Chapter 8 - Blood Against the Stone
The irrigation ditch became an abattoir.
Takoda fought with the brutal, economical violence of a man who had known since youth that his life was forfeit to white men’s machines. He discarded his empty Winchester, drawing a heavy broad-bladed bowie knife in his right hand and a cut-down cavalry pistol in his left.
A sweeper dropped into the ditch ahead of them, blocking the path to the corral. The man swung a heavy iron truncheon toward Isabel's skull.
Isabel ducked, the wind of the blow whistling over her hair, and drove her surgical scalpel upward, jamming the high-carbon steel blade directly through the vulnerable leather seal beneath the sweeper's chin. The blade hit the carotid artery. She twisted it, exactly as Samuel had taught her to do on cadavers in the Philadelphia amphitheaters, and pulled it clear.
The man dropped to his knees, his brass respirator spouting crimson instead of steam.
Behind them, Takoda engaged the remaining two. He took a heavy blow to his left shoulder, the crack of bone audible over the hiss of the gas canisters, but his right hand was merciless. He drove his bowie knife beneath the rim of the sweeper’s breastplate, upward into the diaphragm, using his massive weight to pin the attacker against the dirt wall of the trench.
"Ride, Isabel!" Takoda shouted, his face spattered with black blood and foam. "Take the black mare! Head for the Ghost Mesa! The cave behind the Weeping Rock!"
"I am not leaving you!" Isabel fired her last round into the helmet of the third sweeper, shattering the right goggle lens and blinding him.
"You must!" Takoda roared, coughing violently as a stray wisp of the yellow gas slipped past his lips. His skin, usually bronze and healthy, was suddenly pale, the veins in his neck bulging with dark, poisoned blood. Even his immunity had a limit against Halden’s concentrated industrial aerosol. "If Halden gets Naira, the serum is complete! She is the incubation chamber! If he takes her, millions die!"
Naira grabbed Isabel’s wrist. The ten-year-old’s grip was impossible—it felt like a band of cold iron, possessing a strength that no child should ever wield.
"He is right, Isabel," Naira whispered, her voice layered with an unnatural, resonant echo. "The fire is inside me now. If the man in grey touches me, the whole world burns."
Isabel looked from the child’s glowing golden eyes to Takoda’s dying, desperate face. Her heart ripped clean down the center. She had spent twenty-eight years searching for a father; she had found him only eight months ago. And now, the monstrous machinery of her mother’s ambition was demanding his execution.
Takoda smiled through the blood on his teeth. "You have your mother’s fire, Isabel," he gasped, his fingers slipping from the wall of the trench. "And my blood. Do not let them turn you into an instrument."
With a final, desperate roar, Takoda hurled himself out of the ditch, tackling the two advancing sweepers, dragging them down into the dirt in a chaotic mass of limbs, knives, and shattering glass.
"Run!" he screamed.
Isabel pulled Naira up into the corral, threw the child onto the saddle of the black mare, cut the reins of the other horses to scatter them, and swung herself up into the leather seat.
She dug her spurs into the mare’s flanks.
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The horse leaped forward, clearing the wooden fence in a desperate bound, galloping straight toward the blood-red labyrinth of the Ghost Mesa as rifle fire tore through the juniper branches behind them.
***
