by Alex Archer
The carbine had little kick. It came back online so fast she was able to double-tap her foe as if it were a handgun. He was already slumping toward the dirt. The second shot hit him in the back of the neck.
Billy’s .44 Magnum lever action roared, temporarily deafening Annja’s left ear. Another Dog went down as he tried to draw bead on the Iron Horse chieftain, who was feebly struggling to extricate himself from beneath his enemy’s dead-buffalo bulk. Tracking her carbine left looking for other targets, Annja saw Tom Ten Bears quick draw his big-framed Smith & Wesson revolver, present it into a fast modified Weaver stance and blast out two rapid double-action shots. Another Crazy Dog Wishing to Die fell forward into sight from beyond the garage, an M-16 falling from his hands.
He’d gotten his wish.
Like a sudden rain squall gunfire broke loose again. Another shirtless, gaudily painted Crazy Dog raced madly around the rear of the maroon SUV with a short M-4 carbine in one pistoning hand. Black holes appeared on his bare chest, and red mist puffed out ahead of him as at least two bullets holed him back to front. He fell and slid five feet on his face and didn’t move again.
“I guess not all the bros and sisses were watching the fight,” Billy said. Snake had an M-16 recovered from the dead guy in the doorway up and was squeezing off aimed single shots at a target no one could see.
Abruptly the shooting stopped. No targets presented themselves to the trio crouched in the front-bedroom-cum-command-post. It seemed that the other surviving Horses had run out of bad guys to shoot at, too.
“I guess we won,” Snake said, not raising her eye from her rifle’s battle sights.
“Maybe so,” Annja said.
Tom Ten Bears knelt by Johnny’s side. During the resurgent firefight he helped his savagely battered son work his way out from under the corpse of George Abell. Johnny had promptly collapsed on his back.
Another motion drew Annja’s eye outward to her left. Angel was kneeling in the grass, cradling something in her lap. Her head was tipped forward, her long black hair hanging to obscure her beautiful face. The shaking of her shoulders in the outsize leather jacket told Annja all she needed to know and more than she cared to. The young ex-attorney was cradling the head of her dead fiancé, Ricky, in her lap.
The wind shifted to blow straight from the west, in through the window of the bedroom. Though it was tainted with burned propellants and lubricants, and more organic smells, it still tasted fresh after the more concentrated gunsmoke and spilled blood smells in the room. Its chill seemed to cleanse Annja’s nostrils, throat and lungs and acted like a dash of icy water on the face.
Yet at the same time she felt an increased sense of the light-headedness from before.
Annja breathed deep. Shaking her head and blinking back tears, Annja pushed away from the window. She stayed hunched over. No point standing bolt upright and giving some bitter-ender Crazy Dog a free shot at her from hiding.
“I’m going to go check on Sallie,” she said.
Then she turned and froze.
Sallie stood in the bedroom doorway. Her eyes were huge.
“Sallie,” Annja said, “it’s not safe yet. You need to stay in the bathroom.”
“But I heard shooting,” she said. “Where’s Johnny? Where’s Daddy?”
“They’re fine, sweetie. We’re almost through this. But not yet. We—”
“Annja,” she heard Snake say in a peculiarly taut voice. As she did the gunfire erupted anew, with a frantic vigor Annja hadn’t heard earlier.
Electrified by horror and fear, Annja ran forward two steps to grab and hug the gangly girl against her. Blocking the child’s view of the window with her body Annja looked back over her shoulder.
Like a great gray dog it bounded from the yellow grass. It covered ground with such amazing speed that it looked like a blur. In fact, its outlines seemed somehow to shift as it streaked toward the ranch house.
Holding his revolver in both hands Tom Ten Bears rose from his son’s side and stepped quickly into the gray shape’s path. He fired twice. To no effect.
The beast reared up. Now it seemed to be a man with the head of a wolf. It struck Tom with its claws, driving him back. Snouted jaws snapped for his neck.
The highway patrol lieutenant fell, blood spurting from a ripped-out throat. With a desperate cry Johnny flung himself at the monster. Ignoring him it leaped over his supine father and raced on, intent on the house. Johnny collapsed in the dirt as his strength failed him.
“Oh, shit,” Billy White Bird said.
He turned for the door as Snake began firing at the creature. Outside, the surviving Horses and what Annja thought were at least two of the old-boy snipers were firing furiously. They must be dumping boxes of bullets into the thing. Yet its step never faltered.
“What? What’s going on?” Sallie demanded. Annja yanked her back against the far wall of the hallway as Billy churned past on his short legs. Snake followed right behind him.
Annja still had her Mini-14 in her right hand. Sallie broke free and tried to run past her to the window. Frantically Annja clutched at her arm.
“For God’s sake, stay back!” she screamed at the girl. She thrust her into the bathroom and raced down the short hallway. From the living room came the thunder of Billy’s lever action carbine, cranking out shots. Somehow she knew it wouldn’t be enough.
She had a dread sensation all the firepower in the world wouldn’t be enough. The skinwalker was like a force of nature, like a hurricane or a volcano’s glowing cloud. Yet unlike those impersonal yet irresistible forces of destruction it seemed to give a black radiance of evil that penetrated the thick adobe walls like gamma rays.
Billy bellowed. Annja reached the end of the hall in time to see the burly man grappling with the gray-furred shape. She heard snarling and the tearing of leather and cloth and flesh. Billy’s furious outcries turned to gurgles.
The monster cast the torn body away like a rag doll. For a moment it stood on its hind legs, growling a deep, savage growl, seeming to fill the doorway with its black presence. Its outline still seemed to shimmer, as if Annja—not twenty feet away—was seeing it through a haze of midsummer heat.
The flash and boom of Snake’s 20-gauge pump gun filled the empty living room to overflowing. The shadow shape flinched back. Then with a snarl it sprang at her.
Snake racked the action with speed like that of the fang-bared totems tattooed on her wiry muscled arms. Her courage was as impressive as her skill.
Neither helped. The beast lashed out with its right arm. Black talons gashed open Snake’s left side and flung her clear across the living room to slam against a huge fieldstone fireplace. Her head slammed back into the slate mantle and she slumped, the shotgun dropping from limp fingers.
Now it was Annja’s turn to face the horror. She had the Mini-14 shouldered. The monster of constantly shifting gray shadow filled the space between the steel ears that flanked the front-sight post. She began to squeeze off shots, compact surprise breaks, well schooled to the end.
She saw her bullets hit. Saw the fur fluff out where they went home. They had no effect.
The creature sprang at her. She thrust the carbine crosswise into gaping yellow-fanged jaws. They ground together, crunching the brown-stained wood. Its breath stank of corruption from beyond the grave.
For a moment her gaze met eyes that seemed to glow with their own blue witch fire. It snarled and struck her. The carbine’s forestock splintered as she managed to interpose the weapon to take most of the force of the blow. Yet it still threw her over to slam onto her back and slide across the bare wood floor of the hallway.
She came to a stop with her head and shoulders right in front of the open bathroom door. Sallie stared down at her in horror.
She threw a hand toward the child. “Stay! Get back!”
Low growling dragged her reluctant eyes toward the mouth of the hall. On all fours now, its back fur bristling, the shadow monster prowled around the corner. Its tongue
lolled over lips that seemed to grin. Triumph glowed in the blue-hot flames of its eyes.
“You’re enjoying this,” Annja croaked. Though bruised and battered, her body feeling as if it had turned to lead and her limbs to string cheese, she thrust her torso up off the floor with her left hand while she held her right wardingly toward the beast.
It stopped. Its shadow shape contracted as it cocked itself like a spring to strike.
Like a living spear of righteousness Annja Creed flung herself to meet it. The sword came into her hand. She just had time to wrap both hands in a death grip on the hilt and thrust with all her might before she struck.
The sword met the leaping monster in midair and drove deep into its chest where its neck blended in between the muscles of its forelegs. Its snarl of triumph turned to a yowl.
The hurtling mass crashed upon Annja and drove her back. Hot stinking breath surrounded her head, stinging her skin like acid mist. With the skinwalker lying atop her Annja slid down the corridor on her back. She knew with frightful certainty that she dare not let go of the sword—dare not let it vanish back to the otherwhere. Not until its work was done.
The back of her head struck the drawers at hall’s end. The beast’s forepaws drove into her belly. But they weren’t raking her, tearing her belly open and spilling her guts as they had poor Billy’s. Instead, it was an ineffectual scrabbling that weakened, heartbeat by heartbeat.
With no more strength in her arms she held its snapping jaws away from her face by the sheer power of her will, pressing the sword’s hilt against the gray-furred chest. The monster writhed. It uttered a long agonized cry.
She felt the monster die.
She released the sword. It vanished. With the last of her resources Annja half steered the limp body to her left as it fell, half pushed herself out from under it. It landed diagonally across her hips.
She didn’t lose consciousness then. Not quite.
“Annja! Annja, are you all right? Oh, please, don’t be dead!”
A child’s hands and a child’s voice tugged at her, dragging soul back into her body and mind back behind her eyes. She opened them.
Sallie Ten Bears was holding Annja’s right wrist in both little hands and pulling for all she was worth. Then Snake appeared, tugging at the dead thing that lay across Annja, trapping her.
When the fearful weight came off her legs Annja managed to climb to her feet—slowly, and with more help from a young girl than she’d care to admit.
“Snake,” she rasped through a throat that felt sanded. “Are you all right?”
“Nothing that won’t heal,” the tall Cheyenne woman said. The left side of her black T-shirt was sodden. From the labored whistle of her breath she had broken ribs, and possibly a raw end threatening to pierce a lung. But she threaded Annja’s left arm over her right shoulder as Sallie inserted herself under Annja’s right arm, bracing her armpit with her shoulder, like a living crutch.
“Who the hell is that?” Snake asked, nodding at the shape that lay rolled with its back against the hallway wall.
Annja looked down. A man lay there, naked but for the tattered head and pelt of a wolf. His pallid skin was punctured by innumerable small round holes that bled a tracery of blood, black in the gloom. He had a bit of whitish stubble on his gaunt cheeks, and his wide-open blue eyes seemed to gaze sightlessly upon their own damnation.
“Dr. Yves Michel,” Annja said. “The U.N. guy. The skinwalker expert. I should’ve known.”
The woman and the girl walked Annja out, through the living room and out into the healing sunlight and cleansing wind. Annja made herself look at the torn wreckage of Billy White Bird’s body as they passed.
There was something pressing outward from within her. Something she must say.
“Thank you,” she croaked to her supporters. “The sword—please…don’t tell anyone.”
Snake shook her head. “I won’t,” she said. “That’s between you and your Power. It’s not mine to give.”
“I didn’t see anything,” Sallie said determinedly, and Annja again heard that Ten Bears stubbornness ringing in her voice.
The disparate pair managed to support Annja across the yard and up the road, to where Johnny Ten Bears knelt with his father’s head cradled on his thighs.
The sight of her dad lying there was too much for Sallie. With a broken scream she launched herself from beneath Annja’s arm and fell across his bloody chest, sobbing wildly. Snake caught Annja as her knees buckled and kept her from falling, despite the pain it must have cost her.
Tom Ten Bears somehow retained the strength to lay an arm across his daughter’s heaving back. “You’re all right,” he said in a faint voice.
“Tom,” Annja said.
“My daughter is safe,” he said to her. “My son lives. It is a good day.”
Johnny raised his face to hers. His lean, bruised cheeks ran with tears.
“My father,” he said, reaching down to stroke the back of his sister’s head. “I found him. Now I’m losing him.”
“Your brother will take care of you, Sallie,” Tom said. “He is a good man. I…am proud.”
His head lolled to the side and the life left his eyes.
And then the thunder of rotors swept over them like a Great Plains thunderstorm. Annja looked up at the great shark shadows that seemed to fill the sky with their rotors sweeping overhead. It was too much.
She slipped into darkness.
31
Everybody was arrested.
After Annja came to and was herded to join the others sitting under the guns and black-visored gazes of the FBI SWAT unit, Annja learned the day’s terrible toll. Of those who’d gone with Annja, Johnny and Tom on their last ride, only she, Johnny, Snake, Angel and Lonny Blackhands survived. The others had died. Ricky had succumbed to his wounds, Angel told her in a lost and quiet voice, while shooting at the charging skinwalker. Angel herself had been shot through the upper arm.
The skinwalker had also killed two of the Indian-vet snipers before he attacked the house.
For some odd reason, the media never arrived before the survivors got shackled and bundled into the vehicles of the Albuquerque convoy, which had arrived at almost the same instant as the four FBI choppers. It took some soft words from Johnny to get Sallie to consent to be detached from his side and escorted into a sedan by a shocked-looking female assistant U.S. Attorney. Johnny himself as well as Snake and Angel went into ambulances to be taken under guard for treatment at University Hospital.
Annja’s and Lonny’s wounds were dressed by medics on the scene. They weren’t serious, and aside from cleaning lacerations and applying some bandages there wasn’t much to be done for them. They consisted mainly of massive bone-deep bruising and, at least in Annja’s case, a crushing sadness compounded of adrenaline letdown and grief and trepidation for the fates of herself and her friends.
When she found herself ushered, not ungently, into a black SUV with dark-tinted windows, the first thing Annja saw was Edgar Martínez grinning at her. Rocendo and Frank were in there with him.
“Welcome, fellow jailbirds,” he said. “We held ’em as long as we could. Hope it was enough.”
“You were perfect,” she said, with only a slight hitch in her voice.
Eventually they all wound up in the federal courthouse in Albuquerque. There they were subjected to what would later be termed extensive debriefing.
At the time it seemed to Annja a lot like plain old-fashioned interrogation. It went on for hours at a stretch. The only reason she wasn’t subject to twelve-hour sessions was that they just didn’t have enough personnel on hand to do that, especially given the gigantic investigation into the Dog Society and their now-infamous plot. Instead, between three- or four-hour grillings, Annja was left locked in the interrogation rooms to stew. Despite the fact she was deliberately not made comfortable she mostly slept.
They were clearly not happy, the Bureau agents and the U.S. attorneys. An edge actually came into
Special Agent in Charge Lamont Young’s bland voice as he told Annja in no uncertain terms how disappointed he was in her.
Annja had no way of knowing how long they kept her. She never wore a watch, and she’d left all her gear with the Indian good old boys staying behind at the vehicles in what proved the futile hope of avoiding detection by the tech-heavy Crazy Dogs. The sound of the door opening awakened her. A little trim Latino with a brush of dense, backswept steel-colored hair and a handlebar moustache, dressed in an immaculate dark blue suit and a bolo tie, was ushered in.
“Annja Creed?” he asked in one of those deep, mellifluous trial-lawyer voices. “My name is Reynaldo Montoya. I must say it’s an honor and a privilege to meet you.” He had a dark complexion obviously darkened further by long exposure to the Southwestern sun; it lent him craggy gravitas. Notwithstanding his lack of height he fairly radiated energy and sheer presence.
Annja stirred. She had been dead asleep, stacked in a corner with her Windbreaker huddled about her. It was colder in the interrogation room than it had been in the derelict ranch house out on the Great Plains.
“Thanks,” she said. “I think. Are you the one playing good cop?”
He laughed. “Ms. Creed, I assure you, I’m not a cop at all.”
He came to her side and helped her up. He got her settled into a chair at the obligatory interrogation-room table, then looked up at the blatantly obvious camera mounted in a corner of the ceiling.
“Get some hot coffee in here for this woman,” he barked. “Now.”
Montoya sat down across the table from her and smiled. “I’m eager to hear your story,” he said. “But first there are some things I must tell you.”
“Who are you?” she asked. Fatigue still weighed on her. “And, uh, what are you doing here?”
“Those are as good places to start as any. I am an attorney. I’m retired from paid practice. These days I devote my time and energy to fighting for the rights of those falsely accused, prosecuted or convicted. I am—I was—a friend of Tom Ten Bears. We met several years ago when he played a key role in helping us exonerate a young Acoma Pueblo man falsely charged with rape and murder in Lawton, Oklahoma.”