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Intermission
Kat cuts loose
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“We’re getting out of here,” Kat told the others.
The night sky—what little of it she could glimpse through the forest canopy—flickered with bright pinpoints of light, more stars than Kat had seen in her life. She shivered, as the temperature had fallen steadily after sunset. Though not yet at foggy-breath stage, the air was colder than she liked. Her girlfriend, Carrin, who ran hot in more ways than one, liked to set the thermostat at sixty-eight degrees, winter and summer. Damn near froze Kat’s nipples off. That was how cold she felt now.
“How’d’ya figger we’re doing that?” Billy asked. “I been tryin’ all day, but I can’t get loose.”
“However we do it,” Snow added, “we’d better do it soon. Something is happening with the Nimerigar.”
Indeed, the pygmies had gathered around a blazing campfire by the shore of the small lake. Barely visible through the trees, the tribe bulked into a dark mass of people. One voice rose and fell in rhythmic oration, while background vocalists accompanied him in chanting counterpoint and drummers pounded out a thumping beat: tum-tum-tumppa-TUM. At irregular intervals, the audience roared their agreement with whatever the speaker said. Kat hadn’t been to any human sacrifice preparties, but if she had to guess, this was what one looked like.
They needed to escape, and escape now.
At least her magic had recharged. A little bit. Not nearly as much as back home—or back to the future, or whatever—but it was enough to do what she needed.
Kat focused and applied superheat to a small section of the rope around her waist. The rope parted with a gasp of smoke, and she threw off the bindings. “I worked loose a knot,” she said. “Wait a sec, and I’ll come get you loose.” Moving like a mouse under the whiskers of a sleeping cat, she scuttled between the two men and cut their ropes in a similar manner.
“Now,” Kat whispered, “anybody know the way out of here?”
“Not me,” said Billy. “What about you, Little Owl?”
“Um. Maybe.”
Snow started off through the darkness, followed by Kat, with Billy bringing up the rear. Kat glued her eyes to the Paiute’s white shirt and crept along behind him, wincing at every rustled leaf and snapped twig. The three of them sounded as loud to her ears as a crowd of Black Friday shoppers hitting the Walmart Door Buster sale at 6:01 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving.
The night insects whined and buzzed. Sweat dripped from Kat’s chin, branches swished and slapped her in the face, and roots reached out to trip her. Billy stumbled and hissed a curse, but Kat didn’t dare turn and glare at him for fear of losing sight of Snow’s dim form, weaving and bobbing through the midnight forest. The drumming of the Nimerigar pounded like the thumping of the Devil’s heart, a deep tum-tum-tumppa-TUM as hypnotic as it was frightening. The drumming and chanting rose and receded, waves of sound building, one upon another, climbing toward an inevitable crescendo the way lovers ground their hips together with increasing frenzy, except the conclusion wouldn’t be the joy of orgasm but an explosion of blood and viscera and the primal scream of violence.
Tum-tum-tumppa-TUM. Tum-tum-tumppa-TUM.
Kat shivered at the chill in her blood. She wiggled forward and pressed up close to Snow, nudging him in the back.
“Let’s move it, Little Owl,” she whispered. “The natives are getting damned restless.”
“Would you like to lead the way?” Snow sounded a little peevish, his tone losing some of its finishing school shine.
“No.” Kat couldn’t see six feet in any direction—finding a path under such circumstances would be like threading a needle blindfolded. She patted Snow’s back. “No, you’re doing fine.”
Using a little magic to light the way might make things faster, but she might as well send up a flare to the Nimerigar. Plus, depleting her tiny store of magic would leave her defenseless in the event that the pygmies caught them again. She couldn’t do much if that happened, anyway, not with her puny little charge, but something was better than nothing. What was that they always said in the Westerns? Save the last bullet for yourself? In this case, save the last aneurysm for me.
“No, fuck that,” Kat told herself. “I’m not going out like that.”
Snow stumbled through a gap in the trees, and Kat caught herself an instant before plowing into his back. Billy Minor crowded up behind her. The sweat-stink of the three of them piled close together made Kat’s eyes water. She edged around Snow to get a better look and to give her nose some relief. They had come to the entrance to a canyon. Sheer walls rose to either side, capped with a blanket of starry night. The canopy of stars provided enough illumination that Kat could make out a narrow trail leading deeper into the canyon.
“Hey,” Billy said. “I know this place. This is where they conked my noggin.”
Kat thought the terrain at least looked familiar, though her view had been inverted at the time. If she was right, the pygmies had carried her through this canyon on the way to their camp. She snagged Billy by the elbow.
“Do you remember where it goes?”
“Mostly. It meanders around some but comes out somewhere in the western foothills of the Inyos.”
“How far to Geyser Falls?”
“Ehh...” Billy’s face scrunched up. Now that Kat could see him, she was unsettled by the old man’s resemblance to Gabby Hayes, John Wayne’s sidekick in a dozen or so old Westerns. “Mebbe fifteen, twenty miles?”
Snow held up a hand. “Listen!”
Kat pitched her ear to the sounds of the night—buzzes... chirps... hoots...
“The drumming has stopped,” she said.
“Not only that...”
“What?”
“I don’t hear a dang thing,” Billy said.
“Voices,” Snow said. “Anger. Shouting.”
Now that he mentioned it, Kat picked out the vague sounds of excited jabbering mixed with the natural sounds of the night.
“They figured out we escaped,” she said. “They sound pissed.”
“I’m the one that’s pissed... couldn’t hold it all day.” Billy scrunched his face like a wadded dishrag. “Sorry about that.”
Kat shoved Billy toward the canyon and tugged at Snow’s sleeve. “C’mon, boys. Run.”
#
Mournful song after mournful song clicked through the jukebox in my head. Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind,” Johnny Cash singing “Hurt,” even goddamn “At Seventeen”—the Janis Ian version, of course, not the Celine Dion cover. What next, “Seasons in the Sun”? I shuddered. No misery is worth that.
A death spiral of depression swirled me down the toilet bowl of despair. Terry Jacks in my head meant things were bad. Really bad. I kept reaching for magic, but it was gone. Finding my source of power missing hit me right in the gut, every time, and felt worse than poking at a hole in my gum from a missing tooth.
My horse, Blaze, plodded along, guided by starlight and the distant barking of an excited dog. After my command of “follow that dog,” I let the horse find the path, the reins slack in my hand, nodding with the horse’s movement. Floating along in my sewer of self-pity, I was walled off from the world. I noticed neither the glittering swath of stars nor the plaintive song of a distant coyote. I ignored the smell of leather, horse sweat, and night-blooming sage. The horse kept her thoughts to herself, and I rarely took note of anything coming from her equine mind.
Black moments like those were rare and came upon me like a migraine. When the depression hit in full force, not much could stop me from sinking to the bottom of a very deep pit and staying there for a long time. A strong urge to drop to the ground and curl up for a short nap pulled at me as though gravity had intensified. The rhythmic clopping of hooves lulled me into a stupor. My eyelids drooped, and time disappeared.
Until I nearly fell off the horse and had to claw at the saddle horn to stay upright.
Once I tuned in to the dog’s thoughts, I realized Blackie had been having trouble following the scent for some time. He was catching only whiffs here and there, more from brush hanging near the trail than the ground itself, almost as if Krawczyk had levitated along the trail instead of walking it. Was she being carried? If so, by whom?
We approached the entrance to a narrow canyon, and nearby brush all but disappeared. So did the scent trail. Blackie cast about in widening circles, looking like a very confused dog. Dawn’s early light peeked over the mountaintops, and the first birds of the day flittered about, searching for illusive morning worms and generally being annoying with their happy Disney songs. I dismounted, poured water into my hat for the horse, then whistled the dog back to my side and repeated the hat trick. When I clamped the soggy Stetson back on my head, water dribbled down my temples. That was not something they showed in the old Western movies either. Clint Eastwood never had water dripping down his face.
Blackie’s ears perked up, and his nose swiveled to point into the canyon.
People. People.
“What kind of people?”
The dog shot me a how-the-hell-should-I-know look and refocused on the deep gloom between the V-shaped cliffs. Backlit by the rising sun, the middle of the canyon resembled a developing Polaroid print, slowly gaining definition but too dark to make out details.
I eased my Colt out and held it by my leg then led Blaze in a circle so the horse’s nose faced in the opposite direction.
“Be ready,” I told her. “If we need to run for it, don’t wait for me to say giddyap.”
I heard them before I saw them. Scuffing and cursing echoed from the canyon. Didn’t sound like pygmies, so that was a plus. I squinted and waited, one hand on the saddle horn, the other dangling loose with the Colt. Three figures materialized from the gap. Three sizes, all too big for pygmies. Staggering and gasping, though. One cursed, and I recognized the voice.
“Krawczyk? That you?”
The trio stumbled to a halt and stared in my direction. The smallest one detached from the group and stepped forward. “Shivers?”
“Yeah. Who’re your friends?”
“Former dinner companions.”
“Huh?”
“Look, I’d love to chat and catch up and all.” Krawczyk bent over, hands on her knees like someone about to puke, just having finished a marathon, or both. “But we have a whole tribe of pissed off pygmies—”
“Nimerigar,” said the taller of the two men following the small woman.
“Right on our fucking ass,” Krawczyk continued. “And if we don’t get moving, we’ll all be pygmy shit, in no time flat.”
“Pygmy shit? That’s low. Really low,” I said. “Okay, come on. We’ll take turns on the horse. Kat, you first. You can tell me the story on the way back to Geyser Falls.”
#
The morning sun climbed at our backs, and elongated shadows wobbled in front of us as we trudged across the scrub plain east of Geyser Falls. The distant buildings appeared as small blocks set along the glittering ribbon of the Owens River, overshadowed by the jagged purple range of the Sierra Nevadas. Ten miles, at least, I estimated, before we would reach the town. Two hours, maybe three, until I could find Weeks, beat the man to a finely pureed glob, and get my amulet back.
Somewhere along the way, I had decided Weeks was the Magical running amok, killing off the competition and helping himself to things that didn’t belong to him. All my instincts said he was the guy, and it would be a distinct pleasure to backspace him off the page.
I picked up my pace.
“This icon the Nimerigar lost,” I said to the Paiute scholar, James Snow, who hurried to catch up. It was Billy’s turn on the horse, and Krawczyk lagged behind, keeping her eyes peeled for pursuit. “Would it hold a lot of magic?”
“To them, perhaps. Since there is no real magic, the totem’s value would be purely symbolic, of course.”
“Of course.”
The object Weeks carried when he choked me unconsciousness and stole my amulet fit the bill for the totem Snow described. Was it the one stolen from the height-challenged cannibals of the Inyos? How many carved totems in and around these mountains could there be? I suspected the statue was some kind of super amulet, able to hold a tremendous charge of magical energy. Anyone with the talent for magic who possessed such a device would have a godlike ability to wield that power. Enough energy to, say, burn down a few churches and strangle rival preachers or open a bank vault and carry off all the cash. What was Weeks’s goal, though? Money and power? Converts? If he set himself up as the only church in town, his congregation would grow enormously, of course, and he could preach to a wider audience. The burglary of the bank vault seemed at odds with a man who lusted after ecclesiastic power, though no one was immune to a little earthly wealth to go along with the adulation of a congregation.
Whatever his motivation, the most likely explanation was that somehow, Weeks had gotten his hands on the Nimerigars’ idol, which had kicked over the little people like a mound of fire ants. Now, they were running around stinging everybody in the yard while hunting for their totem. During the attack on the Bannerworth, I had the impression that the pygmies were sniffing at doors in the hotel. Now I knew why. I would have bet anything that they could sense the totem’s presence, at least generally, or they could track the scent of the person who killed their honor guard and stole the statue, which was why they were drawn to Geyser Falls and to the Bannerworth in particular. Weeks stayed on the third floor of the hotel. Had the Nimerigar not been interrupted by yours truly before they reached his room, they likely would have carted off Old Dishonest Abe and eaten him for communion.
“Hey, Daddy Longlegs!” Krawczyk’s voice rattled me out of my thoughts. “You want to slow up, there?”
I checked and found I’d outdistanced my companions by quite a bit. I paused in the sparse shade of a scruffy piñon tree and waited for the others to catch up. Blackie sat by my feet and panted. Snow and Billy traded places on the horse, the old miner grousing about missing his mules.
Of all the people I had met since jumping back to the Old West, James Snow seemed the most out of character. The Paiute wore a much-abused wool suit in light gray with the remains of a silk tie dangling around his neck. Small, round spectacles perched on his broad-blade nose. His Native American heritage stood out in his cheekbones and dark eyes, but his mannerisms and diction were more refined than any I had seen thus far... with the possible exception of Merilee Soames, who wore a veneer of manners the way other women wore makeup.
“Anything following?” I asked Krawczyk.
“Nothing I can see.” She mopped her forehead with a sleeve. “But the people are little, y’know? Could be hiding behind a cow patty, and I’d never see them.”
“How many of them were there? Back in the mountains?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “A big bloody bunch.”
“I second that,” Billy wheezed. “Never did get a good look, but they’s all over the dang place.”
We looked at James Snow sitting atop the horse. As the only knowledgeable source on the Nimerigar, he had been elected as the final authority on everything related to the little people. His expression had turned grim.
“Hundreds,” he said. “Maybe over a thousand warriors.”
“Great,” I said. “And they’re all pissed off and coming to town.”
“No doubt,” Krawczyk agreed.
“Sure as shootin’.” Billy nodded along.
Snow merely looked inscrutable and stoic.
Another roadblock in my path, the Nimerigar, would have to wait their turn in my lineup of future violence, slotting right after my new objective one: find Weeks, kill Weeks, recover magical amulet and the magic-filled totem. The damn thing harnessed the power of a hundred amulets. With that kind of energy, it might be possible to do a whole bunch of things. Level a mountain. Throw Weeks into Pluto’s orbit. Turn night into day.
And maybe... just maybe... do a little time traveling along the way.
Worth thinking about.