by Ethan Cross
As he waited, Ackerman considered a serial killer by the name of Harold Shipman, who had been a doctor believed to have killed over two-hundred and thirty-six people. Most of his victims were killed from intentional overdoses with no real motive as to why except for that Harold Shipman fancied himself a god. Many believed him to be the most prolific serial killer in history. That, of course, was adhering to the definition of a serial killer being a person who murders three or more people, in two or more separate events over a period of time, for primarily psychological reasons, which included historical figures such as Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great, each of whom was responsible for millions of deaths.
He had tried to count up his own number of victims on many separate occasions, but things like explosions and buildings he had burned to ash made it difficult to pin down the exact numbers. It also wasn’t as if he specifically laid claim to each of his attacks, and so the authorities had no idea either.
Once upon a time, being the most prolific serial murderer in history had seemed like the only real goal he could ever attain. He had abandoned all hope of living in the light, and instead, he had chosen to embrace the darkness. What he’d found was that darkness was an illusion.
He was torn away from his mental thesis by the ding of an elevator and the whirring of its motors. He heard the doors part, but there was a hesitation before he heard any footsteps. He imagined that Yazzie was checking the corridor with his gun at the ready, just to be safe, but he also knew that Yazzie believed this exit to be one that they would never discover.
Ackerman waited in the shadows of his hiding place for a few seconds after hearing the eventual sound of three sets of feet exiting the elevator and moving down the corridor toward the parking structure. He then slipped out and without making a sound—utilizing a technique of walking heel to toe with light touches that he had actually learned from a book on American Indians—Ackerman moved up behind Yazzie, who was pushing the women along at gunpoint.
When he had closed the gap to ten feet, Ackerman said, “I have a shotgun pointed at your back, Captain. Do not turn around, but slowly place your weapon on the ground.”
Yazzie became a statue. He didn’t make any offensive movements, but neither did he do as he was told. The police captain and serial murderer said, “What are you going to do, Frank? Kill me? You wouldn’t risk shooting me with a shotgun, when you still have no idea where your missing friend has been stashed away. Only I can save her, and only I know where she is. So give me one good reason I should put down my gun?”
“Well, Captain, this shotgun is loaded with special home defense rounds, which would cause an exquisite level of damage from this distance. I wonder if I squeezed the trigger right now, with my aim on your legs, what would happen? Would you merely be peppered with lead, or do you think I could blow one of your legs completely off at the shin? You want a reason… How about this? I would love nothing more than to see what your insides look like as I start removing pieces of you.”
Yazzie replied, “You wouldn’t risk it. And even if you did, I would take the location to my grave. Even if you torture me, I’ll just lead you on a wild goose chase. But if you let my sister and I walk out of here, I’ll call you in two hours and tell you your friend’s location.”
Ackerman laughed. “I’m sorry, but this is just priceless. It’s like the hyena dictating terms to the lion. I’ve already broken my no-murder streak today, so what difference does it make if I end you? I’m thinking of getting one of those signs that they hang up in factories and places where the work is especially dangerous. The kind of sign that displays information like the number of days without an accident. Only mine would say something like ‘X number of days without the spilling of lifeblood.’ And until I have a place to hang the aforementioned sign, I have a virtual version stored in my mental palace. If I killed you now, I wouldn’t even have to worry about changing the sign.”
“But you’d never find your friend.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Mr. Canyon had quite a bit to say about you after you left the party. He told some interesting stories about an undiscovered Anasazi temple hidden among the cliffs north of Roanhorse.”
Ackerman had been studying Yazzie’s every tiny muscle twitch, and at the mention of the temple of his ancestors, several of the captain’s muscles stiffened. Yazzie said, “You would never find it without me.”
Ackerman, unfortunately, knew that to be true. But he also took things one step at a time, and it always seemed that the universe provided.
As if right on cue, Reyna Canyon—John’s wife and Yazzie’s sister—said, “I can take you there.”
Yazzie blurted, “Shut up, Reyna.”
“No, Xavier,” she said, and to Ackerman, “I can take you to the exact spot, but you have to do something for me.”
“And that is?”
“You have to kill my brother. Right here. Right now. Pull that trigger and end him.”
Ackerman, still watching for Yazzie’s every twitch, recognized the slight sagging of the man’s shoulders at his sister’s betrayal.
With a small chuckle, Ackerman replied, “Deal. I can promise you that, where he’s going, he’ll never be able to hurt you again. So, now the only question is, Captain, would you like to die now or later?”
Reyna, her eyes going wide, said, “Kill him now! You don’t know what he’s capable of.”
“You’re right, my dear. I don’t fully understand what your brother is capable of. But I know what I’m capable of. And lions don’t fear hyenas.”
Moving slowly, Yazzie laid his gun on the ground and said, “She would never be able to find it on her own. Not after all these years. You still need me.”
Yazzie’s last word was punctuated by another dinging of the elevator. This time, Marcus emerged, an MP5 at his shoulder, and joined them in the service corridor.
Ackerman saw his brother marching toward their prisoner in his peripheral vision, and he honestly didn’t know what Marcus would do to the man who had stolen Maggie. Without any warning, his brother raised the MP five and shot Yazzie in the meat of his left thigh, dropping the police captain to his knees. Then, sticking the warm barrel of the gun against the back of Yazzie’s neck, Marcus snarled, “You’re going to take us to Maggie. Right now. No tricks.”
With a roll of his eyes, Ackerman said, “We’ve already been through this. Yazzie’s sister, Reyna, is going to be so kind as to guide us to her brother’s temple of the Old Ones.”
Turning back to Ackerman, Marcus said, “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s go get our girl.”
100
Laying atop her bed of bones, Special Agent Maggie Carlisle fought to remain conscious. Intuition told her that to fall asleep now would mean to fall asleep forever. She had to be approaching the point of total dehydration, and without much ventilation in the pit, carbon dioxide poisoning was also a strong possibility.
Carol—her partner in the pit—had passed away in the night. Maggie had heard her stop breathing, and upon checking, she’d been unable to resuscitate.
Now, laying there thinking about how much longer she could possibly live without water, she thought of the blood coagulating in Carol’s veins as she decayed. But still she refused the idea of cannibalism. It went against every fiber of her being.
Then again, she hadn’t killed the woman. In fact, she had spared her when she had the chance. It just so happened that Carol must’ve been slightly more dehydrated than she had been at the onset of their ordeal. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But if she was going to do that, she should’ve done it at the beginning before the flesh had a chance to decay. She shoved the thoughts from her mind. She would rather die having been able to say that she had never eaten a person then the other way around.
She had tried to prepare herself for death as best she could, but she supposed that there was never really anyone who was completely ready. She still had things she wanted to see and do. Things she wanted to say. Most of all,
she had never truly accomplished the goal she had set out to achieve. She may have found her brother’s killer, but she still didn’t know her brother’s fate, and that bothered her immensely. Perhaps more than anything. She had to trust that Marcus would pick up the trail and finish what she had begun, but she had never been adept at trusting people.
Maggie felt like someone had attached thousand-pound weights to her eyelids and wondered how long it’d been since she’d slept. It felt like she had been trapped here for weeks, but she knew that it couldn’t have been more than a few days. Otherwise, she would’ve already been dead of dehydration.
When a blinding light shined down from above and stung her eyes, even through her closed lids, Maggie thought that she had died and was being raised up to the next plane of existence. A part of her had been relieved it was over.
She heard the voices of two men.
Angels? she wondered.
Then, one of the men swore in Spanish, and the pair then started arguing about who is going to be the one to go down in the pit and retrieve her. Her foggy brain started making connections, and she realized that these men could be here to rescue her. Rolling over, she turned her face toward them and reached up. Her throat felt too dry to speak, and so she merely croaked deeper in her throat to get their attention.
In the dim light above, she could see the faces of the two men. One was a handsome bronze-skinned young man, well-built and clearly the leader of the two. The other was merely a pile of bones with skin stretched over it.
As Maggie raised her arm and moaned up at them, the skinny one said, “Zombie!”
The other man slapped him across the back of the head.
The handsome one said, “We’re coming down, lady. We have water.”
Those had been the sweetest words that Maggie had ever heard, and so she merely laid her head back onto her bed of bones and gently sobbed. Although, in her dehydrated state, she couldn’t produce tears and felt like she’d been eating sandpaper, which made her cries sound like the wheezing of an asthmatic.
101
Marcus sat behind the wheel of the panel van Yazzie had commandeered from Canyon’s roadblock, his foot pushed to the floor and his mind racing. All he could think about was getting there in time and seeing Maggie’s face.
The drive up into the hills was mostly a quiet one. There had, of course, been the catching up conversations at the beginning: the tales of Liana’s wild ride and his trip through the casino in the Narco tank and Ackerman had felt compelled to talk to them about a killer named Harold Shipman. The most difficult conversation by far, however, had been revealing to Reyna Canyon that her husband was dead. Although, after the fact, Marcus hadn’t noticed much of the reaction one would expect from a grieving widow. She had insisted that they take her to her son, stating that she needed him there after John’s death. But the brothers had quickly dismissed that idea, having no intention of trusting Yazzie to show them the way.
Temperatures in the valley were starting to rise along with the sun, even though the latter remained hidden behind dark storm clouds, which cast the desert landscape into shades of gray.
Marcus couldn’t remember the last time he had slept, but he was far from tired now. He’d already pushed through that wall and was now going to see this race through to the end, even if it was the death of him.
Reyna directed him from the front passenger seat and led the way deep into the hills and canyons north of Roanhorse, to a place where all traces of modern life disappeared and the road came to an end. Marcus threw the van into park and cocked an eyebrow at his navigator. She said, “We’re on foot from here.”
102
The hike into the hills was long and arduous and none of them were really prepared for it. With every step, Ackerman felt as if tiny nails were being driven into his wounds. Not that he disliked the pain, but it had started to become a distraction within the first half mile. With most of them bleeding and having been awake for days, a hike into the wilderness was the last activity in which any of them wanted to partake.
Ackerman had suspected that it was Reyna Canyon who had sent Maggie the photograph for some time now, but his brother’s brain worked differently. Marcus needed proof. He thought like a cop searching out a conviction, while Ackerman allowed his imagination to travel down the wildest of paths.
As they pushed forward for nearly an hour, several conversations popped up, all of them short and awkward. Marcus’s intensity loomed over them all. His brother set the pace, and the others seemed almost too winded to speak. Ackerman, of course, had no problem keeping up. In fact, he had considered scouting ahead, but thought better of it, not wanting to let Yazzie out of his sight.
Liana showed him a few of the desert fauna along the way, plants with names like sagebrush, juniper, tamarisk, tree of heaven, blue mustard, and bull thistle. But each interaction seemed awkward in some way. He supposed that, since they had actually survived, she was reconsidering her invitation for a kiss. Not that Ackerman concerned himself either way. Things happened or they didn’t. Unless one made those things happen on one’s own, which usually resulted in adverse consequences.
Finally, Reyna stopped short and looked to her brother to reveal his own secrets. Yazzie—displaying what seemed to Ackerman a suspicious level of cooperation—hadn’t really fought them at all since his capture at the casino. He moved aside some scrub brush and then swiped his hand across the sand to reveal a metal handle. Grasping it with both hands, he lifted off a piece of sheet metal, which covered a tunnel large enough for a person to comfortably slide down through hard-packed desert floor and into the rock below.
Ackerman asked, “You dug this?”
Yazzie shook his head. “It was always here. I found the opening on the other side and had to clear out many hundreds of years of dirt and disrepair. But this was a secret entrance to the temple, probably only used by the priests of the Old Ones.”
Ackerman had read a few accounts of the Anasazi. Mainly the theories about how the group built their homes high in the cliffs with limited access to critical resources and then disappeared, which carried with it a myriad of speculation and conspiracy theories. Some of the more recent archaeological digs had also discovered irrefutable evidence of cannibalism in the form of fossilized human feces, known as coprolite.
Yazzie added, “The metal cover is a recent addition, of course. I wanted easy access so I could come out here to pray. I suppose I’m the priest of the temple now.”
Through clenched teeth, Marcus said, “You ain’t priest of jack or shit, but you’d better pray that Maggie’s still alive down there.”
The implication hung in the air until Marcus, taking a quick measure of the entrance, dropped down first in order to scout ahead and ensure that there were no traps. After a moment, he yelled back up to send Yazzie down.
Once they had all followed and gathered inside a small stone antechamber, Yazzie closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Addressing the group, he said, “Do you feel them? Can you feel their presence?”
Marcus shoved him forward and said, “Take us to Maggie or you’re going to feel the presence of my foot up your ass.”
Scowling at the disrespect of his heritage but not protesting, Yazzie led them through the corridors of stone and sand that the Anasazi had carved into the most inaccessible of places. They followed a narrow corridor into what seemed to be a natural cavern that the Anasazi had converted into their equivalent of the holiest of holies.
Ackerman asked, “Were you first one to discover this place, Yazzie?”
“No, most of these ruins, just like a large portion of all known remnants of my ancestors, have been pillaged. Either by people looking to sell the potsherds and artifacts or the belegana dirt diggers looking to carry them off to museums. Both of which are common thieves. I do, however, believe that I was the first to discover the lower kiva, a teardrop-shaped chamber beneath this temple where sacrifices were made to He Who Devours.”
Ackerman, examining th
e stone altars, asked, “He Who Devours…Friend of yours?”
“He Who Devours the World. He is the darkness that will one day extinguish the fire of all existence. He’s not my friend. He’s my master. My god.”
Ackerman nodded and replied, “I see. Reminds me of the story of a hen in Leeds, England that was believed to be heralding the end of days. It was laying eggs inscribed with the words ‘Christ is Coming.’ Whole thing turned out to be a fraud. They had used some sort of corrosive ink.”
“Don’t mock me!”
Cutting off the conversation, Marcus snapped, “I’m losing my cool here, Yazzie.”
An angry snarl across his face, he said, “She’s this way.” Then he led them to where another metal sheet had been installed to conceal the entrance of what Yazzie had referred to as the lower kiva. As Yazzie pulled away the metal covering, he said, “This is where I saw her last.”
Knocking the older man aside, Marcus threw the metal plate off like it weighed nothing and shined the beam of his Maglite down into the depths below. As the light licked at the darkness, Ackerman saw the mounds of skulls and bones and said, “This was some sort of sacrificial chamber. I’ve read articles that propose the Anasazi disappeared not because of invaders, but because of cannibalism and civil war within their own empire.”
Yazzie chuckled for some reason known only to him. It was the first real moment that Ackerman detected the madness which lived inside the man.
Frantically shining the flashlight beam from one corner of the chamber to the other, Marcus said, “What is this, Yazzie? Where is she? Where—”
The booming sound of a gunshot resounded across the cavern like thunder. Ackerman recognized it as the report of a high-powered rifle. Marcus looked over at his brother with a confused look on his face. Touching his side to reveal the blood, Marcus said, “Frank?” And then fell toward the sacrificial pit.