A few weeks after my sister Lina disappeared, I shouldered my backpack and headed out to a ghost town in the desert, looking for a taste of oblivion.
My preferred place to get shit-faced was the crumbled-down ruin of Blileytown, a flyspeck on maps of the 1890s that was once a thriving New Mexican coal mining community. Today, all that remains are the remnants of a chapel and a lonely windmill. I hitched a ride out of Gallup with some affable Indians who shared a joint and warned me of the danger for a woman out here alone. They dropped me off at the crossroads, and I hiked another half mile through the deep maroon dusk along a barely visible, rutted track.
Most of the night that followed is a mishmash of skewed recollection and haywire dreams, a smear of honey and shit on the back of my tongue that I can’t seem to scrape off. Near sunset, I arrived at the tumbled-down church of San Felipe, whose tiny, walled graveyard provided some shelter from the clamorous wind. Cactuses clawed at the twilight, and a small tribe of tumbleweeds piled inside the courtyard like a collection of severed heads. I hunkered down with my back to the wall and my feet on a splintery cross. I unpacked my works to the cries of coyotes dismembering a kill, and shot up with skag I’d bought from my dealer, and sometimes fuck buddy, Orlando.
He hadn’t lied about it being good shit. Everything mellowed and merged. For a moment, the world seemed surreally pristine, like the scenes on the souvenir beer mugs in the gift shop at the Fire Rock Casino. I flopped onto my back and watched a fat, flirtatious moon perform a splendid fandango behind silken clouds, and I began dreaming the most erotic and terrible dream. I was as high as the Big Dipper and swoony on liquid legs. I twirled out of the graveyard and went traipsing about willy-nilly, meandering among the piñons and creosote bushes in dizzy loops and zigzags, embracing the creaking windmill like we were old chums, calling out to my sister and praying to God that Mami was wrong, that the skinwalker called the Minotaur hadn’t gone off with her soul.
Lina didn’t answer and neither did God, which didn’t surprise me, so I played kickball with the tumbleweed heads and watched a leggy tarantula, resplendent in reddish-brown fur, size me up from its dark hidey-hole. I yahooed to the nude, shameless moon, and the moon leered right back as I whipped off my t-shirt and draped it over the wing of an owl soaring past. The night wind hardened my nipples while stray stars swarmed in my hair, and I swanned around, sighing with bare-breasted glee, aglow in the solace of utter aloneness until I stumbled upon the remains of a dead woman, her bones bare on the moon-dappled sand.
Predators had shredded her clothing and scattered her bones, but cloth clung to some stray ropes of tendon and black hair tufted her bug-ridden scalp. She’d worn a white bra, and a chipped tooth gleamed at the side of her skull.
The bones were helter-skelter, most of them half-buried. In a trance, I picked over them carefully, like a shopper selecting a cutlet for dinner. I decided to pocket a finger bone so that I could later prove to myself the dead woman wasn’t just a dream.
While I was bone-picking, the moon tiptoed away behind furrows of cloud. A meteor derailed from its arc and slammed under my ear, and ten shades of scarlet clawed inside my skull. I became legless, an amputee floating in warm, summer air, while tarantulas erupted out of the earth and pattered over my skin, seeking the warm crannies and niches where their kind likes to nest. When I screamed, they crammed themselves into my mouth. I tasted blood and heard a low, throaty bark. A naked man with a bull’s head loomed over me, rampant and gleaming with sweat. I dug my nails into the meat of his shoulders and tried to tear off the mask until I realized it grew from his chest. My skin started to ripple with horror and awe and peeled off in long swathes that he draped over his back like a shawl, and we flew through the sky like two sorcerers, my mind all in tatters, my sanity strewn.
I woke up in the graveyard with my pack under my head and my works at my side, as if I’d slept there all night. I felt woozy and sickened, the way the dead woman must have felt as feral teeth stripped off her clothes and rent her flesh. My stomach heaved, and I rolled over as everything in me came up.
Well, not everything. Not the feelings of dread and despair or the pain banging around in my body like a drunk trying to find his way out of a strange house in the dark. My feet throbbed, my tongue bled where I’d bitten it, and even the tiny, deep places where my soul goes to hide felt like my drug-addled romp through the desert had scoured and defiled them.
When I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, I found I was still clutching the bone that I thought I had dreamed, and I rolled over again and vomited horror and bile into the dirt by the crosses.
Now I can’t get the sensations of that lurid dream out of my body, and a craving for poison much worse than drugs has thrust its way into my flesh. I feel reckless and starved; my brain swarms with some awful contagion. Sometimes I think the dream never ended, that it smothered me that night in its musky embrace, and I’ve been dreaming it ever since.
* * *
Rumors of a skinwalker preying on girls started back in ‘09, when a trucker making a late run on the 491 between Shiprock and Gallup claimed he encountered a creature who was half-human, half-bull. He said it suddenly appeared by the driver’s side window and kept pace even when he accelerated, glaring in at him with obsidian eyes in a bull’s shaggy, horned head, but that when he looked down, it had the torso and legs of a man.
A few weeks later, Mami’s old boyfriend, the potter Alphonso Nez, was coming back from an art show in Farmington when his pickup broke down. He was aiming a flashlight under the hood when he heard something approach and saw a beast with blood-tipped horns and a man’s powerful physique emerge from the brush. Alphonso locked himself in the truck as the creature circled the vehicle for half an hour before it finally disappeared. Over time, his account of the incident became more elaborate. He said the monster resembled the Minotaur of Greek myth, a description that was repeated often enough that later, when two teenaged girls from Shiprock vanished, and a woman from Teec Nos Pos disappeared after her car ran out of gas, people said the Minotaur was responsible. More women went missing over the years, but it was usually under dubious circumstances. Girls entangled in bad marriages or in trouble with the law, girls with good reason to run.
Not Lina, though. She had a job at the El Rancho Hotel and was planning to start college in Albuquerque. She was doing fine until the moth frenzy took her.
* * *
“Oh, help me! He has me!” Lina is panting and thrashing when I rush into her room, awakened by the creaking of bedsprings and the thump of her head striking the backboard each time she bounces her hips. Her eyes roll, her tongue flicks back and forth, and she yelps like a dog caught in barbed wire.
“Who is it?” I look around wildly, half-expecting an intruder to leap from the closet or the hallway.
“Oh God, he’s here!” She flings back the sheet. Her nightgown is twisted and bunched at her waist, and her knees are bent, exposing slick, maroon folds. I feel heat surge to my cheeks. For a moment, I consider waking up Mami, who snores contentedly in the other room, but I don’t want her to see Lina like this.
Her good daughter.
I cover her up and fetch my last bottle of Mad Dog, but she shoves it away in disgust. Her eyes blaze and her body shivers, like a doomed moth fluttering near the flames. “Alcohol won’t help! Don’t you understand? He has me! He’s inside me!”
“Don’t talk crazy. You’re having a nightmare,” I say, but I can’t stand to stay there and go out into the hall where, unnerved, I chug down the bottle in a few scalding gulps. The alcohol dulls my disgust. I tell myself what Lina says isn’t possible, that not even a skinwalker can rape a woman with sorcery.
Still, it takes all my courage to go back into her room.
She’s spent now, vacant-eyed and exhausted. In the dim light, I’m shocked by the jut of her cheekbones, which poke up defiantly, no longer obscured by the layers of fat that always softened her face. Her once plump, rounded belly is now a sunken, stretched bowl.
She whimpers, “No, don’t,” but her hand slides down as her buttocks lift off the bed and she begins a slow, grotesque grinding.
I crack her across the face, grab her shoulders and try to shake her out of the trance. Rage flares in her face. A surge of energy seethes from her skin into mine. Pain scalds my fingers, flenses my forearms and chews into my wrists. My skin blazes an ugly, flayed red, and for a moment the wall I sag against is the only thing holding me up.
“Stop it! You’re dreaming,” I hiss, but I have no faith in my own words, and I don’t try to touch her again.
Unable to watch her contortions, I stare out the window, beyond the portal and the adobe wall, out where the gate to the courtyard blew off in a windstorm last winter and never got fixed. With nothing blocking the view, the desert unfurls like a black throat gobbling down an obscene spill of stars. Alongside the gap where the gate once stood now swarms an unnatural convergence of shadows. In places they are as thick as the beams supporting the portal, in others gauzy as mist. Something massive hunches there in brute stillness. My blood goes a degree or two colder.
The next morning I find Lina sprawled under a clump of piñons a half mile from the house, her nightgown ripped, her feet bloody. Gently I lead her home, bathe her and put her to bed.
“Who’s doing this? Tell me!”
She doesn’t answer, but her face glows with a terrible radiance, like she’s died and been reborn into some glorious hell. “I want him,” she whispers, without meeting my eyes.
I know then we’ve lost her. I know she’s bewitched.
* * *
A few nights later, Lina went wandering again, and this time she didn’t return. I was in Gallup getting wasted with Orlando. Mami thought Lina was with me and didn’t report her missing until the next day. The tribal police got involved, posters went up, and people searched the arroyos and acequias, but then the deaths of four joyriding teenagers in a head-on with a semi out by Church Rock stole everybody’s attention. As for me, the only searching I did for my sister was in a heroin haze in the desert after she was long gone.
“So what happened, Drunk Girl? You get arrested again?” Mami snorted when I dragged myself into the kitchen, exhausted after my visit to Blileytown the night before.
I collapsed on the couch, staring up at the whirling ceiling. I tried to find words to explain where I’d been, what I’d seen. Hair and bones poking up out of the sand and something half-human that flew me through an eternal night, impaled and enthralled.
“Well?” Mami demanded when I’d been quiet too long.
She brought her plate into the living room and slammed it down on the table. Crossed her meaty arms. Glowered. “So, Drunk Girl, you know what I do last night when Arthur Yazzie won’t let me sleep?”
It took me a second to remember Arthur Yazzie wasn’t some hot boyfriend, but how the old people referred to arthritis. She went on, “First I call Leo, because he’s wise in the ways of the shaman, and he tells me Lina is probably fine, that she must have ran off to L.A. or Vegas to start a new life. So I say, ’Bullshit, old coot! What do you know?’ and hang up. Then I go out in the desert and call to the skinwalker Alfonso Nez saw years ago. I call to the Minotaur to come sit with me.”
I had an image of Mami, ponderous on swollen ankles and arthritic joints, armed with her rosary and fetishes, braving the darkness to conjure up monsters.
Any other time I would have laughed, but today I wasn’t so sure the skinwalkers weren’t real. Still, I tried to dismiss her. “That’s a sick fucking joke.”
“No joke.” She chomped down on frybread folded over a heap of Navajo round steak and gnawed pugnaciously with stump teeth. Bits of bologna spewed from her mouth. I put my arm over my eyes. “I got something to tell him,” she said.
“There’s no skinwalkers,” I mumbled, gummy tongue adhering to furred teeth. “Alfonso Nez was probably doing peyote and ran into a cow.”
Mami shook a sausage-thick finger. “You think skinwalkers just a Navajo superstition, but what do you know, Drunk Girl?”
More than I wanted to, I thought, but what I said was, “I know that even if there’s some psycho out there hunting women, he’s not coming for you. You’re too old and too fat.”
“Old and fat’s better than stupid and squaybe!” She pulled a face like there was a stink to the bologna. “What I want to say to the Minotaur is, ‘Listen, asshole, you fucked up when you took my Lina. She had a good life ahead of her. She was a hard worker, a good student. Didn’t hang out with trash and slut around and drink herself blind. Didn’t bring shame on the family.’ She was nothing like you.”
“Lina is nothing like me!” In my outrage, I lunged up off the sofa too fast. The walls lurched and turquoise paint oozed down the robes of the Virgin in her niche by the kiva. I steadied myself. “Don’t talk like she’s dead!”
My anger must have frightened Mami—either that or she was scared I was about to projectile vomit again—because she got up and lumbered to the window, squinting out at the shimmering heat waves like she expected Lina to come strolling through them.
“She must’ve went off to meet somebody she knew, and the Minotaur saw her,” Mami said and turned her bitter black gaze onto me. I felt the bone tremble in my pocket like a warning. I knew I should speak, but the words wouldn’t come, and I felt a surge of something cold and disloyal.
“You think Lina was so perfect? You should’ve seen her, humping the mattress and tearing out her own hair!”
Mami stared at me like I was roadkill served up on a platter. When she spoke again, the words unspooled from her tongue like a curse.
“So you know why I called to the Minotaur?”
I felt too broken to ask.
“Cause I want to tell the son of a bitch that I’ll make him a trade. I got a girl here who won’t get a job or do chores or act decent. Girl who runs wild like a jackrabbit. I tell the Minotaur to come take Drunk Girl away and bring back my good daughter Lina.”
* * *
Mami’s voice was so full of loathing and scorn that I didn’t dare tell her what happened in Blileytown, or show her the bone that I’d found. Worse, I later discovered she’d ransacked my room and thrown out all of my booze so I had nothing to bolster my courage for what I had decided to do. Finally, I grabbed a bottle of Listerine from the medicine cabinet, stuffed it in my back pocket and took the bus to the outskirts of Gallup.
Uncle Leo lived north of the city, in a split-level modular tucked away on a rural road without much else besides cactuses, but his courtyard was tree-shaded and restful, an escape from the punishing heat of midday. Birdhouses hung from the juniper branches and scarlet ristras swung from the portal.
Leo was outside tending his garden of succulents. A sweat-stained t-shirt clung to his back and his grey-streaked black hair was tied back with a bandanna. When I called to him, he smiled and straightened up, wincing with a hand to the small of his back.
We sat in the porch chairs and chatted a while before I asked him if he really believed what he told Mami, that Lina had left town to make a new start.
He spread his big hands, which were calloused and scarred from years of carpentry work. “What do you expect me to say to her, Franki? That I think Lina’s in the ground rotting somewhere? That would be too cruel, and besides, we don’t know for sure.”
I pounced on that. “What if she’s alive, but she needs help getting home because a demon’s possessed her? You could do an Enemy Way ceremony to protect her from evil.”
Leo hefted himself out of the chair and shuffled out into the garden. “Not many young people believe in demons these days. I’m surprised that you do.”
So I told him about the fits Lina had suffered, and about the thing lurking out by the gate, but I didn’t tell him about my dream of flying through the night with a monster. I was too ashamed to talk about that.
Leo spoke gravely. “That was the moth frenzy that afflicted your sister. She must’ve caught the eye of a skinwalker and he sent his wild energy into her. He drove her mad.”
When he said that, I thought about Blileytown and suddenly remembered finding tarantula hair in my teeth. I clenched my jaw so I wouldn’t throw up.
“Do the ceremony for her,” I snapped, annoyed with his puttering among the clusters of barrel cactuses and coachwhips with their shiny, spiked leaves.
Leo bent to pluck a dead leaf from a fleshy, blue-green agave. When he straightened again, his knees popped like gunshots. “You know how a skinwalker gets his power? By killing a family member. That’s the price for their shape changing, their ability to entice and cast spells. The corpse dust they use, they make that from the bones of the people they kill. You can’t fight a skinwalker, Franki. If you’d talked to me earlier, when the moth frenzy first started, maybe I could’ve done something, but now…”
I’d thought something similar myself. Maybe if I didn’t stay drunk and high all the time, I could’ve done more to help Lina and Mami wouldn’t be wishing it was me gone instead. The guilt stung, and I lashed out. “You could still do the Enemy Way ceremony. You loved Lina! Mami always said she was your favorite.”
“Your Mami doesn’t know everything, Franki.”
I didn’t know what he meant, so I blurted, “Then I need something else. I need you to get me a gun.”
He looked like I’d asked him to help me hold up the Stop N Save. “Forget that. Way you live, too many things can go wrong. Only person ending up dead will probably be you. Now, if you want money to go to that rehab in Tuba City, I might be able to spare a few bucks.”
“I’m gonna get sober,” I muttered for maybe the five-hundredth time in my life.
Leo sighed and ran his fingers over the leathery leaf of a coachwhip, caressing the plant like you’d touch a pet dog. Although he was standing a good ten feet away, his nostrils twitched and deep furrows ridged his high forehead. “Listerine, Franki? You’ve sunk to drinking mouthwash these days?”
* * *
I figured Orlando would show me more respect, so I cruised Coal Street until I found him asleep in an oval of shade behind the Fu King Smoke Shop. He came awake growling when I kicked the soles of his boots.
“Shit you want, Franki?” When I told him why I needed a gun, he said I was batshit crazy and besides, guns weren’t cheap, but when I flashed the wad of cash I’d conned out of Leo, letting him think I might actually go into rehab, he exclaimed “Howah!” and changed his tune fast.
We went to his Dad’s house and I waited while he rummaged through the garage and came back with a .44 Magnum, matte black in a leather holster. It was sexy and lethal-looking and would probably kick me all the way to Las Cruces if I fired it, but I clipped it onto my belt and yanked out my shirttail to cover the bulge. The Listerine buzz was a faint afterburn now, replaced with a shivery nausea. I asked Orlando to get me something to drink. While he was doing that, I spotted a sweet little folding knife inside a table drawer and slipped it in my back pocket.
He came back with a rectangle of black tar, and we shot up and attempted to fuck. When he got sentimental and said going into the desert alone was too dangerous, I told him I’d be okay, and besides, he was going to go with me.
* * *
Near twilight we rode his broke-ass dirt bike out to the crossroads, banged another quarter mile through the scrub, then ditched the bike in an arroyo and set off for Blileytown. I was the bait, walking up ahead to try and lure out the Minotaur, while he followed behind out of sight.
I’d made this trek so many times I knew it by heart, but tonight the landscape looked surreal and distorted. Even the burnt-orange horizon seemed saturated in gloom. Night didn’t just fall here, it dropped like a club to the back of the head. One minute I was squinting into the glare of a fever-red sunset, the next I was stumbling into gullies and slashing my arms on the cholla spines while a paper-thin moon teased hazy light from behind a funnel of clouds. A gritty wind lashed my hair, and coyotes keened a hysterical dirge to whatever poor thing they were rending. When I sensed something coming inhumanly fast at my back, I pulled out the Magnum and almost fired on a rabbit that went bounding past.
Orlando was being a dick, playing some kind of game. He was supposed to keep pace, pausing when I paused, flashing a penlight to let me know he was there. Instead he was either lagging too far behind or following too closely, bumbling into bushes and sending rocks clattering.
Overhead, the sky swarmed with corkscrews of cloud and the stars bled cold, distant light. An owl carved the air with a baleful whoosh and soared past with a mouse struggling in its talons. I hadn’t heard Orlando make any noise for some time now. I was starting to think he’d turned back and abandoned me, but I resisted the urge to call out.
I made it another quarter mile, my nerves increasingly fraught, before the jagged silhouette of San Felipe came into view, and I stopped short with shock. Swastikas covered every inch of the decaying walls. It pissed me off that vandals had done this until I realized the black and red geometric designs weren’t spray-painted on, but were seething out of cracks in the ancient adobe and scurrying away on nimble, reddish-haired legs. I realized that this was where the tarantulas in my dream came from. Blileytown was their nest. Too numerous to crowd onto the walls, they began scaling the black enamel bowl of the night, scuttling across constellations while comets shot past them like tracers. Sometimes a comet would hit its target and burn one of the spiders to ash, but most missed. The tarantulas, manic and vengeful, laid siege to the sky.
I stared at this lurid sight, mesmerized, until I heard Orlando murmur, “Howah,” close by, and that jarred me out of the trance. The word, uttered calmly enough but with a distinct undercurrent of awe, seemed to come from inside the churchyard. I forced myself to climb onto the wall that was now bare of spiders and felt the finger bone shift in my pocket and dig into my hip. It felt alive, like the woman it had belonged to was urging me along. Go find him. Go kill my killer.
From my vantage point atop the wall, I searched for Orlando, but the courtyard was black upon blacker. Some celestial joker had unplugged the stars and thumbed out the moon. Jumping down from the wall was an act of pure faith. When my feet hit the ground I thanked a god I had never believed in, then realized my gratitude might be misplaced because what I saw made my blood freeze.
The skycrawlers had scuttled back into their cosmic rabbit holes, but the chollas were ornamented with bizarre and hideous vines, the limbs of dead women draping their branches in pale, fungal-like strands. Caught on the cactus spines, their tattered skin fluttered like the putrid remains of a pageant of crucifixions. Where the flesh had been eaten away gleamed mottled patches of bone.
Orlando had been positioned with a certain crude jest so that his stupefied stare seemed directed between the thighs of a dead woman dangling above him. When I touched his face, an eyelid peeled off like cellophane and fluttered away in the wind, leaving a damp stain on my fingers.
Something veered through the scrub and I whirled, the gun gripped in both hands, firing at a shadow with a gobbet of meat in its mouth. I didn’t hit the coyote, but the recoil of the Magnum damn near dislocated my shoulder. I went deaf from the explosion and blind from the flash, and one of my fingers broke when I fought to hold on as the gun was pried from my hand. A suffocating weight mashed me into the dirt, and the Minotaur’s huge head, with its matted hair and wide-spaced, bloody horns, lowered itself toward my face.
I found the folding knife in my pocket, but in my desperation to click out the blade I slashed my palm, ring finger to wrist.
The Minotaur opened my legs like a book he was going to rip cover to cover. Beyond his horns I could see the phantom faces of his victims, their eyes bright with a terrible elation that might have been mistaken for lust.
“The dead women,” I whispered. “They’re here.”
Words rumbled from vocal chords not intended for speech. “It’s good you can see them. You’ll join them soon. They love me so they stay close.”
Blood pumped from the gash in my hand, and my fingers were numb, but I felt the curve of the knife hilt and I grabbed it.
The monster’s huge nostrils flared. He looked down at the knife. I knew he would take it away from me and probably drive it into my heart, but he instead snatched up the fragment of bone that had fallen out of my pocket.
He held it up, sniffed it. Dog sounds came from his throat. He tilted his massive head back, the better to inhale the scent. “Your sister’s. I remember her smell. She was eager. She wanted me all the time.”
I stabbed the blade into the base of his neck where the coarse animal hair thinned and a man’s blue vein bulged. The shock jolted him upright and his muscles went rigid. He slapped at his throat, a motion which only drove the blade deeper as blood streamed down his chest. I thought he would topple over and crush me, but he lurched to his feet and shambled away, gouts of blood jetting when he yanked the blade out of his neck. I was on my feet, too, and I glanced back as I ran. He had dropped to his knees and was drinking his own blood from his cupped hands, the dead women mournful, coiled around him like ribbons of thin, patchy fog.
* * *
When I finally made it back to the road and was picked up by a passing motorist, I was raving about dead women hung from the chollas and claiming I’d been raped by a skinwalker.
The tribal police found Orlando’s gored body stuffed into an abandoned coyote den. His face, apparently, was intact, but the pathologist was baffled by the puncture wounds to his belly, which clearly weren’t made by coyotes or by the gun with my fingerprints on it. Around San Felipe, a forensics team dug up the bodies of five women who’d gone missing over the years. None of the remains belonged to my sister, and although I tried to take detectives to the place where I’d found the skeleton, I wasn’t able to locate it.
I spent a month at a shelter in Albuquerque for addicted and traumatized women. I felt safe there, even put on some weight, but the day before I went home, someone hung a scarlet ristra on the door to my room. I screamed when I saw it and tore it apart with my hands.
I should have realized this wasn’t the end of it.
* * *
My first night at home, I wake up lathered in sweat, my body rippling with energy that arches my spine until I think it will snap and violently jitters my legs. I stuff the sheet in my mouth so I don’t scream when my skin starts to crawl off. It slides from my arms like a pair of long gloves, leaving behind only the barest shadows of tattoos and moles, then the rest of it creeps off my body. My face, neck and scalp peel off last with a death-rattle snap, which is when I first see the Minotaur outside by the gap where the gate used to be. Naked and wanton, he snares my skin in his fist and loops it around his groin like a trophy.
After a few nights of this, I stop eating and won’t leave the house. Mami thinks that I’m using and starts calling me Drunk Girl again, but how can I think of liquor or smack when I’m wrecked all the time now, my mind reeling, undone, and the phrase ‘fuck your brains out’ is no longer crass slang, but a dismal, unhinging reality.
One night, in desperation, I drive my head into the wall, but that only makes the assault worse because as my consciousness flickers and dims, his power expands, and I come to convulsing with his violent energy running amok in my veins.
What surprises me isn’t that he becomes stronger, but that in some perverse way, I do, too. If I’m corrupted and deadened by his assaults, he too is ensnared. You can’t fight a skinwalker, he told me, but I have every intention to try.
I enter his yard in the evening via the unlocked front gate, find him sprawled in his garden, sated and snoring, a muscular old man with a bull’s bulging shoulders and a pale, lolling cock, a bandanna knotted around his thick neck where an old wound still might seep. Around him, a ring of corpse dust protects him should his enemies, living or dead, come to call.
I hesitate at this boundary, knowing the cost, but when his body reacts to my scent and grows hard, I step inside the circle of crushed and cursed bones. My entry animates the gray powder and causes it to billow in thick, poisonous ropes that sandpaper my nostrils and blister my skin. It kindles a craving for blood in a part of my brain so ancient I thought it went extinct with the trilobites. A cannibalistic hunger to devour and destroy surges through me as I stand over the sleeping old man and aim the gun. The trigger is too unwieldy to squeeze, so after two or three tries, I use my tongue, which is surprisingly pliant and strong. The bullet plows a crater out the back of his head big enough to punch my fist through, which I contemplate doing, except I don’t have a fist anymore. The scaled talons aren’t practical for using a gun, but work well for scooping out eyeballs.
You were always my favorite, he says, but I figure this to be shock. I’ve never killed anybody before, much less a close relative.
As I leave the courtyard, the corpse dust clings to my misshapen feet and swirls like incense beneath my tough, plated groin. It gifts me with a visual magnitude spanning eons, as well as an unnatural tolerance for the depraved, and it unveils a few extra circles of Hell, a rutting ground for all things bestial stretching back to the Pleistocene. The Minotaur, reborn from the flesh of his former host, looms before me, resplendent in gore.
I belong in this wasteland, and so does he, but first there is carnage to revel in.
The town of Gallup awaits us.
On my four legs, I follow him there.
Lucy Taylor is the Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of The Safety of Unknown Cities, Spree, Saving Souls, Nailed and ten other horror/suspense novels and collections. Her most recent work includes the short story collection Fatal Journeys and the novelette “A Respite for the Dead.” Recent publications include the short story “In the Cave of the Delicate Singers” and “Wingless Beasts” in Ellen Datlow’s The Best Horror of the Year: Volume 7, and “Blessed Be the Bound” in Nightmare magazine.
Taylor lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a land full of mystery, romance and the macabre.