Scott Nicholson - The Gorge

The beans had turned black in the pan, the fire had burned low, and Clara was nowhere in sight. Damned high-toned bitch. Let the Feds have her. She couldn’t tell them much they didn’t already know, and by noon tomorrow the sky above the gorge would be filled with swarms of helicopters. SWAT teams would be jogging behind bloodhounds, and tens of thousands of acres of wilderness would be about as good a hiding place as a cop’s bedroom closet. Come to think of it, killing the two Feds might buy him a day or two, but he couldn’t force himself to face that black gulf beyond the ledge.

He rolled up the sleeping bag and headed along the ridge, going upriver because the terrain was easier. As darkness gripped the forest, Ace had to feel his way through the trees, one arm raised in front of him to ward off branches. The roar of the river provided the only guide, and even its thundering steadiness was unreliable. He came to a clearing and paused, listening, wondering if the Feds had somehow found his trail.

At the edge of the clearing stood a form that blended with the surrounding murk.

Hunched like a monkey, too short and wiry to be Clara.

Friggin’ Feds had tracked him.

Ace reacted the only way he knew, fueled by the anger of being outsmarted. The gun was in his palm before he even thought about it, and three explosions echoed against the trees before he was aware he’d pulled the trigger. From twenty feet away, the slugs should have punched the Fed to the ground. Instead, the form lifted slowly, like a scarecrow on a wire, and drifted through the treetops.

The fucker is FLYING, Ace thought.

Unless secret agents had come up with Buck Rogers backpacks while Ace had been laying low, then something was seriously wrong. Ace fired one more time as the figure cleared a gap in the trees. Its outline was plain against the mottled sunset clouds. It was shaped liked a human, no doubt about that, but it was smaller, knotted up, its arms spread out to reveal short, ragged wings and legs trailing out behind. A keening wail arose from the thing, a cross between the hoot of a gut-shot owl and scream of a gang-raped wildcat.

Ace turned and ran blindly into the woods. Turkey vulture, he told himself. Bald eagle. Kingfisher. Surely all kinds of big birds lived in the gorge.

Except none were as big as a monkey. And this one hardly had any WINGS. And it wasn’t exactly flying, either. It was floating.

There was one other possibility, one Ace kept pushing down to the bottom of his mind, the way you’d drown a pesky kitten. When you did the Lord’s work, you automatically made enemies. Most of those enemies wore sheep’s clothing and hid behind the cross themselves, hypocrites who shunned Ace’s kind while claiming to be pro-lifers themselves. Others upheld the laws of a government that tried to keep God out of every school, courtroom, and library in the nation. Still others didn’t care how many babies were vacuumed and shredded, as long as women got to make their own decisions, even though they were nothing but whores who would spread their legs for any man or doctor who came along.

But those were all human enemies. When you took your marching orders from the Lord, you could expect to run afoul of things with deeper memories and longer hatreds. Them who walked with Satan.

For all Ace knew, that might have been the Devil himself who had put in an appearance. Or maybe, just maybe, it was an angel sent to lend a helping hand.

Either way, Ace’s work must be very important indeed. He ran into the woods.

Fireworks erupted behind his eyelids and his skull thundered. A branch had cracked his forehead, knocking Ace to his knees. Blood trickled down his nose. He wiped at it, but a drop fell onto his lips. It was sweet and rusty. Ace rose to his feet and staggered on through the trees.

Despite the tight sleeve of fear that squeezed his innards, a smile spread across his face.

Important work.

Robert Raintree tuned out Farrengalli’s blathering, looking forward to reaching camp so he could go off on his own. For prayer, medicine, and peace and quiet. He didn’t understand how anyone could enter such an obvious temple of nature as the Unegama Wilderness Area and not be hushed by the spiritual glory. Though the North Carolina mountains had been logged heavily in the early 1900s, the terrain along the river was so treacherous that the lumber companies had left them alone. Hardwoods towered over the trail, knitting a rich, green canopy that filtered the dying sunlight. The undergrowth was robust and varied, with waxy-leafed rhododendron, lavender stalks of blazing star, the creamy white three-leafed trillium, and jewelweed with its fire-colored and drooping petals.

Raintree was no botanist, but he suspected he was the only one in the group who had done any real homework on the region. Maybe because he was the only one who had a real connection with this land, though the connection had been severed through President Andrew Jackson’s forced evacuation of his people. The Cherokee had called the place Eeseeoh, which translated into English as “river of many cliffs.” The white people had named it Lindale after an eighteenth-century explorer who had been murdered here by the Cherokee. Collective and belated national guilt had led to the adoption of the name Unegama, Cherokee for “white water,” when it was added to the National Wilderness Preservation system in the 1960s. Unegama was a somewhat forked-tongue version of the language, but then, the whites had named the Cherokee tribe from a Cree word, not realizing the Cherokee language has no r.

“Step it up,” Farrengalli shouted from the rear. “There’s a bonus if we reach the falls before dark.”

Raintree wondered how Farrengalli would have fared on these trails three centuries ago, when buffalo and elk still made their seasonal passes and wildcats and red wolves stalked easy meat. He somehow believed even the hungriest of predators would find the man’s flesh distasteful.

Equally annoying was the man in front of Raintree, who peppered his dialogue with corporate slogans. The group had obviously been chosen with care, but the company man was a tenderfoot. Raintree couldn’t claim any true outdoor experience, but at least he was in shape. He’d won a bronze in the 2000 Olympics, wrestling in the middleweight class, and had gained a few weeks of notoriety as sportswriters worked the “noble savage” and “the last pure American” angles. Though he’d never won a collegiate championship, he’d survived the Olympic trials by somehow upsetting better wrestlers, and had been an Olympic long shot. He was dream copy, and it didn’t hurt that he had raven-black hair, piercing dark eyes, and the type of chest muscles that led to a few seminude appearances in high-brow magazines marketed to frustrated females.

Raintree parlayed the fleeting fame into a fitness gym in Oklahoma, and his clients included a handful of minor Hollywood stars known more for their builds than their brains. Raintree expanded his network so that it now included six gyms, and ProVentures had partnered with him in developing a line of personal workout equipment. In truth, Raintree had offered little input, merely letting the company use his face and facsimile signature on the products. In exchange, he signed the checks and smiled for Dove Krueger, the company’s official photographer. Like him, Dove had also been recruited on this trip, though he suspected his motives were far different from hers.

Ahead, Bowie Whitlock stopped and stood aside while the company man passed and took the lead.

“Keep walking,” Bowie said to the ProVentures rep. He didn’t speak to Raintree, but their eyes met in mutual sympathy. Raintree noticed the guide was panting a little. Probably could have used the ProVentures Raintree Regimen, where “you measure your chest by the size of your heart.” Trademarked, copyrighted, satisfaction guaranteed, and your money back if you didn’t notice results within thirty days. Of course, most men were embarrassed to admit that they had failed a manly challenge of any kind, so refunds were few.