by Ethan Cross
103
It didn’t take Maggie long to figure out that the two men, who almost literally raised her from the dead, were more like ghetto commandos rather than paramedics or firemen. The skinny one even wore some sort of do-rag over his skeletal visage. Still, even if they were little green men, she didn’t have the strength to fight back.
The next several moments flew by in a whirlwind, during which she phased in and out of consciousness. The fact that they were not rescue workers was further confirmed by the fact that they merely grabbed her beneath the arms and dragged her through the dirt of the cavern and up a small trail, to where natural stalagmite and stalagmite formations had formed a curtain of stone. The Hispanic-looking one carried a high-powered rifle with a scope, while his thinner partner carried an AK-47 assault rifle. The two men laid her in the niche and started setting up some sort of encampment.
“Water,” she croaked.
The two men looked at each other, and the skinny one said, “You’re in charge, Ramirez. What did your new boss tell you to do?”
“I do what I have to do to survive. And no one said that he’s my boss.”
The skinny one rolled his eyes and said, “Okay, Jamie, I didn’t mean to—”
“Just get her some water.”
The skinny one complied, and Maggie was thankful for the healthy gulps of H2O as it poured down her throat. Maggie wanted to talk. She wanted to ask questions or figure out what the heck was going on. She wondered if this could be some sort of trap Canyon was setting for Captain Yazzie, but she really had no idea what was happening. For all she knew, this could’ve been an attack orchestrated by Marcus or his brother. But she supposed there wasn’t much she could do about it either way, so she slipped off into a strange dreamland of scorpions and sand and old bones.
Still, her thoughts dwelled on the sharpened femur bone that she had hidden in her pant leg. It would be a useful tool, but she lacked the strength to wield it.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d continued on that way, slipping in and out of consciousness, reality and dreams becoming so distorted that the world felt like the flipping of channels on an old TV set. Unfortunately, most of the channels seemed to be static.
But then she heard voices echoing through the cavernous chamber of the temple. Not just any voices, familiar voices. Her heart started racing. Adrenaline pumping. Her mind coming back into sharper focus. There were several voices, but two had stood out that she knew well. The voices of the love of her life, Marcus Williams, and his brother, whose voice she was also marginally happy to hear.
She tried to roll over without making too much sound or drawing the attention of her captors, which she now assumed these men to be. Dust and sand from the floor of the niche blew into her face and nose, but she didn’t mind. Anything to overpower the stink of death that still clung to the inside of her nostrils.
The voices continued, coming closer. As they did, she prepared to move. Undoing her jeans, she slipped her hand behind the back of her thigh and removed the sharpened bone, a weapon she had been begun fashioning on her first day in the pit. She had intended it for the neck of Captain Xavier Yazzie, but it was always a good idea to field test a weapon before using it on one’s primary target.
But even retrieving the weapon sapped her strength, and she began to doubt her ability to move against either of the men. The water had definitely helped, and she no longer felt the effects of the dehydration, but she was still weak from the ordeal, not to mention the damage to her leg and hand. Perhaps waiting would be a better idea, gathering her strength, clearing the fog from her brain. She had no idea what was actually going on, but she knew enough to know that attacking someone with the intention of killing them wasn’t something you wanted to do unless you were sure. She was unsure in a lot of ways, and so she waited.
The two men conversed a few times in hushed tones. Maggie was close enough to hear them, but they spoke in Spanish, a language of which she only knew the basics.
The one whom the skinny one had referred to as Ramirez looked down the scope of his rifle and seemed to be making slight adjustments on his sights. The skinny one had propped himself on the ledge of the rock formation, ready to open fire with his AK-47.
As she tried to blink the cobwebs free from her eyes, which had been deprived of light for the past few days, Maggie recognized that Ramirez was military trained by the way that he moved and held the rifle. She could also tell that he was readying himself to fire, which meant it was now or never. Either she would make a move or not, because someone that she cared about could be on the wrong end of that rifle. She tried to lunge forward but was unable to push herself up on her arms. Her two captors were focused on their targets and ignoring her. She realized that, even if she was able to take out Ramirez and keep him from shooting, his skeletal little friend would simply turn the AK-47 on her. Pushing those thoughts aside, she told herself that her own life didn’t matter. She just had to move.
But her muscles wouldn’t cooperate. Her whole body tingled, and she felt like she had been sitting inside a dryer on spin cycle. She took several deep breaths, trying to psych herself up.
She rolled forward and pushed herself up onto one knee. From that angle, she now saw that Ramirez also had a side-arm, which answered the question of how she would handle his partner.
She heard Marcus’s voice again, accompanied by others.
Ramirez, possibly aware of her presence but not considering her enough of a threat to take his eyes off his target, paid her no attention. The military-trained young man had underestimated her. A mistake that people had made about her for most of her life. Ramirez was about to pay for that mistake.
She lunged forward, her makeshift bone knife extended for the kill. But instead of connecting with her target, she stumbled and fell to the side, again ending up in the dirt. She remained there for second, the bone knife clutched to her abdomen, her left hand and knees supporting her.
And then Maggie felt the concussion wave of the rifle blast, followed a millisecond later by the sound of the shot.
104
It took Ackerman a fraction of a second to ascertain that they had walked into a trap and to take action. Having caught his brother beneath the arms before Marcus could topple head-first into the pit of bones, Ackerman carried him to a place of cover within the rock formation. As he made his first two steps toward safety, the cavern erupted with the sound of gunfire from a different caliber weapon. An assault rifle. It was difficult for Ackerman to determine the precise direction and angle of the shooters with the sound echoing all over the cavernous chamber.
Laying his brother on the hard rock floor of the temple, Ackerman examined the wound. It was in a bad spot. The bullet could very well have hit some vital part of Marcus’s anatomy. It wasn’t a fatal shot outright, but could turn into one if Marcus didn’t receive medical attention soon.
Tearing off a piece of his brother’s shirt, Ackerman made an emergency medical compress and told Marcus to hold the fabric in place over his wound and apply pressure.
Liana had followed them to cover and was now crouched down on the other side of Marcus. She asked, “How can I help?”
Ackerman was about to instruct her to come around and assist Marcus, while he found a way to dispatch whoever had shot his brother. But his machinations were cut short by a man’s scream. The sound was strange in the cavernous space. It echoed and compounded upon itself. The cry of pain was cut short by a wet thwack, immediately followed by gunfire of another caliber. This time Ackerman estimated it to be a 9mm.
Back at the hotel, Ackerman had confiscated Yazzie’s pearl-handled Peacemaker and gun belt and had decided to use them himself. Now, he pulled the forty-five long Colt revolver from its holster and cocked back the hammer.
When Ackerman heard the first shot and realized that Marcus had been hit by a sniper’s bullet, he disregarded everyone else in the group and immediately went to his brothers aid. Looking back to the other side of the cavern, h
e saw where Reyna Canyon had found her own shelter in a similar cleft in the rock. But there was no sign of Xavier Yazzie, and Ackerman also noted that Marcus’s MP5 was no longer beside the pit where his brother had dropped it.
He estimated that the attack had been carried out by two men operating under Yazzie’s order. One man wielding an AK-47 and the other—the one who shot Marcus and would soon die by Ackerman’s hand—had set up behind the scope of a .30-06 sniper rifle. Neither of these attackers were of much concern to him. But Yazzie, armed with a submachine gun, could definitely be a wrench in the gears.
Reyna Canyon looked to him with terror in her eyes from across the cavernous temple. He held up a hand to instruct her to stay where she was.
He heard someone stumbling down from the waterfall stalactite and stalagmite formation where he had estimated the gunfire to have originated. Not waiting for them to arrive, he rolled forward from his hiding spot, landed in a crouch, and took aim at the armed figure headed toward them. When he realized who it was, a strange warmth passed over him at seeing his little sister alive.
He rushed toward Maggie. She held a 9mm Beretta clutched tightly in her right fist. It was clear that Maggie, having somehow escaped the pit, had dispatched the men who had laid an ambush and shot Marcus. Grabbing his unsteady little sister beneath the shoulders, he carried her back to the rock formation where he had left Marcus and Liana.
Maggie, upon seeing the blood spreading across Marcus’s shirt, pulled away from Ackerman and rushed to Marcus’s side. They didn’t bother checking each other’s wounds. The couple merely embraced one another and kissed deeply, tears streaming down both their cheeks.
Feeling oddly voyeuristic, Ackerman focused his mind on other tasks. Namely, determining where Xavier Yazzie had wandered off to.
105
The joy Maggie felt overshadowed every bit of the hurt and pain. In that moment, when she embraced Marcus, she forgot about everything else. She forgot about the search for her brother and the whereabouts of the man who took him. She forgot about her days in the pit of the dead, her very soul being drained away by the spirits that Yazzie worshiped. In that moment, all she cared about was holding the man she loved, something that she never thought she would get to do again.
They held each other for what felt like an eternity. Maggie felt her tears streaming down and mixing with Marcus’s as she held him cheek to cheek. He was the first to break the silence. He said, “I’m so sorry, Maggie. I should’ve been there for you. I should’ve realized how important it was to find your brother. Everything that’s happened in the past few years should never have happened, because I should’ve dropped everything to help you. I love you, more than anything, and I’m sorry that it takes situations like this to make me realize that.”
Marcus’s statement was punctuated by a cough and a rattling sound in his chest that Maggie hoped wasn’t blood. Pulling away only far enough so that they could talk, Maggie said, “None of that matters now. I’m sorry too. I should’ve never went off on my own. I should’ve trusted you. But we can talk about all that later.”
Marcus squeezed her hand. He said, “There might not be a later. We always think that we’ll have another chance to say what we need to say, but we never know when someone we love is going to be taken away. And I have something very important that I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
A woman, who Maggie recognized as Reyna Canyon, appeared at her shoulder, interrupting Marcus and saying, “What happened to the people shooting at us?”
Maggie, hoping merely to placate the frightened woman, replied, “We’re safe now.”
“We need to find my brother or none of us will ever be safe. It may take him years, but Xavier always gets his revenge.”
Marcus, still holding a compress to the bullet wound in his stomach, said, “Reyna was the one who sent you the photograph, Maggie.”
Reluctantly tearing her eyes away from Marcus, Maggie looked for the first time at the wife of John Canyon and sister to Xavier Yazzie. All she could manage to say was, “Why?”
Reyna’s cheeks were wet with tears. She replied, “I’m so sorry for the things that my brother and husband have done. I should’ve stood up sooner. But John recently discovered that Xavier had been sending his little care packages out to the families of the children we stole.”
“You were involved? You, your husband, and your brother… All three of you were the Taker?”
“My brother had the idea, John had the connections, and I was along for the ride. We always took kids out of bad homes, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter.”
“No, it doesn’t. You’re every bit as bad as the others.”
Reyna directed her gaze to the stone floor but continued, “There’s nothing I can do but say that I’m sorry. I can’t turn back time. I don’t know what happened to all of the kids, but if it helps at all, I know that your brother was given a decent life. I made sure of that.”
Grabbing the other woman by the shirt and pulling her close, she said, “Don’t you dare lie to me. If you know my brother, then where is he now?”
Reyna quickly explained, “We couldn’t sell him once they found out he was a half-blood. The client only wanted one hundred percent caucasians. My brother suggested taking the boy out into the desert and disposing of him, but I wouldn’t have it. I insisted that we find a place for him, and my uncle Red agreed to take him in. We gave your brother a new name and a new life. It might not have been the life he was meant to have, but at least he got to live it. His name now is Jamie Ramirez. He works for my husband. We even got him good enough fake papers so that he could go to the military.”
Maggie went silent as the pieces started to fall into place. Reyna said more, but Maggie was unable to hear. It was as if she had gone deaf or the entire rest of the world had gone silent.
Jamie Ramirez.
She thought back on the young Hispanic man who had pulled her from the pit. Recalling his facial features, she could see a bit of her mother in him.
Her whole body trembled. She felt like a porcelain doll in an earthquake, and she was slowly cracking apart.
Pushing the older woman aside and rushing back up the sloping floor of the cavern, Maggie thought back on the manner in which she had dispatched their two attackers. She had fully intended to kill both of the gunman, but when she had stumbled and fallen back, she found a rock that fit perfectly in her fist. At the time, she had merely figured that the rock would make for a quick and possibly silent knockout. Which hadn’t worked like she intended. Ramirez had squeezed off a shot and required two blows for the knockout. With his partner alerted to the danger, she had been forced to shoot the skinny young man with the 9mm she pulled from the holster on Ramirez’s hip. She didn’t think she had hit Ramirez hard enough to kill him, but she couldn’t be sure. At the time, her only concern had been disarming them and protecting herself and her family.
The joy she had felt only a moment earlier at seeing Marcus was forgotten now, replaced by an all-encompassing desire to find her brother, who had been closer than she could have possibly imagined. After everything she had been through, after all the years of wondering what had happened to him, all the years of searching, all the years pain, and now, she had nearly killed him with her own hands.
As she reached the rock formation from which they had set the ambush, Maggie felt a terrible weight lifted from her when she discovered that she hadn’t killed her brother. Apparently, she hadn’t even fully knocked him unconscious because the man named Ramirez—and his rifle—were gone.
106
Ackerman followed the stink of Yazzie’s fear through the stone corridors, away from the natural rock formation of the temple, to a spot where he could see daylight in the distance. The passage opened upon a collection of Anasazi dwellings sheltered beneath a canopy of rock, all sandstone and amazingly preserved against the ravages of time within the massive alcove. The place was an archaeologist’s dream, reminding Ackerman of the multi-storied ruins of th
e Cliff Palace found at Mesa Verde National Park.
The ancient settlement was built in stair-stepped tiers, likely adhering to the natural formations of the rock. The passageway leading down to the temple exited onto the highest tier of the necropolis. The air here was so hot that it almost smelled burnt. He supposed it was due to some sort of natural current of air traveling up from the canyon beyond. The Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde was built to receive the sun in the winter. Although these structures were completely hidden from the sun, he supposed that the warm air flow more than compensated.
Ackerman held the Peacemaker out in front of him, hoping for the opportunity to use it on its owner. The pistol was better suited for close quarters combat, but now that he was in the open, he unslung the AK-47 that he had retrieved from one of the dead gunmen. Yazzie was armed with a submachine gun and two magazines of thirty rounds where Ackerman had six in the revolver, a dozen shells on Yazzie’s gun belt, and thirty in the assault rifle.
Being outgunned wasn’t a concern, but Yazzie was also relatively uninjured, while Ackerman’s wounds had reopened after the battle at Canyon’s blockade and the hike into the hills. Now, he was again at the mercy of his mortal coil and realized that his body would soon start to shut down from blood loss. He was already feeling woozy, and his eyes were having trouble adjusting to the faint glow that shining in upon the city of the Old Ones.
As he traversed the prehistoric pathways, Ackerman had wondered why Yazzie hadn’t simply turned the MP5 on them at the site of the sacrificial pit. The answer was of course that Yazzie was a forward-thinking tactician. When the first shot rang out, Yazzie seized his opportunity and then let the pieces fall where they may. If his men succeeded in killing his adversaries, problem solved. But what if they didn’t?