Trail of Lightning

Chapter 4

I live in a one-bedroom single-wide trailer I picked up a few months back. The previous owner died in his sleep, and nobody else would live in it after that. So it was a steal, as in free. I’ve got it parked on a scrubby parcel of land about an hour south of Lukachukai in the Crystal Valley. It sits a half mile from the old abandoned boarding school that gave the valley its nominal fame and right below the entrance to Narbona Pass, the only road across the Chuska Mountains for fifty miles in either direction. The pass itself is named for the ill-fated Navajo chief named Narbona who, back in 1849, showed up to negotiate a peace treaty with the US Army and ended up shot to death over a stolen horse and a bad translator. So go the peacemakers.

There are only about twenty-five families stretched sparsely throughout the ten-mile-long valley, and most of them are clustered at the highway turnoff that I passed four miles back. That leaves me with no close neighbors, which is fine by me. Of course, not having any people around also means that if I get in trouble, no one’s going to come save me. I’m pretty good at saving myself, but even badass Diné warriors need a little help sometimes. Just ask Narbona.

That’s why I have my dogs. A trio of rez mutts that run herd on me and keep the place pretty well guarded from unwanted visitors—human, animal, and otherwise. I picked the first pup up after I figured out Neizghání wasn’t coming back. The second one invited herself in and never left, and the third was the sole survivor of her litter—just like me.

They greet me now as I pull my truck in through the gate and over the cattle guard. Anyone but me pulls in those gates and they bark and carry on. But they know me, know the rattle and hum of my old Chevy that I’ve hooked up to run on hooch now that gasoline’s harder to come by. Know the thump of the tires, especially that one on the right in the back where a lug has come loose and bangs against the wheel in protest. I remind myself that I need to fix that, sooner than later.

Once inside, I stand in the bathroom and peel off my bloody clothes. They’re so covered in gore that I consider throwing them out, but I dump them in the sink, pull the plug up, and run a little of my precious water over them so they soak instead. I’m hoping that most of the blood will come out on its own, but with my luck I’ll have to scour them to make them wearable again. The clothes they have at the government trading post in Tse Bonito are serviceable, but it’s mostly undyed wool and salvaged hand-offs that are priced just short of highway robbery.

I pump the generator and give it time to heat up what’s left in my water tank. I know it’s indulgent to take a shower with water rations the way they are, but I do it anyway. There’s blood and bits of something nastier in my hair, and nothing but a hot shower and yucca soap is going to fix it. It’ll leave me short on water for the rest of the month since the water delivery truck won’t come in for another two weeks, but it’s worth it. I even stand in the steam and take the time to dig the dried blood out from under my nails. My cuticles feel raw by the time I’m done, and my face is flush and tingly to the touch, but I’m clean.

I think about taking a quick nap but decide against it. Not because I’m not tired. I’m exhausted and my whole body still aches, especially the shoulder the monster tried to chew on. But if I want to get down to Tah’s early enough to catch him before breakfast, there’s no time to sleep.

I put my shotgun back on the rack in the truck, check to make sure the monster’s head is still in the back, and head south. The drive to Tah’s place in Tse Bonito takes a good hour. I flip on the radio to keep me company. There’s only one reliable radio station in Dinétah after the Big Water, an all-purpose AM station that plays a combination of old country music and government reporting that passes for news. Every once in a while someone outside of Dinétah will boost their radio signal strong enough to make it past the Wall, and for a week or two we can pick up reports on the massive waterworks projects along the newly formed coastline that stretches from San Antonio to Sioux Falls, or the continued civil unrest in New Denver. But generally Dinétah is just as isolated and insular as it was before the Big Water, and most locals don’t seem to notice either way.

The Wall. The Tribal Council approved it back when the Energy Wars first started. Most Diné supported the Wall. We all grew up with the stories that taught us that our place was on our ancestral land, the land within the embrace of the Four Sacred Mountains. Others call the Wall absurd, saying it’s some paranoid attempt at border control that’s destined to fail, just like the wall the doomed American government tried to build along its southern border a few years before the Big Water.

The tribe built it anyway. The head of the Council, his name was Deschene, wrote some article for the Navajo Times that put the fear in people, especially after the Slaughter on the Plains. Navajo people weren’t safe anymore, he said. He invoked the specter of conquest, manifest destiny. And he wasn’t wrong. The Slaughter had ushered in a heyday of energy grabs, the oil companies ripping up sacred grounds for their pipelines, the natural gas companies buying up fee land for fracking when they could get it, literally shaking the bedrock with their greed. Plus the Feds had outlined some plan to dissolve reservation trust land that would open up Indian Country to prospectors just like they had during Termination. This time the prospectors were multinationals with private armies a thousand times more powerful than the original bilagáana settlers. Deschene warned that if we wanted to remain Diné, if we wanted to protect our homes, we had to build that wall.

The funds were approved within a month. The foundations, made with rock from each sacred mountain, were laid within a year. People laughed and said they’d never seen the tribal government do anything that fast. Six months later the New Madrid earthquake happened and the bottom fell out of the Midwest. Then the hurricanes started. And Deschene’s wall started to look downright prescient to a lot of people.

I remember the first time I saw the Wall. I had expected something dull and featureless. A fifty-foot-high mountain of gray concrete, barbed wire lining the top like in some apocalyptic movie. But I had forgotten that the Diné had already suffered their apocalypse over a century before. This wasn’t our end. This was our rebirth.

They say the hataałii worked hand in hand with the construction crews, and for every brick that was laid, a song was sung. Every lath, a blessing given. And the Wall took on a life of its own. When the workmen came back the next morning, it was already fifty feet high. In the east it grew as white shell. In the south, turquoise. The west, pearlescent curves of abalone, and the north, the blackest jet. It was beautiful. It was ours. And we were safe. Safe from the outside world, at least. But sometimes the worst monsters are the ones within.

I pull into Tse Bonito as the rising sun hits full-force above the cliffs, bathing the desert town in dry heat. Tse Bonito has a way of heating up especially hot. Maybe because it’s centered around a T-shaped stretch of asphalt where the two main highways of Dinétah met. Maybe because it’s surrounded by white mesa cliffs that funnel the heat right down into the Tse Bonito canyon. Or maybe because it’s mostly made of tin-roofed shacks and old metal-sided trailers that soak up the hot like it’s their only purpose. Maybe all three. Whatever the reason, the shanty town of trailers, shacks, and the occasional hogan stretches for two square miles under the unforgiving desert sky. A booming metropolis by Dinétah standards.

It’s also not the safest place to live. Sort of lawless, except for the occasional intervention by the Citizens’ Watch and Guard. They police the streets, but a lot of good that does. Tse Bonito is still more Wild West frontier town than anything else. Bunch of cowboys and Indians, although everyone’s pretty much Diné. Last time I came through here looking for a Bad Man, I ended up in a shootout that felt more like the OK Corral than a monster hunt. Can’t say I’m happy to be back, even if it is to call on Grandpa Tah.

Tah lives in the thick of town. His house is one of the half a dozen hogans that are scattered through the busy marketplace and I know that if I don’t catch him early, he’ll be out puttering around, visiting his neighbors or checking out the goods at the moccasin lady’s store a few doors down, doing his daily shopping or just being a busybody. Oblivious to the occasional gun battle and more worried about the daily gossip than staying safe. Not that anyone would want to hurt him. He’s pretty much a saint around here. Well known and well liked, which makes me wonder what he’s doing spending time with someone of my questionable reputation at all. I figure I’m a bit of a charity case to him, especially this last year. And normally something like that might make me stay away, pride and all. But Tah’s good people, and I try to do right by him when I can. Plus, he’s the foremost monster expert in these parts, and I need his help.

I pull my truck in next to the hogan’s only door, careful to stay well out of the dirt road that would be full of people and dust in another hour. Anything that looks like it’s worth stealing comes inside with me. I grab the sticky bag holding the monster’s head in one hand and my shotgun in the other, and walk over.

The door itself is the kind of traditional door you might find on a hogan somewhere out of town, not in a busy public place like this. No locks, no bolts, not even anything that looks like a tripwire or an alarm. Just a dusty black-and-gray blanket, the kind you used to get cheap from the government trading post, covering the only entrance. But I know looks are deceiving and I keep my distance as I shout across the threshold.

“Tah!” I shift my grip on the bag and sling the gun over my shoulder.

I’m about to shout again when a gnarled brown hand appears and pulls back the blanket. The thick fabric stirs up the parched earth and sends the red dust dancing in little pools. “Come in, Maggie,” comes a voice as gnarled and old as the hand that goes with it. “Come in, shí daughter.”

“Ahéheé, Grandpa. Thank you.”

Grandpa Tah looks the same as always. Spotless jeans that are a bright unwashed blue and a few sizes too big for his bony frame. Same goes for his sneakers, which, despite being about twenty years out of style even before the Big Water, look fresh out of the box. A black-and-red checkered cowboy shirt covers his narrow shoulders, white shell buttons gleaming in the light. He’s sporting a close-cropped cap of silver hair and laugh lines on his worn face. But it’s his eyes I like best. Lively and full of mischief, like he’s in on something way more fun than anything you know about.

I like Tah, I really do, and he’s the closest thing I have to a living relative. We aren’t related, aren’t even the same clan, but he calls me daughter. That means something.

I duck under the blanket and break into a grin. I can’t help it. My trailer is shelter. It serves its purpose as far as a house goes, but Tah’s hogan feels like a home, the kind of home they talk about in bedtime stories. It’s a traditional hogan—one big room in an eight-sided building, walls made of long single-cut logs, tightly roped together and sealed with concrete. There’s a cooking fire already burning in the woodstove in the middle of the room, and the scent of piñon is so pleasantly sharp I can taste it on the tip of my tongue. Warm woven rugs in reds and oranges and browns hang from the walls in between aging picture frames filled with worn photos of smiling family members that I don’t know but I envy. A cheap couch rules the south end of the hogan, and a makeshift kitchen with a sink, a few overhead cabinets, and an old peeling Formica table dominate the west, directly across from the east-facing front door. The floor is hard-packed dirt and covered with a smattering of what looks like unmatched carpet samples in a hodgepodge of rainbow colors. Obvious picks from someone’s castoffs, but every one swept spotless. Tah’s bed is along the southern wall, freshly made. Everything like it always is when I come around, except for a pile of blankets folded neatly on the edge of his old couch.

“You got someone staying with you?” I ask, eyes on the blankets, a memory of my own time crashing on Tah’s couch in my head.

“Hmm?” He follows my gaze. “Aoo’.” Yes.

I wait, but he doesn’t offer me anything else. “And . . . ?”

“Hmm?”

I shake my head. “Never mind.” I know he’ll only tell me when he’s ready and maybe it’s none of my business anyway. “I brought you something,” I say.

He grunts. “I can smell it.”

“Sorry.”

“Monster hunt?”

“Yeah. Where do you want it?”

He points with a twist of his lips to the kitchen table. “Over there.”

“You do not want this on your table. Trust me.”

He looks around. “By the door, then. And wóshd’ . . . come in, come in. I’ve got something special. A treat!”

I dump the head by the door and prop my gun up next to it. “So, what’s this ‘treat’?” I ask as I make my way clockwise around the hogan.

“Gohwééh!” He grins impishly, his deep brown face lighting up as he holds up a tin of the most beautiful stuff on earth. Coffee.

“And where did you get that?” I sound a little awestruck. Coffee is expensive, and hard to come by. Luckily, it grows at high elevations. Most places over 4,500 feet survived the Big Water pretty much intact, but that doesn’t mean the infrastructure needed to move the precious bean made it through unscathed. I’ve heard tales of good coffee, the sweet Ethiopians and the earthy Indonesians served at special stores made just for drinking coffee, but all those are long gone, along with access to the exotic countries they came from. Coffee comes up on mountain passes from Aztlán now, if it comes at all.

A few minutes later water is boiling in a pot on the stove. Tah pours a couple of heaping spoonfuls of grounds directly into the pot. It’s a generous portion to share with me. The aroma hits my senses immediately and I almost swoon. I can’t remember the last time I had coffee. Truth is, most days I make do with a mug of the Navajo tea that grows wild in my yard. When he offers me a tin cup full of the thick black liquid, I don’t wait for it to cool before I take a sip. It scalds, but in the best way.

Tah has another pot on the stove, and he scoops two oversize portions of tóschíín out of it and into bowls. The mush is thick and gelatinous and holds the spoon upright when he stabs it through the middle. I reach for the spoon, but he stops my hand.

“Wait, wait!” Giggling and doing a preposterous little jig, he reaches into a kitchen cabinet and pulls out another surprise. Sugar. I haven’t seen sugar in years. Sage honey, sure, but the good old cane sugar of pre–Big Water days? I stare, mouth open.

He laughs. “You’re catching flies, Maggie,” he warns me with a happy grin. “You want the sugar in your coffee, too?”

Do I? I don’t know. I can’t remember what coffee with sugar tastes like. “Just the mush,” I say. I decide to play it safe. The coffee’s so good, and I’ll be pissed if sugar ruins it.

He dumps a big spoonful of sugar in the blue cornmeal and I stir it up and eat. The sugar bursts across my tongue so sweet it makes my teeth hurt, a perfect complement to the nutty taste of the corn. It is wonderful.

“Where did you get all this?”

“It was a present.”

“That’s some present. Who’s the friend?”

“Not a friend. A relative. My grandson.”

Ah, the mysterious house guest.

“He’s here from the Burque.” He pronounces it “Boour-kay,” with a long rolling u. I know the place. A city a hundred miles east of the Wall. It was the city of Albuquerque before the riots, but now it’s only what’s left of it. Partial city, partial name. Seems fair. I hear it’s a bad place. Rough country plagued by race wars and water barons. Massive refugee problems.

I stick another spoonful in my mouth. Sip my coffee and then we both dig in to breakfast. The only sound is our spoons scraping against the sides of the bowls and the occasional slurps from our mugs. For the first time in a long time, I feel myself relax. The hogan is cozy and familiar, and the coffee warm and earthy. For a moment, I forget about monsters and dead girls and lonely trailers, and everything is perfect.

“So, you talk to Neizghání?” Tah asks.

The perfect shatters. I put down my spoon, my appetite gone. “Neizghání left. Don’t you remember?”

Tah sniffs. “So stubborn. Both of you. I thought maybe he’d come back by now.”

The sugar and caffeine have hit my bloodstream too fast, making my hands shake. I wrap them around my mug and study the table where we sit. Stare at the cheap Formica peeling at the edges and try to think of what to say. Nothing profound comes to mind, so I stick to the facts. “It’s been almost a year, Tah. I don’t think he’s coming back.”

“Not coming back?” He makes a noise in his throat that sounds like disbelief. “I can’t think anything like that. And to say that about Neizghání. He’s a legend. A hero. He saved your life when . . .” He tapers off.

I thumb the edge of my coffee cup.

The old man’s voice is soft, hurt. “I’m sorry, shí daughter. I know you don’t like to think about that night.” He sighs, sips at his coffee. “I wish you would let me do a prayer for you.”

“No.”

“It’s not good, all this death on you. The right ceremony might help—”

“Tah. Please.”

He lets it go. “Maybe something happened to Neizghání.”

“To the legendary Monsterslayer? I don’t think so.”

“But did he say why—?”

“We’ve been over this before.” No way I’m telling Tah about the warning Neizghání gave me on Black Mesa. Tah still sees the good in me, even if my mentor didn’t in the end, and that kind of faith is precious.

“Yes, but—”

“Drop it.”

“Maggie.”

“Tah.” We usually don’t bicker like this, but I feel edgy. Exhausted, restless, after the kill. I’m obviously terrible company despite Tah’s hospitality, and I’m starting to think coming was a bad idea. Especially if he’s set on talking about Neizghání.

He’s quiet for a minute before he says, “You must remember that Neizghání isn’t human. He doesn’t think like we do.”

I snort. That’s a serious understatement.

Tah’s voice is gentle when he says, “Are you ever going to tell me what happened on Black Mesa?”

The coffee mug’s rattling between my hands before I clamp a hand over the top to stop it. The sugar lingering on my tongue has soured. I sit back from the table and give a sharp jerk of my head. This conversation is over.

Tah watches me, obviously curious. But he doesn’t ask again. “So many secrets,” he complains. “And no family, no friends, and now you’re not even talking to Neizghání? You got nobody, Maggie.”

It’s not that I don’t want friends, don’t want family. I do. I want them as much as everyone else. It’s just . . . complicated. Neizghání was different. An immortal. Around him, I didn’t worry. But with other people? Flesh and blood and human? I don’t think I want the responsibility.

“I’m fine,” I manage to say. “I’ve got you, and I’ve got my dogs.”

“Just an old man to talk to, and I won’t live much longer. Then what will you do? It is no good how you live. Alone, not connected. Diné way is to find the connections—between yourself and your relatives, yourself and the world. Diné way of life is k’é, kinship, like this”—he weaves his fingers in and out, bringing his hands together, and then splays his palms open while keeping his fingers intertwined—“but you, your life is all separate.” He pulls his hands apart, setting the fingers free to wiggle. “It’s no way to live.” He pauses, gives me a look. “Even with dogs.”

This is a familiar conversation between us, but on zero sleep, my shitty mood, and the unfamiliar caffeine, I’m not up for it today. “You going to help me with the thing I brought you or gossip about Neizghání?” It comes out harsher than I mean it to, and I try to smile to soften the words, but it feels like a rictus grin.

He stares at me. I wait him out, keep that stupid smile pasted on my face. He finally sighs and drops his shoulders. “You better show me what you brought me.”

“Where did you get this?”

We are standing across from each other at the kitchen table, a refreshed cup of coffee in hand, looking at the head. He’s covered the table with an old plastic tablecloth and I’ve dumped the head out where he wanted it. It’s the first time I’ve seen it properly in the light. The monster’s features are blunt and unrefined, matching slashes for eyes and another slash for a mouth, like his face is made of clay and his features are cut out by a child with a stick. His nose is almost completely flat, like someone put his face up against a granite cliff and pushed hard, and the skin that sags from the skull is almost translucent, veined and pulpy. He has a wide oversize forehead and a thick squared-off jaw that makes him look as brutal as he really was in life. I whistle low in appreciation. That is ugly.

“East of Lukachukai, up in the mountains,” I explain. “He’d taken a little girl. I caught him at a makeshift camp about an hour up the mountain, chewing on the kid like she was for dinner.”

He looks up from his ministrations, eyes intelligent and sharp as an eagle’s. “Chewing?”

“Yeah. Digging out her throat, actually. With his teeth.”

Tah uses his stick to pry the mouth apart. It comes open with surprising ease.

“That’s strange,” I say. “No rigor mortis. Shouldn’t his jaw be stiff?”

“Look at this, Maggie.” He motions me closer, pointing the stick at the monster’s teeth. I lean in. They’re all uniformly straight and blunt, like old wooden dentures. “No incisors, no canines. It’s like a mouth full of molars.”

“Weird. Since he was obviously a carnivore. Shouldn’t he have pointy teeth?” It certainly explains why he was simply gnawing on the girl and making slow progress. And why he didn’t break through my leather jacket.

“No tooth decay, either.”

“Why does that matter?”

“An adult animal with no tooth decay?” He shakes his head. “It doesn’t happen.”

“So what are you saying?”

“Nothing yet.” He lets the mouth fall closed and turns to a shelf behind him. He retrieves a handsaw and a pair of long pliers. “Let’s see what’s inside.”

I wander away while he goes to work on the skull. I’m not squeamish. Okay, I’m a little squeamish. I mean, I cut the thing’s head off, but that was in the heat of the moment. For some reason it’s a little harder to take listening to a saw hack away on a skull in the light of day while sipping my rare Aztlán coffee.

“Come look,” Tah says.

I return to the table. “What should I be looking for?”

“Shrinkage. Abnormalities. Sickness.”

I look closely, feeling a little foolish. I don’t know anything about brains. The ones I see are usually in bits, scattered across the ground or splattered against walls from bullets from my own gun. This creature’s brain looks like any other brain, as far as I can tell.

“Am I missing it?” I finally ask Tah.

“No. There’s nothing to see. The brain looks normal.”

“This thing was not normal.”

“I believe you.”

“And you saw the weird teeth.”

“Yes, yes,” he says, shuffling over to the sink. He runs the water, washing his hands with a bit of root soap. “You do not have to convince me.”

“I’m not trying to convince you.”

He lifts his eyebrows but doesn’t say anything. Instead, he shuffles back to the sink and pours himself a glass of water. I huff, irritated. Sometimes talking to the old man is like going to a confessor. He makes me feel guilty even when I haven’t done anything wrong.

He motions for me to sit, then pulls out the chair across from me and carefully lowers himself down. He takes a moment before he speaks. “Tell me what you saw. Out there, in the forest. Tell me what this creature did.”

“I told you. He was trying to eat this girl. I shot him through the heart, a clean shot that should have taken him out. I took another shot and blew out his shoulder, but he still kept coming. Turned into a knife fight. I won.”

“Did he speak to you?”

“Speak to me? There wasn’t exactly time for conversation.”

“I mean did he use words?”

I run through the confrontation in my mind, coming up blank. “I can’t remember. No, I’d say no.”

Tah drinks his water, staring out into the distance.

“Talk to me, Tah.”

“I think this is . . . very bad.”

“Yeah. I do too. But why don’t you tell me why.”

“Why her throat, Maggie? Why not her heart? Or her softer belly?”

“Doesn’t make sense.”

“Unless there was some reason, something he wanted.”

“Like what?”

He exhales heavily. “I don’t know. It’s not in any stories I know, this monster who eats the throat.”

“Do you think there could be more?”

“More monsters?” He shrugs his thin shoulders. He pushes himself up from the table. Stands there for a moment. Then sits back down. “I can’t say for sure, but this creature . . . I think it was not born but created. By someone powerful.”

“Created?” The walls around me seem to shimmer, hazy and insubstantial. I want to blame the caffeine, but I know it’s a sudden rush of fear making me dizzy.

He looks at me, his eyes wrinkled and kind. One of his hands rests on the table. The other is wrapped loosely around the old blue tin mug. An oversize silver ring on his middle finger glints weakly in the artificial light. “You’re not going to like this.”

“I already don’t like it, and you’re making me nervous.”

“I can’t tell you much about this monster, but I know it craves human flesh. But not for food. I think it’s looking for something. Like I said, something it’s missing. And the only way that could happen is if someone made it, used bad medicine to shape it.”

“Witchcraft.” My voice is soft, breathy. “I know. I smelled it on him.”

Diné witches are powerful, men and women who trade their souls for dark magic, who take the shape of night creatures to travel under the cover of darkness, who dress in jewelry raided from freshly dug graves. It was a witch who led the pack of monsters that attacked me the night I met Neizghání, whose violence still haunts me. Am I really going to go looking to stir up something like that? Now the kindness in his eyes makes more sense.

“This is not my problem, you know,” I mutter under my breath. “I did my job and got paid. If I go running off now to try to find this witch or whatever it is, no one’s going to pay me for it.”

“You came to me for a reason, Maggie,” Tah says quietly. “I know you’ve been sitting alone in your trailer these months, waiting for Neizghání. But maybe it’s time you move on without him.”

“I don’t know, Tah. I have clan powers, sure, but I’m no Neizghání. I’m not immortal. That witch gets to me, I’ll die like anybody else. And I don’t really want to die.” He doesn’t say anything, so I spit out what’s really bothering me. “Cannibal. Witchcraft. It’s all a little too familiar, isn’t it?” I may not talk about the night that I met Neizghání, but he knows the general details.

“Are you scared?”

“Hell, yes.” I push back in my chair. “I would be stupid not to be, taking this on alone.”

“You don’t have to do this alone,” he says brightly. “I know someone who would make a great partner.”