River Runs Red (The Border Trilogy) (40 page)

He started up toward the inner sections, figuring that anything he would need to find wouldn’t be here on the outskirts. The rocks were slick, treacherous, and several times he had to catch himself with his hands, rubbing them raw.

Rounding a curve, he saw something yellow glowing through the rain, like the neon lights that had once decorated Betty’s Night Owl Saloon. But there could be no neon at Smuggler’s Canyon, where there was no electricity. Wiping rainwater from his eyes, he pushed on.

When he found the source of the glow, he wished he still had water in his eyes, or mud, or anything else he could blame.

He had reached one of the areas where the pictographs were the most numerous. Dozens of them decorated a rock wall. As a boy, he had wondered about the people who had made art so high up on a wall, curious about what it had meant to them and why they had been so determined to make their pictures last.

They had not, he would have been willing to bet, intended for those images to glow with their own internal light.

But now they did, bright and steady, like beacons shining through night and weather.

Wade approached the lowest of them, the ones he could reach, and held out his hand. Heat radiated from them. He couldn’t get within six inches without burning himself.

There was no shortage of things that didn’t make sense in this new reality he found himself inhabiting. As he stood there, nearly blinded by the brightness of the ancient images, he felt
Kethili-anh
’s presence again, like a hallucinatory waking dream filling his consciousness.

But Wade remained as well, and in the interface between the two of them, he
knew
.

He remembered.

* * *

Kethili-anh
and
Kethili-cha
had always been enemies, even though, as all the gods had been in their time, they were also siblings. There was no time in the memory of either when they had not been foes.
Kethili-anh
couldn’t recall if there had been some initial disagreement—as far as he knew, he had been born hating her, and she him. Their births, though, were lost behind the veils of millennia, invisible even to gods.

Their enmity had grown and grown, until finally they fell on each other in vicious combat, using mystical attacks and claws and teeth to hurt and tear and rend and break. The battle was epic, lasting sixty years and ninety-three days, in the human reckoning of time. As it progressed, both weakened, until finally those mortal sorcerers and shamans who lived ten thousand years ago took advantage of their weakness and cast imprisoning spells, hoping to rid the Earth of the last of
Kethili
’s children.

The web of magics engulfing them worked.
Kethili-cha
and
Kethili-anh
were torn away from each other’s terrible embrace.
Kethili-anh
found himself entombed in an earthen prison so small that he couldn’t move. Over the centuries, his consciousness waned until only a spark remained, unaware of itself or anything else. The flesh rotted from his body, and he grew ever weaker, unable to feed on the faith of his believers or the consumed souls of the dead.
Kethili-cha
, for her part, had preferred the souls of the living, which she claimed made a tastier meal.
Kethili-anh
’s respect for the living had always been one of the points of antagonism between them.

Finally,
Kethili-anh
had been reborn, into the body of Wade Scheiner, inside a cave beneath Baghdad.

From this point, Wade’s memories became intermingled with
Kethili-anh
’s. The glowing images on the walls of his cave prison, the night before his escape, the miraculous way no one saw him or stopped him, the empty streets—all part of the magic that had freed
Kethili-anh
from entombment. Somehow, the glowing water Byrd had described, from the depths of Smuggler’s Canyon, the water that had dissolved his father like the strongest of acids, must have had some property that made him and Molly vulnerable to possession by the
Kethili
.

So he had been freed from his Iraqi captors and swept into a different prison at the same time. As
Kethili-cha
, Molly was stronger than him. Maybe proximity to Smuggler’s Canyon had made her manifest more quickly. However it happened, and he couldn’t pretend to know, she had been able to control him. Before he was even aware of
Kethili-anh
’s burgeoning presence,
Kethili-cha
had made him murder innocent people. For her own enjoyment? No, he decided—because she enjoyed it,
and
because their suffering made her stronger.

That was the sort of foul act
Kethili-cha
would find endlessly amusing, and the reason he had so long opposed her. At least, he could assure himself, the murders hadn’t been his doing—not really. His body, but someone else’s consciousness, and
Kethili-cha
’s plan.

He guessed the rain was her doing, too. Celebrating her return to the world by drowning it.

That was just like her.

FORTY-FIVE

Brewer had wanted a helicopter, but since the weather had turned so dramatically violent, they were all grounded. He had taken his own vehicle instead, knowing it could cut through anything a simple storm might throw at him.

But he was beginning to think this was no ordinary storm. He had never seen driving rain like this. It turned Interstate 10 into a soupy mess. Truckers had pulled off under the shelter of overpasses, waiting it out. Those vehicles that did press on did so slowly, wipers flicking and lights blazing.

Brewer wove between them, unwilling to let surface conditions dictate his speed. Miles back, he had realized that a car had been tailing him almost since White Sands. On the interstate, the driver had come closer than he should have, probably trying not to confuse Brewer’s taillights with anyone else’s, and Brewer had recognized him.

It took a few minutes to recall the name. He had seen the baby-faced man first in Colorado, with Robb Ivey and then with Millicent Wong. Then today, there had been drawings of him mixed in with all the other whacked-out shit the old man had sketched. Truly, that was it. James Livingston Truly. CIA. He should have realized when Specialist LaTour said he’d been talking to a CIA drone that it was Truly. To be honest, he hadn’t given the agent that much credit.

The guy had turned into a real pest. Brewer would have liked to stop and deal with him on the spot, to smoke him there on the rainy shoulder of I-10. He told himself he was getting soft in his old age, and he had to guard against that. In years gone by, anyone who had stumbled so close to the truth would have been feeding worms in a shallow grave long ago.

But the old man in the backseat was more agitated than Brewer had ever seen him, rocking in the seat, his dry mouth clicking, scribbling drawing after drawing and spreading them all over the vehicle. Any delay would be too much at this point.

An expert at the base had positively identified some of the old man’s drawings, from the six-hour stretch Brewer had started thinking of as his pre-Columbian phase, as representing ancient Indian rock art found at a place called Smuggler’s Canyon. Brewer knew it well, although he hadn’t had occasion to go back there in the last twenty-one years.

In theory, if the man was drawing Smuggler’s Canyon, this meant Brewer needed to be there. Things were coming full circle. And if the words the old man had been scrawling on some of his pictures, “Too late,” had any meaning, he had to hurry.

Which meant no stopping to cap some obnoxious spook. If the guy survived the drive to the canyon, he could take care of it there. He tried to forget about the spy, to focus instead on guiding the Hummer over the perilous roads.

* * *

Everywhere that great rivers flowed, the rains came. In Baghdad, the Tigris and Euphrates swelled and overran their banks. In Paris and London, the Seine and the Thames, engorged by sudden storms, washed into the cities, crumbling ancient buildings, sweeping away cars with their drivers inside. In Cairo, the Nile rose so fast that people were trapped in their houses, drowning as they tried to break through their roofs. In Keokuk and Cape Girardeau and Memphis, Greenville and Farriday and New Orleans, the Mississippi burst over its banks and swamped streets, shops, houses and hospitals with ferocity. In Bismarck, in Pierre, in Sioux City and Omaha and St. Joe, the Missouri did the same.

The combined fury of both rivers struck St. Louis, roiling away the ground beneath the Gateway Arch and bringing that landmark tumbling down. The staff of a city jail fled for higher ground, leaving forty-seven prisoners on the lower tier to drown in cells they couldn’t escape. A traffic jam in a mall parking lot killed another thirty-four who couldn’t flee the wall of water that swept over them. Eighty-eight residents of an assisted-living facility for seniors were killed when a mud flow brought their building down around them.

The president declared a state of emergency, but there was little he, FEMA, the National Guard, or the Army Corps of Engineers could do about it. Rain fell in volumes never seen in recorded history: feet, not inches, every hour. Every other nation’s leaders made similar grand pronouncements, but behind closed doors, all were equally helpless. The waters rose, the rivers ran, and the people in their paths were obliterated.

* * *

Kethili-cha
drove Molly’s brother’s SUV, allowing Molly’s personality just enough leeway to keep the vehicle under control, since driving was a skill
Kethili-cha
had never learned. She left the driver’s window open to feel the rain and road spray, knowing that back in El Paso and Juárez and in every city close to a major river, destruction reigned.

But as Molly drove and
Kethili-cha
sent her consciousness racing around the globe, sucking in whatever pleasure she could from the suffering and death she caused, she encountered unexpected resistance. Probing, opening all her senses, she realized it could have only one source.

Kethili-anh
.

She would like to have killed her brother’s new host before he fully inhabited the man, instead of simply amusing herself with him. He might have chosen another host, one to whom she didn’t have such ready access, but she could have taken that chance. There weren’t many who were suitable as hosts; Molly and Wade were not random choices, but had been selected by circumstance long ago.

But it had been Wade’s imprisonment deep underground, so near where
Kethili-anh
had been entombed, that had begun the process that freed them from their mutual bondage. Until both he and
Kethili-cha
fully manifested, she couldn’t chance aborting that process. Since she hadn’t been able to kill Wade, she had to deal with what was, not what might have been. Now, she could sense,
Kethili-anh
had come into his powers, and he needed to be crushed.

Molly negotiated the coursing waterways and soon stopped at the place she thought of as Smuggler’s Canyon.
Kethili-cha
thought of it as her prison, or at least the outward manifestation thereof, and returning to it brought her little joy. Only anticipation.

It would, she devoutly hoped, bring her power beyond imagining.

The Rio Grande tore furiously at its banks, just beyond the big rocks of the canyon. Among the rocks, smaller rivers flowed. The parking area was hidden under inches of water. Somewhere in there,
Kethili-anh
worked to thwart her desires, to hold back the rain she had summoned. She would find him, and she would put an end to the annoyance he had been millennia ago and remained today. Their eternal struggle would be finished after this encounter, she promised herself.

She left the vehicle she hardly fit into anymore, forcing Molly’s consciousness out of her head altogether. She didn’t need the mortal anymore and wanted no distractions. With the confidence due a goddess, she strode into the tall rocks. Water splashed all around her and the rain on the stones sounded like thousands of running feet.

Finally, she found him, standing on a shelf of rock near an array of brightly glowing pictographs. He no longer looked much like Wade Scheiner; the only lasting resemblance was in the thatch of light hair on his head and the darker hair on his chin, just as she still had Molly’s dark mop. Like her, he was taller than before—probably nine feet tall, although that was hard to gauge with him high above her in the rocks. His head had elongated, his jaw coming to a sharp point, his mouth full of jagged teeth. The back of his head also tapered to a point. His ears were triangular and jutted out like a bat’s. His yellow eyes beamed with internal light, much like the rock art he stood beside. His legs and arms were long, bent twice, once in each direction, giving him a spider-like aspect. He swayed from side to side, palms toward the sky, and chanted softly. A flash of lightning etched his shadow against the dun-colored rocks, paling the glowing pictographs into momentary insignificance.