Sleepwalk (46 page)

Water was roaring from the lower spillway. Then a piece of concrete broke loose, propelled nearly a hundred feet out by the force of the water before it plunged into the stream below.

The stream itself was already beginning to grow into a river.

Now they heard what sounded like a series of explosions coming from within the dam.

But still none of them made a move to leave the dam, their eyes fixed on the hatchway where Jed would appear.

If he appeared at all.

*  *  *

Jed’s vision cleared slightly and he wiped the tears and blood from his eyes. His head was throbbing, and the roar from within the dam was hammering him with a force that was almost physical. But he struggled to his feet and once more began climbing upward.

The steps were trembling beneath his feet now, and he thought he could hear the rending sounds of metal being torn from metal. He pushed himself harder, scrabbling up the steps, his legs threatening to betray him at any moment.

And then, above him, he saw the hatch.

A surge of adrenaline coursed through his system and he sprang up the last few steps, throwing himself out of the hatchway and scrambling back to his feet even as he sprawled out on top of the dam.

He was almost blinded by the glare of the floodlights, but then, ahead of him, he saw three people. His grandfather was already starting toward him, followed by Peter Langston.

“No,” he yelled. Then, when he realized they couldn’t possibly hear him, he waved his arms frantically, gesturing to them to get off the dam.

Brown Eagle hesitated, and Jed began running. “It’s breaking up,” Jed yelled. “Let’s go!”

At last the others turned toward the south wall and began to run, Jed pounding after them, his legs burning in protest. Now they came to the end of the dam, where a narrow trail led upward, switchbacking across the face of the canyon all the way to the top, two hundred feet above.

They started up, but paused to look back.

Below them a fissure in the dam was climbing steadily upward as the pressure in the damaged flume continued to tear away at the walls of the chute. Suddenly there was a crashing sound, then a hole appeared in the dam as the turbine tore loose from its huge anchoring bolts and exploded through the concrete facing. Then the dam seemed to split, the center section breaking away.

Judith instinctively shrank back against the stone wall of the canyon, her eyes fixed on the spectacle below as if she were hypnotized.

The lights on the dam went out as the force of the lake exploded the structure, and a deafening roar issued forth as a wall of water, nearly two hundred feet high, began to move down the canyon.

“Climb!” Brown Eagle shouted into her ear. “That water will tear this whole wall apart. The path’s going to collapse under our feet.”

Judith still stood frozen until Brown Eagle slapped her across the face—not hard enough to hurt her, but with just enough force to snap her out of her trance.

Nodding dumbly, she started scrambling up the steep path, Brown Eagle behind her, followed by Peter and Jed.

Elsie Crampton was standing near the window in Cabin Five. On the floor the body of Lamar Walters still lay exactly as they had found it a few minutes ago when she’d led the two officers, Billy Clark and Dan Rogers, along the path from the main building of the sanitarium. Rogers, the blond one who didn’t look old enough to be a cop, had immediately checked the corpse for a
pulse, and though she hadn’t said anything, Elsie thought it was a waste of time. The man’s head was half cut off from his neck, and there was blood all over the place. Couldn’t have been more than a pint or two left in his body, from the look of things.

Billy Clark opened his notebook and began scribbling in it, asking Elsie questions every now and then. Elsie didn’t mind the questions, since it was already obvious they didn’t think she was involved in whatever had happened to Walters. Even sprawled out on the floor, his empty eyes staring up at the ceiling, he looked dangerous, and anyone could have seen right away that there was no way Elsie could have done this to him.

“What about Dr. Moreland?” Clark asked.

Elsie shrugged, ground out her cigarette on a plate on the lamp table, then immediately lit another. “I don’t think so,” she said finally. He’d be in enough trouble, and right now Elsie figured she’d better stick to the truth. “He wasn’t hardly here long enough, and he sure didn’t act like he’d done it. I mean, he wasn’t even paying any attention to me, and he sounded real upset when he told the other guy Walters was dead. Besides, Walters was a lot bigger than Moreland, and he sure wouldn’t have just stood there and let someone cut his throat. You ask me, it must have been at least two people, and they must have been waiting outside when I came out for the dinner tray.” She shuddered slightly. “Guess I’m lucky to be alive, huh?”

“Guess so,” Clark commented.

Then, in the distance, they both heard a sound. It was a low rumbling, almost like thunder. Elsie cocked her head, then looked out the window.

Her eyes widened as she gazed up the canyon, where a wall of water, towering up the chasm’s walls
and glinting strangely in the moonlight, was bearing down on them.

She uttered a choked scream and stepped backward. Now it was Clark who looked out the window, freezing as he instantly realized what had happened.

The wall of water was only a hundred yards away now, and even though a part of Billy Clark’s mind knew it was already too late, he still bellowed a warning to his partner. “The dam!”

Dan Rogers, startled, looked up just as the raging flood hit the cabin. The walls burst instantly, the roof collapsed, and all three occupants of the cabin were crushed beneath a maelstrom of rubble, part broken concrete from the dam itself, part trees that had been jerked up by their very roots as the deluge roared down the canyon. In a split second the cabin and its occupants had vanished into the flood.

In her own cabin, Reba Tucker had been sitting in her chair by the window all evening, staring out into the night, waiting for the next attack of the demons that always seemed to come in the darkness.

When the first faint rumblings of the raging torrent drifted down the canyon ahead of the flood itself, Reba wasn’t even aware of them. But as the noise built, it finally penetrated her failing consciousness, and in her lap, one of her hands twitched.

The rumbling rose to a thundering roar, and then Reba’s dull eyes perceived the furious wave bearing down on her, its spume glittering silver in the moonlight.

For Reba those last instants of her life passed slowly,
almost as if she were looking at old pictures, studying them one by one, savoring them.

She never understood precisely what had happened or knew how she was going to die.

But images burned into the remnants of her mind.

A tree, floating strangely, its roots up, its branches pointing toward the ground, flashed into her sight, then disappeared, lost forever in the roiling foam.

A block of concrete as big as the cabin suddenly rose up in front of her, and Reba gazed at it mutely.

It came closer, and then her window was filled by it, the foam suddenly gone.

She heard noises, worse noises than she’d ever heard during the times she’d been tortured here, and she felt the very floor shake beneath her feet.

Then the window exploded into her face, and her eyes, punctured by fragments of flying glass, failed her, but it didn’t really matter.

The huge mass of concrete, propelled by the force of millions of tons of water, crushed her beneath its weight then moved on, reducing the cabin to little more than fragments of flotsam churning in the melee.

It was all over in a matter of seconds.

Where before there had been a frame house and several small cabins scattered through a peaceful grove of cottonwood trees, there now was nothing.

Not a scrap of vegetation survived the scouring of the flood’s furious bore; not even a fragment of the building’s foundations remained.

All that was left was the naked rock bottom of the canyon, scraped clean of everything, its sandstone gouged deep with the scars of an assault that nature itself had never designed.

The water rushed on.

Jesus Hernandez began the last check of his work. The power was back on, and once more the concrete pad that supported the huge dish antenna was bathed in the white radiance of halogen floodlights. He examined the connections carefully, then finally nodded to Kruger. “Got it.”

Kruger, who had been pacing nervously, urging Hernandez to work faster, punched a button on the walkie-talkie and spoke to Kendall. “Tell them to start testing.”

Almost immediately the antenna came to life. The dish began to rotate, then tipped on its axis. “Okay,” Kruger said. “Looks like it’s good. It’s just a jury rig, but it should hold up till morning.”

In the control center Kendall felt a little of the tension drain out of his body. His eyes fixed on the screen of one of the computers as he quickly double-checked the codes once more, then he nodded to Stan Utley. “Send it,” he said.

Utley glanced at the display, then whistled softly.
“Jesus Christ—you’ll blow every one of them.” His gaze shifted uncertainly to Greg Moreland.

Moreland nodded curtly.

Utley hesitated, then shrugged his acceptance of the order. He made some adjustments to the controls of the transmitter, then prepared the machine to accept the codes from the computer. His finger hovered over the Enter key on his own computer and he looked questioningly at Kendall and Moreland one last time.

Both men nodded, and Utley pressed the button.

On the display screen numbers began flashing as the antenna above came to life and the first of the high-frequency waves radiated out over Borrego.

And then, abruptly, the lights went out. The cavern was plunged into total darkness.

Paul Kendall froze for a split second, then rage welled up in him. He groped in the darkness, then found the walkie-talkie. “What the hell’s going on?” he shouted. “We’ve lost power down here!”

On the rim of the canyon Otto Kruger felt the same anger as Paul Kendall when the power went out again. He was about to yell an order at Jesus Hernandez when he heard a low rumble, almost like an explosion, drifting down from the eastern end of the canyon. He frowned, puzzled, but as the walkie-talkie in his hand came alive and he heard Kendall’s voice—its fury evident despite the crackling of the transmission—he understood.

“The dam,” he breathed, almost to himself. His whole body tensed, then he pressed the transmitting button on his own instrument. “The dam!” he shouted. “I think it’s gone!”

The distant roar was getting louder now, and a moment later, as the wall of water hit a bend in the narrow
chasm and shot a plume high above the canyon’s rim, Kruger and his men saw it.

Churning out of the darkness, it roared down the canyon like a freight train gone out of control. The first enormous bore seemed almost like the head of some kind of reptilian monster, weaving back and forth across the canyon, smashing first against one wall and then the other. Behind it the body of the monster spread out to fill the canyon a hundred feet deep.

Trees, boulders, massive chunks of concrete churned on its surface, gouged up from the bottom by the force of the flood, only to sink once more, then reappear.

Kruger stared at the spectacle, every muscle in his body frozen by the sheer magnitude of it.

There was a bend in the canyon just above the antenna installation, and Jesus Hernandez, instinctively understanding what was about to happen, began to run, charging away from the edge of the chasm, stumbling through the sagebrush and juniper that spread across the plateau’s surface. By the time the bore struck, he was a hundred yards away, but the force of the cascade of water that welled up from the canyon, overflowing its walls, flattened him to the ground. Then, as it began its backwash, the flood tried to drag him with it.

His hands grappled along the ground, then closed on the lower branches of a thick juniper.

The water, its force spent, released him. He scrambled to his feet and looked back toward the antenna.

It had been reduced to a mass of twisted wreckage. The chain-link fence had been flattened, and the one truck that had been left after the other four men had gone down to cordon off the canyon’s mouth half an
hour earlier now lay on its side, twenty yards in from the canyon’s rim.

Of Otto Kruger there was no sign at all.

As Hernandez watched, the ground beneath his feet trembled, and suddenly fifty feet of the canyon’s rim disappeared, dropping away, crumbling into the roiling water below. The antenna, the pad upon which it sat, and the truck were all gone forever.

Jesus Hernandez, stunned, crossed himself, then fell to his knees and for the first time in years began to pray.

Already the roar of the flood’s charge down the canyon was beginning to fade into the distance.

In the cavern behind the old construction shack, Paul Kendall heard Otto Kruger’s last words, though for a moment the full meaning of them didn’t sink in. But a moment later, when he too heard the first ominous rumblings of the cataclysm that was hurtling toward him, he dropped the walkie-talkie and threw himself toward the door.

Kendall stumbled over a chair, lost his balance, and dropped to the floor. He scrambled to his feet, but felt disoriented in the pitch-blackness.

The roar was growing steadily, and panic began to overwhelm him. He groped in the darkness, his hands touching something hard.

A desk.

Which desk?

He didn’t know.

“Utley!” he yelled. “Greg! Where are you?”

There was no answer, but he could hear the other
men stumbling in the darkness, and tried to move toward the sounds.

Kendall’s knee struck something hard and he recoiled, then tried another direction.

Greg Moreland, groping his way through the dark, fumbled with something that felt like a door. Then fingers reached out of the darkness and touched him. A second later he felt hands close around his neck, and then he was hurled to the floor as someone else—Kendall? Stan Utley?—tried to jerk the door open.