Читать книгу Looking Backward in Darkness - Kathryn Ptacek - Страница 6

BRUJA

Chato Del-Klinne looked around at the airport terminal as he stepped out of the jetway. Not precisely Kansas, he could hear Sunny say teasingly as if she stood next to him, and he would have smiled, except he didn’t feel like it; he felt...uneasy.

Not precisely Kansas, no.

Southern Texas along the Mexican border, to be more precise. He’d been asleep on the plane, thinking he was heading back to Las Vegas when the captain announced that because of the vigorous storm system to the west, he had been ordered to change his route and land at Dry Plains International instead of Dallas/Ft. Worth.

“Vigorous.” Chato shook his head. He just loved these euphemistic terms. Vigorous...meaning the entire western sky was painted a sickly yellow green, twenty twisters had been spotted between Dallas/Fort Worth and Amarillo, and if everyone was lucky, the tornados wouldn’t remove the top six inches of soil throughout the state of Texas, not to mention every single trailer park in the Lone Star State.

And so here he was. The airport was bigger than he’d expected. It was, after all, an international airport, but mostly he had discovered with great irony that in the southwest that term meant flights scheduled to and from Mexico. Period.

International.

Yeah, right.

What he hadn’t expected was the sheer chaos of the place. Many passengers milled around, while some clumped together to speak angrily about delayed or cancelled flights; somewhere someone was sobbing. Children darted back and forth, and several babies wailed.

He had the sense that something had happened, something horrible, and there was only one sort of thing like that that could make an airport chaotic. Yet the captain of Chato’s plane had mentioned no disaster.

Maybe it just happened now. No, he would have heard something. So, it—whatever it was—had occurred before his flight put down. It must have been after the one announcement, and it must have been too late for the pilot to go to another airport; jets had only so much reserve fuel, after all.

So, they didn’t say a thing because they wanted to keep us from panicking, he thought grimly. Swell.

A youth hardly out of his teens and dressed in old jeans and a white tee-shirt smeared with something dark walked by.

Chato grabbed the young man’s arm. “Excuse me. What happened here, can you tell me? I just got off a plane from New York and—”

”A bomb!” the youth cried, his voice thick with fear and a West Texas accent.

“Where?”

The kid nodded with his chin toward the line of tall windows opposite the gate where Chato had disembarked. “Out there. Some terrorist had a bomb. I think it was one of them Eye-ranians. Blew up the whole plane right there on the runway. It was terrible, just terrible. They got firemen and ambulances out there, but I don’t know if anyone’s gonna make it....” The kid began sobbing and Chato let go and watched as he struggled through the crowd.

Chato was stunned. A terrorist here? He moved forward, and looked out toward the line of windows on the left, and now he could see the wreckage in the distance, maybe a quarter of a mile. He saw emergency vehicles, and saw the flames and billowing black smoke, even in the daylight, and he wondered how his plane’s pilot had negotiated the landing so that no one aboard had seen it.

Clever, real clever. Chato didn’t much like being manipulated like that. Of course, what good would it have done to panic them while they were still in the air? Yeah, right; wait until we’re on the ground, then we can panic.

Now, he watched as people scrambled along the tarmac, some into ambulances, others standing with emergency personnel; he sensed futility. No matter what they did out there...it was too late. Inside the building he watched as men and women and children stumbled along, some pushing others, all of them close to panicking. The bomb had set them off, too, he knew; maybe they were afraid that there were other terrorists, perhaps even in the building who might harm others.

Terrorists. In a border airport in southern Texas. Sure. Dallas-Ft. Worth airport, yeah, maybe. But here? Something wasn’t right.

He checked a monitor. Most departing flights were cancelled; his was one. Of course.

Someone next to him started complaining that when he got home he was going to write to the president of the airlines about this incompetence—he had important business in Vegas, by God, and it had to be done on time, by God—and Chato was relieved he wouldn’t have to fly all the way to Nevada with him; with his luck, the guy would have sat next to him and bitched the whole time.

Now that he knew he didn’t have to rush for a connecting flight, he took time to study his fellow strandees. They were a mixed bag: young and old and in-between, a few in wheelchairs or with canes, a fairly equal combination of Anglo and black and Hispanic, with a handful of Asians. Knots of businessmen in anonymous gray suits and look-alike leather briefcases, and several elderly nuns in old-fashioned habits, a Dallas matron with bouffant hairdo and too much eye makeup, a black kid with gold chains and a gold front tooth to match, two little girls in matching pink and lavender outfits each clutching a stuffed animal, a tall Sikh in all white, and more, dozens more. These people didn’t seem to know where they were going, only that they didn’t want to stay here, didn’t want to stay in one place for too long. And beneath the anxiety and disorientation....

He felt...it.

He supposed he’d been vaguely aware of it before this; perhaps it was what had troubled him when he first arrived. But now that he stood there, not moving, he felt it, felt that touch of something else, of somewhere else.

He had had several close brushes with the supernatural before, and he knew its caress.

An Apache shaman, he’d trained with his teacher long ago before leaving home; for a long time he had turned his back on his discipline. But in the past few years he’d gone through a lot, and his instruction had come in handy.

There was more here than just the explosion out on the runway. God knows, that would have been enough for most places, but not here. There was more...much more.

Blood had been spilled here, he could smell it, and could sense, too, that something had awakened with the spilling of the blood.

He felt as if something shifted under his feet, but when he looked back he saw nothing but the innocuous gray tile.

Sunny, he thought suddenly. He had to get to a phone and let her know that he was okay. He checked his watch. 6:15 here, which meant 4:15 at home, and she’d be expecting him in a few hours. Only he wasn’t going to be at McCarron in a few hours.

Mechanically he moved toward the phones, then stopped when he saw the lines there. They snaked back away from the handful of booths, back toward the waiting area.

Determined, he walked into another gate area, but the situation was the same there. At the newsstand no one stood behind the register. Several customers waited patiently to pay, if only someone would appear; one guy was busy reading the Wall Street Journal, not even aware of what was going on around him. Behind him a short Hispanic woman stood with a magazine in her hand.

As he studied the area, he realized that since he’d arrived he hadn’t seen a single airport employee. No one manned the ticket desks at the gates, nor had there been any announcements about incoming flights or departures. There was nothing but the damned Muzak inanely playing some cheerful mishmash of a Beatles’ tune.

He had the feeling someone was watching him, but when he looked around he saw that everyone else seemed occupied in their own little drama. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling. The hair at the back of his neck prickled, and he rubbed the area. He tightened the band holding back his long black hair, then sighed.

Puzzled, he took the escalator to the lower level where the barrage carrousels were located. The carrousels moved, all right, going around and around, but no luggage shot out of the chutes. He checked the rental car desks; no one. No one stood behind the ticket reservation counters, either.

In fact, except for hundreds of panicked passengers the airport was deserted. He looked outside and saw no taxis waiting along the curb. There were no porters, either.

Where were all the airport employees? Off somewhere having a union meeting? On a mass coffee break, perhaps?

Or had they fled?

He thought he smelled burning french fries drifting down from the upper level, and he hoped that someone would go into one of the restaurants and investigate before the whole place caught on fire.

The music system was now playing “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.” God, how he hated bouncy tunes like that. It was all so...pasteurized.

He went outside and winced as the oppressive heat of the Texas summer afternoon hit him. Then all at once he smelled the acrid fumes from the bombed airplane. He watched now as one of the ambulances he’d seen earlier swung around the building and shot out toward the highway. The vehicle abruptly began swerving back and forth; suddenly it flipped over onto its side and burst into flames. The second ambulance, following some distance away, stopped with a squeal of brakes, and the side and back doors flew open and the emergency crew raced away, just seconds before the vehicle exploded.

For a while Chato had thought about taking one of the rental cars—he couldn’t call it stealing in an emergency situation like this—and getting the hell out of this weird place, but seeing what had happened to the two ambulances made him change his mind. Maybe it was just a coincidence, he told himself. And maybe not.

Maybe something didn’t want anything or anyone leaving the airport area.

It wasn’t a thought he wanted to contemplate for long.

He studied the countryside surrounding Dry Plains International. Well, whoever had named it had certainly gotten that name right. He didn’t see anything except a flat brown expanse stretching off to the horizon, and above it a murky faintly blue sky, almost as if there was a haze. No mountains, no rivers or lakes, no buildings, no trees or bushes or strange cacti, no landmarks whatsoever. It was as if a tabletop had been swept clear and this airport plunked down in the middle. He had seen some desolate places, but man, this beat ‘em all.

Comforting, he thought, real comforting. Just where the hell was this place?

To further increase his apprehension a dry hot wind howled around the corner of the building, and in the wind he thought he heard voices, strange voices that seemed to whisper his name.

Quickly he went back inside through the automatic doors before the electricity decided to go off and strand him outside. He wasn’t sure which was worse: being stuck outside or in. As if something had read his thoughts, the lights overhead flickered momentarily, and somewhere there was a high-pitched scream.

He decided right then and there to go where there were people. Safety in numbers? he could hear Sunny tease him. Damned right, honey. This level was far too deserted for his liking. Again, he felt like something was watching him, but again when he looked around, he saw no one.

The escalator stopped halfway between floors, and he was getting ready to walk up the rest of the distance when it started up again, only this time it went backwards. He managed to turn around before he got to the floor, then stood and stared at the slow-moving steps.

Well, he’d take the stairs now. Damned if he go on an elevator or try the escalator again.

As he walked toward the staircase, he thought he heard a sound like a moan. He stopped. There was no one near the escalator. Still no one at the car rental desks or airline counters. All that was left were two doors, each with its bland symbol symbolizing a man and a woman. He entered the men’s restroom first.

“Hello?”

No answer. He checked all the stalls. Nothing.

He went next door to the ladies’ restroom.

“Hello?”

He heard a movement in one of the stalls, and pushed open the door which hadn’t been locked. A young blonde woman—she couldn’t have been much over eighteen, he decided—huddled there. A very pregnant young woman, he thought, when she shifted.

“Do you need help?” he asked gently.

She nodded. When she looked up at him, he could see that tears had left mascara smudges down her cheeks.

“Let me take you back upstairs where there are other people,” he said.

“I-I think the baby’s about to come. I came in here. I didn’t know what else to do,” the girl said.

“Maybe there’s a doctor or nurse on the second floor,” Chato said as he took her by the hand, easing her to her feet. She shuffled forward a few inches, then groaned. He realized she needed to lay down right away, but he would have to get her upstairs for that. Maybe they could break into the airlines’ lounge. Surely they had couches in there.

But once he got the girl outside the bathroom and halfway to the escalator he realized they weren’t going to get upstairs. She could barely hobble and kept crying the entire time.

While he had been looking around, he’d seen an area back of the stairs that made a protected nook. He took her there and told her to wait, then searched the lower level until he found a chair for her. She sank into it with a grunt.

“I need to go up and see if there’s a doctor, okay?”

“No! Don’t leave me!” She gripped his hand.

“Look, miss—”

”Gail.”

“Gail,” he said, trying to keep his tone reasonable. He needed to calm her, reassure her somehow that everything would be all right, when he wasn’t at all sure himself that things would be all right. “It’ll just be a few minutes. You’re okay here. You’ve got this comfortable chair and—”

She squeezed his hand harder. “No, please, don’t leave. I think someone’s after me.”

“No one can see you back here,” he said. “It’s out of the way. You can’t be seen from the stairway or the doors or—”

”No, no, no! You don’t understand. I’ve been hearing this voice ever since I got off the plane. Gail, it’s been saying, give me your baby. I want your baby. I need your baby.”

Chato stared down at her tear-streaked face, and knew then that this wasn’t something she was imagining. She had heard the voice.

“Right. Okay. Look, give me a few minutes to scout around.” He held up a hand when she started to protest. “I won’t be long. But I want to see what I can find to make you more comfortable. Okay?”

She nodded.

“Just sit here and be quiet, and if anyone approaches...scream like hell, and I’ll come running.”

She nodded again, pressed a hand to her abdomen. “Thank you. You know, I don’t even know your name.”

“Chato.”

He ducked out of the nook and glanced around the lower level. Empty as before. Or was it? The hairs along the back of his neck prickled again. Someone watched. He had thought that before. Now he knew he wasn’t imagining it.

“Some Enchanted Evening” played on the music system.

That, he decided, could go off any time soon, and he’d be all the happier for it.

One airline counter over he found a door leading into an employees’ lounge. Lots to loot here, he thought with a wry smile. He dragged the seat cushions from some couches back to the nook. He would have brought a couch, he explained, but he didn’t think he could get it through the doorway.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

He returned to the lounge and found a closet full of the lap blankets that flight attendants give passengers, along with a dozen or more small pillows. He took everything there he could carry back to Gail. He tucked pillows around her, and covered her with the blankets, and stacked some nearby.

Just in case, he thought. Just in case when the baby comes, and I have to deliver it. He felt a spike of panic. His shaman training didn’t include lessons in childbirth. This he’d have to wing.

He’d been aware for some time of more noise from above, and it sounded now like screaming and shouting and assorted bumping and scraping. He wondered what was going on, but he wasn’t about to go and investigate. And he hoped whatever was up there wouldn’t make its way down here.

Not for the first time he realized they were virtually trapped in the nook. The safe place could become in a moment’s notice a prison.

But what choice did they have? He didn’t want to settle her in the middle of the deserted level, where anyone—or anything—could see them.

He went scouting again and came back with two fire extinguishers. Not the best choice of weapons, he told himself, but when you have nothing else at hand. Well, that’s not precisely true, he realized. He did have his Swiss army knife. Yeah, that would be a lot of use, wouldn’t it? Besides, if he had smelled something burning earlier, these canisters might come in handy. If the electricity went off, he could always break the windows with them so they could escape outside.

He saw that Gail had fallen asleep, and so he sneaked back to the employees lounge. When he saw the vending machines again, he realized just how hungry he was. He had slept through dinner on the plane, and hadn’t had anything since he’d left New York City that morning. And he knew Gail would be hungry.

He reached into his pocket for change, and thought, what the hell am I doing? He didn’t have enough for two candy bars, much less what he knew they’d need.

He studied the first machine, one for sodas, then took out his pocket knife, selected a blade he thought would fit and inserted it and began jiggling it back and forth in the lock on the front panel. Finally he was rewarded with a snick, and the panel opened. He did the same for the other machines.

Something thudded onto the floor above and he half-expected to see someone or something falling through the ceiling. But it held. For now.

He located several empty cartons and put all the cans of soda in there, as well as dozens of packets of cookies and potato chips and cellophane-wrapped sandwiches and candy bars. He threw in what paper napkins and plastic cutlery he found; he opened all the drawers and doors he could find to see what other goodies he could liberate. When he left, he thought the room looked like locusts had swept through.

He winced. Somehow he didn’t like the imagery.

When he got back, Gail was awake and had struggled up to a sitting position. He put the boxes down with the others he’d brought back earlier.

“Hungry?”

She nodded.

He pawed through the contents of a box. “I have ham and cheese, or ham and cheese, or ham and cheese.” She giggled and suddenly she looked much younger than her eighteen years. “Or the ever popular ham and cheese.”

“It’s such a hard decision. Umm. Let me have the ham and cheese, please.”

“An excellent choice. And what will you have to wash it down with? Here we have more choice. Clear soda, orange soda or brown soda.”

“Orange, please.”

Somehow he knew she would choose that. He opened the can and handed it to her. He was sitting on the chair now.

“I’ll be back.”

He went back to the airline counters and hunted around until he came to another fire alarm box. He took the fire axe. A better weapon.

On his way back he grabbed some pads of paper and pens. They might as well keep occupied while waiting for the baby.

He was heading back to the nook when he saw something on the now-stopped escalator. He edged closer. A thin trickle of blood dripped down from the floor above to the first tread of the escalator, crawled along the grooved metal plating, then dribbled down onto the tread below. Tread after tread, the blood dripped slowly down.

He backed away quickly.

“What’s the matter?” Gail said, looking up from her sandwich when he came back.

“Nothing,” he said with what he hoped was a steady smile.

“You’re a bad liar,” she said.

“I know. Sunny—my girlfriend—always says that.”

He thought Gail seemed steadier now that she was eating and drinking something. Plus, he reminded himself, she wasn’t by herself. That had to be a bit more reassuring, even if he didn’t know what was going to happen.

“I don’t know anything about you,” he said after he finished his first sandwich and started on a second. He had never realized how good stale bread and dry cheese could taste. “You married?” She shook her head. “About to be?” She nodded. “And your boyfriend abandoned you, right?”

“Yeah, how did you know?”

“Lucky guess. Well, you’re better off without him. He wouldn’t have been much help now, I suspect.”

“No, Randy said I was getting too fat and ugly.”

“You’re certainly not ugly. And you’re not fat. You’re pregnant. There’s a big difference.”

She flashed him a grateful smile.

“Where you going to?”

“Home to Omaha. I wanted to be with my family. My parents don’t know about...my pregnancy. I guess my dad will yell a bit, but he really loves me, and my mom will just glare at him until he shuts up. It’s the only place I can go. I was running out of money.”

“Sounds like a good place, basically.”

“What about you, Chato?” She was gnawing on her lower lip. She hadn’t made any noise for some time, but he knew she was hurting.

“I live in Las Vegas; I was coming from New York City going to Dallas-Ft. Worth, but got diverted here. I do odd jobs, I guess you could say, sort of this and that. Sunny is a blackjack dealer at a casino. What else? Well, I grew up in New Mexico.”

“And you’re Indian,” she said softly.

“Yeah. Chiricahua Apache.”

“I went to school with some Sioux. There are a lot of Indians in Nebraska, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.” He paused as he thought he heard someone speak. Hadn’t they said Gail? No, it couldn’t be. “Hey, I brought along some paper and some pens, and thought after we have our dessert of Paydays or Hershey bars, we could have a rollicking game of hangman. How’s that sound?”

She winced slightly from pain. “Great. I think I’m ready for my dessert now. What were you doing in New York?” she asked as she peeled back the wrapper.

“Business. Okay. I was at some meetings in northern New York state.”

“Are you an Indian activist?” she asked.

He was surprised by her question.

She smiled. “I heard about the protests up there with the Mohawks, and just wondered.”

“Yeah, well, I was there at the same time, although for different reasons. I’m not really an activist, though.” He didn’t want to go into details of the matter that he had handled; he thought it would be too upsetting for her now. There had been some misunderstandings, some deaths; nothing was ever as easy as he thought it would be. He rubbed at a scar on his arm, an red angry-looking scar all too recent. He should know better by now; except that he didn’t.

She sensed his reluctance and didn’t pursue it. “How about that game now?”

“Fine.”

He drew a hanging tree, and twelve spaces below it, then showed her the pad of paper.

“Twelve letters? Oh, no! I was never good with long words!”

She had guessed eight of the letters when the really big pain shot through her, and she groaned so loudly he dropped the paper. He realized she’d been huffing her breath for the past few minutes, and he hadn’t even noticed.

“Oh, damn,” he muttered when he saw her face, and leaped to his feet. The baby was coming.

Rolling up his sleeves as he dashed into the bathroom, he scrubbed his arms with soap and hot water, dried them, then came back to where Gail lay moaning softly.

He checked his supplies. He was as prepared as he’d ever be—rolls of paper towels, spare blankets, a bucket of water and sponges. Now, if he just knew how to deliver a baby, he’d feel a little happier about the situation.

He helped her lay back down on the couch cushions, settled a pillow beneath her head.

“Okay?”

She nodded, her breath huffing faster. She seemed to be counting silently. Then she said, “I have too many clothes on. You-you’re going to have to help me.”

He was embarrassed for himself and for her, too. He helped her remove her panties and push back her dress, and then he draped a blanket over her upraised knees.

Oh, God, Sunny, he thought, where are you when I need you? He didn’t know that Sunny had ever birthed a baby, but he wouldn’t put it past her, and he knew she’d just stride into this little maternity cubbyhole, take in the situation at once, roll up her sleeves, and that would be that. Sunny would take care of everything.

Only Sunny wasn’t here; he was.

“Oh, God!”

Gail gripped his hand as he told her to push. That’s what they did on TV, he told himself, so he assumed it was close enough to truth.

“Push again. That a girl. Good. Again.”

The umbilical cord. What was he going to do about that? Oh, Jesus, what had he gotten himself mixed up in? Then he remembered his pocket knife. He’d clean a blade off the best he could and he’d use that.

What if the baby died? What if Gail died? What if she bled to death right here? He’d have to go get help, he knew it. But upstairs...was there any help upstairs?

No. There was just him and Gail and a baby about to be born.

And almost before he knew it then the baby was coming, and he could see its head, and he told Gail to push harder and harder, and she screamed at him that she was, Goddamnit, and he told her she was doing good, really good, and then all at once there was a baby in his hands. A tiny warm thing covered with blood, and the wrinkled faced contorted itself, and he remembered some dumb medical show he used to watch, and he gently pried open the baby’s mouth and removed mucus, and the baby coughed and started to cry.

Gail, her hair plastered dark against her forehead, smiled weakly. “Girl or boy?”

“Girl.”

“Good. Boys are nothing but trouble. Does she have all her toes and fingers?”

“Sure does.”

He cut the umbilical cord, and cleaned the baby gently with the paper napkins and towels, then wrapped her in one of the blankets. He had to clean up. And he had to help Gail clean about.

Still holding the baby, he stared down at her and she blinked up at him. He felt himself an inane urge to grin foolishly. Babies did that to people, he knew.

He heard a sound behind him.

A small white-haired woman stood there. It was, he realized, the woman from the newsstand.

“I will take over from here,” she said softly, and her eyes were the yellow brown of a wolf’s.

And he knew that this woman was the part of the reason for his unease.

He knew in an instant what she was. Bruja. Witch.

Beyond her something shimmered, and at first Chato thought it was fog that had somehow crept into the terminal, but then he squinted and the fog coalesced. In the rippling light he could see figures that were there but not there, men from the past, dressed in feather headgear, cotton tunics and shields. Their dark bodies glistened as if oiled, and the men grinned fiercely.

“These are my ancestors,” the woman said. “They suffered much under the whites. And they are hungry for their revenge.”

Chato didn’t have to ask how they would be brought into this time. He saw the bruja eyeing the baby, and he knew without question she would harm the newborn, would...sacrifice...it.

Not if he had anything to say about it.

Suddenly she leaped forward and grabbed the infant, and turned and ran.

“No!” Gail shrieked and tried to stagger to her feet.

“Stay there!” he yelled back at the girl as he raced after the woman. For someone so little, she certainly ran fast, he thought. He risked a glance back over his shoulder, and saw that Gail had obeyed and was back by the nook. Good. He didn’t want to have to worry about her as well. God knew what else was wandering around this airport.

This part of the building had grown darker now, as if it were close to nighttime, yet Chato knew it wasn’t. He glanced out the windows as he ran, and saw a gloom. But he didn’t have time to think any more about it. He saw a door closing ahead, and knew the bruja had gone through it.

He stopped moments before he slammed into the wall, wrenched open the door and stepped through....

...and fell down a steep and rough slope. He tumbled and twisted and bounced, and once slammed his knee against a boulder. Finally, he came to a rest at the bottom. Puffs of dust rose around him, making him cough.

Nothing vital, he thought, was broken, although when he managed to get to his feet he knew he was bleeding in several places; certainly he was bruised, and when he touched his side with his fingertips, he winced. He thought he might have cracked a rib or two.

Swell.

And just where the hell was he?

He seemed to be in a tunnel, rough-hewn from rock and the earth. The ceiling wasn’t high, and when he lifted his arm, wincing with pain from his ribs, he found he could touch the surface easily. He was not given to claustrophobia, but he would have liked it if the place were a tad more spacious. The walls were scarcely an arm’s length away on each side. The air smelled of must, of rich loamy earth...like a newly dug grave.

The tunnel should have been pitch-black, but it wasn’t. It was faintly lit, as though the earthen walls around him was phosphorescent. He scraped some of the dirt away, and his fingers glowed slightly. Quickly he wiped his hand on his jeans.

His eyes had adjusted to the semi-darkness now, and he could see that the walls weren’t made of just dirt; objects seemed embedded in them. He stepped closer, and brushed away some grime so he could better see. He backed hastily away when he saw the gleaming white of a human skull. The matrix of the walls were human bones: skulls and femurs, shin bones, and the thin bones of fingers and toes. Here and there stiff hair and parchment-like skin clung. Here and there he could see a bas relief carved, images of skulls and skeletons and pyramids of bones.

He looked back up the slope, but couldn’t see the doorway. There was no way out there; that much was obvious.

He would have to go down the tunnel.

He didn’t want to go down the tunnel.

No choice, old pal, he told himself, and it almost sounded like he had spoken aloud, although he knew he hadn’t.

Something brushed by his ear, and he shook his head.

The floor, he realized then, was made up of crushed bones. Inside his boots his toes curled, but he had no choice. He had to walk upon the dead.

Carefully he moved forward, suspicious there might be some trapdoor waiting for him; but the ground seemed solid enough. For now.

He noticed masks suspended from some of the walls. Intricately carved images that leered or glared down at him with the countenances of stern-faced warriors and eagles and reptiles and pumas and other feral beasts. Masks with elongated earlobes, exaggerated noses and lips, eyes that were narrow slits, tear-shaped or round as if with surprise. Masks hewn of coconut husk, of wood, of copper and silver and tin. Some had elaborate headdresses in turn, those the visages of jaguars and parrots. Bright feathers and plaits of human hair and strands of beads and teeth and shell dangled from the masks, and he saw the glint of gold and precious stones in the rings in the ears.

More light came from ahead, and he reached an opening on the right. There was a smallish room that seemed empty, and when he stepped into it, he saw himself as a boy of fourteen when his father had taken him to Ryan Josanie. His old teacher, the man who had taught him to be a shaman.

Josanie was showing the then-Chato how to control his dreams, and the youth was complaining that it was hard, and Josanie, not smiling, was saying that everything worth having is hard, and the then—Josanie glanced up and saw the now—Chato.

“Josanie.” Seeing the old man brought him such sadness and regret. His teacher had been dead for years. Chato took a step forward, and with a shimmer, as it if were simply an image in water, the scene disappeared, and he was standing in an empty room.

He went out into the tunnel, which now turned to the left. Sometimes, he thought, the eyes of the skulls in the walls seemed to watch him, but he dismissed that thought. He was just getting spooked; that was all. Nothing was watching him.

Or was it.

He encountered another room. There he saw himself and Ross, his brother younger by three years, and they were at a state championship football game, and the then-Chato was in uniform, and Ross was saying how much he admired his brother, and Chato was laughing and telling him he’d know better when he got older, and Ross saying he’d always respect his brother. Ross...whom he’d not seen in years, hadn’t talked to for more than a year. Ross...they’d been close once. Now they had drifted so far apart.

Once again Chato took a step forward, and once again, the image, as if mirrored on the surface of water, disappeared.

Out in the tunnel he grew aware again of a sound that had been with him since he’d entered this stygian world. Its rhythm was regular, he realized, and he thought it might be water dripping somewhere. No, more than that. And he recognized it then as the sound of a heart beating, and whether it was his or something else’s he didn’t know.

Some yards away he found another room, and this time he saw his mother and father working, working hard as they had always done to make a better life for his brother and him. They never complained, even though they often held down as many as two or three jobs at once, all so that their boys could go to school, would not live in the desperate poverty which they had known all too well.

In still another room he saw himself at the university, saw him getting his degree, saw his parents in the audience, and he knew their pride. He was the first in the family to go beyond high school. He was proud, and yet he felt as if he had lost something that night, something of his people, and he didn’t know what.

In yet another room he saw a woman he had loved long ago; they had parted amicably enough; and then he saw his old house in Albuquerque where he had lived when a professor of geology there, and he remembered all the good times he’d had then, all the good friends he’d left behind long ago, all the memories that he had stepped away from.

Another chamber contained niches carved deep into the earth, and in the niches lay mummified bodies. Bodies that had been dead for decades, for a century or two or even longer. The dust was thick in this room, and he did not step inside. He feared to. Here and there he could see a scrap of cloth still sticking to the leathery skin of the mummies, and the air smelled faintly of herbs. Something moved opposite him, and he watched a centipede crawl out of one of the body’s eyes.

His stomach rebelled, and he hurried away.

The path twisted to the right, and he stepped into the room and saw a man on a bed. The man was naked, and a blonde woman, equally exposed, sat astride him and ground her hips and moaned. Her hair was plastered in long sweaty strings down her back. The man on the bed reached up and brutally squeezed her breasts, and she cried out as she arched her back, and then she swiveled her head around and leered at him, and Chato saw with horror that the woman was Sunny.

“No!” he screamed. He stumbled from the room, and when he glanced back it was dark. No, no, no. Sunny wasn’t with a man, wouldn’t be; she loved him. Or did she? one part of him slyly whispered. She did, she did, she did. He repeated it to himself as if it were a mantra.

He rubbed his hand across his face, felt the sweat and grime there, and knew then that what he had seen was false. He had been misled, deliberately. Whoever—whatever—was doing this wanted him to lose heart, wanted him to give up.

But he wouldn’t.

He took a deep breath, and followed the curve of the tunnel which was now heading downward slightly, and he wondered how far below the airport he was now. If that was really where he was.

Abruptly the tunnel ended, and there before him stretched a pool of water. He edged closer and saw reflected only himself.

Now what? he asked himself.

He inspected the wall beyond the water, the walls alongside him. Were there hidden doors somewhere? No. He knew that this was the way.

But if he jumped in, he would drown. Who knew how deep this was? He might just sink like a stone, and that would be the end of him. Or perhaps there were...things...slimy things waiting for him beneath the water, things that would suck the very breath from his body, and crush him with their rot-encrusted tentacles.

No, no, he couldn’t do it. He had to go back, had to find another way to rescue the baby.

No, said a voice in his mind, and he knew it was old Josanie. Think.

He studied the water’s tranquil surface. Nothing seemed to move below it. Nothing disturbed it.

Taking a deep breath, Chato took one step into the water and sank and sank and sank until he thought his lungs would burst from lack of oxygen, and then suddenly he was in another room, this one much larger than those lining the tunnel.

Firelight flickered, casting elongated shadows, shadows that seemed almost to move as if they were alive.

And there beyond the blaze stood the bruja, and she held the baby by its tiny heels, and dangled the child over the flames. The baby wailed miserably, and flailed its arms uselessly.

“You will pay,” the woman whispered, and in that moment he saw she was not an old woman as he had first thought, but that her skin was dark and mottled, like that of a lizard, and her teeth were long and yellowed, something red staining them. From her back arched wings of jade and ebony feathers, feathers that moved, from the lice and maggots that crawled across them. She looked like a feathered serpent.

He blinked, but the image stayed the same, and in that moment, he saw she wore his mother’s face, then that of Sunny, then that of a girl whom he had known long ago at the university, and then it was the face of the old woman, but only as she must have been long, long ago. She was at once beautiful and terrible to see, and he saw now that she was completely naked except for the necklace of bones draped across her full breasts, and her bronzed skin gleamed.

She smiled at him, and beckoned to him with one hand, and in that hand he saw an obsidian knife.

He remained rooted where he was.

Her skin was tattooed. At least he thought they were tattoos. Tattoos of eyes, like the masks in the tunnel: mere slits, round, tear-shaped, and then with growing horror, he realized the eyes were watching him and that some had winked.

The woman’s smile broadened. She raised her arm, the knife rising, and now he watched as the dagger came hurtling down and—

Without thinking, he threw himself across the fire. He was only dimly conscious of the sparks singeing his hair, burning his face and hands, and he grabbed the baby just as the knife slashed downward and pain shot through him as the obsidian cut through his sleeve into his flesh, and he yelled, and kicked out, and his boots connected with the woman, and she screamed as she lost her balance, and fell into the fire.

He scrabbled to his feet, the child cradled tightly in his arms, and watched as the woman writhed and howled as the flames licked up and down her body, melting the flesh away as if it were nothing more than thin tissue paper, and he watched as her bones burned, watched until there was nothing more than charred matter. Abruptly the fire died down, and there was only embers and what had been left of the bruja.

Tentatively he touched one of lumps with the toe of his boot, and he thought he could hear a faint cry.

He hurried away from the fire, then examined the room. It was elongated, the now-dead fire at one end, a pool of water at the other. He had come down before. Would he have to go down again? It didn’t make sense. After all, he wanted to go up, but then maybe none of this made sense, at least as far as the rules of science went. This was a matter of something much darker, much older than science, after all.

The baby was whimpering, and he tried to shush her, but he knew she must be scared and hungry, and with a prayer that this was the right thing, he jumped into the water, and suddenly he was bobbing up and up and up through clear water, and his head broke the surface and he scrabbled out of it before the baby could drown.

Once more he was standing in the tunnel, and as far as he could see there was still no exit. It looked liked he’d have to head up that slope. There was no way around it.

He clasped the infant closer to him and started toward the slope. He ignored the rooms on either side of him; he wanted to see nothing that they held. The walls seemed to grow closer upon him, and things with long plucking fingers reached out and grabbed at his tattered shirt, his burned skin, and he gritted his teeth against the pain.

Finally he came to the slope. He started climbing up, holding the baby with one hand, helping himself find a purchase with the other hand.

What if, he wondered halfway up, what if he got to the top, and he didn’t see a doorway, just like when he fell down the slope.

Believe, one part of his mind said, and it was his voice, though, not Josanie’s.

He reached the top, and rested, but there before him was the door. He pushed it open and stepped through, and he once more was in the airport terminal, and when he glanced around, there was only a smooth wall.

He hurried toward the nook, afraid now that he would find Gail gone, but she was there, sitting on her bedding. She leaped to her feet when she saw him and rushed over, and he handed the baby to her.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

He knew how he must look. His hair was partly singed, some of it laying in wet strands across his cheek and forehead. His face and arms were bruised, he had blood and cuts and dirt all over him, not to mention the burns and scorch marks.

He grinned.

“It’s a long story.” He took a deep breath and felt the sharp pain in his ribs; he had forgotten about them during all this; now he was very much reminded. “I think I’m going to wash up as best I can in the bathroom, and then I think we ought to get the hell out of here. You agree?”

She nodded. “I agree.”

When he came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, he found she’d make a makeshift bed for the baby from a small carton, and that she’d packed some of their things—mostly the food and drink and blankets—into a few other boxes.

“I didn’t know how far we’d have to walk,” she said.

“Walk? Hell, we’re going to drive,” he said, and he strode over to one of the rental car stations, and grabbed a handful of keys. “We’re going to go to the rental lot, and find what fits where, and when we do, we’re getting in and not looking back.” He didn’t mention the vehicles that he’d seen earlier, the ones that couldn’t get out of the airport. Not now.

He wasn’t about to stop for anyone or anything now, not after what he’d just gone through.

It took them half an hour but they found a blue T-bird, and got their boxes settled in. Gail strapped herself in, then held the baby tightly.

Chato got behind the wheel, put on his seatbelt, adjusted mirrors and seat, and turned on the car, and without thinking, flipped on the turn signal. He grinned when he realized it wasn’t necessary. Old habits.

Then they drove out of the deserted rental car lot, and into the outbound lane, and when they reached the shells of the ambulances, he saw that Gail started to shake as she realized what had happened earlier, and he said, looking into the rearview mirror and seeing the dark eyes of old Josanie, “I believe.”

Chato drove away from the airport, away from the fire and the death, and it was only when they had driven over twenty miles further that he remembered he never had picked up his luggage. He began laughing.

That was okay. He’d pick up some more bags. After all, he told himself as he look over at the sleeping mother and child, luggage was cheap; life wasn’t.