“In here,” I urged. “I can smell a cavern.”
We squeezed down into the rocks, feeling our way toward the dampening air. The tight embrace of the stone opened suddenly into a low room, barely big enough for a fox to stand, but enough for us to sprawl, gasping for breath.
“We can’t stay here,” Ray whispered. “He’s coming.”
“Follow me,” I whispered back.
“It’s so narrow … .” I heard the fear in his voice, a rising pitch.
“Ray,
follow
me! Hold on to my ankle.” I groped onward, following the ground upward, sniffing like a badger for musty air. It freshened in a place where outside sounds grew louder, less muffled. I squeezed away from the unseen opening, continued to climb. I reached a place where the space between the boulders was narrower than the length of my thighs. I could no longer go on hands and knees, instead had to push myself along with my toes. Instinct screamed in my ears, telling me not to go into a space that confining, but I had no choice. I was pushing along blindly, going by scent and touch alone, and there was no larger opening through the tumble of rocks. I had to pray that the sheer weight of the stones would hold them in place, and that the shifting and pressing of my own tiny weight would not send them tumbling farther down the slope.
As I pressed and pulled my way through the narrow passage, Ray let go of my ankle. Fear shooting through me like an arrow, I scuttled up into a larger space, where I could turn around and reach back for him, groping in the darkness. I felt his hand. It was stiff and wet with nerves. “I can’t do it,” he said so softly that I had to strain to make certain I had not imagined hearing him. My ears still rang from the gunshots, and now they pounded with the closeness of my own pulse.
“It’s the only way,” I whispered back.
Above my head, slivers of light played through gaps in the boulder pile through which we were climbing. The man who hunted us was scanning, playing his flashlight through the rocks that carpeted the slope, searching for his prey. I braced my feet, grabbed Ray by the wrist with both of my hands, and pulled with all my might. I heard a scuffle as he pulled with his other hand. Emerging into the space beside me as helpless as a newborn child, he lay a moment, curled up, his head
lolling onto my thigh. I touched his face. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving in silent prayer.
The flashlight beam played through the gaps in the rocks over our heads again and we moved onward through the rock catacombs. I tried to reckon how far we had come up the canyon wall. Twenty-five feet? Forty? We had had to make so many turns that I was uncertain. A moment later, we hit a dead end, turned, moved to our right, stopped as the light found my hand. For the first time since the helicopter had fallen to earth, I saw my own flesh. It was not tan, but red, red with blood, drenched by the spray from Joan’s ruptured body, a stain made as death blew past me in a cordite wraith.
I dared not move. I stopped breathing and prayed deep inside my mind.
Heavenly Father, or whatever Your name is, hear me now. I don’t want to die. Not yet, not like this … .
The light moved on, and I heard the man outside stumble farther away over the surface of the rocks. I inhaled slowly, thankfully, and felt the earth embrace me, a solidity of ground supporting my body and soul. Ray’s hand found the crown of my head and cradled it, protective even in his fear. I could hear his pulse meld with mine where the curve of his wrist arched over my ear. I let myself breathe.
The man returned, stumbling over the tumbled surface of the rockfall. And now we heard his voice, a fearful, gasping voice, still frighteningly close, no more than ten feet away above our rock tomb: “I shot a helicopter!” it whispered.
We heard static, a garbled answer, the sounds of a handheld two-way radio.
“It had me cornered! Had to!” the man whimpered.
Now the voice on the hunter’s handset came through clearly: “Manti, you stupid shit! You done it this time.” The voice was angry and lethal, yet curiously close and intimate, like the voice of a gnat in my ear; a miniaturized voice on a radio turned down low in an attempt that we not hear it.
“What was I supposed to do?” the gunman whispered urgently to the radio. “Let ’em
see
me? I was right by the backhoe, Nephi!”
“You
had
to,” drawled the voice over the radio. “Just like you
had
to kill George. Then I got to clear up your mess and make us another contact to get our manna. You God-cursed moron. Now we got another mess to clean up. You ain’t even explained yourself for the first. You think you can get away with murder? God and all His angels will punish you, boy!”
In terror, the man above us shrieked, “It wasn’t murder! George
blas
phemed! He had to
atone
!”
“Blasphemed,
hah!
You miserable tick on my hide! I saw what was left. You ripped him to shit. You call that blood atonement? I call it pissed off, man! Our contact to the
manna!
What he ever do to you?”
The reply from above our heads was a whine, as pathetic as a child who’d dropped his ice cream in the dirt. “All that time, and he’d never bred her
once
!”
“Who?”
“Nina!”
The voice on the radio growled, “So she’s barren. How’s that
blasphemy,
you idiot?”
“No, he
lied
to us! Took God’s chosen and … and didn’t
touch
her!”
Nephi paused before his reply. “How you know that?”
Manti whimpered, “That man told me. The one from the university.”
“That fool with all the keys?”
In the darkness of my hiding place, I thought,
Lew?
“No! The big one with the fish line on his glasses.”
Sherbrooke! So they had met out there in the desert, the Yale-educated paleontologist in search of the answers to riddles and the half-wit cult follower looking for the bones of the damned to trade for manna. What could they have talked about?
“I
told
you you shouldn’t talk to him! Outsiders is only good for business, and you leave that to me!”
Manti’s voice wailed on: “He said George only messed with people’s heads, that he never did breed with no one, not women, not men, not no one. He said it was all a big joke to George. And I
asked
Nina. I had to beat it out of her, but she
told
me … .”
Nephi’s voice came back over the radio, crackling with rage. “That scheming, conniving … faggoty …” His voice trailed off into a froth of venom, but then suddenly the radio rasped with laughter. “Nina?” Nephi roared. “Wait, you mean you killed him over
Nina
? She was
nothing.
The
least
of my spawn.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. George had been killed out of jealousy?
No,
I realized.
Blasphemy runs deeper than jealousy. Blasphemy is that name you have for something that brings humiliation to the depths of your soul—that deep, visceral sense of betrayal that comes when someone tells you that you sacrificed yourself for a sham.
I could see the picture in its entirety now. This Manti had followed his brother into the desert and toiled for him, humbled himself before his brother’s charisma, stood by, blinding himself to his loss of dignity and reality, all the time telling himself it would be worth it because there would be a prize. And then he’d stood by as that prize, his precious, coveted niece, was bartered away. Brother Nephi had fashioned himself to be a god in his own kingdom, but he knew that a kingdom needed to be fed. I could see it now: desperation and malnutrition, and then along came George, looking for the bones of dinosaurs, and an alliance was rekindled. He could control Manti and the others with food, but how to control George? He had a plan for him, too: If he lured George to indulge in that ultimate in control games, the sexual corruption of a child, it would forge a guilty, titillated addiction to his covert clan.
But George had been more clever yet, and had not indulged. Was he just being shrewd? Or had George kept hidden within his twisted soul a heart that no one but Nina knew.
Whimpering, the man who stood above us said, “She … she was s’posed to be
mine
!”
“We needed new blood. I
told
you.”
Manti sobbed piteously. “But she didn’t have no babies, and it wasn’t
her, like
you
said;
it was
him.
He was—” He broke off with the effort of thinking.
“You
were lying to me!”
“Never mind that now!” snapped the voice on the radio. “You kill everyone on board?”
I stopped breathing. My mind swam with the horror of the stunted, medieval people who so automatically wished for my death.
Pause. “No. Got two of ’em. The other two are in the rocks.”
The radio answer was garbled.
“But Neph, you—”
The voice over the radio cleared. “God sent you a tough challenge this time, didn’t he? All right, let’s see what we can salvage of your pathetic little ass! What’s it say on the helicopter?”
“P-O-L-I—”
“Police? You hit a
police
helicopter? You don’t know Satan’s wrath till one of them comes down on you! You say two of ’em got away?”
“Yeah.”
Ray drew breath and held it.
“They make any calls before they leave?”
“What do you mean, calls?”
“Over the helicopter’s radios, shithead!” The voice over the radio was rising, soaring into a panicky anger.
“I—no. One of ’em had a mike to his face, but I shot him.”
I wondered grimly whether it would have made a difference
had he known he was shooting a woman. I began to shake, the reality of death sticking to me like the blood that covered my hands.
It was my idea, my vanity, that led us to this trap, that killed this woman. And Bert, another fool for the truth, just like me.
“I’ll be right there,” came the voice over the radio. “Where did you say they are?”
The man above the rocks was beyond panic. That could only mean that he feared Nephi even more than he feared us. “They’re in the rockfall on the south side of the canyon, down in those cracks where Nina always goes. I got ‘em pinned. They can’t get in there too far, and there ain’t no way out of there ’cept I can see ’em.”
“Right.”
My heart sank into the ground. Were they right? Was there no way out?
Manti said hopefully, “Should I burn that helicopter?”
“No! That would be like setting a flare. Leave it! But wait—there’s a little box on board that’ll be transmitting a distress signal. Should be in the left-front corner of the cockpit. If you can find that, put a bullet through it.”
“Okay … .” The gunman sounded doubtful, edgy. But, like a bull cornered in a corral, he was all horns and brute force, ready to do what he had to. I heard him shift as he prepared himself to climb down off the rocks above us and move toward the helicopter.
As the voice on the radio faded away with increasing distance, it took on an oily, soothing tone. “Now, don’t worry, boy; this is just another test of your faith. Reload that rifle and stop your whining; Heavenly Father’s on your side.”
THE SHOT THAT silenced the emergency location transmitter in the helicopter rang out moments after the second man arrived,
grinding up the canyon in a truck with a slipping fan belt. At the sharp report, I jerked back from the aerie I had at last found my way to near the top of the rockfall, then eased back to a position from which
I
could keep watch while Ray faced the other way and searched for a route out of the canyon. Manti had been wrong. We had found a route through the rocks. Nina had only ever looked for cover beneath the tumble of rocks, not passage through it. Coming out another exit would have only put her right back where she’d started, in the hands of this strange tribe with its contorted set of beliefs.
Ray had managed to make it through the labyrinth with his teeth gritted against fears I could only guess at. The densest part of the tumble had thinned, until we had emerged onto a cladding of scattered boulders lying directly on the shaley slope. We had inched sideways and upward, until we now crouched three-quarters of the way up the slope, perhaps seventy feet above and one hundred feet laterally from the helicopter. Above us jutted the source of the boulders, an overhanging lip of sandstone perhaps fifteen feet thick. We huddled behind a stone not much larger than a hay bale, kinked and aching, gingerly rubbing camouflage dirt onto our faces as we scanned the cliff face for a route up past this last pitch of the climb.
“Manti, you imbecile!” Brother Nephi called. “The guy in the backseat is still alive!”
Ray’s face swung from looking up to looking down. I fought to control a gasp. With terror, I realized that there was nothing we could do to help Bert. The thin starlight barely illuminated the whites of his eyes.