Scott Nicholson - The Gorge

“Samford,” he grunted, angry and a little scared. What if Ace Goodall had taken advantage of the shadows and crept up on his partner? He’d heard no gunfire, but Ace no doubt carried a hunting knife. Castle fumbled for his Glock as he wriggled the lower part of his body onto terra firma. He rolled, the pistol in his hand, forcing himself not to look down into the hole at the creature lurking inside Not a creature, just an old root, not a set of long, curling claws but a brittle branch The yell ripped the fabric of the night. It came from Castle’s left, maybe twenty feet away. At first Castle thought the sound had come from the woman believed to accompany Goodall.

Then: SkeeEEEEeeek.

The shriek phased in an arc overhead, like the stereophonic knob twiddling of a stoned-out rock guitarist or the rusty creaking of a giant coffin lid. Castle lifted the Glock and tracked the sound with the barrel, as if it were another Hogan’s Alley test in Quantico. At the FBI academy in Virginia, trainees were taught the basics of hostage negotiation, trigger jitters, and the kill shot. But Castle couldn’t recall any of those field exercises that had gone airborne.

Against the black sails of the sky, the shape was tangled and awkward, like a broken biplane. Or, he realized, an oversized bird with a healthy hunk of prey.

Like the bird he’d seen earlier.

Too large, too obscene, too out of place in this ancient but hushed wilderness.

A sick, soaring thing.

On clumsy, stunted wings, as if first learning to fly.

The soft moon on the mountaintops gave the creature a silhouette, and Castle’s finger tightened on the trigger. Not enough to squeeze off nine rounds, but enough to scare him. He’d almost broken the Hogan’s Alley code. Don’t shoot until you identified the target.

Because Castle recognized something in the disappearing jumble of wings, limbs, and limp meat.

The Rook’s wrist compass, blaze orange, torn and bobbing in the light of the quarter moon.

Gotta find the stupid bitch before the Feds do.

Ace Goodall plowed through the underbrush, all five-foot-six inches of him, as the branches and brambles plucked at his camou jacket. He figured the highfalutin bitch had turned on him, somehow signaled the agents and given away his position. Thinking back, he realized that bit with the campfire was obvious. She had probably been plotting against him for weeks, just waiting for her chance to betray him. Eve, Delilah, Jezebel. The Bible warned against such things. But God had put a little nub of weakness between each man’s legs.

But God in his infinite wisdom and mercy had also sent help from above. As Ace had watched from the shadows of the forest, debating whether or not to throw down on the pair of Haircuts, the fucked-up bat-thing had come to the rescue, swept down and scooped up the younger one, dragging it across the sky. Ace could have sworn a soft rain of blood had trailed from the struggling agent as the broken angel fluttered against the dusk. Ace could have easily taken the other one, the one who had fallen into the hole, but Ace figured maybe that was part of God’s plan, too. As if the Guy Upstairs had opened up the Earth to drag the Haircut straight to hell.

Proof that God was a patriot and approved of Ace’s holy work.

But Ace knew that God never took care of all the details. God only issued the commands, and left it to the foot soldiers to carry out orders. God might have steadied Ace’s hand while he built the bombs, but it was Ace himself who cooked up the nitromethane and mixed it with a gel of gunpowder and ammonium nitrate. Ace, who had dropped out of school in the seventh grade and never made it to basic algebra, much less chemistry, had learned from the best in a Dakota compound. He’d learned to wire an electric relay with a simple timer, stuff you could get at Radio Shack for less than ten bucks. The hardest part had been to pretend to be one of them, one of the baby-killing heathens in the human chop shops known as abortion clinics.

The first had been easy. He’d posed as a Birmingham municipal worker, gone in with his tool kit and a clipboard, clean blue coveralls, and no one had questioned him. In America, despite the post-9/11 fear of terrorism, a white male with a confident walk was never challenged. He’d set the bomb in a bathroom stall right next to the administrative office, figuring on luck and a little help from God. The blast the next morning had been spectacular, sending ceramic shards into the temple of the clinic’s top doctor, taking the murderous life of a nurse practitioner who’d just happened to be washing his hands (like Pilate) at the bathroom sink, and shutting down the clinic for three weeks.

The next two bombings were tougher, because security got tighter, and he wasn’t helped at all when some copycat amateur botched a mission in Los Angeles, the land of fags and liberals, where there were more baby-killers than bad actors. The La-La-Land bomber had hit a free clinic serving Hispanic immigrants, and while Ace figured there were enough illegal spics swarming the country, that was a mission for a later generation. The copycat had blown himself to bits while trying to plant the bomb, causing no other casualties and launching a week of media speculation over whether the Bama Bomber had met his end two thousand miles from home turf. The Feds knew better, though, because the MOs were different, as well as the chemical composition of the bombs, so the manhunt had scarcely eased.

Then Ace had picked up the bitch outside Atlanta and his luck had changed for the worse.

She had to pay, or at least get on her knees and beg forgiveness.

Just after the angel had delivered Ace from the Feds, Ace had stopped by the camp, retrieved his backpack- only one goddamned bomb left — and begun his hunt for Clara Bannister. Her disappearance had been too convenient, too coincidental. She should have yelled a better warning. Sure, she had screamed, but the scream was probably an act to give away their position. Same as the campfire. She’d insisted on the campfire. A hot meal, she’d said. The smoke would lay low, she’d said.

As if the bitch knew the first thing about survival training.

Ace jogged on, holding one forearm up to shield off the branches and slapping leaves. He’d left the trail, figuring he could head off Clara. She’d stick to the gentler switchbacks that had been cut first by animals and then maintained by hikers who liked their recreation a little bit on the raw side. Predictable, right down to the treacherous little slit between her legs.

He’d show her. He’d show her good.

In the fading daylight, he’d lost his fear of the great, open gorge below. The night was God’s protective tent, a church of hush and solace. Some people feared the dark, but to Ace, it was a place where God filled all the cracks of the world. The river was a gentle wash of sound far below, and that’s where the bitch would flee. Water flowed downhill, and so did blood, and so did the weight of sin. Clara had sinned, and she knew it.

Not by spreading her legs and taking his seed night after night. No, that was her duty, his right. Her sin had been that of Delilah, of seeking to lay him low before the enemy, of making him weak. Though the Book of Judges set down that Samson had been captured and blinded, in the end God restored Samson’s strength and allowed him to drag down a heathen temple on the heads of the Philistines. That was a clear sign to Ace that, though he’d been tricked and seduced by beauty, he still had a final destiny to fulfill. A bomb that would bring down the house.

And she could repent by helping.

He’d been thinking about it for days, and now that they’d given the Haircuts the slip, it was time to work their way out of the wilderness and continue the mission. It was simple, really, so obvious that he wondered why God had shrouded it in secrecy for so long. He’d brought Clara to him for a purpose, and even though the darkness now pressed against him like a liquid, the vision was a beacon that propelled his feet down the slick, leaf-carpeted slopes.