Gateways, page 34
As they arrived at the rim, now only an inch or so above the waterline, Dad leaned close to Jack and spoke in a low voice, barely audible above the storm. “Now isn’t this a helluva thing?” He peered down into the flashing depths. “What on earth is going on down there?”
“Not sure,” Jack told him. “But you want to avoid too much exposure to those lights.”
Dad took a quick step back. “Why? Radioactive?”
Worse, Jack wanted to say, but that would stimulate a lot of questions he didn’t have time to answer. So he settled for, “Could be.”
Carl stepped ahead and crouched behind the head of a newly fallen royal palm. “This here looks like a good spot. Gives me a good bead on the Horse-ship. I’ll park here.”
Jack nodded and motioned his father southward. Dad followed, but kept glancing over his shoulder at the lights from the cenote. They seemed to fascinate him.
Along the way they passed the clan’s little boats—the Chicken-ship, the No-ship, and others—pulled up, turned over, and tied down on the bank. Jack spied a spot near the old Indian huts to take cover, but he kept walking. He wanted to see Dad as fully protected as possible.
He found him a spot behind the wide trunk of a cypress where he had a good angle on the Bull-ship.
Jack gave the old man’s shoulder a gentle squeeze and leaned in close. “Keep your head down, Dad. And if all hell breaks loose, be careful.”
His father patted his hand. “I’m the soldier here, remember? You just take care of yourself and don’t worry about me.”
Jack had a sudden urge to pull everyone out and head back to Novaton. A dark premonition stole over him, a feelin that something terrible was about to happen, that fewer would be leaving here than arrived. But he couldn’t turn back now, and he knew neither his dad nor Carl would go. They’d come too far. And Anya needed them.
One more squeeze of his father’s shoulder and then he hurried back to the ruins of the Indian huts. He found himself a spot behind a thick support post. He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but it began to rain harder.
Jack squatted and spread his poncho like an umbrella over the plastic bag. He removed a few of the grenades and stuck the safety clips into his belt. He pulled out the big Ruger and checked the cylinder. He didn’t have a holster big enough to hold it so he stuck it in his waistband. The nine-plus-inch barrel was cold and not a comfortable fit. If Semelee got a look at him she’d probably think he was very glad to see her.
But he wouldn’t be. It would be just fine with Jack if he never saw her again.
He rose and started to cup his hands around his mouth when he sensed movement behind him. He whirled, pawing at his poncho, trying to get his hand under its flapping hem, but stopped when he saw what it was: a small towel, tacked to one of the hut posts, was flapping in the wind.
Jack waited to let his racing heart slow—for a second there he’d thought he’d walked into an ambush—then turned back to the water.
He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted.
“Hello the boats!”
He repeated this three times at top volume before deciding that they weren’t going to hear him over the storm. He pulled out the Ruger and pointed it skyward. He’d never fired one of these, and had only heard of the .454 Casull round. He knew it was a monster so he was ready for a loud report and a wrist-jolting kick when he fired two shots in the air. Even so, the boom surprised him.
That ought to wake them up.
He replaced the two rounds as he began calling again.
5
“You’ll never guess who’s out there,” Luke said, grinnin and drippin as he came in from the deck. He wore a yellow slicker and a Devil Rays cap. Corley and a couple of the other men trooped in behind him, shakin the water off theirselfs like dogs.
Semelee didn’t feel like guessin—specially if she’d ‘never’ guess the answer—so she waited for him to tell her.
Everybody in the Bull-ship had jumped at the sound of those two shots a moment ago. It’d sounded like a cannon goin off. Luke and the others went out to see what was up. Semelee had heard some shoutin back and forth but couldn’t make nothin out of it due to the poundin of the rain on the roof and sides of the boat.
Finally Luke told her: “It’s your boyfriend.”
Boyfriend? Semelee thought. What’s Luke—? Oh, shit.
“You mean that Jack guy? He ain’t no boyfriend of mine. I hate him.”
She did. Sort of. But that didn’t keep her heart from flutterin for a second at the passin thought that he’d come all the way out here in this for her. But that thought flew out the window soon as it came. He’d made it awful clear he wasn’t interested in the likes of her.
“Good,” Luke said. “Cause I hate him too. I hate anybody who thinks I’m stupid, and he must think we’re pretty damn stupid. Know what he said? Said he was from the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s office and that he’s got a whole passle of cops out there in the dark with him.”
“You sure it’s him?”
“Sure I’m sure. Recognized his voice, even through the rain. Couldn’t see him, but it’s him.”
“What’s he want?”
“Says he wants the old lady back. Callin her ‘Anya’ or somethin like that.”
Semelee felt her stomach plummet. “Then he knows we was there.”
She went to one of the little rectangles of glass that served as windows on Bull-ship’s deckhouse and looked real hard into the storm. The rain splashin against the glass and runnin down its outside kept her from seein even an inch beyond it.
“He knows somethin,” Luke said, “but he don’t know everthing, that’s for sure.”
“But how’s he know we was there?” She couldn’t imagine Jack just watchin from a window. He and his daddy woulda come out sure, probably with guns a-blazin.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Luke said.
She turned and saw that Luke had opened a closet and was handin out rifles and shotguns. He pointed to Corley.
“Get below and haul everbody up here.”
“What you gonna do?”
He smiled at her again. “Gonna give him a nice warm lagoon-style welcome and make sure he don’t leave the Glades—least not alive.”
“That really necessary?”
As Semelee watched the men start pilin up from below decks, grabbin guns, and headin for the deck, she felt a little somethin stir in her chest. Like sadness. Like guilt. She’d taken a change of heart about Jack since yesterday afternoon. She’d tried to make him die then, but afterwards she was a little glad she’d failed. Yeah, he’d turned her down right to her face, but he’d only been tellin the truth: I’m taken meant he had someone else he liked better. End of story. He could’ve lied and then used her like she’d been used before, then dump her like she’d been dumped before. That would’ve been worse. That didn’t make her heart hurt any less, but at least he’d been straight with her.
“I think when he don’t get what he’s askin for—and he ain’t gonna—then I got a feelin there may be some shootin. So I figure we’ll shoot first.”
“What if you’re wrong?” Semelee said. “What if that really is a buncha deputies out there?”
“Ain’t wrong. It’s him, I tell you.”
“All right. Say it is. What if he ain’t alone?”
Luke’s smile turned real ugly. “I hope he ain’t. I hope he brought Daddy along.” He lifted his cap and ran a hand over his scabbed-up head. “I got me a score or two to even with that old coot.”
Semelee stepped back to the window. Why did he come? This storm’s tearin up the place and yet here he comes, loaded for bear, lookin for an old lady he only met a couple days ago. What sort of man does that?
She ducked away from the window as the gunfire started outside.
Whatever sort of man Jack is, she thought with a sting of sadness, he’s gonna be a dead one pretty soon.
6
Jack had taken cover behind an old fallen trunk at the first sight of a rifle on the Bull-ship’s deck. Good thing too, because they’d opened up without warning. Dad and Carl had responded immediately. The element of surprise allowed them to take down a couple of the clan before the rest of them dropped to the deck to take cover behind the gunwales. The Horse-ship crew had their guns out now and the air was filled with wind and water and lightning and bullets and shot.
Most of the fire from the Bull-ship seemed concentrated on Jack’s position. Semelee’s idea, probably…or Luke’s…or both. He’d definitely put himself on the wrong side of those two. When Jack dared raise his head, he fired back with the Ruger. He wanted Luke. If he could take him out, the rest of the clan would lose their steam. But Jack couldn’t identify him through the dim light and the rain. And even if he did, he’d be hard to hit. Jack wished he were a better marksman, but knew if by some chance he did hit Luke he’d be a goner. He was firing Cor-Bon .454 Casulls, hard-cast, flat-point, 335-grain rounds that jerked the barrel high every time he pulled the trigger. Which was okay in a way. If he missed, he wanted to miss high. He didn’t want one of those big rounds to plow through the hull and hit Anya.
The fire on Jack’s position became so intense he didn’t dare raise his head to return it. These guys were good shots. When a lull came, he belly-crawled back to the old huts and took a position behind a post. Maybe from back here he’d be able to take the time to aim and make his shots count. He glanced back at that towel flapping in the rain, thinking it ought to be one damn clean piece of cloth by the time this storm is done.
Lightning flashed as he turned back to the boat, revealing a design on the fabric that caught the corner of his eye. Something familiar about that pattern of lines and dots…
Whatever it was caused a ripple of nausea, and a chill, as if something has crawled under his hood and whispered across his neck on spider legs.
Jack fixed his gaze on the cloth, waiting for the next flash, and when it came he saw the pattern again and knew where he’d seen it before.
On Anya’s back.
With his blood sludging in his veins, Jack rose and stepped over to the cloth, ignoring the lead whistling around him, because it had to be a cloth, a cloth someone had drawn on, copying the pattern they’d seen cut and burnt and punctured into Anya’s back. He reached out and touched it, and when his fingers flashed the message that this was too thick and entirely the wrong texture for cloth, he slumped to his knees in the mud. Somehow he managed to hold on to the Ruger.
A sob burst from his lips, but the grief that spawned it lasted only a few heartbeats before a black frenzy boiled out of the vault where he stored it and took over. Repressing a howl of rage, he rolled back to the post and found his plastic bag of grenades. Breath hissing through bared teeth, he snatched one from within, pulled the pin, popped the safety clip, and waited, counting…
One thousand and one…
The note Abe had included with the grenades said the M-67 fuse gave a four-to-five-second delay between release of the clip and detonation.
…one thousand and two…
It also said each grenade had a kill radius of fifteen feet and a casualty radius of about fifty. Dad and Carl weren’t much beyond that but he was only peripherally aware of the risk. His focus was tunneled in on the Bull-ship and nothing was going to pull it away.
…one thousand and three!
As soon as he hit three, he lobbed the grenade up and out, then ducked behind the pole. If it hit the deck and exploded, great; if it exploded above the deck, even better.
But he didn’t wait for it to hit before pulling another from the bag. He was popping the clip when the first went off. He poked his head up as he started counting. His throw had been short by maybe half a dozen feet, but not a complete loss. It had exploded at deck level and the screams of the wounded and frightened shouts of the rest were music.
…three!
This one sailed toward Horse-ship—no need for them to feel left out—and it too fell short, but not without doing some damage to hull and human alike.
It looked so much easier in movies.
Jack was ready to pop the clip on a third when he heard someone thrashing through the underbrush to his right. The fact that whoever it was made no attempt at stealth left him pretty sure it was his father, but he raised the Ruger anyway. Sure enough, seconds later, Dad burst from a stand of ferns in a crouch and dropped down beside him.
“What the hell are you doing, Jack?” His eyes were wide; rain ran down his face in rivulets. “Anya’s in one of those boats!”
“No, she’s not, Dad,” he said through a constricting throat. “She’s dead.”
He frowned. “How can you know that?”
“I found a big piece of her skin hanging back there.”
“No!” he gasped. Jack couldn’t see his complexion but was sure it had gone waxy. “You can’t mean it!”
“I wish I was wrong, but I saw her back the other day and the same marks are on that piece of skin. They skinned her, Dad. They fucking skinned her and hung it out to dry.”
Dad placed a trembling hand over his eyes and was silent a moment. Then he lowered the hand and thrust it toward Jack’s sack of grenades. His voice was taut, strained.
“Give me one of those.”
7
Semelee lay tremblin on the floor, head down, hands over her ears. It sounded as if war had broken out. Those weren’t just guns firin out there. With the explosions and the way the windows was shatterin, it felt like they was bein bombed.
Luke fell through the door, grabbin onto a bleedin shoulder.
“They got grenades, Semelee! They’re killin us out there! Corley’s dead and Bobby’s leg’s bleedin real bad! Y’gotta do somethin!”
“What can I do? Devil’s dead and Dora’s no good on land.”
“The things from the sinkhole, the ones you brought up last night…we need em now. We need em bad!”
“I can’t! I told you before—they won’t come up till after sundown.”
No matter how she’d tried yesterday, she couldn’t get those awful winged monsters to come out of the hole while the sun was up. But as soon as it went down, they were hers—or so she’d thought.
She’d almost lost it when she first saw them. She hadn’t been able to get a good look at them while they was down in the lights, but once they was up in the air, in the twilight, what she saw scared her so much she almost dropped her eye-shells.
The most horrible lookin critters she’d ever seen.
They was the size of lobsters—not the crawdadlike things around these parts; no, these was thick and heavy, like the big-clawed ones from up north. These things had shells and claws too, but that’s where the likeness ended. Their bodies was waisted, like a wasp’s, and they had wings, two big transparent ones on each side, sproutin from the top of the body like a dragonfly’s.
Chew wasps—that was the name that popped into her head, and it seemed to fit them perfect.
Plus they had teeth. Oh God did they have teeth—each had big jaws that opened wide as a cottonmouth’s, and they was filled to overflowin with long sharp transparent fangs that looked like slivers of glass. One of the weirdest touches was the rows of little blue dots of lights along their sides that glowed like neon. They looked like they’d been drug up from the bottom of the sea where the sun don’t shine, a place so deep and dark that even God’s forgot about them.
God…he must’ve been havin a real bad day when he made those things. She had to wonder what kind of a world they came from, and how anything else survived with them roamin free.
“It’s dark as night out there now! Give it a try! You gotta! They’re putting holes in the hull. They’re tryin to sink us!”
“But why’re they tryin to do that? Why’re they throwin grenades, Luke? If they think we got the old lady and they want her back, ain’t they afraid of killin her along with us?”
“Who knows why, damn it!” Luke shouted. “They’ve gone crazy!”
But Semelee caught a look in his eyes, like he was hidin somethin.
“What is it, Luke? What changed their minds? What makes them think she’s not here, or that she’s dead? You didn’t open your big mouth, did you?”
“No. Course not. What kinda fool you take me for?”
“Well, then what? What, Luke?”
Luke looked away. “I guess they found her skin.”
“What? How could they do that? You buried it.” Luke still kept lookin away. “You did bury it like I told you to, didn’t you, Luke?”
He shook his head. “Nuh-uh. I hung it up to let the rain clean it off, then I was gonna tan it…you know, like a hide.”
Semelee closed her eyes. If she had a gun right now she’d’ve shot Luke—right through his stupid, brainless head.
Her thoughts flashed back to last night…
She’d been in a frenzy, completely out of control…so pissed at that old lady for killin Devil and then ruinin her plans for Jack that she just…lost it. All the trouble she had gettin those things to come out of their hole didn’t help matters none either. By the time she realized that they wouldn’t come out in the day, she was all but frothin at the mouth.
When sunset came, so did the things. She had trouble controllin them from the git-go. Soon as they came out they wanted to run wild, but she managed to gather them into a group and herd them toward the old woman’s house. When they got there, they went crazy, rippin through the screen and gnawing through the front door.
Their ferocity frightened the hell outta Semelee, and she remembered thinkin, Oh, God what have I got myself into now? And, bein inside them, she was beginnin to feel some of their bloodlust.
When they got through the door, there was the old lady, standin in the middle of her livin room, all done up in one of them funny Japanese dresses. She just stood there smokin a cigarette. Smokin! It was like she knew she was gonna die. She didn’t scream, she didn’t cry, she didn’t even fight back.
