The Cutthroat Cannibals Page 4

  But as soon as the great beast had finished with its garbage collection, which took about five seconds, it focused its attention completely on the tree. It walked over on all fours, the great body rolling from side to side, so Stone could see the tremendous muscularity of the beast. Whoever said the animals were fat must have been insane. For the tree-sized predator looked like it had been taking body building courses, as sheets of muscle rippled through its legs and chest. And when it stopped, looked straight up, and opened its mouth with its rows of huge jagged teeth, Stone got a chance to see those too.

  The bear suddenly heaved itself up on its back legs with a big grunt of energy, and the musky stench of the animal suddenly filled Stone’s nostrils.

  “Back, back,” he screamed at the dog, which pulled itself up another six feet or so, scampering along a thick branch and into the higher needled foliage. Stone pulled himself up too, pushing off from the tree ledge with the stick. He found another little meeting point of two branches across from the pit bull, about seven feet above where he had been sitting. The bear seemed to take it all in stride. It set itself on its lower legs, shifted things around a little and then let out an ear-shattering roar.

  It fixed its bottomless eyes right on Stone’s as if to tell him, you can play all the tricks you want mister, but I’m going to eat you before the sun’s up.

  The massive right paw rose up through the branches pushing the smaller ones aside. Claws that looked a good eight inches long and sharp as icepicks at the tips, swept back and forth in the air just beneath Stone, catching the very bottom of the material of his pants. He was up a good fifteen feet and the bear was nearly able to reach him, as it soon would once it got hopping mad. Stone pulled his feet up as high as they would go, and catching one arm securely around a branch he slammed down with the green stick in his right hand. The shot was a good one and caught the grizzly square in the snout. And at that moment Martin Stone learned the one thing you can learn about fighting grizzly bears: go for their noses, the only vaguely vulnerable spot on the fur-coated beast, most of whose hide a spear couldn’t penetrate.

  Stone could see the shock in the great carnivore’s eyes the moment the end of the stick slammed into the nostrils. The bear’s eyes shot open as it let out a blood-curdling scream that promised pain and blood. Rivers of it. Then it really came after him. It was mad now. That much Stone had managed to accomplish. The huge head came snapping up out of the darkness. A fog of moonlight wafting down from the narrow sky that showed between the two towering mountain walls on each side of them suddenly lit up the grizzly, and Stone saw its gnashing jaws, saliva dripping out in torrents, the maddened demonic face growling in the middle of all that black fur.

  He slammed the stick down again with every bit of strength he had, and the beast reeled but stayed on its feet. Yet again Stone cracked down, trying to force the creature back, to force it to submit to his will. At last after six, seven, eight strikes, the brute dropped down to the dirt with a roar that shook the mountain stillness as it echoed for miles. Birds normally asleep flew up from nearby trees at the sound. Excaliber let out a high-pitched counter scream, letting the bastard know that his side had only just begun to fight.

  The bear walked around in a circle, shaking its head from side to side as if trying to clear its senses, like an old but formidable boxer a little punch-drunk from too many rounds. At last it seemed to get it together again and retreated about forty feet. Then all two thousand pounds of the animal came charging in like a cavalry of murder. Stone steadied himself with every bit of strength remaining in his taut body. His teeth gritted like a wild man’s as he timed the charging bear, holding his stick raised until the last possible second. The bear suddenly leaped up with all the strength of its thick hind legs. If a ball of fur as big as a small elephant can fly, then this black-pelted monstrosity was positively heading into orbit.

  And Stone was waiting there to meet him. As if the black snout of the grizzly was the pitch that would save the Series, Stone swung down with every ounce of will and remaining power in his torn and fractured flesh. The combined forces of the bear’s nearly unstoppable mass and the sharp focused stroke of the branch met with a bloody and noisy explosion. Stone felt the stick slammed out of his hand and he fell backward, barely catching himself on a thin branch before he went over and down onto the ground. He tensed himself waiting for the end, waiting for the crunch of those monster jaws. But nothing happened. And suddenly he heard the thing wailing up a storm as if it was having some kind of primal therapy session down below.

  Stone swiveled his body around and stared down. The bear’s whole face was mashed in, just a bloody porridge with more red pouring out every second. It didn’t seem too bent on dinner anymore. It didn’t seem bent on anything for that matter as it raced rapidly around about ten times in a tight little circle like a whirling dervish, and then shot forward in an absolutely straight line right toward the river, where it disappeared into the shadows of the trees. Stone heard splashing and then nothing.

  CHAPTER

  Four

  STONE and the dog spent the entire night up in the tree, not being one hundred per cent sure that the bear wasn’t about to make a reentry and a dramatic finale with their heads as trophies. Stone couldn’t sleep a wink as every chirp, every rustling in the branches or on the ground sent surges of adrenaline into his system in quantities that could be bottled. Stone was annoyed to see that after about half an hour of growling and making general bestial noises from the far side of the tree the dog fell sound asleep. With his four legs draped over the branch, a good sixteen feet off the ground, the pit bull looked to Stone’s fatigued eyes like nothing less than some mutant sloth, a genetic experiment that had gone terribly awry.

  With the taste of rotting fish on his lips, his ass freezing from the cold night, his leg burning with an electric fire, and assorted other complaints too numerous to list, Stone had just about had it. His brain felt as if it was ready to erupt into spouting pink tissue from the events of the last twelve hours. He felt that he was in the front car on the Cyclone roller coaster at Coney Island, only he just kept going down.

  At last as the sun began painting the ribbon of sky above the towering ridges of rock a dim blue, Stone allowed himself to feel just a trace of hope. With the dawn of a new day the eternal optimist in man bursts forth in absurd and ridiculous zeal as the first rays of light hit his retina and set his pineal and half a dozen other glands all working like mad. For if man wasn’t a shit-eyed optimist and wishful buffoon from the start he would have just turned around and walked back into his cave and sealed himself off forever the first time he ever saw what was awaiting him outside.

  So Martin Stone raised his head toward the crazy dawn speckled a hundred colors and vowed that he would make it. Fuck ’em all, he thought.

  “Come on, dog,” Stone yelled across the opposite branch. Not an eyelid stirred. “Dog, we’re on the road, we’re outa here, let’s go.” Not a quiver. Stone didn’t want to start out the day in a bad mood. He had already resolved to ignore his leg, ignore everything bad, and concentrate on the positive. But already he could feel his blood pressure rising, the adrenaline flowing, teeth starting to grind. And he hadn’t been up five minutes yet.

  “DOG!” Stone screamed, slamming out with the long green stick that had done so well with the grizzly the night before. The edge of the stick grazed the pit bull’s shoulder and that seemed to catch its attention. Enough to make it raise its head lazily to see what fool was messing with it. Once it saw that Stone had caught it looking up, it tried to pull its head back down again fast, pretending that it was actually asleep and that what had just happened, hadn’t.

  “Come on dog, don’t be an idiot. I’m a human, I’m smarter than you—I know you’re awake. Now move it. We gotta get going fast ’cause I don’t want to spend the day fending off that bear cub’s mother, brother, sister, or uncle. And if you weren’t so damned lazy you’d think about it and know that if we don’t split it
s dog jerky time.” Stone raised the stick again, being in no mood for canine bullshit this cold morning, the dew of the firs all around him dripping down onto his face and hands as if he was in a mini rain shower.

  The dog jumped up, or tried to, sliding around on its branch as it forgot for a moment that it was high up in a tree. It yelped, not wanting to get struck again, though Stone hadn’t made a scratch on its thick and nearly impervious hide. But in trying to avoid Stone’s “motivator,” the fighting canine lost its grip, and with its paws flailing like mad it slowly slid straight down the branch toward the lower junction. Letting out a shrill howl of hysteria, the animal built up speed as it shot down the six or so feet to the lower level. Its paws moved like pistons but not being quite equipped by nature for tree climbing, it just shot down the limb as if it was greased with oil. The dog slammed into the branch ledge and right across it, bolting out into the air. The pit bull kept swimming away on the insubstantial morning breeze as it shot out about eight feet. Then it looked down and saw that it was no longer traveling on tree.

  The animal let out just about the most plaintive sound Stone had ever heard, then it dropped straight down. The distance, fortunately for the dog, was only about nine feet and it too, as Stone had done, landed in some low bushes, which cushioned its fall. Once Stone saw that aside from a wounded pride Excaliber was okay, he couldn’t help but let out a smug laugh. The pit bull dragged itself from the greenery and looked up, giving Stone a mean scowl. It licked around at its legs and chest, making sure that everything was in working order. Seeing that it was, the pit bull sat down on its hindquarters and stared up at Stone as if asking what’s taking you so long, asshole?

  But having already taken the emergency exit once, Stone wasn’t in any hurry to do it again. With his right leg all swollen up now and hurting even more than it did the day before, he took it slow as he maneuvered himself down the branch, onto the ledge and then down the tree. Without the ladder, which he had kicked away when the bear came visiting, Stone had to hang out from the branch and let himself drop, falling about five feet to the ground. Ordinarily the drop would have been no problem, but due to his fractured leg an explosion of pain ripped through his thigh when he hit dirt. He collapsed straight onto the ground and lay there groaning for nearly a minute.

  When he finally managed to pull his mind back from the vat of pain it was flopping around in. Stone saw the pit bull staring at him. He swore the edges of its overtoothed mouth were curved back in something approximating a smirk. This whole avalanche experience had put the two of them in a fine fettle with each other.

  But Stone quickly saw that he had worse things to worry about than interpersonal relations between the human and animal species. The ground was getting wet, very wet, like a fucking swamp. As soon as he came out of his daze he realized that his legs and chest and face for that matter were wet. He looked down. The ground was oozing with water, like a sponge. He pushed himself up and glanced quickly around. The earth all around him was like that. The river was continuing to rise. It hadn’t abated at all. “Jesus Christ—the whole shoreline could be overrun,” Stone muttered to himself, starting to get depressed again. He again looked up at the towering wall of granite and shook his head from side to side. There was no way in hell he’d even get ten feet up the side of that thing.

  As he gathered his fallen walking stick, Stone saw that it was happening even faster than he had feared. A little wave of water came right across the ground from the river, sweeping toward them like an ocean. The dog jumped around in the inch-deep puddles that were quickly created. Stone made his way the fifty feet or so through the tree grove. He could see instantly as it came into view that the river was much rougher and higher than yesterday. Rains, snows further north, an old dam suddenly burst: something had happened. For the river was positively frothing today, foaming at the bit, like a horse, ten thousand horses, all galloping along, their heady white manes tossed back, their bubbling hooves pounding along with a thundering wet roar. And it was absolutely filled with debris—the corpses of numerous wildlife, birds, fish no longer swimming, and countless bushes and trees of every size, from tiny seedlings to great seventy- and eighty-foot giants that must have stood at the edges of the banks and had their roots weakened and undercut by the rushing currents. An armada of dead things.

  “Great,” Stone spat out through clenched teeth. The pain kept stabbing into him though he tried not to pay attention. There wasn’t a hell of a lot he could do except grit his teeth. In the unlikely event that he got out of all this he sure as hell was going to need a good orthodontist. But Stone knew the horrible truth was that his body would go way before his teeth would. They’d last a thousand years. If hundred-million-year-old dinosaur teeth had been dug up, it seemed likely that Martin Stone’s own jaws might well find their way into the far future. Perhaps they would end up in a museum on some distant planet. The thought didn’t give him much comfort, and he unconsciously felt around his choppers with his tongue to make sure they were still there.

  Stone’s brain whirred like a malfunctioning computer as he tried to figure out what the hell to do. He and the dog could stay here and climb the tallest tree they could find. But even then there were some giants coming downriver, and Stone had no guarantee that his particular tree would withstand them. And with the sky turning a dead silvery color and huge clouds rampaging down from Canada, it looked like there was going to be even more rain. As if the very skies were listening in on his most private fears, the clouds right above the long river canyon lit up with multiple volleys of lightning.

  Then the sky opened up. It just poured down as if the pipes of heaven had exploded. Within seconds Stone could hardly see. And it didn’t take a hell of a long time for the additional drops to add their power to the river. Within two minutes the water had swollen two inches. Within another minute another six. The cold liquid rushed in around Stone’s ankles and knees as he stood about twenty-five feet from the churning rapids of the river, already over a hundred and fifty feet wide and getting bigger and meaner by the minute.

  He heard a growl to his side and looked down to see that the pit bull had managed to snag an errant rainbow that had swum too close. He held it up toward Stone looking hopeful that perhaps they could stop and snack awhile.

  “Dog, you don’t have much sense for natural disasters, do you?” Stone said with a look of infinite disgust. “Spit it out,” he commanded as he made a sudden decision and started walking toward the river’s edge. “Because not only are you not eating, but we’re about to go for a little swim.” The dog spat out the fishy breakfast and trotted along at Stone’s heels. The water was up to its lower chest now so it moved in great jumping strides more like a kangaroo than a canine. Stone knew that he was insane, walking toward the inferno of raging water instead of away from it. But he also knew he didn’t have a chance if he stayed. Once he was cut off, up a tree, the waters would close in on him. This whole section of shoreline would be completely under in minutes at most. No, he was going to have to jump into the watery volcano, try to make his way downriver to a shallower slope that he could manage to climb up or at least sit it out on. And pray real hard.

  Stone cupped his hand over his eyes to try to keep out the sheets of rain and sighted out along the river as it rushed by him with all its multitudinous broken baggage. Even as he stood on the rocky shore the water rose, inch by inevitable inch. The rains—or the immediate cloudburst overhead at any rate—seemed to abate momentarily though upriver it poured down, adding tons of liquid to the flood every second. It was now or never. He could see a little better now that the downpour dropped to a mist. He searched frantically for any possible makeshift vessel he might take a little cruise on.

  There! Coming from around a bend in the river about a quarter mile up, an immense tree a good seventy feet long, perhaps six feet thick, covered with thick-leaved cushioned branches. It was perfect. Something that big would push its way right through other debris, maybe even be able to take
any rapids. Maybe.

  “Come on, dog, I got us reservations on the Queen Mary,” Stone said with a twisted smirk. He started into the water as the pit bull yowled and looked at him incredulously as if to say, “Wasn’t it just yesterday that I saved your damned ass and pulled you right up on this very shore—and now you want to dive back in again?” But Stone wasn’t arguing, just swimming. He was suddenly in it-in the thick of the flood. And it was a hell of a lot different being in it than it looked from the waterlogged shore. For one thing, he was going completely in the wrong direction from the fucking tree. The currents were unbelievable. For about ten seconds Stone found himself whirled around like a top looking for a rock wall to crash into.

  At last he found his bearings and managed to paddle back through the current at an angle heading toward the tree, now about twenty-five feet away but tearing by him. If he didn’t get there soon the sucker would be gone. Suddenly he saw the pit bull thirty feet downriver, paddling like a beaver on speed toward the great fallen spruce. If the little ball of overgrown teeth could make it, Martin Stone was not going to let down the human race. He clenched his jaw and swam with everything he had, churning away in the water with his lean muscled arms toward the tree. Stone’s wounded leg was almost useless, dragging in the water like an anchor of flesh. But he had been the captain of the swimming team when in college and his arms were strong. With his arms and his left leg, which could still kick, he was staying afloat.

  Okay asshole, this is the National Finals and you got ten feet to go to get the gold. So move it, boy, Stone commanded himself, remembering the way coach Williamson had screamed at him. He surged forward, his arms feeling as if they were cast of molten lead. And just as the log swept past him, just as it lunged forward on its unstoppable path downriver disappearing like the caboose on a rickety old train, Stone grabbed hold of a branch with his right arm. His hand tightened like a vise around it and though it bent slightly, being only about six feet long, it held. The momentum of the huge tree barreling by at a good twenty miles per hour caught him and snapped him suddenly along with it, nearly breaking his grip. Stone careened through the water as if he were waterskiing on his face, his body creating a furrow behind the thing. Reaching deep inside Stone found a scrap of energy to pull his other arm around and up, and after a few seconds he was able to reach forward and latch on to another small branch.