Chapter 13
Man, Billy thought, that old fart’s a pretty good bullshitter.
He lay stretched out on the rocks, the heat from the campfire warming his left side. His rifle lay on the rocks to his right; the rest of their arsenal was next to the fire, drying out to prevent rust. Billy didn’t like to leave the guns bunched up, and after his watch he had taken an oily cloth to his rifle, swabbing out the receiver. The inside of the barrel would have to wait until they got back to Highbanks.
Jake and Rachel were a few yards away, sleeping, their toes pointed out over the river, which was dropping rapidly as the night wore on. Warren was closer to Billy, watching him and the fire in alternating glances. Darius, Weasel, and Henry were out cold, their mouths open, their snores coming from way back in their throats. Billy had already done his watch, two hours of tending the fire and watching the three city people, kicking Jake once when he wouldn’t stop whispering to Rachel. Then Garney had relieved him, and now Billy was free to go to sleep, or smoke, or think about old men and their stories.
What the hell was Henry trying to do? Scare them out of taking action?
Maybe it was just cold feet on Henry’s part, because he knew Jake when he was just a kid. Billy got it. He didn’t care about Trueblood, but looking at the girl it was obvious she wasn’t part of some evil empire set on destroying Billy’s homeland. She was a scientist who had come along because it was her job, and she probably thought it was going to be wild and remote and exotic. Even Darius has to recognize that, Billy thought. Drop them off in the woods, see if they can make their way out. If not, oh well.
Except, regardless of whether these people survived or not, someone would be back. There was treasure in the ground, so precious these people had tried to fly in under the radar, take a few scoops for free. They couldn’t allow that, not if they were going to call themselves Okitchawa.
Still, Billy thought, I wish we didn’t have to cross that river.
He’d expected Darius to react more to Henry’s story, to chew on it and stare out into the darkness and say something mystical. Or say nothing, but still look like he had something mystical to say—Darius and his foul old girlfriend, Elsie, tapping into something the rest of them couldn’t even fathom. Jesus, what a bunch of bullshit. But no, Darius just went to bed, went right to sleep.
Overhead, a straggler from the Perseids scratched across the sky, blinking in and out of sight in less than a second. Billy watched the sky, waiting for more. Just a little bit of sleep and his mind would clear up. Would reset.
Surgical was the word Darius had used. They had been surgical in their interception of the three capitalists, as if he was some commando. It was probably Jake’s veteran status that got him thinking along those lines, Darius with his channeling of energies and ideas, few of them original. He had taken on this whole “protect the Cree land” deal from Elsie, and now it was like his religion. Billy had joined up with them because he wanted to do something, wanted to be something.
“It won’t help.”
Billy turned to look at Warren, a white dude who in his nice flannel shirt did look like the establishment, an agent of an evil empire. The kind who a hundred and fifty years ago would slide a piece of paper over for the chief to sign, in exchange for a few copper pots and maybe a few more drinks of devil-water.
Warren jutted his chin out toward the valley. “We don’t have any samples, you know that. I see how smart you are.”
“Shut up,” Billy said.
“But even if we did, so what?” Warren’s voice was low, just loud enough for Billy to hear. Garney was staring at the river as though willing it to keep receding. “You think the demand for this stuff is going to go away because you guys don’t want it in your backyard?”
Billy propped himself up on his elbow. “You’re Warren?”
“Yes, Billy, my name is Warren.”
“Warren, you got maybe one more dawn to see.” He let his hand stray toward his sheathed knife. “Maybe not.”
“I’m not trying to provoke you.”
“You’re annoying me,” Billy said. “If I have to stand up to make you stop, I’m only going to do it once.”
“Then do it,” Warren said. His voice was calm, and Billy pushed himself up a bit. Did he really think Billy was making empty threats? No, Billy didn’t think he did. There was fear in his eyes, but also a bit of a piss on it, let’s see what happens attitude. The guy had probably defused a few issues in his time with his nerve and his calm voice, run a manicured hand through manicured hair and said, Folks, let’s stop and think about this a moment.
“Do it,” Warren said. “But you better check with your boss first.”
“You said you weren’t trying to provoke me.”
“Listen,” Warren said, leaning forward. “You guys are going to stall out the development of this deposit one, maybe two years. Then they’ll be back up here, someone will be. I don’t really care—I’ve made my career, Billy. I have plenty of money, and I’m not a crusader for all the rah-rah shit about how critical this is for national defense. We need it bad enough, we’ll blow the shit out of China and go take it.”
“What are you a crusader for, then?”
“My life, at the moment.” He held up his wrists. “Being a covert contractor for the DOD has benefits, Billy. I have millions. Better yet, I can direct research, future explorations. I can make them move away from this area. There are other sleeper deposits out there, other places the United States government can stick its nose into.” His eyes gleamed as he locked Billy in his gaze. “You let Darius kill me tomorrow, all of that goes away. Somebody will be back here, and you won’t be a rich man. You might even end up in prison.”
Billy lay back down. A curl of smoke drifted over him, and he breathed it in, bitter and biting. He pushed himself back up. “That all you got?”
“Money and power?”
“Come on. You think I’m going to let you go, hope you do what you say?”
“I never said anything about letting me go off by myself,” Warren said. “I couldn’t find my way out of these woods alone if I tried. Let me free, then go after me in the morning. Convince them you can do it alone. Then we go back and I get the money for you, set it up so they can’t trace it. That’s not a problem, happens all the time. I got plenty of experience there. Then, at that point, you decide if you want to kill me and be a rich man, or whether you want to be a man who takes a chance on being great, as well as rich.”
“By letting you go.”
“Yes.”
“I get the money part. Okay, let’s say we live in a perfect, trusting world and there’s no strings attached,” Billy said. “You go off and direct your research elsewhere. Nobody’s going to know why the development stopped here.”
“You serious about this saving the earth stuff, Billy?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
“You think this is it?” Warren gestured around them, at the fire and the sleeping bodies curled around it like dogs, at the dark river a few yards away. “Direct battle? Come on, you know you’re just screwing around, delaying the inevitable. Kidnapping, killing? Those are some hammer-handed tactics. You’re better than that.”
Billy propped himself into a sitting position and looked around. Garney was slouched over and sleeping on watch, something Darius might kill him for if he discovered it. But Darius and Weasel were out cold, too. Henry, who seemed to never sleep except maybe for a nap in the afternoon sometimes, was out as well. Rachel and Jake were sleeping close together, their breathing deep and regular, hands and legs still neatly trussed. Hammer-handed tactics; yeah, that was about right. Hammer-headed leadership, too. Darius might have some good ideas, but they were wrapped up in his mysticism—what Darius thought of as cold-blooded spiritualism—and he handled adversity by strangling it with his bare hands.
“You’re playing the silver-tongued devil, eh?” Billy said. “Man, you better shut up—I could use me a silver tongue. Cut it right out of you.”
Warren scooted closer to Billy. “You need to evolve, you need to switch your tactics. You know that, I can see it.” Warren’s eyes gleamed in the thin orange light of the campfire embers. “What do you call yourself, the Okitchawa? What’s that, Cree for ass-kickers?”
“It means warriors.”
“Okay, that could work, or maybe you come up with something a bit less . . . aggressive. So we set you up personally, you have your own wealth. That helps. You inherited it, or got some sort of settlement. Doesn’t matter. First thing you do, after you go have some fun for a few months, maybe a year, is you set up a foundation. Native Lands Matter, or you stick with Okitchawa , whatever.” Warren’s voice had risen a bit, and Billy had to motion him to keep it down.
“We aren’t opposed to resource extraction,” Warren went on in a softer voice, and Billy understood Warren was talking for this fictional foundation, explaining their position to a media outlet, a potential funder, a judge. “Okay? We just want to make sure the best science is used to evaluate whether it makes sense to do it in this particular location. What the social costs would be, what the impacts would be on the society, on our way of life.” Billy had the sense that if Warren’s hands weren’t tied, the man would be gesturing like a lawyer expounding on certain damning facts. “That message, Billy, would drive fear into the hearts of the men who want to use this place. And the best thing? You don’t oppose every project. You’re not one of these people, ‘don’t do anything ever.’ Some projects are okay, the benefits are worth more than the negatives. That way you build trust, credibility. You build respect. You start to be funded by the government, start getting money from the same corporations you’re sticking it to, because they know they need you on their side.”
Billy shook his head. “You think I could do something like that?”
“You got the smarts, the looks. The charisma. You fund the best engineers, the best scientists, the best strategists. Dig into the real issues, not just the emotional aspects. Let them do the heavy work, the modeling and statistics. You communicate it to the public, to regulators, to the courts if need be. To the great unwashed masses. You’d win, Billy, more than you’d lose. And even our losses would be magnificent.”
Billy was silent, thinking. He knew he should lie down and go to sleep, or maybe kick Warren in the throat and go to sleep.
“I let you free,” he said, slowly, “and you do what? Let me know what’s going on? Let me know what fights to pick?”
“Not me,” Warren said. “Someone, though. I’d make some recommendations to a few companies that they might want to make a contribution to your organization, call it an act of good faith. I have lots of favors owed me, Billy. The money would roll in, and you would be able to hire who you wanted. I’d give advice, or my person would. You could take it or leave it.”
“It all sounds good,” Billy said. “Except.”
“Yes,” Warren said. “Except how do you know I won’t just walk away, forget about all this?”
“There you go.”
Warren leaned in close. “What would you do if I betrayed you, Billy?”
“You know what I’d do. If you were here, if I could get my hands on you.”
Warren nodded. “My wallet’s in my left back pocket, Billy. Grab it, please.”
“If I want to take your money, I don’t need an invite.”
“I know,” Warren said. “The wallet, please. There’s something I want to show you.”
Billy scooted over to Warren, moving slowly so as not to cause the rocks to scrape against each other. He reached into Warren’s back pocket and extracted a thin leather wallet. He opened it, pulled out a wad of Canadian and American currency, and held it up to Warren. “You think this is enough?”
“No,” Warren said, and his voice was different. Subdued. “The pictures.”
Billy frowned, then pulled the two photos from their plastic sheaths. One was of a girl of about sixteen, beautiful and bright-eyed, wearing a sweatshirt with an image of a volleyball being spiked over a net. The sweatshirt read WEST FLAGSTAFF HIGH CHAMPS, and the previous year’s date was printed in block lettering underneath. The other was of a boy, perhaps ten or eleven, holding up a brown trout with a streamer fly sticking out of its lip. The boy held a fly rod in the crook of his elbow. Billy turned them over and saw that both had been signed “To Dad,” with “Love ya bunches, Kayla” on the back of the girl’s picture and the other signed “Tommy the Trout Whisperer.”
“So?” Billy put the pictures back into the sheaths. “This supposed to make me feel bad about what we’re going to do to you?”
“No,” Warren said. “It’s your insurance.”
Billy glanced at the pictures inside their plastic casing, then up at Warren’s face. His visage was almost completely dark, the starlight catching the edge of his nose, the embers from the fire winking in his eyes. But there was something soft inside those hard lines, something that hadn’t been there before. And there was a strong resemblance to both of the children in the pictures: the same Roman nose, the same wide-spaced eyes, more pronounced in the boy but there in the girl, too.
“What?”
“They go to West Flagstaff,” Warren said. “That’s in Arizona. Now you know where they are, what they look like. Keep the wallet, keep the pictures, Billy. If I move my kids to a different town, to a different country, there’s a chance that you will use your money to take your revenge on me that way.” Warren went on, before Billy could talk. “I don’t know if you’d do something like that. It’s enough for me to know it’s possible, because they are literally the only things in life that I care enough about that I can use as insurance. Look me in the eyes and tell me I’m lying.”
Billy looked down at the pictures again, flipping them back and forth. “You’d use your own kids to save your skin?”
“They need me,” Warren said softly. “This is the only way I might make it back to them.”
Billy closed the wallet and laid it on top of his thigh. It had been a long day and a longer night, and the dawn was coming on, finally, a slight gray fraying at the edges of the black horizon. The darkest part of the night was behind them and now there would be a new dawn, new choices. He let his eyes wander over the men sleeping by the dying campfire. Hard men who were able to make hard choices. That was what had appealed to Billy, not because he lacked the ability himself but because it was something, perhaps one of the few things, he admired about himself. It was good to be around those you admired. But hard choices weren’t always the right choices.
Remember that, he thought. If you lead people someday, remember that they will admire you for the hard decisions, and they’ll leave you for the wrong ones.
He looked at Darius, who sounded like he was choking on his snores. Garney was asleep, his chin down on his chest. Behind them the river burbled and whispered.
“What do you think, Billy?”
“I think you’re still annoying me,” Billy said, pulling his knife from its sheath. “We’re going to have to do something about that.”
* * *
“Hell,” Weasel said. “I don’t believe it.”
They stood looking at the shrunken river, the top of the sun just peeking over the horizon. They could see two distinct waterlines on the far shore. The higher one was from the flood of the day before, the vegetation on the far shoreline flattened and muddy. Logs and driftwood were deposited along the edge, some weathered and worn from years of aging, others splintered and fresh, the yellow wood hinting at the force of the flood in the upper watershed. The second waterline was much lower, marked by dark brown sediment. It extended several feet down, the green-slimed sediment covering the rocks. Water wept out of the banks from the saturated soil and trickled down to the river, which had shrunk to a mere thirty yards wide.
Their rifles, all except the one Billy had slept next to, were gone.
Garney’s bow remained, as did Henry’s Walther pistol. Billy still had his mistik, and they all had their knives. But the rest of the long rifles, Weasel’s and Darius’s moose hunting rifles as well as Henry’s and Jake’s 30-30s, which had been placed next to the fire to dry out and prevent rust, were as gone as Warren. Billy’s .308 was slung over his shoulder.
“We’re outgunned,” Weasel said. “He could get up in a high spot and pick us off, one by one.”
“Spread out,” Henry said. He had been the first one up, and had awakened the rest of them to alert them Warren had escaped. “See if you can cut his track. Weasel and Garney upstream, Darius and Billy downstream. I’ll stay with these two.”
Weasel spat between his boots and glared at Garney. “I gotta be next to him, I’ll cut his belly open. Come on, Billy.” They started upstream, moving along the edge of the narrow beach.
Garney waited while Darius knelt where Warren had been, passing a hand over the rocks as if he was trying to see if there was any residual heat left from Warren’s body. Then he reached down and plucked up something very small from between the pebbles, a tiny fiber of rope, less than a centimeter long. He peered at the end of it, then studied the rocks nearby, letting his eyes roam over the sharper edges for several minutes. Finally, he let the fiber drop and looked up at the bluff, at the spine of rock that snaked above them.
“I’d like to find him,” Darius said mildly. “I’d like to talk to him a bit about how he escaped.”
“Darius, I’m sorry,” Garney said. “I was just so exhausted—”
“It’s over now. Come on.”
They had only gone a little way downriver when Weasel whooped from upstream. Darius and Garney ran up to join them. Henry yanked Rachel and Jake to their feet and prodded them forward, marching them up the gravel beach with his Walther. Weasel was pointing at a set of tracks on the far side of the river. Someone had tried to cover them up, smearing the boot prints with his hands and throwing some cattails over others. It may have looked good in the dark, Jake thought, but it’s not fooling anyone now. He looked at Billy, who was studying the tracks intently.
“He went after the samples,” Billy said.
“Of course he did,” Weasel said. “Where the hell else would he go?”
“I thought he . . .” Billy said, looking up the face of the bluff. The spine of rock they had used to traverse the cliff face was the only way to reach the top. “Yes?” Darius said.
Billy looked down, quickly. “Nothing. I just would have thought he’d go the other way. Up the bluff.”
“Well,” Darius said. “It looks like he didn’t.”
Darius walked into the mud of the shrunken riverbed, and the rest followed. The river bottom was soft on the edges, but the flood had scoured the rest of the channel and the footing was firm, the water only up to their shoulders at the midpoint. The river was cold and smelled different than it had the day before—cleaner, not as stagnant.
When they climbed, shivering, out of the mud on the far side, the old smell returned, the fetid, putrescent odor seeping out of the ground. The fissures and mudpots were much as they had been. In the distance, the canted drill rig looked like some relic from a ruined past, as out of place as a circle of stones in a farm field. There was a vague suggestion of a mound where Greer had died, but nothing to indicate the body of a man.
Warren’s tracks petered out on the rocky ground in front of them.
“The samples,” Darius said to Jake. “Where?”
Jake pointed his chin to the left, where the crumpled remains of the lean-to were, just yards from the drill rig. “Let’s start there,” he said. “Most of the other samples are up above.”
Darius pulled Jake’s hands up to inspect the knots. After a moment he let them drop, seemed about to order one of the others to do something, and instead dropped into a crouch at Jake’s feet. He pulled a hank of rope out of his pack and quickly trussed Jake’s ankles, cinching the knots hard but leaving a few feet of slack in between his feet.
“Go,” Darius said.
Jake shuffled forward. His natural pace had been halved, and he thought of the old shows he had watched as a kid, the prison movies with the inmates mincing their way to the cafeteria, to the yard, sometimes holding the ball of their ball and chain, sometimes just with the chain between their ankles. There was something awful in that, in the shortening of the natural stride, more humiliating than wrist chains.
They moved in a single file across the valley floor, the Okitchawa treading softly with the rhythm of natural hunters. By comparison, Jake was noisy, dragging his feet over the wet ground, bringing his heels down hard on the earth. Rachel was watching him with alarm, and when he caught her eye she shook her head, almost imperceptible, but the meaning clear enough.
No, Jake.
Well. He might not be able to run, but she would. And he had not harbored a grand strategy, no plans for both of them to escape. He just needed a distraction, a moment when Darius and Weasel, the two natural-born killers, were not focused on them.
What had Henry said in his story? It was like a bear?
Like a sleeping bear.
Okay, then. Time to wake it up.
He climbed onto a large, flat boulder, then down onto the soft ground again. He glanced back at Rachel, avoiding her face and instead glancing at her legs, her feet. They were skirting the edge of the largest fissure, the one that had turned them back toward the river the day before. There was a way around the fissure at the far end, an escape route they had missed in their hasty flight—or perhaps the fissure had stopped expanding once they had changed course. It didn’t matter, it was there now and it was the natural route he would need to take. Billy prodded Rachel onto the rock and then followed her up, pausing for a second to glance into the fissure, where rocks were sandwiched between strata of red clay.
“Goddamn,” Billy said. “There really was an earthquake.”
The rest of the group was already off the boulder, on the softer ground. Jake’s ankles dragged across each other and he pitched forward, hitting the mud with his elbows.
“Get up,” Darius said from behind him.
Jake rolled to his side, kicking his feet against the ground and sending a muddy spray of water into the air. Weasel stepped back, annoyed. Jake twisted around, jerking his feet some more, throwing a tantrum because he couldn’t get up. Letting all the anger flow into his muscles, his bare feet thudding into the ground again and again.
Come on, come on.
“Quit fucking around and get up,” Darius said.
It will take what you have, Jake thought, pounding his heel into the muck, and amplify it. But you only have indifference, Jake. You have separation from those you love. You are unresponsive, and it will be too—
He felt the ground shudder underneath him.
“What the hell,” Weasel said, backing up a step. He glanced at Henry, then Darius. Billy shrugged his rifle off his shoulder. Ahead of them, Garney notched an arrow onto his bow. The ground shimmied again, and muddy water squeezed out of the earth around them, the puddles shaking with ripples. Henry hopped back onto the rock, and Darius did the same. Billy had taken hold of Rachel and had her in a loose headlock, his eyes casting around him at the shuddering ground. There was a wet sucking noise, and the ground began to separate underneath him.
“Jake! To your ri—”
The rest of Rachel’s cry was cut off by Billy’s tightening forearm, but Jake sensed the presence slithering out of the ground and rolled away, something cold and wet sliding across his shoulder. He kept rolling, feeling the presence pursuing him over the wet and broken ground, the chasm widening behind him. His head struck a rock and his vision went dark, then cleared enough to see the tendril, which had emerged from the far side of the chasm. It had changed direction and was going after something else.
Of all the people in the group, only Garney had stood his ground. The rest had retreated to the rocks, separating like a flock of ducks after a shotgun blast. Now they were spread out on either side of the chasm, clinging to rocks as the ground shuddered under them. Garney stood at the edge of the chasm, his bow at full draw, the string pressed against the side of his face. The tendril in front of him was grayish red, the color of cheap meat at the butcher shop. It paused a few yards from Garney, as though momentarily perplexed by this man who stood his ground. Garney squinted, his left eye closed, his arms steady.
He murmured something, his lips moving against the bowstring, and the tendril surged forward. There was a ripping sound from the chasm as it pulled itself apart, tearing off from the base of the tendril anchored in the sidewall. It fell three yards in front of Garney’s mud-splattered boots, twisting and rolling in the muck.
“What . . . ?” Weasel said. “Wait. What . . . ?”
Garney, who had tracked its progress the entire time with the tip of his arrow, released the string. The broadhead sliced through the tendril two feet back from its tip, dead center. About, Jake supposed, where the brain would be—if it had a brain. The arrow went through the tendril, skewering it to the earth. Behind it, the torn end of the tendril thrashed. Garney looked up, his face calm and deadly. He gave Darius half a nod, and then another tendril rose out of the chasm from behind him and punched through his body.
The front of Garney’s shirt blossomed outward and tore. The gore-streaked tip that emerged immediately reversed course, curving around in a tight circle to reenter Garney’s stomach, just a few inches from the exit wound. Garney’s eyes bugged out, his mouth open but soundless, the loop of the tendril pressed across his blood-soaked abdomen. Then the tendril twisted and pulled at the same time, ripping Garney backward. His screams followed him down into the chasm, his raspy cries bouncing off the muddy walls, still clutching the bow in one hand.
Jake scrambled to his feet. Darius and Weasel were already running for the top of the valley, dodging and darting between tendrils and the labyrinth of holes and cracks. Billy was still on the rock, his forearm around Rachel’s throat. Henry was watching the earth, seemingly transfixed. There were no tendrils around them for the moment, but several more were creeping out of the chasm.
Jake drew his knees up and looped his arms over them, his fingers brushing at the knots at his ankles. He felt along the coils of rope until he found one of the ends, tracing it backward. He dug his fingernails in, twisting and pressing. He cursed under his breath as a fingernail peeled back, and then dug back in, using the lubrication of the blood to wedge his fingers deeper into the knot. The tension dissolved incrementally under his fingertips, but the progress was slow, slow. Something scraped behind him and he paused, his fingertips pressed into the knot, his breath held tightly inside his hammering chest. The scraping stopped, whatever was behind him pausing less than three feet away.
Go, he thought. Go on.
The scraping came again, repositioning itself on the rocks, as though it had heard his thoughts.
It senses you. Maybe not your body heat, but your panic—your frenzy to live.
Jake let his mind go, let it drift away to the only place he could think of that felt the least like life. Down the tiled hallway, past the bulletin boards, the air itself sterile, smelling slightly of alcohol, of the air purification system itself. Beeps and buzzes punctuating the low hum of nurses’ voices. Fluorescent lights buzzing, the cold light. Past room 213, past room 215. Occasionally a doctor or nurse with head down, bustling off to someplace more important.
Take a right and there it was, the short little hallway. The Dead End, he called it in his mind. There was an enormous red and blue checkered painting at the far end, next to the elevators. At first he hated the picture for what it tried to do, its obscene attempt to bring color and life into this place, and then he did not hate it anymore because he understood the intent behind it, and it became one of the many things he tolerated. But he still did not like it. Take in the picture, then inhale a breath of the artificial air, so different from the taste of air inside the forest, the air here antiseptic, yet it felt dirty when he drew it into his lungs. Then exhale, and there it was, room 217, and from inside its ten-by-twelve space, there was a beeping that came at intervals of somewhere between fifty-seven and sixty-one beeps a minute. In a way it was one of the worst parts, hearing that beeping, so steady and regular, and thinking, well, that sounds okay, so maybe the rest . . .
Then inside the doorway and there she was, the shell of what had been, not so long ago, the embodiment of life itself. Sit down, reach out and feel the warm skin. It had grown looser over the months as the weight had shrunk from her body. Eventually he would let his eyes move from the pale skin to the gown they had dressed her in that day, either green or light blue. Green had been her favorite, the color of poplar leaves when they first emerged, the gown a pallid cousin to that vibrant spring color. From the gown, over the slight bump where the sensors were attached, over the neck—still lovely—still almost as lovely as it had been all those years ago in the coffee shop. The face had grown gaunt and it looked different, the angular cheekbones too sharp now, the lips thin. The eyes a darker blue than they had been, and vacant. Just vacant. Once, and only once, he had pinched the skin on her arm hard, wanting to see if he could clear some of that vacancy for a moment. Her mouth had twitched and the pace of the beeping had intensified for a few seconds, but that was all, there was no change in her eyes. He had left a small bruise on her forearm.
Then the confession, the same words every time.
I’m sorry, Deserae. I’m so sorry.
His apologies were not for the bruise, not for his absences, not even for his role in how she had ended up here. That last part just sad and stupid, a moment’s distraction in the car and then they were flying through the air, glass shattering, metal crumpling. Her screams in his right ear, her blood on his face, his wrists.
The apologies were for his cowardice. For his retreat. First there had been his self-imposed exile, his distancing from his childhood home. She had cajoled and demanded more from him, had insisted he be brave enough to feel pain. They had been working their way north, taking months, years, but always getting closer to his home. There had been no hurry. They thought there had been no hurry. And now she was gone, and he had reverted to who he had been: a spectator in life.
He opened his eyes, slowly coming back to himself, aware that Billy was shouting in the distance. The tendril he had heard at the base of the rock was gone. He had no idea how long he had been in his self-imposed mental fugue; it could have been hours, but he was pretty certain it had only been minutes, perhaps not even that. His fingers were still halfway inside the knots, and he pried the rest of the cinched rope apart and stood.
Billy and Rachel were retreating seventy-five feet away, stumbling from rock to rock, Billy still holding Rachel. They were caught between two chasms, and several tendrils were working toward them from both directions. The tendrils were thicker and longer than they had been the day before, more deeply colored. It’s getting stronger, Jake thought.
Not just stronger, his mind whispered. It’s getting ready for something. For a transformation.
Darius, Henry, and Weasel had been turned back from their attempt to flee the valley, thwarted by another chasm stretching open in front of them, a mud-smeared grin that widened and widened. They were retreating toward the big rock pad with the lone cedar tree, the only piece of real estate large enough to offer any protection, pausing only to hack at tendrils. Jake looked down at his wrists, still tightly bound, with no way to get his fingers on the knots. He could be of no help to Rachel like this; he couldn’t even protect himself. But if he could sneak his way down the valley, he could be out of Billy’s rifle range in minutes. Retreat, then come back for her. There was nothing else to do.
Retreat and then come back, eventually.
In the back of his mind he heard the beeping, its regular and monotonous tone.
He stepped onto the soft ground. His feet were still numb from being cinched so tightly, and they bumped and dragged over the ground. He stumbled along the edge of the chasm, not looking at the writhing lengths working out of the edges of the ground below him, feeling the earth sliding away under his feet. Clumps of earth fell into the fissure as he walked, and he looked down as a large clod tumbled down the chasm and hit one of the tendrils. The tendril paused for a moment, trembling, then plunged back into the sidewall.
Go on, Jake thought. Go tell your buddies there’s fresh meat up here.
He reached the section of tendril that Garney had shot with his arrow. It had turned nearly black. Jake knelt next to the shriveled form, the reek of decomposition already wafting from the severed end. He grasped the arrow with his tethered hands and yanked the shaft free. The broadhead was the old two-bladed style, very sharp. He sat down, blocking out the slithering noises coming from the fissure beside him, trying to block out Garney’s voice as well, choked and pain-filled, issuing from deep in the earth.
He positioned the feathered end of the carbon arrow between his feet, then angled it back, the front of the shaft nestled in the notch between his knees. The broadhead was only a few inches from his face. He brought his wrists over the blade and touched the rope to it. A few fibers separated.
He lifted his wrists and repeated the motion. The blade was streaked with black gore from the tendril.
Rachel screamed. Jake jerked, the broadhead sliding across the rope and nicking his wrist.
Tendrils were swarming toward Billy and Rachel, the small rock patch crawling with them. Billy spun left and then right, Rachel’s hair flying as Billy jerked her around. Another large tendril emerged from the fissure, moving steadily toward them. For all its size it gave the impression not of vigor but of rottenness, as though it might fall apart at any moment, the flesh ready to disintegrate.
But before it disintegrates, Jake thought, it wants to see what happens.
He sensed Billy’s intention in his frantic look, in the sudden tensing of his shoulders. “No!” Jake yelled, at the same time pulling his wrists hard over the broadhead. The rope separated under the blade.
Billy shoved Rachel forward, toward the mass of approaching tendrils. She tumbled to the ground, breaking her fall with her tied hands. In front of her, the black tendril rose, trembling, higher into the air. Rachel scrambled to her feet, a tendril shooting forward to loop around her ankle. It yanked her back to the ground, and this time she hit the rock on her side, the air whooshing out of her. She gave a breathless cry of pain as more tendrils surged toward her, crawling along the rock in an intertwined mass, their progress slowed only by their own numbers, so intent on this new prize that they were unwilling to make room for their brethren.
Billy ran toward the chasm, his feet digging into the crumbling edge, and launched his body into the air. The chasm was ten feet across, and he hit the lip of the far side at chest level, his legs dangling into the earth. His rifle was slung across his back and a tendril crept out of the crevasse, twisting along the leather strap, and yanked downward. Billy yelled and kicked back with his legs, his fingers digging furrows into the earth. He slid backward, then at the last moment twisted his shoulders and ducked, letting the rifle sling slide off his shoulder. He scrambled back up over the lip, still kicking at the tendrils around his legs, and staggered toward the rock pad.
Rachel was being pulled into the other fissure, her hands clawing at the rock. Jake picked up the arrow.
“Rachel! Hold on!”
She looked up, her eyes wide, fingers trying to hook into the rock. Then she disappeared over the edge: first her legs, then her torso, then those enormous, terror-stricken eyes, and finally her fingers, still scrabbling for a hold on the broken ground.
Jake slid headfirst to the lip of the chasm. Rachel was several feet down, a swarm of tendrils surrounding her. In the background, a large, dark presence loomed, a despot on its earthy throne. Gone were the creeping, almost brainless movements of earlier; these tendrils surrounded her tenderly, carefully wrapping around her legs and her body, twining their way around her arms and her chest. The other victims had been meat, but this was something else: a prize.
Jake got to his feet. She was already too far down to reach, and he felt panic seize him, a full paralysis of mind and body. For a moment his mind was blank as she was pulled deeper into the darkness. Then he heard a beep in his mind, the sound of a pulse echoing on a hospital monitor, the sound of slow, drawn-out death, and his paralysis broke. He dove straight down into the chasm, arms spread wide like a linebacker, and hit Rachel’s midsection with his chest. He still had the arrow in his right hand, and he kept it far out to the side, wrapping up Rachel with his left arm. The tendrils around her snapped under the sudden force of the impact, and she and Jake plummeted down deeper into the hole, bouncing against the sides of the sodden earth. There were more tendrils farther down that slowed their descent, but these seemed to be inanimate, simple obstructions rather than the seeking, clutching lengths of the tendrils above. Finally they came to a halt at the bottom of the chasm, prostrate and entangled with each other, but for the moment free of growths sprouting from the sides of the chasm. Far above them was a wedge of gray sky, framed by a latticework of writhing tendrils. The large, dark tendril was slumped over, damaged by Jake’s crashing entrance into its world.
Jake spat out a mouthful of mud. One of the tendrils above them twisted toward them, the tip cocked at a slight angle.
“No,” he whispered, then punched through the waxy flesh with his arrow. The tendril withdrew. He got to his feet, his knees braced against the sidewall, and jabbed the broadhead into another tendril. It slithered back into the earth. The tendrils seemed less aggressive down here. Or perhaps they were momentarily confused, as any animal would be when the prey turned around and charged instead of fleeing. Whatever the source of the hesitation, Jake was certain it wouldn’t last.
Rachel got to her feet. She was scratched and bloody, her fingernails splintered. She kicked off a section of torn tendril from one foot, then got the other foot free. She looked up at the sky, then kicked a toehold into the soft earth two feet up. “Come on, Jake,” she said. “Let’s go up.”