What did it mean?
He spent all the following day in the desert, searching the ground for any sign left by the thing that his mind had made him see.
“Dam fool!” He was home at dusk, a whole day wasted, his neck sore from bending so much.
Then the next day he got up and he looked some more.
On the third day, he found something strange. It was a flake of heavy, corroded iron, small as a fingernail, lying atop the sands where nothing made of iron ought to be. Bo held it in his shaking hands. He looked at the ground again and noticed how the sand sunk down in a way that wasn’t right.
That night, Bo drank three beers and woke up sick. He heard pounding and it took a long time to figure out there was somebody outside his place. It was more Air Force. They were nicer this time, but they kept talking and talking and all Bo wanted to do was to lie down and sleep or maybe just lie down and die.
But when they left at noon he got his shovel and he went to the place where the iron chip had been sitting on top of the sands, and he started to dig.
The rain started coming down. The day got dark, and by the time of the real dusk. Bo was exhausted, his old arms on fire and his head pounding. He was too old for this.
But he had to know. Bo kept digging, the powdery sand piling up on either side. He kept thinking the sand was too loose, as if something had been digging here recently, when it should be hard as sandstone.
His shovel hit something metal under the sand, and Bo scrambled out of his newly dug hole in a panic, He stared down there, terribly afraid. Whatever metal object he hit, it was still under the sand.
“Bo, you really ought to go down there and get your shovel,” he told himself.
Then a lightning bolt struck not a mile away and Bo came to his senses. “Damn fool! Don’t you have enough sense to come in out of the rain?”
He began heading back to his place, turned around once, and saw the lightning get closer. He saw—he thought he saw—something moving around by his newly dug hole.
Bo moved as fast as his old legs could go, and he was too afraid to look back again until he got to his place. He tried to get his breath, standing on the tiny porch and holding the wall, watching the desert.
The lightning struck nearby and the crack seemed to rip the air apart. The brilliance lasted long enough for Bo to see that the desert was good and empty.
“Damn fool!” Bo gasped.
Body pumping with adrenaline, he knew sleep wouldn’t be easy. He decided to write a letter to his dad. He did that, every twenty years or so, as a way of helping him think through a crisis. This time it seemed especially appropriate, because who else in the world would know a thing about it except his dad?
Writing was hard, because he didn’t do it much and his hand bones hurt just awful, but he got most of it down, in pencil, on the back of some old phone bills.
When he woke up he was lying on the table, the letter under his head. The lightning had stopped.
Bo Janks wasn’t an educated man, but he knew something about electricity. He knew that a thing made out of metal ought not to be walking around in a desert in a storm. Now the storm had passed on. If there was something in the hole he’d dug, if it were made of metal, then it wouldn’t come out when the lightning was striking. It would wait until the night was peaceful again, like now. Bo got to his feet, slipped on his boots and walked out of his place. The desert smelled fresh and clean, as if God just gave it a good scrubbing. The clouds were almost gone, the moon and stars were bright and Bo could see the desert as clear as in daytime.
There was something in the desert, walking toward Bo’s place.
“Ironhand,” Bo Janks said. “You really here? Or am I just a dam, senile old fool?”
He got no answer, so he sat himself down on his stoop and just watched. The hallucination came close enough to touch him with its moon shadow.
‘I wish you was here, Daddy. You’d want to see a sight like this, that’s for sure.”
Those were Bo Janks’s last words, to himself, to his daddy or to anybody.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and he was looking at the most beautiful woman in the world.
Her eyes had the sparkle of youth and the depth of an ageless soul, while her golden hair made the sun want to hide for shame. Moving with less noise than the shimmers of heat coming off the desert, she crept across dried patches of vegetation in a wilderness naked of cover, but she remained unseen by her prey. The beautiful woman hunted, but the hunt was a mission of mercy.
Remo watched from a cliff. He was hundreds of yards away, but her grace was unmistakable. Alongside this young woman the bobcat and the snake were clumsy and incompetent. The coyote she stalked was no more aware of her than he was aware of the generations of the ancestor spirits that hunted with her and smiled upon her.
When she grabbed the coyote by the scruff of the neck, it made an almost human sound of surprise and kicked at the air wildly.
The most beautiful woman in the world held the coyote by one hand and let it kick, gently tamping in the earth with her foot around the rabbit burrow it had been digging in. She looked up to the top of the cliff and gave Remo a smile, such a smile as the earth was not worthy of beholding. Sure as shooting, Remo Williams wasn’t worthy of it, but the smile was for him
“Told you I could get him, Daddy,” said the most beautiful woman in the world, Freya, daughter of Jilda of Lakluun and Remo Williams.
“I didn’t doubt you for a second, sweetheart,” he said.
Only after he said it did Remo realize that Freya spoke in a normal tone of voice and he answered in a normal tone of voice. It was no surprise, that he had heard her clearly, but she should not have been able to hear him. The senses he possessed came of years of training in the art of Sinanju, the sun source of all martial arts. All other martial were just splinters and fragments of the greatness that was Sinanju. So much of the great abilities of Sinanju came from magnifying the senses beyond that of other human beings, to levels that modem science would have called impossible.
So how had Freya learned to hear like that? And how had she learned to breathe? Because, by all the gods in heaven and on earth, the girl could breathe like a—well, like a Master.
The one who taught the girl much of her breathing skill was walking to the top of the cliff. Remo didn’t hear him. Just an old Native American with the dark, lined face that came from a life outside in the sun, as well as from genetics. He wore expensive but old, scuffed cowboy boots and he didn’t pay much attention about where he put them down, one foot after the other, but somehow he managed to make no sound.
“Howdy.”
Remo wasn’t alarmed. “Hiya, Sunny Joe. I was on my way to visit and spotted Freya from the road.”
Sunny Joe Roam chuckled. “Girl’s tryin’ to reform ’em.”
“Reform who?” Remo couldn’t tear his eyes away from her.
“The coyotes. Ever hear of such a thing?”
“Uh-uh.”
“The heck of it is, she’s doing it. Watch.”
The young woman knelt by the burrow and her arm shot inside. She came out with a desert hare, a scrawny gray creature with ridiculous ears. It gave a few hopeless kicks. She put the rabbit on the ground and stepped on it, pinning it to the earth without crushing it, but she wasn’t so gentle with the coyote. She flattened it next to the rabbit and, despite its struggles to get free, it made a greedy snap at the rabbit. The young woman pinched the thickest part of its upper leg.