The Return

by Bentley Little

  Looking south of the city, toward Socorro in the flat basin adjoining the Rio Grande, he saw a tornado. Not just a big dust devil, but an honest-to-God tornado, the sort of huge destructive cyclone he'd seen before only in news footage. It looked to be over a mile wide, and as he watched, it hit the river and temporarily turned into a water spout.

  Everything he'd feared was coming to pass, the wholesale disappearances, the natural disasters. Pace had known this would happen, but he hadn't known exactly how. He still didn't know. To his mind, this all seemed random, haphazard, not the sort of orderly destruction he'd envisioned.

  He had Glen and Melanie's cell phone number--he'd seen it in his wallet when he was inventorying the wallet's contents in the well--and he found a pay phone, took out his Sprint card, and tried to make the call, but couldn't even get a dial tone. He tried three other phones. Same thing. The lines were down, he thought. He considered finding a store and buying a cell phone, but no stores seemed to be open, and he was not quite up for stealing.

  Not yet.

  It was getting late. Soon it would be dusk, then soon it would be dark, and he didn't want to be out in the city when the sun went down. He found an Enterprise car rental office nearby. No one was there, but the door was open, and though he felt guilty as hell, he grabbed a set of keys from behind the counter. He considered leaving his Visa number, but someone other than the rental car company might get it, so he just wrote down the make, model, and license number of the car he was taking, wrote down his phone number and address at Chaco, left it on top of the desk behind the counter and took off.

  It was like traveling through a nightmare version of New Mexico. The sky was a charcoal ceiling. Snow fell concurrently with rain, and the highway was littered with abandoned vehicles. By the side of the road, he saw coyotes and mule deer with twisted necks and loping gaits and terrible smiles, and, farther back in the desert, bands of raggedly attired people with the same afflictions.

  A trip that should have taken him two hours took four, and when he finally got to Chaco, there was chaos. The visitor's center was closed, but most of the rangers were still onsite, and the ones who weren't holed up in their cabins were together in the workroom where a sculpture of bones reached all the way to the ceiling.

  "Thank God you're back," Steve said when he walked in. "I don't know what the hell's going on here, but it's right up your alley."

  Behind him, Jill Kittrick started crying. "I looked for you in your Forbidden Zone," she told Pace. "And I was attacked! Every time I tried to walk into that damn storehouse, something threw sand in my eyes! Then when I finally got in, it . . . it . . ." She gestured toward her crotch, started crying harder.

  "We were just going to start tearing that thing apart," Steve said, gesturing toward the bone sculpture.

  Pace saw that Miltos and Scott both had pickaxes in hand. "That might not be such a good idea," he said.

  "What do you suggest, then?"

  Pace shrugged.

  Steven threw up his hands. "What is happening here?"

  "It's not just here."

  Pace gathered everyone together in the visitor's center auditorium, even the rangers from the cabins, and tried to calm them down. He started from the beginning and left nothing out, from Al's earliest original theory to his own hellish experience at Christensen Divine's and in Albuquerque. These were smart people from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, and he hoped that they'd be able to come at this from a new angle, to see things he had overlooked.

  They were quiet when he finished, and then the room erupted. There were a few holdouts, literal-minded rangers unable to make the leap, but enough had happened at the park in the past twenty-four hours that the majority understood instantly that he was telling the truth.

  They needed to do whatever they could to protect themselves here, but first he had to call Glen and Melanie. He ducked out quickly while debates were still raging. The telephone lines, thankfully, were still up, and he dialed from his office. Melanie answered her cell phone on the first ring, and he told her that he had found the skull, then went on to describe his adventures since they'd parted.

  "It seems clear now that we're not just dealing with a creature," he said. "There's more than one."

  "We think so, too."

  "There was probably a tribe. I don't know how many are left, but they've been resurrected and they're not just putting their toes in the water anymore. Albuquerque is like a war zone. I didn't see any of the creatures themselves, but I saw their handiwork."

  "We've seen it on the news," she told him. "Denver, too."

  "Denver?"

  "Yes."

  "Jesus. What about Phoenix?"

  "Nothing here. Yet. But Bower, my home, where Al had his dig? It's gone. The entire town has disappeared. We flew over it in a helicopter, and the land's just been wiped clean."

  "There's nothing left at all?"

  "Well, it stops at the town limits. There's a diner right past the edge of town that hasn't vanished. The feds are using it as a staging area."

  Pace was at a loss for what to say. God, he wished Al was here. From the auditorium, he heard loud, angry, scared voices. "I have some fears to calm," he said. "A bone sculpture suddenly appeared in our workroom this morning, and a lot of other things have been going on that I haven't had time to sort out yet. I don't know if we're under attack or just receiving fallout, but I need to be here right now."

  "I understand," Melanie told him. "Stay by the phone, though."

  "Why?"

  "Because," she said, "I have the feeling we're going to need you."

  3

  It was impossible to sleep.

  Glen lay next to Melanie on the high soft bed in the McCormacks' guest room, listening to the sounds of the desert night through the open window. He would have preferred a television, but the guest room didn't have one, and instead of celebrity chatter and laugh tracks, he heard insect clicking and bird cawing and the far-off howl of coyotes.

  Melanie stirred.

  "Are you awake?" he asked.

  "Yes."

  He rolled onto his side, facing her. After returning from Bower, they had untied and unwrapped the mummy, and McCormack and Vince had driven it to ASU, where an entire team was studying it. In the split second they had removed the duct tape and pulled open the tarp to reveal the creature's face, he had again seen his mother, and this time he had told Melanie, though he had not shared that information with anyone else.

  "There seems to be a pattern," Glen said. "First the animals, then the disappearances. But with me it's . . . personal." He looked at her. "You know what I mean? All this destruction is happening, and yet I'm seeing my dead mother. It's like the monster is picking on me specifically for some reason, trying to . . . torture me, I guess, although I can't figure out why."

  "It doesn't go away," Melanie said softly. "It never goes away."

  He wasn't sure if she was talking about his hurt or her own. Maybe it was the past in general to which she was referring.

  "It's personal with me, too," she said. "Don't forget, it was my face on that jar and my parents' house on that pottery shard."

  "Why, though?"

  "Maybe Cameron's right, maybe something is trying to split us up. Maybe we have been chosen and we're stronger together than we are apart, and it's doing this to ensure its survival."

  "There's one thing that bothers me, that's been bothering me for a long time--"

  Melanie smiled. "Only one thing?"

  "Well, one thing in particular. In that church in New Mexico, where we saw the paintings--"

  "I know what you're going to say."

  "Only me and the boy were fighting that creature at the end. You weren't there. No one else was there."

  "I know. And I've been thinking about that."

  "What have you been thinking?"

  "Those paintings were not part of a prophesy. They weren't telling us what would happen, or even what might happen, but what should happen. T
hat last panel was a prescription, direction for what we needed to do if the events in the preceding panels came to pass--which they have. I don't know who might have painted those pictures, but I'm pretty sure I know why, and I think we need to pay attention. Which means that whatever happens, when the endgame arrives, it's you and Cameron. The rest of us need to step aside."

  "So where does that leave us?" Glen asked. "How do we get from here to there?"

  Melanie sat up. "We have to find out where 'there' is. We've been reacting instead of acting, running around after each incident, trying to figure out what happened after the fact. We need to take it to them. We need to find out where these things live and go there."

  He nodded. "The problem is, the last time this happened was so long ago. It's almost impossible to piece anything together from the existing fragments."

  "We're getting closer, though. Enough has happened recently that we're starting to zero in. That train tunnel they explored, with the artifacts? That's good. That's close."

  "And when I go there, I'll no doubt see my dead mother."

  "You can't escape the past," Melanie said. "It's always with us. It's what the present is built upon. In personal lives and in the histories of entire peoples. No matter how many generations of schoolkids are taught that brave settlers from thirteen small colonies on the East Coast tamed this wild land, that governor's mansion in Santa Fe says otherwise. It's there as a living monument to a defeated culture, and it's not going anywhere."

  She paused, looked over at him. "It's not going anywhere," she repeated.

  "What are you getting at?"

  "It's still here," she said wonderingly. "Under the layers, like the original surface of a house beneath coat after coat of paint. In Bower, we built the town on top of an old pueblo, right? Well, maybe they built their pueblo on top of an even older civilization, one that wasn't human."

  "I understand that much. But what are--?"

  "I don't know, not exactly, but maybe there's a . . . a governor's mansion, something right under our noses that we're seeing but not seeing."

  He nodded. "A living monument, like you said."

  "Yes! Emphasis on the living. You know, that's what we've failed to take into account. We've been looking at Anasazi sites and artifacts, assuming anything older than that is gone, that there's nothing remaining of anything prior. But if we're right, these beings were here before the Anasazi and they're still here now. They've always been here. And there's probably evidence of it right before us. Like William Faulkner said about the South: 'the past isn't dead, it isn't even past." '

  Melanie was right, they were getting closer. But what were they to do once they got "there"? If that final panel really was a prescription for action, it certainly didn't tell them much. God damn, he wished they'd picked up their developed photos. There were probably subtleties and intricacies in the paintings that he hadn't seen or had forgotten and that were probably the key to everything.

  As far as he recalled, the last scene had taken place in a cave or a dark room with a weird wheel on the wall, a wheel covered with all sorts of symbols that for some reason made him think of the sun. He and Cameron were both there, and they were winning, the afro-haired figure was screaming. But what were the burning ropes, the cables they were carrying that had lightning coming out of the ends?

  The . . . cables.

  Electrical cables.

  Yes! It was the only explanation that made sense. The creatures were afraid of electricity.

  He told this to Melanie, and she, too, was excited. "Yes!" she said. Everything was coming together. Before the disappearance of the Anasazi, there'd been a prolonged drought. No rain. No lightning. No electricity. That was why those creatures had been able to do so much damage. Electricity was everywhere now, but the modern world, with its self-generated power tamed and contained, was a much more hospitable and predictable place than the wild world of old. They were still afraid of it, though, which was why they appeared in ancient ruins and in the wilds. It explained why there'd been no incidents with the mummy at Nate Stewky's roadside museum. That had been too close to the Holbrook power plant.

  Glen wanted to wake up McCormack and Vince right now and tell them, call Pace on the phone and let him know, but she convinced him to wait until morning. McCormack, Vince, and Pace needed their sleep. They needed their sleep.

  But they were both too wound up to sleep.

  Glen thought about the mummy they'd found and Cameron's Polaroid and the dream he'd had of his mother. He imagined Anasazi warriors manning the battlements of a well-fortified pueblo while a horde of orange-haired monsters descended upon them.

  God or devil.

  How had the creatures been vanquished the first time? A prolonged lightning storm of biblical proportions? That didn't make any sense. Electricity could not have killed them all.

  They hadn't been vanquished.

  They'd used up their food supply.

  Glen suddenly felt sick. That was it. The Anasazi, and perhaps the Incas and Mayans and all of the others, were cattle to be herded and slaughtered, allowed to be fruitful and multiply and then cut down when their numbers reached the target goal. He thought of the disparate artifacts Melanie and the rest of them had found in Bower before his arrival, the objects from around the world McCormack and Vince had discovered in the train tunnel. These beings had followed the food supply, leaving vanished civilizations behind. But unlike those other cultures, the Anasazi had fought back. They'd captured some of the monsters and beheaded them, come up with a ritual to either banish or destroy them, and it had been enough to damage the creatures for hundreds of years. They'd come out to forage only infrequently in the subsequent centuries and became the stuff of legend.

  He told this to Melanie, and she nodded soberly. "Food. It makes sense. But . . ."

  "But what?"

  "But there's not really any evidence of people being eaten. Then or now. Like Al said, there's evidence of cannibalism between tribes, but no indication that these creatures ate or eat people. I'm thinking that they don't use people for food, they use us for . . . fuel."

  "Same difference."

  "Maybe. But these are beings that can create vortexes and animate stone tools, make line drawings move on pieces of pottery, wipe entire towns off the map. I don't think they eat the way we do, and I don't think their basic needs are the same. I think you're right in that they need to kill humans or draw them into their vortexes, and I'd be willing to bet that they made those tribes turn cannibal, but it seems more likely to me that it's for some reason we don't understand."

  "Maybe the Anasazi figured it out, though. Whatever rituals they performed, separating the heads and the bodies and all that, they worked."

  "I don't think it was rituals."

  "What then?"

  "Since we're taking big leaps: dirt."

  Glen raised his eyebrows. "Dirt?"

  "Cameron's dilithium crystals made me think of it. It's true that excavating the skull and these other objects seemed to trigger everything afterward. But why? What was the difference between those things being buried and being unearthed?"

  "Dirt."

  "Dirt," Melanie said. The way I look at it, it's kept the power of those skulls and bones contained for hundreds of years. That tomb under Ricky's house? The trouble didn't start until it was exposed to open air. Same thing with the skull you found. That's why the buildings at Chaco Canyon were all sealed up. You're right, they did know. At least the people left at the end knew, and whether they sealed in one of the creatures or sealed themselves in from it, it worked."

  "It can't be that simple. I mean, these things made Bower disappear. Entirely. The people, the buildings, the trees, everything. And now Albuquerque and Denver are falling apart. Phoenix and Tucson will be next. Who knows what, after that. Do you really think if we just throw a little dirt on these guys, it will all stop?"

  "Why not? You can stop a serial killer with a bullet. My great-grandfather murdered who knows ho
w many people all total. And all of that evil was stopped by a single slug of metal no bigger than my thumb. Who's to say this doesn't work the same way? Why does it have to be some elaborate ceremony or arcane ritual that stops these things? Why can't it be something simple?"

  "I guess it can. It's just--"

  A piercing scream erupted from down the hall, a woman's scream, followed immediately by a man's rough cry.

  Alyssa. And McCormack.

  Glen threw off the covers, sped out of the guest room and down the wide hallway, Melanie immediately behind him. The professor and his wife, both in underwear, were already in the hall. Alyssa was running toward the living room. McCormack was flattened against the opposite wall, moving carefully sideways in order to see into a corner of the bedroom. Vince and Cameron, who'd been sleeping in one of the other guest rooms, rushed out, pulling on shirts, the boy's face frozen in an expression of panic.

  "What is it?" Glen demanded. "What happened?"

  Seeing that everyone was all right, Melanie had run back into their room and emerged wearing a nightshirt. In her hand was a flimsy blue robe which she brought out to Alyssa in the living room.

  McCormack did not yet trust himself to speak, simply pointing into the master bedroom. Warily, Glen and Vince peeked around the edge of the door frame.

  The mummy.

  It was back.

  The blackened figure stood next to the nightstand on the right side of the bed, its fierce rudimentary facial features mercifully shrouded by the darkness of the room, its wild orange hair illuminated by the soft light from the hallway and looking like the penumbra around an eclipsed sun.

  Instinctively, Glen looked toward the window, then glanced down the hallway toward the living room, where he could see that the front door of the house was closed. He needed to check, though he'd known already that the mummy hadn't climbed through the window or walked through the door. If it had been able to get out of the locked lab at ASU and travel ten miles to the professor's home, it did not need to use conventional entrances.