Behind The Flames: A Detective Chineke Series

Chapter 10

After Tarah took Serena took off to the house for safety, I stayed back to look further in the woods at the kids. As far as the woods stretched, I could only guess that we hadn't even come close to half of searching the full area. I was beginning to become desperate to find the kids. So desperate that started yelling randomly.

"Hello! Hello! Anybody out there?" I screamed loudly.

Of course, I didn't get a response. Only the pure silence of nature.

"HELLO!" I yelled again as I kept walking.

Damn! This job was really bothering me. Fuck this! If I don't find those kids alive in the next twenty-four hours, I'm taking Jeff's cash and leaving this state. Maybe even the country! I'm not going to prison. Ever! Wait! Tarah's going to want to come too. Either way, it would be best for me to have a backup plan ready. If the kids are dead, that's out of my control. The only thing I can do is make sure I survive.

"Come on kids. Where are you?" I whispered to myself.

I guess if I was two scared, white kids I wouldn't answer a stranger's call either. How do police do this type of stuff? All this yelling was hopeless. If the kids were around, they would've come out of hiding by now. Just when I was about to give up all hope and leave to collect Jeff's cash from his trunk, I stumbled across a dead corpse.

"Oh shit!" I uttered as I noticed the corpse in front of me.

A deer! At least that's what it appeared to be from the bones and antlers. I squatted near the corpse to analyze the time of death. Using a nearby twig, I poked the blood, and it was still fresh. About a few hours fresh.

"Hmm..." I whispered to myself.

The deer was eaten alive. I stood back up and looked at the spine of the deer. That's when I saw a small trail of blood leading in the upper left direction. With the amount of water in this deer's blood trail, I could trace it to wherever it leads. So, that's exactly what I did. I had to be sure that the kids weren't eaten alive too.

"Here goes nothing." I whispered to myself softly.

As I followed the trail of blood, it began to fade into the ground bit by bit. Suddenly, my ears began to ring with the sound of a flowing river nearby. It wasn't long until I came across a small cave nearby. The cave was spooky, dark inside as I expected. Just to be safe, I grabbed a few pebbles on the ground and threw them inside the cave's entrance. Then, I ducked behind a bush and waited a few seconds. Nothing happened.

"Seems safe to check." I whispered to myself.

I stood from behind the bush and made my way into the cave. Using my phone's flashlight again, I finally could see almost everything in the cave.

"Oh shit!" I uttered as I saw a huge pile of bones.

Was it all animals? Humans too? Well, from the looks of it, I couldn't tell at all. These bones had to be there for weeks or maybe months. As bad as my sense of smell was, I could imagine the stench was unbearable to the human nose.

"This had to be wolves." I told myself.

Great! Here I was in a den full of corpses and darkness. If I did die here, no one would find me. It was so much I still wanted to do. I didn't even have a gun in case I needed to fight to survive. This wasn't even the entire cave.

"Hmmm." I whispered as I saw a deeper area of the cave.

I quietly climbed down and once I landed; I used my flashlight to look around the area before I took another step. As I stood there scaling the area, I heard a familiar sound. It was coming from the corner on the right side of me. I gradually made my way over to the corner making my footsteps as light as possible.

"WOAHHHH!" I spoke randomly as my eyes lit up with shock. To my surprise, it was the two missing kids! The girl and her little brother. Finally, I had found them. Alive!

"Hey, kids! I've been looking for you two. I'm...detective Zale." I told the kids.

I knew my intuition could live inside the cave due to the water in the body. They didn't say a word. By the looks of it, they weren't harmed or bleeding. Why didn't they move? Right before, I could say anything else, the young girl placed her index finger pointed upward over her lips as a signal. A signal to be silent. At that very moment, my heart dropped an inch closer to my stomach. My head turned slowly to catch the sight of an enormous, brown grizzly bear.