Devil Creek

by Mertz, Stephen

  “Circle? Gray Wolf, tell me that Chief Ataka has not taken the form of a man named Lovechio.”

  “No, the one of that name is too weak. Ataka needs physical strength and power to deliver his vengeance.”

  “Then who—”

  “His name is Domino. Ataka possesses him as I possess this form. I, for the light and the power of the spirit gods. Evil will not rule this land. Ataka is evil incarnate.”

  There were patches of clearing where the Subaru’s headlights cut through the haze. They caught the access road to the resort site without slowing. Spinning tires hurled a cloud of gravel behind as the tires gained traction and the Subaru continued speeding up the winding incline road.

  Robin sank back against the upholstery, feeling defeat press down upon her, as if to squeeze the life from her. “This doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  “It is because you are the boy’s mother.”

  “But he’s only fourteen! He’s too young—”

  “He is a warrior. A brave, as I was at his age many, many moons ago.”

  “This is so unbelievable.”

  “And yet you believe, do you not?”

  “Yes, Gray Wolf. I believe. But I’m so afraid. This is so confusing. Are you saying that an ancient war chief caused this forest fire? But how can you … how can you and Paul … possibly stop that?”

  “As the beaver builds his dam to stop the flow of the river, it is the river’s nature to flow. There are prophecies beyond that which Ataka has invoked. Evil will not rule this night. I come with the power of light and peace. Did you think there was a wall between my world and yours?”

  “Yes,” said Robin in a small voice. “Yes, I did… .”

  “Our worlds are one.”

  Paul—or was it Gray Wolf? God, she was losing her mind!—began pumping the brakes, which sent the Subaru into a slowing, sideways swerve. She glanced through the thinning haze to see what he had seen in the road ahead.

  This close to the blaze, at ground level, the smoke on the ground had thinned to wispy tendrils of smoke that only partly obscured the tableau revealed in the Subaru’s headlights, a tableau that sent her senses reeling once again.

  Against the backdrop of fire-red night sky, two men, wearing uniforms, each with a rifle slung over his shoulder, were carrying a man who also wore a khaki uniform, near a van that was lodged, nose-first, in a culvert.

  They turned and paused at the car’s approach to stand there, holding the body between them, one with his arms under the man’s arms, the other facing forward, holding the ankles.

  The Subaru skidded to a halt some fifty feet away, rocking on its shock absorbers from the sudden stop.

  Robin saw who they were carrying. The Subaru’s headlights exposed the back of Ben Saunders’ head as an obscene, pulpy horror.

  She gasped and tasted bile rising in at the back of her throat. “Oh no, they’ve killed Ben!”

  The men dropped the body as if they were discarding a bag of trash. They swung their rifles around swiftly from their shoulders, and aimed the rifles at the Subaru.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The abrupt silence after the Subaru had skidded to a stop was complete except for the crunch-crunch-crunch of the men’s boots as they advanced.

  The night air was hot with the massive heat of the approaching fire that was now just beyond the ridge that separated this stretch of road from the construction area. And yet Robin felt cold goosebumps, making her flesh crawl at the sight of these two grim-faced men approaching, one to either side of the vehicle.

  In the headlight beams, she could make out the Security stitched on the nearest man’s baseball cap.

  The one nearest to her said, “Get the hell out of the vehicle.” From his side, the other one laughed. “Hey, it’s just a kid driving.”

  The chill she felt was close to freezing her into immobility, like earlier, but she couldn’t seem to fight it. “You … you killed Ben!”

  “The dead cop? Not us, lady. That was Domino “

  The name came to her like a slap across the face.

  Next to her, Gray Wolf said, “Domino,” in that sepulchral tone like an echo from inside a tomb.

  The man on his side said, “Him and Lovechio took the cruiser and the guy they had up to the site, the crazy fools.” Another verbal slap. She said, “Jeff—”

  “We were told to clean up the mess, lady, and that includes the both of you, looks like. Now get out of the car.”

  “What … guy did they have?”

  “Ah, that punkass newspaper guy. Wouldn’t surprise me if all three of those guys don’t fry, with the fire moving in like it is. Now I’m only telling you one more time, bitch. Get out of the—”

  Paul/Gray Wolf blurred into action before the man could finish the sentence. His left arm whipped and snared the barrel of the rifle held by the man on his side of the car; then he reached out with his right arm with equal swiftness and wrapped a hand around the rifle stock and yanked forward. The rifle fired off a sharp, loud blast and a spitting tongue of saffron along the side of the car as the man was jerked off his feet and onto his knees beside the Subaru. Paul flung away the rifle as if it was a plastic toy, and with both hands he gripped the man’s throat and began throttling him.

  The man on Robin’s side of the vehicle was then pressing the muzzle of his rifle against her right ear so hard that it hurt.

  “Whoa there, sonny,” he said to Paul. “Let my boy Tupper go, or I blow your mama’s brains all over you.”

  Paul/Gray Wolf released the man without pausing to consider, shoving him away from the Subaru.

  The man stumbled and quickly regained his balance, but he kept his distance from the vehicle. He scrambled to retrieve his rifle and tracked it on Paul.

  “Goddamn, Mr. Firth, there’s something wrong here! This kid’s eyes … they’re glowing in the dark, just like Domino’s! Something’s out of whack. I don’t like it.”

  The one called Firth took a backward step also, as if the Subaru itself were a dangerous thing. He sighted at Robin along the length of his rifle barrel.

  He said, “Calm down. So there’s some bad drugs floating around, making people high. Give me a moment. I’ve got to think.”

  Tupper howled, or maybe it was a laugh. “Drugs, shit! Crank don’t make your goddamn eyeballs glow in the dark. And Domino taking the cruiser and leaving us to mop up. Shit, let the fire burn him. It’s like Domino took charge. That fire’s about to come over that ridge any minute, right at us, and I’m thinking Domino don’t give a shit.”

  Firth said, “You’re right. Let’s off these two and split.” He said to Robin along the rifle barrel, “Sorry, lady. You look like a nice piece of ass,” and his finger began to tighten on the trigger.

  Robin closed her eyes, bracing herself, knowing that she was about to die.

  A car approached from behind and below, not fast due to the smoky, treacherous conditions, but coming on steadily until the tires could be heard crunching to a stop on the gravel, and then a new set of headlight beams further illuminated the scene.

  Her eyes snapped open. She was looking up the length of the rifle barrel. She saw Tupper’s finger relax on the trigger. He was distracted by the new arrival. She turned to peer out through the Subaru’s back window.

  The headlights were about one hundred feet behind them. In the stillness, she heard a well-tuned engine idling.

  She returned her attention to the scene illuminated by the headlights.

  The van, nose-first in the ditch and the corpse of the Chief of Police, lying between the van and where a man stood to either side of the Subaru with a rifle aimed at the vehicle.

  Tupper said, “Now what the fuck?”

  He eased away from the Subaru and tracked his rifle around on the new arrival.

  The driver of the car tromped the gas pedal and the engine squealed. The tires made an angry banshee sound, gaining traction on the gravel, and the car bulleted forward. It looked as if the car we
re going to collide with the Subaru and in the heart-skipping seconds remaining, Robin started to reach out her arms to hug her son to her, a maternal, instinctive reflex that made her want to at least in some way hold him against what was happening.

  He sat with both hands on the steering wheel, appearing neither tense nor calm. His eyes glowed in the dark, watching the placement of the two men, and the oncoming headlights, in his rearview mirror. The fourteen-year-old boy beside her reminded Robin of a predatory beast, ready to spring, waiting only for the perfect moment to strike.

  Robin gave a small start when Tupper fired his rifle. The boom! of its report pounded her eardrums, and merged with the sound was the shattering of glass and the continuing acceleration of the oncoming car.

  The headlights of the oncoming car abruptly swerved as if no one was driving.

  Tupper cursed. He tried to scramble out of the way. The front end of the car tore into him at full speed, gutting him like an animal and splashing its silvery hood with his blood and innards, and then the car was speeding past, tossing the dead man aside as if it were a child’s discarded rag doll.

  The car was a silver Altima.

  It smashed into the tail end of the van, filling the air with the hard impact of metal. The Altima had been traveling at such a high rate of speed that the impact punched it sideways, its momentum spinning it around at an angle that caught the opposite ditch and flattened the front end. The Altima stood perpendicular against the fiery sky for an instant, then fell to the earth like a toppled tree to land on its roof with a crushing noise.

  Beside her, Paul/Gray Wolf leapt from the Subaru and launched himself at the other rifleman, sailing into Firth with the agility and speed of an attacking wolf, with such force that he and the rifleman were both knocked airborne. The rifle flew from Firth’s fingers.

  Robin flung herself from the Subaru.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  She turned her eyes from where Tupper’s unmoving bulk was sprawled across the middle of the road, his mangled guts glistening red in the headlight beams. His rifle had landed a dozen paces from him, and Robin reached the rifle, picked it up in both hands and swung around toward Paul and Firth before she grasped the reality that she knew absolutely nothing about rifles! She’d had handgun training, but this … was it what they called an assault rifle? It was heavy and unwieldy in her grip. Panicky, she turned to look beyond the Subaru.

  Paul/Gray Wolf and Firth were both regaining their footing, the boy with a fluid, graceful economy of movement, Firth like an enraged bear, growling and unsheathing a wide-bladed combat knife worn at his hip.

  The fourteen-year-old assumed a combat crouch, feet firmly planted, knees bent slightly to give him a springy stance, like a lightweight fighter shifting from foot to foot.

  Robin saw an expression on his face that her son could never have worn, even in his most grueling soccer game or wildest paintball battle.

  Paul’s face was constricted into the harsh, hard lines of a man who has killed and is ready and willing to kill again: not a mean look, but of a determined strength capable of ferocity if provoked. And his eyes glowed. He raised both hands, arms extended at shoulder level, and made a “bring it on” wag gesture with the fingers of both hands.

  Firth froze. He observed the silent figure before him. His jaw grew slack and he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

  Then he said, “Fuck, this shit is too weird for me. I should’ve never left Cincinnati. I quit. I’m going home!”

  He threw aside the knife, turned on his heel and ran like a sprinter leaving the finish line, heading downhill, away from the fire, at a pace that quickly took him beyond the curtain of smoke and darkness.

  Paul/Gray Wolf did not pursue him.

  Seeing this, Robin flung aside the rifle, which felt so alien and cumbersome in her hands. She rushed to the Altima.

  The dust drifted about the overturned car, seeming not to settle; seeming to hang in the air suspended, thickening the veil of darkness and smoke. One of the Altima’s tires spun, loose and wobbly. The pungent stink of spilt radiator coolant hung heavy in the air.

  She gave a bleat of dismay at what she saw.

  Kelly was pinned beneath the roof of the car, which had fallen upon and no doubt crushed the lower two-thirds of her body. She was motionless, one of her arms trapped beneath the Altima, the other visible but drawn up, bent at an unnatural angle.

  Robin fell to her knees upon the gravel beside Kelly and whispered her name, certain that she was speaking to a dead person, gently brushing aside strands of blonde hair from across the strangely calm features. A trickle of blood made a red ribbon from the side of her mouth. Robin mouthed Kelly’s name a second time, soundlessly, sadly. Of every emotion she’d experienced in the past twenty-four hours, none was more acute than the sadness that felt now.

  Kelly’s eyes opened; eyes softened, as if gazing in though a mist from somewhere else.

  “Carol… .”

  “Oh, thank God.” The words sputtered from Robin. “Kelly, I’ve got a cell phone in my car. I’ll call 911. I’ll—”

  “No. They’re too busy… .” She swallowed, her eyes blinked as she summoned strength to form words. “There’s nothing they could do for me. I knew I was going to die… .” The lips crinkled in a ghostly smile. “I just didn’t know that it was going to be tonight. I feel … numb. Carol, I … don’t feel anything. “

  Shock, thought Robin.

  “Kelly, what in God’s name are you doing here? Oh, this is terrible—”

  Kelly murmured, “I decided that I was … a coward. I wanted to tell Mike … that I was sorry. I was driving to your house when I saw your car speed away. I followed… . Ohhhh!”

  “Kelly! Oh, my gosh—”

  “I saw what was happening. Those men with rifles… . I had to do something. The one who shot at me missed, but … I guess he did get me. Paul … is he all right?”

  Robin would not have heard Kelly but for the stillness of the night, shielded here beneath the ridge from the thunder of the approaching inferno.

  “He’s fine. You saved our lives.”

  “And Michael?”

  “I don’t know. We’re on our way to find him.”

  “Then go. Find him. And when you do… .” The trickle of scarlet from the corner of her mouth grew thick, dripping from her chin.

  “Yes, Kelly, whatever you want—”

  “Don’t do what I did,” said Kelly. “Don’t take life for granted. Don’t take love for granted. It’s all over so soon.”

  She coughed and a red gob appeared on her lips, and Robin thought she was about to say more, but she didn’t. The soft, misted gaze staring up at Robin took on the cold blankness of finality.

  Robin heard herself mutter a small moan, and she bit her lip to keep from trembling. With two fingers of her right hand, she closed Kelly’s eyelids.

  She became aware that her son stood beside her. He rested a hand on her shoulder and she gazed up him, not knowing what to say. Tears coursed down her cheeks.

  He said, “The river of life flows to the sea of eternity.” The distorted, basso profundo voice was somehow soothing, reassuring. Then the hand dropped from her shoulder and his back drew straight. “Her spirit is safe now. Our work is undone.” He turned his back on her and stalked away, toward the Subaru.

  She scurried after him, wiping the tears away with the palm of her hand and pausing only when she saw the knife that Firth had tossed aside before he fled. She scooped up the knife and ran to reach the passenger’s side of the Subaru as Paul/Gray Wolf again positioned himself behind the steering wheel.

  She twisted around and looked out the back window of the Subaru at the scene of devastation: the van in the ditch, the overturned Altima, the bodies, the headlight beams stabbing through the haze like silver swords in a surrealist painting. She had lost two dear friends back there to a horrible, violent end.

  One was a friend she had only met that day, named Kelly. So much in
tegrity. So much passion to set things right and to live right with what time she’d had left. Kelly’s missteps provided her with challenges that she met with an energy that was as beautiful as she had been. But never again. Kelly was gone.

  And Ben. Dear, beautiful, sweet, good Ben Saunders. She would think of Ben and honor his memory every day of her life for as long as she lived. He had been everything a man ought to be: caring, compassionate, but tough as nails when he had to be and ready to take care of any business life threw his way. Gone in the instant it had taken to pull a trigger. She’d known him almost from the day she first moved to Devil Creek, even before she met Mike. Godspeed, Ben Saunders.

  She turned to look ahead, not back. There were the living to think about… .

  The person beside her—Paul? Gray Wolf?—drove with a grim determination that as much as excluded her presence. She said, “Gray Wolf, what about my husband?”

  The Subaru swerved under centrifugal force but remained on the road as the incline grew steeper before the final bend in the road that flanked the ridge.

  “We are there now. I go to face Ataka on the field of battle. Here.”

  They rounded the bend.

  She gasped.

  The rows of condos and some of the outbuildings were already engulfed with high-dancing flames licking hundreds of feet up at the red-black sky, flames a brighter orange-red than she had ever seen: an awesome spectacle, roaring so loud as to make conversation almost impossible, pulsating with a dry, driving heat that chaffed at the flesh, hotter than sunburn.

  The main lodge was a half-finished jumble of exposed girders and sheet-rock, a towering monolith in the garish, shimmering firelight. Flames were closing in from behind but had not yet reached it.

  A police cruiser was parked in front of its unfinished main entrance. The Subaru came to a stop directly behind the police car.

  Even as he was tugging his door handle, Robin cried out to her beautiful, innocent, lovely, fair-haired, soccer playing son.

  “Paul, I’m afraid!”

  “With reason,” intoned Gray Wolf. “It ends here. The moment of truth. A fight to the death.”