Del hopped down out of the driver’s seat, his green canvas knapsack slung over his shoulder. Carter got out more carefully — his body was still plenty battered and bruised. In the fall from the Mercedes, he’d sprained both ankles, broken one arm, dislocated one shoulder, bruised several ribs, and scraped the skin off both shins. He didn’t look so good in his hiking shorts, but then, there didn’t seem to be anyone around to notice. The parking lot was empty, and as they started up the trail, they saw no sign of any other hikers. Or even much wildlife. Everything was preternaturally quiet, and the air still smelled of cinder and ash. The fires had beaten jagged and unpredictable paths all through the Santa Monica Mountains and the nature preserves, cutting wide swaths down the sides of some hillsides, while leaving others unscathed. Even in Summit View, where Carter had been found unconscious by a fire crew, some of the houses had been reduced to a pile of ash, while others, just across the street, had sustained nothing but smoke damage.
He’d been back there only once since the fire. He’d had Beth drive him to the crest of Via Vista, or what was left of it, and he’d looked over the side of the cliff, where the Mercedes had disappeared. Several hundred yards down, turned over on its back like an eviscerated turtle, he could see the black and twisted wreckage of the car; he half expected the klaxon to still be making some feeble noise.
But there was nothing; no sound, and no sign of the gorgon who had ridden it down. The trees and brush down there were largely intact, as were large parts of the park-lands to the north. Had it crawled off to die in the brush? Had it been cornered, and consumed, by a sudden change in the fires, a gust of Santa Anas that had blown the flames all around it?
Or was it still out there, somewhere, foraging in the tens of thousands of acres that made up the vast preserves, learning to survive in this altogether new world?
For all the misery it had nearly brought him, Carter hoped that it was — and that, when he was in better shape again, he would be able to go in search of it.
“You see those photos,” Del asked, without turning around on the trail, “the ones from the cell phone cameras? They were showing them again last night on the news.”
“I’ve seen them,” Carter said — grainy shots, taken through the smoke, by people stuck in their cars on back roads, of a huge and lumbering creature crashing through trees and, in one case, slinking through a culvert under a freeway. A fire department helicopter, bringing a huge bucket of water up into Bel-Air, got its own long-distance shots, but from so high above, and through all the swirling smoke, it looked as much like an armored vehicle of some kind as it did a creature of legend and lore.
And no one, from the witnesses to the authorities, had any idea what to make of it, or what to do about it if they did. The city administration had its hands full with the more immediate problems — thousands of displaced people, a conspiracy of arsonists to round up and prosecute, sporadic but continuing smaller blazes, disaster relief to claim from the feds (and then find some way to dispense). The Godzilla stories had been put on the back burner, as it were, everywhere but the tabloids and the Fox network.
“So what did you want to show me?” Carter asked, stepping carefully over the rocks and boulders strewn across the hiking path; many of them looked as though they had come loose in the fire and just recently tumbled to rest down here.
“My home away from home,” Del said, “if it’s still standing.”
Carter had no idea what he was talking about until they came to a fork in the trail and Del headed to the right, to the more arduous route — the one that Carter now remembered they had taken on their previous expedition up here. He also recalled passing an abandoned old cabin covered with graffiti. If Del imagined that it was still standing…
All around, Carter could see the charred remains of the trees and brush that had once afforded so many animals, from gray quail to the occasional bobcat, a refuge and a home. But now the landscape was more desertified than ever, with only an occasional weed or patch of grass poking its head up above the layer of ash and cinder that coated the ground.
The cabin, which had at least sported a roof and walls the last time they had come past here, was now nothing but a pile of charred timbers, melted glass, and broken bricks. The blackened branches of a scorched sycamore reached out toward it as if in consolation.
“Any special reason you wanted to come back here?” Carter asked. “Were you expecting some mail?”
“You laugh,” Del said, “but I was living here lately.”
Carter stopped. “You were what?”
“Living here,” Del said, treading carefully through the ruins, his eyes on the ground.
“Why? What was so bad about your sister’s million-dollar condo on Wilshire Boulevard?”
“It was a million-dollar condo on Wilshire Boulevard. It gave me the willies just being there. Out here, I didn’t have a valet trying to park my truck, I didn’t have horns honking all night down on the street, I didn’t have my brother-in-law freaking out every time I tried to play some Willie Nelson on his sound system.”
“Out here you didn’t have a sound system,” Carter pointed out.
“I had a battery-operated boom box,” Del said, stopping in front of a blob of twisted black plastic, the size of a toaster now. “And this was it.”
Carter now understood why they were there and he, too, looked around at the rubble and ash at his feet. “Anything else I should be looking for?” he said.
“I had a propane stove, a few clothes, not much.” He kicked over one of the fallen timbers. “Can’t imagine anything else made it through the fire either.”
Carter helped to make a desultory search through the wreckage. Here and there he saw the glint of a twisted spoon, the metal buttons from a workshirt, a sliver of glass. He was just about to give up when a lizard skittered across the toe of his boot, and looking down, he saw the sunlight pick up a trace of something blue. He crouched down and cleared away some of the debris. Under it all, he saw a turquoise stone, and when he pried it from the earth, it came up on a tarnished silver chain. There were several more turquoise stones attached to it… making a necklace.
Carter held it up. “This yours?” he asked Del, brushing away some of the clinging dirt.
Del came closer. “Nope,” he said, turning it over in his fingers. “Never saw it before in my life.”
But Carter already knew he had seen it himself. He had seen it that terrible day in Pit 91, the day when Geronimo — a.k.a. William Blackhawk Smith — had jumped down and slashed him with the knife. The day Geronimo had died, swallowed alive in the tar pits.
He heard the cry of a bird overhead, and saw a hawk circling… just as he’d seen one the first time they’d come here.
And he knew at that moment whose home this had originally been.
“But it’s not an ancient artifact of any kind,” Del said, handing it back. “That chain is machine-made.”
He wandered off in search of any other remnants of his life, and once he was gone, Carter put the necklace back in the dirt, and covered it over. The hawk, perched on a limb of the sycamore now, cried again.
In the end, all Del was able to retrieve was a pair of army field binoculars, miraculously spared by the fire; they were still in their steel case, and under a bunch of bricks. “Not a total loss,” he said, stepping free of the burned boards and cinders, and climbing back toward the trail.
Carter turned to follow, but not before casting one more backward glance at the last remains of the cabin, and the hawk keeping watch from the blackened branch above it.
They continued on up the trail, toward the waterfall near the top, but it was all so different now; where the hillside had been dense and thickly overgrown, now it was spare and wide open. Most of the trees were down, but those that remained were just skeletal figures, black and bare of leaves. The scrub brush was just clumps of furze, affording almost no cover for the myriad creatures that would once have taken shelter below it.
At a turn in the trail, Carter stopped to catch his breath. Beth was right; he had to take it easy. He had been lying around for a couple of weeks, his body had taken a pretty bad beating, and the sweat was starting to trickle down into the cast on his arm. Del, who’d been pushing on, noticed and came back.
“You need a break?” he said, offering Carter his canteen.
Carter nodded, while showing Del that he had his own water bottle in his knapsack. He took a swig, and then another, while gazing out over the devastated canyon below.
“You don’t think you’re still going to see them, do you?” Del said, and Carter knew exactly what he was talking about. He and Del had discussed the creatures from the bestiary often — what precisely they were, what Carter had been able to learn about them in the brief time he’d had on al-Kalli’s estate, whether or not the fire had
