Kirk sighed. ‘‘I don’t know what your plan is, why you’re going there in the first place, but I’ll tell you why I’m sending these men with you: to exterminate them. They’re evil, they’re dangerous, and someone has to put a stop to them. They tried to kill me. Now it’s my turn. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and all that.’’
‘‘You can’t just . . . slaughter them.’’
‘‘Why not? It’s what they’d do to us. Listen, I don’t know you from a hole in the ground. I don’t know if you’re some bleeding heart or Harvey Hardass. But I do know that I hired these men to accompany you and protect you and kill whatever you find. I’m not arguing with you about it; I’m not discussing it with you; I’m just letting you know.’’ Even in his ailing state, Kirk had the imperious attitude of the extremely wealthy.
‘‘Who are they?’’ Brian asked.
‘‘My father had occasion to use them in his business. They’re men who know what they’re doing.’’
‘‘Are they mercenaries?’’
‘‘Of a sort.’’
Brian didn’t know what to say. There was no point in arguing. These men were going to shadow him and Carrie, follow them wherever they went, and there wasn’t a damn thing they could do about it.
Except back off.
But that wasn’t going to happen. As Carrie said, everything was coming to a head. The stars were aligned, wheels set in motion, whatever cliché one cared to use. Their reason for attempting this trek in the first place was to head off whatever looming disaster lay ahead. Although Kirk was right—they’d had no plan whatsoever. And it
would
be much easier to accomplish their goals with an armed militia at their side.
What about their shoot-to-kill orders, though?
What about his dad?
He and Carrie would have time to work on them while on the trail, explain things more in detail. Things were always different on the ground than they were in the command post, and he was sure that these men were used to using their own judgment as circumstances arose and not automatically following every order to the letter. And if not . . . well, he and Carrie could always turn back depending on how
they
read the situation.
But at the moment, he felt safer with the mercenaries accompanying them.
‘‘Another thing,’’ Kirk said. ‘‘I think they like poems. Or . . . not poems exactly. Rhymes. Like nursery rhymes. I don’t know how you can use that or if it’ll help, but you can never have too much information, right?’’
‘‘Right,’’ Brian agreed.
Some of the imperiousness was gone, but Kirk’s voice sounded tired and weaker than ever. ‘‘I’d say ‘break a leg,’ but they may do that for you. Be careful.’’
‘‘We will,’’ Brian said. He clicked off the phone and handed it back to the man in charge. The name sewn into the breast of his fatigues was
Todd.
‘‘What’s going on?’’ Carrie asked.
‘‘Kirk Stewart hired these men to accompany us. In case there’s danger.’’ He left it at that.
‘‘I don’t like this,’’ she whispered into his ear.
‘‘You will when we save your bacon,’’ one of the men said, overhearing.
‘‘I guess we’d better start,’’ Brian said.
Todd nodded crisply. ‘‘You heard ’em, boys! Move out!’’
Thirty
‘‘Follow the yellow brick road.’’
They were all thinking it, but it was Carrie who said it, and Brian smiled at her, though that was the last thing in the world he felt like doing. They stood in the center of a shaded glade, staring down at the spot where the dirt trail they’d been following turned into a pathway paved with real gold. It was proof positive that they were on the right track, yet for the first time Brian felt like turning back, heading home and not ever returning or even thinking of this place again. He had never been so scared in his life, and he didn’t know what sort of insane hubris had led him to come out here in the first place. Whatever lived here was old, as old perhaps as the redwoods they had passed on the way or the rocks that lined the walls of the canyons through which they’d hiked, and that left him feeling not only intimidated but frightened.
His dream now seemed more like prophecy than anything else, and while Bakersfield and Los Angeles were not to either side of him as they had been in the vision, he understood the symbolism. One was his future and one was his past. Except that the dream had not really been about him, and the path between the future and the past clearly applied to these descendants of men and monsters. They were caught between both worlds, and neither of them could be reconciled.
The mercenaries Kirk Stewart had hired were hard men and doubtless had seen a lot, but they were in awe at the sight of the golden path, and several of them crouched down to touch it with their fingers and make sure it was real. He and Carrie did the same, and the cold feel of the metal caused Brian’s heart rate to soar. It was the matter-of-factness of the gold bricks embedded in the ground that made this seem even more terrifying, that gave everything such tangible immediacy.
Even the fun house way they’d reached this point had not scared him quite so much, although it too was plenty frightening. They’d spent the better part of two hours on a winding trail that led to the top of a high ridge. Along the way, they had seen those rocks with the ‘Native American pictographs’ shown on the brochure. There were a lot more of them than he’d been led to believe—at one point, a series of boulders lining both sides of the trail had been covered with the alien writing—and he couldn’t help thinking that they were signposts placed there for anyone attempting this journey. Even Todd and his men seemed to sense the strangeness of those half-scribbled hieroglyphics, and they were silent as they passed by those faded carved messages.
At the crest of the ridge, smaller unmarked paths had split off from the main trail, but they had continued forward until Carrie pointed out an adobe hut at the end of one of the shorter side tracks. The hut had been almost completely hidden from view behind a copse of unfamiliar-looking trees, and it was only Carrie’s sharp eyes and a stray shaft of sunlight that had let her see the structure.
Todd had taken the lead, weapon drawn, and Brian and Carrie had quickly been surrounded like the presidentin the center of a Secret Service detail. The hut had one small door and no windows. They’d called out, announcing their presence, but there’d been no answer, and Todd and Raul, his second in command, had flanked the open doorway, then rushed in, weapons drawn. ‘‘All clear!’’ Todd announced seconds later, and though the building had barely looked large enough to hold them all, they’d gone in anyway. The single room was devoid of furniture, the floor was dirt, the walls undecorated. Only a torn and tattered strip of leather in one of the corners indicated that anyone other than themselves had ever been in there.
Feeling claustrophobic, Carrie had retreated back outside. Brian followed her—
—and they were not in the same location from which they’d started. The copse of trees was gone, as was the small path leading to it from the main trail. They were not even on a ridge anymore. Instead, they were deep in the center of a miles-wide canyon, amid a meadow of dried grasses nearly as high as their waists. A trail did lead from the door of the hut out of the canyon, but it didn’t seem to intersect with any others, and he had the creepy feeling that it existed only to lead them to a specific destination.
‘‘Todd!’’ he’d called. ‘‘You’d better get out here!’’
They’d been following that same trail ever since, out of the canyon, over a series of hills, through miles of ever-changing forest, until they’d reached this point.
And the golden trail.
Follow the yellow brick road.
‘‘Do you know how much this is worth?’’ Raul said, gesturing toward the winding path before them. ‘‘Millions! Just one of these bricks apiece, and we’d be set.’’
‘‘Later,’’ Todd said. ‘‘First we have a job to do.’’
At that, Carrie looked at Brian. But he ignored her. They’d been hiking for nearly four hours by his watch, and there’d been a lot of time to talk. He, Carrie and ‘‘the team,’’ as Todd called them, had gone over everything. He’d held nothing back—what was the point at this late date?—and while he hadn’t received a commitment from any of the men, he was confident enough in the fact that they’d gotten to know each other, and that they now knew him a hell of a lot better than they knew Kirk, who might be footing the bill but was little more than a voice on the phone to them, that he didn’t think they were going to blow away his dad on sight.
He was counting on it, in fact.
The golden path led between trees of fantastic shape and astonishing lushness, and he was reminded for some reason of that children’s game Candyland.
Where the hell were they?
And would they be able to get back?
Those were questions all of them had been asking and debating ever since emerging from that hut. And they were questions for which none of them had a satisfactory answer. Brian had been filled with an overwhelming sense of dread ever since they’d started on this golden trail, and he had the terrible feeling that the question of how to return was not one they were actually going to have to address.
The sun was sinking behind the mountains to their backs, and though the sky above remained bluish white with only a creeping influx of orange, here on the ground they were walking in shadow. It was exactly what he’d vowed would not happen, and though the team all had powerful handheld searchlights with faces big enough to cut huge swaths through the darkness, he did not like the idea of being out here after nightfall.
Night, he had the feeling, was
their
world.
Still, he made no effort to turn around, and indeed something compelled him to hurry up and get this over with, as though if they were to succeed, they needed to do so quickly.
Or as though dawdling would only prolong the inevitable.
‘‘Look,’’ Carrie said, pointing.
He followed her finger, and it was then that he saw the Black Mountain. It was a mere shape above the tree-tops, a jagged silhouette against the darkening eastern sky, but he knew what it was instantly. Its contours had been seared into his brain more deeply than he’d realized, and its every crag and outcropping was familiar. The mountain was indeed solid black, and the setting sun was unable to shed its light on any part of the peak.
‘‘We’re almost there,’’ Brian said, and he was surprised to hear such calmness as he spoke. None of the fear he felt was reflected in the even tone of his voice.
The others were looking up, too, and he could tell from their hushed response that they knew exactly what they were seeing.
‘‘All right, men. This is it,’’ Todd said. He looked meaningfully at Brian. ‘‘What do you want us to do?’’
Brian breathed an inward sigh of relief. ‘‘Just be ready for anything. We don’t know what we’re going to find.’’ He paused, took a deep breath. ‘‘And if my father’s there, I’d like to talk to him. We need to find out what’s going on before we take any action.’’
Todd nodded. ‘‘You got it. Raul? Me and you. Out front. The rest of you? Behind Brian and Carrie. Let’s do this right.’’
They continued down the path, past trees of wondrous beauty whose tiny leaves glowed in the shadows like jewels, past trees of horrible ugliness whose knotted trunks and branches resembled the bodies of angry, deformed men. A light wind blew through here that carried with it scents of sadness and loss, not recognizable odors but smells that corresponded to nothing, chimerical fragrances able to evoke melancholic memories.
It was a defense mechanism, Brian realized, a way to break down the will of intruders before they had even arrived. Such power seemed impossible, and was definitely not something they could hope to match in any way, shape or form, yet if they knew about it, they could guard against it, and Brian halted the company and told them all what he was thinking. Nearly all of them had come to the same conclusion themselves—he was not the only one with time to think while he walked—and forewarned and forearmed, they continued on.
‘‘I’m not leavin’ here without some of this gold,’’ Raul said, looking down at the path.
‘‘First things first,’’ Todd reminded him.
They rounded a corner.
And saw the dead bear.
It stood in the center of the path, nine feet tall if it was an inch, huge clawed paws raised, mouth open and roaring.
Only . . .
No sound was coming out.
And the massive body was riddled with bullet holes, although the blood had long since dried.
Brian knew nothing about bears, only what he’d seen in movies and on TV, but he was pretty sure this was a grizzly. It advanced on them, snarling furiously, silently, its dead milky eyes staring blankly, and Todd and Raul opened fire. Their automatic rifles cut the bear in half, flesh tearing raggedly, bone shattering, as the bloodless top half of the beast fell to the side of the still-standing feet.
And kept moving.
The two men stopped shooting, and Brian took an involuntary step backward. The two halves of the bear’s corpse made no attempt to reconcile, but both were still moving and both seemed intent on stopping anyone from going any farther along the trail. The giant clawed feet stomped on the gold bricks, bloodless organs visibly jiggling within the open abdominal cavity exposed behind the jagged clumps of flesh and hair. The top half of the body actually attempted to pull itself forward with its heavy arms, as the open mouth continued to roar silently.
Carrie grabbed Brian’s arm, held it, and the other mercenaries looked to Todd for direction. Brian glanced around. They could have possibly gone around the bear, but there were other dead animals as well, he saw, positioned in the spaces between the trees, standing sentry around what was apparently some sort of perimeter. Bobcat and mountain lion, bighorn sheep and elk. Beyond the trees and the dead animals, the forest opened out. It was getting too dark to see exactly what was going on back there, but it was obviously an exposed area because the trees ended in a straight even line, just like the regrown forest they’d visited in the helicopter.