The Gorge

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Bowie led the group down the portage trail, one he had traversed a couple of times in his early career as a white-water guide. However, like the river, which had been shifted and rerouted by floods, the trail had changed in the years since Bowie’s last visit to the Unegama. Moss grew on the boulders, ferns and mushrooms sprouted from the rotten brown leaves, and a thicket of laurel huddled at the base of looming hemlock trees. The landscape had changed, the trail branching off into narrow animal traces before coming together again in a steep, muddy thread.

There were plenty of other differences since Bowie’s last jaunt. For instance, bloodsucking freaks, an armed FBI agent, and a mass murderer. A woman he’d once almost loved. And lots more money waiting at the end of the run.

But the biggest change was in Bowie himself. He could hardly remember the muscular, confident young man who had given orders with the sharpness of a drill sergeant while at the same time commanding the respect usually reserved for preachers and sages. Too much had happened. The weight of failure and isolation colored him, and he labored in the shadow of a death he’d been running from for five years.

Now he had two more deaths in his ledger.

“Are we going to make it, Bowie?” Dove had slipped up behind him while he was lost in thought. He shuddered because he should have been planning ahead, watching out for attacks from above, expecting the unexpected. Instead, his head was firmly up the sphincter of Bowie Whitlock, the tightening ring cutting off the oxygen to his brain.

“Sure.”

In the semi-darkness, she caught up with him, leaned her head against his shoulder, and took his hand. Her damp hair tickled the skin of his upper arm. “I didn’t mean to say those things this morning.”

“That was this morning. Forget it.”

“I was being mean.”

“Well, you learned it from me.”

“Do you think we have a chance?”

“Sure. All we have to do is make it to the foot of the falls, raft eight miles in Class VI rapids in the dark, and avoid getting our necks ripped open by creatures that have no right to walk the face of the Earth.”

“No, I mean you and me.”

“Oh. That.”

Behind them, back in the trees, Farrengalli was bellowing something, probably harassing Raintree, who had paused in the woods to attend to some private matter. Castle had fallen to the rear, whether from some misguided notion of protecting the group, or because he figured numbers would be more likely to draw the attention of the creatures. If the beasts worked on radar and smell, as Bowie theorized, then they’d be more likely to detect humans if they were traveling in a pack.

Which made Dove’s company even more dangerous than usual.

“Do you think we’re safe here in the trees?” Dove’s grip on his hand tightened. He couldn’t tell if she was scared or just pretending. Maybe it made no difference.

“They like to attack from above. So far, they’ve hit us when we were out in the open. But remember, if we accept them as some undiscovered species, then this is their natural habitat. They would have adapted to the terrain.”

“Unless they usually hunt on the river.”

Bowie pushed away a wet rhododendron branch and let Dove pass. After he ducked beneath it, the branch slapped his helmet as it swung back into place. “Some choice,” he said. “We risk walking out of here, on terrain that’s nearly as rough as the rapids, or we make a blind run with the rafts. And we don’t know enough about those things to make the best decision.”

“We trust you, Bowie.”

He winced. Trust. Like he needed a reminder. “You like Raintree, don’t you?”

She let go of his hand and adjusted her backpack. “Robert? He’s okay. A little on the quiet side.”

Built pretty well, too, Bowie wanted to add, but he discovered he wasn’t jealous. Dove was like a roomful of chocolate. You couldn’t wait to eat your way through the door, but once inside, you were in danger of getting suffocated by her sweetness and your own appetite.

“If anything happens to me, then he’s the one you should count on,” Bowie said.

“Nothing’s going to happen to us. Besides, I wasn’t counting on you, anyway. I know better.”

“Smart girl.”

The rain had slackened a bit, but was like icy snakes as trickles of it worked down his neck and under his PFD. Leaves rattled and he thought the rain was picking up again.

SkeeEEEEeeek.

“Bogie at twelve o’clock,” Farrengalli shouted.

Bowie turned, cursing his lack of a firearm. He held his paddle out before him like a jujitsu bo stick, the sound of wet leaves rattling overhead as branches snapped.

Forget the safe-under-the-trees theory. Forget the safe-anywhere theory.

Farther up the trail, Raintree had ducked under the relative cover of a swooning pine tree. Castle was out of sight, his pistol not able to provide any immediate help. But, as they had learned, bullets didn’t necessarily make much of a difference.

Farrengalli raced down the path, the deflated raft in his arms, which were folded like an offensive tackle’s blocking for an end sweep. He bulled his way between Bowie and Dove, knocking Dove to her knees in the mud. Bowie regained his amateur jujitsu pose as the overhead menace swept nearer.

The rain hampered his ability to trace the sound, and it was only when he realized branches were now snapping fifty feet to his right that he realized something else was approaching behind him and to his left. Bansheelike shrieks of two different frequencies ripped the forest.

“Stay down!” he yelled at Dove, knowing the instruction was stupid, that the creatures had already exhibited a deadly tenacity and suddenness. But instinct kicked in, one born of primordial fear and the desire to survive despite the odds.

The first creature broke through the canopy with its arms extended, following its gleaming talons toward its prey. The red-rimmed eyes, though sightless, glimmered with a luminescence that seemed to bore twin holes into Bowie’s flesh. He knelt and braced himself for the assault when a blur of movement caught his eye just in front of him. His initial thought was that it was a third creature, and he knew he would never be able to fight off such a multipronged attack.

Then another shriek ripped the foggy sky. Not a monstrous shriek of the high pitch emitted by the creatures, but the wail of an attacking warrior. Raintree raced headlong, carrying a long, sharpened stake before him as if he were a medieval jouster. His scream wasn’t like those of the dehumanized villains in Westerns, where the cool-eyed white men picked off their hapless, poorly armed attackers one by one. No, this scream was fueled by rage and hearkened back to a primitive era when perhaps his ancestors had fought these same creatures.

The beast spun in midair, graceless, as if unused to maneuvering in the tight quarters between trees. Raintree’s sudden movement had confused the thing’s radar. It hovered for a moment, ten feet off the ground, its ragged, vestigial wings quivering in a mockery of avian flight. Bowie, realizing the creature was homing in on Raintree, swung his paddle in the air and smacked the shaft against a tree.

The creature turned its dead eyes toward the sound, lips parting to reveal slick teeth and two curving incisors.

Dove, catching on to Bowie’s plan of overloading the creature’s perception, rolled off the path and grabbed a stone from the mud. She hurled it at the creature, and though it missed by several feet, the creature’s head tracked the stone’s trajectory.

Raintree seized the opportunity to leap forward and plunge the point of his makeshift spear into the creature’s chest.

The creature’s expression curdled into what might have passed for anger on a human’s face. Elephantine skin collapsed around its eyes and the long tongue rolled out in a soundless hiss. Raintree knelt and balanced beneath the creature as a pole vaulter might prepare to hurdle a high bar. The creature slid down the length of the spear, and Raintree released it just before the unwholesome flesh of the nightmare reached his hands.

The second shriek signaled the attack of the other beast, and Bowie wondered if they had learned that their prey could fight back and had thus changed their strategy. The thought that these deadly monsters, already cursed with claws, fangs, and a seeming invincibility, could develop complex tactics and coordinate their attacks filled Bowie with deep, sick dread.

He swung the paddle around just as the creature exploded from the trees. The shriek rose in intensity as it accelerated straight for Bowie. Dove had collected another rock and hurled it toward the creature, but it ignored whatever stimulus the missile had aroused. This one, larger than the first, appeared hell bent to take out Bowie, like a heat-seeking missile targeting an artillery post. Bowie slapped with the paddle, but the creature grabbed the shaft with one hand, wiry fingers ripping it from Bowie’s grasp.

The thing plowed into Bowie, striking him in the chest, and he went down hard, lungs dead for air.

The creature crawled along his torso, claws making painful tracks up his arms, the PFD ripping like a toilet-paper kite in a hurricane.

Up close, its eyes gave off a strange radiance, as if deep in the back of the orbs, muted kaleidoscopes spun and glimmered.

But the eyes didn’t get much of Bowie’s attention, because the teeth were closing in on his throat, and his arms were pinned to the ground. Though no wind of breath issued from the gaping mouth, a putrid stench rose from the thing’s inner workings.

Bowie bucked, trying to toss off the writhing burden like Raintree had once thrown his wrestling opponents. The creature was only half of Bowie’s weight, but clung with a desperation born of unholy hunger.

Failure.

The final one.

Bowie was about to close his eyes so he wouldn’t see the red proof of his own futility when, over the creature’s shoulder, he saw Dove, face straining, arms quivering, a large, jagged rock raised over her head. She brought the blunt point of the rock against the creature’s head just as it was countering Bowie’s evasive maneuver.

The contact made a moist sloosh, like the dropping of a watermelon on pavement.

This time, Bowie did close his eyes as gore squirted from the top of the wizened, bald skull. The viscid juice splattered across his face, mixing with the rain. The creature didn’t immediately release its grip, but gave a startled turn of its head. Bowie opened his eyes, hoping the obscene blood wasn’t infectious. Dove was lifting the rock for another blow, a thin strand of gray fluid stringing from its tip. Bowie saw the shattered back of the creature’s head, and the bloated, larvalike meat of its primitive brain.

Though the crenulated brain was violated with deep wounds, the creature’s physical responses were still quick and strong.

Because it thinks with its mouth.

And its thinking had turned from hunger to self-defense, because its talons slid from Bowie’s arms and, monkey-quick, it lifted toward Dove. Bowie flinched, waiting for the latest death of someone he loved.

The creature never reached her, because Raintree skewered it in midair. He must have retrieved his spear from the body of the first creature.

Raintree bore his full weight against the creature, twisting the spear and nailing the squirming form to the ground. It raked its claws at him, but Raintree stepped back and lowered his shoulders, a study in combat leverage. Dove moved within striking distance and slammed the rock down once more, this time full on the creature’s forehead. It quivered, more of its foul, gray blood leaking from the deadly mouth.

Bowie rolled to his feet, planning to join the attack, when he was hit by a wave of dizziness and nausea. By the time the mental fog lifted, the creature lay still, though its open eyes appeared to glare at Bowie with a smirk of victory. As if it knew the battle was just beginning, and it would somehow return.

In the heat of his near death, Bowie had forgotten all about Dove, Raintree, the trip, the long nightmare that lay ahead, and the two victims decaying upstream. His universe had been reduced to mud and fear, a primordial combination that had spawned the birth of the world and would no doubt be its ultimate, eternal condition.