Chapter Forty-One
Since I’d never been to the gravesite where Rachel had been laid to rest, I couldn’t time slip to it. But I had been to Redline Pete Otseno’s ranch house. In particular, his huge porch overlooking his pastures. When Leon finally unscrewed his eyes, he gawped. The sight of the magnificent towering snow-covered Rockies could only be truly experienced when you were standing under them. No photo prepared you for their brooding intensity. It was like having a suspended tsunami waiting over your shoulder.
The meadows below the porch were just coming off the snow cover. Patches of barely green were the grass poking their delicate stems through the frost. The first flowers were still a month away and overhead, a falcon cried an eerie whistle that echoed off the slopes. I heard the chittering of ground squirrels and the bark of the first marmots.
The house was empty of occupants. No one was in residence yet the caretaker’s place was lit up and busy. They took care of the stock and horses but that house was far enough away from the ranch headquarters that they wouldn’t see us standing on the huge second-story porch.
To the east, we caught the dim glow that signaled the lights of town. I led Leon down to the first floor and the door out to the garage. Parked on spotless concrete in a four-bay garage were two Dodge Ram trucks, an Escalade and a Range Rover. The keys were in the ignitions and each vehicle had a mounted garage door opener. Both trucks were fire-engine red with all the bells, whistles and chrome a gearhead could wish for. He got into the pick-up and I slid in next to him.
“Not exactly low-key, are they?” Leon asked. “What is it with Injuns and red cars?” He grinned.
“I don’t know. I’ve never been into cars, never even driven one.”
“Didn’t you have a childhood, Lake?”
“My childhood was…different, I think. I don’t remember it. They took away my memories of it,” I said bleakly.
“What are we going to do about them?” he asked soberly.
“I’m going to kill them all,” I snarled as he stared at me. I opened the garage doors and he drove out onto a black-topped driveway that was ten miles long before we hit the highway.
Redline’s truck had GPS and Leon used it to navigate the forty miles to the town of Red Rock. We passed herds of Black Angus and colored horses - paints and Appaloosas. I remembered the colorful paint that Redline had ridden. One of the pastured horses looked like him. We rode in silence as I contemplated those memories, especially the ones of Rachel and me together.
“Who is Rachel?” he asked and I jumped, startled and wondering if he had read my mind.
“Redline Pete Otseno’s niece. She helped me escape from Dr. Cameron,” I said slowly, dwelling on Rachel’s long, clean limbs, her expressive black eyes and delicate scent. Her exquisite grace as she walked barefoot on the sand, gathering weeds and flipping her raven’s wing locks across my naked shoulders as we lay like spoons. “My love,” I whispered.
“Lakan, I’m sorry,” he said and began a chant that I knew from its cadence. I joined him and we sang the Death Chant for Rachel; he in Abenaki and me, in Siouan.
We found the cemetery; it was a non-denominational one. We passed graves with angel and others with the Star of David, and many with native American motifs but we had no idea what section she was buried in. Nor could we stop and ask because I was almost certain this place was one where I would have set a trap for me. To ask for her grave plot would bring them down on me.
“How will we find her grave, Lakan?” he asked and I had no answer. The best I could come up with was to drive around and look for recent excavations.
The cemetery was on a gentle slope among aspen and poplar trees with one main road that circled twice in a spiral with a center park and parking. A small building rested there and from its design, it was a depository for cremains. Better yet, it had a directory listing the occupants back to the 1850s.
Rachel’s name wasn’t the last one listed, five other people had passed since she. Her final resting place was in the far corner, lot 356, next to her parents and grandparents. We found it without too much trouble and someone had been there before us. Fresh flowers stood in front of her stone in a crystal vase. Columbines, lilies, and roses with a card that read, ‘I miss you and love you’ from both Darren White Deer and her uncle Otseno. I knelt and touched the granite stone engraved with her name, date of birth and death. Tears fell freely from my eyes and bled into the disturbed soil.
“I promise that he won’t get away with this, Rachel. I’ll avenge your death a thousand fold,” I spoke through a thickening lump. I wanted to rail, to throw myself down on the grave and scream at the unfairness of life that had taken my parents, my childhood and my first love from me. I don’t know how long I remained there on my knees. It was long enough for me to notice that I had soaked through my pants and to feel the cold. Long enough for Leon to get nervous especially when other cars started arriving and there wasn’t a funeral service scheduled.
“Lakan,” he said from the driver’s seat of the red pickup. “We need to go.”
I lightly rubbed my fingers across her name and stood as multiple car doors opened. It wasn’t mourners who exited these vehicles but men in suits and sunglasses. Federal Agents.
“FBI, Mr. Strongbow! Freeze!”
I didn’t. I ran around towards Leon and wrapped my arms around his waist. “Sorry about your truck, Mr. Otseno,” I muttered. Before the agents could approach or fire on us, I jumped back to the cabin. Leon staggered out of my grip and shook his head in amazement. “Is there anything you can’t do? Can you fly? Can you turn into a hawk or a wolf?”
“I’m not a skinwalker or a werewolf, or even a shaman, Leon. You know what I am - a genetically modified human. I started out just like everyone else born on this earth.” I paused. “Are you afraid of me? Or what I can do?”
He didn’t answer and that was answer enough. I felt broken and unwanted that even he who I thought trusted me and had saved my life was unsure of my humanity. I took off down the trail heading for the edge of the bluff looking for the way down. I found one that required some climbing skills and concentration which was exactly what I wanted. Not to have to think but simply to move.
The bottom came up quickly, choked with brush and rock fallen from the escarpment. Still, some animal, most likely deer had made a narrow 12-inch-wide path through and down to the lake.
The banks were shallow, gravel and some sand but mostly clay. The wet areas nearest the water sucked at my dress shoes so I pulled them off, tossed them into the water where I watched them sink. The mud crept up between my toes and through my socks. It was ice cold. I shifted my metabolism and warmed my feet watching in amusement as the mud dried into little cracks. I kicked at the rocks and debris, asking God or fate or whatever why did Rachel have to die? Why did everyone I loved die?
I would have run if I’d worn boots and if the trails hadn’t been narrow and rocky. Instead, I walked. Walked all day and into the night until I was miles from the cabin. I was lost but I could still see the escarpment against the moon.
Eventually, hunger brought me to an end of my wanderings and I circled around to find Leon’s parked jeep Cherokee on the road that led up to the hunting cabin. The doors were open but no annoying ping accompanied them. Nor was the dome light on. I stuck my head in the driver’s side, keyed in the electronic code to start the engine and the dashboard readouts didn’t light up. When I opened the hood, the spot where the battery rested was empty, the distributor cap was removed and the wiring harness ripped apart.
I looked up towards the cabin in a panic. Couldn’t freeze time and walk there because I’d only planted in my head the memory of the inside room, the escarpment, and the front yard. All too open for safety if Chase’s people were already there.
I heard a strange noise; the flapping of a bird’s wings and translated it into a far-off helicopter rapidly approaching my hiding spot. Saw it bank into a turn over my head and aim for the cabin. I ran up the road keeping to the center where the grass was thickest and the stones buried deeper. I ran as fast as my legs could carry me yet I couldn’t outrun a chopper and I couldn’t do ten miles fast enough to save Leon.
I reached the edge of the tree-line coming out on the east side of the clearing where the cabin sat. It was quiet except for the helicopter sitting smack center of the open space in front of the porch. I had to admire the pilot; there was less than six feet clearance from the end of the trees to the blades still slowly turning. As I watched, figures emerged from the house dressed in jeans and camos. I gritted my teeth when I recognized several of them. Dr. Cameron and Chase. Aiken, Morrell, Jacobs. Names that went back to the time before Sarah Hamilton, faces and names I thought I had lost forever. Yet, I still could not say I remembered the man called my great-grandfather or any of my childhood memories.
“Any sign of him?” Chase demanded, his cold eyes scanning the trees. I held my breath afraid that he could see the heat signature of that exhalation. I froze, afraid that one of them had brought FLIR, forward looking infra-red radar. I had heard or read somewhere that a portable handheld model was available to covert agencies. I dropped my body temp to that of the ambient area but that brought a corresponding thickening of my thoughts and reactions much like a lizard would be in the cold. Making my temp too cold was just as obvious a sign as that of a warm body.
“No. And DeCarlos isn’t here, either,” Aiken reported. “Yet, his coffee is still hot and sitting on the table.”
Leon must have heard them coming and ducked into the tunnels before they had landed. Silently, I retreated to the trees where it was thicker cover and made my cautious way to the base of the cliff, this time searching for the exit to the tunnels.
It was Leon who spotted me first; I felt a pebble hit me in the back. Whirled around to see him poking his head up from a hole between two rocks. When I looked closer, I saw that it was a piece of plywood with rocks glued to one side painted to look like dirt and a handle on the other. He was standing on iron rungs of a ladder bolted to the bedrock. At his feet, a kerosene lamp lit the ground so I could see two backpacks, two compound bows and a bundle of clothes that he told me to put on.
He passed the stuff up to me. I slipped off my suit and threw it down the hole, dressing in jeans, sweatshirt, and buff-colored Schmidt coat. Wool socks and hiking boots. A Case knife, and a quiver of twenty arrows with broadhead points. It took me seconds to strip off the suit and get into the other clothes. With it went the feelings of helplessness and sorrow, as if I were shedding that along with my mourning suit. I was ready to go after those men that were hunting us.
“We can’t stay here,” Leon whispered. “They’ll find the tunnels eventually. We should head back to the jeep.”
“We can’t, they found it and fixed it so it won’t start.” I shook my head. “This is our world, our forté, Leon. We own the woods.”
“I’m no blanket Indian, Lake. I can’t track or live off the land.”
“Don’t worry, I can.” He closed the cover and unless you knew exactly where to look, you’d never find it. In fact, I had walked over it twice and not suspected it was there.
“Follow me,” I said and took him down the deer trail I’d walked earlier the night before. Twice, I had him stop to listen before we continued on. I thought I’d heard voices and once, the chopper came at us from the west but blew on by without spotting us. I looked at the undercarriage and there wasn’t an FLIR camera mounted below.
“They’re searching by chopper,” he said.
“Yeah, but only by line-of-sight. I’m sure they don’t have IFR to pick up our body heat and Albans revealed to me that he had removed all the tracking chips Cameron had implanted in me. Including the radioisotope in my blood. He gave me a transfusion.”
We reached the bottom of the escarpment and were walking quietly between a ravine overgrown with choke cherries and raspberry vines, a thicket so dense that you couldn’t penetrate it. The deer trail through was just wide enough for the width of our shoulders and backpacks. In some places, we had to turn sideways.
Leon took the lead from there, explaining that he knew these trails having hunted extensively on them. We slid slowly and surreptitiously through the brush while men almost as skilled tracked us. Several times, we had to freeze as their voices came close enough for us to overhear their conversations. Chase must have put fifty men in the woods and unless we could break out of their perimeter, we would be cornered.
We crossed the road a few miles uphill from the jeep and I held him back with a hand across his chest. Men in blue windbreakers with big white letters on the backs of their coats were coming up the road single file. They found the jeep and went over it, confirming that it was Leon’s. Their conversation was not happy, they realized someone else was up here tracking us besides their agency. They speculated who else was involved and mentioned the Senator’s name. These agents had radios and some kind of hand-held scanners.
Leon whispered into my ear. “Are they tracking you?”
“I’m not tagged, not anymore,” I whispered back. “How far are we from the river and that canoe?”
“Twenty minutes, forty if we have to sneak,” he said.
“Head for the river,” I said and we slowly backed up to crawl into a stand of willows that lined the banks of a dry wash. Leon moved almost as stealthily as I, as if he were crawling on glass. It took us closer to an hour to reach the trail to the water. He showed me where the tunnel exited the bluff in case I needed it and he wasn’t with me.
The canoe he’d hidden was an aluminum one painted in camouflage patterns and lying under a brush pile. Carefully, he pushed it into the brackish green water and we slid in, the sound of the metal striking against the bottom bouncing back at us. Water lapped at the boat and around my feet soaking through to the wool socks. Sound carried a long way over the water and we froze, waiting to see if anyone had heard it.
When we were certain no one had, he pushed us off the bottom. Both sides of the river were visible but heavily forested. Only if someone was standing on the edge could they see us. Softly, he slid the paddle in and stroked us out into the current. I watched behind us to make sure we weren’t spotted.