Tribal Ways

by Alex Archer

  “I have read your paper, Doctor,” Annja said. She’d found a copy online last night. “I wanted to get what insight I could from you in person.”

  If the fact she’d read his paper mollified the French psychiatrist, he hid it well. “If a true skinwalker is responsible for these killings, I blame the corruption of Western influence—unremitting violence in popular culture and everyday life. And, of course, materialist, consumerist capitalism, which corrupts all it touches.”

  Consumerism? she thought. His twists of logic were starting to make Annja’s head swim the way his stories turned her stomach.

  “In line with that understanding,” Michel said, “I have formed an alternative hypothesis. While traditional Navajo wolves renounce humanity—meaning, to them, the Navajo people—as part of their power quest, and actively embrace evil, I have come to suspect that certain other aspirants to the Witchcraft Way undertake to, in effect, sacrifice themselves for the good of the People. That being, of course, what the Navajo call themselves. To make themselves night stalkers and superhuman killers precisely in order to protect the People, they embrace the appurtenances of evil in order to derive the power to do good.

  “In this they make themselves the opposite of socio-paths, although their actions are almost impossible to discern from each other. Whereas the sociopathic serial murderer kills without conscience, because he lacks empathy, this other being becomes a killer on a mission, who kills because his conscience drives him to do so. He averts his empathy from his victims because he is driven by empathy for those whom he believes he serves. Once many psychologists used the term psychopath for such a one, the conscience-driven killer as opposed to the conscienceless sociopath. The terms have long been conflated in the public awareness, such as it is, and in any event thoroughly obfuscated by the official professional jargon.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Michel,” Annja said, before he could plunge any deeper into what seemed likely to be another of his numerous wells of disregard. “Have you thought of approaching the authorities with your expertise on the subject? Your theories might prove helpful toward solving these crimes.”

  “You must understand, Ms. Creed,” he said, “fascinating as I naturally find this case, my interest remains purely scientific. As for whether they apprehend the killer or not I give not a fig.” He made a dismissive flick of his fingertips.

  “So far as I am concerned archaeologists are nothing more than despoilers of native peoples and violators of their tombs. The more the skinwalker kills of them, the better.”

  With maximum effort Annja controlled herself. “I’m an archaeologist, Dr. Michel.”

  He shrugged. “So? It is on your soul, not mine. Good day to you, Ms. Creed. I shall not talk to you again. I have important work to do.”

  STILL STEAMING OVER her encounter with the arrogant French psychiatrist Annja drove back the way she had come. At Tramway Road she turned south toward I-40. She intended to return to Lawton straightaway. She had decided she’d been away from Comanche country long enough for things to settle down sufficiently.

  It was after dark when she stopped at a rest area near the Texas border. The wind blew down the Plains with little to hinder it. It buffeted her rental car and chilled her right through as soon as she stepped out. Though unheated, the restroom seemed a sanctuary of warmth and calm.

  When she finished her business she opened the stall door to find two men with their faces painted black awaiting her. The one on her left wore an indigo hoodie and what looked like sweatpants; the one on her right a black Windbreaker and pants. Both wore black athletic shoes. The bareheaded one had his dense black hair slicked back.

  They showed no weapons. She was not naive enough to assume that meant they didn’t have them. Most likely, they didn’t feel a need to display them.

  Annja had decided that the attack in the Bad Medicine parking lot resulted from an extreme case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The fact these two weren’t awaiting her with gun or blade in hand seemed to reinforce that. But unlike the Bad Medicine, was clearly personal—targeted at her directly.

  Reading the intent in her eyes, they fell back a step. Sadly, they talked themselves out of doing the sensible thing, which was simply to walk away and leave Annja Creed alone.

  “Dog Soldiers, I’m guessing,” she said, stepping back into the stall. It gave her, she reckoned, maximum choice of engagement ground should they attack. If she thought mobility might serve her best she had the larger restroom to move about in. If she wanted to ensure they could only come at her one at a time she could retreat fully back into the stall and accept the restrictions on her own scope of movement.

  And if at any time the opportunity presented itself, she’d bolt out the door and be gone with the ice-nasty Plains wind that beat and boomed outside.

  “You shouldn’t think so much,” the man on her left said. “You should just leave.”

  “Indian people don’t want you here,” the other said.

  She frowned. Tom Ten Bears spoke with a blend of rolling Okie drawl and Indian staccato. Strange as that sounded when she tried to describe it to herself, in his actual speech it came out perfectly naturally. These men were both speaking deep in their throats in an exaggerated stereotype of a Native American accent.

  “You should turn aroun’, drive back to Albuquerque,” the first man said. “Get on a plane and fly away home. You don’t belong here, stickin’ your long nose in where it don’t belong.”

  The bad grammar sounded as forced as their accents. By their builds and the general shapes of their faces, which was all she could make out for the paint and the not-very-good illumination, she figured they really were Indians, probably Comanche. But they seemed to be playing a role, and rather too hard at that.

  “Thanks for the advice,” she said. “I’ll give it the consideration it deserves. Now, if you’ll excuse me—” She started to walk between them.

  The man on the left said, “Not so fast,” and grabbed her upper arm.

  She spun smartly into him. Her left arm came up and struck his forearm on the underside, knocking his grip loose before he’d had a chance to clamp it down. The palm-heel strike she followed up with flattened his nose with a satisfying crunch of cartilage breaking.

  He emitted a squeal and dropped to his knees, clutching his face, which was pouring blood. Having your nose broken for the first time tended to affect you that way, Annja had observed.

  His partner had already started grabbing for her right shoulder; if the object lesson provided by his buddy made an impression it came too late for him. She wheeled back into him. Her right forearm struck his left, again breaking his hold on her. She let her hand flop onto his arm. Then, putting her hips into it, she snapped right, yanking his trapped arm straight, back into the open stall, and locking out the elbow. She put her upraised left forearm against the locked-out joint and drove with her hips.

  Annja knew very well how much pressure it took to break an elbow, and exactly how it felt to apply it.

  The Dog Soldier did not choose to find out for himself what it took to give his elbow a whole new dimension of play. He had no choice but to allow himself to be swung face-first into the stout floor-to-ceiling upright that anchored the stall’s front.

  His face cracked against metal. He groaned and slumped. Annja gave him a Phoenix-eye fist, first knuckle extended, in the right kidney, just to get his mind right. He dropped with a painful thunk to his knees.

  The other guy was game. On his knees, still trying futilely to staunch the blood from his broken nose with one hand, he groped for Annja with the other hand as she turned to go. She gave him a side kick that drove his other hand into his broken nose and snapped his head back against the other metal upright. He collapsed like an empty grain sack.

  “Good evening, gentlemen,” she said. “No need to get up. The pleasure was all mine.”

  9

  “Mind if I sit down?”

  Annja Creed’s blood froze. It was a w
arm, charismatic baritone voice, absolutely dripping testosterone-fueled charisma.

  It also belong to Johnny Ten Bears, chieftain of the outlaw Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club.

  Chiding herself for being unobservant she looked up. He loomed above her, smiling in a nonthreatening way all over his darkly handsome face, with his black hair hanging again unbound over his colors.

  She kept herself from flicking her eyes left and right like a frightened rabbit to look for other threats. Instead, she softened and widened the focus of her eyes. It showed her only the blurry shapes of the diners who had been there a moment before. When she was eating in peace, alone.

  “Do I have a choice?” she asked.

  He laughed softly. “We always have a choice,” he said.

  He sat down across from her. “It just doesn’t always make a difference.”

  A mere quarter mile from her motel on the southwest outskirts of Lawton—not even a decent warm-up for long-legged Annja Creed—the Oklahoma Rose Café served a great breakfast.

  Annja regarded the outlaw biker lord across the Formica tabletop. Outside the sun was bright, if not too far up the sky; the sky itself was pale blue and brushed over with thin tufts of cloud. The wind buffeted the picture window to Annja’s right, and despite all that glorious sunshine she felt the chill beating from it like heat from a well-stoked woodstove. The diner itself was nice and toasty, though, and filled with the smells of good cooking.

  “How’re you walking these days?” she asked.

  “Gingerly,” he admitted.

  “Good.”

  He laughed.

  Annja’s server turned up. The tall, good-looking black woman in early middle age had light skin and straight auburn hair wound up on her head in something that irresistibly reminded Annja of soft-swirl ice cream. “Johnny Ten Bears!” she exclaimed. “What do you think you doin’, showin’ your face around here? This a respectable establishment.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m the exception to the rule, Ruth. Coffee, please,” he said with a wink and a big grin.

  Ruth went away shaking her head.

  “Don’t even try turning that charm on me,” Annja told him.

  “Wouldn’t think of it, Ms. Creed.”

  “You know my name?”

  He shrugged. “Turned out Billy White Bird, my head wrench, is a big fan. He recognized you. About an hour after you busted a pool stick on his pumpkin head and blew out of the Bad Medicine.”

  “Really.”

  He leaned forward and clasped his hands on the tabletop before him. It was a gesture of such schoolboy earnestness she almost laughed aloud. He had good hands, she couldn’t help noticing—big, strong, showing the calluses and scars of hard work despite his relatively few years. Only a few more than hers.

  “You and my people kinda got off on the wrong foot,” he said. “I apologize for that. Personally, and on behalf of my club.”

  “Whatever,” she said. She went back to eating. “Your family’s just full of coincidences, isn’t it?”

  He raised a brow.

  “I mean, you turning up like this,” she said.

  “You’re watched every moment you’re in Indian country,” he said, and he wasn’t grinning. “Not all eyes are friendly. And, uh—what was that about my family?”

  “The way your dad turned up in his cruiser on the county road north of the Bad Medicine the other night. To pick an example totally at random.”

  He shrugged. “He’s wired into the Nation, too. Not much happens in Troop G territory he doesn’t find out about.”

  “I got that impression.”

  “We wondered where you’d got to. Nasty night out.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “I’d like to try my best to correct some misunderstandings you may have picked up along the way. The Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club is not your enemy.”

  “You put on a good act,” she said.

  He shook his head. “Anyway. First, you blundered into a place we feel very territorial about. Second, you perfectly fit the profile of the sort of person who should not be wandering into random road houses in western Oklahoma—and I don’t mean just Indian bars or outlaw biker bars. Or both. Or, well, at first glance you seemed to fit the profile. I guess you showed how wrong that was. Turned out, unlike your normal tenderfoot tourist, you know how to handle yourself.”

  She smiled thinly. “I like to think so.”

  “Plus, my father may have fueled some fires here I’d like to tamp down. We are Indian secessionists. We’re up front about that. It’s our whole reason for being. What we aren’t is racist.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Please, Ms. Creed. Hear me out. Yes, we picked on you because you were white meat—and would’ve been meat for real if you went through the wrong door in Comanche County. You still could turn out that way, no matter how tough you are. Our reflex first thought was that you needed a good scare to keep you from making a mistake that could seriously cost you.”

  “Why would I believe that?”

  “To start with,” he said, “we let you get out alive.”

  She froze with a forkful of eggs partway to her mouth. “All right,” she said. “Point taken.”

  “Our grievance is with the Great White Father,” Johnny said. “And his hirelings, whatever color they are. We want nothing to do with Washington. Take nothing from it—give nothing to it. That’s what we’re about. Self-determination above everything else.”

  “Your mother said you had a lot of ideas in common with the old militia types.”

  “My mother?”

  She grinned. Despite the all-knowing-native act he could be caught by surprise, after all. “I met her in Albuquerque. Your father sent me to her for a cultural background briefing. He didn’t tell me she was associated with the ubiquitous Ten Bears clan, either.”

  “Okay, so my dad and I aren’t always as dissimilar as we’d maybe both like to believe. How is she?”

  “Fine. So’s your sister.”

  His grin showed nothing but genuine pleasure. “Thanks. We don’t always keep in touch.”

  The smile faded. “Please. Hear what I tell you. It’s not just that there are some people, whether Indians or shit kickers, in these parts who’re inclined to prey on lone young women. Especially ones as pretty as you are. Just fact, ma’am. No familiarity implied.

  “It’s that this is a very dangerous time and place for any outsiders—especially inquisitive white-eyes. There’s a war going on. One that’s the more nasty for being underground.”

  Annja frowned. “Your father told me there was bad blood between you and—”

  “And the Dog Society. You saw some of them the other night.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Please don’t play coy with me, Ms. Creed. This isn’t bad blood—it’s war. I’ve seen war. I know what it looks and feels and smells like.”

  “I know.” He spoke like someone who did know war. Those who only experienced it at second hand seldom understood about the smell.

  “I’m talking about midnight disappearances. Decomposed bodies found in washes. A body count nobody talks about. And it keeps on rising.”

  She couldn’t doubt the truth of what he said. She was surprised, though, by how much Johnny’s ever-helpful father hadn’t told her.

  “The Dog Society were originally Cheyenne,” Johnny said. “A lot of them live around here, too.”

  “I know the history part,” Annja said. “Your mother filled me in. It’s current events I’m not too clear on.”

  “Well, okay. The Dog Soldiers, twenty-first-century edition. A few actual Cheyennes belong, as well as some Kiowa. Most of them are young Comanches. They are racists, who don’t like white-eyes worth spit. They’re hard-core traditionalists, or what they like to imagine Numunu traditions are, anyway. They really believe, and I can’t emphasize this enough, that as the American empire weakens, the time approaches when they can throw off the white-eyes’ yoke and rule.”

/>   “Really?” she asked. “And that differs from your philosophy, how?”

  “Fair question. We—the Iron Horse People—don’t want to force anybody to do anything but let us alone. We only want to rule ourselves. Yes, we think the empire’s going down, too. We’ve got eyes. Don’t you see it?”

  She hesitated. “Let’s stick with the sales pitch for your philosophy.”

  “The Dogs are eager to kill anybody whose feet stray from their very narrow path. We fight them, yes. To contain them. To try to keep them hurting too many people. Or setting a wildfire that could consume the whole Comanche Nation.”

  He sighed. “My father will never believe it,” he said, “but we’re the good guys.”

  “You expect me to believe it?”

  He shrugged. “It’s the truth. Like any gift, what you choose to do with it once I give it to you is your business.”

  Annja nodded.

  He sat back, cocked his head and regarded her appraisingly.

  Without warning the window exploded inward toward them.

  10

  With rattlesnake-strike speed Johnny Ten Bears reached over the table, grabbed Annja’s wrist as she hoisted another forkful and yanked her from the booth. As she cleared the table he pulled her toward him hard.

  Shards of glass cascaded across the red vinyl seats of the booth, over the table and onto the floors. Annja slid past Johnny on the slick floor.

  Automatic gunfire snarled outside. Glass and porcelain tinkled as bullets raked the diner’s interior, shattering crockery on the counter and beyond. Yellow-and-white chintz curtains flapped as the wind blew through the shot-out windows.

  Annja writhed in Johnny’s grasp. Ignoring his shout to stop she pushed up to all fours, then ran bent over through more broken glass toward the door. It was exactly the sort of behavior safety experts told you not to engage in.

  Annja did a lot of things that would make safety experts go faint. She didn’t always have much use for their advice, anyway. Given that somebody was spraying and praying—probably from a moving car—a quick glance outside would expose her to little additional risk. A lot less risk, in her estimation, than hunkering down and getting caught helpless if the shooters decided to stop their car, get out and walk inside to finish the job.