Storm of Locusts

Chapter 3

“What are we up against?” I ask, sliding out of the jeep parked at the edge of the lake. My moccasins kick up swirls of red dust. Around us stretch the red and white striated cliffs of Bowl Canyon. Pine trees dot the sides of the rock face, incongruous spikes of determined survival in a world made of hard surfaces and callous time. Long before the Big Water, before even the Diné became the Earth-Surface People that we are today, this part of the world used to be the floor of a great sea. The bilagáana scientists call that continental shift geology. We Diné don’t disagree exactly. We find the same strange ocean-born fossils in our rocks, the same signs of a world before ours, foreign and unfamiliar. We just attribute the current face of our homeland to different sources.

“Have you heard of the White Locust?” Hastiin asks me as he comes around the back of the jeep.

“Not until your niece mentioned her. Him. They?”

“He’s the leader of a group that call themselves the Swarm. You can blame your boy for that,” he says, digging around in the back of the jeep. My boy. He means Kai. He pulls out a bullet-resistant vest and throws it at me.

I catch it. “I need body armor?”

“Ever since his storm cloud’s been hanging over Canyon de Chelly”—he points with his lips in the direction of the sacred canyon even though we can’t see it from here—“people have been getting crazy ideas. End of the world. Beginning of the new world.”

“Isn’t the apocalypse a little ‘been there, done that’? I mean, didn’t we just have a massive world-destroying flood? Earthquakes? Wars? What, did they miss the memo?”

The new girl laughs, and I give her a grin. Either I’m getting funnier or apocalypse jokes are low-hanging fruit.

“Put the damn thing on,” he says when he sees I’m not strapping on the vest. “I fully expect these people are armed to the teeth.”

“You do remember I’m fast, don’t you?”

He frowns. Hastiin hates when I bring up my clan powers. Most of the time he pretends I don’t have them. The rest of the time he’s relying on me to use them to get us out of a jam. What he doesn’t seem to understand is that I can’t turn them on and off when I want to. They come on their own schedule, usually when I’m personally in danger, and leave just as abruptly when the adrenaline spike that drive them fades.

“You’re not faster than a bullet,” he says, but there’s no conviction in his voice.

I grin at even getting that small admission out of him. I actually don’t know if I’m faster than a bullet. But I do know that I’m faster than the human that is holding the gun that is shooting the bullet. And my clan power, Honágháahnii, will show me where that bullet is heading in plenty of time for me to get out of the way. And that usually means I’m a pretty good bullet dodger. I must have a smart-ass look on my face because Hastiin grumbles, “Humor me.”

I stare at him. He stares back. I consider whether this is really the hill I want to die on and decide it’s not. “Fine.” I lay my shotgun across the seat of the jeep. Shrug out of my back holster. Place it and my leather jacket in the vehicle. “So these people think Kai’s storm cloud is a sign of another Big Water?”

“You know the story of the Emergence?” Hastiin asks.

“Some,” I acknowledge, remembering the stories Coyote liked to tell me about the creation of the world. “I know that the First World was a red world, inhabited by insect people. Beetle, dragonfly—”

“Locusts.”

“—locusts. But they screwed up their world and were forced to flee to the Second World, the Blue World.”

“And what made them flee?”

“Uh . . .”

“Floods. A storm.”

“So this White Locust guy fits in how?”

“When the Air-Surface People escaped the First World and traveled to the Second World, they sent out scouts to try to find a place to live. One of those scouts was White Locust.”

“So this White Locust guy thinks he’s . . . what? Scouting for a new world?”

“Something like that,” he admits. “Says the Big Water was some kind of moral punishment and it’s his job to lead us to a new land.”

“I like the land we’re on just fine. Besides, the Big Water didn’t flood Dinétah.” That was a sobering thought. The Big Water drowned most of the continent, hell most of the world. The coastline these days starts somewhere in West Texas, the island chain of the Appalachians being the only land until somewhere near the Alps. The western half of the continent fared a little better. California was below twenty feet of sea water, but places like New Denver had risen, a chaotic but prosperous place, from what I’d heard. Salt Lake City had extended its influence over most of Utah, Nevada, and what was left of northern Arizona to become the Exalted Mormon Kingdom. Albuquerque was the Burque, a volatile city-state run by Hispanic land-grant families and water barons.

“The White Locust is just another New Ager turned doomsday prophet,” Hastiin says. “Men like him can’t be happy with living. They got to be praying for the end of the world. They thrive on death. Convince weaker men that only they can save them, but it’s all bullshit. Don’t trust those death-dealers, no matter how sweet their words. They only want to die and take you down with them.”

I stare until, under the weight of my gaze, Hastiin looks up. “What?”

“That’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard you make.”

He narrows his eyes, annoyed. “Check her straps,” he says to his niece. She follows orders, although she looks a little reluctant. No, a little scared. Like I might bite if she gets too close. I lift my arms, an invitation, and she approaches me with a small smile. I wince as she tightens my vest.

“Sorry,” she mutters.

“It’s okay. What’s your name?”

“Ben.”

“Ben what?”

“Just Ben.”

“Well, thanks, just Ben.”

She finishes up. Gives me a shy nod and steps back to the jeep and tries to look busy moving equipment around.

“So how’d you get involved with this White Locust?” I ask Hastiin.

“Tribal Council’s put a bounty out on him. Seems the White Locust has been buying up every piece of dynamite in Dinétah. Trading posts. Black markets, too. Not just TNT, but anything that will make things go ‘boom.’ Camped up here at the lake with all his bombs in some hidey-hole. Got the Tribal Council worried. They decide they should have a sit-down, just to talk. So they send a representative out to do just that. Only the rep doesn’t come back. Nobody’s heard from him since.”

“You think he’s dead?”

“That’s what they’re paying us to find out.”

“So, what’s the plan?”

Hastiin looks at Ben. “Go on. You can tell her.”

Ben straightens, tries to look authoritative. “We believe that he and a handful of followers are camping in the caves along the top ridge of the mesa. I tracked one of them back up there when she came down for a first aid kit last week at the medical depot. Her knuckle was all busted and she threw away a bloody bandage, right there in the common trash. She thought nobody saw her. She was real careful, running the switchback, but I’m good on the mountain trails. The best, actually.” She barely blushes at the brag.

I press my lips together. Consider young Ben. “Good on the mountain trails?”

Hastiin exhales loudly and pointedly, and Ben reddens for real this time. “Keha’atiinii,” she admits, “born for Bįįh Dine’é.” Her chin comes up, proud.

Foot-trails People, born for Deer People. A potent combination for a tracker.

“Good for you,” I say. I don’t ask her what life-threatening trauma brought on her clan powers. Us trauma survivors try to respect each other’s boundaries. And I’m fairly impressed that she’s not hiding her powers. I did when I was her age. Actually, I just lived with a supernatural warrior and avoided human contact. We all deal in different ways.

“I’m sending Ben up first because of her . . . talents. She’s only going to scout it out and report back. Not engage.” He glares at his niece, who looks sufficiently cowed. “Then you and I will follow, Hoskie. Atcitty and Curley are circling around the other side of the canyon as we speak. They’ll come down from the east.” Atcitty and Curley must be the other Thirsty Boys, the ones on the bikes.

“Check her straps,” Hastiin says to Ben. Ben’s eyes crinkle, and I hold up a hand to stop her.

“Seems straightforward enough, Hastiin. Go up, find the guy, maybe find the Tribal Council rep, dead or alive. Nothing we haven’t done a dozen times in the past month. What’s making you so nervous?”

“What are you talking about?” he says, voice thick with irritation.

“You’re fidgeting like I asked you to tell me how you feel about your mother loving her other sons the best, and you told Ben to check my straps twice.”

Hastiin looks taken aback. He stills for a moment, something I rarely see him do, before he grunts and hawks another mouthful of tobacco on the ground. “It’s nothing.”

“Say it.”

His shoulders tense. “I said it’s nothing. Just some dreams I’ve been having.”

A shiver of alarm dances down my spine, my monster instincts flaring. “What kind of dreams?”

“Did Ben tell you there’s rumors that the White Locust can fly?” he says, a clear attempt to change the subject.

“Okay,” I say carefully. I’m not quite ready to let the subject of his dreams go, but I also want to know more about our bounty. I decide I’m not going to get much more out of him about his nightmares, or whatever he’s been having, so I let it go for now. Decide to concentrate on the issue at hand. “There’s a lot of strange things in Dinétah after the Big Water. It’s weird, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Clan powers? Or something else?”

“Nobody’s sure. But they say he’s got other powers too. Dark medicine maybe.”

“Like witchcraft?” I shudder. If that’s it, Hastiin’s right to be nervous.

“Nobody said that. But there’s something not right with him and his people.”

“Who exactly are his people?”

Hastiin squints up at the mesa ridge. “Rumor is there’s a whole mess of them. Converts, I guess.” He reaches into a back pocket and pulls out a folded piece of paper. Hands it over. I open it and read the big block lettering.

ARE YOU READY FOR THE NEXT WORLD?

WILL YOU HEED THE SIGNS?

Below the words is a picture of the four sacred mountains being overcome by a cresting wave. People flee in terror. And hovering above it all, like some sort of dark angel, is a man with locust wings. He points a finger at the drowning people in judgment.

“He seems nice,” I remark.

“Tribal Council would probably let it go if they weren’t stockpiling explosives. Nobody wants a bunch of doomsdayers with the means to enact their madness.”

“Well, let’s go relieve them of their means, then,” I say. “Maybe knock a few heads together. Return the Tribal Council representative to the Tribal Council.”

“They are so screwed!” Ben chirps enthusiastically.

Hastiin looks at me and then Ben, lines creasing his face.

“Well, don’t look so damn happy about it, you two,” he mutters before he slings his pack over his shoulders and motions for Ben to lead the way.