“I’ve been in a position to observe enough of them in action, between my step-father, his friends, and my uncles. Besides, my mom was the expert. I’ve learned a lot from her, including never to trust a man.”
“What I learned from my mother is the importance of good dental hygiene.” What else did I learn from her? Nothing, except maybe how to cook a turkey, and how to clean a toilet. Not one useful thing that I can think of. And I certainly don’t know anything about men. Haven’t even thought about men. I’m still just seventeen. I barely even thought about boys before last summer, and not at all since then.
Except Matt. I’ve thought about him a little.
“I wonder if Matt got the messages?” I say.
Wearing dry shirts, but wet everything else, we clip the wet shirts to the outside of our packs. I pull out the GPS. Our direction from here is an educated guess. I picture the trip though the mountain last year, from the entrance we’re now trying to find, to the cavern where Mom lies. It doesn’t seem to me that we made much of an elevation change, maybe dropping a little. That’s my basic guide, the elevation lines on the GPS receiver. The line we’re on runs in an arc from North to South. I take a stab at where we left the ATV in the bushes and run a horizontal line west from there until it intersects our elevation line. I set a waypoint.
“About here,” I tell Mandi.
“Then let’s go. The farther we get from those guys, the happier I’ll be.”
Regretfully we leave the warm sun and head into the trees. At the last second I glance back through the sunny opening, through the few trees, and into the meadow.
“Stop! Down!”
The men are walking across the meadow, not toward where we are, or where we were, but a bit south as though back to where they were coming from when we first saw them. The guy who might be Lester is sporting a regular pack. The other guy has a daypack. They are both armed as they were before.
They disappear into the trees. We rise to our feet.
“Wonder where they’re going?” I say.
Mandi recognizes that I wasn’t expecting an answer and says, “Let’s get going.”
“Wait.” My eyes drift back to the entrance. “They’re gone. We can go in.”
Mandi’s reluctance suddenly fills the air. Is it an odor of fear from her body, or my psychic antenna picking up on her mental vibrations? I’m inclined to the latter because to look at her I wouldn’t believe she is anything but calm and fearless. It’s a different kind of fear than she had with the sabre-toothed cats; less visible, more intense. I realize that I sensed it when we first saw the men, when she fell to the ground in the snow; I just didn’t recognize it, more concerned at the time that they were going to catch us.
“What’s the matter?”
She looks at me, surprised. “What do you mean?”
“You’re scared to go in there.”
She opens her mouth, to deny I’m sure, and then closes it. She looks across the meadow, then back at me. “They might come back.”
“Not in the time it would take us to go in, find Mom’s plaque, and get out. They’re wearing packs, which means they’re gone for a while, if not for a few days.”
She’s not convinced
“Ten minutes, in and out. You can stay here . . . keep watch.”
Her jaw tightens. She doesn’t like it. She wants no part of possibly interacting with these men.
“I’ll be quick,” I say and start heading toward the cave. Just before stepping into the meadow I glance back. She hasn’t moved. I’m on my own. I break into a run.
At the entrance, standing in the middle of the path through the snow bank, I look over at where I left Mandi. She has moved up to the edge of the meadow. I wave, duck through the trees, and enter the mountain.
Chapter 18
I stand and wait for my eyes to adjust, only now considering that maybe there might be three of them and one is still here. There are no noises, such as the movement of a body or the click of a gun, or someone saying, “Who the hell are you?” The only sound is the rush of the falls from the far end, over the rise where there also comes a glow of daylight. I return to normal breathing when I’m assured that I’m alone.
It’s just as I had thought, though not exactly what I had expected. But then, I hadn’t really thought about what to expect other then the fact that two men are camped here. There’s a dead fire ring just inside. On each side of it is a stack of rocks that supports a stick from which hangs the charred remains of something that looks like it could have been a rabbit. More remains lie off to the side. I step closer and a half dozen flies jump into flight around the head of a fawn. I think about the deer I hit with the car and turn away, glad that I wasn’t around to feel this young one’s pain, or the pain of its mother.
Farther on are two heaps of bedrolls. Dirty clothes and dirtier magazines lay about displaying pictures like in a movie I saw at my friend Sarah’s house when her parents were gone. It is gross and disgusting, even more disgusting than the slaughtered fawn. I kick a dirty white sock over one of the worst pictures, and move on. Past the strewn living area, things clear. I am focused on watching where I walk when suddenly something looms up on my right. I jump and trip, catch myself and then look at what it is. It is the remains of the fawn, stripped of its skin, hanging by its rear hooves from a rope. The skin and fur lie in a pile off to the side. I bend down to touch the fur, expecting that it will be soft, and am startled by a movement at the corner of my eye, a pair of boots coming at me.
“Eeeeeee!” Somehow or other I end up four feet from where I was and I’m falling, my pack pulling me backwards, my arms wind milling. Hands grab me. “Eeeeeeee!” I land hard on my pack, roll away from the hands and come fast to my feet.
“Reba!”
I turn and look into Mandi’s face.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
My heart races as I try to catch my breath.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I manage to struggle out. My mouth is dry and it feels like there is a chunk of dirt stuck in my throat. I feel around for my tube and suck up some water.
“Jeez! I really scared you. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” I take another gulp of water. My breathing slows along with my heart rate. “I thought you didn’t want to come in here.”
“I didn’t like us being separated. Besides, if something happened to you I’d be lost. You have the GPS and the cell phone. I couldn’t even find my way out of here to get help.”
“Oh.” She’s right. We’re only a half-day hike from civilization, but without the GPS we could be lost for days or weeks . . . or forever. “Let’s finish what I came in for and get out of here. This place is giving me the creeps.”
“Me too. Typical man camp.”
“Not all men can be like this, can they?”
Even in the dim light the disgusted look on Mandi’s face is evident. “All the ones I’ve ever known have been.”
“Not my dad,” I say. “I have no uncles, just an aunt. Her boyfriends are sometimes kind of weird, but nothing like this.”
“I’ve had them around all my life. My stepfather was the only one who succeeded in raping me. The others groped me, exposed themselves to me, or at the least tried to gross me out with their dirty talk. Every one of them was interested in only one thing when it came to me.”
“Your mother didn’t notice?”
“I don’t know. She’s the one who kicked me out so I guess she either didn’t care or didn’t believe me.” She blows air and then shivers. “Can we get on with what you wanted to do? I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“Sorry.” I adjust my pack and then, together, we walk up the rise and toward the sound of the rushing and falling water.
We stand at the edge of the river, fifteen or twenty feet wide, its flow broken by stones and boulders that I know weren’t there before the explosion. “It’s a miracle that we survived at all, and that
the entire mountain didn’t collapse,” I say to Mandi, raising my voice over the river crashing into the cavern lake; a cacophony reverberating off the cavern walls. I point to a spot where the river breaks from the lake that now fills the cavern. “We were standing there—me, Dad and Sean. Sean was the only one of Vandermill’s men who was nice. I was screaming down at Mom. She had set the bag of dynamite on the fire. It was a conspiracy between Mom and Sam. Ironic.”
“How’s that?”
“Dad had an affair with Sam. Mom knew it and hated Sam with a passion, tried to kill her once. Now she needed Sam to save her family. In the end the two of them became partners. They both knew that we were all destined to die, that with Vandermill, there was no other way, so they sacrificed themselves to save Dad and Me. I sometimes wonder if Mom’s purpose was just for her family, or her hatred for Sam. Did Sam know that in helping take out Vandermill and save us, that she was helping Mom take herself out? Mom used Sam to kill Sam.
“Anyway, Sam kept Vandermill’s attention while Mom did her thing. I was fighting with Black Beard, probably at about the place that the fawn is hanging, when I previewed it all happening in my psychic mind. I managed to get away and raced up here. There was nothing I could do.” I spot the plaque I came here to find. It is encased in a brushed steel frame that is bolted to the stonewall, on the left as we would enter the cavern. I walk to it, place my hand on its center, and close my eyes. The memory comes to me as though it is happening now.
Vandermill is on his feet, his gun out. He sees me, points his gun and shoots. I drop face down in the dirt. When I carefully lift my head and look down, he has Mom by her hair, and his gun to her head.
“No! Don’t,” I yell, jumping to my feet.
“Drop the gun,” he yells.
I look at the automatic weapon I’m still carrying. Since it’s empty anyway, I give it a fling.
“Victor!” Sam yells. She is on her feet. “It’s too late!” He pushes Mom and she falls to the ground. He points his gun at Sam. ‘It’s over, Victor,’ Sam says. ‘You can’t stop it. It’s all over.’ He follows her eyes and sees the canvas bag sitting on the fire. Mom didn’t set it in the exact right spot. The bag has not caught yet. There is still time to get to it, but Vandermill doesn’t understand what he is looking at.
I reach into Mom’s mind. Mom! Stop it! Pull it off!
Get out of here, Reba! It’s the only way.
No! It’s not!. Sean steps up beside me.
He’s going to kill us anyway, Mom says.
Vandermill walks over to the fire.
No one comes into my home and violates my privacy . . . our privacy. Besides, it’s too late.
“No! No! No!” I cry. “There is still another way.” Then Dad is standing on my other side. He signals with his hand that he wants to talk to me.
Take care of Christi, and tell her I love her, Mom says.
“No, Mom! Nooooooooo!”
Vandermill is looking at the bag. Flames are now climbing its sides. Dad grabs my arm.
I yell, “It’s dye . . !” The explosion lifts me from my feet, and then I know nothing.
I place my forehead against the plaque that displays only one beautifully scripted word on a slate black background . . . Mother. I cry. Mandi rests a hand on my shoulder. After a long while she says, “How did you survive?”
I straighten and look into the cavern where the creek plunges from an opening high in the ceiling to form the lake that has become my mother’s tomb. I wipe the tears from my cheek. “It was a miracle.”
“Unbelievable, actually,” a man says from behind us. The voice is unmistakable this time. It is Lester, Mr. Black Beard. We turn around to a pair of green faces. Their guns aren’t pointing at us, but they’re very visible.
“Ain’t this a surprise,” Lester says. “Sarge, I’d like you to meet the queen of the sabre-toothed cats, in the flesh.” He grins. “This might be our lucky day.”
Chapter 19
Mandi has hold of my hand. I don’t need that to know that she is trembling like a frightened puppy. All of my psychic senses are on high alert.
We sit side-by-side, knees up to our chests, halfway between the hanging fawn and the bedrolls. Our eyes are on the two men. They stand near the entrance, talking to each other. I can’t hear them. My high alert senses are not enough to break in. They both carry a protective wall around them. A psychic barrier, I call it. Vandermill was like that, too.
I don’t know how to control my psychic power. I learned a lot last summer in this very place, but that was nearly a year ago, and I have done everything possible to avoid turning it back on ever since. Except with the Christmas Day event with Mandi, and then the cats and the deer, I have managed to keep it buried, going months without ever thinking about it. That may have been the biggest thing I learned last summer was how to turn it off.
Now I’ve turned it all back on and it’s doing me absolutely no good. I can’t hear what Lester and his friend are planning, and I can’t raise a sabre-toothed cat. I pull Mandi closer to me and wrap my arm around her. Her trembling has eased a little. “It’s going to be okay,” I whisper to her. She says nothing. We’re in deep dodo, and once again, it’s my fault that we’re in it. I came here last summer and got Mom and Sam killed. I come here again and now I’m going to get Mandi killed, and maybe myself this time. I don’t even want to think about what they will do with us before they kill us. I know that’s what Mandi has been thinking about.
“Stay strong, Mandi. We have to stay strong, keep our heads. We’ll find a way out of this.” She squeezes my hand. Am I trying to convince her, or me?
I call for Roma but still get nothing. They should be back by now. Can I reach out from inside the mountain? How far can I reach? I have no idea.
I close my eyes and leave my mind wide open.
“Where are they?”
I heard him approach, but chose to play asleep. I open my eyes to his question. He is down on one knee a safe five feet away, leaning on his gun, the butt of which is in the dirt.
“Where are they?” he asks again.
“Where are who?”
“Your cats.”
“I don’t know.” Okay, so it’s a half lie. I don’t know where most of them are. “And since when are they my cats?”
His left arm rests on his knee; his mangled hand dangles. He catches me looking and holds it up. “You remember that, huh?”
“Of course I do. I helped get the boulder off of you. I also let you go and never mentioned anything to the FBI about you and Sean.”
“You didn’t help get the boulder off of my hand. One of your cats did, but you told it to. Somehow you had control of them. That’s why I say they’re your cats.” He grins. He is missing two teeth, and the rest don’t look all that great. “You’re the kitty queen.”
“You’re crazy.”
His grin relaxes. “What are you doing here?”
“I’d like to ask you the same thing.”
“I’m asking the questions.”
“So am I.”
He laughs. “You’re just as feisty as you were a year ago. You caused a lot of trouble.”
“Victor Vandermill is the one who started all the trouble. Everything was fine until two of his men showed up and killed Matt’s dad. And then he shows up with more of his stupid men. What was I supposed to do? Sit around and wait for him to kill me too? He started the war and he lost. We let you go.”
“I should appreciate that?”
“Hell yes!”
He leans in close to me until I can cut his raunchy breath with a knife. “I was what you would call, a career employee. You, your family, killed my employer. That left me unemployed. I do not appreciate that.”
“You made the bed.” I start to gag. “You stink.”
He returns to his one knee position. “Well, pardon me all to hell. I’d of showered and cleaned up if I’d known you was coming. Now, back to my original question. Where are they?”
“I told you already. I don’t know. I came here to visit my mother, and to see the plaque my father and sister placed.”
“Yeah. I saw your little monument thing. How touching. Maybe I should put one up that says, Victor Vandermill, great boss.”
“How about killer boss, who died like he lived, as he deserved?”
He laughs and stands up. “Feisty with a sense of humor. I like that in a woman.” He walks back to his buddy and they start talking again. I still can’t read them and the roar of the waterfalls still masks their voices.
“I’m sorry,” I say to Mandi. I scoot closer to her and wrap my arm around hers. “I’m so sorry I brought you here.”
“Don’t be,” she says. She is not shaking so bad now. “I wanted to come. The sabre-toothed cats were exciting. Scary, but exciting. You didn’t know these men would be here.”
“It’s still my fault.”
“What’s your fault?”
I can’t say it. It’s my fault that we are both going to be killed. Don’t want to scare her even more. “I insisted on coming in here. We could have gone right on by. It’s my fault that we got caught.”
Before Mandi can comment, her eyes change and she tenses. Lester is coming back. He kneels on one knee again; his mangled hand dangles off the other knee as it did before.
“Here’s the deal, Miss Price. We want a sabre-toothed cat. Actually we want two sabre-toothed cats.”
“Why?”
“Cause they’re worth a few pennies. A cool $4,000,000 each . . . alive. You might say we are sabre-toothed bounty hunters.”
“But you’ve already sh . . .” I drive my elbow into Mandi’s rib.
“Who’s paying it?” I ask.
He gives Mandi a long look and then turns his attention back to me. “Back in 2000, when they escaped, thanks to your old man, Vandermill had been negotiating with zoos. When the facility burnt to the ground and he disappeared, the dealing ended. I knew a little bit about that and after learning where they were last summer I revived the negotiations. They were still interested, but it still took me a while to convince them that the cats were still alive.”
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 99