Blind Panic Read online

  The Emperors of IT, they called themselves. They had all joined Tiger on the same day, after a company recruitment drive two summers ago, and they had become inseparable—drinking too much beer together, going to ballgames together, playing stupid practical jokes together.

  They would all meet the same fate together, too. From the moment they arrived at the Pit River Recreation Area, the Emperors of IT would have less than seven hours before they would be struck by tragedy.

  Just after three in the afternoon, the clouds began to fragment and the sun started to shine. They climbed out of the Winnebago and walked to the river’s edge. Remo picked up pebbles and skipped them across the water. Charlie tried to copy him, but all his pebbles dropped into the river with a single plop.

  Only a half mile to the west, the ground rose to a high volcanic precipice dotted with conifers, and the Pit River was forced to rush through a narrow ravine. By the recreation area, however, it was shallow and quiet, with sparkling rock pools, and ripples, and swampy banks where bulrushes nodded.

  The air was clean and sharp and aromatic with pine, and the marsh wrens were rattling and buzzing and trilling to celebrate the passing of the storm. Even Cayley, as she came balancing across the boulders like a tightrope walker, said, “This is so beautiful that I can’t believe it. It’s better even than Bambi.“

  Charlie plopped another pebble into the water. “I thought you hated nature. I thought it ‘majorly sucked.’”

  “Not all the time. I don’t mind it when it’s like this. You know, when it’s behaving itself.”

  “That’s the whole point about nature,” said Mickey. He was hunkered down beside his fishing bag, sorting through his reels and his lures. “Nature never behaves itself. That’s why it’s called, like, ‘nature.’”

  Charlie leaned over his shoulder and picked up a fly. “What do you reckon for this stretch of the river? Stonefly nymphs? Or coppertails?”

  “I guess either. Or black midge pupae, maybe. You have to be careful which pools you choose, that’s all, or you wind up with nothing but squawfish. Did you know that a squawfish can digest another fish as fast as it can swallow it?”

  “Sounds like Charlie and submarine sandwiches,” said Remo, and twisted open another bottle of Michelob Amber.

  “Hey, Remo! You no fish?”

  “Nope. I’m going to treat myself to another brew and enhance my tan. There’s plenty of time for fishing tomorrow.”

  Mickey pulled on his green felt-tip waders and sloshed out into the middle of the river, while Remo and Charlie and Cayley sat on the rocks and watched him. As the sun sank closer to the edge of the rimrock, the surface of the water glittered like broken glass, and all they could see was Mickey’s silhouette as he cast his line across the ripples. There was no sound except for the gurgling of the river and the zizz of Mickey’s reel as he paid out more line.

  After a while, Cayley said, “It’s beautiful and everything. But it’s so darn quiet. At least when you watch those nature programs, they have music.”

  Charlie shook his head in amazement. “She’s on a fishing trip, out in the wilderness, hundreds of miles from anyplace at all, and she wants a sound track.“

  “So?” Cayley retorted. “A sound track helps you to understand what’s going on.”

  “Oh, you mean like tinkly harp music, so you know that it’s a river, and loud trumpety music, so you know that it’s a real high rock?”

  “You’re such a scream,” said Cayley. She teetered across to the Winnebago and came back a few minutes later with her portable stereo and a flowery foam cushion. She put on a trance track by Duke of Motion and lay back on one of the boulders, with her pink sunglasses on top of her head, basking in the last warmth of the afternoon sun. So now they had the river gurgling, and Mickey’s reel zizzing, and the endless tikka-ti-tikka-ti-tikka of Cayley’s music.

  Mickey screamed out, “Take a look at this, guys! Moby Fricking Dick!” He was holding up a thrashing brown trout, at least eighteen inches long.

  Remo held up his beer bottle in salute. “You the man, Mickey! Lord of the Flies!” Mickey carefully unhooked the fish and let it slide back into the river.

  The sun burned its way into the top of the rimrock. The sky turned lurid orange, and the temperature began to drop. Mickey came splashing in from the river and pulled off his waders. “You just have to be careful, man. The bottom is so darned slippery, it’s like trying to walk on bowling balls covered in snot.”

  Charlie collected armfuls of dry brush and built a circular hearth out of small boulders. He flicked his Zippo, and the brush crackled into life immediately, so that sparks whirled across the river like fireflies.

  “Anyone for wieners?” he asked once the fire was burning up hot.

  “Absolutely,” said Remo. “And bring out those chicken legs, too, will you? And lots more beer. It’s like we’re suffering some kind of a Michelob drought out here.”

  “Is that all, O master?”

  “No. Bring out those cheesy Doritos, and those giant pretzels, and those knobbly jalapeño things.”

  “Of course, O master. A balanced diet is so important, don’t you think?”

  As Charlie climbed the steps into the Winnebago, they heard a deep, hollow roar, like half a ton of coal being emptied down a chute.

  “What was that?” asked Cayley, sitting up straight.

  “Mountain lion, probably,” said Remo. “They usually start prowling around this time in the evening.”

  “Oh my God. Are they dangerous?”

  “Well, sure, they’re dangerous. But they don’t usually attack humans. Not unless they’re provoked, anyhow.”

  “Don’t you think we’d better go inside?”

  “No, it’s okay. Mountain lions don’t like fire, and I’ll bet you fifty dollars they have a serious aversion to trance music, too, and psychedelic shirts. The only time they’ll jump on you is if you act chickenshit and try to run away from them.”

  “Maybe you ought to go get your gun.”

  “Cayley, for Christ’s sake, we’ll be fine. I know it sounded close, but that lion is probably more than a mile away.”

  “All the same.”

  “Okay,” Remo said, relenting. He went back to the Winnebago and returned with the Remington 700 hunting rifle that he had borrowed from his uncle. He slid back the bolt to check that there was a round in the chamber and it was ready to fire, and then he propped it against the boulder next to Cayley. “You happy now?”

  “You didn’t tell me there were going to be mountain lions.”

  “We’re in the mountains, babe. The mountains. What did you expect, sharks?”

  “You still didn’t tell me. I wouldn’t have come if you’d told me.”

  “If I’d told you there were going to be mosquitoes, you wouldn’t have come, either.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I hate mosquitoes. And I don’t like sharks, either.”

  Remo put his arm around her and held her tight. “You don’t have to worry. We’re safe; we’re going to be fine. When you hear a helicopter fly over your apartment building, you’re never worried that it’s going to crash on top of you, are you?”

  “Yes.”

  Remo looked over Cayley’s shoulder at Mickey and Charlie and made a face that meant “girls—what can you do?“ Mickey shook his head and stifled a laugh, and Charlie waved a wiener at him.

  “Come on, sweet cheeks,” said Remo. “Sit down and help yourself to something to eat. There’s nothing to be scared of.”

  They sat around the fire. Charlie had heaped even more brushwood on it now, and it was burning up fiercely—so fiercely that it scorched their faces. He had impaled a dozen wieners on sticks, and they were sizzling and popping, and he had arranged eight chicken drumsticks on a wire rack from the Winnebago’s galley.

  They passed around bags of taco chips and pretzels, and swigged Michelob Amber out of the bottle, and Remo said, “The Emperors of IT! This is the life, dudes and dudette! As Teddy
Roosevelt once said, give me the sunset and give me the sausages, and you can keep your palaces and your peacock pies!”

  “Teddy Roosevelt said that?”

  “Well, he would have done if he had been here.”

  “Yeah, but he’s not, is he?” Charlie retorted. “For starters, you forgot to invite him.”

  The sky grew intensely black and thousands of stars came out; they could see Andromeda and Cassiopeia. They traded jokes and campfire stories, and Remo passed around a large, untidy joint.

  Charlie was telling a horror story. “So, it’s pitch-dark, right? And the guy stumbles back into bed. But after a couple of minutes he feels something tickling him. He tells the woman to stop it, but the tickling goes on. He feels a tickle on his back and a tickle on his neck. He even feels a tickle right inside his ear. He hates being tickled, and in the end he loses his temper and he reaches across and switches on the bedside lamp. And there she is, lying close beside him, but she’s a heaving mass of white maggots. Wrong bedroom. Wrong sister. He’s climbed into bed with the dead one instead.”

  “That is so gross,” Cayley protested.

  “I know. But it gets even grosser than that. He screams, and he jumps out of bed. He knocks the lamp over, so that he can’t see where he’s going. He’s groping around in a panic, but after a while he finds a door, and a doorknob.”

  He stopped abruptly and frowned, and then he raised his left hand to shield his eyes from the glare of the fire.

  “He finds a door and a doorknob,” Cayley prompted him. “What then?”

  But Charlie kept on frowning into the darkness.

  “What is it, man?” Remo asked him.

  Mickey turned around. “Something out there?”

  Charlie pointed toward the edge of the river. “There’s somebody there. No, just there. See him? Just left of those tules.”

  It was hard to see anything, because the smoke from the fire was blowing in front of them. But they could just make out the figure of a man in a black wide-brimmed hat. He was standing not more than seventy feet away, not moving, but obviously watching them.

  Remo picked up his rifle and stood up. “Hey, man! What you doing there? You’re not spying on us or nothing?”

  The man didn’t reply, and he didn’t move. Sometimes they could see him quite clearly, but then the smoke would billow in front of him and he would disappear.

  “You going to tell us what you want?” Remo shouted. “Otherwise, vamoose, okay?”

  Still the man said nothing, but now he began to walk toward them, appearing through the smoke like a stage magician. The crown of his hat was cone shaped, with a braided leather band around it, and he wore a long black coat and a high-buttoned black vest. He had a flat, leathery face, with a mouth that was almost lipless. As he came nearer, they saw that his eyes appeared to be totally silver with no pupils, as if he had steel ball bearings in his eye sockets.

  “What do you want, man?” Remo repeated. “Is there something wrong? You blind or something?”

  “Gituwutabudeu?” the man shouted back at him, so harshly that all four of them jumped. “Gi besa! Poohaguma! Soongapumaka!”

  “What the hell is he talking about?” said Remo. “What kind of language is that?”

  “Vulcan, most like,” said Charlie. “Whatever it is, he seems to be pretty pissed about something.”

  The man came closer, until he was standing less than twenty feet away from them. Remo kept his rifle pointed at him, but he wasn’t sure whether the man could see him. The firelight danced and sparkled in his silver eyes.

  “Teyabe?” he asked, turning to Mickey and Charlie. Then he spoke in English, although his tone was still aggressive. “Why is your friend so frightened? In my language we say tsegwabbetuma for such a man—he who aims his gun but never pulls the trigger.”

  “Listen, is there something we can help you with?” said Remo. “We’re just having a cookout here, that’s all.”

  “I told you,” the man replied. "I am poohaguma, medicine man. But I am more than that. I am soongapumaka—medicine man making breath. My name is Wodziwob, but you—if you prefer—you can call me Infernal John.”

  “Phew! Good to know he’s not called anything remotely scary,” said Charlie, out of the side of his mouth.

  Mickey said, “Sir, we’re not, like, trespassing, are we? The signs all say that this a camping zone. And we haven’t done any damage. I caught a trout but I think it was well over the regulation size and anyhow I put it back in the river.”

  “What?” demanded Wodziwob. “You think you have done no damage? You have done more damage than you can possibly know.”

  “Oh, come on, bro,” said Charlie. “We’re only here to drink beer and cook a few wieners and catch a couple of trout, and when we’ve gone, you won’t even know we’ve been here.”

  “We will always know that you have been here, even when you are gone forever.”

  “We’ll pick everything up—I promise you. Every last bottle.”

  “You think I care about your paper and your bottles and your rubbish? All those will vanish in time. But you have polluted the land in a different way. You have stained its spirit, and a stain like that has gi tokedu, no end.”

  “I’m sorry, man,” said Remo. “I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “It does not matter if you know or if you do not know. You will suffer the same consequences.”

  Mickey said, “Look, if we’ve upset you or anything, we apologize. But we’ve been real careful not to make a mess, and our RV has its own chemical toilet facility so we won’t be leaving any kind of stain whatsoever.”

  But at that moment, two figures materialized. They seemed to rise right out of the ground, one on Wodziwob’s left and one on his right. They were both impossibly tall, nearly twice Wodziwob’s height, and wide shouldered, and they were both dressed in boxy black coats. Their faces were covered by expressionless wooden masks, painted chalky white. On top of their heads they wore antlers decorated with beads and small bones and bird skulls.

  They stood beside Wodziwob, swaying slightly, while the smoke from the campfire whirled around their legs. They looked more like living totem poles than men.

  “Where the hell did they come from?” said Charlie, with a wheeze.

  “Remo,” said Cayley, clutching at his arm. “Remo, I think we’d better just get out of here, don’t you?”

  Remo raised his rifle higher, swinging it from one of the figures to the other, but all the same he took two or three steps backward toward the Winnebago.

  “They came out of nowhere, man,” said Charlie, and he was wheezing more painfully now. “They came right out of the fricking ground.”

  Mickey said, “Maybe we’re hallucinating. Where did you get that shit we’ve been smoking, Remo?”

  Remo continued to keep the figures covered, but he continued to back away, too. “That was good shit, man. I got that from Louie.”

  “Then maybe it’s the campfire. Maybe there was jimson weed in some of that brush.”

  “So what do you see?” Remo asked him. “Do you see a guy in a pointy black hat and two tall guys who look like they’re wearing coffins?”

  Mickey glanced at him quickly. They all knew that everybody has different hallucinations when they’re high.

  “I think Cayley’s right,” said Charlie. “Like, let’s say that the better part of valor is getting the hell out of here, prontissimo.”

  They began to stumble back to the Winnebago, but the man who called himself Infernal John came after them, stalking across the boulders with a terrible surefootedness. The two totemlike figures followed close behind him, with long articulated legs like stilts. As they walked, they made a clicking noise and a loud, rattling whirr.

  “Shit, man!” said Remo, and there was panic in his voice.

  “Why are you running away from me?” Wodziwob demanded. “Are you afraid of ggwo tseka’a—that I will scalp you?”

  “Just get away
from us, man!” Remo shouted. “We haven’t done nothing, but if you want us to leave, we’ll leave!”

  He lifted his rifle and fired one deafening shot into the air. It echoed and re-echoed from the rimrock and all the surrounding mountains. The last echo was followed almost immediately by the roar of a mountain lion.

  “You have disturbed kaggwe toohoo’oo,” said Wodziwob. “Just as you have crushed every blade of grass that you have trodden on, and poisoned every insect, and shot down every bird that flies through the air. You have despoiled everything, and now you must pay the price for it.”

  Remo pointed the rifle directly at Wodziwob’s chest. “You take one step nearer, Mr. Infernal What’s-your-name, and the next one’s for you. I mean it. Me and my friends, we’re going to leave now, and you’re going to stay right there and let us go. Capisce?”

  But it was then that Wodziwob lifted both of his hands, palms outward, and started to sing in a high, strangulated warble.

  “Jesus,” said Charlie. “Sounds like my mom’s tomcat when it’s in heat.”

  “I sing to each of you as gi tuwutabuedu!” Wodziwob called out, and his voice was no longer mocking, but hard with anger. “This means blind person. I bring to your eyes toohoo-ggweddaddu nabo’o, which means black paint. Pooga’hoo—I blow out your candle.”

  The totemlike figures stalked closer, until they were towering over them. Behind the expressionless slits in their marks, the Emperors of IT could see faint blue-white lights flickering.

  “Come on, man,” said Charlie. “We really need to go.”

  “Look at them,” Remo protested. “They’re not even human. They’re just, like, robots or something.”

  He leaned forward and peered at them more intently. The two totemlike figures made a creaking noise and swayed slightly. Then, without warning, the blue-white lights suddenly flared up, crackling and spitting as fiercely as welding torches. They were so bright that the Emperors of IT had to raise their hands in front of their faces to stop themselves from being dazzled.