of warning to Joe Hunter.
Except Rink wasn't as blind as he looked.
He detected the shifting shadows and he jerked away. The blade still slid into flesh, but instead of finding that pinpoint where the blade could be forced down into the heart, it found resistance in the form of his sturdy clavicle. The metal scoured bone, but it was deflected away from the vitals and into the pectoral muscle.
'Sumbitch!' Rink grunted, his gun coming around. He fired in an arc, not waiting for the target to present itself before jerking on the trigger. Three times he fired. Two bullets cut chips from the rocks, one snatched at the blanket swathing Cain's form. Then Cain's knee thumped against his forearm, halting the gun, and the knife once more cut a swathe through the night. Rink staggered back, blood from his sliced forehead invading his vision.
Move, move, move. A mantra for both men.
Even as Cain extricated himself from his hiding place, Rink was firing again. Blind, but with determination. One bullet scoured Cain's left thigh, another plucked hair from his head. But then Cain was out of the line of fire and he cut again at Rink.
Sliced to the bone, Rink kicked back. His foot caught Cain in the gut, propelled him backward. Cain was too canny a fighter to be caught so easily. Instead of floundering for balance, Cain allowed his momentum to take him over in a roll that brought him back immediately to his feet. And in that instant he was already coming back at Rink. Rink was big, powerful beneath his clothing, trained to deal with dangerous foes, but unprepared for one as determined as Tubal Cain, Father of Cutting Instruments. The Harvestman.
Rink shot again. But the bullet passed through space that Cain had occupied a second before. He was already two paces to the left. As Rink swung toward him, he arced his blade under the barrel of the gun. The pinching of Rink's eyes showed Cain he'd cut him. Then Cain gained the space below Rink's armpit, squirmed under and behind the big man, and looped his free arm around his throat. He jerked backward, sliced at the throat.
Rink grabbed at his knife, but Cain heard the telltale groan of someone in pain. Cain released him, kicked him away. Rink staggered and his head banged off the rock wall. Pivoting, he fell flat on his face. Blood mingled with the chalk-white sand.
Finally, Cain gave voice.
But all he had to say was 'Ha!'
He stepped forward. Rink didn't get up. Cain smiled. Leaned down and plucked the gun out of Rink's grasp.
Distantly, he caught the sound of someone calling his name.
He turned quickly, heading into the narrow passage.
46
i should've expected something like this. cain's history should have prepared me. The photographs of his victims viewed on Harvey's computer. The skeletons posed out there in the desert. The grotesque art daubed on the rocks outside. But nothing primed me for the chamber I now stood in.
The chamber wasn't huge. But Cain had used the space economically.
There wasn't a surface more than the width of my hand on walls or ceiling that wasn't decorated with human skulls, scapulas, or pelvic bones. Femur, humorus, radius, and ulna bones formed strange mosaics. Spinal columns had been arranged as borders to separate one insane montage from another. Interspersed between the human remains were countless bones gleaned from road-killed wildlife. And equally disturbing in their own way, myriad patches of cloth snagged from unsuspecting bodies were woven between the bones. Human rib cages dominated the far end of the room like shields on coats of arms. And there, as the living embodiment of Cain's insanity, was his centerpiece.
'Oh, my God. John?'
My voice came out as a wheeze and my arms reached out. My feet wouldn't follow them.
'John?' I asked again.
He was displayed like all the other of Cain's exhibits, attached to the walls of the cave by chains fixed to iron spikes hammered through the stone, his chest against the bedrock. Cords were looped around his throat, woven around his skull, and fixed to a hook in the ceiling. His head was forced back on his spine so that he peered upward. His arms were outstretched, the skin peeled from his back stretched taut beneath them like demonic wings. I could see what Cain was attempting to portray. He intended that John be seen as a supplicant, beseeching a higher spirit in the heavens above him. A fallen angel begging for God's grace?
Walter said that FBI profilers had concluded that Cain might be attempting to make amends for slaughtering his own family. Perhaps John was representative of the demon that was Martin Maxwell, and in reality, it was he who begged grace from God. Maybe we'd never know the true meaning, and everything was simply the product of his depraved mind.
It wasn't just the pose that shocked me. In itself it was terrible. The way in which Cain had stripped the flesh from John's back, exposing the musculature, went way beyond awful. Yet that wasn't the worst. What made me shrink inside was that John still shivered with life.
Caught in a snapshot moment again, eternity was measured by the thrum of one heartbeat.
Then I was moving forward with no sense of volition.
One moment I was standing at the threshold, the next I was cradling John's head between my palms. My SIG was lying in the dust at my feet, forgotten in my urgency to help my brother. All that was in my head, my heart, my soul, was to give John a modicum of comfort. He wasn't conscious; not in the real sense of the word. He stirred. I didn't want to look at his wounds, but inexorably my eyes drifted down. My eyes screwed tight, blocking the image, but I knew I'd see it for a long time to come.
'Oh, my God,' I moaned again. Beyond reason, the prayer was for my own mortal soul. I gently caressed John's head, and this time he responded.
He shrieked.
He pulled away from me, shrieked again.
