ONE

Divine Providence. That’s what he thought when he walked into the bar without his M9 pistol and M4 rifle. That’s what he was thinking after reading the secret memo “Highest Priority for All Law Enforcement Agencies: be on the lookout for military members returning from the middle-east.”

It was hot the night he walked in there, and the air was thick with the baked dust of no rain in three hundred days; there was no glass in the windows, not even a door on the clapboard dive bar that cracked in the heat at the Why, Arizona crossroads two and a half hours southwest of Phoenix.

There were at least thirty of them, moving slow beneath the light of sixty-watt bulbs that created a haze of valley fever. The floor was covered in dry desert silt that made a choking fog as they walked. He didn’t belong there: crystal junkies, rotted-out drunks, and blood-shot, sunken-eyed men with thin, dark red lips like they had disease running in their veins.

By the time Ludus and his sister arrived his stomach was churning from the stench of stale beer, rotgut whiskey, and three-week-old spoiled meat in the broken-down freezer. He was hoping to find them, no more tracks in the dust, but it was so hot at the crossroads that led to the Tohono O’odham that he thought he might be looking for bodies in the desert.

He had known Ludus in the Army. Ludus had saved his ass more than a few times by sniffing out the Haji in the mud huts of the Korengal. Ludus’ family had lived in Ali Chuk a few miles north of the border, and he looked for him there, but the locals said that one day the whole family just up and moved. Next thing he knew, Ludus was dragging him to the bar to welcome him into that place he called the crib.

“My sister’s out in the car with the motor runnin,” he said to me in the dry crack of his border accent. He was reluctant at first, but Ludus urged him to go.

Ludus’ sister turned out to be just like he had told him, dark and quiet. He felt bad for assuming she would look like some kind of alien being. She liked metal and grunge and medicine bags just the same as he did. So, they started driving farther and farther into that desert, getting closer and closer to the wheel.

TWO

It was three months before Enduring Freedom when I found it, that Comanche medicine wheel hidden beneath the Central Texas scrub. The Comanche had left it to be forgotten at least two hundred years before, but I found it, the seventy-five-foot diameter circle of stones. There were twenty-eight spokes with a pile of broken rocks in the center. The first day I just marked its location and then ran the ten miles back to the road that lead to civilization. I was drawn to it. There was something odd about it, something about the trees that grew there. The second time, two hours went by watching my hawk friend circle above as I went into a dream on the rocks in the center. The third time I went at night, and that’s when I found it, the medicine bag hanging on the crooked branch of a broken-down mesquite tree. I opened it. I shouldn’t have.

THREE

We were still driving, and I was thinking about Ludus and his sister, and the one thing that I couldn’t wrap my head around. Although they had moved off of the reservation, Ludus still talked about the old legends the same way an old man would talk about his childhood. I wanted to ask him if he believed the tales of his people, but the past few years had brought me to a point where I couldn’t decide if anything supernatural was real. Who was I ask Ludus about what he had seen? Ludus saved my ass a dozen times. Who was I to question his beliefs?

“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you told me in Jalalabad lately,” Ludus said above the drone of the tires that rolled over the decayed asphalt of Highway 86. “About the wheel. About the medicine.”

“The what?”

“The Comanche, they’re great and terrible brujos. They can do all sorts of powerful magic, like becoming Skin-walkers, the “yee naaldlooshii.” Many Elders say they’re evil, that their power comes at a horrible price. But, I don’t believe in them.”

FOUR

I try to push those thoughts out of my head, but I see myself as if I’m floating fifteen feet above the whole scene. I watch my footsteps crunch through the sunbaked crust, and I try not to think about the wheel or what Ludus had said because I’m so far out in the desert that I can never go back. I try not to believe what the old Indian said about what happened to Ludus’ family, about how Ludus kidnapped his younger sister and brought her with him.

But beneath it all, I know it is true. Ludus told me about healing, but somehow, I don’t believe him. There is something different about Ludus now, a hint of some kind of sinister transformation. I remember how time and time again in Jalalabad Ludus had told me about the old ways of hunting the enemy. I remember how Ludus spoke of his intense longing to run on four legs through the desert at night free from the bounds of time and full of power, running like El Lobo Diablo a Mexican gray.

“What a bunch of BS,” I told Ludus a few weeks before he had left Jalalabad for the Tohono. I tried to humor Ludus as much as I could, but Ludus just got so damn crazy that Colonel Smith sent him home saying he had left the reservation.

I look at him and say, “Ludus, you’re telling me that you will kill anyone to become one.”

“To become yee naaldlooshii… To have their power, yes, I will kill.”

What lurks the dark and silent world
     and wanders over hills?

What blows across the empty space
     and wanders in the mist
     from east to west in tireless drift
     to haunt the rising moon?

What stealth and shadow prowl the rifts
     among the splintered sage?

What walking hunger howls insatious across
     the rocks in penetrating cry
     to primal craving swells of burning skies
     in surging floods of heinous flow?

What lingers in the doom of night
     concealed in wisps of gray
     when thunder shaking cloudbursts quake
     the roots of feral wild?

What devours springtime’s fledging growth
     and vernal saplings bloom?

A wolfen hunger gorges on the night
     immersed in raven blood!

“Something happened to you over there. Ludus, you’re a sick dude. And wrong. You’re wrong for thinking about killing your family, your sister, and you’re wrong about Skin-walkers because they don’t exist.”

FIVE

Snap. A crunching sound at the edge of the Anasazi circle snaps me out of a Comanche vision. Ludus’ sister stands beside me as I point the flashlight in the direction of the sound, but we see nothing. She is frozen with fear as we wait for another sound. But nothing comes. Not even the howl of a coyote to acknowledge our presence.

We move toward the center of the circle, then we see the prints in the dust. They are like dog tracks, but larger, and with a leaping gait. At the center of the circle the prints end, piercing deep into the soil. We have the feeling we are being watched. We turn around, and for a moment we think we see something standing in the brush fifty feet away. Then we begin to see them, the beast-like eyes that glow red in the brush just beyond the reach of our flashlight. We take a step closer, but whatever it is moves back into the brush and the red glow is gone.

“He said there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do to get the power,” I said.

“But the Elders say it’s an evil power,” she says.

Mayra looks at me with deep frightened eyes as if seeing something far away. And then we hear it. A yell or a howl, a voice so terrible that it makes Mayra pass out.

SIX

It’s like you’re in a terrible dream. You hear Mayra scream “I see him, I see him! He’s behind us. Keep driving, floor it, Michael! Don’t you stop! Don’t you stop for anything!”

You don’t think of anything. You floor the old Crown Vic and don’t stop for nothing. You feel Mayra’s fear as you watch the white stripes fly by at 100 miles an hour. Your fingers have a death grip on the wheel and you’re pressing the pedal so hard to the floor that your foot is going numb. In your mind, you see the medicine bag in the Comanche magic circle in Texas, and you know what you released into the world when you opened it. You see the paw prints and hear the terrifying howl, and then you remember what the old man said about what made Ludus’ family suddenly disappear.

You think back on it, and you know exactly why. You opened the bag, you know it was providence, and you know what is going to happen. You know because it’s been leading you to this moment. Ludus told you that he feared for his sister because of what all that killing had made him. And you know by all circumstances Mayra should be dead now, laying on her back in that Tohono circle with her throat ripped open and blood staining her beautiful brown skin crimson. You know that much.

You slam on the brakes when you hear Mayra scream, “He’s in the road!” Then you see it, right in front of you, the terrifying yee naaldlooshii legend. His appearance is hideous; he is gaunt to the point of emaciation with shriveled skin pulled tightly over his protruding bones. His massive, paw-like hands end in talons a foot long. His skin is ashen-gray like the color of death. His eyes are recessed deep back into their sockets, and his lips are tattered and bloody. His body is unclean and covered with eruptions of the flesh, and his empty soul gives off a stench of decay and decomposition.

SEVEN

Mayra looks at you, and you don’t understand what she says. Then you look at Ludus and see the blood in his deep sunken-in eyes. You’re in a narrow canyon with scraggy igneous cuts of rock close on both sides—the canyon that ends with a desert wash where mesquites, paloverdes, and tiny western pearly everlastings grow.

“Michael, we have to kill it!”

You reach in the back seat and grab the 12-gauge pump loaded with double-aught buck, and you get out of the car with your heart pounding.

The big Skin-walker is standing in front of the car looking at Mayra with yellow drool dripping over the fangs in its mouth. “Mayra, one more and I got the power,” it growls deep and guttural. “I am going to kill you… I like to eat the sweet meat of young Tohono.”

He moves toward Mayra with his talons raised high, and they look like slashing razors that can skin flesh from the bone—they do that, you know—skin their victims and wear it when they’re not transformed.

Five blasts ring through the canyon, but you can’t remember aiming. But Ludus lays motionless on the ground with his sunken-eyes unblinkingly staring up into the sky. The Crown Vic is splattered with blood, and the pavement feels like it is crumbling as the asphalt turns deep black soaking up the pool of blood.

“Michael! You killed him—you killed the Skin-walker!”

“Help me! We’ll burn it so that it never returns.”

You look at the tears in Mayra’s eyes as you cover what’s left of Ludus with gasoline, and the skin sizzles and smokes in some sort of chemical reaction. You don’t have a match, but two more shotgun blasts and the creature explodes into flames, and the blaze lights up the night sky with spirals of fire.

Mayra is trembling as she holds on to you. “Oh my God, Michael. Ludus, that thing… It killed my whole family. That’s a Skin-walker you killed.”

You wipe your hands on your Levi’s. “Don’t worry, everything is O.K. now, Mayra. It’s dead. They sometimes take on hideous forms.”

The asphalt around the Skin-walker starts to burn, and sparks spiral up with the smoke into the starry night; and on the horizon the sun is rising, as you and Mayra head east into the brightening sky.