Rose Eagle (3 page)

T
wo hundred,” I said, dropping a stone that glittered with quartz on top of the little hill I'd built in the center of the path.

“Add fifty more,” Aunt Mary said. “You were counting a little fast.”

I was glad she said that. Fifty more stones meant I had fifty more seconds to live. One firewolf would have been bad enough, but the thought of five of them waiting for us made it seem hopeless, even with Crazy Dog helping us.

Firewolves were just about — though not quite — the worst of the creatures around the Ridge that hunted human beings. I'd seen viddys — back before all our screens went blank — of other things in other districts that looked awful, like hundred-foot-long snakes and giant predatory birds as big as the airbuses that used to cross the skies. But around here, the firewolves were pretty much the top of the food chain. Us people were much lower links on that chain.

The stories people told about firewolves, people who'd survived them, about their thick skins and superfast reflexes and razor-sharp teeth and claws, those stories flashed through my head so fast I almost lost count of the pebbles.

“Rose, honey,” Aunt Mary's voice cut into my increasingly panicked thoughts. “That's fifty. Fifty-five, in fact. Time to go.”

I stood up, hefting the sawed-off shotgun and wondering if it was going to be any more effective than those little pebbles I'd been piling.

“Ready?” Aunt Mary said.

“Ready,” I replied, a little surprised at how steady my voice sounded. But not that surprised. Even though just about everything we had to deal with these days tended to make me terrified, when I finally had to face up to it, a kind of calm would come over me. When it came time to do what had to be done, I would just do my best to do it. I may have been afraid of trouble, but I'd never run away from it. At least not when I had had no other choice. When I knew I couldn't outrun it.

“Lead,” Aunt Mary said.

I nodded. She followed close behind, watching out for anything that might try to hit us from the back.

I walked at a regular pace. One step at a time. That's all it takes to climb a mountain. Or walk into an ambush. My feet thudded against the ground. I was not trying to walk quietly. That might have given away the fact that we knew we were about to be attacked. If the firewolves didn't know that we knew, it could give us an edge. A very narrow edge. Narrower than the edge of a straight razor.

A meadowlark called from off to my left. To my surprise, I understood its message.

I looked back at Aunt Mary. “Bird said two on either side of the path just past those big rocks,” I whispered.

She made a small gesture with her left hand.
Keep going
.

And as she did that, the wind changed. It turned from blowing down the trail to blowing in our faces. And it brought to me the smell of smoke. I swallowed hard, my mouth so dry I almost had to cough. Then I pressed off the safety on the shotgun that I was holding across my chest.

Maybe twenty steps more and we'd be past the big rocks, each of which was three times the height of a man and flat on top.

Nineteen.

Eighteen.

Seventeen.

Sixteen.

Fifteen.

Fourteen . . .

“HAI-HAI-HAI-HAIIII!”

Crazy Dog's battle cry split the air. It came from somewhere past the place where the firewolves were hiding behind those two big stones. A heartbeat later one of the monsters lurched on two legs out from behind the stone to the left. It dropped the piñon pine torch it had been holding and clawed at the center of its throat, where a black arrow with red stripes was buried deep.

BLAM!

The sound of Aunt Mary's carbine came at the exact moment the firewolf's head was jerked back by the impact of her .44 slug. The firewolf fell on top of its dropped torch.

Another firewolf appeared from behind the rock on the other side, an arrow protruding from its side. Aunt Mary fired again and the man-beast lurched backward and was lost from my sight behind the huge stone.

We'd stopped moving and were waiting now. I had the sawed-off shotgun lifted up. From somewhere below us on the trail, I heard a burst of rapid gunshots that had to be Crazy Dog's AK-47. Aunt Mary's back was against mine, and she was shooting up the trail.

BLAM-BLAM-BLAM!

My ears ringing from those shots, I turned to see what she'd been firing at as the pressure of her back against mine disappeared. She'd stepped away from me, toward —

“Above you, Rose!” Aunt Mary screamed at the same time I heard a deep growl from above me.

And I looked up to my left just in time to see a big red-furred demon, its claws spread wide, dropping toward me from the top of the stone.

M
aybe it's because fear has been such a familiar thing to me, especially when I am uncertain or afraid that I might be doing the wrong thing. Maybe that is why the sight of that firewolf leaping down at me did not freeze me in my tracks like a frightened rabbit. I knew what the right thing to do was if I wanted to survive, and so it had the opposite effect. It made me move that much faster.

I was so fast that when I dived forward, the creature landed not on me, but where I'd been. And when it turned, its fanged jaws gaped wide to rend my flesh, I was just close enough to jerk up my right arm and shove the barrel of the shotgun into its mouth. Saliva dripped down my arm, and its claws were reaching for me as I pulled the trigger.

BOOM!

The shotgun kicked back in my hand, almost breaking my wrist. But that load of buckshot down its gullet did the trick. The firewolf dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Two are down, I thought. Two of five.

I couldn't tell what was happening around me.

“Aunt Mary,” I shouted, looking wildly around.

No answer.

Aunt Mary had vanished from my sight in the thick smoke. I was half-deaf from all the gunfire.

I stood up as fast as I could, racking another shell into the chamber. As I did so, a big paw grasped my left arm. It yanked me around, and the sickening smell of the huge carnivore's rank breath filled my nostrils.

“GOT YOU!” a third firewolf growled, its voice so inhumanly fierce that I felt it in my bones.

As it pulled me close, I tried to remember the self-defense tactics that Aunt Mary had been teaching me and the other girls. Everyone had to learn the basics in the last few months, stuff that would help us survive in this new, dangerous world, not just about weapons but how to use our own bodies to defend ourselves.

Break a grip. How do you break a grip?

I turned, lowering my center of gravity as I did so. Then I twisted my arm in a circle.

The firewolf's claws scratched my wrist, but suddenly my arm was free. I took a step back and thrust out a front kick as I shouted, trying to muster that force my aunt had called chi.

“HEE-YAHH!”

Every ounce of my strength, all of my two hundred pounds, was behind that. And that front kick struck the firewolf just where I aimed it — right in the center of its belly, just below its ribs. I felt the thud of that impact all the way up into my hip. But that kick of mine actually knocked the monster, which had to weigh twice as much as I did, a good six feet backward!

However, it was far from knocked out. Its red eyes glared at me as it dropped to all fours. The fur rose on the back of its neck and it took a deep breath, making itself look even bigger.

“KILL YOU!” it snarled as it gathered itself to leap.

Its voice was even more dreadful than the fangs it bared at me. The only thing I could think to do was to take a quick step toward it, the sawed-off shotgun pointing at its half-human face, and pull the trigger.

There was a moment, measured in milliseconds, when I saw something in the face of that creature as I was pulling the trigger. Something that made the moment even more terrible for me because in that millisecond its face looked human. Maybe even, though it seemed impossible to me at the time, as afraid of me as I was of it. Then the
BOOM!
of the shotgun ended my speculation and its life. It fell backward, its half-human paws clutched over its face.

I looked down at it. It looked smaller in death. I didn't feel any sense of victory. I felt lost and, once again, afraid.

“Aunt Mary!” I yelled. “Aunt Mary! Help!”

“Help?” an amused voice said from behind me. “Are you kidding, little girl? After what you done to that thing,
you
are looking for help?”

It was, of course, Lenard Crazy Dog. He stood there, shaking his head, his arm over Aunt Mary's shoulder to take the weight off his bandaged but bleeding left leg. Both of them still held their guns in their free hands, but they were also both smiling.

“Huh?” I said. For some reason that was the only thing I could think to say, especially since I realized what he was saying was sort of a compliment. I wasn't used to being complimented.

“Yup,” Lenard said. “Next time I get in a fight, I want you on my side, little girl.”

“Forget about fighting,” Aunt Mary said. “With that leg, we need to get you back to Big Cave. Get you sewed up.”

“Just as long as you do the sewing, sweetie,” Lenard said. “Eh?”

“Stop it,” Aunt Mary said. But the tone of her voice made it clear she didn't really want him to stop.

I took a deep breath. My legs were shaking, and I felt like I was going to throw up. Maybe it was the adrenaline still running through my veins. Or maybe it was the way they had their arms around each other and looked like they were about to start smooching. This was no time for snagging. Why did I feel as if I was the grown-up and they were the teenagers?

And were we really safe now?

“Are all five of them dead?” I asked.

“Six,” Lenard said, looking down at his leg. “That's how I got this. Come up behind me just after I come up behind the other ones and put a couple of arrows in 'em.”

He squeezed Aunt Mary's shoulder with his big hand. “Wasn't for my sweetie here, I would have been a dead duck. She put two .44s in that sucker quicker than a squirrel scooting up a tree!”

Jeez.

“We'd better start moving before something else finds us,” I said.

Aunt Mary nodded her head.

“Rose is right,” she agreed. “Let's get going.”

And, thankfully, before they could do any more lovey-dovey stuff, we picked up our packs and then got gone.

P
eople were pleased to see us when we got back to Big Cave. Or maybe they were just surprised to see us alive and all in one piece. It was not that anyone had doubted the power of Aunt Mary's dreams. Not after her earlier dream had saved everyone's bacon. If all of our working men and women had been down in the Deeps as they usually were in the middle of the day, they would have been as dead as the electricity that was cut off by the Cloud's arrival. However, whether guided by a dream or not, just two people going alone up into the hills was seen as close to suicide since the coming of the Cloud.

Our first stop was the infirmary, a roofless structure inside Big Cave that had once been a foreman's office, but its several rooms had now been put to better use. The filtered silver light from the vent grate high above shone into the rooms brightly in the daytime.

Lenard's wound was deep, and he was a long time getting patched up. A whole heck of a lot longer than it took for Doc Bird to disinfect and bandage the scratches on my left arm.

Aunt Mary had disappeared for a while to do something. What, I did not know, but she was gone for a whole hour while I sat there listening to the old windup grandfather clock in the corner tick.

When she finally came back and sat next to me in the waiting room, she didn't tell me where she'd been.

“He still in there?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” I'd replied.

Then, for another half hour we just sat there, neither one of us saying anything — me because, as usual, I had no idea what to say. Aunt Mary because she looked like she had something to say but was not quite sure how to say it. And that worried me.

We both stood up when Doc Bird came out, wiping his hands on a towel.

“He'll be fine,” Doc Bird said. “Nothing wrong with him that old-fashioned early-twentieth-century medicine can't fix. Which is lucky seeing as how that is the only kind of medicine we can practice these days.”

Doc Bird slid the fingers of his right hand along his left forearm and looked down for a moment before shaking his head. No lights responded from a med-app stick-on, no keyboard appeared, no holoscreen popped up.

It's a habit that most of us still had, even though the Cloud had turned things off months ago — trying to activate devices that none of us had anymore. Though some, like Doc Bird, did have little reminders of them in the form of scars where the small sub-cues that med-profs had been allowed to have implanted burned through tissue and hair. Because Doc Bird's was not a deep implant, like those in the heads and internal organs of the most elite and powerful, the resulting wound had healed. All it left was a smooth, featureless circle of healed skin on his left arm.

Doc Bird looked up with a wry smile and continued. “Just won't be walking for a while. Not so much the wound, which was bad enough. More the muscle trauma from that bite. Must have been shaking him like a fox with a rabbit in its mouth.”

Aunt Mary held up her hand.

“Sorry,” Doc Bird said. “Too graphic? I do tend to go on a bit more than I should. Long and short of it, our man just needs to keep an eye on it, keep it clean, get plenty of rest.”

“Can we go in now?” Aunt Mary said.

“Sure.” Doc Bird stood aside and gestured toward the recovery room.

Lenard was sitting up in bed when we came in. His face looked tired, but his grin was no smaller than before.

“Hey, little girl. Hey, Mary,” he said.

No “sweetie,” for which I was grateful.

“How are you?” Aunt Mary asked.

“Aside from my leg feeling like a fish that just got gutted?” Lenard chuckled. “Not that bad.” He touched his leg, which was wrapped in bandages from his thigh down to his calf. “You know just how many stitches I got in there?”

“Enough to sew a good-sized star blanket,” Aunt Mary replied.

“Dang.” Lenard Crazy Dog shook his head. “Should have known about that sixth one. Guess I'm not going to be much use for a while, am I?”

Aunt Mary took his hand. “Depends on what you mean by being of use.”

Puh-lease!

Then she turned and looked hard at me.

“Rose, honey,” she said. “In that dream of mine . . .”

She paused.

“Go on,” I said.

“Dreams are funny things. They never tell you everything right out. Often it's more like hints, though mine have gotten stronger ever since the one that came to me just before the Cloud got to us, telling me that, no matter what, everyone had to get up out of the Deeps and stay out.”

Aunt Mary looked down at her hands. “I don't know why my dreams are so much clearer than they used to be. Maybe it is because what my Grama Little Elk said was true. That electricity was interfering with spirit things like dreams and visions and the old powers we used to have.”

She paused again, and this time I just waited without saying anything. Then she took a breath and nodded.

“In my dream, I saw you going on a quest after we'd done the sweat. And I knew that whatever was at the end of it, if you found it, it would bring good to all of us. But you were not alone on that journey. Someone was with you, a man who was strong enough to help you along the way. When Lenard showed up, I figgered he was that man. But now I see that it wasn't him. You have to leave on that quest before the moon gets full. Which means you have to leave in three days.”

I bit my lip. Three days? I wasn't ready for that. I wasn't ready for next week or next year or maybe ever. And why did it have to be me?

“Leave where?” I managed to say in a small voice.

“Mato Paha,” Aunt Mary said. “Bear Butte, where Crazy Horse had his great vision. That is where you have to go now. My dream told me that for sure. Just as clear as day. From Bear Butte, you will know where to go next.”

Bear Butte. I knew about it. Every Lakota knew about it. Of all our sacred places, none was more special. The whirlwind spirit lived on that sacred mountain. Before the Freedom from Religion Laws, people used to go there, climb the mountain, and leave prayer feathers. Sometimes stay there for days at a time without eating or drinking while waiting for a vision. But as far as I knew, it had been years since anyone had been allowed by our Overlords to do that. What would I find there?

Leonard cleared his throat.

“I been there,” Lenard said. “Year before they caught me and sent me off to Detention. Sneaked in past the guards and the fences strung up all around the base of the mountain. And its power was still there, little girl. Crazy Horse's spirit was there too. You get up on that mountain and you will feel it, sure as shooting.”

“Three days?” I said.

Aunt Mary turned and took my big right hand in both of hers. “Three days, Rose, honey,” she said.

“Three days,” I said again.

“But you won't be alone,” Aunt Mary's voice took on a brighter tone. “While you were waiting here, I found the perfect person to go with you. And he was more than glad of the chance to do something meaningful. In fact, I can't think of a better person. You know who it is?”

I thought I did. There was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that was mixing with a strange sort of hopeful excitement.
Yes,
part of me was thinking.
No,
another part was thinking just as strongly.
Not . . .

“Phil Tall Bear,” Aunt Mary said.