Thunderhead

by Douglas Preston

* * *

  AS JOHN BEIYOODZIN URGED HIS HORSE down the trail into the valley of Chilbah, his heart quickly sank. From the first switchback, he could make out the expedition’s horses; the remuda was watering at the stream. The tiny creek meandered down the center of a great flood-plain, torn and guttered, scattered with boulders and tree trunks. He glanced upward anxiously, but the thunderhead was now out of sight, hidden behind the fin of rock.

  He knew only too well that this valley was a bottleneck for the vast watershed of the Kaiparowits. The flood, coming down the miles off the Kaiparowits Plateau, would gradually coalesce as the canyons came together in the upper reaches of the Chilbah Valley. It was all uninhabited, from the Kaiparowits to the Colorado River—except for the archaeologists in the valley beyond, which lay directly in the path of the water.

  He looked to his right, where the valley broke up into a series of canyons and dry washes. The water coming off the Kaiparowits Plateau would enter the Chilbah Valley through these circuitous, twisting canyons. It would then race through the lower valley in one overwhelming mass. It would be colossal, covering the entire floodplain and probably tearing into the banks. If the horses weren’t moved well out of the plain and up into the high benchlands on either side of the valley, they would be swept away. Many of his people’s horses had died in flash floods. It was a terrible thing. And if there were people on the floodplain of the valley beyond—or, even worse, in the slot canyon that connected the two valleys . . .

  He urged his horse into a plunging lope down the rubbled trail. He just might have time to reach the horses and scare them up to higher ground.

  Within five minutes he had reached the bottom, his horse heaving and slick. He let the animal drink at the creek, all the while listening up the valley with a keen ear for the sound he knew only too well: the peculiar vibration that signaled a flash flood.

  Out of sight of the thunderhead, the horse was calmer, and he drank deeply. When he had slaked his thirst, Beiyoodzin steered the animal across the floodplain, then urged him up the steep banks. Once up in the rocky benchlands well away from the stream, he kicked the buckskin into a lope, then a hand gallop. As long as they stayed on the high ground, they would be safe.

  As he galloped, winding among huge boulders and outcrops of rock, Beiyoodzin’s thoughts returned to the people in the second, smaller valley beyond. He wondered if they would hear the flood coming. He knew there was some benchland on either side of the creek, and he hoped the people had known enough to pitch their camp up there. The woman, Nora, had seemed to know a little about the ways of the desert. They could survive if they were smart—and if they heeded the warnings.

  Suddenly, he reined his horse to a violent stop. As the flurry of sand subsided around them, Beiyoodzin remained still, listening intently.

  It was coming. So far, it was only a vibration in the ground, an unsettling tingle in his bones. But it was unmistakable.

  He clicked his tongue and urged the horse forward. At a dead run, the buckskin flashed across the sandy ground, leaping rocks and bushes, dodging cottonwoods, racing toward the grazing horses. Now, he could hear the ugly sound rising up in the valley, even over the noise of his own galloping horse. It was a sound without direction, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once, climbing quickly in pitch from the subsonic to a shriek. Along with it came a wind that started as a gentle breeze and quickly gained strength, shivering the leaves of the cottonwoods.

  Again in his mind’s eye he saw a world out of balance. Sixteen years ago, it had seemed a small, harmless thing indeed. Ignore it, everyone had said. If these were to be the consequence of that action, they were terrible consequences indeed.

  He reached the edge of the benchland. Below, in the floodplain, he could see the expedition’s horses. They had stopped grazing now and were standing alert, their ears pricked up, staring upstream. But it was already too late to save them. To ride down into the floodplain now would be suicide. He shouted and waved his hat; but his voice did not carry above the growing roar, and the herd’s attention was elsewhere.

  The ground trembled. As the noise continued to intensify, Beiyoodzin became unable to separate the terrified whinnies of his own horse from the scream of the coming water. He looked upstream, into the maw of an even stronger wind that thrashed at the salt cedars and pressed the willows almost horizontal to the ground.

  Then he saw it come around the bend: a vertical wall twenty feet high, moving with the speed of a freight train, driving the howling wind before it.

  But it was not a wall of water. Instead, Beiyoodzin beheld a seething rampart of tree trunks, roots, boulders, and boiling dirt; a huge churning mass, pushed ahead by the flood at eighty miles an hour. He struggled to control his horse.

  The horses below wheeled in hopeless fright and ran. As Beiyoodzin watched—in a mixture of amazement, horror, and fearful reverence—the monstrous wall bore down on them relentlessly. In rapid succession the animals were struck and blown apart, turned inside out like the abrupt blossoming of a rose, the ropy eruptions of scarlet, chunks of meat, and shattered legs disappearing into the roiling mass of logs and boulders.

  Piled behind the murderous wall of debris came the great engine of its momentum: a tidal wave of chocolate-colored water two hundred yards wide, boiling from benchland to benchland in a flow that for the moment was greater than the Colorado River itself. It blasted a path through the valley, leaping into haystacks of water and standing waves ten feet high. The flood ripped at the edges of the plain like a chainsaw, tearing out hundred-ton chunks of earth and sucking away cottonwood trees. At the same time, Beiyoodzin felt a wave of intense humidity pass over him. The air grew suddenly pregnant with the rich scent of wet earth and lacerated vegetation. Despite his distance, he instinctively backed up his horse as the walls of the benchland began caving in before him.

  From still higher ground, he stared down at the humped and gnarled backside of the tidal wave as it thundered down the valley toward the dark slot canyon in the far rock face. As the flood struck the opening of the slot, he felt the brutal crash ripple beneath his feet. An enormous shockwave shuddered backward through the torrent, momentarily stopping the forward motion of the flood, atomizing the water. A vast curtain of brown spume erupted along the rock face, rising several hundred feet up the cliffs with terrifying speed before gradually falling back.

  Now the torrent settled into a new pattern. The floodwaters continued to pile up against the slot canyon, forcing their way in, creating an instant lake: a huge, angry maelstrom of water boiling at the canyon’s mouth. Man-sized splinters of wood were thrown from the water as the swirling trees were torn apart by the violent pressure.

  Another huge piece of benchland caved in before him. Shaking, Beiyoodzin turned his horse from the appalling scene and headed in the direction of the old Priest’s Trail: the back door into the valley of Quivira. It had been too late to save the horses. And now he wondered if anyone—including himself—would get out of Chilbah Valley alive.

  49

  * * *

  WITH THE HELP OF ARAGON AND SMITHBACK, Nora tied off the ripped covering around Holroyd’s body bag and lashed it to the pole. Then she stood back, wiping her brow with the back of her hand. Although she knew it had to be done, she was reluctant to begin the awkward, arduous, depressing task of lugging Holroyd’s body, along with several drysacks full of gear, out to where the packhorses waited.

  She looked up, scanning the canyon ahead. On the far side of the pool and well above her head was the massive cottonwood trunk. Beyond was a steep climb to the next pool; it was going to be hell, she knew, to get across it. The rising wind blew a strand of hair across her face, which she unconsciously tucked back behind her ear. She took a deep breath, knelt, and grasped one end of the pole.

  Then she froze. There was another breath of wind on her cheek, stronger this time. Along with it came the sudden, strangely pleasant scent of crushed vegetation.

  Fear sent blood surging in her ears. T
he wind was accelerating with an almost machinelike precision, very different from a natural, intermittent breeze. Even as she paused it became stronger.

  “Flash flood,” she said.

  “Yeah?” The sky overhead was calm and blue; Smithback’s tone was curious, not worried. “How can you tell?”

  But Nora didn’t hear him. Her mind was calculating furiously. They were at least a quarter mile into the slot canyon. There was no way to get out in time. Their only chance was to climb, to get above the level of the flood.

  Quickly, she pointed up toward the cavity in the rock where Holroyd’s corpse had been stored. “Drop the body,” she said urgently, “drop everything. Let’s go!”

  Smithback began to protest. “We can’t just—”

  “Move!” Aragon said urgently, releasing the other end of the pole. The body slid into the pool, turning lazily. Nora began thrashing through the water downstream, toward the spot where the ledge angled upward to the small cave.

  “Where are you going?” Smithback called, disbelief strong in his voice. “Shouldn’t we be heading the other way?”

  “No time!” she cried. “Come on, hurry! Hurry!”

  Beneath the driving wind, Nora could now hear a faint noise: a low-frequency sound, deep and menacing. The calm pools of water in the stream broke into a dancing chop. The hastily abandoned drysacks began to bob and roll wildly.

  She floundered across the pool, breath coming in sobs. The wind grew, and grew, and then there was a painful pop in her ears: a drastic change in air pressure. She looked back at Smithback and Aragon, wet and bedraggled, and tried to scream at them to hurry. Her voice was drowned by a vast, distorted roar that washed through the slot canyon, popping her ears a second time.

  In its wake came an intense silence. The wind had suddenly dropped.

  She hesitated, confused, her ears straining to catch every nuance of sound. From what seemed to be a vast distance, she could make out clatterings and crunchings, strangely distinct despite their remoteness. She whirled toward the ledge again, realizing she was hearing the sound of boulders and logs jamming into the stone slot, ricocheting off the narrow canyon walls on their way toward them. As she ran, a fresh wind rose to a screaming pitch, tearing shreds of water from the surface of the stream. The flood, she knew, would first turn the slot canyon into a wind tunnel.

  She thrashed forward. The sound in the canyon grew to a terrible howl, and the ever-rising hurricane of wind tore at their backs. We’re not going to make it, Nora thought. She glanced back and saw that Aragon had fallen behind. She held out her hands to him, urging him on, screaming words that had no sound over the blast.

  Suddenly a boulder came down the canyon from behind them, bounding between the rock walls with thunderous booms, roaring over their heads with horrifying speed. Another, even larger, followed in its wake, propelled ahead of the water by a stochastic amplification of momentum. It hit the jammed cottonwood trunk with a shattering force and continued downcanyon, leaving behind the smell of smoke and crushed stone.

  Gasping and coughing, Nora reached the ledge and grasped it with both hands, pulling herself out of the water. She scrambled up the rock, trying to maintain her purchase on the slippery ledge. The air had grown full of pulverized water, which lashed at them mercilessly. She hugged the rockface in an effort to keep the wind from plucking her off.

  An advance guard of water blasted through the canyon just below them, and the light above dimmed. Events were happening so quickly—the day had grown so suddenly, completely violent—for a moment it seemed to Nora that she was locked in some terrible dream. She could barely make out Aragon’s form below her, struggling up the ledge.

  A second tongue of twisting water came racing past below them, almost sucking Aragon from the canyon wall. Pausing in his climb, Smithback reached back, grabbed Aragon’s shirt, and hauled him upward. As Nora watched from above, powerless to help, another surge grabbed at Aragon’s leg. Over the cry of the flood, she thought she heard the man scream: a strange, hollow, despairing sound.

  Smithback lunged for a better hold as Aragon was dragged from the ledge, dangling into space. A passing rock smacked into Aragon, spinning him around; there was a soundless parting of fabric and Smithback fell back against the cliff, a tattered remnant of Aragon’s collar in his hand. A furious gust of wind buoyed Aragon above the dancing rocks, whirling him downstream. Caught by another packet of water, his body was slammed into the canyon wall and dragged across it like cheese across a grater. In his wake, gobbets of red lay scraped across dark rock, vanishing quickly, like Aragon himself, into the boiling spume.

  Choking back a sob, Nora turned and grabbed the next handhold, hoisted herself up, then reached for the next. Higher, she thought. Higher. Behind her, Smithback was coming up fast. She scrambled, slid back, regained her footing, then fell again, the wind tearing her from the rock. As she slid away, Smithback’s arm wrapped itself around her, and she felt herself pulled up the narrow ledge, closer and closer to the cavity in the rock.

  And then, at last, the main body of the flood came: a huge shadow, looming far above them, a wedge of darkness shutting out the last of the light; a foaming spasm of air, water, mud, rock, and brutalized wood, pushing before it a wind of tornadolike intensity. Nora felt Smithback lose his grip briefly, then regain it. As he jammed her into the cavity, forcing himself in after her, there was a sudden fusillade of sound as countless small rocks scoured the walls of the canyon. She felt Smithback go rigid, heard the wet hollow thumps as the rocks glanced off his back.

  Then the beast descended, wrapping them inside an endless, black, suffocating roar. The noise went on, and on, and on, the roar and vibration so loud that Nora felt she was losing her sanity. Rolled into a protective ball, she squeezed her arms tighter around herself and prayed for the shaking to stop. Jets of water forced their way into the cavity around her, battering her shoulders, pulling at her limbs as if trying to suck her out of the refuge.

  In a remote corner of her mind, it seemed strange that it was taking so long to die. She tried to breathe, but the oxygen seemed to have been sucked out of the air. She felt the iron grip of Smithback’s arms relax with a horrifying twitch. She tried to breathe again, hiccupped, choked, tried to scream—and then the world folded in on itself and she lost consciousness.

  50

  * * *

  BLACK SAT ON THE RETAINING WALL, BREATHING heavily. The four expedition members remaining in camp had all taken several trips up into Quivira, lugging the unnecessary gear into the empty caching room they had chosen in a remote part of the city. There—with any luck—it would remain hidden, dry and free from animals until they returned.

  Until they returned.... Black found himself sweating profusely. He licked his lips, staring at the blue sky above the canyon rim. Maybe nothing would happen. Maybe it would happen someplace else.

  One at a time, Sloane, Swire, and Bonarotti emerged from the darkness of the city and joined Black at the retaining wall. Bonarotti removed a canteen and wordlessly passed it around. Automatically, Black took a drink, tasting nothing. His eyes roved over what remained of the camp: the tents, already broken down and ready to be carried out; the neat row of drysacks beside them; the small pile of equipment that still had to be lugged up to the cache site . . .

  It was then that he heard something. Or perhaps he felt it, he wasn’t exactly sure: a strange movement of the air, almost a vibration. His heart began to race, and he looked toward Sloane. She was staring out into the valley. Aware of his gaze, she glanced toward him for a moment, then rose to her feet.

  “Did you hear something?” she asked nobody in particular. Handing the canteen back to Bonarotti, she moved toward the edge of the cliff, followed by Swire. A moment later, Black came up behind.

  The valley below still looked pastoral: somnolent in the heat, drenched in late morning sunlight. But the vibration, like a deep motor coming to life, seemed to fill the air. The leaves of the cottonwoods began to dance.
/>
  Bonarotti came up beside him. “What is it?” he asked, looking around curiously.

  Black didn’t answer. Two emotions were warring inside him: terror and a breathless, almost nauseating excitement. There was now a rising wind coming from the mouth of the slot canyon: he could make out the saltbushes at its fringe, gyrating as if possessed. Then the canyon emitted a long, distorted, booming screech that grew louder, then still louder. It must be in the canyon now, thought Black. There was a buzzing sound, but he wasn’t sure if it was coming from the valley or inside his head.

  He glanced at the company ranged beside him. They were all staring toward the mouth of the slot canyon. On Swire’s face, puzzlement gave way first to dawning understanding, then horror.

  “Flash flood,” said the wrangler. “My God, they’re in the canyon . . .” He broke for the ladder.

  Black held his breath. He thought he knew what was coming; he felt that he was prepared for anything. And yet he was totally unprepared for the spectacle that followed.

  With a basso profundo groan, the slot canyon belched forth a mass of boulders and splintered tree trunks—hundreds of them—which burst from the narrow crevice and came spinning down to earth. Then, with the swelling roar of a beast opening its maw, the slot vomited forth a liquid mass—chocolate-brown water, mingled with ropes of viscous red. It coalesced into a rippling wall that fell in thunder against the scree slope, sending up secondary spouts and smoking plumes. It tore down the floodplain, smoking along the banks, ripping away chunks of the slope and even peeling off pieces of the canyon wall in the extremity of its violence. For a moment Black thought, with horror, that it would actually surmount the steep banks on either side of the plain and take away their camp. But instead it worried, chewed, and ate away at the stone edges of the benchland, its fury contained but made all the more violent. Near the bank of cottonwoods, he could make out Swire, shielding his face with his arms, beaten back toward camp by the fury of the blast.