No Dominion The Walker Papers - By CE Murphy Page 0,117
do was bury him again. In another four thousand years he could be someone else’s problem. It wasn’t the kind of solution Joanne would embrace, but I’d made my peace with what I could and couldn’t do. Burying evil worked for me.
I’d climbed high enough on those thoughts that the fir trees had thinned around me. A few sturdy ones still grew higher on the mountain, but I’d reached something close enough to a tree line that I sent a silent apology toward Marnie’s teens. They’d no doubt been up around this level too. I checked my phone, which told me I was at about 2600 feet above sea level. A good day’s hike under ordinary circumstances, but probably nowhere near my destination. Rocks slid beneath my feet and bounced a few yards down the mountainside before settling into new beds. The mosquitoes weren’t so bad this high up, but I left the subwoofers on, just in case. Then I started circling toward narrow waterfall trickles and stream rivulets spilling downhill.
I had a great view of the simmering Keechelus Lake. If my instincts were right about the causality being the demon Asag, he had to be within view of the lake himself, or it wouldn’t be boiling. I didn’t want to think about how many square miles the lake was visible from, because Eastern Washington would be a wasteland before I’d explored them all. But Marnie had said her kids were up on this snub-nosed peak, so that was where I had to start. I gulped down most of a sixteen ounce water bottle and stuck what was left into my pack. I had another larger bottle, too, and an unwise lack of concern about what would happen to my guts if I drank straight from the streams. The way I saw it, they’d probably been boiled recently, and besides, my water bottles had filters that were supposed to clear the bacteria out. I hadn’t gotten sick yet while on mission.
More stones shook loose as I made my way around and over boulders. I had rope in my backpack along with some very basic rock climbing gear, but if I ended up anywhere sheer I was going to have to find a way around. Being prepared for every possible contingency just weighed too much. I stopped for another drink of water, wiping sweat away and listening to rocks crack and bounce on their way down the slope.
A long gulp and a few steps later, I realized I hadn’t been walking on shoaly ground for some time now, and hadn’t knocked any stone loose in longer than that.
Carefully, I shrugged my backpack off, knelt, and unzipped it as I looked over my shoulder. Everything in the pack had a designated place. I didn’t need to see what I was doing to find the frags, nor to gently swing the grenade launcher into place so I could load it.
The boulders just down the mountainside from me were moving. Rocking slowly, like giant eggs trying to right themselves on invisible legs. Smaller stones were crushed beneath them as they shifted, puffing into dust and bouncing into the distance. I caught signs of more movement uphill from me, and breathed carefully as I loaded the last grenades into the launcher. Then I looked up.
Stone golems were staggered across the mountainside above me. Taller and broader than me, they had visible black pits of eyes and no hands or feet, just blunt ends to their long arms and stubby legs. They had mouths, too, gaping maws like caverns built into a moving mountainside. They moved slowly and in rhythm with each other. Below me, one of the boulders cracked, egg-like again, and another golem emerged from it. The snap of a second boulder breaking apart sounded like a gunshot. I counted six, and more being birthed. I would need a blanket assault to take them all out at once, and my grenade launcher wasn’t going to be enough.
A rumble started, so deep it made hairs on my neck stand up. It felt familiar, but the sensation slipped away as one of the golems below me crouched, then leapt.
I caught it in the belly with a grenade, and flung myself behind a man-sized huddle of rock to protect myself from the fragments. The roar disrupted the rumbling, but it started up again a moment later, angrier this time. The golems picked up their speed, converging on me. I waited a count of eight, long enough for