Lowell wasn’t about to just stand by and watch and, tomahawk raised, he sprang forward. The men and women awaiting the return of the waters, and, presumably, the birth of a new Reata, had backed against the walls, terrified, trying to stay out of the way and protect their own hides. Lowell jumped over the concierge, whose own neck was being throttled by a strong hand that looked like that of a skeleton covered in parchment, and raised his tomahawk above the exposed head of the Founder. For a fraction of a second, he saw into those cold ancient eyes, saw in them dark depths that he could not even fathom. Then he was bringing the stone edge of the weapon down on the scraggly-haired head as hard as he could again and again and again until the body was no longer twitching and the skull was crushed beyond recognition.
He stopped finally, sweating from the steam and the passion and the exertion, breathing heavily through his mouth. The chef was whimpering, cowering in a corner, and some of the other men and women were still alive too, hiding their hideous faces with their hands or their hats, but most of them had gone the way of all flesh and were little more than rotting corpses and dried dead husks of the people they had been.
Those white wraiths were gone, too, returned to whatever hell had spawned them.
And Jim was dead.
Somehow Lowell had not expected that. He’d thought he’d arrived in time to save the old man, but Harrison’s grip had been strong and sure, and it had probably taken less than a minute to crush the life out of the concierge. Lowell felt sad but at the same time grateful, although he could not help wondering if the two of them would have been able to get away with such a slapdash harebrained attack if the ritual had been completed and the waters had been restored. He had the feeling that at full strength, the Founder could have dispatched them both with ease. It was only the fact that the spring had not been revived that had saved them.
Ryan had saved them.
The steam dissipated, the water stopped bubbling, and vegetables and body parts bobbed to the dark surface of the pool, but there was no sign of his son. He was down there at the bottom with the bones, Lowell thought, but as if in response, the brackish water began to be siphoned away, the pool level shrinking inches before his eyes until it was down one foot, two, three, four. . . .
There was no shallow end, Lowell saw now. The entire pool was of a uniform depth well in excess of a hundred feet. At the bottom was a black hole, and somewhere down that hole was Ryan.
He didn’t want to think about that now, he couldn’t think about it, and in a daze he lurched out of the pool room, meeting Rachel and the twins halfway down the corridor. They’d come to tell him that the fat man had dissolved before their eyes, and when Lowell passed through the weight room on his way out, he saw what looked like drips of cooked fat on the metal bars of the weight machine.
They stepped outside.
He told them what had happened.
The resort was dark, all of the lights and torches out. Dead bodies were everywhere, in various stages of decomposition, and among the corpses wandered stunned guests and exhausted employees, confused and frightened.
The sky was lightening in the east, above the mountains, the sky fading from black to dark blue. He knew he should try to find Rand Black or Jose or Laszlo, one of the other Cactus Wrens or one of the employees, knew he should search the once again dead resort for survivors, but he just couldn’t do it. Supported by his family, he stumbled across the sand, past the dark lobby and the downed totem poles toward the sunken buckboard wagon. All four of them holding tightly to one another, they trudged back to The Reata, or what was left of it, and when they emerged from the canyon, a helicopter was hovering over the ruins of the resort. On the ground, between the rubble and the palm trees, were the flashing lights of emergency vehicles in the parking lot.
They were saved.
Rescuers had finally arrived.
Other men and women, and more than a few children, were already in the parking lot awaiting transportation, having told their stories to disbelieving policemen, firemen and paramedics. Lowell, Rachel, Curtis and Owen joined the crowd, and when a clearly stunned police officer asked them what had happened, Lowell discovered that he could not speak. Though crying, Rachel jumped in, starting to explain from the beginning, from the night Blodgett stole their room and her underwear, and Lowell sat down hard on the ground. The tears came then, tears that threatened never to stop but to go on forever. Great sobs wracked his body, and he cried as he had never cried in his life. He cried for himself, for Rachel, for the twins, for everyone here at The Reata.
But most of all he cried for his son, his youngest, his hope for the future, the light of his life.
A smart and quiet boy named Ryan.
Born in Arizona shortly after his mother attended the world premiere of Psycho, Bentley Little is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of fourteen previous novels and The Collection, a book of short stories. He has worked as a technical writer, reporter/photographer, library assistant, sales clerk, phonebook deliveryman, video arcade attendant, newspaper deliveryman, furniture mover, and rodeo gatekeeper. The son of a Russian artist and an American educator, he and his Chinese wife were married by the justice of the peace in Tombstone, Arizona.
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