The Gorge

by Scott Nicholson

  God was delivering. He that sat on high was dishing it out big-time.

  And Ace, His servant, His vessel, His holy antenna on the mortal plane, could only accept and endure, and let the message pass through him. Coarse sand clung to his lips as he spewed forth words in a thousand lost languages. He didn’t know what they meant, and he didn’t care. He couldn’t crawl away from the thundering liquid blaze behind him. All he could do was wait for the storm to pass, or to engulf and swallow him, as God saw fit. And, oh, the red raw glory of Rapture. Praise be to Jesus, our Father who art in heaven, who laid me down by still waters, in sickness and in health “Get up.”

  Ace’s tongue pressed against his jagged teeth. Blood. He’d bitten his lip.

  Ace lifted his head. Red had gone to dark, though tiny streaks of lightning cracked the edges of the black shell above. The river was no longer in flames. It churned and whispered and hissed, a snake without end, sliding over the world in search of the hole that led to Hell.

  “Get up.”

  This wasn’t God’s voice. God had a deep, cruel, demanding voice-almost like that of his real father, the mortal man who had shot angry jism into a throwaway slut three decades before. God wasn’t talking to Ace. Not at the moment, but he’d told Ace plenty enough already.

  Ace blinked. I’ve gone blind. The lion tore out my eyes.

  He rose to his knees, running a gritty hand over his cheeks. Blood. Goddamned blood. He wiped, blinked again, hung between panic and surrender.

  Then he saw that it was night, and he remembered the gorge, the raft, and the angels. Clara. And his baby in her belly.

  And Bowie, who held Ace’s pistol. “Get up,” Bowie said a third time.

  “They took her,” Ace said.

  “They took other people, too. Some of them because of you.”

  “You don’t know.” Ace stood, his knees weak and wobbly. “You don’t know what they’re going to do. But I saw it.”

  “I saw it, too. She’s dead by now.”

  “No, she’s not dead. I tell you, I saw it.” For just a moment, Bowie’s silhouette rippled and transformed, became tall and brick red, scaly, eyes smoldering with the moon’s dead and buried light.

  “Doesn’t matter anymore. You didn’t kill me, and I don’t really feel like killing you.”

  “They took her to the cave. Lots of bones there. Put her on the rock.”

  “The rock?”

  “The Changing Rock.”

  “You can tell the forensic psychologist all about it when you stand trial.”

  Ace laughed, from so deep in his gut that it hurt. “You think you can arrest me? Like God cares about this cops-and-robbers horseshit? There’s only one law and one order and it don’t matter shit for you and what you want.”

  “Right now, I have the gun, so I’m the law.” Bowie, speaking just loudly enough to be heard over the river, his head held erect and his glare fixed on Ace like the mean teacher he’d had in sixth grade. Even in the bad light, there was no mistaking those eyes.

  Jesus, the fucker means business. Forgive him, for he knows not what the hell he doeth, but the river-rat bastard is dead serious.

  “They’re going to put her on the Changing Rock. They’re going to take my baby. Make it one of them.”

  “They’re animals. Vicious, cunning animals. Call them what you want, make up some comic-book legend, it doesn’t change anything.”

  “We got to hurry,” Ace said. He began walking away from the gun, and then broke into a crippled jog.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot, you son of a bitch,” Bowie shouted behind him. “God knows, I’ve earned the right.”

  “Go ahead,” Ace shouted back. “You can’t kill me. You can only make me deader.”

  He ran along the river, knees and lungs on fire, blood sweet in his mouth. God had showed him where to go. God didn’t show the whole picture, because it had never been that way. Part of the mystery and beauty of the visions was that God gave him a few pieces to the puzzle and Ace had to sort out the rest. He only wished it didn’t make his head hurt so fucking much.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  Farrengalli was close to coming when he heard the vampire-fucker’s shriek.

  He’d worked hard for the orgasm, and as it approached, he’d finally forgotten that he might get clawed, bitten, and bagged for a trophy at any moment. Except the hot little babe’s fingernails had done a number on his bare back. When she’d first called to him from the makeshift bed, he’d thought she was teasing him, doing some kind of dyke dance or playing a melodramatic mind game. And when she’d whispered, “Do me,” like an order, well, he’d still needed some convincing. It had taken fifteen seconds to prove she was no dyke, and another fifteen to show both her sincerity and her talents. It wasn’t easy to get the Big Boy Boomeroo up when fear was doing a shrivel number, but she worked hard to set the engorging blood in motion.

  And once the big boy got rolling, it liked to finish the ride. It was only fucking natural.

  But even the Boomeroo couldn’t withstand the effects of a balls-clenching shriek from the throat of a bloodsucking animal. And the monster had come out of nowhere, because the sky over the gorge had been quiet, only the occasional red wink of a distant jet to mar the clouds, stars, and smudge of moon.

  Farrengalli barely had time to withdraw the Boomeroo from its warm, wet, welcoming sheath when the creature struck him, flying sideways to ram into his shoulder. As Farrengalli was knocked across the rocky terrain, the slow-motion tumble knocked some thoughts together:

  … Dove had either come a half-dozen times or else she was the Meryl Streep of faking orgasm…

  … the Boomeroo was flopping like a bobble-head doll, right out in the open where the creature could rip it away like a monkey plucking a banana…

  … the creature had attacked not from the sky, but from the rear of the cave…

  … meaning the fucking redskin had let them down, not covered their asses, sold them down the river…

  Then he was rolling away from the mangling grip of the beast, trying to get up and run, hoping it would attack Dove instead, but it tackled him around the ankles, and this one was huge, not chimp-sized like the others. And the son of a bitch was strong.

  “You goddamned rapist!” the creature yelled, and Farrengalli elbowed the thing in the head before the words registered.

  The redskin.

  Gone off the deep end. Grinding his shoulder into Farrengalli’s gut, lifting him and slamming him onto his back. Raintree did some kind of homo wrestling move, then had Farrengalli pinned on his belly, his arms tucked under Farrengalli’s armpits, hands locked behind Farrengalli’s skull, applying enough pressure to nearly snap his neck.

  Farrengalli tried to roll away, but the man knew his stuff. Farrengalli’s knees were scraped and raw, and he couldn’t twist free. He remembered something he’d seen on World Wrestling Federation broadcasts, and though the matches were staged, the violent intent seemed real enough. Farrengalli jerked his head back hard, smashing it into the broad cartilage of Raintree’s nose. The full-nelson headlock loosened, and Farrengalli drove backward with his elbow again, causing the breath to whooosh out of his opponent. Twisting, he managed to work a knee into the Cherokee’s crotch.

  The man may have been an Olympic wrestler, but he didn’t know shit about fighting dirty.

  Farrengalli kicked again, breaking free, crab-crawling away. “Hold on, Chief!”

  In the muted moonlight, Raintree looked like something out of a Frederick Remington painting, savage, primitive, deadly. The Injun was on the warpath. He pulled the piton from his belt and closed in.

  Farrengalli backed up to the lip of the cave, holding his hands apart. “Easy, fellow,” he said, as if Raintree were a rabid, growling dog.

  His pupils are fucking HUGE.

  Raintree hunched, tensing his body as if preparing to leap. If he did, his momentum would knock them both into the gorge. Farrengalli could try to step aside, like they did in the mo
vies, but he wasn’t a stunt man and there was no safety net below.

  “She wanted it!” Farrengalli yelled. “She begged me for it!”

  He was aware of the Boomeroo in its now-flaccid state, exposed and dangling, where one blow with the crude blade of the piton would leave it laying in the dirt like a half-eaten, ketchup-drenched hot dog at a Labor Day cookout.

  Raintree eased two steps closer, the tension in his muscles almost palpable. The distant whisper of the river fought for attention in Farrengalli’s roaring eardrums.

  “Robert!” Dove called from the cave.

  Raintree’s pupils were black holes. Farrengalli looked left, then right, for a rock or something he could throw. He’d had a piton lying beside him while taking care of bidness with the fox, but the suddenness and ferocity of Raintree’s assault had caught him off guard.

  “Robert,” Dove said, her voice calmer now.

  “Listen to her,” Farrengalli said. “She’ll tell you.” He licked his lips. He shouldn’t have eaten all those granola bars. The water bottle he’d kept secret from the others was hidden in a crevice inside the cave. River water, but water nonetheless. If he got out of this mess alive, he’d drink nothing but Canadian beer for a solid week.

  Raintree hesitated, though his eyes remained just as wild, his biceps twitching. He finally spoke. “Does white man speak with forked tongue?”

  “What the fuck?” Farrengalli said.

  Raintree raised the piton, letting its tapered steel catch the moonlight. “Does he speak the truth, Dove?”

  “Come here,” she said.

  Raintree stood poised like a cigar store Indian, in a mockery of nobility that was all the more preposterous because it so closely resembled the real thing.

  Mocker. Raven Mocker. Is that what Chief called the Cherokees’ evil spirit?

  Farrengalli was starting to think Raintree was more evil than the vampire suckers. They were just hungry and stupid. Raintree was civilized, an American success story, buying into the whole corporate thing. But when pushed just a little, the veneer fell away and he stripped down to the same meat-eating monster as his ancestors.

  For all Farrengalli knew, the vampire suckers were Raintree’s ancestors.

  “She was loving it, brother,” Farrengalli said. “Hell, she’s just getting warmed up. Go ahead and take your turn.”

  Cigar-store Indian.

  Then Farrengalli realized Raintree wasn’t looking at him, but past him.

  He turned, the cool night air shrinking the Boomeroo even further, until it was hidden in the nest of his pubic hair.

  A flock of the creatures flew silently up the valley, stunted wings barely moving. Three came out of the mist, following the river. A few more emerged. Then more, spilling forth like shaved rats from a storm grate. Farrengalli couldn’t count them all.

  Their silence was more unsettling than their shrieks had been, and they soared with an eerie determination. Farrengalli stepped back into the cave, risking Raintree’s piton, but the creatures didn’t detect them.

  Or, Farrengalli thought, they know we’re here but they just don’t care. Like they got bigger fish to fry.

  One of them flew close, not altering course below them. Farrengalli’s breath caught.

  Doo-dah-fucking-day. That one looked like McKay!

  The creature had no hair, like the others, but its face wasn’t quite as wrinkled and it had the same arched brow as the dead bicyclist. A tattered piece of fabric, the same color as McKay’s royal blue SealSkinz, trailed from its neck like the cape of a deformed superhero, flapping in the wind.

  Being dead ain’t good enough. Being dead doesn’t mean you get out of this cluster fuck.

  All the more reason to keep from being dead.

  Farrengalli was about to suggest they all hide deep in the cave for a while, but the words never got a chance to leave his vocal chords. Raintree rammed into him from behind, knocking them both over the ledge and into the great gulf of space.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  Ace knew exactly where they had taken Clara.

  God had shone a thin, golden beam through the clouds, casting its pure light on a dark cleft in the granite. The opening was only about thirty feet above the river, and probably back in the days of Noah, it had been deep underground. But the Unegama had bitched and moaned, as persistent as a psychotic woman, until it cut deep into God’s green Earth and first released these underground demons.

  Why had God played such a trick? He’d let Ace think they were angels, in a nasty piece of bait and switch, and that they had been sent from above to assist in the holy work.

  It all came down to a test of faith. Why, God had tested the faith of Adam, Abraham, Jonah, Daniel, Job, pretty much every big name in the Good Book. He’d even tested his own worldly son, Jesus. So Ace should never have expected any different.

  Besides, God was still on his side, as promised by the guiding light.

  “Wait up,” Bowie rasped from behind him.

  Ace, beating his way through the scrub vegetation, had no reason to wait. This was his mission, even if Bowie now held the gun. Ace had something even more valuable: the C-4 in his knapsack, rigged with a touchy detonator.

  The river guide was maybe fifty feet behind him, and though Ace was exhausted, an inner fire kindled deep in his gut and warmed him. God may have tested him, but it also meant Ace was up there with the big names, that maybe one day an extra testament would be added and preachers would be reciting from the Book of Goodall.

  Ace had never been much for schooling, but he aimed to pass this test with flying colors.

  He scrambled along the base of the cliff wall, following a natural shelf toward the opening. A geologist might have explained erosion patterns and the different properties of various rock layers, but to Ace, the shelf was God’s version of the straight and narrow.

  Though he could use a vision right about now to give him a clue. In school, before he dropped out, he’d been able to bully other kids into cheating for him, or else just wrote the answers on the back of his hand. Except he always wrote down the wrong answers, or they always asked the wrong questions. Tricks. Always tricks.

  God, though I walk through the valley of death by the still waters, may I cast no shadow. And if it be Thy will, deliver me unto evil so that I might show you I’m worthy.

  And, just as simple as that, the demons came out of the misty night and winged toward the opening. Ace had guessed right. They were all gathering inside, gray, blind pigeons come home to roost.

  He paused, moving aside a branch to watch them enter. They were silent, except for the soft stirring of their wings and tongues.

  Three made a beeline for the rock cleft, slowing a little and angling sideways as they entered.

  Then came another batch.

  Feeding time.

  Except Ace knew they were after a different, darker kind of nourishment. They had passed up Bowie to go after Clara. They needed the thing in her belly.

  And goddamned if they were going to take his blood kin without a fight. A baby was a baby, and life was life. Worth fighting for, worth killing for, and worth dying for.

  Bowie caught up, breathing hard right behind him. “Jesus,” the rafting guide whispered.

  “Not exactly,” Ace said. He was calm, his pulse and hands as steady as they had been when he’d planted the clinic bombs. Some of his fellow patriots were hot-blooded, ranting about revenge and revolution, but Ace approached his duty with patience and humility. He was a servant. Rewards would surely follow, but not on this mortal plane.

  “How many of them are there?”

  “They are legion. Don’t you read the Good Book?”

  “Not lately.”

  “You ought to. Lot of wisdom in them pages.”

  “Any instructions on this kind of thing?”

  Ace watched another small flock of the creatures descend and swerve into the cave, their gray flesh making them look like glass ravens in the moonlight. “There’s o
ne of yours,” he said, pointing.

  “Shit. Can’t be.”

  “Proof that he wasn’t worthy. I expect your other people will be along shortly.”

  “Vampires. Farrengalli was right.”

  “Call them whatever you want. They’re unfit. Cast into eternal darkness.”

  “She’s already dead, you know.”

  Ace shook his head as the stream of demons slowed and the gorge again fell hushed except for the riffing melody of the river. “Don’t matter none. Being dead don’t get you off the hook. And they ain’t getting’ my baby. Dead or alive.”

  Ace stepped from the low, concealing trees and walked toward the light.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  Raintree heard Dove call his name as he took Farrengalli over the edge and into space. Or maybe he imagined it, because the loud smack as he and Farrengalli slammed into the side of the cliff was followed by exploding fireworks inside his skull.

  The intensity of the headache was rivaled by the orange strip of napalm in his leg. He was dimly aware of the naked man hanging onto him with a passion Farrengalli had probably never shared with a lover.

  He opened his eyes, and the river was above him, its rapids pale in the light of the grounded moon.

  Farrengalli’s arms were wrapped around his waist, hooked in his belt. The two of them were swaying, and Raintree understood.

  Amateur technique. Poor awareness. The kind of thing you’d expect from a pill-head.

  He’d left the safety rope secured in its anchor, coiled loosely at the edge of the cave. His foot had tangled and aborted his kamikaze attack. Hanging upside down, his leg broken and the tendons separating further by the second, blood pouring from his scalp and nose, he could only imagine how silly he must look. A red puppet on a yo-yo string. He laughed.

  Farrengalli planted his toes on Raintree’s chin, launching himself upward, grabbing for the rope. Raintree was too weak to hold onto him, the Olympic grip now impotent. His back was pinned to the mat, the ref counting down.