“If we have to go in, I want to go in with Steve,” Cynthia said.
“Okay, fine,” Johnny said at once-it was as if he had been expecting this. “You and I can switch places.”
“Who put you in charge, anyway?” Mary asked.
Johnny turned on her like a snake, startling her into a precarious step backward. “Do you want to have a go?” he asked with a kind of dangerous good cheer. “Because if you do, lass, I’d be happy to turn it over to you. I asked for this no more than David did. So what do you think? Want to put-urn on Big Chiefs headdress?”
She shook her head, confused.
“Easy, boss,” Steve murmured.
“I’m easy,” Johnny said, but he wasn’t. He looked at David and his father, standing side by side, heads down, hands entwined, and wasn’t easy. He could barely believe the enormity of what he was allowing.
Could barely believe? Couldn’t believe at all, was more like it. How else could he go on, except with merciful incomprehension held before him like a shield? How could anyone?
“Want me to take those bags, Johnny?” Cynthia asked timidly. “You still sound pretty out of breath, and you look all in, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“I’ll be fine. It’s not far now. Is it, David?”
“No,” David said in a small, trembling voice. He appeared not to be just holding his father’s hand now but caressing it as a lover might do. He looked at Johnny with hopeless, pleading eyes. The eyes of someone who almost knows.
Johnny looked away, sick in his stomach, feeling simultaneously hot and cold. He met Steve’s bewildered, concerned eyes and tried to send him another message: Just hold him. When the time comes.
Out loud he said: “Give David the flashlight, Steve.”
For a moment he didn’t think Steve would do it. Then he pulled the flashlight out of his back pocket and
handed it over.
Johnny lifted his hand to the blackness of the shaft again. Toward the dead cold smell of old fire and the faint roaring sound from deep in the middle of the murdered mountain.
He listened for some comforting word from Terry, but Terry had split the scene. Maybe just as well.
“David?” His voice, trembling. “Will you light us on our way?”
“I don’t want to,’, David whispered. Then, pulling in a deep breath, he looked up at a sky in which the stars were just beginning to pale and screamed: “I don ‘t want to! Haven’t I done enough? Everything you asked? This isn’t fair! THIS ISN’T FAIR AND I DON’T WANT TO!”
The last four words came out in a desperate, throat- tearing shriek. Mary started forward.
Johnny grabbed her arm.
“Take your hand off me,” she said, and started forward again.
Johnny yanked her back again. “Be still.”
She subsided.
Johnny looked at David and silently raised his hand to the drift again.
David looked up at his father with tears running down his cheeks. “Go away, Dad. Go back to the truck.”
Ralph shook his head. “If you go in, I go in.”
“Don’t. I’m telling you. It won’t be good for you.”
Ralph simply stood his ground and looked patiently at his son.
David looked back up at him, then at Johnny’s out-stretched hand (a hand which now did not simply invite but demanded), and then turned and walked into the drift. He clicked on the light as he went, and Johnny saw motes dancing in its bright beam.., motes and something else.
Something that might have caused the heart of an old prospector to beat faster. A glint of gold, there and then gone.
Ralph followed David. Steve came next. The light moved in the boy’s hand, tracing first along a rock wall, then an ancient support with a trio of symbols carved into it. Some long-dead Chinese miner’s name, perhaps, or the name of his sweetheart, left far behind in the marsh- side huts -of Pc Yang-and then to the floor, where it picked out a litter of bones: cracked skulls and ribcages that curved like ghastly Cheshire cat grins. It shifted upward again and to the left. The gold-gleam came again, this time brighter and more defined.
“Hey, look out!” Cynthia cried. “Something’s in here with us!”
There was a fluttering explosion in the dark. It was a sound Johnny associated with his Connecticut childhood, pheasant exploding out of the underbrush and into the air as twilight drew down toward dark.
For a moment the smell of the mine was stronger, as unseen wings drove the ancient air against his face in pulses.
Mary screamed. The flashlight beam jagged upward at an angle, and for just one moment it pinpointed a nightmarish midair apparition, something with wings and glaring golden eyes and outstretched talons. It was David the eyes were glaring at, David it wanted.
“Look out!” Ralph yelled, and threw himself over David’s back, driving him down to the bone-littered floor of the shaft.
The flashlight fell from the boy’s hand as he went down, kicking up just enough light to be confusing.
Unclear shapes strove together in its reflected glow: David under his father, and the shadow of the eagle flexing and swelling above them both.
“Shoot it!” Cynthia screamed. “Steve, shoot it, it’s gonna tear his head off~”
Johnny grabbed the barrel of the .30-.06 as Steve brought it up. “No. A gunshot’ll bring the whole works down on top of us.”
The eagle screeched, wings battering Carver’s head.
Ralph tried to fend the bird off with his left hand. It seized one of his fingers in the hook of its beak and tore it off. And then its talons plunged into Ralph Carver’s face like strong fingers into dough.
“DADDY, NO!” David shrieked.
Steve shoved into the tangle of shadows, and when the side of his foot kicked the downed flashlight, Johnny was treated to a better view than he wanted of the bird with Ralph’s head in its grip. Its wings sent furious skirts of dust in motion from the floor and the old shaft walls. Ralph’s head wagged wildly from side to side, but his body covered David almost completely.
Steve drew the rifle back, meaning to swing it, and the butt cracked against the wall.
There wasn’t room. He jabbed it forward instead, like a lance. The eagle turned its gimlet gaze on him, talons shifting their grip on Ralph. Its wings were soft thunder in the closed space. Johnny saw Ralph’s finger jutting from the side of its beak. Steve jabbed forward again, this time catching the eagle squarely and knocking the finger out of the beak. Its head was driven back against the wall. Its talons flexed. One drove deeper into Ralph’s face. The other lifted, plunged into his neck, and ripped it open. The bird screamed, per-haps in rage, perhaps in triumph. Mary screamed with it.
“GOD, No!” David howled, his voice cracking. “OH GOD, PLEASE MAKE IT STOP
HURTING MY DADDY!”
This is hell, Johnny thought calmly, stepping forward and then kneeling. He seized the talon buried in Ralph’s throat. It was like grabbing some exotically ugly curio which had been upholstered in alligator-hide. He twisted it as hard as he could and heard a brittle tearing sound. Above him, Steve-drove forward with the stock of the .30-.06 again, slamming the eagle’s head against the rock side of the shaft. There was a crunch.
Awing battered down on Johnny’s head. It was like the buzzard in the parking lot all over again. Back to the future, he thought, let go of the talon in favor of the wing, and yanked.
The bird came toward him, squalling its ugly, ear-splitting cry, and Ralph came with it, pulled by the talon still buried in his cheek, temple, and orbit of his left eye. Johnny thought Ralph was either unconscious or already dead. He hoped he was already dead. David crawled out from under, face dazed, his shirt soaked with his father’s blood. In a moment he would seize the flashlight and plunge deeper into the mine, if they weren’t quick.
“Steve!” Johnny shouted, reaching blindly over his head and encircling the eagle’s back.
It plunged and twisted in his hold like the spine of a bucking bronco. “Steve, finish it!
Finish it!”
Steve drove the stock of the rifle into the bird’s gullet, tilting its shadowy head toward the ceiling. At that moment Mary darted forward. She seized the eagle’s neck and wrung it with bitter efficiency. There was a muffled crack, and suddenly the talon buried in Ralph’s face relaxed. David’s father fell to the floor of the mine, his forehead striking a ribcage and powdering it to dust.
David turned, saw his father lying motionless and face-down. His eyes cleared. He even nodded, as if to
say Pretty much what I expected, then bent to pick up the flashlight. It was only when Johnny grabbed him around the waist that his calm broke and he began to struggle.