Page 60 of The Vampire and the Case of the Hellacious Hag

Finally we drove around the mine and the car park to the road that twisted up to the tailings pile.

The tractor was still on the roadside, but the huge truck was gone. I had a very bad feeling about that. Had the MIB left the vicinity? Brought in more people? Had mining personnel come and taken it? If so, who?

The miners had fargreater concerns; it had been hard watching the dwarves scour the rubble, not for survivors but for parts of their loved ones, desperately trying to reconstruct the bodies of the lost so that they could move on to the afterlife. Whoever had done this was cold and callous beyond belief. And I couldn’t quite shake the idea that someone within the mine had been in on it.

Gunnar parked partially off the road in front of the tractor to keep the approach passable. ‘I’ll take the cameras.’ I volunteered. The feed from them that was supposed to stream to our phones hadn’t done so; we were either too far out, had bad coverage or the cameras had been destroyed. They were still hidden in position so I hurriedly grabbed them; perhaps they hadn’t been found or the men were still inside the hole.

I brought them to the back of the SUV so we could watch the footage while Gunnar and Sidnee armed up. Both cameras showed the same thing: several more men going down the hatch and one armed man driving the truck towards the tailings’ pile.

‘We’ve no idea how many there are down there.’ I muttered. We’d seen the original five go down, then the seven on the camera, but we had no idea how many had gone downbeforewe’d set the cameras. The MIB could have a whole underground network.

‘Did you check fortheircameras?’ Gunnar asked suddenly.

I blinked. ‘Umm, I looked around, but no not really.’

Sidnee looked up. ‘Has anyone checked for drones?’

Gunnar looked at her sharply. ‘Why? What have you seen?’

‘Nothing, but it’s night time and sophisticated drones have night vision, infrared, thermal, ENVG-B and probably stuff they don’t announce.’

I looked at her with an open mouth. ‘Umm, have you been holding out on us?’

She smiled. ‘It interested me at the academy so I looked into it in my free time. Some of that stuff is wild!’

‘What’s ENVG-B?’ Gunnar asked.

‘Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular. It can see everything at any time – it uses thermal imaging too to give an outline of what’s around you. It’s not as good as daylight visibility but as close as you can get.’ She shrugged. ‘It seemed sensible to look into what technologies they might want to use against us.’

‘Smart,’ I said admiringly. ‘We haven’t had any calls about rogue drones yet, so maybe they’re just using boots on the ground or they’re trying to keep their presence unnoticed.’ Too bad for them that the local fisherman had seen them.

Just thenConnor’s truck pulled in behind the SUV and he and Thomas climbed out. We filled them in on the camera footage whilst they got themselves suited and booted for war.

When everyone was ready, we approached the hatch. The sewer-type lid didn’t have a handle and, unlike most sewer lids, it didn’t have a hole for a key. ‘How do we get in?’ I frowned as I looked at the useless tyre iron in my hand. ‘I guess it opens from the inside, so they must be watching it – or they’ve set up a communication system so whoever is inside can open the door.’

Connor looked at it and smiled. ‘Hand me that crowbar.’

I didn’t see anywhere to get the tool under the lid to apply force, but he looked determined as he stared at the cast-iron lid. ‘Iron is strong, tough and can hold a lot of weight – but it can be pierced with a high tensile rod and great force.’

He lifted the crowbar over his head with the sharp wedge-shaped end facing downward then, muscles bunching in his arms and back, he drove it down into the lid. There was a loud, screeching bang as the crowbar sank into the metal. Connor bent it downward so he could use it to hook the lid and pull it up.

Only it didn’t comeup: the screech of metal increased, but the hatch lid stayed put. He cursed. ‘It’s locked alright. This rod isn’t strong enough to break the mechanism.’

‘If anyone is close to the hatch, they heard all that,’ Thomas said grimly.

We all stared down at the hatch for a few moments, momentarily stumped.

‘I was kind of hoping they’d hear the noise, come and investigate and open it for us,’ Connor admitted.

We waited. No one came. I tapped my lip thoughtfully. ‘Their tunnel has to access the mine somehow. What if it comes out near the site of the first murder? There has to be a reason why they killed Helmud – maybe he saw one of them.’

‘Where are you going with this, Bunny?’ Gunnar asked.

‘If we can’t get in here, maybe we should check the other end.’

He looked in the direction of the mine. ‘Well, some dumbass blew up the mine so we can’t get in there.’

I smiled. ‘You’re forgetting one thing.’

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