It slammed into the slope and broke into several pieces, all of which continued rolling and causing more of the ridge to break away and to roll after it. Those pieces hammered into the cliff dwellings lower down, and chunks of the mud houses, too, began to break away from the slope and tumble down the ridge.
Lou stared over his Winchester’s barrel in wide-eyed shock as more and more of that ridge broke away from itself and plunged toward the canyon, the pieces slamming into one another and rolling and thundering and kicking up dust and causing the cavern floor beneath Lou to reverberate like the rumbling of a giant’s sore belly.
The attackers stopped, one by one and two by two, to look around in befuddlement. Seeing the ridge wall plunging toward them in chunks the size of wagons and privies, even some as large as cabins, they cursed shrilly in Spanish and began running back toward the canyon’s two openings. An enormous chunk of rock slammed into the canyon floor to Lou’s left, obliterating a good half-dozen fleeing attackers, turning them into a great, brown, billowing cloud of ground rock and dust.
Screams were drowned by the cacophony.
The thunder grew louder. The cavern floor beneath Lou pitched wildly, nearly nudging him onto a shoulder. He looked up to see chunks of his own ridge breaking away and rolling toward the canyon floor.
Lou held his breath and stared in shock. “Holy . . .”
The gunfire must have triggered an earthquake. The old ridge walls were coming alive as though enraged by all the human drama playing out below them.
A grinding noise rose from nearby. Prophet turned his head forward and left, and his eyes grew even more shocked. A zigzagging crack opened up in the cavern’s front wall. It grew wider . . . and wider . . .
Lou cursed as he crabbed straight back on his belly. He leaped to his feet but the vibrating floor tripped him and he fell to a knee. He heaved himself up and forward into the velvet black darkness of the inside of the ridge, crouching and wincing and holding his rifle out in front of him in both hands, shielding himself from a possible painful run-in with an unforgiving rock wall.
From far away in front of him, he could hear the stony echoes of shrieking horses amidst a man’s and a woman’s anxious shouting. Louisa and Colter were trying to force the horses into the river, and the horses weren’t buying into the plan. Lou didn’t blame them. He didn’t buy into it, either. The problem was there wasn’t another one for sale.
Ahead, a murky light grew. He quickened his pace, stumbling from side to side like a drunk as the cavern floor bucked and pitched around him.
Small chunks of stone dropped from the ceiling; he couldn’t see them but he could feel them plunging past his shoulders. He saw the horses silhouetted against the light radiating from the lonely chasm through which the blacksnake of the river wound, roaring.
Both mounts had their heads and tails down. The rumble of the river now covered the thunder of the crumbling ridges.
“They don’t wanna go swimmin’, Lou!” Colter yelled above the near-deafening pounding of the river when he saw Prophet stagger onto the stone embankment. Colter was tugging on Mean’s and Northwest’s reins while Louisa was tugging on the bridle straps of her pinto. Alejandra was pushing against the pinto’s rear, leaning forward, one strap of her gown hanging off her shoulder.
Prophet hurried forward. He tied his shotgun’s lanyard over his saddle horn. He slipped his Winchester into its scabbard.
“Get out of the way!” he bellowed.
He stepped back, raised his Colt, and triggered three thundering reports into the stone, mineral-encrusted ceiling five feet above his head.
All three horses jerked forward off the bank then down four feet into the roiling black water that glinted like the surface of a star-shrouded lake harassed by the gale of all gales.
Colter, Louisa, and Alejandra looked down as the water swept the wide-eyed mounts off to the right, the horrified beasts twisting and turning and then disappearing on down the mysterious, stony bed toward the Sea.
“Our turn!” Prophet said.
Louisa glanced at him with uncustomary wariness. “Where does it go?”
“You’re about to find out.”
Louisa’s mouth and eyes popped wide as Lou stepped toward her, smiling. “No, wai—”
Her protest was swallowed by the river’s roar as Lou nudged her off the bank and into the water. He looked at Colter eyeing him skeptically, edgily.
“There’s no goin’ back, Red!” he yelled. “The canyon’s gone, and this place ain’t gonna be here much longer, neither.” He knew it was true. Already dust was wafting from the corridor through which they’d gained the river. The entrance cavern was likely already buried beneath several million tons of ridge.
The corridor itself would be next . . . then the river gorge.
“All right, then.” Colter stepped up to the edge of the bank. He sniffed an armpit. “I been needin’ a bath for months, anyway!”
He stepped forward, raising his arms out slightly, and dropped lithely into the dark, churning cauldron. Like the horses and Louisa, he was swept eerily away, suddenly gone.
Alejandra moved up to Prophet, placed her hands on his broad chest. “Lou, I’m frightened!”
“Take my hand!”
She placed her hand in his. She jerked her head suddenly to the right with a gasp. She screamed and slapped a hand to her mouth.
As Lou wheeled, he inadvertently nudged Alejandra off the bank and into the river. Ciaran Yeats lunged toward him like a specter from the corridor’s darkness. The big man’s spectacles hung low on his nose, and his eyes flashed with animallike savagery. He raised a razor-edged, obsidian-handled, pearl-encrusted cuchillo in his right hand and, gritting his teeth, thrust the blade down in an arc toward Prophet’s left eye.
Lou reached up and grabbed the Mad Major’s wrist just before the slender blade of the savage pig-sticker would have impaled his eyeball. He raked his spurs until the bank was no longer beneath him. He angled backward and down toward the roiling black water, still holding Yeats’s wrist as he and the big major plunged into the water like two lovers deciding to take a dip hand in hand.
As Lou sank backward into the maelstrom, Yeats’s wrist was wrenched from his grasp. Lou had the vague sense of Yeats himself being whipped away from him, the competing currents sweeping him back over Prophet’s right shoulder as Lou was spun and then hurled on down the near-black chasm.
Lou fought the cold hands of the whirlpool, trying to keep his head above water. The waves beat him about the head and shoulders, sneaky currents reaching up to grab his ankles and pull him down, down, turning him sideways, determined to drown him. He fought those watery devils with his hands and feet, flailing for the surface, forcing his head above the churning waves once more and sucking a desperate breath into his lungs but choking because he’d sucked water in, as well.
A foot . . . or what felt like a foot . . . kicked him in the right kidney. He glanced to his right and thought he saw Yeats’s foot draw back in the froth-fringed, darkly billowing torrent. Or maybe it had been a rock. A rock now slammed against his left shoulder and sent him spinning, wincing against the sudden pain in his ribs.
As the waves continued to batter him, he peered above them and down the sarcophagus-like chasm, seeing only more foaming water following the stone corridor’s bending course. More rocks hammered against him from either side, spinning him, one sending him against another on the chasm’s opposite side.
Gradually light grew around and over Prophet.
Hope lifted him.
He was hurled another harrowing twenty, thirty, fifty feet, following the river’s bends, when suddenly the stone chasm shot back behind him and the sky opened over him. The vast bowl was blue and brassy and the sunlight lanced out of it painfully, reflecting harshly off the foaming water.
He’d never seen a more beautiful sight. He’d been afraid he’d been condemned to spend the rest of his life, however short it may be, fighting the enraged river deep in t
he prisonlike darkness at the earth’s bowels. The current seemed to slow a little, offering even more hope.
As the river turned him so that he was facing slightly upstream and toward the bank on his left, a man’s wet head and broad shoulders lunged toward him. Yeats grimaced insanely as sunlight glinted off the blade of the obsidian-handled stiletto still clenched in his right fist. He lurched up and over toward Lou, swinging the stiletto in another downward arc.
Again, Lou grabbed the man’s wrist and stared up for a second at the small, sharp tip of the blade smiling menacingly down at him, sunlit water beading along the razor edge like liquid gold.
Lou tried to punch Yeats’s grimacing face with his right fist but he fell back as the current grabbed his legs. The current spun him and his assailant, once more ripping the man’s wrist out of Lou’s grasp. He went hurling down the stream again, away from Yeats, but now not only worried about the water itself and rocks, but about Yeats and that damned jewel-limned pig-sticker lurking somewhere in the water, stalking him even while they were both hurled headlong toward the Sea of Cortez.
The current spun him again, again.
Prophet’s heart leaped when Yeats appeared out of the maelstrom, the man grimacing again and once more lunging toward Prophet. Lou grabbed the man’s wrist with his left hand, swung it down and away from him. As he did, he hammered his right fist hard against Yeats’s left cheek. He punched him again and again, and still the Mad Major managed to hold on to the stiletto.
They spun together like dancers in the current, both trying to punch each other while Lou maintained his grip on the major’s right wrist. Yeats swam in close to Prophet, stretched his lips from his teeth, and then rammed his forehead hard against Lou’s.
Lou fell back, releasing his grip again on Yeats’s knife hand.
Lou’s ears rang. The major’s attack addled him. He fought to bring his head up out of the water again as he turned a slow circle, and when the water washed down over his eyes and the world around him swam back into focus, Yeats was before him once more, grinning savagely, cocking that damned stiletto again for yet another attempt at carving out Lou’s left eye.
Prophet was falling back, unable to lift his hand. He was able to kick up with his right boot, however. He landed the blow exactly where he’d hoped. The soft flesh between the major’s stout thighs, just beneath his sagging belly, yielded.
The Mad Major cried out, his face crumpling with agony.
He recovered quickly and lunged at Lou again. This time Lou was rising with the current. He hurled all of his two-hundred-plus pounds at Yeats’s left arm. He grabbed the man’s forearm with both his hands and drove himself downward, holding the arm fast against his chest, driving Yeats down toward the river’s bottom.
Prophet opened his eyes. In the blue-green water striped with the lemon yellow of the sun, Yeats glared back at him wide-eyed, bubbles rising from his flared nostrils and his compressed lips. His long, curly, red-gray hair swirled around his head, obscuring his face. Lou pulled Yeats by his arm to the gravelly bottom.
A large, gray rock churned into view, embedded in the bottom of the river. Prophet drove the man’s hand against the rock. He heard Yeats give a watery yell beneath the sound of bubbles crackling in his ears. Still the major held on to the knife. Prophet slid his right hand up to Yeats’s face, dug his thumb and forefinger into the man’s eyes.
Again, Yeats yelled.
Grinding his fingers deeper into the Mad Major’s eye sockets, Lou smashed the man’s hand against the rock again. This time the hand opened, the knife slithered out and tumbled slowly toward the river’s bottom. At the same time, Yeats gave another, louder wail and drove his knee into Lou’s crotch.
As the burning lance of misery bored through his belly and deep into his bowels, Prophet released his grip on Yeats’s face. He tumbled away as they continued to roll downstream, Prophet glimpsing the major’s bulk pitching away from him on his right.
Lou pushed his feet off the stream’s floor, surprised to find the surface much nearer than he’d expected. He lifted his head above the water, his chest coming free of the river also and so suddenly that he pitched forward by the force of his own momentum and forward into the river again.
As the water flung him back up, Yeats bulled into him, punching his belly and ribs with both fists.
Pushing off the bottom with his right boot, Prophet rolled Yeats onto his back. He head-butted him. Yeats’s eyes rolled up in their sockets. Prophet moved in quickly, punching the man’s face with his right fist.
Yeats cried out, grabbed the collar of Lou’s buckskin shirt with both his fists, stretching his lips back from his teeth. He tried to knee Lou in the oysters again, but, anticipating the attack, Lou stepped sideways, and the man’s knee glanced off his hip.
Prophet hardened his jaws in fury as he slammed his clenched right fist again into Yeats’s right cheek. He punched him in the mouth, across the nose, in the mouth again, against the ridge of his left brow, and then on the lower-left jaw—vicious, pummeling blows that made the Mad Major’s broad, fleshy, bearded face resemble a bloody mop.
Prophet held the man by his shirt collar and punched him again, again, and again . . . until he realized Yeats was no longer resisting. Now it was like punching a fifty-pound bag of cracked corn. Yeats slumped below him, head down, arms sagging, legs curled slack before him.
Prophet pulled his fist back and did not bring it forward again.
He released the major’s collar and was surprised to find that when the man’s head and shoulders slumped downward, it was not into water. The river had disappeared. Now Yeats lay stretched out on wet sand and gravel over and around which the last of the river’s water slithered like transparent snakes. Small bubbles popped in the sand.
Lou looked down at himself. He was standing slumped on the riverbed, over the slack body of Ciaran Yeats. Water dripped from his soaked clothes. He looked downstream, astonished to see the river slithering away from him, like a silver rug pulled out from beneath him, leaving behind it only dark, wet sand and gravel and small pools that collected in bowls between large rocks and boulders. Farther and farther away the water retreated, glinting in the sunlight, resembling nothing so much as a desert mirage.
Then the last of the river turned a bend and disappeared, leaving Prophet standing in wide-eyed shock and awe.
He swung around to stare upstream. The riverbed resembled a desert arroyo in the aftermath of a mountain downpour, after the water had washed off to the sea or been sucked into the earth. Lou lifted his gaze beyond and above the sucking wet bed toward the crags of Baja Jack’s canyon.
Only, like poor ole Baja Jack himself, the canyon was gone. Or if not entirely gone, at least obscured by a giant mushroom cloud of gently billowing dust. The gorge in which he and the others had entered the river had collapsed. The river was sealed off. Or, if not sealed, at least looking around desperately for another way out of the millions of tons of collapsed rock. It would find one soon, and another river would be born.
Prophet blinked, dazed, the intoxication of the savage struggle starting to abate so that he was beginning to feel his sundry aches and pains and the burns of the bullets Yeats’s men had hurled at him.
“Lou!”
Prophet followed the sound of the familiar voice to the river’s southern bank. Colter stood on a rock several feet out from the embankment, waving one arm. Louisa stood on the grassy shore behind the redhead. Alejandra stood near Louisa. They were all as wet as river rats, but relatively intact, Lou was happy to see. The horses stood beyond them in the tall grass amongst the palms, grazing, their saddles hanging askew.
Behind Prophet sounded a gurgling groan.
He turned to stare down at Yeats. The Mad Major rolled onto his back, staring up at Prophet from the bloody mask of his bearded face. He threw up one hand in pleading. It didn’t rise very far, however, before it plopped back down to the wet sand.
“Finish me,” Yeats begged. “Just finish me
. It’s all over, anyway. You took it all.” He gritted his teeth as he glared up at Prophet. “You an’ Baja Jack!”
Lou shook his head. “Forget it, Major. I’m taking you back north. Hell, you’re worth a small fortune. You might have lost your black empire, but I’m finally flush!” He figured that cashing in the Mad Major for the big bounty on his head was worth tangling with the authorities again over the little misunderstanding involving the untimely demise of one Roscoe Rodane.
“The rabies’ll kill me,” Yeats said.
“I hope not before they hang you,” Prophet told him.
He scrubbed a sleeve across his wet, bloody cheek. “I’m gonna take your bounty money and spend next winter up in Dakota. After all this down here—hell, them chill winds and three-day blizzards sound right refreshing to this old rebel son of the Confederate South!”
He laughed, used his other sleeve to swab more blood and sand from his face. “Sit tight, Major. I’ll be back with the shackles soon.”
He turned and strode wearily over to the grassy bank. His boots squawked loudly with every step. Colter grinned from his rock, chuckling and shaking his head. “Next time I think about following you to Mexico, I’m gonna think again.”
Lou smiled, nodded. “That’d be wise, Red. The cost is way too high.”
He climbed onto the bank with a weary grunt. Louisa stepped up before him. Alejandra stood several yards behind her, looking downright ravishing in that wet gown in the sunlight.
Prophet slid his eyes back to his partner and grinned. “Enjoy your swim, darlin’?”
He laughed.
Louisa was holding one of her pretty Colts in her right hand. She swung it up and forward with a wicked-sounding grunt.
Lou didn’t even feel the blow of the silver-chased barrel laid across his temple before everything went black.
The Cost of Dying Page 34