A sun that never sets burns on./
New light is this river's dawn./

When to speak of a word so old/
is to relearn what is known./
A time to think back and move on./
Rebuild the loves of lives long gone./

The blood that flows through me is not my own./
The blood is from the past, not my own./
The blood that leads my life is not my own./
The blood is strength, I'm not alone./

- Neurosis - "A Sun That Never Sets"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puG607ho7TY

---

Rough Rock, Arizona / June 11th / 9:02 P.M. --


“No, it’s not a flat or anything like that,” the black ram said into the receiver. “The alternator should be fine, too. I'm thinking it's only the battery.”

There were few routines quite as sacrosanct as the one which had taken Kyler Clarke to this rural stretch of road in Arizona’s Painted Desert. Preserving tradition for its own sake held little appeal for the black ram, but this one was unlike any other in Kyler’s life. Summer hardly felt like summer if he wasn’t spending quality time with his cousin Lucas and Uncle Tommy, both bighorn sheep themselves, in Chinle for a couple months out of the year. This remained an unbroken tradition every summer since Kyler was eight, but now that the young man was eighteen, this would soon change.

“Yeah, okay. About twenty minutes? Cool. See you in a bit. Thanks, cuz.”

With that, the black ram swiped the screen, and the conversation ended. Kyler sighed and leaned against the driver-side door of his silver Jeep Wrangler. Annoying as it was for his car battery to die a half-hour from his destination, Kyler still took solace in the fact that Lucas was on his way out of town with a pair of jumper cables. The young man pocketed his phone and walked back around to the open hood. The ram pulled a flashlight from his other pocket and examined the battery’s casing and everywhere around it.

“Figured as much,” he said, satisfied with what the light’s beam revealed. Nevertheless, Kyler still brushed aside a shoulder-length black strand of hair from blocking his vision. “No cracking. Cell caps seem fine, too. Thank fuck it’s not leaking.”

Reassured, the black ram then turned the flashlight off and shut the hood with a satisfying, metallic thud. Kyler’s Jeep Wrangler was the first major purchase he had made with his meager paycheck from Trader Joe’s. He’d spent the better part of a full year saving up enough to comfortably quit before graduation. It wasn’t often the young man felt so emboldened to save his earnings with a firm goal in mind, but Kyler had wanted his freshman year of college in Boulder to be as smooth a transition as possible. While Colorado was hardly a world removed from Utah in terms of latitude, the leap from high school to university life would be wider a gulf than anything the black ram had previously traversed.

“This summer’s cost me enough money as is; but still, it could be worse. I’m just glad you were home, Luke.”

Pivoting, Kyler passively stared south down Indian Route 59 in the direction of Chinle and his uncle’s one-story ranch house. His first instinct was to call the man himself. Although, it dawned on him the moment his battery unceremoniously died just outside Rough Rock, that Uncle Tommy was still out of state assisting the installation of a new solar array in California. His work for the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority had attracted the interest of energy companies like Vivint Solar who saw fit to export his skills off the reservation. Not like this was some source of grave concern for Thomas Cartwright and his son. Uncle Tommy made a respectable living as a technician and consultant for these firms, and such an arrangement had been more than enough. For the past four years, with Lucas attending classes at Navajo Prep all the way in Farmington, New Mexico, that house stood empty most the time. Thankfully, now that both he and Lucas had since graduated high school, that oftentimes vacant home was, comparatively speaking, full of life.

“Last thing I need is some dead cell. Not now of all times,” he sighed, pocketing both thumbs in each respective jean pocket. “I’ve been lucky lately though. Can’t tell when it’ll run out, but all things considered, if I my Jeep had to break down between Chinle and Tuba City, glad it happened here and not closer to Kayenta. At least now I’m not totally screwed.”

Kyler toyed with the idea of frittering away the time with a mobile game. However, the black ram resolved to keep his iPhone, and most other distractions, firmly out of reach, at least, for now. While he wasn’t keen on the idea, the notion of a Good Samaritan stopping by the roadside to assist was not outside the realm of possibility. The black ram kept a watchful eye open even if the prospect wasn’t ideal from where he stood. For one, the idea of a stranger meddling with his car gave him little comfort, and two, apart from occasional locals passing through, this spread of Indian 59 was not what most people, generous or otherwise, would call congested. Though the longer he waited, the more the young man fidgeted from impatience. It wasn’t the residual heat or the dying light, however, which made him feel uneasy and on edge. Kyler could not shake off the feeling a pair of eyes were steadily gazing upon him from afar.

“I don’t like this,” he remarked, glancing off into nearly uninterrupted desert. “I’m helpless out here, and I don’t like it.”

Like an allergic reaction, the skin encompassing his left wrist beneath the fur first began itching, and soon thereafter, a series of pinpricks encircled that same area. Specifically, this inexplicable reaction was always confined to an area of skin underneath a silver bracelet the black ram always wore around his left wrist. The exact sensation never exceeded much beyond this area, and whenever it occurred, he was undeniably in and around Chinle. The thick piece of jewelry once belonged to his biological mother, Yvonne Cartwright, and her family. While he never knew his own mother before her untimely death, Kyler nevertheless still felt an indisputable surge of confidence and security whenever he wore it. He received it that summer ten years ago when Col. Sydni Clarke first drove him seven hours into Chinle from Salt Lake City. It would sound trite to some, but this silver bracelet embodied a precious connection which, up until that point, had been all but nonexistent. As for his father, there wasn’t a story to tell. The man was a phantom—a mystery. From what he could infer, Kyler surmised that, like his mother, his father was Navajo. He knew nothing else about him apart from that, but given the unusual way in which he was raised, the black ram believed that such evasiveness was not coincidental.

“Is it the dry air? No. No, that can’t be it,” he said, scrutinizing a small turquoise stone embedded into the silver like a bullseye. “If that was the cause, why does this never happen back home? The Valley’s got some of the driest air in the country. If this was all the result of dry air, I wouldn’t only feel it randomly in Arizona.”

With his mind preoccupied on this heirloom, a loud crashing and scattering of desert debris shattered the silence, and in its wake, Kyler instantly shifted focus. He clenched a fist as he stared with rapt interest into the placid desert. While Kyler often prided his reliance on reason over superstition, in that moment, he felt no less superstitious than more traditional folk and their enduring belief in the supernatural.

“What was that?”

Aggravated and paranoid, the black ram surveyed the area in hopes of easing his mounting apprehension. With the sun soon setting, the landscape was blanketed by incessant shadows that seemed to deepen and enshroud with each passing second. Overhead, the enduring hues of orange and yellow saturated the sky near the horizon’s edge as the amenable sky above the descending sun became a mysterious indigo. This furious palette was the last gasp of a dying day, and the incipient shadows did plenty to obscure what, if anything, wanted to hide its true intentions. Kyler’s view of the desert scrub was intermittently interrupted by telephone poles and the metallic fence posts of unseen homesteads. The only features of note in the distance were diminutive buttes buried in shadow. The young man’s focus then shifted to one of these formations. Underneath the red-orange façade of the full moon, this lonely butte stood idle and unoccupied. If the black ram had to guess just where those eyes once stood vigil, they could only have rested atop that rock. Yet here there were no signs of life. The eyes which Kyler felt so relentlessly study and dissect him from the moment his feet hit the asphalt had since vanished.

“I know what I heard,” he said, thoroughly scanning the scenery for any movement, “and I’m not crazy.”

It was here when Kyler gave up on a fabled Good Samaritan arriving on the scene before Lucas. Removing the iPhone from his pocket, the black ram swiped past several tabs in search of a successful distraction.

“This is ridiculous,” he muttered, dissatisfied with what his search was yielding. “I’m spooking myself. I’m too old to think this way. It really doesn’t matter if it’s dark out, it’s still the same desert even if I can’t—”

‘Ky…ler.’

It was speech. That much was apparent, but the guttural intonation and atypical stressing of syllables was far too abnormal to accept as anything other than abominable. In that moment, an incomprehensible terror overcame the black ram. His mouth hung slightly open as he simply forgot to exhale. Everything remained frozen in time. With wide eyes, afraid to look away, he stared vacantly at the incandescent screen. Whomever it was, this intruder, the young man was stricken with an abject fear so potent and overwhelming, that the prospect of acknowledging it outright seemed an impossible endeavor.

‘Ky…ler.’

Even with every synapse screaming for him to flee, the black ram could only stand still as the sounds of rhythmic scraping across the desert scree drew ever closer. Ever near. This rhythmic scraping was soon met with an otherworldly wheezing. It was as if this man, if it was a man at all, was striving with every ounce of strength if only to utter this one name. It wasn’t so much a matter of weakness. Low and hoarse, boding evil, this was the portentous moan of a revenant. Hollow and resounding like an empty grave, its throat was no longer suited for speech. In an act of breathtaking defiance, Kyler’s curiosity overriding his sense of self-preservation, the black ram slowly turned toward the source of this scraping. At last, when the intruder came into view, the phone he’d held went tumbling onto the asphalt beneath.

‘Kuh—kuh—ky…ler.’

Motionless in silent terror, Kyler saw a great black dog with milky white eyes and pointed ears steadily approach from the burgeoning darkness. As it swayed from side to side, its movement seemed altogether grotesque. Apart from the rhythmic pacing in which it advanced, the beast’s fore and hind legs appeared to almost bend back upon themselves with each step it took. Kyler could hear the sinewy muscles in each limb groan and crack as they contorted into unnatural shapes and configurations. Lurching forwards and back like some perverse rocking horse, its forepaws were now mere feet from the road as an icy chill swept over the area. The most terrifying aspect of the creature was not its gait or the sickly-sweet scent of decomposing flesh and fetid earth which accompanied it. It was its smile. With those twitching, milky white eyes firmly set upon the black ram, the beast had curled its lips into a quivering and monstrous perversion of a grin as it tottered relentlessly toward him.

‘Kyler.’

Tripping backward, the young man fell to the ground as the clamor of firing synapses urging him to run grew too loud to ignore. With the spell fear held over him decisively broken, the black ram scurried in a blind panic out into the middle of the road. He raised his left hand in some pathetic effort to shield his body from the horror to come. As he did so, a forceful wave of pressure seemed to physically push back the creature. He felt this pressure kick up nearby dust as the great black dog, ostensibly startled, ceased smiling. So singular was his focus to escape the threat, Kyler hadn’t registered the blare of a car’s horn and the screeching of tires which followed. He clutched at his chest as the creature let out one final fiendish snarl before assimilating back into the darkness off the highway with deft and alarming speed. The way it melded into the shadow was so sudden. It didn’t even seem possible for anything to disappear so thoroughly. A youthful figure stepped outside the vehicle as the harsh glare of the luminous headlights laid bare his wide-eyed terror.

“Kyler, man,” said Lucas with a small laugh laced with incredulity, “what are you doing out there? You lookin’ to get yourself killed?”

---

I want to extend my utmost thanks to  aerokat for making this scene here as effectively creepy and portentous as I wanted! Not only did she surpass my expectations, but she delivered the goods just before Halloween. The timing's absolutely perfect. I am so very happy with how this scene ultimately came together, and seeing my characters some to life through their talents is always exciting! If you haven't yet seen much from her, then please check out her gallery for more great art!

If you're at all curious about supporting her craft, this link here will take you to her Patreon account:

https://www.patreon.com/poecatcomix/posts


art is ©  aerokat

Kyler Clarke and Engine Joe are ©  nazcapilot