Red Mountain (33 page)

“What the fuck is that about?” Will screamed. He wished he hadn’t used up his pistol on Marsh. Pinned in and nowhere to go but back down, it would be easy for their attackers to finish the job. Like shooting fish in a barrel..

****

Peggy lay on her side while Robert peeled away her jacket. Blood had already soaked all the way through. She was going into shock and her breath had become rapid. Robert took off his jacket and rolled it into a pillow. Peggy lifted her head and tried to speak.

“No baby, stay still,” Robert cooed as he lifted her back and shoved his jacket beneath her. For the few seconds her body was off the ground he’d glimpsed an immense pool of blood. He turned to look at Will and Connor. They could see in his face things were bad.

“What can I do, Robert?” Will asked.

Robert stared blankly outside the cave were the chopper paced the air.

“Nothing. There’s not going to be any time.”

Connor slid up close to his mother, choking back tears. He took one of her hands and placed it next to his flushed cheek and began to whisper to her.

“Mom. You can’t leave us now. We’ve been through too much. You promised me when this was all over we could go to the beach...”

Peggy didn’t move. He face was turning the color of ice.

She was dying…

****

It got quieter outside.

Will crawled out of the cave to see what was happening with the chopper. He saw a man connecting a line between the chopper and the sled, while another man finished tamping down something in the snow. Even in the wavering spotlight beam he could tell what it was.

Dynamite.

Once they have what they want they’ll start an avalanche to cover their tracks.

Will quickly scrambled back to the others.

“They’re going to blow the place up!”

He froze as he got close enough to see their faces.

Robert and the boy looked at him with vacant eyes. Peggy lay still on the ground next to them. Will didn’t even have the courage to ask if she was still alive.

CHAPTER 64

Robert could barely hear his friend’s warnings. It was as if Will’s voice was coming from miles away. At the moment Robert’s head was filled with the ghosts of dark-skinned old men with bone white beards explaining something to him in crude sign language. There was a riot of screams coming from a jungle filled with animals watching him in the dark, and poles stretching the curing faces of men next to a blazing fire.

He heard several voices chanting. But as he listened they changed to a gentle, sweet song.

Healing music...

Without questioning himself as to why, Robert shoveled up some snow with his hand and placed it on each of Peggy’s eyes. He then leaned down and kissed the wound where Peggy had been shot before dipping his finger tips in her blood and pressing them into his forehead to create a cluster of four wet dots. He took a knife he’d had hidden inside his boot and held it over Peggy’s chest. Will stared at him in shock.

“Jesus Robert. What are you doing?”

“Put out a hand,” Robert said in a voice that no one had ever heard before. It caused the hair on the back of their necks to rise. Will and Connor tried to resist, but an invisible force pulled each of their left hands over Peggy.

Robert slit his palm and the palms of the others. He gripped their hands in his and squeezed until Will and Connor begged that he’d let them go. Robert chanted softly, his mind stripping down the truths of life and death and especially love to their most simple elements, to ribbons of pure light weaving themselves in and out of space and time.

Their blood dripped down on Peggy’s wound until it seemed to slow and scab over. Robert stared closely, expecting fresh blood to erupt from beneath the newly formed crust but nothing happened. Then Peggy gasped for a breath of air and her eyelids moved and knocked away the snow Robert had laid there, reminding him of the wet cherry blossoms on the day he’d proposed to her. She shivered, and Robert wrapped her with her jacket and kissed her on the cheek.

Will and Connor sat back and stared.

“Is mom going to be okay?” Connor asked.

Robert turned his head and smiled. “I think she’s got a chance, son.”

Outside, they could hear the chopper’s engine starting up.

“Stay with her,” Robert said.

He got up and walked to the entrance of the cave. From below a shelf of ice he watched the chopper as it raised the sled up on the line. He stepped out from the shelter and into the open. Distant shouts soon followed and the rifleman in the chopper started firing again. Shards of ice spit up and cut Robert’s face, but as much as the shooter tried he was incapable of hitting him. Robert looked inward, traveling by his mind’s eye into the chopper where he saw the face of the man who’d shot Peggy in the back as well as the corrupt Sheriff who’d given the order.

He heard them laughing. Laughing over Marsh’s misfortune and the strangers below who had no idea what was headed their way. It wouldn’t be the first time people in the sheriff’s jurisdiction had become victims of some tragic accident, Robert knew. All it took was a small town where people kept their mouths shut and a corrupt sheriff could do just about anything he pleased.

Robert had just proven to himself he could heal.

Now it was time to exercise the opposite end of the power spectrum.

He wanted those men to pay…

Still standing out in the open with his head raised, he slapped his hands together in front of him like he was killing a mosquito. The chopper hovering above him suddenly coughed and thick black smoked poured out of its engine. He heard screams as the chopper fell toward the glacier, pulled into it even faster by the gold-laden sled. Robert felt as if a bolt of electricity was shooting through his body. In his mind’s eye he could see the horror on the men’s faces as they saw themselves dropping into a most certain inferno.

He remained still and watched. A few breathless moments passed before there was an enormous explosion and the sides of the crevasse caved in, bringing down with it the bundle of dynamite yet to be ignited. But just before he turned to avoid the impending explosion, Robert heard a voice speak to him from some distant place:

We may need to live in the dark when it is absolutely necessary, but we must always return to the house of light after we’ve completed what was needed…

He ran back to the cave. Nugget growled at him, but when he got closer to her he reached out and she nosed his hand cautiously. Something had changed since he’d left to take care of the chopper, in ways that he himself was unaware of. Peggy was sitting up now and when she glanced at his face he saw it there to, her fear of him. Only when he crinkled his eyes and smiled at her in his secret way with her could he be sure she realized who he was, that he was still the man she loved.

“Don’t worry baby, I’m still me,” he said to her softly. He lifted her up in his arms and the entire party hurried deeper into the cave before the second explosion brought down a thundering avalanche of snow.

CHAPTER 65

They were walking on the beach, looking at things left behind by a crashing high tide they’d heard while still in their beds early that morning.

Robert kept in front of Peggy and Connor so he could turn and watch the excitement on their faces as they played a game of who could find the most sand dollars. Nugget quickly caught on to what they were doing and began to swipe the shells off the sand before they could reach them.

“That was mine thief!” Connor yelled. Nugget looked up at him and crunched the shell between her teeth, then turned to go find another. Connor ran to keep up with her, laughing as they fought for the next prize. Peggy tried to distract Nugget with a throwing stick, but the dog seemed too intent on munching shells.

Without these wonderful beings in his life, Robert felt he could have easily given up. It was their love that had kept him from surrendering to the cold arms of the void. They were the buoys in the fog who continually reminded him of who he was, who kept him from drifting off course.

Together they’d survived another nightmare. After they were flown back to Portland, Robert spent a week in the hospital being treated for his injuries, where the doctors were only cautiously optimistic he’d be able to fight off life-threatening infections. His fever caused him to slip into coma and it was hit and miss for several days before he regained consciousness. And yet he still wasn’t completely free of trouble. The fact that a police officer stood outside his hospital room told Robert all he needed to know.

On the day the doctors released him, Robert was loaded into an unmarked county car and driven downtown to appear before a grand jury. After spending two days answering questions he was finally acquitted of murder and released from jail. Then the press swarmed in, and Robert and his family packed in the middle of the night and left for the coast.

CHAPTER 66

Some days were still harder than others, but they seemed to be growing fewer with every passing week. Although the wounds on his body had mostly healed, the scars were like fading roadmaps of where he’d been, and sometimes if Robert happened to stare at them too long in the shower or when he dressed he would be seized by a profound anxiety. Sometimes the fear his family might be in danger was so real that he would search frantically in the cabin or out onto the beach for his wife and son and he would only calm down once he’d made certain they hadn’t been stolen from him again.

But he was getting better. He was certain now the storm had gone back out to sea and died like it should have the first time, after he and Will had rescued Robert’s father in Mexico…

He hadn’t tried using any of his powers again and he didn’t even care if he still had them. Nothing could change the profound understanding he now had of the world, and yet it seemed like he’d had glimpses of it throughout his life—brief partings of the fabric separating a reality he had grown cynical of, to a recasting of that same reality in a light that renewed his sense of wonder and awe.

The first had been going off to college. Later it was having Peggy and Connor come into his life. And now it was the sea where he felt it the strongest, far away from any red mountains…

CHAPTER 67

Back when he lay in the ice shrine receiving the secret knowledge from an unsympathetic ghost named Charlie Maynard, he’d gone far back into the chain of power, hundreds of years before Oman’s great grandfather was even born. It wasn’t like a simple filmstrip playing in Robert’s head but more lifelike in its holographic completeness, for it included all of his senses as well. He could spend as long as he wished in each place he visited, even several lifetimes trying to learn all he could about what had been imparted to him against his will. Yet after all his careful searching for a way in which he could rid himself of it he still found nothing that could help him.

He learned how the power had always resided in the island where Maynard learned the ancient craft, even before the tribe he’d lived with for many years first wrecked upon its shore. In fact it went back to the days before the molten crust of the earth began to cool, to the time when creatures fell from the sky in a meteor-sized ball of flame and how they’d melted into the liquid rock that would one day form an island…

Who they were, he did not know. But the consensus amongst all the shamans who’d traveled this far was that they were powerful spirits of energy. Shiva-like in their ability to create and destroy, they were neither good nor evil, but the essence of nature so concentrated it had drawn together a body, then later a single body divided into many bodies—like a rose with a billion fine petals, each one formed against the other, and meant to one day scatter on solar winds. This rose had traveled a long way through the void to find earth, and the question as to whether it been released from the hand or talon of some cosmic being would remain unanswered. Had it been a gift or a curse to humanity all depended on how the power was used.

The original tribe that washed ashore found the island bountiful in food and fresh water, and it was several generations later before the hidden power of the island had seeped fully into their bloodstreams. By this time their community had grown into the size of a small village. Some members who possessed the power began to use it toward darker ends, especially when warding off outsiders or committing acts of revenge against their own.