A Hero's Curse

by P. S. Broaddus

  The trail finally curves sharp to the right, leaving the Mar and following the pipeline Dad built to bring water to our holding tank. We have followed the pipeline in silence for a moment when Tig utters a low growl and bounds off to the right. He does that a lot. Sometimes he’s gone for minutes and sometimes hours. It bugs me when we’re doing something and I don’t have his eyes to guide me, but he is a cat after all.

  Something interrupts my wandering thoughts. I freeze, my stick hovering in the air. I push my senses out around me, listening, feeling, smelling . . . A change has made me pause. I grip my stick tighter and adjust my feet to a more balanced stance. I try to identify what it was.

  Grasshoppers—they had been singing off to my left. Now it’s quiet.

  Tig. I whirl and swing my stick in a low arc, but he has already pounced on my shoe. I shout and kick out, mostly as a surprised reflex, but he’s gone.

  “Nice one, but you have to admit you messed up by letting me hear you before you were ready to spring,” I say.

  Tig answers from behind me. “This. Little guy. Just. Killed. Your. Shoe!” he says in short breaths. He’s probably licking himself.

  “Fair enough,” I say. “Watch out for those hoppers next time. They’ll give you away.”

  I have the little pack Uncle Cagney had carefully filled for me, and despite its small size, I am looking forward to taking it off. I stuffed too many of my treasures into this bag for a two-day trip. I swing my stick carelessly in front of me. It’s a wonderful piece; Dad carved it from a willow branch for me last fall on my eleventh birthday.

  It is late afternoon when we finally top the familiar ridge between the river Mar and our farm. Unbidden I think of how different this climb was just a couple of days ago, before Uncle Cagney came and our world broke. I hear the water from the pipeline trickling into the ancient wooden holding tank we use for irrigation. The water in the tank has a low hollow sound. I can imagine our fields and house, and wish Mom was on the porch, telling us to hurry up.

  “Uh oh,” says Tig. Before I can ask him to explain, I hear the shout.

  “There she is!” The thud of people moving reaches me. My heart is already racing. The smell of horses, strangers, and sweat reaches me. I hear the pounding of boots and the swish of dry corn stalks as someone runs toward us through the field. This is all wrong. I can’t move. I try to tell my body to act, but my muscles are frozen. I can’t even make my voice work.

  Tig grabs my leg with a claw. Feeling returns—sharp, painful feeling. “Let’s go!” he yowls.

  Chapter 5

  Tig rakes his claws across the bottom of my leg and pulls me out of my frozen stupor. I yell—I don’t know if it is because of the pain or confusion or fear. At least I can move.

  “Where?” I yell. Some part of my brain wants to know where to go—not home—away from the pounding shouts that are growing closer. Another part of my brain wants to know where Tig is.

  Tig answers both questions from behind me. “Follow my voice!”

  I spin around and trot toward the sound, my stick swinging in a low arc and one arm outstretched. The thuds behind me have left the swish of dry stunted corn and meet the crunch of gravel on the ridge. I tap forward.

  “Duck!” yells Tig. I know where we are and double over, still walking quickly, one arm raised to find the pipe I know is ahead. My hand finds the pipe, and I duck under, feel a rusted damp spot, and it is gone, behind me. My throat constricts. I taste dust. The ground away from the trail is rough under my feet. Tig is calling, “This way, this way,” over and over.

  I can’t make my feet move fast enough. I hear panting behind me. We’ve only traveled about two hundred steps. I feel the ground rising sharply. My stick jams into the sudden incline. I scrabble after the rush of gravel and constant calling of Tig just ahead of me.

  A rock under my foot gives away, and I fall. “Wait!” I pant. I’ve never been this way, but I feel the light, sharp lava rock pieces under me and I know we are headed directly toward an impenetrable wall of jagged red stone. The Valley of Fire.

  Tig yowls “Left!” He is just ahead of me. I turn left, and tap quickly ahead. My stick finds something to my right. I avoid what must be a large rock. I brush it on my way past. Sharp—part of the flow. We are close now. I want to scream, “Where are we going!” But there’s no time. Just move forward. To my left is a steep decline, jagged rocks to my right.

  I hear grunting behind me and the rush of lava gravel fewer than a hundred steps behind us. I almost fall. I catch myself and feel the slope turn down. I smell rotting water. The river! I do fall, on my knees. Then I am up, left hand extended, tapping, right hand on the ground, feeling. I crouch, crab walking as quickly as I can, using everything I have. The gravel pounds with heavy boots behind me. It won’t be enough.

  Tig interrupts from just ahead and to my right. “Don’t slow down, into the river, and go right. That’s upstream!” Despite the noise, the heat, the dust, heavy footsteps behind me, my sweat and fear, I find room for annoyance. I know right is upstream. Still no time to say anything. My feet leave the lava gravel and find soft sand.

  I splash into the tepid, slow moving water and immediately turn right. Both arms up, left hand holding my stick. The River Mar’s channel is notoriously narrow. My stick finds the opposite side almost immediately. I splash ahead.

  “Come back here!” I hear a hoarse yell from behind, startlingly close. I almost laugh. Make me, I think. I shake my head; it must be the excitement. I’m laughing, but I want to cry. I hear a splash and a yowl. “Left,” gurgles Tig. I almost laugh again. I wish I could see. Tig has only been wet twice in his life, and he hated both times.

  My stick feels a wall in front of us. I’m confused. “Left!” yells Tig again, and my stick finds open air to the left. I never stop moving, almost trotting, against the now knee-high water. I find the deepest part of the river, just above my waist, and use my right hand to help push me through the water. I’m slow—anything to help me go quicker.

  I hear whoever was chasing us stop at the river. No splash.

  “Keep moving,” says Tig, but in a much quieter voice. I wonder what’s going on. The thug must be only a few steps behind us.

  “We turned a bend,” says Tig. “He can’t see us.”

  I finally slow so that I can be quieter, but I continue moving. I hear more boots scrabbling in the gravel, how many I can’t tell. The crevice we’re in starts to throw weird echoes.

  A man’s flat voice bounces into the gorge. “She went in there?”

  “Yes, sir,” gasps another man. Must be the one who was chasing me so hard. Someone else growls a word I’ve never heard before, but I’m pretty sure I know what it means. I jump at the anger in the voice, but keep moving, swishing the air softly with my stick, letting my legs guide me through the deepest water.

  “Let her rot,” echoes weirdly around the rocks.

  “Outcrop from the left, move right,” whispers Tig. I hear him squishing along what must be a tiny sandbar off to my left. Tig splashes back into the water as I move around the outcrop.

  “Just leave her?” I hear something like relief in the question from outside. It is fainter now, so I slow even more. I want to hear what they decide.

  “We kill her or the rock basilisks kill her, doesn’t matter spit to me.”

  I stop. I hear boots tromping away. The voices are muffled now.

  “You stay here. Make sure she doesn’t come back out.”

  “I’ll watch from down there?” I hear in reply. It sounds like a question, he sounds worried.

  More swearing. I’ve heard that one at the valley market. “Both of you, right there, at the mouth of the river, till she comes out or you know she’s dead.”

  I shudder at the venom in the words.

  Tig whispers, “Come on.” We walk on. The sun is starting to cast deep, cool shadows in the river canyon. Now that I’m not being chased by some heavy creep I realize it’s incredibly hot in this crevice. I c
an’t imagine being here during the middle of the day. We walk in silence for several long minutes.

  “It’s nice the sun is going down,” I say, trying to sound normal, but my voice is still shaking.

  Tig doesn’t respond. The sun is going down, I think. My mind starts taunting me. You’ll be trapped in the Valley of Fire at night.

  “Tig . . .” good, my voice is no higher than it should be, “where are we going?”

  There is more. Why are we here? We’re going to die in the lava flows! But I don’t say it. Not yet.

  “If they’d caught us we’d be dead already,” says Tig bluntly. That silences my rebellious thoughts for a minute.

  “What now?” I ask as we wade through the tepid water. I feel the shadows more often, the shafts of sunlight piercing the canyon growing further between.

  “I don’t know,” says Tig.

  I don’t feel like laughing now. The initial rush and excitement has disappeared, leaving a dull ache in my knees where I fell. The sluggish water of the Mar feels good though. Barely warm, it’s still cooler than the air around us. I let my stick switch hands because my left is tired. My hand trails in the water, and we continue into the narrow gorge, treading deeper into the Valley of Fire.

  We have been walking for what seems like half an hour when a scream echoes up the crevice from behind us. I freeze and listen to the echo. It drags on and on, bouncing around the rocks around us. I reach out to feel Tig—reassurance. He is twice his normal size and spits when I touch him. I jerk my hand back, and he says, “Sorry, you startled me.”

  “What was it?” I ask.

  “It sounded . . .” Tig chews on his thought for a moment, “. . . it came from the direction we just came . . .” he trails off.

  I shudder, “A rock basilisk?”

  “I’ve never heard a rock basilisk,” says Tig. “They say that rock basilisks do scream, but that sounded more like a human to me.” He pauses again to let me catch up. “A man,” he summarizes.

  “Who killed him?” I ask, trying for a joking tone.

  “What killed him,” says Tig. I reach back out to touch Tig, and his hair is still standing straight up, but he doesn’t hiss.

  “Killed?” I squeak. “You think the guy that screamed was killed?”

  “I know it was a kill,” says Tig. “And so do you. You’re a hunter. You know what a kill sounds like.”

  “Maybe Uncle Cagney came back?” I say hopefully.

  “I doubt it,” says Tig. “That was a hunter’s kill—a big hunter.”

  “What do we do?” I ask.

  “Whatever it is, it’s between us and the mouth of the Valley of Fire now,” Tig says slowly. “I think we should follow the river to its source.”

  “Quickly,” I add.

  “Very,” says Tig.

  We set off at a trot again. It is easier for me to stay away from the sides of the narrow crevice, so I continue to follow the middle of the river, but I feel it slowing me down. The minutes tick by, and the water starts to feel like heavy glue, weighting every step. I move as close to the wall as I dare, keeping a couple of steps away. I can’t trail my hand along the side of the cliff like I’d like to—it’s too rough. I try dragging my stick along the side of the wall, but it clatters and the amplified echoes bounce around us. Tig hisses, but I’ve already quit. I’m still in the water up to my knees. I can hear Tig padding along on the bank, which must be only half a step wide next to the wall.

  The twists and turns continue indefinitely, and my brain screams to know where we are going. My body is tired, but my mind is exhausted. The panic that pushed me into the lava flow is long gone, and my thoughts pound me mercilessly—a rebellion starting with my parents at its center—and they don’t trust me! Uncle Cagney and the troop of thugs—did they catch him? Was it the same group that surprised us at the farm? Uncle Cagney wouldn’t have let that group come up to the farm if he was okay . . . and then to be chased into the Valley of Fire, and now to be running further through the twisted rock labyrinth with no idea where we are going.

  “Stop!” I gasp. I try to find a piece of rock to lean against, but it’s so hot and sharp I change my mind. “We can’t keep going!” I realize that I am close to hysterics. “We have no idea where we’re headed, and we have to get out of here! We never should have come here!” I know this stage of the hunt. This is the part where the prey panics. I’m panicking.

  Tig lets out a low growl, “Where would you have gone? We were being chased. There weren’t a lot of options!”

  “That’s fine,” I raise my voice, “But we have to get out of here now!”

  Tig hisses, a hiss that tells me to be quiet.

  Instinctively, I shut my mouth. For a moment all I can hear is the quiet sound of water, barely moving past my legs. I notice the water is getting cooler.

  “We’re being followed,” says Tig in a whisper. “It knows we’re here, and it’s stalking us.”

  My stomach does a double back flip. “How close?” I whisper.

  “Close,” says Tig.

  My mind starts racing again. I’m going to die in the lava flow. I’m going to scream just like that thug who was chasing us did. I clench my fists in frustration and tell my mind not to panic. I recall a memory of Dad helping me a long time ago, when I had fallen in a ditch close to the house. He heard me crying for help and came running up from the fields.

  “Don’t panic, Ess,” he had said. “I understand there’s a lot you don’t know when something like this happens.” He had dropped into the ditch next to me. “Are you hurt?” He gently brushed me off. I checked myself and realized I was okay.

  “There you go,” he said, “now, when you find yourself somewhere new, even somewhere dangerous, don’t focus on what you can’t see. Use your other senses. Find out what you know.”

  From there he coached me to use my sense of smell, of touch, of sound, and even taste to figure out where I was, and how to help myself. I threw my arms around him, and he lifted me out of the ravine. Then, as if he were afraid of me, he set me down abruptly, and I heard him walk back to the fields.

  Now, in the lava flow, I tell myself again not to panic. What do I know? I ask myself. It’s hot. And sticky. Water moves over my feet. Cool water. Even though it’s small my pack is heavy. I feel a prickle run up my spine. Something is close. Something that’s not human—something big, calculating, stalking. The feeling of choking starts to come back. The water is cool.

  The water is cool. I let out a tiny gasp. I feel Tig puff up, but it is just because I startled him.

  “Tig, the water is cool,” I whisper hurriedly.

  I can feel his incredulous look. “Thanks for that,” says Tig slowly. “Maybe I’ll have a drink. And then die.”

  “The water is cool,” I repeat.

  “I heard you the first time, Ess,” says Tig, “and honestly it wasn’t that impressive then.”

  I flap my hand impatiently. “It’s coming from underground,” I say, as if this explains everything.

  I can feel that Tig isn’t getting it. “If you were hoping rock basilisks don’t eat crazy blind girls,” he says, “I wouldn’t count on it. I don’t think they care if you’re crazy or blind. They’re probably more interested—”

  “Shut up,” I hiss, “this river has some underground source, possibly a cave, and we’re close to that source.”

  Tig lets out a long breath. I know that he gets it now. “We have to get to that cave,” he says. “Right away.”

  Chapter 6

  I have never run in my life. Even as I lurch after the sound of Tig’s voice I know we can’t make it. I feel the presence of something big. I smell it now, too. A sharp odor fills the ravine. Tig hisses in front of me. I slosh forward, swinging my stick wildly. It whacks the left side of the crevice, too close. I turn hard to the right and plunge back into the river, then I try to correct, stumbling back to the left.

  Tig lets out a screech, and I know he sees the rock basilisk. He is just a
head to my left. My stick continues to find the rocks close on both sides. I am tripping, falling, splashing forward—noise doesn’t matter anymore. I find deeper water in front of me. I’m confused, did I turn right again? I start to correct left when I hear Tig.

  “It’s a pool! Go straight! Straight!” he screams, still ahead of me by several feet.

  I plunge forward and hear something scrabble on the rocks behind me. A strangled yell squeaks out of me, something that is trying to be defiant, but is closer to sheer terror. The echo bounces around us. The water is up to my waist, my chest. I sweep with both hands trying to move forward, anywhere away from the scrabbling behind me. I choke and cough on water that splashes in my mouth.

  I hear Tig again, spluttering, “fo . . . riii . . .” I can’t understand him, but the sound is enough. He is in the water ahead to the right. I hear a screech behind us, a bone-shattering, teeth-grinding noise that sounds nothing like any creature I have ever heard. I gasp and choke on water again.

  “Where?” I scream to Tig. I’m hysterical now. I can’t hear him anymore as the water is up to my chin. A large splash sounds behind me. My stick hits rock in front of me. I desperately whack to the right and to the left. Rock, rock, rock. A dead end.

  The rock basilisk hisses behind me. Then I hear Tig ahead and to my right again. “Right!” he yowls.

  I turn right and my hands find sharp rock. I pull myself along the rock, not caring that the lava is cutting my hands to shreds. I drop my stick and pull faster along the rock face. Something catches my pack, and my heart is in my throat. But it isn’t the rock basilisk; it is more rock on my left. I am wedged in a crack. I feel cold water rushing around my body from in front of me, so I know I’ve left the pool and am still following the river.

  I yell to Tig, “Where am I?” But there is no response. He’s gone. I wave my right arm forward. The crack continues, so I grip the two sides and pull. I wedge myself deeper and deeper in the crevice, but my pack gets snagged again. I try to wiggle it free, but my backpack has me too stuck to turn. Before I can even yell for Tig again, something grabs my pack from behind—something big.