“Not only do my feet hurt but my back is starting to give me fits,” Tanya complains. “How about I just sit down here and wait. When you find a way, you come back and get me.”
If it was daylight and we were out for a pleasant hike, I’d say sure. In the middle of the night with sabre-toothed cats and men with guns on our tail, there’s no way. “No chance I’ll leave you alone,” I say. “I’ve carried you before. I can carry you again if I have to.”
“It’s tempting,” she growls.
“Let me go down here and see how bad it is,” Matt volunteers. “Give you a chance to rest for a bit, Mrs. Price.”
“Thank you, Matt,” she says sweetly to him. She settles to the ground. As Matt pokes around for footing and then disappears down the slope, I sit down next to Tanya.
“How bad is it?”
“Not terrible yet; my back that is. My feet feel like I’ve been dancing barefoot on glass for the last hour.”
“Let's switch shoes, Mom,” Becky says. “Put on my hiking boots.”
“No. We don’t need two of us with broken feet”
“My feet are tougher than yours, and it’s only a quarter mile.”
“She has a good point,” I say.
Becky drops down next to us and is unlacing her boots. “I’m not making it a choice, Mom. I’ll just demand you buy me a new pair.”
Tanya snorts. “Fine,” she says, and then a few seconds later adds, “Thank you.”
“Sorry they’re not dry.”
“I don’t think I care. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
There is silence for a time while shoes get exchanged for boots. Becky has to help Tanya with her weird lacing in the dark. “Feels much better. What happened back there?” she asks Becky.
“We were being followed by one of those men. A sabre-toothed cat killed him.”
“Oh! You got sick.”
“I saw it, Mom. It’s like watching in broad daylight. He bit his head off. Blood just . . .”
“I get the picture.”
“Yeah. I wish I didn’t. It was horrible.”
“I think the cats have been with us all along,” I say. “What we heard and sensed was one or more of them leaving us to go after him.”
“They leave us alone because there are so many of us, then,” she says.
“Yes.” I remember Matt. “Matt!” I yell. No answer. I stand and inch my way closer to the drop-off. “Matt!” Still no answer. Maybe he’s close to the raging water and can’t hear me. Suddenly Becky is on her feet next to me. “Matt!” she yells, her voice more strident than mine. Maybe he slipped and fell, hit his head or got caught in the current, or maybe a sabre-tooth got him and his head is gone. “Matt!” Becky screams again. I keep looking for a flash of light, wondering if I should climb down there. Suicide in the pitch black, I’m sure, but I have to do something. I sit down and inch forward, searching for foot holds. There is a bush to my left. I test it for strength and then allow it to take my weight as I work my way farther down. It’s not as steep as I had expected. “Matt!” I yell again.
“Zach!” Tanya yells. “What’re you doing? You can’t go down there!”
“Just a little ways,” I holler back.
“Matt!” Becky screams again.
“Yeah!” His voice doesn’t come from below. It comes from up stream. “I’m right here.” His light scatters through the bushes. “I found a way across.” He arrives at the women before I get back to the top.
“We were worried about you,” Tanya says.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” he says, but his voice is shaky.
“Matt,” Becky says softly. I sense that she is touching him. “You’re okay. We wouldn’t have left you.”
I try to get a read on what is going on between them, but I have no clue. Becky seems to have a sixth sense about him that Tanya and I are in the dark about. She’s mothering him and doing a good job with it.
“What do you think we need to do, Matt?”
He takes a deep breath. “The creek is moving fast but it’s narrow.” He takes another breath. “There’s no easy way to cross here, but up a ways there’s a fallen tree. We can cross there without getting wet at all, and then it’s point one five mile.”
“Just over a city block,” I say.
“That’s not far,” Tanya says in her forced happy voice. She is standing with Becky now, also sensing the need to mother Matt. “I’m feeling really good now, so let’s get moving. You’re still in the lead, Matt. You know the way and you have the satellite thing.”
And so we form up our short train and head out
Fortunately, it’s a big tree lying across the creek, big enough that we can crawl on it. We cross one at a time, Matt holding the light for us after he gets across so we can see what we’re doing. The dark, rushing water below us is unnerving. I gain a great respect for blind folded tightrope walkers. Having only one eye makes it a real trip.
Once across, we form up again and move out. The terrain changes once more; more deadfall; uphill; rocky. We’re moving so slow behind the narrow light beam that we don’t have a chance to get winded.
“How much farther?” Tanya complains. “My heart is racing. My legs are burning.” She takes a number of deep breaths. “I can’t catch my breath.”
So much for the not getting winded part.
“Not far,” Matt says. “We should be out of this any minute. We’re down to five hundred feet.”
“Five hundred . . . feet. How far is that?”
“A tenth of a mile.”
She sits down. “You mean we’ve only come a half tenth since we crossed the river? Jesus! That’s like half a block. Is there something wrong with me?”
“You’re just not as young as you used to be,” Becky says.
For a while there is only silence. “Do you think this old woman can make it another tenth?”
“I didn’t say you were old, Mom.”
“Forty is a few years away. It sounds old to me. You’ve made your point.”
“I wasn’t trying to make a point. I just meant that . . .”
“Don’t worry about it. You’re only as old as you feel. Right now, I feel damn old. I’m ready to move again, but you’d better be right, Matt. It’d better not be one foot over five hundred from here. I’m a dental hygienist. I know how to cause pain.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
Fortunately for Matt, he is right. All of a sudden we level out and then break from the trees. We are walking in tall grass. We keep going at a steady shuffle until we leave the grass for dirt, and then into grass again. We go up a slight slope for a bit and then stop. “This is it,” he says as the beam of his flashlight bounces off the huge boulders that I remember from the afternoon. We snake through the opening and around and down the passage to the main chamber. It is empty and quiet. He pauses at the chamber in which he and Becky had hidden earlier. Tanya says, “Thank God,” puts her back to the wall and slides to the ground.
“It’s okay,” Becky says to Matt. She takes the flashlight from him and goes in, then turns and shines the light at the floor of the narrow opening. “Come on.”
“What’s wrong with here?” Tanya says.
“The cats can still get us here,” I tell her. “They’re too big to get in there.”
“All right, then.” Tanya struggles back to her feet. “But I’m not going any farther tonight.” She turns sideways and goes in as Becky moves back out of the way. She disappears in the dark and I hear, “Shit! Damn! There’s a tree in here.”
“It’s just a branch, Mom. We brought it in here earlier today.”
“You and Matt!”
“Yeah. We were going to start a fire if we got stuck in here all night.”
Matt still hasn’t moved. Becky turns her attention back to him. “Come in, Matt. It’s not safe out there. They can’t get to us in here, and we’ll all be with you. We won’t leave you alone.”
I put my hand on his arm
. “Come on, Son.”
“I promise,” Becky adds. He takes a tentative step forward and then slowly goes in. I ease in behind him. Becky moves the light around the small chamber so we can see where we want to plant ourselves. I then take the flashlight from her, turn it off and sit next to Tanya. She snuggles close to me. “I’m cold,” she says. It feels good to sit down, even though I won’t admit how tired I was becoming, how much my legs were starting to ache, and how much the stress is still twisting at the muscles in my shoulders and neck. It also feels good to have Tanya pressed against me. I’ve really missed that.
“I don’t suppose anyone has matches or a lighter on them,” I say, expecting that maybe Matt has something in his arsenal of pockets.
“In my backpack I have my waterproof box of emergency matches,” Becky says. That’s followed by silence as everyone knows where her backpack is.
“What do you want matches for?” Tanya asks.
“To start the fire that Becky was talking about.”
“That would be nice.”
“No! Wait! They’re not in my backpack. They’re here!” I hear her move. “Dad. Give me the flashlight.” Her hands fall on my feet and I hand her the flashlight. It comes on and she illuminates the stack of wood just inside the entrance. She crawls over, feels around and comes up with the waterproof match cylinder. “I took it out expecting we’d use it and forgot about it. Is that weird or what?”
“What’s weird about it?” Matt says.
“It’s like it was meant to happen, like I left it here because some part of me knew that we’d need it now.”
“You didn’t happen to leave a couple of Big Macs, did you,” he says dryly, “and a couple of gallons of water?”
“Don’t make fun. At least we can get warm and dry.”
While they argue, I take the flashlight and start building the makings of a fire, a base of kindling and then some bigger pieces Matt crushes up dead leaves from the branch and drops them in the center. I open the match container and apply a flame, taking joy in the smell of burning sulfur.
“What about the smoke?” Tanya asks.
“There’s a hole in the top, like a chimney,” Becky says.
And we’re inside the chimney! I never thought about the smoke. I consider stomping it out and then decide to wait and see. Maybe . . . I back away from the fire and look up. The light from the flames are dancing against the ceiling made of leaning and piled boulders, in the center of which is a dark spot roughly a foot in diameter, the window to the sky. I can see a few stars. I don’t smell smoke. “It works.”
Tanya moves closer to the fire. Is our snuggle over? Was I only convenient when she was cold? I return to my chosen spot and sit. Becky and Matt are together, his head is in her lap, her arm is around him, one hand is stoking his head. I sense, even in the heavy shadows thrown by the fire, that our eyes meet and for a very brief second I feel her mind in mine. I’m so sorry, Daddy. Then her head leans back against the rock wall and her eyes close.
Did she just talk to me? Did she just use mental telepathy to send me a message?
Impossible!
But I know better than that. I’ve learned that anything is possible.
“Zach,” Tanya says. “Come here. Sit with me.” I fain like I’m having to think about it and then crawl over to her, throwing some larger chunks of wood on the fire along the way. She snuggles up next to me, her head on my shoulder. “What do we do now?”
“We should get some sleep,” I say.
“Yes, but in the morning, when day breaks—what do we do then?”
That same question has been nagging at the back of my head since we stumbled in here. Walking out to the nearest road seems suicidal. Staying here prolongs the inevitable. Going back to the house is certain death. Smilodon may have gotten one, but there’s still another, and for certain more on the way, including Mister V himself. There is no chance that the sheriff or any of his deputies will show up. The only other person who knows we’re here is Sharon, Matt’s mother, who as yet does not know that she is a widow. She is most likely trying to track down her husband and son right now. Will she go there, to Aileen’s house, looking for them? Will they then kill her too? Or will she first see his body lying on the porch and go into hysteria before they shoot her? Has Matt thought of any of this, or has he shut off his mind from the sight of his father being gunned down?
“I don’t know.” That’s my only answer. Things will not be brighter in the morning.
My body is exhausted but my mind refuses to rest. I try to shut it down, force it to look only at the black wall on the inside of my eye-lids, a technique I developed to force my mind to turn off. It doesn’t work now. Unidentifiable things keep jumping out of the blackness; unidentifiable because they are just hazy blobs made of the same material as black holes. That’s exactly what it is. Black holes oozing around in my brain, refusing to let it rest; the black headwaters from where all nightmares begin.
I snap my eyes open. I’m afraid to sleep. What I have seen in the last twenty-four hours is nothing compared to what my mind can create on its own while the rest of me sleeps. The mind doesn’t sleep. That’s the entire problem. When the body rests, the mind stays active inside its cranial cave; thinking up ideas, solving problems, searching for the answer to number eight down on last week’s crossword puzzle, reworking the opening paragraph in the story I’m supposed to be writing for Texas Magazine, reliving the nightmare of the night of the cats, recreating all new nightmares that make the real stuff pale in comparison; it can do anything it wishes, and I know for betting certain it’ll pick the worst.
The fire needs more wood but Tanya is asleep, and moving means disturbing her. I let the fire go. Then my eyes fall closed and I try to convince myself that if I sleep there will be no nightmares.
Chapter 42
Reba
It is starting to settle in on me how much this is all my fault. I know now that Dad wasn’t having an affair, that he didn’t even know that Aileen Bravelli was still alive. Now I’ve ruined both of their lives, plus Mom’s, maybe getting Sam killed, and maybe Dad as well. Maybe all of us. I’ve certainly killed Matt’s dad and that makes me so sick I want to die myself. If I could do something I’d sure do it, but I feel useless as everything around me goes out of control.
Poor Matt. Such a nice guy, really. He’ll never be the same. He is so sensitive, and now I’ve ruined him. He has no clue as to what’s going on. He shifts from a responsible young man to a scared little boy. He knows we are on the run from some bad men, and he knows about the sabre-toothed cats around us but I don’t think he has acknowledged his dad’s death yet, or if he has, then that is when he retreats into his little boy self. The problem there is that the combination of that and the pitch dark draws up his memories of being left in the woods all night.
I’m glad he sleeps now.
I cannot. I close my eyes and everything that has happened in the last twelve hours starts replaying in my mind. That’s another thing that has gone completely out of control—my mind. It listens to other people’s thoughts and feelings and memories, and then the awful stuff; it sees someone die before it happens leaving me feeling useless and helpless.
I hate it!
I force up thoughts of Christi, and us having fun together as little girls, her always not quite being able to do what I can do. I was so nasty to her sometimes. I promise, God, if I get back alive, I’ll be nicer to her. I’ll make sure she doesn’t do some of the stupid things I’ve done. I’ll be nicer to Mom and Dad, too.
I open my eyes and at first I am totally confused. I remember where I am but the fire is out and I can see. It is daylight and Mom and Dad are . . .
“Mom! Dad!”
They’re gone! Matt stirs and sits up. He has no idea where he is, his mind a boggle of confusion. I jump to my feet and race to the opening. “Mom! Dad!” Panic! I should control it but don’t care. I slip into the outer chamber. “Mom! Da . . .” I run right into Mom’s arms.
“It’s okay, sweetie. We’re right here.”
I start to say, “Mommy,” but catch myself. It feels so good to feel her arms around me. “Oh, God. I thought you guys left.”
“No, Sweetie. You were sleeping so well, we didn’t want to disturb you. I’m glad you’re awake, though. You need to be part of this.”
“Part of what?” She steps aside. Dad and Sam are squatting in the dirt.
“Good morning, Champ,” Sam says up to me.
“Morning,” I say. Mom squats down with them and I do the same. I have a lot of questions but I don’t say anything.
“Good morning, Matt,” she says. “How are you feeling?”
Matt grunts and stands over us. I reach into his mind. He’s still confused.
“What do you remember from last night?”
He sits down. His mind is searching, thinking. “Running through the woods. Watching for sabre-toothed cats. We had to leave your house because . . .” His eyes go out of focus and then they close. “I . . .”
My stomach turns into a knot. He stands and runs away, out of the chambers of rocks, to somewhere. I start to get up to go after him. “No!” Sam says. “He needs to be alone for a while.”
“But the cats.”
“They won’t bother him.”
Of course they won’t bother him. She’s told them that he is off limits.
She says nothing more until I settle back down. “I’ve already told your parents, so I’ll give you a quick picture. I think that these two guys that showed up were told to leave no witnesses. However, I don’t think they expected to find a crowd of people here. You guys were really, really lucky. Obviously they weren’t very smart or one would have gone around the back right off before the shooting started. They eventually realized that someone had to have escaped out the patio door. There were too many vehicles sitting out front. I’m sure they assumed I was one of the escapees. From what I can figure, one went after you guys and the other searched down and destroyed every piece of communications equipment he could find, including shooting out the main power box to the house.”
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 63