Tworivers
Copyright© 2025 by Harry Carton
Chapter 1: Helicopters and Apaches
“Christ, you’d think they’d fix the AC in this tin can.” Sergeant Thomas Two Rivers wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. The Black Hawk helicopter rattled around him, vibrating through the soles of his boots. Outside, Oklahoma farmland blurred beneath them—dry, cracked earth and struggling cornfields baking under a merciless July sun. “Feels like Satan’s armpit in here.”
Beside him, Corporal Bob Dawson chuckled, “Stop complaining, Tom. Three more hours, and we’re back at base with cold beer and –”
Two Rivers and Dawson had been transferred from their old base in New Mexico to their new assignment in eastern Oklahoma, for special assignment. That could mean anything from joining a new team of special operators, to learning French so they could invade Canada, or just being snipers going to a special training facility. Both of them knew what they did for a living: they went where the US Army told them to go, and did whatever the Army told them to do.
The helicopter lurched violently sideways. Two Rivers’ harness dug into his shoulders as loose gear clattered across the floor. Outside, the sky turned green—an unnatural, sickly hue he’d only seen in storm-chaser videos. “What the hell –?”
Dawson’s laughter died mid-sentence. The pilot’s voice crackled over comms, frantic: “Microburst! Hold – “ The sentence dissolved into static. Thomas gripped his seat as the Black Hawk spun like a maple seedpod. Cornfields vanished, replaced by a swirling wall of debris – roof shingles, fence posts, an entire tractor tire cartwheeling past the window. Pressure dropped so fast his ears popped painfully. Dawson screamed something drowned out by the rotor’s scream.
The green light intensified, flooding the cabin. Thomas’s vision tunneled to blackness. Static electricity crawled over his skin like ants. He tasted iron, blood from a bitten tongue. The harness straps felt suddenly insubstantial, like spiderwebs against a hurricane. Outside, the world dissolved into fractured light and screaming wind. Time stretched. He thought of his grandfather’s stories: whirlwinds carrying warriors to other worlds. Maybe not a metaphor, he realized, numb. The vibration ceased. Utter silence fell, thick and sudden as a blanket.
Impact slammed him forward. The harness held, but pain exploded through his ribs. Metal shrieked. Glass shattered. Then stillness, deep and profound stillness. Thomas blinked grit from his eyes. Dust hung thick in the air, smelling of damp earth and crushed sagebrush. Sunlight streamed through a jagged hole where the cockpit had been. Dawson groaned beside him, slumped forward. Thomas fumbled with his harness buckle, fingers clumsy. “Dawson! Sound off!” His voice sounded alien in the quiet. He looked toward the cockpit – the two pilots were crushed by a tree trunk, the plexiglass windshield shattered into a million pieces. He scrambled out of his harness and leaned forward and did a quick assessment. He’d seen what dead bodies looked like before, and these two were dead.
Outside, the Oklahoma cornfields were gone. Instead, rolling grasslands stretched to distant mountains, untouched by roads or fences. The air tasted cleaner, sharper. A breeze carried the scent of wildflowers and something else – horse sweat? His gaze snapped to movement: a herd of elk grazing nearby, lifting their heads curiously. Then he saw them.
Three riders on lean, muscular animals he’d only seen in history books. Horses like his ancestors used to ride. The riders wore buckskin leggings and carried bows, their dark eyes fixed on the wreckage with wary fascination. One pointed – not at the shattered helicopter, but at Thomas’s army fatigues.
Dawson groaned again, blood trickling from a gash on his temple. “Where...?”
Thomas fumbled with the chopper’s med box, ripping open a gauze pad, pressing it against the wound. “Don’t know. But stay still.”
His Green Beret medic instincts kicked in: assess airways, check for spinal injury. Dawson’s pulse was thready but steady. Then Thomas froze.
The riders had dismounted. They approached cautiously, their moccasins silent on the prairie grass, bows slung over their shoulders. The tallest one spoke in a language Thomas hadn’t heard since childhood summers on the rez – Coyotero Apache. “You walk with the whirlwind?”
Thomas’s throat tightened. Grandfather’s stories weren’t metaphors. He forced his hands away from Dawson, palms open in the universal gesture of peace. “We mean no harm.” His Apache was rusty, thick with army-English cadence.
The riders exchanged glances. One gestured at the helicopter’s twisted metal. “Spirit-canoe?” The words were biké’ yaałti’í – literally “metal boat that flies.”
Thomas almost laughed. “Yes. Broken now.”
The tallest rider, face etched with wary curiosity, stepped closer. His eyes lingered on Thomas’s digital camo fatigues. “Your skins ... strange colors.” He touched his own deerskin vest. “Not deer. Not buffalo.”
Thomas peeled off his sweat-soaked outer shirt, revealing the standard-issue tan undershirt. “Cloth. Woven.” He mimicked spinning thread.
The rider’s expression shifted—not fear, but practical assessment. “Strong?”
“Stronger than hide. Lighter too.” Thomas kept his movements slow, deliberate. Dawson moaned, his eyelids fluttering. Blood soaked the makeshift bandage. Thomas turned back to the Apache. “My friend. Bad wound.” He pointed to Dawson’s temple, then his own medical insignia patch. “I am a healer.” The word ná’idzid – he who mends – felt heavy, sacred.
The Apache looked into the Black Hawk through the opened side. Two dead bodies, the trunk of a large tree, pinning them, then at Dawson.
The riders murmured. The tallest nodded curtly. “Bring him.”
They fashioned a travois from lodgepole pine saplings and elk hide, from their packs, within minutes, cutting the saplings with stone knives. Thomas marveled at their efficiency – no wasted motion, no debate. As they lifted Dawson onto the hide stretcher, Thomas caught the scent of wild mint crushed underfoot. The elk herd had vanished. Only the wind remained, whispering through grass taller than his knees.
Thomas went back to the chopper and retrieved his and Dawson’s heavy duffels. Sergeant Two Rivers had his laptop and a trickle solar charger for it in his duffle plus a couple of changes of clothes. He didn’t know what Dawson had, but his duffle was heavy and lumpy with some hard packages.
He walked over to the travois the Indians had fashioned for Dawson, and put the duffels at its foot.
“Name?” asked the tallest rider. “I am called ‘Chooli’” -- meaning “antelope” – as they walked.
Thomas stumbled over a prairie dog hole. “Thomas Two Rivers.” He pointed a thumb at his chest.
Chooli’s eyes sharpened. “Two Rivers? You know Tségháhoodzání?” The Navajo name for the Grand Canyon.
Thomas shook his head. “Different band. Chihuahua Apache.” A flicker of understanding passed between the riders. Borders mattered here.
The walk took several hours. The camp emerged like a mirage – thirty hide-tipis clustered near a willow-choked creek. Children froze mid-chase, staring at the party’s return. Thomas’s strange clothes aroused curiosity. Women paused scraping hides, their hands stilled on stone tools. Thomas smelled roasting rabbit and juniper smoke. Dawson groaned on the travois, his uniform dark with blood.
“Bring the ná’idzid,” Chooli commanded.
An elder with eyes like obsidian chips emerged. Thomas knelt beside Dawson, peeling back the blood-soaked bandage. The wound pulsed—deep, jagged. Infection risk screamed in his medic brain. No antibiotics. No IV. He met the elder’s gaze. “Clean water. Boiled.” He mimicked fire and bubbling. The elder frowned but gestured. A girl scurried to a clay pot simmering over coals. From another tipi, an older woman emerged, clutching a bundle of dried yarrow in one hand and a flat stone with a paste smeared on it.
Thomas ripped Dawson’s undershirt into strips. “Hold him,” he ordered Chooli. As warriors pinned Dawson’s shoulders, Thomas poured searing water over the wound. Dawson screamed, thrashing. Thomas ignored him, probing with fingers sterilized in the heat. The older woman came over to look at Dawson’s head. She handed the paste to Thomas. Bone intact. Scalp laceration – messy but survivable. He packed it with yarrow paste, binding it tight with cloth strips.
The elder watched, nodding slowly at the pressure technique. “You know tséé,” he murmured -- the word for blood-stopping.
Dawson’s breathing eased. Thomas turned to the elder. “Infection comes next. Fever spirits.” He mimed shivering. “We need ch’il gohwééh.” Willow bark.
The elder’s eyebrows lifted. He motioned to the woman. She scurried back into her tipi, and emerged with a mortarboard-shaped grinding stone and dried bark strips. Thomas crushed them to powder, mixing it with creek water. Dawson drank, grimacing at the bitterness. “Tastes like ass, Tom.”
Thomas snorted. “Better than sepsis, Corporal.”
The elder thumped his chest and said, “Nantan.” Then he pointed at the old woman, “nǫ́ǫhǫ́hǫ́t’ǫ́ Gouyen” Healer woman, and her name Gouyen.