Page 56 of Badlands (Nora Kelly #5)

H ANDS BOUND BEHIND their backs, Nora and the rest were marched up and out of the canyon on what was evidently a hidden trail the cultists had used to get ahead of them, circle around, and set up their ambush.

Nora realized that as they’d been struggling up the slot canyon, thinking they were escaping, the cult members had evidently divined their plan and been lying in wait, ready to spring their trap.

The head cultist—the figure in white—was carrying a big Mag flashlight in addition to the revolver.

Several others had headlamps strapped around their red-painted hair.

Nobody spoke except Skip, who—his tongue apparently loosened by a cocktail of dismay, resentment, and drugs—started up a refrain of insult.

“You people are a bunch of poseurs,” he was saying loudly.

And “Wannabe jerkoffs playing Indian with stone knives and fake rituals, supposedly divining the wisdom of the ancients—but modern conveniences like flashlights and guns are okay, is that it?” And “Too bad we shot up your founding dickster, Oskarbi, into confetti.” He was ignored until he said, “Nora, can you believe this clown in white, with all the scary handprints all over him, is by day just a slope-shouldered academic named Bromley—”

This was when the figure in white turned abruptly and whacked Skip upside the head with the butt of his gun, sending him sprawling on the ground.

Two handlers seized Skip and hauled him back to his feet, dazed, blood streaming down his face.

For an instant, Nora was overwhelmed by shock and disbelief.

The vicious, bloodthirsty leader was Bromley, the jerk Corrie had interviewed?

But almost immediately the pieces fit together and it began to make sense.

He hadn’t looked like a mentally disturbed cult leader, a Charles Manson type—but wasn’t that what people always said about serial killers, when it was too late?

But here, in this get-up—a full-blown psycho.

Skip, drugged or not, seemed to have learned quite a bit since he was initially captured.

But in retrospect it made sense.

Oskarbi hadn’t gone to Mexico.

He’d died in the canyon.

Bromley must have taken over the cult.

Briefly, she wondered how Oskarbi had died.

In any event, his acolytes had lovingly preserved his body, while no doubt feeding the rumors that he’d gone back to Mexico.

Skip, bleeding and now silent, was pushed forward along the trail, followed by Nora and Corrie and the rest of the cultists.

The trail ran along the canyon rim for several miles before plunging down through a hidden cleft in the rimrock.

It occurred to Nora that, from this vantage point along the rim, someone could possibly make out flames at the spot where Skip and Edison had made camp.

And somebody with powerful enough binoculars could keep a watch over that side of the river—to see if, indeed, she and the rest had tried escaping in that direction.

The cleft descended to the canyon through a series of steep stone staircases, cleverly constructed within cracks and fissures in the rock—clearly an ancient trail.

When they emerged onto the canyon floor, Nora could see the glow of the fire on the mesa—the place where the rituals were being conducted.

They were marched along the canyon bottom, then up to the mesa top.

After being manhandled to the opening of the kiva, their hands were untied.

The white-painted figure—Bromley—pointed with the gun.

“Down.”

They descended the ladder, with Bromley and several cult members following after them.

Four torches, burning low, illuminated the space, and Nora was momentarily astonished: the curving wall of the kiva featured a fresco of the Feathered Serpent of Aztec mythology.

Carved niches called nichos under the eaves protected various ancient treasures—pottery jars, fetishes, clubs, bone flutes, a bow with arrows, and other artifacts, well preserved and of inestimable archaeological value.

In another nicho, all by itself, stood a large, painted pottery bowl brimming with prasiolite lightning stones.

She was abruptly brought back to reality by Bromley, who had seated himself in a ridiculous sandstone throne.

“Bring out the hikuri .”

Two cultists fetched a mortar, from which Bromley removed a waxy substance that he rolled into a large greenish-brown lump.

A cult member grabbed Nora from behind, and she felt the cold edge of a stone knife against her throat.

“Take,” Bromley said, rising and approaching her, the greasy ball held out in one hand.

She felt a concomitant tightening of the knife against her skin.

She opened her mouth and he put the disgusting ball in.

“Chew and swallow.”

Nora chewed up the horrible stuff, then swallowed, trying not to vomit, knowing that would only mean a second helping.

Next came a bowl of some foul soup, with bits of dead insects floating in it.

“Here comes the happy juice,” Skip said loudly.

“Drink.”

This procedure was repeated with Corrie.

They left Skip alone.

Following this nasty ceremony, Bromley stood back, staring at them through his mask while his followers kept the knives at their throats.

“Well, Professor,” said Nora.

“What now?”

“What now,” spoke Bromley, “will be a demonstration of power so incredible that—though you witness it with your own eyes—you will not believe it.” His voice fairly quavered in triumph.

“Nevertheless, you will be given the privilege of seeing it… before your passing to the higher plane.”

Nora began to reply, then stopped herself.

It was all too obvious, from his tone and the bloodshot, maniacal eyes behind the mask, that the man was beyond all powers of persuasion—or mercy.

“Yeah?” said Skip, still high.

“And meanwhile, you can go fuck yourself.”

Rather than doling out another blow, Bromley turned to him.

“Even you will be rendered speechless. But there is one final step. Tie their hands again.”

Their hands were rebound behind their backs.

Bromley made a gesture, and one cultist removed the torches from their wall niches and doused them, plunging the kiva into darkness.

After a moment, Nora heard a faint clicking noise, then saw flashes of green light as a whispery chant began to rise before them.

Bromley was rubbing the lightning stones together, causing them to sparkle and flash in eerie green light, as he chanted.

He was mad, Nora knew—mad with the lust and power that drove all cult leaders, made all the more dangerous here by the actual scholarship of Oskarbi, and the treasures of the Gallina that surrounded them, from which Bromley had gleaned God knew what.

But that very madness made what, in a very different context, might be risible into something terribly lethal.

Now the others took up lightning stones in turn, and a chorus of chanting began as they moved around the three prisoners, the soft clicking of the stones and the flickering of lightning like green fireflies drifting through the darkness.

There has to be a way out of this , Nora thought.

These people were not only crazy, but—Bromley excepted—potentially malleable, gullible.

That was one weakness of cults…

and it just might give them an opening. But what?