Scott Nicholson - The Gorge

And don’t forget me, said one of his other round friends from the bottom of his medicine bag.

Of course he wouldn’t. How could he ever forget that one?

“You were right,” Dove said. “Down there. We should have waited.”

“We’ll turn out okay.”

In rock climbing, patience, caution, and precision were the buzzwords, but they had time for none of those. Climbing in the dark was nearly impossible, and Raintree had argued the climb should wait until the morning.

Castle and Dove believed they wouldn’t live until morning. And Farrengalli had shrugged and said, “Whatever you think, Chief.”

So Raintree thought he should make the climb by himself, but Dove put forth the reasonable argument that the climb would be safer with two people. The buddy system. They’d discussed the route, the dark triangular wedge halfway up that suggested a cave should they need cover, the method of working the ropes, with Raintree leading and setting the anchors. He’d tried to talk her out of coming along, but part of him, that sick part of him ruled by pills and bottomless hunger, wanted her off alone.

Despite the danger.

But danger was everywhere now, even by the river. The winged creatures could swoop down at any moment. Age-old demons from ancient visions, bad dreams brought to life. Bad medicine.

The others probably thought Raintree was calm and fearless, even during the animal attacks, due to some sort of native spiritual makeup, an ancestral chemical that pumped through his genes that allowed him to switch from reflective shaman to blood-crazed warrior in an instant. Genetics could claim no credit, and neither could Raintree. His system pumped enough illicit prescription medications to stagger an elephant or stimulate a sloth.

But he was balanced now, ready for action. Ready for anything.

He bent to coil the primary line. It straightened and grew taut.

“Hey, you guys, wait up,” shouted Farrengalli from below.

Derek Samford dreamed.

He was weightless, hollow, but felt powerful despite it.

The licking, nibbling, and sucking had ended some time ago. In this timeless dark vault, it might have been hours or centuries. The noises had faded, that soft scurrying like nails on stone. As he lay there in his strange half sleep, he dreamed his body was lifting in the darkness.

Levitating a moment, he found he could perceive the boundaries of this prison. He couldn’t explain it. All psychological knowledge had left him, years of training and study washed down an invisible drain along with his soul. He didn’t need to explain it.

He could hear the slanted walls, the rubble strewn on the subterranean cavern floor, stalagtites dangling overhead like icicles frozen in the slow melt of aeons. Hear in a way he had never known, with a deeper and more basic understanding of his surroundings. At Quantico, he’d practiced with infrared goggles and thermal imaging systems, and those advanced technologies offered a fresh and bizarre perspective. This backward evolutionary step had enriched him far more deeply than anything found in the federal armory.

Samford, for the first time since his capture, realized he could move. Perhaps it was merely the freedom of dreaming. It didn’t matter. To his drained flesh and poisoned brain, movement meant flight.

He could escape.

While pursuing his master’s degree in behavioral psychology, he had encountered a theory suggesting the brain played tricks at the moment of death. Perhaps as a protective mechanism, certain portions of the brain took over, suppressing the frontal lobe, giving way to more primitive, reptilian emotions. Other electrical impulses created the illusion commonly referred to as “going toward the light” by those who had been pulled back from death’s door. According to the theory, this cushioning was nature’s way of easing the inevitable.

Suspended in pitch blackness, flexing his thin fingers, Samford crafted a rival theory, one drenched in the morass of nightmares and ignited by the lightning that had sparked the zoological soup.

Death was okay.

Death felt goddamned good.

But just as energy could be neither created nor destroyed, every natural transition had its price.

The price of death, of newfound freedom, was hunger.

He licked his lips and found he was no longer grinning. The persistent erection had lost its blood, along with the rest of his body, and his new sensory perception detected its flaccid wiggle between his naked legs. He spun like an acrobat on stunt rings, though he needed no safety net. In this new state of being, safety no longer mattered.

All that mattered was instinct and the lulling whisper of the night.

Not the night he now smelled seeping from a far crack in the cavern’s walls, but the truer night, the ultimate dark that feasted on the universe and would one day finish its meal, yet still suffer an endless ache for more.

Samford shook his wiry, withered limbs, and despite his dearth of blood, a mockery of feeling returned. He stroked the air like a beginning swimmer in shallow water, tentative. After flailing in place for long moments, wasting a precious stretch of night, he finally relaxed, letting his body do its own bidding.

He moved through the air, ragged wings fluttering behind him.

He realized why he’d heard no more scratching sounds and endured no more bites.

The others were gone, prowling for prey, sick with the same hunger he now endured.

He wouldn’t be hungry for long.

Beyond the opening in the mountain lay a world where Samford and his new kind had never really belonged. A world that had forgotten them, though the creatures themselves harbored an ancestral memory stronger than those who had thrived and populated the planet during their time of captivity.

Samford drifted toward the fresh air that was rich with the smell of the river, teeming with movement, ripe with red possibilities.

Damned redskin thought he’d leave me in the dust and steal my thunder.

Farrengalli worked his way up the rope. He was glad he’d reached the bottom of it before Raintree reeled it in. The first part of the climb had been easy, but a day of fast water and an afternoon of dodging bloodsucking Stephen King nightmares had worn him down a little. He was running on pure adrenaline now, and wondered what kinds of smells the creatures picked up on.

Probably fear. Or blood. Wonder if Dove’s on the rag?

One thing for certain. When they put the call in and the cavalry came swooping over the ridge in their black helicopters, Vincent Stefano Farrengalli was going to be in the spotlight taking credit. He’d propped Castle up in a nice little niche, a place where two boulders had fallen against each other. Castle was alert and seemed recovered from shock. In fact, he’d tried to talk Farrengalli into taking the raft, just the two of them.

Farrengalli had half the same idea: He’d take the raft by himself. But he’d already seen the power of the flooded river, and he knew he couldn’t handle the raft by himself. If any of the bloodsuckers attacked, he wouldn’t be able to fend them off while keeping the raft on course. Castle would be useless, except as ballast. Even if Farrengalli completed the solo run, odds were better that Chief and the Babe would strike pay dirt with their little cell phone trick, leaving Farrengalli in the drink when the reporters started their feeding frenzy.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Raintree said, peering over the ledge.

“The Bat-climb,” Farrengalli said, bracing himself to rest his forearms. “You know, in the Batman TV show, when him and Robin would walk up the side of the building. Except, really, they just turned the camera sideways, because you can see the wires tugging their capes straight out.”