by Mark Lukens
David shook his head no. “I just know. But I need help with something else. Billy Nez said Joe Blackhorn left something for me at his place before he died, something that will help with a spirit walk. I need to go there. I need to find what Joe Blackhorn left for me.”
Begay looked at Palmer. “Could you take him there? I don’t think they’re going to let me out of the hospital for a little while. And I think we need to hurry on this.”
“I have to wait for the FBI agent to get here,” Palmer said. “They need to take my statement. They’ll want a statement from you, too. They’ll probably get in touch with you at the hospital.”
Begay waved his hand like he was okay with that.
“But after that,” Palmer said as he looked at David, “I can take you.”
“I’ll text you the directions to Joe Blackhorn’s place,” Begay told Palmer. “You need to use my truck. Your car won’t make it all the way out there.”
Palmer remembered how remote Joe Blackhorn’s place was.
CHAPTER 35
Cole
Costa Rica
It was almost dawn as Cole drove their Toyota 4x4 through the pouring rain. Right after they had left their burning house, the clouds split open and released a monsoon of rain. A lot of times these thunderstorms only lasted a little while, but this one had been going on now for almost two hours.
Cole didn’t really know where he was going right now; he was just driving as far away from their burning house as he could. He still felt like he was in shock after what had happened there. He had allowed himself to believe after seven years that all of it was finally over, that David had killed the Ancient Enemy in that ghost town, or at least sent it back to its world and closed the door on it.
But a part of Cole had never truly believed it was over, a small part of Cole wanted to be prepared if it ever came back again—as prepared as he could be for something like the Ancient Enemy. He’d had two more fake IDs made when they had first come down to Costa Rica, new passports and new names for each of them, along with fake birth certificates and credit cards. He had also squirreled away five thousand dollars in cash (the rest of their money was in several bank accounts in Panama under their fake names). He had kept all of that in the plastic zippered pack that was on the floorboard right now. The plastic pouch was small, lightweight, and waterproof. The other thing he’d gotten ready were the bottles of grain alcohol he had used to set the house on fire. Fire seemed to have hurt the Ancient Enemy back in the cabin in Colorado, so maybe fire would work again, or at least buy them some time. And it had worked tonight.
Or had it?
Cole still couldn’t help feeling that the Ancient Enemy hadn’t attacked them for a particular reason. There was no way it could be scared of them like it was scared of David.
So why hadn’t it come inside the house and taken them?
“You okay?” Cole asked Stella as he drove, trying to think about something else. She’d been quiet for a while now.
Stella nodded and showed him a weak and fake smile. “You had this stuff ready,” she said, glancing down at the plastic pack by her feet on the floorboard. “And the bottles of alcohol, fuel for a fire. Storing gasoline in the house would have smelled and the gas would have turned bad after a while. You’ve had the house ready for this since we moved in.”
“I never thought it would come back,” Cole told her. “But I couldn’t be sure. I wanted to believe David had killed it, or at least sent it away, but I couldn’t bet my life on it. I couldn’t bet our lives on it.”
Stella didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t want to say anything to you about it. I didn’t want you to worry. I did this stuff when we were first down here, back when we were still paranoid. Still scared.”
Stella pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, checking it again.
“Still not working?” he asked her.
She shook her head no. He knew she wanted to text or call David back, but neither of their phones was working anymore, like parts of them had been fried.
“The Ancient Enemy did something to our phones, didn’t it?” he asked her.
Stella just nodded. “When we get to a phone I want to call David and make sure he’s okay.”
“Don’t you think it’s kind of strange that the Ancient Enemy didn’t rush right in and take us in the house?” Cole asked her. “It had plenty of opportunities.”
Stella didn’t respond, but Cole could see that the thought had already crossed her mind.
“And it screwed up our phones, but not the battery in this truck,” Cole said. “It’s almost like it wanted us to get away.”
Stella looked out the passenger window. “I’ve been thinking about the Mayan calendar lately.”
Cole wondered if she was trying to change the subject, trying not to think about what had happened tonight and why the Ancient Enemy had let them go.
“The Mayan calendar spans for thousands of years,” Stella continued. “And it ends at a specific date.”
“Yeah,” Cole said. “December 12, 2012.” He remembered the anxiety in town leading up to that date. Many people had secretly wondered if the Mayan calendar was true, especially the more superstitious people out in the rural areas. But the day had come and gone. No great travesty had befallen the Earth.
“Well, that’s the date given by many scholars,” Stella said. “It’s the date that the media focused on, mainly because of the popularity of a book and a few articles written by a handful of people. But what wasn’t widely reported was that there were others who interpreted the calendar a little differently, speculating that the interpretation of the dates on the calendar could be off by a few years, or even a few decades. Maybe as much as a hundred years.”
“What are you trying to say?” Cole asked her. He wanted to keep her talking, keep her focusing on her area of expertise. It would help her relax a little after the horrors they’d just gone through. Their house was probably still burning right now and everything they had in the world was literally in this Toyota right now. She needed this; she needed a distraction.
“What if the calendar is a prediction of the end, but it’s off a few years like so many believe? As I’ve said before, I believe the Maya, and many other groups in Central and South America, dealt with their own Ancient Enemy—either a different Ancient Enemy or part of the same being. The Ancient Enemy would win a battle and wipe out a civilization or run them from their villages and into the wilderness. But the Ancient Enemy never completely won because all of us are still here.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Maybe if the Ancient Enemy finally kills the shaman, then it’s all over for us. And that’s when the calendar ends for humanity.”
“Kills the shaman,” Cole said. “You mean David.”
Stella nodded. “There have been a lot of Davids throughout the years, a lot of shamans. And there are many prophecies in Native American and Central American cultures about the End Times, but a lot them are very similar. For instance, the Aztecs and the Navajo have similar stories about this world we live in being the Fifth World.”
“The Fifth World?”
“The final world. There were four worlds before this one, all of them destroyed and a new one taking its place until we finally came to this one—the Fifth World. Maybe these stories are similar because the Central American peoples moved north and brought their stories with them. They became the Anasazi, and they eventually mixed in with other tribes.”
“If this is true, then how come the Ancient Enemy hasn’t killed a shaman yet? You’ve seen how powerful that thing is.”
“I would debate you on how powerful it is.”
“What?” Cole asked. “You just saw what it could do tonight. What it did seven years ago.”
“I’m not arguing that the Ancient Enemy isn’t powerful, just not all-powerful. At least not yet.”
“Because it needs to kill the shaman first to become all-powerful.”
“
Yes. I believe that’s why, even though it seems very powerful, there are still some severe limits to its power.”
“So you think it hasn’t been able to kill a shaman yet because its powers are somehow limited.”
“That and because I believe that throughout history as shamans were born, they were revered and trained to protect their people. They knew eventually that the Ancient Enemy would come and they would have to protect the shaman so he could fight back against the evil power. But in these modern times so many of the Old Ways have been lost and forgotten, or ignored. Now when the Ancient Enemy comes, there are no villagers or tribes to protect the shaman anymore. Not in 1891, and definitely not now.”
Cole drove down the road. The rain was finally beginning to let up a little. “So what do we do? Protect David?”
“Yes. We protect him like he protected us. I’m not saying we’ll survive, but if the Ancient Enemy kills David none of us are going to survive anyway. We have to try. That’s all we can do.”
“And you think David knows what to do now? You think he knows how to fight it now?”
“He was training with Joe Blackhorn, so he had to have learned a lot.”
Cole nodded.
“Until Joe Blackhorn died,” Stella added.
“What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t think David completed his training because Joe Blackhorn died?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how long that kind of training takes.”
Cole just sighed, gripping the steering wheel harder as he drove. The world was beginning to lighten up now as the rising sun broke through the clouds above the trees. “So you think we need to go to David now.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Okay,” Cole said, turning the truck around.
“Where are you going?”
“A small airport I know. I might know someone who can help us get out of here.”
CHAPTER 36
Stella
Costa Rica
Two hours later Cole drove their Toyota 4x4 down a trail through the jungle as the palm fronds slapped at the sides of their vehicle.
“We’re going to get stuck in the mud out here,” Stella said. She didn’t want to get stuck. They needed to stay on the move or they would be sitting ducks for the Ancient Enemy.
Cole didn’t respond; he wrestled with the steering wheel as he navigated the twists and turns of the trail. He drove down into what looked like a ditch of brown water, the mud splashing across the windshield as he waded through the standing water and then climbed up the other side.
“We’re in the middle of a jungle,” Stella said. “How can there be an airport in the middle of a jungle?”
“You’ll see,” Cole told her.
He drove around a few more bends in the trail through the brush and then the jungle opened up to a vast clearing. There were a few metal and wood-framed buildings in the distance, a line of small airplanes, and a strip of pavement beyond them.
Cole sped up as he drove across the grass towards the nearest building where other SUVs and 4x4 pickup trucks were parked in a line. Cole pulled up next to an orange Jeep sitting up on large knobby tires that were crusted with mud. He shut off their Toyota and turned to Stella. “Let me see the pack.”
Stella picked up the plastic pouch on the floorboard and handed it to him. He unzipped it and rifled through it, handing Stella her IDs and keeping his own. He opened up the envelope of cash and gave her some of it. He stuffed the rest of the cash in the envelope down into his pants pocket. He shoved his gun down into the waistband of his pants and pulled his shirt down over it.
“Don’t show that cash or your ID to anyone here,” he told her.
“Are these drug smugglers or something?”
Cole didn’t answer.
“They are, aren’t they?” she said more to herself.
“It might be a little difficult getting a plane on such short notice,” Cole said.
“I thought we had fake passports and IDs. Why can’t we just go to a real airport?”
“Those IDs were made seven years ago. A lot can change with technology in seven years. We could get busted at the airport. We’ll only use those in an emergency.”
“I think this qualifies as an emergency.”
He sighed.
“We should just try the airport,” she said.
Cole looked out the windshield at the aluminum-sided building in front of them, twenty feet away. She watched him. She could tell he was nervous, not just because they were on the run from some cosmic monster, but also because they were here at this little airstrip in the middle of the jungle. “Let’s just try this first,” he said. “My friend told me there should be a pilot here who could help us out, a guy named Paco. Let’s see if he’s here.”
Cole got out and Stella got out of the Toyota on her side. The ground was still soggy even though it had stopped raining for half an hour now. The sky had brightened a little and there were even some patches of blue sky among the swiftly-moving gray clouds, but there was a thunderstorm to the north, a line of dark and menacing clouds. The wind gusted across the grassy field as they walked towards the building.
The building was old and rusty. Junk was piled up at the corners of the building: old metal barrels, wood crates, garbage, engine parts and tires. Another larger building to the right, a hangar, had a big garage door open and a man worked on the engine of an airplane there. The other small planes were lined up a hundred feet away from the tarmac. There were no airplanes on the tarmac, none getting ready to take off and none coming in for a landing—the weather was probably too bad for any of them to fly today.
Cole opened the metal door of the building and entered. The inside of the place was just one large room and it was as cluttered with debris as the outside of the building was. The room was larger than Stella had expected and bright because a large garage door was opened at the other side with a view of the line of airplanes and the airstrip and then the jungle beyond those, the trees of the jungle in constant movement from the stormy weather.
Four men sat at a table in the middle of the room playing cards. To the left was an arrangement of mismatched living room furniture situated around an old television. A man slept on one of the sofas and an older woman turned to look at them as they entered; she looked stoned out of her mind and didn’t seem interested in them.
All four men at the card table had stopped what they were doing to look at Cole and Stella as they entered the building, then they went back to their card game, talking in Spanish to each other.
At the other end of the large room were stacks of boxes and crates, plastic and metal barrels, old metal and wood shelves crammed with smaller boxes and packing materials. There was a bar near the collection of boxes in the corner, a homemade job with a few neon signs on the wall and bottles of liquor lined up along with racks of potato chips and candy bars. An older overweight man stood behind the bar, his attention on a small TV that blared a soccer game.
A breeze blew in through the open door, blowing the odor of motor oil, marijuana, and body odor towards Stella.
Cole walked up to the men at the table and asked how they were doing.
“Pura Vida,” the men answered, a common phrase in Costa Rica.
Cole spoke in his broken Spanish, asking if any of them knew a pilot named Paco.
The men shrugged, none of them identifying themselves as Paco. None of them seemed very interested in what Cole had to say.
The man at the bar pretended not to be concerned, but Stella caught him looking their way every few seconds, waiting for trouble to start.
Cole asked about Paco again.
One of the men, a thin man with a huge mustache and gray stubble on his chin seemed to be the only one willing to talk to Cole. His hair hung down to the shoulders of his long-sleeved cowboy shirt. He had on jeans and well-worn cowboy boots. He was smiling at Cole, showing a bright gold tooth right in front, but he still had a wary look in his eyes.
“I need to hir
e a pilot,” Cole told the men in Spanish.
Again, only the thin man with the big mustache and gold tooth seemed interested in taking Cole up on his offer.
Stella stood pretty far away, but she could hear some of their conversation. One of the men had said: “Not in this weather.” But after a few minutes of conversation, the thin man folded his cards and collected the money on the table in front of him. He stood up and finished the bottle of beer he’d been drinking. He walked away from the table and talked with Cole for a few minutes, negotiating in whispers.
Cole finally nodded and smiled. He and the pilot walked past her towards the door that led out front to the vehicles. “I’ll be right back,” Cole told Stella.
She just nodded and watched them walk out the door.
“Do you want to play cards?” one of the men at the table asked her with a malevolent smile.
She turned and looked at the three men; all of them were staring at her. “We’ve got an empty seat now,” one of the men said. The others laughed.
“No thanks,” Stella told them and tried her warmest smile on them. She walked away from the table so they wouldn’t keep talking to her, but she heard them whispering to each and then laughing again.
She didn’t want to go over to the living room furniture and the stoned woman and the snoring man on the couch, so she walked to the open garage door and looked out at the field of grass and the small airplanes in the distance. She pretended to be interested in the line of small planes. A few of them looked ready to fall apart and she hoped they wouldn’t be flying in one of those.
The sky was churning above them, the small patches of blue eaten up again by the gray clouds. The grass, weeds, and trees swayed in the wind, and even a few of the small planes shook a little from the gusts. At least it had stopped raining for a little while.
The man on the couch stopped snoring and sat up. Stella turned and watched him get up and stumble to a door she assumed led to a bathroom. He entered the room and closed the door. The woman sitting in the chair didn’t even seem to notice or care that the man had gotten up from the couch—she stared at the TV but didn’t really seem to be watching it.