Free Jornada del Muerto: Prisoner Days by Claudia Hall Christian Page A

wasp,” Squawking Black crow chants. “Salt for horses.
Salt for horses.”
    “ Never let him follow you
again!” Black Bear roars with rage.
    And I’m back in my cell, drumming, with
George keeping guard next to me. I don’t have any idea who the
“him” is that followed me into the spirit land. I don’t know what
filled my ears with wool. I don’t know why I was followed.
    Only know this:
George is in danger because Black Bear
appeared.
The spirit that followed me must be attached
to the women and animals.
We will try to save the horses with salt,
but we will probably have to kill them as well.
We are not the first men to “rescue” these
women.
There is powerful, unnatural magic involved
with these women.
We will have to kill the women before
dawn.
    I have a terrible craving for pinon nuts.
George follows me to where our nuts are stored. I grab two handfuls
of roasted pinon nuts and carry them back to our cell.
    Sitting down again at this typewriter, I
give George a handful of pinon nuts. He takes one, cracks the black
shell with his teeth, spits out the shell, and eats the seeds. I
listen to him eat the pinon nuts for a while before realizing what
Grey Squirrel was trying to tell me.
    Like the wasp insects, they have stuffed the
women full of wasp eggs. The wasp eggs will mix with my or George’s
sperm to create a wasp. The wasp will hatch in their digestive
system, not their reproductive system.
    Salt kills the wasp.
    We cannot wait. We must do this now.

11/15/2056
    When I told George what we must do, he
sobbed. We both long for some normalcy. We want to believe that we
will find partners and live out a whole, real life. No matter how
many wasps we kill. No matter how much horror we’ve seen. We still
want to believe that we’ll find love and live happily ever
after.
    Today, reality set in for us. There’s no
going back.
    We changed into our outer clothing and
retrieved our supplies. Delaying the inevitable, we started with
the horses. We started with salt. We fed the horses a mixture of
salted oats. The horses seemed to crave the salt. They wanted more
than we had prepared. We left the horses, let the salt do its work,
and went to the kitchen.
    When we finally made it to the women, they
were expecting us. We smiled and played as if our lust had brought
us to their cell in the middle of the night. We fed them the salted
fried potatoes called “French Fries” that were outlawed in 2021 in
the sweeping obesity legislation. George had a cellmate who’d
worked at a place with the odd Irish name of McDonald’s. The
cellmate taught George how to make these French Fries. He made them
for us once a week. Tonight, we over-salted these potatoes.
    Each of us played our roles. The Talker
giggled and chatted about nothing. The other women batted their
eyes, smiled, and ate their salted potatoes. Even the Ute woman,
the woman I had refused to believe was a part of this, played along
with the women. These women acted like lustful teenagers --
virginal and earthy, pure virtue and pure evil.
    George refused to touch them. From the
moment he saw them, he’d known, on some deep level, that these
women were dangerous. He was right.
    I laughed and flirted with them while
continuing to encourage them to eat the salt.
    The women and horses were eating sea salt I
had purified and blessed. It was ten times as powerful as table
salt.
    The women had eaten about half of their
potatoes when we left them to check on the horses. George and I
went to our munitions area to select our weapons. I took a
long-range rifle and a handgun. George took out his favorite
sawed-off shotgun loaded with purified salt.
    We went to work preparing the sickles and
axes. When we finished, we dug a pit in one of the yards and
started a fire. We waited until the coals were hot and ready to
consume what we ever killed.
    Standing near the door, we shared a look of
determination. We did not want to do this thing. We would do it
anyway.
    The herd of horses