The Seventh Stone (10 page)

She snatched up her pack and the sphere, pivoted, dug in her toes and ran. The monsters brayed angrily. Thirty feet to the nearest doorway. Paws slapped at the gravel at her heels. Five feet. A claw tore at the back of her calf. She dove through the open portal, landing hard on the packed earth floor.

The lead beast skidded to a stop at the doorway. He lurched his massive head through the narrow space, his teeth bared in a snarl. A drip of saliva coursed from the point of his canine to the pounded earth floor, landing with a soft fizz. Joseph had said that Skinwalkers could not enter human habitation.

The beast lifted its clawed forepaw, its powerful muscles rippling beneath its ragged black fur. It stepped across the threshold.

The beast stalked towards her. Its breath stank of rotting flesh. But those red eyes, they weren’t the soulless shark eyes of an animal. They were intelligent, scheming. Smart enough to know that she had one option--the open doorway about ten feet behind her, leading back into the cliff dwelling. It would come down to speed, and the animal with four legs would probably win. She spun and sprinted for it. The beast sprang at her.

She ran through and raced towards the far wall, her headlamp beam jagging crazily. The light hit on another opening, darker, narrower, hardly more than a foot wide. It could be a storage room, a dead end. The air smelled old, stale. She’s never fit through. She had to try.

The beast crept into the room, stalking, patient. The armillary sphere, she could heave it at the thing, maybe daze it, or at least distract it. Sacrifice it for a sliver of time to escape through that doorway. She recoiled her arm. “Damn you,” she screamed at it. “Damn you to hell.” She couldn’t let Samuel’s murderers win. She couldn’t let the bastards who shot Joseph grab the prize. She couldn’t let her father down. “You want this? Never!” She pitched the sphere through the narrow portal. She yanked off her pack and threw it in after the sphere, then turned sideways, and squeezed herself into the doorway.

The other two beasts loped into the room. One more foot and she’d be free. Not good. This wasn’t a doorway, it was a stone vise. And it was crushing her. She couldn’t move. The three beasts crouched in a stalking position, haunches tense. The lead beast growled.

This was absurd. She was dead meat. Why weren’t they attacking? She pressed her palms against the coarse sandstone, not caring that it scraped the skin raw. She kicked out with her foot. The lead beast snapped at it. A feint. Did they know that she was between them and the armillary sphere?

A voice seeped through the cool air.
Calm down.
She sensed it, didn’t hear it. Mom’s voice. This was crazy. It’s not like Mom was helping her from the other side. There was no other side. Her heart hammered. Each breath wedged her in tighter. She couldn’t die like this, through the very act of breathing to stay alive. She couldn’t fail Dad again.

She breathed out, emptying her lungs, collapsing her chest. With one last thrust, she pushed through the opening, landing with a hip-bruising thud. The lead beast sprang at the portal. Its claws scraped the stone. It jabbed in its head, snarling, snapping its teeth. Its hoary breath blew hot on her ankles. But its massive haunches couldn’t fit through the opening.

The beasts hunkered down at the threshold of the portal, and began digging with the vicious determination of a bloodhound on the scent. Damn it. They were creating a tunnel of their own, to get to her. She speared her headlamp beam into the darkness. It didn’t reflect back. This wasn’t a storage room. It was the mouth of a tunnel. Joseph’s tunnel.

She leaned into the tunnel, straining to see, struggling to breathe. The air was thin and heavy at the same time.
You can do this, Christa. This mesa is not going to collapse on top of you.
She jammed the sphere into her pack and ran. The tunnel narrowed. She ducked to protect her skull from bashing into the rock. The weight of the sphere shifted wildly in her pack. But this tunnel went uphill, not down.

Up to the top of the plateau, or back down into the valley. It didn’t matter. Anywhere but in the black throat of the cliff and its suffocating darkness. Her elbows scraped against the stone walls. It was getting darker. No, the headlamp was dying. It was a rookie mistake, not checking the batteries when she picked it up along with her new “lucky” pack at the trading post. She couldn’t die here, not in this black loneliness, her desiccated corpse left behind for some future and better prepared explorer to find and place on exhibit. Like they’d find Joseph, his body twisted and abandoned in a tangle of creosote bush.
Hold it together, Christa.

The blackness engulfed her. This was death. Black. Empty. Hopeless. It gripped her with cold, spindly fingers. Her father had never sounded so desperate, so weak when he called last night. She knew he’d been hurt, though he would never admit it. Her father was dying. That was why he had sent her to find the Turquoise. That was why he hadn’t come himself to hunt down a vital piece of his ultimate treasure. She would never see him again. Never be embraced by his love. Never prove herself worthy of his pride.

She ran on. Her hand scraped against the rough rock sides of the tunnel. Her footsteps rasped against the gravel, violating the utter silence. The headlamp died.

She stopped. Her hand was poised in front of her face. She couldn’t see it. Total darkness. She had to turn back. At least that was a way out. She crept backwards. The tunnel was too narrow to turn around. But the retreat would get wider, easier, and lead her out. To what? A cruel, meaningless death, her flesh eaten away? Even that was easier then plunging forward into the black unknown.

Her father wouldn’t turn back. He wouldn’t surrender to fear. She stopped again. She stretched her arm ahead of her as a guide. She stepped forward.

It seemed an eternity before she felt the split in the tunnel, but it was probably only a few yards. She pawed around. The path on the right sloped downhill. It could be a dead end. The top of the plateau was closer than the valley floor. Joseph had said to head downhill. She had to risk he was right, that history was right. She crept downwards.

Another brief eternity, another split in the tunnel. This time both paths headed downhill. It was too loud, the thunder of her heart, the whooshing of her breath through the utter silence. The air smelled old. She couldn’t think. Just choose. Stay right, always right. Her father taught her that, at the dig in the catacombs. If she had to retrace her steps and choose another route, she could.
Never give up
, he said. She hated when he said that, but it kept him alive. The path plunged downward, a steep drop. Her boots slid on the slick rock.

Then, in the still air, a hint, no, a definite wisp of fresh, river-cooled air. She crawled towards it, the distant splash of water over rock, and the sweet fragrance of the cottonwood trees.

A light at the end of the tunnel, ahead, a brightening, a gray, not black. Heaven wouldn’t have looked as glorious. Oh God, Dad was right. Never give up. She still had time to save him. Moonlight wove its way through a rough tumble of sage overgrowing the small opening, no more than three feet across and high. She yanked at the sage branches, snapping pieces away, releasing a distinctive herbal scent. She bulldozed her way through the last layer of brush. The spindly branches scratched and scraped her arms and legs. The pain felt like life.

Joseph was right. She had arrived at the bottom of the canyon, a dry, sandy area about twenty yards from a sharp bend in the river, a hundred yards downstream from where she and Joseph had climbed up to the cliff dwelling. Joseph could be back there, somehow miraculously survived the fall. Samuel’s assailant had. Joseph needed help, fast.

She snugged her pack straps tight, raced upriver along the rock wall, careening around the bend in the canyon. She stopped short, her clunky hiking boots clattering the loose rock, and ducked back behind the angle of the canyon. Like they hadn’t seen her, two of them. The bad guys. She plastered herself against the cliff, a sage brush poking at her bare thighs. The river ran fast and shallow here, as it angled down the valley. She strained to hear above the noise of its water splashing and coursing over the polished boulders. No shouts of alarm, but definite voices, coming this way, in a hurry.

Run or retreat. A cavalry riding to her rescue would be nice right now, but that only happened in old westerns with happy endings. The jeep, and any chance of returning with outside help, was parked across the river. Midstream was completely in the open. Easy target, especially slowed down by those slippery rocks.

She pivoted and retreated, racing across the short open ground between the river and the opening to the tunnel back into the cliff. Three gunshots blasted the sand in front of her feet. That stopped her. That meant they didn’t want her dead, not yet. A second chance. One day her optimism was going to get her killed.

“
You will not find escape in retreat,” the voice was nasal, just loud enough to be heard above the rushing water.

If he thought fortune cookie philosophy was going to creep her out, he was right. What kind of man shoots first, plays word games later? She raised her hands and pivoted towards him, first taking in the beefy guy on the right with the smoking gun barrel protruding from his meaty paws. He wore a badly tailored black suit. He looked like he’d just buried a bullet-riddled body in a shallow grave. He was six-two, massive enough to make linebacker, but no doubt suspended from school too often to get a football scholarship, opting instead for a PhD from the school of hard knocks. White shirt, no tie, even the silvery moonlight couldn’t soften his jagged features.

A stout man came up beside him. This shorter guy shook his wet, clinging pant cuff with each step, but that’s where any resemblance to a puppy ended. He wore a pristine khaki safari shirt and pants and an orange neckerchief. His Tilley hat brim cast a moonshadow upon a face that was as pale and smooth as moonlight on river-polished granite, marred with eyes like black pinpricks. His cheeks were flaccid, his chin, weak. He had the look of a man who was teased and lonely as a boy who had spent his formative years trying to prove himself worthy. His arrogant smile implied he’d been defiant, or ruthless, enough to succeed.

Their vehicle was equally dark and built to overpower. A hundred yards up and across the river, a four-wheel drive, oversized SUV, its black exterior dusted with red sand, was parked next to Joseph’s beat-up Jeep Wrangler. The SUV’s headlights blasted the cottonwoods with light.

The stout man tipped the brim of his hat with gloved fingers. “I am the Prophet,” he said. Just the kind of nutcase her father’s eternal quest for the Breastplate attracted. “Perhaps you’ve seen my website. I have thousands of loyal followers,” he spread out his arms, “worldwide.”

Reality check time. Christa glanced around. Still in the desert wilderness, bad guy pointing a gun at her, mysterious armillary sphere feeling really heavy in her pack, poking into her shoulder blades. Who was this internet prophet? “A friend of mine,” she dared to point upriver, “he may be hurt. I think he fell from the cliff.”

The Prophet clasped his hands. “The Navajo shaman,” he said. “He’s fine, a tad bruised mind you, shoulder wound, but he didn’t fall far before catching onto a ledge and climbing down. My man is with him.”

“
Thank God,” Christa said, but the fact this guy had shot at her didn’t inspire relief.

The Prophet laughed, soft, a kitten laugh. “Yes, well put, thank God,” he said. “It is my life’s goal, to save people.” He nodded to the man on his right, who raised his pistol level with her heart. “I need what you have found.”

The easy thing to do would be to tug that armillary sphere out of her pack and toss it to him. But the easy thing never came easy to her. And they had Joseph. “I need to see my friend first,” she said. Her voice actually cracked in fear. She swallowed, hard. Allow the predator to smell fear, and the prey was doomed.

He nodded approvingly. “I knew you’d be worthy,” he said. “You and I are here together for a reason. My new religion will bring peace to the people. You can be a part of it. The artifact you found will lead me to the catalyst my followers are waiting for.”

He still hadn’t said armillary sphere, nor Turquoise, nor Breastplate. He didn’t know what they’d found. Like most prophets, he spoke with authority in order to deceive with ignorance. As much as she wanted to believe Joseph was alive, belief was not reality. “Where’s Joseph?” she said. She could still try for the tunnel. Once inside, that thug was too big to pursue her. But he could shoot her.

“
It all comes down to that,” he said, “what and whom you believe.”

He must have sold patent medicines in a former life.

“
I know you’ve lost a loved one,” he said. “I, too, lost a parent to violence. I want redemption, like you. And we shall find redemption, working together.”

Lost a parent? Redemption? Her legs trembled. Her knees turned to rubber. He couldn’t possibly know how her mother died. Nobody knew. “You killed Joseph,” she said. She wanted to run. She wanted to fight. She wanted to kill this guy.