LJ Idol, Season 9, Week 5: Build a Better Mousetrap
There wasn't much of a shoulder on this stretch of highway, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway. The pickup's skid would have carried it well past it, onto the desert floor.
And now, having brought his truck to a halt, Victor was pretty much blind. It was bad enough that he hadn't seen a streetlamp in well over an hour, but the cloud he'd kicked up just now make his headlights, at best, annoying. This was easily fixed. He opened up his window and waved to the ground, whispering, "Esteja em paz, meus amigos." The dust dropped from the air, leaving him with a pretty clear view out of his windshield.
The darkness chuckled. "Never saw that trick before! It's a good trick." The voice was nasal, yet low-pitched and deliberate, almost like the words it used were backwards. "Saw a guy, once, made some poker cards disappear. Can you do that? Made a balloon into a dog too. Not a real dog, though."
"Who are you?" Victor shouted at it.
"And then..." it laughed, "... and then he made a quarter come out of a kid's ear! And that kid was all, 'How long was that in there?' You should have seen that kid's face. Can you do that?"
He scooped some toll money out of his ashtray, touched the back of his fist to his forehead, said, "Conceda-me a sua visão," and tossed toward the voice. In the back of his head, each of the coins mapped out a small patch of earth, allowing him to feel the echo of a pair of feet pacing back and forth, just out of reach of the light.
Victor stepped out of his truck and inspected the five parallel gashes on his door left by whatever the hell that was. "You asshole," he growled.
Close enough that he could feel hot breath in his ear, the voice told him, "That's a mean thing to say, man Why would you call me that?"
When Victor whipped around, he caught only a glimpse of a snakeskin boot disappearing into the night. "You attacked me!" he yelled.
"No, I didn't."
Victor pointed to the damage on his truck. "What do you call that?"
"Those are scratches. Are you stupid or something?"
Victor moaned in frustration. "You came flying out of nowhere."
"This ain't nowhere," it snorted. "This is here."
"And your eyes were glowing red."
"They do that sometimes."
"And you came at me with fangs and claws out."
"I don't go judging you," it said.
"You chased me."
"So what if I did?"
Exasperated, Victor told him, "I was going eighty miles an hour."
"That's why I had to run eighty-five."
"What the hell are you?" he asked.
"You are stupid, aren't you?"
"I'm not stupid!" he snapped.
"I'm a skinwalker, man." It grunted. "Don't you know anything about skinwalkers?"
Victor strained his memory, trying to remember everything he'd read on the Internet about Southwestern lore. "You're some kind of shapeshifter."
It laughed again. "Is that all you people out there think we are? You guys don't even try not to be stupid, do you? You call us lazy."
"I don't--"
"I could smell you before you even got to the rez, man. You stink like a bully. Like you can go anywhere you want and kick the butt of anyone who looks at you funny. You think that because you're stupid."
"Look," Victor sighed. "We got off on the wrong foot."
"Too late, man."
An invisible hand struck the side of his head, rattling his jaw. Victor fell to his knees. Since he was here, he decided to spit into the dirt and ask of it, "Abra-se. Alimente-se." His body went cold. Beneath him, the earth made sound a like an hourglass and shifted.
"Whoa! Hey!" yelped the voice.
Victor stood, blinked the stars from his eyes, and pulled from his denim jacket a strand of prayer beads made of blue chalcedony. He swiped them over his ruined paint job. "Torne-se como a sua carne. Sinta-se como o faz." After squirting what appeared to be breath spray into his mouth, he blew on the stones, announcing, " Minha respiração é fogo."
The scream that followed was a combination of a bird's squawk and the howl of an injured coyote.
Victor stood and shook the stars out of his eyes. "I think I made my point." After all this, he needed to find the nearest motel and sleep this off. He was going to have on hell of a spell-casting hangover tomorrow. He'd just made it to the door of his truck when something like a hand clutched his leg and dragged him into the darkness.
He kicked and kicked until he broke free, and his adrenaline scrambled him over to the safety of his high-beams. The skinwalker followed him out of the shadows, but the glare from the truck made it impossible to get a good look. As it strolled toward him, in no particular hurry, Victor caught little flashes of fur, feathers, fangs, talons, and, strangely enough, flannel, that faded into its silhouette with each step. What the hell is that?
He squeezed his eyes shut and dug deep inside for any kind Hail Mary that might get him into the driver's seat of his truck and far the hell away from here. "Meu corcel," he begged, "livra-me."
With a barely audible thump, his pickup shifted into gear and lurched forward, striking the thing hard enough to knock it back into the shadows.
He didn't even have the time to drag himself to his feet before the voice chuckled, "Ouch, man, that hurt."
"Oh, come on," Victor whined.
An old man stepped into the light, with the thumbs of his perfectly normal, human hands hooked into a belt made up of silver and turquoise plates, along with an enormous, stone-encrusted buckle. The belt held up a pair of dark, well-maintained jeans, tucked into which was the flannel shirt. The old man shook his head, and a smile put another creased in an otherwise thoroughly lined face. "You think you're some kind of wizard, don't you, with all your rings and rocks and quarters and stuff. Do you have one of them wands? You should get one of them wands. It might help, you know."
Victor gritted his teeth.
"Your magic comes from the dirt," the old man continued. "That's pretty neat." He shrugged. "I'm a wizard too, you know. My magic comes from bones. It's better that way. Watch." He pursed his lips and pointed them at Victor's truck. The engine quit, followed immediately by its headlights.
The old man waited a moment to let the darkness set in, along with its implications. He laughed again, but not out of malice. "Heh," he concluded. "Bone wizard. That's funny."
And then something in Victor's forearm snapped.
He passed out, and awoke moments later in a hospital bed, his vision blurry, his thoughts doused with sludge, and his arm covered in dried plaster.
"Multiple compound fractures," said someone beside him. "You're lucky someone could get you to the hospital before there was too much damage."
"Yeah," Victor mumbled. He sobered up suddenly, when he recognized that voice.
"I hope you learned something today," it said.