by Harvey Click
She didn’t want to waste time while she sat there waiting for her arm to recover, so she stared at a baseball-sized rock twenty feet away and sang the telekinesis chant. The rock rose into the air and hovered five or six feet off the ground. She was trying to see how steady she could hold it when another rock suddenly jumped off the ground and nearly collided with it.
Amy dropped her rock and looked around. Nyx was standing behind her smirking.
Amy lifted the same rock again, and this time Nyx’s rock hit it like a cue ball and knocked it ten feet away. Nyx lifted another rock and let it float teasingly in the air while Amy sent a chunk of brick hurtling toward it, but she missed by a foot or two. They kept doing this for several minutes without speaking, one lifting a rock and the other trying to hit it, until Amy’s head began to ache even worse than her arm and she had to stop.
“Not bad for an amateur,” Nyx said, “but I bet you still can’t throw knives worth a shit. I tried to teach you how but you didn’t learn anything.”
“I seem to remember your lesson consisted of throwing twelves knives at me,” Amy said.
“Don’t even go there! That was a misunderstanding. I was just trying to demonstrate how to throw knives, and everybody went and made a big fucking deal out of it. Man, that still pisses me off.”
“Well, it was a long time ago,” Amy said. “Maybe we should forget about it.”
“Maybe so. But don’t be claiming I was trying to kill you. If I was, you’d be long dead by now.”
“I guess you’re right,” Amy said. “So maybe we should try to be friends.”
“I don’t know ‘bout that. I’m kinda particular about my friends. But at least I promise I won’t try to kill you in your sleep.”
Amy smiled and said, “Well, I guess that’s a pretty good start.”
“I think that’s about the first time I ever seen you smile. Okay, I’ll try and show you how to throw knives if you don’t start claiming I’m trying to kill you.”
An old mattress scavenged from the house was leaning against a nearby tree. Nyx was already wearing her twelve throwing knives, six sheathed on each side of her chest. She stared at the target for a second or two, and a moment later all twelve knives were embedded in it, forming a nearly perfect X. She had thrown them so fast, alternating her hands, that her arms had looked like propellers.
She extracted her knives from the target and slipped them back into their sheaths. “You can use my old knives over there,” she said. “Just don’t bust ‘em up.”
They were sheathed in a similar but older harness. Amy strapped it on and touched each knife handle in turn, trying to get a feel for its location.
“Don’t even think about trying that Quick-Draw McGraw shit,” Nyx said. “You’d end up killing us both. Just pull out a knife and use your head before you throw it. That’s what I was trying to teach you back at Neoma’s place, but you wouldn’t listen. You already know telekinesis, so use it. There’s only one piece of advice I can give you: don’t worry about your hands. The knife isn’t your hand, it’s your eye. Just put all your attention into looking at the place you want your knife to go and keep doing that when you throw the damn thing.”
Amy pulled a knife from its sheath, drew back her hand, and stared intently at a small tear in the mattress. Without giving the knife any thought she threw it, and the blade buried itself in the tear.
“See that little brown shit spot ‘bout a foot below your knife?” Nyx said. “Make your next one go there.”
Amy did.
“Not too bad,” Nyx said. “Now try that star-shaped snot spot over to the right.”
Amy made eleven of the knives land just about exactly where she wanted. She tried throwing the last knife with her left hand, and it sailed past the mattress and landed on the ground.
“Don’t be trying any left-hand shit just yet,” Nyx said. “I mean there’s only so much you can expect me to teach you in one day. It’s not like I’m getting paid to do this.”
Amy kept throwing knives until her arm was sore again and also her breasts. She removed the knife harness and went to the tent. She pulled the flap shut behind her, sat on the floor, unbuttoned her shirt and unhooked her bra. She pressed her left breast into the suction cup of her manual pump and squeezed the handle.
Milk began to flow and also tears. These were the hardest times of the day, when she longed for Emily’s mouth against her nipple so badly that her pain seemed much larger than her body. She used to believe there was some limit to pain, but now she knew there wasn’t. It could be as big as the sky.
She was working on her right breast when the tent flap opened and Nyx stuck her head in. She came in and sat on the floor watching Amy without saying anything, and Amy made no effort to stop her tears. When she was finished pumping she set the pump on the floor, fastened her bra and buttoned her shirt.
“I hate having to throw the milk away,” she said. “Every day I pour it into the dirt like…” She couldn’t think of a word to express what she felt.
“Yeah, it’s a fucking waste,” Nyx said. “You probably won’t believe this, but I know how you feel. I used to do it too, pumped it out and poured it right down the sink. Except it was worse with me ‘cause I knew my baby was dead, so there wasn’t no point in continuing to pump the milk but I did it anyway, like I was trying to feed her ghost. At least your daughter’s probably still alive.”
Amy waited for her to add “and we’ll find her” the way everybody else did, but she didn’t.
“Thanks,” Amy said. “Sometimes things really suck, don’t they?”
“You got that right.”
Last night Shane had sprayed the little adobe house with a whole gallon of insecticide, and Amy took the broom he’d bought and opened the two doors and the four windows and began sweeping up dead spiders. She started with the ones still stuck in webs hanging down from the ceiling, but when she felt the carpet of dead spiders crunching under her feet she decided to sweep the floor first.
She’d never seen so many spiders in her life, spiders of all sizes, a few huge tarantulas scattered among their smaller cousins, some with their legs balled up in death and some with them still spread open like grasping fingers, and they made a sizable mound in the corner where she swept them. Spider eggs were hanging down from the ceiling beams, and she swept them down in a bitter fury and added them to the growing mound on the floor.
The place had three small rooms, one of them with an old wood stove, and when she thought she’d swept up all the spiders in all three rooms she fetched Bloody Joe’s shovel and used it to load the carcasses into a dented pail. She carried it outside intending to burn the spiders in the campfire, but the fire was dead and she found Joe kneeling there scooping cold ashes into a can.
“We need these ashes for our protection bags,” he said. “Call everybody over here so we can get started. We need to get ‘em up before dark.”
Amy set down the pail reluctantly and went to find the others. She didn’t want to scatter the carcasses on the ground; she half believed if she didn’t burn them they’d come back to life like demons. The world seemed so irrational, why shouldn’t dead spiders come back to life?
They sat in a circle around cans and jars of ingredients, and Joe refreshed their memories on how to make protection bags. First he put a scoop of fine campfire ashes into one of the little burlap bags he had bought, then a small pebble of frankincense, a splash of myrrh, a sprinkle of cinnamon, a pinch of galbanum, other pinches of other things, another scoop of ashes over all of this, and finally a tablespoon of olive oil to soak the ashes. He stuck a short loop of bailing twine partway into the bag and sewed the mouth shut with needle and thread, leaving the loop sticking out the top for hanging.
“These are good ingredients,” he said. “Not like that crap Neoma bought.”
Sewing took longer than filling, so before long Joe did the filling while the others sewed. Nyx pricked her finger and said, “Fuck this. I got more important th
ings to do.” She lay back on the ground and started browsing her smartphone. Joe frowned but said nothing.
“You remember that young boy named John who sang so beautifully?” Lucky asked. “That’s what we need out here, some music to cheer us up. Too bad I lost my guitar—I never sing without it.”
“Thank God for that,” Nyx said.
“I was pretty good,” Lucky said. “People used to say I sounded like Kris Kristofferson.”
“Remember that Chinese guy named Siliang?” Joe said. “I never could understand any of his stories.”
“Yeah, those interminable parables about swordsmen and Zen masters,” Lucky said. “They never made a damn bit of sense to me. But I guess it works both ways—he could never understand my jokes.”
“Nobody understands your jokes,” Nyx said. “I guess they must be Zen jokes.”
“The ones I miss the most are Brook and Manda,” Lucky said. “They were very decent people with such gracious Southern manners.”
Joe mentioned Leo, and Lucky mentioned Scotty, and Amy wished they would shut up because it was reminding her of how many had died and how few were left.
“Brian Bradford,” Nyx suddenly said. “Ain’t that your FBI guy?”
“Was,” Shane said.
“Was is right,” Nyx said. “Says here he was found dead today in Fort Marcy Park, shot in the head. Suicide, they’re saying.”
Nobody said anything, and now Amy wished Joe and Lucky were still talking. This sounded like the silence of the dead, not the already dead but the soon-to-be dead. They surely had no chance if the FBI was against them as well as the Lost Society. She and Shane had no right allowing Joe, Lucky, and Nyx to be killed in a hopeless venture. Her daughter’s life meant more to her than her own and even her husband’s life, but she had no right leading the others to death.
She kept waiting for someone to say something, but no one did. At last she said, “We’re all going to get killed. This is my fight and Shane’s. I want the rest of you to get out of here before the killing starts.”
There was silence for a while, and then Lucky said, “It’s true there are just five of us, but it only takes five good cards to win the pot. I’m not ready to fold just yet.”
“You’re probably right, we’re all gonna get killed,” Nyx said. “But to be honest I don’t really give a damn.”
“Get them bags sewed up,” Joe said. “We can’t be sitting here on our asses all day talking.”
Their campground didn’t have many tall trees to hang the protection bags from, but there was plenty of scrubby mesquite. The property they were renting wasn’t fenced off, but Joe had already driven stakes to mark what he considered theirs. Amy walked around with him to help him hang the bags, and when they got to the back of what he had marked off as their property he stared into the desert distance for a while, probably wondering about the hacienda located a couple miles farther back there.
As they were circling around to the front, he said, “I don’t know what the future holds because my spirit guide didn’t tell me, so I don’t know if we’ll save your daughter or not. But if we don’t try, we aren’t worth having a future. I don’t want to hear no more talk about how we’re all going to die. Maybe we will, but when you say that kind of thing all you do is make everyone feel like crap.”
The sun was getting low as they ate supper—sausages and canned beans heated over the campfire—and afterward Lucky passed around a bottle of Kentucky bourbon.
“Don’t drink too much of that, Lucky,” Joe said. “You and me are on first patrol shift, and we need to be wary as wolves. We’ll get started here in a few more minutes. The rest of you need to get some sleep ‘cause your turn’s coming up in five hours.”
But when the bottle came around to him, Joe swallowed a couple good deep slugs and then a third.
“Don’t worry about me,” Lucky said. “Nothing perks up my wits like a few shots of good whiskey. I’m certain I would have been killed back there in Blackwood if I hadn’t kept a pint in my pocket.”
“Well, if this don’t take the all-time weird shit award,” Nyx said, staring at her smartphone. “Joe, when we drove by that hacienda you didn’t see no one standing beside it, did you?”
“Nope,” he said. “No one was there.”
“Take a look at this.”
She handed the phone to Joe and he said, “I’ll be damned.” He frowned at the screen for half a minute and handed it to Amy.
She gasped. Standing at the right side of the hacienda and staring straight at the camera was the man she’d seen one week ago at the diner, the man with the tarnished nickel eyes.
“He’s the one behind the kidnapping,” she said. “He has to be. He’s some kind of sorcerer, I’m sure of it. I saw him last Monday, and then just four days later Emily was kidnapped.”
She handed the phone to Shane. “You sure it’s the same man?” he asked.
“I’m positive. He’s even wearing the same three-piece suit and the same hat.”
Lucky took the phone and said, “So it seems he’s living just a couple miles behind our camp. And that house looks big enough to hold quite a few cronies.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t see him,” Joe said. “He’s standing at the right side of the house and I was looking at the driveway on the left side, but I still should’ve seen him.”
“Lucky, you ass-clown, you musta rented this place from the Lost Society,” Nyx said. “I guess that friendly young man you met in the bar knows a real sucker when he sees one.”
“I think we better get packing,” Shane said.
They all got up and Amy retrieved her breast pump from the tent while Lucky and Shane were pulling up the stakes. She spooned the uneaten beans into the fire, set the kettle on the ground to cool beside the empty skillets, gathered up the plates and silverware and carried them to the well behind the house to wash them. She squirted some detergent in their washbasin and was filling it with water when the back door of the house opened and someone stepped out.
It was the man with nickel eyes. He smiled grimly at her and touched the brim of his hat.
Amy drew her revolver and blew her whistle. The others were there at once with their own guns drawn.
The man didn’t move. He stood there leaning on his black walking stick and looked at each one of them in turn as if memorizing their faces. He was wearing the same shabby dark gray three-piece suit, or another just like it, and the same gray fedora.
The sun was nearly down now, and his white face looked ghostly in the twilight, narrow and hollowed out with the hungry look of an elderly drug addict. He looked perfectly impassive, not at all perturbed by the five guns aimed at him.
“Who the fuck are you?” Nyx asked at last.
“You can call me Bill.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Paying a visit.”
“We have a habit of shooting uninvited visitors,” Lucky said.
“That would be unwise.”
“Why’d you kidnap my daughter?” Amy asked.
“I didn’t.”
“Like hell you didn’t. You’re not leaving here till we get her back.”
Bill smiled grimly and said, “In that case I expect I’ll be here a very long time.”
“What kind of ransom do you want?” Shane asked.
“What I want is your help,” Bill said. “But seeing how easy it is to sneak up on you, I’m beginning to wonder if it will be worth my time and trouble.”
“Help doing what?” Amy asked.
“Help getting your daughter back, for one thing. Come by at nine in the morning. I believe you know where I live. Come in one vehicle and park it behind the long shed. Surely I don’t need to remind you to make sure you’re not followed.”
“Yeah, right,” Nyx said. “Like we’re gonna come over to your house and let you shoot us before we get outta the car.”
“The fact that I’m not killing you right now should be proof of my good inten
tions.”
Nyx glanced at Joe and said, “Is this guy insane or just stupid? One scrawny old geek with a cane, and we’re supposed to be grateful he’s not killing us.”
“Look behind you,” Bill said.
They did. Behind them, very nearly invisible in the deep twilight, stood ten or twelve people with rifles aimed at them.
“Well, then,” Bill said. “Nine o’clock, and please don’t try anything stupid. You can bring weapons if you want, but if you attempt to draw them you’ll be shot.”
He turned and strolled up the driveway to the road, and when he reached it he vanished into the gathering darkness. Amy looked behind her and saw that his ten or twelve cronies had vanished as well.
Chapter 12
“I know y’all probably think I’m nuts,” Jack Roamer said.
“We’ve always known that, Hoss,” Bert Barker said. “But that don’t necessarily mean you didn’t see this werewolf thing. Everybody I talk to’s been seeing some mighty strange people walking ‘round these days. They’re everywhere you look. Gimme three.”
He laid three cards on Roamer’s round dining room table and Carlos del Toro dealt him three new ones.
“Can’t be a werewolf ‘cause the moon wasn’t full,” Sonny Fisher said.
“You watch too damn many movies,” Bert said.
“Coulda been a bigfoot,” Sonny said. “Friend of mine seen one a them not even a month ago.”
“Don’t matter if it was a werewolf or a bigfoot or some kinda Yeti spaghetti,” Bert said. “We all know where they’re coming from.”
“Where’s that?” Roamer asked.
“You know damn well, Hoss,” Bert said. “Every kinda freak and creep you can think of is living out there with that cult. Werewolves wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”
“My son seen a guy a couple weeks ago looked like the devil himself,” Carlos said. “He was at the hardware store walking around not buying anything, just staring at everybody. He was real tall and his eyes was black as coals, and Luis said one look at him made ya wanna sh—” He glanced at the woman sitting to his right and said, “Made ya wanna look away.”