CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
"Here It Comes Again"
The spade-shaped head bobbed, black tongue flickering in and out. It lowered its head, looped back in on itself and slithered away like some obscene earthworm. Beadles watched it leave a series of chevrons in the sand until it reached the hole and slipped over the rim. Beadles felt empty. Light-headed. He grabbed a handful of sand and squeezed tight, feeling the grit dribble through his fingers. He got up, scanning the room for more snakes. Thirsty again. He reached for the canteen strapped to his belt and emptied the lukewarm contents.
Beadles returned to the hole in the floor, got down on his belly and examined the first floor for snakes. Nothing moved. Beadles dropped down, out, cut around the pond and went to his vantage point. The figure was now clearly recognizable as a man--or at least manlike. It glided on boneless legs like Michael Jackson doing the "moon walk." The oily delta at its feet surged forward with every step, sometimes overshooting and drawing back. Behind the shimmering delta faded into the sand and heat. Were there army ants? Why no flying insects? Where were the South American killer bees, the yellowjackets? Why only things that slithered or skittered?
Beadles trotted to the top of the tube every muscle aching. He felt like an old man. The gas cans were intact. He picked one up. All there. It was going to be a great show, too bad they couldn't do it at night for full effect. Beadles had to time it perfectly. He intended to dump both cans down the tube and catch them when they were about halfway up. This required him to remain on post watching their approach until the last possible minute.
Beyond that he didn't have a plan. That thing might even be boneless. A ghost. Insubstantial. Able to inflict harm only through its venomous minions. It this were true he had only to turn back the onslaught. Did he have enough gas?
"We'll soon find out," he muttered.
Through the glasses the quavering nighmare approached. Its indistinct features made it worse. Beadles dialed in on its enormous hands, out of proportion with the rest of the body. Its segmented fingers ended in stingers. Its feet were outsized too, the toes elongated and pointed down like claws.
Time ticked by. Heat crouched on him like a monkey. He reached into his pocket and applied lip balm. He thought about his past mistakes, the people he'd wronged. All those girls whose hearts he'd broken. Parents and instructors. Even Betty. Especially Betty.
The sun threw death rays. The sun hated him. Ironic because he'd always loved the sun. But not this sun. He'd loved a cooler, more distant and benign sun, not this ball of fury that bore down with the insupportable weight of its heat. He glanced at his watch. Almost noon. Beadles was drifting. He shook himself and looked down. The thing was a hundred yards out striding so smoothly it could have been riding a skateboard. Boneless legs. Snaky arms. An unusually limber tourist out for a stroll.
On it came. Across the fifty. It glided up to the Hummer, twenty yards from the base of the butte.
It stopped and looked in through the charred remains of the tailgate. It walked clockwise around the vehicle to where Vince's bones lay scattered. It stooped on its haunches and examined the bones, picking one up and smelling it.
Beadles dry-swallowed. The thing circumnavigated the vehicle returning to twelve o'clock. It looked up.
Rebar in his gut Beadles lifted the binocs. For an instant he couldn't focus. He found its face. It was a crude metaphor for a face, something a boy would draw on a bathroom stall. Unfinished and inhuman. Mesmerized, Beadles searched the face for some sign of intelligence. Even from that distance Beadles could read its hostility. It shot death rays. Beadles felt a sick sort of vertigo insert itself needle-like behind one eye.
He was damned if he'd be the first to break it off. His hat kept the sun out of his face while the creature shaded its black sinkholes with a claw. Beadles lost track of time. He fugued unfocused and leaned forward with both forearms on the hot rock. He, the white interloper looking down from the heights, staring at the eidolon of native fury and resentment.
You have no more right to this land than I
.
The Navajo came from Siberia around 1000 AD and displaced the Anasazi. The Anasazi likely took the same path a millenium earlier. This is the way it had always been--the more sophisticated civilization displacing the primitive, often in the most brutal manner.
Beadles had nothing to do with it. The thing had no right to hold him accountable. Beadles was the one trying to restore the thankless creature to its proper place in history! The thing ought to
thank
him. His own anger slammed down like a fire door.
He cupped his hands and leaned out. "WHAT DO YOU WANT?!"
There was no motion, no answer. After a ponderous pause its right arm rised as slowly as an RR crossing and pointed at Beadles. With an abrupt twisting motion, the claw snapped shut and rotated. Its meaning was clear. The creature whirled its gruesome arm over its had and released an ear-splitting yell that struck Beadles like a hurtling truck.
"
KI YI YI YI YI YI
!"
The army of chitin and scales sizzled back like a wave withdrawing from the beach, bunched into a two foot ridge and surged forward, elongating as it raced toward the chimney. A giant's fist wrapped around Beadles' throat. He gasped, hearing his breath scrape like an anchor chain through a steel grommet. Panic attack. He bent over and put his hands on his knees gasping for breath.
Now. It was happening now.
Go to the chimney
. A goony bird in flight, he broke into a stumbling run with a keening whine of anxiety. Part of him hovered overhead looking down, as if he were already dead, seeing himself lurch across the rock and hearing the shameful noise he made. He tripped on a boulder and went down hard, skinning his palms and knees. He got up and it was like running in his dreams, in slo-mo, weak as a crawdad, moving, moving but hardly making progress. On and on. At last he came to the chimney, sliding to his burning knees. He grabbed one of the two cannisters and unscrewed the cap. Gas smell gouged him. His stomach clenched and wound up. He would not throw up. He would not. Eyes shut and tearing he turned away from the gas and breathed in and out. In and out. He fought it down. He turned back. His stomach sucker-punched him in the gut.
Beadles bent to the side and vomited a thin gruel of trail mix and yellow bile. He felt better. He leaned over the gas tank and went blotto.
What was he doing here?
An eerie clicking noise issued from the bowl. White noise with the pop of gristle coming at him like something crawling out of the depths of the sewers, rising in the pipe like vomit. Beadles tipped the cannister forward and emptied the contents into the pipe sloshing it all around. He leaped for the second cannister and did the same. The squeaking and chittering grew louder.
Beadles found his matches, lit several and tossed them into the chamber. FWOOSH. The top of the chimney lit up like the Olympic torch. Beadles staggered to his feet and back, his face flushed from the blast.
Black insect parts rose crackling from the tube like soot from a coal plant. They twisted in the wind and landed on Beadles' face and arms with an itching oily sensation. He frantically brushed them off backing away from the tube.
Flame belched up with a roaring sound sending whole snakes curling into the air performing arabesques. Beadles felt like dancing. He pumped his fist in the air.
"BURN YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!"
He danced and cackled like Walter Huston in
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. He pumped his fist and did the Harlem Shake. He whooped like a cowboy at a rodeo.
He raced back to the vantage point and picked up the binocs. He looked down. The thing was gone. He felt light-headed. He cackled gleefully with an undertone of madness. He''d burned its army and now it was gone. GONE.
Was that all there was to it?
A sharp pain pierced his shoulder. He turned and beheld the devil's face.
***
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
"The Devil Himself"
It towered over him, its lipless mouth fixed in a zipper grin exposing vulpine fangs. Massive high cheekbones, forehead like a cliff, backhoe chin. It stank of despair and the passing of time. Its skin was sun-cured leather stretched taut over massive bones. Its eyes were yellow slits. Its hair was like cornsilk. The hands were the worst.
Each digit was a scorpion's tail. Thumbs the size of cigars tapering into lethal stingers. The hand flickered and seized Beadles by the throat, five needles puncturing his skin injecting him with the poison of hatred and history. Effortlessly it lifted Beadles six inches in the air and studied him as one might study an insect. It exhaled the stench of hecatomb.
Beadles seized its massive wrist in both hands to relieve the pressure, his feet dangling. This was it. He'd had a nice run. Shame to go out a loser. He wished he could have held Lars in his arms again. Even Betty. Even Summer.
He closed his eyes and prayed. Prayed to God. Hadn't been to church or thought about religion in decades. He made his peace.
Stingers pierced his neck. An instant of shock. He felt light-headed. The light swam diagonally in flexible hexagons.
He stood on the ground beneath a merciless sun.
Accompanied by five of his fiercest warriors Skorpio approached the meeting of the blue-eyed devils with extreme trepidation. His mother Nagua had warned of this for years. They would come from the south, a strange invader that actually consisted of two beings fused together. The rider and his beast. So it was prophesied; so the Azuma alone of all the tribes understood that these were but men. Their creatures inspired awe. But the Azuma had seen deer and buffalo and knew that the creatures were children of the sun.
When the invaders first appeared word spread as fast as the runners and filled the land between the four sacred mountains.
The invaders arrived by sea--something neither Skorpio nor any member of his tribe had seen, although there were stories of such a place. Wherever the creatures rode they demanded gold and laid waste the People with their bang sticks and with disease.
The Azuma were at war with the Navajo, the Apache and the Ute. But in the face of this existential threat all tribes were one.
Still grieving from the unexpected loss of his wife Xahnea, Skorpio saught the wisdom of the elders, especially his mother the medicine woman Nagua but also other wise men from other tribes. He sought council with Braza of the Ute, Wyanute of the Navajo and Creote of the Chiracahua. He prayed and fasted five days on the butte. He sang the songs to Monster Slayer promising a cruel end to the blue-eyed devils. He sent runners to follow the four-legged fiends. His warriors captured one of the intruders and were surprised to find him on foot, an ordinary man, not even equal to their youngest fighter. Skorpio told them what to do so they brought their captive with them until it was time to make a statement.
The invaders reacted with fury, destroying a Navajo village that had dared to defy Skorpio. In this way he knew that his prayers had been answered.
Naguna warned him what would happen. It turned his liver white. The invaders would flood the land like a plague of grasshoppers. They would bring unimaginable vice and strife. They were liars and killers. There could be no peace with them. The People would fall on harsh times and know servility and degradation.
The alien leader sent his pet Navajo to ask Skorpio to the pow-wow.
And so it was a on a blistering day in the Month of the Least Heat Moon Skorpio set out on foot with five of his fiercest warriors to meet the invader at a secret watering hole until recently known only to the Navajo. Now the invaders had come with their beasts and foul habits.
Skorpio and his dog soldiers walked across an endless plain of blistering heat, their feet inured by years running barefoot over rock and sand. Ahead they saw the clump of trees huddled around the secret spring where the invader leader waited with only his Navajo interpreter.
Both leaders agreed to bring five warriors. Skorpio and his men entered the ring of stones with their hands empty to show their peaceful intentions, although each warrior was armed with bow, arrows, and an obsidian knife.
The alien leader came forward to greet them, astonished by Skorpio's size. Skorpio towered over the little man who had black kinky hair and a full beard, sweat pouring down his face in the intense heat. He wore a metal breastplate over a leather cuirass and Skorpio knew he was crazy. His soldiers had stripped in the heat and wore only shirts, leggings and boots. They all stared at Skorpio in astonishment. They had never seen an Indian so large.
Skorpio's men stared back. They'd never seen men so white and hairy, or the monstrous deer-like creatures they rode. Each warrior had the same thought. What if we rode those beasts as well? To see the horse was to covet the horse. The unspoken flashed among them like the sun's word: we must steal these creatures.
The white devil bade Skorpio and his men sit in a circle while he passed around water in hollowed gourds but the Azuma refused the water and fetched their own from the spring after carefully tasting it. The invaders stank. With the Navajo interpreting the invader identified himself as deGama and asked why the Azuma had killed his man.
Skorpio brushed the question aside. "Why have you come?"
DeGama claimed that he brought a new religion that would uplift and transform the Azuma and that he was also interested in gold. He gave Skorpio a knife. It was the first steel the chief had ever seen and he was in awe. Imagine what the Azuma could accomplish with weapons like this--or even the thundersticks. Some of his runners had seen the thundersticks in action while following the white devils. Two of them were with Skorpio that day.
DeGama stood, took off his sword, and bade Skorpio accompany him and the Navajo interpreter and leave all others behind. Skorpio, deGama and the Navajo walked around the spring to the far side and hunkered behind a juniper bush. DeGama extended sympathies on the death of Skorpio's beloved wife Xahnea. Skorpio masked his amazement but quickly realized deGama could have gained this information from any number of rival tribes. It was not exactly a secret.
DeGama stunned Skorpio with what he said next, "I will bring her back to you, but you must come alone and you must bring gold."
Naguna said the invaders were liars. It was a trap. But such was Skorpio's love for Xahnea that he convinced himself the invaders spoke the truth. Had they not done as they had said? Had they not slain dozens if not hundreds of the People? Did not their thunder sticks bring down a man with a single bark? And if they were the future as Naguna had warned what was the point of resistance? If they killed him his spirit would join Xahnea's in the place of pinons.
Skorpio agreed to the meeting. For four days he fasted, praying to the four sacred colors, four sacred plants and four sacred mountains. On the appointed day he went to the oasis. From the distance a woman beckoned to him. She might have been Xahnea. There was only one way to find out. As he approached she ran away and the Spaniards emerged from hiding. They had learned concealment from the Navajo. The invaders seized him but not before he killed two with his bare hands. They tied him to a wagon wheel, carried him into the desert, gouged out his eys, castrated him and left him to die in the sun.
***