Nightwing (28 page)

Paine set the grinding weight of his pack down on the road, leaving the Cyanogas, rolled mesh, battery, wires and tools in the pack and taking only his receiver, rope, axe, and rifle. He was a mile from where he’d left the Rover and he assumed Anne and Youngman were now well out of the canyon. No more repeats of his father and Ochay. He was alone and free and his mind was clean.

The abandoned road continued to work its way through the canyon and under overhanging lava formations that had obscured it from aerial photographs. Steep walls of rust-colored sandstone crowded in on either side of the road. Occasionally, the sandstone would part to reveal a raw seam of shale that glittered like sequins. Or a strip of chalk-white limestone. And sometimes Paine would step back from the shadow of a man’s torso and look up to see only a still figure of lava poised on a rim. Of this geological richness, all that interested Paine were signs of limestone which would be most likely to lead to a cave adaptable to bats.

The radio signals weren’t coming. He was sure that the darts were good hits and the bats were close but the walls of the road muffled any kind of transmission. Unless he left the road and got up higher he might miss the cave completely.

He moved slowly until he came to a ragged shank of basalt that ran forty feet up the fifty-foot wall. Paine scaled the basalt and from it chipped handholds that carried him to the top of the wall. All his skills were with him. He pulled himself up to a view of the entire eastern half of the canyon.

Maski Canyon defied the usual arid cycle of land erosion. Instead of uniform canyons and buttes, the varied rocks of different hardness created a bewildering, serrated puzzle. It must have begun as a volcanic eruption, he thought, been covered by sedimentary rock and then torn apart by winds that left gaping mouths of stained sandstone, dikes of basalt uplifted like teeth and, where sandstone had been stripped away from rivulets of lava, those upright almost human figures of black rock. The eastern half of the mesa covered about five square miles, he estimated, and the western half, a higher plateau of the same sort of formations, seemed nearly as large. The burning oil seep was in the western plateau.

Like Milton, he thought. “A dungeon horrible, on all sides round as one great furnace flamed, yet from those flames no light, but rather darkness visible.”

Paine smiled to himself. He felt great, the way he always did when he knew he was right. On top of the world.

He moved from one cliff to another, jumping deep fissures, hauling himself by rope where a glassy wall of obsidian offered no holds. Wherever he found limestone he followed it until it either vanished or hollowed into a cave. There were caves, hundreds of them just as the Indian said, but none big enough or damp enough to support a colony of bats, and no signals reached his receiver. Paine was undiscouraged. There were bats and he was close to them.

From time to time he glimpsed shapes slipping through the basalt dikes. Crows. Beside a high nest, he found a dung beetle regally surveying a mound of bird droppings as high as a man’s waist; Paine had seen storms moving across the desert, but when rain last fell here he couldn’t even guess. There was no apparent plant life and, except for the solitary beetle, not even insects.

He crossed a natural bridge of gutted sandstone and discovered thirty feet below, sunk in shadow, the same road he had been on before. Paine was surprised it came so far. He checked his watch. Five o’clock; two hours to sunset. It was much later than he’d thought. He was confident, though. He still had time.

On the other side of the bridge, the composition of the rock changed to basically volcanic. Paine had to thread his way through fields of lava chimneys and arms that snagged his clothes. At one point, at his feet, he discovered a crude double-spiral scratched through the dark lava to an underlying level of white limestone. How the Indians had known there would be a different kind of rock beneath the lava he didn’t know; that was a problem for anthropologists. For him, the limestone was a good sign.

As he emerged from the lava field, he got his first signal. The signal grew stronger as Paine continued moving. He tried the other two frequencies of the receiver; the second could barely be heard, but the third was the clearest of all. Paine followed it through a series of basalt dykes. He jumped from one side of a crevice to a stone chimney and landed running excitedly on the other side of a crevice. Before him loomed a huge white dome of limestone.

All three frequencies were coming in loudly; he turned the receiver off. The limestone dome was fifty feet across and in the middle of it was a sinkhole twenty feet across where erosion had broken through. The edge of the sinkhole was green with lichen and moss. On his stomach, moving with great caution, Paine crawled up the dome to the hole and looked down.

He’d found them. The shaft of light that slanted down through the sinkhole into the cave dropped into a tarry pool two hundred feet below. The pool was shallow, a new one, but the unmistakable odor of ammonia rose into the air. Paine switched his receiver on for confirmation, just for a second. The short, raucous tone brought a stirring of claws six inches beneath his chest on the thin underside of the dome. All three tones from the same cave. He had them all.

As his eyes became accustomed to looking down into the dark of the cave, Paine saw that it was circular, about three hundred feet wide, with the general shape of a natural amphitheater. From the level floor, all the walls arched smoothly to the dome. If there were a thousand bats in the colony now, the cave would accommodate three times as many. Somewhere on the floor was a spring or access to a water table. Paine sniffed. Because the ammonia was not overpowering, he smelled another faint but familiar odor. Oil. Another seep. Chee would be overjoyed.

The irises of Paine’s eyes continued to dilate. The vertical lines on the cave floor near the pool were not irregular. They were straight. They were crude ladders, maybe ten, with most of their rungs broken. More shapes emerged. In the deepest shadow of the cave was a slightly darker shadow. A square. More squares spread around and above it, reaching halfway up and a third of the way around the wall of the cave. Windows. Windows and doors for five stories of adobe houses, an enormous underground gallery. The reason Paine hadn’t seen it sooner was not only the dark. The houses themselves had disintegrated almost into rubble. Roofs were crushed, walls had fallen in, dust lay like a heavy shroud. Paine reasoned that to escape enemies a people might hide for a short time in such a place. This was not the construction of a short time, though. This had been a small city.

Intrigued and puzzled, Paine edged around the entire lip of the sinkhole, spreading his arms and legs to minimize his weight. He’d thought he would have to lower the Cyanogas canister through the sinkhole from a piton driven into the dome, an operation that risked breaking through the flimsy limestone shell or, at least, scattering the bats. If any point of the ruins, however, came within a hundred feet of the cave ceiling, he could place the canister there. The ruins told him there was another way into the cave because there had to be human access.

But no point on the ruins was high enough for the gas spray to be totally effective. Which satisfied Paine well enough; it was usually a bad idea to change methods, and one misstep among ruins as ancient as these could mean disaster.

The sinkhole it would be, then. Right on top of the bats.

He left the way he’d come, through the lava field to the sandstone bridge, where he descended by rope to the road. By now, he was asking himself questions.

The road comes all this way? To what?

He didn’t want to stop, but his habit of thoroughness was too strong. A trap was no good if there were two exits, and somehow people had gone in and out of the cave.

As Paine reversed himself and ran up the road in the direction of the cave, his receiver came gradually alive again. Not as loud as the signals above the cave, but distinct.

Youngman knew about the canyon and the road. Paine’s face flushed. The bastard must have known about the cave all the time.

The road ended directly in front of what seemed to be an entrance to a mine. A cart wheel of solid wood that had been slowly decaying for hundreds of years lay beside an opening eight feet high and wide enough for two carts to enter abreast. The signals came from inside. He checked his watch. It was getting late, but he had to be certain.

As Paine stepped in, he touched the walls. They were cool and damp and left his fingertips black. One sniff explained all. Oil-saturated shale, that was what the mine was for. Soft shale so pregnant with oil it could be hacked into bricks that would burn brighter than coal.

The mine burrowed ahead and with each step the signals grew stronger. This had to be the other way into the cave. One hundred and fifty feet in, though, the mine came to a dead end. Yet the signals were stronger than before and Paine could smell ammonia. He pushed tentatively against the end wall, and it disintegrated in his fingers. His arm went through the rotting threads of a hanging blanket that had been the only separation between the shale mine and the limestone cave. Carefully, he pulled his arm out and peered through the hole he’d made. Before him, lit by the sinkhole, stretched the gigantic hall of the cave, the shallow pool of digested blood, the ghostly ruins of the pueblo and, overhead, both deadly and vulnerable, a ceiling of bats. They didn’t use the mine.

Paine broke into a run when he reached the road. It was six o’clock, not enough daylight left for him to poison the bats before they flocked. In fact, there was just enough time to retrieve the backpack and escape from the bats’ usual flight pattern towards the desert.

The road wasn’t straight for more than a hundred feet at a time. To Paine, it seemed to wind malevolently, as if it were trying to slow him down, but at last he saw his pack sitting where he’d left it. A crow flew away from the pack as Paine approached.

From habit, Paine checked the pressure of the Cyanogas canister as soon as he reached his backpack. The tank was good. The battery had its charge and the wire mesh was rolled as neatly as before. The crow had been searching for food, that was all. Paine slipped the pack onto his shoulders and started his return to the dome.

In spite of the uphill grade and the weight of the canister Paine maintained a rapid walk. The road was a murky blue under the sunlit tops of the walls, though rarely the low sun did penetrate a gap and throw Paine’s hunchbacked shadow high up a wall. Once, a second shadow joined his and Paine looked up to see a crow running along the cliffs.

Paine cast his rope over the sandstone bridge and hoisted himself up from the road. From there, he worked his way through the lava field and circled to the west side of the sinkhole, where he huddled beneath a stone shelf and watched the last rays of the sun burning out on the dome.

Now that he knew exactly what he was going to do, Paine felt a rising confidence. He opened his pack and laid out his helmet and wire clipper. He wouldn’t need gas mask or gloves. An easterly wind rose, driving his smell away from the cave. Everything was going well.

As the sun set, the eastern horizon turned a fleshy pink shading into purple. No bats emerged from the sinkhole. Other bats might greet the dusk, but vampires waited for true night. Then Paine heard them, the sound of their stirring, of wings and the rain of nitrous urine lightening them for flight. The distant mesa tops lived briefly as golden clouds, stars swam into sight and, in seconds, the world tipped into the dark.

Paine held his breath. For a final minute, the air above the canyon was still, and then the first bats rose from the sinkhole, spiralling up like leaves from a fire. The rest came like a black pillar mounting five hundred feet into the sky.

His bats.

Paine held onto the rock as if he were going to be sucked into the swirling column. Part of him was. Along with his father, Ochay, the years in Mexico. You are what you kill, Joe Paine said. Too true. The bats and Paine had joined, become the head and tail of a single creature leading and pursuing itself. One beast conceived in death and nurtured by obsession. Mantled in evil. He’d lied to Anne. There was, past biological frameworks, a sense to everything. There was a mutual grace in nature. The carnivore eliminated the weak, the herbivores and birds transmitted seed, insects cleansed the soil, flowers lent beauty. Each in turn lent something in return for its life, all but one. There was that single instant, a freak, which gave nothing in return for its all-consuming thirst. The vampire, alone. Claustrophobia was not what Paine had suffered, it was a shudder in the presence of evil. He’d come to understand that but what he hadn’t foreseen was that evil had its own gravity. Not until it had drawn him in and used him to push the bats where they had never been before, and multiplied a thousandfold its own energy and horror. Apocalypse needed no pale horse or fiery dragon, not with the bats as its engine and the plague as its seed. All thanks to Paine. All due to him.

But the end of the chase had come, and after the end he would be free.

Flattening into a cloud turning again and again into itself, spreading into a crescent until the center moved forward and then forming one swift and undulating line, the bats flew east into the desert.

Paine gave the bats ten minutes before he unrolled the wire mesh and cut it in equal sections with the clipper. He wanted a snug fit over the sinkhole, no slack. One section of mesh he neatly rerolled and carried to the far edge of the sinkhole, where he hammered a side of mesh into the dome with pitons. On all fours, he moved to the lip of the sinkhole nearer the rock shelf and tapped in more free pitons. He didn’t need to drive the L-shaped pitons deep, just enough to keep the mesh tautly in place when it was spread. Underneath, he heard the anxious shifting of baby bats clinging to the ceiling. He knew of but couldn’t hear the high-pitched distress calls of the babies, calls that were too weak and too far behind the hunting wave of bats. Paine attached two electrical wires to the rolled mesh and led them back to the battery under the rock shelf. He set the battery voltage at 300, turned it on long enough to listen to one tock, and switched it off. That part of the trap was set.