River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy)

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  She was shrinking… Kethili-anh had grown but Kethili-cha was smaller, not much bigger than Byrd now, and getting smaller all the time.

  And one other thing:

  The images from the pictographs, designs someone had painted on rock walls ten thousand years ago, had come off the walls. Glowing with the same white heat as Byrd and Hollis, warriors on horseback and others wearing masks frightening or comical or spiritual, a tall, elongated man with his face painted half white and half black, headless men holding spears and bows and shields…all had stepped out of the walls and surrounded Kethili-cha, tearing at her, stabbing her, pummeling her, and her wails of pain and terror reached to the heavens.

  Byrd was screaming, too, something Truly couldn’t make out. Kethili-anh screamed. Ginny was probably screaming. Only Truly was silent, sitting there on the wet ground, soaked in rain and Vance Brewer’s bodily fluids, bits of skin and brain and bone stuck to him like sand at the beach.

  Kethili-cha blinked out once, twice, and then was gone.

  Kethili-anh raised his voice in what sounded like a roar of triumph. Then he too flickered.

  The rain fell again, no longer blocked by magic or heat or whatever had kept it from reaching the ground within the little clear space. In the sudden downpour, Truly couldn’t see anyone or anything for several seconds. He stood, extended his arms, let the rain wash him clean.

  Then it tapered off.

  A few drops.

  Nothing.

  The rain had stopped.

  * * *

  Wade Scheiner sat up on the puddled rock floor, naked and trembling from the cold and wet. The motion made his head screech in pained protest, his stomach lurch. He managed to raise a fist to his mouth, belched into it, fought to keep from vomiting.

  Slowly, he turned his agonized head. A man he didn’t know stood watching him, water running off his raincoat. Another man, Hollis Tupper, stood near him, his hands limp at his sides, eyes blank, mouth hanging open. Ginny Tupper crossed the floor toward her father. All of them were blessedly silent. The silence was healing, church silence, “Sunday-afternoon-in-the-park” silence, the silence of a quiet street on a hot summer day.

  Molly was beside Wade, lying on the ground, also naked. Still. Dead. He didn’t have to check her to know that, which was good because that much effort might finish him off, too. He could see there was no breath in her, no heartbeat, that her eyes—eyes that had seen so much of what he had seen during their lives—stared up at nothing, as blind as Hollis Tupper’s.

  He remembered some of what had happened, although it had all been filtered through Kethili-anh’s senses. He remembered the long battle against Kethili-cha. He remembered that he had been losing. He remembered Byrd’s ghost joining the fray, and making the difference. As usual, he thought. That was Byrd, protector to the end. Past the end.

  He laughed when he remembered Byrd’s last words. After all the books, all the lines he had tried out on his nurses and friends, his last words—uttered well after his death—had been, “Nobody fucks with my sister!”

  That was Byrd.

  Ginny reached her father and threw her arms around his lifeless form, and as if that contact finished the job that nothing else could, he collapsed. She lowered him gently to the ground, sat down with him, softly weeping. And yet, when she caught Wade’s eye, smiling, at the same time.

  He returned her smile. Gave the slightest nod of his head—as much as he could bear.

  “Yeah,” he said, answering a question no one had asked. “I think it’s over.”

  EPILOGUE

  James Livingston Truly didn’t fly straight back to Washington. Instead, he went to Mission Viejo with Ginny. She wanted to tell her mother in person what had become of her father: why he had vanished all those years ago, why he hadn’t been in touch, and what he had accomplished, heroically, two decades after his death. Marguerite Tupper turned out to be a remarkable woman, lively and quick-witted, with an intellect as fierce as her daughter’s and a lack of patience for stupidity that made Truly smile when he saw it in action. They spent a week in California, during which time Ginny took him to Disneyland—entertaining, but somehow not as magical as he might once have found it, given recent events—and Hollywood, the beach, cold and windy on a November afternoon, and what seemed an endless landscape of malls and cars and businesses, many advertising “after-flood sales.” The part he liked best was sitting in their old Orange County home, talking about who Hollis had been while he lived.

  During that week, which culminated in a slightly early Thanksgiving dinner that left Truly genuinely satiated, he didn’t call Ron Loesser. He didn’t know if he still had a job. The one time he called his father, he changed the subject when the topic came up, and ended the call before it cycled around again.

  He would confront Ron face-to-face and work out a renewal of Moon Flash. If Willard Carsten Truly still had the pull he seemed to, there wouldn’t be any problem. If there was a problem? Well, he was a young man, and the world had other challenges to offer. Maybe none as dramatic as the last, but he’d done all right with that one. He had accomplished something that not many people ever could—or would ever know about. But he knew. He would meet whatever came up on his own terms, out of his father’s shadow at last, casting a shadow of his own.

  A long one.

  And maybe not a solo one, since Ginny would accompany him to Washington.

  * * *

  “He’s kind of a strange fellow,” Marguerite Tupper whispered. They stood in the upstairs hallway of the Tupper house. Truly had stepped outside to enjoy the morning air before a taxi came to whisk them to John Wayne Airport, but they kept their voices low in case he came back in unexpectedly. “Are you sure about this?”

  “As sure as I’m going to be, Mom,” Ginny said. “I guess he’s a little odd. In case you hadn’t noticed it, so’s the Tupper family. At this point I think normal would bore me to tears.”

  “But Washington is a long way off.”

  “No place is that far by air anymore. It’s not like you’d have to drive out to see me, or vice versa. We’ll probably see each other more than when I was in school or doing my fieldwork. You’ll be sick of me in no time.” Ginny was stretching the truth a bit. During college she had tried to get home for every holiday and many weekends, and she couldn’t see making the trip from D.C. that often.

  “But what are you going to do there?”

  “Whatever I can. I’m sure there are opportunities at the Smithsonian. Maybe I’ll get something there, or at one of the other museums. There are a ton of them there. It’s all just to help pay bills while I work on the book, anyway.”

  Her mother closed her eyes, rubbing her forehead as if she had suddenly developed a headache. “You’re still determined to go ahead with that?”

  “Don’t you think he would have wanted me to?”

  “Why didn’t you just ask him?” Ginny had told her mother that she planned to edit her father’s papers, letters, and notes into a book. She wouldn’t tell everything about the Kethili—she, Truly, and Wade had agreed to keep those details to themselves—but she would tell some. Enough to let the world know that Hollis Tupper had been a remarkable man who had made important anthropological discoveries, even if they had gone uncelebrated all this time.

  Ginny ignored the question. “It’ll be a great book. It’ll restore his reputation, and maybe start making one for me.”

  “You running off to Washington with a spy boyfriend will take care of that, I’m sure.”

  Ginny sighed. “Mom, I don’t know if anything romantic is going to happen there. It hasn’t yet. Maybe it will, maybe not.”

  “It seems like you should be able to tell by now,” her mother said. “How men feel is usually not a big mystery.”

  Ginny stepped closer and enveloped her mother in a firm hug, breathing in the familiar scents of White Shoulders and Prell. Sometimes there was just no talking to the woman. Ginny had already solved the central mystery of her l
ife. If a few smaller mysteries cropped up now and then, what was the harm in letting them play themselves out?

  She was as curious as her mother or anyone else to find out the answer, to that question and to any others her future might bring.

  But she had been patient before. She could be again. She had precious few virtues to fall back on, but that one she had in spades.

  Truly banged the front door open, clomped to the foot of the stairs. “Cab’s here!” he called. “You ready, Gin?” He had taken to calling her that sometimes, although she hated it, just to tweak her.

  She squeezed her mom again, then released her. Tears showed in the older woman’s eyes. “I’ll be right down, Jim!” she called—turnabout being, as they say, fair play.

  “I’ll get the bags.”

  With her mother following, Ginny went down the stairs, into the block of sunlight streaming through the front door, into a tomorrow that was like everybody else’s: unknown, uncertain, filled with light and darkness and hope and wonder. Maybe especially that last.

  Whatever happened or didn’t happen between her and Truly, Ginny knew one thing for certain: she and Truly had both touched wonder, on a scale that set them apart from most people. A scale that might, she reasoned, leave them lonely if they couldn’t share it with each other.

  On the flip side, what if they could top it?

  At the foot of the stairs, she met Truly, who was emerging from the guest room with a suitcase in his right hand. She slipped her right hand into his left, gave it a squeeze, and walked with him, hand in hand, into the light.

  * * *

  He walked with a cane now. The doctors couldn’t say how long he would need one, and they couldn’t figure out what had done the damage that required it. Wade didn’t try to explain it to them. They had enough on their hands anyway, treating the thousands of people injured by the Rio Grande’s flooding. Hundreds had died. Property damage in El Paso alone, was reportedly in the billions of dollars. On the other side of the line, in Juárez, because of the substandard housing throughout much of the city, the death toll was far worse.

  A slight limp, pain in his joints, an intermittent ringing in his ears, various lacerations and abrasions—Wade considered his physical problems minor compared to what others were suffering. He was the lucky one.

  Franklin Carrier had invited him to the office of the Voice of the Borderlands—the temporary office in a big stone house on Yandell, up the hill from downtown. The old one on Montana had been flooded out, the building condemned. It was due to be torn down, Frank said, and they had salvaged whatever equipment and furniture they could and brought them to the place on Yandell.

  He walked into the downstairs parlor that served as Frank’s office. Frank indicated a chair, and Wade happily sat down.

  “Thanks for coming, Wade,” Frank began. His collar button was open, tie yanked away from it, shirtsleeves rolled up over forearms corded with muscle. Just the way Molly described him, Wade thought with a quick grin.

  “Not a problem. I seem to have a lot of time on my hands these days.”

  Frank tapped a small stack of paper on top of his desk. “I’ve read your story. It’s fine. Fine work. Not that I’d expect any less—I’ve been an admirer of your work for a long time, your broadcast work as well as the all-too-rare print pieces. You know I wanted Molly to do this story.”

  “I know.” Frank had told him that the first time they had spoken, several days after the flood. That was how people measured time these days: before the flood, or after the flood. “I wish she had.”

  “Me, too. But you know, people will be interested in your take on it. And it’s a fascinating story. Almost unbelievable in spots, but I think the standard of believability changes during wartime. Nobody who hasn’t been there knows what it’s really like, and anybody who has been knows that the old version of reality doesn’t quite cut it.”

  “Something like that,” Wade said.

  “Here’s the thing, Wade. I appreciate you writing this for us. Appreciate it more than I can say. We were struggling financially before the flood, but afterward, with the expense of replacing equipment lost in the flood, Molly’s death, a couple of other staffers having had to relocate…well, I wasn’t sure how we’d be able to continue, even with our insurance. But we did some damn good coverage during the flood and its aftermath. Sure, it was online, but it came from The Voice and people knew it, and the first issue we printed afterward sold out in an hour. We went back to press, and sold out again the next day. That kind of response, and having your exclusive story—those are the things that’ll get us back on our feet. We’ll miss Molly like hell, but she would have wanted us to do whatever it took, right?”

  “I know she would.”

  “That’s what we’re trying to do. Whatever it takes. I know this is a huge thing to ask, and I’m fully prepared for you to say no. But would you consider a staff job?” Frank held up one hand. “Don’t answer yet. Here’s the deal. You’ll cover environmental issues. You’ll get to write opinion pieces—a regular column, if you want. I know you and Byrd used to be big-time river rats, so if you want to do something like travel around to a bunch of rivers, look at what’s happened to them since the flood, what condition they were in before, report on what might be done to alleviate any negative impacts caused by man or rain…all I’m saying is that I want you to cover the beat that you’re interested in, whatever it might be. It’s free-range journalism. You don’t get that in TV.”

  “You sure don’t,” Wade agreed.

  Frank wrote something on a slip of paper, folded it once, shoved it across the desk. “There’s a salary offer. Probably a tenth of what CNN paid you, if that. But Oscar’s looking to shift his priorities a bit, and if you stay for a few years, we can work out some kind of profit sharing or shared ownership deal for you.”

  Wade left the piece of paper on the desktop.

  “CNN’s paying me full retirement,” he said. “And I have a lot set aside. So money isn’t a big issue for me.”

  “One more thing, then,” Frank said. “When we got stuff out of the old building, one of the pieces of furniture we were able to salvage was Molly’s desk. It was fine, completely intact. If you’d like to use it…”

  “That would be good.” Wade would miss Molly and Byrd every day of his life. He wished they hadn’t had to destroy Kethili-cha to stop her, or that destroying her hadn’t meant killing Molly. He would always regret that, although he couldn’t regret helping defeat the bitch-goddess who had possessed her.

  Maybe sitting at her desk and practicing real journalism for a change, would be the therapy he needed. He was sick of TV anyway, tired of fame, bored with flying in and standing in front of a camera and flying out. He needed to do some real reporting.

  Frank eyed him expectantly.

  Wade smiled, took the piece of paper, opened it up. “Cut it in half,” he said, “and you’ve got a deal.”

  They shook hands to seal it. Wade rose, bringing a hand in front of his mouth to disguise the fact that he was unexpectedly choked up. That happened a lot, these days. It would probably continue to.

  Frank offered to show him around the office, but Wade declined. “Just show me where Molly’s desk is,” he said. “That’ll be enough for now.”

  Frank showed him. Wade put his scarred hands on the wooden surface and tried to feel her presence. At Byrd’s house, he had found the blade end of the broken oar Byrd had kept in his hospital room. He had carved Byrd’s and Molly’s names into it, and planted it at the edge of the natural amphitheater at Smuggler’s Canyon. They would have headstones in an El Paso cemetery, once the stonemasons caught up with the backlog, but to Wade, the oar was the real monument, the one that most honestly marked the passing of his two best friends.

  The next monument—writing stories that mattered—that would be the hard one.

  His friends, however, would have expected nothing less.

  After sitting at Molly’s desk for a while, he left th
e house on Yandell and drove higher up the hill, high enough to get a view of the river channel. Soon the sun would go down, beyond New Mexico and California, past the continent’s edge, and the river would flow through the darkness, through the night and the day and all the nights and days that followed, more eternal and everlasting than the mountains it carved or the deserts it fed. The span of any human life was a single drop of water in the river’s depths, and it mattered as much to the river as that single drop, and no more.

  Byrd and Molly had been the exceptions to this rule. And, Wade supposed, so was he. Once, for a brief instant, the river had known them. It would not forget them.

  And Wade? Wade would remember Molly, and Byrd, and of course the river, would remember them always and forever, amen.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jeffrey J. Mariotte is the award-winning author of more than forty-five novels, including the border horror trilogy River Runs Red, Missing White Girl, and Cold Black Hearts, horror epic The Slab, the Dark Vengeance teen horror quartet, thriller The Devil’s Bait, and others. He also writes comic books, including the long-running horror/Western comic book series Desperadoes, original graphic novel Zombie Cop, and the bestselling biographical comic about Barack Obama, Presidential Material. He’s a co-owner of specialty bookstore Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego and Redondo Beach, CA, and lives in southeastern Arizona on the Flying M Ranch. For more information, please visit www.jeffmariotte.com.