lantern sitting on the roof lit up the area. He nursed a hope that no matter how poorly planned the rest of this was, someone had brought food.
His disappointment was only partial. Willie sat sideways in the passenger seat with the door open, and he was eating. But he was using a finger to coax something reminiscent of spaghetti out of a green plastic pouch. He smiled at Grant. Sauce stained his teeth red.
“What’s up, Doc?”
“You can just call me Grant.”
“Sure thing,” Willie said. “Kitchen’s open.”
Grant eyed an open box of MREs on the van floor. “Anything you recommend?”
“I recommend ordering a pizza.”
Grant would have taken the jest seriously, but he had already checked and cell coverage was non-existent.
There were spoons in the box, so Willie must have just thought spaghetti was a finger food. Grant picked up a spoon and a random entrée. He tore it open and the over-processed aroma tried to convince his stomach that he wasn’t hungry. It lost the argument, and he dug in.
“So you all came up from Los Angeles?” he asked.
“City of Angels, born and bred myself. Yeah, Frazier came knocking and I didn’t have a gig, so what the hell. I recommended Gil. I knew his TV series had wrapped and thought he’d be looking for work. And he was. Boom! We’re a three-man band and we’re on the road.”
“Three plus Phoebe.”
“Eye candy. Having her here is like borrowing a prop. I just need to get her in most scenes.” He looked Grant up and down. “What’s your story that you ended up here?”
“Well, there was Frazier’s sales pitch about this being a documentary. And, well, I was between gigs also, and needed the money.”
Willie choked a bit on his spaghetti. “Money? You think there’s money in this?”
“My contract does.”
“Did you read the fine print?”
Grant didn’t want to admit that he’d skimmed it. His silence confessed it for him.
Willie shook his head like he was admonishing a child. “Pay comes from net profits. Post-release, post-syndication, post-apocalypse. You’ll never see any of that. I never have.”
“But you said you worked with him three times?”
“And get room, board, and expenses while I do. Though this crap in a pouch is kind of pushing the edge of being called food. I don’t lose money, and I add a line to my resume, and a few minutes to my reel.”
“No, not me. I got paid up front, also.”
“Don’t tell me. A check, like twenty-four hours before you left? I fell for that the first time. Bounced like a rubber ball.”
“Damn it.”
Grant tossed the food pouch into the van and turned to give Frazier a piece of his mind. Willie grabbed his arm.
“Dude, chill. No point in going all intifada on the guy. We’re all in the same pot. We have free food and a free camping trip. And in the morning we go all Scooby Doo on the mystery of the cave. Don’t let negative waves make the situation stressed.”
Grant took a deep breath. He was completely dependent on the people here for his survival. “I guess you’re right.” He thought about his college lab being renovated into a sauna. “And I guess that I didn’t have anything else to do.”
Willie released Grant’s arm and smiled. “There you go, one with the universe again.” He offered Grant the food pouch he’d been digging his fingers into. “You’ve got to try this spaghetti.”
“Uh, thanks, but I’m kind of full.”
Chapter Five
It was a tribute to his exhaustion that Grant fell asleep as soon as he lay down in his tent.
Hours later, he awoke with a start. From the darkness outside his tent arose a low rumble, like the sound of hundreds of leather coats brushing against each other. The sound rose and fell, as if advancing and retreating.
He extracted himself from the sleeping bag and fumbled for the tiny headlamp Colton had given him. He stopped short of turning it on, realizing the instant reflection off the tent’s bright orange interior would blind him.
He crawled out into the night and stood up. Glow sticks marked the entrance to the other tents. All was still, save the sound that swirled around him from the camp’s edge. It seemed to skirt the ground and extend up above his head. Clicks and chirps dotted the muffled soundscape. Chill bumps peppered his arms as his pulse accelerated. He clicked on his headlamp to the high setting.
The beam pierced the night and lit a wall of black, flapping leather. Bats. Hundreds and hundreds of bats. He spun around and revealed that the campsite was surrounded in a maelstrom of bare black wings and furry bodies.
Then, as if the light had somehow been a trigger, the swarm let loose a high-pitched screech, a disconcerting wail of mismatched cries that assaulted Grant from all sides at once. He clamped his hands to his ears. The air came alive with echolocation chirps. The bats broke formation, and swarmed him.
In an instant, he was smothered, as if a living, writhing blanket of leather and fur had been thrown over him. He choked against a cloying, musky smell of wet dog, blood, and urine. He struck out into the swarm, but the bats swirled around his flailing arms like polluted water. Claws and teeth scratched at his skin. Wings flapped in his hair, then pulled hunks out by the roots as they became entangled. Grant covered his glasses, to protect the lenses and his eyes behind them. He screamed.
Muffled shouts penetrated from outside the swarm. Metal clanged against metal. Then the van’s horn blared loud and long. The swarm shuddered, lost cohesion, then flew off in all directions. Grant waved his arms to shoo any stragglers, then stood alone, shivering and hyperventilating.
Something touched Grant’s shoulder. Grant whirled and took a swing on reflex. It was Colton. He caught Grant’s fist in the palm of his hand with ease.
“Whoa, whoa,” Colton said. “Stay calm. They’re gone.”
Grant took a deep breath, held it, and let it out. The commotion had aroused some of the others in camp. Willie’s, Gil’s, and Frazier’s glowing faces formed a loose circle around Colton and Grant. Phoebe’s beauty sleep apparently hadn’t been broken.
“What the hell was that?” Grant said.
“A colony of bats returning from hunting,” Colton said. “The campsite was probably something new along their usual flight path. By circling it, using echolocation, they could map the whole thing in their heads.”
“Why the hell were they mapping me?”
“You probably just got in their way,” Colton said. “Bats are not aggressive with humans.”
Grant shoved his bloody hands under Colton’s headlamp. “Does this look non-aggressive?”
Frazier leaned in for a look and cringed. “Ouch.” He turned to Willie. “Get a shot of this.”
Grant looked over at Willie. He had his camera under one arm, filming in night vision mode. “Willie, you didn’t try to help me?”
“Dude, I couldn’t even see you.”
“You got shots of the swarm?” Frazier said. “Tell me you got that.”
“I got something. I don’t know how clear it’ll be.”
“No sweat, we’ll enhance it in post. I need Phoebe’s reaction to all this in the morning. The audience needs to be worried about what’s coming next.”
“Hell, I’m worried about what’s coming next,” Grant said.
Frazier thumped him on the shoulder. “Stardom, brother. That’s what’s next. I couldn’t have scripted a better scene.” He pointed to Grant’s hands. “Put some alcohol on those and get some sleep.” He looked at the rest of the group. “That goes for all of you. The big day starts at dawn. We have a cave to explore!”
The group broke up, save Colton who stayed behind. He shook his head. “Normally, bats aren’t aggressive.”
“Maybe those weren’t normal bats,” Grant said.
He checked an especially painful section of the back of one hand. It wasn’t a scratch. A bat had stripped free a shred of skin and carried it off.
Chapter Six
“It’s those goddamn wolves,” Mike Hogan said.
Ranger McKinley Stinson bit back the sharp retort she wanted to blast at the rancher. It was barely past dawn, she’d only known him for fifteen minutes, and she’d already cultivated an intense dislike for the man. She didn’t like having to leave Yellowstone’s boundaries to begin with, but it was her turn to answer the calls for the livestock losses. Park predators were notoriously poor at respecting the government’s boundaries.
She knelt beside the carcass of a bull in the tall grass. It hadn’t died easy. Blood soaked the ground and splattered blades of grass for a dozen feet all around. Its glazed eyes remained wide open, as if it had died terrified, though the scientist in her shamed her for anthropomorphizing. She looked up at Hogan’s weathered, unshaven face.
“Wolves didn’t do this, Mr. Hogan.”
“Of course that’s what you wolf-loving rangers would say.”
“No, it’s what the evidence says. There are no bite marks, no chunks of missing meat, none of the dismemberment that comes with pack feeding.” She ran the tip of a stick across the carcass’ shredded flesh. “Instead, the skin and muscle were ripped clean, sliced in strips like making pulled pork.”
“Then a bear, one of those damn grizzlies y’all brought back.”
McKinley stood. She looked down at the rancher, though as a former varsity basketball player she looked down at most people. The shadow of her broad ranger’s campaign hat cast Hogan’s face in darkness. McKinley didn’t mind applying a little intimidation when reasoning wasn’t working.
“Mr. Hogan, this wasn’t a bear either. No bear, no wolf, no major predator would attack a healthy bull when there were calves in the next enclosure. And look around you. No wolf tracks, no bear tracks, nothing.”
“Well, something killed it and picked the carcass half-clean.”
“Half–clean” was a bit of an overstatement, but something had definitely fed on the bull. Just none of McKinley’s usual suspects.
“It might have died of natural causes first,” McKinley said. “Or been shot at long-range by some frustrated hunter. There may be a wound we can’t see. I’ll have the carcass picked up and evaluated.”
“Aw, BS! Something ate the damn thing.”
“Scavengers after it died. Bald eagles, vultures, rats too small to leave trails in the grass.”
