C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

Montenegro laughed. She was pretty in the way military women often seemed to be: fit, strong-shouldered, strong-jawed, like she’d walked into a lot of fists in her life and didn’t figure she was done yet. I liked her. Of course, she’d decided not to shoot us all to bits, which would make me like her anyway, but she had a solid presence, a confidence in herself, that was highly appealing. “ I’m going to have to surrender?”

“I’m sure we won’t call it that when it comes time to do the paperwork, but yeah.” My thoughts were skittering all over the place. “Look, Captain, may I safely say you’ve had an unusual day?”

She laughed again, a big open sound that bounced around the valley with no concern at all. “You could say that. How the hell did you do that with the car? Beautiful car, by the way. Your work?”

For a brief moment I considered throwing Morrison over and running away with Captain Montenegro. I swear to God the man knew what I was thinking, because he arched an eyebrow at me and gave me the slyest, sexiest grin I’d ever seen from him. I reconsidered my consideration, but I still beamed at Montenegro. “Yeah, my work. I’ve had her since I was—” This was not the point. I shook myself and tried again. “Magic. It was magic, Captain, and the mess down in Cherokee that the CDC is trying to clean up is also magic, and by tomorrow morning you’re probably not going to remember this right, much less believe it, but—”

“The hell I won’t.”

I paused. Most people confronted with magic turned a blind eye. They found excuses to explain away what they’d seen, or let themselves start to believe they’d imagined it: anything, in essence, to deny the metaphysical in the world. I’d had a lot of sympathy for that position theen,. Still did, in fact, mostly because magic was hard to believe in. Or at least it was for most people.

Captain Montenegro might just be a believer, though. I’d met a couple, people who weren’t magical themselves but who accepted its realism. There’d been a young woman working at a morgue when the zombies had risen last Halloween, and when I met her several months later, she still knew and recognized the truth of what had happened. There’d been the false FBI agents up in Mount Rainier National Park when I’d been hunting the wendigo. There were Morrison and Gary, for that matter.

For some reason I really wanted Captain Montenegro to be like them. It wouldn’t make her life easier, but it might make it happier, because she was the first person I’d ever seen who’d looked joyful when she saw the impossible unfolding in front of her. “All right,” I said happily. “You’ll remember it tomorrow, but there’s a good chance they won’t.” I waved at her crew, who looked nervously back at me. “Anyway, the point is, I really do need you to surrender, Captain, because there are about six hundred Cherokee out here and they all think the military is coming to arrest them, put them in quarantined concentration camps, and ultimately murder them.”

“If they pose no threat—”

“Captain.”

Montenegro actually shut up, sucked her cheeks in, then nodded. She was right, of course. If they posed no threat nothing bad should happen to them. There wasn’t a genocide in history that supported that theory, though, and the Cherokee had already been down that road. The people in this valley weren’t going down it again.

“So if you don’t surrender, they’re likely to fight, Captain, and if a massacre breaks out, it’s going to be your name that goes down in infamy. That’s the first reason you should surrender.”

“And the second?”

“Is that if a massacre happens it’s going to be because some bad magic has peaked. I really can’t afford to babysit you while I go stop it, so I need you to surrender and be on your best behavior under Cherokee watch.”

“Who’s going to make sure they’re on their best behavior?”

“I am.”

I just about jumped out of my skin and whipped around with pointed irritation. Sheriff Lester Lee came out of the woods with a sigh. “Sorry, Jo. I should’ve let you know I was here before. I followed Danny out.”

Still irritated at being surprised, I snapped, “And you didn’t stop him from shooting at us?”

“Some of us can’t see in the dark, Joanne. I didn’t know he was that close, much less shooting, until he fired. Everybody’s okay?”

“Yeah, but that’s not the point!”

“I think it is, Walker.”

I made a face at Morrison, but he was probably right, so I let it go and turned back to Montenegro. “This is Cherokee town Sheriff Lester Lee. He’ll, er, accept your surrender and make sure you remain safe.”

“Just one problem, Ms. Walker. How am I going to explain to my superiors how you took down a military helicopter?”

“Oh.” I looked at the undamaged chopper, then at Danny. “You stopped to provide humanitarian aid?”

“To the guy who was shooting at us?”

“He wasn’t shootiasnary heling at you,” I said blandly. “He was deer hunting.”

“At night? ”

“It’s all been a terrible mistake.” I kept the look of blank neutrality until Montenegro let go another one of her big laughs.

“I guess it has been. Remind me again why the hell I surrendered?”

“Because it was clear to you that no one here wanted to be involved in a firefight, but that they were in fear of their lives. In the name of peace between nations, you relinquished your arms and offered humanitarian aid. You’ll probably get a medal.”

“I don’t want a medal. I want a flying purple car.” Montenegro lifted her voice a little. “Put down your weapons, men. We’re here for humanitarian purposes, not to call down trouble. Come on out unarmed.”

I thought they were actually going to do it, until Aidan and about three dozen wights burst out of the ground below us.

I hadn’t felt them coming. I didn’t know if I should have felt them coming, but I hadn’t, and we all went flying as a result. Morrison, Dad, the chopper, half a dozen military guys, me, we all got flung into the air and came down in a rain harder than the bullets. The chopper crumpled when it landed, its scream of metal briefly drowning out the screams of the men it smashed.

The wind knocked out of me and I saw stars. No, not stars, after all: I saw wights, white against the dark night. They soared and pounced, driving burning fingertips against the foreheads of trapped bodies. Three of Montenegro’s men were dead before the chopper stopped screaming. First casualties of the Second Indian Wars, I thought, and staggered to my feet.

One of Montenegro’s men lifted his weapon and, with the same calm Morrison had shown a few days earlier, started methodically shooting wights. They went down easily with a bullet to the brain, but there were a lot of them and more kept popping free of the earth. I threw shields up left right and center, trying to keep the wights away from everybody on my side of the fight, and swore violently when one of the damned things laid both hands on a shield and sucked it into nothingness. Its cadaverous form filled out some, and power flooded from it toward Aidan, who soared thirty feet off the ground, spinning around in exultation.

The military guy with the gun, being no fool, looked upward when I did and trained his weapon on the boy in the sky.

I honestly didn’t know which of us hit the soldier first, me or Ada. She flung herself at him bodily and I punched a wall of air at him. He slammed back and forth like he’d been caught in a two-way tackle, and crashed to the ground. Ada sat on his chest, beating the hell out of him as she shrieked about keeping her son safe. I knew I should stop for her own sake if nothing else, but a wight burst out of the ground in front of me and I discovered once again how completely helpless I was against a thing that fed on my energy shields.