Borders and Shadows

Rhys Davis reined in the stocky bay gelding at the crest of the ridge. To his watchful gaze, the valley below yawned black and threatening. He heard the muffled sounds as Liam Malone checked his horse just to Rhys’ left. After that, he couldn’t hear a thing—silence, a profound and unusual silence. Not quite total, though, for, after a moment, he could hear the horses breathing and a whispery sigh of the fitful breeze, but not the usual small noises of the night, no coyotes or night birds. Too quiet, unnaturally quiet. He tugged the night vision goggles free of his jacket and settled them over his eyes. As the wind slipped in through the opening he made at his neck, he shivered. The late-November night’s stillness seemed to add to the chill. They might be far south, but they were also about a mile high, far enough up in the bleak, rugged mountains of the New Mexico border land that winter was tangible. Even the goggles didn’t show him much detail. The deep narrow valley remained shrouded in charcoal gray. The faint glowing traces of a few small animals slipping about their nocturnal business were all he could see. “Too quiet,” Liam said, speaking in a low, flat tone. “Billy would say the tchindi were walking.” Rhys snorted. “He would, and he might be right. This whole scene smells bad to me, a stench worse than rotting corpses and bad drugs. Something’s not right besides the fact there’ve been a dozen murders in the past month scattered along both sides of the border and nothing to lead to the perp. Whoever is doing it isn’t particular, either. Anglos, illegals, Mexican law enforcement and some officers on our side. Skinwalkers? Tchindi? Hell, it’s demons for all I know.” The Billy who Liam had mentioned was the third member of the triumvirate they had been from the age of eight until the present with only a few small breaks. Billy Sundog had been in the same class at Window Rock School as Liam and Rhys. Billy was Navajo, while the other two boys were Anglo—or belagani in Navajo—sons of the teachers in the school system of the Navajo nation’s capital. Billy had been a bit of a misfit, too, born to “city” Indians who’d lived in California until his father’s death drove his mother home to the rez to live with an elderly aunt and uncle, her nearest kin. Billy didn’t blend in with the local kids, so he’d teamed up with the two other new boys in the third-grade class—Liam with flame-red hair and freckles and Rhys, almost dark enough to be taken for Latino or Indian, yet clearly not either. Billy’s great-uncle was a practicing medicine man. Billy soon became fascinated by the superstitions and lore of his people when he encountered it for the first time. He learned the tchindi were the restless spirits of the newly dead and much feared by most of the Navajo people. They all soon found you did not speak of the dead by name and shunned places where someone died. Liam and Rhys, both carrying Celtic blood with its bent for superstition about the unknown, jumped into the new mythology, too. They’d all shivered, but speculated at length about the tchindi or Navajo ghosts, and the skinwalkers, shape-shifting witches, talking of them like many kids told ghost stories and “bloody bones” tales at their sleepovers and campouts. Rhys wiggled his shoulders, settling his pile-lined jacket more solidly in place as he slipped the goggles back into its protection, still hanging from the strap around his neck. “Guess we ought to ride on down to the spring and look for tracks before we head back to the truck.” Liam agreed. “Yeah. It doesn’t look like anything’s stirring, but we can check. Sergeant Gomez’ll expect a detailed report of what we did and if we don’t make a full patrol, he’ll be pissed, the damn hard-assed bastard.” Rhys snorted again. “Yeah, Gomez has a hard-on about us, or at least it seems like it. I don’t think he likes gringos and he sure doesn’t like Native Americans! He’s always riding Billy’s ass.” “Maybe it’s just that we’re the new guys on his crew and he hasn’t decided if we’re going to fit in and work out or not. He knows we’re all buds, too, and probably wonders how in hell we got assigned together right out of training. That never happens and if we’d asked for the same duty station, we’d never have gotten it. I’m even surprised we ended up this close to home. We prob’ly should’ve gone to San Diego or Brownsville, even up on the Canadian border or maybe one each way.” Rhys nodded, though he knew Liam could not see the action. “Right. Luck like that is almost too good to be true, but this mess we’re dumped into makes up for it. This whole thing gives me the creeps. It just doesn’t feel right.” At a cluck and shake of the reins, the two horses started down, picking their way confidently along the rut of a cattle trail leading to the spring at the bottom. There, an old concrete trough caught water trickling from a rusted pipe that ran back into one rocky hillside, making a critical water hole for both livestock and wildlife. The U. S. Border Patrol officers knew parties of border crossers also used it to refill canteens and plastic bottles to provide water for the next leg of the dry trek northward. Rhys and Liam approached the spring slowly, casting their senses into the darkness to try to determine if anything larger than small wild animals were near. They sensed nothing. Swinging out of the saddle, Liam drew a powerful flashlight from its loop on his gun belt and shone it into the trampled mud around the trough. The ground hinted at a scuffle, but the tracks were too mixed and mushy to unravel. “Billy might make some sense of this. He’s a hell of a tracker, but damned if I can figure it out.” He shone the light a little farther afield, stiffening when the beam hit a lumpy shape, a shape seemingly out of place and wrong for a rock or a stump. “Wait, what’s that?” Still mounted, Rhys urged his mount in that direction, pulling out his own flashlight as he moved. It was a body all right. Slashed and bloody, the corpse looked to have been a small man or a youth, dark-haired and dark-skinned from what they could see. That wasn’t much because the victim had been literally cut to ribbons. Flesh and skin hung in tattered strands off the frame, tangled and mixed with bloody cloth from shredded jeans and the remains of a shirt, probably a T-shirt. Jagged cuts or claw marks had almost obliterated the victim’s face. Claw marks? Knife wounds? In the limited light, they really couldn’t tell. Liam made a gagging sound before he forced the words out. “Christ, this is the worst one yet. I doubt if we’ll have a signal down in this pocket, but we’d better try to call it in.” He pulled his mobile phone out, and hit a speed dial number. As he’d surmised, there was no signal. “s**t. Looks like one of us has to stay here and the other go back up on the ridge and call. I’m already dismounted, so you go.” Rhys wanted to say no way. Better to leave the ragged corpse where it lay while they both went. The hapless man was far past more harm. Still, it was against policy to leave a crime scene unguarded until the responsible officers arrived, probably members of the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Department. He guessed they were on federal land, either U.S. Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management, but that didn’t mean the FBI would have jurisdiction. They only took over in national parks and monuments and on the rez. “All right. Stay on your guard, bro. Who or whatever did that is one mean customer.” Liam seemed calm. “Could be he was killed in a more or less normal way, maybe even not here, and predators got to him. Coyotes, vultures and stuff can do a lot of damage. We really don’t know, can’t tell. That’s for the CSI people to determine.” To Rhys’ ears, Liam’s reasonable words still held a hint of whistling in the dark. Rhys knew his friend well enough to be sure he was as spooked as Rhys was. Dead bodies were one thing, but mutilated ones were more than a little bit worse. His skin crawled as goose bumps erupted all over his body. If he’d ever sensed pure and total evil, this was it. “Stay on your guard,” Rhys repeated. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. No need to wait for the investigators to guide them in. Everybody who works the region knows this spring and how to get to it. As soon as I reach headquarters and relay the info, I’ll be back.” * * * * Rhys twisted, fighting to free himself from the tangled, sweat-soaked bedding, caught midway between asleep and awake, still mired in a dream too realistic to ignore. In the dark, he fumbled for his crutch, pushed by the urgent note in the voice of the lad who had awakened him. “They’re coming. We’ve got to get to the woods, away from the village. Hurry, hurry!” It was the coldest, darkest part of the night, those power-filled moments just before the first hint of dawn. He ducked out of the low doorway of his stone-and-wattle hut, straightened and cast his senses around, seeking how far away the danger was. Has the enemy reached the village? Which way do they come? Do I need to warn anyone else who is maybe still here? He caught a vague scent of sweat and fear on the thin breeze drifting in from the coast, less than a league away. Perhaps they’d come by water then, this latest group of the invaders that had plagued his clan for two seasons. Leaning on the crutch to take some of the burden off his left hip, wounded in the first invasion six moons ago and slow to heal, he scuttled for the nearest arm of the forest. The shelter of trees seemed like a haven while the soft duff beneath them cushioned even awkward steps and muffled their sounds. If he got that far, he’d be safe. He was not ready to die at the hands of the strangers. His people needed him and his growing Druidic skills…He was their priest and healer, their connection to the gods and the future. * * * * By dint of sheer willpower, Rhys jerked himself free of the dream and back into the present. Small wonder he’d dreamed of death and danger after the horrific night they’d spent guarding the mangled corpse and the crime scene until law enforcement personnel arrived about three o’clock. The miasma was enough to mess with anyone’s mind, but why did he dream of a totally different place and time, a dream that seemed too vivid to be less than a memory? He could still feel the coarse fabric of his robe and the smooth wood of his crutch. He smelled the musty smoke of smoldering peat fires and the odors of sweat, fear and blood hanging in damp air, air touched with the perfume of the sea. Nothing was at all like the high desert he’d known his whole life, yet, uncannily, it all seemed familiar. He heard Liam across the hall, turning and muttering in his sleep. Sounded like he was having nightmares, too, but he never admitted to them the next day, claiming he did not dream or, if he did, forgot them before he awoke. Rhys shook his head. Damn stubborn Irishman. Temper to match his hair, too, but he couldn’t help liking the guy, loving him if he told the truth. He kept telling himself Liam was just the brother he’d never had. Rhys’ father had disappeared when Rhys was barely out of diapers, and his mother had been hurt too badly to try again. She’d always said her students were her family. Rhys was just one of the bunch, lonely without realizing it until he met Liam that first season at Window Rock, Liam and Billy. He couldn’t imagine life without them. But somewhere deep inside he knew there was more to it, knew Liam was the other half of his very soul. He not only loved Liam, he wanted him with a gut-deep hunger that scared him to death. Especially when he was sure Liam did not feel the same way. So he took the other man’s friendship, which had to be enough. He and Liam were sharing a ramshackle little adobe house in Animas, New Mexico now as they worked out the probationary first year on their new job with the border patrol. The fact the three of them had wound up in the same region right out of training was almost unbelievable, but he’d never been happier about any coincidence. It felt like this was meant to happen, like they were still together for a reason. Billy lived a short block away, newly married to a young half Navajo/half Anglo woman he’d loved almost as long as he’d been friends with Rhys and Liam. They were expecting a kid now, which made Rhys grin. Imagine, Billy a dad. Now that’s something. Crazy Billy—yeah, crazy like a coyote. Better to think of that than his maddening dream anyway.