Nightwing (30 page)

“I could be wrong. Want to stay here?”

“Together.” She fell in behind him.

As they stepped into the cave, black wings bolted over their heads. Youngman put his hand over Anne’s scream and they watched four crows climbing into the sky.

“You okay?”

“A little edgy.”

Youngman took the flashlight away from her.

“Stay here.”

He went in alone.

It was as cool as a tomb. Not uncomfortable, though. Just as Abner had described it so many times. The walls of dank, velvet-black shale that the Castillo priests had valued higher than any Hopi slaves. The ruts of overloaded carts. As Youngman went deeper he heard his footsteps resounding and muffled by the sweating walls. The entrance, and Anne, faded into a blur. Youngman swept the mine floor with his beam, looking for Paine. Nothing.

As he came to the end of the mine, a breeze tinged with ammonia drew by him. When he turned off his flashlight, a fainter light glowed on the end wall. The wall was a rotting blanket and the light was a hole. Youngman took one look before he ripped the blanket apart and stepped through.

He could see he was in a tremendous limestone cave lit by an exposed sinkhole in its ceiling. Youngman had to crane his neck to see all of the ceiling and everywhere he looked were bats so thick they seemed to hang in layers, and as one bat shifted all the bats around shifted so that their daytime languor was marked by constant ripples. Over the floor was a brackish pool of urine and feces. And there was the pueblo. And, beside the pool, a man clutching a red canister.

Youngman emerged from the mine ten minutes later dragging a rope. At the end of the rope, still locked together, were Paine and the canister. Paine’s red-headed scalp hung slightly askew, like a cap, over his raw forehead. Stripes of pitch marked his shredded clothes. In the daylight, he seemed out of place, bizarre as a nightmare. Grotesque and reeking of the ammonia. Youngman cut the wrist free and laid the dead man beside the cart wheel. Only then did he dare look at Anne.

“They’re here.” She was staring at the mine.

“Oh, yeah. The bats are here.”

He watched her start to fall apart and pull herself back together. The dead-white pallor of her face turned into tears of anger.

“How did it happen?”

“There’s a sinkhole over the cave. He fell in, tried to catch the rope and got his arm caught.” Youngman held up the frayed end of the rope. “Maybe the rope broke before the bats came back, maybe he didn’t feel a thing.”

Youngman doubted it. A good rope didn’t saw itself apart, not unless there was something at the other end struggling and twisting for a long time.

“The tank, he didn’t use it.” Anne wiped her eyes. “It’s the Cyanogas. We can use it for him. See, Youngman we’ll do what he was going to do.”

“No.”

“What do you mean?” Anne righted the canister. “He told us all about it. He said it was foolproof.”

“Anne.”

“We’ll do it his way. Just set the timer. It’s easy.”

“Anne,” he knelt beside the canister with her and slapped the timer on the valve. It spun around. “The fall broke it. It won’t work.”

“Then how, damn it! What’s your great idea? What did you bring to use?”

“Nothing, Anne. It’s all here.”

While her eyes followed him furiously, Youngman went to the Rover for a blanket, which he laid over Paine. The smell of ammonia didn’t only come from Paine any more, the mine was breathing it.

“You saw the bats.” Anne controlled herself.

“They’re in a big cave at the end of the mine.” Youngman nodded at Paine’s body. “He had a lot more gear in his pack than the canister when he started out, you said. I think I know what he was up to at the sinkhole.”

“Can we reach the bats, that’s all I want to know?”

“We can kill them. Isn’t that enough?”

Youngman climbed onto the roof of the truck, from which he saw a lava torso jutting from a cliff twenty feet above. He lassoed the torso.

“I’ll be back,” he called.

He pulled himself up the wall to the cliff, where he stopped to rest out of Anne’s sight. The narcotic datura was wearing off and his hands burned from the short climb. He bit off more of the root. Just enough to dull the pain, he hoped. When he’d licked his fingers with his dry tongue, he started scrambling up the dome of the cave.

Before he was halfway up the dome, he felt better, stronger. At the sinkhole’s edge, he found metal mesh rolled over pitons and ready to be spread. Electrical wires and a severed rope led to a rock ledge, where he discovered Paine’s battery and backpack of equipment. Youngman spread the mesh tight on the pitons, covering the hole, and started the battery going to electrify the mesh. From the backpack, he selected only the pick axe.

As he straightened up, the datura rushed to his head and he saw the sky become choked with clouds. All the clouds were red, spewing blood.

Youngman had been expecting something like that. He turned his back to the clouds and, his eyes down, worked his way to the road.

Anne was gone when he lowered himself onto the truck. She came out of the mine before he had a chance to call for her.

“There you are,” Youngman was relieved. “I blocked their way out of the sinkhole. Paine had everything set up.”

“I saw you. I went in the cave.”

“Okay, good. Then you saw the bats.”

“I saw the houses, too. Youngman, those tales you told me about an underground city, they weren’t just tales, were they?”

“Ruins of a pueblo, that’s all. The desert is full of them.”

“Not in a cave. And the story about that flaming pit. If we went on another hundred yards would we find that, too?”

“What would it matter? So we found some ruins. We came here to find the bats and we did. You’re not going to be scared of some old Indian witch stories.”

“It matters,” Anne said, “because you knew what was in there and you didn’t tell me. Do you believe in those stories? Do you?”

Youngman took a long time answering because he wanted to lie, it would have been such a comfort to lie, for her, for him. But Anne would hear the lie and despise him for it, as she should. So in the end, he didn’t answer her at all.

“We’re wasting time,” he said instead. “Get all the blankets you can find in the truck.”

They hung a new blanket from the crossbeam that divided the mine from the cave, not only to block the light of the flashlight but to muffle the sound of their work. While Anne held the flashlight, Youngman swung the pick axe into the mine wall.

“See this,” he picked up the first chunk of shale dislodged. “Saturated with oil. It’ll burn like charcoal if we get it hot enough.”

“We’re going to smoke them to death?”

“No. There’s an oil seep somewhere in the cave, I smelled it. If we hit the seep, we’ll get more than smoke.”

“That’s going to take an awful lot of shale.”

“That’s right.” Youngman dropped the rock on a blanket.

He dug the pick axe into the wall again. Again. And again. The shale was soft and absorbed the blows rather than split. But a small pile of glossy chunks accumulated on the blanket. The pile grew. Holding the flashlight so that its beam was a target for the axe, Anne felt her resentment breaking down under the blows. Youngman took his shirt off. He didn’t swing the axe as much as attack the wall with it. She watched the muscles of his arms and back jump with each stroke.

“You almost died two nights ago, Youngman. How can you do this now?”

“Well, hard labor’s a funny thing,” he said between swings. “You never forget how.”

The datura was working for him now. He was in control.

Anne took over with the axe while Youngman dragged the first blanket load of shale from the mine into the cave. By the angle of the light from the sinkhole, he could tell it was about two o’clock. He dragged the blanket across the cave floor to the pueblo ruins. His first step on a ladder rung splintered the entire ladder, but he was able to scale a mound of debris onto the remains of a plaza above the first-story houses. A vapor of dust swirled around his feet. In the curve of the wall, four more stories of ruins loomed over him. Youngman let the rocks spill from the blanket. A ring was what he needed, a solid ring of fire within the cave.

“Flea,”
one of the doors whispered to him.

Youngman stumbled down from the rubble. The bats ignored him.

He went on with the digging, deliberately concentrating on the task at hand. The ring would have a circumference of 150 feet and he’d need fourteen piles of shale about ten feet apart, each pile about a foot high. His body became covered with black dust striped by rivulets of sweat. The same dust Abner had used. When he looked down on his chest he saw himself painted in spirals.

After carrying three more piles to the ruins in the cave, he was on the point of collapse. While Anne went to the truck for the last bottle of beer, he choked down more datura.

A cold sweat of shock poured from him. Within his head, he felt the datura coalescing bright and hot, like a second brain.

“Let me do some of the work,” Anne offered when she returned. “You’re going to kill yourself at this rate.”

“We’re doing fine,” he said calmly.

“Youngman, let’s run. Get out of here while we can.”

Pain and feeling drained from his hands, and he took the beer.

“Just don’t go in the cave,” he said. “Even if I call you, don’t go in.”

He was done with the ruins. The next load of shale he dragged to the foot of the rubble, the sort of detritus of adobe and stones marked by an occasional pot shard that some people called history. The light from the sinkhole had swung high onto the plaza of the ruins, illuminating a standing tablet with the figure of a headless man. One corner of the stone tablet was broken off; it was the Fire Clan tablet stolen from the kiva of dead priests. Youngman was unsurprised until he started to gauge the time from the angle of the beam from the sinkhole, when he realized the tablet and the plaza were at the western end of the cave. The sun had moved to the east, backwards.

“Check the time on the truck clock,” he told Anne when he returned to the mine. “Don’t go by the sun, just the clock.”

“It’s six o’clock,” she reported a minute later. “But it’s very light.”

Ninety minutes to sunset.

“Take the blanket off Paine,” he said.

He filled two blankets for a double load before he went into the cave again, where he started to widen the circle of piles around the pool on the cave floor. So far, he still hadn’t seen any clear signs of the oil seep and he no longer smelled it. Overhead, the roof showed no more than a slow rousing of the bats, but he dumped the first pile as quietly as he could.

The second load of shale hissed out of the blanket as red sand. He felt the datura surge through his head.

“Flea. Flea, what are you doing? You have the datura. We can talk. You’re one of us. What are you doing now, Flea?”

The voice wasn’t Abner’s.

Youngman returned to the mine. Numbed, his body was starting to fail him and each blanket took longer to fill. The wounds on his hands were long since split open, making the axe hard to grip.

“Stop. There’s only an hour left,” Anne told him. “There must be enough shale in there.”

“Has to be a ring.”

“Why?”

He missed the wall and the force of his swing threw him against the shale. He fell on the blanket, blind until Anne wiped blood and sweat from his eyes.

“There’s a towel in the Rover. I’ll be back in a second.”

Alone in the mine, Youngman ate more datura and rubbed some into his hands. When Anne returned, he was hard at work again. The new cut on his brow had stopped bleeding.

“At least, let’s bring the Rover in here and use it to cart the shale,” she said. “The truck will fit.”

“It won’t go under the beam into the cave, not unless we let all the air out of the tires.”

“Then, let’s do it.”

“No.” Youngman continued slashing at the glow of her flashlight on the black wall. “You’re going to get out of here in a hurry. You don’t want to steer down that road on wheel rims.”

“You mean,
we’re
going to get out of here.”

Dragging the next two blanketloads, Youngman found the mine corridor becoming longer and narrower. His legs moved stiffly until he reached the cave, which was suffused by a cool, water-blue light.

Instead of shale piles, one great double serpentine covered the entire floor of the cave. The coils shifted with the lazy power of a huge snake, a snake without a head.

“I watched out for you, Flea. For her, too. For your sake. For the new world I’m making for you. That’s why I’m doing all of this. For you.”

I understand, Youngman thought.

One spiral of the serpentine uncurled and reached out for Youngman to draw him in.

“Let me show you the new world, Flea. Let me show you.”

I’m sorry, Youngman thought. It’s too late.

As the spiral coiled around him, he picked up the sharpest rock in the blanket and twisted its point into his bloody palm. He ground it into his hand, probing until the jagged point found the last neurons of pain, and then he clutched the rock tight in the open wound. The spiral receded and the whole length of the serpentine faded. He looked up through the blue mist to the ceiling of the cave, where a thousand hanging faces looked down.

Youngman emptied the blankets and hurried back to the mine. A wind followed and Anne’s flashlight went out, plunging them into darkness.

“It didn’t even dim,” she said. “What do we do now?”

“Bring the truck up to the mine entrance and turn on the headlights. Run them on the battery.”

In the glare of the headlights, Youngman carved out two more piles of shale. The axe became too heavy to lift and in full view of Anne, he lifted the last of the datura root to his mouth. She shouted at him from the Rover, but her voice echoed confusingly through the mine.

“Getting dark,” he finally understood.

The two piles of shale he dragged into the cave were the last, the ring was complete. The voice was silent, but the ceiling had changed. There was a steady simmering among the bats, waves of arousal and short flights from one part of the roof to the other. He could hear the “clicks” of their lower-pitched chatter.