Page 222 of Evil Hearts

Chapter One

N ora really needed to pee. She’d been following the detour signs along the route through the mountains for what seemed like forever. Thanks to recent storms, there were no places to stop, let alone actual businesses whose facilities she could use. The storm’s damage could not be overdramatized. She had driven through war zones—well, been driven through them, anyway—and the damage here was on par with what she’d seen in places scarred by years of cluster bombs and hatred. Whole communities swept away, entire families gone, erased from the mountains like a five-year-old with a fat pink eraser.

Instead of tight two-laned roads, there was a single lane barely passable for her Jeep. Some places didn’t even have asphalt left, leaving the brave (crazy?) drivers to go off-road and pray the debris piles held. Instead of the concrete pads of buildings, there were piles of wreckage and smears of dank mud. It was almost unfathomable that this had been a verdant paradise just a few months ago.

Spying a wider spot in the road, Nora slowly veered off to the edge, pulled the emergency brake, and got out. She stretched, and redid her very untidy messy bun. Driving through the mountains with the top off the Jeep had turned her wavy brown locks into a large glob of knotted hair. She looked awful but didn’t care. She was there to photograph the storm’s aftermath for publication in one of the world’s most renowned magazines. She’d been ecstatic when she’d gotten the contract in her email. She was still thrilled to be on the job documenting history, but as it always did, the reality of the trauma around her was slugging her in the gut.

Nora grabbed a small stack of napkins and looked around. Behind her, the mountain loomed dark as the setting sun slowly rolled down its other side. In front of her were several piles of debris, clearly just pushed off the road to clear a lane for traffic.

“When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go,” she said to herself. After relieving herself and burying her trash, she wiped her hands with a baby wipe and grabbed her camera. Taking the lens cap off, she slung the camera strap around her neck. When she’d gotten out of her car, the forest around her had been filled with rustling leaves, trickling water, birds…all the things you’d expect to hear in a forest. Now, there was nothing but the water. Nora shivered as a whisper of fear trickled down her spine. “Alright, Mothman!” she called out with silly bravado. “I’m not into you bug boys, okay?”

Before setting out to photograph the hurricane damage, she’d read up on the region, adding to what had only been a basic knowledge of the history and culture of the mountains. She knew her crash course through Wikipedia links only scratched the surface, but it had given her enough information that she could get started. Mothmen, the Sasquatch, and a staunch belief in superstition and the supernatural were things that stood out in her memory. And she was most definitely not into fuzzy men with wings.

Off in the distance, she saw white fabric snagged atop a shredded tree waving eerily in the light breeze. It would have been an adult’s shirt or a child’s dress; regardless, it was a haunting image with the fading light hinting at the loss, and the ragged tree blatantly shouting its heartache to anyone who could see.

Adjusting her focus, she took a few shots, but didn’t like the angle of the light. Without looking around, she took two steps to the left and re-sighted the tree. Still not right , she thought to herself. “Just one more ste—” But there was no ground left and Nora fell. She screamed, her terrified cry ending abruptly as she landed on another pile of rubble down the side of the mountain.

It was dark, and cold, and holy shit did everything hurt. Nora slowly let her senses come back to life. She opened her eyes and couldn’t see anything. It wasn’t that the lights were off, they just weren’t there. Not just dim but black. A blackness so profound she tried to reach out to feel it, but there was nothing there. She started to panic, feeling a tight fabric around her body, and she tried to sit up, but the excruciating pain in her lower leg stole her breath. Her leg throbbed with the worst pain she’d ever felt. It hurt so badly she couldn’t even scream.

Slowly, she slid her hands down her torso, to her hip, and felt around the edge of what had to be a bandage below her knee. Trying to move her foot made the pain worse, confirming her worst fear: if her leg wasn’t broken, there was enough soft tissue damage to make her wish for a clean break. She could feel the raised skin swollen and oozing with plasma and blood. She hissed, trying to determine the extent of her injuries by touch alone. She found a large goose egg on the back of her head, and more scratches and sore spots on the rest of her body than she could count.

Carefully trying to sit up using only her left leg, she realized she was in a hammock made of rough fabric, like a thick cotton or linen, almost burlap, from the feel of it. Her movements made the hammock sway dangerously as she struggled. There was a blanket of the same material atop her, tangled around her good leg. Nora tried to disengage from it, but couldn’t. She was literally blinded by the lack of light.

Nora had been in some dangerous situations before—she’d hidden from rebel fighters, terrorists, and had even managed to evade some really angry provincial police while chasing down answers to the origins of COVID. As long as she kept her hair covered and her eyes down, she could blend in almost anywhere.

Despite all the crazy situations she’d been in, she’d never been this scared. Her whole life was based on what she could see, what she could visually record with her camera. In the cold void of this darkness, Nora Buchanan was truly terrified. Inhaling deeply, she tried to hold the air in her lungs to regain control of her breathing. She had to get her bearings, despite the pain and exhaustion tugging at her.

She started with her right hand, extending it all the way in front of her, and slowly moving it to the right. She gently moved her hand up and down, hoping to find something solid, something she could recognize. Nothing. Her left hand’s explorations came up empty as well. Nora reached behind her with both hands and felt the cold clamminess of a cave wall. She started to wriggle her way to the top of the hammock to better explore.

“Be still.” A deep male voice echoed around her.

Nora froze. She couldn’t tell where it came from, only that it was nearby.

The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

She wasn’t alone.