by John Inman
Real estate wasn’t as expensive on the mountain or in the town of Spangle as it was in the tonier California cities. Yet the mountain cabin and the little clapboard house in town where Terry had lived with Bobby, and from where he worked as a notary public, constituted the bulk of Terry’s financial worth, and he would sorely hate to lose it.
If the authorities decided to blow the area sky-high in an effort to wipe the creatures off the face of the earth, they would pretty well wipe Terry out as well. He would be left with nothing. And if he was still on the mountain when they dropped the bombs, he wouldn’t even be left with his life. Nor would Jonas. They would be as dead as the creatures.
And that was unacceptable. Jonas loaded all the equipment into the back of the Jeep. They were both decked out in their modern-day coats of armor, as they were every time they went outside. Jonas had the .38 strapped to his waist in the holster they’d swiped from the sporting goods store in town, and Terry had his 16-guage shotgun dangling off his shoulder. Both guns were loaded, with the safeties on, and since neither man really knew much about firearms, Terry’s greatest fear was they would accidentally shoot each other before the authorities had a chance to blow them up or the creatures got around to consuming them.
Equipment loaded, they angled their long legs into the Jeep and buckled up: Terry behind the wheel, Jonas in the passenger seat. Bruce stood on his back legs on the console between them, peering over the dash to watch the trail unfold before them. The little pug had howled his head off, refusing to be left behind this time, so Terry had him tethered to his leash, determined to take him along wherever he and Jonas decided to go.
They had lingered late in bed, then dawdled over breakfast, so part of the day was behind them when they started out. The late morning was crisp and nippy. The sky, a smudgeless blue bowl above their heads, was on full view through the mangled remains of the Jeep’s canvas roof, that reminder of the creatures dragging Bobby through it to his death. The remaining tattered canvas was still discolored with Bobby’s blood. Terry tried to keep his eyes turned away from the unintended skylight whenever he drove the Jeep.
Jonas clearly had no similar compunctions. He eyed the shredded canvas warily. “It’s gonna be cold in this Jeep if the temperature drops much more. Maybe we should car shop the next time we go into town. Even if there aren’t any car dealers, there must be a vehicle parked somewhere we can confiscate. Preferably something with a metal roof. Not a Ferrari. They’re snazzy but too low-slung. They’d bottom out on the trails. Might make for a fast getaway, though, and God knows we’d look sexy sitting in one.” He offered up a sneaky grin to show he was kidding.
“Funny,” Terry sniped. But he shot Jonas a friendly wink nevertheless. “We’ll check it out next time we’re off the mountain.”
Jonas rubbed his gloved hands together. “Goody. I love car shopping.”
Terry clucked his tongue. “Don’t give yourself airs. What you’re talking about isn’t car shopping. It’s actually grand theft auto.”
Jonas grinned. “Now, now, Bwana.”
While Terry drove, Jonas unfolded the United States Geological Survey map and spread it out in front of him, holding it flat to the dash and away from the wind whipping through the cab. Ever since Jonas brought it with him to the cabin, he’d spent long hours in front of the fire studying the map. They had concentrated their first efforts on securing the cabin, but now that was out of the way, and it was time to get down to business. That business was called survival. And the only way for them to truly survive was to locate the creatures and destroy them before the authorities took it into their heads to blow up the whole frigging mountain.
The two cave entrances were clearly marked on the USGS map. Located by satellite Infrared Thermal Detection, or IR, they showed up as dark shadows opening to the mountain’s surface. The maps only showed the cave openings, not the depth to which the caves descended or how far beneath the mountain’s surface they spread.
From the corner of his eye, Terry watched Jonas stare intensely at the map, like he was trying to wring every piece of information he could glean from the damn thing. Jonas had drawn from that well of intensity before. When he was writing. When he was hunting. Hell, when he was making love. Everything Jonas did, he seemed to give it his all. As if he only had one chance for success, and he wasn’t going to soften his approach until he got things right. Their relationship included. Even now, eyes fixed on the map, Jonas reached across the console behind Bruce and brought his hand to rest on Terry’s thigh as if determined to keep Terry in the loop, perpetuating a connection, making sure he knew he wasn’t forgotten even while Jonas’s own thoughts were a million miles away.
Terry liked that intensity about Jonas. He liked Jonas’s need to touch, his desire to maintain a bridge between them at all times.
Raising his voice loud enough to carry over the wind and the roar of the old Jeep as it grumbled its way up the side of the mountain, Terry said without taking his eyes off the road, “I’ll still want to be with you, you know. Even when this is all over.”
Jonas didn’t appear touched by Terry’s statement. He didn’t appear moved or surprised. Continuing to stare at the map, he simply answered, “I’ll still want to be with you too.”
Terry placed his hand over Jonas’s and pressed them both against his belly while with the other hand he steered the Jeep up the potholed lane. “If there’s a mountain left standing, will you live with me here? Or do you have to go back to the city for your work?”
Jonas shrugged, his eyes still on the map. “I’m a writer. I can work anywhere. How about you?”
It was Terry’s turn to shrug. “This is my home. I’d like to stay here. Being a substitute teacher, I’m used to commuting. I’m on call with six different school districts, some as far away as San Diego. The notary work I do out of my house in town is my bread and butter.”
“So we’ll manage, then,” Jonas said.
Terry smiled. “Yeah. If we find the creatures and destroy them, and we don’t go to prison for looting, and if we can avoid getting nuked by the Feds, and you don’t wrap our stolen Ferrari around a tree with us in it, then I suppose we’ll manage.”
The Jeep hit a rut, and all three occupants bounced skyward. Bruce gave a startled yelp and scrambled to keep his back feet beneath him. Jonas howled, “Ow!” when he came down hard and drove his asscheek into the pistol strapped to his hip.
Terry reached over and scratched Bruce’s ears. Bruce gave him a grateful lick in return, then continued to cling to the dash and eye the road ahead. His little tail whipped back and forth in anticipation. Christopher Bruce Columbus, pug dog extraordinaire, eyes on the horizon, worlds to conquer.
“Do you know where we’re headed?” Jonas asked, rubbing his butt.
“I think so. I’m still cross-eyed from studying that damn map for hours last night, but I think I’ve got it all figured out.”
“Have you been in this cave before?”
“No, but the map is pretty clear. I can find it without too much trouble.”
They rode on in silence. The day was coming awake, the sun clawing its way toward the top of that vast blue bowl of sky overhead. The surrounding trees were bristling with wildlife—birds, squirrels, and chipmunks galore. In no hurry whatsoever, a skunk and its three young ones waddled across the trail up ahead. Terry slammed on the brakes and waited patiently while the animals meandered one by one into the underbrush, leaving the scent of ammonia behind.
Terry downshifted to low and goosed the Jeep up the last steep incline. Wheels spinning, throwing up dirt and mulch in their wake, the vehicle topped the mountain’s crest and began descending the other side. In the distance, they could see the town of Spangle sprawled out below. The buildings looked deserted. No smoke rose from chimneys. No vehicles moved along the dusty streets.
“Ghost town,” Jonas whispered, as if in wonder.
“There are a few people there,” Terry answered. “I’m sure of it. All of them
wouldn’t have fled. And all of them can’t be dead either. Maybe they’re hiding out in the school auditorium or the public library. Someplace big enough where they could all be together.”
“Why wouldn’t they leave?”
Terry shrugged. “Same reason I didn’t, I suppose. It’s their home. And a lot of people around here have a sort of frontier mentality. Stubborn. Antiestablishment. Liking a good fight and deathly determined to hold on to what’s theirs.”
As if to prove his point that there were still people in residence, Terry pointed. “See? There. Look!”
A lone figure, an older man by the way he moved, was running along the sidewalk in front of the town’s one and only movie house, which had been closed and boarded up for years.
Jonas gave a soft whistle. “Wow. He’s really moving. Is he being chased?”
Terry shook his head. Sadly. “I don’t know.” As if suddenly wearied by what he’d seen, Terry slipped the Jeep into gear and trundled forward, riding his brake down the steep incline, descending the mountain slowly. He’d traveled less than three hundred yards when he pulled off the path, tucking the Jeep into a bank of shadow from an ancient pine tree that had probably been on the mountain longer than the two of them had been alive. The bright sunlight blinked out as if someone had flipped a switch. Under the pines it was forever dusk, an inch away from night. The birds in the branches fell silent, watching them. Leery. Waiting to see what they were going to do.
Terry lifted his chin, indicating the hazy tangle of trees ahead. “According to your map, the cave is right in there,” he said. “Maybe a hundred yards into the woods.”
Terry popped his door open and set a single foot onto the mulchy ground. Before he could set the other foot down, a woman’s scream echoed across the mountain. The cry was so sharp, a flock of starlings exploded from the trees. Goose bumps popped up on the back of Terry’s neck, and he damn near lost his balance. Jonas was rattled too. He came scurrying around the Jeep to grab Terry by the arm and hiss in his ear.
“Who was that? Where did it come from?”
Terry grabbed the shotgun from the back seat and flipped the safety off. “Arm yourself,” he whispered.
With shaking fingers, Jonas released the .38 from its holster and tripped the safety. He held the gun out to his side, pointed up. With his other hand he clutched at the back of Terry’s jacket.
Terry tied Bruce’s leash to the steering wheel to assure he wouldn’t follow, then stooping low, he and Jonas headed into the trees.
Chapter Seventeen
ANOTHER SCREAM of terror rolled over them. It was definitely a woman, and she was definitely close. There was an echoing quality to the scream, like it had come from the bottom of a well.
Or the depths of a cave, Jonas suddenly realized.
Jonas was so unnerved by the woman’s tortured wail he could barely catch his breath. He crept along through the trees at Terry’s back, chewing his bottom lip, looking in every direction at once. Imagining threats that weren’t there. Hearing noises that didn’t exist. His muscles were so knotted up he could barely walk. It was a chore to put one quaking foot in front of the other without falling flat on his face. The gun was dead weight in his hand. He pointed it straight up into the air now for fear he would stumble and shoot Terry in the back.
He hooked his chin over Terry’s shoulder and whispered, “Shouldn’t we be running the other way?”
“Hush!” Terry whispered back. He lifted his shotgun higher, calmly pointing it straight ahead. The barrel wasn’t shaking at all. Jonas had to give Terry credit for all that composure. He certainly wasn’t showing much himself.
By the time they slipped from between the last of the trees, the screaming up ahead had stopped. The silence left behind was even more nerve-racking than the scream. They stepped out onto a small bald. The bald, or meadow, was located at the base of a steep cliff that looked to Jonas’s untrained eye like a sweep of sandstone rising up from the face of the mountain. Parts of the cliff face had only recently broken away, perhaps due to the rain, and avalanched down the hill, gathering into a mound of debris at the foot of it. Streams of mud, great boulders as big as automobiles, and a lot of cliffside foliage, including a few fallen trees, had been swept down the hill in the collapse.
Off to the side of the mess, Jonas could see a smudge of black between two vast heaps of scree and stone. The smudge was clearly a blob of shadow. And the shadow clearly led into the very cave they had been searching for.
Of the woman who had screamed, there was no sign.
Terry stepped closer to the cave entrance. He placed his feet carefully among the loose rocks, probably to avoid losing his footing, to say nothing of trying to keep his approach silent. Jonas, still clutching at the back of Terry’s jacket, stuck to him like glue. His little .38 was still pointed skyward where he couldn’t kill anybody if it accidently went off.
The opening to the cave was far larger than the last one they had entered. This time there was no need to crawl at all. The entrance was pretty much the size of an ordinary door, without the smooth edges, maybe seven feet high and three across at its broadest point.
To Jonas’s dismay, Terry didn’t hesitate. He switched on his Maglite and slipped through the entrance. Reluctantly, Jonas followed. He still had his face mask down, as did Terry, but once they were inside Terry lifted his so he could see better in the dark. Jonas left his face covered, unsure what he was about to find. In other words, unsure if some of the flying creatures were in here waiting to suck his face off.
Another scream erupted, this time far closer and far louder. It came from somewhere ahead of them in the shadows. The sound was so piercing and startling, Jonas jumped and almost dropped his gun.
The next sound they heard was even more startling. It was the full-throated growl of a cat. Not a house cat. A large cat. Like a mountain lion. In fact, Jonas quickly realized, it wasn’t like a mountain lion at all. It fucking was a mountain lion.
The animal was hidden behind a mound of shattered rocks, scree, and shale-like spears of stone. The mass in the middle of the cavern came from a rockfall that had collapsed part of the roof. Jonas could see the scar in the light of Terry’s flashlight beam. Like outside, this fall looked to be fairly recent. Standing on the opposite side of the heap from Terry and Jonas stood a woman and a young girl of about eight, visible from the waist up. The child had hair even redder than Terry’s. She was clutching at the terrified woman—who, judging by her own flaming red hair, was the child’s mother—beside her. They were both staring goggle-eyed in horror at whatever had made the growling noise on the other side of the rocks, where Jonas couldn’t see.
Once again, Terry’s calm astounded him. He slowly, step by careful step, moved around the mound of fallen stone, easing closer to the woman and child. And to the hidden menace lurking on the other side.
He spoke quietly, as if sharing confidences over a cup of tea. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Terry told the woman as he kept moving closer, craning his neck, trying to see what the threat really was. “My friend and I have guns. We’ll protect you. I need to know. Are there any of the flying creatures in this cave?”
The woman remained staring straight ahead, speechless with terror. The child looked up at her mother, then squinted into the beam of Terry’s flashlight. “We haven’t seen any,” she said, her voice quivery but steady enough under the circumstances. “We were trying to get off the mountain when our car died. Mommy said we ran out of gas. She was afraid to stay outside, so she brought us in here to hide.” She raised her arm and pointed to whatever was invisible to Jonas thanks to the heap of rocks. “Then we ran into that.”
“Mountain lion?” Terry quietly asked, still unable to see what was hidden behind the rocks.
The girl mutely nodded. “A big one,” she said on the back of a sob. “I think it’s mad at us for being here.”
“Are either of you bleeding?”
The girl shook her head, finding her voi
ce again. “No. We aren’t hurt. But daddy was killed yesterday. Th-those things. They took him. One minute he was there, and the next minute he… wasn’t.” The child bit back a sob while trying to stand up straighter, trying to show her courage. “That’s why we’re leaving. Mommy said there’s nothing to keep us in Spangle now.” She edged closer to her mother, then trained her eyes back into the beam of Terry’s light. “Can you shoot it, please,” she asked in a little-girl voice. “It’s starting to wiggle its butt like our kitty cat does. That’s what happens when she’s getting ready to pounce on a mouse.”
Jonas could hear Terry’s voice soften as he tried to calm the child’s fears. “So in this case, you’d rather not be the mouse?”
The girl nodded, although the feeble attempt at humor seemed to be lost on her. No surprise there.
“Yes, please,” the girl whispered anyway. And turning, she buried her face in her mother’s hip.
It was only then that the mother seemed to snap out of her trance. She splayed her hand across the back of her daughter’s head and turned to Terry for the first time.
“Should we come to you?” she asked, struggling to find her voice.
“No,” Terry said. “Don’t move. I’ll come to you.”
Casting a glance back at Jonas, he said, “You stay here and cover me. If you have to shoot, don’t hit the woman or the kid. Or me. Aim for the cat if it attacks.”
“I can’t see the cat!” Jonas hissed.
“Neither can I,” Terry said. And with that, he moved farther around the mound of rock, seeking a cleaner line of sight. Before he found it, he looked back at Jonas one more time. “Keep your face mask down. If anyone gets hurt, the creatures will be on top of us in seconds.”
