Skull's Shadows (Plague Wars Series) Read online

  The old man shook his head. “No.”

  “Then why?”

  He looked at the rising sun as it cast brilliant rays over the hills of the mesa. “I’ve lived my whole life on this mesa. It is comforting and beautiful to me even if it can be harsh and dangerous.”

  “I get that,” said Skull. “It does have its own beauty, even if it is a little on the dry side.”

  “What would have happened if I hadn’t brought you here?” Larent asked.

  “I would have died,” Skull answered without hesitation.

  “Before that?”

  Skull thought back. In his mind’s eye, he saw from his sniper’s hide that narrow path the men were coming up. “I would have killed most of them before they killed me.”

  “Yes,” said Larent. “There would have been much death. Early death we do not need here. It brings trouble to my people. This way is best.”

  Taking another drink of water, Skull surveyed the surrounding hills. “Will I be safe here until I’m healed?”

  “You will,” said Larent standing. “And then you must leave us.”

  “Because I’m a Navajo thief?” asked Skull with a slight smile.

  “No,” answered Larent, “because there is a darkness inside you that invites madness and the angry spirits.” Then he turned and walked back inside the crude mud dwelling.

  Skull looked up to see the boy who had fetched the water peeking fearfully at him from behind the corner of a large wooden barrel. Skull scowled at the boy, picking the bucket up and sloshing the water toward him.

  The boy turned and ran.

  Chapter 5

  The next two months passed slowly in Skull’s bored mind. He probably could have left after the first month, but recognized that the need to be fully healed before departing. He knew he would not likely find a safe haven like this Hopi village and the Third Mesa Reservation for some time.

  Skull did what he could to pitch in, especially with the hunting. Additionally, he learned a great deal from the Hopi about desert survival, medicinal plants, and the history of their people. He renewed his ability to slow down and be still, a skill he’d originally learned during the U.S. Marine Corps Scout Sniper Basic Course at Quantico, Virginia.

  Snipers by their very nature must be patient. They may have to sit in one position for days, eating little and pissing in bottles in order to get the perfect shot. Skull didn’t think of himself as an impatient man, but he realized he was a man of purpose, one who wanted to make things happen rather than wait.

  Yet, life on the Hopi reservation was slow and relaxed to the point that Skull felt a sense of emotional vertigo. There were things you could do, or not do. People rarely gave directions or asked for help. You pitched in or you didn’t. Few words were exchanged, and the mild terms of derision thrown at Skull when he entered the village were so unusual for the laconic people that the happenings would likely pass into legend, hardly to be believed.

  The stillness forced him to go days without thinking seriously about anything. When he did turn his mind to what needed to be done, he found himself calm and calculating, as if a giant wind had come through and blown the cobwebs from his mind. Skull remained resolute in his goals, but they were no longer wrapped in clinging, stinking fury and uncontrolled vengeful desire.

  This is the way a man should heal, Skull thought. Naturally, without some genetically engineered germ forcing changes. Spiritually as well as physically.

  When he had recovered enough to depart, Skull felt more in control of himself than he had since Zeke’s death. Surprisingly, he hadn’t truly noticed the difference until he had something to compare it to.

  Riding through the deepening twilight in the rusty pickup truck cab between two Hopi men was a quiet affair except for the constant rattle and squeal of old bolts and factory welds from its chassis, which must have been assembled during the Kennedy administration. Eventually he gave up trying to find a place of rest away from the clattering engine.

  They had left the reservation and crossed into New Mexico on a dry riverbed and were making their way back toward some semblance of civilization in order to take their leave. Skull told them they could drop him in the desert, that he would be fine, but the men exchanged knowing looks that Skull found mildly insulting and kept driving.

  The Hopi had never come to accept Skull, but had at some point stopped scowling at him. None made any effort to converse with him except Larent, but that suited him just fine. Best not to get too close to any of them. He rather hoped for their sakes he never saw any of them again.

  “This radio work?” Skull asked, reaching for the knob to turn on the ancient receiver.

  “Leave it alone,” said the driver.

  Skull ignored him and began turning the dial through the bands. Country and western stations were all he found before he finally landed on a news channel, hearing a near-hysterical voice in mid-sentence. “...are contagious. We all know that. They are sick; none bear them ill will, but we can’t let our children get sick. Think of your children, people. The President’s executive order is a wise and prudent measure. Everyone gets tested for the Eden Plague and those who are sick can get proper medical attention...away from where they can infect others. The national database and FEMA health identification cards will ensure those who are clean, stay clean.”

  The Hopi to Skull’s right reached over and turned off the radio, uncertainty on his face.

  “Testing for everyone,” said Skull thoughtfully. “Wonder if there will be an exemption for the Hopi. They didn’t mention anything like that. Where would all you folks go to get tested – Flagstaff? Maybe the testers will come onto the reservation. That would probably make the most sense.”

  “We will not get tested,” said the driver.

  “Really?” Skull said. “Presidential executive orders are usually specific. In normal times, you might be able to fight this through the courts or something, but these are not normal times, my small sturdy chatty friends. These are the End Times.” He snorted at his own use of a term from his childhood priest’s homilies.

  “We will endure as we always have, like the Earth and the mountains,” said the man in the passenger seat. “What goes on Outside does not concern us.”

  “Far be it from me to disagree with my excellent hosts,” said Skull, “but I think you’re full of shit. Now I can bullshit with the best of them, but the number one rule is, you don’t bullshit yourself. So...the important question is, do you have anything to hide? Any Eden carriers on the Third Mesa?”

  The driver pulled the truck over suddenly on the dirt road. “This is far enough.”

  “What do you mean?” said Skull. “I thought we would go into town. Maybe have lunch together before you boys head back. My treat.”

  Both men were out of the truck and lifting Skull’s rucksack and go-bag from the rusty bed before he finished the sentence. They set these on a nearby rock, and then stared into the cab until he got out.

  “Seriously,” said Skull climbing out of the cab. “Where are we?”

  “The town of Aragon is four miles down that road,” said the driver. “Just keep walking and you should be okay.” They both got back in the truck.

  “I get it,” said Skull leaning into the passenger window. “I’m not one for long tearful good-byes either, but I expect you boys to stay in touch. I’m part of the Hopi tribe now, right? Mystic brotherhood and all that?”

  The truck lurched forward, causing Skull to lean back. He followed along beside them for a few meters. “Hey, if I want to send you boys a postcard, what’s a good address? Should I make it out to Dickhead and Shitkicker of the Third Mesa? Will that be specific enough to get to you two?”

  Rocks and dust flew up in Skull’s face as the truck tore away at the snail’s crawl that was all the old derelict could manage. The driver stuck his hand out the window as it headed west, his middle finger extended.

  “By the way, I’m Apache, you freaks!” Skull laughed, feeling unaccountably
cheerful, even high. It was good to be moving again. He picked up his gear and began walking east down the dirt road in the bright moonlight.

  After two months he found himself again alone, but this time aloneness was comforting. Orderly and predictable. He only needed people when he needed people. When he didn’t, he was a rock, an island. Walking between narrow mountains spotted with stunted trees, he felt good.

  He wondered about Markis, Larry, Spooky and the rest. They were all supposed to find a safe haven in Colombia where a powerful faction of the government promised to offer them sanctuary, but you never knew. Things changed, sometimes. If the U.S. government found out about the arrangement, they could exert significant pressure on the Colombians to give them up. Skull thought his brothers in arms were making a serious mistake by pinning themselves down. Best to stay mobile and hard to grasp.

  Their urge to settle was understandable, though. Much of the group was made up of children and extended family. Those sorts of complications clouded a man’s judgment. This gutted his resolve to do the smart thing, or the necessary thing. Skull hoped that they found safety, but he wouldn’t have placed his faith in vague promises from governments and uncertain allies.

  Leaning forward into the steep rise, he pushed his legs. Life in the mesa hadn’t been a trip to the health spa, but he needed to get his body back in real traveling shape. Cresting the rise at the edge of the valley, he followed the road down into another, smaller draw. He could see the dirt track lifting in and out of the hills for several miles to the east before finally resting on a small huddle of rude structures.

  A thin ribbon of smoke spiraled into the air from off to the right of a burned building. The road led near the source. Skull pulled out his rifle and used the scope to examine the scene. What he saw did not bode well. No movement showed, except for what looked like carrion birds.

  Why not just circle, pass it by out of sight and find the town, Skull wondered, but knew that would be unreasonable.

  Today, Skull felt himself an exceptionally curious creature.

  It took him nearly half an hour of walking until he reached a small black mailbox. On the side it read, “The Frabels.” Skull turned right off the dirt road onto an even smaller, dustier track, checking the pistol in the small of his back and hefting his rifle as he made his way toward the house. Closer, he confirmed what he’d seen through the scope: the building had recently been burned out.

  Skull saw four bodies hanging from the front crossbeam of the porch: a man, a woman and two small boys, the youngest of which couldn’t be older than eight. A cardboard sign hung around the man’s neck, which read, “Eden Sympathizers.” Someone else had written underneath in a cruder hand, “Union Power!” along with a red, points-down trident symbol. The woman’s body was naked from the waist down and appeared to have been raped and mutilated.

  Unionists, Skull thought with disgust. He’d heard about them on Larent’s radio when he could get the old man to let him turn it on. Some kind of new fascist-communist alliance promising the same bullshit every party did in troubled times: security, law and order, protection. That’s all it took for the average citizen-sheep to give up his freedom. Promises to beat back the fear.

  Slinging his rifle and drawing the Glock, Skull crept around the exterior of the house to make sure none of the attackers were still near, but the area seemed deserted. Walking up on the porch, he tilted his head to avoid contact with the littlest boy’s swinging leg.

  Inside the house, everything had been charred by fire, but seemed otherwise intact. The arson was evidently more rushed than thorough, and had gone out naturally because the house was largely built from stone and mortar. Skull started to walk back outside, but he heard a sound under his feet.

  Something rustled faintly, scratching like a mouse making its way through the earth.

  Skull pulled out a flashlight and began playing it across the floor, noticing a faint seam. Slipping his fingers under an edge, he pulled up carefully and shone the light down into the gloom of a hidden cellar.

  Bloodshot, dead eyes looked back at him, set in the blackened face of a girl younger than the two boys on the porch. She appeared to have been trying to make her way up the stairs, but her hair and clothes were burned off and her flesh was charred black, accented with lines of red where the skin had broken open.

  The eyes blinked at him moistly.

  “Shit,” Skull muttered, dropping his pack and pulling out his canteen. He moved down carefully beside the little girl. The eyes followed him in fits and starts, as if the sockets were in need of lubricant. He lifted her head carefully and trickled water into her mouth. The inside of her throat was blackened like her skin, and her body felt cold despite its appearance of being fire-roasted.

  She should be dead, Skull thought. Amazing what humans can endure.

  Coughing, she tried to move, but only groaned faintly.

  Pulling an emergency blanket from his pack, Skull wrapped her loosely, careful not to touch the ruined and sensitive skin if he could help it. He started to get up, but the girl grasped his hand weakly with fingers that look like burned hotdogs, bone visible through the cracks. All the nerves must be dead, for it seemed she felt no pain, a blessing in the midst of damnation.

  “Don’t...leave...” she croaked faintly.

  Skull sat on the stairs and laid a callused hand on her forehead. “I won’t.”

  “Help...me?” she said uncertainly.

  “I can’t,” he said wishing for the first time he had the Eden virus to pass on to her. It was the only thing that had a chance of saving someone so far gone. “I wish I could, but I can’t. Just go to sleep now, sweetheart.”

  The girl closed her eyes and wheezed laboriously.

  A deep flood of sadness and loss welled up within him. This was not the first time he’d seen innocents destroyed by jackals, but it was the first time he’d felt somehow responsible. He’d happily put down such animals that did these things – Al Qaeda terrorists, Boko Haram fanatics, Taliban extremists, Somali pirates and South American cartel thugs. Kidnappers, rapists, “honor” killers, sellers of poison to children on the street and more.

  Skull added homegrown arsonists to his list, if he ever found them. He shook his head in disgust. Bigots abounded, dividing society into smaller and smaller tribes merely for the purposed of exercising petty dominance and giving their hatred free rein.

  Racism he could understand. People looking and acting different was bound to cause tension, even between two such outwardly similar peoples as the Hopi and Navajo. Assholes killing families because of their sympathy for the oppressed…that was incomprehensible evil.

  Skull sat with the girl until she died. It took a surprisingly long time. He swaddled her body tightly in the emergency blanket and carried her outside into the bright moonlight. Finding a shovel in the shed out back, he buried the surprisingly weightless body in the rocky and unforgiving soil, and then cut down the rest of the family and interred them there as well.

  Afterward, he slept nearby, head pillowed on a rock and rifle cradled in his arms like a lover. When the sun rose, Skull filled his canteen and water bottles from the kitchen faucet that still worked, resuming his walk into town.

  Chapter 6

  The vehicle tracks from the burned house all led to one place. The rapist, the arsonists, the murderers hadn’t even tried to hide their trail.

  Arrogant. Cruel. Evil.

  Removing these people from the lands of the living seemed a simple necessity.

  Skull disdained cruelty, especially for its own sake. Those he killed went out clean for the most part. Purposeless torture was an indulgence, demeaning those that did it.

  Gazing down at the tiny town of Aragon through his rifle scope, his hand shading the end to prevent a reflective glare, Skull idly chewed dried meat and sipped water. Perhaps two dozen buildings clustered around a small stream where it intersected the road he’d been walking. Within the cluster of buildings it showed pavement, a hundred y
ards or so of modernity framed by structures before returning to the persistent dust, gravel and dirt that Skull had become so intimate with.

  But Skull saw activity. He observed a score of men carrying rifles and shotguns sitting atop vehicles blocking the road at either end. Others – unarmed women, children, old and young males – walked around with heads bent down between their shoulder blades, scurrying like scared lambs.

  It didn’t take a genius to separate the wolves from the sheep.

  Today, Skull was on the side of the sheep.

  More or less.

  In principle.

  A man had to have a code. A moral center to keep him sane. Skull couldn’t always put his code into words, but he knew evil when he saw it, and eliminated it when he could.

  Several bodies hung from lampposts along the main street. Many of the armed men were drinking. Some used these bodies for desultory target practice. Skull saw that, more times than not, they drunkenly missed their targets despite the close range.

  Pulling out his rangefinder, Skull noted that he was five hundred twelve yards from the farthest man. The closest stood at four hundred seventy-two. Not difficult shots at all for one with the proper training and weapon. The high-tech infrared laser device gave him the humidity and ambient temperature as well. Fortunately, there didn’t appear to be much wind, but even if there had been, he could have handled it. He’d made shots north of a thousand yards in such easy conditions.

  Skull took out a small, specialized calculator and punched in numbers, writing down the results. He then removed a laminated card from a compartment within the butt-stock of his rifle. After carefully consulting the reference, he made adjustments to the scope’s elevation and windage.

  Only then did he crawl forward in his improvised ghillie suit, a patchwork of rag strips hand-tied to his hood, jacket and trousers, to the position he’d previously selected. He moved slowly, dragging his pack behind him. It didn’t appear that anyone from the town was watching the hills, but it was better to be safe.