by Mark Lukens
Stella was at the bar ordering a drink. The bartender, a heavyset man named Pablo, set a bottle of tequila and a shot glass down in front of her.
Cole apologized to the other card players and folded his hand of cards. He collected his meager winnings and left the table, ignoring the teasing from the other guys. He got to the bar and Stella was already on her second shot, cradling the shot glass in her hands.
“Rough day at work?” he asked, hoping the joke might lighten her mood.
She didn’t answer. She downed her drink.
Cole joined her. He poured himself a shot, sipping his. He’d already had a few beers, but he was hardly even buzzed—he could handle a few shots of tequila right now.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her in a low voice. Pablo was at the other end of the bar, he was talking with a young couple who were obviously tourists even though this area was pretty remote and far from the usual tourist spots; only the more adventurous travelers ever came here.
Stella stared at Cole for a moment. “Let’s go home.”
They left the cantina and Cole drove Stella home, which was only three blocks away. The beach was only another block from their home, the blue expanse of the Pacific on the horizon. He drove around to the back of their house and parked the 4x4. He unlocked the back door of their house and entered with his gun in his hand. He told himself that he was just spooked by Stella’s expression, but that old fear was taking over now. Even after years of healing, that old fear could be summoned at a moment’s notice.
He knew something was wrong. Stella was scared of something; he could see it in her eyes. He hadn’t seen her frightened this badly since . . .
He didn’t want to think about that.
Cole mixed two drinks for them, making them pretty weak. Stella had already drunk more in the last ten minutes than she usually did in an entire night, but he thought another drink might help calm her down. She sat on the edge of their bed, hugging herself like she was cold even though it was hot and humid in the house.
“You want me to turn off the ceiling fans?” he asked her.
She shook her head no and accepted the drink he offered her.
He sat down in his chair in the corner of the room, the chair he sometimes still sat in when he couldn’t sleep, the chair he sometimes sat in when the nightmares plagued him. He sipped his drink and then set it down on the table next to the chair, waiting for Stella to tell him what was bothering her.
“Are the doors locked?” she asked.
He nodded. Cole always made sure the doors and windows were locked; some habits never died. He also had weapons strategically placed around the house: a handgun on the table next to their bed, a shotgun behind the couch in the living room, a 9mm in a drawer in the kitchen. And he had some other contingency plans in place.
“What happened?” he asked her.
“I thought I saw someone.”
“Where?”
“At the dig.”
Cole felt a shiver dance across his skin. “Who?”
“I thought I saw someone standing in the jungle,” she continued in a low, expressionless voice. “I was in the pit, at the higher end. I was working and it felt like someone was watching me.” Stella stopped talking like she was suddenly lost in thought.
“And?”
“I got out of the pit and walked to the edge of the dig, staring at the jungle. I saw a man standing in the trees. But then he was gone. He was only there for a second.”
Cole let out a long, slow sigh. This was the very thing he’d been afraid of. Jaguars, wild boars, spiders, snakes, and insects were bad enough, but the thing he feared the most was that a thug might try to rob them, kill them for the money they had in their wallets. “You had your gun with you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“You think it was someone casing the dig site? Someone wanting to rob you guys?”
She shook her head no. She was trembling now. “No. I know who it was.”
That stopped Cole for a moment. His mind was spinning as he tried to think of who she might know.
“It was Jim Whitefeather.”
Cole froze. He stared at Stella. “From the . . .?”
“Yes. From the dig in New Mexico. The first one taken.”
“But . . . You’re sure about this?”
Stella looked like she was about to burst into tears. She shook her head no. “I don’t know. Maybe it was just my imagination. But it seemed so real.”
Cole got up and went to the bed, sitting down beside her. “So, what was it? Did you see someone or not?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Maybe not. But it seemed so real.” She leaned her head on his shoulder.
Something had spooked Stella, and Cole thought he might know what it was. A story about a village twenty miles away was circulating around town—all eighteen people in the village had been slaughtered a few days ago. There had been a brief story on the TV news and in the newspaper about it. Stella had surely heard about the gruesome murders, and maybe they had triggered the fears in her subconscious, making her see the horrors from her past standing there in the jungle.
The local police and media were blaming the murders on a drug cartel. And that was definitely possible. But a day or two later all of the news of the slaughter was buried, which wasn’t a surprise. Tourism was Costa Rica’s number one industry, and they weren’t going to let a story like this ruin that for them. It wasn’t impossible that drugs were being transported through Costa Rica or that a drug deal had gone bad and people had to pay, these things could happen even in a paradise like Costa Rica.
“I’m going to take a few days off from the dig,” Stella told him.
Cole was surprised—but happy—to hear that.
“I’ll call Maria in the morning and let her know.”
“I think it’s a good idea,” he told her. “We’ll hit the beach for a few days and relax.” He pulled her head gently to him again and kissed her forehead, then her lips.
They would hit the beach, Cole was sure of that, but he wasn’t so sure they would be relaxing much—not now that the fear and the paranoia were back.
CHAPTER 3
David
Iron Springs, New Mexico
David woke up, his eyes popping open in the darkness. For just a moment he wasn’t sure where he was, but then it all came to him in a rush. He was at home. Not his real home, he was at his Aunt Awenita’s house where he had been living these last seven years since his parents had been killed by the Ancient Enemy. It had been seven years since he had walked through the desert to the dig site without a memory of the journey, without really knowing how he had gotten there. He’d been in shock when Stella had found him with blood staining his hands and little flecks of blood on his face, neck, and the front of his coat. He’d known something terrible had happened to his parents, but his mind couldn’t seem to focus on it then. Or even now. The terrible things that had been done to his parents, the things they had done to each other, even now it was a red blur in his memory.
It had been seven years now since he had left that dig site with Stella, driving up into Colorado, into the blizzard, just trying to run and get as far away from the Ancient Enemy as they could.
It had been seven years since he had come back to New Mexico with Stella and Cole, seven years since they had found Joe Blackhorn and battled the Ancient Enemy in the ghost town that had once been the town of Hope’s End, a ghost town that was shunned by most Navajo, an ancient and haunted place.
Joe Blackhorn—he was gone, dead two years now.
David had been dreaming of Hope’s End tonight; not the ghost town it was now, but the town it was in 1891, the way it was when he had ridden his horse there with a U.S. Marshal named Jed Cartwright.
He sat up in bed and swung his legs over, sitting on the edge, breathing out a long sigh. He was about to turn on the lamp next to his bed, but he made himself sit in the dark. There was enough moonlight shining through his windows so that he cou
ld see well enough. He was still afraid of the dark, afraid of what could hide in the dark. Joe Blackhorn tried to teach him to fight his fear so he sat there for a moment, concentrating on his breathing.
The dream of Hope’s End came back to him, but the dream was really fragments of memories, memories of Jed, Esmerelda, Sanchez, and Billy Nez. Those memories were as real to him as the memories of Stella and Cole.
And as real as the memories of the Ancient Enemy.
David felt like two people at the moment even though he knew one life had ended and he’d woken up in this life, but he also felt like he was still there in that past life sometimes, like he was living both lives on two different planes of existence, one life in the past and one in the present. And sometimes, like tonight, when he dreamt, he was back in that life. And when he woke up he was in this new life. And the Ancient Enemy was there in both of his lives.
But not this time. The Ancient Enemy wasn’t in this life because David had defeated the Ancient Enemy seven years ago.
Had he defeated it? Joe Blackhorn’s words came back to him: “You sent it back, but I don’t think you killed it.”
“How am I supposed to know?” David had asked him all those years ago when he had begun training with the old man.
“Only you will know,” Joe Blackhorn had told him.
A shiver ran up and down David’s arms and neck. The wind kicked up outside for a moment, suddenly fierce. Sand blew against the glass of his window even though the moonlight was still bright and there didn’t seem to be a storm out there.
He turned and looked at his window but saw only the darkness pressing against it. He could see the silhouette of the jagged mountain range against the dark blue night sky.
The wind died down.
The Darkwind.
David grabbed the bottle of water next to the lamp and took a sip. He picked up his cell phone and lay back down on the bed. He pressed the button and the screen lit up. It wasn’t as late as he thought it was—he hadn’t been asleep that long. He scrolled to an internet news article he had come across a few days ago, one he had bookmarked.
He had stayed in contact with Stella over the last seven years. The first few years they had written letters back and forth. Her letters never had a return address on them and the letters he sent to her were addressed to a business, some kind of cantina in a coastal town by the Pacific Ocean. Stella and Cole (now Melissa and Travis) were very careful about their new identities, their new lives.
The first few months after the Dig Site Murders (as they had come to be known) the FBI had questioned him constantly, but they had never gotten very far with their pursuit of Stella and Cole, and David had a suspicion that Agent Palmer and Captain Begay had had something to do with throwing the FBI off the trail. Those two men knew the truth about what had happened to all of those murdered people, a truth no one would have ever believed, and they knew that it was all over now.
Eventually Stella got a cell phone under her new name, probably a “burner” phone like they were called in the action movies David watched. He and Stella talked once every month or so, and they had even communicated through Skype a few times. David had asked to go down there to visit her and Cole, but she always said that it wasn’t a good time. But at least she looked and sounded so much better. She seemed healthy and she seemed happy.
Everything had been fine until he had come across the news article from Costa Rica a few days ago. He had been looking up articles or any news about Costa Rica for years now, trying to learn as much about the area as he could. He knew Stella and Cole were safe and he knew the horrors of the Ancient Enemy were really over, but he couldn’t help checking the news articles just in case. Mostly the articles were about tourism or local stories, but then he had come across a news story a few days ago about a village where everyone had been slaughtered, hacked to death with machetes, mutilated beyond recognition. The savagery was so brutal, it was almost unimaginable.
David’s first thought was that the Ancient Enemy was back, playing its twisted games again, forcing the villagers to hack each other to death. He remembered Billy Nez in Hope’s End telling them that there were other Ancient Enemies in other places in the world. Sanchez had agreed, telling them about stories his grandmother had told him when he’d been a boy, stories about the mass disappearances of the Maya in their cities in the jungle.
Reading the article again, David lay in bed, still not turning on the lamp. The cell phone’s light in front of his face blocked out the rest of the bedroom around him, the darkness crowding the edges of his vision like a living, solid thing trying to surround him. In the article, the local authorities were blaming the villagers’ murders, all eighteen of them, on a drug cartel.
But David couldn’t help thinking that this was something much worse, and he couldn’t help thinking about how close Stella and Cole were to that village—only twenty miles away.
He set his phone back on his chest and stared up at the ceiling, wondering what he should do. Should he text Stella, warn her somehow? Should he call her tomorrow?
Hope’s End wasn’t the only thing he’d been dreaming about tonight, and the memories of Hope’s End weren’t what had scared him awake. There was another dream about a shadowy man, a killer who prowled the darkness like a jaguar.
But the killer wasn’t here, David knew that. The killer was in Colorado, far away, but still close enough, stalking his victims at this very moment. The killer’s mind was twisted, but he was smart and cunning, strong and merciless; he had begun killing not too long ago, and he wasn’t going to stop now.
Not until he finds me, David thought.
CHAPTER 4
The Killer
Colorado
The killer waited in the darkness. He stood by a thick stand of trees near the edge of the woods. He watched the house that was built up on a slight hill a hundred yards away. The windows of the home were little squares of cozy yellowish light shining in the night. The couple who lived there looked so safe and snug in their home, but they weren’t safe at all. Not at all.
The killer had been in this area twenty miles south of Denver for a week now. He had killed his earlier four victims north of Denver, smaller towns where the murder of two older couples had shocked the residents there. The mutilated bodies, and what he had done to them, had made news all over Colorado, and then the country, and then the world. Because of the placement of the pieces of the bodies, the way the bones and organs had been arranged, the press wondered if the Dig Site Killer was back after all of these years.
He wasn’t the Dig Site Killer, but he wanted to pay homage to the person (for some reason he was certain it was only one person) who had done those things in that cave in New Mexico, and to what the killer had done to the bodies in and near Cody’s Pass, Colorado. The police and the FBI had never admitted that the killings in those two places were connected, but the killer knew they were—everyone knew they were. He wanted to re-create those mutilations. Of course he might never reach that level of skill, an almost supernatural skill, but he wanted to catch the attention of that killer; he wanted him to see him as a student of his work at first, and then maybe even an equal someday.
The killer had watched this house for the last three nights, waiting in the woods and watching each night, studying and deciding on the perfect time to strike. He knew the names of the couple inside the house—Harold and Marcie—but he didn’t know much else about the older couple. He knew they lived alone and that they didn’t have a dog or an alarm system. And he knew that they were going to help him make history tonight.
• • •
Harold watched TV in the living room as Marcie cleaned up the dinner dishes. Harold had told her to leave the dishes until the morning, but he knew damn well after twenty-six years of marriage that she wasn’t going to leave the dishes in the sink until the morning; she just couldn’t do it. Unlike Harold, who could easily relax even though the kitchen was a wreck, she couldn’t rest until the kitchen was clean.
Harold had the TV turned up so loud. His hearing was getting worse and worse. She begged him to go see a doctor, but he wouldn’t.
She finished up the last of the dishes, setting them in a strainer beside the sink. They had a dishwasher but she hardly ever used it because it was just so much easier to wash up the dinner dishes right afterwards.
She thought she might call Brian tonight, their son. He’d just gotten married and he had even less time for her and Harold now. Sometimes months would go by before he called or came by to visit. He only lived thirty minutes away. She tried to go see him, but every time she wanted to visit he told her that it wasn’t a good time. His excuse was always that his wife Amanda wasn’t feeling well or that the house was a mess. Or he would come up with some other excuse. Eventually she just gave up inviting herself over. She could tell when she wasn’t wanted. She could tell that Amanda disliked her and Harold for some reason. She had even asked Brian why Amanda seemed to hate them so much, but of course Brian said that Amanda adored them.
Yeah, right. Marcie could tell when someone hated her. And she was sure Brian had run right back to Amanda and told her everything she had shared with Brian in confidence. She had told Brian that if she and Harold had done something to make Amanda mad, then she should just tell them, just spit it out and get it out in the open. They had been nothing but polite to Amanda, overly-polite, bending over backwards and walking on eggshells around her.
Marcie thought that a person accused of hatred might run to the phone and try to straighten everything out, insisting that any suspicions weren’t true and apologizing for any misunderstandings. But there was no phone call from Amanda, and no phone call from Brian.
Marcie had already left three voicemails on Brian’s phone this week. Maybe she shouldn’t even call him tonight. Maybe she should just wait until he called her. That’s what Harold always said: Wait him out, don’t give in to him.
Brian was probably mad at her anyway. The last time she’d talked to him she had laid on the guilt trip pretty thick. “We’re not going to be around forever, you know. Once we’re gone, you’re going to be sorry you didn’t spend more time with us.”