The Gorge

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

She could hear Ace’s angels above her, their flicking wings and occasional high-pitched whistles reminding her how close they were.

Clara had worked her way into the rhododendron thicket, where the dense leaves blocked the last shreds of dying daylight. Each time she rubbed against a knobby, scaly branch, she thought it was the arm of one of the creatures. Her hair tangled in a forked branch, and she ripped the damp strands free. She wanted to collapse, throw her face into the rotted leaves and loam of the forest floor, and surrender.

The old Clara, the one who sought pain and danger, the suicidal coward, would have given up long ago. That Clara wouldn’t have had the courage to run from Ace when the trip wire triggered the bombs. That Clara wouldn’t have stuck with him later, when he continued his cruel, abusive ways. But she also wasn’t strong enough to make it on her own. Ace wasn’t her savior, and she realized she had shifted her dependence to Bowie. Which is why, in the raft, she had hesitated when Ace asked for the pistol.

She wished she had the pistol now.

Because, for the first time, she had something to defend, a reason to live beyond the hedonistic pursuit of slow or fast death.

Ace talked about the angels as allies, but Clara didn’t see them as something God would send to Earth. She’d been willingly screwed and tortured by some of the finest nihilists and atheists in the business, and had endured a wild six-week fling with a Satanist, whose smoke and mirrors and candles and chants just grew completely corny after a while. She’d sensed no evil in that self-proclaimed “Dark Acolyte,” just as she sensed no evil in these angels.

Like all the other things that were claimed to be “evil,” when you looked right into the heart of them, they were just single-mindedly stupid.

Leaves rattled above, sending down a shower of drops. One of the creatures was trying to penetrate the canopy.

“She wasn’t good enough,” she heard Ace say for the third time, as if talking to some invisible higher power.

Maybe she wasn’t worth a damn, but she was getting smarter by the second. The creatures worked on radar and smell. Which meant if she kept perfectly still, they couldn’t locate her. Maybe the serpentine branches would confuse them. Would they be able to smell her with all the odors rising from the river mud?

The bigger question: Why weren’t they attacking Ace and Bowie? Especially Ace, who had stood and watched while the creature flew past his face and chased her.

She shivered. Maybe Ace really was protected by God, as he believed.

The light. She’d forgotten about the flashlight attached to her helmet. Were the creatures blind? She reached up an unsteady hand and flicked it off.

Something rattled just above her head. She ducked lower. It couldn’t hear her. Not with all the noise it was making, thrashing the wet leaves.

But it could smell her. Smell something that made her far more appealing than the two men.

She could only think of two things. Either her hormonal glands, her vaginal scent, had brought them sniffing the way she had attracted the juvenile-delinquent boys in Ohio.

Or else, through some strange sense she couldn’t begin to understand, they knew she carried a young, tender bud in her womb. Something they might find a rare delicacy, a bloody treat. Or maybe to be used for another purpose.

You’re not getting him. One way or another.

Claws raked her hair, closed, yanked some strands out by the roots. She endured the attack without a whimper. She’d been hurt harder by better.

But the arm behind the claws, though she couldn’t see it, thrust with renewed ferocity, and she could tell from the snapping branches that it had detected her position. That meant the other one would be right behind it.

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.