The Gorge

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Robert Raintree, who still held the branch in a two-handed grip as if it were a baseball bat, nudged the hideous thing that lay on the ground like a knotted lump of wet rope. A dark, putrid fluid oozed from the holes in its leathery skin. The FBI agent’s final shot had blown out the back of the creature’s skull, but the oversize, wrinkled ears still twitched.

“Forget it,” Castle said to Bowie.

Dove went to Bowie’s side, gripped his arm, and pulled him away.

“Look at this,” Raintree said.

Farrengalli, who had fled into the woods when the shriek had first rattled the dying leaves, was now standing amid the group as if he’d been there all along. “The fucker’s fingers are still moving.”

Castle still held the pistol in business position, making Raintree uncomfortable. The agent’s eyes rolled around the perimeter of the surrounding treetops as if expecting more of the creatures to drop from the fog. But Raintree was afraid Castle was as likely to shoot humans as he was the creatures. He’d blurted out several nonsense phrases during the attack, as if he’d lost connection with reality.

Maybe they all had. As Farrengalli had noted, the long, knobby fingers hooked and then relaxed. The creature’s head was in ruins, and its nervous system must have been demolished. If it even had a nervous system. Raintree recalled how the one that had killed McKay had risen from the river with most of its head gone.

Raven Mocker. A shapeshifter, a harbinger of death. Something supernatural that could only be defeated with powerful magic. Raintree touched the soft suede of his medicine bag.

Wishing doesn’t make it so.

As a beginning wrestler in high school, competing in the 128-pound weight class, he’d dreamed of beating out Eddie Cucumber, conference champ the year before. In the week leading up to their face-off in the tournament, the freshman Raintree had practiced “positive visualization,” imagining himself on top of Cucumber, pressing his opponent’s shoulders to the mat as the ref slapped out a three count. Each night, he pictured Cucumber’s straining, panicked face and imagined the weighty brass of the championship trophy in his hands.

Cucumber beat him in a walk, 11 to 2, with Raintree’s only points coming on a spin move and reversal as he was about to be pinned. At least he lasted the full three rounds. Positive visualization had failed him then, but it was the last match he lost until college.

Now he faced a different kind of test, one that maybe his ancestors had faced before. If these creatures had existed for centuries, then the Cherokee must have encountered them at one time or another. Considering this was sacred territory, the land of vision quests, then who knows how many nightmares were brought back to camp by the young warriors who had ventured out in search of their spirit guides? And who knows how many had not returned at all, but instead had followed these demons back into whatever hell had coughed them out?

“Fucker’s going to get up and fly away like the other one,” Farrengalli said.

“No,” Bowie said. “It’s changing.”

Raintree poked it again with the tree branch. Bowie was right, the creature was quivering and trembling, its skin tone lightening. Curled in a fetal position, it shook like a rat in a paper sack.

“Stand back,” Castle said, leveling the Glock. He gave the strange head tilt again, attuned to something beyond the river and the rain. Maybe another creature?

Raintree held his breath and listened for the telltale shriek. Only water, ticking, rushing, splashing, giggling.

At his feet, the creature’s body shifted and swelled, as if soaking up water and taking on muscle mass. The skin was waxy, wrinkled, like something submerged in the river. Instead of ash-gray, the corpse was now as pink as a mouse’s ear.

“Cletus Christ on a clothesline,” Farrengalli said.

“It’s a person,” Dove said, an observation that was suggested by the evidence but by no means obvious.

“Fuck this,” Farrengalli said, stepping over Travis Lane’s cooling body and grabbing his backpack. “Bonus or not, I’m getting out of here.”

“Wait,” Bowie said. “We stick together.”

Farrengalli cradled one of the deflated rafts to his chest. “You want to stay here and get your head chewed off by these freaks, fine with me.” He glanced around the faces of the group, and then fixed on Dove. “You with me, babe? You and me, we get out of here alive, we’ll both be rich and famous.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Castle said, waving the pistol in the rain. “You’re the property of the federal government at the moment, by authority of the National Security Agency’s prime directive on terrorism.”

“I never heard of no prime directive.”

“Of course not. Top secret. But it gives me the power to requisition all available resources in order to do my duty. That means any equipment or personnel.”

“Bowie,” Farrengalli said. “Is he making this shit up?”

“He’s the one with the gun.”

The knotty-limbed, vicious creature that had swooped out of the mist and torn Travis Lane’s neck to shreds was now little more than a pile of slick cheese, its skeletal frame plainly visible beneath, the fibrous wings dissolving. The face might have been humanoid, but it had collapsed upon itself, the clabbered effluence draining down into the mouth and nasal cavities. In the yawning gap of skull, the remnants of the brain oozed out like Jell-O from a broken bowl. Where drops of rain hit the body, a nacreous substance spattered into the air. The corpse now lay in a puddle of muddy cream soup.

Its legs moved.

“I’m out of here,” Farrengalli said. To Castle, he said, “Go ahead, shoot me in the back.”

Dove, who was snapping off some photos as the creature decomposed, said, “I don’t want to be around when this thing does whatever it’s going to do.”

“If it stands up,” Bowie said, “the meat’s going to slide right off its bones.”

It wasn’t hard to imagine that twisted, long-fingered skeleton flying through the air like some kind of Halloween lawn decoration strung from a tree. Raintree threw down the branch and retrieved the other raft. “Bowie?”

“Let’s go,” Bowie said. “We’ll make camp at the foot of the waterfall.”

“And crawl into our sleeping bags like nothing ever happened?” Farrengalli said. “I don’t know if I’ll sleep another wink as long as I live.”

“With the water up, it’s too risky to raft, and it’s going to be dark soon.”

“Aren’t you going to bury him?” Dove asked. Raintree wasn’t sure whether she meant the creature or Travis Lane.

“We’d better get away as fast as we can,” Bowie said. “We don’t know what kind of communication system those things employ. They could work off their olfactory sense as well as echolocation. And if they smell the blood… ”

They. No one doubted there were more of the creatures, lurking somewhere in the high cliffs or hovering in the mists. Maybe a flock.

“Leave him,” Castle said. “It might slow them down if they stop to feed on his corpse.”

Raintree noted how the quality of the group’s mercy had become strained as the nightmare shifted deeper and deeper into reality. At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before Castle was leaving behind live bait. As if these deadly creatures were somehow a less significant threat than a single paranoid bomber.

Bowie had already headed down a narrow trail between two looming, mossy stones, Farrengalli right behind him. Castle, apparently intending to keep a close eye on his “resources,” lagged behind, watching as the creature tried to rise. The head, now little more than a curved and broken plate of bone with patches of rot attached to it, rotated as if trying to orient itself.

Raintree helped Dove slide her backpack into position. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll watch out for you.”

Wet tendrils of hair framed her tired smile. “I think from here on out it’s every man for himself. Even for the women.”

Castle leveled his Glock at the thing as if debating a final round. But he must have decided there was no kill shot for something too stubborn to die.

“Yeah, Rook,” Castle said. “All pigeons eventually come home to roost.”

Raintree gave Dove a knowing look and slung the deflated raft over his shoulder. They followed the path blazed by Bowie, Castle bringing up the rear and whistling an off-key tune.

Raintree, holding Dove’s arm as she nearly slipped on the slick rocks, recognized the song: “Singing in the Rain.” Among the threats they were facing, the river, the bomber, and the beasts, Raintree was beginning to believe the worst enemy might be walking not in their shadows, but in their footsteps.