His eyes searched hers, probing, will you trust me?
The back of her neck prickled, her face flushed. She followed after him.
A rumbling from the back of the hangar, vibrating off the aluminum walls, then a cranking sound. Amy had turned the plane on. Ahead, propellers whirred, like huge blades of a fan, blowing a shock of air toward Calliope and Chance.
They hurried toward the plane.
“What are you doing?” They yelled as one, over the roar of the engine.
“I can fly us to Cruces. It’ll be faster. Hop in!” Amy yelled back.
“Turn that off. It’ll hear us!” Chance screamed.
“What?”
The propeller blew gusts of air toward Calliope. Ash. Swirling pieces of ash like black confetti. They eddied around her face. She coughed. Her whole body went cold, as if the temperature had dropped twenty degrees. Her skin prickled with gooseflesh. A pounding at the doors again. But this wasn’t Chance shoving a propeller into the door handles. He was standing next to her. The pounding was violent, like crashes of thunder, over and over.
“Too late,” Chance yelled. “Get in, mujer.”
Behind her, a cold breath. There had to be another way into the hangar. She’d thought it when she’d first arrived. How else had the ash gotten in?
“Chance?” she said, her voice wavering. “I think there’s someone behind us.”
He turned. Exclaimed in a language she didn’t understand. Pushed her toward the open cabin door. Jumped in. Slammed it down behind them and fastened the bolt.
He was hovering over Calliope, nearly sitting on her lap in the cramped space.
“Drive!” he yelled at Amy.
“Drive where? You bolted the hangar doors.”
“Just drive!”
Gamboling toward them, rabid, with a twisted limping gait that made its speed impossible—a massive painted body, pitch black except for white dappled spots pocking its face and ethereal white hair flowing loose at its sides. A masked creature. No, it wasn’t a mask. Horror pitted Calliope’s stomach, lodged in her throat. The creature was not painted or masked. Its eyes bulged and its teeth were long, protuberant, tusklike. Its romping, hop-like movements as it sped through the hangar were a mixture of a terrifying ritual dance and an animal charging, its arms raised as if swimming through the air. Calliope recognized this monster. It should have been carved of wood or stone. She’d held it before in her palm at the Old Town marketplace. It was a Kachina, a monstrous doll meant to depict an indigenous god whose name she did not know. Only now it was a grotesque giant, close enough to smell, like rotting fruit, sprinting toward her. It was a Kachina, come alive.
ELEVEN
EUNJOO
It wasn’t a nightmare.
The dreams hadn’t started when Eunjoo asked the neighbor lady to help her.
No. Long before that.
Because of the dreams, she had known exactly where to go, whom to ask for help. When her parents had disappeared.
She’d played lots of times with Phoenix, sometimes in the wading pool in his backyard.
His mama was never home, Phoenix had said. She was always at work.
My parents are always fighting, Eunjoo had replied.
Over what?
There must have been a reason.
Eunjoo had shrugged.
They’d splashed cold water from the green hose at each other’s faces. Pretended it was a spitting snake. A water snake. They had laughed.
Eunjoo had dreamt of Phoenix’s mama often.
Lounging in the backyard, a sun hat over her curly hair, dark sunglasses over her suntanned face, and with a book in her hands, always with a book in her hands.
That was before her stomach had bulged. But Eunjoo had dreamt her fat with babies too.
When Phoenix had told her his mama was pregnant with twins, Eunjoo had nodded politely, but she’d already known.
The dreams had shown her that too.
From her little hole behind the seats in the yellow-and-white airplane, she knew what was coming.
She’d awoken sweating in the middle of the night in her own bedroom with cranes dipping from the ceiling. She’d awoken after running from a black-and-white creature with blotches on its face, a creature that would sometimes catch her, sweep her into its basket, take her back to the peach orchard at the bottom of the mesa. Sometimes it had eaten her whole, like a peach. Down to her pit.
Sometimes she had crept out of its basket while it was sleeping. Run back to Calliope.
It was always Phoenix’s mama in those dreams, never her own mother.
Her own mother with straight black hair, smaller than Phoenix’s mama, and quieter.
She’d thought the coyotes had come from her dreams. She was touching one to see if it was real. Or if she’d awoken in her own room again. She’d dreamt this so often. Coyote calling her.
Once, she had thrown peaches.
The biggest piece of fruit, she’d picked from the tree. It was golden orange and squishy. She pulled her arm back, aimed for the blotchy creature, and threw as hard as she could. The peach stuck in its eye.
In the plane, curled into a ball on a stack of maps, the new grown-ups yelling over the roaring of the plane’s belly, she hoped.
She hoped and hoped. That this would be the dream in which she defeated the creature before it could eat her. Or anyone else.
TWELVE
THE SUUKE
Are the stories real, Bisabuela?
The rebozo slung around Calliope’s head, a veil. Her eyes wide with ghosts.
Sí, por supuesto. We knew of the Red Sea, mija. Acoma song talks about it. How would we have known that otherwise? Our Ancestors were right.
Calliope had nodded in earnest at her bisabuela’s wisdom. Then she had grown up. She’d realized perhaps their Elders meant something like the red tide, algal blooms, not blood.
Bisabuela had died before the DNA results came back on Kennewick Man, before Calliope could tell Bisabuela she’d been right all along—of course she’d been right—the Ancient One belonged to their people, his genome closer to modern Native Americans than any other living population. But Bisabuela was not there, not with Calliope, to celebrate when the Ancient One was released to his rightful ancestors and repatriated back into the ground so his journey could continue uninterrupted. If a renowned Smithsonian white coat had been wrong, if they were all wrong about separate waves of migration, and if Bisabuela’s people were all linked, like she said, then maybe she’d been right about the other stories. Why couldn’t Calliope believe Bisabuela was right about emergence? That there was no land bridge. There was no coastal migration. Bisabuela believed the Ancient Ones came from the earth. And returned to the earth. Calliope was determined to find answers. To prove her earlier research wrong. To find evidence that would support Bisabuela’s belief instead. She knew that wasn’t how science worked; you didn’t go looking for evidence of a long-drawn conclusion but rather let the evidence guide you. Still. She was searching for evidence of a different explanation. She owed Bisabuela. She’d come back to New Mexico to find the truth, whatever that meant.
But Calliope had not intended to find the truth quite so literally. Not careening toward her, this monstrous beast. Eight feet tall, it hurled its muscular, athletic body toward the plane. Chance yelled at Amy to drive, and she turned the plane toward the creature. Calliope resisted the urge to shut her eyes. Her throat constricted, her breathing came in labored puffs. From the cabin, she watched the monster launch itself into the air, a panther onto a cliff. A forceful thud, and they careened backward, the nose of the plane tipping at an angle. It was on the rudder.
Amy screamed, “What is that?”
Still she held the wheel steady, taxied forward, gaining speed. They would hit the hangar doors. Except, the hangar doors were no longer there. Di
m light through the ash, a hole through the aluminum, the propeller Chance had jammed into the handles cast aside, crumpled like a soda can on a sidewalk. In its place, another creature. Identical to the one hitching a ride on the back of their puddle jumper. The other creature must have ripped off the hangar doors and was waiting for them in the hangar’s gaping metal mouth.
Amy was screaming expletives, Chance still yelling his one-word mantra. Drive!
Could they gain enough momentum to outrun the second creature?
The wings juddered precariously. Calliope shut her eyes, refusing to face the creature balanced atop the plane, afraid it would break into the cabin at any second.
Checking the airspeed indicator, Amy screamed, “Let’s do this, motherfuckers!” before pulling back on the wheel. Calliope’s gut was a sloshing sea of nausea. They were lifting off the ground. Calliope clutched the sides of the plane, as Chance dipped forward, against her.
The second creature lunged at them, but they were already in the sky.
Calliope looked back. Nothing on the rudder. Like it had been a bad dream. Except they were flying into a red, swirling sky, lightning piercing in the distance. One nightmare into another.
“Eunjoo? Can you breathe back there, chica?”
The girl, muffled by the propellers, asked, “Did we get away from the monster?”
“You bet your ass we did,” Amy said, steadying the plane, cranking a small wheel and pulling levers on the control panel that made whining and clicking noises. To Chance, “What were those things?”
“Suukes,” Chance said, clearing his throat, adjusting his crouching position over Calliope. His knee jabbed her in the hip and he apologized, smiling sheepishly. “Perdóname, señora. I would stay a more respectful distance, if I could.” His wavy black hair brushed against her shoulder, his thighs pressed against hers. She was acutely aware of how close they had all just come to dying. How close they still were.
Amy asked, “Humans? Or animals?”
Before he could answer, Calliope said, “Amy, how are you flying this plane?” Amy launched into a list of technical terms, but Calliope interrupted. “Not how as in give me a lesson, but how do you know how?”
“Flying lessons.” Amy turned back to Calliope, beaming. “Told you I’d fly us outta there. Didn’t know I’d have to fly us away from Sooks though.”
“Suuke,” Chance said. “From Kothluwala’wa.”
“Whata what now?”
“The sacred lake.”
“Oh, much clearer.” Amy’s voice dripped sarcasm.
Calliope was as confused as Amy, though she’d read about the myth. But right then, she only wanted to be safe on the ground. She trusted Amy, to an extent. But she’d feel much better racing toward Silver City, toward Andres and Phoenix, in a land vehicle.
Silver City. Calliope’s heart dropped as if they were taking off again. “Amy?”
“Yeah?”
“Where are we going?”
“Las Cruces. Isn’t that the plan?”
No, it wasn’t the plan. Tension balled in her chest. “Amy, I need to get to my son. Need to hold him. It’s been two days since he disappeared. My aunt’s is my last hope. You wouldn’t understand. You don’t have children.”
“Wow. That’s low, momma.”
Calliope cringed. Said nothing. She hated that her best hope of getting to her son rested on this young woman.
Amy sighed. “So you’re changing the plan.”
Calliope’s stomach twisted, her heart raced. “I never planned to go to Cruces.”
“You lied to me?”
“Can you get me to my son or not? I’m not taking a detour. If you won’t go to Silver City, then land this damn thing and I’ll steal another truck.”
Silver City was hours from her family on a normal day, without inclement weather—which used to mean snow or windstorms. Now it meant volcanic eruptions, earthquakes that python-squeezed the lungs of grown adults and nearly killed children, pieces of painted rock coming to life and attacking … She couldn’t handle anything else. Tears stung her eyes. “Please take me to my aunt’s.”
Chance reached for her hand, squeezed it reassuringly. He whispered, “We’ll find your family, mujer. No te preocupes.”
Calliope’s lips tightened reflexively; she resisted the urge to roll her eyes. He probably meant well, but she didn’t need her bisabuela’s words shoved at her. She never should’ve stopped at that hangar. A sticky sensation, a cracked jar of jelly, settled in her stomach. She couldn’t have seen her dead great grandmother. It must’ve been a delusion. Some trick he’d conjured, whether he’d admit it or not. She pulled her hand away from his.
Amy sighed loudly, exaggeratedly. “Oh-Em-Gee, fine. I’ll take the pregnant lady to her kid. I’m not a monster.” She clicked on the radio. Static. “Problem is, how do we get there? No GPS, no radio. No communications tower. We’re gonna have to old-school this. I’ve always wanted to go all Amelia Earhart. Fly rogue over the black triangle. Anyone have a paper map? They still have those, right? If we can find a map, we should be able to do this. As long as there are no clouds.”
From the crawlspace, a shuffling of papers. A little hand appeared, holding a stack of aeronautical charts. Calliope took the maps from Eunjoo. One was brown and tan, with degrees in angles across the bumpy mountainous terrain. White crosses marked Rattlesnake, Minersville, Aztec, Indian Services, and so on. Calliope had never heard of these places. She looked closer, then held up the map for Amy to see. “What are the areas inside the fuzzy purple lines?”
“I remember now. Yeah, I did learn this.” Amy mumbled something Calliope couldn’t make out, like she was reciting a list. “I think those are FAA controlled airspace. Doesn’t matter to us now, I mean, if no one’s there anyway.”
“The harder purple and blue lines?”
“Military. We could see if there’s any military around.”
His jaw gritted, his face hard, Chance said, “There isn’t.”
Calliope felt a tingling sensation of apprehension, but didn’t ask questions. She just wanted Amy to get them safely on the ground of her tía’s hacienda.
“The compass-looking things on the radio?” Calliope asked.
“Beacons for compass headings. They connect the paths between airports. But we’re not going to an airport …”
“So, what are we looking for?”
Amy was silent for a minute. “What else do you see?”
“What we see from the air. Yellow areas the approximate shapes of towns and cities, blue for water, hard black lines for roads, and black lines with crosses for railroads …”
“That’s it,” Amy said, whooping. “We’ll follow the railroads through the mountain passes.”
“And we’re safe up here?”
“We’re fine. Engines use a self-contained high-voltage generator to create a spark for the spark plugs. Each engine has two in case one fails. Even if we were struck by lightning and lost all power, the engines would still keep running.”
“Don’t say we’ll get struck by lightning.” It was Murphy’s Law. Calliope had heard Richard Dawkins speak about how this so-called law was nonsense since it required inanimate objects to have desires of their own or else to react to one’s own desires. Calliope had agreed at the time. Science had held such a sway—her inner skeptic at its pinnacle.
But now … had she really seen inanimate objects come to life? Those Kachina figures Chance had called Suukes had almost ripped their airplane apart when they should’ve fit inside her palm. It didn’t make sense. The second law of thermodynamics: we tend toward entropy, toward chaos. Everything in our universe when left alone tended toward greater and greater disorder. Toward ruin.
“It’s coming from the north. We’re going south. I’m not as worried about the lightning as I am the ash. It could clog the engine’s
air filter, choke it. I’ll fly low to avoid it.”
Chance said, “I only hope the Achiyalatopa doesn’t come too.”
“What’s that?”
“Its feathers are made of flint knives, which it throws at objects. My people never said it throws the knives at planes, but I don’t know why it wouldn’t.”
Entropy. Anything that could go wrong, would. Anything that could turn to ruin.
The clouds that had formed a red bird above them began to disperse into feathery pink stripes across the sky, the storm moving on, though ash still darkened the distance. Calliope read the map aloud to Amy, navigating where to fly, following the railroad tracks. She was proud of herself, keeping her composure in the air. They passed Truth or Consequences, a town whose name Calliope had always found amusing. They passed Lake Valley. Thirty minutes in the sky without incident.
Then, “Fucking ash,” Amy whispered. “Loss of manifold pressure?”
The map shook in Calliope’s hands.
“What?”
“We’re going down.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Loudly, “Do I look like I’m fucking kidding?” Under her breath, Amy muttered, “Dead foot, dead engine,” as she pushed her foot against the pedal.
Calliope’s gut was dropping.
Still muttering to herself, Amy was chanting, “Feather the engine. It’ll stop windmilling. Feather the engine. It’ll stop windmilling. Fuck. Fuck.” To Calliope, “Where can we land?”
Calliope wanted to answer we’re not landing until we get to Phoenix. The chart in her hands went blurry, the black crosses marking railroads turning to sutures, like those sewn across Calliope’s belly when Phoenix had cesareaned out of her. Nauseous, she narrowed her eyes at the map, trying to concentrate on finding a landing place, seeing nothing but wavy slashes.
“I just need a field, momma, come on. I can’t see beneath the ash.”
In answer, Calliope turned away from Chance, leaned toward the small cabin space beside her seat, and vomited a clear liquid across the floor.
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