River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (43 page)

He spun around and aimed a sudden kick at Truly’s head. Truly saw it coming but since he was off-balance with his hands and feet in the puddle, he could only jerk his head to the side. The kick glanced off his shoulder instead, knocking him sprawling.

“I should have taken you out of this a long time ago,” Brewer said, his voice a menacing growl. He started toward Truly, who was still shaking off the effects of the fall and the kick. Truly scrabbled to regain his feet before Brewer reached him, and almost made it. At the last second, still trying to rise, he scooped up a fist-sized rock from the ground, and just before Brewer slammed into him, he hurled it at the captain’s head. The rock caught the side of Brewer’s temple, staggering him for a moment.

“I thought attacking women was your thing,” Truly said. Taking advantage of Brewer’s temporary instability, Truly charged through the puddle and drove the officer back against the boulder behind him. They landed with a bone-breaking crunch. Brewer groaned.

He was at least twenty years older than Truly. Maybe thirty. But he outweighed and out-muscled Truly, and he was probably a more skillful hand-to-hand fighter. Even smashed up against a rock, he managed to bring a knee up into Truly’s thigh and a fist down against Truly’s ear. Truly’s hold relaxed. He fell away, and Brewer followed up with two more quick jabs, a left and a right, blinding Truly with flashing lights and driving him back through the puddle. There the old man’s outstretched legs tangled with his and he went down again.

Brewer came at him once more. A kick to the jaw snapped Truly’s head around. A second landed short, catching Truly’s leg with a glancing blow. On the third, Truly caught Brewer’s foot in both hands. He yanked, twisted, and Brewer fell hard. Truly scrambled over him, pummeling with both fists as he did. Brewer, on his back, rained blows up at Truly. His right fist caught Brewer’s cheekbone, tearing the flesh. Truly tasted blood. He jabbed a thumb toward Brewer’s eye but Brewer whipped his head to the side. Truly’s thumb mashed against the side of his face, then Brewer turned his head again, snapping at the thumb. He nipped it before Truly could yank it away.

Favoring his damaged thumb allowed Brewer another moment, and he used it. He bucked Truly off him, got to his knees, and lunged into Truly, shoving him down in the puddle once again. Truly landed on his back with Brewer swarming over him, punching and kneeing his ribs and chest. Truly was weakening, barely able to take the punishment and still give anything back. Brewer was a killer, and he didn’t show any sign that he would stop until Truly had joined his list of victims.

Truly got the break he needed when the old man suddenly lurched to his feet, tried to take a step, and tripped, coming down across Brewer’s back. Brewer half turned to shove him off. Truly shot out his left fist, catching Brewer squarely in the throat. Gagging, Brewer reared back and Truly squeezed out from beneath him. He gained his feet and shoved a hand in his coat pocket, drawing out the Colt.

“I don’t want to do it this way, Brewer,” he said. “But if you make a move toward me, I will.”

Brewer held out his hands in a show of truce. “Don’t worry. One thing I’m not is suicidal.”

The old man had fallen back into the puddle, and drew himself to a sitting position, as if forgetting he had ever tried to stand. “All right, then.” Truly relaxed a little, but kept the gun pointed at Brewer’s midsection. If the officer charged, he couldn’t kill him outright but he’d put a hurting on him, granting himself time for a second, more fatal shot. “Why did you kill Millicent Wong?”

Brewer’s mouth opened in surprise. “That’s what you care about? You didn’t notice that we have some far more urgent concerns right now?” He ticked his head toward the battle that, from the evidence of noise and light, continued below.

Truly shrugged. “Okay, point taken. You obviously know something about what’s going on here.”

“About the
Kethili
? Yeah, something.”

“Tell me,” Truly said. “Why are they here? Why have they come back from wherever they’ve been? Where do you fit in? And what’s the army’s interest?”

“Hold up,” Brewer said, raising his hands again. “That’s a lot of questions.”

“Then you better talk fast because I still have the gun.”

Brewer clenched his right fist, then loosened it again. “We brought them back,” he said. “You’re CIA, right?”

“That’s right.”

“You’ve got your occult research section. Army intelligence has ours, too. And we’re way out ahead of you on that. Maybe we’re a little less hidebound, less bureaucratic, I don’t know, but we were willing to make some intuitive leaps, consult some sources you guys didn’t seem interested in. You know how intelligence sharing is—not really a priority for either of us.

“Anyhow, way back, I don’t know, thirty years ago or so, we turned up information on the
Kethili
. Someone in our group thought if they could be restored, controlled, they might be useful weapons. That was toward the tail end of the Cold War, remember, and we needed any edge we could find, in case the Commies decided to launch nukes at us.”

Truly had a hard time accepting what Brewer said. He spat blood. His tongue probed a spot where a tooth he had probably swallowed had been. He was sure the gash over his cheekbone still bled, but the cold, stinging rain had numbed it and washed away any blood as soon as it surfaced. “Let me get this straight. You thought you could bring
gods
back to life and control them?”

“Someone did. I’m not naming names. I was a junior member of the team back then. An errand boy. Somebody told me who to hit or where to go, and I followed orders.”

“Where have I heard that excuse?”

Brewer ignored him. “Eventually they determined who knew the most about the
Kethili
—at least, in the world of English-speaking white men—and they pointed me in his direction. I went and found him, snatched him up, and…let’s say, persuaded him to perform a ritual that would restore their physical bodies. This is still ages ago, twenty, twenty-one years, something like that.”

“Sounds like it wasn’t the most successful ritual ever.”

“Not at first. We thought it was a total flop. The old guy swore it would work, but it might take time. Twenty years, fifty, a hundred, five hundred…he didn’t know. Naturally, that pissed me off royally—flying missiles could be here in a matter of hours, not years. I bitched, but he said there was nothing to be done about it.”

“Where did all this happen? Victorio Peak?”

“Yeah, back inside the mountain,” Brewer said. He dabbed at his mouth with the back of his hand. “The old guy said the correct vessels—that’s the word he used,
vessels
—had to be in the right place at the right time. He said his spell sank down into the water table, where it would join the rest of the Earth’s waters, flowing through rivers and streams and across oceans, until it found the vessels it needed.”

“And the nearest flowing water to White Sands is the Rio Grande,” Truly observed. “So it flowed down the river and wound up here, and that’s why this is their new battleground.”

“At a guess, something like that. Plus this is where I found him in the first place, and he said it was a place that had special significance to the
Kethili
. We figured the old guy could control them whenever they were reborn, or reemerged, whatever, because he was the one who brought them back. What we didn’t count on was that the ritual itself sapped the life out of him. He lived for thirty-three more hours, give or take, and then he died.”

Truly had been expecting the blind man to be the old guy Brewer was talking about. He spared a glance for that old man, sitting in the puddle drawing designs on the air.

“That’s right,” Brewer said, answering the question Truly hadn’t asked. “He died, but he wouldn’t lie down. He remained animate. He couldn’t see or hear or talk, his brain function was at zero and holding, he didn’t need food or sleep or anything else. Once the doctors had put him through every test they could think of, we locked him into a room inside the peak. When it became obvious—because he was doing what you see now—that he was trying to draw something, we stuck a pencil in his hand and some paper in front of him, and he started making drawings. We kept the pencil and paper coming. He kept drawing. A lot of it was meaningless, but every now and then he seemed to tap into something, and we tried to follow up on what we could. He drew the Berlin Wall in rubble weeks before it happened. Before 9/11 he drew airplanes and buildings, but that didn’t give us enough to go on, and we couldn’t predict the attacks.

“Because I was the one who brought him in and convinced him to perform the ritual, I became his keeper. I’ve killed to protect his secret, and that includes your friend Millicent. You’d probably like me to say I’m sorry, but there’s not a chance in hell of that. If this thing worked, if it became real, it was too big to let some psychic bitch get in the way of it. She was starting to clue in on me, despite my blocking her, and she had to go.”

Truly swallowed his rage. Given the circumstances, it would be counterproductive. “Well, it’s real enough now. Where’s the control?”

“We didn’t expect him to die,” Brewer said, indicating the old man. “Or that having died, he would stick around this long. When I realized the
Kethili
really had come back, I brought him out in case there was anything he could do to rein them in.”

The old man sat in the puddle, drawing in the air with his fingers.

“Not looking that way.”

Given the timing, and the connection to the Rio Grande, Truly had to guess that the disturbance in the ley lines that had caught Lawrence Ingersoll in what must have been some sort of psychic feedback was related to the reemergence of the
Kethili
into the world. Certainly an occult event of such magnitude would be beyond the experience of any of the people in his network.

“He said he knew spells,” Brewer went on. “He could command them. But he hasn’t spoken a word since he died, and his drawings don’t communicate anything as substantial as specific spells. I don’t think we can control them now. I think we’re just fucked.” He paused, then added, “Unless you want to try shooting them.”

FORTY-EIGHT

“Shoot them?” Truly asked. “You think?”

“I’ll do it,” Brewer said. “If you’re okay with that.”

Truly twitched his Colt in a shoulderless shrug.

“Reaching for my weapon,” Brewer said. His movements were slow, exaggerated. He drew an automatic from a holster concealed beneath his winter coat, holding it between his thumb and index finger until it was pointed safely away from Truly. There was something comforting, Truly thought, about dealing with professionals.

Truly moved closer to the vantage point from which Brewer had been watching the
Kethili
. The battle raged on. Both gods were hurt now, purple blood flowing freely from numerous wounds.
Kethili-anh
, the one who had been Ginny’s friend Wade, seemed to have taken the worst of it. They had also done significant damage to the rock around them, exposing enough fresh, pale stone to make the place resemble a small-scale strip-mining operation.

The weird, disconcerting chatter between them continued, too, a combination of screeching, whining, and hissing noises, clicks and pops and low, almost subsonic moans.

Truly had been fighting his nerves, struggling to hold his weapon steady, but Brewer seemed to have no such problems. He aimed his pistol at
Kethili-cha
, his arm still and relaxed. He squeezed the trigger. The report echoed off the surrounding rocks and the bullet slammed into the back of
Kethili-cha
’s right shoulder. She spun around, clapping one of those long freaky hands over the wound, and glared up at them. Brewer fired again.

This time the bullet hit her squarely in the chest. Purple blood bloomed there for a moment, but ceased to flow almost instantly.

With a furious scowl,
Kethili-cha
made a throwing motion directly toward Brewer. The army officer ducked behind the boulder he had been leaning on. The top of it exploded, spraying sharp-edged stone all over the three people hiding behind it.

Brewer turned back toward Truly, wiping blood off his face. “Guess that just pissed her off.”

“It looks that way,” Truly agreed.

“Maybe if we both try—”

“Maybe you should put that thing away,” Truly said. Shooting a goddess with regular bullets wouldn’t do the job. She had felt their impact, but hadn’t been terribly disturbed by them, and if the mystical bolt she’d hurled had hit Brewer, it would have taken his head off. “Before someone gets hurt.”

Brewer tucked the gun back into its holster under his coat. “You got any better ideas? The only other weapon I brought is an old blind man. A
dead
old blind man. And that’s about how useful he turned out to be.”

Truly looked at the old man again, and a thought flickered through his mind. “Maybe…” he said. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere, and don’t try to engage them again.”