Among the fallen, p.18
Among the Fallen, page 18
Omar found a smile of his own, felt something heavy lift away from his shoulders, “Why, Constable Bear, that’s the nicest thing anybody’s said to me all day”
At Wild Leek Pub, Darnella Pace approached two thirds of the Drover’s Gap Police Department, She pulled a pencil from her apron pocket and poised it over her pad. “What youns having?”
“A Forester Stout for me,” Jolene Bear said, and looked at her chief.
“I’ll have a Trixter,” said Omar. “I’m buying.”
“No you’re not,” Jolene said. “I’m holding out for dinner sometime.” She looked at Darnella. “Can you bring us an order of sweet potato fries to go with that?” She nodded to Omar. “You’ll share it, won’t you?”
Omar laughed. “How can I refuse an offer like that, even though it will spoil my supper.”
“You’re a big man. You can handle it,” murmured Darnella. She glanced from one to the other. “Anything else I can bring youns?”
“We’re good, I think,” from Jolene, turning to Omar.
“That’s all for me, thanks,” Omar said.
Darnella’s pen disappeared back into her apron, and she was away. Omar put up a hand to hide a yawn. It had been a long day. He hadn’t slept well for weeks. He was tired and almost wishing he had not been so quick to accept Jolene’s invitation to be here.
“You seriously think they might let you go, Chief?” she asked.
“I’d say it’s a distinct possibility,” Omar folded his hands on the table, which Jolene knew was a sign he was engaging in earnest conversation. “Half the commission thinks I haven’t been doing my job and the other half’s mad at me because I have. Unless we get a break in this Lewis Redding business, I wouldn’t make any bets on my contract being renewed.”
“You wouldn’t be easy to replace,” Jolene said. “You’re better than they pay you for.”
“Low pay, in this case, Constable Bear, is tantamount to job security. That might just save my hide, when they find out what real talent will cost.”
“What made you want to become a policeman, anyway? I never figured you for that in school when we were growing up.”
Omar sighed, unfolded his hands, left them flat on the table, palms down in front of him, “I never wanted to be a policeman, exactly, but it was expected of me. My dad, as you know, was chief here close to forever. His big sister, my aunt Wilma, was county sheriff for over thirty years, and their daddy was on the Asheton force before them. There wasn’t much of a choice to make.”
“What did you really want to be, then?” Jolene said, playing with the utensils Darnella had left behind.
“You’ll laugh,” Omar said.
Jolene turned on her serious face. “I would never laugh at somebody’s dream.”
“I wanted to be a forest ranger,” Omar confessed.
Jolene nodded, didn’t look at all surprised. “Like Lewis Redding’s boy.”
“What?”
“Neil Redding wants to be a forest ranger. Lewis was hellbent on him being a preacher he was. I guess the pressure’s off now and Neil can grow his own set of wings.”
“Unless he turns out to be our killer,” Omar said, wishing immediately he hadn’t.
Jolene nodded, “Marcie’s sudden confession could be to protect her son,” she said.
“Just what I was thinking,” agreed her boss.
Darnella appeared with brews and fries, and as soon as she retreated, Omar took a sip of his beer and said, “What about you, then?”
Jolene set down her stout. “What about me?”
“What made you want to be a cop?”
She took a long swallow of her Forester, then, “It’s complicated, you want the long version or the short?”
Twenty-Nine
The sun dropped down behind the mountain as Brian’s jeep churned and jostled up the old logging road in the deep shadow along a creek. They saw no sign of the abandoned civil-war era railroad. Previous generations had taken up the rails and sold them off for scrap and the forest had long ago recycled the wooden cross ties. The gravel railbed had over a century and a half washed away toward the creek below. A vague ledge meandering up the mountainside was all that remained of the great endeavor.
The road ended abruptly against a towering tumble of boulders and earth that had fallen long enough in the past that mature trees with trunks two feet or more in diameter thrust skyward among the rubble. There was barely clearance for the jeep to turn around.
“Shit,” growled Brian, “this is as far as we get in this thing.”
Betty, sitting beside him, looked as if she might cry. “Do we have to climb up that?” she asked.
“No, Darling,” said Brian. “You can sit right here and let the mosquitos drain your blood until me and Willie get back.” He turned and looked at Willie sitting behind them, bruised and battered among jostled equipment. “Where the hell are we now, map expert?”
Willie pushed his map across the back of the seat so Brian could see, traced the line of the old railway with his finger until it terminated. “If I read correctly, it looks like we’re about here where the tunnel began.”
“Well, if I read correctly, it looks like half the mountain’s done fell atop it.” Brian sneered, staring out the window toward the piled boulders.
Willie was unperturbed, he moved his finger an inch on the map. “And up here these little squares are supposed to be ventilation shafts. That’s how we get down into the tunnel. There’s five or six marked on the map. One of them’s bound to be open.”
“You hope it is,” growled Brian.
While Betty and Brian stared skeptically at the tip of Willie’s finger, he added, “The nearest is only about a quarter mile from here.”
“A quarter mile straight up,” Brian said.
“What do we do now?” Betty pleaded, wanting to hear they were going home.
“Now we break out the gear and lug it up to one of Willie’s black holes,” said Brian, before it gets pitch dark on us.”
It took three trips to get the hoist and all associated gear up the tangled and thorny slope to where they thought the ventilator shaft should be. Betty went ahead with the lantern after the first ascent, with Brian all the while yelling at her that she wasn’t shining it where he needed it. It was full dark by the time they hauled up their last load. Brian was mad and Willie felt like a man who’d been beaten and Betty was on the brink of tears. Tempers weren’t improved when after close to an hour of casting about among rhododendron and windfall pines they had turned up no sign of the elusive shaft.
“Dammit, Willie,” Brian shouted. “You got us up here on this benighted knob for some fairytale. We won’t be able to see shit before morning.”
Willie waved his map like a flag. “It can’t be that far away. We’re right on it, according to my GPS.”
Brian snatched the map away and peered at it in the light of his lantern. “If we find that damned hole in the ground, I might just throw you down it, you crazy coot.”
Betty, sobbing audibly, “Don’t be like that, Brian. You’re such a bully.” Brian aimed his lantern at her face. Tears gleamed in the light. He snickered, threw the map at Willie. Betty bleated, “Please, Brian, I gotta go.”
“We’re going no place, girl,” Brian barked. We got sleeping bags in the jeep. We’ll stay right here until there’s light enough to see by, and Willieboy’s gonna pay us by the hour for our time, just like he promised.”
Betty, struggling not to weep, whined, “No Brian, I gotta go now. I gotta pee.”
“Well, go to it, then,” Brian snapped.
“I need privacy, Brian,” Betty whispered.
“Well, go squat behind a tree or something,” Brian said, “There’s plenty of ‘em out here.”
Willie seemed unaware of the exchange as he scrambled through the brush trying to collect his map. Betty took her lantern and moved off into the general dark until her light flickered uncertainly through a maze of laurel.
Brian glared at Willie. “A fine mess you’ve gotten us into this time, Ollie,” he sneered. Willie concentrated on refolding his map until they heard Betty’s scream. Her light had disappeared entirely. Lanterns in hand, the men plunged and staggered through the thicket in the direction they supposed she had taken.
“Betty, where are you?” Willie called, on the verge of crying himself.
“Over here,” Betty’s voice wavery with exhaustion and terror, “Help me, quick.” Brian aimed his lantern into the Laurel thicket. Betty called again, “I see your light. Oh, please hurry.”
Following the voice, the men cast their lights amongst the tangle of laurel and rhododendron and saw Betty’s face and arms, her hands clinging to a gnarled branch. The rest of her had vanished into the mountain. Willie reached her first. Brian was bigger, stronger, but Willie, being smaller was able to squirm his way faster. Willie thought the locals called the thickets laurel hells with good reason. He set down his light, reached under Betty’s arms and pulled with strength he never knew he possessed. She did her part and by the time Brian reached the scene, she had her feet on solid ground.
They peered into the hole she had just vacated. Too far below, they saw her lantern still alight. The three stood for a long moment, listening to their heartbeats and ragged breaths, staring at that lone light way down under. Somewhere off in the night, an owl called.
“I’ll be damned,” Brian said at last.
You just might be, Willie thought in his mother’s voice.
“It’s that shaft thing, Willie, just like you said,” Betty murmured wonderingly.
The old woman was desperate if she called for him, Simon Ryder concluded as the novice closed the Superior’s door behind them, then trotted ahead to shepherd him down the hallway. She kept glancing back furtively as they proceeded toward the Abbey gates, as if she feared he might burst into flames any second and cremate them all. She didn’t know Simon was a dragon, of course. A light scan of her mind revealed as much. She wasn’t even aware of his gentle probe. Simon considered a religious colony similar in constitution to a beehive in an apiary. What the queen knew, the minions sensed untold. The body was the collective will of the head.
When the abbey gates swung ponderously shut at his back, Simon stood in the town square, watching the people of Trier go about their daily business. Yes, like bees, he thought, each one believing their small task was the most important endeavor in the world, never more than vaguely aware of the pattern into which they were woven, never to delight or wonder at the larger purpose that moved them all toward resolution.
In an instant when no soul was watching, Simon shifted just enough from the moment to be rendered invisible to human eyes. Resolving into his habitual form, he lifted his wings and took flight. People were startled at the sudden burst of wind that swirled across the square and looking up when the swift shadow swept over them, they beheld the dragon aloft and rising, and they were afraid.
Simon circled once above the town, just for fun. He wasn’t hungry yet. Away on the western horizon a storm was gathering. The dragon wheeled and flew after it. The storm was energy and fire. He would ride that power through the Separation into Shadow. If he found Badb Catha among the fallen, he might attempt to contain her, or he might not. She was, after all the first of their kind, gathering herself for eons. She might be too strong even for Simon to subdue. He would watch, keep to himself, secure his place, steep himself in Earthlight, which surely burned even in Shadow, if one sought deep enough below the surface. When he was ready, he would see what to do, what was possible, what would weaken, and what would sustain.
The distant storm waned and dissipated before the dragon reached it but sensing a stronger tempest just beyond the nearest range of mountains, he turned in pursuit of that turmoil. As the intervening miles diminished, the storm, as if responding to the dragon’s proximity, intensified, raking the trees with leaf-stripping, branch-splintering hail, blasting the summits with volleys of lightning. The dragon, ever nearer, shapeshifting, morphing into a cumulous of fire and darkness, a rush and a wind, an annihilation that met the storm and became the storm, gathering the spin of it, the lightning and the hail of it into a tightening spiral, concentrating the power and the force of it into one blazing searing point of heaven’s fire that pierced the boundary of the world and disappeared, leaving only stillness and stars in its wake.
And on a winter’s night, high above Drovers Gap, the worst thunderstorm in anyone’s memory is flooding the creeks, toppling trees, drowning the fallow fields, downing powerlines, loosing shingles, and driving every human in the county to seek dry and shelter. Nobody is abroad to see a deeper dark emerge from the center of the storm, resolving into enormous pinioned wings bearing aloft on the gale a squamatacious body, scales glistening in the lightning’s glare, trailing a serpentine tail flickering with latent charge. A relatively slender neck almost as long as the body supports a reptilian head, small compared to the body, but with a mouth that might swallow a man whole. The head glances earthward with eyes that glow like molten iron. The mouth opens with a roar that dwarfs the thunder, and spews not lightning but dragonfire down the dark. In spite of the deluge, a string of fires springs up in the forest below. By tomorrow, the fires will be extinguished by the driving rains and assumed to have been started by downed electrical lines.
Just west of Warwoman Ridge, not far from where Willie Graham, Betty, and her once and maybe boyfriend huddle miserable in Brian’s jeep, the dragon named Simon senses a void within the earth, settles to an opening in a place that is not drawn on any map, cools and dwindles to something resembling human form, and walks inside the mountain.
Thirty
Willie, Betty and Brian clambered down the mountain to the logging road as squalls of rain began crossing the ridge above in sufficient quantity to wet them thoroughly before they regained the shelter of their Jeep.
“I’m cold, Brian,” Betty said, “Can’t we go home and come back tomorrow?”
Brian reached into the back and hauled out one of the sleeping bags, “Here,” he growled, dumping it into her lap. “If you’re cold, put this around you. We’re not going to drive out of here in this shit.”
By now the rain had become a steady deluge. The old logging road had turned into a raging creek. Brian secretly wondered if there would be any road left for them by morning. Lightning strobed the landscape continually. Thunder and rain, at times mixed with hail or sleet made a steady roar. The humans had to shout at one another to be heard over the din. They soon tired of shouting and retreated into a sulky silence. Willie, cramped and folded among the gear, hardly said a word. He was worried what Wendl would say when he got his maps back soaked and muddy. He fell into an uneasy drowse while pondering Brian’s severely limited stock of descriptive nouns.
The storm raged on unabated while the exhausted adventurers slept. Brian roused from his stupor sometime near dawn. He heard Betty’s muffled whimpering from her sleeping bag. He reached out a hand to touch her shoulder, but she pushed it away, tried to squirm as far away from him as the confines of the jeep would allow.
“Bitch,” Brian muttered, and retreated into oblivion.
Behind them, among all the tools and gear, his head resting on a duffel, his unzipped sleeping bag folded around him like a blanket, Willie murmured softly in his sleep. He was dreaming. It wasn’t a pleasant dream. He dreamed about his mother.
Eventually, morning came as morning always does. Stiff and sore, the three seekers clambered out of the jeep just as a hazy sun peeped over the nearest ridge. It clung to the treetops for a few minutes as they staggered and stomped to regain acquaintance with their lower limbs. Brian wandered off among the rhododendron to satisfy some unspoken need. Betty stared away among the woods, her shoulders trembling slightly as if she were cold.
Willie wanted to touch, stepped up close behind her, raised his hand to reach for her shoulder but, perhaps recalling her response to Brian the night before, found himself too timid to risk contact. Instead, he murmured softly, “You alright, Betty?”
Betty turned, startled, as if she had forgotten he was there. Willie thought he saw tears glistening in the early light. Without a word, she pressed her hands against his arms and rested her forehead on his chest. This made Willie, who had assumed Brian had reestablished his boyfriend claim, indescribably happy. They stood just this way while the sun, a bright balloon, loosed her hold on the trees and floated upward above the mountain. They didn’t move or speak until Brian emerged from his thicket.
Betty stepped away, looked up at Willie, wiped her face with her fingers, whispered, “I’m sorry,” and turned to Brian. “Don’t I get coffee, at least?”
Brian apparently traveled prepared for all contingences. From his stash in the rear of the jeep, he hauled out a little primus stove and a plastic milk jug filled with water, and from his backpack, produced a small jar of instant coffee. For breakfast, they had to make do with a half-full box of decidedly stale donuts, and a few strips of turkey jerky shrink-sealed in plastic. The donuts had the consistency of cardboard and the jerky tasted more plastic than fowl, but the fare served to muffle complaint from their empty guts. The coffee was worse than church coffee, but rendered them awake, and to a degree, grounded.
They expected to meet numbing cold when they left the shelter of Brian’s jeep, had waited for some glimpse of sun before they finally emerged to grapple with their day. Instead, they met a morning unseasonably warm. Cool enough, but far from frigid. Brian took off his jacket and worked in his shirtsleeves as he handed out the few items they had not wrangled up the mountain the evening before.
He set a chainsaw on the ground in front of Willie. “Don’t trip on a root and cut your leg off with this thing, Willieboy. Your watered-down blood would likely rust the chain.”
Betty carried a half-empty five-gallon red plastic can with a label that promised GAS. Brian hoisted a light canvas backpack and started up the way they traversed the day before.
