by David Lucin
“Fine,” she said, keeping her voice low, “but then we’re leaving. Deal?”
He didn’t reply, so she let her M4 hang from her chest, put her hands against the cool stone exterior, and stood on her tiptoes to peer through the window.
Faint sunlight streamed in through the clerestory, partially illuminating a large chamber filled with concentric lines of long desks. On the walls were elaborate murals that depicted the Navajo people raising animals and harvesting crops. People sat at the desks, too, slumped over them as if they were sleeping. Others lay in the aisles. Dozens, maybe hundreds of them. Men, women, children, all motionless, their limbs contorted unnaturally.
Jenn blinked twice. Then the reality of what she was seeing struck her like a high-caliber round to the heart.
These weren’t people—they were corpses.
4
Jenn stared into the council chamber, unable to look away from one particular body, that of a five- or six-year-old girl. She lay facedown beneath two adults, possibly her parents, as though they had tried but failed to shield their daughter from gunfire. Blood blackened their clothes. The girl’s dark hair had been done in a tight braid, and she wore simple pajamas, no winter jacket. A stuffed horse rested an inch beyond her outstretched hand.
Rage swirled in Jenn’s stomach, mixing with sickness. Her knees weakened, and her vision blurred around the edges. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to throw up or scream. Maybe both.
Tuba City had gone too far. Raiding she understood. Hated, but understood. The need to survive and all that. But this was murder, plain and simple. What threat was a little girl? In what twisted reality did she deserve to die?
“See anything?” Dylan asked.
She wracked her brain, searching for a way to explain but coming up blank. Language couldn’t describe what she was seeing.
“Jansen!”
“It’s—” With that single word came a mouthful of vomit. She tried to swallow it, but more rushed up from her stomach, forcing her to turn her head and retch.
Dylan said nothing, only backed toward the window and peeked inside.
Jenn put her hands on her knees and sucked in cool winter air. In the snow beneath her, she saw the little girl reaching for her horse, her tiny body full of bullet holes and soaked in blood. The image brought tears to her eyes and tightened her throat.
Then she threw up again.
When she finished, she spat and wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her jacket. The reek of vomit replaced the smell of smoke, and her sinuses burned with stomach acid. Warily, she lifted her head. Dylan had pulled away from the window. In his eyes lurked an intensity she hadn’t seen before, a raw hatred. It radiated off him in waves, like the heat from a barrel stove, and she soaked it in until the tears dried up, her throat loosened, and a flare of fresh rage sparked in her chest. No longer did she want to run back to the truck; she wanted to find whoever did this and make them pay.
But you can’t do that if you’re dead.
Yet again, much to her lizard brain’s annoyance, her rational brain made a good point. Rounding up this many civilians would take a dozen armed men. Against that, her team wouldn’t stand a chance. No, the best option—the only option—was to report this to Militia HQ so Liam could decide how to retaliate. Ideally, he’d send both companies straight north to Tuba City, and the animals who ordered this attack would be put down within the next twenty-four or forty-eight hours.
“We need to get out of here,” she told Dylan. “The people who—”
She caught movement in her peripheral vision: three figures exiting the long sandstone building on the other side of the road.
Adrenaline took command of her limbs, sending her against the wall of the council chamber. Dylan followed her lead without a millisecond of hesitation. The nearby buttress barely covered them from view, so she pressed her back flat to the building, praying she remained invisible.
Her breathing quickened. So did her pulse. The sting in her sinuses vanished, along with the stink of vomit. With shaking fingers, she flicked the selector switch on her M4 from safe to semiautomatic.
Who had she seen? Raiders from Tuba City? The ones who killed these people? If so, where were the rest? There had to be more than three. For all she knew, they could have the council chamber surrounded.
Panic stiffened her limbs. Her eyes flitted to the trucks in the parking lot, then toward the bank, even up to the sky, but she saw nothing.
Yet.
She nudged Dylan with her elbow, whispering, “We need to go. If we stick close to—”
He put a finger to his lips and leaned forward, peeking past the buttress.
“What are you doing?” she hissed. “Let’s get the fu—”
In one fluid motion, he planted his right foot and pivoted out from behind cover, rifle raised.
Before she could process what he was doing, three shots rang out. She flinched at the sharp sound, instinctively shirking away from the source. A buzzing in her ears muffled another three shots fired in rapid succession.
Ice-cold realization filled her veins. Dylan had opened fire on three unknown targets. Without provocation. Without consulting her. Without any consideration for the tactical situation.
She didn’t have time to wonder why; her training had kicked in. Like Dylan, she raised her weapon and pivoted out from behind cover, ready to fight her way to safety but hoping desperately she wouldn’t have to.
Peering down her iron sights, she watched Dylan march toward two men on their backs. Neither moved. Dead, she assumed. From this range, Dylan wouldn’t miss. They wore black ski masks and heavy black jackets, and near each lay a military-style rifle.
Between them, a third man stood motionless, like a statue, hands out to his sides and above his waist. His clothes gave Jenn pause. What she thought was an animal pelt covered most of his torso, and his face had been . . . painted blue? And on his head . . . Were those deer antlers?
The nausea returned in force, and she swallowed bile. Did the Navajo have a tradition of wearing antlers as a crown? She didn’t think so, but then again, she’d only met a few Navajo in Flagstaff and had never visited the Navajo Nation itself. Even if they did, why would raiders wear something so stupidly impractical? Those deer antlers stood out like, well . . . deer antlers. On a human being. The utter strangeness of the sight filled her with cold, primal fear.
“Guys!” Quinn said through her radio. Faintly, Jenn could also hear her voice echoing off the rocks behind the council chamber. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
Dylan ignored her and shouted orders at the man in blue face paint. “Put your hands on your head and get down on the ground!” Blue Face complied but moved slowly, prompting Dylan to add, “Right now, scumbag, or I will end you.”
Blue Face lowered himself to his knees one at a time. As he locked his fingers behind his neck, a smile crept across his lips, sending a shiver up Jenn’s spine.
The radio continued to blare: “Dylan! Jenn!”
Dylan withdrew his support hand from his rifle and pressed the talk button on his mic. “Novak, we’re fine. Get down here with Davis.” He reached for the radio on his belt line and switched channels. “Sam, we need pickup. Get here as fast as you can. We’re at the council chamber.”
“Roger that.” Sam’s inflection made his reply sound like a question.
Jenn crossed the street to join Dylan with Blue Face. She swung her rifle right, then left, noticing another reddish-brown rock, this one with a roughly circular hole through the middle. Window rock. But no threats, no armed men.
Why not? If Blue Face had more guards, why hadn’t they tried to rescue him? Out in the open, Jenn and Dylan were sitting ducks. Maybe his men were elsewhere in town. The sound of Dylan’s shots would travel for miles, so they could be on their way. Yet another reason to get out of here, fast.
But what if the dead men weren’t Blue Face’s guards? He could have been their prisoner. Did Dylan accidentally shoot two people
from Window Rock? No, somehow, he must have sensed they were hostile. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have opened fire.
“Who are these people?” she asked him.
“I don’t know.” He kicked the rifles away from the bodies. “But we’re going to find out.”
“Are they from Tuba City, you think?”
He pulled off one of the dead men’s ski masks, revealing blond hair and pale skin. “He look Navajo to you?”
No, he didn’t. He looked Caucasian. Did these people come from outside the Navajo Nation, then? In her addled state, Jenn couldn’t begin to understand the repercussions of that.
Blue Face smiled, showing perfectly straight teeth. The blue paint, she noticed, wasn’t uniform, only streaked across his forehead, chin, and clean-shaven cheeks. Beneath it lay ghostly white skin atop a gaunt, bony face. Disheveled sandy-blond hair poked out from under the deer antlers, which remained attached to a skull, minus the jaw. She judged him as late forties, maybe early fifties. An emptiness filled his greenish-brown eyes, like they belonged to a mannequin, not a flesh-and-blood human being.
“Was it you?” she asked. “Did you kill those people?” Deep down, she already knew the answer, but she wanted to hear him admit what he’d done.
He laughed, a humorless noise. The imitation of a laugh. “Allow me to commend you on such a remarkable feat of arms.” Every word was enunciated with precision. Jenn also detected the hint of an accent. Midwest somewhere, possibly Minnesota. “Few can boast of besting a pair of my honor guards.”
Honor guards? He must be referring to the corpses in ski masks. Fancy titles for two guys who went down without firing a single shot in defense. “That doesn’t answer my question. Did you—”
“Who is that?” Quinn asked. She and Beau came to a skidding stop at the side of the road. “And who are they?” She pointed at one of the bodies in the snow. “What happened here? Are you guys okay?”
“We’re fine,” Jenn said. “And we don’t know who they are. We’re . . .” What were they doing? She’d been too hopped up on adrenaline to consider anything further than a few seconds into the future. “Dylan, what’s the plan here?”
He slung his AR over his shoulder. “We’re taking him with us. Novak, grab these weapons. Davis, hand me a set of zip ties.”
Jenn’s heart skipped a beat. “Wait, we’re taking him? Why? Shouldn’t we just put a bullet between his eyes and be done with him?” She gauged Blue Face’s reaction, but he gave none, only continued smiling.
Dylan removed the ski mask from the second dead guard. This one was Black. “We need to find out who he is and where he came from.”
“Look at him.” She waved a hand at Blue Face. “He’s crazy. The creep’s been smiling this whole time. You actually think you’re going to get answers out of him?”
“Oh, he’ll talk, “Dylan said with certainty, and Jenn thought back to May, when he threatened to cut off “Ian’s” big toe in exchange for information about the Major. She doubted Blue Face would respond as well to intimidation, so Dylan might have to remove a toe for real this time. One could only hope.
Quinn moved toward the first gun while Beau slung off his backpack and began searching for zip ties. Dylan tore off Blue Face’s headdress and tossed it aside like trash. The man didn’t flinch. Who the hell was he? A nutter, obviously. Some schizophrenic who’d been off his meds for far too long. Why else would he wear deer antlers and paint his face blue? Mental illness might also explain why he remained unperturbed by the death of his honor guards or his imminent capture. He’s crazy, she tried assuring herself. That’s all.
Beau had found a zip tie. He handed it to Dylan, who secured it around Blue Face’s wrists, saying, “Let’s get him out of here.”
Quinn, eyes wide, probably in shock and maybe in confusion, had a rifle in each hand. M4s, both of them; Jenn could tell by the length of the barrels. So Blue Face and his guards were either military or had, like the Major, killed soldiers and taken their weapons. The latter, she decided. No way U.S. troops would murder American civilians.
Right?
“Hold on.” Quinn scratched her cheek. “What if he’s, you know, wearing a tracking device?”
Jenn hadn’t thought of that. Neither had Dylan, apparently, because he proceeded to pat down Blue Face, beginning with the ankles and working his way up. When he reached the armpits, he said, “He’s clean.”
“You sure? Couldn’t it be really small? You should check his shoes or—”
“It’s fine, Novak,” he growled. “We gotta move. Sam’ll be here soon.”
On cue, Sam’s voice erupted from the radio: “Dylan, ETA two minutes.”
Dylan shoved Blue Face from behind. The man stumbled, regained his feet, and walked forward. As he passed Jenn, a rank odor, like wet dog, nearly made her choke. The animal pelt? She couldn’t tell what type of creature had been sacrificed so its skin could be worn as a vest. The same deer that gave him his crown? What an unfortunate fate: to become clothing for a murderous lunatic in blue face paint.
“Come on,” she said to Quinn and Beau, then led them toward the bank. She nearly told them to peek through the window in the council chamber, but the memory of those bodies, of that little girl, would haunt her forever. Her squadmates didn’t need to see what she saw, so she did them a favor and kept quiet as she followed Dylan.
Sam was already waiting outside the truck on the road. “Who’s that?” he asked when he saw them approach with Blue Face in tow. “What’s going on?”
Dylan gave him the bare facts: “There was a shootout. We took a prisoner.”
“Shootout?” Sam whirled on Jenn, mouth agape.
“We’re okay,” she said. “Everything’s fine.” It wasn’t, not even remotely. She felt drunk, like her mind had turned to mush. Not in her wildest dreams or worst nightmares could she imagine something as strange as Blue Face or as awful as the dead bodies in the council chamber.
Beau lowered the Toyota’s tailgate. On his own volition, Blue Face sat atop the edge, then swung his legs around and shimmied himself into the box. Jenn thought to give him a more thorough pat-down in search of a tracking device but realized she wouldn’t be able to recognize one if she saw it. Were those things real, or did they exist solely in the god-awful CIA action thrillers her dad and brothers used to watch on TV? In any case, Dylan would know better than her, so she opted to trust his judgment.
“Where’re we headed?” Sam asked.
Dylan hopped into the box. “Back to the highway. Jansen, ride up front with Sam. Novak, Davis, with me. We need to get away from here as fast as we can.”
Sam’s Adam’s apple bobbed, so Jenn said to him, “I’ll explain in the truck.”
That seemed to placate him for now, and he took his spot behind the wheel. She sat shotgun. Once the others had climbed into the box and shut the tailgate, he smashed the start button, shifted the vehicle into drive, and tore forward, tires slipping on the snow and the ice.
Jenn used the atlas to direct him through the residential neighborhood and out to the main road. She checked her side-view mirror obsessively, expecting vehicles to appear behind them, but the streets remained deserted. With every mile, she became more and more convinced they weren’t being followed. Eventually, after Sam had turned onto Indian Route 12, which led to I-40, she sighed out two lungfuls of stress and sank into her seat. She wouldn’t admit they’d escaped, not yet, but they were close. Or at least closer.
“Okay, what’s going on?” he asked. “Did you find out where the smoke is coming from? And who’s that guy in the blue face paint? He looks like a Celtic shaman or a Pictish warrior.”
Jenn’s skull pulsed with the beginnings of a headache. She didn’t have answers, only a hundred questions, so she told him about the only thing she knew for certain. “In the council chamber, there were . . . bodies.”
“Bodies?” he repeated loudly. “What do you mean bodies?”
She explained what she saw, neglecting to mention th
e little girl and her toy horse; she didn’t want to burden Sam with such a heartbreaking image.
His face had all the color of a bedsheet. “Did he do it? The shaman guy?”
“I think so, yeah.”
In the box, Blue Face sat with his back to the cab, hair whipping violently in the wind. Quinn and Beau aimed their rifles over the bedrails while Dylan crouched between them, watching the captive. A howling came through the open rear window as Sam accelerated to forty miles per hour. Most signs of civilization had fallen into the rearview, barring the odd abandoned home or a decrepit barn.
Ten minutes passed before Dylan poked his head into the cab. He’d removed his ball cap, orange hair wild. “You see that mobile office up there?” Awkwardly, he stuck one arm through the window and pointed ahead. Jenn followed his finger to a gray, rectangular structure that reminded her of the shipping container homes in Phoenix’s modular housing districts. Alone and surrounded by open desert, it sat maybe 150 yards off the road.
Sam squinted and leaned over the steering wheel. “Yeah, I see it.”
“Pull up there. I think it’s time we had a chat with our prisoner.”
“We’re stopping?” Jenn asked. “Shouldn’t we get back to the convoy? Blue Face could still have people coming after us.”
“I’ll be sure to make it quick,” Dylan said and slammed the rear window shut.
5
Two metal steps led up to the unlocked door of the shipping container office. A large window let in ample light, and the floor comprised cheap, scuffed-up linoleum that creaked beneath Jenn’s boots. Aside from a blanket and a few foil wrappers, the space was empty.
Quinn, Beau, and Sam waited by the truck. It faced down a snow-covered dirt path leading from the shipping container to the highway, ready to be driven out of here if Blue Face’s people came looking for him. Dylan might have killed two of his so-called honor guards, but based on the number of dead in the council chamber, Jenn assumed he had more.