by Mike Baron
Nothing.
Beadles realized he had been staring at nothing for five minutes, slowly sweeping the binocs left to right and back again. His head hurt.
Was he tripping? Did she put the acid in his drink?
Beadles saw a ballcap lying on the ground. He put it on pulling the visor low. Where were his sunglasses? He couldn't think. Go back to the camp and look for them?
He felt something slip inside, a fault line. An enormous black word balloon burst from his jaws. He roared at the empty desert, turned and sprayed it on the cliffs. He screamed until his throat was raw and bent over with his hands on his knees, chest heaving.
He straighened up, uncapped the canteen and drank it dry. He leaned over the rock parapet panting. Below lay the black, twisted remains of the Hummer in the center of a carbon stain. Vince was down to twenty pounds of sinew and bones strewn across the landscape.
Beadles raised the binocs again. A vibrating bristle appeared in the shimmering heat. A cannonball of dread dropped in Beadles' gut. For a long time the quavering didn't seem to get bigger or smaller. Just a quavering line on the horizon, so small and insubstantial he wasn't sure he saw it.
His head was a pressure cooker. He had to get some shade. He set the binocs back on the rock and stumbled back toward the trees, the sun lasering through his skull. He sat in the shade rubbing his temples furiously. He rubbed his eyes. It helped a little. He dug through the backpack, found the first aid kit and emptied a couple Ibuprofen into his palm. He reached for a water bottle.
He washed it down. Once, in college, he'd been at a pot party at an old house off-campus, maybe eight people in the room stoned to the gills. Grooving on black lights and the Dead when some hipster in a fucking black beret for chrissake slipped into the room and started slapping palms.
His name was Beako and he was a dealer. Beako opened a big plastic zip-loc filled with hundreds of little pastel pills. "Anyone want some acid?" he said.
A kid named Grover jammed his hand into the bag, grabbed a fistful and swallowed them down with a Coors.
Grover was never the same after that. Years later Beadles learned that he'd died from a drug overdose.
Beadles stared at the brackish pond. The surface roiled and flowed. He leaped to his feet. He realized it was an hallucination. Or was it? He stared at the pond panting, trying to discern the snakes. He'd dropped LSD in college. He knew how it felt. It felt like this. The air filled with sparkles, a snowglobe with firecrackers.
He sure could pick 'em.
Water. He needed water. One full canteen left. They'd need more soon. Have to use the filter. What if the pond contained alkali? Alkali had the same effect as acid. But that didn't explain Summer's absence.
He was not going to look for her. He wouldn't give her that satisfaction. Maybe she'd already left--grabbed the gold and as much water as she could carry, shinnied down the chute and headed east. She wouldn't get far. No way could she even carry all that gold plus the water down the chute without slipping and killing herself.
He lifted the binocs. The wire-hanger figure was barely identifiable as a man. Somewhat like a man. It strode at the head of a roiling delta, a tiny frigate with a huge wake. Beadles guessed they were ten miles out. Maybe three hours. They would arrive at noon.
High overhead a plane left a contrail headed toward the west coast.
Water. He needed more water to flush the toxins from his system, help him to think straight. But he couldn't think straight. He was tripping. He returned to the pond and use the NDuR filter. No time to boil. He drank straight from the canteen tasting the alkaline minerals.
Maybe it was the water. Please God let it be the water.
For all his success and good looks, Beadles felt unloved. Certainly Betty hadn't loved him. Maybe she thought she did when they first met but Beadles had known too many women like that. They were in love with being in love but never were. Minds rationalizing like cash registers, gears clicking, always on the lookout for a better deal. Looking to trade up.
Someday I will meet my soul mate and give up smoking.
Beadles wondered who the lucky guy was. Betty wouldn't jump ship without a lifeboat and despite being a self-proclaimed feminist she believed that a woman without a man was a woman without a man.
She would never quit smoking.
Beadles collapsed on his bed of straw. He laughed. He sobbed. If only he hadn't been an only child. If only he hadn't gone to Shimer. If only he'd never learned about the fucking Azuma.
Wiping his face on the discarded sweatshirt, Beadles looked around for a weapon. He seized Vince's Bowie Knife. It had a twelve-inch blade. Fat lot of good it would do him. A longer blade might delay the inevitable.
A longer blade like the Spanish sword. Yes!
He ran across the rising oven of the plateau and entered the ruins, so intent on his task that he forgot the snakes. He leaped up, grabbed the second tier and hauled himself up into the treasure room. He went to the corner and looked down. Ambient light softly illuminated the empty corner.
A buttress broke loose in his chest and crashed into his heart. He had nothing. No gun, no sword, a twelve-inch Bowie knife.
He saw himself struggling with the creature as in a lurid painting on the cover of a Robert E. Howard novel. Something by Joe Jusko. He knelt in the dirt and sifted his hands through the sand.
Whoops. She'd missed one--a tiny gold medallion similar to the one in his pocket. He left it there. What was the point.
Rapid clicking filled the chamber. Beadles turned. The Mother of all Diamondbacks had been asleep against the wall the whole time. Now she was up and shaking her maracas,body thick as a fire hose. It lay in loops like a hangman's rope, obsidian eyes fixed on Beadles' face with primordial hate.
Beadles laughed. Maybe it was Summer. Maybe she was a shape-shifter. Skinwalkers they called them.
"Go on" he sang. "Do it!"
***
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
"Here It Comes Again"
The spade-shaped head bobbed, black tongue flickering in and out. It lowered its head, looped back in on itself and slithered away like some obscene earthworm. Beadles watched it leave a series of chevrons in the sand until it reached the hole and slipped over the rim. Beadles felt empty. Light-headed. He grabbed a handful of sand and squeezed tight, feeling the grit dribble through his fingers. He got up, scanning the room for more snakes. Thirsty again. He reached for the canteen strapped to his belt and emptied the lukewarm contents.
Beadles returned to the hole in the floor, got down on his belly and examined the first floor for snakes. Nothing moved. Beadles dropped down, out, cut around the pond and went to his vantage point. The figure was now clearly recognizable as a man--or at least manlike. It glided on boneless legs like Michael Jackson doing the "moon walk." The oily delta at its feet surged forward with every step, sometimes overshooting and drawing back. Behind the shimmering delta faded into the sand and heat. Were there army ants? Why no flying insects? Where were the South American killer bees, the yellowjackets? Why only things that slithered or skittered?
Beadles trotted to the top of the tube every muscle aching. He felt like an old man. The gas cans were intact. He picked one up. All there. It was going to be a great show, too bad they couldn't do it at night for full effect. Beadles had to time it perfectly. He intended to dump both cans down the tube and catch them when they were about halfway up. This required him to remain on post watching their approach until the last possible minute.
Beyond that he didn't have a plan. That thing might even be boneless. A ghost. Insubstantial. Able to inflict harm only through its venomous minions. It this were true he had only to turn back the onslaught. Did he have enough gas?
"We'll soon find out," he muttered.
Through the glasses the quavering nighmare approached. Its indistinct features made it worse. Beadles dialed in on its enormous hands, out of proportion with the rest of the body. Its segmented fingers ended in stingers. Its feet wer
e outsized too, the toes elongated and pointed down like claws.
Time ticked by. Heat crouched on him like a monkey. He reached into his pocket and applied lip balm. He thought about his past mistakes, the people he'd wronged. All those girls whose hearts he'd broken. Parents and instructors. Even Betty. Especially Betty.
The sun threw death rays. The sun hated him. Ironic because he'd always loved the sun. But not this sun. He'd loved a cooler, more distant and benign sun, not this ball of fury that bore down with the insupportable weight of its heat. He glanced at his watch. Almost noon. Beadles was drifting. He shook himself and looked down. The thing was a hundred yards out striding so smoothly it could have been riding a skateboard. Boneless legs. Snaky arms. An unusually limber tourist out for a stroll.
On it came. Across the fifty. It glided up to the Hummer, twenty yards from the base of the butte.
It stopped and looked in through the charred remains of the tailgate. It walked clockwise around the vehicle to where Vince's bones lay scattered. It stooped on its haunches and examined the bones, picking one up and smelling it.
Beadles dry-swallowed. The thing circumnavigated the vehicle returning to twelve o'clock. It looked up.
Rebar in his gut Beadles lifted the binocs. For an instant he couldn't focus. He found its face. It was a crude metaphor for a face, something a boy would draw on a bathroom stall. Unfinished and inhuman. Mesmerized, Beadles searched the face for some sign of intelligence. Even from that distance Beadles could read its hostility. It shot death rays. Beadles felt a sick sort of vertigo insert itself needle-like behind one eye.
He was damned if he'd be the first to break it off. His hat kept the sun out of his face while the creature shaded its black sinkholes with a claw. Beadles lost track of time. He fugued unfocused and leaned forward with both forearms on the hot rock. He, the white interloper looking down from the heights, staring at the eidolon of native fury and resentment.
You have no more right to this land than I.
The Navajo came from Siberia around 1000 AD and displaced the Anasazi. The Anasazi likely took the same path a millenium earlier. This is the way it had always been--the more sophisticated civilization displacing the primitive, often in the most brutal manner.
Beadles had nothing to do with it. The thing had no right to hold him accountable. Beadles was the one trying to restore the thankless creature to its proper place in history! The thing ought to thank him. His own anger slammed down like a fire door.
He cupped his hands and leaned out. "WHAT DO YOU WANT?!"
There was no motion, no answer. After a ponderous pause its right arm rised as slowly as an RR crossing and pointed at Beadles. With an abrupt twisting motion, the claw snapped shut and rotated. Its meaning was clear. The creature whirled its gruesome arm over its had and released an ear-splitting yell that struck Beadles like a hurtling truck.
"KI YI YI YI YI YI!"
The army of chitin and scales sizzled back like a wave withdrawing from the beach, bunched into a two foot ridge and surged forward, elongating as it raced toward the chimney. A giant's fist wrapped around Beadles' throat. He gasped, hearing his breath scrape like an anchor chain through a steel grommet. Panic attack. He bent over and put his hands on his knees gasping for breath.
Now. It was happening now. Go to the chimney. A goony bird in flight, he broke into a stumbling run with a keening whine of anxiety. Part of him hovered overhead looking down, as if he were already dead, seeing himself lurch across the rock and hearing the shameful noise he made. He tripped on a boulder and went down hard, skinning his palms and knees. He got up and it was like running in his dreams, in slo-mo, weak as a crawdad, moving, moving but hardly making progress. On and on. At last he came to the chimney, sliding to his burning knees. He grabbed one of the two cannisters and unscrewed the cap. Gas smell gouged him. His stomach clenched and wound up. He would not throw up. He would not. Eyes shut and tearing he turned away from the gas and breathed in and out. In and out. He fought it down. He turned back. His stomach sucker-punched him in the gut.
Beadles bent to the side and vomited a thin gruel of trail mix and yellow bile. He felt better. He leaned over the gas tank and went blotto.
What was he doing here?
An eerie clicking noise issued from the bowl. White noise with the pop of gristle coming at him like something crawling out of the depths of the sewers, rising in the pipe like vomit. Beadles tipped the cannister forward and emptied the contents into the pipe sloshing it all around. He leaped for the second cannister and did the same. The squeaking and chittering grew louder.
Beadles found his matches, lit several and tossed them into the chamber. FWOOSH. The top of the chimney lit up like the Olympic torch. Beadles staggered to his feet and back, his face flushed from the blast.
Black insect parts rose crackling from the tube like soot from a coal plant. They twisted in the wind and landed on Beadles' face and arms with an itching oily sensation. He frantically brushed them off backing away from the tube.
Flame belched up with a roaring sound sending whole snakes curling into the air performing arabesques. Beadles felt like dancing. He pumped his fist in the air.
"BURN YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!"
He danced and cackled like Walter Huston in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He pumped his fist and did the Harlem Shake. He whooped like a cowboy at a rodeo.
He raced back to the vantage point and picked up the binocs. He looked down. The thing was gone. He felt light-headed. He cackled gleefully with an undertone of madness. He''d burned its army and now it was gone. GONE.
Was that all there was to it?
A sharp pain pierced his shoulder. He turned and beheld the devil's face.
***
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE
"The Devil Himself"
It towered over him, its lipless mouth fixed in a zipper grin exposing vulpine fangs. Massive high cheekbones, forehead like a cliff, backhoe chin. It stank of despair and the passing of time. Its skin was sun-cured leather stretched taut over massive bones. Its eyes were yellow slits. Its hair was like cornsilk. The hands were the worst.
Each digit was a scorpion's tail. Thumbs the size of cigars tapering into lethal stingers. The hand flickered and seized Beadles by the throat, five needles puncturing his skin injecting him with the poison of hatred and history. Effortlessly it lifted Beadles six inches in the air and studied him as one might study an insect. It exhaled the stench of hecatomb.
Beadles seized its massive wrist in both hands to relieve the pressure, his feet dangling. This was it. He'd had a nice run. Shame to go out a loser. He wished he could have held Lars in his arms again. Even Betty. Even Summer.
He closed his eyes and prayed. Prayed to God. Hadn't been to church or thought about religion in decades. He made his peace.
Stingers pierced his neck. An instant of shock. He felt light-headed. The light swam diagonally in flexible hexagons.
He stood on the ground beneath a merciless sun.
Accompanied by five of his fiercest warriors Skorpio approached the meeting of the blue-eyed devils with extreme trepidation. His mother Nagua had warned of this for years. They would come from the south, a strange invader that actually consisted of two beings fused together. The rider and his beast. So it was prophesied; so the Azuma alone of all the tribes understood that these were but men. Their creatures inspired awe. But the Azuma had seen deer and buffalo and knew that the creatures were children of the sun.
When the invaders first appeared word spread as fast as the runners and filled the land between the four sacred mountains.
The invaders arrived by sea--something neither Skorpio nor any member of his tribe had seen, although there were stories of such a place. Wherever the creatures rode they demanded gold and laid waste the People with their bang sticks and with disease.
The Azuma were at war with the Navajo, the Apache and the Ute. But in the face of this existential threat all tribes were one.
Still grieving from t
he unexpected loss of his wife Xahnea, Skorpio saught the wisdom of the elders, especially his mother the medicine woman Nagua but also other wise men from other tribes. He sought council with Braza of the Ute, Wyanute of the Navajo and Creote of the Chiracahua. He prayed and fasted five days on the butte. He sang the songs to Monster Slayer promising a cruel end to the blue-eyed devils. He sent runners to follow the four-legged fiends. His warriors captured one of the intruders and were surprised to find him on foot, an ordinary man, not even equal to their youngest fighter. Skorpio told them what to do so they brought their captive with them until it was time to make a statement.
The invaders reacted with fury, destroying a Navajo village that had dared to defy Skorpio. In this way he knew that his prayers had been answered.
Naguna warned him what would happen. It turned his liver white. The invaders would flood the land like a plague of grasshoppers. They would bring unimaginable vice and strife. They were liars and killers. There could be no peace with them. The People would fall on harsh times and know servility and degradation.
The alien leader sent his pet Navajo to ask Skorpio to the pow-wow.
And so it was a on a blistering day in the Month of the Least Heat Moon Skorpio set out on foot with five of his fiercest warriors to meet the invader at a secret watering hole until recently known only to the Navajo. Now the invaders had come with their beasts and foul habits.
Skorpio and his dog soldiers walked across an endless plain of blistering heat, their feet inured by years running barefoot over rock and sand. Ahead they saw the clump of trees huddled around the secret spring where the invader leader waited with only his Navajo interpreter.
Both leaders agreed to bring five warriors. Skorpio and his men entered the ring of stones with their hands empty to show their peaceful intentions, although each warrior was armed with bow, arrows, and an obsidian knife.