Den of the bear vanished.., p.1
Den of the Bear (Vanished, #6), page 1
DEN OF THE BEAR
VANISHED, BOOK SIX
B. B. GRIFFITH
Publication Information
Den of the Bear (Vanished, #6)
Copyright © 2024 by Griffith Publishing LLC
Ebook ISBN: 979-8-9874270-4-0
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9874270-5-7
Written by B. B. Griffith
Cover design by Damonza
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Created with Vellum
CONTENTS
1. The Walker
2. Owen Bennet
3. Grant Romer
4. Caroline Adams
5. Kai Bodrey
6. Owen Bennet
7. Grant Romer
8. Caroline Adams
9. Kai Bodrey
10. The Walker
11. Owen Bennett
12. Grant Romer
13. The Walker
14. Caroline Adams
15. Owen Bennet
16. Grant Romer
17. Caroline Adams
18. Grant Romer
19. Kai Bodrey
20. Owen Bennet
21. The Walker
22. The Walker
23. Caroline Adams
24. Grant Romer
25. Owen Bennet
26. The Walker
27. Grant Romer
28. Kai Bodrey
29. Caroline Adams
30. Grant Romer
31. Kai Bodrey
32. The Walker
33. Caroline Adams
34. Kai Bodrey
35. The Walker
36. The Walker
37. Owen Bennet
38. Caroline Adams
39. Grant Romer
40. Caroline Adams
41. Kai Bodrey
42. Owen Bennet
43. The Walker
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by B. B. Griffith
For Cy.
We passed each other once,
and will see each other again.
“With those gifts from their Father the Sun, the Monster Slayer and the Child of Water set out for home again. And as they made their way back along the Holy Trail they beheld a wonderful vision.
For the gods spread before them the country of the five-fingered Earth Surface People who would someday be known as the Navajo, once all the Monsters were disposed of.”
- Diné Bahaneʼ
The Navajo Creation Story
1
THE WALKER
The second my feet hit the desert floor, I know I’m on Chaco Rez. The horizon line seems sharper, like the edge of a knife. And something about the sky when evening comes on makes you feel small, almost like you’re bobbing in the open ocean, unable to tell what’s looking up at your feet—or down at your head.
I always hate when the soul map calls me to the Rez. That means someone died here. And there aren’t enough of us as it is.
I know this stretch of road. I replaced that beat-up old sign in the near distance more than a few times in my day. It says Welcome to the Navajo Nation—or it’s supposed to, anyway. Back then, whenever Ninepoint and I swapped it out, we gave it about a week. First, the gangs tagged it up. Then the bored high school kids tagged it up, the real comedians, usually with some spice like “Wanted: Indians” or “Thanks for the Dirt, White Man!” or artfully drawn dicks. Then the tweakers and drunks would take potshots with their deer rifles and bird guns until, pretty soon, it was illegible.
Eventually, someone’s auntie raised enough funds for us to swap it out and start the circle all over again.
This particular generation of our welcome sign is late stage. I can see the blood-red sunset through the bullet holes from here. A late wind tussles with the metal, making it groan a bit against the wood.
Someone died here at the welcome sign. That’s a bad omen, quite literally a bad sign. And I don’t like it one bit.
The veil is already here, sweeping for the soul, swaying like the trunk of an elephant on a slow walk. It knows where it’s going, and it will get there at all costs.
“Where is it?” I ask. Unlike this cosmic piece of cloth, I’m physically pulled in a million directions by my job. The veil sorta exists everywhere, just out of sight. It strolls onto the scene. Not me. Every second I’m here, I feel the hundreds of places I’m not. I gotta sprint from spot to spot, across the world.
I guess today is one of those days where the veil pays no attention to me. Sometimes, I swear it’s part cat.
“I know you can hear me, you creepy old towel. My head hurts. I’m having phantom back pain. And I don’t really want to chase any of my people around today. Let’s just get this over with.”
The veil takes no pity on me. If anything, I get a mild flutter of acknowledgement of my existence, which I’ll take to the bank. What it does do, though, is move down the highway toward the border. And since the veil generally knows what it’s doing, I follow.
To the back of me, Rez side, I hear the faint whistle of NNPD cop cars. I would know that whistle anywhere. I swear even over a decade later, I bet I can pick out the car. The way the siren lilts a little if you open up the gas, that’s car six. Danny and I had that car a few times, and it wasn’t exactly new then. Seems strange it outlives me, but then again, NNPD wasn’t in a place to refresh the fleet a decade ago, and decades bleed to decades real quick.
A truck is stopped way out, maybe a mile over the border on the Rez side. No other sign of humanity. But the veil ain’t goin’ that way. The veil is moving off the road by the sign, and now the veil is still.
I’m about to say something snide when I hear a voice, very small and muffled, say what I think is “Can’t see.”
I look left and right, up too. The night is upon us now, and the sky is a mottled bruise.
A choking sound nearby gives me a better bead, and I see him standing stock still past the roadkill ditch on the north side of the road. Here we go. Male, white dude, bald, early fifties, wearing a uniform of some sort. I check the thread and find it’s a prison guard uniform, grays and blacks, but well worn.
“Can’t see,” he says, but his voice sounds like he’s got a real bad head cold, and it’s getting panicky.
“I’m right here,” I say.
He freezes where he stands out there in the desert, which is getting blacker by the minute. Then he turns around, and I see why the head cold.
“Can’t see,” he says again.
“Here,” I say. “Let me help you.”
I sense movement from the car on back on Rez land. I’m pretty sure it’s his car. And since there’s no sign of a wreck, I’m pretty sure whoever he was riding with passed out, likely on account of what I’m seeing right now.
I come up to him and put a hand gently on the back of his skull.
“It feels wrong. Like it should hurt,” he says, feeling gently at the edges. “How come it doesn’t hurt?”
“Don’t worry, brother. Nothing hurts anymore.”
That’s when he seems to get it. And he’s sad. Some people are okay with the Big Exit, and some people are neither here nor there. Escorting these types across is easy enough.
The sad ones hurt.
I pull a brick from his face. A black brick. I look back at the truck on the side of the road. Moonlight winks off little square bits of impact glass on the hood. The brick went right through the front windshield.
He winces, and so do I, but once I pull the brick out, his face sort of fills back in. In death, you present yourself as how old you think your soul is, sorta like a Peter Pan situation.
“What happened?” he asks.
I used to ease into this, but I got a lot of these to get to tonight, and I’m still not super comfortable about the fact this guy got bricked on the front doorstep of the Navajo Nation, so I cut to the chase. “You’re dead, man.”
“What?” He scratches at his nose, pats at his eyes, pulls his cheeks back.
“Yeah, feels alright now, but it ain’t,” I say.
“Get the fuck outta here,” he says in a white-guy way that would be hilarious under other circumstances. “I just picked up the wife. We’re on our way to Manuelito’s. It’s a Friday-night tradition.
That stings a bit, but only because I love Manuelito’s too, and I’ll never taste it again either. “Let’s take a walk,” I say.
He sees the car soon enough, then I’m the one following him.
“Ellen is in there,” he says. “Ellen! It’s Paul! I’m here! I don’t know what happened. I just got lost or something…”
He slows when he sees Ellen. Then he stops when he sees Ellen crying over his own body. The brick was a one-in-a-million shot. His face is pulverized. A six-inch square of black cinder punched right through a life. Ellen is still shaking him. The living brain sometimes tries to power through things like this, refusing to accept it. But in the end, when it comes to brains versus bricks, the brick is gonna win. That’s why brains are special. A brick is a brick, bu
It’s a tough thing to see, no matter how many times I see it.
Paul gets it well before Ellen. The dead usually do.
“Oh, honey,” he says, sadness heavy in his voice. “I’m right here.”
He reaches for her, but he knows. And Ellen can’t feel him any more than he can touch her. Touch is over now. I know that better than anyone.
Those cop cars finally get to us. I don’t recognize anyone on the force now except for Sani Yokana, Chief of Police, and there’s no way he should be here at this time of night on the outskirts of Rez country. The fact that he is tells me shit is running lean at NNPD. But he steps out of his beat-up old Bronco like a pro anyway as two cruisers pull in behind him. Two cruisers is a lot in this country.
Paul gets lost in the lights. They cut through him and around him. That happens sometimes with souls. I whistle for the veil—time to get him in and get gone.
The chief and some deputy I’m way too dead to know come up on the car, and the deputy pukes. Chief Yokana does not. He only bows his head and takes his hat off. Ellen is full-on drenched in blood now. Her head is right below Paul’s, and Paul’s soul is trying to rest on her shoulders but falling through again and again although Sani can’t see that.
“Ma’am, are you hurt?” he asks.
She can’t get an answer out.
“Ma’am, can you get out of the car?”
She doesn’t answer. Yokana pulls his hair back and bands it for dirty work. He’s all silver now. I think that tends to happen when you hang around my crew. Even if he doesn’t know the whole story of what’s going on here, his hair sure does. He can’t take the brick out like I did. That’s not what you do at a crime scene. But he can reach in and unbuckle Ellen, at least give her room to breathe.
She won’t leave Paul’s body, and he doesn’t push. My people understand that certain things have to happen before family—before clan—are willing to let go.
So he backs out of the car and checks on the deputy who’s puking air at this point. He slaps him on the back and says, “Get the flares. Start popping them, and keep popping them until you’re a quarter mile out. Cars come up fast out here.”
The kid staggers away, back to his car, and I follow Yokana back to the Bronco, where he puts his hat back on and reaches through to the scuffed-up CB wired onto the middle dash. “Westbound semis, are you on?” he asks then clicks off to wait.
Static.
“Westbound semitrucks, this is Yokana, are you on?”
A rustle in the static. “Ten-four, Yokana.”
“I got a bit of a mess at the eastern flats border. Off 64 near mile marker one hundred. Anyone pass by? Over.”
Static.
Then a reply: “I saw a stalled vehicle at the welcome sign, Chief. Over.”
Yokana looks at his watch. “Any chance you got a time check on that? Over.”
The reply is scratchy, distant. “Say twenty back. Strange thing. I followed them out of Santa Fe—”
The feed cuts out. Sani clicks the CB a few times and talks to nothing.
Then it kicks in again with the trucker still talking: “thought they’d just pulled over to let ’em pass, but that red truck coming up on them was some suspect shit, Chief.”
Sani looks down the highway like he might see a red truck push itself slowly out of the pitch-black curtain thrown by the flares.
“Red truck?”
“Yeah, ripping up the road, dude hanging a brick out the window—”
The CB takes a total shit—static like nothing can catch. Whatever that good soul saw, he’s out of range. And to be honest, I wish I was with him.
Sani keeps looking west down the road. I know that look. That road leads to the Rez. His Rez. My Rez. And some red truck that a long-hauler says was suspect is headed that way. Long-haul truckers know shady shit on the road when they see it.
But first things first—I gotta get Paul where he needs to go.
I turn back to the car. But Paul is gone.
“Did you take him?” I ask the veil.
The fact that it’s still here, billowing in some cosmic death wind I can’t feel tells me all I need to know. Once the veil nabs a soul, it bounces out of here. So no.
“Well that’s just great. Way to drop the pass. Where did he go?”
The veil billows harder, maybe a bit confused like. Or maybe I’m reading into things. But it’s not moving, which means it doesn’t know.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” I ask, turning a circle.
The flares that puking cop set up are throwing everything not on the road into a smoky soup.
“Paul!” I yell. “Paul, let’s not make this tough, okay? I got a lot of shit to do today!”
He wants to play hardball? Fine, I’ll do it myself. I flutter my fingers and spit into my palms, slap my hands together, and rub them back and forth a few times before reaching out into the air, through the air, and pressing the pause button on his timeline. Sure, the fluttering and spitting and all that isn’t strictly necessary, but when your life becomes your job, it’s the little things that keep you sane.
Backward we go. Very slowly, I rewind the tape of the living world. The guy couldn’t have dipped out more than a couple minutes ago. Only the veil and I operate in this timeline. Everything else reverses while we stay static. Smoke wafts backward, towards the flares. The desert moths flutter away from the flames in reverse, bursting back to life. Chief Yokana’s mouth eats his words in reverse. And here comes Paul, walking backward in a trance, toe-heeling his way out of a ratty knot of gutter weeds off the side of the road.
He’s walking funny, aside from the backward stuff, that is. His shoulders are low, his neck stooped. His arms are stick straight at his sides.
I hit pause.
“Alright, Paul, enough of this shit.” I nod to the veil. “Go on. Do your thing.”
The veil hesitates. Right. I forgot it doesn’t really like when I mess with time. I can rewind a story, but it has to take the soul in real time.
I walk around to Paul’s front and come face-to-face with eyes gone pitch black—front to back, side to side, all black. It’s enough to jump me back a few steps, and after ten years on this job, that is saying something.
“What the hell’s gotten into you, Paul?” I ask.
Paul doesn’t answer, of course, and he won’t until I follow him and find out what he’s staring at so hard it bled the color from his eyes. I can see where the color went too. It’s streaking down his cheeks like… well, kind of like I look when someone really sees me before I take them to the veil.
I have a fever-dream memory of Ana looking that way too in a vision I had of her in a hogan ceremony. All Walkers get it from time to time, the eye bleed. I bet even Black Bear got it.
And just like that, I’m up to the tenth time today I’ve thought about that bastard Black Bear.
He was banished seven months ago, kicked out of the living world forever. But nobody celebrated because he took Caroline with him, a sacrifice for her daughter. With every action that crosses the lands of living and dead, the balance must be kept. But still, for months, the people of the Arroyo held their breath, looking for any sign she might return.
Then summer waned. No Black Bear. No Caroline.
Then the crows stopped working.
Used to be Joey could’ve had everyone in the Circle looking for her, but ever since she disappeared, it’s like the crow totems are blocked. Without Caroline’s to complete the Circle, they shorted out.
Now, fall has come. The Arroyo still rebuilds. The Circle remains committed to their search—no crow left behind—but I can see their strings. I can see what they feel in the dark of the night when they’re awake and staring at the ceiling, and I know that in their heart of hearts they are considering, more and more, that this trade Caroline made, this deal she brokered, whatever it was and however it went… that it was final. That Caroline is never coming back. That whatever connection she and Black Bear had to this world is gone, a door slammed shut.
Even Owen and Joey have these thoughts. Even Grant.
But they don’t see what I see. They don’t see things like Paul, here. Yeah, most of my day-in-day-out is nothing special—find soul, console soul, escort soul. But lately, when it comes to dying on the Rez, souls have seemed… off. Like this eye thing. And the wandering.
