The Revelation (24 page)

"You .. . have to come here." Ralph's voice sounded strange.

"What's wrong?" He was scared. "What is it?"

"You have to come here. You too, Mac."

"Where are you?" Mac's voice sounded faint, far away.

"I'm behind the hill on the west side, probably straight across from the campsite."

Tim was already running. His feet sank in the mud and he tripped over an occasional rock or branch, but he was moving too fast for it to slow down his momentum. He found a deer trail leading up the side of the ravine, and he sprinted up the path. Branches whipped against his face. He was breathing heavily, both because of the exertion and the panic, but he forced himself to keep moving, despite the pain in his chest.

He topped the hill and saw, down below, the red flash of Ralph's jacket through the trees. From somewhere off to the side of him, Mac was yelling loudly for the rest of the search party to follow him. Tim listened, as he ran, for the telltale sound of slamming truck doors, but he heard nothing. The other searchers, sitting in their vehicles, probably with the windows up, could not hear Mac over the rain. The walkie-talkie crackled, and Mac's harried voice came through clearly. "I'm going to get everyone else. Hold on, we'll be right there."

Tim slipped in the mud and slid down the last twenty or thirty feet of the hill. He scrambled to his feet and ran over to where Ralph stood looking into the darkly clouded sky and breathing deeply. "What is it?" he demanded, grabbing Ralph's shoulder. "What did you find?"

Ralph looked at him, the rain dripping down his face looking almost like tears. He said nothing but pointed off to the right. Tim's gaze followed his finger, but he could see nothing at first. There was only a dead half-rotted log, a copse of small saplings, some ferns, and ...

Tim walked slowly forward, his heart thuddingpropulsively in his chest, feeling as though it would pound a hole through both his ribcage and his skin. On some of the light green ferns he could see trails of watery pink. He moved closer. Now there was a definite form lying in the midst of the ferns. A form wearing a T-shirt and jeans.

Matt? "Ohmygodohmygodohmygod..." He realized he was babbling, but he did nothing to stop himself. He didn't care. This close, he could see that the pink trails on the ferns had been formed by splattered blood watered down with rain. Darker blood had seeped into the mulch like ground cover and other, lower, sheltered plants were speckled with various hues of red. He bent next to the body, falling to one knee, praying, pleading wildly in his mind, Don't let it be Matt, please don't let it be Matt, as he tentatively touched the form.

The T-shirt gave under the pressure of his prodding finger and collapsed inwardly. There was nothing there. There was no back to the figure. He pushed his finger forward again and felt squishiness.

Squishiness and bone. The dirty whiteness of the T shirt began to disappear under a creeping soaking red.

The hair was blond, he noticed suddenly. Matt had black hair.

He dared not turn the body over, so he shifted his position, moving in front of it.

He closed his eyes immediately.

The figure's face had been eaten away. Ragged clumps of bitten, gnawed flesh hung in tattered patterns from an almost visible skull. An eye lolled limply on a torn optic nerve. Red-stained teeth grinned in a dead idiot's smile.

He stood up, opening his eyes only when he was once again on his feet.

He stared into the sky, trying to blot the horrible image from his mind, trying to cleanse his senses of the sight. Even in the rain, he could smell the thick, heavy, disgusting odor of blood. Taking a deep breath, he looked down again, checking out the rest of the body. Hands and feet were all gone. Although the backs of the jeans and T-shirt had been untouched, the fronts were ripped to shreds. All that was left of the body was a bare outline, a hollow shell.

He stepped back over the body and stopped before Ralph. He swallowed audibly. "Where are the rest of them?" he asked.

Ralph looked at him, his face pale. "I don't know. I didn't want to look."

There was the sound of voices and cracking twigs and branches as Mac led the rest of the searchers over the hill. Tim looked up, watching the others make their descent. Half of him wanted to search immediately for Matt's body, but the other half wanted to wait until other men could help him search, afraid of what he might find. He was sure Matt was dead after seeing that other body, but he dreaded the confirmation and wanted to put it off as long as possible.

One of the men on the hill stumbled and went down, slipping in the wet mud. Tim heard a disgusted "Jesus Christ!" and then, seconds later, a panicked "No! Please, God, no!"

"Ja-a-a-ack!" Ron Harrison's cry of animal torment cut through the whispered hissing of the rain and the mumbles of the other men like a knife throughJello . Jack. They had found the body of Jack Harrison.

Tim glanced instinctively back at the body couched in the ferns. That must be Wayne, then. Wayne Fisk.

But where was Matt?

He looked at Ralph and their eyes met. They did not have to climb up the hill to know what the other searchers had found. Neither of them said anything, but both moved in opposite directions, their eyes on the ground, searching for the last body. Matt's body.

Tim's muscles hurt, not from exhaustion but from tension. The muscles in his arms and legs were knotted with fear and anxiety, and he could feel his neck cords straining. His teeth were clenched against whatever he might find. He stared at the ground, moving slowly, looking behind every fern, every shrub, every fallen tree for any sign of blood or clothing. His shoe hit against a rock, almost tripping him, and he stopped to catch his balance, looking up Ahead, lying against a tree trunk, almost hidden by underbrush, he could see the bloody, pulpy remains of what had once been a body.

The body of his son.

He ran forward, screaming as he did so, hearing his cries echoed by Ralph and taken up by the men on the hill. He reached the tree and stopped, looking down, his arms dangling uselessly at his sides. He didn't know what to do. Some part of him, some primal fathering part of him, felt the need to cry and grieve and hug his son's dead body.

But there was no body to hug. What remained of Matt was a broken and twisted lump of bloody, almost gelatinous, flesh. There was no sign of head or hands or feet or anything recognizable. It looked as though his body had been torn apart, then turned inside out, then completely restructured. Only a tiny scrap of cloth remained of his clothing, and it was glued by blood to the tree trunk.

Tim looked away, staring down at his feet instead. He wanted to cry, but he could not. He was too horrified. For some reason, he could not conjure up Matt's image in his brain. When he tried to picture his son, only the bloody lump of flesh came to mind. He tried to force his brain to concentrate on Matt's good points, to remember the times they had had together, to somehow recover those moments that had been lost and would open the floodgates to his grief, but his senses were too shocked, his mind too numb.

From far off, behind him, he heard someone gagging, then retching.

His eye caught on a small footprint next to his foot. He stared at it. What the hell could it be? It looked almost like a baby's footprint. He looked closer, and saw that there were many such footprints in the open mud around the tree. Quite a few of the footprints had been either obscured or obliterated by the constant rainfall, but the deeper ones had remained and stood out sharply.

Ralph walked up behind him and clapped a sympathetic hand on his shoulder. "Sorry," he said. His voice was filled with genuine hurt, genuine understanding. He glanced toward Matt's body and looked instantly away.

Tim touched his arm and pointed at the footprints. "Look at that," he said.

There was a rustling movement in the ferns off to the right. Both men watched as something small scurried away from them, pushing ferns and grasses aside as it moved. Around them, other rustling noises sounded.

Tim felt an instinctual fear supersede his pain and disgust. The rain became suddenly heavier, its loudness drowning out the rustling noises in the underbrush. He turned to Ralph. "What do you think it is?" he asked.

Something grabbed his legs from behind and jerked, sending him sprawling. In the split second before his eyes were clawed out, he saw Ralph fall as well. Small creatures, creatures brown with mud, were hanging onto Ralph's legs and pulling him down. Others were darting out from under the ferns, babbling and cackling in some high-pitched alien tongue.

Then his eyes were gone and he was fighting blindly against his unseen attackers. His hands found flesh, soft flesh, and punched, grabbed, squeezed. Others were upon him now, small claws ripping and tearing, small mouths biting. He screamed in agony as he felt his legs being torn apart, the pain shooting up through his spinal cord and bolting through his brain in one shock-inducing instant.

Where were the other searchers? Couldn't they see what was happening?

The last thing he heard, before he lost consciousness for the last time, was the sound of other men screaming.

The rain had abated and the lightning had stopped while Gordon had been in the sheriff's office, but there was still a light mist in the air and the sky was darkly overcast. He pulled out of the parking lot and onto Main. Ahead of him, above the road, across a telephone line, two rain coated workers were stringing a large banner. He slowed down.

Through the wet windshield he could read the purple words written on the white cloth: "Thirtieth Annual Randall Rodeo Sept. 1, 2, 3."

The rodeo. He had forgotten that it was coming up. He and Marina had been planning to go this year. Gordon stared at the two men wrestling with the banner, both standing on the top rungs of twin tall ladders, as he passed between them. He wondered how many other people had forgotten about the rodeo this year.

The whole town's on edge, the sheriff had told him before he'd left.

Gordon passed the Valley National Bank building, now closed, and sped up as he passed the Circle K. By the time he hit the ravine on the other side of Gray's Meadow, he was doing well over sixty. He knew for a fact that the sheriff wasn't hiding behind bushes trying to catch speeders, and he had a feeling that handing out tickets wasn't high on his deputies' list of priorities right now either. Rounding a curve, he swerved to miss a small boulder that had fallen from the adjacent cliff onto the road during the storm.

"Shit," he said, turning the wheel sharply. He slowed down. He didn't want to kill himself.

By the time he pulled off on the small dirt road that led to their house, it was almost dark. He could see the warm comforting yellow lights of home through the irregularly spaced black shadows of the trees. He pulled to a stop and Marina, peeking out of the living room window, unlocked the front door. She met him on the porch. "So what happened?" she asked.

He looked down at her big brown eyes and put a hand protectively over her stomach. He wasn't sure he should tell her. Well, he should tell her, but he wasn't sure he wanted to. He didn't want to worry her unnecessarily. Though he didn't know if he believed everything Brother Elias had said, both the preacher and his theory scared the living hell out of him.

"Nothing," he said.

She looked up at him, forcing him to meet her eyes. "You're lying. I

can tell. What happened?"

"Nothing," he said.

"Bullshit."

Gordon smiled. "I never could fool you, could I?" He kissed her, but she pushed him away.

"Don't try to change the subject," she said.

Gordon assumed a look of unhappy resignation. "The sheriff doesn't think we have much of a case against Brother Elias," he lied. "He might do thirty days at the most, then walk." He met her eyes, feeling like a prick for not leveling with her, for not even being honest about his real reason for meeting with the sheriff.

Marina was outraged. "The man's crazy!" she exclaimed. "What does he have to do, kill me before he can be put away?" She shook her head in disbelief. "Jesus, I used to think the conservatives were idiots when they said our judicial system's gone to hell."

"I know," Gordon said sympathetically.

"That Weldon's an incompetent jerk. God, I hate that man."

Gordon said nothing. He held her close, kneading the muscles in her shoulders until he felt some of the tension drain out of them.

Marina pulled away from him. "Come on," she said. "Let's eat.

Dinner's been ready for a while now. I thought you'd be home sooner."

She led the way into the house. "You'd better enjoy these home-cooked meals while you can, you know. School's starting in a few weeks, and you're going to have to start helping around here again."

He followed her into the kitchen and sat down at the table while she pulled a casserole from the oven. She turned the oven off and used a spatula to dish out two equal portions of the casserole. "I don't know how that man ever rose past patrolman," she said, grabbing two wine glasses from the cupboard. "He doesn't know what the hell he's doing."