Session 05 – What the Coyote Knew
1–2 August 1996 · San Carlos Apache Reservation / Gila Mountains / Phoenix, Arizona
Campaign: The Weight of Knowing · Scenario: Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays
Teaser
The mine has been dark for sixty years.
The thing that walked into it before dawn does not mind the dark. It has crossed distances the dark between these walls cannot begin to describe. It settles into the shaft the way it has settled into caves and cellars and the bodies of men, patiently, with a full day to wait before it can move again.
Somewhere inside the body it is wearing, Emanuel Santana watches the entrance.
A rectangle of white light, fifty metres away, at the end of a tunnel he cannot make his own legs walk toward.
He has been watching things happen through his own eyes for a month. The ranch. The cave. The three men his hands made quiet at their desks. He has stopped praying for rescue. What he prays for now is smaller, and he prays for it constantly, in the one part of himself the thing has no use for and therefore never visits.
Outside, the heat builds toward noon.
Something with four legs and yellow eyes comes to the edge of the village, sits down in the shade of the water tower, and waits.
Act One – Standing on the Table
Breakfast happens because it has to.
The cruiser takes them back to the station house, past the tape, past the neighbours who are still on their porches because there is nowhere else to put themselves. Inside, the machinery of a manhunt is assembling faster than anyone can direct it – volunteers arriving by the truckload, half of them armed, all of them angry, nobody in charge.
Sterling climbs onto a table.
The CDC man in the linen suit, standing above a room full of grief, and he takes it over. Calm. Clinical. Certain. He sets the volunteers into a cordon at the edge of town, a quarantine line, though he is careful about which words he uses out loud, and gives frightened people the thing they need most, which is a job and a place to stand.
It works.
The room organises itself around him.
Nobody in it knows they are watching him do this for the last time.
Act Two – The Cabin
The first helicopter takes the agents and three volunteers into the Gila Mountains – Vietnam veterans, men who knew the hermit in the hills by reputation and terrain, who have tracked and been tracked in worse country than this.
Santana’s cabin sits where the tribe always knew it sat and the government never did.
It is empty.
Not recently empty. The dust says weeks. The stores say weeks. Whatever came down out of these mountains and started killing, it left this place long before the Begay ranch – around the time, O’Brien notes without saying it aloud, that a sunburned woman was seen wandering the desert.
The man who lived here kept it neat. Twenty-five years of a life arranged carefully in one room.
They send the veterans back to town with the first helicopter and take the second east.
Act Three – Thirty Miles a Night
The sacred cave is as they left it.
The sand painting. The fire pit. The dark. They go in armed and come out with nothing – no ship, no sign, no trace of return. Whatever the cave held, it has been given up.
O’Brien stands at the entrance and builds the pattern out loud.
He travels at night. He is a Special Forces soldier with twenty-five years in these mountains; daylight movement against air search would be beneath him. He has to feed, which means he leaves a trail whether he wants to or not. Call it thirty miles a night. He is moving northeast.
The map comes out.
Thirty miles a night, northeast from the station house, and the line runs toward Talkalai Lake – and on its shore, marked on the old surveys and nothing printed since, an abandoned mining town.
One entrance into the rock. Water on one side. Sixty years empty.
It is exactly where he would go.
Act Four – The Village
The trail brings them there just before noon.
The heat sits on the village heavier than it should, with nothing moving to break it. Thirty buildings once; fewer now. Timber gone silver-grey, dried past rot into something harder. A water tower leaning at an angle that should have brought it down years ago. And at the back, where the land rises toward the mesa, the mine head – two heavy uprights, a crossbeam, and a rectangle of dark cut into the rock face.
The village is completely quiet.
Not the quiet of a place where nothing lives. The quiet of a place where something has stopped moving very recently.
O’Brien reads the ground before anyone crosses it. The dust on the main track brushed clean in a wide arc. A tin can on a wire at knee height between two buildings. A second wire in the shadow under an eave, angled down to something on the ground.
Not kill traps. Alarms.
He wants to know we’re coming.
O’Brien takes the near wire apart with the patience of a man who has done this in worse places, and the village lets them through without announcing them.
The mine entrance is fifty metres away.
It is dark.
Act Five – The Left-Hand Shaft
Three go in. O’Brien, Shaw, Garcia. Sterling holds the entrance — the surface man, the rational man, the man whose job is samples and frameworks and staying out of firefights.
The shaft splits a short way in. The team takes the right-hand passage and the darkness closes over their torches.
At the entrance, Sterling waits.
The coyote comes out of the light behind him and stands at the mouth of the mine.
It looks at him. It waits until it is sure it has been understood. Then it turns and trots down the left-hand shaft, and Sterling – who has a category for nothing that has happened to him in the last five days, who stepped out of a helicopter once because someone had to – follows it.
The coyote leads him to a shallow depression in the shaft wall, hidden from the passage, and crawls into it. It looks at him again.
He understands. He climbs in beside it.
In the right-hand shaft, something takes hold of Becky Shaw from behind.
The arm comes across her throat out of absolute darkness and she is already moving – twisting out of the lock before it closes, turning, her torch beam coming up into a face she has only seen in a service photograph from 1971. Older now. Ruined now. The eyes are the worst part. They are not the eyes of a killer.
They are the eyes of a man watching a killer use his hands.
Santana breaks and runs up the shaft. O’Brien and Garcia wheel and give chase, weapons up, torch beams swinging wild across the rock.
From the depression, Sterling sees him pass – a shape going by at speed in the dark – and moves to follow.
The coyote shakes its head.
It does not move from the hollow. It looks at him with those yellow eyes and shakes its head, once, unmistakably, and stays exactly where it is.
Sterling goes anyway.
He moves down the shaft as quietly as he can manage, which is not quietly enough, because the man he is following spent twenty-five years learning what this country sounds like when something is moving through it.
Santana comes out of the darkness.
His eyes are insane and pleading at once — begging, in the last light Sterling ever sees, for a release neither of them can give — and the combat knife goes in, and in, and in.
Royce Sterling goes down on the floor of the mine with his life spreading dark into the white linen, and the shape above him is gone before he finishes falling.
The coyote does not come out of the hollow.
Act Six – The Staging Chamber
The radio call goes out: contact, in the mine, backup now.
O’Brien, Garcia, and Shaw run the shaft hard, past a shallow depression in the wall, past a shape in the darkness at the edge of their torch beams that none of them turn to look at, and out into a wide staging chamber cut for machinery that was stripped away before any of them were born.
The first shot takes O’Brien across the temple.
He drops where he stands and does not move.
Garcia and Shaw scatter for what cover the chamber offers, which is not much, and return fire at a muzzle flash that is never twice in the same place. Santana moves like a ghost and shoots like something out of a story, and the mathematics of the chamber begin to assert themselves. Shaw goes down.
Garcia is hit. Then hit again. The tactical armour takes it, takes all of it, and he keeps his feet, and he keeps firing, and he does not stop until the shape in the darkness finally, finally falls.
Master Sergeant Emanuel Santana, twenty-five years a ghost in these mountains, lies still on the floor of the mine.
The tribal police and the state troopers arrive to find one man walking out of the dark, exhausted past speech, bringing his wounded out one by one.
And then bringing out the body of his friend.
Act Seven – The Morgue
They get patched up because there is a protocol for that.
There is no protocol for the other thing, which is why, hours later, three agents who should be in hospital beds are standing in the Maricopa County morgue watching Medical Examiner Joseph Gutierrez prepare the body of Emanuel Santana for autopsy.
They need to know what he was.
Gutierrez makes the first incision.
The fronds come out of the corpse like something unfolding – pale, boneless, fast and take him across the chest and throw him to the floor.
The body of Emanuel Santana sits up on the table.
O’Brien and Garcia open fire and it does not matter. The rounds go into dead flesh that no longer has any use for the things bullets do. The tendrils reach upward and the lights begin to go out, one fixture at a time, the room collapsing into darkness in stages.
The doors burst open.
Smith. Jones. Armed men behind them.
We are here for the creature. Stand down.
Shaw does not stand down. Shaw is already moving through the dark at the edge of the room, and what she finds there is a container of something flammable, and what she does with it is throw it across the thing wearing Santana’s body and set it alight.
The negotiation happens over the light of the burning corpse. O’Brien and Garcia try federal jurisdiction, evidence chains, anything with words in it. Smith has heard all the words before. The order he gives his men is short and specific and it is about the agents.
Jones is watching the fire.
The thing in the flames stops moving. Whatever came down in the rock, whatever walked out of the desert wearing four bodies in six months, whatever chose Emanuel Santana and would not let him die — it burns, and it ends, and it does not get up.
The order is rescinded.
The camera pulls back from the room: the burning table, the men in suits, the doctor on the floor, and three agents standing at the very end of everything they have.
Coda
The mine is dark again.
The village goes back to being quiet, the ordinary quiet this time, the kind that has birds in it. The water tower goes on leaning.
Somewhere in the Gila Mountains a cabin sits neat and empty, one room, twenty-five years of a careful life, waiting for relatives who observe the old ways and will not speak its owner’s name aloud.
In Phoenix, MAJESTIC takes possession of a burned thing on a steel table and whatever else it decides belongs to it.
In San Carlos, the cordon comes down. The volunteers go home. The pots go back on the stoves.
And somewhere between the mine and the morgue, in a hollow in a shaft wall where a coyote sat and shook its head, is the fact none of them have said out loud yet:
It knew.
It tried to tell him.
He went anyway – the way he jumped from the helicopter, the way he climbed onto the table, the way he did every brave, necessary, fatal thing he did in the five days they knew him.
Royce Sterling is dead.