Текст книги "The Chosen"

Rogue Angel 04

By

Alex Archer

All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

ISBN: 978-1-55254-827-1

Copyright © 2007 by Worldwide Library.

Special thanks and acknowledgment to Victor Milán for his contribution to this work.

Prologue

New Mexico

"That poor child," Mrs. Murakami said. "We should stop and pick her up!"

The ceiling of gray-and-blue clouds hanging low over the rented minivan was suddenly veined with lightning. The vehicle's interior flashed blue-white.

It might have been the judgment of the kami.Alien spirits of an alien place, Mr. Murakami thought.

Obsessed enthusiast that he was for the history and culture of the southwestern United States – so different from his grim industrial suburb outside Tokyo – Murakami should have been in heaven. Instead he was peeved. Not to mention lost.

"What child?" he demanded, as the echoes of a shattering thunderclap died away.

"That child. Hurry! It's about to rain," his wife replied.

This is the desert, he thought. It isn't supposed to rain. Although from his studies he knew that it did. Rarely. But violently. And there was no denying a violent downpour was in the offing. He could smell the rain and the ozone, overlying the sage and dust of the deceptively flat-looking khaki terrain of the Acoma Indian Reservation where he and his family had wandered, small and utterly lost. A few drops splatted against the windshield like fat, transparent bugs.

He looked the way his wife's sturdy arm pointed. "A child!" he exclaimed. "What can she be doing here?"

She stood in the clumpy weeds by the side of the rough dirt track. She wore a sort of blue dress with a scarlet cape around her shoulders, pinned off center with a gold clamshell brooch. Small pink feet in sandals poked out beneath the hem of the robe. She had a plump, round face framed by flowing brown locks spilling from either side of a hat with an astonishing plume and the brim pinned up in front.

Though he couldn't drive faster than twenty miles per hour without jostling the van intolerably on the horrendous collection of ruts and rocks that passed for a road, Murakami hit the brakes so hard the vehicle squeaked and jerked sideways as it stopped. The children, Taro and Hanako, looked up from their furious head-to-head battle on their video game.

"A little girl!" Hanako cried.

"Can we pick her up?" her brother asked. "Can we, Daddy?"

"We have to!" Hanako said. "She'll wash away."

Murakami growled like a bear. His family wasn't fooled. They knew he was a kind man.

But Murakami was also well and truly stressed. They had reservations at the Old Town Hotel in Albuquerque for five that afternoon. He knew that they could be in trouble if they missed their reservation. The whole area was flooded with visitors. But he was a stranger in a strange land indeed. None of his loving studies had come close to preparing him for the unreal size of this western New Mexico desert. The land was so wide he had felt in danger sometimes of falling right off the planet. They had driven through mountains with pine trees, almost like home, between Gallup and Grants. But somewhere south of U.S. 40 they'd found themselves stuck in the middle of a vast bowl of desert rimmed by wind-scalloped mesas.

He stopped the van. His wife hopped out into a barrage of raindrops. She opened the sliding side door of the van and clucked and cooed to the oddly dressed girl.

"What's a child doing alone out here in the middle of nowhere, anyway?" Murakami asked. No one answered him. His children had unbelted their eat belts and were hopping up and down chirping like happy birds.

With Mrs. Murakami's help the child stepped into the van. Startled, Mr. Murakami realized it was a boy.

"Thank you, honored sir, for stopping to pick me up," the child said.

The Murakami children slid the door shut as their mother returned to her seat hastily. Taro and Hanako barraged the curious-looking boy with questions thick and fast as the rain as they helped him buckle himself in the seat between them. He answered only with great, beaming smiles. Gently but firmly he insisted on keeping his staff tucked in a crook of his gowned arm, at a sort of angle to fit the roof.

Murakami started to drive again. He felt a rising urgency. He perceived America as a violent land but had not expected that might extend to its very environment. The growing fury of the lightning and thunder so unsettled him that he had a hard time preserving his stoic demeanor. And the rain suddenly began to rattle off the van's metal skin like ten thousand drumsticks.

Away off to the left he could see the looming sandstone mesa on which an ancient city rested. Its somewhat brutal blockiness was softened by veils of rain that threatened in short order to mask it from view entirely. His objective in driving in to this lunar wilderness was not the great, gaudy Sky City Casino built on the desert, but the real Sky City on its majestic rock slab, the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America. People had dwelt up there, over three hundred feet above the surrounding land, since sometime before the twelfth century.

If only he could figure out how to get tothe confounded hill.

Lightning flashed and thunder crashed around them so constantly it felt as if they had strayed into the middle of one of America's vaunted shock and awebombardments. Through the explosive roars and racket of the rain Murakami could hear his children trying to share their handheld games with their new passenger.

His wife had turned around in her seat to fire solicitous questions at the boy. "Where are you from, child? Who are your parents? Where are your parents?"

Murakami was creeping along. He was genuinely afraid he and his family and their peculiar guest would be swept away at any moment by the horrible, ferocious weather. He tried desperately to remember if they got tornadoes in this part of the U.S.

"Honored sir," the boy said from the backseat.

Murakami drove across a low rise and began to descend. A hundred yards ahead the road bottomed, passing through a gulch with sheer high walls scooped out of the hard earth. Beyond it rose the flank of yet another ridge. He wished his budget had permitted a rental with GPS.

"Please," the little boy said.

"What is it?" Murakami asked. He felt instantly shamed at his brusqueness.

"You must not go down there, sensei."

"Ahh!" Murakami drew in a startled, gratified breath. The child had named him "master."

"But what other way can I go?" he asked, wondering how this strange young child was familiar with Japanese customs.

"You must turn around," the boy said. "If you do, you will find a dirt road a mile and a half on the right, back the way you have come. It is hard to see but you will see it. When you take that, it will bring you shortly to a paved road that will take you where you need to go."

Murakami scowled. If the confounded road was there, how had they missed it? The child didn't even know their destination.

He shook his head. "I don't want to turn back. Surely if we keep going this way we shall get there." The truth was he was afraid to go back. But he would never admit that aloud.

"Master, please. Your danger is very great if you proceed down this road."

"I think you should listen to him," his wife said, her dark eyes, normally calm, wide and worried behind her glasses.

"Yes, Daddy," his son said. "Listen to him, please."

Frowning furiously, Murakami brought the van to a stop halfway down to the gully. "All right," he said, "but if – "

" Daddy!" his children shouted in chorus. They flew from their seats to plaster themselves against the passenger-side window.

"Look!" his wife exclaimed, pointing.

Down the narrow gully from the right came something that turned Murakami's blood to ice. Though he had never seen one in person, and didn't live close enough to the coast to be in any real risk, like many Japanese he feared in his bones a tsunami.

That was what he saw rushing down on them. A wall of water, frothing dirty white – tsunami in miniature, six or seven yards wide and two yards tall. He saw with instant, horrible clarity what would have happened had he driven on. That moving water-wall would have caught the minivan amidships, tumbled it downstream like a toy, until it battered open a window and the turbulent water smashed in to drown his precious family and himself.

In silence that seemed almost like a bubble insulated from the raucous storm noise, Murakami and his family watched the flash flood sweep past. It made a roiled river of the road in front of them.

"You are safe now," the boy said from behind him. "But your world also faces terrible danger. Please heed that warning, too."

"Yes, yes," Murakami muttered. He turned. "I thank you – "

Hanako screamed.

The seat was empty.

The child was gone.

Chapter 1

"Hey, Annja," the wiry red-bearded man in the white straw cowboy hat called out. He stood to his faded-denim-clad hips in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot hole scraped out of the scrub-dotted chaparral of the Española Valley, about ten miles north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. "Come over here a sec."

The sun looked like a big red balloon about to pop itself on the peaks of the Jemez.

Annja Creed swallowed the last of the water from the cooler settled on the lowered tailgate of what Max Leland, professor of archaeology at the University of New Mexico and dig leader, called his "pick-'em-up" truck. She set the speckled blue metal mug marked with her name on the scuffed black bedliner and walked over, drying her hands on the rump of her brown jeans.

She walked along the lip of the dig, trimmed with tough blue grama grass. Like much of New Mexico the soil was a tough clay that turned into concrete on almost any pretext. Annja was not ashamed to admit – to herself – that she was glad to have missed the drudgery of excavating the site in the brutal summer sun of northern New Mexico. It didn't get all that hot up there, and there wasn't any humidity to speak of. But above seven thousand feet there was also a lot less atmosphere to blunt the force of the sun than down at sea level where she'd grown up. Even though the temperature wasn't that far into the sixties, Annja had been able to feel the ultraviolet rays sizzling on her skin.

Max boosted himself to sit on the edge of the hole. "Check this out," he said, holding up a Ziploc bag.

She squatted next to him, squinting at the scalloped chips of pale stone. They had an almost translucent quality in the dying daylight. The dense overcast, like a ceiling set ablaze by the sunset, gave the light a texture she could almost feel, but did little to aid her vision.

"Flint flakes!" she exclaimed after a moment. "Someone's been knapping."

He nodded, beaming. In archaeo circles – where Annja ran, as it happened – Max Leland enjoyed modest renown as a flint knapper and general expert on the subject of making things from flint. He gestured into the flat-bottomed oblong hole at his feet.

"Found 'em right here, not too far from where the front door used to be. Looks like the inhabitants of this house were rolling their own tools up to the middle of the nineteenth century."

"You racist!"

They both whipped around. An angry young Latina with long black hair stood right behind them shaking a finger at the sunburned tip of Leland's nose.

The professor blinked. "What?"

"You racist bastard! You can't say that about my people."

"Say what, Yvonne?" Annja asked, trying to understand.

"I didn't mean to offend you," Max said in badly accented but fluent Spanish. "I'm just showing Annja what I found."

"But it must have been left here by Indians long before the house was built," the furious young woman said in English. "And don't try to weasel out by speaking Spanish."

The professor's face was turning even redder beneath his tan. "Now, listen. I thought all this got settled years ago – "

"All right, everybody," a husky female voice called. "Just hold on, here."

Everyone turned. Trish Donnelly and Alyson Simpson, the first a graduate assistant and the second an undergrad on the dig, had been loading gear into a second pickup owned by UNM. They had been drawn to the dispute, which was getting louder as the sunset deepened and the air got chillier.

"He's accusing my people of being savages," Yvonne González said. She was a freshman who hailed from Las Vegas, just over the mountains to the east. "He claims they used stone tools like cavemen."

Trish put herself between the combatants. She held up a stubby finger before Max Leland's nose. "Wait," she said. "Here."

She took hold of Yvonne's upper arm.

Yvonne was slim and wiry, with an oval face that seemed to be all flashing anthracite eyes. She tried to resist, but Trish Donnelly, in her blue coveralls faded to gray, with her stiff, upswept brush of black hair and laughing pale-blue eyes, was built like a harbor tug was and about as easy to resist.

"Come on, Yvonne," Trish said in the same easygoing tone she always used.

Annja had known her for years. Trish had invited her to spend the past two weeks on the dig, and wangled permissions from Leland and the San Esequiel Pueblos, who owned the land. In all that time she had never heard the woman raise her voice. Not even in a bar fight.

"We're gonna talk. Annja, why don't you come, too?"

"How about me, Trish?" Alyson asked. She was a willowy Dartmouth blonde from upstate New York.

"You stay here, honey," Trish said. "Keep Professor Max from spontaneously combusting."

"I am notspontaneously combusting!" Leland shouted.

"She's a sweet child," Trish said sotto voce to Annja, "but far too innocent for archaeology."

"These Tejanos are all alike," Yvonne muttered darkly. She was still trying to hang back. She reminded Annja of a child balking when a nun was trying to take her somewhere. She was having the same success.

She's like me, Annja thought. She'd always had a problem with authority herself. Growing up under the iron regime of the nuns in an orphanage in New Orleans had hardened rather than softened her resistant nature. Still, in their brief but intense association, she'd never found Leland remotely authoritarian.

Or racist, for that matter.

"Dammit, I'm from West Virginia!" Leland shouted. But he made no move to follow.

Trish marched her little party up to the top of the rise. The clearing went on for ten or fifteen more yards, then rose into some woods of serious pine trees – not the scruffy, hunchbacked piñons that dotted most of the rolling landscape for miles around.

Trish stopped, turned Yvonne to face her, released her arm. "Now, chica,what exactly is your major malfunction?"

"He was trying to say the people who lived in this house knapped flint," Yvonne said sullenly, trying to rub her arm surreptitiously.

"And did he have any evidence to back that up?" Trish asked.

"Well, he dug up some flint flakes. But they couldn't have anything to do with the people who lived here. They must have been from long before!"

"Think, Yvonne," Annja said. "They were found at the same level as artifacts we've definitely dated from the 1850s. We have the land records. The Tejada and then the Dominguín families lived here from 1701 until the house burned down in 1863. How could Indian artifacts from some earlier time period have gotten mixed up with stuff from a century and a half afterthe house was built?"

She had broken herself of the habit, however temporarily, of saying "Native American." Burt Trujillo, a stocky middle-aged Santa Clara Pueblo man working with them as a contract archaeologist for the state, teased her and fellow easterner Alyson mercilessly whenever they used the expression. Alyson had actually gotten indignant with him for calling his people Indians, which only made him laugh louder.

Like the rest of the dig team, he wasn't at the site. Annja and her companions were winding down before the early onset of winter shut them down.

"Maybe kids dug them up," Yvonne said. But she muttered the words so low Annja could barely hear them over the ever present whistle of the wind, which didn't lend them particular conviction.

"The point is," Trish said, "where do you think you get off calling Leland a racist? That's a serious accusation. He could lose his job. Shit, maybe go to jail, the way things are these days."

"But it's like he was saying my people were savages," Yvonne said, at once intent and pleading to be heard. "Just like..."

Her words trailed away as she noticed Annja and Trish both looking fixedly at her. "What?" she asked plaintively.

"Who's being racist now, Yvonne?" Annja asked softly.

Yvonne drew in a deep breath as if preparing to blast the gringafrom back East, then she deflated in a hurry. She wasn't stupid, Annja knew. Far from it. ButAnnja had noticed she did have a tendency to be reactive and defensive. While polite enough, the young Latina had acted wary of Annja since her arrival. She hadn't opened up, but Annja guessed she had some unresolved cultural conflicts going on that made her touchy.

"But," Yvonne began. She let that drop, too. She realized, now the moment's heat had cooled, that she had wandered out of bounds.

"Lighten up, sweetie," Trish said. She caught Yvonne and dragged her into a hug. "It's been a long season. And the clock says it's time to go. We're all a little frazzled. A little weird."

Annja saw Yvonne blinking tears from her eyes. She understood. She hadn't had time to really become part of this crew, yet she, too, felt the camaraderie that arose from long, hard hours spent working to a common purpose. What these women were feeling, she knew from experience, was much more poignant.

Will I ever really know that feeling again? she wondered. She was starting to feel half-misty herself. Or have I lost that part of my life forever?Between her semiregular gig with the hit cable-channel show Chasing History's Monstersand her...destiny...she wasn't really in position to commit herself to a full season in the field.

She saw Yvonne's eyes suddenly go wide. "Oh, my God," the young woman whispered.

Trish's shoulders tensed. Annja felt her own chestnut hair rise at the nape of her neck below her sleek ponytail. Slowly she turned.

There was a figure standing among the trees. It looked like a tall man in a dark cloak. Annja had the sense he was staring at her. She felt intent so malign it made her knees weak.

She shook her head. I am overwrought, she thought. It was the mellow sunset light, she reckoned.

Trish disengaged herself from the smaller woman and turned to face the intruder. Her bulldog jaw squared. "Can we help you?" she asked in a tone that didn't sound all that solicitous to Annja.

The figure said nothing.

"Listen, buster," Trish said.

Annja waved a hand from her hip in a calming gesture. Soft-spoken and generally easygoing though she was, Trish didn't have the longest fuse.

"I don't know what game you think you're playing – "

Two red glows appeared from the stranger's shadowed black head. "¡Jesu Cristo!"exclaimed Yvonne. She crossed herself.

"Yvonne?" Max Leland called from his truck, where he sat on the tailgate swinging his boots and talking to Alyson. "Trish? Are you guys all right?"

"Holy shit," Trish said. Her hand dived inside her dirt-caked coveralls. It came out holding a flat black pistol.

Darkness unfolded from the mystery figure's sides. At first Annja thought it was a cape. Halloween's almost a month away, and this jackass is about to play Dracula to the point of getting shot, she thought disgustedly.

But it wasn't a cape. Black, tapering wings spread wider than the man was tall. Annja felt her right hand start to curl as if to grab something. No, she told herself. It isn't time.

Yvonne had dropped her knapsack off her back and was rummaging furiously inside. Leland emitted a startled yelp and, leaping off the tailgate, ran to the front of the truck and yanked open the door so hard it banged against the stops.

A strange sound keened with the stiff steppe wind. It was like a baby crying. Yvonne pulled a Glock 19 out to the full length of her arms in a two-handed grip. She was trembling so violently the gun's blunt muzzle waved wildly.

The figure rose straight into the air. The black wings never stirred. At twenty feet it leveled out and glided over their heads with silent purpose.

Leland had popped out of the truck cab working the lever action of a .44 Magnum Marlin Model 94 carbine. The huge black creature swooped toward him. It passed ten feet over the top of his and Alyson's heads. Leland's face went so pale it was green behind the red beard and rusty freckles. He had not been able to bring himself to raise the gun.

Again Annja heard the noise like a baby crying. The black figure soared upward to clear a juniper-dotted ridge a hundred yards away and vanished into the lavender dusk.

Large snowflakes began to fall. Alyson threw herself on the ground and covered her head with her hands. "Oh, my God!" she screamed. "They had guns!"

Annja let out the breath she had not realized she was holding in a long, shuddering sigh. Trish came up beside her and rested her right elbow on Annja's shoulder. Her pistol dangled from her hand.

"Wow," she said, as if that summed it all up.

"What was that?" Yvonne asked. "What was it?"Thankfully she was pointing her own handgun toward the clouds, now bluish-black. The sun had vanished from sight, leaving a lemon glow around the Jemez peaks.

"A bird?" Annja said. Her voice sounded like a croak to her. "Eagles have surprisingly wide wingspans."

"Do eagles have red freakin' eyes?" Yvonne screamed.

Annja shrugged. "Maybe the sunlight, reflected – "

She gave it up. Shedidn't believe it. Much as she wanted to.

"What's with all the swamp gas?" Trish asked, taking her arm down and putting her pistol back wherever it came from. "That show you're on, I figured you'd be, you know, on the other side and all."

"I'm kind of the reality anchor. You're a scientist, Trish. What else could it be?" Annja asked.

"I've also been hiking the Southwest most of my life. Be real, Annja. That was an eagle like I'm Mary-Kate Olsen," Trish replied.

"What was it, then?"

Trish shook her head. "I'm afraid to find out." She didn't sound as if she was kidding.

Down the hill, Alyson screamed, "Don't touch me!" and rolled frantically away from Leland when he knelt next to her to see what was wrong. He held the Marlin pointed skyward in one hand.

Yvonne had regained control of herself and zipped her Glock back into her pack. Aside from high color in her cinnamon cheeks and slightly flared nostrils she didn't look as if much out of the ordinary had happened. It made Annja wonder. Outsiders told strange stories of happenings where Yvonne came from, way up in the Blood of Christ Mountains.

"What's wrong with her?" Yvonne asked with a sidewise nod of her head at Alyson.

"Easterner," Trish said.