Thin Blood Thick Water (Clueless Resolutions Book 2) (17 page)

On the mountainside along the Forty Five River there was an increase of murmuring among the sacrifice assembly. The elders took turns standing and ordering silence. The order would be heeded for a few minutes and then the chatter would resume, slightly louder. Three enforcers, those who were not busy with guarding Max and Maggie, roamed in front of the on-lookers giving stern stares at those who seemed to be causing the unrest. To Maggie, it appeared that most of the insubordination within the crowd came from the females, who far outnumbered the males. The women would say something emphatically and then poke their male family leader to goad him into agreement. The younger males seemed to be siding with the females. Maggie’s primary focus was on her closest guard, looking for signs of distraction that would give her a jump on making her escape.

Max was stepping deliberately along the uphill steps to the upper ledge. He noticed an approaching area of restricted vision due to the rows of brush on both sides of the path, at a certain point where the path took a sharp twist to the left.
“That’s my break point”,
he silently readied himself.  The enforcer on Max’s right stubbed his toe on the steps and held back, reaching down to embrace his wounded lower digit. Above on the ledge ahead, the open shed doors exposed the cage surrounding the ‘trap door of death’. Jonathan was standing with one hand on the long raised lever which activated the trap door. He had the horn in the other hand. Mario was inside the cage, dressed in only a woven grass-type of skirt around his midriff. He was looking, with a horrified expression on his swollen face, down at the floor of the cage. It was vibrating, and evidenced by Mario’s revulsive reactions, hissing out volumes of foul-smelling air.

Lamar took the brief hesitation in their approach to call up ahead to his brother Jonathan. When Jonathan turned to respond, his head exploded in a ball of pink brain matter! The sound of an impact was like the smashing of a ripe watermelon. His legs buckled and his body collapsed. The grip on the trip lever held, and downward pressure was being applied to the point where the lever began to move downward. A loud creak emitted from the swivel point attached to the side of the shed, and after a millisecond, Jonathan’s hand released as his massive body rolled over in a heap on the ledge surface. Lamar, who had released his grip on Max’s arm, lurched forward up the steps to assist his brother while emitting a moaning sound. Max seized on the moment of distraction to drive his knee into the groin of the enforcer on his right. As the enforcer folded over, embracing his crotch with both hands, Max delivered a military-trained right cross punch with his clenched fist to the enforcer’s left jaw bone. He collapsed into a motionless pile on the stone steps, sitting on his crossed legs with blood spurting from his mouth and nose.

Lamar was kneeling motionless over his brother’s mostly-headless body when Max ran by him to release the exterior latch on the cage in the shed. He opened it and reached in to grab Mario. Still in a dazed state, Mario shrunk back from Max’s approach.

“Mario! Mario! It’s me, Max!” was the frantic attempt to bring Mario back to reality. “Max,” Mario cried, “is that you?”

“C’mon, we’re out of here!” Max yelled, as he pulled Mario out of the shed. As he passed the opening of the shack, Max noticed a pile of clothing. He grabbed it on the way and shoved it into Mario’s surprised hands as they stumbled past Lamar and his dead brother. He proceeded to drag the stumbling Mario down the pathway.

Meanwhile, sitting on the stone bench, Maggie was startled at a gunshot report which echoed from across the river. There was a unanimous gasp among the assembled tribespeople and they rose in unison to look toward the reservation side of the river. The elders rose and looked above to the upper ledge, gesturing wildly to Maggie’s guard while pointing to the sacrifice shed.

“
This is it
,” Maggie thought.  She flipped around on the bench and dove over the ledge into the brush below. Scratched and bleeding from several small abrasions, she bolted to her left and ran down the path used previously by the paddlers, toward the river. She heard the sound of a low-flying aircraft coming from across the river, over the reservation. Suddenly Max, with Mario in tow, burst through the brush in front of her.

“Maggie,” Max shouted. He grabbed her upper arm and, leading both her and Mario, guided them along the winding, downhill pathway.

Close to the end of the path at the river’s edge, due to the high tide level of the river, five canoes and two aluminum dinghies were tied to dug-in anchors. The canoes had paddle handles showing above the side rails. Three of the canoes also had clamped-on electric outboard motors at the aft end. The dinghies each had oar blades showing at upward angles, but each had a low horsepower outboard engine mounted on the stern.

“So much for paddling,” Max surmised wryly. “I guess they wanted to take it easy on the way home.”  Neither Maggie nor Mario caught the drift of Max’s quip.

“Let’s take the aluminum skiffs,” he commanded. He pushed Mario into one skiff and pointed Maggie toward the other. Max stepped to the rear of Mario’s skiff, switched on the motor magneto and opened the fuel valve. He pulled twice on the starter rope and the motor purred into life. Maggie had watched from the adjacent skiff and mimicked Max’s actions. The motor on her boat also started. As the escapees sat in the idling boats, Max jumped onto the river bank and uprooted the anchors, first to Maggie’s boat and then to Mario’s. Yells and whoops were coming from the path as Max jumped into the boat with a still-dazed Mario and, as the boat drifted out into the river, he opened the throttle to full and steered the skiff out onto the mid-stream current. Maggie followed suit with her dinghy and both pulled away from shore as a group of shouting, younger Native Indians reached the river’s edge.

Max noticed movement on the reservation side of the Forty Five River. On closer inspection he made out a figure holding what appeared to be a rifle. He prepared to take evasive maneuvers and, looking back at Maggie in the skiff behind his, waved and pointed at the figure on the opposite bank. When Max looked back at the ‘rifleman’ he was startled to see the figure of a woman, holding a rifle over her head and waving for attention. Maggie throttled her dinghy down and couldn’t believe the idea of this seemingly friendly, athletic-looking woman with a large weapon, who apparently wanted to be picked up at the river bank.

“Max, I think she wants us to go over to the shore,” Maggie called out. Max circled his skiff back around to Maggie’s.  He suggested they should be making their way out of the life-threatening scenario from which they had just escaped. At that point the ‘rifleman’ gave out a high-pitched yell, “Max, It’s me, Dannie!” Max looked with disbelief at the frantically waving woman across the river. The midstream current was swirling and developing a moderate surface chop which indicated the tidal change point. Looking down he noticed a color change taking place in the water below the surface, which was rising to the top. A deep red hue was becoming more and more evident by the second. Back on shore at the sacrifice scene, crowds of Native Canadian Indians were bowing and chanting some sort of rhyme or song in an indistinguishable language.

“The River Turns Red,” Mario said loudly, coming around from his apparently drug-induced daze. They’re saying “The River Turns Red”.

The situation was changing at a rapid rate. Max and Maggie, who were captives ready for extermination only moments ago, were now in the middle of a strange river with their former capturers on one side, a woman with a rifle on the other, floating on a swirling tidal change which was turning red, in Canadian waters somewhere near the Bay of Fundy.

As if the nightmare they were involved in wasn’t bizarre enough, the scene was suddenly interrupted by the piercing sound of a low-flying aircraft rapidly approaching from the west. Over the rolling hills of the reservation, a high-winged aircraft was approaching at full speed. Max made out the profile of a float plane, obviously not preparing to land on the river, bearing down on them. In the moment when diving into the river water seemed to be the only way to escape the onslaught of the speeding aircraft, it leveled off and discharged a missile from its left pontoon. Following the trail of grey-white exhaust of the missile as the float plane banked right and pulled up sharply, they witnessed a moment of relative calm and then…
Blam!
The cave opening on the lower ledge of the mountain erupted in a fiery explosion, followed by an onrush of reddish water, washing away everything in its path and sending debris cascading down the hillside toward the river. Two of the elders, caught in the onrush of water, washed over the rim of the ledge. They were becoming impaled on the trees and boulders along the mountainside. The remaining elders were hurriedly making their way up the path with two of the enforcers to where Lamar was moaning over his lifeless brother’s body. Lamar’s grief turned to uncontrollable rage at the sight of the elders when they reached the upper ledge. With a blood-curdling scream he lunged at the group he held responsible for Jonathan’s death.

Along the river bank, the tribespeople were screaming and waving anything they could lay hands on to ward off the reddish water splashing down the hillside. “The river runs red! The river runs red!” was chanted over and over among the paranoid grouping from the reservation.  Some of the younger, less superstitious male members were more interested in the people on the river in the motorized dinghies they had confiscated.  A dozen, or so, jumped into the canoes by twos and threes and began paddling frantically in an effort to catch up with their pilfered boats.

“That’s the Cessna float plane,” Max yelled to Maggie. “Go pick up Danyel and bring her along down to the bay,” he ordered, pointing to Danyel. With a wave of agreement, Maggie opened the throttle on her dinghy to full-speed and steered toward the reservation side of the river. Max opened the throttle to full speed on his dinghy motor and steered toward the mouth of the river on the open bay. The young Native Canadian Indians, paddling with all their strength were in hot pursuit.

Max, confident that freedom was imminent, was astounded when a submersible floatation machine rose up from the depths of the river directly in his path.  After the small-sized submarine vessel surfaced, a person holding some sort of firearm emerged at the top of its dorsal tower and was looking directly at the approaching out-board-motorized dinghy carrying Max and Mario. Max instinctively steered his boat hard to the right and made a U-turn. Mario almost fell over the side but held onto the seat to maintain his on-board status, while Max now steered the boat directly toward the young native Canadian Indian canoe-paddlers. The canoers had lagged far behind but were now looming closer and closer. Maggie followed Max’s maneuvering with her lighter load, consisting of herself and Danyel, and pulled up beside Max’s more heavily laden skiff.

“Max,” Danyel shouted over the roar of both outboard motors. “That’s the submergible from Bickford Lab! Chip told me about it,” she yelled, pointing rearward. She then turned, looking up-river now. Without hesitation, Danyel leveled her rifle and fired. Her target was the curved forward keel of the nearest canoe. Amazingly, shooting from the middle seat of the lurching aluminum skiff, her shot splintered the bow of the lead canoe. It went end-up, nose down, and sent the occupants flying into the river current. The skiffs zoomed past the other canoes, which were maneuvering to pick up their dunked comrades, and proceeded up-river away from the submarine vessel.  Looming just above the river surface, the Cessna float plane was approaching the two motorized skiffs rapidly. Max veered his boat to the right and Maggie steered to the left. As the Cessna zoomed between them the flash of an explosion from the right pontoon prompted the skiff operators and passengers to look rearward. An explosion of water and fire erupted just forward of the submarine vessel and covered it with a steamy reddish shower. The wake from the blast rocked it violently from side-to-side. As the Cessna pulled up into a steep climb the submersible vessel, which had been forced into a perpendicular position from its previous path, began to submerge rather quickly.  Max pulled the throttle on his outboard motor back to idle. Maggie circled her skiff around to come alongside his boat. They were in a position on the river directly between the sacrifice cave and the reservation.

“Look!” yelled Danyel, “There’s Lamar,” pointing to the riverbank below the ledge. “Let’s go pick him up so we can get away from this circus!”

Max, Maggie, and a stupefied Mario, having been through a nightmare wherein Lamar was less than sensitive regarding their planned demise, were hesitant to heed Danyel’s suggestion.

“What?” Danyel inquired. “Do you want to leave him here to fend for himself?”

After a moment, Max responded. “Take Maggie’s boat and pick him up, we’re heading toward the bay and hoping that whoever is flying the Cessna amphibian will pick us up and get us the hell out of here. “Chips flying the plane,” Danyel shouted.

“We’ll wait a minute or so for you to reach us,” Max answered. “Otherwise, good luck.”  With that, Maggie hopped into Max’s skiff and sat alongside Mario.

Danyel fiddled with the outboard mechanism, applied full throttle and maneuvered the other skiff toward the river bank. Max moved his boat upstream toward the likely touchdown location of the landing float plane.

The Cessna had circled in a wide arc and was now approaching from the mouth of the river with flaps down, in a landing approach. It passed at around 50 feet above the now reorganized canoe fleet, caught up alongside Max’s speeding skiff and touched down on the river surface. Gradually, the speeds matched and both waterborne machines idled to a stop. Max slowly moved his boat over to the tail end of the starboard pontoon of the float plane. Max and Mario grabbed a hold on the landing structure and Maggie tied the bow rope to the boarding ladder rung. She climbed up, unlatched the rear cabin door, and climbed into the passenger compartment.