by Chuck Dixon
Jimbo was working behind her to scoop loose earth and gravel into a bucket. He played the dirt through his fingers, and there were roughly-rounded pebbles of irregular sizes left when the dust fell away. He crawled backward and followed the trench outside. Faint sunlight was just showing over the mesa top.
He pulled off his NODs array and looked at the pebbles rattling in his hand. They cast off a soft yellowish hue. They had holes drilled through them so they could be strung as beads. Dwayne rose from where he was sharing cold coffee and power bars with Chaz and Morris.
“What you got there?” He looked down into Jimbo’s palm.
“What’s it look like to you?” Jimbo grinned. “Pay dirt.”
From inside the cave came a whoop followed by Caroline’s voice.
“You’re going to want to see this!”
The Rangers and Morris jammed themselves into the narrow passage to the rear of the cave where Caroline sat grinning and holding a glow stick against the crudely sculpted face of undeniable ugliness glowing dully with the satin sheen of solid gold.
9
Excavations
They kept to the shade of their camouflaged covers throughout the day. Chaz and Jimbo made a run back to the trucks before the sun was too high. They brought back water jugs. They’d stay cool and hydrated and out of sight until nightfall. Caroline argued for continuing the excavation.
“We need the rest,” Dwayne said. “The gold’s been there all this time. It’s not going anywhere.”
“We haven’t seen any activity at the compound,” she said. “There’s no one there, and there’s not going to be. Besides, isn’t it true, the longer we’re here, the greater the risk we might be discovered?”
“You want to take a vote? The Rangers will vote with me. And, if he had the balls, your big brother would agree with me, too.”
The Rangers bedded down and were soon asleep. Caroline fidgeted. Her body hummed with the need to uncover the statue and the rest and get out of here. She was achy from the work within the tight space of the cave. Muscles that Pilates forgot to address hurt, and Advil could not reach the burning in her legs and shoulders.
She lay alternately wishing for a shower and thinking about the gold they found within the cave. Seeing the yellow metal again brought questions to mind. The hominids who held her captive in the past were not metal workers of any kind. Their spear blades were of chipped stone as were their knives. The gold was soft and malleable and melted at a relatively low temperature. Even as technologically primitive a species as the tribe that once called this valley home could fashion simple objects from gold by hammering the soft metal into shapes. But where had they found the gold? Did they pan for it? That seemed highly unlikely. They certainly didn’t mine it by digging for it. And there were no signs that they had the wherewithal or industrious nature to refine the gold in the amounts to be found in the cave.
Most of the artifacts they found were just hammered lumps fashioned into crude plates or the hideous fertility statue. But a few were more finished pieces like medallions stamped with stylized pictographs of deer and fish. That meant someone who could work harder metals to make a press.
What was the source then? Could there have been other hominids or protohumans present in that era? Maybe there were a more advanced Neolithic people or even a settlement of homo sapiens present in North America long before archeologists believed there to be such inhabitants. The man-eating creatures she so disastrously discovered were not supposed to be here either.
Along with her swirling thoughts, the heat wasn’t helping her get comfortable and nor were the flies. After what seemed like hours of sweating and scratching and changing positions, she finally dropped off only to be startled awake by engine noise.
She sat up. Morris lay still sound asleep by her. A figure was low by the tent opening, silhouetted in the sunlight coming through the cover. It was Dwayne Roenbach crouched by the cover opening and squinting out through a narrow gap into the sunlight.
“A helicopter,” he said. “It buzzed the compound site and banked around to the south. Probably en route to Vegas.”
“Not looking for us?” she said.
“Not sure,” Dwayne said. “Could be surveyors like Chaz and I pretended to be. Or a routine flyover by Gallant.”
“For what reason?”
“Like I’d know? This Sir Neal character is one big question mark, isn’t he? But from here, we turn up our awareness factors. Eyes open. Ears open.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?” Caroline said.
“Maybe when I was a baby,” Dwayne said, smiling. “Can’t remember.”
The chopper’s noise died away to nothing, and he parted the opening and slipped into the light.
She didn’t get to ask him what he’d been doing in her tent in the first place.
They worked all through that night and entirely uncovered the fertility statue, along with a pile of other gold pieces in the form of plates, rough bars, talismans, and beads. Those were found packed in a loose mix of sand and ash under the hard layer of compacted shell. They were able to use their hands to brush away the grit and fill the buckets with the dull yellow pieces. The pile of gold artifacts was deep, deeper than Caroline recalled. Their digging revealed a stash roughly six feet in height before they reached the original stone floor of the cave. Could the hominids have added to the heap before their extinction?
The primitive fertility statue slowly revealed itself. The weight of years and several tons of earth and sand had crushed it to a misshapen mass with only a vaguely human shape. The outsized breasts were flattened, and the phallus was broken off. But what remained still weighed hundreds of pounds, if not thousands.
They worked their way down around the base of the statue to what was the floor of the cave a hundred millennia ago. The three Rangers were crammed into the tight space and strained and cursed, in an effort to work the fertility statue loose. It wasn’t going to move with their muscle alone. In the end, they used a hatchet and a wedge to chop through the soft gold to break it into ten separate pieces. They found that it was thickly molded but hollow. Morris raised some objections about the fetish idol’s historical significance but was growled down. Caroline even told him to “grow up” again. The creatures that held her captive did not have the wherewithal to create a mold for an object like the ugly idol. Had they found it somewhere?
The statue sections were muscled out of the cave and into the moonlight.
“Gotta be fifty pounds total,” Jimbo said, regaining his breath. “That is one heavy bitch.”
“What’s that, in today’s gold prices?” Chaz said and sat in the sand by the head.
“Millions,” Morris said, and they all turned to look at him. “I haven’t checked the last quote, but it’s over seventeen hundred an ounce. Rounding it down means the statue alone could be worth over a hundred million if your guess is right.”
Chaz grasped the hideous, misshapen head and kissed it on the lips.
“The rest is easily half that in weight again,” Caroline said with a grin. “It could be as much as two hundred million.”
“Is half of that enough to fund your work?” Dwayne smiled back at her. Hers was the smile he recalled when he first saw photos of her; the smile that wrinkled the freckles across her nose.
“Well, let’s not leave any behind,” she said and stooped to enter the cave again.
They widened the depression they made around the place where the gold lay. More plates and beads were there; embedded where they’d been crushed into the soil by the weight of years. There was a stratum of crusty flakes of oxidation starting at the edge of their excavation. Jimbo carefully uncovered a portion of it and found more skeletal remains―the bones of a human arm.
He scooped away the loose sand as the others searched for gold bits on hands and knees by the ghostly glow of the light sticks. Jimbo found what amounted to the full remains of a skeleton lying atop a streak of dark crimson earth. He cleared away the gritty red
soil and shell all around the yellowed limbs and torso. The bones had fallen apart over time, but their placement described a figure lying prone. The skull was crushed in on one side. Whether while the owner was alive or postmortem, Jimbo couldn’t tell.
“I’m no expert,” Jimbo said to the others. “But this is no skinny.”
Caroline crawled over to the remains and poked a trowel at the skull.
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s an adult male. Homo sapiens. He was six feet tall when he was alive.”
“Renzi,” Chaz said and met the eyes of the other Rangers. “Has to be.”
“You think he died here?” Dwayne said. “I’d like to think he bought it on the mesa. You don’t think they took him alive?”
“If they had,” Caroline said, “they’d have eaten him, right?”
The Rangers turned to her silently. “Sorry,” she said and lowered her eyes.
“What’s this discoloration in the soil he’s buried in?” Jimbo said. “It’s not blood, is it? Not after all this time.”
“It’s rust. Something oxidized here long ago and decayed into the sand,” Morris said. He lay on his stomach and ran fingers over the soil. He picked up brittle chunks of soil that were fused with shells. They crumbled in his hand into flakes.
Chaz held a light stick higher and looked at the streak of red soil with which the bones of their Ranger brother Richard Renzi had intermingled in the thousands of years since it was laid here. The streak was more than seven feet in length and only a foot across at its most narrow.
“It’s the Ma Deuce,” he said. “Excuse me?” Caroline said.
“The fifty-caliber machine gun,” Dwayne said. “The one Ricky was manning to cover our asses while we went through the Tube.”
“They brought it here as a totem,” Jimbo said. “They carried the Ma Deuce and Ricky up here and laid them at the feet of their god with the bodies of the old woman and the shaman. And I’m betting they never came into this cave again.”
“They were afraid,” Caroline said. “So many of their tribe died that day. And all at the hands of a kind of men they’d never seen before. And weapons they couldn’t understand. They brought this gun and this man to the most sacred place they had and prayed to their goddess to protect them.”
“That is badass,” Chaz said with a chuckle. “Ricky would have loved it.” Dwayne grinned. “Seriously?” Caroline said with an arched eyebrow.
“You never got to know Ricky Renzi,” Jimbo said. “Having the last word meant everything to him.”
They slept again through the day, and this time Caroline succumbed to exhaustion and slept hard despite the heat, the grime, and the flies.
When night came again, Jimbo and Chaz went and retrieved the two four-wheel-drive trucks. They drove them slow, with lights out and using night-vision gear to steer. The plastic buckets of gold and the sections of the statue were loaded on board and strapped down under a heavy tarp. Rick Renzi’s skeletal remains, in a canvas bag, were carefully placed behind the seat in the cab of Chaz’ Dodge Ram.
“What will you do with your friend’s bones?” Caroline asked.
“We sure as hell can’t get him into Arlington,” Chaz said.
“We’ll bury him somewhere out of the way and have a few beers over him,” Jimbo offered.
“Bury him with a pack of smokes and a bottle of Jim Beam,” Dwayne said.
“I don’t mean to offend you guys so cut me off if I’m out of line. I have a friend in forensic archeology at University College London. She could tell us about Renzi, things we haven’t had an opportunity to study until now,” Caroline said.
“You mean cause of death?” Dwayne asked. “I think that’s pretty clear to all of us.”
“I mean the possible physical effects of travel through the disruption field. There are all kinds of data in these bones,” she said. “But if you guys think that’s a bad idea—”
“I think Ricky would like the idea of going to college,” Chaz said.
They worked on covering the traces of their excavation until the first purple glimmer along the eastern horizon. They shoveled dirt over the remains of the shaman. It was lost on none of them the crime against paleo-archeology they were committing by callously concealing what would be The Find of the Century. They refilled the trench and smoothed the floor as best they could in the unlikely event that someone might wander across the dig site.
Sunlight was just touching the tops of the range to the west as they drove away down the valley toward the service road for the highway. The trucks rode low, burdened to their weight capacity with the tarp-covered loads.
10
The Morning After the Night Before
Lee Hammond was sure someone had nailed his head to the bed.
He searched his forehead with his fingertips and was sure he’d find a nail head there. A big fat sixteen penny spike driven right between his eyes.
No nail.
It was moving from beer to Jaeger to tequila and beyond the night before that gave him this head. He ran a dry tongue over his teeth. They felt like slimy fur and tasted like onions. That made him feel like it was all coming up, and he sat upright and opened his eyes.
Worst. Decision. Ever.
The pain in his head made him upgrade the size of the imaginary nail in his skull to a tent peg. His vision swam like his head was pinwheeling on his shoulder. He glimpsed something pink and blonde in his peripheral. He didn’t recognize the room he was in. So damned sunny with sheer curtains over peeling paint wooden frames. The bed was a double, and he was sharing it.
Lee steadied himself and looked over at a slim white body turned away from him and a tangle of bottle bleach hair atop it. She was naked, and so was he. There was a butterfly tattoo on her right shoulder.
His bladder was sending him urgent signals, and he began to ease on out on his side of the double bed. Butterfly made some noises and moved a bit and he gently raised himself to a standing position. Butterfly woke at that and turned over to pull hair from her eyes and looked at him with a bleary smile. Not bad, Lee thought. Blue eyes and a pixie nose. She was smiling, so whatever happened last night agreed with her. Damned if he could remember any of it after the first tequila round.
“Bathroom,” he rumbled and snatched up his jeans. She pointed a lazy hand at a door against one wall of the room.
“Don’t take too long,” she said languidly.
He hoped that meant she needed to piss, too. He stumbled into a half bath with a john and a sink and slung his jeans on a towel rack. He leaned hands on the wall over the back of the toilet and let fly with a long, splashing, spine-quivering piss.
Over the gurgle of water, he could hear Butterfly’s voice call out, but not to him. She was answering someone. A child’s voice followed hers, and Lee could tell from the timbre and tone that it was a young kid with lots of questions.
“Who’s in the bathroom?”
“Just a friend, honeybunch.”
“Uncle Beau?”
“No, it’s not Uncle Beau.”
“Uncle Fletcher?”
“Not him neither. You don’t know him.”
“Will he be my new uncle?”
“Could be. We’ll see, honeybunch.”
Oh, hell no, Lee thought and pressed his bladder to empty faster.
A third voice joined them through the thin bathroom door.
“If he’s staying for breakfast, I’m making eggs.”
An older female voice. Butterfly lived with her mom.
Oh, fuck no.
Lee was still dripping as he tore his jeans off the towel rack. He shook them and heard the reassuring jingle of his key ring. It was the work of five seconds to shimmy into them and somehow squeeze out through the tiny window of the bathroom to drop into a flowerbed crowded with weeds. Barefoot he made his way around the corner of the house to find his brand-new Raptor parked on the gravel beyond some wash hung on lines.
He heard Butterfly’s voice calling from the
house. “But Mama made breakfast, baby!”
That picked up his pace, and he was in the truck and spraying gravel all over the Buzz Lightyear sheets hanging on the line. He left behind a brand-new pair of rattlesnake Larry Mahans, but that was a small price to pay.
Lee stopped at the first Walmart he came to and slipped the greeter a twenty to ignore the “no shirt, no shoes” policy just this once. He bought a new shirt, a bag of socks, a pair of Timberlines, a super-size bottle of Tylenol, a Payday bar, and two Cokes.
He was back in the Raptor finishing the second pop when one of the cells in the center console buzzed. He fumbled through the collection lying in the bin between the seats and came up with one that vibrated in his hand. He flipped it open. The caller on the tiny monitor was TIME2GO.
“You know who you’re talking to,” he said.
“This a secure phone?” Dwayne Roenbach’s voice. “Always.”
“How much do you know about gold?”
11
Salt Lake City
They met at the bar at the Hilton closest to the airport.
It was midday, and the place was mostly empty. Caroline had a salad, and Dwayne and Lee ordered ten-dollar burgers.
“This gold is from back then?” Lee said when their waitress had dropped off the plates and been shooed away.
“It was in the back of the cave they were holding me in,” Caroline said. “They had a kind of altar in there.”
“You went back there? Way back there?” Lee said.
“No damn way. We went back to the site a week ago and it was still there,” Dwayne said. “In the present. The Now.”
Lee set down his beer and looked at the two of them.
“I go to all the trouble to hide your asses from the outfit that bankrolled your little experiment, and you go back to dig around right under their noses? You know better than that, Dwayne.”