Bolt

by Siena West

  When Gray Dawn believed he was far enough away from the kiva, he trotted as fast as the icy terrain would allow. But he had not reckoned with the guards. A huge, gray owl swept down on him seemingly from nowhere and dug its powerful, curved talons into his back.

  Gray Dawn whirled about, trying to dislodge the creature. Blood poured as the owl’s talons dug deeper into his flesh. He scrabbled with his walking stick, desperately trying to hit the creature. They reeled about in a crazy dance, and some of Gray Dawn’s blows landed. Feathers flew and floated to the ground. After what seemed an eternity of frenzied motion, Gray Dawn lodged a blow against the owl’s skull.

  Stunned, the creature loosened its grip enough so Gray Dawn could throw it on the ground. The owl thrashed about, and Gray Dawn pummeled it with his stick. The creature shifted shape before his eyes. Sometimes it looked human, and with the next whirl, it was an owl again. Whether owl or human, the creature’s huge, baleful eyes gleamed yellow in the starlight and seemed to strike into Gray Dawn’s soul. At last, he landed a blow on the creature’s wing. He heard the lightweight, hollow bones crack in the still night air. With that crack, the owl was transformed into a bright-red fireball. Shedding droplets of flame, it whistled away.

  Exhausted and bleeding, Gray Dawn limped home.

  * * *

  It was near morning when Gray Dawn reached the village. He went to his father’s house and woke Green Spring and Small Deer. His appearance horrified his father and Small Deer. The owl’s talons had ripped his blanket and deerskin to pieces. Small Deer removed the tattered garments, taking care not to hurt him more. Deep furrows and punctures covered Gray Dawn’s back, the nape of his neck, his hands, and his scalp. Blood stained what remained of his clothing. Small Deer fetched fresh water and herbs to make a healing tincture. As she washed the blood from his wounds, they bled again. She applied a poultice of leafy material mixed with mud from the sacred spring. When she had finished dressing the wounds, she brought Gray Dawn a bowl of warm meat broth to warm him. As he sipped, he told them what he had seen at the witches’ kiva. It made him sick again, and he struggled to keep down the broth.

  “I feared this, my son,” Green Spring said. “Two nights ago, the twins born to Yellow Bird and his wife went missing. Perhaps you heard? We searched in the village and around it. Yellow Bird thought wolves had taken his children. Now we know why he found no tracks to follow and no blood.” Green Spring shook his head, great sadness melting his eyes.

  “We will seek the Village Chief because he will know what to do. The priests of the curing societies will use their powers to discover the witches. There are ways to make the accused witches confess to their crimes, and we have certain prescribed punishments for sorcery. This will exorcise the malignancy, and our lives will return to harmony.”

  “Father, I do not understand. How could my uncle and aunt be so cruel? What turned them into Two Hearts?”

  “It is known the Two Hearts seek more power and longer life than the Creator meant for us, and it changes them. It is also known the Two Hearts’ wrongdoing is best accomplished on relatives.” Gray Dawn thought of Many Bright Colors’s death, his unborn son’s death, the whirlwind that destroyed her family’s crops, and the village spring turned to blood. He remembered the faces in the doorway of his granny’s house, and the owls that had fled in the night.

  “You have done the people a great service, Gray Dawn. We will survive this horror and prosper.”

  “Remember that the witches saw me, Father. They know we have caught them, and they will try to hide from the doctors and priests. There were more witches at the kiva I did not recognize. They may be sorcerers from other villages.”

  “Do not worry, Gray Dawn. Red Bear and the other doctors have great power, too. They will discover the witches wherever they hide.

  “And you, my son, must have a curing ceremony. You have watched things that no good person should ever see, and great wickedness has touched you. We will begin tomorrow, lest the malevolency linger in your soul. I will call the doctors together to prepare the medicines and rituals.”

  “Come back tomorrow,” Small Deer said. “I will check your wounds and dress them again if needed.”

  Green Spring cast down his sad eyes.

  “The medicines and rituals will cure you, my son, I am sure of that. But I cannot imagine how we will tell Yellow Bird and his wife what happened to their children.”

  Chapter 27

  Inferno

  Sometime after midnight, Elena jerked awake with a start. Befuddled from waking so suddenly, she lay in bed, unsure of time and place. The palpable silence and blackness of the night were suffocating. The slice of moon had set, and no lightning flickered in the distance. No wind swayed in the tops of the pines, and no thunder rumbled.

  As her mind cleared, she decided one of the mouse families that lived under and in the cabin had awakened her. She turned over to go back to sleep when a man’s shout split the night.

  “FIRE! THERE’S A FIRE IN THE LAB!” The terrifying words echoed in the stillness like thunder off the mountaintops, rolling wide and then lodging in her heart.

  Fear pulled her out of bed, now alert. At the Taylor Ranch, nothing could be more frightening than fire.

  The shouting continued. In the dark, Elena grabbed the first clothes she found, slipped into her boots, and rushed out of the cabin. Smoke hung in the still air. Norm’s truck pushed through the pall and roared past her cabin, just missing her as she ran across the road. He was on his way to start the generator so they could pump water.

  The pines, painted orange by the flames, stood like cardboard silhouettes against the midnight-black sky. Elena’s throat constricted with the smoke—or fear—before she even crossed the lawn. Norm had pounded on the bedroom doors in the house, shouting at the sleepers to wake up and get out. People spilled out of their cabins and tents, disheveled and disoriented. The lab was aflame, fire climbing the walls and flames licking the corner of the lab where it joined the annex. Shocked into action by the sight, Elena shouted orders. The generator roared in the distance, cutting through the silent night. God bless Norm.

  Tim was trying to find a way to climb on the roof without a ladder. Shirtless, with his half-naked, lanky form and red hair shining in the orange light, he looked like a Halloween figure at a Samhain bonfire.

  Elena pushed back the knot of gawking students from the burning building. “Make yourselves useful. Go get shovels. I’ll tell you what to do.”

  She ordered Cole and Mel to hook up the garden hoses in the front and back yards.

  “I’ll take the back,” Mel said, and ran, finding that flames were eating through the exterior wall of the lab. She hurried to disconnect the lawn sprinkler and then soaked the wall.

  Cole did the same in the front yard, uncoiling two hoses. Tim had climbed on the deck that covered the flat roof of the lab, and Cole threaded a hose up to him. Then he rushed to turn on the water and as Tim hosed the roof, directed his own hose at the lab. The ranch house would be a banquet for the inferno. Asphalt roofing, old wood painted and repainted over decades, and worst of all, propane stove, freezer, and refrigerator—and a nearly full tank nearby.

  Nausea held Elena in its grip, and fear sank in her belly like a stone, as when she was inside an excavation unit in the bone bed. Something malicious whirled in the flames and smoke, a thing far beyond the danger the fire posed.

  When the students reappeared, armed with shovels, Elena ordered them to throw dirt on the fire. They shoveled it up from Norm’s flowerbeds and lawn and tossed it on the flames.

  The fire ate its way across the wall separating the lab and annex. It would soon spread along the wooden benches and shelves where they stored the artifacts and samples. Wraithlike, Susan appeared at Elena’s side. She tugged the director’s sleeve to get her attention.

  “The tree-ring samples,” she said. “We’ve got to get them out.” Mierda, she was right. Soaked in gasoline and pa
raffin, wrapped in cotton and stored in cardboard boxes, they would fuel the conflagration beyond saving. They might lose much more than the ability to date the excavations as well. Sue stored the samples on shelves near the annex. A chill shuddered through Elena’s body, and the sickness worsened, a sharp-toothed serpent biting at her guts.

  She found Maggie.

  “See if you can find any sprayers in the tool shed and give them to the kids.” Most of the rusty, hand-pumped, always-clogging sprayers were at the dig, but they might find a few in camp. “And get the fire extinguishers from the kitchen.”

  “Norm’s using them now,” Maggie said.

  “Okay, good. I’ll need people to form a line for me.”

  Maggie’s huge eyes glistened in the eerie light. “What are you going to do?”

  “Try to save the tree-ring samples. And the lab.”

  * * *

  As Maggie ran to organize the students, Elena grabbed towels from the kitchen. She soaked them in the sink, twisted them, and wrapped one around her head like a Hindu turban. She tied a second in bandit-bandanna style over her face.

  “I’ll hand you boxes of samples,” she told the crowd waiting outside the lab. “Pass them down the line, please. And don’t get too close.” The university’s risk-management team would be apoplectic. She plunged into the smoke-filled, burning lab and started moving the boxes. As she worked, the wet towels warmed up, and she felt the heat of the flames. It was almost impossible to see through the thick smoke. She passed box after box to the line of students. Before she lifted the last box, the flames were curling along the storage bench toward her—entirely too close. Water spilled through the burned rafters where Tim hosed the roof, but it wasn’t helping much to stop the fire.

  Elena emerged from the burning lab and pulled the towel from her face, taking big gulps of air. Cole concentrated water on the wall separating the lab from the annex. All too aware of the danger if the flames reached the annex and kitchen, Norm directed his little knot of people with sprayers and fire extinguishers to do the same.

  Drawn by the commotion and the smoke, the ranch hands appeared. “Should we start a bucket brigade to bring water from the barn?” Ned asked Norm, who pumped a sprayer like a madman.

  “Wouldn’t hurt,” he said, because with all the hoses going nonstop, the water pressure had fallen. The onlookers collected buckets from the artifact-washing areas in the yards and grabbed feed buckets from the barn. They formed the bucket brigade, filling the buckets with water from the troughs at the barn and passing them from person to person. The last one in line dumped water on the smoldering wood. They passed empty buckets the other way down the line.

  The horses in the barn kicked their stalls in terror. They smelled the smoke, and their fear was instinctive. If the fire spread to other buildings and the barn, the amateur firefighters would have to save the animals. Norm could not bear to lose his expensive quarter horses.

  A gawking student, one of the few who hadn’t been conscripted, asked Norm, “Why don’t you call the fire department?”

  Norm stared at him, profound disdain and a little amusement reflecting from his sweat-stained, sooty face.

  “Because, stupid, there is no fire department. We’re it. Why don’t you help?” The student slunk away.

  It was hopeless. Eventually, the flames diminished and flickered out, and rubble smoked under the piled-up dirt. Water dripped from the burned rafters, and the wet wood below steamed and sizzled. Without speaking, the filthy, amateur firefighters surveyed the damage. The lab was a total loss. The heat caused windows to pop and shatter. The storage benches and shelves burned and collapsed, sending the artifact boxes sliding in a heap to the floor. Benches and tables where the lab crew sorted artifacts and everyone assembled for dinner were burned, too, only the metal parts remaining.

  It could have been so much worse. The wall separating the annex and lab was burned and scorched, but the flames didn’t reach the propane freezer. Tim had kept the roof on the main house from catching fire. No other buildings had burned, and the frightened horses in the barn were safe.

  The true casualty was Norm’s flower beds. Between the trampling and the shoveling, only a few flowers stood unharmed.

  * * *

  The ranch house blazed with light. The noise had awakened the Apache laborers, and they joined the crowd collected in the dining room, sitting on the floor with their backs against a wall. Only Caleb was missing. Relieved that the danger was past, most students and the ranch hands went back to bed. Dressed like refugees, the staff sat around the big table, and a student or two took up seats in the living room. High from adrenaline and fright, it was impossible to even try to sleep. Norm made coffee and sandwiches and offered a pitcher of milk and slices of pie left from dinner. He also raided his liquor cabinet and passed a bottle of whiskey around the table. Everyone coughed, and their handkerchiefs showed black from soot and smoke.

  The serpent of fear had uncoiled from Elena’s belly, but the nausea and unease persisted. The towels had protected most of her face, and it stood out pale against the filth that covered the rest of her body. Her hair was gray with ash, and she would discover later that the ends were singed off an inch or two shorter.

  “We were incredibly lucky,” she said. “If there had been wind, or if the roof hadn’t been wet from the last rain—I don’t want to think what might have happened. We lost the lab, but it could have been so much worse.” None of them could bear to think about it. Sparks could have leaped from roof to roof, igniting each old building in succession. In the daylight, they would discover what had been lost.

  No one commented on the others’ appearance. Elena’s hiking boots were unlaced; it was amazing she hadn’t tripped over them. In the dark, she’d dressed in sweatpants and a tee shirt, forgetting her bra. Now, her clothes were coated with mud and charcoal.

  They sat talking until the sky lightened in the east. Gradually, they pieced together what happened.

  “Tim, you gave the alarm,” Elena said. “How did you discover the fire?” Tim found a shirt somewhere and looked less like a feral child, although like the others, he was filthy with dirt and ash.

  “Well,” he said, embarrassed, “I had to visit the outhouse.” He blushed, and it contrasted with his gray hair, its normal bright orange covered with ash. “On the way back, I smelled smoke. I thought it might be the Apache laborers who’d built a fire down at their camp—they do that a lot. But then I realized it came from the house. When I got close, I saw the flames.”

  “Kid’s smart,” Norm interjected. “He knew we’d need the generator to pump water. He pounded on the door to wake me up.” Norm had wrapped himself in a bathrobe over his pajamas and donned his cowboy boots before racing out to the truck. Although he still wore the bizarre costume, he seemed normal under the circumstances.

  “We have you to thank for saving the camp, Tim.”

  Tim blushed even harder. “No, Tía. You saved the camp. Those tree-ring samples probably would have exploded like Molotov cocktails if they’d caught fire. We would never have kept the main house from burning.”

  “Bullshit.” No one commented on the fact that Elena emerged unscathed as she had on the day of the wildfire. Nonetheless, they wondered what skill kept her safe. She wore a kind of invisible, protective bubble—nothing touched her.

  “Okay, everybody, we all want to know how the fire started,” Cole said. “Any ideas?” He and Maggie sat side by side, holding hands. Maggie’s hair was a tangled web, and the parts of her face not black with charcoal were pale, the freckles standing out on her nose and cheeks.

  “Well, when I got to the lab, I smelled gas, and it wasn’t the tree-ring samples,” Tim said. The gas shed held a siphon, two 55-gallon drums of gasoline for the generator, and several gas cans. In the morning, they would find an empty gas can tossed aside in the lab. “Whoever started the fire must have soaked the artifact boxes in gasoline.”

  “So it
was arson,” Elena said. Her tone was flat. “You didn’t see anybody?”

  “Nope. The guy who set the fire left by the time I got there. He wouldn’t have hung around long—he’d have to make tracks as soon as the fire took hold.”

  Mel was dressed in pajama bottoms and a sweat shirt and had helped herself to a whiskey or two as they talked. “It’s just like the vandalism to my room,” she said. “It was either someone living in our camp or a person who drove in the back way. Nobody heard a car, did they?”

  The people around the table shook heads, not speaking.

  “There’s your answer, then. The same dickhead who trashed my room must have started the fire. It was someone in camp.”

  A vast, cold silence filled the room. The Apache laborers murmured among themselves. A black cloud of suspicion settled over the room. It was if a bomb had exploded in their little paradise.

  “Except,” Elena said, breaking the chill silence, “the person who looted Mel’s room drove away in a vehicle. The arsonist didn’t as far as we know. But why burn down Norm’s house? It makes little sense.”

  Maggie’s great infectious laugh dispelled the gloom. “Obviously, it was someone who was tired of getting sick from Norm’s cooking!” She was giddy with exhaustion and whiskey and just blew a kiss to Norm when he shot her a black look across the table.

  “I bet the arsonist was trying to cover something up,” Cole said. “Something we haven’t seen yet.”

  “Or it was revenge,” Mel said.

  “Revenge for what?” Tim asked.

  Mel shrugged. “If it wasn’t one of us”—she shot an angry glance at the tired and dirty folks in the room—“maybe it was someone who worked here before or visited us. Maybe that person held a grudge.”

  “What the hell for? Elena didn’t short anybody’s paychecks or refuse to show any visitors around camp,” Cole said.