The Remnant (30 page)

He turned to stare again at the dancing
flames and smoke below. How could such a thing have happened even
in so remote a location? What were the police going to make of it
when they finally did discover the murders? More than likely the
whole thing would be blamed on the Brethren themselves. Or maybe
Stan would take the rap. He wouldn’t care. He was one of those
chameleons who would disappear again into the underbelly of
society. But no one was likely to believe it had all been the work
of fanatic Mormon fundamentalist killers, especially since
Deadly Angels
would never see the light of day.

I don’t care. This isn’t my fight anymore.
All I want is Ashley back, safe.

A bolt of pain unlike any other jolted
through his entire body, and he convulsed with it, rattling around
in the cut like a spoon in the bottom of a tea glass. When the fire
of it faded to embers he drew a deep breath, flexing his fists on
the rope to regain feeling. He jerked himself up another foot and
jagged his feet around until they had halfway solid holds.

All right, then. What the hell do you want
from me?

But of course there was no answer. The pain
did seem to ease a little, though.

He wished his father was there. The man Trace
remembered had had arms like steel girders and a grip that could
crush a cue ball. Trace could imagine him squishing fistfuls of
granite through his fingers like so many mashed potatoes, clawing
his way up the face of the cliff with Trace hanging on for dear
life.

Trace had been hospitalized for two days, but
between the fourth and fifth shot session they had gone home, Trace
nursing a terrible bellyache, and an even worse terror. Standing in
the driveway, staring up at the brooding second story of the old
house, he had begun to shake. He was surprised when his old
man, who had seldom touched him before, rested one of those giant
mitts on Trace’s shoulder and shook him gently. Then he reached
into the back seat for the bag he’d picked up at the hardware store
after leaving the hospital. On the front porch his father nudged
Trace’s mother aside, glaring at her.

"Come on, boy," he said, quietly but firmly.
"Let’s go finish this."

Trace followed him curiously into his
parents’ bedroom, sniffing at the dense odor of Old Spice and
talcum. Staring at the sagging iron bed and the peeling veneers on
the mismatched dresser and mirror-vanity. His father jerked open
the closet, and for the first time Trace saw that there were guns
inside. One was some kind of pump affair, and the other a small
shotgun with two barrels. He stared at his father, wondering which
one he was going to select. His father took the pump and shocked
Trace by handing him the heavy double barrel.

"It’s only a twenty gauge," said the old man.
"You’ll be able to handle it. I guess I should have taught you to
use a gun before now. Here, let me show you how to cock it."

He took it back and explained the mechanism
to Trace.

"Don’t ever point this at anyone. Never aim a
gun at anything you don’t mean to shoot. Hold it like this until
then."

He showed Trace how to grip the gun in two
hands.

"Now, we aren’t going up there to
shoot
those bastards," said his father, tucking the bag
under one arm and snatching a flashlight off the closet shelf. "I
just want to have the guns in case... I never seen that many rats
together, and maybe the damned things are rabid and crazy. But if
you have to, you shoot. Understand?"

Trace nodded, and his father smiled.

Then he led the way up the stairs to the
attic door. It was still open, and there were a thousand rat turds
in the hall and leading up the stairs into the darkness. Apparently
the rats had milled there after Trace and his dad had left for the
hospital. What were they doing? What were they thinking? Why hadn’t
they attacked his mother after Trace and the old man left?

His father shone the flashlight up into the
attic.

The beam revealed even more spoor, covering
the worn pine treads like black gravel. The acrid ammonia smell
burned Trace’s nose, but not one red eye shone. Not one eep
sounded. He followed his dad up one step after the other, holding
his breath, his eyes glued to the floor above where he expected at
any moment to see a thousand bright red eyes. But the rats had
either all scurried away, or were waiting in ambush in the attic
proper.

Only they weren’t. They were just gone.

His dad insisted on searching every nook and
cranny in the attic, then scattering poison from three big boxes
all over the floor and all along the eaves. Then they searched the
entire house together including the dank, musty old crawl space
where they put out more poison. Finally they baited traps and put
them in both bedrooms and the kitchen cupboards.

But they never found one dead rat. Not a
dried up corpse in the attic. Not in the crawl space. They never
captured one in any of the traps, although Trace continued to bait
them for almost two years. The infestation ended as suddenly as it
had begun.

His mother said it was a miracle.

His father said it was weird.

Trace just kept thinking the rats were coming
back. Something had caused them to want to kill him. Then something
caused them to run away. He had no idea what that something might
have been, but for years he was very much afraid that whatever it
was might just change its mind again. Apparently, one dark night
far beneath the streets of New York City, it had. Only the rats had
changed, too, but what was the hell was the lesson in that?

What if there wasn’t one? What if there never
was?

More and more he was coming to that opinion.
There might
be
something or someone out there in the great
beyond, maybe a lot of somethings. But that didn’t mean that there
were answers there, or at least not any answers any human being
could ever understand, anyway. Or, maybe if he
did
get
answers they might not be answers he wanted to hear. Maybe it was
better to quit asking.

He clawed his way up another foot, wedging
himself into a narrow defile again. The bulge in the cliff face was
more evident here, and he thought he understood why the unknown
climber had chosen this route up or down. Just above his head the
way led through a section of the cut that would be invisible from
the ground or above, where the stone face almost closed into a
narrow tunnel of rock. Although it seemed to make no sense, for
whatever reason whoever had left the rope here had not wanted to be
seen.

Trace felt safe enough between the tight
surfaces—with his toes locked into holds—to release his grip for a
moment and massage his damaged arm. The muscles in his shoulder
were swollen and tight, and the joint burned beneath his fingers,
but wriggling his fingers seemed to imply that it might not be
dislocated.

A soft fluttering caught his attention, and
he glanced back at the view of night sky, valley, fire, and smoke.
Against the tenebrous background myriad darker shadows danced in
the air. It would have been a misnomer to label it a swarm. But for
all his training Trace was loathe to discover a word that did
describe what he was seeing.

Bats again. Thousands of them.

Only this time their arrival seemed to lend
no clue to his escape, and they didn’t appear engaged in attacking
insect prey, either. There were intricate patterns to their flight
that were as impossible to unravel as the precise designs of the
shimmer of sunlight on the surface of a rippling stream, and Trace
recalled Ashley’s mention of the bees. Each of a thousand
leather-winged creatures seemed to catch errant starbeams and to
glitter for an instant, frozen in flight, then to disappear back
into the melding miasma of the flickering flock, causing the swarm
to glimmer darkly like glitter flowing amid the weird and unknown
currents of some bleak and dusky liquid. He stared in wonder at the
odd exhibition until the creatures finally did coalesce into a
swarm, and-as though they were now one great beast-shot up the
cliff face and disappeared.

Okay,
thought Trace, taking a deep
breath and resuming his climb,
at least I understand the message
this time.

The hike down the back side of Raven’s Head
onto the open flats beyond was much less rugged than Ashley would
have guessed. They followed a well hidden trail, and she realized
that the Angels must have been using it for months if not years,
which meant that they had been watching the Brethren-with Stan’s
collusion-all that time. While she and others had sat for long days
and nights at the crossing, trusting Stan’s security system to
guard the ridgeline the Angels had entered at will, behind all
their backs. The killing might have taken place at any time. The
thought made her skin crawl.

When they reached a narrow dirt road canopied
by surrounding pines the pair of Angels shoved Ashley into the back
of a black sedan. Her wrists burned from the tight bindings they
had placed upon them, and there was no comfortable way to sit with
them bound behind her. Finally, when Rendt slid in beside the
driver and slammed his door, they were off.

As they rolled out of the hidden gravel lane
onto the highway several matching vehicles pulled in front and
back, forming a caravan. It was all so precise, so military. The
Brethren had been kidding themselves all along, living in a fool’s
paradise. The Angels were better funded, better trained, far more
deadly, and this was the end of the road. Still, she could not
allow herself to be taken alive to California City. The thought of
being raped repeatedly by her own father and then more than likely
beaten to death-with his wives watching-was more than she could
stand. Better to find some way to end it all quickly.

The Angels were diligent little slaves,
though, and she knew that she might only get one chance. She would
have to act instinctively. So she steeled herself to what she was
going to have to do, with gun, or knife, bare hand or bit of broken
glass.

But as the car continued to roll along in
silence she noticed that her father didn’t have the look of a man
who had just won the victory of his life, and she wondered if
perhaps something had gone wrong back in the valley. Had he lost
more men than he expected in the attack? She’d heard no shots.
Still some of the Brethren might have awakened in time to defend
themselves.

"Why no smile?" she asked. "You just murdered
an entire community of peaceful people who were no threat to
you."

He glared back at her. "They were a threat to
my God."

Ashley laughed.

"You dare mock me?"

"You mock the very idea of God," she said.
"How could we threaten him?"

"Your blasphemies are at an end."

"So why the long face?"

"You will do," he muttered, turning away.

"Do what? You talk as though you wanted
more."

But what more? Then it dawned on her, and she
felt a ribbon of hope swirling around her.

"You wanted Marie as well, but you didn’t get
her. Did you?"

She saw the words bite. Rendt turned to stare
out his window.

"You didn’t find her. She’s alive, but you
don’t have her. And you didn’t dare remain in the valley any
longer."

"You will do," he repeated.

"It’s a long drive to Arizona."

"But a short flight."

Trace kept his bad arm locked into the
climbing rope while with his other hand he scrabbled for purchase
on the steep and jagged slope. Discovering a wide, flat handhold he
lifted himself up just enough to stare into a hole in the cliff
face barely large enough to slither into. He wormed his way into it
and lay for a moment on his back, letting his legs droop outside,
feeling around ahead in the darkness. The crevice seemed to be a
narrow shaft leading horizontally into the face of the cliff.

Finally, on the crazy off chance that there
might be a way
through
the mountain, he dragged himself
farther inside. It was several minutes before his eyes grew
accustomed to the feeble starlight that managed to reflect its way
down the narrow entry channel, and he found himself in a small
cavern. He sniffed the air, but there was no acrid guano odor,
which made absolutely no sense. Obviously there were hordes of bats
in the valley, and this was a prime bat cave, but the stone floor
beneath his feet was not only unusually smooth and flat but, when
he knelt to touch it, clean as a whistle.

"Okay. I’m here," he said.

The shadowy cavern didn’t appear that large,
not much bigger than an average bedroom, if that bedroom had been
built with flowing stone walls. He ran his fingers along the
nearest rock, feeling his way around the room until his toes struck
something hard and he leaned down to trace the outline of what felt
like a metal box.

It seemed intricately carved, but in the
gloom he could not discern the marks other than that some appeared
to be tiny human forms. His fingers traced an empty keyhole, but
when he pried at the lid it opened easily, and he was surprised to
fumble across a flashlight inside. He switched it on, shining it
first around the cave, which was indeed as small and exitless as it
had appeared. Within the box he discovered a small stack of copper
plates bound with a leather thong, and a rolled piece of parchment,
wrapped with a frayed red ribbon.

The Platinum Casket.

So this was where the old man had hid it. How
in the hell had he made that climb? It must have damned near killed
him. No wonder his last words were that it was
safe.
It was
ironic that Stan and Rendt had been standing only yards above what
they had come here for, what they had murdered for. Trace lifted
the parchment carefully, slid the ribbon off one end, and gently
unrolled it, holding it aside so as to read it by the light.