And the blade of dawn moves on . . .
IN THE PACIFIC
30o N, 122o W
As its fringe winds begin to brush the coast of southern California, the storm veers sharply north.
Captain Harry Densmore stares bleary eyed through the windshield and adjusts 705’s circular course along the eye wall. They should have been out of fuel long ago, but the needle on the gauge hasn’t budged since they entered the eye. So they keep on flying. They’ve got to keep on flying.
But what are the engines running on?
TWENTY-THREE
HURRICANE WARNING
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE HAS ISSUED A HURRICANE WARNING FOR SANTA CRUZ, MONTEREY AND SAN LUIS OBISPO COUNTIES. HURRICANE LANDFALL IS EXPECTED BY 9:00 A.M. EVACUATION OF OCEANFRONT AND LOW-LYING AREAS SHOULD BEGIN IMMEDIATELY.
(The Weather Channel)
‡
Paraiso
Emilio fought through the horizontal sheets of rain assaulting the ambulance as he wound up the road through the woods to Paraiso. Bolts of lightning lanced the sky, clearing the way for the ground-shaking thunder, but the heavy vehicle hugged the road.
When the storm had changed course in the early hours and it became clear that it would strike Monterey County, the Senador had sent him to find an ambulance for Charlie, to take him inland out of harm’s way.
But there were none to be had. The city had placed every available ambulance, public and private, on standby alert. Emilio had stopped by a few services personally, contacted many more by phone. No matter how much he offered, they would not risk their licenses by hiring out for a private run during the emergency.
Call the county Civil Defense, they said. All you’ve got to do is tell them it’s an emergency, that you need an ambulance immediately to remove an invalid from an evacuation area, and they’ll okay it. No problem.
No problem? Not quite. Emilio could hardly get Monterey County officialdom involved in moving an AIDS patient who happened to be Senator Arthur Crenshaw’s son. The word would spread like the wind from this storm. He couldn’t even allow a private ambulance company to know who it was transporting. He wanted to rent a fully-equipped rig and drive it himself. The answer everywhere was the same: Nothing doing.
Emilio had wanted to scream. He could not let the Senador down on this. He’d already suffered the withering fury of his anger after he’d learned about the nun. The Senador had been quiet at first, then he’d exploded, calling Emilio a murderous fool, a ham-handed incompetent, a dolt who had jeopardized a lifetime of effort. The Senator had turned away in disgust, telling him to see if he could do something as simple a hiring an ambulance without screwing that up.
Hurt, humiliated, Emilio had vowed never to fail the Senador again, but events continued to conspire against him. He had to get an ambulance. To return to Paraiso without one was unthinkable.
So Emilio stole one.
Quite easy, actually. The whole world was in panicked turmoil over the systematic destruction of temples and mosques across the globe. California had not been spared. Dawn had left not one church or synagogue standing. This area of the state was in double disorder because of the added threat of the storm.
Emilio had taken advantage of that. He’d parked his own car at an indoor garage, then walked two blocks to the lot of one of the ambulance services. Amid the tumult of the storm, they never heard him jump start the engine and drive away.
A particularly violent blast of wind buffeted the ambulance as it crossed the one-car bridge over the ravine. The top-heavy vehicle lurched and for an instant—just an instant—Emilio lost control as it seemed to roll along on only two wheels. It slewed and skidded and veered toward the guardrail, but before he could panic it rocked back onto all four wheels again.
And then a deafening pop and a sizzle as a blinding bolt of lightning wide as a man arced into the base of a huge ponderosa pine on the far side of the ravine. There was no pause between the flash and the thunder. The ambulance, the bridge, the entire ravine shook with the deafening crash.
Emilio slowed as he blinked away the purple after-image of the flash. Through the blur he saw flames licking at the blackened trunk of the pine. The whole tree was swaying wildly in the wind...seemed to be moving his way.
He blinked again and cried out in terror as he saw the huge pine toppling toward him. He floored the accelerator, swerving the ambulance ahead on the bridge. The right rear fender screeched against the metal side rail. Emilio bared his clenched teeth and let loose a long, low howl as he kept the pedal welded to the floor. Had to move, had to get this huge, filthy puerco going and keep it going, couldn’t go back, couldn’t even look back, straight ahead was the only way, even if it looked like he was driving into the face of certain death, his only hope was to get off this bridge and onto the solid ground straight ahead on the far side of the ravine. Because this bridge was a goner.
Branches slashed, crashed, smashed against the roof and windshield, spiderwebbing the glass in half a dozen places. It held though, and Emilio kept accelerating. He heard the flashers and sirens tear off the roof as he slipped the ambulance under the falling trunk with only inches to spare. But he wasn’t home yet. He heard and felt the huge pine’s impact directly behind him. The ambulance lurched sideways as the planked surface of the span canted right and tilted upward ahead of him. He fought to keep control, keep moving, keep accelerating, because he knew without looking that the bridge was going down behind him. The wet tires spun and slipped on the rapidly increasing incline and Emilio filled the cabin with an open-throated scream of mortal fear and defiant rage.
Emilio Sanchez refused to die here, smashed on the rocks a hundred feet below. His destiny was not to meet his end as a storm victim, a mere statistic.
The tires caught again, the ambulance lunged forward, its big V-8 Cadillac engine roaring, pushing the vehicle up the tilting incline and onto the glistening asphalt and solid ground.
He slammed on the brakes and sagged against the steering wheel, panting. When he’d caught his breath, he held his hands before his face and watched them shake like a palsied old man’s. Then he stepped out into the wind and rain and looked back.
The bridge was down. The giant pine had broken its back, crashing through the center of its span and dragging the rest of it to the floor of the ravine.
Emilio began to laugh. He’d stolen an ambulance and now he couldn’t use it. No one could use it. And no one would be leaving Paraiso, not Emilio, not the Senador, and certainly not Charlie.
Prisoners in Paradise.
His laughter died away as he remembered the fourth occupant of Paraiso. That ancient body. He’d have to do something about that. It was evidence against him. He had to find a way to dispose of it. Permanently.
‡
“Turn here.”
Dan sat behind the wheel of their rented Taurus and stared at the electric security gate that stood open before them. Through the wind-whipped downpour he made out identical red-and-white signs on the each of the stone gateposts:
PRIVATE PROPERTY
NO TRESPASSING
VIOLATORS WILL BE
PROSECUTED
“Are you sure?” Dan said. “This is a private road.”
“Turn here,” the voice from the rear repeated.
Dan glanced at Kesev in the front passenger seat.
The bearded man nodded agreement that they should proceed through the gate.
“Yes. The feeling is strong. The Mother is near.”
Dan then turned to look at Carrie where she sat in the back seat, staring up the private road.
She wore one of Dan’s faded plaid flannel shirts over his oldest pair of jeans, and a pair of dirty white sneakers they’d found in the housekeeper’s closet. She looked like a refugee from a grunge band.
Once again Brad’s AmEx card had come in handy for the tickets and the rental car agency. They’d driven south from San Francisco, following Carrie’s directions as she took them deeper and deeper into increasingly s
evere weather. Now they were on the coast of Monterey County.
Dan faced front and did as he was told.
He was on autopilot now. His head throbbed continually, but it had been aching so long now he barely noticed. The post-concussion dizziness and nausea were what plagued him physically. Emotionally and intellectually...he was numb.
With no sleep for thirty-six hours, with the woman he loved murdered but sitting in the back seat giving him directions toward the corporal remains of the Virgin Mary, what else was there to do but shut down his emotions, turn off his rational faculties, and become some sort of servomechanism?
Go through the motions, follow instructions to get to where you’re going, do, do, do, but don’t think, don’t question, and for God’s sake, don’t feel.
Because mixed with the guilty joy of having Carrie back was the horrific realization that she wasn’t really back...not really back at all. And Dan knew if he unlocked his emotions he’d go mad, leap from the car, and run screaming through the trees.
So he kept everything under lock and key, turned the car onto the narrow asphalt path, and kept his eyes on the road.
Water sluiced down the incline toward the Taurus but the front-wheel drive kept them moving steadily. Pine needles, pine cones, leaves, and fallen branches littered the roadway. Dan drove over them, letting them snap and thud against the underbelly of the car. He didn’t care. Didn’t care if they punctured the oil pan or the gas tank. All he wanted was to get where he was going. Somewhere ahead was the Virgin, and with her maybe the man who shot Carrie.
And then what will I do?
Whatever he did or didn’t do, Dan sensed that he was on his way toward a rendezvous with destiny...or something very much like it. Whatever it was that lay ahead, he wanted to confront it and have done with it. Things had to change. Something had to give.
Because he couldn’t go on like this much longer.
The trees thinned as they came to the top of a rise. It looked open ahead. And then Dan saw why: A deep ravine lay before them.
“Keep going?”
“Straight ahead,” Carrie said.
Kesev pointed. “I see a bridge.”
Dan gunned the engine. The car accelerated.
‡
“And so, Senador,” Emilio said, spreading his hands expressively, “I’m afraid we are stuck here.”
Arthur Crenshaw nodded slowly, amazed at his own serenity. Here he was, trapped in a house that was little more than a giant bay window set in a cliff overhanging the ocean, looking down the barrel at the most powerful Pacific storm on record. He’d watched the front steamroll in, the lightning-slashed clouds sweep past, blotting out the rest of the world as the storm launched its assault on the coast—his coast. And every time he’d thought he’d seen the peak of the storm, it grew worse. The ocean below churned and frothed like an enormous Jacuzzi; thirty-foot waves lashed at the rocks, hurling foam a hundred feet in the air; wind and rain battered the huge windows, warping and rattling the glass. And yet he was not afraid.
Something—who else could it be but Satan—had destroyed every place of worship in the world. Saint Patrick’s in New York, every synagogue in Brooklyn, the National Cathedral in DC, all the small-town Baptist churches in the rural South, the Mormon Cathedrals in Bethesda and throughout Utah. And yet he was not afraid.
That amazed him.
Perhaps he was too drained to be afraid. Or perhaps all his fear was centered on Charlie.
His son was worse.
Arthur didn’t need a CD-4 count to know that. Instead of falling, Charlie’s fever had risen through the night. He was now in a coma.
His son was dying.
Arthur moved to Charlie’s side, passing the so-called miraculous relic as he did. He was tempted to boot the piece of junk off the table, even drew his foot back to do so, but for some reason changed his mind at the last moment. Why bother? Just another in a long line of fakes. And to think a young woman had been killed in order to bring it here.
And then it occurred to Arthur that perhaps that was why Charlie had not been healed. An innocent life had been snuffed out in order to save Charlie’s, and so Charlie could not be saved. Because a life had been taken on one end of the country, another life would be allowed to burn out on the other. A balancing of the scales.
Rage flared. Damn Emilio!
But he’d only been following orders. Arthur remembered his own words: Bring me that body—no matter what the cost.
But he’d meant money and effort and expense—not life.
Hadn’t he?
Not that it mattered now. The inescapable reality of Charlie’s impending death blotted out all other considerations.
“He’s going to die, Emilio,” he said, staring at Charlie’s slack features. “Charlie...my son...flesh of my flesh and Olivia’s...the last surviving part of Olivia...is going to be gone. Why didn’t I appreciate him while he was here, Emilio? When did I stop thinking of him of a son and start seeing him as a liability? That never would have happened if Olivia were still here. She was my heart, Emilio. My soul. When I lost her, something went out of me...something good. Charlie was harmless but I came to loathe him. My own son! And that loathing infected Charlie, causing him to loathe himself. That’s when he stopped being harmless, Emilio. That’s when he started becoming harmful to himself. His self-loathing made him sick so he’d end up here in this pathetic miniature intensive care unit in the big gaudy showplace of a home where he was never really welcome when he was well.”
Arthur bit back a sob.
“I’ve got so much to answer for!”
Unbidden, unwelcome, another thought slithered out of the darkest corner of his mind, whispering how if Paraiso were damaged by the storm...if, say, some of the windows were smashed and Charlie’s terminally ill body were washed out into the Pacific, he’d be listed as a storm victim instead of an AIDS victim, wouldn’t he?
Arthur shook off the thought—though, despairingly, not without effort—and shoved it back down the dank hole it had crawled out of.
Is this what I’ve come to?
He backed away from the windows as the wind doubled its fury, battering those floor-to-ceiling panes until he was certain one of them was going to give.
‡
Emilio watched the Senador retreat from the storm, but he stood firm. He felt no fear of wind and rain. What were they but air and water? And even if he were afraid, he would not show it. He feared nothing...except perhaps that body he’d brought back from New York. He had to get rid of it.
An idea formed...put the body in the back of the ambulance...send them both over the edge of the cliffs into the wild, pounding surf far below...
And as the plan took shape...
The storm stopped.
The thunder faded, the wind died, the rain ebbed to a drizzle. Suddenly only swirling fog danced beyond the windows.
“Senador?” Emilio said. He rested his hands against the now still glass and stared out at the featureless gray. “It is over?”
“Not yet,” the Senador said, his voice hushed. “I’ve read about this type of thing. I believe this is what they call the eye of the storm, the calm at its center. It won’t last long. But why don’t you hurry up topside and take a look around, see how much damage we’ve got up there. Don’t get too far from the door. As soon as the wind starts to blow again, get back inside, because the back end is going to be just as bad as the front, maybe worse.”
Emilio nodded. “Of course.”
He hurried up the stairs and stepped outside into a dead calm.
The still, warm air hung heavy with moisture. Fog drifted lazily around him, insinuating through his clothes, clinging to his skin. So strange to have no wind. Emilio could not remember a time when a breeze wasn’t blowing across the cliff tops.
And silent...so eerily silent. Like cotton wadding, the fog muffled everything, even the sound of the surf below. No birds, no insects, no rustling grass...silence.
No, wait
. Emilio’s ears picked up a hum, somewhere down the driveway, growing louder. It sounded almost like...
A car.
Emilio gasped and took a hesitant step toward the noise. He glanced at the carport. The Senador’s limousine and the ambulance were where he’d left them. And still the sound grew louder.
No! This is not possible!
Instinctively he reached for his pistol before he remembered that he’d left it downstairs in the great room when he went into town. He hadn’t retrieved it because what need for a pistol with the bridge out and Paraiso isolated from the outside world?
The bridge was out! He’d seen it fall. He’d almost gone down with it. How could—?
Emilio stood frozen as a Ford sedan rounded the final curve in the rain-soaked, debris-littered approach road and pulled to a stop not a hundred feet in front of him. Normally Emilio would have rushed forward to confront any trespassers, but this was different. Something was wrong about this car.
A short, bearded man stepped out of the passenger side and glanced around before staring at Emilio.
“The Mother,” he said in an unfamiliar accent. “She is here. She has to be here. Where is the Mother?”
The Mother? Emilio wondered. What is he—? He was jolted by a sudden thought: Can he be talking about the ancient body below in the house?
But Emilio had questions of his own.
“How did you get here?”
“In the car,” the man said with ill-concealed impatience. “We drove up the road.”
“But the bridge—!”
“Yes, we came over the bridge.”
“The bridge is out! Down!”
The bearded man looked at him as if he were crazy. “The bridge is intact. We just drove over it.”
No! This couldn’t be! This—
The driver door opened then and out stepped a familiar figure. Emilio steeled himself not to react, to hide the sudden mad thumping of his heart against the inner walls of his chest.
The priest! Father Daniel Fitzpatrick!
The priest looked Emilio square in the face but gave no sign of recognition. Without the hat, the mirrored glasses, and the phony beard he’d worn that night in the church, Emilio was a different person.
Ultimate Supernatural Horror Box Set Page 29