Nightwing

by Martin Cruz Smith

  The irises of Paine’s eyes continued to dilate. The vertical lines on the cave floor near the pool were not irregular. They were straight. They were crude ladders, maybe ten, with most of their rungs broken. More shapes emerged. In the deepest shadow of the cave was a slightly darker shadow. A square. More squares spread around and above it, reaching halfway up and a third of the way around the wall of the cave. Windows. Windows and doors for five stories of adobe houses, an enormous underground gallery. The reason Paine hadn’t seen it sooner was not only the dark. The houses themselves had disintegrated almost into rubble. Roofs were crushed, walls had fallen in, dust lay like a heavy shroud. Paine reasoned that to escape enemies a people might hide for a short time in such a place. This was not the construction of a short time, though. This had been a small city.

  Intrigued and puzzled, Paine edged around the entire lip of the sinkhole, spreading his arms and legs to minimize his weight. He’d thought he would have to lower the Cyanogas canister through the sinkhole from a piton driven into the dome, an operation that risked breaking through the flimsy limestone shell or, at least, scattering the bats. If any point of the ruins, however, came within a hundred feet of the cave ceiling, he could place the canister there. The ruins told him there was another way into the cave because there had to be human access.

  But no point on the ruins was high enough for the gas spray to be totally effective. Which satisfied Paine well enough; it was usually a bad idea to change methods, and one misstep among ruins as ancient as these could mean disaster.

  The sinkhole it would be, then. Right on top of the bats.

  He left the way he’d come, through the lava field to the sandstone bridge, where he descended by rope to the road. By now, he was asking himself questions.

  The road comes all this way? To what?

  He didn’t want to stop, but his habit of thoroughness was too strong. A trap was no good if there were two exits, and somehow people had gone in and out of the cave.

  As Paine reversed himself and ran up the road in the direction of the cave, his receiver came gradually alive again. Not as loud as the signals above the cave, but distinct.

  Youngman knew about the canyon and the road. Paine’s face flushed. The bastard must have known about the cave all the time.

  The road ended directly in front of what seemed to be an entrance to a mine. A cart wheel of solid wood that had been slowly decaying for hundreds of years lay beside an opening eight feet high and wide enough for two carts to enter abreast. The signals came from inside. He checked his watch. It was getting late, but he had to be certain.

  As Paine stepped in, he touched the walls. They were cool and damp and left his fingertips black. One sniff explained all. Oil-saturated shale, that was what the mine was for. Soft shale so pregnant with oil it could be hacked into bricks that would burn brighter than coal.

  The mine burrowed ahead and with each step the signals grew stronger. This had to be the other way into the cave. One hundred and fifty feet in, though, the mine came to a dead end. Yet the signals were stronger than before and Paine could smell ammonia. He pushed tentatively against the end wall, and it disintegrated in his fingers. His arm went through the rotting threads of a hanging blanket that had been the only separation between the shale mine and the limestone cave. Carefully, he pulled his arm out and peered through the hole he’d made. Before him, lit by the sinkhole, stretched the gigantic hall of the cave, the shallow pool of digested blood, the ghostly ruins of the pueblo and, overhead, both deadly and vulnerable, a ceiling of bats. They didn’t use the mine.

  Paine broke into a run when he reached the road. It was six o’clock, not enough daylight left for him to poison the bats before they flocked. In fact, there was just enough time to retrieve the backpack and escape from the bats’ usual flight pattern towards the desert.

  The road wasn’t straight for more than a hundred feet at a time. To Paine, it seemed to wind malevolently, as if it were trying to slow him down, but at last he saw his pack sitting where he’d left it. A crow flew away from the pack as Paine approached.

  From habit, Paine checked the pressure of the Cyanogas canister as soon as he reached his backpack. The tank was good. The battery had its charge and the wire mesh was rolled as neatly as before. The crow had been searching for food, that was all. Paine slipped the pack onto his shoulders and started his return to the dome.

  In spite of the uphill grade and the weight of the canister Paine maintained a rapid walk. The road was a murky blue under the sunlit tops of the walls, though rarely the low sun did penetrate a gap and throw Paine’s hunchbacked shadow high up a wall. Once, a second shadow joined his and Paine looked up to see a crow running along the cliffs.

  Paine cast his rope over the sandstone bridge and hoisted himself up from the road. From there, he worked his way through the lava field and circled to the west side of the sinkhole, where he huddled beneath a stone shelf and watched the last rays of the sun burning out on the dome.

  Now that he knew exactly what he was going to do, Paine felt a rising confidence. He opened his pack and laid out his helmet and wire clipper. He wouldn’t need gas mask or gloves. An easterly wind rose, driving his smell away from the cave. Everything was going well.

  As the sun set, the eastern horizon turned a fleshy pink shading into purple. No bats emerged from the sinkhole. Other bats might greet the dusk, but vampires waited for true night. Then Paine heard them, the sound of their stirring, of wings and the rain of nitrous urine lightening them for flight. The distant mesa tops lived briefly as golden clouds, stars swam into sight and, in seconds, the world tipped into the dark.

  Paine held his breath. For a final minute, the air above the canyon was still, and then the first bats rose from the sinkhole, spiralling up like leaves from a fire. The rest came like a black pillar mounting five hundred feet into the sky.

  His bats.

  Paine held onto the rock as if he were going to be sucked into the swirling column. Part of him was. Along with his father, Ochay, the years in Mexico. You are what you kill, Joe Paine said. Too true. The bats and Paine had joined, become the head and tail of a single creature leading and pursuing itself. One beast conceived in death and nurtured by obsession. Mantled in evil. He’d lied to Anne. There was, past biological frameworks, a sense to everything. There was a mutual grace in nature. The carnivore eliminated the weak, the herbivores and birds transmitted seed, insects cleansed the soil, flowers lent beauty. Each in turn lent something in return for its life, all but one. There was that single instant, a freak, which gave nothing in return for its all-consuming thirst. The vampire, alone. Claustrophobia was not what Paine had suffered, it was a shudder in the presence of evil. He’d come to understand that but what he hadn’t foreseen was that evil had its own gravity. Not until it had drawn him in and used him to push the bats where they had never been before, and multiplied a thousandfold its own energy and horror. Apocalypse needed no pale horse or fiery dragon, not with the bats as its engine and the plague as its seed. All thanks to Paine. All due to him.

  But the end of the chase had come, and after the end he would be free.

  Flattening into a cloud turning again and again into itself, spreading into a crescent until the center moved forward and then forming one swift and undulating line, the bats flew east into the desert.

  Paine gave the bats ten minutes before he unrolled the wire mesh and cut it in equal sections with the clipper. He wanted a snug fit over the sinkhole, no slack. One section of mesh he neatly rerolled and carried to the far edge of the sinkhole, where he hammered a side of mesh into the dome with pitons. On all fours, he moved to the lip of the sinkhole nearer the rock shelf and tapped in more free pitons. He didn’t need to drive the L-shaped pitons deep, just enough to keep the mesh tautly in place when it was spread. Underneath, he heard the anxious shifting of baby bats clinging to the ceiling. He knew of but couldn’t hear the high-pitched distress calls of the babies, calls that were too weak and too far behi
nd the hunting wave of bats. Paine attached two electrical wires to the rolled mesh and led them back to the battery under the rock shelf. He set the battery voltage at 300, turned it on long enough to listen to one tock, and switched it off. That part of the trap was set.

  The rock shelf itself was granite, harder than limestone. With a piton, Paine searched out a vertical fissure and then hammered the piton into the fissure. He tied his two fifty-foot ropes together, making a single hundred-foot length. One end, he tied to the piton. The other end, he knotted in a bowline through the canister handle. He twisted the timer on the canister valve. Every complete revolution set back the Cyanogas spray sixty minutes; he gave the timer twelve full turns, its limit.

  Then, he turned the canister on its side and, lying on his stomach, started to roll it up the dome to the sinkhole. The granite shelf was fifty feet from the sinkhole; the tank would hang fifty feet below the sinkhole into the cave, well out of the bats’ way when they returned, and when Paine would spread the net and throw the battery switch and wait. Until 7:45 A.M., to be precise, when the first lethal vapor of the canister would rise. Nothing could be simpler.

  Stars came out in clusters of light. Paine rolled the canister slowly up the dome. At the lip of the sinkhole, he gave the tank a final push that tilted it into the cave. He grabbed the rope and let it play through his hand gradually, lowering the tank. Cautiously, he moved away from the sinkhole, halfway down the dome, before he played any more rope through his hand.

  The rope stopped. The heavy tank was only about ten feet down into the cave, Paine estimated, but the rope must have snagged on something at the lip of the sinkhole. He tugged the rope. It wouldn’t move.

  Paine crawled back up the cave dome. Underneath his hands and knees, he felt the anxious scuttling of the infant bats, unsettled by the ominous appearance of the tank. “Patience,” he whispered to them.

  At the sinkhole, he found the problem. The rope had cut into and stuck in the soft limestone of the lip. He didn’t like resting all his weight on his knees, but he pulled the rope free and raised the tank to set the rope at a different place.

  There was another problem he saw as the tank rose. Somehow, the rope from the handle had twisted around the valve and jammed the timer. Paine lifted the canister gently out of the cave and set it on the edge of the sinkhole.

  A single yank loosened the rope and Paine freed the valve. He lowered the tank into the cave again, watching with satisfaction as it descended into the dark, playing the rope tenderly until the canister had vanished, gently swinging in the shadows.

  Paine leaned back and took a deep breath.

  He heard the dome crack around him. He was already twisting as the sinkhole widened and the limestone under him dropped away. His hands clutched at rocks that crumbled with each grasp into a pale sand that streamed over him.

  Paine fell. Feet first, to begin with. Then he spread his arms and legs like a man soaring and dark blew into his face. In front of him, he saw the canister rope measuring his dive.

  He stopped short swinging fifty feet below the sinkhole. His wrist was tangled in the rope at the canister handle. The canister rocked coldly against his cheek, which was crushed over an eye. He tried to raise himself, but the arm caught in the rope was pulled out of his shoulder socket. His other arm couldn’t reach around the canister.

  He dangled.

  The babies scuttled around the ceiling. In time, though, they settled down and waited.

  Along with Paine.

  C H A P T E R

  N I N E

  “He didn’t make it,” Youngman said. “He’d be back by now if he made it.”

  The two stars of Natupkom, Castor and Pollux, swung high overhead. Rising from the earth was Talawsohu, the Morning Star. Twice during the night, he and Anne had followed the flight of the bats. Their departure by sight. Their return, five hours later, by Paine’s oscilloscope. That was five hours ago.

  “I told him to wait.”

  “Paine knows what he’s doing. Here, eat something, you look terrible.” She offered him a slice of bread smeared with margarine. “I’m sorry that’s all that’s left. And some beers.”

  He shook his head. Even in the green glow of the scope, his skin was tinged with the ash of fatigue.

  “He would have shot us if we went after him.”

  “He won’t shoot any more, he’s past that.”

  “He’s all right. The best thing we can do is get to the highway so Chee will know to send a helicopter here and pick Paine up.”

  Youngman turned the radio on again. The stations in Tuba City no longer played music. Long periods of dead air were punctuated by bulletins. Tuba City was nearing its second day of quarantine . . . Fifteen dead at Shongopovi, twelve at Walpi . . . Utah and New Mexico state lines were closed . . . the evacuation of Flagstaff was orderly . . . the situation was in hand . . .

  “I’m going out to watch.” Youngman kissed Anne’s hand. “Let me know if you see anything on the screen.”

  He got out and stood in back of the Rover, looking up the road. Paine wasn’t coming back. Instead of leaving for the cave when he should have, Paine had overstayed on the ridge. Even asleep, Youngman had done as Abner had asked. As Abner had predicted, how long ago? A week? Only that long? And a week from now, who or what would be left? What would have happened to anyone if a week ago a deputy had been able to read a dead man’s sand painting?

  As Youngman felt for a cigarette, his bandaged hand fell on his pocket. He drew out the datura root.

  On his own, Youngman knew he didn’t have the strength to go to the cave. He could barely walk and his hands were almost useless.

  If only Paine had been right. If Paine had been the one man who could stop the bats.

  Youngman bit into the root. The largest bite he could manage, although he didn’t know how much he could handle. If he poisoned himself, Anne would drive him out of the canyon. If it was narcotic, they could go after Paine. What was there to lose? He let the bitterness pour down his throat.

  After Talawsohu came Ponochona, the Dog Star, and night was complete, darkest before dawn. All night ceremonies ended with the appearance of Ponochona, and then the priests would wait for the sun to tell them whether the ceremonies had been carried out correctly. One error would cause the rising sun to bring in its right hand a rainbow of reversed colors. Youngman waited, his arms and legs rigid, his mouth open, his heart slowing with every beat. His head lolled against the truck and his eyes followed the course of the stars, bright bats wheeling in a middle distance. The lights were all colors and in between were mixed auras, like colored grains of sand. He measured out minutes to the rare beats of his heart. A morning breeze blew on the left side of his face and traced its way with infinite slowness to the right. Showers of turquoise obscured the stars and then the desert burst into flames that leaped from end to end of the eastern horizon. The canyon began sailing into the flames.

  The flames covered Youngman and warmed him like a light blanket of gold. His body burned up and released him, letting him float upward. For a long time, he enjoyed nothingness, and for a long time he felt consciousness returning. Below him he found the world spinning slowly between two kachinas, one with a face of clouds and the other tarnished brown by the sun. They bowed to Youngman and gave the world a push.

  The world was different. An ocean lapped against a canopy of trees. Between the trees he could see familiar rows of corn and elsewhere were square obelisks and temples like statues alive with stone faces of tigers and snakes and bats writhing, their mouths gaping. The corn was fat and the wells were full of clear water but the people were leaving, walking along the axis of the earth for hundreds of years until they stopped at an inland sea surrounded by volcanoes. On the sea islands grew pyramids and on the pyramids formed steps mounted by blood-encrusted priests and guarded by soldiers dressed as animals. Yet some of the people left again, again walking the world’s axis north until they reached the edge of a desert. Under his eyes new c
ities grew. Mesa Verde, Aztec, Wupatki, Keet Seel. Each built and at the height of its prosperity abandoned until the people were gathered for their last great migration into the desert itself. Into four groups they divided themselves and in four directions they left, making a cross over the land until more hundreds of years passed and they wheeled right, forming a swastika. As this swastika wheeled, they broke into smaller groups, all returning but all moving in circles until the land was a giant’s pattern of moving swastikas and serpentines. A pueblo would live for an instant. Another group would find it and a spiral map of their predecessors’ path and then turn in the opposite direction, one eddy twisting from another, yet always directed to the finally permanent gathering at the center of the world. And there at the rim of the Black Mesa they finally did appear, at Oraibi and Hotevilla and Shongopovi, without water, without fertile land, without friends, at the mercy of their gods.

  Youngman saw himself, on his back, hands and feet outstretched, and covering the desert spinning slowly within a nimbus of yellow light.

  He had finally arrived. He was ready.

  “Feeling better?” Anne joined him.

  “More myself.”

  He took a deep, comfortable breath. The breeze of the dawn swayed a ringlet of soft hair at her temple and the slanting rays of the sun made her blue-brown eyes luminous.

  “You know, you’re very beautiful.” He got up.

  “Yes, that’s more like yourself. Come on, we’d better get ready if we’re going to go.”

  She climbed on the hood and handed down the unidirectional microphone to Youngman, who stowed the mike, amplifier, and oscilloscope in the rear of the truck. The equipment was almost weightless to Youngman. He looked at his hands and peeled off the bandages.