Scott Nicholson - The Gorge

“Right now, I have the gun, so I’m the law.” Bowie, speaking just loudly enough to be heard over the river, his head held erect and his glare fixed on Ace like the mean teacher he’d had in sixth grade. Even in the bad light, there was no mistaking those eyes.

Jesus, the fucker means business. Forgive him, for he knows not what the hell he doeth, but the river-rat bastard is dead serious.

“They’re going to put her on the Changing Rock. They’re going to take my baby. Make it one of them.”

“They’re animals. Vicious, cunning animals. Call them what you want, make up some comic-book legend, it doesn’t change anything.”

“We got to hurry,” Ace said. He began walking away from the gun, and then broke into a crippled jog.

“Stop or I’ll shoot, you son of a bitch,” Bowie shouted behind him. “God knows, I’ve earned the right.”

“Go ahead,” Ace shouted back. “You can’t kill me. You can only make me deader.”

He ran along the river, knees and lungs on fire, blood sweet in his mouth. God had showed him where to go. God didn’t show the whole picture, because it had never been that way. Part of the mystery and beauty of the visions was that God gave him a few pieces to the puzzle and Ace had to sort out the rest. He only wished it didn’t make his head hurt so fucking much.

Farrengalli was close to coming when he heard the vampire-fucker’s shriek.

He’d worked hard for the orgasm, and as it approached, he’d finally forgotten that he might get clawed, bitten, and bagged for a trophy at any moment. Except the hot little babe’s fingernails had done a number on his bare back. When she’d first called to him from the makeshift bed, he’d thought she was teasing him, doing some kind of dyke dance or playing a melodramatic mind game. And when she’d whispered, “Do me,” like an order, well, he’d still needed some convincing. It had taken fifteen seconds to prove she was no dyke, and another fifteen to show both her sincerity and her talents. It wasn’t easy to get the Big Boy Boomeroo up when fear was doing a shrivel number, but she worked hard to set the engorging blood in motion.

And once the big boy got rolling, it liked to finish the ride. It was only fucking natural.

But even the Boomeroo couldn’t withstand the effects of a balls-clenching shriek from the throat of a bloodsucking animal. And the monster had come out of nowhere, because the sky over the gorge had been quiet, only the occasional red wink of a distant jet to mar the clouds, stars, and smudge of moon.

Farrengalli barely had time to withdraw the Boomeroo from its warm, wet, welcoming sheath when the creature struck him, flying sideways to ram into his shoulder. As Farrengalli was knocked across the rocky terrain, the slow-motion tumble knocked some thoughts together:

… Dove had either come a half-dozen times or else she was the Meryl Streep of faking orgasm…

… the Boomeroo was flopping like a bobble-head doll, right out in the open where the creature could rip it away like a monkey plucking a banana…

… the creature had attacked not from the sky, but from the rear of the cave…

… meaning the fucking redskin had let them down, not covered their asses, sold them down the river…

Then he was rolling away from the mangling grip of the beast, trying to get up and run, hoping it would attack Dove instead, but it tackled him around the ankles, and this one was huge, not chimp-sized like the others. And the son of a bitch was strong.

“You goddamned rapist!” the creature yelled, and Farrengalli elbowed the thing in the head before the words registered.

The redskin.

Gone off the deep end. Grinding his shoulder into Farrengalli’s gut, lifting him and slamming him onto his back. Raintree did some kind of homo wrestling move, then had Farrengalli pinned on his belly, his arms tucked under Farrengalli’s armpits, hands locked behind Farrengalli’s skull, applying enough pressure to nearly snap his neck.

Farrengalli tried to roll away, but the man knew his stuff. Farrengalli’s knees were scraped and raw, and he couldn’t twist free. He remembered something he’d seen on World Wrestling Federation broadcasts, and though the matches were staged, the violent intent seemed real enough. Farrengalli jerked his head back hard, smashing it into the broad cartilage of Raintree’s nose. The full-nelson headlock loosened, and Farrengalli drove backward with his elbow again, causing the breath to whooosh out of his opponent. Twisting, he managed to work a knee into the Cherokee’s crotch.

The man may have been an Olympic wrestler, but he didn’t know shit about fighting dirty.

Farrengalli kicked again, breaking free, crab-crawling away. “Hold on, Chief!”

In the muted moonlight, Raintree looked like something out of a Frederick Remington painting, savage, primitive, deadly. The Injun was on the warpath. He pulled the piton from his belt and closed in.

Farrengalli backed up to the lip of the cave, holding his hands apart. “Easy, fellow,” he said, as if Raintree were a rabid, growling dog.

His pupils are fucking HUGE.

Raintree hunched, tensing his body as if preparing to leap. If he did, his momentum would knock them both into the gorge. Farrengalli could try to step aside, like they did in the movies, but he wasn’t a stunt man and there was no safety net below.

“She wanted it!” Farrengalli yelled. “She begged me for it!”

He was aware of the Boomeroo in its now-flaccid state, exposed and dangling, where one blow with the crude blade of the piton would leave it laying in the dirt like a half-eaten, ketchup-drenched hot dog at a Labor Day cookout.

Raintree eased two steps closer, the tension in his muscles almost palpable. The distant whisper of the river fought for attention in Farrengalli’s roaring eardrums.

“Robert!” Dove called from the cave.

Raintree’s pupils were black holes. Farrengalli looked left, then right, for a rock or something he could throw. He’d had a piton lying beside him while taking care of bidness with the fox, but the suddenness and ferocity of Raintree’s assault had caught him off guard.

“Robert,” Dove said, her voice calmer now.

“Listen to her,” Farrengalli said. “She’ll tell you.” He licked his lips. He shouldn’t have eaten all those granola bars. The water bottle he’d kept secret from the others was hidden in a crevice inside the cave. River water, but water nonetheless. If he got out of this mess alive, he’d drink nothing but Canadian beer for a solid week.

Raintree hesitated, though his eyes remained just as wild, his biceps twitching. He finally spoke. “Does white man speak with forked tongue?”

“What the fuck?” Farrengalli said.

Raintree raised the piton, letting its tapered steel catch the moonlight. “Does he speak the truth, Dove?”

“Come here,” she said.

Raintree stood poised like a cigar store Indian, in a mockery of nobility that was all the more preposterous because it so closely resembled the real thing.

Mocker. Raven Mocker. Is that what Chief called the Cherokees’ evil spirit?

Farrengalli was starting to think Raintree was more evil than the vampire suckers. They were just hungry and stupid. Raintree was civilized, an American success story, buying into the whole corporate thing. But when pushed just a little, the veneer fell away and he stripped down to the same meat-eating monster as his ancestors.

For all Farrengalli knew, the vampire suckers were Raintree’s ancestors.

“She was loving it, brother,” Farrengalli said. “Hell, she’s just getting warmed up. Go ahead and take your turn.”

Cigar-store Indian.

Then Farrengalli realized Raintree wasn’t looking at him, but past him.