In For the Kill (McClouds & Friends #11)(124)

Who knew if it was securely fastened at the top. Or if she could even make it up, exhausted as she was. But the alternative was crawling through that twisting cave again. She could not face the darkness a second time. Not after what she had just seen.

The rope hung about five feet short of the cave’s floor. She picked her way, as carefully and respectfully as she could around the scattered arm and leg bones, rib cages, skulls, and reached to grab it. She leaped.

The rope creaked as she swung, back and forth, over that surreal backdrop of bones. The rope did not break, but it took all the strength she had to climb it. She was lucky for Tam’s and Val’s insistence on upper-body strength. Fight biology, Tam said. Be stronger than ninety-five percent of the men you meet. If you can’t crack the top five percent, cleavage and eyelash flutter and surprise will take care of the rest.

All those pull-ups and push-ups and back strengtheners were what saved her now. She worked her way up, huffing and groaning. The afternoon sun burned. She sweated, in her light jacket. The rope sawed against the dirt and rocks of the opening, sending earth and dangerously large rocks pattering onto her head and shoulders.

Her hands burned, scraped raw against the harsh synthetic fibers of the rope, but she moved steadily upward. When she finally laid her elbow on the overhanging lip of turf, it collapsed beneath her weight, sending boulders and clods tumbling down onto the bones below.

And again. And again. The hole was almost twice as big as it had been before she finally found ground solid and stony enough to bear her weight. She scrambled up on it and crouched there, shivering.

The rope had been knotted around a downed metal pole for a huge chain-link fence, sunk into a now-exposed well of cement that lay on its side, dangerously close to the opening. The rope was frayed, brittle from sun and wind and rain, heat and cold, fewer than half of the fibers intact. It could have snapped under her weight. Or the massive lump of cement that had held the pole could have rolled down inside the hole and crushed her. But it hadn’t.

The opening had once been covered by a large square chunk of metal and camouflaged by a pile of rocks, but time and weather had carved away at it and opened it to the sky again. A path alongside the inside of the chain-link fence led right to the hole.

She staggered to her feet and stared down into the hole. It was a twelve-meter drop, minimum. Maybe more like fifteen. She could barely see the bones now. They were lost in shadow. The spotlight of the sun had vanished. Too low to clear the lip of the ledge.

She felt the impulse to extend a formal gesture to these people whose deaths had been stripped of all ceremony. She bowed to the dark hole. “I’ll do my best for you,” she whispered. “I promise.”

Her voice was thick and froggy, from the dirt and the damp, and weeping. She emerged from the rocky outcropping, looked around to orient herself. She was in a narrow canyon, barely 200 yards from the bottom of the garbage dump, downhill from the abandoned lab, a corner of which was visible up on the ridge. After that endless spirit journey through the underworld, she’d expected to be miles away, but she was only a few hundred yards from where she’d started.

The gully full of garbage spilled down into the narrow canyon where she found herself, but the canyon itself and the rough road that snaked through it were blocked by heavy-duty industrial fencing still in intimidating good repair and covered on the top with loops of cruel-looking razor wire. There would be no climbing that. She’d slice herself to ribbons. The sides of the canyon were sheer, with jagged overhangs.

She could hike down the canyon in the opposite direction, and try to clamber out and circle around somehow, but who knew how long such a detour would take? Alternatively, she could climb up that long, steep, slippery cascade of garbage in the gully.

She opted for the garbage. After all, Mama had told her not to be afraid of garbage. It was a metaphor for her life. And after a cave full of decayed human bodies, what terrors could a garbage dump hold?

But as with most things, it proved to be harder than she’d anticipated. She slipped and slid on rotten plastic bags, which broke open under her feet. Broken glass, test tubes, vials, and syringes burst out. She was climbing a mountain of biohazardous waste.

About twenty feet up, she lost her footing by stepping on a plastic box lid that acted like a sled, and set her tumbling and rolling down the pile, sliding between yellowed and rotting mattresses. She bounced her hip agonizingly hard against something very solid and stationary, and came to rest in a tangle of rusted bed frames. Dazed and panting.

When she looked up, she saw the bumper of a car, poking out of the wreckage. Dirty, but whole. Not rusted, or dinted or scarred.

She pried some garbage away and saw a headlight. Not a broken one. She moved a sheet of corrugated plastic, a couple more bed frames, and peered into the cab of the vehicle. It was a smallish white panel van. The windshield was streaked with mud, but it was whole. It was dirty, but not ruined enough to warrant being buried under a pile of garbage.

She yanked a box away and uncovered a tire. The treads looked deep and sharp and new. In southern Italy, a car would only end up in a heap like this after it had been scavenged down to the bare frame.

The words from Mama’s letter rang in her head. You’ll find your strongest weapon buried in all this garbage. It had never occurred to her that Mama might have meant it literally.

On top were mattresses. Heavier things were piled to the sides. Sveti dragged away enough to expose the passenger’s side door, which was unlocked. Inside, the car smelled stale, but not rotten. It was a Mercedes panel van. The seal had kept humidity out. On the seat was a plastic sleeve with a sheaf of paper, a thumb drive. A handwritten note, in her mother’s graceful script. First in Italian, then English.