Silverback passed the heavy front door of Dr. Rails’ mansion for the fourth and utterly last time. Ivory followed hurriedly behind him. They headed toward his motorcycle, parked facing the artificial horseshoe-shaped hedges that bordered the long, curved driveway.
Silverback pressed the handlebars in, and it pulsed beneath his palms, coming mechanically alive again. Ivory turned and looked back at the three-car garage, where her mom sometimes kept her old car when Grandpa wasn’t borrowing it.
They rode far past the tail end of the city’s lights, where the darkness swallowed the desert, leaving only the sky’s dull spooky lantern. A stretch of popcorn asphalt rolled ahead for miles and miles. The road they needed to take to the abandoned motel was blocked by a bus-and-car accident. The entry to the deep canyon consisted of merely three narrow roads.
Silverback sighed, not wanting to take the road littered with dangerous scorpions; What was left was the road where the wildflowers grew thick and bold. But with that came the evil playground for the Beast of Utah.
Ivory stared at the plum sagebrush and desert cacti that guarded the hiking trails at the outer edges of the hills and cliffs. There lay monster-sized lizards with skins like prayer quilts and slithering dirty snakes moving across the cracked, packed earth.
Silverback zipped up his black jacket to the collar when Ivory saw it: A tall van with Gorilla’s claws wrapped on the back windows, the symbol of their gang, the Mountain Gorillas. The license plate read UR403. A single headlight reached them, illuminating their motorcycle and tapping their red headlights. The spotlight moved, and the van passed them, then was utter darkness.
The energy of the road at night was strong, but the magnet of the desert canyons was stronger. Silverback felt weakened by its pull too. The Gray Wolf cried in his head as the warning sirens of the desert animals went off. The darkness was still raw; Yet; The night would soon be ambushed by pitch black.
Silverback and Ivory were not sensitive to the stains of isolation, or of the many victims haunting the canyons. The canyons had recently released another, a teenage runaway, a girl who made the wrong choice that left her alone and vulnerable to Beast of the canyons. She paid for that, smashed to threads and eaten up by insects after the mountain lions and wolves took a generous share.
Silverback shrugged, calculating the risk of the Mountain Gorrillas and what was likely inside with them. He watched it and waited expectantly.
Since leaving DR Rail’s mansion upon her mother’s return from her usual Saturday dinner out with the high-profile mysterious plastic surgeon DR Rail’s (Aka, The Phoenix) who had little food in the kitchen, Ivory grabbed hold tight onto Silverback’s hands then waist as they rode together. Her shoulder had healed cleanly because of DR. Rails’s boiled-over pride, and pure genius; she glanced at Silverback’s cheek, and there was zero trace of Bill’s deer knife attack.
Silverback had, in the month that followed, been searching for the runaway girl’s family, but none was ever found. The news story was that her parents didn’t want her and went back to Canada by train before she turned sixteen. The Scarlet Owl ring will reveal the truth about her last time alive, and the others as well, Silverback thought.
Silverback and Ivory had abandoned the Mountain Gorillas’ criminal code in favor of freedom years ago, after Ivory been released from prison and placed on probation. Silverback was the first leader to turn on them. Ivory had was given a sentence from a history of arrests for supporting the Mountain Gorillas gang. They both were desperate for a different life, but the Mountain Gorillas remained visibly willing to take action, day or night; the threats were cords, not threads, that kept them bound to the criminal world they no longer identified.
The van’s headlights swept across the plum sagebrush and desert cacti. The darkness repositioned and doubled around them, squeezing them and picking at their confidence. It got under their skin and unsettled them, the sweat dripping from their helmets.
The Mountain Gorillas had given them varied bad experiences, including fear, but no breaths of freedom. The Scarlet Owl shimmered metallic red like foil; Ivory held the recurring image of the abandoned motel come to her consciousness. “Our oasis from the violence and cruelty of the Mountain Gorillas,” Ivory whispered in the wind. I am worn out from the fast scams, cons, and drug-and-money-laundering operation. The iceberg of the Mountain Gorillas criminal enterprise was growing into something colder than ice… they were becoming rare predators, the boogeymen of Salt Lake City. Ivory thoughts continued as her hair rose over her helmet in the wind: Still, if you can fairly distinguish one kind of human monster from yet another, then the Beast was inflated by evil, a desert demon who charged the innocent without mercy.
Ivory’s blond hair tangled in the desert’s lapping winds. The night was newly awakened by the layered voices in the desert canyons: Brightly colored ladybugs, mantises, and dragonflies twisted and tumbled in the swirls of cool wind laced with moistened dust. The wind’s tides pushed at the back of his left motorcycle mirror. The dying crystal insect shells fell to the whirring grey of the start of the dirt path. The winds softened slightly but rolled deliberately over the canyons like a swan shuffling its feathers.
The rows of buildings and bus terminals had turned into the narrow path of wildflowers, leading them straight out to the abandoned motel. Silverback and Ivory knew the way by memory, knew all the familiar voices of the deep canyons. They understood the risks without the Scarlet Owl Ring; The Beast was out there aiming for the brave and afraid, but so was a van with a bin of Mountain Gorillas who were everything and nothing at once, just like death itself.
“Hey, don’t look back,” Ivory said.
“Why?”
“Gorillas are still following behind us.”
Silverback turned off at the next sign marking an exit. “Do you doubt me, Ivory?”
“No. I did. I married Bill to confirm that you’re not the Beast of the desert.”
“What else did you find out, Ivory? Silverback parked directly in front of the rest stop bathrooms.
“Well, Bill’s not the Beast either.” Ivory got off the tan leather seat and grabbed her cell phone from the side pocket of the Harley. She opened her purse wallet and showed a portrait of Silverback’s brother. They both viewed it more closely beneath the lights of the old brick building.
“I know that he went missing at the apartments by Rea’s Park, presumed kidnapped by a stranger.”
Silverback thought about the Sheriff, the police in-house crime-investigation unit, later joined by the FBI forensics team. They had each failed to bring his brother home safe. Silverback peered up at the exit ramp; the van did not follow. I am no longer a person of interest in my brother’s case, and I guess in the desert murders.”
“No.” Ivory hesitated, realizing what she was about to say meant, “The Surreal Forces took our files we gathered on the Mountain Gorillas expanding activities at Smokies; Bill didn’t know anything about them.”
“Wonderful.” Silverback walked back to his motorcycle and put on his helmet. The lawmen have no replacement, no named suspect responsible for the slaughter in the canyons. Nothing to keep folks from terrible panic of the canyon maniac, the hoarding at the hardware, gun, and loan and pawn will continue, and Bill is to blame.”
“Let it go. Bill’s not important.” Ivory looked around her, eyelids twitching in worry. You think it’s one of the Mountain Gorillas who killed that poor runaway girl who probably just wanted to get lost a while?”
“Yeah, Ivory, stay with me. It’s just the Mountain Gorillas conducting surveillance to see whether we are fit and loyal to the code and to them. After the head trauma from Bill’s beating, the steroid medication, and seasickness coming back from the Bermuda Triangle.” Silverback stopped. He gazed slowly over the blackened earth as he lowered his head: “Even I was unsure if there was a button that could be pushed under systematic pressure, and I snapped and became a serial killer.
Silverback kicked at the mustard yellow sand and rocks, then stepped toward her. “No, no, no, I am just a criminal gang leader who desires transformation. Silverback took her hand and gently pulled it, and they got back on his Harley Davidson; Silverback thought, I am the diabolical bobcat in control, showing absolutely no physical or mental pain. “So, the Surreal Forces had a hand in my brother being taken.”
***
“We are alive, Silverback.” Ivory said and hugged him fully when they reached the end of the narrow path, the remains of a cemented signpost marking the abandoned hotel; she lowered her head and kissed his chest. “The Gray Wolf has been watching over us, guarding us at Smokies, at this abandoned motel, not to fall into the serial killer’s trap.”
The motorcycle tires leaned against the signpost. They stepped closer to front office. “In the back room, inside the lavatory, I could sense the Gray Wolf, not with sight, but smell. It was outside that window. Silverback gestured with a wave of his whole arm; Gray Wolf had stood still and silent in the long shadow of the Juniper Bush.” Silverback said, “I am not superstitious.”
“I called it, and the Gray Wolf answered. Your little brother must be alive too.” Ivory said, “The Gray Wolf is his protector also.” Ivory thought she heard something around the back of the abandoned motel at the locked Shed. She jumped. Ivory folded her arms. “Fucking annoying sidewinder snakes.”
Silverback put his hand at his belt touching his gun.
“The Gray Wolf wants to stop the slaughter here and restore the peace in the canyons. You are not the Beast Silverback. You are the Gray Wolf! You are two halves of One.” Ivory turned and looked to the canyon cliffs. “We can’t wait anymore out here in the open,” Ivory said as she scratched her forehead. The motel room door was yards away. “Your memory may never return. The marijuana therapy isn’t working. Ace is dead; whatever fucking secrets he had that may have helped us, they were cremated with him.”
“Nelson is in terrible trouble. So is anybody who comes out alone in these deep canyons now. Silverback answered, “I think the girl, the runaway, had a connection to my brother.”
“What do you mean?
“I’ll tell you later.”
“Okay, Nelson’s ill health, I know, and it’s okay that we help him; He can’t escape Bill without it. If he’s gone searching for the Scarlet Owl Ring out here, I hope we’re not too late.”
“Did Bill say anything else about the Surreal Red Forces?”
“Bill said they were involved in violet abductions, strange and dark happenings, and deadly wrath to whoever tried to interfere with them. Operate on full government clearance, no consequences that could leash them.” Ivory continued, “They aren’t savage killers like Bill, but powerful perceivers and manipulators setting futures by unraveling the past and present, to fit strictly their needs and design.”
“Then they’re extremely dangerous. Nelson gave them more information about the Scarlet Owl’s powers, which go beyond any artificial intelligence and could instantly destroy them. The Surreal Forces’ superpowers can be stripped away, no longer able to serve the multi-government’s security pedestals, working as underground soldiers.” The noises near the back of the abandoned motel were not sidewinder snakes but the Surreal Red Forces. Silverback took out his gun.
Celia Garza 