Game Of Cages (2010) (12 page)

It looked like it was growing larger. Would it stop hunting me if it fed enough from the power pole? I didn't know what to do, so I jumped up and down and swung my arms, trying to keep my muscles warm for the next leg of the chase. All I was sure of was that I was giving Catherine extra time to prepare.

Then I imagined the predator growing large enough to split in two like a dividing cell. That thought scared the hell out of me.

Five quick cuts with the ghost knife on the nearest power pole made it topple--away from me, thank God--and snapped the power line. The blue arcs stopped popping under the predator. Dinner was over.

The floating storm didn't move for a couple of seconds. It bobbed up and down as if it was trying to puzzle out why the juice had stopped. I picked up a rotten hunk of branch and threw it.

The predator was too far away for me to hit it. The branch landed in the bushes near the base of the electric pole, and a sudden crack of red lightning blasted the ground at that spot. The sound startled and frightened me, and clumps of dirt and burning wood chips showered down over me.

The floating storm started in my direction. I turned and ran like hell toward the tree farm. The chase was back on.

There were no trees here, and the landscape between me and the tree farm was a wall of bramble and bush. I sprinted around the edges, hopping over downed trees in some places and pushing blindly through tall grass in others. My shadow began to shorten. Then I hit a rocky little stream and ran along it, picking up speed. I knew it was stupid to have my feet in water, but it was the only place I could run.

The stream disappeared into a drainage pipe. I scrambled up a dirt slope and ran straight into a chain-link fence.

With my ghost knife, I cut a hole in the chain link and pushed through. My shadow was short--too short. Behind me the creature was humming like a transformer, and I expected to feel lightning any moment. I sprinted out into the neat rows of trees. Flat ground. Hallelujah.

The old man had ordered the predator to patrol within the iron fence, but the chain link was made of steel. Obviously, he didn't know that the black iron fence along the road didn't ring the property. Or he didn't care. I had a moment's hope that the floating storm would turn back at the fence anyway, but that didn't happen. Damn. I kept running.

The trees themselves were just over two feet tall and offered no cover at all. I was glad. I needed to see.

My shadow slowly stretched out before me. I saw a small cluster of buildings way off to my right and angled toward them. There was a figure waving a long cloth back and forth over its head. Catherine.

I tried to put on extra speed, but I didn't have it. I didn't look back at the predator. I didn't need to. I could feel it back there like a high-tension wire, and I was flagging.

There were three buildings: One was a yellow farmhouse well off to the left. The others were a pair of big wooden barns, both painted red.

Catherine stopped waving her jacket at me, backed toward the red buildings, and ducked between them, making sure I'd seen where she'd gone. I was not far behind her.

"Through here!" Her voice came from the darkened doorway on the right. I staggered toward it just as the shadow of the other building swept over me. The floating storm was close behind.

I rushed into the darkness, barking my shin against something low and wooden. I tumbled onto my face, and the pain in my leg made me curse a blue streak. Something wet sloshed onto my leg.

The ground was packed earth and smelled of pine needles. I scrambled away from the doorway until I struck my head against something metal.

The barn lit up with a flickering electric red light.

I turned around. The floating storm had followed me to the doorway but had stopped at the entrance. It bobbed up and down, as though it didn't want to enter an enclosed space.

I glanced around, trying to see what Catherine had planned aside from the water-filled trough across the entrance, but the predator was too bright. I couldn't see into the shadows cast by the doorway.

I had not been this close to the floating storm before. It seemed to be swirling and churning from inside, like a sped-up lava lamp. The outside was a bluish-white cloud of brilliant light, but in the spaces where the swirling gases were thin or parted from one another, I could see a dark red color that swirled like blood in oil. In the center of that was a white-hot fire.

I laid my hand on an old, rusting truck. Would grounding myself lure it inside? Apparently not. To my left I saw a small pile of wooden disks. I grabbed one. It had been cut from the base of a pine trunk and was still sticky. I threw it at the floating storm like a discus. It struck almost dead center, but nothing came out the other side but a little burp of flames. So much for using my ghost knife.

"What are you waiting for?" I yelled. "Didn't the old man order you to kill me? You want to pose for a picture first?"

There was no way to tell whether it understood. I kept throwing hunks of wood at it. One grazed the bottom edge and landed, burning, on the ground outside. The others never made it all the way through.

After the sixth piece of wood, it ducked under the lintel and floated into the room. It must have decided I didn't have anything more dangerous than slices of Christmas trees.

I took the ghost knife from my pocket.

The shadows receded as the floating storm entered. Tucked back into the corner on the right, I saw Catherine against the wall. She had a long wooden pole in her hands.

As the predator moved by her, she dropped the pole and something heavy swung out of the ceiling--chains, it was chains. They fell against the floating storm's body and splashed into the water.

What happened next happened without a scream or a moan or any of the sounds you would expect from a living creature. It seemed to bleed light and heat into the hanging chains. The water below boiled. That lasted a few seconds until the creature's core had deformed into a teardrop shape as the power flowed out of it.

The glowing chains melted apart and dropped into the boiling trough below.

The predator flew erratically for a few seconds, seemingly disoriented. It was very much reduced in size, but for a split second I was sure that Catherine's trap would have killed it if I hadn't let it drink so much power from the electric lines. My fault, I thought. All my fault.

Then the water sprinklers turned on.

Steam blasted off it. The floating storm sank toward the ground and passed near the door on the left side. Sparks shot out of its body onto every metal object within ten feet--door handle, hinges, nails in the wood, even the still-glowing chains.

A wave of flame billowed up the wall. The predator struck a pair of metal trash barrels, releasing the last of its life and energy in one sudden blast. I was knocked flat near the rear wall, my ears ringing. Aside from the flickering firelight of the burning doorway, the room was dark.

The predator was dead.

Flames climbed the walls on either side of the door, and even the trough was on fire. I wouldn't be getting out that way. I couldn't see Catherine anywhere.

I hopped up onto a table saw and cut a circular slash in the wall above it with my ghost knife. The flames had already covered both side walls and had spread to the loose pine needles and sticky pitch on the ground. The sprinklers were not going to stop this fire.

I pushed the cut section and jumped out, running far away from the building. My scalded skin cooled quickly in the night air, and I knew that soon my wet clothes would be stealing body heat.

But I was alive. A predator had chased me halfway down a mountain, and I had survived.

Catherine came around the edge of the building, giving it a wide berth. We jogged toward each other.

"Thank you!" I said.

"No one has come out of the farmhouse," she said, ignoring me. Her expression was blank, but her hands were trembling. "Either they're really deep sleepers or there's no one home. Normally, I'd suggest we knock and ask for help, but since we just burned down their barn, I think we should get the hell out of here." She was still all business.

"Fine." About fifty yards away, I could see a line of streetlights. We headed for it. She took out her cellphone, scowled at it, and put it away. No reception.

"It looked bigger," she said.

"It was," I said. "While I was leading it away, I came to a power line--one that led to the mansion up on the hill, I think. It fed from that before I could stop it."

She didn't respond. The closer we got to the road, the stronger the wind became. I began to shiver.

"We need to get out of this wind," I said.

"Good idea," she snapped. "Let's chop down some trees and build a log cabin."

We didn't say anything else for a while.

On the road, we came to a sign that read WASHAWAY 2 MILES. We headed in that direction, jogging along the shoulder. The wind was strong at my back.

The road narrowed ahead, and the wide, gently sloping area where the trees had been planted gave way to steeper ground. People lived here, although we could only see their mailboxes and driveways.

A pair of headlights came up behind us. Catherine moved to wave the car down, but I grabbed her elbow and pulled her to the drainage ditch. We crouched behind a tree, watching.

Two black Yukons passed. Both had red-and-white cards in the front window. They were bidders, but which ones?

"Don't grab at me again," she hissed.

We kept going, moving more carefully now. We stayed off the road when we could and hid whenever we saw a pair of headlights. After about ten minutes, a fire truck came toward us from town, lights flashing. We ducked behind a thicket of blackberries just as it rounded the curve and drove by.

We started walking again. I was shivering and my legs were chafed from the drying mud on my pants. My ears were burning cold, and I squeezed my hands in my armpits to keep them warm. Still, I felt elated. I'd faced a predator and survived. Again.

I wanted to thank Catherine in a way that broke through her anger, but I couldn't see a way to do it. She made a point of staying several paces ahead of me, and she didn't want to chat. It was too bad, but it was her choice.

Still, there were things we had to talk about. "Hey," I called. "We need to get our story straight."

She was so used to working alone that it hadn't even occurred to her. We settled on a rough carjacking narrative. The barn fire would be a problem; there was no way to deny that we'd passed the building at the time it burned, but what should we say? Catherine wanted to claim we hadn't seen anything, but I'd never met a cop who would be satisfied with I don't know a thing about it.

In the end, I convinced her to say it had been fine when we passed it, but we'd looked back and seen the flames from down the road.

Traffic began to flow out of town toward us. Morning was coming. My elation over our victory began to wear thin, and my morale dropped. Catherine and I stopped hiding from traffic, and eventually a battered pickup pulled up beside us.

"What brings you folks out here?" the driver asked as she rolled down her window. She was in her sixties, with a thick head of wavy gray hair and a deep, no-nonsense voice.

"My car was stolen," Catherine said in a high, helpless voice. She had a personality for every occasion.

"Out here?" She sounded skeptical. "What'd they look like?"

"Like Chinese fellas," Catherine answered.

"If that don't beat ... Hold on. Lemme give you a ride into town."

She climbed out of the truck and grabbed a blue plastic tarp from the back. Catherine thanked her and said of course she wasn't offended to be asked to sit on the tarp, considering how muddy she was, of course not. The driver asked me to hop in back with Chuckles, a sleepy Rottweiler. I looked Chuckles over carefully first; he wasn't made of a blue streak and he wasn't even a little beautiful. I decided he wasn't Armand with a fake ID.

The driver introduced herself as Karlene, then climbed behind the wheel and did a U-turn.

Chuckles and I weren't all that interested in each other. I watched the houses go by--big farmhouses with crooked foundations and peeling paint. We crossed a bridge over a narrow river, and the lots became smaller. More of the houses were decorated with Christmas lights and lawn displays. I slumped down out of the wind. Chuckles leaned against me.

Eventually, we did another U-turn and stopped at the edge of a gravel path. Catherine opened her door, so I hopped out of the bed.

"Chuckles keep you warm?" Karlene asked.

"Other way around, I think."

"Hah! You have to watch out for him. There's a motel way other side of town, but these people are nicer. You can shower and call the sheriff here. And I'm in a hurry, so tell them--wait a minute." She glanced at a pickup driving down the street. "What's Phil doing driving back into town so early? With an empty load? Anyway"--she turned back to us--"you folks take care." She sped off.

At the top of the path was a huge rambling farmhouse on a tiny lot. "One moment," Catherine said. She took out her phone again and pressed the dial button. Then she held up a hand and moved far enough away that I couldn't hear what she said. She spoke a few words, then shut the phone. I might have thought she was bad-mouthing me to the society, but her message wasn't long enough.

We walked onto the porch. The sign by the door said this was the SUNRISE BED AND BREAKFAST. Catherine rang the bell, and a slender woman of about fifty let us in. The warm, dry air burned my face and ears.

The woman led us into a living room with a fire crackling in the fireplace and twinkly white lights on the mantel. Catherine told her we'd been carjacked.

She sized up the situation quickly. "We've only got one room left."

"We'll share, if we have to," Catherine said with the brisk efficiency of an executive.

"And no luggage, right?"

"Not anymore, except for my bag."

"Would you like to borrow some things to wear until the stores open?"

Catherine shook her head and looked at me. I almost said no out of habit. Then I looked down at my clothes. I wasn't in Chino anymore. I could accept an offer of help. I said: "Yes, thank you," but it was hard.