Ancient Enemy (13 page)

He looked like a different man. More than could be justified by his younger age. There was something alien on his face, in his eyes. Something I had never seen there before, at least not before his stroke, but something I now saw every day thanks to his paralyzed facial muscles.

Fear.

He stared straight at me from maybe ten to fifteen years ago, from the time before the wrinkles had truly staked their claim to his face and his ears and nose were still proportionate to his other features, from before the flesh started to sag from his jaws and his hair thinned to the point that his scalp showed through. I could almost hear his words, meant for whoever stood where I did right now, some unknown number of years later, words that had failed him when he needed to speak them, forcing him to communicate with his frightened eyes. Words that couldn’t possibly have been meant for me specifically, at least not at that point, because I couldn’t have been more than a toddler back then. Words presumably meant for a son, but since he didn’t have one…

I lost my train of thought when I recognized the face of the man sitting next to him on the tailgate of the same truck that would undoubtedly outlast us all. The man wore a down jacket with feathers protruding from tears in the fabric and a pair of jeans with holes in the knees, through which his dirty long johns showed. His face was so pale he almost looked white, with the exception of the smear of blood on his cheek. His eyes were glassy and had a faraway look I attributed to veterans returning from war, which, perhaps, was exactly what he’d done. My father, not much older than I was now, sitting as far away from his father-in-law as he could get without physically getting out of the truck. He looked so small and scared. It wouldn’t be much longer before that same man abandoned his wife and young son.

I studied him…shorter and thinner than I remembered, with long hair and sideburns, little more than a kid himself. I couldn’t see any of myself in him. He looked so much different than he did in my memory, which grew less distinct with each passing year. There wasn’t a single picture left of the two of us together, if there had ever been any at all. Only him with my mother in the early days, looking happy and carefree, and then nothing, as though when he split my mother had decided she no longer wanted to commemorate a single second of our lives as a family. I looked in his eyes for the evil that had caused him to leave us, but saw only the terror of a child, one who’d drawn his knees up to his chest so they couldn’t possibly touch the bodies lined up with their horns and antlers hooked over the edge of the tailgate so they’d remain sitting up. There were six of them. Four males and two females. All slender and naked. All covered with blood from what looked like the close-range blast from a shotgun.

I glanced back at the other pictures, from the earliest copperplate images of hunting parties of dozens of braves on horseback to the more recent images of men clad in suits ripped out of the Wild West to the pictures of Grandfather’s family, and finally to the fate that had befallen them in the attack on the cabins. For as many of our enemies as we had killed, they had claimed even more of us. All of these heads…they were nothing. For all I knew, there was a cavern just like this one hidden in the mountains, positively overflowing with the trophies of my ancestors.

I studied the most recent collection of heads. My grandfather had brought all of them, not just the most formidable, for these had been the creatures responsible for the slaughter of his entire family. One had the antlers of an antelope projecting like twin scimitars from its forehead, another two the horns of dairy cattle, one the massive horns of a bighorn sheep, and two more the long spikes of juvenile bucks. They’d been cured in salt, but I could still smell the rot. Their eyelashes were knotted and scabrous, the edges of the lids raw, as though they’d been closed so long they’d grown together and then been torn apart in order to see again. Beneath them I could see the bulge of where their desiccated eyeballs had shrunken. They weren’t quite blind, but appeared to be well on their way, arrested during some evolutionary adaptation that would one day make their eyes obsolete like the blind fish and salamanders that lived in caves. Their ears had shriveled to crisp cartilaginous nubs and their lips had receded from their sharp teeth.

And that was it. The end of a story spanning however many thousands of years. Or more. Lord only knew.

I stared at the blank stone wall leading back toward the hole through which I’d crawled and realized that a part of it was reserved for me, that my chapter was the next to be written. And if I were fortunate enough to survive, I would only curse a son who wasn’t even an abstraction in my mind yet to the next section down the line. What kind of monster would I be to willingly do such a thing to an innocent child?

Again, I looked at my father, so young and frightened. I understood now why he left. It wasn’t like that revelation made it any easier, but at least now I knew it wasn’t my fault. It was one thing hunting these creatures the first time, when you didn’t really know what you were up against, but another entirely knowing you would have to do so again at some unforeseen time in the future when these monsters found their way out of the darkness again.

And they always did.

A part of me wanted nothing more than to run away, as well. The difference between him and me, though, is that I wouldn’t. I could not leave my mother and grandfather to their fates to save my own skin. It had nothing to do with bravery or cowardice; it was a decision made out of love for the woman who had given me life and the man who had raised me like his own son. Flawed though they were, they were the only family I had and I wasn’t about to let anything happen to them, despite the fact that I’d never been so scared in my life.

Worse, I was alone.

I crawled back into the kiva and climbed out of the darkness in something of a daze. My mind was a train wreck of thousands of colliding thoughts, all of which ultimately led back to the same question…why didn’t my grandfather tell me? About this. About my father. About everything. I wondered if my mother even knew why my father left her. Like me, she’d undoubtedly combed through every minute detail of every memory in hopes of figuring out what she had done to drive him away. If she could find it, she could fix it, and if she could fix it, we could be a family again. That was why she drank, why she retreated from the rest of us and why she inflicted what could only be a form of penance upon herself. I was furious with my grandfather for not telling me, but I was even angrier with him for what he had done to his own daughter. Maybe bringing us to live with him had been
his
form of penance. I could think of no worse punishment than watching your own child slowly killing herself right before your very eyes.

I understood why he hadn’t told me, though. Without seeing firsthand what these things were capable of doing, there was no way I would have believed him. Even looking at all of these trophies wouldn’t have seemed real without having to butcher the carcasses of the animals they’d torn apart, that I’d listened to being slaughtered in the field.

Maybe he honestly believed he’d killed the last of them. After all, if the pictures were any indication, he’d known they were fighting a war of attrition. Or perhaps he’d simply believed that he would have more time to tell me about it, that the right moment would present itself. It’s not like he was planning to have a stroke. For all I knew, it was the idea of having that conversation with me that had caused the stroke. Or maybe I was just making excuses for him, giving him the benefit of the doubt after taking me in when I would otherwise have had to fend for my alcoholic mother and myself.

The biggest problem was I hated him for chasing off my father and for bringing me into this situation in the first place. That thought alone was enough to cause me physical pain. I wanted to lash out at him, but each time I imagined doing so, I saw his feeble form underneath the blankets and his terrified eyes staring out at me from inside his prison of failing flesh.

I watched the sun though the canopy overhead as I rode Yanaba home. It was far closer to the western mountains than I would have liked. I’d lost track of time down there in the darkness and that was the one thing I simply couldn’t get back. There was an inevitability to the setting of the sun and the impending confrontation that drew me onward with a combined feeling of dread and what I could only describe as destiny.

Yanaba knew her way back to our land, so I let her lead while I used the time to think. To plan. The way I saw it, my first responsibility was to protect my family. I did not want to have to return to this awful place with pictures of a ruined trailer home and two bodies under bloodstained blankets.

And for the first time I wondered what would happen if none of us survived.

TWENTY

I sat at the end of our driveway for several minutes, watching our trailer. The last thing I needed right now was to find my mother waiting for another go-round. I had neither the time nor the patience. I didn’t have to check the clock to know that I was running out of time. The sun would set in maybe five hours and I needed to spend them wisely. I would waste roughly an hour and a half of it traveling to the entrance to their underground warrens, which didn’t leave me very much time for any kind of concerted hunt. And the thought of crawling around in utter darkness in search of creatures with lethal horns on their heads and who navigated the passages using senses I didn’t possess was terrifying. When I went in there, I had to be prepared to bring the entire mountain down on my head if I had to, if for no other reason than because I was the only one left.

I thought back to all of the hunting trips I’d taken with my grandfather, to all of the times he’d tried to show me the old ways and I’d rolled my eyes because I was sitting there with a rifle in my lap. He’d shown me how to make snares for animals, first for small ones, and then for large. And despite my obvious lack of enthusiasm, he’d demonstrated how to do so in painstaking detail. Over and over again until I was old enough to blame it on his dawning senility and wise enough to humor an old man. But it had never been about passing down the traditions I cared so little about or sharing a facet of his life that was no longer relevant in the modern world, had it? Even then he had been training me for just this moment and I hadn’t even suspected it.

The safest thing would be to get my mother and grandfather out of there, just load them in the truck and drive, but where would we go? We had no money, no way of earning any, and it was only a matter of time before my grandfather died. I feared moving him at all would be more strain than his body could physically take, but what was the alternative? Leave him in that flimsy trailer to be butchered if I failed? And what about my mother? She hadn’t left that trailer, let alone that couch, for longer than it took to go to into town in as long as I could remember. There was only one thing I could think to do to keep them safe.

I recalled the picture of the houses with their broken windows and doors and prayed for a miracle.

I was going to have to be quick. More than that, though, I was going to have to be perfect. Any mistakes and the people I loved most would pay for them. I reminded myself that I was only implementing a Plan B and that it would only be necessary if Plan A failed, and if that happened, likely no countermeasures I put into place would be sufficient anyway. It came down to me needing to do what the generations before me had done, and even I wouldn’t have taken the odds on my chances.

I gathered the wood I would need from the stables and allowed Yanaba to graze with her mother while I worked. I wished I could leave her behind, but, regrettably, I was going to need her speed if I was going to make it to Fewkes Canyon with enough sunlight left in the sky to do what needed to be done.

The chicken coop and the goat pen were still locked up tight. A walk around the perimeter of each confirmed there were no glaring holes in either structure, although neither would hold up to any kind of assault. I could hear the does inside bleating for relief from their engorged udders and felt badly when I walked away without easing their suffering. There simply wasn’t the time.

I boarded up the holes where Yanaba had struck the wall with her hooves and carried the remainder of the wood I was going to need to the trailer, where I leaned it against the siding. I left the hammer and nails on the railing of the deck, within easy reach of the door when I came out, and stood there with the knob in my hand, wondering if this would be the last time I would ever do so. I listened for the creaking of floorboards or the sound of voices from the television, anything to betray my mother’s location inside and her state of consciousness, but couldn’t hear a blasted thing over my heart pounding in my ears.

My hand trembled when I turned the knob and opened the door inward with a creaking noise loud enough to wake the dead. At least in my own ears. The shape of my mother stirred beneath the blanket on the couch. I could tell by the lack of smoke rising from the ashtray and the empty bottle beside it that she hadn’t been awake recently, and likely wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon. I felt a pang of guilt. Last night she’d come as close as I’d ever seen to expressing remorse for what had become of our relationship and a genuine willingness to make an effort to try again. And I’d thrown it back in her face. Treated her like the drunk she was instead of the mother she could be. The mother I needed her to be. I was worse than all of the others—the people over in Cortez and even the other members of our tribe in Towaoc—who saw her as the physical embodiment of the stereotype that our once-proud bloodline had become.