Chapter Eight

 

Johnny’s feet pounded the slick rock, every step sending shudders of pain along his legs. Next crash could happen anywhere. Got to keep moving. The blood on the soles of his feet made him slip every few yards, and he was certain that at any second he would end up on his back, the crags slamming into him. But then the last explosive collision came from far behind them, and he slowed his pace, putting a hand on Carol’s shoulder to let her know the danger had passed.

Breathing heavily, the twins emerged from the passage on the other side of the mountain. A smoother, more gradual slope greeted them, promising an easier descent down into a valley shrouded in thick mist. Leaning against a boulder, Johnny took a rest.

“Looks like regular granite and sand on this side,” he mused, rubbing a hand against a rock. “Which is, you know, impossible in the real world. I guess this…place? Dimension? Gah, this Underworld has different laws of physics and stuff. But it should be easier on my feet.”

“What you need is something to bind them up.” Carol looked herself up and down. “But we’re just wearing jeans and t-shirts, so there’s not much material to use.”

Johnny nodded. “Yeah. This is one of those times when I wish I listened to Dad. He’s always bugging me to wear a belt, like it makes me more of a man or something dumb like that.”

The image of their father that came to him wasn’t of the present drunken, broken man, but of Dr. Oscar Garza, decked out in his suit and tie, hair a little unruly, a book tucked under one arm, a cheesy joke on his lips. The memory was poignant, almost painful. Johnny realized with a start that he didn’t just miss his mother. He missed the man his father used to be, the man he admired despite their differences. His eyes burned with the realization.

“Maybe we’ll find something down at the bottom,” Carol mused. “We could tie wood to the bottoms of your feet with my shoelaces. You really shouldn’t have thrown away your other shoe, Johnny. We could’ve…”

Before she could finish with her irritating scolding, the slope in front of them exploded into the air in a geyser of sand and rock. Towering above them, its body coiling free from the ground, a massive white serpent hissed loudly and opened wide its dark red mouth. Two enormous fangs, each the length of one of Johnny’s legs, glinted bone-white and deadly in the gloom.

“Run!” Johnny screamed, shoving his sister ahead of him. They went stumbling down the side of the mountain as the serpent twisted around and dove, headfirst, after them. The ground shuddered violently beneath its weight. Risking a glance back, Johnny saw the infernal reptile slithering toward them, shoving boulders out of the way effortlessly, sending them flying into the air or tumbling in the direction of the fleeing twins. Pain was a distant memory. The journey’s objective was forgotten. All that existed was the ineluctable danger behind and the boy racing to survive. In that purely instinctual drive for self-preservation, Johnny felt his tonal scratch at the edges of his mind, and with a sigh of relief, the boy stepped aside.

With a thrusting twist of magic, his animal soul reshaped his flesh, and his clothes fell away as the jaguar dug ebony claws into the gravel and wheeled about the face the giant snake. The white reptile shot past him, continuing its pursuit of the girl. The jaguar roared in anger and leapt onto the slick, cold skin, snapping his jaws and clawing viciously. Enraged and confused, the serpent curled back with a snap, its tail whipping about and sending the human girl sprawling in the sand. The jaguar clung tightly and sank his teeth into the snake, its strange, cold black blood squirting into his mouth. Hissing hoarsely with pain, the serpent tried to shrug the jaguar off, but coiled back around when it found its struggle useless. Opening its jaws impossibly wide, it flung its diamond-shaped head toward the girl, who had just rolled over and was regarding the demon rushing at her with wide, frightened eyes that closed for a moment before the wolf snarled its way to the surface of her being and scrabbled out of reach.

Johnny came forward a little, bonding with his tonal so that he could guide it with his conscious, human mind. He roared at Carol, who had run down the slope in her lupine form, the strange tzapame necklace still snug around her neck. She looked back and saw him struggling to hang on to the massive serpent. With a short, barking howl, she turned around and ran at the hellish reptile, leaping at the soft flesh below its head. Realizing that his sister had found the beast’s weak spot, Johnny used his claws to clamber up its side. Together they ripped at the snake with their deadly teeth until great gouts of black began to squirt all over. They dropped to the ground and backed away, their hackles raised. The snake quivered for a moment and then fell, thudding like a dead weight against the mountainside.

After a few moments of staring at the twitching corpse of their enemy, Carol walked over to her clothes, nuzzling them into a pile that she picked up with her narrow snout. She ducked behind a boulder, and soon Johnny heard her speak.

“You should probably shift back and get dressed, Johnny. I don’t particularly feel like seeing your naked butt walking around through Mictlan.”   

And how am I supposed to do that? Johnny was stumped for a second, staring down at his paws, at the mysterious bracelet that encircled his left foreleg, but then he realized that all he needed to do was to come forward, totally inhabiting his body. The tonal obediently backed off, and his body stretched and snapped itself back into the form of a twelve-year-old. To his delight, his feet were completely healed. He pulled on nearly all his clothes, abandoning only the bloody socks, which he was covering with a medium-sized rock when Carol emerged from behind the boulder.

“Wow.” There was a look of wonderment on her face.

“I know, right? I guess it’s good Xolotl’s not around. He’d be all ‘see, I told you it would be remarkably easy’ and stuff. I really don’t want to be chewed out right now.”

Carol giggled. “Yeah, we’re kind of all chewed out, huh?”

That cracked Johnny up. He doubled up with more laughter than her cheesy joke deserved, partly because it was nice to see her loosen up, partly because he had been so on edge that he needed the release. “That was pretty good,” he managed to say after a few seconds. “All chewed out. Heh. Funny Carol.”

He showed her his feet, and she gave him a hug for the first time in months. Feels good to click again, like we used to. Nothing like killing a demon snake to bring a family together, I guess!

They continued down the slope, laughing and comparing their impressions of the fight, what each had sensed in their nagual forms about the reptilian titan and the strange new landscape. They had both noticed the absence of the living web they had discovered they could perceive in their own world. “It’s probably because, uh, yeah, this is the Land of the Dead,” Carol ventured.

“Well, hello, but not even that snake seemed alive. Did you notice it had no scent? And what the heck was that black stuff? That sure wasn’t blood. Didn’t taste like a regular lizard or snake…and my tonal has eaten a bunch of those.”

“Maybe it’s some sort of demon, made out of weird, I don’t know, supernatural stuff. And, Johnny? Lizards? Really? Gross.”

“Uh, didn’t you snack on a tlachuache?” He made a face and feigned a stuck-up fresa accent. “Guácala. O sea, qué asco, en serio.”

Carol sputtered with laughter. “Yeah, I guess an opossum is about on level with a…Holy Mother of God!”

“Huh?” Johnny looked up, and towering above them was a gigantic lizard, something like a cross between an alligator and a komodo dragon, its eyes yellow and malevolent, its many rows of teeth sharp, crooked and dripping with poisonous saliva that sent waves of fetid odors pouring over the twins.

“You,” the reptile declared, its voice booming like the raging flames that destroy forests, homes and families, “have slain my brother Chalmecatl! Living intruders prepare to meet your doom in the jaws of Xochitonal!”

As it opened wide its maw, a shape came bounding down the mountain, hurtling at Xochitonal. It was the hellhound, Xolotl. They came together with an earthshaking thud, their forelegs wrapping around each other as they struggled, jaws reaching for each other’s throats.

“Dude,” Johnny muttered reverently, “it’s like Godzilla versus King Kong or something!”

Xolotl flipped the great lizard onto its back, turning briefly toward the twins. “What are the two of you waiting for? I can only hold this creature off for so long! He can’t follow you into the first desert…” the tonal of Quetzalcoatl leapt onto the reptile’s belly “…so get yourselves down this mountain as fast as you can!”

Without waiting to see how the epic battle turned out, the twins began running down the remaining stretch of dark gray granite sand that lined the narrow confines of the Black Road. From behind them came apocalyptic sounds of struggle and destruction, but Johnny focused on the dark fog rising before them from the valley at the foot of the mountain. It seethed and swirled ominously, like virulent smoke from a witch’s cauldron.

Blackness, he mused. That’s okay. I’m not afraid of the dark.

They reached the bottom. Carol grabbed his hand, and together they plunged into the roiling mists.