(1995) The Oath (52 page)

Tracy grabbed his hand. “I knew it! They put something in your beer. Come on. Try to get up!”

“I’m coming . . .” he said, not moving at all.

A pickup shot out of the tunnel and screeched to a halt, then another, then an old van, and then a station wagon. Doors flew open, men leapt out, guns appeared.

Harold Bly stood at the head of the crowd, a revolver in his hand. Beside him stood Doug Ellis; behind him, Elmer and Joe; over on the left, Andy Schuller and friends; on the right, Carl Ingfeldt and Kyle Figgin.

Tracy looked toward the stairway.

Carl and Kyle moved quickly, guns aimed, and cut her off. “Don’t try it,” Kyle said. “We’ll only have to shoot you.”

She hesitated, still holding Steve’s hand. Steve was getting weaker by the moment.

Bly ordered, “Drop that rifle or I’ll drop you right now!”

Steve had already dropped his shotgun simply because he couldn’t hold it any longer. He knew he was slipping away. Still, he could hear the roar of some kind of machine, but he didn’t know where it was coming from.

“Harold,” Tracy said, still holding her shotgun, “this won’t accomplish anything.”

“Sure, it will,” he replied. “You’re the ones who brought the dragon down on us. If you would have left things alone—”

“We’re trying to save you from the dragon! You can’t stop the dragon by killing us!”

“Oh, you’re going to save us, all right. By going first.”

Steve was slipping from consciousness. Now the ground was not only swaying under his feet, it was also quivering and shaking.

“Harold, what’s that?” Andy asked.

Steve heard the question but couldn’t make out the answer. He could barely raise his head, but he saw people moving around. Something was upsetting everybody.

“Drop that gun, Tracy!” Harold ordered again.

“Why should I?” she countered. “If you’re going to kill me anyway, then go ahead!”

“What the—” Carl yelled.

“Who’s that?” Andy wondered.

Another vehicle was approaching, the roar of its engine rumbling and echoing out of the barricaded tunnel behind Tracy and Steve. Whatever it was, it was making the ground shake.

Harold Bly was the first to catch a view of it over the barricade. “Why, that old fool!”

Wisps of black smoke curled out of the tunnel. Then the barricade broke open like a bursting dam, hitting the timbers, the scrap, and the diesel drums and pushing the debris right along in front of it. As Tracy dragged Steve out of the way and the mob scattered backward, the pile of debris and waste rolled over the patrol car like an ocean breaker and then carried it along, moving into the center of the loading yard.

Above that tumbling, clattering, dust-raising pile appeared the yellow driver’s cab of the county’s monstrous articulated loader, and at the wheel, cowboy hat squarely in place, sat Levi Cobb. He pushed that iron monster onward, the timbers cracking and dragging, the immense tires rumbling like an avalanche, the patrol car skidding sideways before the big front bucket, until he’d come between the crowd and the two people they were chasing. Then he halted, idled the throttle, and let the bucket down with a crunch. He stood in the cab, looked at the astounded group, and hollered, “All right now, you people know better than this!”

The ground seemed to pull Steve down. He collapsed, one ear in the dirt. With the other ear he could make out Levi hollering something and Harold Bly hollering something back. He could feel Tracy’s hand on his shoulder.

Levi was saying something . . . sounded like he was trying to talk the crowd out of all this . . .

A gunshot. Steve winced. Levi wasn’t talking anymore. Some people were cheering.

With all his remaining strength, Steve raised his head to see Levi slumped over the wheel of the loader and Harold Bly just lowering his revolver, a cold hatred in his eyes.

More cheers.

Tracy let go of his shoulder. He heard her running.

Then everything went black.

EIGHTEEN

PURSUED

E
VERYTHING
HURT
. Somebody must have beat him up. Maybe he’d fallen from a building or tumbled down a rocky cliff. If he could just wake up a little more, Steve thought, maybe he could locate the arms, fingers, legs, and toes that seemed to be reporting all this pain.

Now more reports came in. His head reported a hangover. His shoulders and then his arms started reporting aches and cramps from immobility. And there was his chest again, still aching, still burning. He began to remember the tavern, the beer he drank, the chase through town—and gunfire. Levi. Tracy.

So the nightmare wasn’t over. He’d been drugged. While drugged and delirious he’d had dreams about being far from Hyde Valley, at work in his normal, everyday, safe little world: the university, his classes, his research. He even dreamed about safer activities like chasing and tagging sweet, innocent grizzly bears.

He forced his eyes open and saw the ground only inches beyond his nose. Tall grass. A few weeds. Everything was blurry, but he concentrated on getting his eyes to focus.

Ouch! Now his wrists were protesting.

He realized they were behind him. Then he realized they were going to stay there. They were bound. He curled his fingers around to feel what it was that held them.

It was a chain. A cold, hard, circulation-stopping chain.

He was half-sitting, half-lying on the ground. When he tried to move, his muscles punished him for the idea. He must have been like this for quite some time, he thought.

He pushed with his feet—at least they were free—so he could get his posterior directly beneath the rest of him, and then, inch by inch, his back against some huge object, he managed to sit upright.

The world continued to come into focus, and the ground grew steady as his mind cleared.

He saw that he was sitting in tall grass, surrounded by weathered, teetering ruins. His heart sank as he realized where he was. I’ve come full circle, he thought. I’m back at ground zero.

He was sitting chained in the center of Hyde Hall. This big object at his back had to be the rock he’d sat on that other night. Well, now he was chained to it, and it didn’t take him long to guess why.

I’m going to be a peace offering to the dragon. Harold Bly was acting in the grand tradition of Benjamin Hyde: Give the people a scapegoat; destroy the messenger, bury the memory, and the trouble will go away.

Yeah, I’ll go away, all right. Without a trace. No shots fired, no witnesses, no body, no evidence. The outside world will think a bear ate me.

How handy.

There had to be a way out of here, he thought. After scanning the area to make sure his captors weren’t around, Steve pulled against the chains, then eased back to see how much slack he could give himself. There was virtually no slack. He moved sideways, then tried lifting himself and his bonds up over the rock. It didn’t work.

Where was Tracy? he wondered. And Levi? Were they dead? Were they chained somewhere? He strained and searched all around one more time, but didn’t see or hear anything.

Quietly he called, “Tracy!” No answer. “Tracy!”

There was no answer but a breeze through the towering cottonwoods and the lazy rush of the river.

So when should he expect the dragon? He tried to recall any incident when the dragon attacked in daylight. Cliff was killed at night, so was Maggie, and it was the same with Vic and Charlie. Steve noted the position of the sun. If the dragon preferred hunting at night, there could be several hours yet to go before any action.

Then again, the dragon hadn’t minded playing hide-and-seek with him during the afternoon up on Saddlehorse.

The final conclusion was, the dragon would do whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted.

How comforting.

A MILE SOUTH
of Hyde River, just above a wide heap of mine tailings near the river’s edge, some rotting planks were suddenly kicked out and away from a tight opening in the rock.

Tracy, her face and uniform muddied from a long crawl, wriggled through the opening she’d made and tumbled into the brush now obscuring the old tunnel. She righted herself, staying concealed in the bushes, and then looked up and down the Hyde River Road just across the river. No one in sight.

Well. She had made out like a bandit. This old tunnel had gotten a bit tighter since she was a kid and the entrance had all but disappeared behind new growth, but it was still there, just as she remembered it.

Now to get down the river to the Stewarts’ ranch before some of her childhood playmates, now her pursuers, also remembered it.

STEVE HAD
been sitting there forever and wasn’t sure he could trust his perceptions. Was that just the breeze he heard behind him, or was someone—or something—coming through the tall grass?

He stilled his breathing and listened carefully for the kind of slinking, slithering sounds he’d come to know up on Saddlehorse. There it was again! It could have been footsteps, but he couldn’t be sure. Whatever it was, it was getting closer.

Then, from a different direction, he heard another sound. This sound rose and fell, stopped and started, like something moving as light as mist over the ground. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

He knew the sound—it was the slow, steady, incredibly light touch of the dragon’s belly slithering over the terrain. Frantically, he scanned the trees, the brush, the tall grass. That thing would try to hide itself, but by now he knew what to look for.

He thought of praying. He resisted the idea. Who was there to pray to?

“God help me,” crossed his lips anyway.

He relentlessly scanned the terrain in front of him, the old ruins, the scraggly trees—

The eyes appeared first. There they were, just like that, suspended in space in a small tree at the opposite end of Hyde Hall. It was as if nature itself had sprouted eyes and was looking down at him.

Their eyes met and then Steve winced, even cried out as the wound over his heart began to burn. Psychosomatic reaction, he thought. Power of suggestion . . .

We’re linked! He recoiled in horror at that realization. We’re linked.

That thing was digging into his heart, his soul, and he was totally helpless. Steve broke out in a cold sweat.

The eyes moved slightly as the head turned. Steve could discern the shape of the head, horns, and neck emerging from the forested background.

A red tongue, long, forked, and wet, whipped about like a snake in midair and then vanished again.

“Oh, God . . .” This time the words came easily, though his voice was shaking. “Oh, God, if you’re there, help me.”

A low bush just inside Hyde Hall’s foundation flattened. The foundation wall rippled as the shape of an elongated, lizardlike foot passed in front of it.

Then another foot.

Steve could smell the thing now, an all too familiar smell of death, of rotting meat. Just like Maggie. And Charlie.

This time the dragon wasn’t going to let him go.

“God, help me!” Steve cried.

Then he heard a sound behind him. A stumbling, a staggering, then a body falling in the grass.

The dragon’s scales fell out of sync with the background. They flashed, they scrambled, the colors raced and flickered like a Las Vegas display gone mad. Then the camouflage broke down, and Steve could clearly see the dragon was right there, right in front of him, the golden eyes locked on whatever was making the noise behind him.

Then, loud enough to spike Steve’s terror, a familiar, gruff voice hollered, “GO ON! GIT! GET OUT OF HERE!”

Suddenly all Steve could see from one side to the other were wings, flashing silver at first, then fading quickly to the sky’s blue. A blast of wind hit him like a wall, and he turned his face away, his eyes shut.

He could hear the dragon’s wings pounding the air with powerful strokes. When he opened his eyes, the tops of the cottonwoods were still swaying and fluttering from turbulence.

But the beast was gone.

It was gone! Steve thought. I’m alive. What a feeling! Right now even the pain in his wrists, his arms, his shoulders, and yes, his chest, was welcome.

There is a God, he thought as he released a held breath.

“Levi!” Steve called over his shoulder to the man who had just saved his life.

“Yeah!” Levi hollered back.

He could hear the big man struggling as he made his way across Hyde Hall. His breathing was labored, and Steve heard him groan, as if in pain. It didn’t sound good.

“Levi, are you all right?”

“No, I’m not all right,” came the impatient reply.

Steve heard Levi take a few more steps and finally caught sight of him over his left shoulder.

A few more steps, and Levi collapsed to the ground right in front of him.

Levi’s shirt was soaked in blood. He lay there a moment just breathing, almost weeping from the pain. In one hand he carried a gigantic pair of bolt cutters.

Now the scene at the mining company came back to Steve. Levi had been shot.

Despite the pain, the big mechanic hadn’t given up on getting his message across. “Is any of this sinking in yet?”

“It—it was afraid of you,” Steve stammered.

“And Evelyn.” Levi stopped to breathe and gain some strength. Then he started crawling toward Steve with the bolt cutters. “And so the townfolk don’t care much for us.” He fell to the ground again, weak and gasping. “They thought I was dead, and so did I. But I guess God tricked ’em. They all ran off and just left me there.”

“How did you know I’d be here?”

“They were gonna sacrifice somebody. The dragon won’t take me, and Tracy got away, so—”

“She got away?”

Levi pulled himself over to the rock and started groping about with the bolt cutters. He was in agony just moving his arms. “Ran. Just ran for all she was worth. Ran out through the hole I busted through with the loader.”

He got the cutters’ jaws around one of the links and bore down on the long handles. There was a snap.

Steve tugged.

“Hold still now,” Levi instructed, “I only got half of it.”

Steve held still. “How badly are you wounded?”