Life and Limb

by Jennifer Roberson

Summoned by computer yet again. Muttering about rude awakenings, I found my leather bike pants, pulled on a fresh t-shirt, and opened the door.

  Remi was not there. Barefoot, I padded down the short hall to the common room and found him sitting at the computer.

  “What?” I repeated. “More cryptic statements?”

  He was hatless, but dressed. Still all cowboy. “Exactly the opposite. Everything’s normal. I can reach all kinds of webpages.”

  I massaged one eye socket, then ran a splay-fingered hand through loose hair. “And last night you couldn’t.”

  “Last night I couldn’t.”

  “Well, can you reach the site we saw before? The photos, stuff about the phones?”

  “Page error.”

  I grabbed a chair from the table, dragged it across wooden floorboards, sat down just off Remi’s right shoulder so I could see the monitor. “Now what?”

  “Found a website for the place we’re heading.”

  “Woo pot?”

  “Wupatki. Look.” He typed it into the search field, then clicked on a link. It brought up a page hosting a large photo of a substantial pile of rocks.

  But a pile of sunset-colored stone, shaped kind of like squashed bricks, and organized one atop another to make walls, windows, doorways. It reminded me a little of castle ruins. “Native Americans lived there?”

  “Anasazi and Sinagua. Built the pueblo in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. And I think we ought to head out there now in the daylight, so we can scope out the place before we go lookin’ for a demon wearing the shape of a—” he paused, gave me a sidelong glance, “—whatever the hell a barghest or black shuck is.” Another pause. “What is a barghest or black shuck?”

  “Also Hairy Jack, Padfoot, Churchyard Beast, Hateful Thing. Among other names.”

  McCue sounded annoyed and repeated himself with excessive clarity. “What is it?”

  “It,” I said, “is a dog.”

  “A dog? We’re hunting a dog?”

  His reaction didn’t surprise me. “You know The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle? Features Sherlock Holmes?”

  Remi nodded. “Never read it, though.”

  “The book’s about a fearsome, ferocious beast believed to be straight out of hell. Tons of legends about it from all over England, which inspired Conan Doyle. Basically it’s a harbinger of death, though some legends say different.” I stretched, cracked my spine. “Mostly it haunts places, doesn’t actively kill people.”

  “It is now,” Remi put in. “Adults and kids.”

  Yeah. So it was. Subdued, I went on. “Best known name is plain old ‘black dog.’ Mostly it haunts places and wasn’t particularly known for killing people, though obviously that’s changed.” I thought about the photos. Thought about the kids. Felt sick all over again.

  “So we’re gonna hunt us a dog.”

  “No, we’re gonna hunt us a demon.” I pushed the chair back and rose, shoved it into place at the table. “I need a quick shower, a little food.” I looked him over. Neatly pressed clothes and different from the day before. “You good to go?”

  “Already showered. There’s coffee made,” he said, “and eggs, sausage, hash browns. Also cereal. I had Wheaties.”

  “Breakfast of champions. Or also, I guess, breakfast of demon hunters.” I left McCue reading about Wupatki, headed to the kitchen still barefoot. Boots could wait on coffee.

  Coffee. Stuff of the gods.

  But not of Ganji, I hoped, or it might taste like lava and ash.

  * * *

  —

  We hit a minor glitch when it came time to head out to Wupatki. Remi had assumed we’d ride together in his truck. I said no way.

  I told him, “I like the freedom of a bike on the open road.”

  His look was quizzical. “You’re wearing leathers, a full coverage helmet, gloves, and boots. It’s like armor. What it’s not like is feeling the wind in your hair. And if you really want that, I can lower my windows.”

  “You have a horse, I think you told me.”

  Remi, frowning at the apparent non sequitur, nodded.

  “That’s not like riding in a truck, either,” I pointed out. “And when on horseback, don’t you feel different?”

  Apparently he’d never considered that. After the brief parade of thoughts visible on his face, he arrived at an understanding and climbed up into his truck as I threw a leg over my bike.

  Wearing my armor, as Remi described it, was an encumbrance. Zooming down the interstate in shirt, jeans, without gloves or helmet, was far more freeing than doing it all geared up. But bodies bounce when they come off bikes at high speed, and when head meets road it usually results in death or a persistent vegetative state. I wanted neither, thank you very much. Around towns at much reduced speeds, yeah, I might go without the whole shebang, but the interstate could be a vicious beast.

  We headed north on Highway 89 about twelve miles, turned off at the sign for Wupatki and something called Sunset Crater.

  Sunset Crater turned out to be a massive blackish purple-red cinder cone left over from an eruption. With my mind on Indian ruins, not on a mountain of cinders, I didn’t much give it attention as I rode toward Wupatki—that is, until something reached out and grabbed me.

  Not a person. Not a demon. A feeling.

  Wrongness.

  Evil.

  I braked, rolled my bike onto the shoulder, stopped. The road was crowded by pines, firs, juniper, and wild grasses. Patches of cinders broke free of the soil, of the deadfall of limbs and leaves. The remains of jagged, broken lava flows had turned much of the area to black, blistered rivers of volcanic stone, intercut with trees. Trees and grasses also climbed most flanks of the crater.

  Like an ice cube dropped down my back, I was abruptly chilled. I heard thin, high-pitched screaming.

  Remi, too, had pulled over. He drove up beside me, dropped his windows, leaned low toward the passenger door to speak out the window. “What’s up?”

  I did not want words. I waved him into silence, concentrating on what I had felt. Climbed off my bike, took two long steps toward the huge cinder cone, then stopped short and blinked heavily, because it felt like my eyes weren’t behaving properly.

  The colors that crowded my vision were black and red. And I sensed a thrumming buried deep. Saw flashes of fire, of lava, of an undulation in the earth. Heard again the screaming.

  Remi, out of his truck, came up beside me. His tone was low, and infinitely quiet. “What do you feel?”

  I worked my shoulders, trying to shed the chill lodged in my spine. “Did you hear anything?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Rabbit. Maybe more than one. Probably a mountain lion. They hunt this whole area. You ever hear a rabbit die?”

  I shook my head.

  “They scream. Sounds like a human baby.”

  I thought again of the dead children and their dead parents. Neither were babies. But they were too young to die, and no one deserved to be torn apart by a demon in the guise of a massive dog.

  “Do you sense anything?” I was tense, unsettled. “Any kind of—a human host? A surrogate?”

  McCue shook his head. “But I suppose in dog form it could wander back and forth between the ruins and the crater. They’re only about fifteen miles apart. I checked the papers, news sites—there’ve been no reports of anyone being killed here. Just at the ruins.”

  “And what do the papers and news sites say about it?”

  “Mostly, they believe it’s a mountain lion. Maybe a bear. They’ve gone looking, even on horseback, but found nothing. A few whackjobs claim it’s extraterrestrials.” He grinned. “That a space ship crashed and caused the crater in the cinder cone when it buried itself, and if the government would just allow people to hike up the cone to the crater on top, evidence would be found.” />
  “So you can’t hike the cone?”

  “Nope. What I read said it used to be allowed, but it was breaking down the ecological integrity of the area, so it’s closed off to the public now.”

  Anger surfaced. “I want this son of a bitch.”

  Remi said, “Then let’s go kill it.”

  Back on my bike, the sense of wrongness bled away from me. I heard nothing more, felt nothing more than the warmth of a bright summer day mitigated by the shade of tall trees and a breeze ruffling through.

  I pulled back onto the road with a pickup truck behind me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  At the turn off to Wupatki, I cut the engine, rolled to a stop. The road that led to the ruins was blocked by a wide metal gate across the entrance, a three-strand wire fence, and featured a big posted notice stating the ruins were temporarily closed to visitors. Apologies for the inconvenience.

  Yes, having four people killed by—something—would indeed be inconvenient.

  Remi got out of the cab, climbed up into the truck bed, and opened one side of the big hinged tool box, which ran from one bed rail to the other. Kind of like steel saddlebags, in a weird sort of way.

  He jumped back down, brandished a pair of wire cutters, and proceeded to cut away the fence beside the gate. He bent it back so that my bike and his truck would fit through, then motioned me onward.

  I took the bike off asphalt onto deadfall made up of pine needles and other detritus, then returned to the entrance road. A little way down I came upon a parking lot, rolled into a space.

  As I shut down the bike, I couldn’t take my eyes off the ruins. Wupatki in the flesh, so to speak, was identical to photos that captured the place but not the feeling. Wupatki was old bones with an older soul.

  Considering the builders cut stone into flat rectangles back in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and mortared them together with clay into stacked walls, I was damn impressed. The big building was built around massive sandstone rock formations swelling from the earth. The color throughout—stacked stones, the formations, and the dirt all around it—was a pale, dusty sunset gone rich beneath the sun.

  We had the place to ourselves, since access was closed. I pulled helmet and gloves off as Remi drove in. I felt for the Taurus in my shoulder holster, decided to strip down to t-shirt, which left the gun and holster visible. Legal open carry is all well and good, but some people get nervous around guns. My ex hated them. Had we come where others, such as tourists, gathered, I’d have kept the jacket on even though the day was warm.

  Supposedly the beast attacked at sunset, so we had some time. And no guarantees it didn’t continue to hang around until well after dark. Lily seemed to think so; she’d said we would need the full moon in order to see.

  I felt better for having my KA-BAR and revolver loaded with powdered iron shells. Remi checked himself as well: belt-mount holster, big damascened Bowie, the tri-part sheath of throwing knives.

  Ghosts, as had been established, could be killed if shot or stabbed in the vulnerable parts of human anatomy. At the Zoo, I’d taken out the male ghost with a point-blank head shot, which certainly would have killed a normal human. Remi had thrown knives into a tight grouping in the heart, almost like arrows or darts in the bulls-eye, and killed the female ghost. And he had exorcized the demon in the cop, leaving the host alive and unpossessed.

  Now we faced an animal. Because black dogs had always been in the realm of folklore rather than reality as ghost-beasts haunting various areas, I wasn’t quite sure what it would take to actually kill the thing.

  “Well, let’s get this checked out,” McCue said, heading out. I hesitated a moment. Wondered, because I couldn’t help it, if I would scream like a dying rabbit if the Churchyard Beast took us.

  It wasn’t a steep climb up into the ruins because the place was built on a modest plateau and twentieth-century contractors had put in wide, shallow, framed steps. At some point they’d also mounted hand rails throughout various parts of the trail in the ruins, and in some areas natural mortar gave way to modern cement to shore up the place.

  A winding trail, converted to powdery red dust by the soles of thousands of shoes, led me inside. The ruin was open to the skies, though at some point a wood-pole ceiling had kept out the sun and rain, because the remains of those poles were scattered across the ground. And the walls were easily two stories high, no second floor. Again, I figured the builders had used wood to create a floor that now lay in ruins upon the ground.

  The windows and doorways were shaped with great precision, considering the material was hand-hewn stone. I walked into a square tower-like room, saw the high second-story window. I tipped my head back to see what I could see. The sky beyond was a blistering blue.

  I closed my eyes. Let my awareness of the here and now fade.

  There was warmth in my head, like a banked fire, and the edges of my vision were a comforting green yet again. I caught the faint trace of fire, of ash, of water; of ground-growing plants such as squash, plus beans and tall, rustling corn. But that was not all. Piñon pines bore seeds that were roasted, or pounded into flour for baking. Wild plants offered flavor and spice, and there was meat aplenty from deer, rabbits, and prairie dogs, those weird little chipmunk-like animals who popped out of burrows and chittered to sound the alarm when children came hunting them.

  It had been a vital, thriving community, a place where multiple native cultures came together to trade, until the climate changed. Water became less available, the land more arid, and eventually Wupatki could no longer support its residents. The tribes moved on, leaving behind them a massive structure surviving to this day, if depleted of roof, ladders, and flooring.

  “Gabe!” Remi’s voice snapped me out of it. “Gabe—come take a look!”

  I followed his voice some distance, found a huge, round, deep dug-out area in the ground lined with stacked stone walls and mortar, plus a surrounding wall up top. Those top walls were probably three feet high; below the outer surface ring was a lower structure forming circular bench-like seating around a large area of flat, dusty ground.

  I stood atop the wall, found Remi down in the—well, hole wasn’t the right word. It was a planned and hand-built structure, not a natural opening in the earth. It struck me as incongruous to see a hatted modern cowboy standing in the middle of something built centuries before by Native Americans.

  “It’s a ball court,” he said.

  “Ball court?” That seemed unlikely. “How do you know?”

  Remi stared up at me as if were too stupid to live. “I read the sign.”

  Oh. Yeah. Signs are handy.

  “Anyway, come down,” he called. “There’s an opening about ten paces to your right.”

  And so there was, and so I walked through a walled entrance that struck me as similar to the entry tunnels football teams use to head out onto the field.

  I strode toward Remi, until he told me to stop. “Look,” he directed, and pointed at the powdery, gritty earth.

  Boot prints all over the place. But overlaying them were animal tracks. Big-ass animal tracks.

  “Too large for mountain lions,” Remi noted, “And the shape’s wrong, anyhow. Those prints weren’t made by a cat.”

  Or a bear, I thought—though I doubted there were any out here in the middle of a waterless, very warm nowhere.

  “Doglike,” Remi continued, “but too large for a coyote or wolf.”

  I squatted, looked more closely at the paw prints. The depressions were clear. Even the holes left by toenails were well-defined. The creature had returned after the investigators departed.

  I shook my head. “They’re nothing more than folklore.”

  “Grandaddy and Lily said—”

  I cut him off. I hadn’t exactly meant for him to hear that. “I know what Grandaddy and Lily said.”

  Remi’s expressio
n was serious. “Then why do you want to deny it?”

  It wasn’t denial, exactly. More like an expression of hope, but I didn’t know how to explain it. From my squat, I looked up at the cowboy. “Because black dogs are not supposed to exist.”

  He was unsmiling; this was no joke. “Neither are demons.”

  I looked at the paw prints again. “This is a domicile. I can feel it, even if I can’t quite do it in Grandaddy’s way. You sense a demon in any form hanging around?”

  Remi’s eyes went blank and unfocused, but finally he came back to the here and now and shook his head.

  I said, “It would be helpful if you did—” I gestured at the tracks “—but I guess not really necessary.”

  “I reckon that’s the truth of it.”

  After a moment of quietude where all we heard was the buzz and whine of insects, I said, “I’ll admit it . . . this scares the shit out of me. Some big-ass thing out of folklore killed four people.”

  “Yup.”

  I rose. “And it’ll kill more.”

  “I would bet my horse on it.”

  That was stone-cold significance, coming from Remi. I stared across the high desert vista, saw endless blue skies. I was trying to convince myself that all this was real, when what I wanted was to forget the last few days.

  It was a fucked up errand, maybe, but people had died. “We’re coming back tonight and taking this thing out. One way or another.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  In Arizona, I’d discovered, the curtain-fall of twilight came late. No wonder the state didn’t do Daylight Savings Time. The light lingered much longer than in the Pacific Northwest, as did the heat of the day. Daylight here most assuredly did not need to be saved.

  We were in Remi’s bedroom back at the Zoo, and he was checking the slide of throwing knives in their sheath. The big Bowie was on his belt, as was his Taurus. The smooth efficiency of his movements made him dangerous. In a way I wished it otherwise—because then it made me dangerous, too. Maybe that was necessary now, but it played hell with memories of a quieter life. College student, college prof. Now ex-con and killer.