“This isn’t necessary, Mom. I. . .”
“Don’t you argue with me! Do what I say!”
“But . . .”
“DO IT!”
“NO!” Becky steps away, leaving Matt attached to Tanya. “You’re wrong, Mother! You’re the one being stupid here.” With that she turns her back to us and walks toward the cat just visible in the lantern light inside the passage to somewhere in the bowels of the mountain.
Chapter 50
Reba
I know I’m right. I don’t know why I know it; I just do. Yet, my heart is in my throat and racing a mile a minute as I walk toward the sabre-toothed cat. Halfway there he turns away from me, shows me his tail and disappears into the darkness of the tunnel. I go until I’m at the end of the reach of the lantern light and then look back at Dad, Mom, and Matt. They are all looking at me, the lantern light cutting a grotesqueness across Mom’s face. She is scared and angry, but she is also wrong, so what was I to do? I can also see past them and the fact that the other two cats have moved to within twenty feet of them. “I think you had better come with me.”
“No! I’m not listening to you, Becky. You’ve gone too far this time and I’ve had enough. As soon as I get you home, you’re grounded.”
I can’t believe what she just said. It’s ludicrous. My mom has flipped. I stifle a laugh and say, “Fine. I think you’d better look behind you.”
They do and just as I expected they are all suddenly standing next to me; even Matt. I take his hand again and reach into his mind. He is a mess. His fears have collided and his thoughts are like a mass of half melted multicolored gummy bears. There is no definition. He likes holding my hand, and he likes holding Mom’s hand too. For right now I take charge of him. I need a little handholding security myself, even if he is screwed up. Mom needs Dad.
The look on Mom’s face hasn’t changed much. She is willing to follow my lead but she still doesn’t like, or agree with it. Dad has the lantern, so he takes the lead down the tunnel, holding Mom’s hand. Matt and I stay close behind. The two cats are following, keeping the twenty feet distance. Dad glances back now and then as well. I think he agrees with me, but he has doubts, which keep him on guard. Matt’s mind has shut them out, has shut everything out. If there is nothing coming in, there is nothing to be afraid of.
I just hope that wherever we’re going, it is warm. A hot tub would be nice. Maybe a sauna and a masseur—male and muscular. Rib-eye steak and baked potato while I sit in the sauna. Extra sour cream. Steamed baby carrots. A second rib-eye steak. A second baked potato. Dessert. I shiver at the thought of rocky road ice cream. I decide on hot apple pie. Two pieces. Maybe I could handle a hot fudge sundae.
We stop and dad holds the light off to the side to reveal the carcass of an animal. “A deer dragged in here by a sabre-toothed cat,” Mom says.
“No it’s not,” I say. Mom’s head turns toward me. “It’s an elk,” I add.
“How do you know?” Mom asks.
“I just know,” I say. Actually I have no idea except that it seems bigger than a deer. I just have this desire to disagree with her.
“Right,” she says and turns back to the path. I’m irritated that she doesn’t believe me.
The sight and smell of the carcass drives away my thoughts of food until we’re a few more minutes down the tunnel. Down is the optimum word. We are continuously dropping in elevation. It is kind of eerie with the dripping sounds, and the clip-clap of Mom’s shoes—which I’m still wearing—echoing off the stone walls. We pass some stalactites and stalagmites. They’re not nearly as massive or as beautiful as those in the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. I look up at a stalactite and recall Jeremy Peters, a gross, fat boy in eighth grade, who pointed out not too quietly during a field trip that looking up at the stalactite reminded him of sucking tit. I find it a bit amusing that that is now how I remember that it’s the stalactite that grows from the ceiling and that it’s the stalagmite that grows from the floor.
The way is mainly rock now. My boots, which are still on Mom’s feet, and like those on Dad and Matt’s feet, make almost no sound. There is only our heavy, nervous breathing. Except for my clip-clopping, we are otherwise quiet. There is nothing to say . . .
. . . until something flutters around us.
“What was that?” Mom’s sudden panicked voice bounces off the walls.
“Probably a bat,” Dad says casually as though it was nothing but a butterfly.
“A bat!” Mom is ducking her head as if there were a dozen vampire bats diving at us.
I’m not exactly comfortable with it either, but I’m trying to hold my cool. “It’s no big deal, Mom.” My words are more to convince myself than her, I’m sure. “It’s not true that they can get tangled in your hair.” Even as I say it I’m scratching an itch above my left ear and wishing I was wearing a hat. I sense agitation coming from Matt. I strengthen the conviction in my voice and say, “Bats are nothing to be scared of. They have great radar. Just ignore them. Right Dad?”
“Exactly,” he says, and continues forward. Another bat, or the same one, streaks around us and then, except for Mom’s muttering, and the breathing and clip-clop, all is quiet.
There is a change in the atmosphere; a slight movement of air in our faces, and an odor that doesn’t smell so much like a stalactite and stalagmite factory. “Do you feel that?” Mom says. “That’s warm air.”
“I don’t know if I’d call that warm, Mom. It’s just less cold.”
“Why do you have to argue with me all the time?”
“I’m not arguing,” I argue back. “Just saying what I observe. I don’t observe warm air.”
She shuts up. We continue on, dropping at one time a good thirty feet on stone steps that seem to be honed out by man. When it becomes obvious that the temperature is rising, she says, “That’s definitely warm air.”
She’s right. There is no doubt that the temperature is changing. But I still wouldn’t call it warm. Warm is eighty five or ninety. This is maybe sixty. I’m hungry and cold to the point of collapse, not to mention damned scared, yet I don’t want to get my hopes up, and Mom’s sudden optimism has me irritated beyond reason. “Whatever!” I say, and then ignore the look. The thing about Mom is she doesn’t even have to look at you to give you the look. There is a set to her jaw and shoulders plus an iciness in the air around her. I’m too cold already to catch the iciness, but I have no doubt about the look.
We enter an area that has only a very narrow, single-file walkway along the right wall. To the left of it is a sheer drop into an abyss. We have stopped moving because Dad is leading.
Shit! Not again! I pick up a stone and chuck it into the darkness. I count a bare second before I hear it hit. Okay, it’s not an abyss, but it’s deep nonetheless. “It’s no big deal, Dad. Just a little hole.” There is silence. We still don’t move. “Dad!”
“I hear you.” Irritation mixed with fear.
“The path is four feet wide. That’s a regular sidewalk. Just walk!”
“Give me a second!”
Our sabre escorts are waiting behind us. “Do I have to come up there, Dad?”
“Becky! Watch your mouth!”
“What the hell did I say, Mother? I just want to know if you guys would like me to take the lead. I’m not afraid of this thing.”
“Then say it that way. ‘Do I have to come up there?’ strikes of no compassion or understanding of the fear your father has no control over.”
“Compassion? I’ve been compassionate for the last I don’t know how many hours.”
“To Matt, sure. But you don’t seem to give a damn about your parents.”
“I have been passionately pushing and pulling and babying you since we ran out of the house last night.”
“Babying!”
“And the gratitude I get is restriction when we get home.”
“Listen to me young lady . . .”
“If you want to call me a young lady than you should be
treating me like one!”
“I’ll treat you like you’re acting and that’s a spoiled, inconsiderate brat!”
“KNOCK IT OFF!” Dad’s voice booms and reverberates off the walls until silence takes over. For several seconds there is nothing but angry breathing.
“Yes, Dad,” I say as my way of getting the last word in.
“Not another word from either of you! Now, let’s go.” We start moving again. I make a mental note to apologize to him later, maybe say something about how proud I am of him.
We clear the abyss and I put Matt in front of me, a barrier against the ‘my shit doesn’t stink’ ice goddess.
It’s maybe twenty minutes later that the air temperature seriously changes. My guess would be that it’s around seventy degrees and humid. There is also light. Not enough that we could extinguish the lantern, however, nor enough to see entirely whatever it is we just stepped into. The walls and ceiling disappear, which gives me the feeling of a very large room. The light is coming from the far side, a hundred feet or a hundred yards. I have no sense of which. There is also the distant roar of water falling into a pool. A waterfall. It is coming from the area of light, I think. The floor seems to drop away, as though into a large sunken living room, or another abyss. The only way to go is down into it, and so we proceed.
Zach
My arm is tired of carrying the lantern. I’m considering asking Becky or Tanya to carry it for a while when we seem to arrive at our destination. Off in the distance is light, and the sound of rushing water. Between where we’re standing and that light is a vast chamber and the light of the lantern is not enough to reveal much more than what’s right in front of us. There is also a humid quality to the air along with the rise in temperature. I carefully step forward and down several rock steps and then follow a path that goes to the left for maybe thirty feet and then switchbacks to the right for another thirty feet, and then to the left to a half dozen more rock steps. I stop and wait for everyone to join me, turning to provide light as I do so.
When we get to the bottom, we are in a room of sorts; its ceiling is so high as to be irrelevant. Where we stand is actually a dugout area roughly thirty by forty feet, defined by five-foot walls. From the top of the walls is a slope of rock and dirt that, I think, runs up to meet the ceiling. A rock fireplace—like a barbeque one would build in their backyard from stone gathered in the mountains—stands in the middle. There is wood and kindling stacked along the wall on one side. Against the opposite wall are three coolers large enough for a major beer bust, and four large trash bags tied up tight. Around the area are torches mounted on poles that are standing in piles of rocks. Not wanting to use up our matches, I light a stick from the lantern and apply it to one of the torches. Becky does the same and before long we have six torches sending light throughout the chamber. We visually explore what I at first thought was our new digs, but gradually discover that we have moved into a sabre-toothed den; a big sabre-toothed den. There are a half dozen cats lounging about on various indents and hollows on the edge of the reach of the light. I’m sure there are more that we cannot see. They seem to not be very concerned about our presence. The closer ones stand and move away from the light.
During our visual inspection we have backed up against each other, forming a tight little circle. Tanya is the first one to say anything. “Shit! I don’t know if I can handle this.” And then, “Okay, Miss Smart Ass; since you’re the one who herded us here, now what?”
“Herded you here! I’m a victim as much as you guys.”
Tanya laughs, but not in a funny way. “You could have fooled me.”
“Listen, Mother! I was doing fine here by myself. All this other crap happened because you guys couldn’t leave me alone to have a vacation. None of this shit started until Dad showed up. Correction! It all started when you showed up.”
“Becky!” I say firmly. “That’s enough!”
“No! It’s not enough. Mom needs to know that things turn to shit because of her. Same thing happened eight years ago, didn’t it, Mother? Sure Dad wasn’t making good choices but he would have never lost his eye and you’d never have broken your back if you had stayed home.”
“Where in the Hell . . ?”
“Where in the hell did I learn that or where in the hell did I get my attitude? I learned it from a combination of Dad’s journal and my psychic reading of Sam’s mind. You, of all people, should know where I got my attitude. As I’ve heard you say, a pumpkin seed makes nothing more than another pumpkin. It kind of looks like I got the worst part of both my parent pumpkins, doesn’t it?”
I’m speechless, and I think Tanya is too furious to say anything. What’s there to say, after all? Her daughter is probably right.
“In Miss Smart Ass’s opinion,” Becky continues, “they’re not going to bother us. Hey, but what do I know? I’ve only pulled our asses from the fire how many times now?”
With that Becky walks over to the coolers. From one she pulls out a package of dried fruit, and from the other a package of jerky. She returns, gives me an apologetic look, takes Matt’s hand and leads him to a place to sit down. Tanya starts tossing wood into the fireplace. I stop her. “Kindling first,” I say and pull everything out to start over again. She throws the two chunks of wood that are in her hand to the ground and sulks away, but not very far away before she turns around and comes back. I look up and see the reason. Two of the lounging cats were passing by, heading for the exit. They’re probably escaping before being caught in the mother-daughter crossfire. I actually consider following them.
Tanya stands near, saying nothing, while I lay a bed of dry grass. When I get a layer of kindling in place, she picks up the pieces of wood she threw down plus several more and hands them to me; an act of apology or a realization that at this moment I’m not the focus of her anger. It may also be a motion of solidarity, which is good with me since I’m a bit miffed by Becky’s words as well. I finish up and then apply a fire. It takes some coaxing with a little more dry grass and small sticks, but eventually it is crackling and Tanya is standing as close as she can get, a bag of dried fruit in her hand. I stand next to her and she offers to share. I trade a little of my jerky for her fruit. We enjoy the heat for five minutes before anything is said.
“Can I ask you ‘what now?’ without getting my head bitten off.” Her voice is low
“I think we just wait for Aileen to show.”
“What if she doesn’t?”
I turn my hot side away and contemplate the question. Whether she shows or not, we eventually have to come out of hiding.
“What if they have found her and killed her already? When do we know it’s safe? How do we know it will ever be safe?”
I don’t know the answer to that question either, so I pose one of my own. “If she is killed, that means she has no control over these cats. How long before they turn on us?”
She rotates her cold side to the fire and looks up at me, if you’d call two inches difference in our height as looking up. She says nothing.
“If she doesn’t show by tomorrow morning then we’ll have to assume that it’s over for her. I’ll then have to walk out of here and contact the FBI. They’ll protect us.”
“You can’t go alone. That’s suicide.”
She’s right, but it wouldn’t be me I’d be worried about. Rather it would be them alone here with the cats.
“We’ll all go together,” she adds.
“Let’s wait and see.” I walk over and inspect the food stock a bit closer. In addition to a generous supply of dried fruit and jerky, there is sugar, salt, and flour, plus ketchup, mustard, and Thousand Island dressing. The last three are unopened. I wonder how they’ll be kept cold once the seals are broken In two of the bags are cardboard boxes with sealed clear containers of rice and oatmeal, noodles, a coarse wheat flour, powdered milk, several types of beans, lentils, and crackers. There are also a half dozen bags of hard candy. The third bag contains cookware, plates, bowls and utensils, as w
ell as towels and cleaning supplies, including bar soap and shampoo. The last bag holds a sleeping bag, a self inflating ground cover, a pillow, and additional blankets. All the comforts of home. I take a blanket and consider how everyone is going to sleep tonight. Two hour shifts? One sleeps while the others guard? I spot a couple of logs sitting on end and bring them over. We set them side by side—a little farther from the fire so we don’t roast to death—and then work the blanket around us.
As if she had read my mind earlier, Tanya says, “Have you figured out where we’re going to sleep, or better yet, how?”
“There’s one sleeping bag and some more blankets. We can take turns. Maybe two can sleep while two guard.”
She glances over at Matt and then whispers to me. “Can we trust him?”
I want to say yes, but I know better. “Maybe a good sleep will help him. We can let him sleep and the three of us can work out the rest. One sleeps and two guard. I don’t want less than two awake.”
“I agree.” There’s a silence for a time, then she says, “I know what you’re thinking. How are you going to sleep, with her and I sniping at each other?”
“I’d like to think that’s over. She was just venting, releasing some tension. It’ll be fine.”
“Humph!” She rips off a chunk of jerky and chews with vigor.
Reba
It’s not rib-eye steak, but if I close my eyes and imagine, the jerky is really close. There’s no way I can conjure up a baked potato out of a dried apricot though. In any case my imagination isn’t going to satisfy my hunger and I’m sure not going to consume a belly full of apricots, dates, raisins and banana chips. Apparently there’s stuff in the bags but from my vantage point, and in the torch lights, all I could see of what Dad pulled out were noodles. I also heard the banging of pots and pans. But he put it all back and grabbed the same thing I did. What was wrong with the noodles? There’s probably other stuff there. Mom could cook up an entire meal for us. With the torches it could almost be fun.
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 68