A Beast with Four Heads
Book 2 of the Prairie Wolf Trilogy
By Joshua Scribner
Copyright 2011 Joshua Scribner
Smashwords Edition
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This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Chapter 1
January 2010
The familiar feeling arouse as soon as he turned onto Freedom Highway. He associated it with the feeling an old mechanic must get in his wrist when he turns his wrench, or the feeling in the fingertips of a seasoned guitarist fingering his guitar. But Evan felt it in his entire body. It still fit.
He passed the 24-hour Supercenter. They had intentionally built it outside of Green Pastures city limits to avoid the excessive sales limitations imposed by the city, especially the “No beer after midnight” ordinance. But the city had zoned them less than a year later. Bad for the Supercenter. Good for Evan Terry.
A few hundred yards past that, on the left, and just outside the city limits, was the parking lot Evan Terry pulled into. With oil stains and cracked asphalt in his headlights, Evan pulled his Jaguar under a marquee that read, PLAY LOTTO.
The lot was littered with, amongst other things, cigarette butts and used lotto cards, but that was fine. The third shift had only begun fifteen minutes ago, and first and second generally wouldn’t have time to clean the lot.
The lights from the canopy showed down on six parking spaces marked by white lines so chipped and faded that more of the asphalt underneath was visible than the paint itself. Directly under the canopy, the blue paint of the front walk was in even worse condition.
He used to have these places painted regularly, but then he noticed the way his sales dropped off for a little while after each fresh coat. It was one of those phenomena he came to understand by a simple principle. The regulars at General Lee’s weren’t looking for a clean, well-lighted place. They were looking for a shithole, where they could feel comfortable letting the ashes from their cigarettes fall onto the floor. Now the stores met the minimum requirements to keep the health department from shutting them down, and not a bit more.
From inside, Corey, the night manager, watched him walk in. The door beeped open, and Corey stood up from the chair behind the counter. The tired thirty-year-old man looked at Evan as if looking into a light.
“Hey. Aren’t you . . .”
“Evan Terry,” Evan said, then walked to the counter and extended his hand. Corey stepped forward, hesitantly, and took it.
“I don’t think I’ve seen you in here before,” Corey said, his voice with a little bit of the suck up to the boss quality to it, but more than that, the bitterness from the hand life had recently dealt him. “Hell, if I hadn’t seen you in the paper, I wouldn’t have recognized you.”
“Yeah. Well. I travel around a lot. And I try to stay out of the stores. Kind of makes people nervous to have the owner around.”
Corey nodded. Evan could tell this wasn’t a man who liked where he was. He got to his reason for being here. “Listen, Corey. I understand that your wife is very ill.”
Corey nodded. His wife was in a hospital in Columbia, receiving treatments for breast cancer.
“And I’m sure you’d rather be with her than stuck in this place. So I want you to take about twenty minutes to get me up to speed, then get out of here.”
Corey looked at him inquisitively, sighed, then dropped his hands to the side. “I’ve used up all my sick leave and my vacation. I can’t afford—”
“I know. That’s why I’m going to keep you on the clock.”
Again, the inquisitive look.
“You’ve been here for seven years, which is a long time in this occupation. You’ve never stole from this business, and before your wife became ill, never missed a day. I appreciate that. Besides, I’m bored with traveling and can’t think of anything else to do. So I’m going to work your hours, and you’re going to get paid for them.”
There were tears in Corey’s eyes, but Evan doubted he would cry. Corey whispered, “But the swing person quit last week. That means you’ll have to work seven days.”
“Well then, I guess you’ll be getting overtime on your check.”
#
Jonnie Sanders sat up in bed. But it was still there. To this day, it still caught him off guard to wake up this way, waking up but not realizing he was awake, thinking it a dream because part of what was in front of him wasn’t his life. It always took time for logic to set in, if logic was what you could call Jonnie Sanders making a connection, conclusions that would be madness to anyone else.
And logic said, “You’re not sleeping; you’re seeing the zone.”
Jonnie got out of the bed. The room was dark, except for the power light on his PC. But there was so much more than the room. There was also the desert. Nothing around but sand and cacti, mostly sand. And in the distance, someone was walking up. And who was it? That remained to be seen.
Jonnie went to the computer, turned on the monitor and pulled up the word processor. He typed the scene, all the while wondering who was walking up.
He ran the characters through his head, pulling them up in random order. Paul Siever: It couldn’t be, not in the desert, a place of solitude, away from the masses of people he loved to prey on. Besides, Paul was on death row and not clever enough to escape.
Blane Mannie: Would he use the desert to hide? No. A black man from the city hid best in the city, where there were a million other black faces to blend in with.
Heath Isabell: No. Like Siever and Mannie, he was a killer and would have to live life on the run. Isabell, however, was more arrogant than the other two and would consider his gift too refined for the desert. He would have thought of another way to hide.
Could it be Quentin Blath? No. Blath’s power was knowing the fields. He could see many different possibilities at once and in little time, making him impossible to catch and impossible to chase into the desert.
Who was the writer? Which alter ego was stepping up to the plate at four in the morning? Who did Jonnie Sanders feel like now? How were his fingers stroking the keyboard, and how was the scene being described?
It couldn’t be Diedrick Enhile, with his love for humiliation and constant need to ridicule the sacred mores of the world he hated so much. Enhile’s emotion was cool rage, and his outlet for that rage was Paul Siever, whose impulsive acts never failed to bring disorder where there was order before. Jonnie felt rage right now, but it was at a deeper level than Enhile delved.
And Jonnie didn’t feel the flow it took to write Blane Mannie, whose speed with a gun could only be found in the smooth rhythms of Blane’s creator, Carl Blake.
Arnold Plum’s strength was the dialogue of his characters. He had to be good with dialogue, because dialogue was what his character, Heath Isabell, used to attack. And, in this desert scene, there was no dialogue to be had.
That left Ingle Pitory. Was it Pitory? Yes, it was obviously Pitory. The metaphorical significance of the desert—a clear view for miles in all directions—the unfolding sequence of what is to come, the patient approach of a character confident he will succeed; they were all of Pitory.
Pitory’s character came into view, Quentin Blath, walking in the midday desert sun, no predators in sight, no prey in sight, but there for a reason. Jonnie went inside Blath’s head.
#
And though Quentin Blath walked in the desert, he wasn’t hot. His body wasn’t drenched in sweat, and his throat wasn’t burning with dehydration. He didn’t need to cover his face to prevent scorching of his skin.
He had been here for what felt like hours, but time was of no concern in this place. He had not eaten or drunk since he came here, for outside sustenance was of no concern either. And though Blath was old, his skin wasn’t wrinkled here, nor was his mind clouded or his body feeble. In fact, he was frozen at the peak of his physical life.
Blath was dreaming, but unlike most mortals, he always knew when he was dreaming, and he decided when the dream would end. It was a skill he had taught himself as a young boy. Then it was for protection. Now it was for the experience itself, moving in places he couldn’t know in waking life, performing magic that he had yet to bring to his waking life, and learning. It was within dreams that Blath first learned the power of fields, seeing different outcomes of the choices he made in advance.
And how excited he had been so many years ago when he first saw a few seconds into the fields. And then the years passed with the fields growing seconds at a time, moving him ever so much closer to invincibility. But then the rate of growth decreased, gains turning from seconds to half seconds, to quarter seconds, to microseconds. It was a lesson he had learned in life and confirmed in dreams: Just as physics had its laws, so did metaphysics. There were limits to the amount of energy he could bring into this realm to feed his power, a line he could forever approach but never reach. And that line was about two minutes, which was enough to escape would be captors and assassins, enough to find victims whose emotional reactions would be suitable for his conscience and lust, but not enough for him to find the way to immortality.
Within his waking life, Quentin Blath was getting old.
The years of his life could reach one hundred and twenty, a metaphysical law imposed upon physics. And with his lifestyle, stress, but only thrilling stress, no need for chemicals or other artificial pleasures that would harm his mortal being, he might reach that age, or close to it. But with his dulling senses, even with the power of fields, they would catch him, and if they were smart, cut his existence short, sending him early to the eternal Hell he had earned by tampering with the black magic of metaphysics.
But now there was hope for him: an opportunity within the dreamt part of his existence to exit life and enter into the realm of black magic shared by the immortals. An invitation had been extended from a demon there.
The demon had not identified itself, which did increase the risk. Could he trust a wicked spirit, one, like he, versed in the art of deception? All Blath could do was go within this vast place, find the entrance, and hope he would know at the moment he stood in front of it.
And now, in the distance . . .
#
“Hello, Gary.”
Gary smiled, not as exasperated as Evan remembered it, but still not a full-fledged smile.
“I’ll be dammed. Look who came down to walk amongst us mortals.”
From behind the counter, Evan lifted his hands and looked to the ceiling.
At this, Gary shook his head, then walked over to the same old aisle, where he looked over the bread. Gary had put on more weight, and any remnants of a body that might have once been athletic were gone. “So where’s your employee? You got him slaving in the cooler?”
“No. Corey had to go out of town for a while. So, I’m covering him.”
Gary smirked, but didn’t say anything else. Less than a minute later, Jack, who now owned the local Frito Lay distributorship, pulled up. Jack walked up as Gary walked out. They stood out on the walk and talked for a few minutes, before Jack led the way in.
“Is it true what I hear?” Jack asked in his loud voice. “You’re too cheap to pay your help, so you decided to do it yourself?”
“Yeah, man. After I leave here, I’m going to one of the other stores. I figure two shifts a day and seven days a week ought to save me at least a thousand dollars.”
Jack laughed, and he and Gary both went for the coffeepots. Jack had actually lost weight, but by his pale face, it hadn’t necessarily been intentional, but the deterioration that comes with illness and age. He was limping now.
They started yapping again back by the pots, but Evan missed what they said. Something flashed through his head. It was like several different pictures coming at once. It only lasted a few seconds, but when it was over, Evan was a little dizzy.
Evan went to sit down. He wasn’t used to working much at all, and he wasn’t used to these hours. But he was sure that he would be fine once his body acclimated.
Chapter 2
“What the . . .”
Evan Terry awoke to the sound of his own voice. He looked up from his pillow at the only light in his room, the red numbers of his alarm clock.
It was a little after 10AM.
#
A noise. It was in his head. And the noise was bringing him awake. The world that was outside the zone came back to him, and he realized that the sound was real.
Jonnie sat up. The midday light reflected from the snow came through the windows and stung his eyes, and the pain absorbed his attention, blocking orientation.
Within moments of closing his eyes again, there came thoughts that made sense. The noise had come from outside, and it had went away. Maybe he would be lucky, and it wouldn’t come back. He had things to think about, things to hope for.
Last night, the zone had shut off as quickly as it had come on. And for hours, he’d sat there in the night, and then into the morning, waiting, hoping that it would come back. He wanted to know what happened to Blath. What was in the distance?
At sometime he’d wandered from his room and sat on the couch. He’d fallen asleep, and the zone hadn’t awakened him again.
The zone. At sometime in his life, the relationship between he and it had changed. Used to be, he went in and out of it when he felt like it. Now it came and got him, held his attention until it was finished, then let him go.
He supposed the current relationship was better, in a way. He used to bring it on and apply it to his work, rushing to write down its visions, barely finishing stories before he grew bored and was ready to move on to the next vision. Now the zone went away for long periods of time, sitting inside the deepest parts of his unconscious, hibernating and growing until it brought forth tales so fascinating that they could hold even Jonnie’s migrant attention.
And last night the zone had brought back the most fascinating of all his characters, Quentin Blath, who Jonnie had thought was gone for good. Blath wasn’t like the other characters in the zone. He didn’t have a weakness that arose from his evil, no Achilles’ heal that would lead him to die. And it was just that, his survivability, that the only way to kill him was to wait for old age to take him out, that Jonnie was sure made him go away. There were only so many books to write about a villain who only grew more adept at escaping death. Or maybe some deep part of Jonnie’s unconscious didn’t want its favorite child to die, so it refused to find the death sentence all literary villains were destined to face.
And maybe that was why Blath was back. He had found a way to never die.
But now, noise was back. And he was oriented enough to realize that the noise was a knock at his front door. Jonnie took his time opening his eyes to the sunlight in his window-lined living room, thinking it was just one of the people from the pool of 99 percent of the population that he really didn’t like to be around. Maybe it was that pesky local reporter who couldn’t take no for an answer when she asked to interview him. Making her or someone like her wait out in the cold, frustrated, annoyed at the hermit writer who wouldn’t be such big news in an urban area, would be a delightful little pleasure.
Yeah, I’m Jonnie Sanders. Maybe you’ve heard of my work. Maybe not. But I bet you’ve heard a lot more about the four other people I am, the one’s I’m not going to take credit for or tell your invasive ass about.
Whoever it was knocked again, lightly, and Jonnie continued to take his time, slowly opening his eyes and stretching.
Eventually, Jonnie made his way across the bare-wood floor, noting the flashing light on his answering machine as he went by. Could have been his agent. Or it could have been the lesbians calling from their winter home in Florida.
Or it could have been Jessie.
“Oh shit,” Jonnie said out loud, stopping in the kitchen to look at the microwave clock. It was 3:30 in the afternoon. He rushed to the door. A look in the eyehole told him he’d fucked up. He unlatched the door and whipped it open. There, standing in front of him, face covered from nose to neck in a giant scarf, body mass nearly doubled by the puffy snowsuit, was the little girl.
“Hi, Hanna,” Jonnie said, glad five-year-old girls were not skilled detectors of guilt in the adult male.
The little blue eyes looked up at him, and something incomprehensible as anything but the excited voice of a child came through the scarf.
“What?” Jonnie asked, still stupefied by his own irresponsible act.
Hanna spoke again, this time no more understandable than the first.
It was so hilarious that, even in his state of guilt, Jonnie was tempted to keep it going. But this time guilt won out over his ever-childish sense of humor, and Jonnie unwrapped the scarf from her face.
“Jonnie,” she said, her breath misting in the cold air. “My mama said on the phone message machine to come here after school from the bus.”
Hanna lived down the street. It was her parents’ cabin, but for all but three months in the summer, only she and her mother stayed there.
Jonnie, now the self-proclaimed world’s biggest asshole, moved out of the doorway. How long had she, one of the exceptions to the rule that Jonnie preferred his life peopleless, waited in the cold?
Seemingly indifferent to the wrong she’d just endured, Hanna took three steps inside and plopped down on the floor. She shaped her body in a V, holding her snow boots up in the air. Seeing her anticipation, an expression unadulterated by anything other than its simple agenda, Jonnie rushed to help her. After whipping off the wet boots, he lifted her to her feet, where she slid off her backpack as he unzipped her suit. Hanna held her hands out in front of her, as she tried to crank her neck around to look inside the rest of the cabin, and Jonnie removed her mittens. With spasmodic but effective movements, Hanna pulled off the scarf and her snowsuit, leaving it all where it dropped, then ran into the living room.
Jonnie stepped into the kitchen area and watched Hanna do her scan. She looked at the stack of board games first, and as usual, passed them up. Next, she opened up the bottom cabinet of the entertainment center where Jonnie kept the Wii. She inspected the discs one by one, only to leave them and the Wii where they were. Next, there was the rack of child DVDs, and it too was inspected without becoming the immediate object of play. She didn’t want to play with anything in the living room now. Checking the living room when she got here was Hanna’s way of planning her time for later this evening, establishing an alternative plan for if Jonnie’s stories took him away from her. Right now she would want to play the computer, something else that would be taken away when the story took Jonnie away.
Like clockwork, Hanna left for Jonnie’s bedroom. That was when the phone rang.
“Oh shit,” Jonnie whispered. “The messages.” He picked up the phone on the third ring. “Hello.”
“Oh good. You’re there,” Jessie rushed out with a dwindling panic. “I have my keys in my hand and was out the door if you didn’t answer this time.”
“I’m sorry, Jess. I slept through you calling.”
“I got to work at nine and saw that I was going to have to work late. I tried calling several times, but got your answering machine.”
“Sorry. I must have been really out of it. I got out of bed and wrote a little last night.”
“Well, anyway. I guess Hanna got there okay?”
“Oh yeah. She’s in there tearing up my computer now.”
Jessie sighed. “Please make sure she gets her homework finished sometime within the playfest.”
“No problem.”
“I don’t think I’ll be there before nine. So could you lie her down?”
“You got it.”
“And Jonnie?”
“Yeah?”
“You rule.”
“Oh really. Does that mean I get to be on top?”
“It never ends.”
“Yeah it does. I’ll die someday.”
“See you tonight.”
“Have fun.”
Jonnie hung up the phone on time to see Hanna walk out of his bedroom. She walked by him and stood at the sliding glass door at the back of the cabin. She looked over the snow-covered lake for a few seconds. It was empty now until Saturday, when a few of the cabin dwellers would come for ice fishing, hunting, or whatever winter activity flipped their Bic.
“Jonnie,” Hanna said. “Can we go snowmobiling early today?”
“Well, that was fast. Don’t want to play the computer today, huh?”
“Yeah. I wanted to play the computer, but it’s stuck.”
“Stuck?”
“Yeah, Jonnie. It’s stuck.”
Jonnie left Hanna standing there and went to his room. If there was one place Jonnie pampered himself it was in his computer equipment. He had spent top dollar on the PC, and it had never once froze up before today. But this time, when he walked in his room, he found the computer had more than froze up. The screen was black, except for a frozen cursor in the top left-hand corner. He tried to type WIN for Windows, but the cursor didn’t respond. He tried control-alt-delete, and nothing happened.
“It’s stuck,” Hanna repeated from the doorway.
“It sure looks like it.”
“Are your stories stuck too?”
Jonnie chuckled. “No. They’re fine.”
Jonnie unplugged the computer from the wall. After waiting a few seconds, he pushed the plug back in and hit the power key. He got the display page that bitched about how he had shut off the computer, and the computer did a scan disk, but otherwise, the boot up went as normal.
“Well, it looks all right now, Miss Hanna Banana. Do you want to play it?” Jonnie looked at her and grinned. “Or do you wanna go see how much we can tear up the lake?”
Hanna’s face lit up. “I want to tear up the lake.”
#
Jess hadn’t been real happy when Jonnie got Hanna the miniature snowmobile for Christmas.
“Jonnie, it’s the most expensive present she’s ever got, and we haven’t even been dating for a year.”
Jessie’s reaction had validated his decision to not buy Jessie the Mustang Cobra. He’d figured that, in her mind, the Mustang might have complicated things. But he had to go ahead with the Kitty Cat, not wanting a child to do without because of the linear assumptions of an adult world.
Hanna’s reaction hadn’t been what he expected. She’d ridden the Kitty Cat a few times, probably just to make Jonnie feel good, Jonnie thought. But Hanna had made it clear through her choices that she preferred to do her snowmobiling as a passenger. Jonnie wasn’t sure why, but he thought it was a combination to two things: Riding together was something they’d come to love before Christmas, making the Kitty Cat an intruder of sorts, and Jonnie’s snowmobile flew.
And today, with the frozen lake otherwise peopleless, they flew extra fast. They started out circling the lake, vacant docks and cabin’s blurring together as they passed, Jonnie treating each curve as if it were the last one they would ever be able to take, Hanna swaying and bouncing in front of him.
Thinking her taste for raw speed was probably satisfied, Jonnie turned into the center of the lake and sped toward one of the baby islands. It was on the third time around the island, the same place the three of them had come out to so many times last summer, the same place they’d ran the Cat around 100 times before, that Jonnie saw Blane Mannie.
#
It was just a flash, Blane Mannie in a casino, moving between aisles of slot machines, and Jonnie put the zone on hold and aimed the snowmobile toward his cabin.
He could hold the zone in check for now, until he could get to his PC. But that didn’t stop him from wondering. Since he’d started writing novels, it had not worked this way. Books came one at a time, until they were done, and right now, it was supposed to be Blath, the master of fields, not Mannie, the master of pistols, coming through the zone. But Jonnie didn’t mind the incongruity as much as he was intrigued by it. Incongruity just added to the flame.
Jonnie left the snowmobile parked in back. Rushing, he carried Hanna inside and sat her on the living room floor, then proceeded to the bedroom, kicking off his boots and taking off his snowmobile suit as he walked, leaving them where they landed.
Inside his room, at the computer, Jonnie formatted the screen. He sat his fingers on the keyboard and tried to turn the zone back on. Nothing.
A block. Why a block? In his preoccupation with the zone, it took Jonnie a few seconds to realize the obvious. Another rule that started when Jonnie started writing novels was that there were no blocks, no writer’s block, no planning time—that was done in the back of his mind—no interruptions allowed. Then, last summer, a block came. And it was the only one. He called it the Hanna block.
As quickly as he’d come to the chair, Jonnie left the chair. He found Hanna, not trying to undress herself, but instead, taking care of another piece of Jonnie’s neglect, the sliding back door. She managed to get it shut before Jonnie got to her.
Jonnie twisted her around to see her head immediately turn to look around the living room, no doubt remembering the alternate plan she’d made earlier.
After getting Hanna’s snow attire off, Jonnie made her some hot chocolate. Finding her already engaged in the Wii, he sat the cup beside her.
“Thank you, Jonnie,” she said, seemingly indifferent to being neglected. She would take care of herself now, getting her own dinner, doing her homework on her own, probably putting herself to bed, as Jonnie hammered off a couple of Blane Mannie chapters.
Jonnie left her to it. No time to dwell on guilt now.
He sat down at the computer to find the block lifted and Blane Mannie in the casino.
#
And what was he doing here? Blane Mannie recounted all the mistakes. He had left LA, which was probably not a bad idea, with every gang of any importance looking for him. But he should have left for San Diego, Oakland or anywhere big, where he knew the territory and could blend in for a while, not out of state to a rural place where a black man with a scarred face stood out.
And then to come inside a casino, where metal detectors prevented him from bringing his guns.
The modern-day Billie the Kid was black, and his weapons of choice were an Uzi and a nine millimeter. But right now, both were in his car.
And the worst thing he’d done was come onto an Indian reservation.
But the fuck-ups didn’t really matter right now. He had to clear his head, even though it was hard without his guns, two pieces of metal that had become like extensions of him, the organs that allowed him to manipulate his world, the triggers for the adrenaline that sharpened his mind.
They’d found him at a poker table. And he hadn’t even been cheating, though he easily could have, the sleight of his hands too fast for the naked eye. He’d intercepted the money in a drug exchange last week, so he wouldn’t have to worry about cash for a long time. Today he was playing merely for the sporting aspect, until the three observers showed up.
They were Indians. But they were not like the many other Indians he’d seen around the Casino. These three were not wearing one of the various uniforms of the casino staff. Two were wearing basic street clothes. One was wearing the beige skin of some animal, with feathers circling around the chest of his jacket.
They stood in a line, a few feet from the poker room, the stone looks on their faces unreadable. The one in the skins ran a finger across his neck, and Blane was up, leaving his cards on the table and his money in the pot.
Since then, he’d seen several more, some in street clothes, some in the traditional clothing, each a new face, but each and every face as stone as the one before it. Not a one of them had a visible weapon. And there were no bulges in their clothing that indicated they might have a gun or knife tucked away.
Blane zigzagged through the rows and rows of slot machines, his direction random, looking for someone to take a gun off of. Finding no one of use, he gained a little direction. He knew there had to be a gun in the front walkway. He knew because when he’d first walked in he’d felt itchy fingers as he crossed in front of the tribal cop there, the man’s pistol not fastened in his holster.
Blane thought the casino security system must be like it was at a prison. They kept the guns at the entrances, and kept unarmed guards amongst the population, or in this case, gamblers.
But since he’d left the poker room, Blane hadn’t seen one of the floor guards or the tribal police, just the street Indians.
A few rows from the front, Blane stopped and peered over the machines, scanning the front walkway, needing just one cop with one gun. But there wasn’t a single security guard or tribal cop. There were, however, plenty of the Indians staring at him. Most were spread out, but there were a few groups. The largest group was standing right at the entrance from the walkway to the casino floor, several Indians arranged in a U shape, frozen in their stances, waiting for the gunman to make his move without his guns.
All in all, there must have been fifty or sixty of them in the walkway, scattered amongst the casino customers, who, as impossible as it was, seemed indifferent to the motionless men.
And what was more incredible was the variety amongst the Indians. Some were ancient looking, their clothing hanging from emaciated bodies. Some were young, a few boys. The youngest he saw couldn’t have been ten years old, his face so beautiful in its youth and his hair so long that he could have passed for a girl, but his expression just as stone as the others and his body just as motionless.
Blane got back on the move, making his way back to the center of the casino. He ran into an old woman as he tried to watch out for the Indians and move at the same time. She kept her balance, but her bucket of quarters spilled from her hands and scattered on the floor.
Instinctively, Blane moved away from the woman before she had time to protest and draw even more unwanted attention to him.
Blane stepped into an aisle that he thought must run a good distance. There had to be an alternate way out, and maybe it was guarded with armed guards. But from where he stood, which had to be somewhere near the center of the casino floor, Blane could only see a few feet in front of him in any direction. There were just too many people.
Right now, he couldn’t see any of the Indians, but he doubted that mattered. They were watching him on the security cameras. He was sure of it. He decided to try the back.
He inched his way through a crowd that seemed to grow thicker by the minute, hearing nothing but the same rings, beeps and turns, tasting air that seemed to be more cigarette smoke than oxygen.
It had been so well planned. They’d known regular security wouldn’t contain him. They’d known to pull the armed guards back. But the worst part of it was that they knew he was coming in the first place. Blane hadn’t even known that, himself. He had seen the sign from the interstate and acted on an impulse.
It was the over-Americanized, linear part of him that had gotten him in this mess. It was that part that made him not believe in, and thus, not fear the avenging spirits. He was too far separated from his roots, and not his biological roots either, but the roots that counted, the roots that had made him what he was, the roots that he’d betrayed, the roots that he suspected had found him.
At the back of the casino was a wall lined with nickel slots. These were less busy than the slots further in, and they broke in two places, steel doors marked as emergency exits. Beside one of the doors, a woman with an oxygen tank by her side and a bifurcated tube running down her body held a cigarette in one hand as she operated the slot machine with her other. She didn’t seem to notice the three Indians standing right beside her in front of the door. The other door was also blocked off with three stone-faced Indians. With twelve eyes staring at him, Blane turned around.
A partition ran along the south side of the casino floor. Beyond that partition was a restaurant. As he made his way along the side, he saw two doors marked as employees only. The restaurant and the two doors were, of course, all carefully guarded by the Indians.
There was now only the north side to check. The north side contained the poker room, where Blane had been playing earlier. But Blane had not checked the entire side yet.
Why hadn’t he checked it out? For a man like him, checking every place he entered for escape routes should have been routine. That was something he should have learned from his teacher, one of the many things he could have learned from his teacher had he not been so arrogant. But learning guns had seemed like enough. And how natural learning the guns had been. It had been just as his teacher had said it would be on that day so long ago, when he caught Blane shoplifting from his store. Even then, as a boy, his hands had been lightning, so fast his teacher had not seen him steal; his teacher had just known, and knowing was something else Blane could have learned.
“Come with me,” his teacher had said. “Be my son, and I will show you a better way to use your gift.” But what Blane had learned fast was what he had focused on in his few years as a student. The rest he had only tasted.
And now, as Blane made his way across the floor again, his angst growing, he wished he’d waited longer before he’d forsaken his teacher.
Making slow progress against the throng of people, Blane felt himself begin to lose it. Down one aisle of slots, he bumped into four different people. Down the next, he actually shoved a person and launched an elbow into the side of another.
“Hey!” was the only protest he heard, and he kept moving. Then, when some man fat enough to block most of the aisle would not clear out of Blane’s path, Blane ducked his shoulder and tried to push right past.
“Wo!” the fat bastard said, as he put his large hands over each of Blane’s arms. Blane shook to get free, but the man was much stronger than he. When Blane stuck his knee up, it missed the man’s crotch, but it was enough to make the man release Blane’s left arm. With movements not as fast as he could make with the guns in his hands, but still much faster than most human beings could make, Blane stuck a finger in one of the man’s eyes, clawed the man’s nose with his long fingernails, then punched him in the throat. Letting go of Blane’s right arm, the man grabbed his face as he stumbled backward. He ran into someone else, sending he, that person, and the person on the next stool all to the floor. Blane stepped right on top the fat man as he continued toward the north side.
After what seemed like several minutes, he made it to the north end, where he combed the side. There he found the poker room, a bar and a concession area. But there was also a corridor with restrooms. The corridor wasn’t guarded. That’s where Blane went.
Inside were three doors. One, on his right, was to the mens’ room. Another, to his left, was to the ladies’ room. Another, all the way at the end of the corridor, about twenty feet away, was an emergency exit. A sign posted there warned that an alarm would sound, but at this point, Blane didn’t care. He didn’t know what was beyond that door, but he had no other choice.