Storm of Locusts

by Rebecca Roanhorse

  “Or they split up. Who knows? But the timing is right.” I down the rest of my Shasta, the aftertaste of whiskey dulled by the sugary drink. “Let’s go, before the dust storm hits.”

  I turn off the video feed. Slide off the bench. Take a few steps before I realize Ben isn’t following me.

  “What is it?”

  She’s rocking back and forth on the barstool, eyes down and hands tucked in the sleeves of her shirt. She looks young. Alone. All that teenager sass from earlier vanished like it never was.

  “We’re going to kill him, aren’t we?” she says, her voice hard. “The White Locust?”

  I think about what Kai said on that tape. He didn’t know, couldn’t know that Caleb’s disappearance would threaten to destroy Grace, that the White Locust’s follower would kill Hastiin, that his cheii would be desperately waiting for him. And I think about my vow to myself, that I’m not the indiscriminate killer I was before, definitely not the boogeyman Ben described me as up on the mountain. But before I can answer her, the walls of the All-American give a little shake. We stop still, listening, as the roar of a dust storm rolls over us.

  “Damn,” I mutter. “You didn’t say it was coming in that fast.”

  We can hear the thunk of something hitting the roof loud enough to make me flinch. It sounds like a hail storm, but there’s no way it’s hailing. The weather in Dinétah doesn’t vary much from dry and sunny.

  The sound of objects hitting the roof gets louder, more steady.

  Ben hops down off the barstool and walks toward the back door, the one facing the trailer. There’re no windows in the All-American, so if we want to see what’s going on, we’re going to have to open a door.

  “Wait,” I tell her. I reach around the bar to find a couple of Grace’s ubiquitous bar rags. Hand Ben one, and we tie them around our faces, covering noses and mouths. By now the sounds of the storm have become so loud I have to raise my voice to be heard.

  “What’s going on?” Ben asks, her voice scared. We both flinch again as something heavy lands on the roof.

  “I don’t know, but that doesn’t sound like a normal windstorm unless it’s tossing around boulders. You better let me do it.” I step in front of Ben, moving her protectively behind me. She grasps the back of my shirt in her fist, holding on. “I’m going to open the door,” I tell her, trying to keep my voice reassuring, “and we’re going to make a run for it. On the count of three. Okay?”

  She pulls a little harder at my shirt, so I take that for a yes. It’s less than fifty feet to Grace’s porch. Whatever is raining down on us, we can make it.

  I grip the door handle. “One . . . two . . .”

  But I don’t get to three before the door comes crashing inward, forcing me to step back and almost knocking Ben, who’s too close to me, over. I reach back to steady her as a hulking figure fills the empty space. I catch a glimpse of the storm before Clive slams the door shut.

  “What in the . . . ?” I whisper, awe in my voice, my eyes still staring beyond that flimsy door.

  “Locusts,” Clive says grimly. He shakes his shirt out. Shudders as three insects fall to the floor. They are about an inch to an inch and a half long, a dull dusty-brown color, with the shimmering wings of a dragonfly and the long back legs I associate with a grasshopper. Clive immediately stomps on the bugs, crushing them under a heavy boot. The crunch of their carapaces is drowned out by the roar of the swarm outside.

  Ben makes a choking sound as they splatter against the hardwood floor, and I’m not far behind.

  “What in the hell is going on?” I ask.

  Clive shudders as something huge thumps against the closed door. “That’s not a windstorm out there,” he says grimly. “It’s a locust swarm.”

  “What are they?” Ben asks, her voice shaking. “Why are they here? Why are there so many of them?”

  “All good questions,” Clive assures her. “But right now we’ve got to get back to the house with Rissa and Mom. The bar’s not going to hold up to this.”

  As if to prove Clive’s point, something strikes the roof hard enough to shake a piece of the ceiling free. Plaster and Sheetrock rain down a dozen feet from us, and through the hole they leave, I can see daylight. Or at least the place I expect daylight to be. Because all I see out there is a dark cloud of living shadow.

  “Not good,” I murmur.

  We all watch as a single locust squeezes through the hole. And then another.

  “Gotta go,” Clive repeats. He hands us each a pair of goggles, which we gratefully put on. “Tuck your shirts in too. Tighten your sleeves, if you can. And make sure those towels don’t leave any holes for them to get into. They stick to you”—the big man shudders again—“so move fast. They get in your hair, but there’s no way to avoid it. If one gets in your clothes, don’t stop. Get in the house and we’ll deal with it then.”

  “Look!” Ben says. Crawling through the growing hole in the ceiling is what can only be called a giant. More than twice the size of the other locusts, it is at least four inches long, with iridescent wings and long spiked back legs. It swivels its huge head back and forth, mandibles snapping.

  “Tell me that thing can’t actually see us,” I say, my voice high with a primal fear of crawling six-legged things.

  “There’s no way . . . ,” Clive starts, but he drifts off as the giant locust settles its huge eyes on us. I swear it looks right at me.

  “Run!” I shout, pushing Ben to the door. Just as the swarm breaks through the ceiling and the giant locust launches free.

  Chapter 14

  There are many times I’ve faced down monsters in my life. Frightening creatures that made my blood run cold. But there is something about insects, the mindlessness of the horde, that is particularly terrifying.

  Ben screams, Clive curses, and I move.

  Honágháahnii wakes. Time slows to the pulse of an insect’s wings, the sustained scream of a young girl, and between one beat and the next, my hand finds the throwing knife tucked in my moccasin. I release the blade, an impossible throw, that splits the giant locust in half. It breaks. Falls.

  And then Clive’s wrenching the door open, and the roof is collapsing under the weight of the insects, and we’re running. Stumbling into hell.

  The darkness is alive, clutching at our clothes, our hair, our skin. A million tiny claws, grasping, hungry. Honágháahnii shows me each creature clearly, a tiny individual nightmare, There’s so many that there’s nothing I can do but hold back the fear, keep moving, and try to shield Ben.

  Ben stumbles. Trips on the stairs of the porch and goes down. I grab for her, yank her up by her shirt, but she slips from my grasp. The swarm seems to solidify around her, a blanket of unnatural blackness. I do the only thing I can think to do.

  I draw Neizghání’s sword.

  I lift it high, like I’ve seen him do a hundred times. And . . . nothing. The sword stays as it is, black obsidian on black wood, no fire. No lightning.

  Shit.

  But even without the lightning, it’s a powerful weapon, like a sharp-edged club.

  I swing it. Cleave through the swarm. Again and again, until I can get to Ben. She’s struggling on hands and knees to crawl up the stairs. I reach down with my free arm and grasp Ben around the waist. Heave her up and throw her forward up the stairs. She stumbles to her feet, and then Clive is there, pulling her through the open door.

  I jump the remaining stairs in a single leap, swing the sword one last time to clear my path, and tumble backward through the door. Clive slams it shut, and I hear the heavy smack of bugs against the wood.

  Hands are on me, Rissa and Grace, knocking locusts from my clothes and hair. I hold my arms out, careful with the sword, as Grace whacks me with a long-handled broom.

  “You’re clear,” Rissa says. I nod thankfully and hobble to the familiar chair by the sofa.

  Ben’s sitting on the floor, sniffling quietly but generally holding it together. Maybe not holding it together well, but I
can’t blame her. I’m not sure how well I’m holding it together and I’m used to the monsters.

  Rissa and Clive are pushing furniture against the door to help it hold. And Grace . . . Oh, Grace. Rissa was right. Her mom looks frail, a bad tiding away from broken. But she’s got a pair of heavy black combat boots on, and she’s sweeping the bugs into piles and stomping them like she’s crushing grapes for harvest.

  “It won’t hold,” I tell the twins, breathless. “The door. There’s too many, and they’re not natural.”

  Rissa looks up. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean this swarm is not natural.” I catch my breath a little before I continue. “I don’t believe it.”

  “There’s been locust swarms in the past. Famous ones, that last days and cover a hundred miles. There’s no reason to think this isn’t one of those. I mean, they’re destructive, but they’ll pass. We just have to wait—”

  “It looked right at us.”

  Grace stops her stomping to stare at me. “What?”

  “The giant locust inside the bar,” I say, sheathing the sword. A little tricky the first time, but I manage. “Before I killed it. It looked right at me.”

  “It’s a bug. Be serious.”

  “It—it did.” Ben sniffles, her arms wrapped tightly around her knees. She rocks slightly to comfort herself. “I felt it too. Like a presence. It was. . . . smart. It knew we were there.”

  Rissa looks grim. “What are you saying?”

  “That this door isn’t going to hold. That they know we’re here and it’s only a matter of time. They’ll find another way in. There’s no waiting them out because they’re not going away.”

  “So we fight our way out,” Rissa says.

  “To where?” I ask. “You said it yourself. This swarm could be a hundred miles wide.”

  “The tunnels,” Grace says.

  We all turn to Grace. She may look feeble, but her eyes are sharp and her mouth is set in a determined line.

  “Mom?” Clive asks.

  Grace drops her broom and heads for the back bedrooms. Clive helps Ben to her feet, and we all hustle after her, the steady beat of insects striking the side of the trailer all around us.

  “Help me move the bed, son,” Grace says once we’re in her bedroom. Dutifully, Clive pushes the mattress to the side. Rissa and I move to the other side to pull, and soon the floorboards are exposed. Sure enough, there’s a trapdoor there, square and big enough to fit a person through. The lock is rusted shut, like it hasn’t been used in years.

  Grace goes to the dresser next to the bed and opens the top drawer. Pulls out a small key, the kind that would fit into a padlock like the one on the trapdoor. “Open it,” Grace says, handing the key to Clive. He bends to fit the key in the lock. It takes a little muscle, but he gets the lock to turn. He slips the bolt off, and the door swings inward. Stale air wafts out, rich with the smell of dirt and age.

  “Where does this go?” I ask.

  “It’s an old smuggling tunnel,” Grace explains. “Used to use it to move bootleg booze and the occasional human when the Wall first went up. This is checkerboard land—Navajo police got no jurisdiction at the All-American—but there’s plenty of jurisdiction between here and the Wall. So we needed a better way.”

  “Are you saying this tunnel goes all the way to the Wall?”

  The older woman lifts a shoulder. “Used to. Now, maybe. Maybe not. Maybe it’s caved in.”

  Rissa says, “The Wall’s twenty miles east of here. We’re not crawling underground in the dark for twenty miles.”

  “And it’s the wrong direction,” I say. “Caleb and Kai’s trail goes west toward Tse Bonito.”

  “We’re not crawling,” Grace says. “The tunnel also goes right out to the garage, where there’s some perfectly fine motorbikes that can certainly outrun a bunch of damn bugs.”

  Clive grins. He picks his mom up and twirls her around, planting a kiss on her cheek.

  “Put me down,” she complains, slapping his hands away. “Good Lord. You’re going to break something.”

  Rissa laughs. “You’re full of secrets, Mom.”

  She sighs as her son sets her gently on her feet. “A woman’s got to keep secrets. Else who is she?”

  “You can’t come back here, you know,” I say. “At least for a while.”

  The Goodacres look at me like I spoiled the party. I look pointedly at the walls, the ceiling, where we can still hear the constant noise of locusts.

  “Grace, you can go to my house in Crystal. Tah’s there, and it’s safe enough. Thirsty Boys can help you out if there’s trouble. And the rest of us will stick to the plan. We go after Kai. And Caleb. The locusts will follow us.”

  No one says anything. Rissa still looks dubious, like maybe I’m a little crazy. Like I haven’t been fighting supernatural creatures since I was fifteen.

  “You think this is a coincidence?” I hiss, my voice angry. “You think some guy calling himself the White Locust just shows up, steals your son away, and then coincidently, a monster swarm of killer locusts shows up and tries to break your door down?”

  “What?” Rissa and Clive say at once.

  “How the hell do you know that?” Rissa asks.

  “Who is the White Locust?” her brother asks at the same time.

  Grace is staring at me hard, part like it’s the first sign of hope she’s had in days and part like I was keeping secrets and she’s pissed. “You better explain, Maggie.”

  “There’s not really time,” I say.

  “We’ll make time,” Rissa says through gritted teeth.

  Grace motions her daughter to silence. “Just tell us the basics, Maggie. We have time.”

  I want to argue. The locust swarm has become a black mass pressing against the windows, and that tells me different. But Grace asked, and she deserves an answer. “Hastiin and the Boys were hired to find this guy, the White Locust. It was one of his followers who killed Hastiin.”

  “Hastiin’s dead?” Grace asks, surprised.

  Ben whimpers somewhere behind me.

  I nod, grim.

  Grace makes a little motion, touching her head and her chest. “Then what, Maggie?” she says, voice subdued.

  “Then I saw the videotape, the one from the guardhouse, and I think I recognized the woman on the tape. I think she’s the same woman who killed Hastiin. She has a clan power or something similar that gives her the ability to sing this song. . . .”

  I can tell Grace isn’t following.

  “Anyway, I’m sure it’s the same people. The ones who killed Hastiin and the ones who took Kai and Caleb. And they all tie back to the White Locust.”

  “You still haven’t told us who he is,” Clive says.

  “He’s a cult leader,” Ben volunteers. “Believes in the end of the world, cleansing Dinétah of its sins or something like that.”

  “What does he want with Caleb, then?” Clive asks.

  “Maybe nothing,” I admit. “Maybe he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You mean he came for Kai and Caleb was in the way.”

  “So it is Kai’s fault,” Rissa says, jaw clenched.

  “You don’t think Caleb’s dead, do you, Maggie?” Grace asks.

  “I don’t. You know Kai, Grace. He wouldn’t let Caleb die. He’s a healer. He . . . wouldn’t.”

  “Unless he’s the one who hurt Caleb to begin with,” Rissa says, “because your theory about a cult leader is great, but there’s only your word for it. And it doesn’t explain the bloodstains. Or what he said on that tape.”

  Rissa knows. She knows what Kai said to me. And in her mind, he left because he did something terrible, something unforgiveable, like kill Caleb. She believes it was his good-bye, and while I don’t believe he would hurt Caleb, it’s hard to argue with the rest.

  “No,” Grace says, voice firm. “Maggie’s right. I know Kai. He’s a good young man. He wouldn’t hurt Caleb, and if Caleb was hurt by this White Locus
t man, Kai would heal him. I know that.”

  “How can you know that, Mom?” Rissa asks.

  “Because he did the same for you.”

  Mother and daughter lock eyes for a moment. The room is quiet except for the growing song of the locusts outside. We all hold our breath.

  And then the sound of shattering glass fills the room as the bedroom window breaks.

  * * *

  Chaos, as we scramble for the trapdoor and the tunnel to safety.

  Rissa drops first, gun drawn, no hesitation. Clive helps his mom follow, and then Ben.

  Clive shouts, “Maggie, you go fi . . .” His voice dies as he looks back at me over his shoulder. His face pales, the expression draining away in fear. Whatever he sees behind me is not good. “Maggie . . . ?” he whispers, his voice soft with terror.

  I draw Neizghání’s sword.

  “Go!” I shout.

  Without a word, Clive drops through the trapdoor.

  I can feel it now, whatever horror Clive saw. It’s behind me, reaching for me.

  I turn and swing.

  And strike a man.

  I almost pull up short, I’m so shocked. But I’m moving too fast and he’s too close, so I cleave him in half. Locusts splatter and break, the rotten-pork smell of their guts filling the bedroom.

  And the man re-forms, his body a mass of locusts. Crawling over one another, singing their strange shrill song. He smiles, dripping locusts from his mouth, a black carapace for a tongue.

  I strike again. He re-forms.

  I take his head off, but it doesn’t matter. As soon as the blade is clear, he re-forms.

  This time, when his head re-forms, his mouth opens. His voice is the buzz of a thousand winged creatures, the song of nightmares long buried underground, the cry of a million hungry mouths. And he says one word:

  “Godslayer.”

  Horror shudders through my body. The same word the archer called me after Ben’s wild accusation.

  I run.

  Honágháahnii has me diving for the tunnel entrance headfirst. I hit something fleshy that grunts. Clive. He puts me on my feet and slams the trapdoor closed. Slides the bolt closed. But it won’t hold long. Already locusts are trying to get in around the thin edges at the seams. Once enough are through to make a man again, I have no doubt they will.