Scott Nicholson - The Gorge

But she was already gone. She had eased back into the concealing ink of the cave.

Raintree looked out across the valley once more. Even in the dim, filtered light, he would be able to see the creatures if they made an aerial attack. He believed, based on their habits, that they wouldn’t attack unless the prey- odd to think of ourselves as such — was out in the open. He recognized, on a deeper, intellectual level where the drugs swam with lazy strokes, that he knew nothing about these creatures, and didn’t think they could ever be understood, even if the finest scientists on the planet had a crack at them.

He decided he and his companions should at least wait until morning, when they’d have a better chance of fending off attack. A little rest would help. They could take turns, one keeping watch while the other two slept. He thought of lying in the dark next to Dove, the two of them drawing close to one another for heat. He was letting his mind wander when the pinprick of light danced deep in the cave’s guts.

The light grew larger, brighter, and then cast a cone of bluish white that revealed Farrengalli’s arm. He joined them at the mouth of the cave, then flicked off the light. They stood there, silhouettes barely visible. “Nothing back thataway,” he said.

“How far did you go?” Dove asked.

“Hard to say. All looks the same after a while. Two hundred feet, maybe. Started branching off in places and I was afraid I’d get lost.”

“This changes things,” Raintree said.

“How so, Chief?”

“I thought we should rest for a while, try to get some sleep, and keep one person on watch at the mouth of the cave. But you heard what the FBI guy said. They had been trapped in a cave when an explosion set them free.”

“You think they live in caves, then? Like this one?”

“Who knows? The point is, we don’t know. So we’d have to keep two guards, one up front and one deeper in the cave.”

“Cletus Christ,” Farrengalli said. “You let me go in there knowing vampires might be waiting?”

“We don’t know anything,” Dove said. “He’s just trying to think ahead, consider all the options. Maybe if you kept your mouth shut once in a while, you’d think of something, too.”

They all fell silent for a moment. Somewhere below, an owl hooted. Such an ordinary, natural sound took on a plaintive note because it was from a sane, normal world they would never again experience. Their lives had been changed, and whether they lived another fifteen minutes or fifty years, they would never outrun the nightmares that would forever stay one step behind their dreams.

“Okay,” Raintree said. “I’ll watch the back end first shift. Give me the light.”

Farrengalli handed it to him without protest. “Guess that means I got to be a goddamned gentleman and let Dove sleep.”

“Here,” Dove said, unbuckling the band of her wristwatch and passing it to Raintree. “Two-hour shifts. In six hours, we can catch the dawn’s early light.”

Raintree pressed the button on the timepiece, and the tiny LED showed it was after 11 o’clock. Time flew when you were scared shitless.

“Okay.” He played the light inside the cave until he found a spot where aeons of sand and grit had swept into a passable mattress. “Here’s a bed,” he said. “Wish I had a midnight snack and a pillow to go with it.”

Dove sat on the sand and curled into a ball on her side. Two coils of rope lay beside her, along with a small pile of carabiners.

“Hell, if you’re going to play hero, I might as well mind my manners,” Farrengalli said, unbuttoning his shirt. He took off the garment and draped it over Dove, his sweaty muscles glinting in the weak light. Then he moved to the lip of the cave and sat on a large rock, looking over the valley like Rodin’s Thinker with a hangover.

Raintree aimed the thin beam of light in front of him and entered his own private hell.

She could hear Ace’s angels above her, their flicking wings and occasional high-pitched whistles reminding her how close they were.

Clara had worked her way into the rhododendron thicket, where the dense leaves blocked the last shreds of dying daylight. Each time she rubbed against a knobby, scaly branch, she thought it was the arm of one of the creatures. Her hair tangled in a forked branch, and she ripped the damp strands free. She wanted to collapse, throw her face into the rotted leaves and loam of the forest floor, and surrender.

The old Clara, the one who sought pain and danger, the suicidal coward, would have given up long ago. That Clara wouldn’t have had the courage to run from Ace when the trip wire triggered the bombs. That Clara wouldn’t have stuck with him later, when he continued his cruel, abusive ways. But she also wasn’t strong enough to make it on her own. Ace wasn’t her savior, and she realized she had shifted her dependence to Bowie. Which is why, in the raft, she had hesitated when Ace asked for the pistol.

She wished she had the pistol now.

Because, for the first time, she had something to defend, a reason to live beyond the hedonistic pursuit of slow or fast death.

Ace talked about the angels as allies, but Clara didn’t see them as something God would send to Earth. She’d been willingly screwed and tortured by some of the finest nihilists and atheists in the business, and had endured a wild six-week fling with a Satanist, whose smoke and mirrors and candles and chants just grew completely corny after a while. She’d sensed no evil in that self-proclaimed “Dark Acolyte,” just as she sensed no evil in these angels.

Like all the other things that were claimed to be “evil,” when you looked right into the heart of them, they were just single-mindedly stupid.

Leaves rattled above, sending down a shower of drops. One of the creatures was trying to penetrate the canopy.

“She wasn’t good enough,” she heard Ace say for the third time, as if talking to some invisible higher power.

Maybe she wasn’t worth a damn, but she was getting smarter by the second. The creatures worked on radar and smell. Which meant if she kept perfectly still, they couldn’t locate her. Maybe the serpentine branches would confuse them. Would they be able to smell her with all the odors rising from the river mud?

The bigger question: Why weren’t they attacking Ace and Bowie? Especially Ace, who had stood and watched while the creature flew past his face and chased her.

She shivered. Maybe Ace really was protected by God, as he believed.

The light. She’d forgotten about the flashlight attached to her helmet. Were the creatures blind? She reached up an unsteady hand and flicked it off.

Something rattled just above her head. She ducked lower. It couldn’t hear her. Not with all the noise it was making, thrashing the wet leaves.

But it could smell her. Smell something that made her far more appealing than the two men.

She could only think of two things. Either her hormonal glands, her vaginal scent, had brought them sniffing the way she had attracted the juvenile-delinquent boys in Ohio.

Or else, through some strange sense she couldn’t begin to understand, they knew she carried a young, tender bud in her womb. Something they might find a rare delicacy, a bloody treat. Or maybe to be used for another purpose.

You’re not getting him. One way or another.

Claws raked her hair, closed, yanked some strands out by the roots. She endured the attack without a whimper. She’d been hurt harder by better.

But the arm behind the claws, though she couldn’t see it, thrust with renewed ferocity, and she could tell from the snapping branches that it had detected her position. That meant the other one would be right behind it.