Scott Nicholson - The Gorge

And she’d closed herself in, rolled the dice all or nothing on the rhododendrons. She had no weapon, and she didn’t think she’d be able to slip past the Gordian knot of branches to make a run for it.

“This way,” she heard somebody hiss, where she believed the thicket gave way to the greater forest. Bowie.

Did she trust yet another man?

Did it matter?

She rolled away from the sweeping claw, thumping her head against a protruding root. The loam was slick and smelled like mushrooms. She kept her face close to it as she wriggled forward like an inchworm.

The claw snaked around her ankle and tightened. Her leg was yanked hard enough to nearly tear it from its socket. Then she was being lifted off the ground. Impossible. She’d seen the size of the creatures. She was twice as heavy as they were.

But she couldn’t deny the weightless moment. She grabbed blindly for branches as her body rose upside down in the stinking, moist darkness, rhododendron tearing her clothes, water or blood trailing under her arms.

Her fingers closed over the slippery cable of a branch, and for a moment the upward movement stopped. Then she was ripped free, spinning in dizzy circles, and below, in the gloaming of a fantasy-land mist, she made out Ace’s slim form, his pale face looking up at her without expression.

Fifty feet up in the air, now hanging high above the river, she arched her neck and looked at the thing that was carrying her. She had been wrong: it wasn’t an arm that held her ankle, it was a foot. Her skin chafed beneath the powerful grip, but she kicked anyway, believing a drop to her death was better than whatever fate the creature might have in store for her.

And the thing inside her…

Little Robert Wayne.

She couldn’t let them have him.

But she couldn’t curl her body enough to grab at and attack the creature, whose deformed wings seemed barely to ripple on the night current. Its grip on her was too strong to escape.

She let her neck relax and rolled her eyes to look down at the wide ribbon of the Unegama River. In the scant light, the wet rocks of the gorge walls glistened like jewels.

Ace said the creatures came down from heaven. She wondered if this one were returning there, or if God’s orders had been misinterpreted and twisted, or just plain forgotten altogether.

Clara Bannister closed her eyes and folded her hands across her belly. She’d never had a choice between heaven or hell, and she saw no reason for things to change now.

Bowie should have made a run for it. The woods were waiting, dark and dense enough to allow him to evade the creatures. Two full days of hiking, as long as he kept in one direction, and he’d eventually reach a highway, a house, or someone with a motorized camper. Springs would provide water, and some late berries were probably in season. He’d find safety, give directions, and wait until the whole chaotic mess died down, the government agencies and police and rescue squads sated, the creatures eradicated in the type of wide-scale military sweep that would rival the invasion of a small, troublesome dictatorship.

When the last bullet was fired and the last corpse collected, Bowie would be allowed to slink away to the Missouri Breaks, to a lone, thick-walled cabin in the hills, where he could add this freshest failure to his menagerie of memories. With exercise and a proper diet, he’d live another fifty years. Over eighteen thousand nights in which to lay his head down and endure its swirling stew of accusations and guilt. Nights when dreams, as they rose like rats from sewer holes, would pick at the torn meat and nibble down the long list that no longer had Connie alone at the top.

Yes, failure was an option. It had always been an option.

And he recognized that revenge against Ace Goodall, no matter how sweet, was not as spiritually fulfilling as saving Clara would be. And, since Clara was pregnant, maybe he’d get a two-fer in the eyes of God, wipe the slate clean for the loss of Connie and Dove, if not the rest of his group who had been slaughtered. So he’d bypassed the mesmerized and dazed Ace, who could have easily shot him in the back, and dashed toward the rhododendron, yelling and waving his arms, hoping to draw the attention of the two creatures. They ignored him, just as they had ignored Ace.

When Clara had been ripped from the thicket and carried across the night sky, Bowie had emerged from the woods and approached Ace. Bowie, the legendary tour guide, wasn’t even fit for prey, wasn’t good enough to serve as monster meat. A clean death would be a happy ending.

“They took my baby,” Ace said.

“Shoot me, you ugly son of a bitch.”

Ace lifted the Colt almost as an afterthought, the action of an absentminded mass murderer and serial killer. “I thought they was going to eat her.”

Bowie was calm. It would probably hurt like the Devil’s hot sauce for a split second, but the peace that followed would more than make amends. “A bullet, please.”

“God sent His angels, and they took her. Not me.”

“Maybe God left you here for a purpose. Maybe God needs you to kill me. Listen to Him.”

Ace actually cocked his head and put a hand to his ear, in what would have been considered a display of overacting if a movie camera had been rolling. “I don’t hear nothing. He used to talk to me, but now I don’t hear nothing.”

The clouds had thinned a little and the rain had stopped. The moonlight spread across the night sky in melodramatic purple wadding. The barrel of the pistol glinted, and its dark round eye looked into Bowie’s heart.

“He led me down by the still waters and left me there.” Ace glanced above, exposing the stubbly knot of his Adam’s apple.

“The waters don’t seem all that still to me,” Bowie said. “Class VI plus.”

“They took my baby. God took my baby.”

Ace, who had taken half-a-dozen lives without showing a shred of regret, and who had just lost his lover to an unknown and possibly supernatural species, harbored no room for self-reflection. It confirmed what Bowie had always heard about the most successful killers: They were sociopathic, lacking morality, possessing loose wires and corroded contacts where the higher-order brain housed its sense of right and wrong.

So, one more wouldn’t hurt, right? God wouldn’t hold it against his special little agent. If God were truly fair and merciful, Ace Goodall would even get an additional reward for eradicating one more cockroach in the Great Big Bug Motel. Maybe an extra string on the harp, or a golden-cross tattoo on one wing.

“Maybe God knows something we don’t,” Bowie said, stepping toward Ace, goading him.

Ace nodded as if Bowie had served up a sage’s helping of spiritual smoke. “Him that has the plan.”

“Right.”

Bowie was three feet away now, instinctively flinching in anticipation of the. 32-caliber bullet. But Ace let him come, until Bowie wrapped his hand around the pistol’s barrel and pulled it from Ace’s limp fingers.

Shit. What now?

“We got to save her,” Ace said.

“She’s probably dead by now.”

Ace dropped to his knees and grabbed his head, squeezing it between his hands like a rotten melon he was trying to smash.

“She ain’t dead,” he shouted, voice breaking and rising to an unsettling, keening pitch that roared back and forth across the gorge, so loud even the lapping, churning river couldn’t suppress it. Then he flopped forward in a quivering seizure, limbs twitching, fingers clawing at the coarse sand of the riverbank. The schizophrenic killer vomited a staccato rant of strange syllables.

Bowie could only stare transfixed, the Colt Python as heavy as a dead snake in his hand, as Ace spoke in tongues.