River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (29 page)

“Water” might not have been the right term. It was white, milky, if milk had been irradiated and become its own light source. But it was pooled inside a cave, close to the Rio Grande—for all Byrd knew,
under
the Rio Grande.

Staring in amazement at the chamber, he almost forgot why he had reenacted his own birth and forced himself through that tiny crevice. The racket of old man Scheiner duplicating his feat, with more swearing and grumbling, reminded him.

He could hardly believe the man could do it.
He
had just barely made it, and he was thinner than Wade’s father. But as he watched, a foot swung into view, reaching out, probing for its next step. Then a hand showed, gripping a flashlight. Byrd hid before Wade’s dad spotted him.

He started casting about for someplace he could duck down when another thought dashed that one to bits.
Hide? Why bother?
When Brent Scheiner emerged, he would be just as spellbound as Byrd had been. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t gawk for a few seconds.

Instead of hiding, Byrd flattened himself against the wall the gap opened out of. He waited, keeping his breathing shallow and silent, still clutching the stupid, busted flashlight.

Wade’s father came out of the squeeze and into the chamber, carrying a small revolver in his other fist, Byrd thought the man would hear his heart slamming around in his chest like a tennis ball in a dryer. He stared, however, at the pool and the rock formations, just as Byrd had, his gaze drawn by the glow of the pale liquid. Finally, remembering his quest, he swiveled toward Byrd.

Byrd drove the broken flashlight’s shaft into his pursuer’s face. Jagged plastic sliced flesh, and leftover shards of bulb filled his right eye socket. Wade’s father screeched in pain and reeled back, throwing his hands into the air. His flashlight fell to the ground and the gun slammed into Byrd’s left eyebrow, before hitting the rocks and bouncing into the pool. Old man Scheiner grunted wordlessly and stumbled after it, splashing into glowing water up to his knees. Byrd thought he was safe for a second or two…before Wade’s dad reached out, snagged his T-shirt, and yanked him toward the pool.

THIRTY-TWO

The water Brent Scheiner splashed onto Byrd’s chest burned his flesh. Byrd tried to wrench free, but Wade’s father had a fistful of T-shirt and wasn’t letting go. His mouth opened in a soundless howl, his bloody face twisted in pain and rage, and with his other hand, instead of hitting Byrd or using it to pull him in, he made a fist and punched at empty air.

But Scheiner had splashed milky water onto the rock floor, and Byrd’s feet slid, unable to get enough traction to resist the man’s pull. He grabbed Scheiner’s wrist and hand, trying to break his grip. It was like trying to smash concrete with a cotton ball. In another few seconds he would be in the pool, too, and judging from Wade’s dad’s reaction, it wasn’t exactly a spa.

The once-still pool churned and spat, burning the man’s flesh where it landed, bubbling and adhering to his skin. Smoke rose from those spots, and Byrd realized that must be the source of the man’s agony.

He’d still only felt secondhand water, transferred to his shirt by the man’s fist, and that was bad enough, as if he had leaned onto a hot burner. He didn’t want the full-on dunking.

It looked, however, like he didn’t have much of a choice.

Then Wade’s father let out a shrill scream and his back arched abruptly. For a brief instant, Byrd thought he would let go. Instead, he held on tighter and jerked Byrd several inches closer to the pool. Struggling for balance, Byrd caught a glimpse of his skin where the liquid—it wasn’t water after all, no water could do this—had started to eat away his flesh. Byrd saw exposed fat and muscle, splotchy red and white and pink stuff he couldn’t identify. Wade’s dad’s flesh started to fall off his body in chunks, splashing into the roiling pool. Byrd’s gut heaved, but if he were to puke, old man Scheiner would haul him in for sure.

Instead, he took what he thought would be his last shot.

The man’s face, purple with fury and pain, had started to disintegrate. Touching it seemed like a bad idea, but it was close enough to reach and he still couldn’t break the grip Scheiner had on him, or get out of his shirt.

He slammed his fist into the man’s bleeding eye.

Wade’s dad shrieked again and released Byrd’s T-shirt, clapping his hand over his injured eye. He reeled backward, losing his own balance and landing on his ass in the pool. There he twitched and writhed and batted at himself like wasps were swarming him.

Byrd didn’t hesitate. He snatched Scheiner’s still-working flashlight off the ground and squeezed back into the tiny gap through which he had entered this chamber of horrors. He had to fight to control his own panic, knowing it would only make things worse to try to rush it. A few desperate minutes passed, and then he was out. With the light, finding his way back to the main tunnel was easy. From there it was just a matter of covering the distance to the entrance, with one brief detour to make sure Wade and Molly had left.

* * *

Byrd burst from beneath the slab that overhung their cave’s entrance like he’d been shot out by a cannon. In another context, it would have been comical—his frantic emergence, hands pawing at the ground, mouth open, eyes blazing like a crazy person’s. To Wade, though, watching from behind a large boulder close by, it was terrifying. Byrd was the bravest person he had ever known, so anything that scared him that much had to be beyond awful.

He held Molly back for a few seconds, until he was sure that Byrd had come out alone. Then he released her, and rushed with her to Byrd’s side. “Byrd!” he called as he ran. “We’re over here!”

Byrd looked at them—through them, it seemed, like he couldn’t focus on anything directly in front of his eyes, and his mouth worked silently. Wade reached Byrd first, throwing his arms around his friend and helping him to his feet. By then Molly had joined them. Tears ran down her pudgy cheeks, tracking the dirt that caked them. Byrd’s shirt was soaked, dampening Wade and Molly when they hugged him, and blood dripped from an ugly gash above his left eye.

“You okay, Byrd?” Wade asked.

Byrd nodded a few times and then finally spoke. “I guess.”

“What happened in there? Where’s my dad?”

“He…the pool…” He started to speak again, swallowed, couldn’t get anything out.

“It’s okay now,” Wade said. “Whatever you did, it’s okay.”

“Not me,” Byrd managed. “The pool…it glows. Burns.”

Wade didn’t understand what he was talking about. Pool? They had never seen any kind of pool in there. “Slow down, man,” he said. “One step at a time. What pool? Where’s my dad?”

Byrd looked right into Wade’s eyes, finally, and Wade could tell that his friend had been through something horrible, something that would leave scars for the rest of his life. “I don’t think he’s comin’ out, Wade.”

“What do you mean?” Wade asked. He was getting the picture already, though. Byrd had killed him, somehow. That would explain Byrd’s awful, haunted stare. Not only had Byrd become a killer, but the person he had killed was Wade’s father. “It’s okay, Byrd,” he said again. “You did what you had to.”

Byrd shook his head impatiently, flinging blood from his cut everywhere. “No, no, no. Wade, it was—”

Suddenly they heard a low snarl, like a rabid dog, coming from the direction of the cave. “Oh fuck me fuck me no no no!” Byrd said. Panicked, he tried to run, but Wade held him. He didn’t know what was coming out of the cave, but he would want Byrd’s help to deal with it.

Although Wade didn’t think it was possible, whatever was emerging from the cave actually budged the stone slab that had leaned there as long as anyone knew, maybe for thousands of years. Not a lot, but enough to be visible, shifting it just enough to change its angle of lean by a degree or two. What was in that cave with them? he wondered. A bear? A big cat? What had that kind of strength?

The growl came again, and his dad crawled out from under the leaning rock. The man pawed at the ground, his fingers cutting deep furrows in the hard-packed earth there. When he shook his head, foam and spittle flew in every direction. He stared at them with one eye—the other eye had been brutalized, liquefied somehow, a hellish soup of blood and eye goop and sweat mixing on what remained of his cheek. And although Wade could tell it was his father, he looked more like a wild thing, a monster, than anything human. The clothing that had been perfectly fine an hour ago had turned into rags and ribbons, barely concealing his skin.

And he was strong. He had not only moved the big leaning rock, but his fists closed around smaller stones and pulverized them. He crept toward them on all fours, as if he had forgotten how to walk upright.

Finally, for the first time, he spoke words that Wade could understand. “Wade,” he said. “Help…”

He might have said more, but his lower jaw fell away from his face, dangled there by a few strings of flesh, and then he swatted it angrily with his left hand and it tore off altogether, flying into the rocks. Blood drained from his head, pattering to the dirt and making a trail as he kept crawling toward them.

The next to give way was his right arm, which had begun to buckle under his weight when he lifted his left hand. When he shifted onto it again, it collapsed beneath him, snapping off at the shoulder. He grunted and dropped, blood from his face and obliterated shoulder soaking the dirt. A nauseating odor, as if he’d accidentally wandered into a dysentery ward with backed-up plumbing, flooded over Wade like a wave.

“Dad…” Wade said, horrified in spite of his anger and hatred. “Dad, are you…?”

His father tried to rise again, but his left wrist snapped. He pushed himself up on the stump for a moment, bone shards digging into the soaked earth. He might have been trying to say something, but his ruined face made it impossible. With defeat dulling his remaining eye, he slumped back onto the blood-pooled dirt.

It happened fast after that. His skin bubbled and disappeared, like foam breaking up on the side of a beer glass. Wade wasn’t sure what he was looking at beneath it—muscles and fatty tissue and bones, he guessed, like the models he’d seen in biology class, but before he could really grasp it, they dissolved, too.

Molly started to scream—long, keening wails that hurt Wade’s ears. Byrd had fallen to his hands and knees, puking on the dirt. Wade’s guts were doing backflips, but emotionally he was numb, worn out and wrung out, and watching his father turn from a powerful, evil man to a puddle of softly burbling goo and soaking into the desert floor didn’t do much to change that. He had already given up on the man. Now there was no man left to worry about.

* * *

Molly had often described memory as a river, sometimes calm on top while beneath the surface it could be roiling and churning madly. You couldn’t tell unless you ducked underneath and checked.

Submerged in the depths of memory, Wade barely realized that they had walked through the rocks to the river’s edge. The Rio Grande ran there as it always had, but its flow was less than in years past. It ran in a stream inside its channel, almost chocolate brown, reeds and grasses hemming it in. Since the old days it had been set off, on this side of the border, by a tall wire fence with razored coils on top.

What struck Wade was that the river was always there, but not the same water—each drop that passed by was gone forever, replaced immediately by another one.

He took a deep breath, inhaling the musty aroma of riverside vegetation, letting it overcome the remembered stink of his father’s sudden decomposition. That had never left him, that smell, or any of the rest of it. You could tie concrete blocks to the ankles of something like that and throw it way out in the middle of memory’s river, but you couldn’t make it stay under. Sooner or later, usually when you least wanted or expected it, it floated back to the surface and horrified you all over again.

“I always thought it would affect me, in some way,” Byrd said. He unconsciously touched the scar that bisected his brow like a pale worm. “Spent my whole life waitin’ for it. Now I think I know. I think it’s what caused my leukemia.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Molly asked.

But Wade thought he knew. “The pool?” His own thoughts had been full of that night since they got here. Why not Byrd’s?

“Yeah, the pool. That water, or whatever it was. The way it…it just ate your dad up. I didn’t get nearly as much on me, and thank God y’all just got a little bit, whatever you got off of me, I guess. I was sure it couldn’t do that to him without havin’ an effect on me, too. Now that I know what it is, it’s kind of a relief. I mean, I’m fuckin’ pissed, too. But at least I’m not waitin’ for it anymore.”

“Do you really think that, Byrd?” Molly asked. “That after all these years, it just hit you now?”

“We don’t know how long it’s been simmerin’ inside me,” Byrd said. “Maybe years. Decades. It only became noticeable recently, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t lurkin’ somewhere. Then it progressed way faster than any of the doctors had ever seen, right? Like something unnatural.”

“We probably should have been checked out at the time,” Wade suggested.

“We were dumb kids. We were immortal. What the fuck did we know? Anyway, that would have meant tellin’ someone what had happened.”