The Language Of Cannibals

because then I'll blow you away.'

'Maybe, maybe not,' the man who called himself Dan Mosely replied in a perfectly steady voice, as if I had suggested he was in danger of nothing more serious than catching cold. 'You've got a head injury, and I'm betting you may not be able to see too clearly. All I need to do is get off one burst up that rock chute you're sitting in, and the ricocheting bullets will do the rest.'

'I can see well enough to blow you away with a machine pistol, Mosely. Let it go. What the hell? The KGB makes a point of always getting their own home, so they'll trade for you. Going back to Russia with KGB honors is a hell of a lot better than being dead.'

'I won't negotiate, and I won't give up your brother and the woman as a shield while you're sitting up there with a gun on me.'

'Is that what we're doing, Mosely? Negotiating?'

'A machine pistol isn't the most accurate weapon in the world at that range, Frederickson. I believe I can kill these two people and escape your burst of fire. Then I'll be the one shooting up that rock chute. I'm going to count to five. If you haven't thrown out your weapon and started down by then, that's exactly what I'm going to do. The police will be told you all managed to shoot each other.'

'Nobody's going to believe that, Mosely!'

'They'll have to believe it; there are no other witnesses. I'm the chief of police, remember? One!”

'Don't come down, Mongo!' Mary shouted, her voice clear and strong. 'He means to kill you too! I'm not afraid to die!'

'Two!'

I leaned out through the cleft, bracing my elbows against the rock, and used both hands to aim the machine pistol at the point where Dan Mosely would be if Garth's body weren't in the way. I felt paralyzed with indecision. Sweat continued to run into my eyes, stinging them, blurring my vision even more.

'Don't let him bullshit you, Mongo!' Garth shouted. 'Just divide by two and shoot the fucker!'

'Three!'

And I knew that the KGB assassin wasn't bluffing; he fully intended to play out his string to the very end. I desperately wanted to plead with the man to give Garth and Mary a few more seconds of life, perhaps even throw out my weapon to buy those seconds for them. But I knew that giving up my own life, which I would surely be doing if I disarmed myself and stepped out onto the road, would be a futile gesture, and would only ensure that I wouldn't be able to avenge my brother's and Mary's deaths. I sighted down the barrel of the machine pistol and prepared myself to pull the trigger at the moment Mosely pulled the triggers of his weapons, killing Garth and Mar)'. I anticipated that he would immediately try to dart to his left, toward the stone wall on my side of the road, and then try to come at me. Tears sprang to my eyes; I blinked them away, choked back a sob.

'Four! They're going to die in front of your eyes, Frederickson, if you don't throw out your weapon and come down. If you do, I promise that we'll negotiate. Maybe I'll let them go and-'

Mosely abruptly stopped speaking, started, and then reflexively turned to his left as a flesh-colored artificial leg dropped into the road beside him and bounced high into the air. An instant later there was a sharp crack of a high-powered rifle somewhere above and behind me. A red hole appeared in the center of Mosely's forehead a moment before his head exploded in a cloud of blood, brains, and bone. In death, his fingers tightened on the triggers of the service revolver and machine pistol he held, but Garth had ducked away at the instant the prosthesis of plastic, wood, steel, and leather landed, grabbing Mary around the waist and carrying her to the ground with him. The bullets fired by the dead man flew harmlessly through the air over their heads and clattered in the rocks of the quarry further up the road.

As the echo of the gunfire blended with the sound of fast-approaching police sirens, I glanced up behind me, shielded my eyes against the setting sun, and saw a blurred but unmistakable figure on a rock ledge high above me. Jack Trex, dressed in camouflage fatigues and cap, was sitting on the ledge with his good right leg drawn up and his chin resting on his knee. The empty sleeve 'of his left trouser leg hung over the edge of the ledge, flapping in a stiff breeze rising off the Hudson. I saluted smartly, and he saluted smartly back.

Garth and Mary were waiting for me in the road at the bottom of the chute. We all embraced, and then Garth pointed at the figure silhouetted against the sky high above us.

'Mongo, who the hell is that?'

'Gregory Trex's father,' I replied quietly. 'That was payback time for one of the men who helped eat up his son.'

What looked like the entire Cairn police force, led by Officer McAlpin, came pouring out of the three patrol cars that had screamed to a halt behind Mosely's car on the other side of the rockslide. Guns drawn, they clambered over the loose rock, then fanned out in the road, leveling their guns on us and on the figure high in the quarry. Only then did I realize that I was still holding my machine pistol. I dropped it to the ground at the same time as Jack Trex tossed his.30–30 out over the ledge. The weapon plummeted down through the air like a broken bird, black against the sky and stone, to shatter on the rocks below.

McAlpin holstered his own revolver, indicated to the others that they should do the same, then slowly walked toward us. His almond-colored eyes were filled with horror as he looked around him, and he nervously stroked his droopy mustache. 'What the hell happened here?' he asked hoarsely.

Garth walked over to where the artificial limb had landed, bent over, and picked it up. 'Mongo will explain it all to you,' he said over his shoulder as headed for a break in the stone wall that looked as if it could be the start of a trail to the top of the mountain. 'I'm going to see if I can get this man's leg back up to him.'

Epilogue

Jack Trex's The Language of Cannibals stood propped up, unwrapped, against the trunk of an elm tree down by the river, along with the other wedding gifts.

'I'm a paramedic with the volunteer ambulance corps in Cairn, so after the shooting at the Community's mansion I was on the scene a few minutes after the police. But I ended up a hospital patient myself. When I saw and heard about what had happened, when I found out that my son was a. . killer, I collapsed. The doctors thought I'd had a heart attack. It wasn't that, but I spent the night in the hospital, under observation. My roommate was one of the Community members who'd been wounded in the shoot-out. She gave me all the details of what had happened, and what she could remember of the conversation between the three of you after Jay here had come to your rescue. She finally told me you'd left just before the police arrived, and that she was pretty sure you'd taken canoes out onto the river and that Gregory was with you. If you'd escaped by way of the river, I knew there was only one place you would have any chance of reaching and hiding out in without being spotted, and that was the quarry. The questions were why you had left the mansion, who or what you were hiding from, and what you hoped to accomplish. And, of course, why you had taken my son. I felt a need to find out what had happened and the reason why you were hiding. I felt responsible for what Gregory had done, since I should have taken steps to straighten him out years ago.'

We were sitting at one of a dozen linen-draped tables set up in Jay Trex's riverside yard where the wedding reception, hosted by Cairn's Vietnam veterans, was in progress. Across from us, Jay Acton was leaning back in his lawn chair, practicing chords and idly strumming his father's guitar, which Mary was teaching him to play. Jack Trex seemed to harbor no resentment toward the former KGB operative, indeed seemed to be very fond of him, and I wasn't sure why. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that it was Elysius Culhane, not Acton, who had stolen his son's soul-and Acton hadn't so much stolen Culhane's soul as probed, twisted, and manipulated the darkness that was already there. Also, the affection might have been due to the fact that Jack Trex was nothing if not patriotic, and it was thanks to Jay Acton that the largest and most insidious KGB operation ever mounted against the United States was being rapidly closed down; we tend to forgive a great deal in those onetime enemies who slip over to our side.

I sipped at my Scotch, said, 'You did everything you could for your son, Jack,' and wondered if it was true. 'Culhane manipulated and stroked him in ways you never could. Gregory was determined to go his own way, and