A quick survey showed dried pasture grasses standing tall, a good crop this year. There’d been two decent rainy periods during the growing season and the bottom land was rich with naturally cured hay, full of nutrients that would keep the animals fat all winter. Tomorrow, he’d start some of the men cutting loads of it to be brought in and stacked at headquarters in case winter grew severe. A precaution. He didn’t expect it would be needed. For now the supply looked ample.
One worry off his back.
He was thankful to be home. Now, if only Harrison would appear, hale and hearty and as though planning to live forever, he could dismiss the visualized, though not realized, dreams that had haunted him these last two days.
Why should he dream of the old times as if he were present for them? He hadn’t been alive then. All he knew came from stories handed down from his great-grandparent’s time. That, and the sometimes odd artifacts Nate brought back from his scouting excursions into far-off territories.
He made up his mind to ask Neila for help. Driver of the first wagon in, she and Harmon had the horses out of harness and hobbled on the nearby pasture before the wagon even quit dripping water from immersion in the river. As leader of the women, her responsibility included the selection of a prime location to park the family wagons. She ordered camp set up beneath the sheltering branches of cottonwood trees, barren now with the coming of autumn, but with a thick golden carpet of fallen leaves to cushion their bedrolls. The air was redolent with a sharp, nutty smell.
Neila was waiting for him as he rode up, even though her fire-building techniques never missed a beat.
“Get down. Ease yourself. I’ll have tea ready soon.” She blew on the sparks thrown from her flint and steel. After all these years, it was still the quickest and most reliable way to make fire. Once, so the lore went, there’d been other, easier ways.
“Plain water is fine,” he said. “Though it’ll take a gallon before I’m filled.” He dismounted, leaning against the sturdy brown gelding with a smothered groan. Stiff enough he could hardly walk, and sore along with it, his muscles protested the long hours in the saddle. When feeling returned to his legs, he limped over to the cask at the side of the wagon and filled a dipper. Taking only small sips for fear his stomach would rebel if he drank too fast, he watched his sister.
“I can’t rest long,” he said. “There’s a lot to do.”
She waved a negligent hand. “Phfft. Every last one of us is aware of proper procedure, eldest down to the youngest. Don’t take yourself so seriously, Selk. You’re entitled to a moment and everyone knows it.”
He smiled. His people ought to. She told them at least once every day.
A wisp of smoke rose from the small pile of kindling and dry cedar shavings Neila used as tinder. She grunted as she sat back on her heels, piling larger sticks over the fire, teepee fashion.
When flames began snapping at the sticks, she looked over at him and said, “I’ll bring a chair. You can take a load off on something softer than that saddle.”
“Thanks.”
The chair she brought was made of alder, smooth with a patina of age and fine workmanship, one of six in a matched set she carried around in her and Harmon’s personal wagon. The wood felt warm under hand. The chairs folded down to almost nothing and when set up, were cushioned with quilted pillows filled with sheep wool. Selkirk sat his abused behind down on one and sighed.
“Feels good. The Bell clan always has been the best woodworkers and furniture makers I know. These chairs are clever. Who made them, Harrison or Caleb?”
“Harrison,” she said. “They’re old, maybe forty years, from a pattern designed long before the Big Bang. He gave them to Caleb and me when we married.”
“As good as ever,” he replied.
She set a metal rod, anchored at either end in Y-shaped posts, over the already-blazing fire and hung a water-filled kettle on it to heat. “You’re not here to talk of chairs, Selkirk. What’s on your mind?”
“Dreams.”
The word captured her full attention, her dirty face in sharp contrast to her thoroughly washed hands.
Wary, she repeated, “Dreams? Yours or somebody else’s?”
“Well, they’re in my head. I guess that makes them mine.”
“What do they say, these dreams?”
He stared into the fire, avoiding her eyes. “It isn’t so much what they say, Neila. It’s what they show. Maybe you can figure out what they mean.”
“Show?” She frowned.
Selkirk nodded. He often had visions inside his head that were portents of things to come. It was no secret. The clanfolk all knew of this odd talent, and since what he saw was never downright wrong—although he failed sometimes to interpret the meaning correctly—they were part of the reason he, and his family, remained clan leaders after all these years. He and his dreams, Bannion with his animals, their cousin Nate with his uncanny weather-sense. Neila had her healing and her wisdom, seeing things in his dreams even he missed. Other extraordinary talents showed within their bloodline. A rarity in their world, one that so far as he knew had not existed anywhere before the event. Moreover, the O’Quinn gifts seemed to be growing stronger, which in his case, made his head ache.
As though called, a portion of the earlier vision appeared behind his eyes. The woman. The blood. The dog.
It was Harrison’s dog.
He looked up to find Neila handing him a steaming cup of spiced tea. Around them, quiet laughter sounded as fires were built, tea made, food prepared. Relieved laughter. They were almost home.
“You went off for a moment,” she said. “What is it? Have you seen Harrison in a dream?”
He drew breath to tell her, but the three boys running toward him interrupted his flow of thought.
“Mom, Mom,” Harmon called, his young voice soft for all the excitement and alarm the boys were unable to hide. “Come quick. Uncle Selkirk, we’ve found something you need to see.”
He was a smart boy, wise enough not to disturb the whole camp, just now settling into a comfortable nightly routine.
Selkirk got his legs under him and rose, envious of the grace Neila used in rising from her knees on the ground. She was on her feet well before him.
“What is it?” she asked. Plainly her son was safe, so there was no alarm in her voice either.
The boys reached them, Benji and Pak hanging back letting Harmon do the telling.
“We found a body,” Harmon whispered. “Of a man.” The other boys nodded, solemn as young soldiers.
Harrison? Selkirk’s heart sank. “A body? Is it…”
Harmon’s voice dropper lower. “I think it’s a Mag.”
The other boys’ heads bobbed agreement.
Behind him, Selkirk heard Neila’s breath catch. “Show me,” he said.
Chapter 3
Pain, running bone deep and raw throughout her body, awakened Lily Turnbow. It didn’t help that her bed was the hardest, lumpiest piece of crap imaginable. She wondered, in fact, if someone had played a joke on her by placing a bunch of jagged rocks beneath her mattress. Some joke.
More logically, given the amount of pain, the torture was on purpose. Something like an electric shock jolted through her, eliciting a moan.
Where the hell was she? Not at home in her own bed, that’s for sure.
She tried to think, her memory searching for information like a computer with one of those antique dial-up Internet connections. The facts were there, accessing them slow if not impossible. Nothing made sense.
There’d been a fight, shots fired. That much came back to her.
Okay. Good.
Or not so good, maybe, because the fight had been with someone who was almost certainly a terrorist. He shot at her, and when that failed, stabbed her, cutting her arm.
Lily groaned. From the feel of things, he almost succeeded in killing her during their last struggle, but then—
Then? For the life of her, she couldn’t remember what happened next.
She was alive. Did that mean she’d won?
Her body twisted under the strength of another surge of…what? Life force? Something that left her gasping, hard put to stifle screaming aloud. She felt as if her blood was burning a new course through long dried arteries and veins, and it hurt. Lord, how it hurt.
She lay still, panting, until after a time the worst pain backed off. Her heartbeat pulsed in her ears, perfectly audible to her sharpened hearing. An errant thought came to her, one that said at least the rain had stopped.
Rain?
Last she remembered it had been dark, the rain pouring out of a leaden sky. Lopez, her superior officer, had revealed himself as a traitor. She remembered hearing him talk to the Arab, urging him to kill her.
Rat bastard.
Her sense of urgency grew. She had to get word to Border Patrol; to Homeland Security; the FBI. Hell, the local cops. She had to tell them not to trust Lopez. He’d put something serious in motion. Something bad for the country.
And something bad for him? The last she heard of him had been a scream.
Hot sunlight beat down on Lily’s eyelids. To her surprise, when she forced her eyes open she found blue sky—a summer sky—forming a bright canopy overhead. A few lacy clouds drifted in the high atmosphere.
Had someone moved her from the mausoleum? If so, why had they put her outside by herself and left her in the middle of a hip-high rock pile? Why hadn’t they loaded her in the ambulance that must be waiting up on the road?
But she heard nothing. No voices. No motors running.
Where was everybody?
Lily, her muscles and joints creaking like they’d been frozen in place for the last umpty-dozen years, raised herself on one shaking elbow. The movement brought her forearm, the one the Arab had cut with his knife into her line of sight. Stiff with dried blood, the cut sleeve of her jacket flopped open.
Her heartbeat increased, thudding in her ears as she stared, unbelieving. She expected to find an open, bleeding wound, by preference infection free, which she would consider real lucky considering the mausoleum’s rat scat infested dirt floor.
What she saw was a double scar about six inches long, one of which bore the raised surface of pale, ridged keloid tissue. Quite ugly, really, nothing any self-respecting physician would show to advertise his surgical prowess. The other scar lay flat, wide, and white. But their appearance didn’t bother her as much as the fact she had them at all. To her untrained eye, they looked old. Years old, not weeks, or days—or hours.
Which was impossible.
Wasn’t it?
How much time had passed since the fight anyway? A glance at her watch showed the battery had died at ten seconds before midnight. Another puzzle since the battery had been replaced only a couple months ago. How strange was that? Although on second thought, no stranger than the scars.
But wait. The Arab must have stabbed her as she went down beneath him, scoring her side with that big knife he took such pleasure in flourishing in her face. She remembered the pain, more fear than agony, just as the—what? Thunder? Lightning? Earthquake?—hit. Her mind shied away from thinking of anything else.
Fumbling, she reached around, finding no trace of other wounds. Just the arm. Then why did she feel so weak? What in the hammered hell was going on? Had she come down with some sickness? Dementia, per chance?
Her elbow collapsed beneath her. She flopped down hard enough to take her breath away, forcing a moan from her dry throat.
“Help.” Her voice scratched and wavered as though it had forgotten how to speak. She coughed, the pressure causing her insides to blaze with new fire, and tried again. “Help. Anybody? Where are you?”
The raucous caw of a crow sitting on a tree branch arching over her head answered, its cry sounding as if the bird were laughing at her. Damn, she hated crows. Too Edgar Allen Poeish, by far. Or were those ravens? Not that it mattered.
“Hello?” A few seconds later she tried again, a little stronger, a little louder, still shaky. “Hello!”
But although she listened with all her being, only the bird answered. It seemed she was the lone human in this little universe.
After a while, she sat up, feeling as if every little gray cell inside her brain was doing a sit-spin on ice skates. But after a few moments, her vision settled down and she could see again. And think—after a fashion. And oh yes, she could feel. Every pain, every stone and shard of old concrete on which she sat bruising her butt, every toe inside her mud-caked packer boots. She even felt pangs of hunger. Moreover, thoughts of a simple drink of water almost made her weep with longing. Which meant all of this must be real.
But where in this world was she, if not still on the scene of last night’s mission?
And what about the lake? She ought to be able to catch a glimpse from here. Or a smell, at least. Hear the gentle lap of waves on shore. But she didn’t.
Maybe she’d gone rat’s ass crazy. Been gassed with some mind altering crap that screwed up her perceptions. Not a lethal poison gas, because she wasn’t, after all, dead. Something peculiar, though, that’s for sure. Unless she wasn’t alive. Maybe she was walking around in some kind of hell.
Lily grabbed the crumpled edge of what once had been a concrete wall. A piece broke off in her hand, but the rest supported her weight as she pulled herself to her feet. She stood there dizzy, ears buzzing, waiting while her equilibrium reasserted itself.
No. Definitely not dead. Too much pain for that.
So if she wasn’t dead, she wasn’t in hell, right? Right?
“Help!” she called. A moment later, the crow mocked her cry, if not the actual word. “Help.” Her arm throbbed.
She knew her problem. Some asswipe had stuck the blade of his ninja knife in her, and the loss of blood had weakened and disoriented her. Made her plumb goofy. As for the scars—
Don’t think about the scars, she told herself. Think about the asswipe.
A terrorist, trying to sneak into the country over the border from Canada, that’s who he was, and she the patriot making certain he didn’t succeed. Looks like she won—although that might be up for grabs. Still, he must be dead if she wasn’t.
Keeping a grip on the wall, she stared wildly around. In that case, what had happened to his body? She shuffled her feet, which is when she realized what she’d taken for a yellowish, rounded rock nudged up against her foot was actually an old human skull, its eye sockets and nose reduced to open holes in the bone. The jawbone, separated from the skull’s top, grinned up at her from a foot away, it’s teeth out of line and rattling loosely. A few of the other bones scattered about might have belonged to a ribcage. The longest one probably a femur. Closer examination of the skull showed an extra hole in the middle of what had been a forehead.
No. Not possible.
She kicked the skull away, aware of sweat running into her eyes.
Better to study her surroundings. She made out the familiar backdrop of mountains covered in timber. Closer, deciduous trees, some with leaves miraculously reattached since last night, shimmered in greens and golds. Jack pines loomed overhead, the crow still perched on a high branch where it yammered at her. At some time, long ago by the look, several of the pines had fallen criss-crossed like matchsticks, their roots torn out of the ground by a fearsome kind of cataclysm. The one lying across the broken end of the mausoleum showed charred bark as from a forest fire. A very old forest fire.
Not how she remembered the terrain. And yet—
She went to sleep, so to speak, in a mausoleum, and awakened sheltered by worn down stone. The tall angel monument she took cover behind last night—last night?—had disappeared. She didn’t see a single tombstone. Nothing added up.Where was everyone?
Lily checked her pockets, nearly crying when she found her cell phone still in one piece. What a relief to find hints of herself remained with her.
Fingers clumsy in their eagerness, she snapped the tiny case open, touching the key pad to turn it on. And although she tried and t
ried, pounding the tiny switch two, three, four times, the device did not respond, its battery as dead as the one in her watch.
Everything was wrong. Just wrong.
Her sense of the uncanny increased. Somehow, the phone’s demise did not even surprise her. She put the useless instrument back in her pocket and called, “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
No answer.
The discovery of her Border Patrol badge, a supply of plastic tie handcuffs, and the Glock 9mm that had been half-hidden under her left thigh came as a relief. Nothing electronic about them, thank God. No batteries to die. She looked down and saw something else, too. Something as hard and unyielding as her semi-automatic—the assassin’s knife. One of those huge survival gadgets with a hidey-hole in the haft that concealed, among other things, a garrote capable of everything from sawing wood to cutting someone’s throat. But this knife must’ve been custom made, because the blade’s sheen, except stains here and there of what she suspected was her blood, glowed bright as new in the sun’s glare.
After a while she realized no one was coming no matter how long or how loudly she called.
Holding onto the low wall, she bent and gathered her things, including the knife, and distributed them around her person. Then she started walking, lurching along like someone suffering the most gawd-awful hangover of all time. Each step brought a new wave of pain inside her. Eventually, she reached a break in the trees and caught sight of the lake, a mile or so distant.
A fluttering sensation shook in her belly. Who, she wondered, had cleaned up all traces of the shooting and then, then moved the whole damn lake?
***
An hour later Lily finally reached the shore. Ignoring the rocks grinding into her kneecaps, she knelt on the gravely beach, sucking water out of her cupped hands with all the greed of a hummingbird at a feeder.
Did giardiasis grow in lakes, she wondered, or was the parasite active only in streams? She had some pills in one of her pockets that were supposed to kill a full spectrum of boogers, but she couldn’t—absodamnlutely could not—wait twenty minutes for it to work before she drank. Besides, she had no container to put water in. Where were the cast off Dasani bottles or Pepsi cans when she needed one?
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