Squeezed the trigger.
Again.
Again.
I thought I saw one of them go down, but I couldn’t be sure.
My feet found open air and before I knew it I was falling. I struck the ground on my heels. My butt. A crack on the back of my head and white sparks exploded in my vision. The darkness swelled on a tide of unconsciousness, pulling me under. And then the pain chased it back into the depths.
I heard shouting over the ringing in my ears and only vaguely recognized the voice as my own.
A hunched shape darkened the opening of the tunnel, high up on the wall. I fired up at it from my back. The bullet ricocheted with a spark from the wall several feet away from it, but close enough to force it to duck back into the tunnel.
The flashlight had fallen from my pocket when I hit the ground. I grabbed it and tried to shine it at the hole while I sighted it down the barrel of the rifle. Fired wildly. This arrangement wasn’t going to work.
I shot again and prayed I’d hit close to the mouth of the tunnel. Rolled over. Onto my chest. Popped up to my knees, facing the opposite direction. Ran faster than I ever had in my life.
Whoomphwhoomphwhoomph.
The report from the rifle had to be affecting them even worse than me. They had to be disoriented to some degree and surely couldn’t hear the sound of my running footsteps over the ringing.
The flashlight beam swung in front of me. Side to side. Glimpses of smooth rock to either side. Swatches of the wall toward which I raced.
An opening.
I barreled through it, saw a twinkle of brass ahead of me in the darkness, and knew I was headed in the right direction. Blew past it. Followed the swinging light. My frantic breath echoed inside my skull.
Tried to think.
Two of them dead. Without a doubt. Possibly a third. Four, maybe five still back there.
The ringing diminished by the second. I heard the clapping of my footsteps, and, beneath them, the clamor of others.
They were coming.
I pushed myself even harder.
I wasn’t going to make it.
A reflection from a brass casing. Ahead and to my left. Then it was gone. My heart nearly stopped. It reappeared in the swinging light. Closer. Dead ahead.
The footsteps behind me grew louder.
I wasn’t going to make it.
If I stopped and turned around, tried to get off a shot, they’d be all over me. My only hope was to outrun them.
I lost track of the bullet on the ground. Prayed my course held true. Glimpsed the wall ahead of me. Then the ground. The wall again. A toe trail full of shadows. Leading upward. The footsteps behind me. Louder still. A stampede of bare feet I could feel through the ground.
The wall again. The ledge. Maybe eight feet up.
I couldn’t risk slowing down.
The low-lying roof of the cavern. The narrow, crescent-shaped passage to the surface.
I raised the rifle in my right hand. Got one final look at the ledge before I held up the flashlight in my left. Threw them both upward as I leapt. Heard the clatter of the rifle striking stone. Felt the impact of the flowstone against my chest. Grabbed for the ledge. My hands slipped from the smooth rock, but I managed to brace my right elbow on the ledge. Caught a toehold with my left foot. Scrambled up and over the silhouetted ledge toward where the flashlight rested against the sheer face of the next steppe.
Pain in my right leg.
I went down hard on my right knee. Felt a hand tighten around my ankle. Claws beneath my skin. I cried out and jerked at my leg. Fell flat on my face. Grabbed the rifle. Rolled onto my back. Sighted straight down my extended legs toward where the antlers of a deer rose above the ledge. Fired the moment its head cleared the stone. Its mouth crumpled inward in a spatter of blood and the pressure on my ankle abated. The claws dragged along the bones toward my feet before they disengaged.
Another one was already coming over the ledge as I attempted to push off with my bleeding leg. I saw a blur of antelope horns and muscular shoulders, pushing upward to raise its surprisingly feminine torso. I fired again. A string of blood unraveled from the woman’s left breast. I saw the fear and pain register on her face before I squeezed the trigger again and it disappeared into a cloud of red.
Brass casings tinkled to the blood-drenched rock as her body toppled out of sight.
How many was that? Four? Five? I didn’t know. Couldn’t think. I had to assume there were three left. How many times had I fired? How many bullets were left?
I scooted backward until I ran into the bare stone and grabbed the flashlight. Shined it toward the ledge and the small gap through which they would have to crawl.
Whoomphwhoomphwhoomph.
My jeans were torn and sopping with blood. The lacerations on my ankle were so deep that the edges had puckered and pulled away from each other. The blood welling from between them was a deep crimson. I was grateful for the adrenaline that spared me the pain, but it would only last for so much longer.
I drew my knees to my chest. Braced the rifle.
Waited.
Whoomphwhoomphwhoomph.
Listened for any sound to betray how many of them were still down there.
Nothing but the tinny hum in my inner ears.
Whoomphwhoomphwhoomph.
What in the name of God were they waiting for?
I pulled my sock up over the wounds. It immediately darkened with blood. The nerves started to sing as they came to life. I watched my own blood work its way through the narrow crevices on the stone until it dribbled over the ledge.
Whoomphwhoomphwhoomph.
Movement.
Horns. Two of them. Sharp. Scimitar-shaped. I aligned the rifle with where its head would appear. Tightened my finger on the trigger.
Whoomphwhoomphwhoomph.
The horns. They were those on an antelope. I remembered seeing only one of them with those horns in the cavern where they’d been sleeping. And I’d already killed it.
But what if there’d been another one somewhere else? What if this whole mountain was crawling with them?
It was a risk I had to take.
I refrained from firing, even as the cracked crown of the head rose into view, followed by a forehead spattered with blood. If whatever was down there raised it any higher, I was certain I’d be able to see where I’d destroyed its face.
I waited it out.
Whoomphwhoomphwhoomph.
Listened to the blood drip from the ledge and onto the ground with a soft plip…plip…
Whoomphwhoomphwhoomph.
The antelope horns fell from sight and just as quickly there were two more shapes, hauling themselves up and over the ledge. The eyes of the man with the horns of a domesticated ram widened in surprise a heartbeat before the bullet tore through his neck. I saw a geyser of blood from the corner of my eye as I swung the rifle toward a woman with the antlers of a young buck, which had been filed to points like the horns of a gazelle.
She was upon me before the rifle was halfway there.
Claws sank into the meat of my thigh and her body weight came down on my chest. I kicked out from against the wall and slumped to the ground. Got my right hand around her neck and barely kept her face away from mine. She snapped her teeth like a rabid animal. Her breath smelled of death.
I fumbled for the rifle with my left hand. Jammed the barrel up into her right hip. Pulled the trigger. Blood and bone erupted from her bare buttocks. She screamed. It was an inhuman sound of unadulterated rage and pain.
I rolled over on top of her. Used my right forearm to pin her neck to the ground. Shoved the smoldering barrel into her left eye.
Thoom!
The rifle bucked from my grasp.
My eyes burned and I couldn’t see a thing. I felt the heat of her blood on my skin. Tasted it. The body beneath me twitched, then held perfectly still.
I toppled to my right and cried out at the sensation of resistance from my thigh. Her fingertips w
ere still hooked inside of me. I pried them out and watched the blood boil to the surface. The pain didn’t wait nearly as long this time.
I picked up the rifle again. It was so slick with blood that it slipped from my grasp. True to form, it clattered over the edge and fell down into the cavern below me.
Whoomphwhoomphwhoomph.
I expected my demise to be as swift as it was painful, but nothing appeared over the ledge, no matter how long I watched. I listened for any sound other than the thrum of my pulse in my ears.
The math was solid. If I had killed a third one with my blind shot back in the cavern, then that accounted for all seven.
I waited a full minute longer.
I used the time to tie my left sock around my punctured thigh in order to keep pressure on the wounds. Tore the already ripped cuff from my jeans and similarly bound my ankle. Cinched it so tight my startled cry could probably be heard from space. Grabbed the flashlight and crawled over to the edge. Shined it down onto the bodies crumpled at the foot of the wall. At the rifle lying there beside them, every bit as still.
It was over.
This nightmare was finally over.
TWENTY-SEVEN
I don’t know how long it took me to climb up all of those steppes to reach the tunnel they’d carved around the stone seal. Everything following the final assault was a blur. I vaguely remembered bandaging my wounds, but I’d already lost so much blood that it was all I could do to remain conscious. I fell countless times from the toe trails that ascended the flowstone and honestly don’t know how I managed to climb out of there at all, especially with as hard as I had begun to shiver. I understood how shock worked, but recognizing the onset of symptoms was a far cry from overcoming them.
The juveniles encased in minerals watched me stagger between them toward the outside world. Even though they were extremely dead, I was certain I felt the weight of their eyes upon me. I had just done the one thing no man could ever take back. I had exterminated an entire species. That they had slaughtered our livestock and had been actively trying to kill me seemed a poor excuse for finishing a fight picked thousands of years ago by men who had taken everything but their hatred with them to their graves. I doubted even my grandfather, for all his wisdom, knew why our two bloodlines—if indeed they were truly distinct from one another—had gone to war in the first place.
I knew those thoughts were irrational. I had survived an attack on the lair of a predatory species, which, had I not hunted it to extinction, would have killed my family. What was left of it, anyway. My grandfather’s days were numbered and it was only a matter of time before my mother destroyed either her liver or her lungs, whichever came first. Assuming she didn’t drop dead from heart disease or some complication of diabetes before that. And then there was my father, for whom earlier today I’d actually felt sympathy. Having survived that nightmare ordeal, I realized that there was no excuse for what he’d done. He’d seen what they were capable of doing and decided that he was never going down there again, not even if the alternative meant sending his only son to be butchered.
What kind of parents cared so little for their own flesh and blood that one was willing to orphan him while the other apparently didn’t care whether he lived or died?
When my grandfather finally passed, there would be nothing to keep me here. My mother could get a webcam if it was so important to her for me to bear witness to her killing herself. Maybe I’d even watch it. I owed her a debt for my life; bearing witness to her protracted suicide seemed a fitting way to repay it.
My thoughts remained dark as I crawled out into the frigid night, but not nearly as dark as the sky. Storm clouds had swallowed the moon and the stars and the wind blew ice crystals sideways across the mouth of the cave. The ledge was slick, the talus slicker. I lost count of how many times I fell. As long as it was a smaller number than the times I stood up again, the balance tilted in my favor.
Yanaba was waiting for me at the top of the steepest rise she could manage and covered my face with ice-cold snot when she nuzzled her nose all over me. I hugged her around the neck and somehow climbed up onto her back. Leaned against her and clung to her with the last of my remaining strength.
I barely saw the green tracers of trees whipping past from the corner of my eye and her hooves churning up the white snow. The cloud of her frozen breath gusting into my face. The sad realization that I was bleeding all over her and if I died, she’d be forced to smell it until my mother finally cleaned it off of her.
The shivering worsened and I’m not entirely sure how much of the ride back to the trailer I’d been awake, let alone how I’d stayed on her back with as hard as she galloped. The Mancos River called with a crisp sound I would have recognized—even if I never heard it again—as an old man on my deathbed, not that I wasn’t beginning to wonder if Yanaba would end up having to buck my frozen corpse off of her back when we arrived. But she got me there. Somehow. Some way. Like I said, there were simply some bonds for which words were not just insufficient, but the mere attempt to formulate them was an insult of the highest order.
She may have “only” been a horse, but she was my best friend in the world and she saved my life.
I heard the intonation of her hoof-strikes change when she hit our gravel driveway. She whinnied like we had the hounds of hell nipping at our heels and for the briefest of moments I thought that just maybe my mother would burst through the front door and haul me out of the saddle and into an embrace. I laughed aloud, not at the image of my mother trundling down those wooden stairs, but at my own rotten luck. I’d be long dead by the time she found her cell phone battery or broke through the front door. Suddenly, the idea of rigging the trailer with deathtraps seemed a whole lot more foolish than it had at the time.
At least, I remembered they were there before setting one off myself. Maybe my luck was finally starting to turn.
Yanaba whinnied and stomped when she reached the foot of the stars. Swung her flank around. Just hard enough to encourage me to climb down, not so hard as to do it for me.
I slid my hips to the right, just far enough to throw off my balance. I hit the ground on my right side, which felt as though it were made of icicles that shattered on impact. The most alarming part was not how my head bounced from the hardpan under the snow, but how none of it caused me acute pain, which I knew couldn’t possibly be a good sign.
I heard banging from somewhere above me. Something heavy striking wood.
I glanced up at Yanabe to see that she wasn’t the source of the sound. She faced away from me, her legs stiff, her head lowered, her ears flattened against her head. The muscles in her haunches shivered.
Again, the pounding. I heard a muffled scream. Or maybe it was just the wind. Rolled over. Raised my right hand to the bottom stair.
My pulse in my ears.
Whoomph…
Whoomph…
Whoomph…
Dragged myself up onto the deck.
The plywood I’d nailed over the door trembled. The nails stood maybe a quarter-inch from the board. I gave my mother credit for trying, but, as usual, it would simply be a case of too little too late.
I dragged myself toward her anyway, my blood smearing the ice-covered planks. My makeshift bandages were pink with frost. I barely had the presence of mind to crawl around the loose plank to which I’d attached the tripwire.
Whoomph…
…whoomph…
…whoomph…
The plywood shuddered. A crack raced down the middle with a loud snapping sound. It grew even longer with the next blow.
Yanaba huffed. Stomped. Huffed again.
“Luh, shik’is,” I whispered, but this time I had a feeling that everything wasn’t going to be all right. Not at all.
I rolled onto my side and looked back at her. If this was my time, then I wanted hers to be the image I carried with me into the afterlife.
She swung her haunches to the side. Shook her mane. Lowered her head. Huffed and stomp
ed. Swung around the other way, like she was trying to make sure I didn’t crawl back down the stairs.
Or trying to make sure that something else couldn’t get up them.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The banging on the door behind me grew frantic.
“No,” I whispered.
The trim splintered with a crack.
“Please…not my horse.”
Yanaba screamed. It was a horrible, heartbreaking sound. One so full of pain I could feel it deep inside of me.
She flung her head to the side and a spatter of blood raced up the stairs toward me. I caught a glimpse of a ragged wound near the point of her left shoulder before her legs buckled and she hit the ground on her side. She screamed again and kicked at the ground. Snow and dirt reddened by her blood flew from her hooves as she tried to right herself.
Whoomph…
…whoomph…
…whoomph…
I used the railing to pull myself to my feet and was overcome by a wave of dizziness. I hadn’t even taken my first step toward her when I saw the curved horn of a bighorn sheep protruding from her girth and the blood glistening on her pelt as it rushed down into the snow.
A feral, bestial sound erupted from my chest and my vision clouded with rage.
The banging behind me ceased.
I saw it. Through the blowing snow. A dark silhouette, crouching near the ground. A broken horn hung from the right side of its head like a loose tooth, while the horn on the left rested on its shoulder. The crescent of animal skull stood almost straight up from its head, glistening with blood. A blur of movement and it leapt over Yanaba, who made a horrible sputtering sound and expelled a mist of blood from her nostrils.
Again, I released a cry of pure anguish.
I recognized this one. The ram. The second one in the cavern. The one I had shot right in the forehead and sent flipping off into the darkness. The dense skull of the bighorn sheep had saved it. I could see where it had shattered at the point of impact, where the animal’s bones had ripped away from the man’s, taking with them enormous flaps of skin and leaving behind a bony forehead alive with ruptured vessels, from which blood flowed unimpeded over its abrupt brow, its useless, nearly-sealed eyes, and a face full of torment. A face I could have sworn—
Ancient Enemy Page 13
