Category:CC
Rating: MATURE - ADULT (Violence and some sexual content)
Summary: The night after the escape from the white room....
Spirit Walk
They lay exhausted in the overturrned van, wanting little more than protection from the cold, a little rest, and a chance to hide in the darkness until morning. But even these simple wants were not to be. The Forward Looking Infrared scanner of the helicopter hovering far above had long ago picked out their small heat signatures in the junkyard, identifying two large warm-blooded animals, traveling together. New Mexico was not a populous state and this part of the state was particularly barren. The identification was certain enough, and the members of the special unit activated their night vision goggles as they approached the junkyard. Their orders were clear, use TASERS for the boy, the alien who was needed for study. The girl..??? Just a common teenager, but a potential public relations complication. It would be better if she just disappeared altogether.
The first hint of the attack to the two teenagers was the snipers bullet that went through the windshield of the van. It had been fired at the center of mass of the girl, but the curvature of the window had distorted the sight picture. As the bullet went through the windshield it struck her not in the heart, but in the mid-abdomen. The damage was significant and would have been lethal within seconds, had the boy not started to heal her. But before the healing was complete it was interrupted as the other agents closed on him. The TASER darts reached out for him but were at first deflected back by the white light from his hands. They charged the boy then, and two agents died quickly before the remaining four scored with their TASERS. 50,000 volts went through his body from each of the four TASERS and yet the boy struggled, and nearly managed to reach one more agent, before his muscles locked in spasm. They dragged him into the waiting car as well as the bodies of their two fallen fellows. They'd seen the hit on the girl, they knew she was gone, and the junkyard was as good a place as any for her.
Liz Parker lay there unconscious, her energy almost spent even before the impact of the bullet, the loss of blood. She was not dead but hovered in some nether world, balanced there, teetering between life and death. Her body slowly strengthened but her brain was still reeling from the shock of the last day, the shock of the attack, the shock of her near-miss with death.
The spirit of Dahteste wandered through the New Mexican Desert. This was her home. She remembered her childhood here, remembered her rites of puberty here, remembered her decision to take the way of the warrior and the way of the shaman. She remembered the good times, riding with Geronimo, raids on the Mexicans and on the US Cavalry. She also remembered the bad times, prison in Florida and in Oklahoma when the government of the whites had broken their word to her people. She remembered her return to this land of the mountain gods, the Gan. She remembered growing old, even her death. This was her land and the land of her people. It would always be hers.....
Dahteste looked down at the body of the girl laying where the boy had dragged her behind the overturned van. There was yet a spark of life there. She knew this was a private quarrel, and it was not the Mescalero way to intrude on the battles of others....and yet, it had been many years since she had felt the thrill of battle and the agents who had done this to the girl, who had taken the girls man from her were agents of the same government that had treated her people so unfairly for all those many years. There was still a debt of blood owed them.
She looked at the raven hair of the young girl. She could have been Mescalero this one, Dahteste thought. And had she been she would have been taught the skills needed to survive in the desert, the skills needed to fight the Mexicans and the US government.
She was not too young to be a warrior, not by Mescalero standards, but she was untutored in the skills she would need. And she had no teacher so she would die in this desert, die without being able to claim vengeance against those who had done this to her, those who had stolen her man from her. It was not the way of the Mescalero to intrude into the fights of others, but perhaps this was not entirely a personal fight after all, Dahteste thought. And it was the way of the Mescalero to teach their children, and perhaps for a while she would claim this young woman as her child or her younger sister.
When Liz Parker awakened she was alone in the desert, the sun just beginning to rise. She was still cold, still somewhat weak, but for some reason no longer afraid. They had taken Max, but Max still lived. She would know if it were otherwise. And she knew this land, she realized, although she wasn’t sure why she knew it. It was the land of the Mescalero.
The roots of the yucca were bitter, but they provided water and a starchy nutrition for Liz Parker as she slowly circled back toward the mountains above the abandoned Air Force base. She found the ancient trail and walked past the petroglyphs at the base of it, surprised at how familiar something could seem, even though she knew she’d never been there before.
Her feet seemed to guide themselves to the narrow cleft in the rock wall, and even as her hands dug through the rocks and earth piled there she wondered why she’d come here. The leather was hard and brittle, made so by decades of resting in the desert. The rifles there were beyond use from corrosion, and the cartridges were green with corrosion, but there were two knives and a lance that had survived from the long ago buried weapons cache. The knife in her hand comforted her somehow, as if carrying a long lost friend. She gathered agave and prickly pear then and risked a small fire to roast it before eating, filling her belly.
Somehow the trail to the small spring deep in a cleft in the mountains seemed familiar to her feet, she really didn’t understand why. She rested in the shade in the heat of the day, preparing for her work that night.
The moon was full as Liz Parker moved down from the hills toward the access road to the old airbase. Her face was darkened by charcoal from the fire, her body daubed with mud from the small stream beneath the spring. She carried the lance and both knives. They would serve her until she had better weapons.
It truly wasn’t that the two agents in the open top jeep were incompetent. One had been, a couple decades previously, in Marine Recon. It’s just that for too long they had been the hunters, and actually considered patrolling in defense of the facility somewhat demeaning and they were therefore somewhat bored. And they had long forgotten that hunters could be hunted too.
When they saw the body lying still beside the road in the night desert, they brought the jeep quickly to a stop. As he held the searchlight on the body while his assistant held a gun in one hand and prodded the body with a stick in the other, the former Marine Recon agent thought to himself curiously, ‘Hey, those clothes look just like the ones on that girl I took out with the sniperscope yesterday.’ When the body moved easily with the lightest push of the stick, the second agent reached forward and grasped the clothes. He looked only briefly, then turned back to say, ‘These are just empty clothes, stuffed with weeds. There’s nobody in them.’ By this time, however, he was talking to himself.
He seemed confused or even irritated, shouting more loudly, "Hey Bob, there’s nobody here, it’s just some clothes.”
The lance came out of the glare of the lights so quickly he was never really sure of what killed him. His scream was brief, and silence returned to the desert, broken only by the howl of a coyote off in the distance.
Although they heard nothing on the radio from the missing two man patrol, the static of the carrier wave filled the night. ‘Either those two had broken the damn radio, or they’d dropped it somewhere,’ thought the lead agent in the second jeep as he drove through the dark.
The headlights shining down the dirt road revealed the overturned jeep at the bend of the road, the body of one of the missing agents partially trapped underneath. The other agent was nowhere to be seen, perhaps all the way under the vehicle, perhaps enroute to the nearest telephone to get help. The lead agent sent his fellow to provide first aid while he keyed the mike to get help. “There’s been a rollover accident on the curve between milepost 4 and 5. We’re going to need medical personnel.” As he finished the radio call a blow to his head rendered him unconscious.
The other agent briefly checked the body on the ground and looked back into the headlights in shock and amazement. “Frank, Jim has had his throat cut.” As he waited for a reply the lance again knifed out of the glare of the headlights killing him instantly.
Dahteste could feel the discomfort in the spirit of Liz Parker. While she was not young in years, certainly old enough to be a wife, a mother, a warrior, she was young in experience in the ways of the Mescalero. The woman wished for an easy way, but the way of the warrior was never easy and the task she had set for herself was a difficult one.
These men had chosen to be her enemies and they’d paid the price enemies pay when they were careless and arrogant. Dahteste thought it quite likely that the woman herself would die before the task she had set for herself could be done, but it was not the Mescalero way to flee death, but rather to die well. Dahteste would teach her this.
What she had done so far was but a foretaste of the battle that still lay ahead of her if she was to steal back her man from the government men and they were yet many in number and she was only one. But Dahteste would embrace her younger sister, and lead her on the path. She would succeed or die a warriors death, for that was the Mescalero way.
Frank Abbott awoke in the cave, naked to the waist and bound hand and foot. There was a small fire burning at the mouth of the cave, a young and fairly attractive girl squatting there covered only with mud and charcoal, slowly pulling Pinon branches out of some clothing and feeding them into the fire. The fire crackled loudly, the strong scent of the Pinon filling the small cave. Abbott felt his head throb and could sense matted blood around the bruise and laceration where the club had struck him. He groaned slightly, and he saw the girl turn toward him. The smoke made his eyes water and the smoke made him cough as he analyzed the situation. ‘This didn’t look so bad,’ he thought. Whoever had knocked him out had apparently left him here in the keeping of this little girl. She couldn’t be more than 16 or 17, probably 105 pounds. If he could get a single hand free, he could overpower her. Then if he could find his KaBar…… He started working at his bindings as she turned to him.
“Where’s Max, and what are your plans for him?”
Despite the throbbing pain in his right temple, he had to laugh. A naked little girl, smeared with mud and charcoal thought she was going to interrogate him? He knew who Max was, Max was the creature they’d captured last night, the one that was being held sedated until he could be transferred to the secure facility in California, now that the old airbase had been compromised. But if this naked child thought that he was going to tell her anything, she was wrong.
“Who is Max?” he said with a grin. The grin faded when he saw the girl’s eyes. The grin went away altogether when he saw her pull out of the coals of the small fire his own KaBar, most of the blade glowing red.
An hour later he was unaware that he’d given her all the information he had, unaware that he had ceased even to scream, unaware that he’d spent the last 20 minutes pleading with the young girl to have mercy, to finish him quickly. He had in fact ceased to be aware at all and would never be aware again.
With two jeeps and four men missing for the last three hours the senior agent at the airbase could no longer pretend that the situation was under control, whatever the situation was. He needed information and he needed it fast. Sending out two people at a time and losing two people at a time was now an obvious losing strategy.
For years security had been about keeping people out, or capturing people in quick snatch operations, not defense of themselves from attack. The rules had changed somewhat, when they’d been attacked and the boy had been helped to escape. Somehow someone was changing the rules again, and picking off security agents.
He ordered almost half of his remaining security personnel, nine in all, to go to the armory, get night vision goggles, automatic weapons, grenades, whatever they needed and to find out for sure what was going on, without taking anymore casualties. Then he called up California and told them to expedite that damn plane. The sooner they could get the kid locked up safe in California the better off they’d all be.
The two guards at the armory helped arm the three jeeps. .30 caliber machine guns, light antitank weapons, night vision goggles, sniperscopes with night vision sights, nothing was spared.
As the eight men mounted up to go down the dirt road the senior agent indicated to the junior armory guard that he should come too, “The boss wants three to a jeep, and we are running low on people here.” Grabbing his own automatic rifle, he mounted up, putting on his night vision goggles as the three jeeps drove off into the moonlight with no lights showing.
They faded from sight quickly, but the remaining guard still looked in their direction, hearing the motors accelerate away. He should have been looking at the edge of the Malpais, where a small mud covered figure had made her way through the lava flow and under the concertina wire to within 30 feet of the open armory door. The fading noise of the distant jeeps more than covered the noise made by the young woman in her final stealthy rush, and almost covered the noise of his final gasp of breath.
Dahteste was pleased with the progress of her young sister. She knew how to do things that even Dahteste herself did not know, useful things, valuable things, knowledge that would have served Dahteste well back when she had ridden with Geronimo those many years ago. The warrior spirit was blossoming in the woman, and Dahteste felt pride, as if she had given birth herself to this new warrior.
‘Kee-riiist, could it get any worse than this,’ thought the senior agent. ‘Three dead, one missing, both jeeps destroyed. Two dead from…..spear wounds? Who in hell fought with spears? And one with his throat slit. And Frank was missing.' Frank his number two man, tougher by far than most of the ones that were still left.
He’d called the nine troops back in. They’d take defensive positions, make whoever was doing this come to them, where they’d have the numerical advantage and the advantage of fighting from fixed positions with overlapping fields of fire. They’d get the kid out in the morning, and then they’d go on a little hunt of their own. As he checked for the second time about the progress of the aircraft, he heard the three jeeps returning.
The nine agents returning in the three jeeps had their night vision goggles on, but their minds were elsewhere. Their minds were on the violent and unexplained deaths of three of their colleagues. Someone was good, damn good. They’d proved that by taking out those three guys with contemptuous ease and apparently using antique Indian artifacts to do it.
And what in hell had happened to Abbott? That SOB was REALLY tough. Was he still out there somewhere chasing after whoever had done this? Didn’t seem likely. He was probably out there somewhere with a spear through him too.
At last they saw the lights of the gate, the glare from the gate lights magnified in their night vision and briefly overloading the phosphors. They turned off their NVGs the last 300 meters from the gates, but because of the use of the NVGs their eyes had lost their dark adaptation. Because of that even the light of the full moon was not enough for them to see the line of a half dozen slightly convex canisters along each side of the narrow dirt road, let alone read the lettering stenciled on those canisters that faced them, “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.”
