“Yes, said Dellhart, stepping up to the doorway. “We were out hiking in the mountains this morning and…well, hell, it’s sort of embarrassing to admit, but we got lost. Can’t even find where we parked our rental car. I was wondering if you could give us a ride.” He took a fifty-dollar bill from his pants pocket and held it out to the man. “Will this get us a seat?”
“Sure enough will,” smiled the driver. He reached down and snatched the bill from Dellhart’s fingers. “Climb aboard. I’ve got a straight route to Knoxville, but I can let you off at Tucker’s Mill or Mountain View if you’d like.”
“No, Knoxville is fine. That’s where our hotel is anyway,” replied Dellhart as he ushered Jenny up the steep stairway of the passenger bus.
“Then we crossed paths at just the right time.” The driver closed the folding door and nodded toward the double row of seats behind him. You folks grab yourself a seat back there and leave the driving to us.”
Dellhart escorted Jenny down the narrow aisle way toward the center of the bus. The vehicle was nearly empty. Only a few passengers sat scattered along its length—a solemn nun reading a Bible, a cowboy drifter snoozing with his hat pulled down over his eyes, and a perky, fresh-faced family consisting of a husband, wife, and giggling baby girl sitting at the rear. They couldn’t make any of the passengers out very well, for the interior of the bus was shadowy due to the dark tint of the windows. Very little sunlight seemed to filter in at all.
Denham chose a seat isolated from the other passengers and, with a warning glare of his crisp blue eyes, directed his hostage to sit down. Jenny passively obeyed and took the spot next to the window, stifling the urge to start kicking and screaming for help. She knew that the bus was no place to try a foolish escape attempt, for the simple fact that it could endanger the lives of the other passengers and the friendly driver as well. Jackson Dellhart was a very desperate man at that moment; she could clearly see that caged emotion in his eyes. If she sounded the alarm, Dellhart could end up killing everyone on the bus in order to save his own hide.
The driver put the Greyhound into gear and headed north along Highway 411. Dellhart settled back in his seat and let the deep thrum of the engine lull away the tension of the past hour on Pale Dove Mountain.
Jenny wasn’t so relieved to be on the road. She knew the sudden change in Dellhart’s plans didn’t exclude the fate he had in mind for her. Sooner or later, she must try to escape. Perhaps when they reached the bustle of the crowded airport, she would find an opportunity to make a run for it and hope that she didn’t catch a bullet in the process.
“It stinks in here,” she complained as the bus cruised around the western side of the mountain.
“Stop your bitching,” Dellhart warned. He breathed deeply and found that she was right. It was a little rank inside the vehicle. A nasty odor that smelled like spoiled meat hung in the air. In fact, the entire bus had an oddly uncomfortable feeling to it. The interior was much too warm and humid, and the black upholstery of the seat was strangely damp and sticky to the touch.
Dellhart craned his neck and watched through the broad windshield of the Greyhound—which seemed as darkly tinted as the side windows—and saw the turnoff that led up the western face to Brice’s cabin. There were a couple of state patrol cars parked there with their blue lights flashing. At first, Dellhart was sure that they had set up a roadblock across the highway. But on second glance he saw that they were only sealing off the mouth of the access road.
The bus began to speed up slightly as they neared the two cars, which were parked nose to nose at the mouth of the mountain road. Dellhart smiled, feeling smug satisfaction at having escaped the mountain undetected and triumph at having pulled the wool over the eyes of the state police.
However, those emotions soon gave way to a heart-pounding jolt of fear and confusion as the driver jerked sharply on the wheel and steered the bus off the surface of the main highway and straight for the two patrol cars.
Abruptly, there was a tremendous crash. The blunt nose of the Greyhound slammed into the front fenders of the abandoned cars, pushing them aside as if they weighed nothing. The driver laughed loudly as he stepped on the accelerator and sent the bus into a swift, climbing ascent up the mountainside.
Jackson Dellhart drew the magnum and lurched from his seat. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, brandishing the gun threateningly.
The driver cackled wildly. “We’re taking a shortcut…straight to hell!”
Dellhart was about to run forward and take control of the bus himself, but he was frozen in his tracks when the driver turned around, revealing his face. A loud crackling echoed through the bus as a strange transformation began to contort the man’s features. The friendly face of the black man was turning increasingly lighter in pallor, almost to the point of grayness, and the bone structure of the cheeks and jaws were growing gaunter in nature. Suddenly the metamorphosis was completed and Dellhart found himself staring into the ashen face of a man he knew only from the pictures in his Project Pale Dove file. The face of an elderly man whose horrible torture and death he had been responsible for.
Dellhart raised his gun and aimed it at the leering face of Fletcher Brice. He was about to pull the trigger when the hand of the silent nun reached out and grabbed his arm. He screamed out as the bones of his wrist were instantly ground into splinters by the viselike fingers of the Sister. The .44 Magnum spun from his convulsing hand and landed on an empty seat, where it was swallowed up as though sinking into some dark mass of absorbent tissue.
He looked down, his ears filled with the unnerving sound of crackling, and watched as the face of the nun slowly switched from one countenance to another. The passive features that had once glowed with the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures now grimaced in rage, the smooth gray skin deeply furrowed with battle scars. “Where are you going, Dellhart?” rasped Frag Hendrix. “Sit back and enjoy the ride!”
Dellhart wrenched his broken arm away from the creature’s slimy grasp and stumbled backward. A multitude of strong hands clutched at him from all sides of the aisle way, dragging him off his feet and pressing him back into his seat. The crackling grew in intensity and volume. He flailed out and his fist hit one of the side windows. His hand rebounded as though it had hit a tautly stretched membrane—darkly translucent, yet incredibly durable. The bogus windows on each side of the bus began to slowly thicken and close in on themselves, for the illusion was no longer necessary. The deception had already served its purpose and the prey was securely ensnared within the trap.
“Jenny!” called Fletcher Brice from the driver’s seat. “It’s time to let you off!”
The woman sat crouched in shocked immobility, watching the fetid, gray-fleshed things as they grappled with Jackson Dellhart. At the sound of her father’s voice, however, she stood up and scrambled past the struggling executive. “Hurry!” rasped one of the things that held Dellhart captive in his seat. Its face pulsed and swirled, the features slowly molding into a ghastly replica of Deputy Homer Peck.
She made it to the center aisle and started forward. The floor of the bus heaved and settled with a life of its own.
Mucus-like secretions boiled around her feet and sucked at the soles of her shoes, threatening to bog her down like an insect on flypaper. As Jenny neared the front of the monstrous Greyhound, sunlight broke through the gathering darkness as the nose of the bus split open. A toothy maw appeared there. She hurried toward the gruesome exit way, feeling the bus slow to a lumbering creep.
Jenny paused for a long second and regarded the familiar face of the driver. “Papa?” she whispered as emotion threatened to overcome her.
The thing masquerading as Fletcher Brice smiled gently at her with all the love and tenderness that her true father had never shown her. “You’d best leave now, daughter,” he told her in that gravelly voice she had known since childhood.
Tears welled in her eyes as the mouth of the bestial bus yawned, giving her enough access for
escape. Suddenly, she had a million things she wanted to say, a million things she wanted to tell this eerie incarnation of Fletcher Brice before she took her leave. But she knew that she only had time to say one. “I love you, Papa,” she managed.
“I love you, too,” said the Dark’Un with a gentle smile, voicing the words that she had longed to hear from her true father. “Now, get going.”
Without looking back, Jenny Brice leapt from the spiky cave of the gaping mouth and dodged to the side of the road, letting the dark juggernaut pass as it continued up the mountainside.
Inside the belly of the beast, Jackson Dellhart struggled to no avail. The faceless, formless creatures that held him down had now taken the appearance of those who had died because of his greedy quest for Pale Dove Mountain. He writhed and wailed as he stared into their horrible gray faces. The three Stoogeone brothers were there, as well as Colin Wainwright and the unfortunate surveyor, Steve Ratcliff. They were all an extension of the same hideous being, sprouting from the cushiony floor of the bus like pustulant growths with minds of their own. He recoiled from their touch as they crowded around him, their pitch black eyes burning with a hatred that far exceeded any that he could ever conjure from the dark cancer of his own soul. Through the physical manifestation of the Dark’Un, his unwilling victims were back from the realm of the dead, ready to initiate him into the hellish ranks of the damned.
Dellhart slipped his good hand from the grasp of fiendish Skeeter Newland and snaked it into a side pocket of his trousers, searching for his last remaining weapon. A weapon that he had completely forgotten about—until now.
A pair of gray hands grasped his head and he stared toward the gnashing maw of the Dark’Un as the crackling grew louder and he felt the entire structure of the living bus begin to take on an entirely different form. The interior lost its even rows of comfortable seats, the walls growing smooth and pliant. Dark secretions began to seep from the inner tissues, dripping down upon him. The potent juices of the Dark’Un’s digestive tract bathed Dellhart’s skin, sizzling as they ate away his flesh like sulfuric acid. He began to howl as the fluid covered him, dissolving his clothing, his epidermis, and then the raw red fiber of the muscles and ligaments underneath.
The last thing he saw, before the acid reached his face and reduced his handsome baby blue eyes to useless jelly, was a fleeting glimpse through the closing jaws of the monster. The scenery of the mountainside slipped away and was replaced by the cloudless blue expanse of the Southern sky as the dark creature transformed into some vast black fowl and took to the air.
Laughter blared in his putrefying ears, the mocking laughter of the thing that had cleverly swallowed him moments before. But despite the certainty of agonizing death, Jackson Dellhart found himself joining in the hilarity. His peals of triumphant laughter rang through the innards of the beast as his bony hand discovered the object of its frantic search—the fragmentation grenade that had been concealed in his back pocket. With the last effort of his melting muscles, Dellhart raised the grenade to his exposed teeth and, with a jerk of his skeletal head, pulled the pin free.
He counted off the final seconds, knowing that he had won even in defeat. He would destroy the dreaded and invincible Dark’Un as he had originally vowed, delivering the killing blow from the tender vulnerability hidden within.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“I’m through screwing around with these guys,” Jacobi told the other soldiers who crouched behind the boulders that lined the flowery pathway. The three nodded solemnly, for they had also grown weary of the firefight. He could see that their morale had hit bottom, especially after Quinn had been wasted by the MAC-10 and Weinhold wounded by a potshot from the .357 Magnum. Looking back, he knew the disillusionment had started before those incidents. Throughout their long trek up the mountainside, they had become increasingly aware that they were losing this seemingly simple battle against the inhabitants of Pale Dove Mountain. First, they had lost contact with Khiem, Jamal, and Lopez, then witnessed for themselves the hellish assault overhead, a battle of reality versus nightmare that had pitted Skeeter’s mercenary squadron of armed choppers against a horrid demon in the image of an F-16 fighter jet.
Now it seemed that they were the last survivors of Frag Hendrix’s crack commando unit as well. Thirty minutes had passed since they’d left Red Team at the massive crater in the clearing below. Hendrix and the others should have joined them by now. Checking out a hole in the ground was no big deal—unless the thing inside the pit was still alive. He recalled the distant echo of grenade explosions and the distinctive blast from the LAWS rocket launcher only a short time ago. Such a barrage usually spelled victory, but after the crushing defeat that the other teams had been subjected to, Jacobi had a dismal feeling that his iron-fisted commander had suffered a similar fate.
Well, it isn’t going to happen to us, he promised himself. The job is going to get done, one way or another. Careful not to expose himself, he unshouldered his backpack and rummaged through the contents for the materials he would need. He crouched behind the boulder and laid out the makings of a bomb—two rectangular blocks of C-4 explosive, detonation caps, and a small quartz timer. While his men laid down a barrage of suppressing fire, keeping the two in the cave occupied, he took his time and constructed a device that would seal the cave permanently, blocking the inner passageway with solid rock and earth for a good ten meters. He connected the last wire and set the LCD display with a ten-second delay.
“Okay, you guys get ready to move when I throw this baby,” he told them. “Thompson, you help Weinhold down the pathway. Baker and I will be right behind you. All right, on the count of three. One…two…” Jacobi stood up, his arm cocked back and ready to hurl the bundle of explosives into the mouth of the cave. “Three!” He activated the timer button with his thumb and then tossed the bomb toward its intended target.
The others were already heading down the flowery trail, putting as much distance between themselves and the point of impact as possible. Jacobi was whirling on his heels, ready to follow them down, when he glanced back to make sure that the cluster of C-4 was heading toward the open hollow. Much to his surprise, it was stopped in midair. He watched as the pale-flowered limb of a dogwood tree snapped out and caught the bomb in its curling branches. Like the lanky arm of a baseball pitcher, it reared back and shot the explosive in the direction from which it came.
Jacobi hit the ground hard as the bomb whistled over his head, as well as those of the retreating soldiers. It landed in the pathway fifteen feet in front of them and detonated a second later. The end of the trail was totally engulfed in a chaotic burst of blinding fire and deadly debris, sending a shuddering quake through the very core of Pale Dove Mountain. Thompson and Weinhold were killed instantly, taking the brunt of the explosion and disintegrating amid the rending fire flash. Baker was riddled by a dozen stone projectiles. He fell to his back on the pathway and wailed with the agony of his wounds. Then something totally inexplicable happened, something that Jacobi saw with his own eyes, but could scarcely believe. The white-flowered vegetation on one side of the pathway began to move of its own accord. Pale branches and vines snaked out, wrapping tightly around Baker’s convulsing limbs. Kicking and screaming, the soldier was pulled from the smoking pathway and into the savage heart of the living garden. The man vanished from sight, but his shrieks of horror grew in volume and intensity. Abruptly, they faded as the sound of splintering bone and tearing flesh came from the wall of fragrant dogwood and Lily of the Valley.
Jacobi lifted his M-16 and sighted down on the thrashing plant life. But before he could fire, a tendril of pale-leafed honeysuckle lashed out and encircled the barrel of the assault rifle. With a jerk, it tore the weapon from Jacobi’s grasp. The gun clattered down the littered pathway and disappeared into the steaming hole made by the explosion.
He could only stand there, frozen to the spot like a panicked rabbit, as the thorny arms of surrounding rose bushes snagged him from all sides
, entwining his flailing arms and legs, denying him any chance for escape. A spiky vine wrapped around his throat. Its razored barbs dug deeply, drawing trickles of blood. Slowly, it began to tighten, strangling the breath from his struggling form. As Jacobi began to black out, he saw the single bloom of a pure white rose hover before his purple face. Within the soft petals of the flower, he could make out two tiny pink eyes. They blazed at him not with malice or hatred, but with an emotion he could only describe as angry regret. Even as it choked the life from him, Jacobi somehow knew that the pale creature deplored the necessity of its deadly action.
Glen and Rowdy had witnessed the death of Jacobi and his fellow mercenaries from the mouth of the cave. So had Joe Nickles and his group of armed troopers, who had reached the rocky peak just as the explosion went off.
“Well, it looks like the cavalry did show up after all,” said Rowdy as the law officers jumped over the smoking crevice and joined them on the other side. “Too late for this fellow, but then I reckon he got what he deserved.” They stared down at the twisted form of the mercenary. Jacobi glared up at them with bulging eyes and a dark tongue poking between his teeth, looking like an unruly child throwing a temper tantrum.
Glen reached over and curiously touched one of the rose bushes. The plant recoiled at his touch, then bashfully surrendered to his attention, purring like a contented kitten as the storekeeper’s fingers stroked its pale petals.
“What the hell are these things?” asked the bewildered police captain. He recalled the way the rose bush had mercilessly throttled the soldier at their feet. “And why are these guys here? On our way up the mountain we saw some wreckage that looked like military helicopters.”
“It’s a long story,” came the voice of Gart Mayo. They turned to find two albinos carrying the sheriff on the makeshift stretcher. Lance LaBlanc and the others followed. “I’ll tell you the whole fantastic story later on. Right now, you’d best find that bastard Dellhart.”
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