River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  * * *

  Kethili-cha drove Molly’s brother’s SUV, allowing Molly’s personality just enough leeway to keep the vehicle under control, since driving was a skill Kethili-cha had never learned. She left the driver’s window open to feel the rain and road spray, knowing that back in El Paso and Juárez and in every city close to a major river, destruction reigned.

  But as Molly drove and Kethili-cha sent her consciousness racing around the globe, sucking in whatever pleasure she could from the suffering and death she caused, she encountered unexpected resistance. Probing, opening all her senses, she realized it could have only one source.

  Kethili-anh.

  She would like to have killed her brother’s new host before he fully inhabited the man, instead of simply amusing herself with him. He might have chosen another host, one to whom she didn’t have such ready access, but she could have taken that chance. There weren’t many who were suitable as hosts; Molly and Wade were not random choices, but had been selected by circumstance long ago.

  But it had been Wade’s imprisonment deep underground, so near where Kethili-anh had been entombed, that had begun the process that freed them from their mutual bondage. Until both he and Kethili-cha fully manifested, she couldn’t chance aborting that process. Since she hadn’t been able to kill Wade, she had to deal with what was, not what might have been. Now, she could sense, Kethili-anh had come into his powers, and he needed to be crushed.

  Molly negotiated the coursing waterways and soon stopped at the place she thought of as Smuggler’s Canyon. Kethili-cha thought of it as her prison, or at least the outward manifestation thereof, and returning to it brought her little joy. Only anticipation.

  It would, she devoutly hoped, bring her power beyond imagining.

  The Rio Grande tore furiously at its banks, just beyond the big rocks of the canyon. Among the rocks, smaller rivers flowed. The parking area was hidden under inches of water. Somewhere in there, Kethili-anh worked to thwart her desires, to hold back the rain she had summoned. She would find him, and she would put an end to the annoyance he had been millennia ago and remained today. Their eternal struggle would be finished after this encounter, she promised herself.

  She left the vehicle she hardly fit into anymore, forcing Molly’s consciousness out of her head altogether. She didn’t need the mortal anymore and wanted no distractions. With the confidence due a goddess, she strode into the tall rocks. Water splashed all around her and the rain on the stones sounded like thousands of running feet.

  Finally, she found him, standing on a shelf of rock near an array of brightly glowing pictographs. He no longer looked much like Wade Scheiner; the only lasting resemblance was in the thatch of light hair on his head and the darker hair on his chin, just as she still had Molly’s dark mop. Like her, he was taller than before—probably nine feet tall, although that was hard to gauge with him high above her in the rocks. His head had elongated, his jaw coming to a sharp point, his mouth full of jagged teeth. The back of his head also tapered to a point. His ears were triangular and jutted out like a bat’s. His yellow eyes beamed with internal light, much like the rock art he stood beside. His legs and arms were long, bent twice, once in each direction, giving him a spider-like aspect. He swayed from side to side, palms toward the sky, and chanted softly. A flash of lightning etched his shadow against the dun-colored rocks, paling the glowing pictographs into momentary insignificance.

  She looked much like him, with the same elongated head and multijointed limbs. Molly’s soft, pasty flesh had been replaced with hard, scaled gray-green tissue that could more easily withstand the battle ahead. Her red eyes saw with more clarity than Molly’s ever had.

  As she started up into the rocks, Kethili-anh’s head turned. He saw her, his eyes widening, their yellow heat boring into hers.

  “You interfere with my designs,” Kethili-cha said, scarcely containing her fury. “We are reborn after so long, and already you mock my authority.”

  “You hold no authority over me, sister,” Kethili-anh said. “But obviously your inflated sense of your self-worth has not been affected by your time in bondage.”

  “My authority is in my strength, brother. And I have been hampered by your weakness for too long. The time is here, at last, for our final reckoning.”

  He extended his spidery legs and started down the rocks, toward her.

  Very well, then, she told herself. Let the battle be joined.

  FORTY-SIX

  “In El Paso,” the TV voice said, “the Rio Grande and the Franklin Canal have spilled from their channels and run together. City officials have called for a mandatory evacuation of the downtown area and are urging all residents to get north of I-10 at the very least. Up into the Franklin Mountains might be better, but there is a danger of flash flooding at lower elevations. At any rate, traffic is at a standstill, and the water continues to rise. In Ciudad Juárez, meanwhile…”

  Ginny glanced up at a tremble in the news anchor’s voice. The woman sat behind her glitzy news desk but she held a sheaf of papers in her hand, as if the news was coming in so fast they didn’t have time to put it on a teleprompter. Her eyes brimmed with tears. Ginny didn’t remember ever seeing this happen before, no matter how horrific the news was.

  She wished she could change the channel to something less disturbing, but she couldn’t get many channels in the motel room, and they all carried the same thing—bad news from around the world. Bizarre, unexpected storms like the one she had turned on the set to drown out in the first place, thunder and lightning and rain that wouldn’t quit. So far, no water had come into her room, which was a blessing, because her father’s papers were in boxes stacked on the floor.

  She didn’t know how she would get safely back to Smuggler’s Canyon, assuming she found anything that would be helpful to Wade. At this point, she wasn’t sure Wade’s little Ford Focus would get out of the parking lot. She wished she had brought her SUV instead.

  She had found a passing reference to Kethili in one of the journals. She didn’t think it would help much, but its context gave her another idea. She went back to his letters home, leafed rapidly through them, and finally found several paragraphs of interest. She spent another thirty minutes or so making sure there was nothing else—not that she could know for sure without rereading every scrap of paper—but it looked like what she had was the best she would get.

  She put on her still-damp hooded sweatshirt, which she had hung over the shower curtain rod to dry, pulled the hood tight, covered it with the windbreaker—also damp—and stepped into the deluge, sloshing through inches of water to Wade’s car.

  She got the unfamiliar car started. The wipers were worthless against the watery onslaught, and the headlights barely sliced through the downpour. She backed out of the space and drove around the building, to the driveway onto Palo Duro Road. Headlights emerged from the gloom to her left, coming from the highway, so she held back and let a huge SUV barrel past. She started out onto the road, but then spotted more headlights belonging to a large American car. When that had passed, she pulled onto Palo Duro. Three vehicles at once were more than she had seen there since she had checked in.

  She followed, hoping that if, by chance, the other cars were bound for Smuggler’s Canyon, they would clear the irrigation canals, and reveal to her whether she could do the same.

  * * *

  Listening to the newscasts blanketing the radio waves, Truly shuddered. He could barely imagine the devastation wrought by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, or the Asian tsunami from a few years back. From everything he heard, the current disaster made them all pale in comparison. The only thing he could liken it to was the meteor activity that had, according to some experts, driven the dinosaurs to extinction. Rain hammered his car and lightning bolts seared themselves onto his retinas and thunder ricocheted around like cannon fire at a free-for-all, and he knew that everything he was experiencing was minor-league compared to what people in riverside cities were dealing with. He’d alre
ady heard of entire towns in China submerged by the Yangtze, of villages swept away by the Congo’s surge, of a Brazilian city called Macapa, near the mouth of the Amazon, where the mortality rate was said to be a hundred percent, give or take a few possible survivors who would have lost everything they had ever known, and of devastation by the Potomac in Washington, D.C., where his neighborhood, Georgetown, was only one of the areas too dangerous to enter even by boat.

  Still following Captain Brewer, he had turned off the interstate and sped through a tiny town called Palo Duro. Once he saw it—what little he could see through the storm—he understood why he had never heard of it. He flipped open his mobile phone and tried to call Robb Ivey—the psychic seemed to be a fount of knowledge on a wide variety of topics—to see if he could find out anything about the town or the area. He couldn’t get a decent signal, though, and he gave up, jamming the phone back into his pocket in frustration.

  Just off the interstate, he passed a shoddy-looking motel where a car waited in the driveway. When he passed by, the car pulled out, heading in the same direction, into and through the town, instead of going toward the highway. Frankly he thought this would be the preferred destination of anyone out tonight: away from the Rio Grande and toward higher ground).

  He wondered if Brewer was drawing him into a trap. Him up ahead in the Hummer, someone else behind. If they hemmed him in on one of these little country roads, he wouldn’t have anywhere to go. Hardly anyone else was on the road, so any confrontation would go unwitnessed.

  The trailing vehicle stayed pretty far back, keeping a consistent but not threatening distance. Truly tried to keep an eye on it while also watching the Hummer’s taillights and the treacherous, wet road. They drove out of town, past cotton fields sensed more than seen. The wind-driven rain in his headlights looked like it was leaping up from the road, tiny glowing sprites performing an elaborately choreographed gymnastics routine.

  The Hummer splashed through deep, running water. Truly didn’t think there was much that could stop the powerful Crown Vic, but if he turned out to be wrong, he could be in a lot of trouble. Beyond the fast water, lightning—or something like it, anyway, although it appeared to be more long-lived than any lightning he’d ever seen—illuminated a massive jumble of light-colored stone.

  He braked, wanting to gauge the water’s speed and depth before he proceeded. The Crown Vic was heavy and powerful, but so was the Hummer, and that had four-wheel drive to boot. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to follow.

  While he considered it, the other car, a Ford Focus, came to a sliding, unsteady halt behind him. He didn’t believe the small compact could possibly cross the flooded bridge. He was no longer worried about a trap. Brewer had gone too far ahead for that, unless he was now doubling back on foot, but that would be dangerous through the swiftly flowing water.

  Still, Truly didn’t want to give away any advantage to Brewer, so he drew his .45 automatic Colt—loaded with 230-grain hollow points—from its zippered bag and threw open his door. He dashed through the soup toward the little car, letting its driver see in the glow of its headlights that he had a gun pointed toward him.

  Or her, as it happened.

  The driver lowered her window tentatively, looking frightened. A sweatshirt’s hood surrounded her rawboned face. “Hey,” she said, her tone more combative than her anxiety suggested, “go easy with that thing. Is there a problem?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the one following me.”

  “I’m just trying to find a friend at Smuggler’s Canyon.” She stretched her arms out the window, showing him empty hands. She looked taller than Truly, and lean. Curls of reddish hair showed at the sides of her hood.

  “Is that where we are?”

  “Not many people would come all the way out here without knowing where they’re going, especially on a night like this.” The terror etched on her face had turned to concern, but her voice was strong and confident. “You didn’t see the signs?”

  “I didn’t see anything except you back there and the taillights of the car ahead of me.”

  “So you were following someone, and thought I was following you?”

  He couldn’t help laughing. “Occupational hazard,” he said. He flashed his ID at her. “I’m James Truly, CIA.”

  “Ginny Tupper,” she said. “AAA.”

  “You’re with the auto club?”

  “American Anthropological Association.”

  “Okay. And you have a friend in there?” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, toward the rocks. “Do you know this place well?”

  “As well as anyone, probably. I’ve been studying it for weeks, on site, and most of my life from a distance.”

  “I’m not sure what’s going on myself,” he said. “But it could be dangerous around here tonight.”

  “It’d be at least somewhat less dangerous if you’d put that gun away.”

  “Tell me what you’re doing here and what your friend is doing here, and I might.” The rain pounded down on him, having already soaked through his raincoat and glued his sweater and Oxford shirt and casual trousers to his skin, and he made a hasty decision. “Look, let’s get into my car where we can talk without drowning.”

  She hesitated, then agreed. “Let me just get some papers,” she said. She bent over in her seat, reaching into the passenger-side foot well. He aimed the Colt at her, in case she came up with a weapon, but when she sat up again, all she had were what looked like old journals and stacks of letters rubber-banded together. “Okay.”

  “Run,” he suggested.

  She emerged from her car—as he had thought, taller than him by a few inches, and rangy—and they dashed to the Crown Vic, flung open the doors, and scooted in. “Some storm,” he said.

  She drew her bundle out from under her hoodie, where she had put it in a largely fruitless attempt to keep it dry. “You’re not kidding.”

  “So your friend? What’s he up to in there?”

  “I wish I really knew. Kethili hunting, I guess.” She looked away, toward the rain pinging off the windshield. “All I know is that it’s bad.”

  “Bad how?”

  “You’d never believe me. Not in a million years.”

  “You’d be surprised at what I’ve come to believe.” Bernard had used that same word, Kethili, or something like it. Anyway, Vance Brewer was involved in whatever was going on, and he had come here, too. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Ingersoll’s death, and Millicent’s, and the disruption of the ley lines that had all his psychics on edge all linked together here. Vance Brewer was a connecting thread. This woman showing up and saying the same nonsense word that Bernard had meant something, too. Truly decided he had to give a little away to win her trust. “I head up a CIA operation focusing on psychic phenomena,” he said. “The paranormal, the supernatural—that’s what I do. So whatever you’ve got, however out there it is, don’t think it’s too far out for me.”

  He could practically see the wheels turning in her head as she decided to trust him. Maybe a bad decision, lying to her by using the present tense instead of the past to describe his job, but he needed her to spill what she knew. “Okay,” she said. “We shouldn’t sit around talking, though. My friend might be in trouble.”

  Truly had to agree, especially with Brewer closing in. “Tell me more about this Kethili,” he said as he started the car again. He drove cautiously into the stream. He was an easterner, city-raised and not accustomed to flash floods, but he guessed that’s what this was. His headlights picked out the side rails of a bridge. He took care to drive between them, holding the wheel steady, keeping enough pressure on the accelerator to make sure the car never stopped rolling. The force of the water, flowing from north to south, pushed against the car and he had to correct the wheel to stay on course.

  “My father was an anthropologist who studied the indigenous residents of Smuggler’s Canyon, particularly through their rock art, for years,” Ginny began, speaking loud enough to be heard over the
din of the storm. “He was convinced that this was a sacred spot in ancient times, and that the art here had ritual significance far beyond most other rock art sites. It wasn’t until he started experimenting with mind-altering substances, though, that he learned what it was really all about.”

  “So what, you’re here because of some hallucination?”

  “Some hallucinations reveal deeper truths. Or at least that’s what he believed. I don’t know how much of this to credit, but in an altered state he claimed to have learned things he couldn’t any other way.”

  Once Truly had crossed the first stream, he started to relax a little before noticing that a second followed right after. The Hummer had made it through without any problems, though, so Truly applied the same principles he had to the first one. The water was faster this time, and he had a few seconds of near panic when it felt like he was being shoved toward the edge of the bridge.

  Then he was off it, on solid ground once more. Water was everywhere, but not flowing as fast as in the streams. The Hummer was parked, its lights off. It looked empty from here. “Keep going,” he said, pulling as close to the rocks as he could. Logs intended to mark parking spaces looked like islands floating in a vast sea. “And quicker would be better than slower. The Reader’s Digest condensed version, please.”

  “The seven original Kethili, my father wrote, were the beings, or gods, who created the world. Each one dug his or her hands into the ribs of two others, tugging their bones and flesh out, bone building upon bone in a great sphere to form the Earth’s skeleton, flesh upon flesh to form the land around it. As they drew away from one another, reaching the diameter of the Earth, the flesh gathered and folded to make the valleys and mountains and meadows, while the tears they cried from the incredible pain filled the oceans and rivers. Animals and people sprang up from drops of blood they spilled.