Ancient Enemy (17 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Stella and David
stared at the front door. They could hear Cole beating on the door and demanding to be let in. Cole said it was only him and that Jose had been shot. But could she believe him?

David touched Stella’s hand. He nodded his head yes.

Stella nodded back at David, and she took a deep breath. She moved close to the door and talked through it. “It’s only you, Cole?” she asked.

“Yes,” Cole answered, and there was panic in his voice. “You have to hurry. I can hear something out in the trees. It’s something big.”

Stella looked back at David one more time, making sure. Then she opened the door and Cole rushed inside.

Stella closed and locked the door. She twisted the knob for the deadbolt. Then she backed away from the door and stared at Cole.

Cole stood only a few feet away from Stella, closer to the kitchen. He looked very cold even though he was only outside for a few minutes, but he didn’t have his coat, hat, or gloves. He stood very still and stared at her.

Stella began to wonder if she’d made the wrong decision letting him in.

“You were going to leave me out there?” Cole asked Stella in a strangely calm voice. “Leave me out there in the cold? Out there with that thing?”

“I … I had to be sure,” she told him.

“I just killed another friend of mine to save you and David. How is that not enough?”

“You’ve seen now what that thing can do,” Stella answered quickly, a sudden anger in her voice. “I had to be sure it was really you.”

Cole walked away from Stella and let out a long breath. He inhaled deeply, trying to calm himself down, trying to think rationally. But he’d been through so much in the last few days, seen things he never thought were possible, hadn’t had much sleep or food, and now thinking rationally was a little more difficult than it used to be.

He grabbed the bottle of whiskey and took a sip, letting the fiery liquid relax him a little. He turned and looked at Stella who stood in the same spot in the living room, staring at him. He had frightened her, but at least she was trying to trust him.

She had trusted him enough to let him back inside, and he needed to trust her. “This is what it’s been leading up to the whole time, isn’t it?” he asked Stella.

She nodded yes.

“This is the same thing that it led up to at the dig site, isn’t it?”

Stella glanced at David, and then she looked back at Cole. She sighed heavily and nodded. “Yes.”

“Why does it want us to kill David? He’s just a kid. Why doesn’t it just come in here and do it?”

Stella hesitated for a moment, staring at Cole. “I don’t think it can,” she finally answered him. “I think it’s afraid of David for some reason. I don’t think it’s able to kill David so it needs others to do it. It tries to scare others so badly that they will do anything it wants – even kill a little boy.”

There was a pounding on the front door.

They all jumped.

From the other side of the door, they heard Jose’s voice. “Cole, let me in! I’m not dead yet!”

They all stood very still and stared at the door.

“I need help,” Jose continued from out on the porch. He beat on the door again. “Please, I’m bleeding bad, man. Please don’t leave me out here!” They could hear that Jose was beginning to cry. “Please don’t leave me out here with this thing!”

Cole took a step towards the door; he rested his hand on top of the butt of his gun that stuck up from the waistband of his pants.

“I won’t hurt David,” Jose said from behind the door. “I promise. Just let me in.”

Cole took another step closer to the door, he stared at it. It couldn’t be Jose, Cole thought to himself. Jose had to be dead by now. Or taken by that thing out there.

“We’ll think of another way,” Jose said from the other side of the door. “Like you said, we’ll think of something else. We won’t kill David.”

As Cole stared at the door, he took another step towards it. David jumped off the couch and ran across the floor to Cole. He grabbed Cole’s hand and took it in his own hand, like a son would grab his father’s hand. Cole looked down at David who stared up at him.

“It’s not him anymore,” David told Cole in a soft voice.

Cole nodded down at David. “I know,” he told him.

There was a sudden flurry of poundings on the door. Jose screamed at them from the other side of the door, and his voice was no longer pleading; now it was angry. “You’re going to be very sorry, Cole! It will get you just like it got me! It won’t let you die. You just go on and on. Just like Frank! Just like Trevor!”

Jose’s voice turned deeper as he continued shouting, his voice became more guttural, more demonic. “Kill the boy, or it’s going to be bad. So bad. Worse than you can possibly imagine!”

There was a rush of wind from outside and the door shook and rattled in its frame.

And then everything was deathly quiet.

Cole looked down at David who still held his hand and stared up at him with his dark eyes.

Cole knelt down and got on the same eye level as David. “Don’t worry, David. We’re not going to hurt you. We’re not going to give you to that thing outside. We’ll find a way out of here. I promise.”

David stared at Cole for a moment, then he jumped at Cole and hugged him, squeezing him tightly, his eyes shut, a few tears slipping out of his eyes.

Cole was a little shocked by David’s sudden hug. He glanced over at Stella who watched them. She wiped away a stray tear from her eye.

David let Cole go and he ran back to the couch.

Cole got back up to his feet and he looked at Stella. “We have to try and run,” he told her.

Stella just stared at him.

“But we can’t run at night,” Cole went on. “We need to get through this night and leave in the morning.” Cole pulled Jose’s gun out of the waistband of his pants from under the back of his shirt. He held it by the barrel and walked over to Stella. He handed it to her.

Stella took Jose’s gun.

“Do you know how to use one of these?” Cole asked her.

Stella looked down at the gun in her hand, and then in a blur of motion, she expertly checked the clip for bullets, then popped the clip back in. She racked a bullet into the chamber, and then checked to make sure the safety was on.

Cole stared at her in amazement.

Stella gave Cole a small smile. “I taught myself how to use guns a few years ago. A girl by herself at remote dig sites can be a little unnerving.”

Cole smiled. “You’re full of surprises.”

He looked at the front door. “Since we’re going to be stuck here for the night, I think it’s a good idea to barricade the front door and windows.”

CHAPTER FORTY

The night was
eerily quiet and calm. There was no winter wind whistling in the eaves around the cabin. There were no sounds of Frank or Jose calling out to them from out in the snow. No sounds of footsteps on the front porch. Everything was just … quiet.

Earlier in the night Cole barricaded the front windows and doors as best as he could. He managed to tear apart the dining room table and chairs so he could use the wood for the barricades. He used the hammer and various nails he’d found earlier in the cabinet underneath the sink. He used slats from underneath the beds and nailed the pieces of wood over the back door and the windows that looked out onto the front porch. They shoved Needles’ recliner against the front door; it wasn’t much of a barricade, but they didn’t want to use the couch as a barricade because none of them wanted to sit in the chair that Needles had occupied for so much of the time he was in the cabin. They upended the dining room table and shoved it against the entrance to the hallway. It closed off the bathroom to them, but they would just have to make do.

None of them wanted to go into the bathroom anyway after what happened to Trevor.

It was late, nearly two o’clock in the morning. David fell asleep on the couch. Cole and Stella sat on the floor in front of the couch, like they were guarding David.

Stella had Jose’s gun beside her on the floor. She stifled a yawn, trying to stay awake.

Cole looked at her. “I just wanted you to know that this was supposed to be my last bank job.”

Stella stared at him for a moment. “You guys seemed like an experienced group.”

“I used to be a part of Frank’s crew. Then I quit. But then Trevor got involved with them. He ended up owing Frank some money – a lot of money – and I needed to help them with one last job to help Trevor pay him back.”

Stella nodded.

“I don’t expect you to believe me; I just wanted to tell you that this was going to be my last time.” Cole thought for a moment. “I was really trying to change. I just wished I would’ve changed a little sooner. Before I got Trevor involved …”

“I’m sorry,” Stella said in a soft voice. “I’m an only child. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to lose a brother.”

They were both quiet for a long moment in the murky cabin. They had turned all the lights off except for the light over the stove.

“How did you get away from that dig site in New Mexico?” Cole asked Stella.

Stella looked at Cole, trying to determine if there was any accusation in his eyes or in the tone of his voice.

“You said your vehicles wouldn’t start,” Cole continued. “And then you said that the thing out there was taking your friends one by one.”

Stella sighed. “Even before I realized that the thing out there wanted David, I began to suspect that there was something … something special about David.” Stella stole a quick glance at David – he was still sleeping peacefully. “When the thing asked the few of us who remained to kill David, I began to believe that it needed us to kill David because it couldn’t do it by itself.”

“So David is …” Cole thought for a moment, trying to find the right words. “He’s special. Like powerful. Like you think he has powers?”

“There were only a few of us left,” Stella said in a low voice, looking away from Cole. “And Jake, my friend, he hadn’t been taken yet. But Jake and the others wanted to kill David. They felt like it was their only way out. I tried to convince them that once we gave it what it wanted, it wouldn’t let us go. It would just kill all of us because it wouldn’t need us anymore. But I couldn’t convince them, they had their minds made up, they wanted to kill David. So I took him and I ran to my truck.”

“And you knew it would start?”

“Yeah, I had a feeling it would,” Stella answered him. “It was a big gamble, but it was the only choice I had left.” Stella didn’t mention to Cole that she had watched Jake slit his own throat rather than let that thing take him alive.

They were quiet for a moment.

Stella thought of the things David had drawn in his book. She needed to take another chance right now, she needed to trust Cole. “I want to show you something else,” she said. “I want to trust you. And I want you to trust me even though I know you don’t have any reason to since I’ve hidden so much until now …”

“You had to,” Cole said quickly. “I understand why you did it.” Cole thought of her trusting him, and then he thought of the secret he’d kept to himself all this time – the snowmobile in the garage. But who knew if it would even work. The snowmobile could be old or damaged. Or maybe that thing out there knew it was there. Maybe that thing could read minds and had learned of the snowmobile from Cole’s thoughts.

Cole pushed the thought of the snowmobile out of his mind as Stella turned and carefully pulled the spiral notebook out from under David. She opened the notebook and showed Cole what was inside.

He took the notebook and flipped through page after page of what looked like some kind of symbols. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at, but it seemed like some kind of ancient language.

He looked at her, not really understanding what he was looking at.

“It’s the Anasazi language,” she told him in an awed voice.

Cole shook his head a little. “David’s been writing in this language?” Cole shrugged his shoulders like it shouldn’t be a big deal. “Isn’t David Native American?”

“Yes. I’m pretty sure he’s Navajo; most likely full-blooded. But he’s never told me much about himself.”

“But this Ana … ana …”

“Anasazi. Like I told you before, they lived hundreds of years ago and then they vanished. No one knows where they went to. Some say they intermingled with other tribes, or even became other tribes. Some say they left the area. Others even speculated that the Anasazi were the remnants of the Maya who also built massive cities and then abandoned them. But no one knows for sure.”

Cole nodded his head.

“The Anasazi, like many ancient peoples of North and South America, had no written language, or at least no significant evidence had ever been found.”

It was beginning to sink in a little to Cole.

“There have been bits and pieces of Anasazi symbols found, but not much, not enough to get a clear overview of any kind of language. It’s sort of like Egyptian hieroglyphics.”

Cole nodded; he’d heard of Egyptian hieroglyphics before.

“I asked David how he learned how to write all of this, but he said he didn’t know.”

Cole glanced down at the notebook which was filled with page after page of symbols. All this time in the cabin David had been scribbling down these symbols, one after the other. He looked at Stella. “Can you read it?”

“I can recognize some of the symbols, enough to know that it’s from the Anasazi culture, but I can’t make enough of it out to understand any of it.”

Cole sighed, thinking this over. “So David definitely has something to do with all of this. He has some kind of powers, he knows about that thing out there.”

Stella sat up a little, becoming a little excited, her eyes lit up a little in the darkness of the cabin. “The word Anasazi is a Navajo word,” she continued. “A lot of times the word is translated as Ancient Ones. But a more accurate translation is Ancient Enemy.”

“So the Navajo called this tribe their ancient enemies?” Cole asked.

“That’s what most scholars believe. But I have a different theory.”

Cole waited for Stella to continue. He could tell that she was a little excited, archeology was definitely her passion.

“I believe that Anasazi wasn’t a word that the Navajo used to name the tribe, I believe it’s a word they used to describe the beings that took the Anasazi and caused them to vanish.”