Chapter 17: The Salamander

The Salamander

I put the beam out across the water and got water back.

That was the whole report. I held it there long enough to burn the picture in: the dead bugs, gray as ash, spread out over the surface in one sheet; the black past them where the lake kept going; the wall of the chamber behind us and the falls coming down off it. No shape anywhere in it. I swept the light left to right twice and got the same nothing both times, and I kept it on a second longer than I needed to, because turning it off meant taking the answer.

“Anything?” Tank said.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing.” He turned that over. “That don’t help.”

The water pushed at my chest. It pushed again, harder, and then it began to run.

It ran the wrong way. The film of dead bugs went past us in one sheet, all of them at once, like a page turning, and the water under them came with it, and the rock went out from under my boots, and we were moving.

“Hold on to somebody,” I said.

Tank got a fist in the back of my belt and I got a fist in Delgado’s shirt and the three of us went down that channel in one knot with the hot water rolling us over. There was a drop at the end of it and we took it. I do not know how far it was. It was far enough that Tank lost his grip on me and got it back.

The second river was hotter than the first. It was hot the way a bath is hot when somebody else has been in it, and it stayed that way for a hundred yards, and then it got hotter, and it never cooled off again.

Both walls were holed like a sponge. Water came out of some of the holes, dozens of them, at knee height and over my head, white where it hit the air, and out of the rest came steam, long threads of it, hissing, that went up into the dark over the river. The air smelled like struck matches. In the cracks between the rocks there were lines of red that were not the reflection of anything. They moved. Not much. They moved.

I put the light in my belt and left it there. There was enough light in that place to see the man in front of me and the shape of the man behind him, and that battery was the last one we had.

We got up onto a slab of rock big enough to park two trucks on, and the stone was warm through my pants. That is where we took stock, because there was nothing else to do for two minutes.

Here is what we had. Three knives. One angle-head flashlight, battery of unknown age, in my belt. No rounds: what was left of those had gone into the lake on the rifles and in the demo bag, and both were on the bottom behind us. No packs. No rations. No radio. No map that showed any of this, because none of this was on a map.

Delgado’s left boot had split across the top in the chute, and the foot under the split was bleeding into the water. He said nothing about it and neither did we. He sat with his knife out and wiped it on his sleeve and looked at the river.

Tank stood up. He had his knife in his hand and he walked to the lip of the shelf and looked down at the water.

“Nothing’s in there,” he said. “Two hundred feet of river and not one place in it for a thing to stand up.”

“Get back from the edge,” Delgado said.

“I’ll get back when I’m done looking.”

It came up over the lip in front of him, fast and quiet, seven feet of it, red as the inside of a mouth, and it took him around the legs and folded him at the waist and started back.

He got one hand into the grit on the stone and the grit did not hold him. He got the other hand around a rock and the rock came out of the shelf, and he went down on his face and it kept pulling, and his boots were over the edge before I had moved.

I crossed that shelf and went after the tongue with my knife and put the blade into it, top and down, twice, and it let go.

Tank came up on his hands and knees with the water running off him and crawled back out of reach before he stopped and started swearing. There was a welt across both his legs where the thing had had him, blood coming up through the cloth in two lines.

“You put a knife in him,” he said, when he had language back. He was watching the water, and he had his knife in his hand again. “He came up here to collect. Now there’s a debt.”

“He doesn’t keep books,” I said. “He’d have come up on us either way.”

Then the water came apart at the edge of the shelf, and it got up onto the rocks.

Frog head. That is where I have always started. A head like a bullfrog, wide and flat over the eyes, and a body like an alligator with the hide taken off it, forty feet from the nose to the tip of the tail, half of it still in the river. The skin had a shine to it the way gasoline has a shine across a puddle, running through every color there is and settling on none of them. Two red lights sat back in the skull under the ridge of the head and did not move.

I put it at forty feet. I never had any way to check it, and I have never been able to talk myself off that number.

“See that?” Tank said. “That’s a salamander. That’s all that is.”

“That is not a salamander,” Delgado said.

“Then we put it there,” Tank said. “We sprayed this country for years. That’s something that ate it and got big.”

“Nothing came out of a drum,” Delgado said. He was on his feet. He had his knife in his right hand and his left hand against the rock, and he did not take his eyes off the thing. “That was down here before there was a war up there. Look at the feet.”

I have had ten years to make up my mind about what came up out of that river, and I have not done it. Tank had it two ways that night, out loud. Delgado said no to both and put it older than us. I never picked. There was no time that night, and there has been no way since.

Then it came.

Delgado was on my right and Tank was on my left and we had about two seconds to look like we had one. I gave them the hand, left, right, and they went, and the three of us had it in the middle, which is what you do, and it made a noise that was neither a hiss nor a bark, and it brought its tail around in a flat arc and took Delgado off his feet with it.

Then it had him. It had him around the middle and it lifted him off the rock and turned him toward the river, and the mouth came open over him. There were teeth in it. Rows of them, top and bottom, every one of them pointed.

I got both hands over the top jaw and Tank got both hands under the bottom jaw and we pulled, and it was like pulling the lid off a footlocker with a man standing on the inside of it. Tank was screaming at me over it and what he was screaming was, “Hold it, hold it, it’s a bear trap, hold the goddamn thing.” Delgado was down inside the mouth with his knife by then, and he put it in wherever he could reach, and I could feel every one of those through the jaw.

It got its feet under it and bucked. That was the end of it. It threw all three of us at once, like a dog throwing water off its back. I went into a rock with my shoulder and my spine, the burn on my back underneath all of it, and I saw the stars they talk about.

Tank went into the river. He went off the lip into the run of it, where the water came down from the hot end and had not cooled any of the way, and he came up with steam standing off his shoulders and his neck, and he was back up on the rocks before my eyes had cleared, and he was making a sound I had not heard him make in four months, and he kept making it.

Delgado was on his hands and knees. The tail had put him into the face of the shelf and something in his left side had gone, on top of the foot, and his leg was not holding him up anymore.

Delgado got his head up. “We can’t kill that,” he said.

“I know.” I said it to all three of us. “Up. Rocks. Go.”

We went up the slope with Delgado between us, and the ground was ash and pumice, soft, and it came away under a boot in sheets, so every step we took got us half a step. Behind us it came off the shelf into the water and then out of the water, and up.

The slope got steep and we went to hands and feet. Delgado could not keep his feet under him on that grade and he could not be carried on it either, and he knew it, and he told us so, and he told us to keep going, and we did not leave him. We just ran out of grade. There is a place on a wall where a man with two arms and two legs has to go up alone, and after that we were three men climbing separate rocks in the dark with a thing coming up behind us.

It did not sound like a man climbing and it did not sound like a lizard climbing. It was something wide and wet coming unstuck from the stone, over and over, fast, in a rhythm, and the rhythm did not change when the wall got steep.

I was halfway up a face with my fingers in a crack when Tank started yelling. He was above me, ten feet, both hands in a seam, and what he was yelling was my name, and then he was yelling, “Look out, look out, it’s on you.”

I looked down between my arm and the rock.

It was on the wall under me. Ten feet, maybe less. The nose was up and the mouth was closed and it was holding to that face the way a lizard holds to a screen door. I thought about the water. The water was fifty feet down and there were rocks in it, and from where I hung I could not tell one dark shape from another. Fifty feet onto rock is not a jump.

Tank tried to come down for me and could not. He had two hands on the rock and one boot on the rock and nothing left over, and he stayed where he was with his voice going. Delgado was below me and off to the left on his own piece of wall, done, out of it, twenty feet away across a face he could not cross.

Which left the knife.

I got it out of my belt with the hand I could spare and I hung on with the other one and I looked down at it and I waited for it to come up the last ten feet.