Bloodletting

by Michael McBride

  Until they discovered the next body.

  He set the soggy brown paper sack on the table and the mail on the eating bar. The sink beneath the lone window was brimming with dishes he'd at least managed to rinse, the curtains riffling gently behind. The counter beside was littered with crumpled fast food wrappers. He was about to open the fridge to grab a Killian's when he saw the note he had affixed to it only the night before: Buy Beer. Shaking his head, he shrugged off his suit jacket and drank some water straight from the faucet. He'd just head upstairs and change his clothes, come back down, eat a little Mongolian Beef, and pray sleep claimed him before he again caved in and cracked open the case files.

  Passing through the darkened living room, the light from the kitchen reflecting through the layer of dust on the TV, he ascended the stairs one at a time, feeling aches upon pains throughout his body. There were three doors at the top of the landing overlooking the great room: to the left, the master bedroom; straight ahead, a bathroom; and to the right, the second bedroom, which served as his study. He always kept them open. Always.

  The door to the study was closed.

  He took a deep breath to focus his senses. There was no time to hesitate or whoever was inside would realize that he knew. He pulled the Smith and Wesson Model 19 snubnose from his ankle holster and jammed it under his waistband, untucking his button-down to hang in front. Drawing his Beretta, he kicked the door in with a crack of the destroyed trim.

  The room beyond was dark, as he knew it would be, but he immediately sensed someone else in there with him. He could smell their sweat, rank breath, ammonia--

  Cold metal pressed against the base of his skull behind his left ear as he entered the room. An even colder, trembling hand with spider-like fingers closed around his and relieved him of the Beretta.

  "Why couldn't you find them?" a voice whimpered directly into his ear. It was somewhat effeminate and dry, a freshly sharpened scythe through wheat.

  "I must have been close."

  "I never meant to hurt them. But I know, I know. I did. They're dead, aren't they? Dead, dead, dead!" the man said, jabbing him in the head with the barrel of the gun.

  Carver staggered deeper into the room, colliding with his desk chair.

  "Sit down," the man said, training both guns on him through the darkness. The mismatched pair of pistols shook in his hands. There was a rustling of papers as he sat on the desk. "I have to show you. So you'll understand. You have to see."

  He turned the computer monitor on the desk toward him and pressed the power button with the barrel of the gun in his right hand. A weak glow blossomed from the screen, highlighting his face. His unblinking eyes bulged and tears streamed down his cheeks. The muscles in his face twitched spastically.

  "This wasn't what I wanted," the man sobbed. "It wasn't supposed to be like this. No one can help them. No one can--"

  Before the man could turn back to him, Carver pulled the snubnose from beneath his waistband, raised it, and fired. He caught a glimpse of the man's profile, silhouetted by the light from the screen, as he flipped backwards over the desk, a pinwheel of blood following him from the spouting hole in his ruined chest.

  Carver lunged from the chair and leapt up onto the desk, training the revolver on the heap of humanity crumpled against the base of his bookcase. The man shuddered and tried to rise. Carver dropped down beside him and kicked both of the guns away. He was just about to drag the man back around to the front of the desk when he heard a soft voice behind him.

  He turned to face the monitor on the bloody desktop.

  There was a hiss of static, a droning monotone interrupted by the sound of labored breathing.

  "Please," the voice whispered, barely discernible above the din. "Mommy... Please..."

  A girl was sprawled on a filthy concrete floor, naked save the brown skein of refuse and blood coating her body. Her tangled blonde hair covered her face, framed by both hands, still feebly trying to push her up from the ground. A thick chain trailed from the manacle on her ankle to an eyebolt on the nicotine-yellow concrete block wall.

  A single overhead bulb illuminated the room, casting a dirty manila glare over everything, turning the spatters on the walls and the dried pools on the floor black.

  "Jesus," Carver gasped.

  There were no windows in the girl's prison. Her respirations were already becoming jerky, agonal. She was asphyxiating.

  "Where is she?"

  A burbling of fluid metamorphosed into crying.

  "Where is she?" Carver shouted.

  The man whimpered. Blood drained from the corners of his mouth. Trembling, he tried to stand, but collapsed again.

  Carver grabbed him by the shirt, lifted him from the ground, and slammed him against the shelves. Blood exploded past the man's lips, hot against Carver's face. "Where is she?"

  The man's head fell forward onto Carver's shoulder.

  "You'll never find her in time," he rasped. The burbling tapered to a hiss as heat streamed down Carver's back, and then finally to nothing at all.

  * * *

  Carver eased down the stairs. They were sticky and made the sound of peeling masking tape each time he lifted a foot. There was no sound from ahead. The only light was a pale stain creeping along the concrete floor at the bottom from beneath a rusted iron door with an X riveted across it.

  Footsteps stampeded behind and above him.

  Carver licked his lips and seated his finger firmly on the trigger. He leaned his shoulder against the door and prepared to grab the handle, but the pressure caused the door to open inward with a squeal of the hinges, allowing more light to spill onto the landing. Cringing against the stench, he shoved the door and ducked into the small chamber, swinging his pistol from left to right.

  Twenty-two hours and twenty-three minutes.

  He had never stood a chance.

  The laptop monitor to his left, balanced on top of a workbench crusted with blood, still showed the image of the girl collapsed on the floor, and the web camera mounted above still faced into the room, but it had all been a ruse.

  Beneath the harsh brass glare, he lowered the Beretta and stepped deeper into the cell. In the middle of the floor where the girl had once been was a stack of body parts, a pyramid of severed appendages built upon her torso, her head balanced precariously on top, facing the doorway. Her lank hair stuck to the blood on her face, eyelids peeled back in an expression of accusation, lips pulped and split over fractured teeth.

  She'd been dead before the monster had even revealed himself to Carver, her agonizing death previously recorded and broadcast after the fact.

  Carver averted his eyes from the carnage as the sounds of voices and pounding treads filled the room.

  A full-length mirror had been recently affixed to the gore-stained gray wall directly ahead. A single word was painted in blood near the top.

  Killer.

  Beneath the word, he stared at his own reflection.

  II

  Sinagua Ruins

  36 Miles Northeast of Flagstaff, Arizona

  Kajika Dodge followed the buzzing sound to a small patch of shade beneath a creosote bush where the diamondback waited for him, testing his scent in darting flicks of its black tongue. It acknowledged the burlap sack at his side, ripening with the limp carcasses of its brethren, with a show of its vibrating rattle.

  No matter. Soon enough it would join them.

  Kajika readjusted his grip on his pinning stick.

  The rattler seized the opportunity and shot diagonally out onto the blazing sand away from him.

  He dropped the bag and with a single practiced stride was in position to drive the forked end of his stick onto the viper's neck when it vanished into a circular hole in the earth.

  Kajika could only stare. A short length of three-inch PVC pipe protruded from the ground. The white plastic was smooth and unscarred, brand new. He wandered through this section of the desert at least once a week. It was a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts, an op
portunity to pay homage to the desert from which his lifeblood had sprung. The pipe was definitely a recent addition, the only manmade interruption in the otherwise smooth sand.

  Why would someone wander out into the middle of the Sonoran, a solid half-mile from the nearest dirt road, only to shove a length of pipe into the ground?

  He crouched and pulled the plastic tube out of the earth. The sand immediately collapsed in its stead. He brushed it away with the prongs of his stick, revealing a shallow system of roots and a warren of darkness beneath.

  The sand slowly slid back into place.

  This was all wrong.

  Wiping the streams of sweat from beneath the thick braid on his neck, he surveyed the landscape of golden desert painted by creosote and sage in choppy green and blue brushstrokes. Beyond rose a rugged backdrop of stratified buttes, red as the blood of his ancestors. Their spirits still inhabited the Sonoran Desert, lingering in the memories of crumbling stone walls and scattered potsherds.

  He lowered his black eyes again to the ground. Those weren't roots. Not six feet from the shrub.

  Turning the stick around, he shoved the duct-taped handle into the nearly invisible hole until it lodged against something solid and levered it upward. A tent of what appeared to be leather-wrapped sticks broke through the sand, smooth and tan.

  His instincts told him to grab his sack and head back to the truck. Forget about the diamondback and the odd length of pipe. His mother had named him Kajika, he who walks without sound, as a constant reminder that there were things in life from which he would be better served to silently slink away.

  But those weren't roots.

  He kicked the sand aside with the toe of his boot, summoning a cloud of dust that clung to his already dirty jeans and flannel shirt, thickening the sweat on his face.

  With a sigh, he unholstered the canteen from his hip and drew a long swig, closing his eyes and reveling in the cool sensation trickling down his throat.

  "Couldn't have left well enough alone," he said aloud, grabbing his bag and stick and heading back toward his truck, where there was a shovel waiting in the cluttered bed.

  No, that wasn't a tangle of roots. Not unless roots could be articulated with joints.

  * * *

  The sun had fallen to the western horizon, bleeding the desert scarlet by the time he climbed back out of the pit. His undershirt was soaked, his flannel draped over a clump of sage. He dragged the back of his hand across his forehead and slapped the sweat to the ground. Strands of long ebon hair had wriggled loose from the braid to cling to his cheeks. Night would descend soon enough, bringing with it the much anticipated chill.

  The rhythmic hooting of an owl drifted from its distant hollow in a cereus cactus.

  Tipping back the canteen, he drained the last of the warm water and cast it aside, unable to wrench his gaze from the decayed old bundle he had exhumed. Tattered fabric bound its contents into an egg shape, a desiccated knee protruding from a frayed tear, exposing the acutely flexed lower extremity he had initially mistaken for roots, the mummified flesh taut over the bones. Even though the rest was still shrouded in an ancient blanket tacky with bodily dissolution, it didn't take a genius to imagine what the leg was attached to.

  "Burnin' daylight," he said at last, sliding back down into the hole.

  He slashed the bundle with the shovel, the sickly-smelling cloth parting easily for the dull blade. The foul breath of decomposition belched from within.

  "Moses in a rowboat," he gasped, tugging his undershirt up over his nose and mouth, biting it to hold it in place.

  Casting the shovel aside, he leaned over the bundle and grasped either side of the torn blanket. He could now clearly see two legs, both bent sharply, pinned side by side.

  The stench of death was nauseating.

  He jerked his hands apart with the sound of ripping worn carpet from a floorboard. The shredded blanket fell away to betray its contents.

  A gaunt face leered back at him, teeth bared from shriveled lips, nose collapsed, eyes hollow, save the concave straps of the dried eyelids. Its long black hair was knotted and tangled, fallen away in patches to expose the brown cranium. It had been folded into tight fetal position, its thighs pinning its crossed arms to its chest. Lengths of rope, hairy with decay, bound the body across the shins and around the back, tied so forcefully the dried skin had peeled away from beneath. There was no muscle left, no adipose tissue. Only leathered skin and knobby bone.

  Kajika was overcome by a sense of reverence. Could this possibly be one of his ancestors? Could the very blood that had crusted and rotted into the fabric and putrid sand now flow through his veins?

  He felt the spirits of the desert all around him, dancing in the precious moment when the moon materialized from the fading stain of the sunset and countless stars winked into being.

  Movement, a mere shift in the shadows, dragged his attention to the corpse a single heartbeat before a wave of diamondbacks poured out of the hollow abdomen where they had recently made their den and washed over his boots.

  III

  Death Valley

  40 km West of Nazca, Peru

  The Nazca Desert stretched away from her to the eastern horizon, rising and falling in rolling dunes, contrasted by the distant blue of the jagged Andes, shrouded by the omnipresent snow clouds. Behind her, lush mangrove forests sheltered the tributaries feeding the Pacific Ocean, green walls of foliage at a standoff against the white sand. Only the occasional mangrove braved the desolation, oases of withering leaves interrupting the ivory perfection. From afar, the desert appeared pristine and untouched, but from where she stood now, her hiking boots ankle-deep in the sand, it became an apocalyptic wasteland. Human bones were scattered everywhere: long femora and humeri, curved segments of rib cages, vacant-eyed skulls, and the pebbles of carpals and tarsals, all bleached and baked by the sun. Many had been gnawed by feral mongrels or provided structure for spider webs and reptile burrows, though even more were broken and trampled puzzle pieces, never again to be assembled. The ancient skeletons had been unceremoniously disinterred and cast aside by marauding groups of huaqueros, grave robbers pillaging their own heritage for the most prized possessions of the dead.

  Elliot turned away with a sad smile, imagining artifacts of incalculable archeological value being pawned for next to nothing, and slid down the slope to her dig where the team of graduate students crouched inside the rebar- and rope-cordoned grids, excavating the ground in centimeter levels. So far they had already unearthed three intact Inca mummy bundles against the odds. The huaqueros had a sixth sense for buried gold and were as thorough as they were destructive. She had something of a gift herself, though. If there were a mummy to be found, Dr. Elliot Archer would find it. There was little scientific method to the search. She simply closed her eyes and tried to envision the world as it was more than a thousand years prior, constructing the scene detail by detail until she felt as though she were really there.

  She tucked a stray shock of raven-black hair beneath her Steelers ball cap, the fabric long since faded to a weathered brown, and tugged the curved bill low to shield her eyes, blue as the placid heart of a tropical sea. Exhausted faces acknowledged her as she passed, using the distraction to stretch the kinks from their backs and legs before once again resuming their tasks of removing the earth from the grids, sifting it through wire mesh, and meticulously cataloging everything larger than the fine desert sand. The sun was only beginning its ascent and they were already covered with a thick skin of dirt with only a handful of teeth, corn kernels, and bits of charcoal to show for it.

  "Let me know when you reach China," she said in an effort to combat the looks of disappointment on their faces, eliciting a few smiles but not a single weary chuckle. Theirs was a generation accustomed to acquiring anything in the world with a single click of the mouse, the simple lessons of patience harder learned. She was less than a decade older than most of them, but the generational gap seemed to grow by the year. At least t
here was that moment of silence in her passage before the sound of scraping trowels and sifting resumed, reassuring her that the gap hadn't grown too wide, at least not from behind.

  There were six khaki tents past the site, three to either side of a path trampled into the sand. The three mummies were housed in the first on the left, still bundled in fetal position within layers of hand-woven blankets that had assumed the fluids from the dead and hardened over time. She heard the thrum of the generator powering the portable x-ray setup from the tent to her right where the radiographer was presumably preparing to begin taking films of the bundles. Attempting to unwrap the mummies would destroy them. Using x-rays allowed them to visualize not only the body, but the valuables and various bowls of corn, grains, and charcoal hidden inside. Preserving the integrity of their discoveries also helped maintain the often strained relationship with the Peruvian government, which frowned upon the rape of its heritage, at least by foreigners. The tent beyond was draped with tarps and served as the darkroom, the scent of chemicals seeping out on toxic fumes. The remaining tents to the left were larger and functioned as housing, sleeping the unpaid labor in matchstick fashion, while she shared the final tent on the right, which also acted as their satellite communication center, with her fellow professors, Dr. Abe Montgomery from the University of Texas and Dr. Eldon Wilton from Vanderbilt. As she approached, Dr. Montgomery threw back the flap.

  "Ah, Elliot," he said, his eyes brightening when he saw her. He reminded her of Santa Claus on Jenny Craig, an affable bear of a man who radiated the wonder of a child. "I was about to come looking for you. We just received a very interesting call on the satellite phone, followed by an equally intriguing email."