by John Inman
He stepped forward and clutched Jonas’s arm, gently coaxing him around. “We can’t stop now, Jonas. We have to keep going. We have to check out the last cave. There’s nothing we can do for these people. They’re gone. You know that.”
Slowly, Jonas appeared to calm down. He centered his gaze on Terry’s face, and after a while the fear in his eyes appeared to slip away. He brushed a streak of tears from his cheek as a horrifying calm set in somewhere back behind his retinas. He nodded faintly. Matter-of-factly. Businesslike. Calm again, Terry realized. In control. Or appearing to be.
“Let’s go on, then,” Jonas said.
Taking one last look at the savaged Camry, he gripped Terry’s hand and led him back up the lane toward the Jeep.
They were less than two hundred yards up the road when Terry spotted movement in the sky through his driver’s side window. “Jonas!” he hissed, pointing.
Both men stared at the tiny drone hovering along at their side, matching the Jeep’s speed. It accompanied them down the road for another hundred yards or so, then skirted off to the left, disappearing behind a wall of pines.
“It’s the authorities. They’re watching the mountain more closely,” Jonas said. “First the helicopter and now the drone. They’re gearing up for something. I wonder if we really do have two days left before they start dropping their bombs.”
Terry didn’t respond because he didn’t know what to say.
Without another word, he drove on down the mountain.
Heading for the outskirts of Spangle to the cave they had to find. Toward the creatures they had to destroy.
Finally Terry asked the question that had been on his lips for days. “I know what we need to do, Jonas. It’s the how I’m a little less clear about. How exactly are we going to kill these things if we find them? Do you really think your firebombs will work?”
Jonas thought about it for a long time. Finally he said in a hushed voice that barely carried over the wind, “I guess we’ll find out when the time comes.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE DEEP arroyo scarred a path through the valley floor, twisting and turning this way and that. In the rainy seasons, the water sometimes sluiced among the rocks with enough force to sweep away anything in its path, be it bobcat, cow, or automobile. When the rains were heaviest and the rushing waters climbed to a certain height, the surging torrent spilled out of sight through a crevice in the arroyo’s bank, forming a subterranean river channel.
To the north Jonas could see a scattering of dusty buildings marking the outskirts of the tiny town of Spangle, California, where it rose up from the desert floor. To his back stood the beginning rise of Terry’s mountain leading up into the trees. The arroyo was like the DMZ between the two. Or more precisely, no-man’s-land, where, if you didn’t keep your wits together, the earth might suck you down its maw before you could escape to either town or mountain.
The spot where the floodwaters were known to disappear was clearly the opening to the cavern they were seeking.
Jonas didn’t like the looks of the cave entrance at all. It was small, cramped, and unless he was hallucinating, Jonas could swear he saw the tail end of a rattlesnake disappear down the hole as they arrived. He had been laboring for days under the assumption it was too cold for snakes to be out and about. Apparently he was wrong.
“Did you see that?” Terry asked. Obviously he had seen the snake too.
Jonas groaned. “Yes. My sphincter snapped shut like a Venus flytrap.”
“Lovely image.”
“I don’t like snakes.”
“So I gathered.”
Terry poked at the cave entrance with the barrel of his shotgun, but nothing happened. No venom-slathered monstrosity sprang out to do battle. If the snake was still lurking inside, Jonas suspected it was waiting for something juicier than a tube of gunmetal to stab its fangs into. Like a human ankle. Or an unsuspecting kneecap.
On the way here, Terry had told Jonas that more than one foolish hiker had been lost trying to learn this cave’s secrets. “Being an underground river during the rainy season, the cavern is endless,” Terry had said. “Rumors say it goes all the way to the ocean, more than a hundred miles away, but I have a hard time believing that. However, deep inside there are subterranean pools and lakes left behind after the rains are over. Our creatures could live here if they had to. It’s centrally located, which would give the bastards quick access to each and every sniff of human blood that gets spilled either in town or on the mountain. To reach their kills as quickly as they do, you said they would have to be centrally located.”
Jonas hated it when he made sense. “Yeah. That’s what I said.”
Still rattling the shotgun around in front of him like a blind man’s cane, Terry dropped to his hands and knees and crawled through the tiny entrance.
Feeling suddenly very alone, Jonas quickly but reluctantly crawled in after him.
“I love the view,” Jonas mumbled, watching Terry squeeze his luscious ass between the rocks in front of him. “The destination not so much.”
He had never considered himself particularly claustrophobic until he started threading himself through this inky hole, knowing there was a frigging rattlesnake in there with him.
They crawled for a good twenty feet before the opening began to widen. The minute Jonas’s shoulders weren’t touching both sides of the tunnel at once, he breathed a sigh of relief. He breathed even easier when the roof opened up above his head and he was able to stand erect.
He flipped his face guard up and saw Terry watching him.
“You’re looking a little bug-eyed,” Terry said. “You okay?”
A blush crept warmly up the front of his neck. “Don’t quite know how to say this, but having your ass squirming around in front of my face for the last twenty feet gave me a boner.”
“Good to know I’ve still got it.” Terry grinned. “Ready to move on?”
Jonas tried to drum up a little enthusiasm, but it wasn’t easy. He lit his Maglite and flashed the beam around the cavern. The ground at his feet was rocky and still damp from the latest rains, with little puddles of standing water sprinkled here and there. The roof above his head was tiered in sharp shelves of what looked like limestone, gleaming gray in the beam of his flashlight like a series of knife blades. Still, he didn’t see any snakes lurking, either underfoot or head high, and that gave him hope.
“Lead the way,” he finally said, lowering his voice because the echoes in the cave were giving him the heebie-jeebies. “Let’s get this over with. For some reason this cave is spookier than all the others put together.”
“It’ll be okay,” Terry softly said, laying his hand on Jonas’s arm. And without further encouragement, he led Jonas deeper into the cavern.
Up ahead, water dripped. The air smelled damp and crystal clean, like a freshly opened bottle of Evian. With each step forward, the temperature seemed to drop another degree or two, until finally Jonas was glad for all the clothes he was wearing.
Their two flashlight beams jounced off here and there, seeking out corners and dark recesses. Everywhere they looked they saw gleaming cavern walls and reflections off water. There was none of the bioluminescent fungus they had seen in the first cave, and none of the mud and clay they had tromped through in the second. Here the floor and walls had been washed clean millennia ago. This cavern was home to no indigenous bats either. But for the rattlesnake Jonas had seen at the entrance, the environment appeared to be totally absent of animal life.
By Jonas’s estimate, they walked for upward of a quarter mile, burrowing deeper and deeper into the underground chasm. He had little fear of getting lost because the channel veered neither left nor right but dug a steady path straight under the desert floor.
Terry at long last stopped in his tracks, effectively halting Jonas too. They were standing at the edge of a wide underground lake. Terry picked up a stone and tossed it as far as he could. It landed with a splash, and their flashlight b
eams caught the lake’s surface, rippling in silver circles. The water looked pristine and limpid. They stood stock-still, listening to the kerplop echo off into the darkness. It stirred no answering cry from any living creature they could hear.
Terry turned and aimed his light at Jonas’s feet so he could look at his face without blinding him.
“This can’t be right,” Terry said. “This air is too sweet and clean. Carnivores have a reek to them. Their lairs are scattered with bones and crap. If the creatures were here, they would leave a sign. We could smell them.”
Jonas edged closer to Terry’s side. “So you’re saying they aren’t here.”
“Yes. They aren’t here. We’ve failed.”
“So what do we do?” Jonas sighed, suddenly exhausted. “What’s our next step?”
Both men, as if by unspoken agreement, switched off their Maglites and let the impenetrable darkness swallow them whole. To his amazement, Jonas realized he felt no fear. By that, more than for any other reason, Jonas knew Terry was right. The creatures were not here.
Terry found Jonas’s hand in the darkness. He clutched it gently. “We have to leave the mountain, babe. There’s nothing else to do. In a couple of days, this whole place will be a huge bomb crater.”
Jonas hated saying the words. “You’ll lose your home.”
“No,” Terry answered. “We’ll lose our home.”
They fell silent, listening to the tinkle of water dripping down a limestone wall. “Would you have really wanted me to stay here with you?” Jonas softly asked.
Jonas was surprised when a hand came out of the darkness and leather-clad fingers brushed the nape of his neck.
“I’ll want you with me, no matter where we end up. I just hate to start over from scratch, is all. I hate to leave my town and my mountain. My two properties. This place has been my whole life for a very long time.”
“I’m sorry,” Jonas said.
He heard a clacking sound and realize his teeth were clattering. That’s how cold it was. Terry must have heard it too.
“Let’s get out of here,” Terry said with a sigh. “If we’re really going to leave, I need to make a trip into town to get my papers together. Insurance forms, birth certificate, passport, all the stuff you can’t live without these days. Then we’ll swing by the cabin and pick up all your research and your unfinished book.”
“And the dog.”
“Yeah. And the dog.”
“I don’t want to go,” Jonas said.
“Neither do I,” Terry answered. “But we really don’t have a choice.”
Without another word they retraced their steps through the long cavern, following the little point of light that showed where the entrance beckoned. As the tunnel narrowed, they dropped to their hands and knees and, in single file as before, they crawled out into the sunlight.
When they could at long last stand, they groaned their way to their feet and switched their flashlights off.
They immediately froze.
There was a policeman with a big potbelly standing there, watching them. His khaki uniform was stained with sweat, and he had dirt on his knee like he must have slipped climbing down the rocks. That might have been enough to explain his foul mood, or maybe he was grouchy all the time. Jonas wasn’t sure. What he was sure about was that the fat guy had a pistol aimed at Terry’s belly.
“Drop the guns,” the policeman said. “Both of you.”
Terry carefully laid the shotgun on the ground, and Jonas slipped his .38 from the holster at his waist. He tossed it into a pile of bracken at the edge of the cave entrance.
The cop had a mean glint in his eye. He looked like he hadn’t slept for a while, leaving his patience worn thin. He waved his gun toward the only reasonable path out of the arroyo.
“Climb,” he said.
As Terry and Jonas began to clamber up the side of the gulch, the cop scooped up the two guns they had dropped. He holstered his own pistol, stuffed Jonas’s .38 in the waistband of his pants, and kept the shotgun trained on his prisoners, since that was clearly what he considered them to be.
“We’ve been watching you fools for weeks. You and all the other idiots who refused to leave this goddamn place. If it was up to me, I’d drop the bombs anyway. A few less stupid people in the world isn’t going to hurt anything.”
“You’re all heart,” Terry said, turning a mean eye of his own on the man with his gun.
They were almost to the top of the arroyo wall. The cop still brought up the rear. He had the shotgun trained on Jonas’s back now, and Jonas wasn’t liking it much.
“Careful,” Terry hissed in front of him, pulling himself up short.
Jonas walked into him before he could stop himself. He looked where Terry was pointing. Not two feet away from where they stood, another rattlesnake lay coiled in the dirt.
“Keep moving!” the policeman barked, clearly not knowing what was happening.
“I’ll move,” Jonas said on a growl.
And stepping sideways, directly toward the snake, he lashed out with his foot, scooped the rattler off the ground in the arch of his boot, and kicked it through the air directly at the cop.
The rattler was fat and long and still rattling a furious warning as it writhed in midair, sailing directly toward the policeman’s face. The cop spotted it and let out a horrified scream. He threw his arms across his face, dropping the shotgun and at the same moment losing his footing and tumbling sideways into the brush.
The snake landed on his chest, and as the policeman opened his mouth to scream yet again, the snake lunged forward, burying its fangs in the cop’s cheek. The policeman screamed even louder then, emitting a high-pitched wail of terror as the two of them, man and snake, rolled around in the weeds, one trying to get away, the other trying to latch on tighter.
“Oh Christ!” Jonas cried, appalled by what he’d done. He sprang forward and snatched up the shotgun off the ground. Not quite sure what to do next, he suddenly found himself yanked backward. Terry’s arms came out and grabbed him, dragging him to the ground.
“Stay down!” Terry spat in his ear. “Don’t move!”
A moment later Jonas heard it. Above the wailing of the policeman and the insane bzz of the snake’s rattles came the drumbeat of wings slapping fat bodies. The concussion of those wings downstroking the air to stay aloft. The bone-chilling reedy song of the creatures’ hunting cries, their bloodlust ignited by the blood leaking from around the rattlesnake’s fangs still embedded in the poor cop’s cheek.
In spite of Terry telling him to lie still, Jonas—and Terry too—scrambled farther away from the man and the snake. When a shadow passed over them, they burrowed flat to the ground in each other’s arms, face masks down, and didn’t move.
Jonas squeezed his eyes shut as he pressed his face to Terry’s chest and tried not to listen to the policeman’s horrified screaming.
In a flurry of wingbeats, a final scream was cut short. Jonas opened his eyes in time to see the man lifted straight up into the air, his body already being torn apart. The snake was nowhere to be seen, perhaps devoured already because it was covered in the man’s blood. Collateral damage, he supposed. Tough luck, snake.
Without thinking, Jonas rose up to a sitting position and pointed the shotgun at the man hovering just above the ground, stretched wide by a dozen nightmarish creatures as they peeled the flesh from his bones and then proceeded to pulverize those bones between fangs as long as Jonas’s little fingers.
“No!” Terry cried.
But it was too late. Jonas couldn’t have stopped himself even if he wanted. He pointed the shotgun straight up into the air and pulled the trigger. The kick smashed him back against Terry’s chest, and in that same moment, Terry wrapped his arms around him and dragged Jonas back to the ground. He covered him with his own body, and with the fury of the attack quieting behind them, waited for whatever would happen next. Either the creatures would come for them, or they wouldn’t.
In less
than a minute, the banks of the arroyo lay silent around them. The attack was over.
They opened their eyes, and where the policeman and the snake had fallen, there were only vast splashes of blood. He saw the snake now—a two-foot section of rattlesnake, headless, lying in the dirt, twisting in its death throes, too dumb to know it was already dead.
Beside the rattlesnake lay one of the creatures. Peppered with shotgun pellets. Its wings shattered. Long talons at the base of the wings, clenching and unclenching like the fists of a dying man. Trying to hold on to life.
While they watched, the clenching stopped, the jaws fell slack, and the creature lay still.
Slowly, with Terry’s hand still clutching at Jonas’s shirt, the men rose and took a step forward. Then another.
The creature lay sprawled among the rocks like some horribly mutated butterfly from hell pinned to a slab of cardboard. Its fat body was sprinkled with dark, wiry hair. Leaning closer, Jonas could see fleas squirming over the beast’s flesh. He cringed and pulled back, making a face. He could smell the creature now. The gamey reek of rotted flesh wedged in razor-like teeth, the stench of old blood clotted among the hairy pelt.
The wingspan was almost five feet wide from tip to tip. In its jaws, slack with death and still smeared with the policeman’s blood, were serrated teeth, inches long and gleamingly sharp. To either side of its face protruded two stubby ears, small for the creature’s size. Fleshy and pale.
In the middle of the face, above the jaws wrenched open in death, a fleshy nose lay flat, spread from ear to ear below the lifeless onyx eyes. Nostrils slit. Rubbery and mottled pink, clearly riddled with nerve endings.
It was the heart of the beast. Jonas glanced at Terry, who looked back at him and nodded. They both knew immediately. That nose was the creature’s greatest weapon. It could hone in on a droplet of human blood in a nanosecond from God knows how many miles away. The creatures’ speed reaching the policeman proved that to be true. And it was the bloody great wings, powerful and strong, that swept the creature there.
