Chapter 44
“These traditions are nonsense. Grandmother insists on performing The Ritual, but to what end? The Gray Man is gone, and She no longer answers our prayers. If She was ever real, if the earlier stories are to be believed.”
The Hollow Walker’s distinct steps crashed through the trees, and the sound led them up the mountain.
When its long strides, slow as they might be, managed to carry it too far ahead of them, they used the muddy footprints along the riverbank or the strange new moss to guide their way.
All the while, Alexys thought about Elliot, about Entity, about herself, and Nic.
She’d been gone what, five days? It’d felt like a lifetime.
And still, here they were, scrambling in the dark after a creature she’d never heard of, praying they all make it out alive.
Eventually, the Hollow Walker’s tracks led them to the rusted ruins of Greenbriar Mine.
The abandoned machinery and dilapidated structures looked like the skeleton of a beast half-devoured by the mountain.
They carefully picked their way through equipment and tools Alexys couldn’t even hope to identify.
For once, Nic didn’t offer up the information.
The metal grate that should have sealed off the mouth of the mine was eroded beyond use and had been propped up against one side of the entrance, leaning drunkenly against the rocks.
The thin metal rails that led inside the mine were still visible here and there, but there was no saying what state the warren of tunnels beneath were in.
She imagined most of it had been buried under fallen rocks. She swallowed.
“You ready for this?” Nic asked.
“It’s now or never,” she said.
Nic gave a quick nod stepping inside. “Stay close, and watch your step.”
The tunnel was swallowed by darkness, packed, solid earth lining the ground.
No wind, no sound at all, for that matter.
Once they entered the mine, they would be completely blind to the monster’s whereabouts.
Every instinct inside Alexys screamed not to go in, to turn and flee while she still had the chance.
It must have shown on her face because Nic took her hand once more.
“We can turn back,” he offered. “We could file a report on what we know and let them send in a Reaper to finish the job.”
Before he finished speaking, she began shaking her head. “We can’t. We both know we can’t, it’ll take too long. Whoever they send won’t even care about Elliot, it’ll just be about the creature.”
Reapers were ruthless, a last resort, and one Alexys wasn’t willing to consider. Not yet.
“Am I allowed to say ‘I told you so’ considering this is, in fact, Greenbriar Mine?” Nic asked, looking at her with a crooked smile.
“No, you’re not.” She wanted to smile, but the reality of their situation was too daunting. She took another step and turned back to Nic. “Come on, then.”
The shadows of the mine swallowed them as they walked inside.
Her eyes tried to adjust, but the tunnel ahead of them was filled with complete darkness.
No moonlight, no starlight, nothing natural or man-made that could lend assistance to them as they crept slowly forward.
Nic ran his hand along the wall, using the packed earth and wooden support beams as a guide as they walked deeper.
They walked in silence. The shuffling sounds of the Hollow Walker’s hulking form were no longer audible. They moved at what felt like a glacial pace, and Alexys kept wondering just how deep this shaft went. Miles? Possibly. Would they ever find their way out again?
After a few dead-ends and blind corners, they finally took a sloping path and found the cavernous space the creature had ended up in.
Lanterns dotted the walls, offering weak light that did little to illuminate the pit. The lofted ceiling towered above them, and the other tunnels splitting off from the space were nothing more than black spots against the walls.
Alexys barely registered any of it. Her eyes were fixed on the bloodstained floor and the heaving presence crouched nearby. Nic, in front, put his arm out, and he twisted his face toward her, putting a finger to his lips. She nodded in understanding, eyes wide with fear.
The Hollow Walker was hunched over by one of the walls. A disgusting, wet sound emanated from it, followed by a low growl that reverberated in her bones. The squelching noise was nauseating enough, but her stomach truly roiled when the smell finally hit her.
Decay.
It was pungent and revolting and undeniable: the smell of rotting meat.
Of dead bodies.
She’d never seen or smelled a dead body before, but there’s something in the human psyche that recognizes death like the chill of the wind carrying a storm. It prickles along the spine and grips the heart, whispering, Flee, run, death is near.
But death had come and gone. It’d already touched every inch of that place and left ash and bone in its wake.
Alexys took a step forward. Nic tried to grab her arm to stop her, but she slipped his grip and took another step. There was a horrible squishing crunch as her foot slipped. She didn’t lose her balance, but her gaze swung up to the beast across the room, her breath frozen in her lungs.
The Hollow Walker paused. The rumbling went quiet, and the hairs on her arms stood on end as its head slowly turned to the side.
They still didn’t know if it could see, but it felt like those eyeless pits were staring right at them.
Alexys didn’t move, and beside her, Nic pinched his mouth shut.
The creature’s bones clicked and scraped together as it turned.
One of its skeletal hands scraped along the wall as if to guide its movements while the other clutched a blood-soaked bundle of fabric to its gaping chest. It paused for another painfully long moment before finally turning to shuffle into one of the other tunnels.
Her breath choked out of her, and Alexys heard Nic curse quietly as he slipped past her and into the room.
They could face that beast a thousand times, and she would still quake at the sight of it.
Alexys took a moment to steady her pulse before looking down to see what she’d stepped on. She was met with instantaneous regret.
At first, the mottled gray thing on the dirt floor didn’t look like much of anything. Alexys almost leaned forward to get a closer look—until she realized there was a thumb attached to it.
Her hand rushed to her mouth in horror, trapping a scream behind it.
Her stomach was contracting as she tried to process the details.
The harrowing sound, the relatively fresh blood, the length of the forearm, the missing fingers.
It all added up to a gruesome picture she couldn’t seem to pull her eyes from.
“Oh my God,” she cried. Nic appeared in front of her and grabbed her face, cradling her cheeks in his warm hands.
“Look at me,” he whispered. His gray eyes stared into hers, refusing to let her look away. “Focus on me. I need you to look at me and listen.”
“But,” Alexys said, her eyes darting to look past him.
He leaned closer, his face filling her field of vision. His grip on her face was gentle but firm.
“I can’t let you look.” He swallowed. Alexys had never seen him look so serious yet so frightened. “They’re dead. They’re all dead, Keane, and I can’t let you see that. I don’t know how long they’ve been here.”
She immediately tried to jerk her head free. “No, are you sure? Did you check? Did you check for Elliot? I need to know if Elliot …” She grabbed his wrists and tried to pull free “I have to see if it’s him. I have to!”
“Quiet,” he shushed her and looked over his shoulder.
“You can’t.” He pulled her face back to his, eyes locking on hers.
“You can’t. They’re …” He closed his eyes tight, thumbs brushing over her cheeks, and she realized he had already seen things that were so much worse than the severed hand.
Things he couldn’t erase. Things he was sparing her from.
Alexys slackened her grip on his wrists and kept her gaze fixed on his face.
“They’re what?” she asked quietly.
“They’re in … pieces.” It was a broken whisper, but the words echoed through her.
She wanted to vomit. She wanted to scream, to hit things, and to run.
She wanted to find the monster and kill it with her bare hands, and she wanted to curl up in a ball and pretend none of it had ever happened.
She wanted to take everything back, to tell, no order Elliot into a different Quadrant, to force him to pack up his things and run like hell.
She wanted to scream, at herself, at Nic, at the monster, at … everything.
None of the emotions took hold long enough for her to act on them. They were rushing below the surface of an icy lake, frozen over with the realization that everything had been for nothing.
Rationalization or denial, it didn’t matter which. Her brain kicked into gear as she stepped away from Nic and turned her back on the cavern, avoiding looking in the direction of the corpses. She dropped her backpack to the ground, feeling too hot and too cold and too much.
“Maybe he isn’t here,” she said, mostly to herself. “There’s no telling how old the bodies are. Right? There’s no guarantee Elliot even found the mine.”
Alexys was staring without seeing. Her mind provided images of Elliot sitting in the diner, in Opal’s kitchen, in the hotel, anywhere but in that mine. She was in full denial. “He could have gone home. He didn’t tell me about coming out here, so he could have—”
“Keane.”
She rambled on, pacing a few strides back and forth but diligently keeping her eyes trained on the floor. Away from the bodies. Away from the severed hand. Her words grew more frantic, her pace quicker. She wasn’t even aware of what she was saying anymore.
“Keane.” Nic’s voice pulled her from her thoughts. Her head snapped up.
He was standing beside her holding an Entity-issued backpack.
“No.” Alexys snatched the bag from his hands and saw the patch on the side shaped like the state of California. “No, it can’t …”
The initials E. H. written on the tag in sharpie. One shoulder strap torn, and a dark stain marring the bottom of the bag.
“He can’t be—”
“I took it off one of the … It’s him.”
She looked back to where she knew the bodies were piled in the dark and sank to her knees. “He shouldn’t have been here. He should have stayed put.” A pathetic sound, something between a sob and a whimper, slipped out.
Nic’s arms wrapped around her and tried to quiet her as gently as he could, but she was lost to the emotional upheaval.
It was all her fault. Elliot had been there because of her.
He had been her employee, her responsibility, and she had let him die a horrible, cruel death.
He was lost, and there wasn’t even a full body for them to bring home.
She would have to call his family, his grandmother, she would have to send the report that would break her the same way it had broken Alexys’s mother, and it would be her fault.
The weight of what she had done crushed her as she clutched Elliot’s backpack to her chest.
“It’s all my fault,” Alexys whispered, her voice raw and thick as tears tumbled down her cheeks.
Nic ran a soothing hand up and down her back. “You know that’s not true.”
She shook her head. “He was my responsibility. I was supposed to keep him safe.”
“He’s an adult, Keane. He made the choice to come here even though you told him not to.
” He frowned as she shook her head. “Listen to me, none of this was your fault. Entity makes the risks of the job very clear. Those risks, this job, and the monsters that come with it are completely out of your control. You did the best you could.”
Had she? Alexys looked down at Elliot’s backpack.
The still-wet blood stained her jeans and her hands.
The guilt was overwhelming, and no matter how hard Nic tried to assuage it, Alexys feared it might drown her.
She knew they were vulnerable, sat on the floor of the cave where the Hollow Walker could return at any moment, but she found it hard to care.
She opened her mouth to ask Nic what to do, to seek some sort of comfort from the person who was always right, who had all the answers, but she was cut off by the sound of footsteps echoing through the mine tunnel.
Not the shuffling, heavy steps of the Hollow Walker, but the light, swift sound of several sets of human feet.
Panic welled up inside her. They didn’t have time to hide, or to even stand from their place on the floor, before a group of people walked into the room.