The Storm Runner

by J. C. Cervantes

  I kneeled to investigate. Even without the moonlight I would’ve been able to see the huge prints, because I had perfect eyesight in the dark. Mom called it a sacred ancestral blessing. Whatever. I called it another freak-of-nature thing.

  “They look big enough to belong to a dinosaur, Rosie.”

  She sniffed one, then another, and whimpered.

  I followed the trail, but it ended suddenly, like whatever creature the prints belonged to had simply vanished. Shivers crept up my spine.

  Rosie whimpered again, looking up at me with her soft brown eyes as if to say Let’s get outta here.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, just as eager as she was to get to the top of the volcano.

  We climbed the switchback trail, past my secret cave (which I’d camouflaged with a net of creosote and mesquite branches), toward the ridge.

  When we got to the top, I took in the jaw-dropping view. To the east was a glittering night sky rolling over the desert, and to the west was a lush valley dividing the city and the flat mesa. And beyond that? A looming mountain range with jagged peaks that stood shoulder to shoulder like a band of soldiers.

  This was pretty much my favorite place in the world. Not that I’d ever been outside New Mexico, but I read a lot. Mom always told me the volcano was unsafe, without ever really saying why, but to me it had always felt quiet and calm. It also happened to be where I trained. After the docs had said there was no way to fix my bum leg, I spent hours hiking the Beast, thinking if I could just make my shorter leg stronger, maybe my limp would be less noticeable.

  No such luck. But by walking the rim’s edge I learned how to be a boss at balancing, and that’s a handy skill when you get shoved around by kids at school.

  I set down my cane and began teetering along the rim of the crater while holding my arms out to my sides. Mom would kill me if she knew I did this. One slip and I’d tumble fifty feet down the rocky hill.

  Rosie cruised behind me, sniffing the ground.

  “How ’bout I pretend to be sick?” I said, still stuck on how to get out of Holy Ghost school. “Or I could release rats into the cafeteria….There can’t be school if there’s no food, right?” Did Catholic schools even have a cafeteria? The only problem was, my ideas would only buy me a day or two.

  A low rumble rolled across the sky.

  Rosie and I both stopped in our tracks and looked up. A small aircraft zoomed over the Beast, turned, and came back.

  I stepped away from the crater’s edge, craning my neck to get a better look.

  I waved, hoping the pilot could see me. But he didn’t come near enough. Instead, he started zigzagging like a crazy person. I thought maybe he was borracho until he circled back perfectly for another run. This time he came in tighter. Just when I thought the pilot was going to pull up, he pointed the plane’s nose toward the center of the crater. The wings were so close to me I could practically see the screws holding them together. The plane’s thrust shook the ground, sending me stumbling, but I caught myself.

  Then something started glowing inside the cockpit. An eerie yellowish-blue light. Except what I saw had to have been some kind of a hallucination or optical illusion, because there was no pilot—there was a thing. An alien head thing with red bulging eyes, no nose, and a mouth filled with long sharp fangs. Yeah, that’s right. An alien demon dude was flying the plane right into the Beast’s mouth! Everything happened in sickeningly slow motion. I heard a crash, and a fiery explosion rocked the world, big enough to make even the planets shake.

  I did a drop roll as flames burst from the top of the volcano. Rosie yelped.

  “Rosie!”

  And before I knew it I was tumbling down, down, down away from the Beast, away from my dog, and away from life as I knew it.

  2

  When I opened my eyes, the sky was a sea of black and the world was muffled, like I had cotton balls stuffed in my ears.

  I rolled over with a groan and saw that I’d tumbled about twenty yards down from the rim. My head was pounding and, after a quick inventory, I found two scraped wrists and a bleeding elbow. Then I remembered: Rosie! Where was she?

  I got to my feet, frantically scanning the dark. “Rosie! Come on, girl.” I was about to climb back up to the top, when I thought I heard her cry near the base. “Rosie!” Quickly, I hobbled to the bottom of the trail, feeling woozy and light-headed.

  When I got there, I squatted to catch my breath. That’s when Mom showed up. She fell to her knees in front of me and death-gripped my shoulders. Her eyes were flooded with tears and she was spitting out all kinds of Spanish—mostly “Gracias a Dios”—which she always did when she was freaked.

  “I heard the explosion!” she cried. “I went to check on you and you weren’t in your bed and”—she gripped me tighter—“I told you not to come out here. Especially at night. What were you thinking?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, slipping onto my butt. I looked up at the Beast, blacker than a desert beetle. How long had I been knocked out? “Have you seen Rosie?” I asked hopefully.

  But Mom didn’t answer. She was too busy thanking the saints and squeezing me.

  My heart started to jackhammer against my chest in a terrible panic. “Mom!” I shrugged her off me. “Where is she?”

  A second later, Rosie was there with my cane tucked in her mouth. I took it from her and she began licking my face and pawing me like she was making sure I was really alive. I pulled my dog to me, hugging her broad chest, burying my face in her neck so Mom wouldn’t see the tears forming. “I love you, you stupid, stupid dog,” I whispered so only Rosie could hear.

  It didn’t take long for the ambulance, cops, fire trucks, and camera crews to show up. Was everyone here just for me? Then I remembered the creepy guy who had crashed. He definitely needed more help than I did. Within a few minutes the paramedics checked me out, bandaged my cuts, and told Mom I had a bump on the head and should get a CT scan. That sounded expensive.

  “I’m fine,” I said, standing to prove it.

  I could read the paramedic’s doubtful elevator eyes taking me in and stopping on my cane.

  “I’ve got a straw leg,” I told him, leaning against my cane, thinking that sounded better than freak leg.

  Mom shook her head.

  “What’s wrong with your leg?” the paramedic asked.

  “His right leg just hasn’t caught up with the left one yet,” she said.

  The truth was, nobody knew. Not a single doctor had been able to tell us “definitively” why my leg hadn’t grown properly, which meant I could probably be on one of those medical mystery shows if I wanted to. I’d for sure rather be a mystery than a definition.

  I was glad Mom didn’t say anything about my right foot. It was two sizes smaller than my left one, which was why Mom always had to buy two stupid pairs of shoes every time I wore out a pair.

  The cops were next. After I told Officer Smart (real name, no lie) what happened, she said, “So the plane just crashed into the crater.”

  I nodded, keeping a tight grip on Rosie, who was dancing in place and whining as she stared at the volcano. “We’re safe now, girl,” I told her in a low voice.

  Smart continued with the questions. “Did the plane look like it was in trouble? Did it make any weird sounds? Was there any smoke?”

  I shook my head. There’d been no signs of distress, but I recalled the pilot’s glowing red eyes and long fangs. I must have imagined them….

  “Well?” Officer Smart asked.

  “I don’t remember.” The less I said, the better. If I told them what I’d seen, they’d really think I needed a head scan. “What happened to the pilot?” I had to ask.

  Smart glanced at Mom like she was looking for permission to tell me the awful truth.

  “We haven’t found anyone,” Smart said. “There’s a search crew on the way.”

  I didn’t see how anyone could have survived crashing into…Hold on. Search crew? My body stiffened. What if they found my cave? It would be
all over the news and all kinds of explorers would show up, thinking it was their volcano.

  A car pulled up, and a second later Mr. O and Ms. Cab got out. They crossed the night desert slowly. She was wearing her big Chanel sunglasses to cover her nonworking eyes, and he had on his wide-brimmed cowboy hat, as usual, to cover his baldness. They looked like an old married couple, but unfortunately for Mr. O, that wasn’t the case. He was always asking me questions about her: What’s her favorite color? Does she ever talk about me? Do you think she’d go out with me? So one day I finally asked Ms. Cab if she’d ever be Mr. O’s girlfriend. By the look she gave me, you’d think I had asked her to leap into a fire pit. I never told Mr. O about it, because I knew it would make him feel fatter and balder than he already did, and he hadn’t given up. He was always working on some scheme to get her to go out to dinner with him. I respected the guy for that.

  “Zane!” Mr. O said as he led Ms. Cab by the arm. His brown eyes were huge with worry. “I saw the explosion. Are you okay? Did the fire catched you?”

  “It’s catch,” Ms. Cab mumbled as she pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

  I must’ve drop-rolled just in time, I thought.

  Mom patted my shoulders. “Thank the saints, he’s safe now.”

  “No good comes from stepping out of your house in the middle of the night, Zane,” Ms. Cab said. “What were you thinking?” She turned her head toward the volcano, and even behind her sunglasses, I could see her scowl. Her hands went to the Maya jade pendant dangling from a leather cord around her neck. She’d told me once that a protector spirit lived inside the jade. Seemed a pretty lame (and claustrophobic) place to live.

  Smart asked to speak alone to Mom, and they wandered out of earshot.

  Before I could wonder what that was about, Ms. Cab took me aside. “I’ve told you, this place is muy peligroso. You shouldn’t spend time here.”

  “It’s not dangerous,” I argued. At least it wasn’t before tonight, I thought.

  “Evil lurks here, Zane.” Ms. Cab adjusted her sunglasses. “I can sense it. You must stay away.”

  Ha. If she only knew I’d found a way inside! Good thing her psychic abilities were hit-and-miss. It would seriously stink if she could see everything.

  “Did you predict the plane crash?” I asked. “Did you know it was going to happen?”

  Rosie chose that moment to break free. She took off running toward the volcano. Even with only three legs, she was a little rocket. I went after her, taking long strides, wishing I could break into a run. Still, I was a crazy-fast hobbler. “Rosie!”

  “Zane!” Mom called after me.

  I jumped from shadow to shadow to slip past the searchers. I headed around to the other side of the mountain, in the direction Rosie had gone. When I got there, the coast was clear—no one else was nosing around there yet. Smoke curled from the top of the Beast as if it were awake. Rosie stood at the base, barking like crazy. I picked my way toward her, wondering what had gotten her so worked up, and was finally able to grab her collar. Then my eyes followed hers until I saw what she saw.

  I didn’t think I’d hit my head that hard. I froze, thinking what I was seeing had to be a hallucination.

  I still wasn’t sure what exactly had been in the cockpit when the plane was coming straight toward me: An alien? A monster? A drunk pilot in a really good Halloween costume? Whatever it was, it had to have been killed in that crash. Yet here the dude was, behind a scrub brush a mere twenty feet in front of me, hunched over and digging like a wild animal. In the flesh, it was even more hideous than before, and it for sure wasn’t an alien or an award-winning costume. It… it looked like one of the monsters from my mythology book, except this guy was a whole lot uglier. The monster’s skin was a pasty bluish gray in the moonlight. It didn’t wear any clothes, but it didn’t need any. Its bloated body was covered in patches of dark hair. Cauliflower-like ears drooped down to its bulging neck. It turned and looked at me straight on with its huge lidless eyes. Standing up to its full freakish ten-foot height, it hobbled toward me, dragging its knuckles across the ground. How the heck had this dude fit in that tiny plane?

  It hissed something at me that sounded like Ah-pooch. Or maybe it was Ah, puke. My mind was reeling too much to be sure.

  I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out.

  A giant black owl with glowing yellow eyes circled just a few feet above my head. It swooped so low, I had to duck to avoid its talons.

  Mom caught up with me then. “Zane, what’s wrong with you? Why did you run off like that?”

  “Mom, get back!” Why wasn’t she screaming?

  The monster opened its awful mouth and yellow slime oozed out.

  Rosie howled like a banshee. I gripped my cane, ready to stab the thing in the eye. Anything to keep it away from Mom.

  In the same moment, the monster groaned and disappeared into a thin trail of smoke that curled into the sky.

  My heart double-punched my ribs. “Did… did you see it?”

  “See what?” Mom felt my forehead. “You’re scaring me, Zane. Maybe we should get that scan.”

  “I’m fine. Really. It was just… a coyote.”

  Except I wasn’t fine. Not even close.

  I patted Rosie to calm her—no, both of us—down. At least my dog had seen the monster, too. But why hadn’t Mom?

  “Necesitas rest,” she said. “Let’s get you to bed.”

  The second my mom left my bedroom, I checked my Maya book. I found an illustration that looked pretty close to the creature, down to the hairy knuckles and bulging eyes. I read the caption twice to be sure. “A demon of Xib’alb’a, the underworld,” I whispered to Rosie. “But how can that be? These are just stories, not real life….”

  She pawed my leg and whimpered.

  “Yeah, I’m creeped out, too, girl.”

  I slid the book beneath my bed and hopped under the covers. Rosie groaned.

  “Right. Get rid of it.”

  I retrieved the book, then got up and went to my dresser, where Mom made me keep a vial of holy water. I splashed some on the picture of the demon, then shoved the book under a pile of dirty clothes in my closet and shut the door.

  Once I was back in bed, Rosie settled against me and I could feel her heartbeat thudding, telling me she was still scared.

  It was impossible to fall asleep. Seeing the plane crash had been terrible, and thinking Rosie could’ve been burned was pretty bad, too. Seeing that evil thing had been… well, beyond horrible.

  And then there was the weirdness with Mom. Why hadn’t she been able to see the demon, too? What if it had attacked us? I wondered. Could Rosie and I have protected her?

  I squeezed my eyes closed, but I couldn’t escape the terrifying image.

  But something else terrified me even more: knowing that with my bum leg I’d never be able to run fast enough to escape the monster.

  3

  When I climbed onto the Holy Ghost shuttle the next morning, I had a pounding headache and bleary vision. Weird dreams will do that to you, especially when they’re about your dog talking to you, telling you things like You’re in danger.

  Yeah, danger from a brain-drain at lousy Holy Ghost Catholic School. There were eight kids on the van. That was sixteen eyes. Rosie had come with me to the end of the road, and when I got on the bus, she sat on her haunches and crooned. It made me feel ten kinds of miserable. But even worse were the kids’ whispers.

  What’s wrong with his leg?

  What’s up with the cane?

  What happened to his dog’s leg?

  The freak probably ate it.

  I loosened my dumb plaid tie and untucked my white button-down shirt, keeping my gaze on the long stretches of desert outside. Over breakfast I’d tried to tell Mom I had post-traumatic stress disorder from the plane crash, and I almost had her… until Ms. Cab came over to wish me good luck. She told Mom I looked “superb” in my new uniform and convinced her that I needed to be in sc
hool to get my mind off crazy things. Right. Because hanging with nuns all day would somehow erase the monster’s face from my memory.

  It took twenty minutes for the shuttle to get to school, ten minutes for me to get my schedule, and five minutes for me to get sent to Father Baumgarten’s office. I had promised Mom I’d try my best to make friends and stay out of trouble, but when the freak-probably-ate-it dude knocks you into the lockers and elbows you in the gut “by mistake,” and a bunch of stupid lookie-loos crack up, any self-respecting guy would launch his cane at the dirtbag’s head. Accidentally, of course. It was either that or risk getting knocked around all year. No one was laughing after that.

  I was sitting outside Father Baumgarten’s office, tapping my cane against the floor, staring at the pope’s framed picture on the wall, and trying to figure out how I was going to explain whacking a dude with my new cane to Mom, when the most beautiful girl on the planet (maybe in the universe) walked over and sat next to me. She smelled like rain, and her skin pretty much glowed. She had on a pair of black leggings, a zipped hoodie, and short lace-up boots that appeared to have seen a century of battle. I guess you could say she looked like an assassin-for-hire who took really good care of her skin. Where was her uniform? I wondered.

  “Hey,” she said, pushing a piece of dark hair behind her ear.

  My stomach did a somersault. Okay, so I wasn’t used to talking to beautiful girls. Reality check: I wasn’t used to talking to any girls. I tucked my cane at my side and waved slightly, saying nothing, because my voice was stuck in my throat.

  “I’m Brooks,” she said without blinking.

  My uncle Hondo had once taught me to act cool around girls by looking distracted. I nodded in her general direction and then turned my attention to a poster on the wall about something happening in two days. There was a picture of Father Baumgarten wearing clownish green sunglasses and a huge openmouthed smile.