Tala stared at her father’s silhouette, high on the cliff above her. “Do these people you tell me are safe know you intended to kill hundreds of millions of others, then rule over them as a king?”
“My child, you have not forgotten how they slaughtered our people and raped our women. Kidnapped our children and sold them into slavery. Where is this misplaced devotion coming from?”
“These people did not do that to us. Nor their parents, nor theirs. What’s more, they didn’t do it to you, or your father, or your father’s father. Those responsible and those affected are long dead. No, Qaletaqa. This is only about you and the omnipotent power you seek. You did not raise a fool in me.”
He leaned down with something in his hand and scraped it on the rocky ground at his feet. A traffic flare sparked to life, spitting red flame as he held it high in his upraised hand. “Come with me or leave here now, Tala. I do not want you to die by my hand or any other’s.”
Tala looked around, but saw nothing for him to light with the flare. Confused, she looked up at him. “Father, these people are good. They all have native blood within their veins, and they help one another. They would help us. They are not seeking power or wealth or anything else; they simply wish to live and take care of one another.”
“You are saying they are good people, but you have only just met them. We do not need their help. We need no one’s help.”
“Yes, they are good, and everyone needs help, father. Even you and me. You, to abandon this delusion that has overtaken you and changed you into a person I would never follow.”
Tala motioned to the cave opening. She now understood what her father intended to do with the signal flare. Upon closer inspection, she had seen the dull, red color of the sticks of dynamite hidden by the cascading foliage on both sides of the cave. When she started to look for more, she found it at the top of the cave opening, too.
“Father,” she said, easing closer to the cave wall in case she had any opportunity to strip the string of explosives from the wall before he had a chance to light the fuse.
“Yes, Tala.”
CB, Lilly, Danny and Georgina were the first to step out of the cave. To her surprise, skinwalkers were beside and behind them, mixed in with the others.
It had worked!
Her father looked down at them, staring speechless for a long time. Looking back up at his daughter, he said, “What have you done?”
“I am a good pupil,” she said, removing the ancient book from her cloak.
“You have only proven yourself a fool.”
“Mr. Qualetaco,” said CB, turning to face the silhouette above them on the ridge. “Whoever’s responsible for doin’ this to the world, whoever got everyone sick and turned ‘em into zombies or skinwalkers or whatever you wanna call ‘em,” he said, “that’s done. Now we just need to figure out a way to move on. You’ve got a smart daughter here, and she’s got a good heart.”
He looked back at the cave entrance and waved someone over. Magi Silver Bolt walked forward, Tommy Rivers by his side.
Tala believed she could see her father’s eyes blaze.
“I underestimated you,” said the old man. “I did not realize you possessed the charms to convince my own daughter to betray me.”
“It’s not about your daughter’s devotion to you,” said Magi Silver Bolt, no fear or hesitation in his voice. “It’s about her goodness, and her heart. It is about her unwillingness to kill others to advance a dream of power.”
“You are ignorant to the ways of this world,” said the old chief. “You and your peers have ignored the old ways and forgotten the history of our people. You are happy idiots, no better and no wiser than those who slaughtered our people and deposited us on plots of wasteland to die off in our own time.”
“It is you who have given up,” said Magi. “I thought you wise when we met. You thought me foolish. Now I know it is the reverse; we recognized the goodness in your daughter; we saw that she, not you, represented the future of all of mankind.”
“Your words are your last, so they are wasted to the universe,” said Qaletaqa. The hand holding the flare twitched to the right.
“He has laid dynamite out on both sides of this cave opening,” said Tala in a low voice. She was not sure if her father could hear it or not, but Cole Baxter was close enough, and he immediately focused on the rock face leading up to the old man.
“Damn, I see a couple of sticks,” he said.
CB touched Georgina on the shoulder and glanced up at Qaletaqa again.
His muscles tensed.
Ω
Garland leaned back, pulling the chain harder when he saw they were almost at the crest of the coming plateau. He quietly slid the rod from its steel sheath and reached down to insert the pin at the end of the long handle into the eye-plate.
The zombiegator continued to walk forward, its craving, dead brain still trusting it would catch up to and be rewarded with the putrid rabbit meat in just a few more steps.
Instead, cresting the rise, it saw the old Indian, standing with his back to them. His long headdress draped all the way down his back to reach the sandy earth, and he held a burning road flare in his hand. It was then that Garland realized what he intended to do.
Flame was used for one purpose; lighting something. That something had to be explosives, which is what was likely feeding out of the bag.
Dynamite, thought Garland. Shit!
He didn’t know how many sticks he’d strung together, but even one stick would devastate the top of this outcropping. They would both die.
Garland crouched down and rested the heavy chain on the ground, placing his foot atop it. The old Indian was exchanging words with someone below them, distracted.
Placing the pack on the ground, he carefully unbuckled the straps and opened the flap.
The smell of putrid, dead guts hit him instantly.
The gator stirred, swishing its tail as the scent drifted in to permeate its dead nostrils.
The old Indian suddenly turned at the noise of the gator’s heavy tail knocking gravel aside. Garland grabbed the pack and sprung to his feet, snatching the eye-plate rod as he rose. The contents of the backpack sloshed inside.
“What is this?” the ancient-looking man said. “What kind of foolishness?”
“Your death, starin’ you in the face,” hissed Garland. He yanked hard on the rod, pulling the eye-plate up with a metallic clang. The zombiegator’s mouth reacted, opening wide, exposing the dozens of sharp teeth as it emitted a low hiss-croak.
But it did not charge forward.
“Go, asshole!” yelled Garland. “Lester!”
The old chief smiled and pulled out a revolver, still holding the half-burned flare in one hand. He held the gun out.
“Oh, not a good move, Mr. Taco.”
Qaletaqa fired. The bullet bounced off the metal plate, ricocheting off a rock and whizzing past Garland’s ear.
As the old man lined up his second shot, Garland dropped the chain and pivoted to his right side with the gut-filled backpack. Rotating counterclockwise, he brought his arms forward and flung the pack forward, keeping hold of it as he mashed it together, expelling the contents through the air.
It splashed the old chief from the top of his headdress to the bottom of his buckskin moccasins, covering his face and dripping from every part of his body.
Lester charged.
Qaletaqa dropped the flare. It was clear of the fuse, but it began to roll.
The huge gator launched itself into the air, mouth opened wide, and clamped down on the chest and torso of the shaman-turned-chief-turned despot. It immediately went into a death roll, twisting and flipping the old man’s body like a limp, rag doll.
Garland felt as if his legs were caught in molasses; he watched as if in slow motion as the road flare rolled directly over the fuse, catching it immediately, like an Independence Day sparkler.
Garland didn’t think – he ran.
Forward. Not backward.<
br />
Three huge steps and he crouched low. Beside the burning fuse was the enormous dead gator, his brutal jaws snapping bones, tearing through the buckskin and feathers, ripping the old man’s 200-year-old body in two, his innards spilling out, further exciting the undead reptile.
Garland, running at full speed, scooped up the fuse and staggered forward, wrapping as much of it around his fist as he could. His momentum carried him forward, and though he had not seen what lay below, he pushed off with his feet as hard as he could.
Ω
Below, as I charged for the wall to grab the string of planted dynamite and try to pull it to the opposite ledge and save all our lives, it suddenly began pulling away by itself.
Confused, I followed the string of tethered dynamite and saw a figure flying overhead, momentum carrying it toward the cliff behind us, and I realized it was none other than Garland Hunter.
He was screaming as he flew overhead, but both hands were pulling on the explosives he’d been moving toward.
Garland’s momentum carried him all the way to the cliff’s edge, and as he dropped, I, Tala, Danny, Lilly and Georgie all jumped to the sides, clearing the way for the string of dynamite to pull away from the vines draping down the face of the cliff to follow him.
The dead weren’t moving out of the way, though, and the fuse got tangled underfoot as Garland plunged over the edge, out of sight.
I charged toward the closest rotter and gave the bastard the Heisman, pushing his frail body with both hands as I ran toward the cliff’s edge, finishing the job and shoving him over.
The fuse wrapped around his legs went along with him, pulling the remainder from the cave wall.
As the last stick slid over the edge and out of view, I let out a sigh of relief. My elation didn’t last long, however, because a split-second later, another shape plummeted from above us, this one landing so hard it shook the very ground upon which we stood.
It was a huge alligator, at least a fifteen-foot male. In its mouth was half a body, a bloodied, feathered headdress twisted among the torn flesh and snapping teeth. That monster of a zombiegator was in a frantic death roll on dry land, spinning and twisting its way toward the ledge where Garland had gone over.
No. Where Garland had flown over. He must have had a helluva running start to pull that whole string of dynamite over that cliff to save us all.
We were all feeling a surge of strength from the ceremony with Tala. Garland probably had no clue where he’d gotten the surge of power from.
The gator kept spinning toward the ledge until its enormous tail slid over. From there it momentarily spun the gator around as if to display the half-man in its jaws.
Not a man. A man-god of his own creation who was almost 200 years old, but who would not survive a day longer. Qaletaqa’s face was centered in the open mouth of the reptile, and it looked like his eyes were wide-open and pure white, his mouth opened in a silent scream.
Both of them slipped over the edge, out of sight.
A series of explosions fractured the silence of the night, the vibrations from which sent dirt and debris cascading down every sheer face of the mountain upon which we stood.
We all scrambled as far from the ledge as we could, huddling near the cave entrance in case the plateau gave way to collapse.
It didn’t. Still, we waited.
A familiar voice called out in the half-moonlit darkness.
“A little help?”
I looked at Georgina, Lilly and Danny. “You hear that?”
“I think so,” said Danny. “But … really?”
I said nothing. Instead, I charged forward, shoving aside the remaining dead milling around the plateau, and reached the ledge. Falling down on my stomach, I stared down.
There was Garland Hunter, clinging to a large tree growing from the side of the sheer, dirt wall. His legs were wrapped around the trunk, and his left hand clutched a root protruding from the cliff face about two feet above his body.
“Everyone okay?” he asked.
“Hell yeah, everyone’s okay. Thanks to you.”
“You know who’s not okay, CB?” asked Garland.
“Who?”
“Me, you asshole! Pull me the hell up!”
I laughed then. When I looked behind me, I simultaneously felt Danny’s arms curl around my legs, holding me steady. “Save his ass, CB,” he said. “He done good.”
“Yeah, he did,” I said. Reaching down, I clasped Garland’s wrist as he clasped mine, and I realized I didn’t strain one ounce to pull his skinny body up.
He let go with his other hand and now we both had double grips on one another. Less than a minute later, we had him resting on his back, both of us breathing steady and calm.
We were all alive.
And we stood to be alive for a century – or more – to come.
Ω
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
EPILOGUE
As we all checked our equipment and vehicles back down at the staging area, getting organized for the ride back to Lebanon, Tala remained inside the cavern above us. The dead inside the cave numbered over a thousand – formerly her father’s army of skinwalkers – but they didn’t bother her.
We intended to leave a good number of the dead in the cave to preserve it from anyone else who might discover the place.
Whether it was the cave itself or the many ancient words and symbols scrawled on its walls, it held great power.
Power we still needed. Some of us, anyway.
Everyone in our traveling group of survivors was now immune to the zombie attraction; we were no different from the skinwalkers in that respect. Still, when we came across them, we killed them.
It wasn’t like they’d die on their own.
When we finally left the cave, Tala insisted on holding the book that Silver Bolt’s friend, Atian Shining Eyes, had pulled from the floorboards of Standing Rock’s home just a few months before. She had made many more entries, though.
We returned to Lebanon only to discover it abandoned, except for five people holed up in a home south of the auditorium, which was filled with damaged, dead bodies.
The Nacogdoche kids who hadn’t come with us, along with the remaining elders of the tribe, had put forth a valiant effort; they had not run with those who had heard the horde coming. They had remained and fought, but the number of skinwalkers was just too great.
All who remained perished. The funerals for the dead took weeks.
During that time, Magi Silver Bolt spent hours with Tala. They went over the ancient languages and drawings she had copied, determining their meaning.
It became clear to them both that the elders who had created the curse had always known how to stop it. It was camouflaged by meaningless text and images scattered among the valid words and symbols, all purely decoys.
Whoever had originally masterminded the destruction of all non-Native life had planned for a way to end it, but only on their terms.
Together, Tala and Magi finally extracted only the meaningful words, putting together the ceremony that would lay the remaining dead to rest.
Ω
On a clear night in January, the biggest fire I’d ever seen was lit.
And I’m a hick, so you gotta figure I’ve seen a few bonfires in my life. The bones of this sucker might’ve been as big as the teepee Silver Bolt told me he almost died in.
Anyway, with the new people who had found us since we got back to Lebanon, our group now numbered 224 people.
The ceremony that had extended our lives and enhanced us in other ways, undertaken within a strange cave with even stranger powers, had to remain a secret. Any mistake – or even some innocent meddling – could begin the apocalypse again. What did we know? Who knew it would be possible in the first place?
Anyway, nobody wanted that. Everyone who underwent the ceremony seemed to understand. If we were now all partially immortal like Tala and her late father, we’d face the years ahead and decide how to deal with any suspicion as
it came up.
Most of us. Almost all of us.
Magi Silver Bolt was now dressed in his finest ceremonial garb; he told me and Danny he felt a bit foolish because he’d never been a chief, and he had never pictured himself in the regalia he had to put on for this thing.
As the sparks flew from the flames, dotting the night sky with orange specs, Magi and Tala, also dressed in a colorful beaded tunic and wearing her own special headdress, danced and chanted, sending the sparks swirling upward and dancing as though even the embers were a big part of it.
This time, it didn’t take days for something to happen. It was immediate.
At first, it looked like a splash of milk on my arm. I looked at it, wiped it away, and looked at Georgie.
“You got something on your nose,” I said.
“What?”
“I don’t know. It’s white.”
“So do you,” she said, wiping something from my forehead.
Then we were being pelted. The drops came slowly at first, scattered, tiny drops. Then they changed to bigger drops. After that, I realized it had become steady, and before we could get up and run, it was a white-out.
Now we had no option other than to stay put and use jackets for cover.
It came down as though from a celestial bucket; pure white. As fast and hard as it came down, and as complete as our inability to see was, it was as though it resisted gravity. It did not sting or pelt us – rather it engulfed us somehow gently.
I know I sound like some kinda damned poet with that crazy description, but that’s the only way I can describe it.
The fire beyond and the darkness of the night aside, it was like standing in the middle of a snowstorm. The droplets became more of a blanket, and if anyone were to move I’m sure they would’ve gone down in two steps.
It wasn’t cold. Despite the night’s temperature, it was almost neutral. Not hot, not cold. Just … wet.
It went on for one minute, maybe two. I’d never seen anything like it, so it could’ve been a half hour before it stopped.
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