(1995) The Oath (37 page)

The road curved to the right, and he followed the white line. He’d been up and down this road a thousand times; he knew what was coming. The curve straightened, and now the road stretched out ahead of him as straight as a rail, cutting through flat pastureland for the next mile. He pressed the accelerator, and the car surged forward, the speedometer topping sixty.

One of his favorite songs was playing on the radio, and he started singing along, finding notes the song’s creator never thought of. It was over now—all the worry, all the pain, all the fear. He was free. Like the road, the future was laid out straight and true ahead of him, with no surprises—

He yanked his foot from the accelerator. In the far, fading reach of his headlights, he could see something crossing the road. He couldn’t make out what it was, perhaps a deer or an elk. He’d collided with a deer once, and he didn’t want that kind of damage done to his car again, so he applied the brake and slowed to forty. As he drew closer and his headlights illuminated more of the area, something didn’t look right. He couldn’t see an animal—it was more like a huge shadow falling across the road. The center line seemed to waver. He slowed some more.

Suddenly the road was clear again, just like that, stretching out straight in front of him as if a cloud of fog had just rolled past.

He wondered what it was he had seen. Maybe—

THUD! The front of the car crumpled, and the car swayed and fishtailed. Charlie felt his shoulder belt cutting across his chest like a knife edge, and his head lurched forward.

I’ve hit a moose, he thought.

The car slowed to a stop within seconds, pushing something ahead of it. When Charlie’s body slammed back against the seat he saw flashes of silver, gold, emerald, and ruby, a shimmering display just outside the windshield, a moving, shifting wall of neon metallic scales, flickering and flashing like sunlight off lake water.

I’ve hit a trout!

He blinked, rubbed his head and eyes, looked again.

The shimmering wall lifted like a curtain. He could see the road again in the headlights.

What a relief, he thought. He must have had more to drink than he thought. He put his foot on the accelerator—

CRASH! The roof of the car caved in as if a tree had landed on it. The windows shattered. Charlie watched in horror as huge steel hooks—no, metal claws!—curled in through the passenger window.

“AAWWW!” Charlie screamed as the claws barely missed his head then clamped around the car’s roof. The car teetered, rocked, and slid sideways.

Then something hit the hood of the car, mangling the metal. Glass from the windshield showered into Charlie’s lap. He recoiled in horror at what he saw through the glittering, broken opening.

An immense, leathery, clawed hand rested on the hood, the gnarled, sinewy fingers stretching from one side of the hood to the other.

Then the claws that were inside the car pulled upward. The metal groaned, rivets popped, glass went flying. The roof was peeled back like the lid of a sardine can.

Dazed and panicked, Charlie groped for the door handle, and the door flew open. But he couldn’t move—and he realized his seat belt still held him in. He groped for the buckle.

Above him, where the roof had been, he caught sight of something metallic, something glittering.

A huge hand was reaching for him. The fingers curled around him, and his ribs snapped and cracked with a sound like burning cedar; his lungs filled with blood, and he choked it up.

The seat belt broke away from his body, and the car dropped away below him.

He could see eyes—huge, golden eyes—the instant before he died.

SO TELL ME
, Steve, do you think I’m crazy?”
“

He looked back at Evelyn and could hardly speak. Her recounting of what had happened that night on the mountain had become the core around which all the other data he’d gathered, all the hunches, all the eyewitness testimony, and all his own experiences, were finally bonding into one cohesive whole. He was overwhelmed.

Evelyn misread his silence. “Well I’m sorry, but I gave you everything, just the way I saw it.”

He was quick to reassure her. “I believe you, Evelyn.”

She found it hard to believe that. “It’s hard to swallow, I know.”

He touched her hand. “Listen to me. Tracy and I—well, we set out some bait and encountered the same thing a few nights ago. We didn’t see it clearly, but we tracked it all through the night and into the next morning. We know it’s out there. We just don’t know what it is.”

She thought it over, then said, “I think ‘dragon’ will do.”

He nodded. “Okay. But there’s something I need to tell you. The people in the valley know about the dragon. But it’s some kind of religious thing with them, and they don’t want anyone else to know about it. And now we know they’ll even kill to keep the secret from getting out. That’s what I was trying to tell you on the phone—to keep quiet about it, to not tell anybody.”

Steve could see the fear in Evelyn’s eyes.

“But why?” she asked him. “Why are they trying to hide it?”

“I wish I knew. I’m as perplexed as you are.”

“It kills people, Steve! This doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“I know.”

She was visibly flustered, even angry. “So what about the police? What about the Forest Service? The army! I mean—” She came to a halt, realizing the answer even as he said it.

“That creature knows how to hide,” he said. “And no one outside the valley would ever believe there was a dragon hiding in the mountains.”

Evelyn took a deep breath to calm down then rested her chin on her hand. “Okay. So what can we do?”

Steve grappled with that; there was no easy answer. “Well, the problem isn’t going to just go away . . .”

“It certainly isn’t!”

“When the dragon killed Cliff—someone from outside the valley— and left part of the body behind, that opened things up to the outside world. It sucked you and me into it. Now all we can do is take it one step at a time. Tracy’s going to arrest Phil Garrett, if he hasn’t fled to Mexico or something, and then maybe the authorities will have a reason to start unraveling what’s going on up there. But I don’t think I can wait for that. I have to find that creature and contain it before it kills anybody else.”

“Steve . . .”

“Yeah.”

“How much do you know about Tracy?” Evelyn asked with caution.

Had the question come from anyone else, he wouldn’t have liked it. “Oh, quite a bit for the short amount of time I’ve known her. Why?”

Evelyn shook her head. “I don’t feel right about her. Even before Cliff died, I had a feeling, a sense that something was wrong, that something was creeping into our marriage and into him. Whatever it was, it came out of Hyde River. But I think it’s affecting Tracy, too. I think she’s part of whatever it is.”

Steve didn’t know what to say. How could he argue with such an intangible thing as a woman’s intuition? “Well, you don’t know Tracy.”

“And you do?”

“Of course.”

“How can you be sure she’s not one of them?”

He rolled his eyes at that. “Evelyn, come on. They want her hide as much as they want mine. She could lose her job over this.”

She gave a slight nod. “I know.” By her tone, he could tell she was not convinced.

“Listen, I’ll watch myself. Don’t worry.”

“It’s something spiritual, Steve.”

He raised one eyebrow.

“Hey, listen, I know that doesn’t get very far with you, but just for the record, I’m sure that something’s behind all of this: the dragon, the valley, Tracy, Phil Garrett—even what happened to Cliff. It’s all part of the same thing, and it’s not—” She groped for the words. “—it’s not of this world, okay? I’m afraid for you.”

“Don’t be.”

“Promise me you’ll be careful.”

“I promise.” He got up. “I have got to get back. You have my mobile phone number. Call if you have any trouble, and don’t be afraid to tell me what you’re thinking and feeling. Any information you can give me is welcome.”

“I’m going to be praying; I’ll tell you that.”

He smiled. “That’s fine with me.”

IT TOOK
Steve forty minutes to drive back over Johnson’s Pass and through West Fork. From there, he turned north on the Hyde River Road and made his way through the valley, his hands just a little tighter on the steering wheel and his adrenaline pumping. He was returning to the trouble, and he knew it.

Halfway to the town of Hyde River, as he came around a curve in the road and then onto a long straight stretch, he saw the flashing lights of emergency vehicles, and not just a few. This had to be a major pileup, Steve thought—if it wasn’t something else. He was on edge, expecting anything.

A county sheriff’s patrol car was parked across the road to block traffic, its blue lights flashing. Already, two vehicles ahead of Steve had been turned back by the deputy holding a flare.

Steve had no intention of being turned back. When he reached the patrol car and the deputy approached his window, he had his bluff ready.

“I’m sorry, sir, you can’t go through here,” said the deputy.

“I’m Dr. Steve Benson. I got a call.”

The deputy bought it. “Go right ahead, Doctor.”

Steve inched his camper around the patrol car and kept going. Well, he did have his doctorate in biology, and he had gotten a few calls lately.

The accident scene was another quarter-mile ahead. He pulled onto the shoulder only a hundred feet away, extinguished his lights, and got out of the camper, wanting a good look before anyone approached him. He could see Sheriff Collins standing by his patrol car, hands on hips, surveying the scene, supervising. Two fire trucks were parked alongside the road, lights flashing, radios squawking, fire hoses snaked all over the pavement. An aid car waited, its rear door open.

In the center of it all were the remains of a car, the roof peeled completely back, the tires flattened, the windows shattered. The whole vehicle was charred black. The pavement was still wet from fire hoses.

Steve saw flashlight beams sweeping in the pastures on either side of the road. The police and firefighters must be searching for something, perhaps the victim or victims.

He reached into the cab of his camper and got his flashlight, then ducked through the barbed-wire fence to join the others in the pasture. He swept his light to and fro, becoming one of the searchers. Somehow he had to find out what had happened and what they were looking for.

He drew close to a volunteer firefighter walking along the fence line near the shoulder of the road. “You got anything?”

“No,” the fireman answered. “We’ve swept the area within a hundred feet of the road. Either he’s on the other side of the road or he took off.”

“Is there any kind of a description?”

“Well, we think the car belongs to Charlie Mack. You know, the guy who owns the tavern in Hyde River?”

Steve didn’t have to fake his surprise. “Charlie?” He looked back toward the road and the charred, mutilated car. “Does anybody know what happened?”

“He hit something, but we don’t know what. As near as we can tell, it was another vehicle that fled the scene.”

“How’d the roof get torn off?”

“Beats me. It was that way when we got here. The whole car was on fire, the roof was torn off, and there was nobody inside.”

“So what started the fire? Did the gas tank explode?”

“No, and that’s the oddest thing of all. The gas tank’s intact.” The man shook his head. “This whole thing is weird.” He called to another firefighter out in the pasture. “Joan, I’m going to the other side!”

“Okay,” came the answer. “I’ll work here a little longer.”

The man ducked through the barbed-wire fence and started to the other side of the road.

Steve followed him as far as the road shoulder, then lowered his light to cast a shallower angle on the soft ground, making the shadows more pronounced. He walked along the shoulder slowly, up past the wreck, then past the aid vehicle still standing empty, then back again, examining the patterns in the gravel. Plenty of human footprints, tire marks, even some hoofprints left by local equestrians. Nothing unusual.

He followed the road shoulder almost to his camper, then crossed the road and started up the other side. He was getting close to Collins’s patrol car, so he kept his head down, his face turned away, glad that it was dark.

He’d just passed the patrol car and was abreast of the wreck when he stopped. The furrows and scratches in the gravel could be what he was looking for, but he wasn’t sure. He looked closely, shining his light at the pattern from different angles. Then he shined his light off the shoulder and into the soft grass below. Now he was almost positive. The scratch patterns and impressions in the ground resembled those he’d found on Wells Peak as well as the supposed “footprint” Levi had shown him above the dragon’s “trap.”

He didn’t want to jump to conclusions, but already he was fearing the worst.

He crossed over the road to the wreck for a close look, searching inside and out with his light. The inside of the car was burned, melted, obliterated. The damage to the front end did not indicate a high-speed crash, although the hood was crushed in as if something had smashed it from above. The roof—now that was a mystery. It had not been cut through, as rescuers would do if a victim had to be extracted. It had been torn away in one piece, crumpled, and was just lying on the rear of the car. It was punctured in several places as if with huge spikes.

Claws, perhaps? No. Maybe. He couldn’t be sure . . .

Steve was filled with fear and foreboding. If this was the work of the dragon, then that thing was getting bolder by the minute, and no place was safe, day or night. Had the beast torn this roof off? And had the fire come from—

“Benson!” It was Collins’s voice.

Steve turned to face the sheriff marching toward him with his powerful light right in Steve’s eyes. Steve blocked the beam with his hand.

“How did you get in here?” Collins demanded.

“I volunteered.”

“We don’t want your help. Now get out of here!”

“Was it Charlie Mack?”