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Disclaimer: Not mine if you've seen them on CSI: NY.

Chapter 10

Jo had simply lay there in silence for what felt like an eternity. She refused to allow herself to open her eyes, to face the reality of her bleak situation. Realising she had to she forced her eyes open. Seeing the wood around her brought stinging tears to her eyes. She coughed, cleared her throat and forced the tears back. "Stay calm, Jo." she told herself out loud. Hearing her own voice was better than the deafening silence around her.

This is what she knew: she was in a world of pain, everything ached and throbbed, her head in particular. She also knew that she had been buried alive, the smell of earth was too strong around her to think otherwise. The cold dampness off it seeped into the box, sending a chill right down her spine.

She looked over the box she was in again, making a mental note of its dimensions. She used that to calculate how much air was in the box, used that to work out how long she had in it. A couple of hours, it was something that brought tears back to her eyes, she couldn't stop them.

She reached up and hid her face behind her hand and just let her tears fall, even though she knew being worked up like this would only use up her limited oxygen quicker. She suddenly noticed the slight breeze on her arm. She looked up to see what could possibly be responsible and noticed something, so she shone the torch up at it. It was some sort of pipe.

She shuffled across slightly, all she could do, and looked straight up the pipe, shining the torch up it. She could make nothing out but she could feel the cold fresh air blowing down it. She let her calculations of air-time go right out of her head. At least she wouldn't suffocate, but she did suddenly become aware of how thirsty she was.

~0~0~0~0~

The team where spread out over the forest. Choppers had headed out before them and had located the Sedan, after what had seemed like forever. They had split up into teams, lots of them, all heading out five miles from the site of the burnt out Sedan. Only Hawkes remained with it, trying to gather any evidence he could possibly get from it or around it.

Flack's voice suddenly came over Mac's radio, "Have you found it?" Mac asked him.

"No, but I just got a call from the chopper pilot. They've spotted a small wooden cabin less than twenty miles from where they spotted the Sedan. They're trying to find out who it belongs to now." Flack replied.

"Okay, keep me posted." Mac said to him and returned his radio to his belt.

Lindsay was walking beside Mac. Just like him she was scanning every inch of the forest floor. She was so busy looking ahead that she didn't see the pile of leaves blocking her next step. The toe of her shoe hit something and sent her crashing to the ground.

Mac was quickly knelt beside her, checking she was okay. "I'm fine," she told him, "My foot got caught on something…" she said, before both of them suddenly saw what it was, a pipe.

"This is about five miles from the Sedan!" Mac rejoiced as he crawled over to the pipe and began using his hands to dig through the mud. "Jo we're here! We're gonna get you out. Hold on!" he yelled.

Lindsay grabbed her radio and yelled into it, "We have her, we found Jo! We need back-up to help get her out!"

Mac heard her give their location as he continued clawing his way through the cold ground, the mud getting harder to dig through as he made a small dent in the patch they would have to dig out. Lindsay was suddenly there helping him. "We're gonna get you out, Jo!" she called out as she dragged dirt away with her hands, but something suddenly caught her attention, another pipe, just a few feet away from them. She stopped digging as she studied it.

"Lindsay!" Mac yelled at her desperately wanting her to continue. "We're coming, Jo!"

She looked down at the pipe near them and noticed it had been plugged with some sort of black rubber cork. She rubbed her thumb over it, the plug was stuck tight. She glanced over at the other pipe and saw it too had been plugged, "Mac, look!" she said as she pointed out the other pipe to him.

Mac saw it then looked at the one near him, he too noticing the plug in it. Twelve hours was nowhere near up. Ged wasn't plugging the pipe yet. Mac fell back off his knees. "This isn't Jo. He said we would have to find 6 victims before we would find her…"

Lindsay nodded and said, "Farrah Vaughn and her unborn child were the first two, then her parents, and now another two. Mac, he was telling us where the next bodies are, not Jo."

Mac scanned the forest around them, "We're not going to have enough time to find her!" he suddenly realised as the others all began to join them.

~0~0~0~0~

It had again taken what felt like forever for the two wooden, homemade coffins to be fully dug up. The stench of rotting flesh had poured out of the cracks between the wooden boards. They had cracked the coffins open right there in the forest, under as control conditions as possible.

The smell of death was always hard to swallow, but at this rate of decomp it was one hundred times harder. They all watched as Sid who had also joined them searched through their DB's clothes, looking for anything that may help identify them. It was clear one of the bodies was male, the other female.

Sid pulled a wallet out of the male victim's pocket and passed it to Flack. He began looking through it with Mac. He came across the very thing they were looking for, "I got his driver's licence…What the..?" Flack said, sounding as confused as he looked.

"Flack, what is it?" Danny asked.

"Our vic's name is Brian Cullen."

"This is Maura Cullen." Lindsay told them, having gone through the wallet Sid had passed her from out of the female DB's pocket.

"The name can't just be a coincidence," Mac said, "I think that Ged wanted us to find his adoptive parents and then he led us to his biological ones."

~0~0~0~0~

Jo had tried just closing her eyes and imaging she was somewhere else, it helped keep her calm…slightly. She kept turning the Maglite off, trying to preserve the batteries as best she could. As she closed her eyes again she saw images of the hell she'd been though to get here. She didn't remember being put in the coffin, nor did she remember the dirt being thrown over her.

What she did remember haunted her just as badly. Ged had marched her through the forest, making her walk just a couple of steps ahead of him, the whole time he'd had a gun pointed at her back. They seemed to have been walking for hours when he finally told her to stop.

She did as he instructed and glanced over her shoulder at him. Her hands were tied together in front of her, the rope scratching her already wounded flesh. He had with him a shovel. He held that in one hand and the small hand gun in the other, still keeping it pointed at Jo.

He flicked the gun to the left, indicating that she had to move to the left. She did as he told her, stepping into a tight circle of young looking trees and some dead looking tree. She brushed against one of them as something caught her eye. It was the hole in the ground, the contents of which sat in a heap beside it.

She hadn't realised she'd stopped dead in her tracks but the gun jabbing her in her back told her to get moving again. She took a few more steps forward and tried to look into the hole but suddenly she was on her stomach, eating dirt. She groaned in pain as her head spun, throbbing with pain.

Ged nudged her over onto her back. She looked up at him, seeing two of him thanks to the bump on her head. She yelped in pain as he dropped down on top of her. She felt herself slipping into unconsciousness but not before she felt Ged tug her trousers down. She felt the sickening familiarity of him thrusting himself into her.

She welcomed unconsciousness but it taunted her, beckoning her in and then blocking her out. It was forcing her to live through another rape, this one much more brutal than the last. It seemed to go on and on and unconsciousness drifted further away.

Eventually she had fallen into unconsciousness but it hadn't been soon enough and images of her second assault kept flashing through her mind, bringing stinging tears to her eyes.

She suddenly screamed as something wet and cold hit her face. She dropped the Maglite from her hands in her panic, she felt around, trying to find it and screamed again when her hand touched another thing that was cold and wet.

She continued trying to search for the Maglite and finally put her hand on it. She grabbed it and turned it on and shone it around the box. What she saw was something that she would have laughed at if the situation had been different, but as it was it just made her scream in frustration.

It was a worm, a big fat worm that wriggled around her coffin. She shone the torch around her tiny prison and cringed when she saw another big worm near her feet. She flinched when she felt another touch her face, it was like torture. She closed her eyes as tears formed in them, rebelliously leaking out from the corners of her eyes.

When she opened them and looked up she saw another worm inching its way in through the small gaps in her wooden coffin. "Get out!" she yelled at it, slamming the Maglite into it.

She looked up when she heard a familiar voice. It seemed to travel right down the pipe and echo around her prison, or maybe it was just echoing in her head. "I thought you might want some company down in there, Alabama!" Ged shouted to her.

She had no idea what he meant. If she had been able to see him she would have known just what he meant. He picked up the second bucket he had brought to the site and poured it out. Hundreds of worms landed on the ground, all squirming, quickly burrowing into the loose earth.

Ged couldn't help but laugh. "I hear they taste good too if you're feeling hungry."

Jo looked up and shone the torch up to see another worm trying to wiggle its way into her coffin. This was the company he meant.

"Please, let me out!" she begged him, shouting into the pipe.

"No can do!" he yelled to her.

She closed her eyes and put her thumbs in her ears and held the rest of her hand over her face as she tried desperately not to sob her heart out. This was supposed to be a myth, being buried alive and being turned into worm food, but here she was, here were the worms, and this really was happening to her.

~0~0~0~0~

The door of the cabin was slammed open so hard it bounced back off the wall, nearly hitting Flack as he ran in, followed by Mac and the rest of the team and dozens of armed officers. They were all shouting out, words that seemed to fall silent in Mac's ears. All he could think was 'what if Jo's here?' He was praying she would be.

Everything around him seemed to be moving in slow motion. He watched the others race around checking every room, every closet, everywhere. All of them were coming up empty. He saw Flack open a door that led to a basement. "Down here!" he yelled.

Mac came unfrozen and ran over to the door, following Flack down the stairs. Here time seemed to return to normal. "Over there!" Lindsay said as she moved over to a dark stain on the floor.

Mac didn't need a closer look to know what it was but he moved over to it anyway. "Blood." he said.

"Hey, this is Jo's, she was wearing it in the video!" Flack said as he looked down at a jacket that was draped over a chair.

"Don't touch it. I'll get Adam to process it." Mac said, desperately hanging on to a hope they might find something from it, anything that would lead them to Jo.

"If Ged's not here then where the hell is he?" Lindsay asked.

"Hey guys!" Danny yelled as he ran down into the basement.

They all noticed how he momentarily froze when he saw the blood pool. He ripped his gaze away from it and walked over to where they had gathered and showed them the letter in his hands. "Found this upstairs." he said.

The others all read it but it was Mac who read the short letter out loud. "Time is running out. How long will you continue looking for her? See you round, the Gamekeeper."

"Until we find her!" Flack stated.

The others all looked at him, agreeing. Mac, however, couldn't help but think they were going to be too late.

~0~0~0~0~

Adam was in the cabin, he was using equipment that a chopper had brought out to them to analyse some of the evidence they had found at the scene. Hawkes had gone back to the crime lab via a chopper to analyse the blood they had found. He'd already determined the blood was Jo's, something they'd all been expecting.

He was also there to assist Sid with the autopsies. Both men had their phones on speaker so they could talk to one another whilst working.

Hawkes was telling Adam what they had discovered so far. "Both victims have no major injuries. We've looked for everything Adam, bullet holes, knifes wounds, you name it. We need a little more time but we're fairly certain both vic's died from the same thing Farrah Vaughn did."

"Asphyxiation," Adam said.

"Yes," Hawkes said. "So, what about you, you found anything we can use?"

"Not a lot, but I did find something on Jo's jacket. Some sort of insect. I've done some research and I sent some pictures back to the lab and it's been confirmed. The insect is called a Beech scale insect."

~0~0~

Adam had gathered the others to tell them what he had already told Hawkes. "The Beech scale insect, along with two types of fungi, is responsible for causing beech bark disease on beech trees. The insect attacks the tree leaving behind cankers in the bark which are then inhabited by the fungus. Trees affected by it more often than not die."

"What does this have to do with us finding Jo?" Mac asked impatiently.

"It could narrow down our search." Adam said.

"How?" Danny asked.

"Will you guys just let me finish!" Adam yelled, "When the beech tree dies because of this it is replaced by sugar maple trees. The insects I found on Jo's jacket where in the second stage. This is when they are known as crawlers. I managed to contact a biological organisation that is monitoring all beech disease outbreaks here in the Catskills. The sent me this map. It has all the locations of beech trees where this stage in the insect is most occurring. There are several major locations, but I managed to narrow it down…"

"How?" Danny asked.

"How doesn't matter!" Adam snapped. "It's still gonna take us hours to check the different locations but it has to be better than nothing. It has to help a little bit." he said sounding like he was trying to convince himself more than he was his colleagues.

"Great work Adam. Where's this map?" Mac said.

Adam passed him a tablet that was displaying the map. "I noticed something, maybe it was just wishful thinking but when I compared the locations of the Cullen's body, the Sedan and the Cullen's cabin they came together to create almost a rectangle. Just one corner was missing from it and that corner also happens to be one of the possible locations we need to search." Adam said, bringing up the map and the correlations on the tablet before turning it to show the others.

~0~0~0~0~

Jo could still hear Ged's menacing voice. "Hold ya breath, Alabama." he told her just seconds before the cool breeze stopped. After that she no longer heard his voice. When she shone the Maglite up into the pipe she saw nothing, just blackness. She knew he'd somehow covered the pipe. She thought back to her earlier calculation.

She had two hours at most and that had begun decreasing half hour ago, or was it more. She began pounding her fists on the lid of the coffin, she screamed at the top of her lungs, begging for help from anyone who may be able to help her. Little did she know no one was around to hear her cries.

TBC

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