The Darkness Drops

by Peter Clement

  “You mean, have I made promises I can’t keep? Don’t take me for a fool, Ryder.” Her voice remained quiet and smooth as ice, the glitter in her eye disturbingly bright. “Even if I eluded the police, sooner or later what I did here would come out. Jade mustn’t see her mother . . . the stain . . .”

  She went pale, and drew her face into a look of revulsion, as if a bad smell had filled her nostrils. Swallowing a few more times, she continued to speak. “My legacy would haunt her for life. But if what I’ve set in motion works out . . .” The little coloring that remained drained out of her. Struggling to breathe, she seemed to be looking at something he couldn’t see. “Please, tell her that I loved her and did my best for her. Can you do that, Ryder, and not feel it’s a lie? She’d sense a lie.”

  Terry leaned down, bringing his face to within an inch of hers. “A hundred yards from here, in that courtyard killing ground, another mother and child endure God knows what horrendous agony. It’s your doing, an atrocity of pure evil, and at the same time you want me to make sure your daughter thinks well of you?” He spit out the words, meaning them to wound, his rage at the wrongness of all she’d done sweeping through him. “Imagine her contempt on the day she learns of the lie behind Mummy. Because she will, sooner or later. Whisking her out of China won’t protect her from that kind of truth--”

  Wey Chen silenced him with a finger to his lips, “Yes, I’m a monster. But do you know why those images you saw in the projection room were set up, ready to run?” she asked.

  Stunned by the question, he stood speechless, unable to fathom why she’d even ask it.

  “There are those in my country who think it’s you, Ryder, who should be put on trial for crimes against humanity. Those creations are what they consider you guilty of. My late commander intended that we force you to admit it.”

  “Admit crimes against humanity? Me?” The woman’s lost her mind.

  She leaned over her daughter, and inhaled the scent of the girl’s hair, as if storing up the memory of it for eternity. She then stepped back, and tentatively placed a hand against Terry’s chest. “So you see, who is a monster remains a matter of perspective. The point is, this isn’t about my guilt. It’s about a little girl’s peace of mind. Help protect it. And don’t worry. My own torment in hell is assured.” She absently patted her palm against him a few times, as if the gesture might deliver all that she’d told him directly to his heart.

  “I almost forgot,” she called over her shoulder while rushing back toward the projection room. “Jade speaks English, but if you need to cheer her up, talk like Donald Duck. He’s her favorite American.”

  Chapter 31

  Two hours later, Tuesday, February 3, 2009, 9:12 A.M.

  On a tributary of the Jinjiang River, North Guangdong Province

  Normally the canvas-covered holds would carry five hundred pounds of fish.

  Not today.

  Terry kept peeking out from beneath the tarps.

  Their little flotilla--three boats, long, narrow, and pointed at both ends--slipped upstream, plowing the swift current of reddish-brown water with ease. They were passing between cliffs that towered hundreds of feet above them, the smooth weathered sides as vertical as the arms of a vice. He kept his eye on the crack of blue sky that ran the length of the abyss, and fought images of it closing in, sealing him off completely--Whoa, focus!

  He checked the tremor of his hands. They had begun to quiver more discernibly now. But the damp in this gloomy chasm had also set him shivering. Where the chills left off and SHAKES might be gaining brain, he couldn’t tell. What worried him more was a cold sensation, like the beginnings of an ice cream headache, that had set itself up behind his eyes. An I scream headache he’d called them as a kid. He thought of Samantha in the San Antonio stadium and wondered how she was doing, or if she were even still alive.

  He’d shut down such questions about Carla.

  Terry ducked back under the tarpaulin where it was dark enough to sleep, but no sooner had he shut his eyes than images of what he’d seen back in the projection room haunted him. Were the organisms real? They appeared to be. But what in the world did Wey Chen mean about his being their creator, let alone a war criminal? He’d tried to dismiss that as the ravings of a woman driven half mad by grief and guilt over giving up her child. But those chimera had originated from somewhere. One thing for certain, he hadn’t let his team keep written records of the what-if sessions that had given rise to imagining such creatures, so no outsider could have learned of them by stealing documents.

  Had a member of his own ranks sold out?

  Ten minutes later, unable to breathe in such close quarters, he’d thrown off the canvas cover altogether. He kept an eye on Yuri who sat in the next boat. The man had drawn deep within himself, staring into the water and not saying anything for the last few hours. No question he was obsessing over what had really happened to Anna and Kyra. Watching him cling to the futile belief that they were still alive tore at Terry’s own faint hope that Carla might survive.

  They entered a bend of the river where it snaked sharply left, and on the right, a well worn breech in the craggy escarpment opened to a massive, naturally formed, geological bowl. The basin of it extended at least two miles across, reminding him of the vents formed by extinct volcanoes back in Hawaii, and the jagged heights that framed the gap, their high ridges curving inland, resembled the stony spines bracketing his Waianae Valley. Except instead of cradling a place of life, the verticals here were too sheer to support vegetation, and the interior remained a barren, black cavity eroded out of rock.

  The helmsmen nosed the prows of their crafts toward a beach of red silt at the mouth of the opening. Terry stepped out on the gritty surface and lifted Jade, now awake but still drowsy, to his shoulders. She’d shown no fear of him after the sedative had worn off, nor had she cried at being with strange people or even asked for her mother. In fact, she hadn’t spoken at all, just did what she was told with chilling passivity.

  “Why land here?” he asked Yuri.

  “Because no one in their right mind would try and get off the river at this spot.”

  “Why?”

  Yuri scampered over the shallow dune, ignoring Terry’s latest question, exactly as he had all the other enquiries, and glanced at his watch. Obviously he still didn’t believe in sharing details of their travel plans. Even when he’d insisted that they make their escape from the base by following the river further north, no explanations were offered.

  Terry started after him.

  The terrain became softer and had a gelatinous, semi-liquid feel under his boots. Their boatmen, revving the oversized diesel engines that powered the slender crafts, backed out to midstream and sped off the way they’d come, quickly disappearing into the chasm.

  He understood their hurry.

  Black specs swarmed the southern horizon like flies over a corpse.

  Helicopters.

  Wey Chen’s late supervisor might not have told anyone at the base about the expected arrival of Yuri’s band, but he’d sure as hell mobilized some kind of backup. The boatmen wanted to be off the water before any of those pilots twigged that the trap had gone wrong and came looking for them.

  Gaining a foot or two of elevation, Terry could see the floor of the bowl. It was a single, vast mud flat, six feet lower than the bank he stood on, the surface pitted with depressions, some still brimming with dark water. Leading across it was a rope drawn straight as a bow string and attached to tall metal stakes spaced about a hundred feet apart. The line disappeared in the distance, toward a point directly opposite him near the peak of the valley.

  “I take it we follow that,” he called to Yuri, hurrying to catch up with him. The man was practically running.

  “Only if you want to keep out of the quick sand.”

  “And what’s at the other end?”

  Again, no answer. But Yuri glanced at his watch for the second time since their arrival.

  Even staying cl
ose by the line, the silt felt saturated with runoff and quivered as Terry trotted over it. Little wonder. The whole of Guangdong Province had been over irrigated for years. The full height of rock, earth, and knobby mountains that surrounded them, their wrinkled crevices oozing bracken water, were but weeping mud slides waiting to happen. “A fitting place to contemplate self-inflicted extinction, don’t you figure?” he said, catching up to Yuri.

  The guy regarded him as if he’d gone nuts.

  “Don’t you get it, Raskin! This is the head waters of the primordial sludge in which this whole mess started. Part of the same lunacy by which people pack themselves cheek to jowl with their animals in an already sodden landscape. Why shouldn’t I get angry? These fools created a giant Petrie dish out of where they live, then added chimera to the soup.” He gave an extra hard stomp to the mud beneath his feet. “Anyone up there listening?” His voice echoed around the circular cliffs and megaphoned itself toward the sky.

  Yuri frowned “Fuck, Ryder, keep it down.”

  The others flashed him wary looks.

  Only Jade paid him no heed, her little arms clasped around his head.

  Sure his sudden outbursts of late were SHAKES driven. And sure, they were extreme in the extreme. But damn it, his rages were also justified. If he learned to ride them, the way he had his oh-so-visual imagination, why should he tolerate fools gladly? Let the righteous anger roll, and the stupid beware.

  They ran in silence for the next few minutes.

  Yuri continued to look at his watch.

  At the midpoint of their trek, Terry realized that the far end of the bowl didn’t simply end in more cliffs.

  A wide, bulky tower rose out of the stone. “What the hell’s that?” he asked.

  “According to my sources, it’s an abandoned power station.”

  “Up there?”

  “Apparently. There’s also supposed to be service ladders cemented to the sides of the sluices, and we can climb them all the way to the top. Once there, it’s only a few hundred yards to a deserted airstrip. I’ve a plane waiting for us, a local commercial turbo prop known for hopping about the country. Once in the air, it won’t attract attention, and the pilots don’t ask questions. I’ve used them many times before. Very reliable.”

  A virtual cornucopia of information, compared to what Yuri usually relinquished. Maybe he’s thought it wise that someone other than himself be privy to how we get our asses safely out of China. “Where are we flying to?” Terry asked, determined to harvest all he could before the new openness vanished.

  “Don’t worry. Every link of the Siberian Express knows its own job. Just follow the chain.”

  Back to stonewalling. “Why the hell should I believe that that’s even a power station?” Terry asked, wanting more facts. Something definitely didn’t feel right. “Convenient ladders in sluices and shit--what a bunch of crap. I mean, where the hell’s the water that powered it? Look around! I know your great Siberian Express network brought us here, but if you’ve been led down the bull-crap path on this one, we’ll never scale these cliffs on our own.”

  “This used to be a tidal lake, a kind of natural reservoir that prevented flooding farther south along the river.”

  “So?”

  “At the bend behind us, any spillage from the river roared straight into here first. During monsoons, these storm surges could raise the lake level twenty, thirty feet. Luckily the water raced on through the natural sluices in the far end of the basin, where the tower is now, then tumbled into a series of underground pools leading to more lakes on the other side of the mountain. All that fast flow meant power, and a century ago they built this generating station to harvest it. But recent master minds decided to damn the river further up stream, creating a giant artificial lake to produce a thousand times the kilowattage. That dried up the lake here and lowered the river water levels to what you see now. Unfortunately those same geniuses didn’t allow for the increased rains from climate change. Their state-of-the-art facility is always on the brink of overflowing, even during the so called dry season, and they’re forced to do unscheduled releases. They get away with it because all that spillage simply surges through here, just like the old days, minimizing its impact downstream. In other words, natural topography saved the master-minds from being treated to a traditional rice and bullet breakfast.”

  “Unscheduled releases?” Terry asked, beginning to grasp why he was being briefed.

  “They’re kind of a Chinese Old Faithful, though nowhere near as punctual, and nothing close to the previous scale when the river was higher and this was a lake. But it still puts on enough of a show that locals stay clear.”

  Terry began to notice horizontal water-marks on the cliffs that were twenty feet above ground. They looked fresher than he would have liked.

  “Those same locals call the place ‘Bone Crusher,’” Yuri added, and glanced at his watch again.

  Terry looked up to see the effect, if any, all the talk had had on his tiny passenger. Her legs astride his neck, her hands gently clasped across the front of his forehead, she continued to stare straight ahead, secure in her perch, but eyes blank. He pulled a bottle of water from his hip pack and offered her a drink.

  Still no response.

  “It’s okay, Jade. Just hold onto me tight, no matter what happens.” But dare he trust Yuri’s judgment about anything, this man who deliberately eschewed logical planning, choosing instead to live by wit, instinct, and impulse?

  Maybe.

  He’d obviously been savvy enough to escape north instead of heading back south. And he’d been right that Wey Chen wouldn’t betray them. Trick, yes. Make wild accusations, sure. But not betray. Even his ideas about SHAKES had been sound.

  Yes, the man definitely had his talents.

  Yuri looked at his watch yet another time, and broke into a full sprint.

  The rest of the party followed suit, their features taut with strain.

  Terry matched them. “Remember, hold tight, Jade,” he warned, trying not to sound too concerned, eyeing the waterlogged cliffs. To Yuri he added, “Any helpful hints?”

  “Make for the sluices on the left. That’s where the handholds and ladders are.”

  “Just so I don’t slough off my mortal coil thinking it’s because I teamed up with an idiot, what happened? I take it you bribed the keepers of the dam to protect us from being flushed through the valley.”

  “Of course. We bought ourselves a half-morning delay. Any longer without someone dumping water as usual would have aroused suspicions among their masters in Beijing. Still, it should have been enough. Trouble is, I hadn’t timed in all the theatrics with Wey Chen’s boss.”

  “And when does our period of grace end?”

  “Five minutes ago.”

  * * * *

  Despite being in the topographical equivalent of a frying pan left out in the sun under a cloudless sky, the temperature seemed to drop as they raced for the vertical cuts in the cliffs. Seconds later a clammy breeze came at their back, accompanied by a distant rumble that sounded like rocks rolling down hill.

  Ryder increased his stride.

  Jade’s small arms clasped his head with double the force.

  The noise increased. “Don’t look back,” he yelled at Jade.

  He felt the girl turn. Her scream soared into a high-pitched shriek, and her grip on him trebled.

  “It’s okay, Jade!” He adjusted his grip on her legs and glanced over his shoulder.

  A roll of water several feet high tumbled across the plain toward them, propelling a jumble of logs and rocks before it. But farther back, still within the confines of the river gorge, a cascade of foam and debris half the height of the cliffs raced down the chasm, followed by a second and third tier of even more muddy water filled with flotsam, all of it moving fast.

  The initial wave continued its progress toward them, showing no break in speed. Its contents leapt and bounced as if caught in some giant thrasher, the bulk of the rubble con
centrated in the center, like a phalanx. Water that spilled to either side of the flats appeared relatively free of solid objects.

  Terry cut left.

  Immediately, the suction of soggier ground pulled at his boots but, high-stepping through it, he didn’t slow down. In seconds he was breathing hard. Yuri, having also cut left, began to pull ahead. The rest of their team were scattered on either side of him, all running as wildly as himself.

  The wave continued its rush, closing the gap, its roar increasing as the surge grew nearer.

  It caught him behind the knees and flung him face forward, then rolled him in a lopsided somersault as it thundered over his head, grinding his nose into the dirt.

  But Jade hung on.

  “Good girl!” he said, choking on silt as he thrust his head back above the surface, then let the current sweep them in the direction of the cliffs. The shallow water traveled faster than he could run.

  To his right were cart-wheeling logs and flying stones, but he’d no such dangers to deal with in his immediate vicinity.

  Looking behind him, he saw the three-tiered staircase of water explode into the basin as if it had been shot out of a fire hose.

  It immediately widened, fanning out to fill the valley, the height of each wave diminishing, but none of the force or forward progress ebbed. All three waves bore down on him and Jade with the fury of living monsters.

  He glanced right and left, looking for the others. The heads in the water seemed to number about a dozen, but toward the center where the bulk of the detritus had been, people were screaming. The water there, already reddish-brown with silt, billowed crimson.