by S. A. Sidor
McTroy pulled the reins on Moonlight and put up his hand.
Evangeline and I stopped our horses. The animals lined up, almost touching.
The bounty hunter’s squinty gaze filtered everything in sight, searching out danger the way a prospector pans for gold. He cut a plug of tobacco and thumbed it behind his lower lip. He spit on the sand: a sound like slicing. The sun inched higher.
“It’s awful quiet,” he said, finally.
“That’s good,” I said.
McTroy stared at me as if I had sat in horse flop and praised its warmth.
Evangeline put her head down and smiled. Wu had a wide grin.
“Resurrección is beyond that plateau.” McTroy tilted his chin. He checked the map. “See that purple notch? Looks like a lopsided V? That’s where we go in.”
“What do we do now?” Evangeline asked.
“We go in,” he repeated.
McTroy tucked the map under his poncho.
“Doc, you ride first. Miss, you give him a little space. Follow behind. If they shoot him, high tail it for them red pointy rocks on the left.”
“If they shoot me?”
“Calm yourself. I ain’t seen one mummy could handle a rifle worth a damn.”
“These are the best odds we’ve faced since we started,” Evangeline said, sunnily. Her eyes were like polished jades. “My father has no familiarity with firearms. Kek and his five minions are likewise ill-equipped for modern warfare. It is four against seven. And we have Rex.”
Rex. I urged Penny forward.
“There is the small matter of the mummies’ immortality. Kek’s supernatural omnipotence and Monty Waterston’s masterful planning are trivial in the face of Mighty McTroy, eh?” Penny seemed as hesitant as I did to take the lead. I offered her words of friendly encouragement. The wind whipped up fine grit and seemed as though it wished no less than to peel away our skins, layer by layer, molecule by molecule. I felt rough – a collection of saddle sores, leg cramps, a stiffened, twinging back, and sunburnt cheeks. I was in dire need of a hot bath and a bar of soap. My hands resting on the pommel had mysteriously shrunken over the journey to look like chicken feet: dusty, scaled, and gnarly. I flexed them to make certain they were still mine. I glanced over my shoulder. Evangeline and Wu rode together in the saddle. They were falling in place behind me. McTroy, stationary, pinned his attention to the horizon. “Have we given any thought to how we are going to kill the unkillables?” I asked.
“Crush ’em. Burn ’em. Cut the bastards apart with lead or steel,” McTroy called.
My mind flashed on Rojo, on what Kek did to annihilate him.
“I believe there is historical precedent for beheading and de-limbing as a method of neutralization, if not actual execution,” Evangeline said.
“If we had a fish pond we might drown them,” I said bitterly.
“You jest, but they might well disintegrate in large quantities of water.”
“If only you had told me sooner, I would have buried them in the blue Atlantic.”
Penny had slowed again. Her hooves struggled as if we were mired in swamp mud. She pulled her head back. I bent over her neck to study the terrain underfoot.
“Sand is soft here. And rather deep,” I called back. “What is it, girl? Do you smell something you don’t like?” Snakes? I didn’t see anything but a miniature dune. Penny was standing in a drift of sand as high as her knees. Directly before us, the quality of the sand changed. It flattened into ribboning waves, like the ripples a stone makes when tossed into water. The sand appeared raked in a large circle. A continuous, widening groove, a spiral curve. A gyre.
“There’s something on the ground here. It looks manmade. Like a pictogram drawn in the sand.”
The hand came up from underneath Penny.
I didn’t see it. Not at first. And she didn’t see it either. She felt it. Not the hand itself, but what it held.
A spear.
The chiseled flint tip stabbed at her belly. Penny reared up and threw me. I landed hard on my back. My head smacked the gravel, and a shower of golden sparks flew like embers kicked into my eyes. I shook my head. A mummy was sitting up in the dune. His dingy ivory bandages leaked sand. Grains spilled off him, following the creases, like rainwater. He swiped at the horse with a long, wooden spear. His bandaged hands gripped the shaft. Penny was bleeding. He hadn’t managed to impale her as he wanted to, but he’d given her a deep scratch along her ribs; her brown abdomen was awash in crimson, and she was kicking her forelimbs. Her big, yellow teeth protruded, her eyes bulged out in fear.
I scrambled to my feet.
The mummy was on his feet too. An unraveled strip of bandage looped under his chin, swaying back and forth as he shifted his weight. I saw his mouth grimacing, a few skinny, ochre teeth, and a wedge of khaki bone that was his jaw.
He lunged at Penny. His spear cut horse flesh. Penny shrieked. She backed up and nearly trampled me. I darted aside and slipped my walking stick deftly from the saddle. I raised it like a cricketer’s bat, readying myself to take a swing, but the horse kept herself between me and the sorcerer’s desiccated servant.
“Hardy, look out!” Evangeline shouted.
I had the mummy squarely in front of me. What exactly was I to look out for?
I shot a questioning look to Evangeline.
Out of the corner of my eye I spotted the second assailant and the reason for her alarm. This mummy had unburied himself like a trapdoor spider. His hidey hole gaped behind him. His head was a mass of dirt and camouflaging creosote-bush twigs. He brandished a rather alarming weapon in his right hand. My background in Egyptology allowed me to identify it quickly as a khopesh: a sickle sword. The khopesh has more in common with hook or bludgeon than sword, actually. I’d compare its function to that of a battle axe rather than a cavalryman’s sword. Nonetheless, it is a proper killing tool.
He swung the khopesh. I deflected the blow with my stick. But the flat, unsharpened edge of the khopesh caught me above the hip, rather painfully, in the region of my kidney, knocking the wind from my lungs. I did not fall, but I staggered.
To give myself a chance at regaining a degree of composure, I retreated two steps and found I was standing at the center of the sand spiral. The khopesh-wielding mummy lost interest in me and joined his soulless partner in the harassment of poor Penny. The first mummy wrapped his spearhead in Penny’s reins. She tried to bite him. He batted her nose with a closed fist. She nipped again. He let go of his spear and took hold of the cheek piece of her bridle. He was trying to drag her toward me.
No, toward the spiral.
She would not budge. She tried her best to toss him.
Then she was up on two legs and the mummy was dangling in the air with his hands locked on her muzzle. The second mummy maneuvered behind her and smacked her flank with his khopesh. Driving her forward.
She lurched in my direction. The mummy fell off.
Penny and I were both inside the spiral now.
The mummies gathered at its edge.
Dust exploded from their chests as McTroy filled them with hot lead.
The gunshots did not faze them. But I was no longer focused on the mummies, because the sand under me had begun to shift. Rotating. Like the gyre it resembled, the spiral turned, and like ships caught in a whirlpool, Penny and I were being sucked down.
“Run! Get away from the center!” Evangeline yelled to me.
Riding on Neptune’s back, she positioned herself and Wu along the opposite rim of the whirlpool from the mummified attackers. I saw anguish in her face. Knowing then how critical my situation was.
The vortex picked up speed.
It moved as if powered by an enormous underground engine, the sand spinning counter-clockwise, grains tumbling over and under other grains. Sifting, sifting, everything going down into a giant funnel. I was up to my thighs already, and it was impossible to walk through, heavier than water, paralyzing, or so was its effect once a body part was submerged. I
tried swimming, as one is supposed to do in quicksand. But this wasn’t quicksand. The gyre hauled me in, gravitationally, it seemed. I could not escape its force. The more I strove to leave, the faster I lost myself in the warm, granular grind. I struck out with my stick, hoping to grab a bit of purchase on more solid footing.
But my effort failed. I was sliding the wrong way. The entire terrible wheel tilted inward towards its devouring core. Shushing like surf on rocks, spitting granules like bits of salty seawater. Hypnotic, really. If one were not caught in its clutches.
“Oh, Hardy,” Evangeline said. She shut her eyes.
McTroy had put his guns away. He roped one of the mummies by the neck – it was the one who had employed the spear – and he wrenched the ancient Egyptian off his feet. Moonlight stomped her hooves into the mummy’s bread basket until it was like a man crushed by the wheels of a coach.
The khopesh mummy noticed the extreme damage, and ran.
“The rope!” Wu shouted to McTroy. “Throw Dr Hardy the rope.”
Now despite his raging hatred for anyone who might harm a horse and his loathing of cowards who ran from fights they started, McTroy paused in delivering punishment long enough to keep me from dying an unspeakable death.
He dismounted. Cutting his lariat (he left a noose attached to the trampled mummy), he tied a honda knot, and on his very first toss, roped me around one arm and shoulder.
“Slip that over your head. Get your other arm in the hole,” he said.
The spiral hugged my upper chest. As I breathed in, the sand squeezed me tighter. I expected my ribcage to cave in and fill with loose earth. I could not expand my chest. Breathless, I raced with clumsy, thick-seeming fingers to get the rope around me.
I succeeded.
In three long pulls McTroy towed me to stable ground, outside the deadly funnel.
There was no time for my horse.
Penny screamed a terrible scream.
I tipped on my side to witness her last moments.
Her head jerked as if she were crossing a deep, cold river full of undercurrent. She was choking, blowing and coughing sand. Struggling to keep her nose up. She corkscrewed. Hundreds of pounds of sand crushing in on her. The long, brown face went under. Then no sound. The spiral slowed. Stopped. A thin, dirty amber cloud lingered.
I lay panting. “No,” I said. I climbed to my knees. “No…”
“Nothing you could do,” McTroy replied.
He spit into the killing circle.
In the distance, the slashing mummy was running. Loose-limbed. A shamble here, a stutter-step there. Never quite straightening out and never managing to fall down either. His top half shimmied while his bottom danced across the Sonoran floor. It was a crazy thing to watch. Funny if it weren’t so damned weird. In my gut, I knew it shouldn’t be. This undead thing was perverse. Abomination is the biblical word. But I am not a biblical man. Unnatural would be mine. McTroy pumped two rifle shots into the ghastly thing on principle alone. He hit it between the shoulder blades. But it kept on going. Until it disappeared into the V notch.
“Least we were right about their location,” he said. “Now where’s that other shit sack?”
Moonlight stood guard over the demolished mummy, one hoof anchoring its rags in place.
“Ease up, ’light,” McTroy said.
When the horse withdrew, McTroy straddled the mummy. He reached down and seized its head. He grunted with effort. Cords popped out in his neck and his face turned red as a rooster’s comb. A sound like a broomstick snapping – he pulled the mummy’s head off. He left it there on the ground. Without a word he rolled the headless body into the spiral. The sand churned, sucked the body down.
It grew still again. Quiet.
“Bring me the lamp oil,” he said.
I went to Evangeline’s saddle and unhooked the bull’s eye lantern. I unscrewed the oil reservoir. “Here,” I said, passing it to McTroy.
We four watched the undead thing’s head. Its mouth was moving. Chewing air like bread. Utterly mindless. The crusty eyes blinked. Did they see like we see? Were thoughts being registered in its brain? It reminded me of a dying insect. Once, though, it had been a man. Like me. I swallowed.
McTroy splashed lamp oil on the head. He sparked a match on his thumbnail and flicked it at the mummy’s forehead.
A great whoosh.
A sudden burst of heat.
The head quickly changed to black. Smoke poured upward as if from a censor. A smell of frankincense released bluely into the morning air. The head crackled like a pile of kindling pine needles. McTroy crushed the charred remains flat, grinding the bones under his boot heel.
Something shined at the outer limit of the spiral: the ape’s head of my walking stick. I leaned over and snatched it. I joined McTroy on Moonlight. Evangeline and Wu rode beside us. We followed the coach’s wheel tracks into the notch cut into the plateau.
The shadows felt like home.
39
Prelude to a Desert Death Ritual
The notch led us into a twisty canyon. Red rocks lined both walls. The sides were too steep to climb, and the winding trail pinched too narrow for the horses to turn around. It was one way in, no way out. Saguaro and organ pipe cactuses grew from the upper ledges along with flowery yellow splashes of brittlebush and spiky soaptree yucca whose stalks of droopy, white blooms leaned inquisitively over our heads like faces of concern.
Neptune paused. Wu jumped down to retrieve something from the path in front of the horse: the khopesh. The mummy must have dropped it in his shambolic retreat.
Wu handed the sickle sword to Evangeline and climbed into the saddle.
Evangeline turned the weapon back and forth, studying it.
“This comes from my father’s private collection,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Can we assume the same about the flint spear?” I asked.
“Father owns several spears of bronze and flint. It might have been one of his.”
“What other weapons may he be supplying to the mummies?”
“Oh dear, an arsenal, I dare say. Bows and arrows, of course – those were the preferred arms of the ancients, and they would be tipped in iron, bronze, or flint.” She counted on her fingers. “Throwing sticks. Battle axes. Slingshots and maces – Father possesses fine examples of both. He collects daggers by the dozen. We keep an entire hall devoted to displaying edged weapons. Who doesn’t love a beautiful old dagger?”
“My mother often said the same to me when I was a boy,” I agreed.
Evangeline rolled her eyes. “He doesn’t have a chariot, thank goodness.”
That reminded me of a question I had concerning the map.
“McTroy, is this the only access to the Resurrección Mine? How did the company transport their equipment and loads of ore? Not through this ravine, that is for certain.”
He swiveled toward me. Eyebrow cocked and cheek bulging with tobacco.
“We’re coming in the backdoor. There’s a road to the north. Five miles ’round the plateau. I reckon it’s gated. Might be a guardhouse. This way’s quicker.”
“Hakim didn’t drive that coach and stallions through here,” I said.
McTroy uncapped and drew on his flask. He offered me a sip of whisky.
I took a swallow and it spread warmly from my belly. However, when I attempted to breathe again, I began a fit of uncontrollable coughing. My eyes watered. McTroy politely passed the bottle to Evangeline while he slapped me thunderously on the back. This did me no good, but McTroy seemed pleased in his attempts. I hiccupped. He walloped my spine. As we were engaged in returning me to equilibrium, Evangeline finished the remains of the liquor. This allowance was more generous than McTroy intended it to be. He received his flask with an instant realization that it had become dangerously weightless.
He said nothing but sucked in his cheeks and uttered a chesty growl.
Evangeline nodded cordially.
“Who knows where the black magic br
oncos mightn’t go,” he said. “Those wheel tracks stopped at the notch. They didn’t circle.” He tipped the flask and worked his lower jaw like a landed fish. But not a single drop fell. He spied into the bottle. “Don’t matter. We know where they are.” He chucked the glass into the pink-red rocks where it clinked twice but failed to shatter.
After the ambush at the spiral, McTroy had given one of his Army pistols back to Evangeline for protection. Now she resettled it in the belt of her dress. She moved her braid off to her shoulder. Her neck was the color of spring peonies. She spoke to Neptune using words of gentle, yet firm encouragement.
We resumed our slow ride.
The canyon narrowed. We approached a stone arch, like the gateway to a forbidden city. It bridged the ravine. A myriad of thin, meandering cracks branched throughout the span from stem to stern. The arch had probably been there for a thousand generations. A sign bolted to the rock read: Resurrection Mine – Peligroso. Some objector had blasted away the lower half of the sign with a shotgun. A group of ravens perched along the upper edge; their feathers gleamed shiny and black as an undertaker’s shoes. They were silently watchful.
“An unkindness,” Evangeline said.
“What’s an unkindness?” I asked, puzzled.
She lifted her chin. Her hips rocked in perfect synch with Neptune’s equine forward motion. Shading her eyes with the flat of her hand, she said, “That’s what you call a group of ravens. An unkindness. When you write a book about our adventure, you’ll need to remember that.”
“Why do you think I’m going to write about this?”
“The way you study things. Tucking them into your memory, like an old scribe brushing away on his papyrus scroll. Making certain you jot everything down correctly.”
“I’m not old,” I said, testily. “I estimate us to be about the same age.”
“You’re old inside, Hardy. You’ve probably always been old.”
