River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “Maybe that’s not such a good idea.”

  “You seem to have this flawed notion that I couldn’t kick your ass if I needed to,” Ginny said. “Unless I’m mistaken, you’ve spent most of the last decade or so sitting or standing in front of a TV camera, right? I’ve spent it hiking to remote locations, scrambling up and down mountains, surviving the elements…I think I can handle a pretty newsboy.”

  In spite of himself, he had to smile. “Okay. If you can swing by my hotel, we can take my car, and maybe we can figure this out together.”

  “Your car? You don’t trust mine?”

  “Mine’s a rental and CNN’s buying the gas.”

  “We’ll take yours,” Ginny said.

  He glanced up at the walls again, defaced by madness. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot,” he said, “so we can leave right away.”

  * * *

  “Wade?”

  He snapped to attention, realizing that the car was drifting toward the highway’s centerline. He shook his head to clear it, corrected course. “Sorry.”

  “Are you falling asleep?”

  He had to think about it for a second. “No, it’s not that. It’s…hard to explain.” He was afraid he knew, although he didn’t want to go into it with Ginny. Wade had faded away because Kethili-anh had crowded out his consciousness. Ginny had brought him back. But from what he’d seen of Molly, that wouldn’t always be an option.

  There was an upside, he reminded himself; if he was being possessed by some ancient entity, it meant he wasn’t turning into his father.

  In the half-light of merged memories, he grasped at some that threatened to flicker away. If Kethili-anh can mess around in my head, he thought, why shouldn’t I dig into his?

  One overwhelming sensation buried all the rest, and it tied into something Kethili-cha had suggested. Kethili-cha and Kethili-anh were ancient enemies, engaged in a war that had been interrupted millennia before. He remembered towered cities being razed, villages burning to the ground, swollen rivers flooding through narrow, winding streets and carrying off children, mules, everyone and everything in their path. He remembered the wails of the living and tears shed for the dead. All of it, the effects of that war between gods. Now that they were released from their mystical imprisonment deep beneath the earth, the conflict would begin anew.

  Maybe it already had.

  “I thought explaining things was what this was all about,” she reminded him. “And if I recall correctly, you promised some explanations.”

  “I did. But there’s only so much I know. Most of it, I need your dad’s notes for.”

  “Tell me what you can, Wade. That’ll help me know what to look for.”

  “It’s hard to even know where to start. Something happened to me—to us, really, me and my friends, the ones you met the other day at Smuggler’s Canyon. Now Byrd is dead and Molly is changing into something else, something monstrous and murderous, and I’m afraid the same thing is happening to me.” He stopped, glanced at her in the passenger seat. Outside, a curtain of rain blocked everything more than a dozen feet away. “That sound ridiculous enough?”

  “Anthropologists learn pretty early in the game that we don’t know everything. What’s bizarre and implausible in our culture is everyday and commonplace in others.”

  “Including magic, or, I don’t know…paranormal weirdness?”

  “Especially magic.”

  Her ready acceptance surprised him. “Okay, here’s one more thing. The thing that I said happened at the canyon? It happened twenty years ago. A year after your dad disappeared. And it also involved my dad, who…well, I guess you could say he disappeared.”

  Her jaw was as tight as if it had been wired shut. She stared straight ahead, looking at something that was not in the road, but in her past. “I always knew that he might be dead. I never wanted to admit it, but I’m a practical girl.”

  “I’m not saying I know that anything happened to him. I only know about my own case and what happened to my father.”

  “I get it, Wade. I’m just telling you I’m ready for whatever we find out. One thing, though. I’ve seen some strangeness at Smuggler’s Canyon myself, now that you mention it. I think maybe we should split up after all.”

  “Split up how?”

  “You can drop me at the motel and go on to the canyon. I can dig through Dad’s stuff and see if I can find anything pertinent. But it sounds to me like this all begins and ends at Smuggler’s Canyon, and I’d hate for us to waste a lot of time in the room.”

  “But if you learn anything, how will you let me know?” he asked. “There’s no cell phone reception out there.”

  “I’ll…I don’t know. I’ll hitch a ride.”

  He couldn’t hold in a chuckle. “Because there are so many people headed that direction on a good day, much less one like this.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  “You drop me at the canyon, then backtrack to the motel. That way you’ll have wheels.”

  “That’ll work,” she said. “It’s not too far back to the motel.”

  Through the downpour, the three signs for the Palo Duro Motel loomed like lonely roadside ghosts. Wade pulled off at the exit, passed the motel, and took Palo Duro to River Road. His life’s history unspooled out the windows, painted in runny watercolors.

  They couldn’t make it all the way to the canyon. The irrigation ditches that usually diverted much of the river’s current into farm fields had swollen from the heavy rain. Chocolate-colored water washed across the road, carrying branches and other plant matter. The bridge was underwater, almost invisible.

  “This car can’t make it through that,” Wade said, stopping on the near side of the flood. “It’s got no ground clearance at all. And there’s another ditch after this one.”

  “What do we do, then?”

  “I think I can get across on foot,” he said, hoping to sound more confident than he felt. “I used to be pretty good at navigating rivers. You go back to the room. Maybe by the time you come back for me, this will have receded. If not, don’t try to run it in this car.”

  “Okay.”

  When he opened the car door, Ginny put a hand on his arm.

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “I think you’re right, Ginny. The answers are at Smuggler’s Canyon, somewhere. Anyway, Kethili-anh wants to be there and I can’t hold him back much longer. If you learn anything, hurry back.”

  She looked at him curiously, but didn’t ask what he meant. “I will. You be careful.”

  Instead of answering, he slammed the car door. The time for being careful had passed long ago.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Ginny backed away from the irrigation canal and turned the car around. She wiggled her fingers at Wade as she drove away.

  He faced the submerged bridge with trepidation. This was a flash flood, not a river, and the rules were different. He couldn’t boat across. The water was probably no more than three feet deep, but since the banks had disappeared he couldn’t know for certain. The water’s speed was hard to gauge, but it could have been running at thirty or forty miles an hour, gaining speed and strength minute by minute. Under the surface, he might encounter anything—rats, rattlesnakes yanked from their cozy homes by the current, rocks, bigger branches. The bridge itself might be damaged, and his foot might crash through it and get stuck, pinning him there while the water rose around him.

  The whole point of river running was that you tried to stay in the boat and out of the wet. It didn’t always work out that way, and Wade had spent more time in rivers—some fast-flowing—than he cared to remember. Some of those dunkings had been purposeful, an afternoon swim to cool off, but many had not been.

  He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, a leather coat, and casual leather shoes. A far cry from his river clothes.

  On the bright side, he was already soaked to the skin by the rain. No matter what happened, he couldn’t get much wetter.

  He stepped in,
felt the sudden shock of cold water against his legs, and kept going. The water ran fast and hard, threatening to yank his feet out from under him. He leaned into it and pushed on. He kept his feet close to the bottom, taking small, shuffling steps. Water splashed against his legs, trying to bowl him over. A branch slammed into him. Before it could trip him, he shoved it away with one hand.

  Then he felt the relative solidity of the bridge beneath his feet and relaxed a bit. There was still the possibility that the bridge wouldn’t support his weight, but he had recently crossed it in an SUV. Fast water could knock down a bridge, but he didn’t think it’d had enough time to work on this one yet.

  A few minutes later, the first canal was behind him. One more to go. He approached this one with more confidence, and he made good time across it.

  Finally, so drenched that he might as well have been naked, Wade reached the rocks. Water tumbled down from the higher reaches, mini waterfalls running everywhere. The answers were here, Ginny had suggested. Kethili-anh seemed to think so, too. But where?

  He started up toward the inner sections, figuring that anything he would need to find wouldn’t be here on the outskirts. The rocks were slick, treacherous, and several times he had to catch himself with his hands, rubbing them raw.

  Rounding a curve, he saw something yellow glowing through the rain, like the neon lights that had once decorated Betty’s Night Owl Saloon. But there could be no neon at Smuggler’s Canyon, where there was no electricity. Wiping rainwater from his eyes, he pushed on.

  When he found the source of the glow, he wished he still had water in his eyes, or mud, or anything else he could blame.

  He had reached one of the areas where the pictographs were the most numerous. Dozens of them decorated a rock wall. As a boy, he had wondered about the people who had made art so high up on a wall, curious about what it had meant to them and why they had been so determined to make their pictures last.

  They had not, he would have been willing to bet, intended for those images to glow with their own internal light.

  But now they did, bright and steady, like beacons shining through night and weather.

  Wade approached the lowest of them, the ones he could reach, and held out his hand. Heat radiated from them. He couldn’t get within six inches without burning himself.

  There was no shortage of things that didn’t make sense in this new reality he found himself inhabiting. As he stood there, nearly blinded by the brightness of the ancient images, he felt Kethili-anh’s presence again, like a hallucinatory waking dream filling his consciousness.

  But Wade remained as well, and in the interface between the two of them, he knew.

  He remembered.

  * * *

  Kethili-anh and Kethili-cha had always been enemies, even though, as all the gods had been in their time, they were also siblings. There was no time in the memory of either when they had not been foes. Kethili-anh couldn’t recall if there had been some initial disagreement—as far as he knew, he had been born hating her, and she him. Their births, though, were lost behind the veils of millennia, invisible even to gods.

  Their enmity had grown and grown, until finally they fell on each other in vicious combat, using mystical attacks and claws and teeth to hurt and tear and rend and break. The battle was epic, lasting sixty years and ninety-three days, in the human reckoning of time. As it progressed, both weakened, until finally those mortal sorcerers and shamans who lived ten thousand years ago took advantage of their weakness and cast imprisoning spells, hoping to rid the Earth of the last of Kethili’s children.

  The web of magics engulfing them worked. Kethili-cha and Kethili-anh were torn away from each other’s terrible embrace. Kethili-anh found himself entombed in an earthen prison so small that he couldn’t move. Over the centuries, his consciousness waned until only a spark remained, unaware of itself or anything else. The flesh rotted from his body, and he grew ever weaker, unable to feed on the faith of his believers or the consumed souls of the dead. Kethili-cha, for her part, had preferred the souls of the living, which she claimed made a tastier meal. Kethili-anh’s respect for the living had always been one of the points of antagonism between them.

  Finally, Kethili-anh had been reborn, into the body of Wade Scheiner, inside a cave beneath Baghdad.

  From this point, Wade’s memories became intermingled with Kethili-anh’s. The glowing images on the walls of his cave prison, the night before his escape, the miraculous way no one saw him or stopped him, the empty streets—all part of the magic that had freed Kethili-anh from entombment. Somehow, the glowing water Byrd had described, from the depths of Smuggler’s Canyon, the water that had dissolved his father like the strongest of acids, must have had some property that made him and Molly vulnerable to possession by the Kethili.

  So he had been freed from his Iraqi captors and swept into a different prison at the same time. As Kethili-cha, Molly was stronger than him. Maybe proximity to Smuggler’s Canyon had made her manifest more quickly. However it happened, and he couldn’t pretend to know, she had been able to control him. Before he was even aware of Kethili-anh’s burgeoning presence, Kethili-cha had made him murder innocent people. For her own enjoyment? No, he decided—because she enjoyed it, and because their suffering made her stronger.

  That was the sort of foul act Kethili-cha would find endlessly amusing, and the reason he had so long opposed her. At least, he could assure himself, the murders hadn’t been his doing—not really. His body, but someone else’s consciousness, and Kethili-cha’s plan.

  He guessed the rain was her doing, too. Celebrating her return to the world by drowning it.

  That was just like her.

  FORTY-FIVE

  Brewer had wanted a helicopter, but since the weather had turned so dramatically violent, they were all grounded. He had taken his own vehicle instead, knowing it could cut through anything a simple storm might throw at him.

  But he was beginning to think this was no ordinary storm. He had never seen driving rain like this. It turned Interstate 10 into a soupy mess. Truckers had pulled off under the shelter of overpasses, waiting it out. Those vehicles that did press on did so slowly, wipers flicking and lights blazing.

  Brewer wove between them, unwilling to let surface conditions dictate his speed. Miles back, he had realized that a car had been tailing him almost since White Sands. On the interstate, the driver had come closer than he should have, probably trying not to confuse Brewer’s taillights with anyone else’s, and Brewer had recognized him.

  It took a few minutes to recall the name. He had seen the baby-faced man first in Colorado, with Robb Ivey and then with Millicent Wong. Then today, there had been drawings of him mixed in with all the other whacked-out shit the old man had sketched. Truly, that was it. James Livingston Truly. CIA. He should have realized when Specialist LaTour said he’d been talking to a CIA drone that it was Truly. To be honest, he hadn’t given the agent that much credit.

  The guy had turned into a real pest. Brewer would have liked to stop and deal with him on the spot, to smoke him there on the rainy shoulder of I-10. He told himself he was getting soft in his old age, and he had to guard against that. In years gone by, anyone who had stumbled so close to the truth would have been feeding worms in a shallow grave long ago.

  But the old man in the backseat was more agitated than Brewer had ever seen him, rocking in the seat, his dry mouth clicking, scribbling drawing after drawing and spreading them all over the vehicle. Any delay would be too much at this point.

  An expert at the base had positively identified some of the old man’s drawings, from the six-hour stretch Brewer had started thinking of as his pre-Columbian phase, as representing ancient Indian rock art found at a place called Smuggler’s Canyon. Brewer knew it well, although he hadn’t had occasion to go back there in the last twenty-one years.

  In theory, if the man was drawing Smuggler’s Canyon, this meant Brewer needed to be there. Things were coming full circle. And if the words t
he old man had been scrawling on some of his pictures, “Too late,” had any meaning, he had to hurry.

  Which meant no stopping to cap some obnoxious spook. If the guy survived the drive to the canyon, he could take care of it there. He tried to forget about the spy, to focus instead on guiding the Hummer over the perilous roads.

  * * *

  Everywhere that great rivers flowed, the rains came. In Baghdad, the Tigris and Euphrates swelled and overran their banks. In Paris and London, the Seine and the Thames, engorged by sudden storms, washed into the cities, crumbling ancient buildings, sweeping away cars with their drivers inside. In Cairo, the Nile rose so fast that people were trapped in their houses, drowning as they tried to break through their roofs. In Keokuk and Cape Girardeau and Memphis, Greenville and Farriday and New Orleans, the Mississippi burst over its banks and swamped streets, shops, houses and hospitals with ferocity. In Bismarck, in Pierre, in Sioux City and Omaha and St. Joe, the Missouri did the same.

  The combined fury of both rivers struck St. Louis, roiling away the ground beneath the Gateway Arch and bringing that landmark tumbling down. The staff of a city jail fled for higher ground, leaving forty-seven prisoners on the lower tier to drown in cells they couldn’t escape. A traffic jam in a mall parking lot killed another thirty-four who couldn’t flee the wall of water that swept over them. Eighty-eight residents of an assisted-living facility for seniors were killed when a mud flow brought their building down around them.

  The president declared a state of emergency, but there was little he, FEMA, the National Guard, or the Army Corps of Engineers could do about it. Rain fell in volumes never seen in recorded history: feet, not inches, every hour. Every other nation’s leaders made similar grand pronouncements, but behind closed doors, all were equally helpless. The waters rose, the rivers ran, and the people in their paths were obliterated.