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I stuffed my face in the Bannerworth dining room, feeling the aches and pains of a long hike settle through my legs and back. The last thing I wanted to do was go back out on another snipe hunt, though I owed it to Krawczyk to make sure nothing bad had happened to her. It was my fault she was in harm’s way to begin with. The first place I would check would be Weeks’s camp to the north of town. If that prick had hurt her, he would be nothing but a scorch mark on the earth once I was done with him.
I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. With luck, Krawczyk had gone haring off on her own somewhere, seeking peace and quiet, and was merely temporarily AWOL, perhaps hunting some incense to burn or a crystal to rub for luck. The uneasy feeling spreading under my skin said otherwise. She knew her situation remained tenuous, what with the townspeople suspicious and prone to using violence to calm their nerves. She had no friends beyond me and Merilee, so it was unlikely she would be just hanging out, having a cup of tea and chatting with random citizens.
I looked up and spotted Sheriff Bridger standing at the entrance to the dining room, scanning the smattering of diners. Our eyes met. Bridger hitched his chin and crossed the room. The sheriff walked with a bit of a list, stepping with the careful deliberation of a man who’d had a few or more shots of rye. When he arrived at the table, the aroma of stale whiskey confirmed my assessment.
Bridger sat without waiting for an invitation. “Any luck?”
“I haven’t even started looking for her yet.” His blank look caused me to shift mental gears. “Oh, you mean the little people? No. Nothing. Though somebody took a shot at me.” I explained the bullet fired from ambush that hit my saddle and my subsequent walk back to town.
Bridger pursed his lips and contracted his brow. “That’s odd.”
“Odd. Yep. Have you seen Kat? Ms. Krawczyk?”
“Ahh, yes. Yes, I did.” Bridger picked at a fingernail. “She was, ah, following along behind Reverend Weeks. Headed north, out of town, last I saw.”
“Damn.”
“Do you think... Should we be concerned? Why would she be following Weeks?” Bridger’s blue-eyed expression seemed as open as a barn door but held a hint of mischief that tickled my nerves. The expression said he knew something I didn’t.
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
Merilee Soames appeared at the table with a piece of white cloth folded into a small square. She held herself as though wrapped in tight rubber bands from head to toe, and a blush colored her cheeks. “This... this is all I could find that... that Miss Krawczyk has worn. It’s her... it’s her...”
Panties, I finished in my head. “No problem.” I took the cloth then tucked it in my pants pocket. The three of us stood around the table, contemplating the remains of the meal for a silent moment, like people on an elevator. Conversational gambits scattered and ran from my mind, and the harder I chased them, the faster they ran. I had never been good at small talk. I looked at Bridger, who glanced at Merilee, who studied her fingertips and cleared her throat. I wanted to ask Merilee about her Cockney-talking, dagger-wielding inner self and whether her starched-shirt-headmistress persona was some kind of superhero disguise. But the woman’s outer shell was so hard, I imagined her skin would ring like ceramic if I tapped it with a penny.
“Okay, then,” I said.
“Yes,” Merilee said.
“That’s a curious stone, Judge.” Bridger’s eyes were fixed on my chest. I glanced down and discovered that my magic amulet had fallen out of my shirt.
“Oh this?” I tucked the stone away and stood. “Just a trinket. Anybody seen my dog?”
#
Intermission
Kat’s up a tree
I’m in trouble was Kat’s first conscious thought when the darkness receded and she could think again.
No shit was her second.
She reached for magic, and of course, it was tapped out. Dry as a mummy’s tits.
Suspended from a jouncing pole by wrists and ankles, being carried by the Ewoks’ ugly cousins over and along desert trails, Kat’s head lolled back. She viewed the world from an inverted position. Ahead of her, she got a good look at a pygmy’s tiny little butt cheeks. Was it racist to call them pygmies? It felt racist. Maybe Short American would be better. When she raised her head and chinned forward in the mother of all crunches, she could make out the trailing pole bearer, who resembled a cross between a troll and a Native American. Height-challenged Native American.
The trollish-looking thing grinned at her with a mouth of rotten teeth. Pointed, rotten teeth.
What time was it? Well after noon, she judged, given the shadows forming through the underbrush. Adding to her list of complaints, her stomach sent up a telegram saying, empty. Please fill.
By twisting up in a pretzel, Kat examined her aching left arm. It dripped sluggish red drops, thick as paint. That was bad. Worse, she couldn’t feel her hands or feet, as the ropes binding her to the pole had clamped the circulation off like a pneumatic tourniquet. Whatever poison they had hit her with had left her woozy, too, and coupled with the swaying and bouncing, she wanted to hurl chunks, which would be really bad in this position. Kat gritted her teeth and held on to what was left in her stomach with a strong will and a rediscovered aptitude for prayer. She let her head drop back, which cramped her neck like a sonofabitch and dragged her hair through the dirt on the low spots. These people were seriously testing her peaceful and nonviolent nature.
“You just wait,” she growled at the pygmy’s upside-down ass. “I get my magic back, I’m going to give you a boil on your testicle the size of a walnut.”
#
Kat passed out again somewhere along the way and only came back to awareness when the pygmies dropped her in a stand of trees after full darkness had swept the sun from the sky. Light and smoke filtered through the trees, the first allowing her to make out dim shapes of tall conifers surrounding a living-room-sized clearing and the smoke bringing her the scent of roasting meat, which set off her stomach rumbles. Her hands might as well have been lopped off and sewn back on, for all the feeling left in them. They dangled, useless as puppet hands. Ditto both legs below the knees. Kat concentrated a trickle of magic on getting her blood flowing and hissed when circulation fired the angry buzzing of a thousand bees through her extremities.
Two of the pygmies dragged her by the shirt collar and shoved her back against a tree. A third little bastard looped a rope around her midsection, cinching her tight and pinning her arms against her sides. A few others stood around and supervised. Having to smell creatures up close should have been labeled a hate crime. A combination of vinegary sweat and unwashed ass invaded her sinuses and forced her to sip air through her mouth. It was culturally insensitive of her to apply her own hygiene standards to a different race of people, but Great Maia, please...
“Please,” she gasped aloud. “Take a fucking bath.”
“They do carry a tang, don’t they?” wheezed a voice from the darkness to her right.
Kat squinted, and the form of another full-sized human materialized from the gloom, outlined by the orange glow of a distant campfire. She got the impression of thick whiskers on one end and heavy boots on the other, not unlike the gear she wore on her own feet. “Who’re you?” she demanded.
“Billy Minor,” the shape said in a scratchy, old-man voice. “Pleased to meetcha.”
The pygmies finished their tying. The group of small people wandered away, chattering in their guttural language. One paused long enough to lift his breechclout and urinate on the tree against which Kat was tied. Some spattered on her neck.
“Goddess, damn you to hell,” Kat growled. Her cultural sensitivity was growing thin as latex, and she found herself unable to control an impulse at revenge. Kat tapped her amulet’s puny charge and sent a bolt of fiery heat upstream and into the pygmy’s penis. The little man yelped and hopped away, clutching his privates and squawking.
“Serves you right!” Kat shouted after him. “And you have a tiny prick, you ignorant little weasel!”
Billy Minor chuckled. “What was all the commotion?”
“I don’t know,” Kat said. “Wasp stung his pecker, looks like.”
“Ouch,” chimed in a new voice from her left. A younger man, based on the tone and timbre. “That sounds excruciating.”
“I hope it rots and falls off,” Kat said. “And who’re you?”
“James Snow, ma’am.”
“Jimmy there’s a Injun,” Billy chimed in. “His Paiute name is Little Owl. He talks like a white man, account-a he went to school for redskins where they eddicated him.”
“Oh. My. God,” Kat muttered, shaking her head.
“I know,” Billy added. “But don’t you worry none. Jimmy’s a good egg. Ain’t hardly Injun at all.”
Kat controlled herself with an effort. Escape first. Bring about social justice later. “Where the fuck are we? Anybody know what’s going on?” She worked her dry throat, attempting to swallow, but she was parched. Her hands and feet were on fire, but at least she could flex her fingers a little. The feeling seeped back in prickles of fire. Her amulet carried about a quarter charge, enough to get her loose from the ropes around her waist, but until she could trust her feet to support her weight, there was no sense getting loose. The effects of the poison left her sluggish and dopey. The ache in her neck from being pole-carried for miles was approaching migraine-level pain. Kat rolled her head around, but it did little to loosen the stiff muscles of her neck and shoulders.
The silence had grown long while she inventoried her personal situation. Kat realized after a moment that neither of the men had answered her question. “Umm... guys? What’s the deal here?”
“It’s... ah...” James Snow started and stopped. “I believe the Nimerigar... well, they... First, they’ll prepare for a, ah, feast of sorts.”
“Huh?” Kat said, “What the fuck? Just spit it out.”
“What Jimmy’s trying to say,” Billy rasped. “He thinks these here Nim-riggers is gonna eat us.”
#
Kat got the story from James Snow, aka Little Owl, in a series of starts and stops, interrupted by heapings of hick wisdom from Billy Minor along the way. The way Snow told the tale, with the three of them sitting in a circle near a campfire in a dark and sinister forest, made Kat feel like she was listening to a ghost story on a camping trip. However, instead of making s’mores, she was tied to a tree, and the campfire would likely be roasting her tender flesh instead of a marshmallow.
“I always believed the Nimerigar people to be a myth,” Snow said, “a Paiute legend used to frighten children at night.”
“They’re doing a bang-up job of scarin’ the willy-Jesus outta me,” Minor added.
The Nimerigar, as Snow explained it, lived in hidden canyons deep in the mountains—the Inyos, the Sierra Nevadas, or the Sierra Madres, depending upon which tribe told the tale. They were often associated with the spirit of the mountains, either as a manifestation of the spirit made flesh or as agents of the spirit, sent to work its will in the material world. They were not a kind and benevolent people. According to legend, the Nimerigar were mean, vicious, and cannibalistic, eating their enemies’ flesh to gain strength from the souls of their foes. These particular Nimerigar had been stirred up recently, and their rage was directed toward someone currently in or around Geyser Falls.
“I can only understand about one word in three,” Snow said, “and I’m not entirely certain of the translation of the familiar words that mirror the Paiute language, so my interpretation may be off by quite a bit. In fact, I could be totally wrong...”
“Don’t equivocate,” Kat told him. “Just say it as best you know it.”
“The tribe who attacked us,” Snow said, “lived here in the Inyos. They owned or worshiped or were caretakers for—I’m not sure—a totem of some kind. That’s the best translation I can come up with. It was something like a religious icon for them.”
“What?” Kat asked. “Like the Holy Grail?”
“Yes, I suppose. Something like that...”
They kept the totem in a cavern, well protected and safe. But a few months ago, an earthquake—“An angry god shook the earth, so I’m assuming an earthquake,” Snow said. The caverns flooded, and parts of it caved in. Many Nimerigar died recovering the totem from the chamber where it was kept, and many more were trapped in the labyrinth of collapsed caverns. The survivors frantically began digging their way through to rescue their loved ones, despite the frequent aftershocks. The chief ordered the totem to be carried to higher ground by an honor guard of six warriors. That was all he could spare, as everyone else was either trapped or digging.
“Uh-oh,” Kat said.
“Hoppin-Johnny,” Billy rasped. “I bet I know how this ends.”
“Exactly,” came Snow’s voice from the dark. “When the chief ended the rescue effort and the earth stopped shaking, he sent for the honor guard to return with the totem. What they found was six dead Nimerigar, all killed by gunshot.”
“And no Holy Grail,” Kat concluded.
“And no Holy Grail. The tribe’s trackers followed the trail as far as Geyser Falls but lost it before they reached town. They’ve been searching for it ever since, attacking travelers and settlers and even some Paiutes. Some, they merely kill. Others, they kill and butcher. And a lucky few—”
“They tie to trees and save for late-night snacks.”
Snow cleared his throat. “Actually, I believe, if I understand them correctly, they plan to sacrifice us to appease the spirit of the mountain, whom they believe they’ve offended somehow. Then yes I, uh, I believe they plan to... to...”
“Eat us like fried chicken,” Kat supplied.
“As you say.”
Billy Minor cackled. “More like fried goat, come to me.”
“Where’s a vegan when you need one?” Kat muttered.
A gaggle of little people entered the clearing. The group approached Kat, who squinted and tilted her head to see by the dim starlight filtering through the trees. Her heart stuttered when she recognized the guy in the lead. It was the Big Kahuna, the nasty piece of work she’d seen in the Bannerworth the other night—was it only last night? Jeez how time flies when you’re being poisoned and dragged through the desert. The vicious little man stopped and studied her as closely as she studied him. He had squinty eyes over a broad nose, dominant cheekbones, and a pointed chin. Curly hair capped his head. All in all, the Nimerigar were vaguely similar to Australian aborigines, she decided, with pointed teeth and a personal odor best described as rotten skunk overlaid with stale urine.
The chief’s hand shot out and pinched her left boob. Hard.
“Hey! Stop that.”
Chief Grab-a-tit turned to his cadre of yes men and said something guttural and obviously witty, for they all laughed on cue.
“He said,” Snow chimed in from the darkness, “something about a woman hiding as a man.”
“Har-fucking-har, Big Chief Peanut.”
The leader of the Nimerigar considered her for a moment then spoke in passable English. “Moon come. Meet God.”
“Oh, lucky me,” Kat muttered past the sudden blockage in her throat. “And here I am, without a party dress.”
The chief laughed, echoed closely by his lieutenants.