Bolt

by Siena West

  Chapter 2

  Warning

  Long ago, the director’s cabin belonged to the ranch’s foreman. Today, its sagging porch of weathered wood was the camp’s central gathering place. Across the dirt road that fronted the cabin was the main ranch house where Norm lived and the women staff bunked. The breeze stirring the pines and the leaves of the cottonwood trees brought the good smells of dinner cooking and voices from the kitchen. Soon, the crews would return from the field, lured by the prospect of cold beer like horses to water.

  Elena tossed her cap on the bed, filled a plastic cup with wine, and sank into a camp chair on the porch. Dios, what a day it had been. She loosened the elastic binding her hair and shook out a glorious cloud of burnished mahogany. As she unlaced her boots, she considered what the day brought. Since she was a little girl, Elena had experienced second sight. Although she wasn’t able to see the past or the future with clarity, she could sense traces of events and emotions, especially if they were strong. Her physical body mirrored what she sensed, explaining what happened that afternoon in the excavation unit. Elena’s antepasados were Andalusian Spanish, and magical realism touched her otherwise practical and scientific nature. Most of the time, she felt grateful for her gift. Today, she did not. She could have done without the fleeting images of death and dismemberment.

  A truck pulled past the cabin and into the makeshift parking lot, moving too fast to keep the dust from boiling up around the tires. She sighed—how many times had she warned the staff about driving too fast? Fine, red dust would settle on everything, including dinner.

  A diminutive redhead packed into blue jeans as dusty as the truck out of which she climbed strolled over to the cabin, a bottle in hand.

  “Hola, Tía María. I’ve got a surprise for you.” They air-kissed cheeks. Elena had carried the Latin social tradition with her to Arizona. “I made a little detour to Show Low after work.”

  “The surprise would be a bottle of very nice añejo, ¿no?” Elena said, assessing the label. Maggie’s taste for tequila was legendary.

  The young woman grinned. “You got it, professora. Dump that fancy-pants wine and let’s drink a man’s drink.”

  Elena obliged, pouring the tequila over ice. She liked her graduate students, with their grand ideas and tender sensibilities, but Margaret Denny was special. She reminded Elena of herself at a younger age when the world was ready to fall at her feet. In spite of Maggie’s awesome propensity for tequila, research was serious business to her, and that was important.

  “Want a lime?” Elena said.

  “Nope. I’ll take it naked.”

  The silence was companionable; if they were cats, the women would have purred. The view spreading before them might have been in a John Ford western or an old Bonanza episode. Ancient cottonwoods dwarfed the ranch house, their fuzzy snow drifting down and piling up against the fence. In the distance, the range sloped away to purple mountains. Any minute, it seemed, Little Joe or Hoss would come careening around the house, spurring a horse and waving a hat.

  Maggie smiled into the golden liquid in her cup, shimmering as if it captured the afternoon light. “I’ve got a proposition for you, Boss.”

  Elena grimaced. “I don’t like the sound of that, Maggie.”

  “Don’t worry, Doc. Here’s the deal—I’ve found, recorded, and photographed most of the Apache sites I can reach by vehicle. I want to finish the survey on horseback, so I can ride into the canyons and higher elevations where the special-use sites and storage cists might be.” Maggie held a dissertation-improvement grant to survey the area for historic Apache sites, and she used the Taylor Ranch as her base of operations.

  Elena played with the petals of a rose poking through the porch rails. The ancient bush’s gnarled and twisted vines covered one side of the porch and ran up the cabin wall. The rose dripped with pink, scentless blossoms.

  Before Maggie could continue, Melissa Harvey, the crew chief in charge of the pueblo excavations, joined them. She accepted a beer and folded her lanky body into the camp chair nearest Maggie.

  Elena continued the conversation. “Mi’ja, I’m not crazy about this idea. Although you’re not part of the field school, I’m responsible for you, regardless. If you’re out there alone, no one would know if you fell off your horse and broke an arm or leg—until you didn’t come home on time. We’d have to send a search party to find you.”

  The director lectured often about the obvious and unseen dangers of wild Arizona. Angry bulls, bucking cow ponies, scorpions, black bears, rattlesnakes—critters most urban kids of college age had never even seen, much less encountered face to face.

  Melissa, whom everyone called Mel, wore a puzzled look. “What are you guys talking about?”

  “Tía Elena is trying to stop me from surveying on horseback.” Maggie said, complaining.

  “I’m not trying to stop you, chica. But I’m certain you shouldn’t go by yourself. Remember the Columbia University anthropology student? She worked alone, and look what happened to her.” While doing ethnographic research on the San Carlos Reservation in the 1930s, the woman became friendly with an Apache man who misunderstood her intentions. A polite refusal resulted in a tragic, senseless murder.

  “Come on, Tía. I seem to recall you were in the field alone for your dissertation research.”

  “That was different. I was doing historical archaeology in the middle of town.”

  Maggie laughed. “Yeah, sure—an abandoned, falling-down town with what, ten people living in it? In New Mexico. With nests of rattlesnakes living in the ruined adobes.”

  Elena ignored Maggie. “Not to mention bears—I understand that horses hate bears.”

  It was odd that Mel wore a look of concern that verged on fear. “I’m with Dr. V,” she said. “It’s not a good idea, Maggie. I wouldn’t go out there alone.” Mel feared nothing, and her exploits in the field and on the volleyball court were as legendary as Maggie’s taste for tequila. Elena was sure that Maggie would be wise to take Mel’s concern into consideration.

  Maggie chuckled. “Ladies, I appreciate that you’re worried, but I don’t plan to ride alone. My honey will go with me on the weekends.” Cole’s survey crew did not go out on Saturdays, which were only half-days in the field.

  The director snorted her disbelief. “The pair of you won’t get a thing done. Kissy-face on horseback, I’m sure. But that’s your chairman’s problem, not mine.” She poured herself another shot of tequila and held out the bottle to Maggie. “Do you plan to borrow Norm’s horses?”

  “I already talked to Norm. He thinks I’m too fat to ride his precious quarter horses or something.” Maggie’s big, infectious laugh echoed in the afternoon quiet. The grumpy ranch owner valued his prize-winning roping horses above almost everything else, and Elena should have known he would never let a novice ride one.

  “So, I must find a rancher willing to rent out a couple of trail horses. There’s no shortage of corrals and falling-down barns around here to stable the nags. I’ll pay for their feed out of my grant money.”

  Elena stretched, tequila having relaxed her after the day’s challenges. “Okay, you’ve persuaded me. If you can find horses. If you can pay for their feed. And if Cole goes with you every single time you ride.”

  Maggie touched her cup to Elena’s. “Deal.” Mel’s scowl made it clear she did not approve.

  “Well, speak of it,” Elena drawled. “There’s the dear boy now.”

  A white university van drove past the cabin. Elena noted with approval that the vehicle raised only a little dust. Driving was one of Cole’s many skills. The young man had common sense and uncommon field ability. She relied on her assistant director more than a feminist would like to confess.

  After the dusty, sunburned crew members stumbled out of the truck, Cole ambled over to the cabin and tossed his battered pack on the porch.

  “Hey, you guys got started early, didn’t you?”

  “It�
��s never too early for me,” Maggie said, her voice lazy.

  “It was a rough day,” Elena explained. “At least for me. And the tequila is because Maggie has been bribing me to let you guys ride horseback into the wilderness.”

  Cole ruffled Maggie’s gleaming hair. “I’m sure. She’s a little manipulator.”

  “I assume she’s discussed this harebrained scheme with you?”

  “At great length, Dr. V, as you might imagine.” Maggie made an ugly face at him. He helped himself to a beer from the cooler that Elena kept stocked with cold drinks and ice for her guests and visitors. “Hey, Mel,” he said in greeting. He settled on the sagging step below Maggie and leaned against a porch post.

  “Well, I’m about to make your day worse. We found very recent pot hunting up in Ghost House Canyon.” He told them about the ruin they found, Linda’s discovery, and what they did to document the find and bury it again for safety.

  Me cago en todo o que se menea! The dead were everywhere, surrounding Elena and binding her as surely as if they had wrapped their cold limbs around her own warm ones. She would have to go into town to notify the Forest archaeologist, assuming the cell-phone magic wasn’t working. At the same time, she would report the human remains in the pasture.

  As if on cue, Tim joined them, carrying a beer. He had showered and combed his fiery hair.

  “Why did you have a hard day, Tía?” Cole said.

  “I can tell you,” Tim said, sinking into a chair and taking a big swig of beer. He related what had transpired in the pasture.

  “No shit,” Cole said.

  Tim had finished exploring the bottom of the excavation unit as he and Elena discussed. The bones extended across the entire unit. “And the really bizarre thing is that I found several duplicate bones, meaning more than one person is there. Although it’s hard to tell because the bones are so smashed up.” He tossed back the last of the beer and lowered his voice. “The bones look like somebody cut them apart.” Elena saw it for herself when she crouched in the pit sick with nausea and fear.

  “Gross,” Maggie said. “Cut-up dead people?”

  “It’s worse than that, Maggie,” Elena said. “The breaks and cuts showed no healing. That means the damage was perimortem—when the people were still alive or soon after they died.” Maggie paled a little, highlighting the freckles sprinkled across her nose.

  “And you won’t like this at all, Tía,” Tim said, “but it looks like the bones continue under the unit wall. I am so screwed.”

  “It’s full of bones, isn’t it?” Mel said, echoing Elena’s own concern.

  Maggie poured a couple fingers of tequila into a cup and offered it to Tim. “Drink up, bud. You need this.” Tim tossed it down in one gulp. None of them had ever seen him do that. “Geez, Tim,” Mel said, “you must really be spooked.”

  Without a word, he held out his cup to Maggie for a refill and then took a deep breath. “I’m afraid to say it.”

  “Say what?” Cole said.

  “The C-word. You know archaeologists have been finding bodies cut up and smashed like the ones in the pasture in other places. The Cowboy Wash site, I guess it’s called, and that project in Colorado by a contract group? They found a bunch of shattered bones at one of their sites. Archaeologists think human remains from those places represent cannibalism. The bones in the spaceship appear to be similar. Are they cannibalism, too?” he asked, his voice lowered almost to a whisper.

  His question dropped into a pool of silence. It was so quiet, the breeze might have ceased blowing, and the birds may as well have stopped their noisy business in the trees. Nothing in Southwest archaeology created more controversy than cannibalism. Native Americans and most archaeologists reviled the scientists who proposed it. Only a few scholars conceded this horrifying act of violence took place in the past.

  Cole and Elena remembered their own premonitions—the lightning-struck tree, the sickness in the excavation unit—

  Elena spoke into the silence, her words falling like stones into a well. “It’s too early to say, Tim. There are other possibilities.”

  “Isn’t Dr. Thomas coming to lecture soon?” Mel said. “The bioarchaeologist who specializes in identifying cannibalism from bones?”

  Elena nodded. When she scheduled him, she hadn’t foreseen they would need his particular specialty at the field school.

  “Can he tell us if it’s cannibalism?” Tim said. His fingers strayed toward his hair, undoing the careful combing.

  “¿Quien sabe? We’ll find out in good time.”

  “Jesus. Thank God there’s no dead people at my Apache sites,” Maggie said.

  Cole’s grin was evil. “Maggie, that’s not your problem. It’s finding Apache sites. Seems like they’re mighty scarce on the ground.”

  She replied with a soft kick to his ribs. “Shut up, dickhead. I bet I’ll find something big, like Dr. V’s never seen. Then she will have to buy me a bottle of tequila to celebrate.”

  “In your dreams, Red.”

  “Stop squabbling, niños,” Elena commanded. “And shoo, all of you. I want a shower before dinner. Smells like Norm fixed lasagna tonight.”

  Tim had brought up a horrifying possibility she herself feared. Despite the bureaucratic baggage that human remains carried, she prayed the bones in the pasture would prove to be burials. Formal burials of the dead, laid to rest with care. That would be better than the deliberate butchering, cooking, and consumption of human flesh.

  * * *

  The camp’s inhabitants scattered after dinner, which did prove to be lasagna, as the day melted into evening and the light faded from gold to blue. Some campers planned to walk in the meadows rich with wildflowers and grass. Others headed up an impromptu volleyball game. Elena needed the free time as much as everyone else. The university hired her to run the field school after her predecessor quit to become head of the anthropology department. Because she wasn’t tenured, Elena experienced considerable pressure. Unlike the previous director, she had never made a grad student cry, but that virtue carried no weight with the promotion-and-tenure committee.

  I should go work on the annual report. If she did her homework well, she might turn three years of annual reports into the framework for a publishable monograph. That would impress the committee. But tonight, her thoughts were elsewhere.

  Norm turned off the generator early on week nights, and soon, only a few soft lights marked where the campers had lit lanterns or candles. The night was soothing, silent, and still. Elena fell asleep in bed with the report files on her chest, still dressed.

  * * *

  The screams woke the entire camp. What the hell? ¿¡Qué chingados es eso?! Fuzzy-minded with sleep, Elena grabbed her boots and stumbled out of the cabin. The sound filled the night. The screams were female and seemed to come from the old ranch bunkhouse converted into the women students’ dorm. In the darkness, she almost collided with Maggie and Cole coming from their tent.

  As they hurried toward the dorm, they could make out words. “Bones? It sounds like she’s yelling about bones,” Cole said.

  Norm materialized out of the darkness, still in his pajamas and carrying a shotgun. Lights flickered across the camp, marking where sleepers were waking, shaken from slumber by the screams.

  Linda Benjamin’s screams stopped by the time they reached the dorm. But her eyes were huge, and her breaths came so shallow and fast it seemed she might hyperventilate and faint. A dorm mate talked to her in soothing tones. The women had lit candles, suffusing the room with soft light.

  Elena knelt before the young woman, taking the cold hands into her own warm ones. “Was it a dream, my dear?”

  “Long bones. I saw long bones!” Linda said, shuddering. “Arm and leg bones. I saw them floating in the air, coming for me. I was so scared, but I felt paralyzed. I wanted to run away—but I couldn’t make my legs move.”

  Elena smoothed the tangled hair away from Linda’s face. “It was j
ust a dream, sweetie. Deep breaths, now.”

  “But they were after me. It was so real, I believed I could touch them—”

  “There’s not much doubt about what caused your dream, Linda. Cole told me about your encounter with the vandalized burial today.”

  Linda’s breathing slowed, the candlelight and soft voices drawing her back into the real world. But she shook her head, adamant. “This wasn’t just a nightmare—it was a warning. The bones are telling us not to mess with the dead.”

  Dios mio. Things had never been the same with this age group since the glut of vampire-witch-werewolf books, movies, and television shows.

  “They’re warning you not to eat Norm’s lasagna again.” Elena chuckled and winked in his direction, trying to lighten the mood. “I bet he owns stock in Prilosec.”

  Linda began to weep. “I’m so sorry,” she said between sobs. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble.”

  “Shh. Don’t worry, querida. We’ll get back to sleep soon enough. Norm, please take that gun away and make this poor kid a cup of hot cocoa.”

  * * *

  Much later, after Elena went to bed for the second time that night, albeit undressed and with teeth brushed, she woke again. She was unsure if a sound had intruded on her sleep. It might have been the mouse family that lived in the cabin and raised their babies in it. Once, she let a blanket corner drape onto the floor and later found it held a family of hairless, pink baby mice. Now, the wind had risen and was singing a haunting, minor tune in the pines. Perhaps the wind presaged rain, a gift for the dry land.

  As she listened, half asleep, for the sound of raindrops on the tar-papered roof, the low hoot of a great horned owl broke the silence. A harbinger of bad things to come to the Apache, the sound brought her completely awake. The owl was a ghost, a witch, or the ghost of a witch, coming to haunt the living and tell of coming death.

  She wriggled out of the sleeping bag and padded barefoot to the window. Heat lightning flickered on the eastern horizon, but no thunder accompanied the flashes. The cabin was silent, too, without mouse squeaks and shuffles.