Catacombs Read online

  “It is. Joe’s outdone himself this year.” She opened the bag and slid out a hollow shaft carved from rosy-brown cedar wood. Its surface was smoothly finished, and a series of holes drilled along one side revealed its purpose. It was an Indian flute, handmade by Cully himself.

  When Joe got word that Cully was coming back to Oklahoma City for his first visit in decades, he’d networked hard, tapping every connection he had in Creek country in hopes of finding someone who could put him directly in touch with his famous cousin. Faye was pleased—and, to be honest, she was spitefully pleased—that Joe’s tribal connections had so successfully bypassed Cully’s hyper-vigilant personal assistant, who had politely but firmly said no.

  Thanks to Joe’s persistence and to the all-knowing Creek grapevine, Faye’s anniversary present had been this flute, which would be followed by three private lessons with the man himself. In other words, Joe had effectively won at gift-giving for the rest of their natural lives. The only conceivable way Faye could top this was to time-travel her husband back to the Stone Age, so that he could pick up some tips for chipping the awesomest spearhead ever made, directly from the lips of the people who invented stone tools.

  The upheaval came as she was admiring her new flute, fitting her fingers over its open holes and testing its balance. In that cataclysmic moment, Faye’s logic failed her. This is the way of upheavals.

  She cradled the flute like a baby as she went down, sacrificing her own safety to protect it as her right elbow and shoulder and cheekbone crashed to a floor that was lushly padded with its luxurious golden rug, but not lushly enough to spare her the bruises that would come…if she lived.

  Her free arm, the one not clutching the flute, flung itself out to her side, its hand scrabbling for something solid to hold her up. It extended past the edge of the rug, so the lower part of her left arm—elbow, forearm, wrist, and hand—struck the marble floor so hard that the pain rang like a crystal bell.

  Everyone around her was dropping to the ground, and she had no idea why. Maybe they were all dead. Or dying.

  There was a noise, or there had been. Something had overwhelmed her ears and her mind could no longer process sound.

  Faye felt a slap across her back from shoulder to shoulder, and she retained enough awareness to know that Cully had reached out an arm of protection as he fell with her. It was the act of a man accustomed to protecting children. This made her realize that she had no idea whether Cully was a father or a grandfather. This was a thing that mattered when death loomed, creeping near enough to make her consider who would grieve for her if she died.

  Joe would grieve her, of course. So would their children, Michael and Amande, and Joe’s father, Sly, and her friends.

  Loved ones had gone on before her—her mother, Mamaw, the father who had never come home from Vietnam, her loving mentor Douglass. Was she a moment away from seeing them again? And Cally, the great-great-grandmother whom Faye worshipped for freeing herself and a hundred others from slavery in 1800s Florida? Was there a place in Heaven where she would finally meet Cally?

  Her brain gave up on making sequential memories, giving her only snapshots taken during the instant that she spent falling.

  A woman, her coat collar still flipped up against the early fall chill, who stumbled as she made her way to the reception desk where a uniformed clerk waited.

  The two clerks at the reception desk, a red-haired man and a graying woman, who disappeared behind the desk so suddenly that Faye couldn’t tell whether they were falling or diving for cover.

  The sweet-faced hotel manager, whose open phone dropped from her hand as she crumpled flat on the carpet.

  The middle-aged woman wearing a cell phone earpiece, who was speaking to the air in one moment and collapsing to the ground in the next.

  The man emerging from an alcove on the far side of the lobby, cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes, who took flight without warning, arms flailing as if to stop gravity from dragging him back down.

  The two women wearing blue-and-white maids’ uniforms and carrying mops, one of them crumpling by the hotel’s grand staircase and the other one miraculously upright as she stumbled over the shuddering floor.

  The people standing in friendly conversational clumps who toppled to the floor, perfectly synchronized.

  Faye wanted to wonder what was happening, but even wondering was beyond what her brain could do. It was rattled and still rattling. If her brain had been in working order, she could have come up with a long list of reasons why she might be lying facedown on the ground, gently keeping her flute from harm and cradled in the arms of a film star.

  An earthquake.

  A tornado.

  A mass shooting.

  A meteor strike.

  A bolt of lightning.

  A plane crashing through the roof of this magnificent building.

  Catastrophic failure of the beams supporting that magnificent roof.

  Any of these things might explain the rumbling beneath her and the deafening noise and the screams, but Faye’s mind was too frayed to hold more than one thought. In Oklahoma City, where in 1995 a cold-blooded murderer brought down a tremendous building on the heads of hundreds of people who were peacefully living their lives, she had only one thought as she watched strangers cry out and collapse.

  In Oklahoma City, when a human mind is trying to make sense of apocalypse, the first word that comes is “bomb.”

  Chapter Three

  Evil must be obliterated.

  This was the First New Commandment. He had repeated it to himself as he got on the bus, as he rode across town, and as he navigated a city sidewalk crowded with people. His backpack was heavy, but the First New Commandment had given him the strength to carry it as if it were made of feathers. Whenever his vitality flagged, he whispered it again and felt God lift him up on the wings of eagles.

  Evil must be obliterated.

  A doorman had opened the old hotel’s heavy door for him, enabling him to pass through it quickly while intent on avoiding bellhops who might try to relieve him of the backpack. A maid and her mop were wetting down a segment of floor nearby that was marked by yellow signs reading, “Wet—Do Not Walk.” The wet floor had been an unexpected obstacle, forcing him to walk down a path prescribed by someone else, but good fortune pointed that path in exactly the direction he wanted to go.

  No, not good fortune. He was doing the work of the Lord, and the Lord was not going to let him be impeded by a thin skim of water on old marble.

  Once past the unexpectedly wet floor, he had let himself slow perceptibly, because he couldn’t afford to be singled out for behaving oddly. His goal had been to be unnoticeable, even innocuous, until that moment when it was impossible for anyone to ignore the momentous thing he had done.

  He had adjusted the cowboy hat and lowered his chin, just as he had rehearsed. He’d been told where the security cameras were, so he had practiced using the hat’s brim to shield his face from the government agents who would soon be looking for him.

  He had forced himself to meander, drifting first to the glass-fronted showcase by the elevators. It was full of musical memorabilia—George Gershwin’s watch, Ira Gershwin’s notebook, a photo of their childhood home—and he’d lingered there as if he were interested in century-old trash. Then he had paused to admire a bronze statue and a monumental floral display and a glossy black piano, each stop taking him closer to his destination. Finally, he had drifted toward another display case that was tucked in an out-of-the-way alcove because it was full of less interesting memorabilia from the history of the old hotel—quaint china, monogrammed napkins, telegrams from famous people.

  He’d lingered there until another hotel maid, barely ten feet from him, finished mopping the marble floor and moved away. Again, the wet floor acted in his favor, keeping others from passing close enough to see his next move, which was to tap gent
ly on the wall. He’d been told exactly which spots to tap on the richly gleaming mahogany paneling, and the instructions proved sound. The panel slid into the wall, revealing an old brick staircase leading down into darkness.

  Two steps had taken him through the opening and two more taps on the wall had closed it behind him, shutting him into the catacombs that had rested beneath Oklahoma City for almost as long as there had been an Oklahoma City. Local children had told stories about the monsters lurking under the city for decades. They’d had no idea that the monsters weren’t real but that their tunnels were.

  His heart had been light because he had known that vengeance was coming. His steps had been light, too, as they took him down the stairs, toward the door that he had been assured would be unlocked, as it had been in 1992 when he last saw it from this side.

  And it was indeed unlocked. The door had opened easily, with only a slight grinding of wood on sandy brick. This was the gateway to his victory.

  Once through, he had stood in front of two more doors, one in front of him and one opening into a corridor at his left. He had paused to fumble for his compass. Where was it? Not in his backpack, no. He had no desire to disturb the device there, built to help him do God’s work.

  The device—crafted of a pressure cooker and powered by black powder—was designed to destroy everything above the spot where it exploded. He had built it by instructions available to anyone on the internet, crafting an ignition device from a cell phone and a string of Christmas lights. Though he would gladly have sacrificed his life to bring down this particular building, the device was built to be detonated remotely. He was at no risk. His mission was to place it, get clear, and then use the cell phone in his pocket to set it off.

  Poised on the brink of victory, he had pulled the compass from his pocket and studied it. Not liking the direction of its needle, he had tapped it firmly with his index finger, then tried again. The needle didn’t budge.

  There had been two available paths, a door ahead of him and another to his left. His instructions were to take the door to the left, but the compass reading had told him that the IRS building was behind him and to the right. Could the maps he’d been given be this far wrong? This was an important problem, important enough to abort the mission until he could be sure of hitting the target.

  But first, before aborting his mission and going back topside, he had wanted to see the work of his hands again. He had opened the other door, the one directly at the bottom of the stairs, and taken three steps through it. His eyes had traveled the room’s walls, the floor, the ceiling, everywhere but the bench to the right of the door. He never wanted to think of the things that he had put there, not ever again.

  But every other surface in that room, every square inch of it, was still covered with his paintings, and their colors shone as brilliantly as ever. He had soaked in the beauty of his work, the lush countryside of his farm and the faces of his family. He had given thanks that the plan had never involved setting a bomb off in that sacred spot.

  Then, he had spun on his heel, feeling the heft of the backpack and its cargo of death. Passing back through the doorway, he had closed the heavy door behind him, for no reason other than that he was an essentially orderly person. The wasted seconds that he spent closing it saved a half-dozen lives.

  Taking the stairs slowly, he and the bomb had risen toward the surface. His deliberate motion had consumed more seconds, and thus saved more lives.

  He had reached out a hand, tapped the door, and watched it slide into the wall again. The maid standing nearby had dropped her mop and run hard at the sight of someone materializing out of nowhere, and this bothered him. He’d been told that the alcove would be clear and that he wouldn’t be seen.

  A single step had put him barely through the doorframe when the bomb went off. In the few milliseconds left to him, he just had time after the world-rattling blast to wonder how the bomb could blow when he hadn’t touched the cell phone rigged to trigger it.

  Nevertheless, it blew. Nature was merciful enough to throw him quickly into shock, but not so merciful that he didn’t feel an impact like a runaway freight train hitting him from behind and not so merciful that he didn’t feel the horror of impending death, even if only for an instant.

  The alcove’s stout walls, constructed at a time when everything was built stoutly, had contained much of the explosive force in three directions, behind him, to his left, and to his right, focusing the blast in one direction. The blast carried him out of the alcove where the bomb did most of its damage, blowing a hole in an exterior wall that opened the hotel’s lobby to the autumn breezes. One of the walls enclosing the alcove was obliterated, too.

  The nails packed into the homemade bomb burst out into the world, accompanied by twisted pieces of the pressure cooker itself. Small fires erupted around the spot where he’d been standing before his body went airborne. Plaster fell from walls and from the ceiling high above him. A tremendous chandelier plummeted, adding its crystal prisms to the flying nails.

  The bomb landed a fierce attack on the old building, which suffered grievous damage, but the people in it were protected by its thick masonry walls and by fate. Perhaps this was the worst insult fate could have dealt him. No one other than himself was killed by his rage, and this was a terrible end for a man whose life had been consumed by the hatred in his heart. He had used its flame to emotionally maim everyone who knew him, and now he had missed his chance to physically maim a lobby full of innocent people.

  The world was still rumbling when he died. Ashes were settling around him, but his thoughts were no longer coherent enough to remember the phrase, “Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” He had no more thoughts at all.

  His hatred winked out of existence when he did. He simply was, and then he was not, and the world kept turning without him.

  Chapter Four

  “Sorry, but I gotta shine this in your eye.”

  Faye wasn’t sure how long she’d been waiting on this city sidewalk to see the paramedic who was checking her pupils. It had been an hour, maybe two, because others had needed help far more than Faye.

  At first, the medical personnel had struggled in the chaos of rubberneckers. Even after the first responders had moved bystanders out of the way and established a perimeter to control access to the site, and even after an impressive convoy of FBI vehicles had sped to the scene, there had been the problem of locating survivors. Many of them had picked themselves up off the floor, running blindly as far and as fast as their injuries would allow. Now they had to be found before they could be treated or interviewed as witnesses. Some of them had evaded medical personnel completely until they were located by the FBI agents sweeping the area around the Gershwin Hotel, looking for accomplices. Or for additional bombs set, God forbid, to blow up the survivors as they fled. Considering all the confusion, Faye thought that an hour or two was probably an appropriate amount of time for someone with no obvious injuries to wait for emergency services.

  Nevertheless, however long Faye’s wait had been, she should have waited longer. Cully was pushing seventy. He should have been checked out before her.

  She opened her mouth to say so, then she saw Cully’s solicitous face looming over her. He came from a generation that did things differently. The psyche of a man of his age was tattooed with the chivalrous notion of “Ladies first.” Cully would have died before he got between a woman and emergency medical care. He would literally have lain on the ground and bled out before he let that happen.

  Faye had her own brand of chivalry and it told her to stuff the desire to say, “Did you notice how old this man is? Look at him first!”

  Faye eyeballed Cully herself. He was walking without a limp, so at least he hadn’t broken a hip. His eyes were focused and their pupils weren’t dilated. He made sense when he talked. She remembered him lifting her from the rubble-strewn carpet with two strong hands. Maybe he was okay.
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  Cully saw her scrutinizing him and waved away her concern. “I’ve probably got some bruises, but everything works,” he said, and he demonstrated it by breaking into a jig. Faye was pretty sure she’d seen him dance a jig in Beyond A Golden Sky, distracting the bad guys while his buddy got away. She was also pretty sure that Beyond A Golden Sky had been filmed before she was born.

  Cully didn’t dance long. He was obviously favoring a knee and he was breathing a little hard when he was done, but just those few steps had succeeded in attracting a few dozen people. They stood just on the other side of the crime scene tape that separated the witnesses and victims from the curious bystanders. They stared, murmuring, “Is that…? I think it is!” Most of them were of retirement age, but not all. Cully’s fame had filtered into the next generation, and the next. Faye thought that Oklahoma City was probably a hotbed of Western movie fans, and this made her wonder why it had been so long since Cully visited his childhood home.

  He gave his fans a smile and a nod, but his attention was focused on Faye and he was revealing himself as a micromanager. “She hit the ground hard. Face-first. Did you check her neck? And she hasn’t had much to say. I mean nothing, really. Do you think she has a concussion?”

  Faye was pretty sure that all composers were micromanagers. Who else would be interested in telling every last person in an orchestra what to do and when?

  “Probably shock,” the paramedic said. “Can you say something for me, ma’am?”

  Faye was pretty sure Cully was exaggerating until she tried to speak and nothing came out but “Check ma fllllt.”

  The paramedic looked concerned. “Maybe she does have a concussion.”

  Cully understood her, and he responded like a father whose teenager had turned bullheaded. “Don’t be stupid. Your flute is fine. I’m worried about your head. I can always make you a new flute.”