The Mountain Page 20

  “Harry and I are gonna clean out this shit-hole. It could be long and loud and fucked-up as hell, and if it is fucked-up, it’s gonna get loud. We don’t know how far in we’ll have to go or how far away their camp is, but if we start droppin’ motherfuckers and that camp’s close enough for somebody to hear us and come haulin’ ass to the rescue, we’re gonna need you up there covering our asses.”

  Harry shrugged his shoulders, looked at Charlie, and said, “Makes sense.”

  Charlie opened the box of shells, stuffed half into one pocket and half into the other, and dropped the empty carton to the ground.

  Traber said, “You ready?”

  “Goddamn right I am,” Harry answered, and the two of them stepped into the dark mouth of the cave.

  * * *

  She ran giggling through the woods, happy to have gotten away. But it wasn’t much of a trick, not really. She’d planned it as soon as she landed in a heap on the bowls and silverware that had been swept off the table when Mark slung her across it. She was just sorry that other bitch hadn’t been behind her, the one who had stuck her with the fork and threatened to feed her eyeball to her. She’d hated doing it to the one who had been so nice. It didn’t matter though, not now it didn’t. None of them were going to make it off the mountain tonight. Not with what she was about to do.

  There were several entrances to the caves, all of them leading to a series of dark passageways, many of which ended down in the pit. And Dolly knew every nook and cranny of each and every one of them. She didn’t need light to find her way around—she’d been in and out of those long and winding tunnels as far back as she could remember, visiting Granny, hiding in the shadows while Willem and Lewis and Arley dragged somebody kicking and screaming into the caves. Watching what they did to some of those outsiders made her glad she wasn’t one. She sure would have hated to end up like that, the way Mark and Eddie and that mean bitch Tina was going to end up: down in the dark with the Shadows ripping them to shreds. So maybe it was a good thing she had stabbed the other girl; that way she wouldn’t have to find herself down there with the shadow-people. Dolly was sure she wouldn’t have wanted that to happen. Dolly wouldn’t have wanted it to happen to her.

  She stopped and turned and looked up the footpath. The fog was so thick she couldn’t see very far, so she just stood quietly, listening. She had expected them to chase after her, especially after she stabbed that girl, but they must not have because she would’ve heard them by now—talking or shouting, crashing through the underbrush or… something. But no one was following her, she was sure of it.

  She grabbed the thin trunk of a tree, pulling herself up the hill as she leaned forward. Legs pumping and feet digging into the dirt, she kept going, until finally she had stopped again, fifteen yards or so above the footpath.

  The fog was thick, but it didn’t stop her from locating the entrance she’d been searching for. She’d wanted them to chase her, not because she thought they could catch up to her—huh uh. No way. She knew they couldn’t do that. She wanted to run them around in circles and leave them wondering where the heck she had gotten off to. Which would’ve been up here, giggling and sliding into a hole much too narrow for a grownup to fit into. And she would have called out to them, too, just so they could see her scramble away, and then claw and scratch their way up after her, only to find her laughing at them on the other side of an entrance they could only reach an arm through.

  And God help them if they did that.

  Dolly couldn’t help giggling to herself as she dropped into the hole, her feet and hands finding every jutting rock as if they were a ladder she herself had built. She scaled the wall, down to the floor, and then took off along the long, dark corridor. Anyone else would have kept going until the tunnel dead ended into a solid wall of rock. But not Dolly—she knew better. A little ways down, she ran a hand along the rough-hewn wall. When the wall dropped away she turned into the opening. She quickly found the wall lining this tunnel, and then skipped along until it too dropped away. Then she was standing in the opening, staring up at a faint yellow glow she knew would lead her up to the pit.

  At the top of the tunnel, she saw Lewis leaning over a girl with blood all over her pants, stroking a hand across her long blonde hair. He didn’t see Dolly. He didn’t hear her either, because Granny and the Others were calling up to him. But that was okay with Dolly. She wasn’t here to see him anyway. She took off to her left, past arms and legs and hunks of meat, and two heads on a rock that seemed to be watching her run by them… down into another tunnel that led to Granny and the rest of her kin.

  Halfway down the corridor, a big metal key hung by a leather bootlace on a hook that was embedded into the wall. Anybody else would’ve run right by it. But not Dolly. Dolly knew where everything was down here. She ran by the hook and grabbed the key, and kept on running until she reached the rusty old gate that kept Granny and the Others from leaving the pit. Arley and Lewis said they weren’t allowed to leave it. That’s what Willem said, too. But Elbert didn’t like keeping them down here—he’d told her that himself. And this was an emergency, wasn’t it? Arley was dead and a bunch of outsiders had done it, and now they were fixing to hightail it to town to make trouble for the rest of them.

  Not if Dolly could help it, they weren’t.

  And Dolly could help it.

  She fit the key into the lock that held the gate in place, turned the key and the lock popped open. She could still hear the voices calling out from the pit, echoing through the cave behind her. She lifted the lock away and dropped it to the ground. The rusty hinges squalled when she tugged on the gate. When it finally opened, she stepped further into the darkness, and yelled, “GRANNY! COME QUICK!”

  In the darkness in front of her, someone said, “The gate’s open.”

  Further away, someone else called out, “The gate’s open!”

  From deep within the pit, somebody screamed, “THE GATE’S OPEN!”

  Dolly took a backward step. She could hear them coming, screaming and shouting and calling out, “THE GATE’S OPEN! THE GATE’S OPEN!”

  A webbed hand that looked more like a dolphin’s flipper touched her arm. It was soft and clammy and slippery-wet. A face appeared in the darkness, attached to a body that was slithering through the dirt like a snake. A second figure came crab-walking across the floor behind it. Seconds later, she was swept up in a mass of deformity, a swirling sea of human depravity that carried her away from the gate and up toward the flickering yellow glow at the apex of the tunnel.

  * * *

  Halfway down the corridor, voices echoed through the cave; screaming and shouting, curses and taunts and deep-throated moans. The hellish choir sent a chill up Harry’s spine, but it did nothing to slow him down. Nothing would weaken his steadfast resolve tonight. He looked over his shoulder at Traber. The guy may have been a first class fuck-up, but Harry was glad to have him back there. He couldn’t imagine going through this on his own. But he would’ve gone it alone if he’d had to—he would have done anything to get Tina back. He just hoped he wasn’t too late.

  At the end of the passageway, they stepped into the faint yellow glow that had been visible from the mouth of the cave. The voices were louder now, more distinct as they called out a name—Lewis.

  “C’mon, Lewis!” they cried out.

  “C’mon, Lewis!” they shouted, and Harry thumbed the Mossberg’s safety into the off position.

  “Throw her on down, ya cocksucker!”

  “Jesus,” he whispered.

  Cackled laughter echoed down the corridor as somebody screamed, “GIVE US ANOTHER ONE!”

  Another one…

  “I’ll be goddamn,” Harry said, and then took of running through the tunnel, closer to the torchlight flickering at the end of the line, Harry swinging his shotgun before him while Traber stayed at his heels.

  The tunnel they were in fed into another long passageway. They entered it on a dead run, Traber and Harry angling down and to the
left, their pumping legs drawing them ever closer to the moans and the shrieks.

  Down the corridor, the voices were calling, “The gate’s open! The gate’s open!”

  Harry burst into a huge cave to see the same inbred freak he’d found on his front porch earlier in the night kneeling next to Thel Colbert. Even in the dim glow of the torchlight, Harry could tell she was a miserable wreck—her eyes were closed, her face pale, her shirt and pants a bloody mess. Beyond the wounded girl lay a human ribcage, hacked to pieces beside a piece of an arm, a foot and a leg and a pile of rotted entrails. A decapitated head lay face down in the dirt, amidst hunks of meat and other indefinable parts that were scattered around two more severed heads, both of which stood upright on a raised, flat stone.

  “Hey!” Harry yelled, his words drowned out by a rising tide of screaming and shouting, the animalistic howling of an army of freaks who seemed to be bubbling up from the darkness at the far end of the cave; at least twenty of which came screaming and crying and running hell-bent for the giant.

  A one-eyed woman led the pack, her face a scarred mask of twisted flesh, a deep, black pit where her eye should’ve been. A man with a lopsided mouth and gnashing, jagged teeth followed, his wild hair a mass of tangled clumps, so long the mane trailing behind him looked like a bizarre forest creature hanging on for dear life. The giant picked an ax up off the ground. He stood and the shrieking woman flew at him, fingers clawing as his massive arm sent her screaming sideways into the pit. In one swift motion, the ax-head found the shoulder of the next raving lunatic; metal met bone and the limb fell away, blood spraying from the ragged stump as the severed arm dropped to the floor and the pathetic creature followed it, howling and landing on his knees while the giant kicked him in the chin. He fell backwards, one hand clutching his face, the other twitching in the blood-soaked earth while a little girl with a face like a human sow ran laughing toward the dark opening of a distant tunnel.

  Men with flippers for hands and swollen and misshapen skulls ran side-by-side cackling, disfigured women, and children born of nightmarish deformities: bulging necks and humped-over backs, caved-in faces with open and leaking sores. Some missing fingers and some with too many fingers. One woman with a hole where her nose should have been raced beside a man who had no lips at all, who ran shrieking through a mouthful of broken and busted teeth. They laughed and they screamed and they howled and they moaned. Some moved quietly across the floor.

  And then they were on him, clawing and scratching while the giant swung his ax, slashing and hacking and pushing and punching, while blood flew and bodies fell, and more bodies took their places. They leapt and clutched and grabbed and bit, until their scratching and clawing and howling and punching sent the giant stumbling sideways toward the pit.

  “Jesus, Harry,” Traber said, as both stood wide-eyed and slack-jawed against the attacking horde.

  A crab-walking, humpbacked freak grabbed a handful of Thel’s hair, and Harry said, “Kill them! Kill them all!”

  The shotgun roared and the freak’s head exploded, and a smoking red cartridge landed at Harry’s feet. Then he was pumping and firing, stepping forward while Traber’s bucking .45 sent broken bodies to the blood-soaked floor.

  A man ran screaming from the pack. “Wait a minute, motherfucker!” he yelled, and a roaring shotgun blast cut him nearly in half.

  The giant teetered dangerously at the brink of the pit—Harry pumped and fired and his kneecap disintegrated, and he and the angry kin clinging to him toppled headlong into the wide, dark hole. Traber shot a woman in the chest and Harry finished her off, the roar of their weapons sending the others howling for the back of the cave while Traber reloaded and Harry ran after them, pumping and firing, two more dropping as the rest disappeared down the dark passageway.

  Then they were gone, and all was quiet.

  Except for the ringing in Harry’s ears.

  He turned and went back to Thel, knelt down beside her and touched the side of her throat. “She’s still alive.” He looked up at Traber and smiled. “Barely, but still alive.”

  “Sorry, Harry.”

  “What? You did good.”

  “No, for this.”

  He pointed his .45, and Harry said, “What the fuck?”

  “Like you said back at Butchie’s: you walked in on the town sheriff snortin’ cocaine in a marijuana factory.”

  “Trab—”

  Traber pulled the trigger and Harry grabbed his chest, blood spurting through his fingers as he fell sideways to the ground.

  “Sorry, Harry,” Traber said again, and then finished him off with one to the head.

  He crossed the floor and looked down at Harry, and then over at Thel. Harry was dead, the entire side of his skull blown away. Harry was dead, but not Thel. Traber could see the unsteady rise and fall of her chest. Harry was gone, a bullet in his head and one in his chest. Traber’s bullets. The giant’s ax lay on the ground, beside the pit. Traber walked over and picked it up, holstered his weapon and returned to Harry. He couldn’t afford to take any chances. Sure, Charlie Rodgers could end up dead—maybe he already was. But he couldn’t count on it. Come morning, he could be in town rounding up a posse. He’d tell them Harry and Traber had gone into the cave. Next thing you know, they’d be in the cave. Then the next thing you know, somebody would be digging the bullets out of Harry.

  Traber’s bullets.

  Traber drove the ax-head into Harry’s skull, pulled it out and swung it again, over and over until his head was a pulverized mush of red and gray and bloody slivers of bone. Then he lifted the ax and went to work on Harry’s chest, destroying it as well.

  Now he was a hero. They’d gone into a nightmare world of bizarre, inbred freaks. Harry’d fought the good fight, but he ran out of shells and the giant got the better of him. Traber did the best he could, but in the end, he was lucky to have gotten out alive. Nobody left but the nightmare creatures, the ones they would have to lay waste to before the day was out.

  Everybody dead but the freaks.

  Traber buried the ax deep into Thel’s chest, and left it there.

  Everybody.

  He picked up Harry’s shotgun, jacked the remaining cartridges onto the ground and tossed the Mossberg next to Harry; bent down and picked up the unspent shells, and put them into his pocket. Then he turned and ran, down one passageway to the next, and then on to the next, a steady trot that took him through the mouth of the cave and into the fog… up the footpath and on to the clearing, to the tree line on the other side, headed back to the ridge, and to Horse-Trader-Harry’s pick-up.

  Chapter Thirty

  All was quiet when Willem pulled up to the cabin. Not a sound came from inside, no laughing and joking around, no hushed whispers or loud conversations. Nothing, not even Dolly. The door open and light filtering out into the fog. He killed the engine and stepped out of the jeep, grabbed the shotgun and hurried onto the porch. Shotgun leveled, he stepped into the shack, and saw Arley lying motionless on the hardwood floor, a glistening scarlet trail running from his ruined eye to where blood had pooled beneath his head. Light from the flickering kerosene lamps glinted off the handle of the fork that had been mashed across the bridge of his nose.

  Arley was dead, but where was…

  “Gerald.”

  Willem turned and ran out of the shack. He stared up at the vague outline of an identical wooden structure standing off in the distance, then over at Elbert’s place.

  “Gerald!” he called out on his way past the jeep, hoping like hell something hadn’t happened to him too. He was across the clearing, approaching Elbert’s place when the unmistakable snick-snack of a round being chambered froze him dead in his tracks.

  He lifted the shotgun, and Gerald called out, “Don’t do it!”

  Willem could see him standing on Elbert’s porch, Cindy beside him while the business end of a shotgun stared Willem straight in the face.

  “What the hell happened, Gerald?”

  “They go
t away.”

  “Got away, huh? Killed your cousin too, didn’t they?”

  “Don’t know nothin’ ‘bout that.”

  “And where were you? Huh, Gerald? Where were you when they killed your cousin and hauled ass outa that cabin? Where were you when you were supposed to be down there watchin’ those cocksuckers?”

  “Lookin’ after Elbert.”

  Willem smiled. “Look cousin, we need to—”

  “They hauled ass down the mountain a little while ago.”

  “Why in the hell didn’t you—”

  “Better get after ‘em if you want ‘em stopped.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Why should I? I didn’t do nothin’ to ‘em. I ain’t the one hauled their asses up here at gunpoint.”

  “Look, Gerald.”

  “I ain’t the one raped their women.”

  “We need to get after ‘em before they get too far.”

  “Like I said: I ain’t the one hauled their asses up here. Ain’t my mess to clean up.”

  “The law ain’t gonna see it that way.”

  “I ain’t done a damn thing to them folks—we ain’t done a damn thing to ‘em. All that was you and Arley’s doing.”

  “Lewis, too!”

  “Either way, got nothin’ to do with us.”

  “Goddamnit! You come down off that porch and go with me!”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Okay, cousin, you go on and be like that.” Willem gave him a cold, hard stare, the same withering look that had wilted Arley and Gerald many times in the past. “I’ll be talkin’ to you later.”

  “You mean like you and Arley talked to Elbert?”

  “The hell you talkin’ about?”

  “Lewis in on that too? I bet he ain’t. Bet he don’t even know what you two did… yet. Bet he ain’t gonna like it too much neither. Choked on an apple core, huh? How’d he get those bruises on his cheeks? Why’s his lips all swolled up?”