The Vanishing (34 page)

Marshall was not sure he believed that.

He wasn’t actually involved in the incarceration of the beast. Once they returned to the fort, Sutter had others take over. It was just as well. He was tired, as were the rest of the men who’d accompanied Sutter on his expedition. It was Marshall’s shift, he’d been one of those carrying the pole on the last leg of the journey, and he gratefully handed over his burden to Graham Arthur, who at least looked as though he’d had a decent night’s sleep within the past week.

He watched the men carry the bound and gagged creature across the open courtyard, the other residents and visitors to the fort following at a safe distance.

Is this one of the demons the Indians are so afraid of?
he wondered. Judging by the reaction of Matthew’s wife, the answer was yes, but Marshall found it hard to ascribe to this captured beast the sorts of powers that demons were supposed to have.

He was still afraid of it, though, wasn’t he?

Yes, he had to admit, he was.

He spent the next day in bed. He was more than just tired. He was exhausted. But he still needed a trigger to fall asleep, and he pulled out an old bottle of whiskey from the cubby where he’d hidden it and polished it off in a few eye-watering minutes. That put him out, and he slept straight through for the next twenty hours or so, his sleep undisturbed by dreams.

When he awoke, it was night and his cabin was dark, the great swaths of stars in the moonless sky visible through his window failing to provide even a smidgen of usable light. He sat up coughing, his head pounding with each hack, his mouth tasting like dog shit. He reached around on the floor for his bottle and held it upside down over his open mouth, a few leftover drops falling onto his tongue. Rather than getting rid of the taste, they intensified it, and he stood unsteadily and made his way to the table, where he fumbled with the matches and lit his lantern. There was a half-eaten box of crackersnext to the lantern, and he grabbed a few and ate them, grateful for the salty flavor that spread through his mouth.

It must have been very late at night or very early in the morning because on the other side of the garden, the fort was nearly silent.

Nearly.

Marshall moved closer to the window and stood there. Watching. Listening. There were no lights or signs of movement, but from this spot he could hear the creature and the noise it made. The mewling. He thought of Pike, and an icy chill slid down his back and into his arms.

He could have gone back to bed and waited for morning, but he had never been a coward and had seen too much since leaving Missouri to be scared away by anything. Picking up his lantern, he walked out of the cabin and over to the fort, where Sutter, Matthew, Big Reese and Whit Fields were standing near the livery.

‘‘Good,’’ Sutter said. ‘‘You’re up.’’

‘‘Yeah,’’ Marshall grunted.

A lot of them were up, and the courtyard continued to fill with men as more and more of them were awakened by that mewling and felt compelled to investigate. The cries seemed to grow louder and softer in a recognizable rhythm.

‘‘What do you think’s going on?’’ Marshall asked. ‘‘You think it’s trying to call for help?’’

‘‘I think it’s in heat,’’ Sutter said. ‘‘Come with me.’’ He led the way across the courtyard to the storage room where it was being held. Drawing forth a ring of keys, he unfastened both padlocks and pulled open the heavy door. With nearly all of the men carrying lanterns, the dark room was clearly illuminated, their jostling throwing strange jittery shadows on the walls and ceiling.

Marshall was next to Sutter, in the lead, and he saw that the monster was chained to the rear wall but not like a prisoner. Instead, the captain had had his men shackle the creature so that it was on its back, arms and legs spread out.

The thing looked at them and made that terrible mewling noise, but now it sounded . . . enticing.

Marshall’s gaze went from its face to its breasts to its oversized sex.

‘‘Let’s fuck it,’’ Sutter said, and there was a gleam in his eye that Marshall didn’t like.

‘‘No,’’ he said, grimacing, but he wasn’t nearly as offended as he let on, and a voice inside was saying,
Yes, yes.

Matthew was already pulling down his pants and pushing past them, his penis erect and ready. ‘‘Hell, they’s taken our women. We might’s well take theirs.’’

The men were lining up. The mood had changed, and whatever nervousness and fear had drawn them out from their beds and into the courtyard had shifted and hardened into a greedy and lustful sense of entitlement. Matthew was already on top of the creature, and both he and it were moaning as their intertwined bodies moved up and down. He finished, then pulled out, pushing himself off and staggering backward. ‘‘Oh my God,’’ he breathed. ‘‘I ain’t never felt nuthin’ like that before. Jesus Christ. No wonder . . .’’ He shook his head numbly.

Grinning, excited, Sutter stepped up to have his turn, but the night air was shattered by a scream of pain and fear that came from somewhere outside and all of the men swung awkwardly around, their lanterns crashing into each other.

Matthew had just finished pulling up his pants, and he turned white, the color draining from his face. ‘‘Tha’s Nina!’’ He shoved his way through the crowd like a wild man, pushing everyone aside. Marshall and the others butted heads and elbowed ribs as they tried to scrabble their way out into the open air.

The fort had been breached.

They saw it instantly. Monsters were throwing themselves against doors, climbing stairs, stalking horses. It had been so long since Indians had been considered a threat that the fort had not been entirely closed, none of the lookout posts had been manned, and Marshall cursed the complacency that had allowed them to become so lax—although he knew that the guilt and remorse Sutter was feeling at this moment completely dwarfed his own.

The captain was shouting orders, sounding the alarm, calling on everyone who was still in their quarters to come out with weapons and defend the fort.

Marshall and Jameson sprinted together toward the armory along with a host of other men who weren’t at the moment armed. The monsters were all around, in every direction. He counted at least five of them, but it felt as though there were a lot more. They didn’t all look the same. Some were hairier than others, some slimier, some with horns and tails, others with body parts that had no names. But they were of the same ilk—

—and he had no doubt that it was the creature’s mewling cries that had called her kind to the fort.

The armory was locked, but Sutter was right behind them with the key, and he opened the heavy door, all of them rushing in at once, grabbing rifles, pistols, swords, whatever they could lay their hands on. Marshall ended up with a rifle, and somebody shoved some shells into his hand as he made his way back outside. Looking around, assessing the situation, he saw now where the initial screams had come from.

It was Matthew’s wife. She was bent over a bench on the far side of the fort, and one of the monsters was behind her, grunting with pleasure as it plunged its enormous organ deep inside. She had stopped screaming by now, and blood erupted from between her slack open lips in time to the rhythmic thrusts.

Matthew was right there. He always had a pistol at his side, day or night, and he slapped leather so fast that Marshall could hardly see it, his hand coming up and pointing the weapon at the monster in a single move.

He shot it.

What spewed from the bullet hole was not blood but something black and thinner, like dirty water.

Then the others were shooting, the best among them staking out positions that allowed them maximum coverage, and the creatures started to fall. One with horns and a forked tail tumbled from a turret, its body riddled with bullet holes. Another, loping across the open center of the fort, was thrown backward by the force of the blasts aimed at its chest.

Marshall returned to the storage room, poking his head in the doorway. The men were gone, but the shackled creature grinned at him and cackled, its laugh an eerie hiss that seemed low and quiet but somehow carried above the clamorous chaos outside. He went inside the room and in the light of a left-behind lantern saw satisfaction in those beady, calculating eyes, derision in the upturned corners of that cackling toothy mouth. Before Sutter returned to tell him he couldn’t do it, Marshall raised his rifle and shot the monster full in the face. That watery black liquid sprayed out from the shattered mass of flesh and skull, soaking the wall and floor, and after a few quick convulsions, the creature lay still.

Marshall stepped outside. As quickly as it had started, it was all over. There was still a lot of shouting and screaming going on—Sutter was ordering all lookouts manned to make sure they weren’t still under attack— but amid the clamor and commotion it was clear that the monsters had all been killed. Their freakish bodies lay in twisted heaps all about the fort, and a quick count told Marshall that his initial estimate had been right. There were only five of them. Why had it seemed as though there were many more?

Sutter explained something to Goose, then hurried over to the storage room. Marshall stepped aside to let him pass. The captain emerged a moment later with a stunned, devastated look on his face.

‘‘So they can be killed,’’ Marshall said to him.

Sutter looked at him, nodded.

‘‘That’s good to know.’’

Twenty-three

Kirk woke up again, his mouth so dry that he felt like gagging, but before he could even croak out a request for water, someone was carefully putting a straw to his lips. He drew in the cool, refreshing liquid, feeling it smooth over the harsh roughness of his throat. Gradually, his vision adjusted to the brightness of the hospital room and he made out the machines and monitors, the utilitarian furnishings and pastel wall decorations.

Waylon, Tina and Brad were there, Tina and Brad seated on the small square love seat, Waylon perched uncomfortably in an atrociously designed chair. Earlier, Monica, April, Orlando and Sal had been sitting by his bedside, but he hadn’t wanted to talk to them and so had pretended to be asleep, waiting them out, knowing that with their short attention spans he was certain to outlast them. He had. This time, though, he smiled at his friends and used the push button control at his fingertips to raise the back of the bed as far as he could. He was not allowed to move to a sitting position, but he was able to better see the room in front of him.

There were cards and flowers, get-well gifts galore on the dresser beneath the wall-mounted television. In front of everything, standing astride a tiny sleigh, was a toy figure that had obviously been given to him by Waylon, a little man in blue snow clothes with a curly brownish red beard. Kirk grinned. ‘‘Poontang Cornelius!’’

Waylon nodded. ‘‘Crouton Pornelius himself.’’

It was an old private joke: purposely getting the
Rudolph
character’s name wrong and seeing who would pick up on it. Both Tina and Brad did. ‘‘
Yukon
Cornelius,’’ they corrected, almost in unison.

Waylon nodded, grinned at Kirk. ‘‘Good catch.’’

Kirk leaned against the pillow. It was nice to be back, though in truth he didn’t feel as if he’d really been gone. In his mind, it had been only a few hours since his father had brought him home—where his mom had been tortured and his dad had tried to kill him. It had been weeks, though, and according to Waylon, his dad had been arrested several days ago in California, although Waylon didn’t know if he was still there or if he’d been extradited back to New York.

Kirk knew he was flying on some serious painkillers. His body remembered the agony suffered at the hands of his father, and the casts and bandages testified that the injuries had been major, but at the moment there was only a light numbness that made every part of his body feel just like every other. He could blink his eyes and nod, speak and drink, move his fingers and toes, but all of that was at a remove, as though his brain were telling a robot what to do. He’d asked the nurse how long it would be before he was out and about, but she dodged the question and went to get a doctor, who told him he was looking at another week in the hospital and six months of physical therapy.

‘‘It’s going to be tough, too,’’ the doctor had warned. ‘‘Recovery is not for the fainthearted.’’

Kirk looked at his friends, tried to smile. ‘‘So what’s going on in the real world? Not
news.
Clubs and concerts. Feuds. Fights. Gossip. Fluff.’’

‘‘Well . . .’’ Tina said. ‘‘Word is that Shelli’s looking to get back with you. She misses you terribly and realizes she made a huge mistake and feels just
awful
about everything that’s happened to you. Of course, the fact that you’ve been in the papers nonstop—on the front page no less—has absolutely
no
bearing on her sudden interest in rekindling an old flame.’’

They all laughed.

‘‘Huston’s insanely jealous over all the sympathy and publicity you’re getting, so he’s letting the world know that
he’s
suffered, too. He’s revealed to all and sundry that his late great father molested him as a child and that he’s been hiding this dark secret all these years, struggling alone and in silence.’’

‘‘Anal?’’ Waylon asked. ‘‘Did his dad get anal off him?’’

‘‘I hope so,’’ Brad said, grinning.

It was starting to hurt when he laughed, and Kirk wondered if it was time to receive more medication.

A nurse stepped into the room. ‘‘Excuse me, Mr. Stewart. There’s another reporter on the line. He’s from the
Los Angeles Times
—’’

‘‘Oh shit,’’ Waylon said.

‘‘No reporters,’’ Kirk told the nurse.

‘‘I didn’t think so.’’ She smiled sweetly at him. ‘‘Thank you, Mr. Stewart.’’

Kirk sighed heavily. ‘‘That’s like the tenth one who’s called me. It’s why the calls are going through the nurse’s station now instead of coming directly here. Let them handle it. I’m supposed to be recuperating.’’