Earthquake Weather (77 page)

A fresh volley of gunfire erupted from down the slope, and stone splinters whistled through the air as bullets hammered into the cliff face to his left and behind him and ricochets twanged through the rain. Then someone had grabbed Cochran’s arm and yelled into his ear, “Back—Arky’s been shot, and there’s bikers in the cave.”

Cochran threw his arm around Plumtree’s shoulders and pulled her away from the dust-spitting cliff face, back down the mud slope toward the fires. He realized that it was Pete who had seized him, and he glimpsed more moving headlights up the slope on the right. The cold rainy air was fouled now with the smells of motor oil and cordite.

“This isn’t aimed at us!” yelled Pete over the banging din.

“Gooood!”
wailed Cochran, gritting his teeth and trying to block Plumtree from at least one quarter of the banging, flashing night. The two of them stumbled and slid back down the slope after Pete; squinting against the battering rain, Cochran could see Mavranos being half-carried back toward the roofless stone building by one of the naked-looking clay-people, with Angelica and Kootie hunching along after. The flames that boiled up from within the stone walls were huge now, throwing shadows across the mud-flats and clawing the night sky, seeming even to redly light the undersides of the clouds.

“The men on m-motorcycles,” said Pete, speaking loudly to be heard, “think-kuh Kootie is the khing, but they want him to be-be
their
king. They’ll—kill—everyone else, if they
cannn
.”

Sound was becoming jerky and segmented again, and Cochran again felt that he was experiencing time in fast but discrete frames—the unceasing rattle and pop of gunfire near and far began to be
paced,
in a fast, complicated counterpoint tempo like the hand-clapping of the clay people—

—Cochran was stumbling, suddenly feeling very drunk, with the taste of the
pagadebiti
wine blooming back into his throat and expanding his head—

—Clumsily he pushed the revolver back into the holster at the back of his belt so that he could hold the bottle with the black-stained hand too—

—And then in an instant all the noise
stopped,
with one last distant rebounding echo to deprive him of the consolation of believing that he had gone deaf; and as if the stunning racket had been a headwind he’d been leaning against, the abrupt cessation of it pitched him forward onto his knees in the mud.

The cork popped out of the bottle’s neck, and Cochran thought he could hear the
smack
of it hitting the mud a moment later.

Even the rain had stopped—the air was clear and cold, with no slightest breeze, and the fire in the stone building convulsed overhead for another moment and then stood up straight, a towering yards-wide brushstroke of golden glare against the black night.

Cody Plumtree was on her hands and knees beside him, panting. “When the shooting started,” she whispered, “the other girls fell back, and I was on the bus alone, in the driver’s seat, driving away from them.” Her voice was faint, but in the silence Cochran could hear every sound her teeth and lips and breath made. “But the man standing beside me in the vision wasn’t the broken lunatic anymore—it was Scott Crane, all strong and excellent and wise, guiding me; and we sped up and leaped the bus right over the gap in the freeway, and landed whole on the other side.”

From
Dirty Harry
to
Speed,
thought Cochran. That’s good, I guess. “Kootie did say,” he whispered cautiously, “when we were here two or three weeks ago, that you’re probably carrying Crane’s ghost on you.”

“Tonight he gets washed off.”

Cochran remembered the motorcyclist she had killed, and the automatic in the man’s limp hand. “Cody,” he said, “you saved my life.”

“Old Chinese proverb,” said Plumtree hoarsely. “ ‘Whoever saves another person’s life should dig two graves.’ ”

Kootie came plodding up to where Cochran and Plumtree knelt. And the boy’s splashing footsteps in the mud awoke a wind from over the eastern slopes—the gusty breeze swept down the bowl of the vast amphitheater, bending trees and rippling the ponds, and twitched at Cochran’s wet hair as it stepped over him and his companions and moved out over the dark ocean. The air smelled of dry wine and fresh tree sap.

“Give me the wine,” said Kootie, his raincoat flapping in the breeze. He had lost Cochran’s hat at some point.

Cochran looked past Kootie. The tall flame was curling and snapping again, and by its yellow glow he could see Angelica standing close behind Kootie, and next to her Mavranos with his left arm around Pete’s shoulders and his right hand pressed to his side. Cochran lifted the bottle over his head with both hands and the boy took it.

“Now I think Dionysus
… set me up
to kill that woman, meant me to do it, in his boarding house,” the boy said quietly. The firelight made deep shadows of his cheeks and his eye sockets. “But I did kill her—I do still have to offer my neck to the Green Knight’s blade.” Angelica would have said something, but Kootie raised his hand. “We won’t be able to get into the cave, until I do—and I know the god will kill us all here tonight if I don’t. Remember the end of that play Arky told us about, the one where the people refused to drink the god’s wine.”

“The Bacchae,”
said Mavranos through clenched teeth.

A deep, hollow drumbeat rolled down the strengthening breeze; then after a few seconds came another. Like two very slow steps.

“Get up,” Kootie told Cochran and Plumtree. “Let’s go over by the water—”

Cochran struggled to his feet and helped Plumtree up, and with Angelica and Pete and Mavranos they followed the boy down the slope toward the black water beside the stone building. The heat from the flames was a sting on the right side of Cochran’s face.

They passed half a dozen of the mud-smeared youths, all of them kneeling; several of them, and many others on the plain, were facing away, toward the Point Lobos cliff, and holding pistols and even rifles at the ready.
Bikers in the cave,
Cochran remembered. Four ragged figures were trudging at a labored pace down from the highway-side slope into the light; one was limping, evidently supported by two of his companions.

The drumbeat had continued as the wind strengthened, and was now thumping a little faster. At least two other drums, at other points across the dark basin, had joined the first one in the same rhythm. White patches showed in the eastern sky, where the moon was breaking through the wind-riven clouds.

But it can’t be the moon, thought Cochran. The moon has been waning for a week, it was full on the first of the month—it should be totally dark tonight.

The ground sloped right down into the water here, any original wall long gone, and Kootie halted with his boots a yard from the water. He dug a fluttering paper out of his raincoat pocket and passed it carefully to Cochran. It was a car-registration slip.

“Arky wrote the palindrome on that,” Kootie told him. “When I give you a nod, read the last line aloud.”

“Right,” Cochran said, in a rusty voice. When I read each of the two previous lines aloud, he thought, Crane’s ghost showed up; first as our taxi driver after I read the Latin on the ashtray at the Mount Sabu bar, and then as a naked flickering image right here, after I read the next line from Valorie’s matchbook.

“When are you going to drink the wine?” asked Angelica with badly concealed urgency. Her wet black hair was blowing in tangles across her lean face.

“When we get back up to the cave,” Kootie told her firmly.

The drumbeat was pounding exactly in time with Cochran’s pulse now, and he intuitively knew that his companions were experiencing the same synchronization.

Quickly, before Angelica or Pete could react, Kootie raised the wine bottle and tipped it up to his lips; and when he lowered it, Mavranos quickly reached out and took it out of his hands.

“Aaah!”
Angelica’s wail was snatched away over the sea by the wind, and Cochran knew that she had intended to stop the boy, and that Kootie had known it too.

The boy reeled back across the mud, away from the water, but he didn’t fall; well, thought Cochran,
he
wasn’t standing next to an open
grave.

Kootie reached jerkily into an inside pocket of the raincoat and yanked out the dirty little yellow blanket that he had been given by the Diana woman, Scott Crane’s widow. For a moment Cochran thought he was going to throw it away. Then the boy pulled it around his shoulders, and he was suddenly closer, or taller, and the blanket seemed to be a spotted yellow fur. Cochran was having trouble focusing on him in the light of the gusting fire.

Cochran shoved the wet car registration into his pocket. His right hand was still flexing, and he was trying to focus his eyes clearly on anything—the low stone walls that stretched away in the darkness, Plumtree’s face, his own hands—and he found that he couldn’t make out the exact shape of the black hole in the back of his twitching right hand, no matter how he blinked and narrowed his eyes—

The drumbeats were coming more rapidly—the mud-smeared people had got to their feet and were milling around uneasily, swinging their rifles and pistols—and now fast-thudding footsteps from behind were matching the drum’s strokes.

Cochran turned, and flinched even as his right hand sprang once again toward the holster at the back of his belt.

The fire-lit figure rushing straight at them across the mud looked at first like some hallucinatory three-headed Kali with four waving arms, and Cochran’s abdomen momentarily turned to ice water; then he saw that it was a portly white-haired man, with a pair of life-size gesticulating manikins attached to his shoulders; and as Cochran fumbled the gun out of the holster he recognized the muddied, grimacing face—it was Dr. Armentrout, and one of the doctor’s hands clutched a tiny silver pistol.

But another man was running up behind Armentrout, and now caught the doctor; and he must have punched him between the shoulder blades, for Armentrout’s head rocked back sharply and he plunged forward face-down into the mud. The little pistol flew out of his hand and bounced once off the mud and splashed into the dark water.

Before the doctor’s encumbered form had even stopped sliding, his pursuer had leaped onto his shoulders, and Cochran saw that it was Long John Beach. The one-armed old man was gripping the back of Armentrout’s neck—the two artificial white heads were splayed out to the sides in the mud, their aluminum neck-poles bent, and between them the doctor’s head was jerked violently to the side each time Long John Beach’s shoulder stump flexed over him.

Cochran was pointing his revolver at the pair, into the middle of the spider-cluster of mismatched arms and heads, but the muzzle wavered. He was aware of Plumtree standing beside him, breathing fast.

Without halting his invisible beating of the doctor, Long John Beach raised his round white-whiskered face, and his little eyes seemed to be squinting fearfully up at Kootie. “A three-headed dog—on your altar,” he said, panting as his shoulder spasmed metronomically and blood began to blot through the doctor’s snapping white hair. “Your way,” he gasped, “is—clear.” Then he leaned down over the doctor’s limp, jerking form, and a woman’s voice cawed,
“Can you breathe, Richie dear? Say something if you can’t breathe.”
The voice must have come from Long John Beach’s throat, but Cochran thought the left-side manikin head had been jerking in time to the words.

A dozen drums were pounding in rapid unison now, and though it was no longer synchronized with even his presently very fast heartbeat, Cochran thought the drums were matching some other rhythm inside him—an ancient, savage brain-frequency that made thought impossible. His open mouth was fluttered by the wind, and his nose was full of the wine and sap smells.

A warm, strong hand gripped Cochran’s shoulder—and he found himself helplessly pointing his revolver at the two jolting figures on the mud in front of him, and then he pulled the trigger—but he must have miscounted his previous shots, for the gun didn’t fire.

He was dizzily ready to crouch beside Armentrout and begin pounding on all three of the twitching heads with the pistol grip; but the hand on his shoulder pulled him back and gave him a shockingly hard shove that spun him around twice before he was able to flailingly catch his balance. In the fire-lit wheeling blur he had glimpsed a wooden mask on broad, fur-caped shoulders, but the urgency was now somewhere else; Cochran was still off-balance, somehow.

The clay-smeared people had all stood up at once from the mud around him, and were walking, then striding, toward the Point Lobos cliff. And in a moment they had opened their mouths in a shrill, ululating chorus, and they were running. Cochran let himself start to fall in the same direction.

And then Cochran and Plumtree were running too, right with them, and Cochran didn’t even know if he was joining in the predatory yelling as his feet thudded in the mud and flames whirled around him and Plumtree. No particular sound in the shaking din told him that the struck bullet in the gun he was carrying had belatedly fired into the ground, just the jolt in his hand and the flare at his thigh; he didn’t even look down, just flipped the gun around in his hand so that it would be a better club.

He did hear shots from up the slope ahead—a rapid-fire stutter that conveyed desperation and panic—and over the close tossing clay dreadlocks Cochran could see muzzle-flashes from the mouth of the cave. None of the sprinting youths appeared to be shooting back—like Cochran they were waving their firearms overhead like clubs, or just tossing them away.

Cochran and Plumtree leaped over wall sections and fallen naked bodies, and then he had lost the gun and they were scrambling up the mud slope toward the cave, imitating the naked earth-people around them in hunching forward to pull themselves up with their hands as well as push themselves along with their feet. All the torches and even the guns had been dropped and left behind, and it seemed to be a pack of four-legged beasts rushing up the path to the cave.

The gunshots were just sporadic punctuation to shrill screams now, and the cave was packed with straining, clawing forms streaked only with reflected moonlight. Cochran was breathing fast through his clenched teeth as he fought to get through the press of bodies to the prey; until a heavy, hairy ball rolled over the shoulders in front of him and fell into his empty hands.