Burial Ground (51 page)

The woman with the bowl approached, scooped
her first two fingers into its contents, and pulled out a glob of
glistening black sludge. She raised her hand to Merritt's face and
wiped it onto his cheek. The sting of the lacerations started to
fade immediately.

The chief shouldered his way through the
gathering of curious, excited, and frightened faces, toward the
home they had managed to hide from the outside world for countless
generations.

Sam positively beamed at the prospect of
studying these people in the flesh, of living among them and
learning everything she had once only been able to imagine. And
that smile was more than enough to convince Merritt that there was
nowhere on the planet he'd rather be than by her side.

Sam leaned closer and rested her head
against his shoulder. She too recognized the gravity of what had
passed between the two men, unvoiced pledges and silent
promises.

The chief had entrusted them with the fate
of his people. In sparing their lives, he risked possible discovery
and exploitation by the outside world. In welcoming them into the
fold, he had potentially damned his entire tribe.

Merritt watched the old man disappear
through the gate as the woman smeared black paint all over his
face. He understood all too well, and would never betray the secret
of their existence.

After all, he knew how it felt to want to
remain hidden.

He turned to face Sam, stared into her
stunning blue eyes, and saw both those of the woman he had failed
and the one he had saved. In that moment, he laid the ghost of his
past to rest and welcomed a future as infinite as the most perfect
blue sky.

An
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One

Pueblo Bonito

Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

June 17
^th

7:36 p.m. MDT

Twelve Years Ago

Dr. Graham Bradley waited for the rooster
tail of dust that had followed them for the last twenty miles to
pass over the forest-green Cherokee before he finally opened the
door and stepped down onto the sun-baked earth. His chief of
security, Roland Pike, remained rigid behind the wheel, staring
fixedly through the dirty windshield. The setting sun bled the
sandstone escarpments crimson and cast long shadows from the sparse
pockets of sage and creosote that spotted the sandy valley. A faint
breeze ruffled Bradley's ebon hair and returned the dust, forcing
him to shield his azure eyes. His custom-tailored Caraceni slacks
and calfskin shoes were already gray with accumulation. At least
he'd had enough foresight to shed his jacket in the car, just not
enough to have packed a change of clothes in his hurry to reach the
site. When the call came from Dr. Brendan Reaves eight hours ago,
Bradley had been in the middle of a board meeting. The
anthropologist had refused to divulge the nature of his discovery
over the phone and had insisted that Bradley needed to see what he
had found in person. Considering the scope of Reaves's research,
Bradley couldn't imagine why he would be summoned in such a
fashion, which only served to heighten his curiosity. The corporate
jet had been fueled and waiting at Sea-Tac when he arrived. Four
hours in the air and three more wending through the New Mexico
desert in the rental Jeep, and here he was, parched and irritated,
and tingling with anticipation.

"This had better be good," he said, and
struck off toward the cluster of khaki tents at the edge of the
Pueblo Bonito ruins.

The rubble formed a D-shape, straight in
front and rounded where it abutted the sheer cliff. Walls composed
of stacked layers of flat rocks climbed three stories up the
sandstone face to where petroglyphs had been carved by long-dead
hands nearly a thousand years prior. Where once more than six
hundred rooms and thirty-nine ceremonial kivas had surrounded a
broad central courtyard, now only the framework remained. Some
walls still stood thirty feet high, while others had crumbled to
the ground. A large portion was buried under tons of sandstone
where "Threatening Rock" had broken away from the embankment.

For nearly two hundred years, this had been
the capital of the thriving Anasazi culture and could have housed
as many as five thousand people. Until, abruptly, they abandoned
the entire canyon and embarked upon a northwestward migration that
would prove to be the end of this once flourishing society.

And no one knew why.

A ring of halogen lights blossomed to life
just beyond the tents, turning half a dozen men and women to
silhouettes. One of them raised an arm to hail him and broke away
from the group. Dr. Brendan Reaves, Regent's Professor of Cultural
and Evolutionary Anthropology at Washington State University,
strode directly toward him. He wore a dusty ball cap over his
unkempt, sun-bleached hair. The bill hid his face in shadows. He
extended a dirty hand, then thought better of it and swiped it on
his filthy shorts. Instead, he tipped up his chin and offered a
beaming smile, which made his sharp hazel eyes positively sparkle.
He barely looked out of his teens.

"Thank you for getting down here so
quickly," Reaves said. "I honestly didn't think you'd be willing to
make the trip in person."

Bradley gave his best boardroom smile to
hide his annoyance. GeNext Biosystems was his baby and he was
intimately involved on every level from research and development
through marketing and distribution. He wasn't the kind of COO who
pandered to shareholders or spent his days swilling martinis on
tropical shores. His vision was of a forward-thinking,
revolutionary company that remained on the cutting edge of
biotechnology through a non-traditional approach to research all
over the globe, which meant that even he needed to roll up his
sleeves from time to time.

"So, Dr. Reaves. Right to business. What
could possibly be important enough to drag me across the country on
a moment's notice?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
Reaves turned and guided Bradley toward an old pickup painted tan
by the desert. "Like I said, you have to see it with your own
eyes."

Pike eased out of the Cherokee and stood at
attention, but Bradley dismissed him with a subtle wave. He climbed
up into the passenger seat of the professor's truck and kicked
aside a pile of garbage to make room for his feet. The truck reeked
of body odor and dust, and shook when Reaves started the
engine.

"Where are we going?" Bradley asked.

He watched the ill-defined dirt road in the
bouncing headlights.

"Not far. Just across the wash to Casa
Rinconada. It's the largest, and only freestanding kiva in the
Pueblo Bonito complex."

"You found more remains?"

"You could say that."

Reaves glanced over and gave a cryptic
smile.

Bradley was in no mood for games. He was
tired and famished, and had reached the end of his patience. Reaves
must have recognized as much from his expression and started
talking to fill the tense silence.

"Okay. Let me set the stage. In case you
don't remember, I'm an evolutionary anthropologist. I study the
changes---both cultural and physiological---in a society over time. My
primary focus is the tribes of the American Southwest, specifically
the Anasazi, who inhabited this amazing primitive mecca here in
Chaco Canyon from about 800 to 1150 C.E.. We're talking about more
than four hundred separate villages clustered around a dozen or so
major pueblos like Bonito back there, all within a twenty-five
thousand square-mile territory, the majority between these very
canyon walls. They mastered agriculture, even in this hostile
terrain, and set up a system of commerce that was beyond advanced
for the time. And then, one day, they just up and abandon this
community that took hundreds of years to build, by hand, stone by
stone."

The tires grumbled over a bridge that
shuddered under the truck's weight. The creek bed below them didn't
appear as though it had ever held water. Ahead, a low mesa crowned
by a tall stone ring resolved from the cliffs behind it.

"Next thing we know," Reaves said, "the
Anasazi reappear in the Four Corners area, only their entire
architectural style has changed. Instead of building at the bottom
of valleys like this one, they're erecting fortresses hundreds of
feet up on the cliffs. We're talking about the kinds of places that
someone can only enter if a ladder is lowered down from the village
or if they can scale the sandstone like Spider-Man. Places like
Mesa Verde in Colorado and the White House in Arizona. We
speculated that the mass exodus was caused by a prolonged period of
drought in the middle of the twelfth century, which killed all of
their crops and drove the wild game from the area, but that didn't
explain the necessity for the fortified villages carved into niches
that only birds could reach. It was almost as though they feared
something, as though they were preparing to defend themselves
against some kind of invading force."

"I know all of this, Dr. Reaves. I'm the one
underwriting your research. Tell me how all of this pertains to the
project I'm funding."

The plateau rose above them to their right
as the road wound around it. From their vantage point, the circular
walls of the kiva appeared remarkably well preserved.

"Right. We know that the Anasazi had an
absurdly high incidence of anemia. Nearly forty percent of the
remains exhumed here in Chaco exhibit
porotic hyperostosis
,
which is a destructive pathological condition caused by
iron-deficiency anemia that erodes the bones of the skull and
orbits, and the ends of long bones. We assume that this was caused
by a shift in diet over time as the Anasazi came to rely almost
exclusively on plants and grains rather than the increasingly rare
native game animals. They essentially cut out the iron that the
human body needs to function, which it extracts from meat. That's
why it made reasonable sense when we found evidence of cannibalism.
The body always knows what it needs to survive, and instinctively
determines how to get it. It's the same reason that pregnant women
have cravings. Their bodies are telling them exactly what they
need, both for themselves and their unborn fetuses, from
fundamental nutrition to vitamins and trace minerals."

"What GeNext is paying you for, Dr. Reaves,
is to determine if the Anasazi had a genetic predilection toward
anemia or if it was truly dietary. We need detailed physical assays
of the structural and physiological damage in order to understand
how to counteract it. And considering the prevalence of anemia
diminished significantly within this same population over the next
two hundred years as it migrated away from this canyon and into
Colorado, we need to identify the mechanism by which it decreased,
be it genetic or environmental. Nearly three percent of the
population of the United States has converted to vegetarianism,
which opens a huge market for targeted dietary supplements. Not to
mention the intrinsic value of this information as it pertains to
cultivating artificial plasma and blood."

Reaves stared straight through the
windshield as they rounded the mesa into a makeshift dirt lot
wedged between Casa Rinconada and the canyon wall.

"While we appreciate and respect your
expertise in matters anthropological, and would be thrilled if our
shared venture afforded you the opportunity to advance your own
theories in regard to the demise of the Anasazi, it is of secondary
concern to our vested interest in your anemia research. GeNext
is
a biotechnology firm after all."

Reaves killed the engine, which died with a
clunk
that rattled the entire frame. He turned to face
Bradley and offered a sly smirk.

"Prepare to forget all about that."

Reaves clambered out of the pickup, grabbed
his backpack from behind his seat, and slammed the door.

Bradley climbed out and followed the
professor up a steep dirt trail toward the ruins. It struck him as
odd that this one sacred kiva would be built all the way across the
canyon when there were nearly forty within the fortification walls.
They scaled a crumbling mound of stones and dropped down to the
level ground on the other side.

Reaves removed a long black Maglite from his
backpack. He clicked it on and slung his pack over his shoulders.
The beam illuminated a T-shaped opening in the tall circular wall,
which framed a staircase that descended into the kiva. It reminded
Bradley of a miniature coliseum with the rings of stone bleachers
that encircled the main ceremonial stage. Three rectangles of flat
rocks had been stacked a foot high to either side and toward the
rear of the weed-riddled earth like primitive planting boxes
roughly the size of graves. A mound of dirt and sandstone chunks
lorded over the one directly ahead of them. The flashlight stained
the pall of dust seeping from the hole.

"We found the first stair about three feet
down." Reaves nodded toward the pit and shined his light onto a
stone staircase that vanished into the darkness. He hopped down
into the hole and spotlighted the narrow channel. Bradley covered
his mouth and nose with his handkerchief to keep from breathing the
dust and followed Reaves underground. "It took nearly another month
to excavate the remainder of the staircase and remove the stones
they had used to seal off this chamber."

Reaves led him into what appeared to be a
natural cave. The walls and ceiling were rounded and scarred by
dozens of petroglyphs, all of which featured massive centipedes
with enormous pincers attacking stick-figure representations of men
and animals alike.

"The Anasazi considered depictions of the
centipede to be taboo," Reaves said. "They believed it to be a
powerful symbol of the transition between the world of the living
and the land of the dead. The mere act of drawing it on these walls
would have been considered sacrilegious."