“So the cavern turned into an underground lake at the bottom of which lies your mom.”
“And Sam, and Vandermill,” I add.
I approach the expanse of water at the base of the falls. The water is high and most of the beach is gone, Spring runoff I assume. “This is where I woke up after the explosion, and where I learned of the true power I had over the sabre-toothed cats.” I squat down on my heels and put my hand in the water. This water may have touched my mother. I hadn’t thought about it for the last couple of hours, intent only on making progress around and over our obstacles. Now, like a punch to the gut, it hits me. I’m here where my mother died, where it all happened ten months ago. I stand and breathe deep, suddenly aware that despite my early morning reservations, I am glad that I came.
“It’s like it’s been here for millenniums,” Mandi says. “I’ve never read about anything like this anywhere else in the world, where a waterfall comes out the side of a mountain.”
“Somewhere in South America, I think,” I say. I really have no clue. It just sounds about right. “I’ve got to find it!” The urge comes to me in a flash. I jump to my feet and head off into the trees to find my way up to the side entrance to the cavern.
“What?” Mandi yells, having to suddenly scramble to keep up with me.
“The plaque that my dad and sister placed is here somewhere; as close to Mom as they could get, I’ll bet.”
“Where are we going?” Mandi is right behind me, moving just as fast.
“To the entrance into the mountain. There’s a tunnel that comes in from the side. It’ll come right up to where the waterfall comes out.” We are in the northern shadow of the mountain, scooting around patches of snow. We climb a hillside, zigzagging back and forth to find the best path around bushes, rocks and snow. When finally we break from the trees, into the open, and then top the rise, we are both breathing hard and fast. We stop. I point toward the middle of an open field.
“This is where the helicopter landed. This is probably the only open space for miles and it happened to be right here when we came running out of the mountain, over there.” I swing my pointing arm toward the side of the mountain and the group of trees and bushes that hide the entrance. Along that entire side of the meadow is a huge bank of snow, deep snow, except for one very disturbing feature. Its smooth surface is broken by a trail that leads through it into the trees, into the mountain. It is not an animal trail. I can see, even from where we stand, that there are human foot prints, and a definite attempt to shovel or move the snow aside to create an access. “Holy shit!” I grab Mandi and pull her back down the hillside and into the trees.
“What!” Mandi demands.
“They’re back!”
“Who?”
“Vandermill’s men. Didn’t you see the tracks, the path through the snow?”
“Yeah. How do you know it’s them?”
“I just . . .” She’s got a point.
“Besides. I thought they all died.”
“Not all of them. Two took off.”
“You said they were okay, though.”
I’m feeling stupid, but I can’t shake the feeling. “One of them. The other was weird.” I blow out a lungful of air. “You’re right. I have no idea what got into me. Vandermill is dead and he was the brain behind the whole thing. He’d held some kind of anvil over his men so I’m sure they took off without ever looking back.” I look back up the hill, but don’t move in that direction. "Probably hikers that ran onto the entrance and are making camp.”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t like it, though. I wanted to go in there.”
“I’m sure if you explain the situation, they’ll have no problem with it.” She starts walking up the hill. “Come on.”
“I don’t know. Still doesn’t feel right. Could be hunters.”
“This isn’t hunting season.”
“That wouldn’t make any difference to Vandermill’s men.”
I expect Mandi to roll her eyes at me. She doesn’t. She’s being patient.
“Someone shot Edik. Remember? I saw it Saturday. Two men. They were camouflaged and painted. Whoever is in there is probably them.”
She stares at me for a long time. “So, what do you want to do?”
“I guess I want to see them first. Right now, I’m hungry. Let’s move around to where we can see the entrance better, and be hidden. I’d like to rest and eat a little.”
“Sounds fine with me.”
Staying down and out of sight, we swing to the east and come up into the trees across the open field from the mountain entrance. There is some snow and we try to be careful to not track through it and leave evidence that we had been there. We find a comfortable looking downed tree that gives us seclusion and a decent view, pull off our packs and sit. I inhale a couple of dried apricots and water, and watch in silence. Mandi does the same.
“Did I tell you about the Grizzly attack?” I say.
Chapter 15
Mandi turns and looks at me. “Grizzly attack? No.”
“We were almost there, to the other entrance to the mountain, where I believe the cats are waiting for me right now. For some reason I started lagging back. I remember being pissed about something. Dad and I had just finished saving Mom from drowning. Apparently it energized Mom who had been dragging her butt up until then.
“Anyway, they were all moving fast ahead of me until they were out of sight. That’s when I learned for sure that the cats didn’t want to hurt me. I heard something behind me and turned to find a young sabre-toothed cat following me, young meaning about half-size. He scared me at first. Was I being stalked? He didn’t look mean, though. He looked curious, friendly. I relaxed and we walked on together for a while. He stayed a few yards behind me. Then all of a sudden, he seemed to start to attack me.
“Sursaut,” Mandi says.
“Huh?”
“Sursaut. It means to attack suddenly. It just came to me.”
“Is that one of those words that’s not in my dictionary?”
She tilts her head. “Possibly.”
I roll my eyes. “Anyway, he charged past me and took on a grizzly bear that I would have walked right into. Before I knew it there were three sabre-toothed cats; two others had come out of nowhere. I was crouched behind a tree, only a few yards from the battle. I think I was screaming but I couldn’t hear myself over the earsplitting roar of the bear.”
“Wow! What happened?”
“The grizzly kicked their butts and ran off. The two younger cats limped away, embarrassed. The older one that jumped in at the end got ripped up pretty bad. That was Simon. He was shot to death the next day trying to protect us from Vandermill’s goons. He lies at the bottom of the cavern lake with my mom.”
“That must have been scary.” Mandi drags her pack into her lap and takes a pull on her water tube. “So, now what? Do we just sit here until someone appears?”
I sigh. “No, I guess not. I want to convince myself that you’re right, that it’s just some hikers who found a great place to make camp. I can’t get rid of the feeling, though.”
“Having witnessed your psychic power, I would be the last person in this world to ignore one of your feelings. I certainly wouldn’t want you to be acrasia.”
I give her the old woman look—dipping my chin and peering across the top of make believe glasses. “You’re playing with my mind again.”
“It means to act against better judgment.”
“Bet it’s not in the dictionary.”
“That all depends on the dictionary.”
“The one most people use, the one that comes with my word processor.”
“Maybe not. It’s an old word that has gone out of use.”
“Then why use it and confuse everyone?”
She frowns at me. “Maybe we should reduce everything down to three and four letter words so as to confuse as few people as possible. Newspapers already do that kind of thing. They write to thirteen year olds.�
��
“There’s something wrong with that?” We’ve been through this discussion before. I know where it is going to go. She does have a point.
“Certainly! Everyone is expected to graduate from high school, but they’re not expected to retain anything past seventh or eighth grade. By watering down our news with simple words we make it easy for them.”
“If we make it too hard, people won’t buy. It’s economics.”
“That’s part of it, maybe, but I don’t think that is the main reason.”
“What else, then?”
“So that information is available to those who have difficulty reading due to challenges beyond their control.”
“The mentally disabled. There is something wrong with that?”
“I didn’t say there was.” She sucks on her water tube again. “Think of it this way. We put in big buttons at doors so that those in wheelchairs can go in or out. What if everyone started using those buttons to open the doors? They’d become lazy.”
“I hardly ever see anyone doing that.”
“Actually you see it every day. If it was just the button, you wouldn’t, but we’ve remade that button into the form of motion detectors, which open the doors for you whether you want it to or not. There are lots of things like that that make us physically lazy. When we present public information at the eighth grade level, we force all people to read it whether they want to or not. We make it easy for even the college graduate to become mentally lazy. We never challenge them with complex words or a richer language; and so words like acrasia go out of use.”
“There will always be people like you around to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“It already has happened. There aren’t enough people like me around. I can feel myself falling into it, too. Even in the university environment, I have to force myself to stay above it. Maybe that’s why I like you. You challenge me.”
I laugh. “I challenge you?”
“You’re way outside the norm. You’re exciting. I never know what’s going to happen next.”
“And neither do I.”
Chapter 16
I pull out a handful of dried fruit and slip my pack on. Mandi waits; already set to go. We’ve decided to move on, head for the other end of the mountain, the other entrance where I know the cats have made their den, where Edik waits for help, if he is still alive.
I try to adjust a strap without dropping any of the fruit. A chunk of apricot slips away. I bend down to pick it up and hear a voice—a deep man’s voice. I can’t make out the words. It’s followed by a grunt, a grunt I think I recognize. I look up at Mandi and whisper, “Get down!” She drops down next to me and we both scoot up against the fallen tree we had been sitting on, and peer across it. We kneel in a couple of inches of snow; the cold, wet seeps in around my knees.
“Where are they?” Mandi whispers.
“I don’t know.” The voices are off to our right, the direction from where we came. Are they following our trail? We tried hard to avoid leaving one, at least not walking through any of the snow if we could. There were places where we couldn’t avoid it.
“I think,” the first voice says and then is followed by garble.
“Maybe,” the grunting voice replies, and I’m not so sure I recognize it this time. The grunt reminded me of Black Beard—my name for Lester—who got his hand crushed in the explosion, and who walked away after we escaped. Men’s grunts can sound the same, and Black Beard never talked much.
“We should have brought a dog,” says first voice.
The response is another grunt.
They are silent now. There is footfall; a twig snaps, and then another. They aren’t moving toward us, but heading for the meadow, probably going back to the camp inside the mountain. There is a flash of movement, dark green, and then suddenly they break out into twenty feet of opening. Mandi drops flat to the ground, fully in the wet snow. I watch and hold my breath. If they turn at all our way, they’ll see us. At this angle we have no cover and we dare not suddenly move. They are both wearing camouflage, just like I saw when I was in Roma’s head, and they both have a gun slung off a shoulder. I can’t see their faces. They keep on going, disappearing into the trees again. In a few seconds they’ll be into the meadow.
I take a breath and poke my head over the edge of the fallen tree. I count my heartbeats until they finally show in the sunlight, striding steadily toward the cave. The angle allows me only a bare profile of their faces, but it’s enough to see that they wear camouflage paint, and neither one is bearded. In an effort to reposition myself I place my hand on an old dried branch sticking out of the tree. The branch gives with a snap that seems to reverberate off the mountainside. The men turn, the guns come off their shoulders, and I duck down.
“Shit!” I whisper. I slide out of my pack and belly crawl until I can see around the end of the tree where it was snapped in half from rot and high wind. Two three-foot pine trees allow me a view, with cover. The men are moving our way, taking slow, quiet steps. The taller of the two, the talkative one, I think, is the closest. The other, a bit shorter, but more stocky, is about twenty feet to the tall one’s left. They’re holding their guns against their shoulders, like a couple of commando’s expecting to meet the enemy at any second.
I look back at Mandi to motion her to stay low, tight against the tree. She is right where I left her. She is shaking. I look back through the little pine trees. He is within thirty feet, still coming. The other one disappears from my view, eventually to come around on our backs if he keeps going. Ten feet from the tree behind which I lie in the wet snow, the tall one stops. I’m looking right at his feet. My eyes rise from the black, military-like high laced boots, to the tucked in camo pants with a knife strapped to his leg, up to the camo belt with various things hanging off of it—including a pistol and magazines for it and his rifle—to his camo shirt with a radio hanging off of a hook, and on up right into his camo face. If he looks down, he’ll see my white, shining face peering up through the little green pine needles. Instead he is looking off into the distance, into the trees beyond us.
“Probably a spooked deer,” he says.
“Humph!” The stocky one says and then mumbles something I can’t make out.
For well beyond my ability to hold my breath he stands there, looking and listening. Will he hear me take a breath? Will he hear my pounding heart? When I have no choice I open my mouth as far as possible and take a deep, silent breath. I hold. He cocks his head. He turns about thirty degrees and listens some more.
Suddenly his weapon is pointing right at me, directly at my face. I almost shout, “Don’t” and then realize he isn’t looking at me. He has simply relaxed his gun from the ready to kill the enemy position to, unknowingly, the ready to kill Rebecca Price position. I hold my breath until I start seeing stars.
“I’m not up to chasing wild gooses again.” He turns as I’m taking my breath. I watch him walk toward the meadow where the two of them join up and continue on. I crawl back over to Mandi.
“They’re gone,” I say to her. She looks up but says nothing until they disappear into the mountain.
“Wow!” Mandi says.
“You can say that again. I’m soaking wet.”
“Hunting season or not, these guys aren’t after deer, or any other regular game. You’re right.”
“What changed your mind?”
“First, only bow hunters camouflage themselves. They have to get much closer to their target than do rifle hunters.”
“Makes sense.”
“They certainly aren’t caring bows. Second, those are semiautomatic military weapons, not hunting rifles. I don’t know what they’re called but I know them when I see them.”
I wonder how she saw them with her face melting a hole in the snow.
“They’re armed for combat against something that is either going to shoot back or fight back, or is big enough that it’s going to take some heavy firepower to bring it down.”
&nb
sp; “Maybe it’s a military game, or training.” I play devil’s advocate even though I agree with her.
“Didn’t you hear what the one on my end said?”
“My heart was banging so loud I couldn’t hear much of anything.”
“When your guy said it was a spooked deer, my guy said, ‘or cat.’ I don’t need to be precognitive to figure out that he wasn’t talking about the mountain lion. They’re here hunting for your sabre-toothed cats; and they’re serious.”
Chapter 17
“Who are they?” Mandi asks.
We are skirting around the meadow, staying inside the trees, keeping the mountain opening just in sight. I say, “At first I thought I recognized a voice when he grunted. It sounded like Lester, the one whose hand was crushed.”
“Black Beard?”
“Right. But this guy certainly didn’t have a beard.”
“Could have shaved it off.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“It would make sense. He would know about the sabre-toothed cats.”
We stop for a minute in a sunny opening. I turn my front to the sun and revel in the warmth, however slight it might be. Mandi starts digging in her pack for a dry shirt. I start doing the same, keeping half an eye through the trees in case the two men should pop out of their cave again.
I consider what Mandi said. “But why would he come back? He got away with his life and without being nabbed by the FBI. Vandermill no longer controls him. If I was him I’d have taken the opportunity to start a new life.”
“Maybe he did, thus the reason for no beard. A new life; a new look.”
“Then why come back?”
“To bag a sabre-toothed cat. He probably couldn’t keep his mouth shut. Men are like that. They get together, down a few beers and then start telling stories about having the fastest cars, biggest trucks, biggest fish, and biggest elk. He probably bragged about seeing sabre-toothed cats. A man can’t brag about something like that without producing proof.”
“You’re an expert on men? You’re only nineteen.”
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 98