Page 41 of Badlands (Nora Kelly #5)

S KIP EMERGED FROM a groggy stupor in the pitch dark.

He must have dozed off, helped along by what was probably a concussion.

But how much time had passed?

A day? Two? It seemed like he’d been there forever.

The fear—and the cloud of pain in his head—was distorting his perception of time.

He had a vague recollection of someone giving him water.

But no food—and he was ravenously hungry.

He’d stopped calling out: it was a stupid exercise in futility.

Attention, right now, might be the last thing he wanted.

He took a mental inventory of his aching, battered body: nothing seemed to be broken, just a lot of painful bruises and cuts, and his lip was as swollen as a kumquat.

“Edison?” he ventured into the dark.

“Are you there?”

Silence.

“Edison, God damn it!”

Was he dead?

Skip tried to banish the out-of-control fantasies of torture, rape, and death that were crowding into his head.

Who were these people?

Crazy survivalists? Satanists?

His rampant speculations were interrupted by a noise from above, and the rectangle of light reappeared as the covering was slid back.

A beam of sunlight came in, illuminating drifting motes of dust. It was daylight, of another day, he assumed.

Skip glanced over to where Edison had been tied up before, but he was now gone.

A ladder was lowered, then a figure began to climb down.

As the person became illuminated by sunlight, Skip could see him more clearly.

But what the hell was this?

He was naked, smeared head to toe with a thick layer of red clay, wearing a mask of smoothly carved wood, also painted red.

A hairpiece of woven grass stuck up from the mask like some outlandish hairdo.

He carried a wooden baton in his left hand, the fist-sized sphere at one end carved with a grotesque face.

The man reached the bottom of the ladder and straightened up.

Skip could see the gleam of the man’s eyes through holes in the mask.

The figure moved toward him.

There was something odd about the way he walked, a sort of shuffle, as if his feet were too heavy to lift much above the ground.

Was he blind? Drunk?

High?

Skip stared, fear surging again.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

The figure bent down and fumbled with the leather straps holding Skip’s ankles together.

He loosened the straps, then lengthened and retied them—creating a pair of hobbles that allowed limited movement of the feet.

“Stand up.”

The voice was flat and neutral.

Skip staggered up, hands still tied behind his back, fighting a momentary dizziness.

The man took out a long cord made of leather with a slip knot at one end and wrapped it around his neck, tightening it until it functioned as a collar.

The man stepped back, looping the leash around his left wrist.

The man gave the rope a savage jerk, which tightened the cord around Skip’s neck until he coughed and choked.

After a second or two, the figure loosened it.

“Message received, thief?”

Skip was surprised by the normal, even educated, sound of the voice.

The man jerked the leash.

“Respond.”

Skip nodded.

The man now untied his wrists.

“Climb.”

Skip shuffled over to the ladder.

The hobbles made climbing difficult, but the ceiling of the kiva was low and it was only moments before he emerged into the sunlight.

He blinked in the dazzling light as his handler once again tied his arms behind his back.

“I’m no thief.”

“Desecrator.”

“Hold on, that wasn’t me—”

The handler struck him a sharp blow on the back of his head with the club.

“Shut up.”

Skip’s headache burst back into his consciousness, temporarily forcing everything else away.

He closed his eyes, fighting another spell of dizziness, which gradually passed.

When he reopened them, he made an effort to focus on his surroundings.

He was atop a steep, long mesa about a hundred feet above the river, but still enclosed within the walls of the broad canyon.

Three other men were gathered at the end of the mesa.

They were naked as well, two of them smeared with red clay and wearing the same polished masks and grass headdresses.

They were shuffling in a crude circle around one of two tall tripods of lashed poles.

Something was hanging from the tripod they circled.

Skip could not make it out clearly from between the passing forms, but as the three stopped again and began a low chant, he saw, with a spasm of terror, that it was a body, beaten and covered in blood, hanging head down from the tripod by a cable.

Son of a bitch—it was Edison: hair matted and stiff with curds of blood, tongue lolling.

These motherfuckers had killed him.

“Jesus Christ!” Skip cried out in dismay.

He felt another blow to the back of his head.

“I said, shut up ,” his handler murmured.

Skip felt himself go weak, sagging down to his knees.

His handler jerked him back up with the leash, grabbed his jaw in one meaty paw, turned it upward, then blew some powder he’d cupped in his other paw into Skip’s face.

Skip coughed, choked, and sneezed as he felt the unknown substance enter his nostrils, mouth—even his open eyes.

It felt like a million tiny pieces of grit, each of them on fire.

He struggled and gagged, even as the fiery pain receded to be replaced by a fog of delirium.

What had been men lost focus and became shapes.

Skip collapsed onto the ground, but his handler no longer tried to keep him standing.

Through blurred and watering eyes Skip could hear—as if from far away—a low chanting arise as the three figures began circling Edison’s corpse.

Then, vaguely, Skip saw the leader raise one arm, and something gleamed darkly.

It was a dagger, made of flaked stone—long and black and cruel.

More chanting… then the three men stopped circling, moved in tighter around the tripod—and, abruptly, screams broke out.

Skip tried struggling to his knees, fell again.

The screams were growing louder and louder, throat-shredding, more animal than human…

but nevertheless Skip recognized the voice as that of Edison.

So he wasn’t dead after all.

He blinked and blinked, trying desperately to clear the swirling mist from his eyes.

But the leader blocked his view and he could not see what was happening.

But the screams continued, growing louder and more agonized.

Since his hands were bound behind him and he could not cover his ears, he shouted, “Stop it! Please stop it! Stop it! Stop it! ”—until the shadow of his handler fell over him, the wooden club came down on him again, and a merciful darkness claimed him.