Damn, these things can be hard to kill.
This is all only taking me a few heartbeats. But if his mate is out there about to attack, it’s a few heartbeats too many!
I twist the staff and thrust it to the side, using all of my strength. Toothy’s struggling body is pushed toward the fire on my right. His heels catch on a burning two by four and he falls backward.
“EEEEYAAHHHH!”
His scream is as high and ear-splitting as a blade drawn across metal. No wonder, though. As soon as he hits that blaze, his waist-length hair becomes a nimbus of flame, and his parchment-pale skin blackens and crinkles like dry paper. The fear they have of fire is well-founded. Apparently the Bloodless burn as quickly as paper soaked in kerosene.
All that, from Toothy’s leap to his metamorphosis into a Roman candle, has taken no more time than for me to count from one to four. Almost too much time.
Like a sharp-fanged whirlwind, Mariah comes flying out of the night. No clever hypnotic monologue this time. Just claws and canines aimed for my eyes and my throat.
I sidestep and swing my left arm—holding my faithful Arkansas Toothpick—at the back of her neck. The Bowie knife’s razor blade parts bone and flesh with one smooth sweep.
Her decapitated head bounces three times to land sizzling in the largest fire. Her lifeless body falls at my feet.
And now, though the larger problem preventing a good night’s rest may have been eliminated, I am faced with another annoyance—the rank odor of two crispy critters frying in my bonfires.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Dragoon Springs
I’ve traveled another twenty miles toward my destination. The sun is high in the hazy sky and the desert lands I’m now leaving behind as the road climbs are rippling with the heat. It is so hot that five miles back I passed a hungry coyote trying to catch a jackrabbit. Both of them were walking and taking rest breaks.
That’s my own feeble attempt at making a joke. I’m afraid that I am nowhere as good as Uncle Chatto or my Dad at humor. And I am going to have to get serious all too soon. According to the rusty, bullet-perforated road sign I just pedaled past as the road turned around a rock outcrop, I am nearing my destination.
DRAGOON SPRINGS 5 miles
The Dragoon Mountains are one of the places my people found safety for a while. Cochise had his stronghold here. Safety from the Mexicans and New Mexicans who took us as slaves. From the Americans who sided with our old enemies and then, at the end of our wars of resistance, put us all on a train and shipped us to Florida, then Alabama and then Oklahoma. Hard places of exile.
My namesake was one of those put on that train. And that is where she disappears from their histories. Lozen, the warrior woman. Was she buried in an unmarked grave in one of those faraway places?
However, hard and bitter as it was for us, we Chiracahuas did not just politely curl up and die as many hoped. Those of us who survived became that much tougher. And eventually, the children and grandchildren of those old resistance fighters found their way back to the Southwest. Most went to our cousins, the Jicarilla Apaches, but some like my dad and Uncle Chatto, returned quietly to Arizona. Not on a reservation, but on land they purchased with the money they had set aside when they were in the Marines and then doing private security work. And then came the Cloud, making all that history more or less irrelevant.
But I still remember. And so do our mountains. And, if I didn’t just hallucinate my ironic mountain spirit’s visitation, so do the gans.
I park the bike, leaning it against a state historical marker that is almost readable despite the bullet holes. I push my goggles up on my forehead and start up the narrow trail between boulders toward the high place I’ve spotted. A few feet along the trail, a piece of my torn sleeve catches on the dry branch of a shrub. I tug it free, a strip of frayed cloth hanging down where the short sleeve falls over my bicep. Not enough cloth to sew it back in place—easier to just rip it off.
I always carry a needle and strong thread with me. I’ve already sewn the two other tears that were ripped into my clothes last night by Mariah, who came closer to nailing me with her clawed right hand than I’d realized. One of the razor-cut rips was on the left inseam of my shorts just above the knee. Two inches higher and deeper and she would have gotten my femoral artery and I would have bled out.
I hold up the four-inch-long piece of red cloth. It looks like a prayer tie. I reach into one of the pouches hung from my belt and pull out a little tobacco. I wrap it in the cloth and then tie it to the branch that had caught hold of it as if to stop me, to remind me. I’d forgotten last night to give thanks properly for my survival. I do that now. Then I continue up the trail to the place that was once a lookout point for some of my own ancestors. It’s a perfect spot to see in all directions, to see if enemies are on your trail, to see the enemies that may be just ahead.
When I reach the top I stand on top of a flat black boulder, its surface of rippled stone glistening in the sun. It’s beautiful here. Familiar. My dad brought me here when I was little.
So I know this place by the name it’s held since long before I ever breathed. We Look Far From Here. It is a name that is like a track, telling me what was here before, connecting me to a memory that might otherwise be lost.
I turn slowly to face each of the four sacred directions. The view from We Look Far From Here is far, indeed. Breathtaking. The land is spread out before me like a living map. And so is the sky, stretching farther than any human eyes can clearly see. As I face the direction where the winter lives, there’s something gliding across that endless sky. Not just one, but three eagles. Real eagles, not monster birds. A wind comes whistling in, washes over me, then passes by and all is calm again.
Look down at your feet, my Power tells me.
I do. An eagle feather is right there, almost touching the toe of my left boot. It is a perfect feather just like those in the tails of the distant, sailing birds. Except for the black of its tip, this feather is pure white—so white that it seems to vibrate in the light. I don’t ask myself where it came from and why I didn’t see it when I first stepped onto this flat stone surface that is like a great black table. It doesn’t matter if it was blown here by the wind or just appeared on its own out of thin air. It is here. That is what is important.
I go down to my knees to reverently pick it up. I lift the feather, feeling the quiver of wind held within it. Then I touch it to my forehead, my chest, my shoulders.
I ask for help, Great Creator.
Still holding the eagle feather between the thumb and index finger of my right hand, I raise my arms and turn them palm out. I slowly begin to turn again. The tingling sensation in my palms comes just when I expect it, facing the direction of my destination, a walled estate that houses what was once the largest private collection of art in the Southwest. The place where the Dreamer expected me to believe his extra sensory perception told him that mirror he is lusting for was hanging.
I know why he’s aware of the crawly creature that guards the place. The one he told me he saw in one of his dreams. Guy laid it out for me as he was outfitting me for this latest task. A month ago the Dreamer sent out a group of a dozen of his best guards on a little collecting mission. Only two came back. The others, heavily armed men, met their demise on the grounds of Dragoon Springs.
Swallowed by a giant snake. Which will soon be viewing me as yet another desirable entrée.
But when I turn back to face the direction away from the place where danger awaits me, that sensation—as if I was holding my hands against a stone heated until it glows red—returns to my palms.
I immediately drop down to my belly, slide back where to I am no longer a silhouette against the sky. Then I lower one hand to pull out the small collapsed 40X telescope that I carry in one of the numerous handy pockets in my vest. I flip it and it clicks out to its full length.
I scan the road I’ve just traveled where it comes out of the desert several miles back. Movement. Just co
ming into view between the hills. And there they are at last, the ones following me. Two, three, four, five of them loping along at a brisk military pace. Following their leader, a big bear-like man wearing a red armband. He stops and looks down. I know what he’s seeing. The tire treads of my bike in the sand that drifted over the dip in that part of the road. His head starts to turn my way. I quickly lower the scope and drop down out of sight. Did his peripheral vision pick up a brief gleam of sunlight reflecting from the lens of my scope? If so, maybe I’ll get lucky. Maybe he’ll think what he half-saw was nothing more than sun bouncing off stone. Or maybe not.
Crap! Everybody wants to get into the act. But not actually everybody. Just one Overlord in particular. Only Diablita Loca’s men wear the red band. The huge man leading them is the head case everyone calls Big Boy. Boss of an outlaw biker gang back when motorcycles still worked. Now Diablita’s head of security. I recognize him by not only his boxcar bulk but by the two jagged lines of raised flesh across his right cheek. Plus the signature machete hanging at his waist. He’s never without it and uses it for you-know-what. I don’t have to guess whose head he plans to cut off with it this time.
Big Boy was a Chainer even before the coming of the Cloud. It’s surprising he’s still alive. Chain isn’t just addictive. It eventually kills its users, burns them out in a few years. At the very end it’s like there are chains inside your body, wrapped around you, being pulled tighter and tighter until your own bones begin to snap.
Why are Big Boy and his crew after me? Perhaps there is no logical reason other than that the Ones are always at odds with each other. Sending a killer team after me would be one way to thwart the Dreamer’s wishes. Done just to spite him? Getting what he wants for herself? Take that prized mirror to Diablita Loca, who can let the Dreamer know that she plans to hang it among her trophies? Or maybe she’ll just have it smashed to pieces in public?
Then again, it just might be that their job is simply to get rid of me as soon as possible because I am being viewed as a potential risk by the one who dispatched them on their mission. They’re obviously not backup for my mission.
So which will it be? Engineer my immediate demise or hang back to see if I manage to retrieve that stupid mirror and wipe out a baleful beast or two in the process? Then, if I am still alive and ambulatory, ambush me on my way back?
Not that it matters in the long run to me which objective they have been instructed to accomplish.
After all, either way, I’ll end up as dead as alternating current.
CHAPTER TWENTY
More than One
I’ve never killed a human being.
Even though I have fantasized snapping Edwin’s neck, tearing out Diablita Loca’s jugular, I have yet to do anything like that. I would gladly have killed those men who took the lives of my dad and Uncle Chatto and then gunned down Lobo. The first few weeks I was in Haven I dreamed about the revenge I would take on them. But I never got that chance because something else got them first. Whatever it was took them by surprise while they were on patrol not long after they brought us to Haven. What was left of them was found by another crew a week later.
On the other hand, I have broken my share of other people’s bones. Back when I first got to Haven, some of the bad boys decided to see just how tough this skinny Apache girl was. Three against one. Odds that were lessened when I broke the first man’s knee cap with a kick and then smashed in the next attacker’s nose with a palm strike.
That discouraged any testing of me till a week later. That was when I stuck a guard’s bolo knife through his left hand, pinning him to the wall. But that was only after he held its point to my throat as a gentle persuader to convince me to allow him to, shall we say, have his way with me? That was sufficient to convince him that no really does mean no! I didn’t need to make his attempt at undeserved intimacy his last date.
It was lucky for me—and them—that none of them were Chainers. Because even broken bones and impaled palms would not have stopped one of them. Nothing short of killing discourages a Chainer. Which I could have done, though I’m glad I wasn’t brought to that decision point.
Now, though, I may have to make that kind of decision. Neutralizing or shaking that five-man hit squad, before I go up against the denizens of Dragoon Springs, might be the smartest thing for me to do now. My brief glimpse of them was enough to see that two of them were carrying sniper rifles with those old-fashioned but still effective mid-twentieth-century telescopic scopes that do not rely on any of the electronic stuff that took over in the next millennium. Telescopic scopes are easily effective from half a mile away in the hands of any halfway decent marksman.
As I begin my climb down from We Look Far from Here, keeping the mountainside between me and my stalkers, I consider my options.
They have to see me to get me. All they know now is that I’m somewhere ahead of them. I could try to stay unseen and pick them off one by one. It might take a few hours, but I could possibly decommission all five of them before sundown.
But do I have to do that? I might if all I had on my side was my stealth, my strength, my weapons, and the training given to me by my family, passed on from generations of the greatest guerilla fighters the world ever knew. The last Apache to fight against the United States was Geronimo, but our people then—like other American Indian nations before us—began to apply our skills to fight for the country that had been their enemy, all through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. My dad and Uncle Chatto were only the most recent Chiricahuas to serve as special force soldiers. And they kept on passing me their knowledge and training until the day they died. Like them, I am a warrior.
However, I have one additional choice other than just using my fighting skills against the men tracking me. I can use my Power.
I begin to climb down from We Look Far from Here.
Little Foo-ood!
I almost slip on a loose stone that goes bouncing and rolling down ahead of me.
I should have known it. Just when things are looking bad, my silent admirer would show up to make them worse.
What?! I think back at him.
Somehow, though I’ve not seen more than a partial glimpse of this sardonic kibitzer who has been describing me as a future menu item, I know that he or it is a male. Back once again to taunt me. But the unspoken words that enter my mind surprise me.
I could help you.
There’s a sort of sincerity in those words. As I start climbing down again, I consider that. And he did help me before. But I have to ask.
Why?
Because.
And the old irony is back again in that telepathic message to me. I stop again. I look carefully downslope, upslope, to either side. Nothing living in sight aside from a horned lizard sunning itself.
Where are you?
Somewhere.
Why did I even ask?
I’m halfway to the bottom now. Then it comes to me. Something is different. What is it? No pain in my forehead when his words touched down in my mind. We’ve been having a conversation just now—frustrating though it may be—as easily as if we were speaking aloud. Actually, for me, easier than talking.
You are not really going to eat me, are you? You’ve just been messing with me.
You think?
Ho ho ho.
I thought it was funny.
I hop down from one last rock and I am back on the road. The crossroads that lead south into the mountains are just ahead of me to the east. I pick up a stick and crouch down by the side of the road in front of the sign, which is leaning at a forty-five degree angle and still reads US10.
My silent partner is quiet now. No mental messages. But I can feel that he is somewhere nearby. Perhaps no more than behind one of those boulders back up the slope. I can feel him watching me. And suddenly I think I know now who—or what—he is. Of course! And I feel stupid for not having figured this out sooner. He is not a gemod. He’s far older than that, a being who lives in the stories of
not just my people but those of Indians all over this continent. Not exactly a human being, either. Or a gans. Someone more ancient than that, from a time before us humans, him and his people. All of our Native people have stories about him or his relatives. They’ve called him by many different names. Big Elder Brother, Sasquatch, Bigfoot. To us he was just Tall Hairy Man. Perhaps if I turn around quickly I’ll see his large-toothed face before he can duck back out of sight. But I won’t.
I feel the presence of my hairy friend beginning to fade. He is moving away fast, back toward the direction where I saw that sniper team. I can almost see him in my mind.
Why has he chosen to help me? I no longer think that it is, as he so sardonically put it, because he sees me as his Little Food. He’s doing more than just protecting a potential protein source.
Maybe I’ll survive long enough to find out the answer. But I need to get my mind back to this task if I expect to eliminate the additional threat to my existence posed by my well-armed pursuers.
I bring the words of Lozen’s chant to my mind. I learned it not from my father, but from my mother. She passed it to me soon after we were brought to Haven. The blood of Lozen’s family came down to me from Mom’s side, not Dad’s. Mom is just as strong, in her own way, as Dad was in his. If she weren’t, she would not be able to take care of Ana and Victor the way she does, making them feel safe as long as she is by their side.
I can see Mom’s calm, unlined face, her dark, knowing eyes. She was holding both my hands in hers. And though I was already half a head taller than her, I felt in that moment as if I was the one looking up at her as we stood there. We were in one of the few quiet places in Haven that day, by the wall behind the shed where Hussein stores his tools. Mom had just been assigned to the job she still has working in the garden. We really knew nothing about him. But Mom and I’d known, somehow, that we could trust him.
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