Give 'em Hell; short stories

The Eagle and The Vulture

Title: The Eagle and The Vulture
Purpose: Modern thriller ish au for my book, for fun!

Genre: Mystery
Warnings: Eyeballs

Description: Amante keeps having dreams which can tell the future. On the last night of September, he dreams of his brother dying—his brother who already died two years ago.

Notes: The characters used in this prompt are from my book, Land of Armonia, which you can purchase on Amazon or Kindle. This is a modern AU setting for them, so if you've read the book, just know that this has nothing to do with it.

The fall was going well so far down in Texas. The Llano Estacado–or more commonly known as the Staked Plains–was possibly the flattest region on this very earth. The four seasons were more of just an idea than an actual occurrence. It was either hot, or it was freezing cold, but never was there snow. To most people, fall was orange and cool. However, the particular region Amante lived in was completely dry. This was the only time of year when the temperature was somewhat tolerable, and thus, fall was going well.

To paint a better picture, there was nothing but sagebrush for miles, and all the roads were made of dirt. Amante lived there because his parents, as well as his parents' parents, and their parents as well, had been holding onto a small chunk of land that was sure to stay theirs for the rest of time itself. In their words, "we've lost too much land in the recent history of the world, but this piece right here belongs to us." And yes, that was true. Amante was Comanche. And the Comanche people owned the Llano Estacado way back when and it was taken from them, without even a reserve left for them. Most places across America did in fact get those scrappy pieces of land to "make up" for the lost territory, but not the Comanche.

Amante was always prone to nightmares. Well, generally, he always had grand dreams. His dreams typically were vivid, and felt so incredibly realistic to him that often he would wake and ponder if what he had dreamt was real or not. Sometimes, he would confuse them with reality. This being said, you can imagine that nightmares were somewhat the same to him.

As of recent, Amante's dreams had been almost prophetic. He had a dream that he was wandering about the plains and came upon a river, just a few days ago. There, at the river, he found half of an entire herd of cows. Most of them were dead, and the ones that weren't were eating the corpses of their brothers. That very same day, one of the local ranchers lost half of his cattle due to a disease. Some of their bodies had fallen into the river that ran through his ranch which polluted the water for irrigation and drinking along the local town.

The night after that, Amante dreamt of the Quahadis tribe of the Comanche people. They were all walking and living but they had the faces of ghosts. And their hair was hacked off to their ears, making them look scrappy and beaten. He could see their hearts glowing in their chests, and all were red with anger. In his dream, the Quahadis began popping up all over the Llano Estacado for miles, and they would just stand there, angry and scrapped. Completely still. That following morning, he saw on the news that an old cave of the Comanche had been uncovered, and in it were the hundred year old bones of Quahadis children who had been fleeing the westward expansion wild riders who were pillaging their forgotten village.

And after that, he had another dream. And in that dream, the sun went black and the clouds disappeared. The land quickly became cold and dry and mammoths and locusts rose from the earth. Since he woke from that dream, the sky had been so cloudy one might think it was black. The plains were now unusually cold and dry, as if winter had come a few months too soon.

On the last night of September, Amante dreamt of a road. It was an old highway running west. Amante could only walk westward, for when he tried to walk any other direction, the road would turn with him and he'd be going west again. Along the road, he came upon an eagle and a vulture. They had their wings fanned out over a dead creature, pecking at it hungrily. To Amante, this was just roadkill. But curiosity got the better of him, and he stepped up close to it, rather than passing it by. He found the roadkill to be the body of a dead man.