THE BLOOD MESA Page 3

Matt wondered what was in Hammond's mind to cause that ugliness. Sometimes when he came across the people Mr. Dark had touched, it took a while for the creature's plans to become clear to Matt. All he was sure of was that something bad was going to happen, and it was up to him to stop it if he could, or try to minimize the damage if he couldn't.

  After supper the members of the expedition split up and headed for their tents. Technically, the two students in each tent were supposed to be the same gender, but Matt had a hunch there had been some mixing and matching since they'd been here. The three professors had individual tents of their own because they needed room to work. As Matt looked around, he realized that he didn't have a tent. When he asked Ronnie about that, she confirmed it.

  "Alberto had been sleeping in the truck. There's a sleeping bag in the back, along with some extra blankets you can use for padding. Do you think you can get by with that?"

  "Sure," Matt said without hesitation. "I'm liable to be more comfortable than the rest of you. I've never liked cots very much, and a sleeping bag on the hard ground can be pretty uncomfortable."

  Ronnie yawned and said, "I know it's early, but I may go ahead and turn in anyway. It was a long day, driving all the way into town and back, and we're always up early in the morning to get started on the day's work."

  "Good night, then," Matt told her.

  She started to turn away from where he stood beside the truck, but she paused and looked back at him. "I'm convinced it really was a stroke of good luck when you came walking along that road, Matt. Good luck for us, I mean."

  "And me, too," he said.

  He pulled himself up onto the lowered tailgate and sat there for a few minutes, watching and listening to the night. The students had taken the lamps with them when they went to their tents. He could see some of them glowing through the canvas and around the entrances, but a couple of the tents were already dark.

  Matt tilted his head back and looked up at the stars. To creatures with the short life spans of humans, they seemed unchanging. And they were merciless, he thought, shining down on good and evil alike. Maybe merciless wasn't exactly the right word.

  The stars just didn't give a damn about what happened on this puny planet. Being out here like this made Matt uncomfortably aware of just how tiny the denizens of this world really were.

  Tiny, maybe, but important enough for Mr. Dark to screw with their lives, for reasons of his own that Matt couldn't yet begin to fathom.

  He was thinking about that when loud, angry words came from the other side of the camp and shattered the night's hush.

  "Back off, dude, or I'll rip your fuckin' heart out!"

  CHAPTER SIX

  Matt dropped off the tailgate and hurried toward the sound of the disturbance. He heard a voice he recognized as belonging to Jerry Schultz saying, "Hey, take it easy, man. I just want to talk to April."

  "She's got nothing to say to you, and she's not interested in anything you have to say."

  "Well, I . . . I'd like to hear her tell me that herself."

  Several other people had emerged from their tents in response to the commotion, including Ronnie, Varley, and Hammond, whose rotting visage was horrifying in the dim light, bad enough that it would have made a normal person run away screaming.

  Matt, for good or ill, was no longer a normal person, of course. And even he flinched inside when he looked at Hammond.

  Everyone gathered around a tent where Scott Conroy and Jerry stood facing each other in angry confrontation.

  Actually, Jerry looked more scared than angry, Matt thought as he came up to the two young men. Enough light spilled through the tent's entrance for him to get a good look at them. The flap that normally covered the opening was thrown back. Matt saw April inside, sitting on a sleeping bag with her knees pulled up and her arms around them. She had her head down, as if she didn't want to see what was happening just outside the tent.

  "What's going on here?" Varley demanded. "I heard shouting."

  "It's nothing important, Dr. Varley," Scott said. "Just somebody nosing around where he's not wanted anymore."

  Jerry swallowed. He was a little bigger than Scott but a lot softer. But as Matt watched, he saw Jerry's determination overcome his fear.

  "I still haven't heard that from April herself," Jerry said. "You don't speak for her, Scott. I just want to talk to her."

  "You've talked to her enough."

  Hammond said, "We have important work to do out here. Very important work. We didn't come all this way just for you people to play adolescent games!"

  Even though Hammond looked like a walking corpse, he was still a stuffy, pompous windbag, Matt thought.

  "Sorry, Dr. Hammond," Jerry muttered. "I just want to talk to April for a minute; that's all."

  "Oh, for—" Hammond stopped and looked through the tent's open flap. "Milligan, if that's what it'll take to put an end to this idiocy, get out here and talk to this fat cocksucker!"

  The others stared at him, including Matt. Most of them seemed shocked. After a couple of seconds, Ronnie said, "Andrew, I'm not sure that's really the best—"

  "I'm sorry," Hammond broke in. "It's just been a long day, and I'm tired." He summoned up an insincere smile. "Sorry, Jerry. I didn't mean anything by it."

  "That's . . . uh . . . that's all right, Dr. Hammond," Jerry said.

  Still smiling, Hammond held out a hand toward the tent. "April, if you would . . ."

  Slowly, she crawled out of the tent and stood up. As she put a hand on Conroy's arm, she said, "It'll be all right, Scott. I'm fine, really."

  "I just didn't want him upsetting you even more," Scott said.

  April looked around. "Please, everyone, just go on about your business. We all need our rest."

  "That's right," Varley said. "We'll be digging early in the morning."

  As the crowd began to scatter, April faced Jerry. "Say what you have to say," she told him.

  Jerry looked around. "Can't we have some privacy?"

  "Scott can hear anything you have to say to me."

  "Then it's true? The two of you really . . . really are back together?"

  "That's right. I'm sorry, Jerry, but you never really trusted me, and because of that, you kept pushing me away."

  Matt started drifting back toward the truck. The way this was going, somebody was going to start saying "XOXO" any minute, and he didn't want to hear it.

  One of the other grad students fell in beside him. "Almost had a good show back there, didn't we?" the guy said.

  Matt glanced over at him, trying to recall his name. Rankin—that was it, he thought. Rick or Rich Rankin; Matt wasn't sure.

  "Yeah, I guess," he said.

  "Poor April's bound to lose either way."

  "How do you mean?" Matt asked.

  "Well, she's way out of Jerry's league. She'd be lowering herself to hook up with him. And Scott . . . well, Scott's just trying to convince himself that he's not gay. That's a losing battle. Believe me, I know."

  "Okay," Matt said. He didn't care who coupled with whom among this bunch, but listening to Rankin was probably the easiest way to get him to go on his way.

  "He'll figure it out sooner or later," Rankin said. "Good night, Mr. Cahill."

  "Good night," Matt said. Rankin veered off toward one of the tents, and Matt headed for the truck.

  When he got there, he looked back at the tent where Jerry and April still stood. Jerry was gesturing and talking earnestly. April just shook her head and turned toward the tent. Scott Conroy stood nearby, his arms crossed and smugness radiating from him. He said something to Jerry and then followed April into the tent.

  The entrance flap fell closed, cutting off the light.

  But Matt could still see well enough to see Jerry standing there, his shoulders slumped in defeat. Matt recalled the line from some poem about it being better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

  Sometimes, poets didn't know shit.

  # # # # # #

&
nbsp; The rest of the night passed quietly enough, although Matt was restless, his dreams haunted by visions of Mr. Dark and all the evil he had witnessed in recent months. He woke up sweating a couple of times, even though the dry, high desert air grew rather chilly before morning.

  Everyone would be responsible for cooking, cleaning up after meals, and all the other mundane chores that kept the camp functioning while the dig went on. This morning two of the young women, Maggie Flynn and Astrid Tompkins, were preparing breakfast. Matt accepted a cup of coffee from Astrid, a young black woman with a killer smile.

  Thinking back to his high school days, Matt recalled that most of the really smart girls had also been pretty good-looking. He didn't know why that was, but obviously that was still the case. Jerry was right: all six of the female grad students were attractive.

  After breakfast, which was over by the time the sun had risen much above the horizon, the members of the group scattered to three dig sites. Dr. Varley headed toward the spot where Matt had felt that eerie, unpleasant sensation the previous evening. As Matt trailed behind him with an armload of tools Varley had asked him to bring, he said, "Excuse me, Doctor, but are you sure this is a good place to dig?"

  Varley stopped short and turned around to look at Matt with an irritated expression on his lined and weathered face. "And exactly how many books on archeology have you written, Mr. Cahill?"

  "You know I haven't written any," Matt said.

  And I've never even read any, but I know a bad place when I see it.

  "Well, then, I think we'll leave those decisions up to me," Varley said.

  Matt nodded. "Sure, Doctor." What else could he say?

  April and Scott assisted Dr. Varley, along with Sierra Hernandez and Chuck Pham. Hammond's excavation was a couple of hundred yards away. He had Brad Kern, Rich Rankin, Noel McAlister, and Maggie Flynn working there with him. Still farther away, almost on the other side of the settlement, Ronnie was excavating one of the collapsed kivas with the help of Jerry, Ginger, Astrid, and Stephanie Porter. Matt circulated among all three locations, fetching equipment and tools for the scientists and helping to haul away chunks of rock that were too big for one person to handle.

  Hammond was as ugly as ever with the rotting sores on his face, but they didn't seem to be getting any worse, which surprised Matt a little because he had expected some progression. He kept a close eye on the others as well, in case sores began to pop up on their faces, but so far that hadn't happened. He didn't really like some of them, but he knew it was possible for people to be assholes without being truly evil.

  Matt kept drifting back to Varley's excavation, convinced that if anything happened, it would be there. Varley had used stakes and twine to lay out a rectangle with a large rock at each corner. As Matt studied it, he realized how symmetrically the rocks were placed. They appeared to be markers designating an area about eight feet by fifteen feet.

  When Matt stood there next to the excavation, he still felt the definite sense of unease that had cropped up inside him when he was here the night before. He wished he could talk Varley out of digging here, but every time he even broached the subject during the day, the elderly professor cut him off short.

  About the middle of the afternoon, Ronnie scrambled out of the kiva, looked around, and then waved her arms at Matt, who was over by the truck. He had already spotted her as she emerged from the hole in the ground and recognized a sense of urgency in her movements. He started trotting toward her even before she signaled to him.

  She motioned for him to stop and called, "Round up everyone and bring them over here, Matt! We've found something they need to see!"

  Matt couldn't tell from her attitude if the find was something good or bad, but Ronnie certainly seemed excited. He gave her a thumbs-up and headed for the other locations to spread the word.

  "What's this all about?" Hammond asked irritably when Matt told him Ronnie wanted to see everybody at the kiva. "Did she tell you what she'd found?"

  Matt shook his head. "Afraid not, Doctor. She just said everybody should go over there."

  "All right, all right," Hammond muttered, adding to the students working with him, "Come on."

  Everyone gathered around the kiva. The stone wall of the well-like structure was still partially intact, but it had collapsed in places and over the centuries allowed dirt to spill in and fill the hole. Ronnie and her helpers had dug down, exposing the broken top of the circular wall and emptying some of the dirt from the lower part of the kiva. Matt knew vaguely that the Indians had used these places in their religious ceremonies, but that was the extent of his knowledge.

  Ronnie had gone back down the metal ladder that rested inside the hole. Ginger and Astrid were down there with her, but Jerry and Stephanie were on the ground outside the kiva with the others.

  "What is it, Dr. Dupre?" Varley asked. "A significant find?"

  "I think so," Ronnie said. She took something that Astrid handed her and came up the ladder to show it to the other members of the group. What looked like a dirty brown stick about a foot and a half long was really something else, Matt sensed as the unease grew inside him.

  When Ronnie reached the top of the ladder, Hammond practically snatched the thing out of her hand.

  "Good Lord," he said. "That's a human femur."

  "Look at the markings on it," Ronnie said.

  Everyone leaned in except Matt. He wouldn't have known what he was looking at.

  He didn't have to wait long to find out, though. April made a face and asked, "Are those . . . teeth marks?"

  "I think so," Ronnie said. "It looks like something has gnawed all the meat off that bone."

  "Not something," Hammond said with excitement in his voice. "Someone. No wild animal did this. Those marks were made by human teeth." A grin stretched across his rotting face. "What you've found here, Dr. Dupre, is indisputable evidence of cannibalism!"

  He didn't have to sound so damned happy about it, Matt thought.

  Then again, considering that Hammond's face was rotting off his skull, maybe he did.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  They were all excited by the discovery, even the ones like April, who were grossed out by it.

  "We've uncovered several other bones with these markings," Ronnie said. "Also marks that look like they were made by flint knives or axes."

  "Excellent, excellent," Varley said. "Continue with your excavation, Dr. Dupre. Do you need some extra help with cleaning, identifying, and tagging the specimens?"

  Ronnie shook her head. "No, my team and I can handle it, at least for now. But I thought you'd all like to know."

  "Of course," Hammond said as he handed the femur back to her. "This is very exciting."

  They all stood around talking about it for a while; then Varley said, "We should get back to work."

  The other teams returned to their digs, leaving Ronnie, Jerry, Ginger, Astrid, and Stephanie to work in and around the kiva. Jerry spread out a tarp on the ground and arranged all the bones they had found so far on it.

  Matt watched him for a minute and then asked, "Are you going to try to reassemble the whole skeleton?"

  "No, not here," Jerry said. "That's a job that'll have to be done back at the university. Anyway, there may be more than one skeleton down there. We're still pretty high up in the kiva."

  Matt frowned. "You mean there could have been a whole bunch of bodies in there?"

  "Sure." Jerry sound cheerful about the prospect, which Matt supposed meant that he was a true scientist. The evidence left behind was more important than all the people who had died to provide it.

  "The Indians normally didn't use these kivas as burial pits, did they?"

  "We don't really know everything they were used for," Jerry said. "The later Puebloan tribes used them primarily for ceremonial purposes, but the Anasazi and the other early peoples in this region had them, too, and we don't know why. I don't recall reading about anybody ever coming across evidence of them being used as burial pits .
. . until now. And what happened here wasn't exactly a burial, you know."

  Matt frowned. "What do you mean?"

  "Well . . . you heard what Dr. Dupre said about all the meat being gnawed off the bone. When you finish with a chicken wing, what do you do with the bone?"

  "Throw it in the garbage," Matt said as a hollow feeling crept into his gut. "This was a garbage dump for cannibals."

  "Looks like it might've been," Jerry said.

  "Jerry," Astrid called from down in the excavation. "We've got more bones here!"

  "Coming," Jerry said.

  Matt felt a little sick and just wanted to get away from there. Ancient cannibal Indians . . . just one more indication, as if he or anybody else needed it, that human evil wasn't a recent invention.

  By the end of the day, the tarp Jerry had spread on the ground was covered with human bones, and another one had been filled as well. Matt stood looking at them as the sun went down and thought about the incredible amount of human suffering they represented.

  Ronnie came up beside him. "Pretty impressive, isn't it?"

  "In a gruesome sort of way, I suppose."

  "Well, yes, there's that to consider, of course. I'm not an expert in forensic archeology, but even I can tell that these people were killed, hacked apart, and eaten, probably raw. The ends of the bones where they were dismembered don't show any signs of charring, as they would if they'd been cooked."

  Matt started to take a deep breath, then stopped abruptly because of what he might smell. Then he realized that the stench of death was long gone from this place. It just smelled of dust.

  "How many people are we talking about?" he asked.

  "Again, I'm not an expert in that field, but I would guess somewhere between two and three dozen. And it's likely we'll find even more as we continue to dig. There's no sign of the pile ending anytime soon."

  "Dozens and dozens of people," Matt murmured. "Murdered and eaten."

  "I know, it's terrible. You're probably asking yourself what could cause such an atrocity."

  He looked over at her.

  "Actually, it ties in with something we've come to believe about the Anasazi and why they abandoned these pueblos. There's evidence to suggest that the region was hit with a whole string of disastrous droughts and crop failures. In an area that doesn't get much rain to start with, the margin for error in such things as growing corn is very small. And when there's a severe drought, the animal population is always affected, too, and becomes smaller. So if both hunting and raising crops didn't produce enough food to feed the people who lived here . . ."