THE ENEMY ATTACKED the encampment the moment the sun peeked over the plain stretching forever to the east. John Smith, a missionary sent to convert ‘friendly natives’, as his mentor called them, watched the riders whooping and yelling as they descended upon his adoptive tribe and their cluster of teepees and fire pits nestled above a small stream cutting deep into the sunbaked landscape. He hid in a cave under an overhanging rock protruding past the edge of the ravine, a deep canyon with a meandering stream at its heart, an artery pushing red silt through the ancient walls.

John silently cursed the tribe for selecting this arbitrary place to set up camp, a blank space on all the maps he had seen. Hiding from the unfamiliar landscape and violence he had no experience with, he closed his eyes and put his fingers in his ears to drown out the screaming.

Amidst the chaos above and John’s silent prayers below, a small girl entered the cave. She climbed down, squelching the blood-choked mud spreading at the entrance to join him. The girl jumped at the sight of him hiding underground and almost backed over the cliff. John sprung up after her, ready to seize her wrist if she fell. But the girl steadied herself and hunched deeper into the cool shadows and sat.

There was nothing to do. They could only wait and hope. John knew of a fort downriver where they would be safe if they could survive the journey.

Eventually the battle noises shifted from anger to despair and businesslike killing. John resisted the urge to creep out from the blood-spattered cave mouth and look back over the top at the camp. The screams subsided, but the beating of horse hooves on the dust continued, and rifle shots cracked the air. It was likely that, with most of the violence over, the invaders were killing and scalping the surviving men and rounding up the women and children.

The bloody sludge advanced from the cave entrance, encroaching on their hideout. The girl sat in the dirt, eyes on John. She crossed her arms in front of her knees, red lines, scratches, running down them. Hair like the night.

But she didn’t look at John, staring instead through to the bare rock behind him, seeing nothing. The rifle fire continued, popping at irregular intervals. This girl’s community was dying, their last protests against the darkness diffusing into the dry air. John tasted bitterness on the back of his tongue, matching the flavor of his thoughts: Why do we use our God-given hands to brutalize, maim, and kill each other? John privately thought free will was a kind of divine experiment, to see if God’s creatures could find their way on their own. He had entertained himself with the thought of God trying to record his findings in some heavenly ledger. Now he saw the experiment as a cruel curse.

All hope that had lit the girl’s eyes was extinguished. She looked at the dirt where they sat. John imagined her thoughts. A grown man hiding with her in a cave. Hiding like a child, like her.

They heard shouting close to them, then a splattering, drawing their attention to the cave mouth. A wet, red strand of blood hung from its lip. The stinking mud puddle was bathed in a fresh cascade of dark viscera. A body must have fallen above them. The attackers were shouting at one another, cleaning up their mess, taking whatever food they could find, killing the enemy wounded, and rescuing their own, whose deaths would be formally honored and considered righteous, while the girl’s tribe—John’s tribe—would be left for the animals, some corpses sent down to the bottom of the ravine where their bones would feed the creek and its creatures. That’s how these raids went.

Finally, after growing numb and cold in the shadows with the motionless girl, John stirred. The setting sun bled over the distant mountains in the west. The rifle fire and screaming had subsided.

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Follow the rest of this dark journey in SN15: Black Friday, coming out November 23rd.

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