Lone Wolves

by Chesbro, George C. ;

“Take it easy, will you, Dylan?” Brendan said not unkindly, extricating himself from the cult leader’s grip and stepping back. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m here on business.”

  Dylan Parker shook his head determinedly. “God’s business. The fact that you’re here is one more sign.”

  “I gave up the presumption of trying to know God’s business ten years ago, Dylan. It’s the same situation as when I met you the first time. I’m looking for another kid.”

  The big man in the silver and orange parka spread his arms in a gesture that seemed at once benediction and supplication. “Why bother? In a very short time you’ll be reunited with everyone you’ve ever loved or looked for, have everything you ever wanted or thought you wanted. We all will. We’re going to heaven.”

  “His father doesn’t want him going to heaven just yet, at least not without his medication. I was certain he’d be with you, and if he’s not, I’ve wasted a lot of my time and his father’s money. He’s a nineteen-year-old boy by the name of Hector Martinez. Is he here, Dylan?”

  “Yes,” the other man said simply.

  Brendan let out a deep breath he had not even been aware he was holding. The simple affirmation meant he had not traveled more than six thousand miles by jumbo jet, bush plane, dogsled, and snowmobile for nothing. “Thanks, Dylan. I appreciate it.”

  “What are you thanking me for, Priest?” Parker asked, a slight edge to his voice. “My telling you that Hector is here? You know I don’t ask anyone to follow me against his will. People who are with me are free to come and go as they wish. I don’t hide things, and I don’t try to brainwash anybody.”

  “I’m aware of that, Dylan. Where is he?”

  “In town getting supplies. He should be back in an hour or so.”

  “I hope he took a barrel of cash. The Indians in that native village are having a field day, thanks to you. It’s costing me two hundred dollars a night to stay in a tool shed with a kerosene heater, and that snowmobile I rented must have been the last one in town because it’s costing me three hundred and fifty dollars a day. The Indians should give you a cut, or at least make you an honorary tribal chieftain.”

  “I have my own money,” Dylan Parker said stiffly. “It’s given to me by my followers of their own free will, and it all flows back to them. You know that, Priest. If you thought I was a thief, I suspect your attitude toward me would not be quite so benign. I helped you find that girl; she wanted to go back with you to her family, and I didn’t object in the least.”

  Brendan sighed, and then nodded in the direction of the black gash in the mountainside at the edge of the glacier. “Just what is it you think is down there?”

  “The end of the world. Jesus is coming.”

  “Out of the cave?”

  “I’m not sure what’s coming out of the cave. Perhaps Jesus—perhaps demons, or angels. It doesn’t matter. It’s the end of the world as we know it, because Jesus is coming back to rule His kingdom.”

  Brendan grunted. “You thought it was the end of the world five years ago, Dylan. You and twenty-seven of your followers, including the girl I was hired to find, went to New Mexico and sat in the desert for a month, waiting, until your food and money ran out, and you all decided that your timetable had been a bit off. What makes you so certain you’ve read the schedule right this time?”

  Dylan Parker pushed a long strand of white hair out of his eyes and back under the hood of his parka, then half turned and waved his right hand to indicate their surroundings. “Look around you, Priest. There are hundreds here, camped out in the cold. They’re not here because I told them to come. They’re here because of the discovery of the cave; they’ve been called to this desolate place by God to witness the beginning of our entrance into Paradise.”

  “They’re here because they read or heard news reports about the cave and your prophecy, Dylan. The entrance to a cave that’s been hidden since at least the last ice age suddenly appears and starts swallowing up people, and then somebody with your charisma starts telling everybody it’s a sign of the Second Coming. It’s powerful imagery, and it appeals to a lot of people who are miserable with the present version of their lives. They want an easy way to start over, and they think a Second Coming will give it to them. Also, it’s Millennium Fever. You’re going to see a big increase in this kind of nonsense in the next few years.”

  Parker squinted. “You may call it nonsense, but the fact that you’ve come here, for whatever reason, is still a sign. It’s what God wants.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Why did the Church excommunicate you, Priest?”

  The abrupt change of subject, and the question itself, startled Brendan, and he was momentarily taken aback. “It’s none of your business, Dylan,” he replied at last, softly, and twenty-four hours later, suspended in darkness and listening to the faint but distinct scratching sounds of moving things on the stone of the cave floor far below him, he realized that what he was feeling was the same almost overpowering sense of mystery and awe he had once experienced when entering a church and thinking it was God’s home. He was as surprised at the intensity of the emotion as he was by his lack of fear. Although he had not yet even made it to the floor of the cave, and was surrounded by clicking and scratching sounds that could signal the presence of whatever it was that had killed the others, he was not sorry he had begun this journey into a place possibly millions of years old where humans had only recently come, and disappeared. He knew what he had told Philip Imukpak, and he knew what he had told himself, but now he wondered if the real reason he had started on this journey was to experience an emotion, a kind of ecstasy, he had thought lost to him forever, as well as a kind of faith as powerful as any he had ever felt.

  He could traffic in crackpot ideas with the best of them, Brendan thought as he smiled grimly to himself in the darkness; he actually believed that he was not going to die in this cave.

  He estimated it had been more than five minutes since he had turned off the lamp on his helmet, and the scratching sounds in the darkness below him had become even more pronounced. When he heard something climbing up the ice wall toward him, he locked off the bosun’s chair on the line, then took his automatic and a powerful flashlight out of the smaller pack strapped to his chest. He aimed the flashlight down into the darkness, flipped the switch.

  “Christ!” Brendan cried out when he saw the black, leathery thing with long fangs and claws and no eyes clinging to the ice wall barely two feet below him.

  He was about to fire the gun when the thing began to thrash wildly in the bright light, then lost its grip on the ridged ice. It emitted an extremely high pitched squealing sound as it plummeted to the stone floor below, where it exploded in a burst of blood, bone, and tissue that appeared black in the beam of light. When Brendan swept the beam across the floor, two other black leather creatures shuffled away into the darkness, their extended claws clicking and scratching on the stone.

  The creatures looked like bats, Brendan thought—except that they were almost the size of a man and waddled like penguins rather than flew.

  And they were obviously carnivorous; as he continued to sweep the beam of the powerful flashlight across the floor he could make out bloodstains, scattered bones with pieces of flesh still clinging to them, and scraps of clothing. However, he did not see any army uniforms or equipment, and he did not see a green-checked flannel shirt or red cap.

  This sealed-off, domed entrance to the cave system was the size of a massive cathedral, and tributary caves of various sizes radiated off from the stone wall in all directions, at varying heights, and Brendan knew that, even without the threat of the creatures in the darkness who viewed him as their latest entree, it was hopeless to even think of trying to explore all of them. He needed a sign—and he received it.

  When he swept the beam of light across the curved wall to his Left, his heart began to pound, not with fear but with hope. At the mouth of one of the larger tributary caves, placed on top of a
pile of stones as if it had been left there intentionally, was a red baseball cap.

  He knew he could descend to the bottom of the hall and climb up a slope of riprap to the cave, but the stone floor, with its pools of gore, did not look like a particularly safe place to be. Consequently he pushed off the ice wall at an angle, swung out, then extended his legs and pushed off even harder, in the opposite direction, when he came back to the wall. After fifteen minutes of considerable exertion the arc of his swing carried him over the ledge that held the pile of stones and red cap. He released the safety mechanism on his rigging, dropping to the ledge. He immediately grabbed for the rope, but missed; the line swung away into the darkness, out of reach. It meant he would have to descend to the killing floor to climb back up, but Brendan decided that was the least of his worries at the moment. He picked up the cap, stepped into the mouth of the cave.

  “Hector!” he shouted. “Hector, can you hear me?” He waited, listening, but heard nothing but the hollow echoes of his own voice, and then silence once more.

  “Hello, Priest,” Hector Martinez said evenly as he pulled his red supply-laden snowmobile into the area near the edge of the glacier where Brendan was waiting, cut the engine, and got off.

  “You don’t look surprised to see me, Hector.”

  The slight boy with the handsome face and hair and eyes as black as Brendan’s merely shrugged. “My dad sent you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to try to persuade me to go back?”

  “If I did try, would I have any chance of success?”

  “No.”

  “Then I won’t try.”

  The boy looked up, fixed Brendan with his sad eyes. “It’s almost time, you know. Jesus is coming out of the cave. I want to be here to meet Him.”

  “Fine. You’re of legal age now, Hector. Nobody can make you do anything you don’t want to do. If you want to sit around on a glacier and wait for Jesus to step out of a cave that’s already killed seventeen people, that’s your privilege. It’s not like when you used to run away and spend time at the shelter.”

  Hector Martinez raised a brown hand to shield his eyes from the bright sunlight reflected off the ice and snow around them. “Then why are you here?”

  “To deliver a message.”

  “What message?”

  “Is there someplace we can go to sit down and talk, Hector? Maybe the Quonset hut? It looks like the state troopers have set up some kind of first aid station there.”

  “I want to get back to my friends, and I have these supplies to take to them. Why don’t you just say whatever it is my father paid you to come all this way to say?”

  Brendan studied the boy, felt anger and frustration rising in him. “All right, Hector,” he said abruptly. “Your mother’s dead. She died in an automobile accident three weeks ago. Your father thought you should know.”

  Brendan waited for the boy’s reaction. He was prepared to take Hector Martinez in his arms to comfort him, but the boy did not seem particularly shocked, or saddened. His eyes misted, and a single tear roiled down one cheek, but that was all. “It’s all right,” he said softly. “We’ll be together again very soon.”

  “Come back with me, Hector. Your father would very much like you home with him. He loves you. Nothing is going to happen here, except that you’re going to get older, wetter, dirtier, and more miserable.”

  The boy slowly, firmly, shook his head. “The world is going to end. Jesus is coming. I have to be here to meet Him.”

  “I’ve brought you something.”

  “What?”

  Brendan took the dark orange plastic prescription bottle out of one of his pockets in his parka, offered it to the boy. “Your lithium.”

  Hector Martinez looked at the bottle in Brendan’s outstretched hand, took a step backward. “You know I won’t take that stuff, Priest. God doesn’t want me to poison my body with drugs. The doctors couldn’t get me to take it before, and I won’t take it now.”

  “This isn’t for your body, Hector, and you know it. It’s for your mind. You’re a severe manic-depressive, and God put a lot of you on this earth. Fortunately, God also made lithium. It’s not poison; it won’t alter your thoughts, and it won’t do your thinking for you. What it will do is give you a level emotional playing field to stand on. It will help you to think straight, and you’ll feel better. You’ll know you don’t really want to be here. You’ll understand that you’re squandering your place in the world, your life, by sitting around and waiting for it all to end. People who think the world is going to end and that Jesus is coming back really want to end their own lives because they’re unhappy; they want God to end it all for them, painlessly, and then give them a brand new off-the-shelf Life that Jesus won’t allow them to foul up. I’d have more sympathy for them if they weren’t so eager for God to take everyone else’s life, too. Take the medicine, Hector. Go back home to mourn with your father, and stop all this stupid screwing around. You’ve wasted enough of your Life because you wouldn’t do what your doctors recommended, and your life isn’t going to end now just because you want it to.”

  The boy stiffened. “Just because you don’t have faith, Priest, is no reason why I shouldn’t. Jesus is coming soon, and I’m going to be here to meet Him.”

  “Goodbye, Hector,” Brendan said quietly to Hector Martinez as the boy snatched a box off the snowmobile, then turned and started up the steps carved in the ice, and Brendan was still haunted by the conversation as he walked through the intricate labyrinth of caverns, leaving chalked blaze marks on the walls, calling the boy’s name, and at the same time experiencing an ever-increasing sense of awe as he passed running streams and coursing rivers, night meadows of strange, dark plants, some as tall as trees, none of which had ever been exposed to a single ray of sunlight. He found the corpse of one of the black, leathery creatures that had apparently died of natural causes, examined it and knew what it was, which he could not say about the myriad other creatures that appeared in increasing abundance as he traveled ever deeper into the mountain, ever closer to the unsuspected heat source three miles to the north that gave life to this world and had sustained the Givers, whose artifacts were strewn all over the caverns. But he had not found the boy, and even in his rapt awe and astonishment he remained haunted by their last conversation, as he had been haunted the night before as he’d lain awake in the tool shed, staring at the glow of his kerosene heater and knowing that in the morning he would cancel his reservation with the bush pilot and return to the glacier and the ages-old secret it had only recently begun to reveal.

  “You don’t look like the type.”

  Brendan turned from the cave opening, found himself looking into the handsome, brown face of an Eskimo, one of the state troopers who occasionally stopped by and stayed for a day or two in the Quonset hut, which they had made their headquarters. “What type is that?”

  “An end-of-the-worlder.”

  “What does an end-of-the-worlder look like?”

  The trooper casually swept his arm around to indicate the others scattered over the ice, Dylan Parker and his followers. “Like those people.”

  Brendan grunted. “I’m surprised you haven’t sealed off the cave entrance, or at least posted a guard to make sure nobody else goes down there.”

  The Eskimo shrugged. “This is Alaska. Here, we let people do pretty much as they please.

  “Even if it pleases them to kill themselves?”

  “Alaska has a high suicide rate; I suspect a lot of people come here to kill themselves, although they may not realize it. We come around to keep an eye on things, but if anybody is stupid enough to go down there after seventeen people, including expert cavers and a team of Army Rangers, have disappeared, it’s their problem.”

  “Sometimes people have to be protected from themselves.”

  “Not in Alaska; Alaskans don’t like to be protected from themselves, which is one reason they come to, or stay in, Alaska. Besides, these peopl
e won’t be here much longer. If they think it’s cold up here now, wait another month. Our summers don’t last long.”

  “When winter comes, do you think the glacier will seal off the cave again?”

  “No. It’s been slowly receding for the past seventy-five years. In another thousand years or so, the entire entrance will probably be exposed.”

  “What happens with the cave now?”

  “This is federal land, so it’s the Feds’ call, but the last I heard NASA is sending a team of scientists here. They’re going to try to modify one of their robot explorers, then lower it down there to have a look-around with a TV camera. I wish them lots of luck. We’ve got seismic readings showing there are hundreds of miles of caves honeycombing not only that mountain, but the two on either side of it as well, and they’re all interconnected. The system may be bigger than Carlsbad Caverns and Mammoth Caves combined. We may never know what killed those people. The Rangers went down there loaded for bear, with everything from gas masks and oxygen tanks to machine guns; the problem is that whatever it is down there killing people isn’t a bear.” The trooper paused, looked hard at Brendan. “You’re Brendan Furie, aren’t you? The man they call Priest.”

  “I’m not a priest,” Brendan replied, making no effort to mask his surprise.

  “But you used to be. You were excommunicated for some reason. I’ll bet the Church fathers are sorry about that now.”

  “Somehow, I doubt it. How do you know who I am?”

  “You’re very modest, Furie. There’s been a lot written about you. You work now as a private investigator.”

  “I investigate sometimes, privately, but I’m not a private investigator in the usual sense. I do a lot of work for social agencies, private, state, and federal, and for a private foundation that studies human belief systems.”

  “You search for troubled children.”

  “Sometimes for troubled children, but there are a lot of troubled adults, too. The things that people believe sometimes get them into a lot of trouble, and I’m occasionally hired to get them out of it.”