Killer of Enemies

by Joseph Bruchac

  We’d both walked up to him where he was adjusting one of the drip hoses for his beloved tomato plants.

  “Hussein,” I said.

  He stood gracefully, turned to look at me. His brown eyes were really kind. My voice stalled out.

  “Can you help us find a quiet place for just a few minutes?” Mom asked him.

  I didn’t say why.

  He didn’t ask.

  “Come,” he said

  Then, without another word, he had led us both there and then left us in private.

  “Are you ready?” Mom asked. “I can only sing this once. Then it will have passed from me to you and I can never sing it again.”

  I nodded. And then in her soft, strong voice, she gave me Lozen’s song.

  I am ready now to sing it. As I do so I need to think not just of myself, but of my family. But not just of them. There are other innocent people back in Haven caught like flies in a spider’s web. Far more of them than those who have chosen to follow the dark path shaped by the Ones.

  Hussein is not one of those who’ve gone that shadowed way. Though he could have, at least physically.

  Because of my job, I’m allowed to work out in the gym. They have heavy bags and weights. It’s the favorite hangout for guards to keep in shape—or what they think is shape. All that bulky muscle slows you down, in my opinion. I hit the gym at least three times a week. In part it’s a show of defiance. I know a lot of the muscle heads in there resent me. But the Ones passed the word down that I was not to be messed with physically. I was too valuable as a monster slayer. So mostly I just get hostile stares or remarks like those Edwin always makes.

  “Hey girl, want to work my heavy bag?”

  Because they can’t do anything else to escalate their harassment when I ignore their taunts, eventually those making the nasty comments get bored and I can work up a sweat in peace.

  To my surprise, the fourth time I went to the gym Hussein was there. And he was busy. Though he saw me and nodded politely over his shoulder to me, it didn’t interrupt his concentration on what he was doing. He was wearing a tight black t-shirt that showed the long rippling muscles of his arms and shoulders and torso. He was working not one but two heavy bags that were hung within ten feet of each other. And he was doing it not just with his hands, but also with his feet, his elbows, and his knees. Back and forth between them, his limbs moving so fast that they were blurred, the two man-sized bags folded in the middle from his kicks, rocking back and forth from his elbow and knee strikes. All of his hand strikes, though, were open handed. Palm strikes. Not wanting to break his knuckles, preserving his fingers for his guitar strings.

  He went on like that for ten minutes straight, according to the clock on the wall, at a pace none of those doped-up, muscle-bound thugs could have maintained for a minute. By the time he was done, he was glistening with sweat. Then he stopped and began doing a breathing exercise.

  I realized then that I hadn’t moved. I’d just been standing there watching him. And thinking how much fun it would be to spar with him. But I didn’t say anything.

  He came over toward me—to pick up his towel from the bench next to where I was imitating a statue.

  “Muay Thai,” he said as he wiped his forehead. “It keeps me in better shape for my gardening. Now I have to get back to work.” Then he smiled. “It was nice to see you.”

  And I didn’t even nod in reply.

  Despite my obstinate silence that day—and other times, Hussein has still been nothing but polite and kind whenever he sees me. Probably because my mom is such a nice person.

  But Hussein is not alone in being one who has kept a good heart. Every day when I am in Haven I see good people—mothers and fathers trying to take care of their children, young people of my own age whose hearts are still good. I can sense that, even if I never even say hello to them. Maybe they’d be friends with me if I let them. My true task in life must be not just to protect my family, but to try to somehow save us all in this dangerous world. Somehow. Even if all that I have now is the faintest glimmer of an idea about how I might go about that monumental task.

  There are tears in my eyes as I begin to chant the words, far more words than I usually speak out loud. But every word is needed.

  In this world,

  this world of many dangers

  only our Creator has the power

  it is from our Creator

  that this power comes

  so I ask for this help

  I ask so that I can help the people

  I ask for this gift

  this gift to confuse my enemies.

  I’ve been drawing in the earth with my stick as I chant, drawing a shape that begins with a circle and continues until the lines within the circle seem to glow like silver touched by moonlight.

  I’m vulnerable as I do this. There is a chance that the killer team trailing me might come up over the rise in the road half a mile behind me and see me here in the open. I just hope my ally is helping me right now as he said he would.

  But when I am halfway done with this task I hear something. I should have been expecting it, but I still jump at the cracking boom. A shot fired from a high-powered rifle—but more than a mile away. As its echo reverberates between the rock walls, a small smile comes to my face. I can imagine Big Boy cussing out whoever fired that shot. Just as I can imagine what led that person to do something as foolish as shooting a gun while engaged in what was supposed to be unnoticed pursuit of their prey—me.

  Actually, I am not just imagining what happened. A picture of it has come into my mind, like the images poorer people used to be able to see on the inside lenses of the viddy glasses or the corneal implants of the elite back when television was still possible.

  I’m seeing it through the eyes of my hairy ally. Hairy? Hairy Ally? Nah. What the heck, maybe I’ll just call him Hally.

  Hah. Good name. Better than some I have been called.

  I can really see him clearly now.

  He’s crouched down, concealing his sizeable bulk behind a mound of stones and earth surmounted by several clumps of rabbitbrush. I don’t see him. But I see what he is seeing, which includes two hairy hands. Three times as big as my own, those hands of his are juggling a melon-sized rock back and forth between them.

  I hear him chuckling. Or maybe I should say I feel the growling chortle building within him at this moment.

  Hmmmrr, hmmmrrr, hmmrrr. Watch this, Little Food.

  One of his hands whips forward so fast in a sidearm underhand throw that it’s a blur. The rock sails out swift as a ball shot from a cannon. It doesn’t look like it is heading toward the confused mass of men perhaps two hundred feet down slope from him. Until it bounces off a wall of rock to their left and ricochets back to strike the ground in their midst, sending up a sharp spray of small shards.

  One of the men with the sniper rifle lifts his weapon and points it in the direction of the wall of rock that the stone rebounded from. But he doesn’t fire a shot this time. The barrel of his gun is pushed down by Big Boy’s lightning-quick right hand. The man with the gun, who is almost as big and muscular as Big Boy himself, takes a quick step back and reaches down toward the knife at his side. Big Boy starts to raise his machete.

  Are they going to end up at each other’s throats? Maybe just kill each other and save me the trouble of having to figure out how to get rid of them? It’s a pleasant thought that brings a little smile to my face.

  I smile even broader when I realize my old buddy Edwin is the one who tried to fire his weapon. There’s a trickle of blood coming down Edwin’s forehead from being struck by one of those pieces of obsidian kicked up by my unseen ally’s stone. His teeth are visible in a snarl. He and Big Boy are standing there as stiff-legged as two bulldogs about to go for each other’s throats. The faces of the two big men are distorted with the kind of illogical rage that is a side effect of Chain.

  Then another rock, bigger than the first two, slams into a tall saguaro
cactus next to them. All five men, Edwin and Big Boy included, scramble down into an arroyo for shelter, out of Hally’s sight—which I’ve been sharing with him.

  Then his perspective shifts. I’m no longer looking at the retreating team of would-be assassins. I see two large hands brushing off rock dust and then folding themselves together in a self-congratulatory handshake.

  I go now, Little Food. Bye bye.

  A moment of darkness. Then I am back to seeing through my own eyes.

  Over and out. And over to me. Even though I’m sure Hally could have harried them all the way back to Haven, he has done all he will do to assist me.

  But they’ve been delayed long enough. I have finished my drawing. And now it is time to see if it will work. As I descend the trail I break off a broom-shaped stalk of dry rabbit bush. Perfect. Then, retrieving the trail bike from next to the cracked roadside, I walk it up the road edge where the tire treads and my feet leave visible tracks in the dry earth. I continue straight on, right to the place where the roads diverge. The first branch, the one I have to follow, leads to the right, while old US10 just keeps going straight. Instead of taking the turn, I keep walking the bike straight along the road edge of US10, leaving more tracks, fifty paces past the intersection. Then I lift the bike and return to the intersection, staying on the unbroken pavement. I stop and look back. The only tracks visible are those in the soft ground of the road’s edge. Perfect.

  I’m at the turn off, where the side road has aged away, leaving only earth. There’s a smaller, two-sided metal sign here on a single post. It reads DRAGOON SPRINGS on each side, with arrows pointing the way. I put down the bike and the stalk of rabbit bush, step over to the sign. I grasp it with both hands. Time to use that deceptive strength of mine. I set my feet firmly, bend my knees a little, take a deep breath and then twist. The metal post resists at first and then it turns.

  I step back and view my handiwork. Now it looks as if US10 and not the side road is the route to Dragoon Springs. I scan the unpaved route I’m about to take and the sandy soil to either side of it. No way to avoid walking through more soft earth and making prints. I pick up the bike and the stalk of rabbit bush. With the bike on my right shoulder, I walk backward, making good use of my improvised broom with my other hand to wipe out my prints. I also stop every now and then to bend down and grab handfuls of dried sticks, leaves, and small stones to strew across the places that have been swept clean.

  If I truly have inherited that power of the first Lozen to confuse my enemies, all of this back tracking and track covering might not be necessary. But the one being hunted is wise to use more than one method to deceive those on her trail.

  After I’ve gone a way down the side road to Dragoon Springs, I put my bike down where it’s out of sight behind a pile of lava rocks. I climb the slope that will give me a view of the place behind me where the roads diverged. I shrug off my pack and lay down flat behind a clump of sage. Its clean scent fills my nostrils as I watch through its screening branches.

  At least half an hour passes before anything happens. But eventually I can feel them coming. Then I hear them well before I see them. They’re trying to walk quietly, cautiously, but they don’t know how to do it. And through the scent of the sage, I can smell them. Fear and adrenalin have made their body odors even ranker than usual.

  Despite my good buddy Hally’s delaying tactic, they’ve gotten back on track. Perhaps they’ve convinced themselves that those stones which slowed their pursuit were not hurled by a long anthropoid arm but merely round rocks that rolled down at random from the nearby hill.

  “Most people have this way of fooling themselves,” Uncle Chatto said once when we were out hunting. “Especially when they are in dangerous places. They imagine they’re safe.” He put one palm on my shoulder and the other over his heart. “We never do that.”

  Big Boy holds up a hand just as they reach the junction. He stands with his right foot next to my drawing in the dirt but is not looking at it. If I have done it right, he will not see either my markings or the road sign reading DRAGOON SPRINGS. Nor will the other four.

  The huge former biker looks right, then left. Taps his fingers on the handle of his machete. Starts to take a step, stops, takes a step backward. Stops again.

  The power to confuse my enemies.

  The others seem even more bemused. One of them sits down and pulls a map out of his backpack. The two men with the sniper rifles move to stand back to back to each other, their heads moving back and forth like mechanical toys. Edwin takes a kerchief out of his back pocket and dabs at the bleeding wound on his forehead.

  “Hut!”

  All four of them turn toward Big Boy at the barking sound of his voice. He holds his right hand out, points it at the tread marks of my trail bike. He raises his other hand, fingers pointing at the sky, chops it forward toward the northeast along US10, and starts off that way at a half-trot. The others fall in behind him.

  If the medicine I’ve made works half as well as I hope, they will keep going for hours, on and on until the sun is about to set. By then, they’ll have reached the deserted ruins of the next town down the road, Wilcox. Like Sun City, it’s a haunt of the Bloodless. And with night falling, the team trying to track me will have no choice but to find the best shelter they can. Then their fires and their guns may protect them through the night.

  Or not.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Crawly Things

  It is still well before midday when I reach Big Ranch. Big Ranch is the name that was given it by Doctor Samson, the mega-wealthy and powerful man who built it and the high walls that stretch around it. Some, especially those currying favor, called Big Ranch the “Seventh Wonder of the Southwest.” I have no idea what the other six were. Others called it the scariest place they had ever been.

  Why? Well, Doctor Samson (an actual doctor whose special field was something called replacement genetics) had an interesting hobby. Or maybe obsession is a better word. He liked to keep, breed, and—as he put it—“improve” large reptiles. Some of it was through the genetic modifications that produced the gemods of the sort I’ve had to hunt.

  But Doctor Samson was one of those men to whom size really mattered. So just mixing and matching was not enough for him. Bigger was better. That is why he recreated the Super Snake.

  Despite my lack of fondness for snakes, I have always been fascinated by them. As a little girl, I clicked every text or viddy I could read or goog. The biggest snake that used to exist in the wild was the anaconda down in South America. An adventurer named Percy Fawcett who made a survey of the Bolivia/Brazil border in 1906 wrote that he shot one that measured sixty-two feet from tip to tail.

  So, of course, the anaconda was chosen to be part of the mix.

  Back in the mid-twenty-first century, there was little chance of finding a big anaconda in the watery swamps in what was left of those jungles. Jungle rivers had been poisoned by gold mining, the great forests of giant trees had been clear cut. But there were still anacondas in the private menageries of the privileged. Easy sources for the necessary DNA.

  There were also fossil remains of something that paleontologists called the Super Boa. Long extinct, but twice as big as the largest recorded anaconda, according to one vid-arty I googed from way back in 2011.

  And so, with unlimited wealth and the developing gen-tech to do it, Doctor Samson decided to recreate and improve that ancient creature. It was rumored that he succeeded. He made a Super Snake. But he kept it secret. Until the Cloud, everything within the walls of Big Ranch was kept hidden from the public. Unbreachable barriers kept the uninvited out and Super Snake—and perhaps other behemoth beasts—within.

  As I pedal along I pass a succession of guard posts that once blocked the curving road that winds between stony hills. The guard posts are not just empty now, their gates broken. They are flattened, as if by a giant foot stomping on them. Not an encouraging sight.

  Then I round a corner and find myself look
ing down into a wide valley. Big Ranch lies below me. And as I stand here, in admitted awe, I am struck by two things.

  Numero Uno is that wall. It crawls like a giant snake itself, way off as far to left and right, encompassing the entire valley here in the folds of the surrounding hills. How many acres in there? More than a thousand, I’d guess. Taller than the Great Wall of China, I bet.

  I push up my goggles, train my scope on its top. Wide enough for a two-lane road up there. It’s strung with electrical cables that must have lit it so brightly every night that it was visible from space—back when humans flew beyond Earth’s gravity.

  Even without its electric lights this set-up is more than just impressive. There’s no way anyone could build anything remotely similar today. It brings to mind an ancient film made before CG made anything imaginable possible in viddies. Despite its primi-tech, I loved that movie as a little kid. I got goosebumps every time I viddied it. King Kong. And right now I feel as if I am on Skull Island. I can practically hear that antique film’s foreboding music playing in the background as I stare at the hundred-foot tall rampart.

  I study that wall. How did people get on top of it? It seems to run in an unbroken circle with the exception of the gate. No outside stairs visible. But there had to be access to the top. How? Interior stairs. That must have been it. Maybe even tunnels from the mansion that came out within the hollow interior of the wall. But most likely the main entry point would be at the front. Something to keep in mind.

  Which brings me to Numero Dos—the entryway into Big Ranch. It’s a wide portico, eighty feet across. It was formerly closed by the mammoth door that is jammed askew part way across that opening. Beyond the entry is an equally wide roadway protected on both sides by heavily reinforced electrical fences. There the good Doctor could drive or walk at his leisure and observe, to either side, his scaly lovelies. Plural because Super Snake was supposedly just one of his overgrown cold-blooded prizes. There were other crawly things.