Under the Beetle's Cellar

  by the same author

  ZERO AT THE BONE

  THE RED SCREAM

  PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY

  a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  Though this novel was inspired by certain actual incidents, it is a work of fiction and references to real people and organizations are included only to lend a sense of authenticity. All of the characters, whether central or peripheral, are wholly the product of the author’s imagination, as are their actions, motivations, thoughts and conversations, and neither the characters nor the situations which were invented for them are intended to depict real people or real events. In particular, the Hearth Jezreelites are not meant to portray any real religious sect or cult and any resemblance to an actual religion or religious group is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 0-385-46859-8

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5404-8

  Copyright © 1995 by Mary Willis Walker

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  To the memory of my mother,

  who would have enjoyed

  all this making

  of books.

  Oh for a disc to the distance.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Epilogue

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Because I seem incapable of writing a single page without stopping to ask someone for information, I am deeply grateful to those who routinely share their knowledge with me. They make research fun and writing less lonely.

  Debbie Lauderdale and her fourth grade at Forest Trail Elementary School brainstormed what kids would do trapped in a bus for fifty days. Fred Askew and Glen Alyn shared their experiences in Vietnam. Joshua “JM” Logan told me the procedure for making body casts. Becky Levy consulted on art. John Hellerstedt, M.D., Norman Chenven, M.D., and Susan Wade informed me about the realities of childhood asthma.

  Special Agents Nancy Houston and James Echols told me FBI stories. Gerald Adams told me more FBI stories and sparked off some wonderful ideas about a female agent. Ann Hutchison, APD Victim Services, and APD Sr. Sgt. Jack Kelley gave me information on hostage negotiating. Janice Brown at the Texas Department of Protective and Regulatory Services and Chris Douglas at Adoption Affiliates of Reproductive Services educated me on adoption procedures.

  Ralph Willis offered his eighty-six years of accumulated general knowledge on all subjects. Tim Wendel gave some practical info about the world and TJ reminded me what fourth graders are like. My “muscle class” at the Hills helped on all manner of things. Susie Devening and Rebecca Bingham dredged up the worm ditty from the distant past. Amanda Walker gave unflagging Emily Dickinson consultation.

  The Trashy Paperback Writers—Fred Askew, Jodi Berls, Dinah Chenven, and Susan Wade—were there helping through the whole messy process.

  And Kate Miciak believed in me and edited me with enthusiasm and nit-picking attention to detail.

  Thank you, all.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  “The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth, as late figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind.”

  REVELATION 6:12

  Walter Demming hadn’t cried since September 2, 1968, but he sure enough felt like crying now. The lightbulb at the back had gone out while he slept, burned out most likely, leaving them with just the sixty-watt bulb that hung in the pit outside the open front door. So meager was the illumination from that one pathetic bulb, so cold and scant, it could barely be called light. Here in the middle of the bus, as Walter did his morning count, it provided just enough light to discern shapes by.

  Maybe this was the way the world ended, not with the fireworks Samuel Mordecai kept ranting about, but with a simple, gradual fading of the light, a blurring of detail until everything vanished.

  It would end not with a bang but a whimper.

  And whimpering was exactly what Walter felt like doing. Especially when he thought about what it would feel like when that last bulb burned out, too, and cast them into utter darkness. They’d had a taste of that the day it happened. Forty-six days ago.

  The Jezreelites had herded them into the dark barn, Walter and eleven sobbing, terrified children.

  Two of the Jezreelites had put their rifles down and dragged the wooden slab to the side, revealing a raw hole in the earth. One of them walked to the barn door and flipped a switch. From inside the hole, a light glowed up. Walter stared at it. It was just an illuminated hole in the ground. He couldn’t imagine that it had anything to do with him or the children he’d been driving to school.

  The gunmen formed a circle around the twelve of them.

  “Down you go,” said one of the gunmen, pointing to the hole.

  Walter had stood there uncomprehending. The children huddled around him, whining and crying.

  “Bus Driver,” the man said, “you go down first and help them others.”

  Walter had continued to stand there.

  A gunman approached him; he jabbed his rifle into Walter’s spine. “Do it.”

  So Walter had done it. He walked to the edge and looked down into the hole. He knelt and backed himself down, wondering in a distant way if he were climbing into his grave. He landed and looked around. He was standing in a rough dirt pit about four feet in diameter and six feet high. A lightbulb hung from a cord at the side of the hole.

  An open bus door was the only place to go. He stepped in. The buried bus was older and more decrepit than the one they had just gotten out of, but bigger. Half of the seats had been removed, leaving an open space in the back. A hole was cut in the middle of the open floor. A second dim lightbulb hung down in the back.

  It was cooler by about ten degrees than it had been aboveground. And damp, like an old summerhouse after weeks of rain. The smell was musty and heavy.

  But the strangest part, the worst of it, was the windows. They were black with the earth pressing in on them. Since his glasses had got broken and left behind on the road, Walter had to walk closer to look at the dirt outside the window. A thick white grub worm wiggled against the glass and a dark beetle was inching its way through a tiny burrow.

  A voice from above said, “Help the others down.”

  Walter stood in the pit and lifted the children down, one by one. He didn’t even know all their names then, but he lifted them down, one after another, delivering them to the underworld. Lucy came first, red-nosed and sobbing. Bucky dropped into his arms light as a feather, his eyes squeezed shut, his freckles vivid against blanched skin. Josh, wheezing violently, was so heavy Walter stumbled as he lifted
him down. Heather clung to him like a baby monkey, wrapped her legs around him; when an impatient voice called from above, Walter had to peel her off. Sue Ellen and Sandra came clutching on to each other, whimpering. Conrad was moving his lips in silent prayer. Philip was shaking violently and he had wet his pants. Brandon’s face was dark red with rage. Kim was looking around, wide-eyed and stunned. Hector was the last one. Walter knew Hector’s name well because he tended to get into trouble on the bus. He was struggling against the hands pushing him from above. He pushed Walter away with his foot and jumped down, landing hard. “Ow. Shit.” His lip was bleeding. At least someone had fought back.

  The kids wandered into the cavity of the gutted bus and stood looking around in stunned silence.

  Above them, the wood cover was slid into place over the opening. The space they stood in seemed to shrink. They were, the twelve of them, sealed into a pit with the smell of damp rotting earth. Buried alive. Walter thought it would be hard to think up something much worse.

  Then it had happened: The lights had gone off.

  The darkness had been so complete it had made Walter gasp. Total, absolute, end-of-the-world blackness. The darkness of the grave.

  He hadn’t cried then, but now, forty-six days later, he felt like making up for it. He could sit down and let it all go. Like the kids did, when it got to be too much for them. They would just sit down and sob their hearts out and afterward they’d feel all mellow for a while, their eyes red and their cheeks glowing. But if Walter did that, the kids might think he’d given up hope and then they might get more scared than they were already, which was pretty goddamned scared.

  No, he wouldn’t cry today. Anyway, he needed to get on with the count. Crying could wait, but the count had to be done—every morning, before 6 A.M. It had turned into a ritual, this counting business, but he felt that if he kept on doing it just like he had been, maybe they’d all keep on being alive, just like they had been.

  He squinted down at the small blurry shape curled up on the third seat from the back. In the gloom and without his glasses, all he could see from where he was standing was the silhouette of the small pale body against the torn brown vinyl seat. It was Bucky, of course—the smallest, six years old, legs skinny as a water bug’s. The third seat had been Bucky’s spot from the start, where he kept his white Mighty Morphin Power Ranger and the jacket he had with him that day. It was where he hummed himself to sleep at night. Lately, he had been humming himself to sleep during the day, too—or what they thought was the day, what Walter Demming’s watch told him was the day, what he believed to be the day, what he told the kids was the day.

  Bucky’s escaping into sleep all the time was probably a sane response to a nightmare situation. Actually it was a tantalizing idea—just go to sleep and stay asleep until whatever was going to happen happened—a life that didn’t actually require your presence.

  Walter Demming leaned way down until his face was just inches away from the small ear. To do the count right, he needed to see some sign of movement, some sure sign that life still resided there, that Bucky had made it through another night. He watched the delicate eyelid. After a few seconds the lid quivered slightly. He kept watching until it happened again, just to be sure. Then he exhaled slowly and straightened up. Good. Bucky made eight.

  He thought of something and leaned back down. The boy looked different. What was it? He studied the small, finely molded head. His hair. Yes, Bucky’s dark hair had grown so shaggy it covered most of his ear. Even the cowlicks that used to stick up seemed weighted down now. In only forty-six days it had grown that much. Haircuts—one more thing to think about, or to add to his list of things he should be thinking of, but wasn’t. God knows they hadn’t devoted much effort to personal hygiene, but they didn’t have much to work with—no hot water, no soap. He put his head closer to Bucky’s and sniffed to see if Bucky smelled. He couldn’t tell. He probably smelled like sin himself after all these days with no shower, but he seemed to have lost his sense of smell. At first the stench from that foul hole in the back had revolted him. Now he was slightly aware of the dank, musty, trapped air, but it didn’t really offend him—proof positive that you could get accustomed to any damn thing fate threw your way. Anyway, in comparison with their other concerns, body odor and shaggy hair were just not up there at the top of the list.

  And after the dream he’d had last night, dirty, shaggy kids who were alive looked pretty damn good to him. Last night he had jerked instantly awake, sweating and panicked. He had dreamt of flying past thatched cottages where tiny corpses, stiff and dry, were stacked like firewood. A new variation of the nightmare he’d had ever since Trang Loi.

  Walter Demming stood up straight again and tried to keep his eyes lowered, away from the windows, but the problem with buses was that they had windows everywhere. There was just no avoiding them, and no avoiding the black dirt pressing in against the glass. It was craziness, of course, but the dirt seemed to press harder, more relentlessly, every day, and there were moments he thought he could hear the glass creak and groan under the pressure, and the worms and beetles that tunneled right outside the windows seemed marshaling to spill in on top of them all. It made him think of that ditty the kids used to sing on the bus. The words went something like this:

  Never laugh when the hearse goes by

  For you may be the next to die.

  They wrap you up in a dirty sheet

  And put you down about six feet deep.

  All goes well for about a week,

  And then your coffin begins to leak.

  The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,

  The worms play pinochle on your snout.

  He hated it when they sang it. But he hated it more now when they didn’t sing it.

  He walked to the next seat and squinted down at the lumpy body curled up there. Josh. Oh, Lord, this one really worried him. He didn’t need to lean over to check for signs of life here. Josh breathed in raspy gasps, his bare chest heaving with the effort. Asthma, all the kids had chorused on the first day, when Walter had thought Josh was going to strangle on his own breath, when they were all so terrified by what was happening to them it had seemed reasonable to him that one of them might just stop breathing from the terror. But on that first day Josh still had medicine left in his inhaler. The medicine had run out after the first week, and the attacks had gotten progressively more frequent and more intense. Yesterday, in the night, he’d had a choking spell that had lasted for two hours. It had turned his lips blue and made his eyes pop. The other children had wept in terror. If Walter could have one wish answered—just one—it would be to get Josh out of here and into a hospital.

  Today he would make another plea for Josh’s release, but trying to reason with Samuel Mordecai was like trying to reason with a whirlpool when you were caught up in its furious spinning. Everything just got swept up and flushed away in the torrent of words the man spewed out. Walter was going to have to think of something better to do or say, some better approach than he had been using.

  It was silly, but he felt sure he would be able to think clearer, do better, if only he had his glasses. There was something about not being able to see well that interfered with his thought processes, made him more passive. Although, God knows, he’d rolled over and played dead even before his glasses got smashed. It had happened so damn fast. The last thing he expected early in the morning on that country road outside Jezreel, Texas, was a bunch of men with AK-47s surrounding the bus. Before he even realized what was happening, they had dragged him off the bus and smashed his glasses on the road.

  Then he had simply followed their instructions. He’d left six of his charges behind, six young children he was supposed to deliver to school. He’d left them alone on the road, as instructed. He had driven the hijacked bus with eleven whimpering kids and eight armed men to Jezreel, as instructed, even though he could barely see without his glasses.

  And he hadn’t done much better since then. He’d been unable to
affect their situation in any way. Glasses or no glasses, today he needed to think of something new to try.

  He turned to look at the seat across the aisle and, in spite of everything, the sight made him smile. Kimberly’s pale red hair was swirled together with Lucy’s wild brown curls. Kimberly and Lucy, nestled together like two kittens, as usual. They were both awake and starting to stir. Lucy began making a tiny mewling whine—the very noise Walter Demming had been feeling the urge to make himself. He watched as Kimberly put her arms around her friend and rocked her slowly until the whining stopped. Kimberly and Lucy—numbers ten and eleven. All accounted for, all eleven. All still alive on this, their forty-sixth day of captivity.

  Behind him, the morning noises were underway—the scuffle and thumps and whines and skirmishes of kids getting up and heading to the back of the bus to the hole the Jezreelites had made for them to use as a latrine. They had cut a hole right through the bus floor and dug a pit underneath for the waste to fall into, lined it with lime. Most of the kids wouldn’t use it at first. They were embarrassed by the lack of privacy and unsure how to use it. But nature took over and they had learned to squat. And there was a general agreement not to look when someone was using it. Since several of them had suffered with intestinal problems, they actually spent a lot of time sitting right next to it. It was now routine for all but Philip, who still wet his pants occasionally because he waited too long.

  “Mr. Demming. Mr. Demming.” Josh’s raspy voice called out as it did every morning. “Is it time to get up?”

  Walter checked his watch. “Quarter to six, Josh. Quarter to six in the morning.” He walked back to where the boy was sitting up on the seat and reached his hand out to smooth Josh’s dark blond hair. It felt greasy and damp under his palm. “It’s April tenth, so the sun will be rising soon, in about fifty minutes. You could get up or rest for another half hour, Josh. They’ll probably bring us something to eat pretty soon.” The boy was breathing heavily; he kept both pale hands pressed to his chest.