Page 95 of Badlands

As she tried to focus, she heard, from above, Skip’s cries intensify into a scream. She could also hear Corrie’s slurred voice yelling at them to stop, her shouting abruptly drowned out by the hideous shriek of the bear or whatever animal was up there, being tortured or something.

Something to disrupt the ceremony.

Her eyes lit upon the bone flutes. She grabbed one, put it to her lips, and blew. Nothing.

She tried again, blowing harder—then plucked it from her lips and inspected it. The bone was old and flaking from the embouchure and finger holes, and the body of the flute was riddled with cracks. Useless.

Throwing it to the ground, she plucked up another one. A weak, tremulous sound emerged. She licked the dirt from her lips, blew again—harder, this time—and the thousand-year-old relic broke apart in her fingers.

Goddamnit! She tossed away the pieces in frustration. The desperate plan that had come to her mind was a long shot anyway—the mother of all Hail Marys, in fact—but she couldn’t execute it with a fossilized, crumbling instrument.

Now her eyes stopped at something else: a blanket, laid out in a dark corner of a kiva. She’d noticed it before and deduced from the stuff spread on it—artifacts, lightning stones, some camping equipment—that the cultists had taken these things from the campsite. She saw the stem of a stone pipe peeping out from the folds of the blanket, an obsidian axe, some spearpoints, a crumbling sandal, a pair of lightning stones… and a flute. She darted across the kiva and seized it. It was a beautiful modern replica of an ancient Pueblo flute, rebuilt with original turquoise inlays. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes, then raised it to her lips and blew—gently.

A remarkably pure sound issued forth.

Now she blew harder, her fingers stopping various holes. The tone holes were spaced in a pentatonic scale, its tone clear and fine—in perfect working order. Against all expectations, she’d found a working instrument… one clear and loud enough to interrupt the ritual. Now it was time to undertake the Hail Mary.

She rushed to the ladder and scaled it, emerging into the heart of a seething ritual. Skip, strung up by his ankles, was missing his shirt and blood was running down his back. He seemed unconscious, a strip of skin about to be peeled off from between his shoulder blades. But the torture of him had stopped. Theattention of the group had shifted from Skip to the charred corpse of Edison Nash, hanging from the nearby tripod, above a raging fire. The cultists were transfixed by the corpse, staring, frozen with awe—including Bromley.

She followed their gaze. What had fixated their attention wasn’t the corpse, exactly, but rather what wasinsideit—a nebulous apparition, appearing and disappearing amidst flames and smoke.Somethingwas animating the charred bones and flesh, and it was also where those muffled animal sounds were coming from.

She stared, uncomprehending. She was still hallucinating, of course.

Or was she?

No. No, no.

A hallucination, drug-induced or otherwise, could not possibly seem this real…

… And this overwhelming realization left her paralyzed.

62

NORA WATCHED, TRANSFIXED.Somethinghad begun to emerge from what was left of Nash’s body, in a series of spastic, organic contractions, almost as if the burnt corpse were giving birth. Wreathed in smoke, it slowly squeezed out of its womb of charred bone and meat. The shapeless thing that emerged cried out again: not the muffled, guttural sound Nora had heard before, but a soul-chilling shriek so loud and full of triumph that she felt the pinpricks of faintness come over her. In the roiling smoke, she saw two dark spots form, resolving into slitted lizard eyes. Soon the manifestation of a face formed—with a black mouth, which began to move, opening and closing like a fish’s, and then a body, appearing and disappearing in the whirling smoke and fire.

Then, abruptly, clouds of smoke billowed out on either side of the thing and began to form into a pair of wrinkled wings. Nora watched as the creature flexed them—slowly at first, as if testing—before starting to unfold them. Instead of feathers, tongues of dark fire flickered over the skeletal body, never fullyvisible, obscured by whorls of smoke that revealed glimpses of grotesque body parts quickly cloaked again.

Now the smoke-creature moved its wings, fully unfurling them so that they seemed to cover half the night sky. Its head formed: the mouth morphed into an eagle’s beak, and it gazed down with snake’s eyes upon the beings below it, the head moving jerkily this way and that, like a bird of prey’s.

Nora stared at this summoned thing, wreathed in appalling black flame, slowly fanning its skeletal wings. It seemed to be waiting, looking down at the puny creatures that had summoned it—waiting for purpose.

Her paralysis at the sight vanished when the smoke-creature opened its monstrous beak and let out another unholy shriek—and then she remembered her plan.

Bromley and the rest remained transfixed, staring upward, their faces slack. They had the look of children who, having tossed a lit match into a lake of gasoline, were witnessing a terrifying conflagration of their own making.

Tearing her gaze away from the creature, Nora put Nash’s flute to her lips and blew a note, and another. She closed her eyes to shut out the horrific sight, but especially to recall the ancient melody from the wax cylinder that she had played with Skip. It was in a pentatonic scale, but with added quarter and half tones, which she had earlier learned how to make by half covering the holes with her fingers. Eyes still squeezed shut, but confident now, she raised the flute skyward and unleashed the thousand-year-old melody, the song to repel skinwalkers.

The melody swelled as she gained confidence: louder, faster, the notes rising cleanly above the snarl of wind and fire.

It had an instantaneous effect. With an unearthly screech, the apparition began beating its skeletal wings, stirring the pyrebelow. It flared up with a crackling hiss, spewing vast showers of sparks into the wind. The blackened corpse swung and twirled madly on the tripod, as if assaulted by some demonic wind, before coming apart, bones and burnt flesh scattering.

“No!” screamed Bromley, shaken out of his own paralysis.

She continued to play, faster and louder, even as the skeletal thing thrashed amidst the fire, its shrieks and bellows mingling with the melody.

Bromley dashed at her in a frenzy. Nora yanked the obsidian knife from her belt and lunged toward him, arm extended, bracing herself. In his mad rush, Bromley ran himself directly onto the knife. He grunted, his mask jarred off by the impact. He stepped back as she pulled the knife out, and he stared down at the blood gushing from his solar plexus. Staggering backward, he fell to his knees among the other cultists, who could only, zombie-like, gape at the events as they played out. She felt the unholy wings beating up a swirl of sparks around her, spreading smoke that surged over the mesa top. As if from far away, she could hear Corrie shouting something, but then the smoke-creature gave another screech that sounded… almost triumphant.

With a terrific effort, Bromley rose back to his feet and now, at last, pulled the Raging Judge from the strap around his waist. Legs spread, bracing and swaying, he tried to raise it toward her with shaking hands.

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