River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  With blind eyes, he read what was written on the walls in glowing pictographs. A ritual that not even Kethili-anh had been able to translate had been written in the stone, millennia ago. Hollis Tupper, dead until just now, spoke the unfamiliar words in a clear, ringing tone.

  Kethili-anh wasn’t sure what it all meant, but he thought it would help stop Kethili-cha. The old man had to be protected. Kethili-cha threw another blast of power, intended to bypass Kethili-anh and strike the old man, but Kethili-anh threw himself into its path, taking its full brunt. This one burned; Wade imagined it would be like taking a napalm bomb full-force.

  Kethili-anh screamed in agony. Wade would have screamed, too, if he had a voice of his own to scream with.

  The old man continued to recite the words on the walls, his voice rising in power.

  Wade only hoped he wasn’t too late.

  FORTY-NINE

  Hollis Tupper shouted out words that sounded to Truly like more of the same unintelligible language the Kethili spoke, except filtered through a human throat. As he did, the battleground changed. The air became thicker, harder to see through. The rain hadn’t stopped, but for reasons Truly couldn’t fathom, it no longer reached the ground inside the amphitheater of rock. Some force or substance filled the space around Hollis and the Kethili, roiling and churning, like someone had poured molasses in from above and it oozed all around them. This energy affected Truly’s visual perception of the battle in another way—suddenly the Kethilis’ motions appeared choppy, as if taking place under strobe lights, although the renewed fury of their assaults kept the light steadier than it had been before. Through the heavy air, Kethili-cha kept up a furious attack. She threw three or four blasts for each of Kethili-anh’s. Kethili-anh took the full force of them, shielding Hollis from their impact. He was clearly weakening, her assault wearing him down little by little.

  “Truly!” Brewer shouted. “The old man needs help! Whatever he’s trying to do, either he’s not strong enough or it’s not good enough!”

  Truly wasn’t sure what he was expected to do. Hadn’t he been the one who reunited Ginny and her father? How much had Brewer contributed to fixing the problem he and his kind were responsible for in the first place?

  He was right, though. The fight was getting more difficult to watch because of the increasingly strange light-show effects, and also because Kethili-anh—who might have been humanity’s last, best hope—was getting his head handed to him.

  “Isn’t there someone else who can help?” Ginny asked, grabbing his arm.

  “We’re pretty isolated here,” he pointed out. Even if he had been able to think of someone else who might be able to help, he had already discovered that he had no cell phone service, and Ginny had mentioned the same thing.

  He watched Hollis shouting out his ritual, his voice now booming through the blasts and falling rocks and rain and thunder and the roar of the river and the shifting of many tons of stone, and he realized that maybe there was something he could do after all. An impossibly long shot, he thought, but the impossible, like that old gray mare, ain’t what she used to be.

  He flipped open his phone. The signal was clear and strong. How could that have changed so dramatically?

  Shaking his head, he dialed Robb Ivey.

  “Truly?”

  “Listen, Robb, there’s something going on here. Don’t make me explain it more than once. Just get everyone in our group on the phone.”

  “Everyone? Like a conference call? Do you know what’s going on, Truly? We’re about to evacuate. The San Francisco Bay is rising faster than—”

  “I know, Robb. It’s important, okay? Just get them on the phone. Johnny and Bernard and Maha and Simon and…get them all. Anyone you can reach.”

  Robb seemed to grasp his urgency. “Okay, hang on a minute.”

  Truly hung on. Ginny watched the battle with her fists clenched and drawn up beneath her chin. Brewer had drawn his gun again. Truly had no idea what he intended to use it for, unless he figured that if things turned worse, he could kill Hollis Tupper…again.

  Truly didn’t think that would help. Hollis was, he believed, still dead. The fact that he stood there, reciting a ritual inscribed on stone by shamans or magicians thousands of years before his birth, didn’t change a thing.

  “Truly?” Robb’s voice came over the phone he had nearly forgotten about. “We’re all here.”

  “Who have we got?”

  “Maha, Simon, Johnny, Yanick, Eduardo, Annalise, Sergei.” The whole network, if you didn’t count Lawrence and Millicent, including some people Truly hadn’t spoken to or thought about in ages. “Now what’s going on?”

  “We’re trying to put things right,” Truly said. “I can’t go into a lot of detail.” The moment came that he’d been dreading since this idea had occurred to him. He stepped out of the protective shelter of the boulders and back into the natural amphitheater. Ginny snatched at him, but he shook off her grip and kept going. “You’re going to hear a voice that’s not mine. He’s reciting a ritual. He’s been repeating a lot of the same phrases, over and over, so I think you’ll be able to pick up on it pretty quickly. He needs help, and I thought maybe if you all participated, from your various locations around the world, it would strengthen his efforts.”

  “Who is it?” Eduardo asked.

  “Never mind, you’re just going to have to trust me. It’s more…necessary…than anything you’ve ever done. Any of you.” Walking onto the battleground took unexpected effort. The air was dense, like trying to move through deep water, but water that weighed several times more than usual. It offered resistance, slowed him down. He was surprised he could even breathe.

  “That’s—”

  “It’s presumptuous as all hell. Shut up and listen.” He held the phone near Hollis Tupper’s mouth. Hollis continued reading the glowing images with unseeing eyes and reciting his meaningless phrases with a voice he hadn’t used in more than twenty years.

  Kethili-anh and Kethili-cha struggled. They had closed on each other, hitting and clawing, biting and kicking. Kethili-cha wrapped her hands around Kethili-anh’s throat, her claws digging into his flesh, drawing blood. Mystical energies swirled around them. Truly sweated. It was oven-hot now. Raindrops sizzled when they hit the magically charged air.

  Truly tried to listen to the phone, but up close the screeching and hooting and clicking of the Kethili language was nearly deafening, and the other noises hadn’t abated. He thought, after Hollis had worked through the ritual phrasings a couple more times, that other voices joined in.

  * * *

  Kethili-cha was surprised that Kethili-anh had held out against her this long. She had always been the stronger of them, more powerful than any of her six siblings, ever since they had been born from nothingness and created the world from their own bodies and blood.

  This world had been a failed experiment, one that had outlived its usefulness. The next world, she would create by herself, with no help from her deceased, unlamented family.

  First, she needed to finish off Kethili-anh.

  But that noise…

  Words, the same ones that had imprisoned her and Kethili-anh the first time, rolled off the walls, bounced from stone to stone, filled her head. They made it hard to concentrate on what needed to be done. She held Kethili-anh’s throat in her hands. She smelled the rich tang of his blood. She squeezed. His fists pounded against her scales, weakening with every passing minute. He tried to gather kesineth, to strike her with another magical missile, but he couldn’t bring his hands together in the right manner.

  The world shifted beneath her feet.

  Not from the river battering the rocks, which she had been aware of as soon as it had begun. Part of her was aware of every river in the world, all of them running strong, running fast, taking lives, running red with the blood of hated humanity.

  This was something different—something within her. She had faded for a moment, blinked out of existence and then returned. />
  The ritual? Were the old human’s words having their intended effect?

  Voices—not just the old one’s but others, from faraway places—rose and repeated the words, and with their increased volume and energy and effort she felt the world shift, blink, vanish again, and this time she knew it was her, she had gone away and returned and if she didn’t end this quickly, it would be too late.

  She increased the pressure on Kethili-anh’s throat, changed her position to get more leverage. A twist, a tear, and his head would separate from his jerking, gushing, lifeless corpse.

  “Sister, there is no good in your cause, no worth in your effort,” he told her in a pathetically weak voice,

  She almost laughed as she began the final killing move.

  * * *

  Other voices had joined with Ginny’s father’s. Together they drowned out the thunder, the river, the rain. They clattered and roared through Smuggler’s Canyon as if they issued from the rocks themselves, or were shouted out by the images drawn there. She chewed on her lower lip, stamped her feet. This had to work.

  But Kethili-cha had the advantage, that was clear, and Kethili-anh—Wade, she told herself, that’s Wade inside there somewhere—appeared to be breathing his last. Kethili-cha had him down, on his knees, and she remained strong while he was clearly struggling to stay upright. She corkscrewed his neck in a way that looked painful, and quite likely fatal.

  Ginny had done what she could. Truly had done his best. Even the army officer, Brewer, had tried. Her father kept trying, kept repeating the ritual phrases, and for a few moments she had thought they would do the trick. Both Kethili had flickered in and out of visibility, like one of those power failures when the lights wink out and back on so fast you’re not really even sure they went away, but then you look and your digital clock is blinking 12:00.

  They were out of ideas. Out of options. If Wade and Kethili-anh couldn’t save themselves now, then all was lost. The rain would keep falling, the rivers would continue to rise. Humanity would be blotted out.

  But a new player appeared on the battleground, a figure she had never expected to lay eyes on. For a moment, she didn’t understand what she was seeing. She blinked, wiped rain and tears from her eyes, looked again. Yes, there was a man, slight, pale, bald. Then she recognized him.

  “That’s Byrd!” she shouted.

  “Who?”

  “Byrd McCall! Wade’s friend. Molly’s brother.” She had explained everything to Truly as they climbed into the canyon.

  “Isn’t he…?”

  “Wade said he died. Today, I guess, or yesterday…I have no idea what time it is.”

  “So there’s a dead man getting involved now. Another dead man.”

  “That’s how it looks.”

  “Fucking great,” Brewer said. “That’s just what we need.”

  FIFTY

  Vance Brewer had had enough of dead guys to last him a lifetime. For that matter, during his life, he had recently realized, he had spent more hours with Hollis Tupper—postmortem—than with any other single individual. No wife, ever. No kids. Mother dead, father playing canasta or casino or Texas hold ’em with the other codgers and grab-ass with the widows at an old folks’ home in Indianapolis. He hadn’t been able to let anyone get really close to him, because any close friends might wonder what he did with his days and way too many of his nights, and that old cliché was ever so true, after all: if I told you, I’d have to kill you.

  So he had passed his adult life with Hollis Tupper and a succession of acquaintances, drinking buddies, football buddies, whores, and strangers.

  Now, finally, Hollis Tupper had succeeded in bringing back the Kethili, as he had promised so many years ago, and when it turned out to be a clusterfuck of genuinely legendary proportions, he was trying—still postmortem—to put things right. With, apparently, the assistance of everyone in Truly’s calling circle.

  And it wasn’t good enough.

  But look, Ginny Tupper had cried, enthusiastically enough to stomp all over Brewer’s last tiny shred of nerve, there’s another fucking dead guy!

  Byrd McCall—his ghost, anyway, his form possessing about as much substance as a politician’s promise—appeared from nowhere and stormed up to the grunting, struggling Kethili and stopped with his little fists on his semi-opaque hips. He glared like a pissed-off televangelist about to rip into the flock for not emptying their wallets fast enough. Then he spoke.

  “You took my sister!” he shouted.

  For a ghost, the guy had a hell of a voice. It boomed from him like a cannonball, bounced up one side of the stones and echoed back from the other.

  Kethili-cha stopped what she was doing, which Brewer believed was ripping off Kethili-anh’s head, a little at a time.

  “Nobody hurts my sister!” Byrd screamed. “Give her back!”

  Kethili-cha gave Kethili-anh’s head a last, sudden jerk and hurled him aside, neck still more or less intact but with the flesh torn and bleeding heavily. She did that thing with her ugly hands, scooping up energy from the air, and Brewer had seen this happen enough times to know whoever was on the receiving end when she hurled it was going to be hurting.

  On the receiving end this time, was Byrd McCall. His ghost, anyway.

  An enormous blast sent rock flying thirty or forty feet into the air and coming down again, rain of a different, harder kind—a cloud of dust.

  At the end of it, the ghost hadn’t budged. “You let her go!” he insisted again.

  There was something different about him now, though. Brewer could still see through him, at least a little. On the other side of Byrd, Kethili-anh tried to regain his feet, but he was weak, barely able to support himself.

  But now Byrd glowed, like the images painted on the walls. A pure white light seemed to emanate from somewhere inside him.

  It wasn’t just him either. It came from the old man now, from Hollis. Even Truly’s cell phone glowed. Light beamed from Hollis and the phone over to Byrd, and across open space to the dozens of petroglyphs, linking them all in an insubstantial chain that brightened the killing field to near-daylight levels.

  Kethili-cha blasted Byrd again. This time, the magical bomb didn’t even reach him; his glow rebuffed it.

  The voices chanting the ritual grew louder, and as they did Hollis and Byrd glowed brighter. The pictographs almost seemed to have burst from the walls, floating free inches from their former locations.

  Trying to read Kethili-cha’s expressions and body language was difficult, but Brewer would have sworn that she was—for the first time—afraid.

  Then Byrd did something that changed everything, that made it clear why she might fear him.

  He raised his hands, moving them around each other rapidly, and his glow grew, extended, burst toward her. She flew back from the blow as if it had solidity and weight. If not for the overbearing chanting, Brewer thought he might have heard the impact when it hit her.

  She regained her feet, wiping the back of her hand across her lips in disturbingly human fashion and glaring at Byrd with undisguised, if alien, hatred.

  “I told you to give her back,” Byrd said. “And I meant it.”

  She stared at him, took a swing at him with one of those huge, clawed hands. He blocked it with a hand encased in armor made of light so white it hurt Brewer’s eyes, returned it with a jab of his own. This one slammed home, made her squeal in pain.

  Watching Hollis, Brewer noticed that he moved, ever so slightly, when Byrd did, his arms swinging a little when Byrd threw a punch, his feet shuffling when Byrd took a step. The glow within him echoed Byrd’s, or vice versa. The two were clearly linked in some significant fashion.

  Then he saw Kethili-cha notice it, too. He could tell by the cock of her head toward Hollis as she feinted at Byrd. Maybe he was learning to read her, after all.

  The import of her noticing struck Brewer almost physically.

  He shoved past Ginny and ran out onto the stone floor. He’d seen the difficulty Tr
uly had moving through the almost viscous air, but something—maybe the glow shared by Byrd and Hollis, or the ever-louder chant from Hollis and the phone and the drawings on the walls—had lightened it, and he barely felt a difference when he entered the miasma of light and heat that was the battlefield. The air smelled like scorched copper.

  As he ran, Kethili-cha turned her attention away from Byrd, who continued to rock her with one glowing bolt of light after another. Brewer saw her gathering for another assault, saw her raise the sparking, amorphous energy mass, and he put on a final burst of speed.

  He had spent his adult life with Hollis Tupper. Using the man, many would have said. But also protecting him. That was his job, his mission, his duty. Protect the old man, he had been told, and he had done so without question or complaint.

  Kethili-cha threw her missile.

  Brewer lunged.

  Protect.

  * * *

  “Brewer!”

  The soldier hurtled between Hollis Tupper and Kethili-cha, blocking the mystical blast just before it hit the old man. It crashed into Brewer instead, full on. The shock wave blew Truly onto his ass. The phone jumped from his hand and skidded across the rock, and Truly tried to reach for it but it was beyond his grasp and Brewer was—

  Brewer was coming apart, flesh and muscle and organ and bone and cartilage and tissue and blood all driven to the stone floor, coating the phone, coating the floor, coating Truly on the periphery of the spray. Brewer was like a water balloon hitting the sidewalk.

  And Truly realized it didn’t matter if he held the phone close to Hollis’s mouth, because the chanting had taken on its own life, and it had to be helping because—

  It had to be helping because Byrd’s ghost was four feet off the ground now, pummeling Kethili-cha with one glowing fisted blow after another, and Kethili-anh was on his feet again, and he was bigger than he had been before, bigger than Kethili-cha now, and he snatched magic right out of the air and smashed it down on her, using mystical energy like so many whips or clubs or maces. The chant roiled through the amphitheater and Byrd and Kethili-anh beat Kethili-cha mercilessly, and even though Truly couldn’t understand what she said, there was no hiding the fact that she was afraid, terrified, and she was—