The Slab (45 page)

“Don’t worry about that,” Hal said. “You probably thought the thing would stop your slugs a little better. Or slow them down, at least.”

“That’s what I thought. I’m sure I hit it.”

“You did,” Hal said. “I saw the impacts. They just didn’t do any damage. At least, not long-term.”

“What I thought.” Ken continued walking for a moment. “Life sure is funny, ain’t it?”

“Stranger than most of us could possibly imagine,” Hal agreed. They continued on, into the depths of the cave, past writing that grew older and older. Like descending into the Grand Canyon, he felt as if they were walking past a visual record of the planet itself. “Do me a favor?”

“What’s that?” Ken asked.

“You see anyone you’ve killed show up in here, don’t stop to chat.”

“You’ve got my word on that,” Ken said. “No problem at all.”

***

Lucy ran, breathless and exhausted, as fast as she could manage. When she approached the area she thought Eddie’s trailer was in, she began to feel heartened. Eddie would hide her. Eddie would be an ally—the first one she’d had since all this started. She could still hear the crashing of brush and thumping of feet behind her, but she allowed herself a moment of optimism.

Which was when the bullet slammed into her left shoulder, spinning her half around and slamming her down into a creosote bush as surely as if someone had pushed her. Stiff branches clawed at her, cutting her exposed flesh, snagging her clothing and loose, wild hair.

Damn it, she thought. So close…

She started trying to regain her balance, to extricate herself from the greasewood, but she was too tangled up. Then she felt a strong hand on her, tugging her by the wounded shoulder. The pain was unbearable.

The touch was worse.

She saw the curly guy looking at her, smiling. The one she believed was Kelly Williams. He pulled her free of the bush and then let her go. Her legs gave out beneath her and she dropped to her knees.

“You’ve run us a merry chase, bitch,” he said. “A merry Goddamn chase.”

Lucy was breathing hard, through her mouth, trying to push the pain in her shoulder into a separate compartment of her mind where it wouldn’t interfere with thinking, with trying to find a way out of this.

“There has never been a Dove I have so looked forward to seeing dead,” the man went on. “You have no idea of the pleasure you’re about to cause me.”

He began to lower his gun to her head. With nothing to lose, she tried a desperate ploy.

The knife she’d taken from Ray Dixon was still tucked between her belt and waistband, at the small of her back. With her right hand, she grabbed for it and lashed out. The blade drew a fine red line across his thigh. He screamed and wobbled on his feet, and she slashed up as she pushed herself to her own full height. This time, the knife caught his right hand, the one groping for the gun’s trigger. He screamed again.

Behind him, the other guy, the fat one, angled for position. He looked like he wanted to shoot her but didn’t dare, for fear of hitting Williams.

She didn’t bother to watch any longer, but ran. Behind her, she heard loud swearing and then the sounds of pursuit.

A minute later, she plowed through the flaming brush that had been left behind when whatever it was had exploded and dripped down the weird blue bubble, and into the little clearing where Eddie had parked his trailer, next to the upside-down wreck of a Chevy Impala that always signposted his place for her, and what she saw stopped her cold.

Her brothers, Jorge and Diego, pawing at the dirt like animals. Their hands were bleeding; the ground before them was soaked with blood, wet and black in the firelight. She gave a little, wordless shout, but they didn’t even look up.

“What are you doing?!” she demanded. She grabbed Diego’s shoulders, bent down to get in front of his face. “Diego! Jorge! It’s me, Lucia!”

Diego shook her off, swatted at her like an insect.

“Don’t do no good,” Eddie said. Now she saw him, sitting on the step of his own trailer and watching the whole scene. There was a massive gun cradled in his arms. “They’re like, loco or some shit. It’s fucked up, man.”

“Can’t you do anything?”

“They don’t listen, Lucy,” Eddie told her.

She ran to him. “Eddie, there’s these guys chasing me. Trying to kill me.”

He smiled, as if she were telling a joke. “Seems like everybody’s tryin’ to kill somebody. Except your brothers—I think they already did their killing for this week.”

Before she could continue, though, two more figures came through the flames. Kelly and Terrance. Kelly’s walk was a half-stagger, as his right leg couldn’t support his weight. They looked at Diego and Jorge, digging like crazy people, at Eddie, and finally at Lucy. Both men looked awful, exhausted, filthy, half-mad. Kelly was splattered with blood. Probably, she thought, a lot like me.

But Kelly’s grizzled face was split in a sinister grin, as if finding Lucy again had made everything she’d put him through worth it. “You,” he said weakly. “You cut me.”

“Those the guys?” Eddie asked quietly.

“What’s left of them,” Lucy replied. She snatched the big gun from his hands. “Give me that.”

Kelly barked out a laugh, looking at her struggling to lift the big weapon with a wounded shoulder. But she made the effort, lifting the thing to her waist and tugging the trigger.

The first burst was a quick three shots that completely missed her targets—loud but not significant enough to be heard by many people over the Slab’s apocalyptic soundtrack. She squeezed again, holding down the trigger this time, and the thunder started.

A line of slugs cut across Kelly like stitches. Then Terrance, same thing, even as he tried to raise his own rifle. Both men fell—Kelly nearly torn in half—and still Lucy fired, bullet after bullet after bullet chewing flesh and shattering bone and spurting blood, giant brass shell casings hitting the ground around her.

Finally, the gun fell silent. Eddie looked at her. Even her brothers had stopped digging for the moment and stared at her. Eddie was still sitting on the trailer’s step, his posture casual, a faint smile playing about his lips and eyes.

“Guess they won’t bother you anymore,” he said.

Diego and Jorge went back to digging.

***

Ken hated the idea of leaving Penny alone with that thing, that abomination. But she was right, they needed to keep going, and if she couldn’t get past it—or if taking three minutes to converse with it would let her do so safely—then he guessed she’d made the right decision. He and Hal needed to hurry on. He couldn’t have said why, but he knew that time was becoming an issue—that no matter how much he’d come to like Penny in the last hours, her survival wasn’t as important as their task here, the sense of urgency he felt. The three minutes had come and gone and he didn’t know if she was following yet, but he wasn’t turning around to find out.

He practically ran now, and Hal kept pace right behind him. The cave’s floor slanted more and more, and the path seemed to lead almost straight west. His assumption was that it would end more or less directly underneath the Slab. He still didn’t know what waited for them down there, but one thing was certain.

It wasn’t good.

As he ran, he began to wonder what Hal brought to the table. He’d always handled problems himself. He had Billy Cobb at the substation, but that was only because the Imperial County Sheriff insisted on it. If it had been up to him he’d have run the station solo, taking calls when he could. The way he did everything else in life. If you didn’t depend on other people they couldn’t let you down. They couldn’t abandon you if they weren’t there to begin with. Maybe, he thought, I should just tell Hal to go back, to stay with Penny. Keep them out of my way while I check things out.

But Penny’s voice came to him as clearly as if he’d had a telephone held against his ear. “You can’t do everything by yourself, Ken,” she had said. She was right. He knew that. Which meant that this was just the cave—no, not the cave, but whatever was inside the cave—trying to trick him. To split them up.

And that’s when he understood.

It had made that person from the mushrooms in order to slow Penny down. Because they were strongest when they were together. Two of them were strong, three were, they had agreed, practically godlike.

So it had already won, and they didn’t even know what the fight was yet. If it took three of them to beat it—and why else had the magic spared three of them, directed their lives, brought them through the years to this one specific place and time, if not because it did—and there were only two, then they’d already lost. Going back for Penny was out of the question; they’d lose too much time, and time was definitely the other factor.

All those years, all those lives—Shannon’s life, Mindy’s life, and so many more—to bring them here. And they’d blown it.

He stopped and let Hal catch up. He almost didn’t feel like going any farther.

“We fucked up,” Ken said. “We shouldn’t have let Penny stay back there.”

“Yeah,” Hal said. “I’ve been thinking the same thing.”

“What are we gonna do?”

Hal reached out and touched Ken, and Ken felt the power surge through him again, recharging him. His mood elevated with his strength.

“We go on,” Hal said. “We go down there and we stop it.”

“We don’t even know what it is,” Ken protested, knowing even as he did that he was going to give in.

“Doesn’t matter,” Hal said. “What matters is that we try. We don’t back down from the fight. We’ll know it when we see it.”

“You’re right,” Ken said. “I sure wish Penny was here, though.”

“That makes two of us,” Hal said. “Probably three of us. But that choice has been made, so we’ve got to go on without her.”

He started walking down the sloping cave floor again, and Ken followed. The mushrooms weren’t so thick anymore, just an occasional one here and there, as if they weren’t needed down here like they were closer to the surface. The cave’s floor and walls were solid stone, floor smoothed with the passage of feet over the centuries, walls, devoid of pictures or writing now, nearly as rough as if they’d been hewn from the earth with stone axes. No timbers supported the ceiling—this had the feel of a tunnel built by human hands, though Ken was sure it wasn’t—but somehow the cave felt strong and secure just the same. Ken had no idea how deep they’d gone, but it felt like they were completely cut off from the rest of the world.

Finally, they reached the end.

The cave widened into a small chamber, a couple of dozen feet in diameter, almost perfectly round. The roof was lost in the darkness overhead. There were pictographs on the walls, as illegible to Ken as if they’d been Chinese or Arabic, though he suspected Penny would have been able to read them if she’d been here.

In the middle of the room stood a small, round rock structure, looking much like the opening to an Anasazi kiva. A slab had been laid on top of its low rock walls, its surface completely covered with the same kind of pictorial language that appeared on the main walls of the cave. The slab must have weighed a ton or more, a solid piece of granite, smoothed and rounded and carefully fit to cover the top of the rock construction.

From the cracks between the rocks, mushrooms grew. As Ken watched, they seethed through the cracks, tiny tendrils at first, growing heads that expanded as they reached away from the rocks. Ken put a hand out, caught Hal’s arm, held him back.

“I don’t like this at all,” he said.

“I’m sure we’re not supposed to.”

They were still standing that way, flesh touching flesh, when the stone slab rocked and tipped back, sliding to the ground with a crash.

Something emerged from underneath.

Ken was predisposed to see him as the gray man, from Penny’s vision. Through whatever it was that linked them, Ken could see him from Hal’s perspective, and knew that to Hal, he looked like an enormous insect, vaguely cockroach-like but pale, as befitted something that never saw the sun—a huge white carapace over an insect’s thorax and abdomen, six twitching legs, long antennae on stalks protruding from its small, glistening head, clicking as it came out from underneath its rock.

And now, looking at it, Ken understood. He knew that Hal did, too. Penny’s impression had been correct—the thing was, more or less, a personification of evil. Not the personification, because evil was everywhere, in everyone, and around all the time. But a bad thing, nonetheless.

The knowledge raced through his mind like a movie, as he imagined it must have done for Penny when she’d been reading farther up the cave, earlier. He saw what must have been the same scene she did, on the shores of the ancient lake, water lapping at the very plateau on which they stood. Long, long ago, thousands of years ago, this presence had set upon the Cahuilla Indians, turning them against each other. They had lost many—the bodies scattered around, skulls stacked in morbid piles like cannonballs, transgressors writhing, impaled on massive stakes—testified to that.

But they had learned to fight back, had somehow tapped into magic of their own, and had eventually beaten the thing. Penny had described that, too—shoving the gray man into a hole and sealing it with a slab of rock.

Here, the internal movie went dark for a long time. Maybe the thing had been comatose, maybe they’d actually killed it. Impossible to tell. But eventually, there was light again, and life—as portrayed, in this movie, by water. Only this water was foul, poisoned, filled with chemicals that made it unhealthy for man and beast alike. Which made it, as it soaked into the water table and then down, and down, through the layers of rock and dirt and the very crust of the earth, perfect sustenance for the gray man. He tasted that water, and found it sweet.

And wanted more.

And began to hunger and thirst and look for a way out.

But after all those centuries of death or near-death, it needed more than just the few drops of water that made their way this far down. It needed blood. It needed death and destruction, fire and fear. These things gave it strength. So it reached out. It found what it needed, as living things will.