The Gorge

by Scott Nicholson

  “Get it off me,” he yelled again. The thin but corded arms wrapped around his legs again. He couldn’t kick free.

  The falling darkness, the rising mist, the stink of the river, all combined to confuse him. This is a hell of a way to get a book deal, but keep your eyes on the prize.

  Dove gave the doubled rope some slack until there was a loop at the end. Then she flipped it over the bat-beast’s head, yanking back as it dropped below the pointy chin.

  She gave a violent lift of her arms, tightening the makeshift noose around the thing’s throat. Planting a knee in its back, she arched, straightening until she applied pressure with all her weight. Farrengalli expected the bat-beast to start bucking like a rodeo bronco, with Dove holding on for the ride of her life.

  Wait a sec. Those fuckers don’t breathe. So you sure can’t choke one to death.

  He’d heard Lane’s, Bowie Whitlock’s, and Dove’s theories on the nature of the beasts. Chupacabra, the goat-suckers. A lost species. A mutant strain of oversize bats. Even the Chief, who currently looked to be locked in a wrestling match tougher than anything the Olympics had thrown at him, had come up with the out-the-ass theory of the Raven Mocker.

  The dumb redskin. These things didn’t have any feathers at all.

  While Dove wrangled with the creature, Farrengalli freed his knife. He slashed sideways, opening a seam beneath the creature’s left eye. Soft drops of gray snot leaked out. The gray fluid spattered his jeans, and he wondered if skin contact would cause infection.

  No time to worry about that now, because the creature went nuts. It flailed its claws at Farrengalli, coming way too close to his crotch, shredding his jeans down to the white threads. One of the thin, spindly fingertips broke through the cloth and jabbed him like a ten-penny nail.

  “Hey, fucker, that hurt.”

  “The head,” Dove said. “You have to mess with its motor controls.”

  Farrengalli imagined some sort of radar equipment in the thing’s brain, tucked away in a chamber like the command helm of a submarine. Cut off the head, the body dies, someone had once said. Or maybe it went, “A fish rots from the head first.”

  Either way, Farrengalli was ready to roll with it.

  He swept the knife forward, the eight-inch blade digging into the creature’s eye socket. The eyeball plopped, oozing rancid buttermilk.

  “The brain,” Dove said between clenched teeth. “Get the brain.”

  Farrengalli didn’t think the bat-beasts had any brains. He’d watched the vampire movies, same as everybody, and to kill a vampire you drove a stake in its heart. Zombies were the things you killed with head wounds.

  But Farrengalli figured he might as well play the odds and do both. As Dove held the skewered skull in place, he rammed forward until the Buck knife was buried to the hilt. He figured the thing deserved a good frontal lobotomy just for ruining his jeans. He twisted the knife handle back and forth, gouging.

  The Jagger lips flapped, and Farrengalli wouldn’t have been surprised to hear “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” coming from them.

  Its limbs slackened and it flopped forward, limp, across Farrengalli’s waist. He crab-crawled out from under it, giving it another kick for good measure. Dove whiplashed the rope, pulling it from the thing’s neck like floss from the tight gap in two rotted teeth.

  Farrengalli went to his knees, raised the gory blade, and plunged it where he guessed the thing’s heart would be.

  Tired, his limbs shaking, he shoved the creature to the edge of the rock shelf with his boot. With one last kick, the thing tumbled off and into the thick mist below. He didn’t hear it hit.

  He turned to Dove. “That will teach those sons of-”

  A wet, flexing snake brushed his shoulder and he dropped the knife, squealing in surprise.

  “Don’t fill your drawers,” Dove said, snatching out with her hand. “It’s a rope.”

  “Hurry up,” Raintree shouted from the dark notch above. “Before more of them come.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  “Better save the batteries,” Dove said.

  Raintree, crouching at the lip of the cave, checked the bars on the cell phone again. Nothing. It was an inept tool, an artifact from an alien world that wouldn’t function in such a primitive environment. He felt silly holding it, like a Neanderthal pointing a laser weapon at a mastodon.

  They had divided up the pitons, two each, as their only weapons. Farrengalli took the penlight, saying he wanted to explore the cave. Raintree hadn’t argued, even though, strategically, the group should stay together in case of another attack. In truth, he wanted to be alone with Dove.

  “I’m not sure it will work even if we get to the top,” Raintree said, looking out over the dark valley. Though the rain had stopped, the clouds hung low and heavy over the gorge. The hidden moon provided some filtered backlight, but the sky was almost as black as the cave’s interior. The river was completely obscured by mist, and the drop might as well have been bottomless.

  “The FBI agent believed it would.”

  “Him. I think he was cracking up. Didn’t you hear him blurting out random sentences, like he was talking to somebody who wasn’t there?”

  She glanced behind her, and then lowered her voice. She was close enough that he could feel her breath on his ear. “What do you think happened down there, with him and Farrengalli?”

  “Who knows? I don’t trust either of them. I can see the agent pulling rank and taking the raft. Like I said, he’s going nuts.”

  “He was hurt pretty badly.”

  “Crazy people sometimes ignore their bodies.” And I’m star witness for the prosecution in that trial.

  He tilted the cell phone for a moment, casting the green glow of its screen on her face. Her cheeks were dirty, hair tangled and greasy, and a long scratch stitched her forehead. But her brown eyes were unfazed, wide and beautiful and hopeful, pupils large in the darkness.

  “Well, we’re here now. What choice do we have?” she asked.

  “Two choices. Go up or go down.”

  “Or stay here.”

  “For how long? Even if the Bama Bomber makes it out of here, do you really think he’s going to send a rescue team? Do you think he’ll let Bowie live once they make it to the lake?”

  He caught her sharp intake of breath, the wince of inner pain.

  “Sorry,” he said. “We just have to be realistic. We have to keep it together if we want to get out of here alive.”

  Like you’re one to talk about getting it together. Already, he was starting to itch, to feel the crab-crawl of addiction across his skin. The night was the worst, for some reason, as if his body didn’t want to shut down and his brain craved fuel and sedation at the same time.

  “We should have already been dead,” Dove said. “You saved us.”

  “We all saved us. I just got lucky.”

  Luck, hell. He wanted to tell her how close he had come to falling after losing his grip. About that moment of desperation, the rush of fear that even modern pharmaceuticals couldn’t suppress. Not fear for his life, but fear of facing survival without his medicine bag. But the pine branch had held, the brain-skewered creature’s corpse dropped away, and he’d scrambled to the cave, set an anchor, and swung the line down to the ledge.

  “We’re going to need a lot more luck.” She reached out and touched his hand. Though her fingers were calloused and ragged from the climb, they moved with a smooth, reptilian grace, up along his thumb. Raintree focused all his attention on the sensation, and he wasn’t sure whether it was the painkillers, the speed, or the tranquilizer, but something was pumping through his bloodstream with a full load of electricity. She hesitated a moment, squeezing his hand gently until the cell phone closed. “Better save the batteries.”

  Her mouth was close to his cheek, her breath sweet despite the long day’s trauma. Raintree turned, wondering if their lips would meet, either accidentally or on purpose. As if there were ever any difference.

 
; But she was already gone. She had eased back into the concealing ink of the cave.

  Raintree looked out across the valley once more. Even in the dim, filtered light, he would be able to see the creatures if they made an aerial attack. He believed, based on their habits, that they wouldn’t attack unless the prey- odd to think of ourselves as such — was out in the open. He recognized, on a deeper, intellectual level where the drugs swam with lazy strokes, that he knew nothing about these creatures, and didn’t think they could ever be understood, even if the finest scientists on the planet had a crack at them.

  He decided he and his companions should at least wait until morning, when they’d have a better chance of fending off attack. A little rest would help. They could take turns, one keeping watch while the other two slept. He thought of lying in the dark next to Dove, the two of them drawing close to one another for heat. He was letting his mind wander when the pinprick of light danced deep in the cave’s guts.

  The light grew larger, brighter, and then cast a cone of bluish white that revealed Farrengalli’s arm. He joined them at the mouth of the cave, then flicked off the light. They stood there, silhouettes barely visible. “Nothing back thataway,” he said.

  “How far did you go?” Dove asked.

  “Hard to say. All looks the same after a while. Two hundred feet, maybe. Started branching off in places and I was afraid I’d get lost.”

  “This changes things,” Raintree said.

  “How so, Chief?”

  “I thought we should rest for a while, try to get some sleep, and keep one person on watch at the mouth of the cave. But you heard what the FBI guy said. They had been trapped in a cave when an explosion set them free.”

  “You think they live in caves, then? Like this one?”

  “Who knows? The point is, we don’t know. So we’d have to keep two guards, one up front and one deeper in the cave.”

  “Cletus Christ,” Farrengalli said. “You let me go in there knowing vampires might be waiting?”

  “We don’t know anything,” Dove said. “He’s just trying to think ahead, consider all the options. Maybe if you kept your mouth shut once in a while, you’d think of something, too.”

  They all fell silent for a moment. Somewhere below, an owl hooted. Such an ordinary, natural sound took on a plaintive note because it was from a sane, normal world they would never again experience. Their lives had been changed, and whether they lived another fifteen minutes or fifty years, they would never outrun the nightmares that would forever stay one step behind their dreams.

  “Okay,” Raintree said. “I’ll watch the back end first shift. Give me the light.”

  Farrengalli handed it to him without protest. “Guess that means I got to be a goddamned gentleman and let Dove sleep.”

  “Here,” Dove said, unbuckling the band of her wristwatch and passing it to Raintree. “Two-hour shifts. In six hours, we can catch the dawn’s early light.”

  Raintree pressed the button on the timepiece, and the tiny LED showed it was after 11 o’clock. Time flew when you were scared shitless.

  “Okay.” He played the light inside the cave until he found a spot where aeons of sand and grit had swept into a passable mattress. “Here’s a bed,” he said. “Wish I had a midnight snack and a pillow to go with it.”

  Dove sat on the sand and curled into a ball on her side. Two coils of rope lay beside her, along with a small pile of carabiners.

  “Hell, if you’re going to play hero, I might as well mind my manners,” Farrengalli said, unbuttoning his shirt. He took off the garment and draped it over Dove, his sweaty muscles glinting in the weak light. Then he moved to the lip of the cave and sat on a large rock, looking over the valley like Rodin’s Thinker with a hangover.

  Raintree aimed the thin beam of light in front of him and entered his own private hell.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  She could hear Ace’s angels above her, their flicking wings and occasional high-pitched whistles reminding her how close they were.

  Clara had worked her way into the rhododendron thicket, where the dense leaves blocked the last shreds of dying daylight. Each time she rubbed against a knobby, scaly branch, she thought it was the arm of one of the creatures. Her hair tangled in a forked branch, and she ripped the damp strands free. She wanted to collapse, throw her face into the rotted leaves and loam of the forest floor, and surrender.

  The old Clara, the one who sought pain and danger, the suicidal coward, would have given up long ago. That Clara wouldn’t have had the courage to run from Ace when the trip wire triggered the bombs. That Clara wouldn’t have stuck with him later, when he continued his cruel, abusive ways. But she also wasn’t strong enough to make it on her own. Ace wasn’t her savior, and she realized she had shifted her dependence to Bowie. Which is why, in the raft, she had hesitated when Ace asked for the pistol.

  She wished she had the pistol now.

  Because, for the first time, she had something to defend, a reason to live beyond the hedonistic pursuit of slow or fast death.

  Ace talked about the angels as allies, but Clara didn’t see them as something God would send to Earth. She’d been willingly screwed and tortured by some of the finest nihilists and atheists in the business, and had endured a wild six-week fling with a Satanist, whose smoke and mirrors and candles and chants just grew completely corny after a while. She’d sensed no evil in that self-proclaimed “Dark Acolyte,” just as she sensed no evil in these angels.

  Like all the other things that were claimed to be “evil,” when you looked right into the heart of them, they were just single-mindedly stupid.

  Leaves rattled above, sending down a shower of drops. One of the creatures was trying to penetrate the canopy.

  “She wasn’t good enough,” she heard Ace say for the third time, as if talking to some invisible higher power.

  Maybe she wasn’t worth a damn, but she was getting smarter by the second. The creatures worked on radar and smell. Which meant if she kept perfectly still, they couldn’t locate her. Maybe the serpentine branches would confuse them. Would they be able to smell her with all the odors rising from the river mud?

  The bigger question: Why weren’t they attacking Ace and Bowie? Especially Ace, who had stood and watched while the creature flew past his face and chased her.

  She shivered. Maybe Ace really was protected by God, as he believed.

  The light. She’d forgotten about the flashlight attached to her helmet. Were the creatures blind? She reached up an unsteady hand and flicked it off.

  Something rattled just above her head. She ducked lower. It couldn’t hear her. Not with all the noise it was making, thrashing the wet leaves.

  But it could smell her. Smell something that made her far more appealing than the two men.

  She could only think of two things. Either her hormonal glands, her vaginal scent, had brought them sniffing the way she had attracted the juvenile-delinquent boys in Ohio.

  Or else, through some strange sense she couldn’t begin to understand, they knew she carried a young, tender bud in her womb. Something they might find a rare delicacy, a bloody treat. Or maybe to be used for another purpose.

  You’re not getting him. One way or another.

  Claws raked her hair, closed, yanked some strands out by the roots. She endured the attack without a whimper. She’d been hurt harder by better.

  But the arm behind the claws, though she couldn’t see it, thrust with renewed ferocity, and she could tell from the snapping branches that it had detected her position. That meant the other one would be right behind it.

  And she’d closed herself in, rolled the dice all or nothing on the rhododendrons. She had no weapon, and she didn’t think she’d be able to slip past the Gordian knot of branches to make a run for it.

  “This way,” she heard somebody hiss, where she believed the thicket gave way to the greater forest. Bowie.

  Did she trust yet another man?

  Did it matter?

&n
bsp; She rolled away from the sweeping claw, thumping her head against a protruding root. The loam was slick and smelled like mushrooms. She kept her face close to it as she wriggled forward like an inchworm.

  The claw snaked around her ankle and tightened. Her leg was yanked hard enough to nearly tear it from its socket. Then she was being lifted off the ground. Impossible. She’d seen the size of the creatures. She was twice as heavy as they were.

  But she couldn’t deny the weightless moment. She grabbed blindly for branches as her body rose upside down in the stinking, moist darkness, rhododendron tearing her clothes, water or blood trailing under her arms.

  Her fingers closed over the slippery cable of a branch, and for a moment the upward movement stopped. Then she was ripped free, spinning in dizzy circles, and below, in the gloaming of a fantasy-land mist, she made out Ace’s slim form, his pale face looking up at her without expression.

  Fifty feet up in the air, now hanging high above the river, she arched her neck and looked at the thing that was carrying her. She had been wrong: it wasn’t an arm that held her ankle, it was a foot. Her skin chafed beneath the powerful grip, but she kicked anyway, believing a drop to her death was better than whatever fate the creature might have in store for her.

  And the thing inside her…

  Little Robert Wayne.

  She couldn’t let them have him.

  But she couldn’t curl her body enough to grab at and attack the creature, whose deformed wings seemed barely to ripple on the night current. Its grip on her was too strong to escape.

  She let her neck relax and rolled her eyes to look down at the wide ribbon of the Unegama River. In the scant light, the wet rocks of the gorge walls glistened like jewels.

  Ace said the creatures came down from heaven. She wondered if this one were returning there, or if God’s orders had been misinterpreted and twisted, or just plain forgotten altogether.

  Clara Bannister closed her eyes and folded her hands across her belly. She’d never had a choice between heaven or hell, and she saw no reason for things to change now.