Killer of Enemies

by Joseph Bruchac

  The sounds behind me of angry bellowing, horns clacking against stones, rocks being rolled aside, tell me that thus far my plan is working. The giant gemod isn’t giving up, but it’s been held back long enough for me to round another turn, run deeper into the canyon to the place where I put the second AT-4 at the front of the arroyo. I flatten myself, raise the tube, ready it for firing down into the little canyon . . . and then wait.

  But not for long. The monster buffalo pushes its way around the narrow turn in the arroyo, scattering red dirt and pebbles with its shoulders as it thrusts forward below me and, yes, past me. One of its back legs is lame and its flank is blackened from the blast of a missile designed to pierce through sixteen inches of armor. But it is far from mortally wounded. It hasn’t seen me or caught my scent, even though it’s so close as it passes my place of concealment that I could hit it with a rock.

  I wait, my heart pounding. Just a little further, a little more.

  Now!

  WHOMP—POW!

  The strike of the missile—which can travel over two hundred yards in less than a second—and the thudding explosion are almost simultaneous with the whooshing sound of its brief flight. The back blast sets fire to the tipi of brush and branches I’ve piled behind me, a fire that will be as visible to the wounded beast as I will be invisible.

  No waiting this time to see the results of my shot and admire my work. I’ve discarded the tube as soon as I fired it, turned, and ducked down into the tunnel that will lead to my final position up by the pinon pine.

  The sound of the beast’s bellows tell me that, once again, my shot wasn’t fatal. But there’s a different tone to its ear-shattering roars. Pain is mixed in with the rage. And when I raise my head to look back up the canyon, I see that my aim was much truer this time. The monster has managed to turn and force its way up the side of the arroyo to the place where I shot at it. It is tearing with its horns at the bonfire ignited by the backblast, scattering burning brush in every direction. And that is starting more fires in the dry grass and bushes. With the wind blowing down from the mountainside, this arroyo is going to turn into an inferno. That fire is going to reach me in a matter of seconds.

  Flames are also licking up from the thick hair on the beast’s shoulders. It’s practically bathed in flame. As it drags itself along, blood spurting from the deep gash inflicted by the rocket, it’s setting even more fires around it. It’s not giving up, despite the fact that it’s ablaze and crippled by the blast that shattered its pelvis and tore the scales from its side. I can feel its pain washing through my mind.

  I also feel a twinge of my own regret. Terrible as this creature may be, there’s a kind of awful beauty about it. But it’s wrong for this world.

  The fire is getting closer to me. I need to get out of here, but I need to end this beast’s suffering. I raise the third and last rocket launcher, stand up, and take aim.

  Look at me.

  The giant buffalo stops bellowing. It raises its head above the flames, shifts itself in my direction. The no-longer shielded side of its immense body is open to the shot that will penetrate into its heart.

  I press the firing button.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Just a Second

  The arroyo is a rolling inferno of flame as I scramble out of it. My face and hands are blackened by soot. The pack on my back is smoking. The tips of my long hair that shook free from my braids are burned. I was almost killed by that monster after all—albeit indirectly. Behind me there’s the scent of burning wood and cooking flesh. The world’s biggest buffalo burger now being grilled for the buzzards and coyotes.

  I kneel down in the shade of a huge flat-topped boulder far enough to the side of the arroyo’s mouth to be away from the fire, which is now burning itself out. I take the top off my canteen, half fill my mouth with water, and swish it around. The thirstier you are, the slower you should drink.

  Thank you, Life Giver.

  I put the top back on the canteen, settle down with my back against the boulder. I’m exhausted by the exertion of outrunning the flames, but I am also elated at having defeated another monster. The thought of having succeeded, of being reunited with my family, wills me with so much emotion I feel as if I am about to overflow.

  And what will we do now? Go back to Haven and trust that the Dreamer will be an ally? Turn instead to the mountains and return to that little valley where we were so happy before Diablita’s men found us?

  My mind is tired, filled with so many thoughts and contradictory emotions. Maybe that is why I am, just for a second, unwary. Maybe that is why, just for a second, I don’t respond to the touch of my power, to its warning of danger. Just a second.

  But a second is way too long. A second in which it comes to me that among all those killed by the giant buffalo beast there were three people that I never saw among them. Three who disappeared when it began.

  Snick.

  It’s the sound of the safety being clicked off on an M-16. A sound that comes from the top of the boulder I’m leaning against.

  “Don’t move or I’ll shoot you,” a voice as harsh as a handful of gravel scraped across a windshield growls. “Hands up.”

  Now there’s an interesting paradox. How nice to know that the enemy who has a drop on me is logically challenged. There are advantages to not talking much. Numero Uno is that you avoid sounding like the one who has just given me those two contradictory commands. Don’t move and hands up. It’s not often a little Apache girl gets a straight man like Big Boy, whose voice is as easy to recognize as his limited mental prowess.

  “Which?” I ask, trying not to laugh.

  “Huh?”

  “Shut up, idiot,” another voice says. Diablita steps out from behind the boulder and positions herself in front of me. But not close. She is not as stupid as her head surviving henchman. She’s staying at least twenty feet away. Red is standing to her left, his M-16 to his shoulder, squinting down the sights at me. Things are not looking good.

  However, the fact that Diablita hasn’t told Big Boy or Red to punch my ticket pronto or shot me herself yet—which I would have done if I were her—indicates several things.

  Numero Uno, she wants to keep me alive for a little while.

  Numero Dos, she thinks she has me where she wants me.

  Numero Tres, she is planning on getting much more enjoyment out of my dying than simply plugging me with a volley of bullets from the M-16 she is holding would provide.

  Numero Quatro, she has a little speech she wants to deliver to me, just like every dastardly evil doer in every grade-B viddy that Dad and I used to watch. Gloating over a defenseless enemy seems to be built into the DNA of villains.

  Keeping her gun pointed dead center at me, she motions for Big Boy to come down from his perch. He leaps down to land on his feet. He may be half-crazed and terminally violent after all those years on Chain, but he’s still as graceful as a big cat—and just as lethal. I can tell from the look on his face that he’d like nothing better than to be given the opportunity to do what he wants with me. The way he’s eyeing me from head to toe sends a little shiver down my spine. As well as what he’s thinking, which I’d rather not be hearing in my head right now.

  My mind is picking up the thoughts of all three of my enemies. Their vile ideas are buzzing like poisonous wasps through my brain. Somehow, I keep my face impassive.

  Diablita’s mask quivers as she lets out a slow exhalation of breath and adjusts her long, perfect hands on the rifle she is holding.

  “So,” she says, “my little killer, what shall I do with you?”

  As if she didn’t already have the whole scenario worked out in her twisted brain.

  First skin her hands. Yes. Then her feet and make her run.

  I don’t say anything. After all, it wasn’t really a question.

  Diablita laughs. It’s a little too high and too long of a laugh for it to sound as if it is coming from someone entirely—or even partly—sane. Even Big Boy tak
es half a step back and away from her. Then she coughs, reaches up one hand to wipe the scarred mouth hidden beneath the mask that covers her facial deformity.

  “Do you think I was always this way?” she says. “Do you think I was always so ruthless in my pursuit of power, in my desire to destroy anyone foolish enough to get in my way?” She pauses again, waiting this time for an answer that I am not about to give her. Saying nothing is to my advantage. It keeps her attention, as well as Red’s and Big Boy’s eyes, focused on me. She hasn’t realized—as I did just a few seconds ago—that I’m actually not alone.

  Diablita takes a step toward me. It looks as if she plans to prod me with her gun barrel. Then she thinks better of it and stops. Too bad. But I can wait. And she’s only ten feet away now.

  “I want to tell you a story,” Diablita says. Her voice has changed. It is softer now, almost wistful. “It is a story about a little girl, a girl as sweet and innocent as the dawn of a day in spring. That golden-haired little girl was always kind to everyone. She believed that life was good and that if she did good to others, then happiness would be hers. She wasn’t engaged in the wearying struggle of trying to maintain her power from day to day. She wasn’t bitter, she knew nothing of injustice. She was the sort of child who would pick up a baby bird and gently put it back into its nest.”

  Diablita pauses, reaches out a hand toward me. “And do you know who that little girl was, what that little girl’s name was?”

  Her mask does not cover her left eye, so I can see her raise the eyebrow on that side of her face. A clear sign that she is waiting for me to answer before giving me the punch line.

  “No,” I say.

  “Neither do I. I just killed her and drank her blood. Just as I am going to do with you. Although I may wait until we find your mother and your sister and your brother so I can make you watch as I kill them inch by inch!”

  Diablita’s laugh—that follows her undoubtedly true little anecdote and her equally sincere statement of intent—is even more maniacal than her first one. The events of the last hour or so, which have decimated her forces and, thus far, thwarted her plans, have driven her off the deep end. If the door of her sanity was slightly unhinged before, it has now been blown off the hinges. Her laughing is bringing her close to me. Less than six feet away now.

  It’s time, I think.

  It’s not polite to use your hand to point. That’s what we Apaches believe. But we also know how non-Indians think. So when I raise my right hand to point behind them, my three adversaries take immediate notice.

  Diablita stops laughing and raises her gun to point it at my chest.

  “Hold it,” Big Boy growls. Red’s finger tightens on his trigger.

  “Look,” I say.

  I move my index finger slightly, jabbing it forward and indicating a spot just behind and to the left of them. Of course, none of them turn to look.

  “That is the oldest trick in the book,” Diablita giggles, shaking her head.

  “How stupid you think we are?” Big Boy snarls.

  Just stupid enough. I drop my index finger down.

  Now.

  A tall shape steps out from the other side of the giant saguaro twenty feet behind them. Two very large, hirsute hands reach down and around Big Boy, pinning his gun to his side and lifting him off the ground.

  Red starts to swing his gun in the direction where Big Boy has just been pulled back behind the giant saguaro that hid Hally’s bulk. But he never completes his turn, stopped by the crossbow bolt that is suddenly jutting from the center of the skull tattoo on his heavy right shoulder. He drops his gun to grab at the short arrow and pull it free. He’s still yanking at it as Hussein comes leaping in and cracks him across the jaw with an elbow strike. They grapple together and fall out of sight behind a clump of ocotillos.

  Diablita sees all this out of the corner of her eye. It briefly takes her attention off me. Just long enough for me to step in and swing my leg up in a crescent kick that tears the M-16 from her grasp and sends it spinning. I follow up with a back kick from my other leg at her chin. My aim is to take her head off. But all I hit is the edge of her mask, knocking it from her face. She’s dodged out of the way. Her reflexes are so incredibly fast that it takes my breath away.

  There’s no time to see what is happening with my two allies, though I can hear the struggle between Hussein and Red still going on.

  Diablita has already spun back toward me. Crouched down, she resembles a leopard. It’s not just her hands, held out like claws, that make her look more like a beast than a human. It’s also her exposed face. She was, I can now see, far more “improved” than the Dreamer was before the Silver Cloud brought an end to the Age of Edison. Her implants were so much deeper that much of the flesh on one side of her face is not merely scarred, it is gone. There is nothing but bone from just above her chin to her hairline. Some of that bone is blackened and pitted from the burning components that were ripped out. A normal person would have died from infection with those wounds. But Diablita must have been saved by the bio enhancements flowing through the bloodstream of One who was made nearly immortal. The mask she donned is gone. The one she wears beneath it is that of death embodied.

  In less than a heartbeat, barely time enough to think this, she is leaping at me with a scream.

  “AYYYYYYYYY!”

  I grasp her clawed hands and fall backward, bending my knees, placing my feet between her hips and waist, then roll and thrust upward. She goes flying over me.

  She should have landed on her back, knocking the wind out of her. Instead she twisted in midair and ended up on her feet. I barely have time to regain my balance before she’s attacking again, this time with a sharp-edged rock that she has grabbed from the ground. I lean back, block her blow past me at the same time as I sweep her feet out from under her. She lands on her stomach. Well, not quite on her stomach.

  The ground around here isn’t smooth. It’s stony desert soil and there are desert plants growing here and there around us. Ocotillo, creosote bushes, cactuses. Not just giant saguaros such as the one that hid Hally’s silent approach, but also barrel cactuses.

  Diablita has just fallen belly down on one of those. Its spines dig deeply into her as she rolls to pull herself free.

  That takes long enough for me to notice that my least favorite desert plant, the cholla “jumping cactus,” is also a prevalent part of the ecosystem here. Cholla got its nickname from the fact that its fat, modified leaves so easily detach from the main plant that it seems to leap up to stick into you.

  The follow-through on my block ended up with my left hand in a clump of cholla. I don’t feel the pain yet, but I’m wearing a piece of heavily thorned cholla on my palm like a fat green mitten.

  Her struggle to escape from the embrace of that barrel cactus seems to have given Diablita enough time to return to whatever passes for rational thought in her brain. When she turns toward me, plucking cactus spines from her body and her hands and arms, she doesn’t just attack. She reaches back to her waist and unsheathes a long, thin blade. Then she drops into the stance of a well-trained knife fighter and begins to make the figure eight moves that suggest her points of attack. Either side of the throat, the inner thighs where the femoral arteries might be cut . . .

  “I am going to kill you,” she hisses as she circles me. “Skin you!”

  Whatever.

  I stand there, one foot slightly in front of the other, my hands at shoulder height. I still have my own hidden knife inside my belt. But the time it would take to reach down, twist, and pull it free might take too long. Plus I have this piece of cholla clamped on my hand. So, as she circles me, I just concentrate on keeping her in sight.

  Suddenly, quick as a cat, she feints right, then slashes at my throat.

  Perhaps if she had two eyes and not just the one, her attack might have been more successful. She might have seen my left hand coming at her face as my right hand parried her knife strike past me. Her rattlesnake-swift slash
comes closer than I expected. The warmth I feel flowing down my neck tells me that she’s managed to slice my cheek.

  But I’ve done worse to her. The slap of my cholla-gloved hand dislodged the sharp-needled piece of cactus from my palm and fastened itself to her face. I’ve blinded her one remaining eye.

  “ARRRRRHHHHHHEEEEE!”

  Screaming like a banshee, she slashes her blade back and forth. Tearing the air with her anguish, she stumbles backward, trips over the skeleton of a fallen saguaro branch, twists, falls. And goes silent.

  Plucking cholla thorns from my palm, I walk over to her, kick her limp body over with my foot. As she fell, her knife ended up in her own belly, thrust deep by her own weight. My enemy is dead, a victim of her own bloodlust.

  But what about my two allies?

  Hussein?

  I am here, Lozen.

  And there he is. He’s starting to push himself up to his feet a few yards to my left. Below him is the body of Red. Though Red freed that crossbow bolt from his shoulder, it’s now thrust deep into his throat. The bandage has been torn from Hussein’s wounded hand by the struggle just ended. He’s covered with blood.

  Most of it is his, Hussein thinks to me.

  And there is no pain in my forehead as I catch his thoughts. Instead, it just feels . . . right.

  He walks over to me.

  Are you all right? he thinks.

  He starts to reach his left hand to touch the cut on my cheek. I push his hand aside, step in and put my arms around him. I lean my head down for a moment onto his shoulder. I can feel his warm breath on my neck.

  We’re all right, he thinks to me. All three of us.

  Hally?

  Here.

  He’s standing right next to us. I didn’t feel him coming up.

  Hussein and I let go of each other—aside from his left hand and my right one, which remain linked together. We look up at our Bigfoot friend.