And since my grandfather was a good man, he’d accepted the responsibility for his role and raised me like his own son. I knew him better than anyone else on the planet. He wasn’t the kind of man who would groom me to wage war upon my ancestors. He wouldn’t have taught me his skills as a form of trickery. That wasn’t who he was. His portion of the storyline in the cave should have told me as much. He was a man who believed in the truth and shouldered his share of the burden for his involvement in the war. For better or worse, his portrayal of himself and his role was honest. It showed his shame and regret for the violent actions he had taken and that he’d done the only thing in the world he could do to try to make things right.
He hadn’t deliberately misled me. He would never do something devious like that.
“You thought they were all dead. You didn’t tell me because you didn’t want to hurt me. You wanted me to believe that I was your blood, that I was just like everyone else. But you would have, wouldn’t you? When the time was right. You just needed to make sure that I would be able to take care of myself first. In case I didn’t handle it very well when you told me the truth. That I wasn’t your grandson and you’d killed my entire race.”
The corners of his lips pulled back into the hint of a smile and his eyes fixed on the far distance. I could no longer see him inside of them.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
I set down his hand, closed his eyelids, and softly kissed him on the cheek.
* * *
There were many times when I wanted to ask my mother what my grandfather had told her about me. Was I the child of some cousin who’d abandoned me to run off to Hollywood? Had I been passed off as one of my mother’s cousins who’d actually been killed when their homes came under attack? Was I my father’s by some previous relationship with a woman who left me on their doorstep?
In the end, I decided it didn’t matter. What did was that she needed me as much as I needed her. And if she was willing to invest the time and effort, then who was I not to reciprocate?
As far as my father was concerned, he was nothing to me. The adoptive one who’d never even tried to love me before splitting, anyway. As far as my real one—the one whose blood flowed through my veins—I sealed him inside of the cavern behind the kiva with the body of the man whose face looked like mine, the man who had worn the horns of a ram, like his father before him, when he attacked my horse and then me. A man who very well might have been my brother. I laid his body to rest in a recess in the cavern wall above which I’d hung a close-up photograph of his face next to mine. I hoped the message came through loud and clear. It was the same message the man who was and always would be my grandfather had hoped to convey. So there would be no confusion, I carved three words above the pictures.
NO MORE BLOOD.
* * *
I sat on the ledge outside of the tiny hole high up in Fewkes Canyon, below the Sun Temple. The ice was gone and it was only a matter of time before the last of the snow, which clung to the shade of the pines, would be too. Yanaba grazed in the damp grass. I could barely look at her without starting to cry. Her neck and chest were shaved and covered with thick, Frankenstein-like stitches that held the puckered skin closed. Her right side was deformed where they’d been forced to remove two ribs in an effort to stop the bleeding where she’d been gored. She’d lost a large chunk of her liver and several feet of her small intestines, but she was going to survive her injuries. She wouldn’t be doing any galloping with the damage to her muscles, at least not for the foreseeable future. Not that I cared. I was so happy she was alive that I’d carry her on my back if I had to. There were simply some bonds that were stronger than blood, and even some that crossed the border between species.
She looked up at me and huffed impatiently.
“I know, I know.”
I didn’t blame her for wanting to hurry me along. This place didn’t hold the fondest of memories for me, either, but I owed a debt to my family—both of them—and I intended to repay it.
I squirmed through the tunnel, navigated the caverns, passed between the bodies encased in flowstone, and crouched before the hole beside the centuries-old stone plug. I listened for several minutes before clicking on my flashlight, palming my compass, and opening the notebook I intended to use to create a map.
If any of them had survived, I wasn’t about to wait for them to mature so we could fight a battle neither side could win.
Like I said, this war was over, and if there were any more of them down there in the darkness, I would help them see the light.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Lost Tribes
No one truly knows how many undocumented and uncontacted tribes remain hidden in the jungles and caves of some of the most geographically isolated regions on the planet. According to Survival International, an organization that advocates for the rights of indigenous peoples, there are more than 100 uncontacted tribes in the world, the majority of them in Amazonia and New Guinea. The government of Brazil has identified 77—a full third of which were discovered within the last decade alone—through satellite surveys of the rainforest and interviews with the more Westernized neighboring tribes.
The unpredictable nature of first contact makes it nearly impossible to determine how many tribes are out there, how many individuals constitute each, and whether they’re peaceful communal farmers, hunter-gatherers, or outright hostile warriors. In addition, initiating contact can prove devastating. Encounters can easily trigger a violent response by territorial tribespeople who have existed in utter isolation for countless generations. These are populations for whom exposure to even our most innocuous diseases—against which our bodies have developed natural immunities—could prove catastrophic.
Experts believe there are no more lost tribes in the United States, despite the preponderance of uncontacted peoples throughout the remainder of both the Old and New World. If these tribes actively seek to avoid contact with the outside world at all costs, is it impossible to believe they can successfully do so, especially considering how long they’ve already remained hidden? Consider the Ruc people of Vietnam, who lived in the caves of the Quang Binh province until North Vietnamese soldiers blindly stumbled upon them during the war, or the Tasaday of the Philippine island of Mindanao, who were only tracked to their concealed caves within the last forty years by utilizing largely anecdotal evidence. Is it so hard to believe that another such tribe could live undetected in the vast subterranean karst formations that positively riddle the ground beneath this continent, especially in the American Southwest, where in 1909 the Phoenix Gazette detailed a Smithsonian-led expedition into an enormous abandoned stone citadel nearly fifteen hundred feet straight down a sheer stone escarpment in the heart of the Grand Canyon, mere miles from where this story was set?
The Ceremonial Rattle
The Uncompahgre Ute are credited with being the first to use the principles of mechanoluminescence to generate light from crystals by taking advantage an optical phenomenon known as triboluminescence, which results from the breaking of chemical bonds in a material when it’s pulled apart, scratched, crushed, or rubbed. They created their rattles from buffalo rawhide stretched to a state of translucence and filled them with quartz harvested from the mountains of Colorado.
The Desana and Warao Indians of South America independently discovered the same principles and used them in their shamanic rattles.
This concept can be demonstrated with everyday objects. Scotch tape produces a glowing line (and x-rays in a vacuum) where the end of the tape is being pulled away from the roll and Wint O Green Life Savers produce blue light when chewed.
Artificial Human Deformation
Humans have been artificially deforming their bodies since the beginning of time. The earliest instance predates recorded history, as evidenced by a carbon-dated 47,000 year-old Neanderthal skull with artificial cranial deformation discovered in Shanidar Cave in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.
In 400 C.E., Hippocrates descri
bed a race he called the Macroencephali, or Long-heads, who were so named for their practice of elongating the skulls of their infants by using a wooden press. The Huns, and the Eastern Germanic Tribes they ruled, adopted the same custom nearly a thousand years later.
The Maya and Inca were both known to have deformed the skulls of their children, although not nearly to the same extent as the Paracas tribe of Andean Peru, the discovery of whose remains led to speculation that they were alien in origin.
In North America, the Chinook, Choctaw, and Salish tribes all practiced this custom by strapping the infant’s head to a cradleboard and squishing it with a flat piece of wood.
Isolated instances have been found throughout the Pacific Ocean from Australia to Samoa and Vanuatu to the Hawaiian Islands.
Artificial cranial deformations were performed in the Toulouse region of France well into the twentieth century.
The skull isn’t the only part of the body that people have sought to remodel for aesthetic reasons.
The Sara women of Chad and the Mursi and Suri of Ethiopia insert plates into their lips and stretch the lobes of their ears. Kayan women from Burma wrap brass coils tightly around their necks to force their clavicles and ribs downward in order to create the illusion of an elongated neck. Apanti women from India wear large wooden discs in their nostrils and tribes from South Asia and the Philippines file their teeth to points.
Even now, the practices of body piercing, tattooing, trans- and microdermal implantation, and surgical breast augmentation are almost routine. Not to mention extraocular implants, genital cutting, nipple and tongue splitting, scarification, anal stretching, labia elongation, and, yes, even horn implantation.
The Anasazi
The fact remains that no one knows why the Anasazi abruptly fled first Chaco Canyon, then their cliff dwellings in the Canyons of the Ancients in the Four Corners region of Colorado. Some believe climactic changes caused them to migrate and ultimately integrate into the neighboring tribes, while there is ample evidence that a cataclysmic event caused them to abandon their advanced civilization at the height of its influence. Still other archaeological evidence supports the theories of violence and warfare, and even cannibalism. The truth is we’ll probably never know, but it’s a whole lot of fun to speculate, isn’t it?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael McBride is the bestselling author of Bloodletting, Burial Ground, F9, IMMUN3, Innocents Lost, Predatory Instinct, Remains, The Coyote, The Event, and Vector Borne. His novella Snowblind won the 2012 DarkFuse Readers Choice Award and received Honorable Mention in The Best Horror of the Year. He lives in Avalanche Country with his wife and children. To explore the author’s other works, please visit www.michaelmcbride.net.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.
To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at www.darkfuse.com.
Table of Contents
ANCIENT ENEMY
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NOVEMBER 8th
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
NOVEMBER 9th
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
NOVEMBER 10th
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
NOVEMBER 12th
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Author’s Notes
About the Author
About the Publisher
Ancient Enemy Page 15