Scott Nicholson - The Gorge

Ace wouldn’t kill her. Perhaps he needed a vessel for his anger. Out here in the wilderness, there were no abortion clinics. The bombs he’d planted with trip wires around the camp might have killed the two agents, but Ace wasn’t a mindless killing machine. After all, he’d spared the New Jersey couple, taking only their canoe and leaving them with their money, jewelry, and lives.

“It’s raining,” she said. The drops were heavier now, ticking off the dry leaves.

Ace sat up. “I had a vision.”

She cupped a hand over her eyes, scanning the breaks in the canopy for the angels.

“No, not up there,” he said. “In my head.”

Clara expected him to cite book, chapter, and verse. “Did it show you the way to the Promised Land?”

He looked at her as if gauging the length between his hand and her cheek. “No,” he said, nodding down the slope to the long, plunging falls that had caused them to ditch the canoe. “It showed me that.”

Through the gray gauze of the rain and the mist that was beginning to rise over the river, she saw the raft above the falls, making for shore. Three occupants. They reached the shallows, apparently forewarned of the falls and able to avoid the insistent pull of the main channel. The person in front, wearing an orange life vest, rubber-looking suit, and blue helmet, jumped out of the raft and towed it to the muddy bank. The other two got out when it ran aground. Unlike the couple with the canoe, these boaters looked experienced and confident.

“They’re going to carry the raft around the falls,” Ace said. “Smart.”

“Should we catch a ride?”

Ace reached for his pants. “That’s what the vision told me to do.”

“Maybe we should wait. If they give us the raft now, we’ll have to carry it ourselves. But if we wait until they reach that sandy beach at the bottom of the waterfall, we can get in the water and put some distance between them and us.”

Ace twisted his mouth to one side, chewing the inside of his lip. “It’ll take them at least twenty minutes to get around those rocks on foot.”

“They might even be setting up a camp.” The vision of a dry tent appealed to her, but she didn’t want to think about Ace marching the three people into the woods and pumping them full of bullets. Killing was okay when it happened off somewhere in another state, or if it was cops or something, but people you looked in the eye were another matter.

The man Ace had killed in Atlanta was trying to stop them from stealing his car. That murder made sense. It had a purpose. She understood that one, and knew God would forgive it. But these people were innocent.

The three had hoisted the raft over their heads, which provided protection from the rain as well as allowing easy balance. The raft was the inflatable kind, so it probably wasn’t that heavy, but Clara didn’t see how they could carry it that way over either the steep, rocky drop or the dense and twisted vegetation. But instead of walking the raft along the shore, they carried it to a sparse stand of trees, where they set it down and stood talking to each other, the tallest one making wild gestures with his arms.

“What are they waiting for?” she asked Ace, who was now rolling his damp socks up his pale, knobby ankles.

Ace reached for the backpack and pulled it to him, drawing out the pistol. He pointed it upriver, well above the falls. “Them.”

Another raft. Three more passengers. Three more victims. The one in the rear wore no helmet or life vest.

“And them.” Ace poked a thumb toward the sky.

As if determined to be a permanent fixture in Ace’s visions, the angels circled high overhead, mixing with the roiling clouds.

Bowie dragged the raft up the bank where Dove and the others waited under the trees. After giving McKay a shallow burial, Bowie had warned the group about the upcoming falls, a severe and impassable drop known as Little Flush to white-water enthusiasts, though on the official maps the stretch was called Echota. Bowie no longer fully trusted his memory of the river’s twists and turns because Hurricanes Katrina and Ivan had flooded the gorge and altered the channels. However, Little Flush was still just as severe as ever, and probably had been since the dinosaurs had died out. The only way down it was around it.

“What took so long?” Farrengalli asked, the trace of a taunt in his voice.

“The important thing is getting here safely,” Bowie said, not mentioning that he’d slowed down so Castle could maintain surveillance against the flying nightmare. Or nightmares, if there were more than one, and Bowie was willing to bet there were. After all, God had commanded Noah to carry two of every species on the ark. “This rain will make the river even more dangerous.”

“Should we make portage down to the bottom and then look for a campsite, or do the best with what we have here?” Dove asked him, in obvious deference as if to show the others that the decision was Bowie’s alone.

“We need to push on,” Jim Castle said. The rain and river moisture hadn’t affected his hair a bit. The crew cut bristled up like the business end of a wire brush. “The suspects might be just ahead. They had to get out and walk, too, or else went over the brink and got smashed up.”

“They mighta gotten munched.” Farrengalli squinted into the rain.

“We haven’t seen any sign of the creature,” Bowie said. The word “creature” sounded odd on his tongue, as if naming it gave it more credence. He still wasn’t quite willing to accept what he’d seen. He’d assimilated it as just another danger, a natural hazard that could be handled with proper preparation and caution. Like the rain and the rising rapids.

“I’m exhausted,” Lane said. “I think we should break here.”

“This isn’t a democracy,” Bowie said. “ProVentures carries weight in the boardroom, but out here I call the shots.”

“I say we move on,” Castle said.

Bowie wondered if the agent would force them ahead with his gun. Or worse, split them up. He decided to exaggerate the potential danger in order to sway the doubters. It wasn’t much of a stretch.

“Remember how I explained how the Unegama ranged from Class III to Class VI waters, with VI meaning there’s a risk of death? Well, when it’s raining like this, you can bump it up to Class VII.”

“There is no Class VII,” Lane said.

“That’s what I mean.”

“I don’t want to wait around here and get my ass chewed off by a flying thing with no brains,” Farrengalli said.

Bowie looked at Raintree, who, as usual, stood off to the side, meditative and stolid, almost spaced out. “What do you think, Raintree?”

“Shit, why you always got to ask the redskin?” Farrengalli complained. “Like the rest of us don’t matter. Or do you just make a point of including minorities?”

“Because he knows how to listen.”

“Listen?” Farrengalli put his hand to his ear and made a theatrical tilt of his head. “Me hear-um call of nature. Oh, wait, that corn fart. You call it ‘maize.’”

Raintree didn’t blink. The rain fell harder, the staccato fusillade rivaling the sound of the river. Bowie realized the others, even Farrengalli, were waiting for Raintree’s opinion. He didn’t know whether it was Raintree’s stony equanimity or his people’s ancestral link to the area that gave his opinion added weight.

“What do you think of a compromise?” Like Dove, Raintree directed his remarks to Bowie, who was relieved to have at least two allies in case the dispute came down to a war of wills. Both Castle and Farrengalli appeared on the point of rebellion. “I think we all could use a rest. Maybe we could break until we see whether the rain keeps up, then make the trek to the bottom of the falls and set up camp for the night.”