He then says in our language that I was right.
That he kills . . . animals.
Yes, I recognize that venomous tongue of his, the tone of his poisonous words. He is of the foreigners!
Fighting through my pain, I reach up and choke him, but he only seems to feed off this, and the burning of his demon eyes grows. His smile stretches. He brings his arm up behind my head and shoves something into the side of my neck. Instantly I release him, and he laughs as he pushes me away, freeing me from the spear and his deadly embrace. I land hard on my back. I try desperately to pull the weapon from my neck.
What did he get me with?
Baxter laughs louder now. I flop to one side and catch him pulling out the spear from his belly as if it were a mere splinter. He holds it up like a sacred artifact. “Got you,” he says.
Seems he broke off the tip of the spear and stuck me with it.
I can no longer speak.
Can’t even scream.
I feel my energy draining.
My vision fading.
Baxter tosses the broken spear shaft aside and says, “Adios, Nannokto. Could’ve used your help.” He raises his shoulders up and down. “But I guess we’ll be carrying on without you.” He turns his back on me, approaches my brothers, and snatches a tomahawk from one of them.
A chek-tah has defeated me.
Again.
Given this second chance at revenge, another opportunity to avenge the death of my Keyaha and my people, I have failed once more. And now he will lead my brothers to continue the wicked deeds of the foreigners. To kill in the name of the wolves. The very pigs who slaughtered us in life will now lead us in death.
I want to continue the fight. I am not afraid.
I try to push myself off the ground, but my body falters. I feel myself slipping once more into the dark slumber.
No!
I must fight it.
I yank the spear tip out from my neck. But I am too late. The call of death stiffens me, and I unwillingly submit to it—
But not before I hear the shrill cry of a woman.
Chapter 34—Hell Hath No Fury
My head falls to one side. I catch sight of the chek-tah woman screaming. Her eyes glowing as blue as a cloudless afternoon sky. She examines her arms as if gazing upon them for the first time.
“Yatah la chek-tah.” She says that she bears the skin color of a chek-tah.
Okoto and the others look at her as if watching a delirious cat awaken from a nap.
The woman looks in my direction. “Nannokto?” She runs to my side, drops to her knees and places a hand gently on my forehead. “Nannokto, koalka nah’tal.” She tells me not to leave her. Then tells me that she is my . . .
Keyaha!
My eyes deceive me as she appears very much as this chek-tah woman and not my beloved Keyaha. But it’s as if she is reading my thoughts. She leans close to me, whispers in my ear that I never answered her question—the question she asked just before dying at the hands of the foreigners and their cursed fire sticks.
Would I be willing to leave the tribe for her?
This is her.
My Keyaha.
I want to tell her yes—yes, I would leave for her. I would do anything for her!
I try to respond, to even say her name, but the only thing that comes from my mouth is blood.
“You’re too late to save him,” Baxter says.
Tears fall from her eyes as her gaze levels with mine. Her face blurs as the cold grip of death reaches once more into my soul.
“Nannokto!” she shouts as she shakes me, trying to keep me awake in this world.
“Kiss him goodbye already,” Baxter says as he comes into view, standing over the two of us like an evil giant. “You two make me want to puke.”
She leans in close once again. Whispers that she won’t let my dreams take me away from her again. Nor will she let this chek-tah break us apart.
That her magic will consume me.
That her magic will consume us all.
She tells me this, all the while never lifting her hand from my forehead, which suddenly grows hot. I want to scream out in pain, but all that comes out is a whimper.
“Enough!” Baxter tears Keyaha off me and pushes her aside. “We killed your boyfriend hundreds of years ago. And you know what they say? History has a way of repeating itself.” He brings up the tomahawk—
But Keyaha moves so fast, even Baxter is caught off guard. She grabs his wrists and stops him from delivering the final blow. The color of Keyaha’s eyes changes from blue to yellow. Her entire body does the same. It is as if she is on fire.
“Jot ko la noa!” Baxter tells her she can’t turn on him. He is the chieftain now. He commands my brothers to attack her. They respond by raising their spears and stepping forward—but she spins around and aims a fiery hand in their direction.
“Soelka Keyaha Lokota, peoska na Tekano Lokota.” She tells them that she is Keyaha Lokota, daughter of Tekano Lokota—our real chief. Her eyes sparkle like flames from a pit. She then asks how dare they take aim at her and not challenge this chek-tah snake who raped their wives and slaughtered their children?
Our wives.
Our children.
My brothers exchange confused looks. Then hang their heads in shame. Keyaha goes on to tell them that this chek-tah, Baxter, has the necklace, but he does not have the heart of the tribe. He is the false leader.
Baxter squirms and tries to move but is paralyzed by her grip. A rat in the talons of an eagle. He calls out to Keyaha, challenging her to try to take his authority from him.
An immense pain—like that of a thousand daggers stabbing—consumes me. I clench my jaw, shut my eyes—
There’s a flash of white light.
I open my eyes as if waking from a nightmare of violence, suffering, and blood. A montage of images cycles through my mind. Glimmers of fighting, bloodshed, death. Fragments of the Kenneh’wah language echoing in my head like a long-distance phone call with a bad signal. As I come to, I realize that most of those glimmers, those flashes of brutality and bloodshed, are all still very much right here in my head.
It isn’t a dream or an abstract nightmare, but the horrible truth.
Kylie is holding Baxter’s wrists. She brings them down to his side then turns back to look at me. Her entire body, from her head to her toes, is ablaze with a yellow light. She’s a walking fireball.
I feel a sharp pain in the side of my neck. I wince and reach for it—but I can’t move my arms!
Kylie!
I try to say her name but all that comes out is a liquid that I can only surmise is a mixture of blood and spit and my definitive death.
I’m going to pass at any moment.
I try to utter her name once more, but can’t.
“Fight me, you stupid bitch!” Baxter barks. “Don’t just hold my hands. Fight me if you think you deserve to take control of these feather heads.”
Kylie turns pale. She turns back to Baxter. “I don’t need to fight you. I don’t need to control them.” She eyes the other hunters. “I want them to have peace. The peace the two evils inside of your soul have stolen and held captive for years.”
“If peace is what you want, then come and get it!” Baxter leans forward, eyes burning with an almost neon red glow. “Vamos, puta!”
Kylie plants her hand square on Baxter’s face, palm dead center on his nose, fingers splayed open. A white light escapes from beneath her grip, casting a creepy light over his entire face. He cries out. His screams growing louder by the second.
Mid scream, she breaks away, steps back and tells Baxter, “You stay right there.”
Baxter does.
Seems she has somehow locked him in place. Hit the pause button on his pain. His face is frozen into a sort of permanent scream. The red glow from his eyes fades. His eyeballs are the only things that he has control over now. They shift from side to side, watching Kylie make her way from one hunter to another as if tak
ing roll call.
Somehow Kylie is speaking to them in the Kenneh’wah tongue. As she walks up to each one of the hunters. They bow as she touches their foreheads. The same bright white light emanates from their heads, travels up her arm in a ring of light, and fades once it reaches her scalp. Then the hunter collapses. She moves around the tribe and does this until every one of the hunters is on the ground.
Baxter’s eyes swell as she approaches him, unsure of what she’s about to do next. A weak groan escapes his throat. Mouth still hung open, he looks like a baby chick awaiting its mother’s offering.
Something tells me that what Kylie is about to feed him isn’t food.
Kylie places a hand on his forehead. Baxter’s groaning gets louder. A waterfall of tears slides down his cheeks.
“You want forever?” she asks him, tilting her head to the side. “Well, how about an eternity of pain and misery?”
Her hand glows once more on his forehead, and he screams the way a man would if he were plummeting down an elevator shaft to his death.
“I want both of your souls to have back all of the pain,” she says. “Pain you inflicted onto the Kenneh’wah and onto those you wrongfully deemed as chek-tah.”
Blood pours out of Baxter’s nose as his entire body shakes. It’s almost as if she’s electrocuting him. But she’s not. She’s giving him what he always wanted, what he’s coveted.
The agony and suffering of innocents.
The white light intensifies until there’s a blinding explosion. I close my eyes. When I open them, Baxter is lying on the ground trembling and twitching like a dying fish. Kylie stands above him, watching on.
“Congratulations. Their pain is now your pain.” She spits on him. “Now the Kenneh’wah can finally rest in peace, and you get to enjoy an eternity of misery.” She leans over and tears the necklace from his neck. “And I’ll make sure this gets to the right person.”
Baxter’s body twitches sporadically, wriggling as if some latent electric current still pulses through him. Kylie kneels next to him, plants a hand on his head. Her hand emits a brief flash of white and then his head flops to one side.
“You’re going to need all the rest you can get,” she whispers to him. “Because when you awaken, you’ll know Hell.”
An unexplainable warmth washes over me. I close my eyes as I feel my body give out and the last thing I hear is Kylie’s voice calling out, “Rodney!”
Chapter 35—Trucks and Mojitos
The afterlife sounds an awful lot like a truck.
The ride is a lot bumpier than I expected, too. When I come to, I nearly jump out of my skin. This is not a tunnel of light leading to Heaven. Or, worse, a pit toward the bowels of Hell. Seems the road to the afterlife is traveled via a Ford pickup . . .
Driven by Kylie?
“Morning!” she says to me with a big grin. She lifts a finger off the wheel, points it up at the sky. “Well, technically it’s almost dinner time.”
It’s just her and me in the truck. No Baxter. No Damien. No Kenneh’wah.
Is this another dream?
Am I lying dead in the middle of a field, in the middle of Baxter’s jungle?
Difficult to tell what’s real any more, considering what my mind has been through.
I touch my neck. No gash. No blood. Perfectly healed.
I shoot Kylie a baffled look.
“You were snoring,” she says with a chuckle.
I look down at my chest. I’m wearing a UCF T-shirt.
“I think Baxter stole that from one of his victims,” she tells me. “He didn’t strike me as the literary type. Not to mention that shirt’s a medium.” She taps her belly. “Baxter wasn’t exactly a fit guy.”
I lift the shirt. Check for wounds. Not a scratch on me. “Kylie—”
Oh my God!
I can talk.
My vocal chords work. The hauntingly distinct feeling of trying to communicate with a mouth full of blood is no longer my reality.
“Yessssss?” she says.
“What’s going on?”
“Well, we’re headed for Miami.” She glances at me out of the corner of her eye. Winks as she says, “Got to finish the trip we started after all, right?”
“Miami?” I repeat the word as if it’s completely foreign.
“Yep.” She pats the steering wheel. “And we’re headed there courtesy of Baxter’s F250.” She cranks up the air conditioning. “God, I’ve missed AC.”
I simply nod, trying to take this all in. Along the roadside, a wall of pine trees and palm trees zip by as the sun settles to the west just above them. “Kylie, what happened to my wounds?” I turn to her. “I thought I died.”
“You almost did. A second time, I might add.”
“Yeah, but . . . I should’ve died.”
“Right.” Kylie shrugs. “But we saved you.”
“We?”
“Keyaha and I.” She taps at her temple. “She might have been at the steering wheel in my mind, but she kept me in the driver’s seat with her. My thoughts were her thoughts and vice versa.”
“So . . . she possessed you?”
“More like channeled.”
“Oh yeah. Human radios. As your sister used to say, right?” I detect the echoes of a headache forming in the back of my neck. My body feels as if I’ve just survived a car crash. Throbbing everywhere. It hurts to move. It hurts to be alive.
But at least I am alive.
“Keyaha inhabited me only temporarily.” Kylie glances in my direction. “She needed someone like me to help end the pain that Baxter has been perpetuating for years. To stop the exploitation of her tribe for his pleasure.”
“What do you mean, ‘someone like you’?”
“Someone born with supernatural gifts. Turns out, that Keyaha was also a student of the tribe’s shaman. She was learning the mystical ways of her people. A secret she kept to herself.”
“So, what did you do to me?” I ask, rubbing the miraculously healed wound on my previously perforated neck.
“Not a thing. That was all Keyaha.” She places a hand on my shoulder and squeezes gently. “She brought you back. Healed your wounds before you left us for good.” Her gaze shifts back to the road. “She healed us both.”
Stating that this is a lot to absorb would be the understatement of the year. We should be dead—twice over. But it seems Keyaha’s ultimate mission was to end Baxter’s tyranny, to give her tribe peace, and to reunite with Nannokto in the next life.
Granting Kylie and I a third chance to live was her parting gift.
“What about Nannokto?” I ask. “He awoke inside of me. I mean, I relived both Keyaha’s death and his own. Where did he go? Why didn’t she bring him back into me permanently?”
“Because the Kenneh’wah were revived out of hatred, not love. Something neither Nannokto nor Keyaha believed in. Not to mention, it was the enemy—a chek-tah—that summoned them.”
“Baxter.”
“Yes, as well as the spirit of the Spaniard who shared space within Baxter’s mind and body.”
I shoot her a look.
Her gaze meets mine briefly as she says, “Just as Nannokto awoke inside you, the Spanish soldier who lead the assault on the Kenneh’wah awoke inside Baxter.”
“So the fact that we were all inhabited by these spirits . . . does that mean we were all—” I make quotes with my fingers “—human radios?”
Kylie shakes her head. “Using the necklace as the power source, Baxter forced the shaman to turn the Kenneh’wah grounds into a spiritual doorway of sorts. Recycling the fallen warriors with new victims, who, upon death, would physically and mentally transform over time into more Kenneh’wah hunters. An endless supply of bloodshed to satisfy Baxter’s palette for the death of innocents.” She chuckles and says, “However, the shaman threw a monkey-wrench into Baxter’s game.”
“He did?”
“Yep.” Kylie points at herself with her thumb. “Me.”
“But how?” I a
sk as the pounding headache in my brain makes itself very known.
“When the shaman picked up on my intent to kill myself, he inadvertently found himself a fellow shaman, sha-woman, whatever you want to call me. With me in the game, via my death, I revived Keyaha who was able to put an end to this nightmare.” She glances at me briefly once more with those beautiful eyes of hers and says, “She did so by granting her people sleep and much deserved eternal peace . . . and by taking their rage and giving it to Baxter.”
“That’s why your hands were glowing?” I ask. “Why the warriors fell as you touched them?”
“As she and I touched them, yeah.”
“Right.”
“I know it’s a lot, Rodney. And trust me when I say, I get it. I’m still trying to digest this myself,” she says as she shakes her head in disbelief. “But through Keyaha, I felt every ounce of pain, every ounce of loss for those who were slaughtered that fateful day—from her father to her lover.”
I stare at her in quiet awe, as a tear forms at the corner of her eye and slips down her cheek. I reach over and wipe it away. She turns to face me, eyes sparkling with more tears. I’m taken aback at how a woman with such a tough exterior has let down a little bit of that wall. Just enough to show her true emotion.
“I realize how precious life is,” Kylie continues. “And how selfish I was to even consider taking my own.”
I nod, feeling the exact same way. By the generosity of a forlorn spirit, I’ve been given a second chance at life.
Technically a third.
That goes for both of us.
I reach over and take her hand, squeezing it, grateful that it is not covered in blood or gore and is very much alive. “I agree.”
Up ahead is the on-ramp for I-95. Kylie throws on the blinker and merges onto the highway, entering in a river of speeding cars, trucks, and semis. A road sign tells us that Miami is roughly an hour away.
I’ve never been so happy to see traffic.
To see life once more.
And Miami is the opposite of where we just were.
Speaking of which, I ask, “So, being that we were in the middle of nowhere, how do you know how to get to Miami?”
Kylie gestures toward the backseat.
The Death Wish Game Page 19