The Blood Mesa

CHAPTER FOUR

A number of tents were set up near the parked pickups and jeeps. Matt and Jerry began carrying the supplies into a large one that Jerry identified as the mess tent.

Matt had to move his duffel bag to reach one of the crates, and as he set it down, something in the bag made a slight clunking sound as it landed on the truck bed.

"What was that?" Jerry asked.

"Just some of my gear," Matt said.

He didn't explain that it was the ax he had brought with him from the sawmill when he started on his personal odyssey.

The ax that he ought to take out of the duffel bag, carry over to the tent where Dr. Andrew Hammond was talking to an older man with white hair, and bury the keen edge of the blade deep in the evil motherfucker's rotting face.

That would put an end to the trouble before it even began.

But it would leave unanswered the question of why he felt such a compulsion to journey to the top of that mesa. Was there something even worse waiting for him up there, something only he could stop?

Matt didn't know, but he had to find out.

"So you're a graduate student," Matt said to Jerry, just making conversation while they worked.

"Yeah. I'm doing my doctoral thesis on the linguistics of the Anasazi, so I'm hoping we'll find something that'll tell us more about their language, which seems to have been primarily Uto-Aztecan in nature."

"Uh-huh," Matt said.

"Plus it was supposed to be a chance for me and April to spend some, you know, quality time together."

"April?"

"My girlfriend. We came out here together, but we . . . uh . . . sort of had a fight."

"Oh." Matt hoped that Jerry wouldn't feel compelled to share all the details of that disagreement. He didn't really have any interest in grad student soap opera.

"But then that damned Scott Conroy had to come along, too," Jerry continued. "I hate guys named Scott."

"Let me guess," Matt said. "He's . . . April's ex?"

"Yeah. They broke up four months ago. I finally get a chance with her, after all this time, and it looks like things are gonna go my way at last, and then . . . then Scott comes along and starts makin' noises about getting back together with her, you know, and I thought maybe April would tell him to take a hike, but she said she couldn't be rude to him after all they'd been through together, so she had to listen to him, and that just made me, well, you know, that's not something a guy like me wants to hear, since Scott, he's this good-lookin' guy and I'm, well, you can see for yourself what I am, and his name is Scott, for God's sake—"

"So you've known April for a long time?" Matt asked, figuring that if he didn't stop the flood of words somehow, Jerry might pass out from lack of oxygen, especially at this altitude.

"Since a seminar on ancient civilizations in our sophomore year. I looked at her across the room, and suddenly I didn't give a shit about the Hittites anymore."

"Yeah, I know what you mean," Matt said. "So are they going to get back together?"

"April says no . . . but I don't really believe her."

"And she figured out that you feel that way."

"Oh yeah. Pissed her off, too. She said if I didn't trust her, then maybe we shouldn't be together after all."

"Well, there's something to that, I suppose," Matt said.

"Yeah, probably. Anyway, we're sort of stuck up here now, so I guess we'll have to make the best of it. You'd think we'd be more, you know, mature about everything. I mean, we're graduate students. We should be past all this stuff."

Matt just grunted and didn't say anything. He didn't know much about grad school or the whole world of academia, but he had knocked around enough in his life to know that anytime you put a bunch of males and females together, it was junior high all over again.

To distract Jerry from the subject of romance, he said, "This Dr. Varley . . . I take it he's some sort of hotshot in the archeology field?"

"You've never heard of him?"

Matt shook his head. "I don't travel much in academic circles."

"Yeah, he's one of the top men," Jerry said. "He's written a bunch of books and been running the department for years and years. This is gonna be his last dig, though. He's retiring pretty soon."

"Dr. Hammond's going to replace him?"

Jerry laughed, then shook his head. "Don't tell anybody I said this, but Dr. Hammond just wishes he was going to replace him. Dr. Varley's picked Dr. Dupre to take over."

"Does Hammond know that?"

"Yeah, and he's not happy about it, either. This is between you and me, right?"

Matt nodded. "Sure. My word on it."

"Hammond figured when he was running things, he'd be able to hook up with Dr. Dupre. He's been tryin' to get in her pants for a long time, and let's face it, who can blame him? But now she's gonna be the boss, not him, so he's not gonna have any leverage, you know what I mean?"

"Yeah. Tough break for him."

And maybe the anger and resentment that had grown in Hammond's heart because of it was what had drawn Mr. Dark to him.

At first Matt had wondered if the evil he saw on Hammond's face was caused by that skeletal, lollipop-sucking bastard, or if the man had started to rot, inside and out, without being touched by Mr. Dark.

The momentary glimpse Matt had gotten of Mr. Dark as they left the state highway, though, convinced him that something on this mesa had drawn the creature here, just as Matt himself had been drawn. There had to be a reason they kept winding up in the same places. Mr. Dark had a history of manipulating humans to get what he wanted, and Matt had a hunch that Hammond was one of those tools.

The more information he had, the better he might be able to fight whatever was lurking up here. He said, "Tell me about the other members of the expedition. Is that the right word for it, expedition?"

"Sure, whatever. We're all graduate students in archeology . . ."

For the next few minutes, Jerry rattled off names and random facts about his fellow would-be archeologists, mostly concerned with the relative hotness of the female members of the group. All of them met with Jerry's approval to some degree. Matt knew he wouldn't be able to remember all the names, at least not until he got to know them better, so he didn't really try.

By the time he and Jerry finished unloading the supplies, Matt was tired. The heat made a man sweat, and the dry air sucked up all the moisture almost immediately. It would be easy to get dehydrated out here.

He turned to look around. The mesa had a stark beauty, and from this height he could see for twenty miles or more in every direction. Miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles, as the old saying went. But the red and brown and tan landscape was dotted with other mesas, too, as well as slender, towering rock spires and other formations in odd, twisted shapes.

"What do you think of it, Mr. Cahill?"

The voice belonged to Dr. Veronica Dupre. She had come up behind him without him hearing her.

"It's something," Matt said noncommittally as he turned to look at her. "And you might as well call me Matt, too. Mr. Cahill still makes me look around for my dad."

She laughed. "All right, Matt. And you can call me Ronnie. I know I should stand on ceremony, like Dr. Varley and Dr. Hammond, but I've never quite been able to do that. I suppose that comes from years of working to put myself through school."

"What did you do?" Matt asked, curious about this woman. She was attractive, but that wasn't it. There wasn't really anything flirtatious about her attitude.

"Waitressed, bartended, you name it. I even worked in a lumberyard for a while."

That was it, Matt thought. She might have transformed herself over the years, but she had started out in the same blue-collar world he came from. In fact, some of the boards in that lumberyard where she worked could have come from the sawmill where he had worked for so many years.

"That's why I was interested when you said you'd worked in a sawmill," she went on. "We're a lot alike in some ways."

"I suppose so," he said.

But they really weren't, not anymore. She had become a professor, and he had become . . . something. He wasn't sure what. But he wasn't an average joe anymore, no matter how he might wish that were the case.

Ronnie laughed. "Come on. If you're through unloading, I'll show you around. There's a little daylight left, but when night falls out here, it falls hard and fast."