‘‘We will,’’ Brian said. He clicked off the phone and handed it back to the man in charge. The name sewn into the breast of his fatigues was Todd.
‘‘What’s going on?’’ Carrie asked.
‘‘Kirk Stewart hired these men to accompany us. In case there’s danger.’’ He left it at that.
‘‘I don’t like this,’’ she whispered into his ear.
‘‘You will when we save your bacon,’’ one of the men said, overhearing.
‘‘I guess we’d better start,’’ Brian said.
Todd nodded crisply. ‘‘You heard ’em, boys! Move out!’’
Thirty
‘‘Follow the yellow brick road.’’
They were all thinking it, but it was Carrie who said it, and Brian smiled at her, though that was the last thing in the world he felt like doing. They stood in the center of a shaded glade, staring down at the spot where the dirt trail they’d been following turned into a pathway paved with real gold. It was proof positive that they were on the right track, yet for the first time Brian felt like turning back, heading home and not ever returning or even thinking of this place again. He had never been so scared in his life, and he didn’t know what sort of insane hubris had led him to come out here in the first place. Whatever lived here was old, as old perhaps as the redwoods they had passed on the way or the rocks that lined the walls of the canyons through which they’d hiked, and that left him feeling not only intimidated but frightened.
His dream now seemed more like prophecy than anything else, and while Bakersfield and Los Angeles were not to either side of him as they had been in the vision, he understood the symbolism. One was his future and one was his past. Except that the dream had not really been about him, and the path between the future and the past clearly applied to these descendants of men and monsters. They were caught between both worlds, and neither of them could be reconciled.
The mercenaries Kirk Stewart had hired were hard men and doubtless had seen a lot, but they were in awe at the sight of the golden path, and several of them crouched down to touch it with their fingers and make sure it was real. He and Carrie did the same, and the cold feel of the metal caused Brian’s heart rate to soar. It was the matter-of-factness of the gold bricks embedded in the ground that made this seem even more terrifying, that gave everything such tangible immediacy.
Even the fun house way they’d reached this point had not scared him quite so much, although it too was plenty frightening. They’d spent the better part of two hours on a winding trail that led to the top of a high ridge. Along the way, they had seen those rocks with the ‘Native American pictographs’ shown on the brochure. There were a lot more of them than he’d been led to believe—at one point, a series of boulders lining both sides of the trail had been covered with the alien writing—and he couldn’t help thinking that they were signposts placed there for anyone attempting this journey. Even Todd and his men seemed to sense the strangeness of those half-scribbled hieroglyphics, and they were silent as they passed by those faded carved messages.
At the crest of the ridge, smaller unmarked paths had split off from the main trail, but they had continued forward until Carrie pointed out an adobe hut at the end of one of the shorter side tracks. The hut had been almost completely hidden from view behind a copse of unfamiliar-looking trees, and it was only Carrie’s sharp eyes and a stray shaft of sunlight that had let her see the structure.
Todd had taken the lead, weapon drawn, and Brian and Carrie had quickly been surrounded like the presidentin the center of a Secret Service detail. The hut had one small door and no windows. They’d called out, announcing their presence, but there’d been no answer, and Todd and Raul, his second in command, had flanked the open doorway, then rushed in, weapons drawn. ‘‘All clear!’’ Todd announced seconds later, and though the building had barely looked large enough to hold them all, they’d gone in anyway. The single room was devoid of furniture, the floor was dirt, the walls undecorated. Only a torn and tattered strip of leather in one of the corners indicated that anyone other than themselves had ever been in there.
Feeling claustrophobic, Carrie had retreated back outside. Brian followed her—
—and they were not in the same location from which they’d started. The copse of trees was gone, as was the small path leading to it from the main trail. They were not even on a ridge anymore. Instead, they were deep in the center of a miles-wide canyon, amid a meadow of dried grasses nearly as high as their waists. A trail did lead from the door of the hut out of the canyon, but it didn’t seem to intersect with any others, and he had the creepy feeling that it existed only to lead them to a specific destination.
‘‘Todd!’’ he’d called. ‘‘You’d better get out here!’’
They’d been following that same trail ever since, out of the canyon, over a series of hills, through miles of ever-changing forest, until they’d reached this point.
And the golden trail.
Follow the yellow brick road.
‘‘Do you know how much this is worth?’’ Raul said, gesturing toward the winding path before them. ‘‘Millions! Just one of these bricks apiece, and we’d be set.’’
‘‘Later,’’ Todd said. ‘‘First we have a job to do.’’
At that, Carrie looked at Brian. But he ignored her. They’d been hiking for nearly four hours by his watch, and there’d been a lot of time to talk. He, Carrie and ‘‘the team,’’ as Todd called them, had gone over everything. He’d held nothing back—what was the point at this late date?—and while he hadn’t received a commitment from any of the men, he was confident enough in the fact that they’d gotten to know each other, and that they now knew him a hell of a lot better than they knew Kirk, who might be footing the bill but was little more than a voice on the phone to them, that he didn’t think they were going to blow away his dad on sight.
He was counting on it, in fact.
The golden path led between trees of fantastic shape and astonishing lushness, and he was reminded for some reason of that children’s game Candyland.
Where the hell were they?
And would they be able to get back?
Those were questions all of them had been asking and debating ever since emerging from that hut. And they were questions for which none of them had a satisfactory answer. Brian had been filled with an overwhelming sense of dread ever since they’d started on this golden trail, and he had the terrible feeling that the question of how to return was not one they were actually going to have to address.
The sun was sinking behind the mountains to their backs, and though the sky above remained bluish white with only a creeping influx of orange, here on the ground they were walking in shadow. It was exactly what he’d vowed would not happen, and though the team all had powerful handheld searchlights with faces big enough to cut huge swaths through the darkness, he did not like the idea of being out here after nightfall.
Night, he had the feeling, was their world.
Still, he made no effort to turn around, and indeed something compelled him to hurry up and get this over with, as though if they were to succeed, they needed to do so quickly.
Or as though dawdling would only prolong the inevitable.
‘‘Look,’’ Carrie said, pointing.
He followed her finger, and it was then that he saw the Black Mountain. It was a mere shape above the tree-tops, a jagged silhouette against the darkening eastern sky, but he knew what it was instantly. Its contours had been seared into his brain more deeply than he’d realized, and its every crag and outcropping was familiar. The mountain was indeed solid black, and the setting sun was unable to shed its light on any part of the peak.
‘‘We’re almost there,’’ Brian said, and he was surprised to hear such calmness as he spoke. None of the fear he felt was reflected in the even tone of his voice.
The others were looking up, too, and he could tell from their hushed response that they knew exactly what they were seeing.
; ‘‘All right, men. This is it,’’ Todd said. He looked meaningfully at Brian. ‘‘What do you want us to do?’’
Brian breathed an inward sigh of relief. ‘‘Just be ready for anything. We don’t know what we’re going to find.’’ He paused, took a deep breath. ‘‘And if my father’s there, I’d like to talk to him. We need to find out what’s going on before we take any action.’’
Todd nodded. ‘‘You got it. Raul? Me and you. Out front. The rest of you? Behind Brian and Carrie. Let’s do this right.’’
They continued down the path, past trees of wondrous beauty whose tiny leaves glowed in the shadows like jewels, past trees of horrible ugliness whose knotted trunks and branches resembled the bodies of angry, deformed men. A light wind blew through here that carried with it scents of sadness and loss, not recognizable odors but smells that corresponded to nothing, chimerical fragrances able to evoke melancholic memories.
It was a defense mechanism, Brian realized, a way to break down the will of intruders before they had even arrived. Such power seemed impossible, and was definitely not something they could hope to match in any way, shape or form, yet if they knew about it, they could guard against it, and Brian halted the company and told them all what he was thinking. Nearly all of them had come to the same conclusion themselves—he was not the only one with time to think while he walked—and forewarned and forearmed, they continued on.
‘‘I’m not leavin’ here without some of this gold,’’ Raul said, looking down at the path.
‘‘First things first,’’ Todd reminded him.
They rounded a corner.
And saw the dead bear.
It stood in the center of the path, nine feet tall if it was an inch, huge clawed paws raised, mouth open and roaring.
Only . . .
No sound was coming out.
And the massive body was riddled with bullet holes, although the blood had long since dried.
Brian knew nothing about bears, only what he’d seen in movies and on TV, but he was pretty sure this was a grizzly. It advanced on them, snarling furiously, silently, its dead milky eyes staring blankly, and Todd and Raul opened fire. Their automatic rifles cut the bear in half, flesh tearing raggedly, bone shattering, as the bloodless top half of the beast fell to the side of the still-standing feet.
And kept moving.
The two men stopped shooting, and Brian took an involuntary step backward. The two halves of the bear’s corpse made no attempt to reconcile, but both were still moving and both seemed intent on stopping anyone from going any farther along the trail. The giant clawed feet stomped on the gold bricks, bloodless organs visibly jiggling within the open abdominal cavity exposed behind the jagged clumps of flesh and hair. The top half of the body actually attempted to pull itself forward with its heavy arms, as the open mouth continued to roar silently.
Carrie grabbed Brian’s arm, held it, and the other mercenaries looked to Todd for direction. Brian glanced around. They could have possibly gone around the bear, but there were other dead animals as well, he saw, positioned in the spaces between the trees, standing sentry around what was apparently some sort of perimeter. Bobcat and mountain lion, bighorn sheep and elk. Beyond the trees and the dead animals, the forest opened out. It was getting too dark to see exactly what was going on back there, but it was obviously an exposed area because the trees ended in a straight even line, just like the regrown forest they’d visited in the helicopter.
He jumped at the sound of gunfire, and saw Raul and Todd firing again at what was left of the bear. The other men—Garth, Christian, Antonio and Isaiah—moved into position and started shooting as well until there was nothing left of the bear but chunks of hairy flesh and bone. The men remained tense, weapons at the ready, prepared for one or more of the other animals to take the bear’s place, but the beasts remained where they were.
‘‘Let’s go!’’ Todd yelled, motioning for everyone to follow him down the— yellow brick road
—path, and the rest of them hurried past the remains of the bear before the other dead animals got their marching orders.
They rushed between two identical yellow trees that reminded him of something he’d seen in a book as a child—Go, Dog. Go!—and stopped.
They’d reached their destination.
They emerged from the trees into the open. The Black Mountain loomed before them, not part of a range but alone, rising above the land like an angry god, massive and implacable. Brian stared up at it. What was it made out of, he wondered? It didn’t look like rock, exactly, but neither did it appear to be dirt or sand. What it resembled most was rot or mold, and though he couldn’t be sure without getting closer, he thought that it might be nothing more than a gigantic compost pile, reaching its current height only after hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years of accretion.
At the foot of the mountain was the village. Although it was more than that. And less. Dotting the sloping ground were huts of the kind they had entered earlier, dozens of them by his count. These structures had neither doors nor windows, though, and in the adobe with which they’d been constructed he could see large pieces of bone and skull. They were not arranged in any kind of order but appeared to have been set down at random amid a land littered with holes that looked not dug but blasted.
What is in those buildings? Brian wondered. He thought of what had happened when they’d entered the adobe hut on the ridge and saw them not as homes but little powerhouses, energy sources that could be tapped by the monsters that lived here.
And there were monsters.
They were all over the place, standing for the most part, doing nothing, as though waiting for something to happen or someone to tell them what to do. A few wandered aimlessly about, but they weren’t behaving like actual villagers: mingling, working, performing tasks. This was their home, he was sure of it, but they seemed to have no real need for community, and where they actually slept—or whether they slept—he had no idea. He would not have been surprised to learn that they lived in the holes rather than the buildings or that they simply stood about like this all day long. He looked from one to another, noting the differences in their horrific forms.
All of the females were sexy.
It was not something he had expected or that he would have even believed before this moment. Their faces were indeed monstrous to behold, no two of them the same. Some had big eyes; some had small eyes. Some had noses; some had snouts; some had slits. The shape of the mouths varied, but all seemed to be possessed of the same small sharp teeth.
The bodies were uniform only in their height. They were all nearly as tall as the grizzly. But a multitude of body types were on display: thin, fat, long arms, short arms, clawed hands, fingers, cloven hooves, toes, tails, horns, even antlers. The various figures were covered with a jumble of hair, fur, scales and skin that could be either snake-slick shiny or rough and dull like rhinoceros hide.
Yet they were sexy.
He could not explain it, but as he watched, one of the females closest to them, her pubic area smooth and hairless, her single breast furry, began to sway and dance in place like some primitive stripper, and he was filled with a lust like he had never known. The other men felt it, too. He could see it in the way they stared at the monster and then tried to look away, pressing down on the growing bulges in their pants. He glanced over at Carrie and saw that she had her eyes on one of the males, watching as it stroked its enormous slimy penis and grinned at her.
Brian forced himself to take his eyes off the dancer and saw that the other creatures in the village no longer seemed so aimless or inactive. The monsters had moved closer and were watching their little group carefully, like people trying to circle in and trap an escaped pet. The male and female were distractions, their seductive movements an attempt to keep attentions away from the encroaching horde. He counted eight already that were within easy striking distance, and the expressions on their horrible faces were sly and crafty.
There were piles of human re
mains on the ground, he saw now, half-eaten carcasses and bones that were not the clean white of movie skeletons but yellowed and dirty, many of them with pieces of rotten flesh still clinging to them.
He yanked Carrie’s arm to get her attention and shouted, ‘‘Todd! Guys!’’
At once they were on alert again and, almost as though it hadn’t happened, the monsters in the village were standing dumbly about, staring at nothing, shambling around.
But they were closer.
The female was still swaying to unheard music, the male was still stroking his oversized organ.
‘‘They’re trying to hypnotize us!’’ Brian said. ‘‘I saw the rest of them moving closer while we were distracted by those two!’’ He pointed.
‘‘What should we do?’’ Todd asked, and once again Brian was filled with gratitude that the man was not so gung ho as to follow Kirk’s orders to the letter.
A trail of green—either moss or grass—led between the huts and up the Black Mountain. He could see, in the quickly fading light, where the solid emerald ribbon turned into a multicolored tapestry of the most vibrant hues imaginable. More monsters were coming down from the mountain along that trail, moving from half-lightinto shadow, having not gotten the message to play possum, and Brian knew that they would have to act fast.
‘‘I want to find my dad,’’ he said.
Todd nodded. ‘‘Lights on!’’ he ordered.
The mercenaries switched on their portable searchlights, and the area in front of them was illuminated almost as brightly as day. Brian would have expected the creatures to shy away from the light, like vampires avoiding a cross, but they didn’t seem to mind, didn’t even seem to notice, and he grimaced as he saw how truly ugly they were in the bright halogen beams. One of them with horns and a tail looked almost exactly like the traditional conception of the devil, and it stared at him with beetle-browed eyes and grinned knowingly until he was forced to turn away.
Back in Carrie’s pleasant kitchen, over iced tea and tacos, the idea that these beings were like some sort of endangered species of animal seemed a reasonable assumption. In that environment, under those circumstances, many of the harsher truths got stripped away. But Native Americans had considered these creatures demons, and for the first time Brian understood why. Because it was not some fundamental incompatibility between their genes and those of humans that had caused members of the moneyed elite to go on psychotic rampages. Such a predilection was a part of the very nature of these things. Coexisting with their enticing sexuality was a wild need for violence that was visible on every face and that could be described only as evil.
The Vanishing Page 33