Mile still felt the crackle of energy about him, and he had no doubt that she was about to finish him off, to kill him and absorb his life force or whatever the hell it was that ii she did; but before that happened, he leaped up, ran over, and grabbed her head with both hands.
She screamed, began thrashing wildly.
And he pulled off her head.
The break was clean, and he realized her head had not been reattached properly to begin with. That was why it had been held at such an odd angle. :::
He dropped the head, feeling dirty and disgusted by the sensation of it in his hands: the sliminess of the skin, the coldness of the flesh. Her body had stopped moving instantly, going limp, the thrashing ceasing upon disconnection with the head.
He helped Claire up, grabbing her hand and pulling her to her feet, though she would have had no trouble getting up on her own, and gave her a warm hard hug, kissing her full on the lips, grateful that she was alive, grateful to be alive himself.
Jesus, Al breathed, standing and rubbing an obviously hurt knee.
Miles glanced back toward the black hole in the ground.
He thought of his dream, the old cowboy.
'That's where I put her body.'
Whatever useful knowledge he possessed had come from that dream, and he quickly grabbed Isabella's slack arms.
'Pick her up,' he told Hal. 'We'll throw her in the hole.'
There was no argument, no hesitation. Hal grabbed her legs, and the two of them lifted the unnaturally heavy form and staggered over to the edge of the massive pit.
'On three,' Hal said.
They began swinging the body back and forth to gain momentum.
'One... Two... Three!'
They let go, and Isabella's body fell into the hole, disappearing instantly, swallowed by the deep lightless black. They looked down, waited, but there was no flash of light as she was consumed, no sound of thump or splash as she reached the bottom.
She was simply gone.
Or rather her body was
The head was sOil there, lying on the smoking ground at Claire's feet.
Miles and Hal walked back to where she was standing. Hal motioned toward the jar Claire had placed on the ground. 'What about that? I guess we don't need it any more, huh? ..... Miles looked over at the shattered glass of the lantern he had tossed and was about to say no, they didn't need it, when a high keening sound issued from between the lips of Isabella's head. Claire jumped back, crowded next to Miles.
Hal's eyes widened.
The head lay on the smoldering rock, and there were no bones or veins or blood in the neck. There was not even an open wound. There was only a smooth bright green gelatinous substance that looked like liquid plant flesh encased in a roll of skin.
Still, the features were moving, eyes blinking, eyebrows raising, lips parting. The keening sound grew lower, separated into words. Isabella began speaking, cursing them, spewing forth a litany of foul promises and invectives that made Miles' skin crawl. He moved forward. He suddenly knew what he had to do. Reaching down distastefully, he picked the head up by the green algae hair, holding it at arm's length.
'Your children will be born deformed,' Isabella said, and her voice was neither male nor female, was not even human. 'hey will be burned and dismembered by tribes of unbelievers, their entrails scattered to the four winds...'
'Open the jar,' Miles said. 'he lid.'
Hal hurried over, pulled off the jar's top.
Miles lowered the head, placed it in the jar. Hal quickly replaced the lid, and Miles took the rested spoon from his pants pocket, the mint vine from his shirt. He took a deep breath, gathered his strength, then pulled open the lid and used the spoon to sprinkle mint leaves on top of Isabella's upward tilted face. He closed the top again.
With a scream of rage and agony, Isabella's features melted, devolving into separate elements, as though they were unrelated objects that had been held together by glue into a coherent whole What remained resembled nothing so much as sliced fruit: cherries and pears and peaches.
Miles felt drained. He didn't know what type of witchcraft he had performed, where it had come from, or how it had worked. All he knew was that whatever he had done, it had succeeded. Isabella was no more.
And, hopefully, she was the last of her kind.
This entire odyssey had been a series of vague impulses and half-understood events, things that made no logical sense but fit together on some subliminal level and were granted meaning. He thought of May.
'Sometimes there just isn't an explanation.'
He stared up into the dark sky, breathing deeply, his muscles shaking.
He had changed, he realized. This experience had altered him in a very profound and fundamental way. His entire outlook and approach was different than it had been. No longer was he a captive to logic, a head-over-heart guy. He was more like his father, and he wished Bob were here so he could tell the old man that he was happy to be like him, that he was proud.
Hal still seemed somewhat jittery as he stared at the closed jar. 'What now? Do we dump it in the hole?'
'No,' Miles said. 'Just leave it here.'
'What if?'
'Nothing will happen. 20'How do you know?' Claire asked.
He looked into her eyes, took her hands in his. He didn't.
It just felt right.
And for him that was enough.
' EPILOGUE
They were still in the canyons when the rescue helicopter found them.
Janet had gone for help, and from the town of Rio Verde, the sheriff had contacted the FBI office in Phoenix, which had immediately marshaled the manpower to assist one of its own.
Night had finally fallen, and the strange storm clouds had, if not disappeared, at least reverted to something resembling an ordinary weather phenomenon.
Base camp for the rescue effort was the Rio Verde sheriff's office.
Rossiter, still alive but condition unchanged, had been flown back to a Phoenix hospital. The rest of them were questioned in separate rooms in the local lockup about what exactly had happened, and though Miles was tempted to lie and say he knew nothing, they had not gone over a plan in advance and he did not want to contradict anything
Hal, Claire, or Janet might say.
So he told the truth
He had no idea how much of his story would be given credence, but the man talking to him nodded solemnly at the appropriate places and showed no outward sign of amusement. Miles wanted to believe that his story would be routinely filed away and attributed to the effects of heatstroke, but he knew from overheard conversations in the hallway that the half-buffed bodies of the Walkers had been found, as had May's. Their stories would be harder to dismiss with corroboration.
And a part of him could not help thinking that someone, somewhere in the government, already knew about
