Dreading the surprise in store, Cole steps from the helicopter. There’s a hand on his shoulder before his second foot hits the ground. He brought Noah because he thought they could use his combat skills. But the fight’s over, and now his presence might cause more problems than it solves.
“Just wait here,” Cole says.
Clearly stung, Noah averts his eyes and sinks back against the leather bench seat.
Two response team members advance as soon as they see Cole approaching the barn. One’s strapped with an assault rifle he never got the chance to use, the other a Glock in a hip holster clearly visible under his windbreaker.
They start to explain what’s waiting for him inside, but he holds up a single hand and they go silent. He’s too busy observing what he can already see. It’s a large concrete mixer, or what’s left of it. The damn thing’s the size of a small car, and there’s a large plastic tube wrapped in its wreckage. Grooves in the earth between the barn’s half-open double doors suggest the machine was dragged to its current position by a giant. That makes sense. Charlotte’s actions often look like a Titan’s handiwork.
“Watch your step inside,” the guy with the assault rifle says.
Cole walks through the double doors and into the barn.
There are no horse stalls or interior structures of any kind, and Cole wonders if there were previously and Charley tore them all to pieces. He doesn’t see any piles of splintered wood, however. No, what she’s torn to pieces is the ground itself, and that ground, it turns out, is mostly concrete. Evenly spaced squares of concrete that travel the entire length of the barn; multiple rows of them, about three rows in all, but it’s hard to tell because what mostly fills the barn are piles of large concrete chunks. With the strength of a god, Charlotte has managed to dig down into most of them.
As he walks carefully between the concrete piles, he sees that each hole reveals something stomach churning. In some, there are mummified arms. In others, desiccated heads. It’s a gallery of bodies entombed beneath the barn’s floor. The awful scene reminds him of those death casts from Pompeii, but those were created by pouring plaster into the cavities once occupied by bodies long since decomposed. What he sees here are actual corpses unearthed for the first time by the impossible strength of Charlotte Rowe’s hands.
Then he sees Charlotte. She’s rocking back and forth, her arms looped around her bent knees, powdered head to toe with concrete dust. Her second trigger window closed a few minutes ago, and he wonders if that’s the only reason she stopped.
“Charley?”
She doesn’t even look at him. It’s quiet enough for her to hear him, he’s sure. His helicopter’s blades have powered down, and the only sound is a gentle huff of wind that blows through the half-open barn doors, lifting little twisters of concrete dust into the threads of early-morning sunlight pouring through the slats in the barn’s roof.
“Charley?”
I have broken her, Cole thinks before he can stop himself. Broken her as surely as she tried to break these long-buried bodies free.
He approaches her until only a few feet separate them. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t recognize his presence, and—worst of all—doesn’t stop rocking gently back and forth.
“Charley?”
No response. He scans their surroundings again, sees a few untouched squares of concrete in the barn’s floor she hasn’t gotten to yet. Will she ever?
Will they?
He says her name a few more times. The results are the same. She’s never gone into shock before. But during their last operation an unexpected explosion caused her to lose consciousness while her entire body regenerated from burns that would have instantly killed a normal person. Maybe this silence, this retreat inside of herself, is a part of her process now.
Or I’ve pushed her too far.
Charlotte dug until the concrete wouldn’t give underneath her clawing hands anymore. When she crawled her way up out of the last hole she’d dug, her fresh scratches didn’t heal right away, and her fingers were bleeding like a normal person’s. She told herself she just needed a minute to regroup, to recover, to catch her breath with lungs that were no longer superpowered. But as soon as she gazed into the middle distance, her vision went misty, and when people spoke to her thereafter, she heard them and even formulated answers to their questions, but those answers got stuck on a tape loop inside her mind.
It’s her fault she ran out of time. Once she realized she wouldn’t be able to remove the bodies from their concrete graves intact, that her incredible strength was ill suited to such a delicate and intricate task, the sheer volume of the dead she was uncovering started to overwhelm her. She had no idea what condition they’d be in when she started to dig. She’s not a chemist. She’d hoped for something close to preservation. While there were some variations to their conditions, for the most part they were mummies. Some badly decomposed, whole body parts missing.
If she couldn’t extract them, she would reveal them. That’s what she’d decided. The crown of a skull or a bent arm. A distress flag, no matter how grotesque. Something to say I am here and I will not be forgotten or erased by the madness that took root on this property.
“Charley?”
Cole’s here. As usual, he looks like a menswear model amid the horror.
“Zoey,” she says.
“What?”
“The woman I saved. Her name’s Zoey Long. We take care of her. We figure it out.”
Cole nods.
“That means we don’t drug her and leave her on the side of the road and make the world think she’s crazy.”
“I get it,” Cole says.
Steadying her voice as much as she can, she points one dusty finger toward the expanse of pits before them. “We learn their names, too. Every last one. And we let their families know. Or so help me God I’m never doing this again.”
Cole turns to survey the awful sweep of the barn’s freshly opened floor.
He’s hesitating.
She’s waiting. She’ll wait for hours if she has to.
“Deal,” he finally whispers.
The men standing guard outside the barn part before her like she’s the president, clearing a path to the Black Hawk, where Luke stands waiting for her next to the open door. Zoey Long’s already inside, wrapped in a blanket, watching her approach. She looks alert, present inside her skin, and that fills Charlotte with relief.
Cole wants them airborne as soon as possible. She can hear him giving orders to the response team members behind her, telling them to scrub all evidence they’ve been there, including removing the third truck they found left on the property, the one in which the slain victim presumably died. Luke’s helping her into the Black Hawk when she hears one of the ground team guys ask Cole, “What’s the cover story?”
Cole says, “This time we’re not using one.”
For a second, she thinks that means Graydon Pharmaceuticals is about to out itself to the world as a freelance hunter of serial killers. But that can’t be it, and she’s too tired to figure out what else it might be. Inside the helicopter, she settles onto the bench seat. Luke sits down next to her as the door slides shut next to him. He slips her headphones on, puts on a set himself. He’s explaining how they’re going to make a refueling stop on the way back to Kansas Command, but she’s not paying much attention. She’s just spotted something outside.