Read The Remnant Online

Authors: Chandler McGrew

Tags: #cult, #mormon, #fundamentalist lds, #faith gothic drama suspence imprisoment books for girls and boys teenage depression greif car accident orphan edgy teen fiction god and teens dark fiction

The Remnant (2 page)

BOOK: The Remnant
2.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Trace followed the voice to another crossing.
Down its length he spotted an open door through which a dim
lamplight trickled. He strolled to the door and peered inside.
Unlike the stacks outside, this equally windowless space was barely
larger than the average bedroom. And although the walls were lined
with more floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, most of the room was taken
up by a large oak desk covered in reliefs of pentagrams, crosses,
and some sort of hieroglyphics that seemed vaguely familiar. Trace
noticed that the titles on the shelves along the walls were all
more esoteric in nature than those in the other room.
Psychic
Gifts in the Christian Life, Chronicles of Golden Friars, History
and Practice of Magic.

Trace stared at the little man, seated behind
the huge desk, cradling his chin on his feminine fists.

"Quite a collection," muttered Trace.

The man nodded, smiling. "My benefactor has
complex tastes, and I am fortunate to be allowed to enjoy them in
his absence."

"You’re Ezekial?"

"No," said the little man, shaking his head
without raising his chin. "Eziekial is a nom de plume."

"I don’t write about the supernatural,
anymore," said Trace, nodding toward the shelves beside him.

"No? I was under the impression that it was
of great interest to you."

"I write mostly true crime now."

"Such as the deaths in Mexachuli?"

Trace frowned. "How did you know I was
writing about the
Massacre?
My publisher has been keeping
the book under wraps."

The little man shrugged. "I understand your
interest."

"You keep implying you know things about me.
What is your fascination with me?" The little man shrugged.
"Actually my only fascination with you is my mentor’s fascination
with you, but I would assume that that is about at an end."

Trace started at the sound of a footstep
behind him. Two very muscular looking men wearing expensive looking
suits entered and took up positions on either side of the door. A
third man, older, tall and distinguished looking with salt and
pepper hair and riveting black eyes entered behind them.

Frederick Rendt.

"You," said Trace, glaring at the man who had
murdered the woman he loved, destroyed his life, and set him on
this road to purgatory in the first place. Over the past five years
Trace had striven mightily to discover some path to the inner sense
of peace he had lost. He had even tried to find some way to forgive
Rendt and his fanatical band, because he knew that was what Ashley
and the Brethren would have taught. But forgiveness was not in
Trace, and now it seemed that his goal of revenge might never be
fulfilled, either. Rendt hadn’t lured him here for a
reconciliation.

He glanced at the two bodyguards again as
they drew nasty looking automatic pistols from beneath their
jackets.

"Tying up loose ends?" said Trace, watching
the little man nod deferentially to Rendt before slipping out of
the room.

"I’m so glad you understand," said Rendt.

His deep and resonant voice might have
belonged to a singer or a carnival barker, but his face belied any
association with show business, exhibiting instead the hardened
look of the true believer, eyes that could judge a man and damn
him, tight lips that could pronounce a death sentence without
emotion. The creases in his dark suit were as sharp as axe blades,
his handmade shoes gleamed, and his hair was slicked back in a
manner that had been more in vogue fifty years before.

"It’s going to be messy," said Trace,
glancing around for a weapon.

But he didn’t think he was going to be able
to subdue the two armed killers with
A Study in the Etymology of
Ant Species.

"It would be, yes," admitted Rendt. "Do shift
that aside."

Rendt nodded toward the hefty looking ornate
desk. When Trace made no move Rendt turned to the taller, bulkier
killer to his left.

"Count to three. If he’s not moving, shoot
him in the knee."

The killer grinned.

Trace laid his hands on the desk.

"Move it where?"

"Back against the wall there will do
fine."

The damned thing weighed a ton, but finally
Trace managed to shove the heavy piece of furniture back against
the shelves behind it. Where the desk had stood a trap door
lay.

"Open it," commanded Rendt.

Trace fingered the hand hold and lifted the
panel onto its back on the floor. A square hole in the floor
revealed a rickety wooden ladder leading down into what looked like
a shadowy, brick-lined tunnel.

"What’s down there?" asked Trace, staring
anxiously into the hole.

Rendt shrugged. "Your destiny, Mister
Wentworth. Didn’t my associate promise you would find it?"

He turned to the other, shorter killer this
time. "Count to three. If he’s not on the ladder-"

"You’re getting redundant," said Trace,
taking one step into the hole.

He was halfway down the ladder when he
noticed that Rendt had already disappeared.

The two gunmen were still right there,
though.

"Rendt said to take him way down into the
lowest tunnels," said the largest of the two gunmen.

The man’s face looked as though the bone
structure below his leathery skin had been hammered out of lead,
and his eyes were beady and cold. His partner, on the other hand,
looked softer and easier going, but something in
his
blue
eyes told Trace that he would be the coldest killer.

"I don’t like it down here," said the
larger.

The softer looker frowned, and Trace got
another intimation that he wasn’t Shirley Temple, either.

"Shut up," said Softie. "There’s a map here
somewhere.”

Trace glanced around the brickwalled space.
It might have been any old cellar in the city, and it was filled
with the standard junk, old furniture, packing boxes, a couple of
rusted free-standing lamps.

"Here," said the lead faced killer.

He lifted a sheet of what looked like
parchment from the top of a dusty packing crate. When the softer
gunman nudged Trace with his pistol barrel, Trace moved closer to
Leadie, noticing that there were a pair of large black flashlights
on the crate as well.

"Let’s go," said Softie.

Leadie frowned but led the way through the
boxes to yet another trapdoor. Trace followed him down the ladder
discovering that it led into an arched brick tunnel lit by
wire-covered sconces overhead. The walls were lined with more heavy
packing crates bearing large block lettering.

Meals Ready to Eat, Sleeping Bags Utility,
Water Potable.

"You guys like to plan ahead," he
muttered.

"Article of faith," replied Leadie.

Trace nodded. They weren’t going to kill him
here, among their stores for the coming apocalypse. That was far
too messy, and Rendt wanted him to disappear, not smell up the
place.

"Why here, in New York?" he asked.

"Whataya mean?" asked Leadie.

"Kind of far off your stomping grounds, isn’t
it?"

"This don’t belong to Mister Rendt," said
Leadie, as though explaining to a ten-year-old. "It’s just a
friend’s place."

"Shut up!" said Softie, and Leadie gave Trace
a hurt expression as though Trace had taken advantage of his good
nature.

Finally they passed through the crates and
back into empty tunnel without Trace spotting one loose item he
might have used for a weapon. He noticed that the floor sloped away
from them ahead, and as they walked the slap of their soles against
the concrete echoed like a thousand bat wings, which made the place
all the creepier. Over a long and interesting career Trace had
found himself in life or death situations more than once. In
Mexico-immediately following the Massacre-he had been certain a
crazed man holding the pistol to his head was about to splatter his
brains across the night. So he was no stranger to the gutwrenching
terror gripping him, but he also knew that panic would only assure
an earlier and even more certain demise. He clenched and unclenched
his fists, forcing blood back into them, stilling the shaking
excess adrenalin was causing.

At a T in the tunnel they stopped.

"Here?" asked Leadie.

Trace’s back stiffened. If this was the place
it was going to happen quickly. Softie wasn’t going to talk him to
death. He prepared to kick the closest killer in the kneecap and
take his chances in the ensuing struggle.

"I told you. He’s supposed to be left in the
lowest tunnels," said Softie.

Leadie sighed. Apparently he liked these
cramped shadowy places not much more than Trace, although
he
wasn’t destined to spend eternity here.

They took a right. Down that shaft only a few
of the lights were working. Evidently Rendt’s friend saw no sense
in paying for upkeep where he wasn’t storing anything for the
battle of Armageddon. When Leadie stopped in front of him, Trace
stiffened again, but the hulking killer simply knelt and began
wrestling with a heavy manhole cover. Trace wondered just how many
intersecting tunnels and different levels there were.

"Help him," said Softie.

Reluctantly Trace knelt beside the bigger
killer. Up close the man smelled of garlic and too much aftershave,
the sweet odor cloying enough to be nauseating, but the two of them
were able to lift the round cover on end. Softie came around and
knelt to take hold of it as Leadie stood up and started clambering
down metal rungs inserted in the stone wall. There were no lights
down there, and Leadie switched on his flashlight halfway down.

"Go," commanded Softie.

Trace did as he was told. When his face came
level with Softie’s Trace stared the man in the eye.

"You enjoy killing people?"

"Some people need killing."

"Amen," said Trace, poking him in both eyes
with spread fingers.

Softie stumbled backward, clawing at his
face, but before Trace could clamber back out the heavy manhole
struck him hard on the shoulder, the weight forcing him down first
one rung, then another. As he struggled to lift the manhole he
glanced down at Leadie who had locked the arm wielding his
flashlight through a rung and was raising his pistol.

"Coming down," muttered Trace, stepping away
from the rung that held him and falling straight down onto Leadie’s
shoulders.

As they crashed together to the hard concrete
floor below the ringing sound of the manhole rattling back into
place echoed away around them.

Trace landed on top of Leadie, not only
driving the wind from the larger man, but apparently knocking him
unconscious. The flashlight lay beside his shoulder, the lens
pressed against the wall creating a weird halo effect over Leadie’s
head. Trace snatched the flashlight and used it to search for the
pistol. He found it under Leadie’s back, but as soon as he lifted
the gun he saw that he was screwed again. When the big bastard fell
he must have lashed out with it so hard that the slide was bent
against the barrel. He might be able to fire the one shot in the
chamber, if there was one in there already, or it might just be so
damaged the damned thing exploded in his hand. In disgust he threw
it aside.

Considering his options he knew he had
few.

He couldn’t lift the manhole cover without
Softie’s help, and that wasn’t going to bode well for him,
especially now that Softie was probably bearing a grudge. He
couldn’t stay here, since Leadie was almost certainly going to come
around any time. And as evil as the pair were, he couldn’t bring
himself to kill the unconscious SOB with his bare hands, although
he was aware that that decision might still cost him his life in
the not so distant future.

Finally the light fell on the parchment map
Leadie had stuck back inside his jacket.

Trace lifted it and began trying to decipher
it, walking as he did. The farther away he got from Leadie before
he came around the better.

 

 

* * *

Trace cursed his luck as he trotted alongside
a wide sluice filled with stinking stagnant water, his ears ringing
with the incessant dripping noises that had been his only companion
for the past half hour. He clutched the flashlight, shining it
across the brown tile walls of the old sewage tunnel, across the
rusted out rungs of an iron ladder leading to what was surely yet
another bricked-over manhole shaft. The shafts and tunnels were a
maze, and they seemed to have enough twists and turns and levels to
give your average mole conniptions.

He had no idea how far he was now beneath the
streets or where exactly he might be in relation to the city above,
but he knew that the pair of assassins was still on his tail,
because from time to time he could hear their voices echoing in the
distance. Run of the mill murderers would long ago have given him
up for lost, but Frederick Rendt didn’t breed run of the mill
murderers.

Trace consulted the map again, wondering
where he could have taken a wrong turn. But he had been through so
many dried up water mains, so many abandoned subway tunnels, and up
and down so many crumbling connecting shafts he knew he could never
hope to find his way back to his starting point even if that had
been an option. He recalled years before flipping through an old
National Geographic full of images of all the hidden spaces that
lay beneath the city. There was an entire municipal department
whose job it was to catalog them and all the wires, pipes, buried
basements, and conduits, and tunnels that made up the
spaghetti-maze of underground New York, but even
they
were
constantly discovering new shafts and spaces.

The dank odor of mildew and rot saturated the
humid air so thickly that he felt marinated in it, and the weight
of the vast city overhead pressed down upon his already hunched
shoulders. When he reached yet another wide vertical shaft he
stared upward. Unlike all the others he had come across this one
was intersected by another small horizontal tunnel near the top.
Flicking off the flash he could make out no light from above, but
of course it was still night, and if he continued on the way he was
going without checking this new shaft he knew the idea would drive
him crazy that this might have been the way out.

BOOK: The Remnant
2.17Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

HEAT: A Bad Boy Romance by Jess Bentley, Natasha Wessex
Brotherhood of the Tomb by Daniel Easterman
Silent Hunt by John Lescroart
With Honor by Rhonda Lee Carver
Protection by Carla Blake
The Violent Century by Lavie Tidhar
Thread of Fear by Laura Griffin