Darkwind: Ancient Enemy 2

by Mark Lukens

  That thing out there could’ve disabled their truck at any time before, but it chose this moment now to strand them out here. It seemed to have been hesitant for some time now, like it had been waiting for the right time to attack … and that time was now.

  A flash of movement streaked across the dimming splash of light from their headlights—a coyote darted in front of their truck, disappearing back into the darkness.

  Stella stifled a scream, her body tensing up, frozen for a moment.

  “I saw it,” Cole said in a low voice.

  Their pickup truck’s engine was really sputtering now … dying. The headlight beams were fading even more.

  “I’m scared,” David said in a low voice from the back seat.

  “We’re going to be okay,” Stella said, telling David that well-worn lie again. She needed to start telling David the truth and it needed to start right now.

  She turned around in her seat and stared at David. “No, I’m sorry, David. We’re not okay. That thing out there has stopped our truck. And now it’s coming for us. And you’re the only one who can fight it. You’re the only one who can stop it.”

  David didn’t look so sure about that.

  “You have to find the power inside of you. You’ve done it before … you can do it again.”

  David just nodded, but he seemed close to tears.

  Stella hated yelling at David, but the situation was critical now. The Ancient Enemy had attacked them at the Mountainside Inn, but that was over twenty-four hours ago. It had laid low for a while, waiting for the right time to strike. It had been hesitant, Stella was sure of that, but now it was ready and it had finally struck, disabling their vehicle. And now there wasn’t a group of dead people coming towards their vehicle in the darkness … but there were plenty of animals out there.

  Stella turned back around in the passenger seat, looking out the windshield again. “What are we going to do now?” she asked Cole.

  He sighed. “We could wait until the morning and then walk.”

  “Those animals out there are going to attack soon.”

  “They can’t get in here,” Cole said. “And at least in the daytime we can see them to shoot at them. If we try to walk at night then they’ll be on us before we ever see them coming.”

  As if answering Cole, a howl from a coyote pierced the night.

  And then another howl.

  And another.

  We’ll freeze to death if we wait in here too long, Stella thought but she didn’t say it out loud.

  The pickup truck was still in park, still rumbling and chugging. The heater was already blowing cold air. The radio was reduced to static. Their cell phone had lost any signal hours ago. The dials of the speedometer, alternator gauge, and gas gauge were spinning wildly back and forth.

  Stella looked back out the windshield and her breath stopped for a moment, her body frozen with fear, her skin crawling with dread.

  “I see it,” Cole whispered, his words barely heard over the sputtering motor.

  In the flickering light of the headlights a horde of snakes, spiders, and scorpions traveled across the two ruts in a wide line like a group of pedestrians crossing a busy city intersection.

  “Those spiders and scorpions,” Stella said, fighting for her breath. “They’ll be able to get inside the truck, won’t they?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  Navajo Reservation

  “Those spiders and scorpions will be able to get in here!” Stella said again, her voice squealing in panic.

  Cole only nodded, swallowing hard, too shocked to speak for a moment.

  Stella had seen Cole afraid many times already in the past few days. She’d seen his shock as the reanimated dead attacked them at the cabin, but this seemed to be a new level of trauma for him, a new depth of fear, some subconscious phobia finally tapped.

  Stella looked back out through the windshield at the impossible sight. There were hundreds of those creepy-crawly creatures traveling across the ruts in the dirt right in front of their truck in an orderly fashion. And there were probably thousands and thousands more out there in the darkness, all of them summoned from the square miles of desert all around them by the Ancient Enemy. She had worked out here in these deserts for years now; she knew how many snakes and spiders there were.

  “They’re going to get inside the truck,” Stella said again, her voice lower this time. “They’re going to get in here and … and attack one of us … and the other one is going to have to watch that person die.” She could imagine her or Cole covered with tarantulas and scorpions until that person panicked enough to bolt outside where the coils of snakes would be waiting, their rattles shaking in unison like the buzzing of cicadas.

  No, this was too much.

  “David,” Stella said, turning around to look at him.

  He was crying. He looked miserable. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “You have to fight it,” she told him. She was holding on to the back of her seat and staring at the child who watched her with a hopelessness in his dark eyes. She felt the tears slipping out of her own eyes. “You have to try.”

  Just then the cab of their pickup truck was lit up with a bright light.

  “Headlights!” Cole said, pointing out the windshield.

  Stella turned back around and plopped back down in the passenger seat.

  A vehicle was speeding towards them down the rutted trail, its headlights washing their vehicle in light.

  The lines of snakes, spiders, and scorpions scattered, trying to crawl out of the way of the oncoming truck and rush back into the darkness, but the truck ran many of them over.

  The truck slowed down and pulled right up to the front of their truck so that the two trucks were pointed grill to grill with only a few feet in between them. The headlights dimmed down from the high beams to low beams. The truck looked a lot like the pickup truck they were in, only older and more beat up. The interior light flicked on and an old Navajo sat in the driver’s seat. He rolled down the window a little and stuck his arm out into the night, gesturing wildly at them to get into his truck.

  “That must be Blackhorn,” Cole said, already reaching for the door handle of the driver’s door. “We gotta go!”

  “We should all go together,” Stella said. “All of us from the same side.”

  “Wait,” David said from the back seat.

  Stella was stunned to hear David speak, and she was also surprised at the sound of his voice, it seemed a little stronger than it had ever been before.

  They both turned around to look at David. The other truck’s headlights bathed David in light.

  “What is it, David?” Stella asked.

  “Let me go first,” he said.

  Stella was already shaking her head no, ready to dismiss that idea.

  “I think he’s right,” Cole said.

  “I don’t want him going out there first,” Stella said.

  Cole glanced out the windshield at the truck that was so close to them. “Look,” he said, pointing at the truck.

  Stella saw that there were already several tarantulas and scorpions clinging to the grill of the truck, crawling up the metal quickly like ants on a mission. One particularly large tarantula clung to one of the headlights, blocking out the light a little.

  Stella looked out her passenger window down at the ground which was lit up from the truck’s headlights revealing a living carpet of snakes, spiders, scorpions, desert rats, and a vast assortment of insects.

  “Blackhorn’s not going to wait there forever!” Cole said. “If we don’t do something soon his truck is going to be covered in those spiders and scorpions. He’ll have to leave.”

  David jumped over the back of the front seat, crawling into the front.

  “Out the driver’s side,” Cole told David as he scooted over to the middle and let David crawl into the driver’s seat on the other side of him. “That’s the shortest way to the passenger side of Blackhorn’s truck.”

 
Stella didn’t object this time; she knew David and Cole were right even though she didn’t like the thought of David going out there first.

  “You can do this,” Cole told David as he opened up the driver’s door. Their truck had already stalled and the headlights were out. The keys hung uselessly in the ignition.

  David didn’t answer Cole. He didn’t turn around to look at either one of them. He took a deep breath and stuck his foot out into the space, lowering it down towards the dirt.

  The critters scurried away from his foot, crawling back into the darkness like David’s foot was a magnet repelling them.

  “They’re backing away,” Cole said. He glanced back at Stella with an insane smile of disbelief on his face. “He’s making them back away!”

  David stepped down onto the dirt beside the truck. The spiders and snakes crawled back into the darkness, keeping ten to twelve feet away like there was an invisible barrier that they were unwilling to cross.

  “Come on,” David said to Cole and Stella without looking at them.

  Cole got out of the truck right behind David, and Stella got out behind him. She stood there huddled together with Cole and David.

  “We all walk slowly towards the truck,” Cole said. “We stay together.”

  They walked slowly and Stella watched the hordes of animals back away even farther into the darkness.

  The spiders and scorpions were already falling off of Joe Blackhorn’s truck and dropping to the dirt and then scurrying away.

  They were going to make it, Stella thought as they inched closer to the waiting pickup truck.

  A coyote howled from the darkness. Then another one. These howls seemed angry. Snakes hissed all around them and their rattles buzzed in the cold night air.

  “Almost there,” Cole said.

  Stella kept her hands on Cole’s back just like she’d done when they’d been on the snowmobile. And David was in between them just like on the snowmobile, but he was still enough protection to keep the animals driven back.

  They got to the passenger door. Cole opened it. “You first, Stella,” he said.

  She clamored inside the truck into the back seat; Blackhorn’s pickup had a king cab and a back seat like the pickup they’d just been in, only this one didn’t have all the clutter that the other one did.

  “You next, kiddo,” Cole told David.

  David climbed up into the truck.

  Cole looked back at the sea of animals all around him and as soon as David was inside the truck the snakes, spiders, and scorpions shot out of the darkness for him. Coyotes bolted out of the blackness, snarling, eyes practically glowing with fury.

  “Cole!” Stella yelled. “Get inside!”

  Cole just got inside and slammed the door shut before three coyotes thumped into the passenger door. Joe Blackhorn shifted into reverse and stomped his foot down on the gas pedal without even looking behind them.

  The back tires spun for a moment in the rutted dirt, but they grabbed quickly. The truck bumped and creaked as it picked up speed, backing up over animals. They could hear the thumps and crunches as it ran over snakes, insects, spiders, and other small animals that hadn’t gotten out of the way in time.

  Joe Blackhorn spun the steering wheel around in his wrinkled hands like an expert racecar driver. They all held on while the truck spun around to head back the way it had come from.

  Stella looked out the rear window of the truck. She expected to see the bed of the truck awash with spiders and scorpions, but there wasn’t a single creature there. All of the desert animals stood in a line in the darkness, all of them watching them drive away.

  She turned back around and looked at the front of the truck. David sat in between Cole and the old Navajo man who wore a flannel shirt and a red bandana over his long gray hair that he had tied back in a long braid. His skin was wrinkled and dark, but he looked trim and healthy for an old man.

  He turned and looked down at David for a moment before looking back out the windshield. “It’s really you,” he said in a low voice. “It’s like looking at a ghost.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  Joe Blackhorn’s property

  “What do you mean by that?” Stella asked. “What do you mean, it’s like looking at a ghost?”

  The old Navajo turned around in the driver’s seat and looked at Stella who was leaning forward from the back seat. He gave her a humorless smile. “All in good time. I’m Joe Blackhorn.”

  I figured that, she almost said, but stopped herself. This man had just saved their lives. Perhaps she, Cole, and David could’ve walked all the way to Joe Blackhorn’s house in a tight group with all of the snakes, spiders, and other animals following them, but it would’ve only been a matter of time before the animals got to one of them.

  “Stella Weaver,” she finally said and offered him a hand.

  “Forgive me if I don’t shake,” he told her. “This road … I need to keep both my hands on the wheel.”

  “Please do,” Cole said. He nodded at Joe Blackhorn and smiled. “I’m Cole. And this is David.”

  “David,” Joe Blackhorn said. “Even the name’s the same.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Stella demanded.

  “I will tell you everything soon,” he said as he drove. He didn’t seem particularly worried about the horde of animals they’d left behind nor traumatized by what he’d just witnessed … almost like he’d been expecting something like it.

  “Did Billy Nez tell you about us, Mr. Blackhorn?” Stella asked, trying a different line of questioning.

  “Yes,” he answered. “And please, just call me Joe.”

  “Joe,” she said.

  “Billy told me that you were looking for help. He told me a little about what had happened at a dig site and to …” he hesitated a moment like he wasn’t sure if he should go on. “And what happened to the boy’s parents,” he said in a lower voice.

  “You’re going to help us?” Cole asked.

  Joe drove for a moment, his truck bouncing around on the rutted road. He drove a lot faster than Cole had dared to drive on this rough road, but he seemed to know where all of the worst bumps and dips were and he navigated around them almost with a sixth sense. “Let’s get you back to the house,” was all he said.

  • • •

  Twenty minutes later they drove down a steep decline and there below, tucked neatly in a narrow valley, was Joe Blackhorn’s home. The headlights from the truck splashed across several structures and the foothills of the ragged mountains rose up sharply right behind the property like a wall of rock in the darkness. Stands of cottonwoods and junipers flanked the structures on both sides, boxing them in.

  Even if the headlights hadn’t spotlighted the buildings, the full moon and the cold cloudless night sky of stars would’ve been enough light to at least make out what was down there: four main structures, and only one had lights on inside—a singlewide mobile home that looked like it was new back in 1975. A large shed sat a few yards from the end of the trailer. Another building, what looked like it could’ve been a horse or cow stable, was set far off from the trailer and it had a large corral beside it that was fenced in with a myriad of building materials including wooden posts, wire mesh, pieces of chain-link fencing. In between the horse barn and corral was an old hogan closer to the foothills, shrouded by trees and shrubs.

  Stella recognized the hogan, a traditional building of the Navajo, but this building looked (and felt) abandoned to her, like Joe Blackhorn had left that structure alone for quite some time now.

  There was some debris stacked up beside the shed and near the back of the trailer: wood planks, wire mesh, pieces of metal, a few old truck rims, fencing supplies.

  A squat wooden structure with a mishmash of plastic and glass panels in it that made it look like some kind of greenhouse stood between the end of the trailer and the horse stables. A metal and wood windmill tower stood behind the trailer about fifteen feet away and the metal blades turned slowly and creaked
in the cold air.

  There were three old vehicles parked near the nose of the trailer. One of the vehicles, a pickup truck from the 1950’s, was just a rusted hulk sitting on rotting tires. There was another pickup truck that looked very similar to the one they were in. It looked like it could still be drivable, but maybe it was reserved for parts. Parked near the truck was a 1980 AMC Concord, the paint far past faded now. It had been a while since Stella had seen one of those cars.

  “Here we are,” Joe said as he parked right beside the other pickup truck and shut off the engine and the headlights.

  “Is it … safe?” Cole asked.

  Joe looked at his property out through the windshield and then he looked out through the driver’s window. He looked back at Cole, and then down at David in between them like he was waiting for David’s judgement on this matter.

  David just nodded.

  “I think it’s going to stay away for a while,” Joe said. “But it won’t stay away for long.”

  “So you know what that thing is … the Ancient Enemy?” Cole asked.

  “Is that what you call it?” Joe wondered.

  “I’ve heard it called the Darkwind,” Stella said from the back seat.

  “It’s had many names through the years,” Joe said as he opened his driver’s door and got out.

  Cole, David, and Stella got out through the passenger door, all of them looking around, trying to spot any movement in the dark, all of them traumatized by what they had just been through.

  A barking startled them and a dark German Shepard mix ran up to them, yapping at them and wagging its tail.

  “He’s harmless,” Joe said and then he spoke harshly to the dog in Navajo. The dog came over hesitantly towards Cole, Stella, and David, sniffing at the air, then the dog shadowed Joe as he walked to the steps that led up to the aluminum door that was the front door of his trailer.