Scott Nicholson - The Gorge

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.

“Maybe it’s different when you actually make a baby out of love. Maybe it really is a gift from God.”

Ace cackled like a rooster with a sore throat. “What the hell you think I been telling you?”

“I don’t mean like that. I mean, like, it’s something you own. Something you owe. Something you have a duty to care for.”

“Don’t be getting uppity. It’s God’s will that makes them, and it’s God’s instruments that plant them, and it’s God’s whores that spread their legs and squirt them out. A woman’s just there to serve. That’s the only reason it’s set up that way.”

“I could never kill a baby.”

“Me, neither.”

“But you did kill one. In Birmingham. That pregnant woman who died.”

“That’s different. The baby wasn’t born yet.”

“So it was just another innocent bystander?”

“Ain’t nobody innocent. I told you that already.” Ace was getting a headache. He wished his instrument would get hard so he could shut her up with another round of loving, but the cigarette tasted like mud and his toes were cold and it was going to rain before long and the Feds were closing in and they wouldn’t take him alive, which meant this might be all he had left so he’d better make it matter.

“Well, if I ever got pregnant, I’d consider it a blessing.”

“It’s gonna rain.”

“What are we going to do, Ace?”

“Get up under them big trees, I reckon.”

“No. I mean, what are we going to do?”

The angels were nowhere in sight. Maybe they were off helping other servants in need. “We’re already doing it,” he said.

Raven Mocker.

Robert Raintree couldn’t believe he’d even mentioned the legend. Raised in the Qualla Boundary, less than two hundred miles from the Unegama Wilderness Area, he knew better. The Cherokee reservation had been the home of alcoholism, violence, and poverty during his childhood, until his grandfather had whisked him off to Oklahoma. In Qualla, the best job you could hope for was to pose in ceremonial headdress and buckskins beside a stuffed, moth-eaten black bear while sweaty white people took your picture. Or, if you had patience, you might work your way into a cashier’s job at a shop that sold rubber tomahawks and Confederate license plates.

All that changed with the coming of Harrah’s Casino, federally approved gambling that offered belated reparations for the White Man’s long-ago massacre. A tiny portion of the profits were distributed to anyone who was at least one-sixteenth Cherokee. Not a bad deal, all the way around. The U.S. government shed the public’s collective guilt, and the average Qualla resident graduated from drinking Boone’s Farm Kountry Kwencher to Crown Royal, though white people ran the casino and managed to gain a majority interest in nearby hotels and restaurants.

Raintree invested his gambling proceeds in his fitness gyms, and now he was a partner in another White Man project. One that now had a body on its hands. He wasn’t sure he liked the way Bowie had ordered them to haul it to the edge of the woods and cover it with stones.

It wasn’t an it. It was a person. C.A. McKay was a celebrity to some people, those who followed cycling. A man was dead, torn up by a creature that wasn’t a vision and wasn’t a Raven Mocker because the Cherokee spirits were too weak “What you thinking, Chief?” Farrengalli called from the rear of the raft.

He was thinking of the painkiller he’d taken while on burial duty, and how it was seeping softly through his bloodstream. Raintree made a powerful dip with his paddle, sending the raft shooting ahead of Bowie’s. A drop of rain hammered off his nose. “I think we’re going to get wet.”

Dove touched his shoulder, her fingers gentle and warm. The first warmth he’d felt in a long time. “You have to talk to him.”

Him. Raintree wasn’t in any position to challenge Bowie Whitlock. Though Raintree had a formal business relationship with ProVentures, his contract for the Muskrat run was clear: He was only along for promotional considerations. He assumed the others had received the same contract, though he had no doubt the payments varied, depending. Bowie would earn the most, probably twice what the others made. Travis Lane, already on the payroll, would probably get a bonus and maybe some stock benefits, while Vincent Farrengalli had probably signed for minimum wage and a date with a hair stylist.

But nowhere had the contract covered the possibility of being ripped to shreds by bloodsucking creatures.

“We finish the mission,” Raintree told Dove. It was the sort of thing Bowie would say. What she would expect to hear.

“Did you see that fucker?” Farrengalli said, working his paddle at a feverish pace, dipping off starboard and hurrying back to port, arms not resting. “I mean, I know I don’t have no imagination, so I couldn’t dream up nothing like that. Fucking doo-dah-day.”

“I wish I had photographed it,” Dove said.

“Did you see it fly off and leave its brains behind?”

“Maybe we should have collected some of the flesh,” Raintree said. “For later analysis.”

“Would you touch that shit?” Farrengalli was talking even faster than usual. “No telling what kind of alien AIDS that thing carried. You saw the way it ripped into Golden Boy’s neck.”

“A search team will have to come back for his body,” Dove said.

“Let the FBI worry about it,” Raintree said. “Castle acts like he’s seen it all before.”

“He seems a little unstable to me,” she replied, her voice barely audible over the incessant wash of the river.

“You kidding? He’s a fucking nutter,” Farrengalli said. “Talking to himself all the time. I can’t believe none of us brought a gun.”

“Why would we need a gun?” Raintree asked. “Nobody expected something like this to happen, even ProVentures.”

“Expect the unexpected, dude. Isn’t that what Bowie Boy says?”

“That’s not helping any,” Dove said. “Bowie knows this gorge better than any of us. Maybe better than anybody.”