River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (42 page)

“So what, you’re here because of some hallucination?”

“Some hallucinations reveal deeper truths. Or at least that’s what he believed. I don’t know how much of this to credit, but in an altered state he claimed to have learned things he couldn’t any other way.”

Once Truly had crossed the first stream, he started to relax a little before noticing that a second followed right after. The Hummer had made it through without any problems, though, so Truly applied the same principles he had to the first one. The water was faster this time, and he had a few seconds of near panic when it felt like he was being shoved toward the edge of the bridge.

Then he was off it, on solid ground once more. Water was everywhere, but not flowing as fast as in the streams. The Hummer was parked, its lights off. It looked empty from here. “Keep going,” he said, pulling as close to the rocks as he could. Logs intended to mark parking spaces looked like islands floating in a vast sea. “And quicker would be better than slower. The
Reader’s Digest
condensed version, please.”

“The seven original
Kethili
, my father wrote, were the beings, or gods, who created the world. Each one dug his or her hands into the ribs of two others, tugging their bones and flesh out, bone building upon bone in a great sphere to form the Earth’s skeleton, flesh upon flesh to form the land around it. As they drew away from one another, reaching the diameter of the Earth, the flesh gathered and folded to make the valleys and mountains and meadows, while the tears they cried from the incredible pain filled the oceans and rivers. Animals and people sprang up from drops of blood they spilled.

“Having made the Earth and watched the population grow, however, the seven
Kethili
disagreed on what they should do next. They went to war with one another, fighting over the course of eons until only two were left:
Kethili-anh
, who wanted to let the world continue on the course that was begun, and
Kethili-cha
, who wanted to wipe it clean and start over.”

Truly didn’t know what to make of her fantastical story. “We going into the rocks?” he asked, nodding his head toward the pale, rain-soaked stones ahead. Brewer must have gone that way, he figured.

“Looks like we should.”

“It’s going to be wet.”

“Is there any place that isn’t?” She checked the strings on her hood, and he wished he had one, too. Even a hat would help. Or a force field. He reached into his zippered bag again, removed two spare magazines for his weapon, then zipped it shut. He dropped the magazines into the side pockets of his raincoat and opened his door. “I don’t remember reading about all that in the Bible,” he said as they sloshed through standing water toward the first of the huge rocks.

“There are far older writings than those contained in the Christian Bible, Mr. Truly,” she replied. “And older stories still, written on stone, which no one has ever dared to put down on paper.”

“So you believe this tale?” He slipped on wet stone, and she caught his arm, held him until he regained his balance. Forty days and forty nights of rain had been in the Bible, and he hoped that wasn’t about to be repeated.

“I don’t know what to believe. But I refuse
not
to believe in it. And if you have any special relationship with God, I expect that praying would be a good idea right now.”

Truly ignored the suggestion. “And your friend? What’s he doing here?”

“That’s hard to say. I need to look for him, and maybe we’ll both find out.”

Ginny Tupper had calmed considerably since he had pointed his weapon at her, but she was still anxious for her friend. Truly thought he sensed an undercurrent of excitement, too, as if she believed herself on the verge of a major discovery. Perhaps they both were.

She was smart and she had a fierce wit even under pressure. Unlike most of the women he dated, she wasn’t too young for him—or too married, judging from the lack of a ring.

He wanted to kick himself. In the midst of the worst storm in history, heading into a rock formation he had never heard of, chasing a murderer who was traveling with an old blind man, listening to tales of homicidal gods, he couldn’t help thinking that the woman beside him—whom he had met all of ten minutes before—was strangely attractive.

Keep your mind on business,
he told himself.
Try not to be a dope for once.

But people couldn’t change their true natures, and he doubted he’d be able to take his own best advice.

FORTY-SEVEN

“It’s not a great night for rock climbing,” Truly pointed out.

“It’s not a great night for anything,” Ginny said. “Except maybe a stiff drink and a movie on TV. I’m not even sure where we should go. Besides up, there are also caves in there, whole networks of them tunneling under the rocks. But given the river’s height, I’d rather go up than underground.”

“Works for me.” She obviously knew the place better than he did, so he let her lead. He tried to emulate where she put her hands and feet, knowing the rocks could be treacherous in this heavy rain. His leather street shoes weren’t meant for serious hiking or climbing.

Amid the rocks, the lightning and thunder seemed louder, closer, more violent than they had en route from the city. It didn’t make sense—not that “sense” meant what it once had—but it almost seemed that the blinding flashes and crashing thunder was originating
within
the tumble of rock instead of outside it.

Ginny led him up a trail of sorts, winding up a series of ever-higher outcroppings. Along the way they passed images painted directly on the rock: a sunburst, some parallel wavy lines, creatures that might have been deer, and a shield, all of them glowing as if white-hot. “What the hell? That’s definitely not normal,” Ginny said. It seemed like a vast understatement, but Truly didn’t offer any comment.

Strange as the glowing images were, his attention was fixed on something else. The storm made its own crashing, banging racket, its particular light show in the sky, but there was definitely something going on within the rock formations as well. Cracks of thunder echoed off the stone surfaces, drowning out that coming from the clouds. Other sounds were interspersed with that thunder, rattling booms like an army of convicts breaking rocks with sledgehammers. Occasional whining sounds sliced through the rest of it like devilish buzz saws.

“What do you think that is?” he asked, not really expecting an answer.

“We’ll find out soon, I expect,” Ginny offered. They had almost reached a pinnacle from which they would be able to look down onto whatever transpired below. The rocks were steeper here—the fall, should they lose their footing, potentially lethal. Wind and weather had smoothed the stone, leaving handholds that were little more than bumps on its surface. Realizing he could see better the higher he climbed, Truly determined that what he had first thought were thunder and lightning glowed bright enough to cast its illumination all the way up here.

When she reached the top and stared down the other side, Ginny let out a gasp. Her body went stiff. Truly hurried the last few feet, joining her at a jagged edge from which he could see all the way to the river more than a hundred feet below. Blinking rain from his eyes, he gazed at a scene he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe.

Two—
creatures
—was the best word he could summon, not human, although they had human attributes—faced each other in some sort of mystical battle. Both were naked and their genders were clear—one, with longer dark hair, had visible breasts and a slightly softer, rounder form, while the other had shorter blond hair and beard, and external genitalia swaying between freakish, spidery legs. They stood across from each other on a wide rock shelf that had stone spurs shooting up all the way around it, forming a natural amphitheater, the walls of which were covered in glowing pictographs. They conversed, Truly guessed, as they circled each other, making a series of squeaking hisses interspersed with whoops and barked comments, in a language that didn’t sound like anything he had ever heard, or heard of.

The male’s oddly jointed arms worked together in a motion that looked like he was scooping up empty air—except that the air bent and wrinkled where he held it, as if he’d formed a huge soap bubble—and then he hurled his ball of seeming nothingness at the female.

She bobbed on legs that made Truly’s teeth hurt to look at, ducking under the male’s attack. While Truly couldn’t see the projectile in flight, except for a vague wrinkling of the air where it flew, it hit the wall behind her and exploded, sending shards of stone flying everywhere. The blast unleashed a stink like burning rubber, but with an unexpectedly sweet undercurrent that reminded Truly of fennel.

The female hissed something unintelligible at the male and blasted him with her own unseen missile. It glanced off his left shoulder, spinning him around, then crashed into the wall and sprayed him with bits of stone. He dropped to one knee—or whatever those inverted joints were called—and clapped a hand over that shoulder. Purplish blood seeped between fingers as long as Truly’s forearm—seven of them on each hand, he noted, ending in inches-long claws.

Ginny’s expression was rapt, awestruck. She stared in wonder at a scene that no anthropologist—no human being—had witnessed since before the dawn of recorded history.

Truly’s belief system had undergone serious changes since he had taken the job running Moon Flash. But it hadn’t altered enough to accommodate whatever he was seeing. Looking at them made his stomach churn and he had to swallow back bile. He wished it were a nightmare so he could wake up, or that in the brief time Ginny had been in his car, crossing the flooded bridges, she had dosed him with LSD. “What are those things?” he demanded.

“I can only guess,” Ginny said, her voice now much calmer than his. “The guy used to be my friend Wade. I’m thinking the other one looks like—and I use that phrase loosely—his friend Molly. But now? Now I’d have to say they’re
Kethili
.”

Truly didn’t bother arguing. No other explanation was any more plausible than hers, and at least she ventured one. “So one of them wants to—how did you put it?—wipe the world clean and start over? Which one?”

“From what Wade told me, that’s Molly.
Kethili-cha
.”

“Then we’d better damn well hope she loses.”

He tore his gaze away from the struggling creatures—or gods—and looked toward the river. Lightning and the illumination from the explosion of their mystical weapons lit up the flowing water momentarily, like a camera’s strobe, and he saw figures floating in it, whisked downstream by its ferocious current. A cow, he thought, and maybe some deer. Smaller shapes that might have been human beings.

Movement across the way caught his attention, and he tried to focus through the rain. On the far side of the rock amphitheater, mostly tucked away behind some large boulders, Vance Brewer watched the battle. The blind man, standing slightly behind him, appeared oblivious to the scene in front of him. The rain had pasted the old man’s few tendrils of hair to his scalp, giving him a cadaverous appearance.

Truly still owed Brewer for killing Millicent, and he wanted answers about his involvement in this whole mess. “Wait here,” he told Ginny, fully aware that he held no authority over her whatsoever. “There’s something I have to do.”

She touched his shoulder as he started away. “Be careful.”

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m good at that.”

More confident than when he had first climbed up, Truly descended and worked his way around the natural clearing where the two
Kethili
fought. The flares and flashes of their conflict lit his way, lightning providing secondary illumination. Every now and then the clouds parted enough to reveal the moon—a flat, pale pewter disk that offered no light. When he threatened to lose his balance, he grabbed at the yucca or mesquite breaking the stony surface here and there—all of it sharp, slicing his bare hands, but better than a fifty- or sixty-foot drop.

Fifteen minutes later, he had circled all the way around, coming up behind and slightly above Brewer and the old man. Brewer still watched from hiding, but the old man had sat down in a puddle behind him and inscribed shapes on the rocks with his fingertips. His mouth moved, but no sound came from it.

Truly could shoot Brewer from here. One in the back of the head should do it. That might avenge Millicent, but it wouldn’t help him achieve his other goals. Anyway, the man was a captain in the United States Army. Although it hadn’t seemed like it, they were ostensibly on the same side. Better to give Brewer a chance to explain himself.

He maneuvered toward a narrow bench from which he could drop down behind Brewer, taking him by surprise. Dodging the old man would be the only hard part, since he had moved to the center of the small hidey-hole Brewer had found.

As he slid around, trying to position himself for the drop, though, Truly slipped, his hands gliding out from under him on the rain-slick stone. Instead of a dramatic landing, he plopped six feet to the ground, splashing into the puddle, one outflung arm smacking against the old man’s leg. The old man didn’t react, but Brewer did.