The man may have been an Olympic wrestler, but he didn’t know shit about fighting dirty.
Farrengalli kicked again, breaking free, crab-crawling away. “Hold on, Chief!”
In the muted moonlight, Raintree looked like something out of a Frederick Remington painting, savage, primitive, deadly. The Injun was on the warpath. He pulled the piton from his belt and closed in.
Farrengalli backed up to the lip of the cave, holding his hands apart. “Easy, fellow,” he said, as if Raintree were a rabid, growling dog.
His pupils are fucking HUGE.
Raintree hunched, tensing his body as if preparing to leap. If he did, his momentum would knock them both into the gorge. Farrengalli could try to step aside, like they did in the movies, but he wasn’t a stunt man and there was no safety net below.
“She wanted it!” Farrengalli yelled. “She begged me for it!”
He was aware of the Boomeroo in its now-flaccid state, exposed and dangling, where one blow with the crude blade of the piton would leave it laying in the dirt like a half-eaten, ketchup-drenched hot dog at a Labor Day cookout.
Raintree eased two steps closer, the tension in his muscles almost palpable. The distant whisper of the river fought for attention in Farrengalli’s roaring eardrums.
“Robert!” Dove called from the cave.
Raintree’s pupils were black holes. Farrengalli looked left, then right, for a rock or something he could throw. He’d had a piton lying beside him while taking care of bidness with the fox, but the suddenness and ferocity of Raintree’s assault had caught him off guard.
“Robert,” Dove said, her voice calmer now.
“Listen to her,” Farrengalli said. “She’ll tell you.” He licked his lips. He shouldn’t have eaten all those granola bars. The water bottle he’d kept secret from the others was hidden in a crevice inside the cave. River water, but water nonetheless. If he got out of this mess alive, he’d drink nothing but Canadian beer for a solid week.
Raintree hesitated, though his eyes remained just as wild, his biceps twitching. He finally spoke. “Does white man speak with forked tongue?”
“What the fuck?” Farrengalli said.
Raintree raised the piton, letting its tapered steel catch the moonlight. “Does he speak the truth, Dove?”
“Come here,” she said.
Raintree stood poised like a cigar store Indian, in a mockery of nobility that was all the more preposterous because it so closely resembled the real thing.
Mocker. Raven Mocker. Is that what Chief called the Cherokees’ evil spirit?
Farrengalli was starting to think Raintree was more evil than the vampire suckers. They were just hungry and stupid. Raintree was civilized, an American success story, buying into the whole corporate thing. But when pushed just a little, the veneer fell away and he stripped down to the same meat-eating monster as his ancestors.
For all Farrengalli knew, the vampire suckers were Raintree’s ancestors.
“She was loving it, brother,” Farrengalli said. “Hell, she’s just getting warmed up. Go ahead and take your turn.”
Cigar-store Indian.
Then Farrengalli realized Raintree wasn’t looking at him, but past him.
He turned, the cool night air shrinking the Boomeroo even further, until it was hidden in the nest of his pubic hair.
A flock of the creatures flew silently up the valley, stunted wings barely moving. Three came out of the mist, following the river. A few more emerged. Then more, spilling forth like shaved rats from a storm grate. Farrengalli couldn’t count them all.
Their silence was more unsettling than their shrieks had been, and they soared with an eerie determination. Farrengalli stepped back into the cave, risking Raintree’s piton, but the creatures didn’t detect them.
Or, Farrengalli thought, they know we’re here but they just don’t care. Like they got bigger fish to fry.
One of them flew close, not altering course below them. Farrengalli’s breath caught.
Doo-dah-fucking-day. That one looked like McKay!
The creature had no hair, like the others, but its face wasn’t quite as wrinkled and it had the same arched brow as the dead bicyclist. A tattered piece of fabric, the same color as McKay’s royal blue SealSkinz, trailed from its neck like the cape of a deformed superhero, flapping in the wind.
Being dead ain’t good enough. Being dead doesn’t mean you get out of this cluster fuck.
All the more reason to keep from being dead.
Farrengalli was about to suggest they all hide deep in the cave for a while, but the words never got a chance to leave his vocal chords. Raintree rammed into him from behind, knocking them both over the ledge and into the great gulf of space.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Ace knew exactly where they had taken Clara.
God had shone a thin, golden beam through the clouds, casting its pure light on a dark cleft in the granite. The opening was only about thirty feet above the river, and probably back in the days of Noah, it had been deep underground. But the Unegama had bitched and moaned, as persistent as a psychotic woman, until it cut deep into God’s green Earth and first released these underground demons.
Why had God played such a trick? He’d let Ace think they were angels, in a nasty piece of bait and switch, and that they had been sent from above to assist in the holy work.
It all came down to a test of faith. Why, God had tested the faith of Adam, Abraham, Jonah, Daniel, Job, pretty much every big name in the Good Book. He’d even tested his own worldly son, Jesus. So Ace should never have expected any different.
Besides, God was still on his side, as promised by the guiding light.
“Wait up,” Bowie rasped from behind him.
Ace, beating his way through the scrub vegetation, had no reason to wait. This was his mission, even if Bowie now held the gun. Ace had something even more valuable: the C-4 in his knapsack, rigged with a touchy detonator.
The river guide was maybe fifty feet behind him, and though Ace was exhausted, an inner fire kindled deep in his gut and warmed him. God may have tested him, but it also meant Ace was up there with the big names, that maybe one day an extra testament would be added and preachers would be reciting from the Book of Goodall.
Ace had never been much for schooling, but he aimed to pass this test with flying colors.
He scrambled along the base of the cliff wall, following a natural shelf toward the opening. A geologist might have explained erosion patterns and the different properties of various rock layers, but to Ace, the shelf was God’s version of the straight and narrow.
Though he could use a vision right about now to give him a clue. In school, before he dropped out, he’d been able to bully other kids into cheating for him, or else just wrote the answers on the back of his hand. Except he always wrote down the wrong answers, or they always asked the wrong questions. Tricks. Always tricks.
God, though I walk through the valley of death by the still waters, may I cast no shadow. And if it be Thy will, deliver me unto evil so that I might show you I’m worthy.
And, just as simple as that, the demons came out of the misty night and winged toward the opening. Ace had guessed right. They were all gathering inside, gray, blind pigeons come home to roost.
He paused, moving aside a branch to watch them enter. They were silent, except for the soft stirring of their wings and tongues.
Three made a beeline for the rock cleft, slowing a little and angling sideways as they entered.
Then came another batch.
Feeding time.
Except Ace knew they were after a different, darker kind of nourishment. They had passed up Bowie to go after Clara. They needed the thing in her belly.
And goddamned if they were going to take his blood kin without a fight. A baby was a baby, and life was life. Worth fighting for, worth killing for, and worth dying for.