by T. J. Klune
When he was finished, Coyote’s friend Fox said that no tribe had been created on the spot where they stood. Coyote was sorry he had no more parts of the monster. But then he had an idea. He washed the blood from his hands with water from the river and sprinkled the drops on the ground.
Coyote said, “Here on this ground I make the Nez Perce. They will be few in number, but they will be strong and pure.” And this is how human beings came to be.
Hank’s voice died away. The stars were long gone.
Cavalo said the only thing he could. “I’m sorry about Deke.” Because he was.
“So am I.” Hank’s voice was hoarse. “Don’t you see, Cavalo? He’s taken all the little animals away. The monster has eaten everything as he heads back to the north where he came from.”
Cavalo could see, and the clarity burned. “I will cut out his heart.”
“Will you?” Hank asked.
“Yes,” he said, though they both knew it was a lie.
“And scatter his pieces to the wind?”
“Yes.”
“And what will you make out of him, James? What will you make out of the monster?”
And because Cavalo didn’t know the answer, he closed his eyes. Eventually he dreamt of stars.
THEY REACHED Dworshak the next afternoon. Bad Dog kept his nose close to the ground yards ahead of them, making sure they wouldn’t be caught off guard. They kept low to the ground as they crested a hill south of the dam, hidden amongst the thick forest.
He’d been here once before, back in his wandering days. Those days when he never stopped walking for fear of whatever would catch up with him if he ever stopped. He remembered looking at it with disinterested awe, unable to quantify what exactly it was he’d been looking at. Metal and concrete carved out into a valley in a place no longer inhabited by man.
Dworshak was big. Very big. When the name Dworshak had first been uttered after Lucas revealed his skin, SIRS had told him the dam had been considered the third tallest dam Before the bombs fell. Seven hundred seventeen feet tall. Over half a mile long. Six and a half million cubic yards of concrete. As SIRS rattled off the stats, Cavalo couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed at the entirety of it all. He didn’t know how he was able to overcome that feeling, that feeling of insignificance that he felt akin to when he saw the stars above. It’d been so much greater than Cavalo could imagine, and the enormity of what it could mean if they could harness the power of the dam took his breath away.
That was then, though.
Now, it was suicide conveniently disguised as a rescue mission.
“Jesus,” Alma said. “It’s… big.”
“You’ve never been here?” Bill asked her as he pulled out the binocs and handed them to his son.
She shook her head. “Never had a reason to. All that water. Just… sitting there. And we can’t do a damn thing with it.”
“Might not be for much longer,” Richie said.
“What do you mean?” Hank asked.
“Look to the center,” Bill said. “Up toward the top. See it?”
Cavalo followed where Bill was pointing. At first he thought there was a discoloration in the cement, years of inclement weather that wore on the stone. But then it widened, the vague shape becoming sharper.
There was a crack in the dam. A huge one at that. Jagged and widening as it etched toward the river below.
“Holy shit,” Hank muttered.
“How long is it?” Aubrey asked, glancing nervously at her father.
Bill shrugged. “Probably fifty feet. Thereabouts. Three or four feet across at the widest point. It happens when there’s no one maintaining it. I’m surprised it’s not bigger. Or that it hasn’t collapsed already. If anything can happen here, that’s going to have to be taken care of first.”
The bees laughed in Cavalo’s head. I don’t think he realizes that he’s going to be slow roasted over a fire in the near future, they whispered.
“Will it hold for now?” Cavalo asked.
Bill shrugged. “As long as there’s no added stress to it. Like rockets or grenades.” He looked slightly amused. “Or it could collapse the moment we get near it, and then it won’t even matter anymore. That many tons of water and you won’t even know what hit you. This whole area for a half mile will be underwater. Won’t be much—”
Bad Dog growled. Bad guys.
“How far?” Cavalo asked, crouching by his side. Bad Dog stared down into the valley. Cavalo followed his line of sight but couldn’t see anything.
In the trees. Near the river.
Quarter mile away. A little less. “No one closer?”
No.
And even though he knew, he had to ask. “SIRS? Lucas?”
No. Just bad guys.
“Tree line,” Cavalo told the rest. “Downwind.”
“Got them,” Aubrey said, looking through the scope of her rifle. “Eight… no. Ten. Toward the dam. Don’t see Lucas or SIRS. Or Patrick.”
“Track them,” Cavalo said. “Don’t engage. It’s not worth it.”
“You got it, boss,” she said, keeping the scope on the Dead Rabbits.
“Bill, how far are we away from the hatch?”
Bill pointed farther along the hill, toward the dam. “We can stay up top,” he said. “It’s a few hundred yards ahead.”
“And it’s accessible?”
He shrugged. “Was when we were here last. If not, we’ll have to go to the other side of the valley. Which means crossing the river.”
“And the tunnels aren’t blocked.
“SIRS didn’t seem to think so,” he said quietly, wincing. “Before… he thought that unless the dam itself had been compromised, then the work tunnels would be clear. It’s either that or go straight to the dam direct.”
“And that’s probably not the best idea,” Richie muttered, binocs trained at the top of the dam. “Dead Rabbits. Lots and lots of Dead Rabbits.”
Cavalo didn’t feel bad when he grabbed the binocs from Richie, the pain in his wrist flaring sharply. He ignored it, pushing it back down. He didn’t have time for it. They didn’t have much time for anything anymore. Time gave the illusion that they weren’t going into this half-cocked and without a clue. It’d be sweeter to think they did, but reality was cold, and Cavalo knew the cold. It was where the bees lived.
He scanned the dam. Richie was right: Dead Rabbits, Dead Rabbits, Dead Rabbits. At least a dozen of them, patrolling the top of the damn. No one that Cavalo recognized. No one with signs of visible injury from the attack on Cottonwood a couple of days before. Most were armed with some kind of weapon. A rifle. A gun. A thick wooden board with a rusty spike shoved through the end. No Patrick. No Lucas. No—
“SIRS,” he whispered. Because he was there. The robot stood amongst the Dead Rabbits. His eyes were red. One of the Dead Rabbits was talking to him, pointing toward some debris on the ground. The robot bent over and picked it up, tossing the chunks of cement over the side of the dam. He repeated the action two more times before the Dead Rabbit spoke again. And then he didn’t move.
Tin Man? Bad Dog asked him.
“Yeah.”
We gonna go get him?
And that was it, wasn’t it? This was the choice he had to make. He had to choose at this time, at this very moment, whether or not to stick with the plan (if it could even be called that) with some semblance of stealth and find Lucas somewhere inside the dam, or to go in guns blazing for SIRS in hopes that somehow, someway, SIRS would snap out of it, because for the life of him, Cavalo could not remember what Patrick had said. What Patrick had said the moment he’d left the prison that day weeks before. The code. The password. The motherfucking incantation that brought SIRS back his humanity. The questions from the Book of God that Cavalo had never bothered to read because with all the shit in the world, he couldn’t possibly believe that motherfucker wasn’t the biggest asshole. He hadn’t ever seen a Bible before (precious, like snow globes, they were), but stories had been passed down
by fireside late into the night of Hellfire and Damnation and the Wrath of God. God was cruel. God was merciless. His words uttered made SIRS turn into a robot.
And Cavalo couldn’t remember how to bring him back.
“Not yet,” he said. “We can’t go to him yet.”
“We could, though,” Hank said, sounding thoughtful.
“How do you figure?”
Hank shrugged. “Might be easier and a whole hell of a lot quieter if only a couple of us went in for Lucas. The rest of us could go after SIRS.”
“You can’t alert them,” Cavalo snapped. “They’ll swarm. You won’t survive.”
Aubrey rolled her eyes. “Give us a little more credit than that, Cavalo.”
“She’s right,” Alma said. “We can handle up top. You can find Lucas. Bad Dog will be able to track him better than any of us.”
Bad Dog’s ears perked at his name. He cocked his head and panted quietly.
“Fucking idiots,” Cavalo muttered. “How in God’s name do you think you’re going to stop SIRS? He’s… gone. Whatever’s there isn’t him.”
“That’s where I come in,” Bill said. He reached into his pack and pulled out a bulky metal object, similar to the landmines they’d used in Cottonwood. “There were only a couple of these in his box. Didn’t think we’d need them back in town. Might do us some good now.”
“What is it?”
“EMP mine. Electromagnetic pulse. Short range. Sends a blast that should fry whatever SIRS has got cooking in his head. It’ll stop him. For now.”
“How close does it have to be?”
“Couple of yards. I think.” He at least had the courtesy to look slightly embarrassed.
Cavalo looked at each of them in turn, growing more incredulous. “You planned this.”
Hank snorted. “As much as this could be called a plan. It’s still shit, James.”
“Fuck.” And he laughed. It was rusty and hysterical. It hurt his throat. “Oh fuck.”
They didn’t laugh with him. He hadn’t expected them to. They couldn’t hear his bees, after all. “No guns,” he finally said as he wiped his eyes. “Bullets are a last resort. Bows and arrows only.”
They nodded at him, and it was all he could do to keep from screaming.
IT DIDN’T take them long to find the hatch. Overgrowth had been cleared away at some point, so he knew it’d been in use recently. Aubrey nocked an arrow as Richie pried the hatch door open. It grated loudly and echoed down a long black drop. There was a dim light near the bottom. A metal ladder curled up near the top.
“That’s not creepy at all,” Aubrey muttered. “Dark tunnel into the side of a crumbling giant cement dam filled with Dead Rabbits. I almost want to go with you.”
“I’ll go,” Richie said quietly. They all snapped their heads up to him.
“No,” Cavalo said.
“You can’t get him down the ladder,” Richie said. “Not with your fingers and wrist the way they are. And what happens when you need to climb back up? You going to leave him?”
Cavalo hadn’t even thought about getting out. It was lost in the haze, hidden behind now now now and wondering if Lucas was already dead. It wouldn’t surprise him. Patrick wouldn’t need him alive, just his skin, and Cavalo knew there were ways to cure it, to make it stiff as a board and stop any morbidity. It could be done with animal skins. That meant it could be done with human flesh.
No. Lucas was alive. He had to be. And the longer they stood around, the less time Cavalo would have to find him.
And so, for one of the first times in his life, Cavalo acquiesced. He was getting too old for this shit.
“How long will it take you to get to the ridge?” Cavalo asked Aubrey, knowing who was really in charge. He watched as Hank wrapped a blanket around Richie’s shoulders, creating a sling for Bad Dog.
“Fifteen minutes,” she said. “Longer if we run into trouble.”
He thought hard. “Wait two hours,” he said, “before going after SIRS.”
“And if our hand is forced?” she asked.
He grinned at her. It felt too wide. “Then you take out as many of those bastards as you can.”
She nodded. The bees buzzed at the steel in her eyes. “Stay safe, Cavalo.”
He turned and saw Bill talking quietly to Richie. The older man’s hand was curled around his son’s neck, their foreheads pressed together. Cavalo couldn’t hear what was said, but it wasn’t for him. It was between fathers and sons, and for a moment, he thought he saw Jamie skipping through the woods. But then he went behind a tree and never appeared on the other side, so Cavalo knew he hadn’t been there at all.
“You’ll be good?” Alma asked him. She looked like she wanted to say more but stopped herself.
“Yeah.” He thought of her song where she said good-bye all those weeks ago. He didn’t stop himself when he leaned in and kissed her forehead. She sighed, her breath on his neck. He stepped back, and she looked away, but not before he saw the tears in her eyes that she didn’t let fall.
“We’ll see you soon,” Hank said, and when Cavalo tried to protest (because surely, out of all of them, at least Hank would realize this was good-bye), he stepped away and wouldn’t say another word.
“Take care of him, okay?” Bill asked him as they watched Hank lift Bad Dog into the sling. Bad Dog only grumbled a little at that. “He’s all I got.”
“I will.”
“I know it’s a lot to ask after… after what I did.”
Anger. He pushed it away and said, “You didn’t know.”
“No. I didn’t. But I’m sorry.”
“I won’t let anything happen to him,” Cavalo said before he could stop himself.
Bill nodded and walked away before Cavalo could take it back.
I’m not a damn puppy, Bad Dog growled at him.
“Sort of,” Cavalo said. He looked up at Richie. “Something to prove?”
Richie shrugged. “Or maybe I just want to help.”
“You do what I say, when I say it. No questions.”
“Okay.”
“If I tell you to run, you run.”
“Okay.”
“If I tell you—”
“Okay.”
Fucking kids. He glanced at Aubrey. “Two hours.”
“If we don’t meet here, head for Kamiah,” she said. “Wait two days. If none of us show, it means we aren’t going to. Go back to the prison and start again.” He wasn’t surprised when the others nodded at her. She’d be good at this. Like Hank. If she didn’t die horribly first.
No more words.
He turned toward the hatch. Got his feet situated on the ladder. Descended into the dark. His wrist hurt. His fingers hurt. He didn’t pay any attention to them. He looked down between his legs and saw the dim light at the bottom of the tunnel. It meant electricity in some capacity.
The steps of the ladder were cold under his fingers. His breath was harsh and loud around his ears, bouncing off the walls. Movement, from up above, and he saw gray sky, bits of snow falling around him. Bad Dog whined quietly as Richie stepped onto the ladder.
Cavalo looked back down. Almost to the bottom. He stopped briefly and took out Lucas’s knife. Held it tightly. The blade scraped against a metal rung. He thought he saw sparks.
The air was growing thicker the lower he got. Heavier. He thought he would choke on it. Drown in it. Let it take him under. He would—
His foot reached solid ground.
A long narrow hallway stretched out before him, low lights spread along the floor every ten feet. The air was rank and wet. Steam poured from a cracked pipe along the wall. He heard water dripping, a steady beat. Above him, a low metallic groan as if something had shifted. The hairs on the back of Cavalo’s neck rose, and he wondered if he’d felt any place more haunted than this.
“Holy shit,” Richie whispered as he reached the bottom of the ladder and peered over Cavalo’s shoulder. “Maybe we should just go back up. And leave. And never come b
ack.”
Cavalo put the handle of the knife in his teeth and turned, helping Bad Dog out of the sling and onto the floor. His claws clicked along the metal grating that lined the walkway. Not a puppy, he grumbled.
“I know,” Cavalo said, reaching down and rubbing his fingers along Bad Dog’s muzzle. Bad Dog leaned into his hand and gave a quick dart of his tongue to show all was forgiven.
Bad Dog lowered his head to the floor and started sniffing, getting used to the smells. It was something Cavalo had taught him when he was little. Anytime they were at some place new, Bad Dog took time to align himself with his surroundings so he wouldn’t be overwhelmed. He huffed to himself quietly. He growled once, but it faded away quickly as he walked up and down the walkway. He paused to piss on the wall before he circled back around.
And aside from Bad Dog and the sounds of the dam around them, there was nothing else. No voices. No footsteps. No movement. “Farther in,” Cavalo muttered quietly.
Richie nodded and pulled out his own knife, smaller than the one Lucas carried, but with a wicked sharp curve and serrated edge. He handled it well. “Follow your lead,” he said.
Cavalo moved down the walkway. The lights were bright enough to keep them from bumping into the walls. They passed an electronic panel with four buttons that flickered lightly. Cavalo left them alone and gestured for Richie to do the same. Above, he saw a loudspeaker that crackled faintly twice before it fell silent. A sign hung on the wall, water-stained and corroded. A man and a woman were smiling, the man’s face bubbling and torn, and it looked like he was screaming. SAFETY FIRST! the sign read, an echo from Before. KNOW ALL LEVEL SIX PROTOCOLS! There were other words, but they were lost.
Bad Dog came back, bumping his head against Cavalo’s knee.
“You good?” he asked.
Ready, Bad Dog said. Ready, ready, ready.
“Anyone close?”
No.
Good and bad, then. “Bad guys come through here?”
Yes.