Devil Creek

by Stephen Mertz

  That's all I needed, Paul told himself. Fresh air. I needed to get outdoors.

  He never realized how much he loved the outdoors until he moved West. He'd always enjoyed swimming and the activity of basketball especially, but most of his friends in Chicago were bookworms like him, and liked to play video games. That had changed, maybe because he'd had no choice, removed as he'd been from the world he'd known of malls and fast food restaurants where he and his friends would gather. He was still a bookworm, but more often than not these days he liked to read outside on the patio at home, or sometimes he would hike up one of the trails he knew, behind where they lived. He'd find a spot of shade under a quiet tree and lose himself in a book. He enjoyed that every bit as much as playing soccer or paintball, or going on overnight hikes with Mike and his mom. He always felt better when he was outdoors.

  He started walking toward the center of town, from which it was not that far a walk to the road they lived on, which crossed the highway outside of town. He thought about cutting over to the newspaper office, which was only two blocks from the Ordway home, but instantly decided that this would not be a very good idea. Mike and his mom didn't seem to be angry at each other any more about Mike showing up late for their anniversary party last night, but what with Jeff in town, Mike and Mom would have plenty to discuss.

  He hadn't thought of Jeff as "dad" or "father." Something in him felt glad about that.

  His mom and Mike would work things out between them. Like he'd told Mom, he really wasn't upset like he would have been before in Chicago, because now they were a family. Then he thought about the drums and the scent of juniper and being in the teepee. Yes, that's what his trouble was. He was upset, down deep. He would talk to Mom and Mike after they were all together at home tonight. They often had family meetings on everything from where to hike on the weekend to more important issues, like a slipped grade on his report card . . . or something like what he was going through now. He would feel better after hearing what they would have to say.

  When he got home, he would curl up in one of the patio chairs with the Isaac Asimov robot novel he was reading, and everything would be all right.

  He rounded the corner and crossed the main intersection near Donna's, and his eyes naturally lifted to travel up the heavily slopes of the mountains towering north of town, and that's when he saw the thick plume of white smoke curling toward the sky from where the forest was densest. Estimating the distance from his familiarity with that range, which rose from the foothills behind their house, he determined the smoke to be only a few miles from town, not far above the site of the Sunrise Ridge construction, which wasn't visible from town.

  Maybe the Forest Service was doing what they called a controlled burn. There had been much concern during the summer about fire because of the drought conditions that were plaguing the region.

  No one about him seemed to be paying attention to the plume of smoke, which blended with the clouds behind the mountains, unless you were looking carefully, as Paul was. Cars and pickup trucks drove by; there were a few pedestrians strolling the sidewalks, but everyone was preoccupied with their own concerns.

  And Paul felt no different. Those weren't juniper trees up there. That was not the smoke he had smelled, sitting in the Ordway home.

  He continued walking. The warmth of the sunshine from the blue sky overhead warmed him pleasantly.

  And just like that, he started hearing the war drums again. Yes, they were war drums. Somehow he knew that. And they were calling to him, not to anyone else. The beating sound was muted now, not pounding between his ears, but curling through his senses just the same. His nostrils caught the hint of burning juniper.

  He thought again about turning around and walking back to The Clarion office. But he was more than halfway home. And what if Mike and his mom weren't there? For that matter, what if they were? His stomach was tightening up into that nervous knot again. He kept walking.

  He wondered how his mom was doing.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Shifting winds sent glowing embers wafting over the ledge of the looming cliff that formed the northernmost rim on the canyon, and a few embers were still glowing when they nested amid the branches of stubby mesquite trees that sprouted from outcrops on the face of the canyon wall. These trees ignited almost instantaneously, as if they had been doused with fuel, and their flaming embers drifted down onto a tree line of silverleaf oak with fiery kisses.

  The heat of this feeding, growing beast of flame sent wildlife, winged and legged, fleeing, panicky to escape the fast-encroaching, licking orange-red flames that were driven by winds from the north that huffed down into the canyon like bellows, giving the fire more heat, ever growing, consuming its way down the canyon, toward civilization.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Ever since she'd been a young girl, Robin had always tried to have a place of her own, a special outdoor spot that was hers and hers alone.

  Her upbringing had been securely middle-class. There had been a time when being brought up in the suburbs—as if everyone had learned their lifestyle from Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet—had been made much fun of, satirized, looked down upon. She never understood that. Her parents had worked hard. Dad was a chemical engineer and Mom worked as a substitute teacher when the family needed some additional income, but mostly she stayed home to raise Robin and her two brothers. She realized now how hard and diligently her parents had worked to be good parents, and now that they were both gone and she was a mother herself, she had profoundly come to appreciate the good job they'd done raising her. Whatever mistakes she had made—as a mother, in her own life—were hers alone, while many of the good things about her—and she did like herself; she was proud of what she'd accomplished—were because of the upbringing and the environment her parents had provided for her.

  But even in that loving environment, the little girl she had been had loved her "secret" (or so she thought at the time) little space of barren earth between shrubbery planted in the narrow space between her family's house and the house next door. Oh, her mother always knew where she was, but must have understood and left Robin in that neat "secret place" that was all her own, a place she could see and feel today as a grown woman without even closing her eyes. She had loved the smell of the soil and the cool shade provided by both houses that had seemed so very big to her, shielding her from wind and sun, alone and close to the earth, free to think and play and dream. She had never been a lonely child, but one who generally chose to be alone.

  As she grew up and matured, the "secret places" changed—her favorite bench in the park of the town where she'd grown up, the birch tree that was hers and hers alone on the hiking trail through the university arboretum during her college days, even the jogging path in Chicago—and the need for such a getaway never left her. She suspected that many people had such a place, where you could be left totally alone if even for a short time.

  Though she and Paul had never discussed it, she knew that he often would take a book on a lone walk or hike, and she prided herself in thinking that this was her influence manifesting itself in some way.

  She never told anyone about these places. As an adult, they served much the same purpose as for that little child with her secret place in a shaded corner of the family's yard: a special somewhere to catch her breath, to contemplate and reflect, to dream, perhaps to cry.

  These days, it was a lovely place she had discovered one day on a hike alone, when Paul and Michael had gone to Las Cruces to see some popular action movie which she had no interest in. She'd gladly yielded them some bonding time, had chosen instead to bond with nature and had discovered "her place"; it was something of a climb, and one had to watch on the main path where a narrow game trail, matted down by generations of wildlife but not readily apparent to the human eye, cut off for a distance before passing a rising clump of rock which she had climbed—nothing terribly difficult—to find a vantage point from which she could see some twenty miles or more, looki
ng westward, while she basked in the sun and felt the breeze in her hair, cooling her perspiration while she smiled up at birds soaring aloft on the wind currents.

  She went there now, after dropping Paul off at Terri Ordway's house. She needed to be alone, in "her place," before she proceeded. Before anything else happened.

  She brought with her a peach and a twelve-ounce bottle of drinking water. In these dry western climates, where the relative humidity during the summer months rarely exceeded fifteen or twenty percent, drinking water was a staple of the hiker and many others. Dehydration was a real and constant concern. But by the time she had finished eating her peach, she felt no closer to enlightenment on the matters troubling her.

  Yesterday and today had been an emotional drain so severe, she had to admit that she had coasted through most of her teaching responsibilities on automatic pilot, ever since Paul had delivered the exploding bombshell news about Jeff being in town.

  Talk about having your world rocked.

  In addition to Mike's vanishing act when she needed him the most, and her suspicion that he may have known of Jeff's presence in town before she did, there was the incident that had occurred the day before, before she knew Jeff was around. She could have sworn she'd seen a woman, talking with her son, who was the spitting image of Mike's deceased wife! As if both her and Mike's previous spouses were returned to the present. But of course that was ridiculous, even the mere suggestion that there could be a connection between the two incidents.

  And yet . . . And yet. . . .

  If she had learned nothing else from her ordeal two years earlier, it had been a most definite affirmation of her belief that there was a spiritual realm about us, which danced in and out of our physical world and, it seemed, in one way or another to varying degrees, shaped the realities of this world. An ancient—a truly ageless, she believed—Native American shaman had been responsible for convincing her of this.

  Gray Wolf had been a medicine man, said to be one of the last of a vanished tribe who had once roamed and fought over these lands. The peculiar thing was that she had never encountered the man on this plane of reality, though he had certainly lived and indeed had "died" during the course of those events, that ordeal, which had culminated when a gray timber wolf had interacted with men—something that never happened—to effect a favorable outcome on her behalf. Or had that been a coincidence? She knew it was not.

  For those who would attune their senses and open their hearts, life was a dance between the spiritual realm and our world. She knew this to be true. Was this troubling coincidence—Jeff's arrival, and swearing she had seen the ghost of Carol Landware—part of that? Gray Wolf had once before interfaced with her world. Was he doing so again?

  One could hardly control those "unseen" forces. At least she certainly possessed no such means! So if anything like that was unfolding here for whatever reason, she would only truly become aware of it in due course. But that was not good enough. She had hoped this visit to "her place" would give her strength to face what was happening. Perhaps she would become enlightened by her own thoughts, if not by the spirit of Gray Wolf.

  No such luck.

  She walked back to the Subaru, which she'd left a quarter mile away at the graveled parking area where the main trail began. She did not even feel renewed. She felt edgy. She must confront Michael, as she'd told Paul she was going to do directly after dropping him off at the Ordways'.

  She found herself having to ease up on the accelerator, driving on the dirt road which led to the highway.

  She adjusted her breathing, willing herself to relax and commanding her chi, her inner, intrinsic energy, to rise. Her tai chi classes were one of the few things she did miss about her life in Chicago, but she drew now on what she had been taught. She could not control these spiraling events, perhaps, nor the spirit realm. But she could and would control herself. She had the power to do that.

  As the narrow dirt road curved to join the highway, the vista opened and she caught her first glimpse of the plume of white smoke snaking into the sky, seen from this angle in sharp relief against the mountain peaks that lifted darkly.

  She noted it, but did not dwell on it. Maybe the Forest Service was doing a controlled burn. Since a horrific wildfire season had devastated large areas of the Southwest the preceding year, measures had been taken during the long, hot summer just past to guard against forest fires ravaging the national forestland that surrounded Devil Creek on three sides.

  She steered onto the highway and continued into town.

  The clouds to the south were starting to thin and dissipate as a dry wind started stirring up the air enough for her to roll up her side window, leaving it open just a crack for ventilation. This wasn't an unusual weather pattern for this time of year, when the monsoon—determined by variables such as jet streams, dew points, and temperature—would sometimes spend weeks just "knocking at the door," as one weatherman had phrased it. Nearly every afternoon, clouds would build to the south. Eventually they would bring a regular pattern of afternoon moisture—from mild showers to torrential downpours—for six weeks or so. But until then, there could be storms—sometimes "dry" thunderstorms, with lightning strikes—to the south, but the skies over Devil Creek remained cloudless, as they were this afternoon.

  Mike's Jeep was the only vehicle in the small blacktop parking lot—big enough to accommodate four or five vehicles—adjacent to the converted residence that was home to The Clarion. She sighed with relief as she brought the Subaru to a stop alongside the Jeep. Rose Merrill, a sociable Mormon matron in her late fifties, came in several days a week to do the bookkeeping and manage the advertising accounts, but today was one of her days off. Advertisers and folks in general often dropped in. But she had timed her visit well for some time alone with her husband.

  She frowned when she discovered that the front door was locked. She tapped on the glass with the knuckle of an index finger.

  "Mike?" Another tap. "Mike, are you in there? It's me. Let me in."

  No answer.

  That wasn't like him at all. This was during business hours. The door should not be locked.

  He had given her a key when he first took over the newspaper. She used it now to let herself in.

  Chapter Nineteen

  "Domino! Wake the hell up. What's the matter with you?"

  He awoke with a snarl, instantly aware of where he was and of what had happened, riding passenger in the Bronco.

  Lovechio was at the wheel. The van was chugging up the narrow dirt road that rose steeply through the dark somberness of the tall pine forest that surrounded them, blocking out any view of the mountains.

  He grunted. "Chill. I was catching a catnap. What? You need help driving?"

  "No, I don't need help driving. But I don't want you sleeping on the job, either."

  Domino said, "The job will get done. You've just got a case of nerves. What's wrong? This your first hit?"

  Lovechio did not respond to that. He said, "We're almost there."

  "I'm ready," said Domino.

  But inwardly, he chastised himself for having nodded off like that. What the hell could have caused that?

  He usually got a rush when he took someone's life, a turn-on that left a pleasant lingering after-sensation for the rest of the day. He should have felt that way today, after Olson. And in anticipation of what was to come when they reached Del Muskie's cabin.

  Not only had he fallen asleep, but had the strangest goddamn dream of his whole goddamn life during the short time he'd dozed off, and he wondered if the dream had anything to do with that queasy sense of foreboding he'd felt earlier at the construction site. It had been the damnedest dream. . . .

  He was Ataka. War chief. Feared by all who had ever heard his name and knew of his exploits. His enemies—the bluecoat pony soldiers, the other tribes he fought to keep from this sacred land of his people—trembled at his name. Those who would betray him—the men he traded with, the women who were his squaws—feared his mil
dest displeasure. A gouged eye for trickery in horse-trading; the nose carved from the face of a faithless wife. His command was absolute.

  His war party raided ranches outlying the settlements established by the whites. They swooped in at night and took the horses and slaughtered everyone but the girls, who they took as wives: those who did not commit suicide, or who had not pleaded with their men to take their lives as an act of mercy rather than falling victim to such a fate.

  When the cavalry came, he and his warriors waited until the bluecoats rode to the very mouth of the canyon, where the canyon began to widen and there was much cover to hide until the moment to strike was at hand. They swooped down from two directions at once.

  There was dust and the frightened whinnying of bucking horses and the war cries as lances and tomahawks speared and crushed flesh, and some gunfire, and some of his braves fell, but not many. It was over in a very short time.

  He strode through the scene of sprawled bodies. Flies buzzed madly under a fiery sun. His braves moved from body to body, killing the wounded, sometimes slowly: scalping, mutilating, looting for clothes and valuables.

  He was Ataka. Ruler of this land. He was the spirit of war, chosen by the Old Ones to forever guard and protect this sacred land. His duty was to eternity. He would never die. He was Ataka.

  He knelt over the body of a young, blond-haired lieutenant who had ridden at the head of this column. He was barely conscious, moaning into the long grass beneath them. One glazed eye looked up and saw Ataka, and widened with realization and sudden protest. Ataka laughed and grabbed the man's head with both hands, crying his fiercest war cry to summon the attention of all. There was a short scream from the soldier