The Gorge Read online

  “Shoot the fucker,” Farrengalli yelled as the second raft hurried toward the carnage.

  Bowie lifted his paddle handle like a Zulu warrior chucking a spear. The jagged tip was covered with a viscous substance the color of used motor oil, the same liquid that oozed from the gash in the creature’s back.

  Give ‘em hell, cowboy. Castle wasn’t sure whether the man in the raft had yelled the words or whether The Rook was still indulging in his Brokeback Mountain fantasies from beyond the grave.

  “Hold still,” Castle shouted, his words meant for the blond. However, Bowie also froze, the line clenched in his right fist, his back arched as he fought to hold the raft in place.

  This is for you, Rook. Castle leveled his arms in a two-handed grip, sighting down the barrel. The blond’s head slumped forward, the man either unconscious or dead. The movement gave Castle the moment of opportunity and he gently squeezed the trigger. The top of the creature’s gray skull exploded in a shower of ochre bone, black grue, and bits of ash-gray meat that might have been the thing’s brain.

  The roar of ignited powder raced up the gorge and echoed off the cliffs, the sound like a cannon volley in the otherwise hushed wilderness.

  Bowie released the raft, and it floated a few silent feet before bumping against a fallen tree. The boat gave a slow, full turn, and the two tangled bodies appeared unaffected at first. The creature’s mouth was still locked on the blond’s neck. The blond’s head lolled forward, his eyes closed, mouth parted in an unvoiced scream.

  Castle was readying for a second shot when the thing’s fingersclaws, Castle thought, though he wasn’t sure whether the observation was his or the disembodied Rook’s-slackened and released their grip on its victim’s life jacket.

  The creature’s arms dropped and it fell backward into the river, leaking a greasy, dark chum across the silvery surface of the river.

  The blond pitched forward. The raft wheeled along the length of the half-submerged tree before the grab line caught on gnarled, exposed roots.

  Bowie hurried past Castle, who checked the sky and listened past the gentle and constant wash of running water for a descending, primitive shriek.

  “McKay!” Bowie shouted, flopping onto the raft and lifting the man’s head. The injured man’s face was pale and bloodless, but his eyes blinked. He was still alive, though he appeared to be in shock.

  Twenty feet away, the river erupted in thrashing foam. The gray, skeletal creature lifted from the shallows, beads of water cascading from its flesh. The ivory rim of its skull was jagged, still oozing a putrid fluid.

  You should be dead, Castle thought. You don’t have a fucking brain anymore.

  But, like the creature under the bed that never went away even when the sun was out, this thing was stubborn.

  The creature twitched and whirled in crazy loops like a kite in a hurricane. The circuits of its airborne path became more erratic. Then it steadied in mid-flight, like a wingless hummingbird. It hung weightless for a moment, and then made a beeline for the forest, crashing into the high pine branches.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Downriver’s the best bet,” Bowie said, addressing the group on a sandy stretch of shore. Expect the unexpected was a lame little cliche, but it sure beat the alternative: G ray creatures will drop from the sky and suck your blood. “We could rig a makeshift stretcher, but it would take two days to hike out from here.”

  “I want to know what the fuck that thing was,” Farrengalli said. He jabbed a thumb toward Castle. “He blew its head off but it didn’t die.”

  “The worst thing we can do is panic,” Bowie said. “Let’s just all calm down and talk it out.”

  “This ain’t no self-help circle jerk,” Farrengalli said. “This is totally fucked. Look at Golden Boy.”

  McKay was wrapped in blankets, shivering, cheeks pallid. Dove attended to him with her usual precision, the same bedside manner that had soothed Bowie’s brow on more than a few troubled nights. The difference being that Bowie hadn’t suffered bite marks to his chest, except those passionate little nibbles she sometimes left.

  “He’s in shock,” Dove said. “Blood pressure dropping, breathing shallow. He won’t make it if we don’t do something fast.”

  “We can’t do anything fast out here,” Bowie said. “It’s not like we can dial 9-1-1.”

  “I should have insisted on a more thorough first aid kit,” Lane said. “I was expecting some scrapes and bruises, maybe a broken bone. Certainly nothing like this.”

  “The fuck you were,” Farrengalli said. “You wanted somebody to die. Like you told me, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

  Lane could barely suppress a grin. “This will cause our liability insurance to take a big hit. Though I suppose we can wiggle out under the ‘Act of God’ clause.”

  “Like a bat-faced bloodsucker dropping from heaven is an act of God?”

  “One thing I want to know,” Bowie said to Castle, who stood watch as if he were in the 1940s South Pacific and Japanese kamikaze pilots could drop from the clouds at any minute. “We didn’t know what hit us, but you reacted like you expected something like this.”

  “Training,” Castle said.

  “There’s no training for a wild animal attack.”

  “That wasn’t an animal.”

  I know it’s not an animal. But I’ll be damned if I’ll be the first to admit what we saw. Or that it took a. 357 caliber bullet to the head and flew away like a butterfly at a church picnic.

  “I saw one,” Raintree said. “During the last stop. I thought it was some kind of bird, then I thought it wasn’t, then I didn’t know what to think.”

  “You been smoking that shit in your medicine bag?” Farrengalli said.

  “My people had legends about this place, about the Raven Mocker, an evil spirit that could change forms.”

  “Don’t give us that redskin voodoo shit,” Farrengalli said.

  “What do you think it is, then?” Dove asked, taunting him. “Count Dracula?”

  “Vampires ain’t real,” Farrengalli answered, though his eyes flicked upward. “Even if they were, they’re all European poofs, fags who wear sunglasses at night.”

  “What about it, Mr. FBI?” Bowie asked. “Did the Boys Upstairs brief you on those things?”

  “Need-to-know basis,” Castle said, his eyes cold, the Glock tucked into his exposed shoulder holster, unstrapped and at the ready.

  Though Castle outweighed him by thirty pounds, Bowie fought an urge to grab the man by the front of his shirt and snap his head back and forth. Better to be calm. The others were looking to him for guidance, and he couldn’t fail them now. He’d done enough of that. “Maybe we do need to know.”

  Castle glanced at McKay, whose lips were parted like those of a beached trout. He walked to the water’s edge and examined the high granite cliffs. The darkening sky brought out the striations of the veins, revealing tons of Earth that had been peeled away over millennia by the ceaseless rub of the river.

  “Okay,” Castle said, turning back to the group. “I saw one of those things last night. It-” Castle looked at the wet tips of his hiking boots-“It carried off my partner.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Farrengalli said. “Hold on just a doo-dah-fucking-minute. You’re saying there’s more than one? And you didn’t care to mention such a fact?”

  “Look,” Castle said. “I thought I was seeing things. The monsters under the bed… ”

  “I don’t see no beds around here, do you?”

  “Take it easy,” Bowie said, though his blood was probably boiling as hot as the Italian’s. “Tell us what happened.”

  “We were closing in on the suspect,” Castle said, his words fast and fluid. “The Bama Bomber was camped upriver on the ridge, just above where I flagged you guys down. He must have set some kind of booby trap around his camp, because one of us triggered an explosion and started a landslide. My partner was trying to help me out of a hole when one of those things swo
oped down and carried him off.”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t the same one?” Bowie asked.

  “It was bigger than the one we just saw.”

  Bowie traded looks with Dove, whose face registered disbelief. She mopped McKay’s forehead with a wet cloth. “Chupacabra,” she said. “First reported recently in Puerto Rico, then all over the Southeast. Doglike creatures that supposedly suck the blood from cows and goats.”

  “Urban legends out here in the sticks?” Lane said.

  “I think they were in the hole,” Castle said. “Like maybe they were living underground, maybe sealed off for years, maybe even decades or centuries, before the bomb set them free.”

  “Then who knows how many of them are flying around up there?” Farrengalli said. “Could be dozens, for all we know.”

  “I only saw one,” Raintree said.

  “Might be the one that attacked us,” Bowie reasoned. “You saw its eyes. Blind, like it was nocturnal.”

  “Looks like a fucked-up bat-creature to me,” Farrengalli said. “Unless it’s what Raintree called it “Raven Mocker.”

  “Yeah, and it changes forms.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Bowie said. “There has to be some sort of explanation.”

  “None that will do him any good,” Dove said, pressing her fingertips to McKay’s jugular. “He’s dead.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “Could be worse,” Pete said.

  “Yeah?” Jenny sat on a stump, rubbing one of her bare feet. It was pale and wrinkled, fungal skin flaking. “How could it be worse? Like maybe your mother was with us? And it’s going to rain?”

  “Stop with it. If I’m reading this map right, we’re only about four miles from the ranger station.”

  “One, you couldn’t read a map unless it was leading you to a strip joint, and two, the ranger station’s only open in the summer, remember?”

  “Well, might be a pay phone there. And maybe a shelter we can sleep under.”

  Jenny let out an exaggerated, wet sigh. “No pay phones, dummy. No electricity. No plumbing. Nothing. You wanted to get away from it all, and we sure as Christ did.”

  “Hey, if we make it out of here, we’ll have this to look back on. We pulled through together when times were tough.”

  “Like when you lost your job? Six months of Scotch pulled you through that one. My miscarriage? You were busy banging that slut dental hygienist. We know all about getting through tough times.”

  “Do we have to go into all that? You can’t give it a rest, can you?”

  “Not when my feet are killing me and my belly’s growling and I’m stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with a wannabe Daniel Boone.”

  They had walked maybe two miles so far, most of it uphill, and Pete had only the slightest idea where they were. They had passed a couple of trail intersections marked with signposts, so Pete guessed they were going in the right direction, but judging from the scale of the map, the ranger station was at least six miles away, not four. He was trying to keep Jenny’s spirits up, but was struggling to keep from slapping her. He’d only struck her once, when she’d found out about the dental hygienist. He’d never had to hit her again, because she didn’t know about the day-care teacher down the block, the bank teller with the D cups, or her own sister Lillian, who had first seduced Pete at a family reunion and had made it a regular feature of their Thanksgiving holidays thereafter. Not that Pete considered himself a stud or anything. He’d been popping Viagra since it had first arrived on the market, and sex with Jenny happened about as often as the coming of an Ice Age, with about as much warmth.

  He’d been hoping the trip to the North Carolina wilderness would awaken her primal instincts, because despite his philandering, he thought of himself as a loyal and supportive husband. When he’d said, “For better or for worse, until death do us part,” he’d meant it, though he occasionally regretted it. This had turned into one of those occasions.

  “We can go for days without food,” Pete said. “Water’s our main concern.”

  “We just left a bunch of water. Why didn’t you think to drink some of it?”

  “Bacteria. You want diarrhea for the next three weeks, go ahead.”

  “Looked clean to me. No houses means no toilets. No civilization, remember? That’s what you kept telling me. Like it was a good thing.”

  “At least you’ll have a story to tell your bridge club. About how I let us get our canoe stolen at gunpoint. And we how ran into a real-life FBI agent. And we-”

  “-and we died on a dirt trail in the land of the hillbillies.”

  Jenny was always one for melodrama. Never happy unless things were at their absolute worst. Pete was no Mr. Sunshine, but he’d learned to play devil’s advocate to give their relationship some talking points. “Okay, we make it back, get to the rental car by tomorrow, catch the first flight out of Charlotte, boom, back in Jersey before you know it.”

  “Slots in Atlantic City?”

  “Whatever you say, babe.”

  Funny how surrender was the only path to victory in a marriage. Pete was just about to say the ranger station was maybe only three miles away when he heard a peculiar whining sound. Thinking a mosquito was orbiting his ear, he swatted, but the sound grew louder. He wondered if they had somehow stirred up a nest of bees.

  Jenny screamed, bees for sure, she was allergic to them, and if they ever made it out alive, he’d never hear the end of it Her scream blended with the heightening whine, her face was fixed on a point behind him, and her eyes were wide and he noticed the irises were brown, funny how you could live with somebody for fifteen years and not know the color of her eyes.

  Pete was about to turn when the sky dropped on him, hammering him into the loam of the forest floor. He tried to stand, but his legs were sodden stumps. Jenny was still screaming, and somehow the noise was out of place in the previously hushed wilderness. His shoulder hurt, and his arms, and a steel band of agony girded his chest. He looked down and saw gray hands gripping his upper torso, long, knotty fingers tapering to sharp talons. The fingernails sank into his flesh, one above the other, exploring the gap that divided his rib cage. The hands tugged and the talons sank deeper, spawning a gush of blood.

  Pete, swaying on his hands and knees, could only stare with fascination at his torn skin, struggling to stay upright against the weight on his back. Jenny screamed. He wished she would shut up.

  Animal attack. Bear, mountain lion, something. Except he knew better. Those hands and the cruel, sinewy fingers belonged to a creature that had no place on this Earth.

  Buzzing in his ear. The papery rattle of a dry tongue. A tug at his neck.

  Numb. Fading to black. Blood warm on the inside of his shirt.

  Shit. Talk about melodrama. He was dying and didn’t know how.

  He collapsed as the teeth gained a better purchase on his neck and the gap in his chest widened. He opened one eye and saw Jenny running. Maybe Jenny would make it.

  The ranger station was only a million miles away.

  Just like he was.

  Going.

  Shit.

  Just before he went under, as his life fluids leaked into the ancient Appalachian soil, he felt the weight lift and heard the shrieking scream as the creature went after Jenny. Pete grinned, broken leaves sticking to his lips.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “Sin’s a funny thing,” Ace said. He’d been thinking about it for a while, since they had nothing else to do.

  “What’s so funny about it?” It was the first time Clara had spoken since they’d finished making love.

  Women. Who could figure ‘em? Blab your ear off one minute, then sink into a long sulk.

  “It’s almost like the better it feels to do something, the higher the price ought to be. Take killing, for instance. It didn’t bother me one bit to blow up a few baby-butchers. And I know I’ll get rewarded for it come Judgment Day. But if I really had to kill somebody, look them in the eye and make their heart
stop, why, that would be plumb awful.”

  “What’s that got to do with feeling good about it?” She had put her clothes back on, though the day was still warm despite the gathering clouds. Truth be told, she was putting on a little weight in the gut, despite not eating much. Just proved what he’d always heard, once a woman thought she had you hooked, she let her body go all to hell.

  He rummaged in the sealed ziplock and pulled out a Camel. “Shit. Only three smokes left.”

  “Don’t you feel bad for killing those innocent bystanders who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?” she asked.

  Ace lit the cigarette and watched the smoke curl into the sky. “First off, nobody’s innocent. The women who went to the clinics to get their babies sucked out of their bellies sure ain’t innocent. That plumber who died in the bathroom had hands as red as any of them, because he was roundabout helping commit murder.”

  “So it’s murder when they do it, but not when you do it?”

  Ace didn’t like the way the clouds were mashing together and ruffling up in a slow boil. His clothes were just about dry, and he was starting to feel exposed. Like maybe the angels would frown on his nakedness. “I ain’t the one ordering the killing. I’m just the Lord’s instrument.”

  “You know when we first got together, when I said a woman didn’t have the right to make a choice about her baby?”

  Ace bit down hard on the Camel’s filter. “Yeah,” he grunted.

  “And life is sacred, and all that?”

  “Yeah.”

  She’d get to the point eventually, but it would probably be some highfalutin horseshit she’d learned in college, morality and religion dressed up in a suit and tie. Hell, religion was just another layer that kept you from God. He knew it was horseshit, and she knew he knew, but it made his gut tight all the same. Another reminder that she came from money and fine society while he fought, fucked, and fast-talked his way out of a Southern trailer park to Dakota.