They both told it, alternating segments, both clearly aware that the things they had seen and experienced upped the ante of belief considerably. They both ex-pressed frustration at their inability to articulate how awful the stone fragment in the lab! storage area had been, how powerfully it had affected them, and neither seemed to want to come out and say what had happened when the wolf (they agreed that that was what it had been, not a coyote) brought the fragment out of the lab and laid it before them. Ralph had an idea it was something sexual, although what could be so bad about that he didn’t know.
“Still a doubting Thomas?” Marinville asked Audrey when Steve and Cynthia had finished. He spoke mildly, as if he did not want her to feel threatened. Of course he doesn’t want her to feel threatened, Ralph thought. There’s only seven of us, he wants us all on the same team. And he’s really not too bad at it.
“I don’t know what I am.” She sounded dazed. “I don’t want to believe any of this shitjust considering it freaks me severely-but I can’t imagine why you’d lie.” She paused, then said thoughtfully: “Unless seeing those people hung up in Hernando’s Hideaway. . .
I don’t know, scared you so badly that. .
“That we started seeing things?” Steve asked.
She nodded. “The snakes you saw in the house-that at least makes sense of a sort. They feel this kind of weather coming as much as three days in advance sometimes, and go for any sheltered place. As for the rest.. . I don’t know. I’m a scientist, and I can’t see how-”
“Come on, lady, you’re like a kid pretending her mouth is stitched shut so she won’t have to eat the broccoli,” Cynthia said. “Everything we saw dovetails with what Mr. Marinville there saw before us, and Mary saw before him and the Carvers saw before them. Right down to the knocked-over piece of picket fence where Entragian greased the barber, or whoever he was. So quit the I’m-a- scientist crap for awhile. We’re all on the same page; you’re the one that’s on a different one.
“But I didn’t see any of these things!” Audrey almost wailed.
“What did you see?” Ralph asked. “Tell us.”
Audrey crossed her legs, tugged at the hem of her dress “I was camping. I had four days off, so I packed up Sally and headed north, into theCopperRange . It’s my favorite place inNevada .” Ralph thought she looked defensive as if she had taken a ribbing for this sort of behavior in the past.
Billingsley looked as if he had just wakened from a dream.. . one of having Audrey’s long legs wrapped around his scrawny old butt, perhaps. “Sally,” he said “How is Sally?”
Audrey gave him an uncomprehending look for a moment, then grinned like a girl.
“She’s fine.”
“Strain all better?”
“Yes, thanks. It was good liniment.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“What’re you talking about?” Marinville asked.
“I doctored her horse a year or so back,” Billingsley said. “That’s all.”
Ralph wasn’t sure he would let Billingsley work on his horse, if he had one; he wasn’t sure he would let Billingsley work on a stray cat.. But he supposed the vet might have been different a year ago. When you made drinking a career, twelve months could make a lot of changes. Few of them for the better.
“Getting Rattlesnake back on its feet has been pretty stressful,” she said. “Lately it’s been the switchover from rainbirds to emitters. A few eagles died-”
“A few?” Billingsley said. “Come now. I’m no tree hugger, but you can do better than that.”
“All right, about forty, in all. No big deal in terms of the species; there’s no shortage of eagles inNevada
. As you know, Doe. The greens know it, too, but they treat each dead eagle as if it were a boiled baby, just the same What it’s really about-and all it’s about-is trying to stop us from mining the copper. God, they make me so tired sometimes. They come out here in their perky little foreign cars, fifty pounds of American copper in each one, and tell us we’re earth-raping monsters. They-”
“Ma’am?” Steve said softly. “Pardon, but ain’t a one of us folks from Greenpeace.”
“Of course not. What I’m saying is that we all felt bad about the eagles-the hawks and the ravens too, for that matter-in spite of what the treehuggers say.” She looked around at them, as if to evaluate their impression of her honesty, then went on. “We leach copper out of the ground with sulfuric acid. The easiest way to apply it is with rainbirds-they look like big lawn-sprinklers. But rainbirds can leave pools.
The birds see them, come down to bathe and drink, then die. It’s not a nice death, either.”
“No,” Billingsley agreed, blinking at her with his watery eyes. “When it was gold they were taking out of China Pit and Desatoya Pit-back in the fifties-it was cyanide in the pools. Just as nasty. No greenie-treehuggers back then, though. Must have been nice for the company, eh, Miss Wyler?” He got up, went to the bar, poured himself a finger of whiskey, and swallowed it like medicine.
“Could I have one about the same?” Ralph asked.
“Yessir, I b’Iieve you could,” Billingstey said. He handed Ralph his drink, then set out more glasses. He offered warm soft drinks, but the others opted for spring- water, which he poured out of a plastic jug.
“We pulled the rainbirds and replaced them with distribution heads and emitters,”
Audrey said. “It’s a drip-system, more expensive than rainbirds-a lot-but the birds don’t get into the chemicals.”
“No,” Billingsley agreed. He poured himself another tot. This he drank more slowly, looking at Audrey’s legs again over the rim of his glass.
A problem?
Maybe not yet . . . but there could be, if steps weren’t taken.
The thing that looked like Ellen Carver sat behind the desk in the now-empty holding area, head up, eyes gleaming lustrously. Outside, the wind rose and fell, rose and fell.
From closer by came the pad-click of paws ascending the stairs. They stopped outside the door. There came a coughing growl. Then the door swung open, pushed by the snout of a cougar. She was big for a female-perhaps six feet from snout to haunches, with a thick, switching tail that added another three feet to her overall length.
As the cougar came through the door and into the holding area, slinking low to the board floor, her ears laid back against her wedge shaped skull, the thing cored into her head a little further, wanting to experience a bit of what the cougar was feeling as well as to draw her. The animal was frightened, sorting through the smells of the place and finding no comfort in any of them. It was a human den-place; but that was only part of her problem.
The cougar smelled a lot of trouble here. Gunpowder, for one thing; to the cougar, the smell of the fired guns was still sharp and acrid. Then there was the smell of fear, like a mixture of sweat and burned grass.
There was the smell of blood, too-coyote blood and human blood, mixed together. And there was the thing in the chair, looking down at her as she slunk toward it, not wanting to go but not able to stop. It looked like a human being but didn’t smell like one. It didn’t smell like anything the cougar had ever scented before. She crouched by its feet and voiced a low whining, mewing sound.
The thing in the coverall got out of the chair, dropped to Ellen Carver’s knees, lifted the cougar’s snout, and looked into the cougar’s eyes. It began to speak rapidly in that other language, the tongue of the unformed, telling the cougar where she must go, how she must wait, and what she must do when the time came. They were armed and would likely kill the animal, but she would do her job first.
As it spoke, Ellen’s nose began to trickle blood. It felt the blood, wiped it away. Blisters had begun to rise on Ellen’s cheeks and neck. Fucking yeast infection! Nothing more than that, at least to start with!
Why was it some women simply could not take care of themselves?
“All right,” it told the cougar. “Go on, now. Wait until it’s time. I’ll listen with you.”
The cougar made its whining, mewing sound again, licked with its rough tongue at the hand of the thing wearing Ellen Carver’s body, then turned and padded out of the room.
It resumed the chair and leaned back in it. It closed Ellen’s eyes and listened to the ceaseless rattle of sand against the windows, and let part of itself go with the animal.
“You had some downtime coming, you saddled up, and you went camping,” Steve said. “What then?”