Chapter Two
I remembered to the day when I was born. In fact, I remembered before I was born. While I was still just a tiny mass of cells in utero growing a brain, I had the sense of my own awareness. Once I developed ears, eyes, and a nose, I heard things. Like my mother talking to me and naming me. She wanted to call me Jesse after an early crush from grade school but I put the suggestion in her head of my own choice. Lakan. It meant World Changer in the old language, the language before the great apes stood up and walked on their hind feet.
I remembered the trauma of birth, seeing my great-grandfather’s wise old brown eyes and my mother’s sweet face, the watchful expectant look on the doctor. Instantly, I knew he was not to be trusted.
I knew things but my infant body and undeveloped tongue, mind, and the sensory system could not tell of those things. I had to grow, to catch up before I could and by the time I was ready to reveal them to my mother, it was too late. I remembered the accident and her murder. I felt it when the bright candle of her light went out. I felt my own brain take on such injuries that I knew I was dying.
Yet – the GMO that Cameron had injected into my mother during her pregnancy had changed me and kicked in moments from that death. Cells underwent a radical shift into a sort of suspended stasis while others began to repair the most critical injuries staving off cessation of the major functions. My brain did not remember the pain or the why, only that it must not reveal those changes.
When I opened my eyes six months later, I saw the world through a dull perception. My reactions and emotions were stunted. Cameron tested me extensively and pronounced me developmentally delayed. Brain-damaged. Released me back to my grandfather but kept tabs on me with monthly checkups at his clinic. It was easy to fool him for in truth, my brain felt dull and lagging behind. My grandpop did not care, he took me in and cared for me as if I were an orphan foal. He bottle-fed me until I learned how to eat again. Carried me with him everywhere until I learned how to walk and do those things I had taken for granted. He never judged me and was always patient, praising me when I had done something right and using a word or two that meant more to me than any effusive reward.
He celebrated my birthday as milestones giving me not gifts but responsibilities. By the time I was five, I took care of my own horse and his, the two Heeler dogs, chickens and a small herd of sheep he raised for meat. He believed in giving me responsibilities, giving me a sense of self-worth and accomplishment.
He used to take me to the mine until I got lost once in the dark stope and scared both of us. Me into a quivering mass and he to the point of frantic. He called the Elders and they organized a search delving deep into the old mine and found me curled up in a fetal ball in a shaft long forgotten and only feet away from deep water. No one knew how I’d gotten there, myself included. After that, I explored until I knew every inch of the tunnels.
When I turned seven, I grew tired of lighting the kerosene lamps and using the wood fireplace to heat and cook. Using parts from his junk pile, I built solar panels on the roof and rigged it to provide electricity powered by both sun and wind. I also hitched a wind turbine to the spring and the wind-pumped water with full pressure into the house for the first time in 25 years. In fact, the first time since the house had been laid there.
“How did you figure all this out?” Grandpop asked scratching his head. He handed me a bottle of red water, my favorite - cherry Kool-Aid. He wore his hair short and under an old straw hat he’d found on the side of the road. He was taller than my mom but bent over through the years. I thought he told me he was in his 80s.
“I read about it somewhere,” I said in my slow halting speech. Since the accident, I was prone to lapses in concentration and comprehension, slow to talk, act and react.
“Maybe I should’ve homeschooled you, Lake. I don’t think your mother would have wanted you to grow up ignorant or illiterate.”
“No, she wouldn’t,” I said cocking my head as I listened to her agree. “She says to teach me the old ways, too. Like you tried to teach her.”
“You see her spirit, boy?”
“Is it her spirit? She looks real. Solid. Huh.” I tried to touch her and my hands encountered only the briefest of sensations. Sort of like a chilly surface brush. “Mom says hello, Grandpop,” I repeated. I took a drink and my lips stained from the cherry flavor. Grandpop smiled.
“Hello, Rachel. I hope your spirit is happy,” he replied.
“No, Grandpop. She wants the men who murdered her to be punished.”
“Do you know who did it, Lakan? The police said it was an accident. She was driving too fast.”
“I was there, Grandpop. There was a big black beast chasing us.”
He looked at me funny. Sometimes, the words I wanted did not come out like I planned. They made perfect sense in my head but once they left my mouth – they were so inane.
“Who?”
“That doctor mom worked for,” I answered quietly.
“Doctor Cameron?” He looked skeptical.
“I can prove it.”
“How?”
“There’s a secret lab beneath the clinic and access below by old mine shafts where he keeps the bodies.”
“Bodies?” Now I was scaring him, my stoic brave great-grandfather.
“All those children that disappeared? He took them.” I could see he did not believe me and I told him that I would show him.
Grabbing my backpack, I loaded it with water bottles, flashlights, extra batteries and hard hats with lamps. Strode to the door and held it open. “You coming?”
As mines go, this one had produced a spectacular amount of quartz with very little gold to show for it but had been loaded with turquoise which in itself was rare to find so far north from the Navajo and Hopi lands where it was more common.
This turquoise was deep blue shot through with strands of pink making it a rare and costly gemstone much in demand. Mined to the last speck in the late 1890s, no one had brought out more than a few karats in the last 50 years. Called the Opal Heart Mine, it had officially been closed and abandoned before the US government had deeded the land to the Wind River Reservation and my great-great-grandfather had purchased it with his first and last $100. It had been in the family since and still was even though Gramps had mortgaged it to put my mother on the way to law school.
We approached the old buffalo wallow that time and the weather had turned into a ravine coming down from the range. If I looked up, I could see the tops of the mountains where late spring snow still capped the highest peaks. It was chilly here in the high desert and I wished I had brought my jacket as I shivered. Standing in front of the man-sized hole covered with chaparral brush and small piñon trees, my grandfather handed me my jacket from out of his pack.
Gratefully, I pulled it on as he reached inside the dark hole for his coal lanterns. Using a long self-striking match, he lit the wick and trimmed it. Light flared and illuminated a scant 5 feet into the stygian black. I always liked that word stygian. Precocious of me to use it but then, I read. A lot.
Grandpop took the lead obeying my directions until we came to a dead end that he had never bothered to look beyond. The cave angled back on itself and because of the angle, it presented an illusion of a flat wall when instead, another four tunnels branched off. Three went nowhere except in circles coming back on themselves but the fourth led down into caverns that were the epitome of the Greek version of hell, complete with a stalagmite that could have been a portrait of Hades. Another looked like Poseidon raising his trident.
“The gods are buried here,” Grandpop whispered and I did not have to tell him to be quiet as even his whisper echoed in the room.
Beneath a frozen waterfall of stone was a vertical crack just wide enough for us to fit into but we had to remove the backpacks and drag them behind us. The headlights glowed on walls of smooth rock, almost as if it had parted for us like the Red Sea had for Moses. The hiss of the coal lantern and my Grandpop’s easy breaths were the only things I could hear.
One minute we were entombed in the Earth’s crease, the next we were in a chamber carved and blasted by man. The walls were worked smooth, the floor concreted and machinery hummed with electricity providing power and lights. Electricity kept the huge freezers running and they preserved the remains of my kindred brothers and sisters.
Grandpop looked at each glass-fronted coffin and recited each child’s name. There weren’t many – perhaps six or seven but he knew every one of them. What was even weirder, there was an empty one with my name on it.