River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  She’d have to arrive soon, he decided, and he went to the small lobby area inside the back doors to wait. If she managed to park out front, which was unlikely, she could page him. He waited with a mother and two small children, one still in a baby carrier, staying inside out of the drizzle that had started falling from leaden skies while the father brought their pickup truck around. His stomach and chest itched like mad, and the overhead lights kept jabbering at him.

  Finally, he saw Byrd’s Xterra roar into the parking lot, going much too fast for the confined space. He only caught a glimpse of Molly at the wheel, but she looked distracted. She spotted a parking place and zoomed in, miraculously missing the Mercedes next to it by inches.

  He started out into the lot, wondering where the light rain had come from. The sky had been cloudless earlier. She stalked briskly toward the hospital, hadn’t seen him yet. “Molly!” he called.

  Her head snapped up at the sound of Wade’s voice. He didn’t like the look in her eyes, angry and bitter. They were ringed with red, and he guessed she had been crying. They both went between the same two cars and met in a crushing embrace. “Oh, Molly, I’m so sorry.”

  “I know,” she said. She drew away from him, met his gaze. The angry look had passed, replaced by one of sadness. So very, very sad. “Is he…?”

  She didn’t finish. He didn’t know what she meant to ask. Certainly she didn’t think there had been a mistake, or Byrd had come back to life. He shouldn’t have left Byrd alone—that had been the one thing she had asked for, after all—but he just couldn’t stay in the room with him. “He’s in there,” he said, having to stop himself from adding, “he’s okay.” But he was. Byrd’s pain was gone, his sorrows finished. He was, in fact, more okay than Wade and Molly were or ever would be.

  “Thank you for being here,” Molly said. “I don’t know why I…why I was so stressed about him being alone. I guess in the end it doesn’t matter much one way or the other, does it?”

  “Probably not.”

  “I’ll miss him.”

  “We all will. You and me the most.”

  “He…he was the best brother. The best friend. I can’t imagine…”

  “I know, Molly. There’s no one like him. No one at all.”

  Wade tried to reach into his clouded, confused mind for something else to say, something comforting and pithy and smart, but before he found it, Molly—

  Molly changed.

  Her lips tightened. Her eyes narrowed. Her jaw pulled up, setting itself, firm. Her shoulders squared. She must have been slouching, because suddenly she was nearly as tall as Wade and she just—she just wasn’t, couldn’t be, never had been.

  There was a sudden smokiness to her eyes. She tilted her head back, ever so slightly, as if taking on an imperious air, regarding the scene before her from some new height.

  Even her scent was different, more metallic than it had been, with an ashy undercurrent.

  The transformation confused Wade. He had expected her to fall apart. Byrd had been her rock. When their parents had died, Byrd had handled all the details, leaving Molly free to mourn without having to be practical or reasonable. Wade had assumed that he’d have to take on that role now; that Molly would collapse into herself. Instead, she seemed to be growing, taking on strength she had never known before.

  “You…” she said, only the voice Wade heard didn’t belong to Molly. It was more strident, and even that single word carried a tone of condescension. “…are weak.”

  “Molly?”

  “Do not speak to her. She is not part of this.”

  So that’s it, he thought. Mental breakdown. Dissociation, wasn’t that what they called it? Something like that. A psychotic break. Her grief had forced her to invent a second personality to cope with it.

  He reached for her. He had to get her inside the hospital, out of the cold drizzle. “Molly, please, listen to me.”

  She batted his hand away. Her motion was casual, almost off-handed, just the slightest swing of her arm, but he felt like a truck had smacked him. His hand flew into the nearest car, landing with a loud bang.

  “Don’t touch me!” the voice that had never been Molly’s snapped. “Kethili-cha will not be handled by the pathetic Kethili-anh.”

  Wade cradled his hand against his stomach. “Molly, please.”

  She stared at him—stared down at him, it seemed—with fury burning in her eyes. “Shall I finish it now? While you still wear that useless suit of flesh?”

  “Molly, you need to get some help. Please, come inside with me and let’s—”

  Her hand darted toward him, curving into a fist, and Wade knew several things at once.

  He knew that hand could kill him if it touched him.

  He knew he had to get out of there.

  And he knew that he was Wade Scheiner, but he was also Kethili-anh. Until he could bring Kethili-anh to the fore, however—until Wade stopped holding him back—he was in terrible danger.

  He dodged the fist, barely.

  Then he ran.

  Molly—Kethili-cha—didn’t try to give chase.

  She laughed, peals of laughter echoing off the hospital walls, rolling throughout the parking lot, probably even audible down the hill at UTEP. Laughter that could shatter bricks, that could burst brains inside skulls.

  Hands clapped over his ears, Wade ran as fast as he could.

  * * *

  The statue of Christ the King at the peak of Mt. Cristo Rey towered over El Paso, and like the ASARCO smelter smokestacks, it could be seen from vantage points all over the city. It was actually in Sunland Park, New Mexico, however, so Kethili-cha had to drive down Sunland Park Drive, out of Texas and into the spur of New Mexico snaking beneath it. Here, the Rio Grande was contained within the borders of the United States. Across the river, in New Mexico, she turned off the main road onto a dirt track and climbed the steep hill toward the statue. A few weeks before, on the last Sunday of October, the hill would have been crawling with worshippers—literally in certain cases, as they scaled its heights, some flagellating themselves on the annual pilgrimage to the statue’s feet.

  Kethili-cha hoped there would be mystical power left over from that recent event, generated by the believers’ faith in the supernatural. But that was not her primary reason for forcing Molly’s brother’s vehicle up the hill. No, she climbed it because from there, she had a clear view of the river that wormed its way through El Paso and beyond.

  She gunned the vehicle up the slope. Small rivulets from the sudden rainfall ran down the hillside, carving curlicues in the dirt road. Rocks spat out behind her wheels, but the tires held the trail and carried her up. At a parking area, she stopped and walked the rest of the way. Bandits often lurked here to rob unsuspecting tourists and pilgrims, but they had fled, as if they had somehow known Kethili-cha was coming.

  When she reached the statue, she saw that vandals had chipped off some of the Christ’s toes. No one would dare treat Kethili-cha with such disrespect.

  Anyone who did would quickly regret it.

  The river wound below her, muddy and slow. It had once raged, pouring from its source high in the Rocky Mountains and cutting a swath through what would, in time, become the United States.

  It would do so again.

  Kethili-cha thrived on destruction, on devastation, all in the service of what she considered a greater good. She was an Earth goddess, of the Earth and for the Earth. Rivers were the planet’s circulatory system, as critical to its survival as blood to a human being. Earth was suffering a plague, and had been for millennia, but that plague had been getting worse. Upon awakening this time, she had been astonished and disgusted to see how bad it had become. On this peak, looking down at the river, she could see houses, thousands upon thousands of them, spreading up the hills like fungus, like a disease. In each of them, humans lived. Those humans were a pestilence, and they would kill her precious Earth if left unchecked. Already they were choking the life from the Rio Grande.

&nb
sp; No longer. She would not suffer them to keep spreading their blight upon the skin of the one she loved.

  By returning the rivers to health—restoring Earth’s circulation—she could cleanse it.

  Kethili-cha held her arms toward the sky, which had already, at her merest thought, begun to weep. Clouds had been gathering for the past hour or so, massing overhead, their tops climbing higher, their undersides as gray and ragged as old, walked-on hems. She cried out to them in a language not heard on Earth for thousands of years, and the clouds responded, crashing together in their urgent desire to do her bidding. Lightning flashed in their depths and thunder rolled out from them, filling the air with its sound.

  Then the rain, which had fallen only lightly so far, began in earnest.

  Kethili-cha delighted in the feel of it on her face, running down her neck, between her breasts and across her back. Her flesh split where it had been cracked, exposing new, pink skin as the old skin peeled away. She had begun to transform the body she had been born into, Molly McCall’s body, into one more suitable—taller, stronger, faster, with beautiful crimson eyes and jaws that could grasp and tear. The rain soaked through what remained of Molly’s clothing, cooling her from the heat of transformation.

  Through firmly planted feet, Kethili-cha felt the vibration of millions upon millions of lives, crowding into this place where only fifteen thousand years ago no one had lived. Through senses unknown to humankind she experienced a million voices raised in chant, in song, in hymn, in canción, in corrido. She knew the drumming of billions of feet touching earth in the sacred ritual of dance. She delighted in the knowledge that all of these people were out there, unaware, believing themselves secure in their small, pathetic lives.

  The skies opened and the rain fell, faster and harder than anyone in the two cities below her could possibly have imagined. Lightning lanced the gray sky everywhere at once, a jagged bolt even striking one of the statue’s outthrust hands, far above her. Sparks showered down.

  And in its constricted channel, the river began to rise.

  PART THREE: THE RIVER

  “like a ghastly rapid river,

  Through the pale door

  A hideous throng rush out forever,

  And laugh—but smile no more.”

  —Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”

  “Dark silent forms, performing

  Remote solemnities in the red shallows

  Of the river’s mouth at the year’s turn”

  —Robinson Jeffers, “Salmon-Fishing”

  “I turned homeward from Colorado early in September, but I stopped for several days at the Grand Canyon, descending alone to the depths, to submerge myself in the steep silence, to be overcome by the fearful immensity, and to drown everything in the deafening roar of the Colorado, watching its snakelike writhing and fire-tongued leaping until I was entranced as with the vermilion waste of the Navajo desert and many other places.”

  —Everett Ruess, letter, in Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty

  FORTY-THREE

  Rain drummed on the roof of the Crown Vic, danced up the windshield until the wipers snagged it, splashed off the hood in a fine spray. Truly had caught the local news the night before and nobody had predicted a major storm, but one had slipped in from someplace. In the time it took him to reach the rented car from his hotel room, his raincoat had been soaked, his short hair pasted to his scalp, and he was shivering from the cold. He kept an automatic pistol and spare ammunition in a waterproof zippered bag, which was currently on the floor in front of the passenger side’s bucket seat.

  He raced up Highway 70. As soon as he cleared the pass, the White Sands Missile Range occupied most of the land on his right, into the Organ Mountains. Including Victorio Peak.

  He would have to use whatever clout he still possessed—unless the agency had broadcast some kind of warning about him—to bluff his way onto the base and into the mountain. Coming down the far side of the pass, with nothing before him but wide-open desert, he took the Owens Road exit and drove past an Oryx Crossing sign toward the base entrance. Water sheeted the roadway approaching the double arched entrance ahead.

  Halfway to the entrance, he saw headlights charging toward him through the rain. He recognized the vehicle as a Hummer—civilian, not military. As the vehicle roared past, spraying his windshield, Truly glimpsed the driver’s face and almost lost control of his car.

  Vance Brewer drove it, his fists tight on the wheel, leaning forward slightly as if that would help him see through the downpour.

  Sitting in the backseat, his blank face pressed against the window, was an old man.

  The blind man? Truly couldn’t tell. He wished he had made Bernard Frontenac describe in more detail the man who drew all the pictures. Then again, who else was it likely to be?

  Truly continued toward the gate for another twenty seconds; then, hoping the rain would hide his actions, he braked, turned around, and followed.

  The Hummer’s taillights had already vanished.

  It didn’t matter. Owens Road ended at the highway. From there, Brewer could go toward Las Cruces and El Paso, or north toward the White Sands National Monument and Alamagordo.

  Truly’s guess was Las Cruces and El Paso. When he reached the highway, he chose that direction, gunning the rental car’s big engine. There wasn’t much traffic, and unless Brewer drove like a madman, he’d catch the Hummer in no time.

  * * *

  Something terrible had torn through Wade’s life and stolen away the two people who were most important to him, the only two friends whose significance had deepened over the decades instead of fading. Molly’s sudden transfiguration at the hospital had, quite bluntly, scared the crap out of him, as had the intimation that something similar might be happening to him. The cracked and itching skin, the whispering in a half-remembered language, worst of all the certainty that he had committed murder…it all had to have meaning. He feared that, as with Molly, some terrible change was overtaking him.

  He needed to figure out what was going on and why, and he needed to do it while he was still Wade Scheiner. For lack of anyplace better to go, he raced back to the safety of his hotel room.

  Entering the room, he froze in the doorway.

  The walls were covered in half-legible scrawls. Used-up markers, their caps off, were scattered everywhere. Some of the words had been scrawled in other media than ink—in brownish red letters that looked like blood. Wade looked at his palms and saw fresh cuts there that he didn’t remember. He didn’t recall any of this, writing all over his room, but the handwriting, while done rapidly and without concern for neatness, was clearly his.

  “Kethili inth kusili tia ti niala,” one line said. There was no punctuation, only spaces between what appeared to be different words and phrases. “Ina talaka ni Kethili-anh kinistero. Koni ni tia tilistira katala.” It went on like that, none of it making any sense to him…and yet distressingly familiar at the same time.

  He put out the Do Not Disturb sign, then closed and bolted the door. Standing near the bed, he turned in a slow circle, scanning the walls. The writing was everywhere. When could he have done this?

  After Ginny Tupper left, obviously. She would have taken one look and run away screaming.

  He wouldn’t have blamed her a bit. He wanted to do the same. But he couldn’t, not now.

  He had come here to call her from relative privacy, not knowing that stepping into his own room would chill him to the core. He sat on the bed—trying not to look at the scribbling on the walls—and dialed her number. She answered on the second ring.

  “Ginny?”

  “Wade…I don’t think—”

  He cut her off midsentence. “I was an asshole, Ginny. I’m sorry. I can explain—well, maybe I can explain. The point is, I had a reason for what I did, for sending you away. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “Hurt me?”

  “Look, I can’t go into it over the phone,” Wade said, fighting the de
speration he heard in his own voice. “I would never hurt you of my own accord, I can promise you that. And I don’t pretend to understand all of this myself, but there’s a possibility that it ties in to your father’s disappearance. I think maybe it’s connected to Smuggler’s Canyon, anyway.” That part was a wild guess with only the vaguest hunch to back it up.

  But something unnatural was going on. His earliest encounter with the supernatural was the night his dad had chased them into the cave at Smuggler’s Canyon. If Byrd had been right, then what happened to them that night had some kind of long-term repercussions they couldn’t know until they manifested.

  Maybe Kethili-cha and Kethili-anh were those manifestations, for Molly and himself.

  He had nothing better to go on. If Ginny’s father was an anthropologist studying Smuggler’s Canyon, maybe he had turned up something helpful. “I have a quick question. That word you asked about, Kethili. You said he used it in letters and notebooks. Do you know if he went into any more detail about it?”

  “I have boxes and boxes of notebooks, journals, and reports,” Ginny said. Wade heard the sounds of traffic in the background. “They’re all back in my motel room in Palo Duro.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m still in town, getting ready to head back down there. Turns out there are a lot of things you can’t buy in Palo Duro. Like, you know, everything.” She paused, considering a newfound idea. “You want to go back there with me? Maybe together we can get through them faster, see if anything more on this mystery word turns up.”

  He hadn’t imagined she would offer such an invitation. Not that long ago he had scared her half to death in his hotel room. Now she wanted him to come to hers?