by John Saul
She heard noises, worse noises than she’d ever heard during the times she’d been tortured here, and she felt the very floor shake beneath her feet.
Then the window exploded into her face, and her eyes, punctured by fragments of flying glass, failed her, but it didn’t really matter.
The huge mass of concrete, propelled by the force of millions of tons of water, crushed her beneath its weight then moved on, reducing the cabin to little more than fragments of flotsam churning in the melee.
It was all over in a matter of seconds.
Where before there had been a frame house and several small cabins scattered through a peaceful grove of cottonwood trees, there now was nothing.
Not a scrap of vegetation survived the scouring of the flood’s furious bore; not even a fragment of the building’s foundations remained.
All that was left was the naked rock bottom of the canyon, scraped clean of everything, its sandstone gouged deep with the scars of an assault that nature itself had never designed.
The water rushed on.
Chapter 33
Jesus Hernandez began the last check of his work. The power was back on, and once more the concrete pad that supported the huge dish antenna was bathed in the white radiance of halogen floodlights. He examined the connections carefully, then finally nodded to Kruger. “Got it.”
Kruger, who had been pacing nervously, urging Hernandez to work faster, punched a button on the walkie-talkie and spoke to Kendall. “Tell them to start testing.”
Almost immediately the antenna came to life. The dish began to rotate, then tipped on its axis. “Okay,” Kruger said. “Looks like it’s good. It’s just a jury rig, but it should hold up till morning.”
In the control center Kendall felt a little of the tension drain out of his body. His eyes fixed on the screen of one of the computers as he quickly double-checked the codes once more, then he nodded to Stan Utley. “Send it,” he said.
Utley glanced at the display, then whistled softly. “Jesus Christ—you’ll blow every one of them.” His gaze shifted uncertainly to Greg Moreland.
Moreland nodded curtly.
Utley hesitated, then shrugged his acceptance of the order. He made some adjustments to the controls of the transmitter, then prepared the machine to accept the codes from the computer. His finger hovered over the Enter key on his own computer and he looked questioningly at Kendall and Moreland one last time.
Both men nodded, and Utley pressed the button.
On the display screen numbers began flashing as the antenna above came to life and the first of the high-frequency waves radiated out over Borrego.
And then, abruptly, the lights went out. The cavern was plunged into total darkness.
Paul Kendall froze for a split second, then rage welled up in him. He groped in the darkness, then found the walkie-talkie. “What the hell’s going on?” he shouted. “We’ve lost power down here!”
On the rim of the canyon Otto Kruger felt the same anger as Paul Kendall when the power went out again. He was about to yell an order at Jesus Hernandez when he heard a low rumble, almost like an explosion, drifting down from the eastern end of the canyon. He frowned, puzzled, but as the walkie-talkie in his hand came alive and he heard Kendall’s voice—its fury evident despite the crackling of the transmission—he understood.
“The dam,” he breathed, almost to himself. His whole body tensed, then he pressed the transmitting button on his own instrument. “The dam!” he shouted. “I think it’s gone!”
The distant roar was getting louder now, and a moment later, as the wall of water hit a bend in the narrow chasm and shot a plume high above the canyon’s rim, Kruger and his men saw it.
Churning out of the darkness, it roared down the canyon like a freight train gone out of control. The first enormous bore seemed almost like the head of some kind of reptilian monster, weaving back and forth across the canyon, smashing first against one wall and then the other. Behind it the body of the monster spread out to fill the canyon a hundred feet deep.
Trees, boulders, massive chunks of concrete churned on its surface, gouged up from the bottom by the force of the flood, only to sink once more, then reappear.
Kruger stared at the spectacle, every muscle in his body frozen by the sheer magnitude of it.
There was a bend in the canyon just above the antenna installation, and Jesus Hernandez, instinctively understanding what was about to happen, began to run, charging away from the edge of the chasm, stumbling through the sagebrush and juniper that spread across the plateau’s surface. By the time the bore struck, he was a hundred yards away, but the force of the cascade of water that welled up from the canyon, overflowing its walls, flattened him to the ground. Then, as it began its backwash, the flood tried to drag him with it.
His hands grappled along the ground, then closed on the lower branches of a thick juniper.
The water, its force spent, released him. He scrambled to his feet and looked back toward the antenna.
It had been reduced to a mass of twisted wreckage. The chain-link fence had been flattened, and the one truck that had been left after the other four men had gone down to cordon off the canyon’s mouth half an hour earlier now lay on its side, twenty yards in from the canyon’s rim.
Of Otto Kruger there was no sign at all.
As Hernandez watched, the ground beneath his feet trembled, and suddenly fifty feet of the canyon’s rim disappeared, dropping away, crumbling into the roiling water below. The antenna, the pad upon which it sat, and the truck were all gone forever.
Jesus Hernandez, stunned, crossed himself, then fell to his knees and for the first time in years began to pray.
Already the roar of the flood’s charge down the canyon was beginning to fade into the distance.
In the cavern behind the old construction shack, Paul Kendall heard Otto Kruger’s last words, though for a moment the full meaning of them didn’t sink in. But a moment later, when he too heard the first ominous rumblings of the cataclysm that was hurtling toward him, he dropped the walkie-talkie and threw himself toward the door.
Kendall stumbled over a chair, lost his balance, and dropped to the floor. He scrambled to his feet, but felt disoriented in the pitch-blackness.
The roar was growing steadily, and panic began to overwhelm him. He groped in the darkness, his hands touching something hard.
A desk.
Which desk?
He didn’t know.
“Utley!” he yelled. “Greg! Where are you?”
There was no answer, but he could hear the other men stumbling in the darkness, and tried to move toward the sounds.
Kendall’s knee struck something hard and he recoiled, then tried another direction.
Greg Moreland, groping his way through the dark, fumbled with something that felt like a door. Then fingers reached out of the darkness and touched him. A second later he felt hands close around his neck, and then he was hurled to the floor as someone else—Kendall? Stan Utley?—tried to jerk the door open.
As the rumble of the flood grew, so also did Greg Moreland’s own panic. Reason deserted him. He began thrashing in the darkness, stumbling first one way then another. But wherever he turned, something seemed to be in his way.
The roar was deafening now, and there was a crashing noise as the flimsy frame structure fronting the cavern was swept away. Then, as the inrushing water compressed the air in the cavern, he was struck by a blinding pain.
His eardrums, stressed beyond their capabilities, burst. Abruptly, Greg Moreland found himself in utter silence.
But even the silence lasted only a second before the water overcame him, knocking him to the floor, then picking him up again to hurl him against the rock wall of the cavern.
A fragment of concrete, carried from the dam on the pure force of the current, slammed into his head, crushing it like an egg against the rough sandstone wall.
The water swept on, scouring the cavern clean, gouging the bodies of Greg Morelan
d, Paul Kendall, and Stan Utley loose from the shelter of the cave, sweeping the transmitter and computers away, adding them to the great collection of debris the flood had gathered.
When the water finally ebbed a few minutes later, the cavern in the wall, like the rest of the canyon, had been swept clean of every trace that human beings had ever been there.
A moment later the wall of the canyon, undercut by the fury of the flood, collapsed, marking the spot with a pile of rubble that, if left undisturbed, would last for a millennium, slowly to be reshaped by rain and wind.
The four of them approached the rim of the canyon slowly. An eerie silence seemed to have fallen over the night. The roar of the flood had faded away completely, but the normal night sounds, the rustling of small animals, the flutter of the wings of bats as they hunted for prey, the chirping of insects calling for mates—all were gone.
It was as if every living thing on the plateau had been shocked into utter silence by the forces that had been unleashed when the dam crumbled.
Judith instinctively slipped her hand into Jed’s as they crept toward the edge of the precipice.
The path they had come up a few minutes earlier was gone, and the verge of the canyon was twenty feet farther back than it had been before. The new face of the canyon, freshly exposed sandstone, was rough and uneven, like a gem waiting to be cut.
Far below them fragments of the great slab that had broken away from the heights lay shattered on what had once been the bed of the river but was now nothing more than the hard and wetly glittering surface of the bedrock beneath.
To their right was what had once been the bottom of the lake, a great layer of silt that had been carried downstream by the river over the course of half a century slowly sinking to the bottom of the lake, building up. Eventually, even if the dam had survived, the lake would have disappeared, the canyon filled by the silt. Now it lay gleaming in the moonlight, a huge mud slick thirty feet thick, its surface carved in strange patterns by the water that had left it behind.
Awestruck, they stood still, gazing out on the ruins of the reservoir and the canyon, each of them lost in his own private thoughts.
Jed stared down into the utter desolation below, the sheer magnitude of the fury he had unleashed threatening to overwhelm him. Finally he looked away, gazing up into the sky. The moon and stars overhead were comforting, for unlike the landscape below, they were unchanged, oblivious to the cataclysm that had swept through the canyon. As he watched, a shadow swept past the moon. Jed felt his grandfather’s hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently.
“What is it?” Jed asked, murmuring the words softly, as if even his voice would defile the strangely reverent silence of the night.
The pressure on his shoulder increased. “Don’t speak,” Brown Eagle whispered. “Just watch.”
Now Judith and Peter too were staring up into the sky. As if seeking the light of the moon, the shadow appeared again, silhouetted against the silver disk, and then began lazily spiraling downward.
It was a bird, its great wings set as it coasted on the air currents. As it came lower and lower, growing larger, the four people watching it gasped at its sheer size. It circled over them, then soared eastward, its huge wings pounding as it gained altitude and once more began riding the breezes, sweeping back and forth over the canyon. It disappeared into the distance, then, a moment later, reappeared, beating its way back to swoop low over the small cluster of people on the canyon’s rim.
It screamed, a shrill sound that echoed off the canyon’s walls, then began climbing, higher with every wing beat, silhouetted once more against the brilliance of the moon. Finally, when it was almost out of sight, it dove, sweeping its wings back, stretching its neck so that its enormous curved beak sliced through the air.
It was over the canyon now; and then, as it dropped below the rim, it screamed once more.
Its wings spread wide as it neared the canyon wall only a few feet above the great mud slick that covered the chasm’s floor, and then it screamed a third time.
Its talons reached out, clutching at the naked rock, and in an instant it disappeared.
The four of them watched in silence, unsure whether they’d seen and heard the strange phantom bird at all. In the silence, Brown Eagle spoke.
“Rakantoh,” he said softly. “He’s come home.”
They had been walking for nearly an hour, pausing now and then to look down into the canyon.
They’d stared in silence at the spot where the sanitarium had been.
Now, as on the rest of the canyon floor, there was nothing left: only a few boulders that the passing flood had almost whimsically dropped here and there.
Farther on they had paused again, and stared at the great slab of rubble where the ledge upon which the antenna had stood now lay shattered at the bottom, blocking the cavern that had been dug into the wall beneath.
At last they started down the gentle slope that led to the desert floor In the distance they could see the town, a few of its windows glowing with candlelight.
Spread out across the desert, already disappearing quickly into the sands and gullies, draining down the myriad washes that cut through the flatlands, there was a sheen of water.
By morning it would be gone.
They paused, almost by common consent, and Judith turned to Jed Arnold.
“What do you want us to tell them?” she asked. Immediately, they all understood what she meant.
Jed was silent for a moment, but when he finally spoke, his voice was clear.
“We’ll tell them the truth,” he said. “They tried to kill us all. So I killed them first.”
They started once more toward the town, with only the moon lighting their way.
But above them, high in the sky, the great bird soared.
Jed looked up at it, and smiled.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOHN SAUL is the author of twenty-eight novels, each a million-copy-plus national bestseller: Some of them are: Suffer the Children, Punish the Sinners, Cry for the Strangers, Comes the Blind Fury, When the Wind Blows, The God Project, Nathaniel, Brainchild, Hellfire, The Unwanted, The Unloved, Creature, Sleepwalk, Second Child, Darkness, Shadows, Guardian, The Homing, Black Lightning, The Presence, and The Blackstone Chronicles. John Saul lives in Seattle, Washington
ENTER THE TERRIFYING WORLD OF JOHN SAUL
A scream shatters the peaceful night of a sleepy town, a mysterious stranger awakens to seek vengeance.… Once again, with expert, chillingly demonic skill, John Saul draws the reader into his world of utter fear. The author of countless novels of psychological and supernatural suspense—all million copy New York Times bestsellers—John Saul is unequaled in his power to weave the haunted past and the troubled present into a web of pure, cold terror.
THE GOD PROJECT
Something is happening to the children of Eastbury, Massachusetts … something that strikes at the heart of every parent’s darkest fears. For Sally Montgomery, the grief over the sudden death of her infant daughter is only the beginning. For Lucy Corliss, her son Randy is her life. Then one day, Randy doesn’t come home. And the terror begins …
A horn honked, pulling Randy out of his reverie, and he realized he was alone on the block. He looked at the watch his father had given him for his ninth birthday. It was nearly eight thirty. If he didn’t hurry, he was going to be late for school. Then he heard a voice calling to him.
“Randy! Randy Corliss!”
A blue car, a car he didn’t recognize, was standing by the curb. A woman was smiling at him from the driver’s seat. He approached the car hesitantly, clutching his lunch box.
“Hi, Randy,” the woman said.
“Who are you?” Randy stood back from the car, remembering his mother’s warnings about never talking to strangers.
“My name’s Miss Bowen. Louise Bowen. I came to get you.”
“Get me?” Randy asked. “Why?”
“For your father,” the woman said. Randy’s heart beat faste
r. His father? His father had sent this woman? Was it really going to happen, finally? “He wanted me to pick you up at home,” he heard the woman say, “but I was late. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right,” Randy said. He moved closer to the car. “Are you taking me to Daddy’s house?”
The woman reached across and pushed the passenger door open. “In a little while,” she promised. “Get in.”
Randy knew he shouldn’t get in the car, knew he should turn around and run to the nearest house, looking for help. It was things like this—strangers offering to give you a ride—that his mother had talked to him about ever since he was a little boy.
But this was different. This was a friend of his father’s. Her brown eyes were twinkling at him, and her smile made him feel like she was sharing an adventure with him. He made up his mind and got into the car, pulling the door closed behind him. The car moved away from the curb.
“Where are we going?” Randy asked.
Louise Bowen glanced over at the boy sitting expectantly on the seat beside her. He was every bit as attractive as the pictures she had been shown, his eyes almost green, with dark, wavy hair framing his pugnacious, snub-nosed face. His body was sturdy, and though she was a stranger to him, he didn’t seem to be the least bit frightened of her. Instinctively, Louise liked Randy Corliss.
“We’re going to your new school.”
Randy frowned. New school? If he was going to a new school, why wasn’t his father taking him? The woman seemed to hear him, even though he hadn’t spoken out loud.
“You’ll see your father very soon. But for a few days, until he gets everything worked out with your mother, you’ll be staying at the school. You’ll like it there,” she promised. “It’s a special school, just for little boys like you, and you’ll have lots of new friends. Doesn’t that sound exciting?”
Randy nodded uncertainly, no longer sure he should have gotten in the car. Still, when he thought about it, it made sense. His father had told him there would be lots of problems when the time came for him to move away from his mother’s. And his father had told him he would be going to a new school. And today was the day.