The Graves of Plague Canyon (The Downwinders Book 3) (12 page)

“I’m prying,” he said. “I shouldn’t. I retract the question.”

He deserves an answer,
she thought.
Maybe not now, but at some point.
She
took a moment to look at him, lying vulnerably on the blanket next to her,
staring away from her, up into the sky. A hint of a smile was on his lips, and
for a moment she thought about leaning over and seeing what his lips were like,
but she stopped herself.

He turned to see her watching him. “What?” he asked,
smirking.

“I had a great time,” she replied. “The hike, the food, this.
All really nice.”

“I’m glad,” he said. “I did too.”

She suddenly felt guilty realizing that within a few hours she’d
be going behind his back, using the information she’d picked up from him to
sneak onto his employer’s property.

He saw the look on her face. “Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing.” She laid back down next to him.

“Can we do this again sometime?” he asked.

“Sure,” she replied. She felt his hand reach out to hers, and
she allowed him to take it. His fingers had the roughness of someone who works
a ranch all day. She felt him squeeze her hand gently, and she gave him a
squeeze in return.

“Soon?”

“Sure,” she replied. “Soon. It’s getting cold.”

“Do you want to go back?” he asked.

“Not really, though I suppose we’ll have to, eventually.”

He reached over her and pulled the edge of the blanket from
the grass, wrapping it over her. “There,” he said. “That better?” He dropped
back down next to her, and pulled his edge of the blanket up as well.

She snuggled in next to him, getting a much stronger smell of
him. Then she smiled to herself.

Wow
,
she thought, surprised.
I really like this guy.

▪ ▪ ▪

Deem felt Winn’s body bump up against hers, and she pushed
back at him.

“Ow!” he said.

“Stay on your side of the tent,” Deem said.

“I was adjusting myself,” Winn said. “I didn’t mean to bump
into you.”

“Are you sure this is a two man tent? Because it seems really
small for two people.”

“Maybe the makers of the tent didn’t think the two people
inside it would be so averse to an accidental bump,” Winn replied.

She stopped, feeling irritated with herself. She looked up at
the tent’s ceiling, just a few feet from her face. She knew she was irritable
because they were sneaking onto land that they shouldn’t. Land patrolled by
Warren. It bothered her.

“So, a hundred thousand dollars? Are you sure?” Winn asked.

“Carma says it’s worth that much,” Deem replied. “Only a few
thousand were printed, so they’re very rare. Honestly, I’m more intrigued by
the journal I found. I’d be interested if you could read any of it.”

“Why didn’t you show it to me on the drive back from Left
Hand?” Winn asked.

“The backpack was in the back of the Jeep, and I forgot that
I’d picked it up until we were back at Carma’s house.”

“Your date went well?” Winn asked, changing the subject.

“Five hours ago I was lying on a blanket with him, staring up
at the stars after a wonderful dinner,” she said. “Now I’m lying here, next to
you, getting elbowed. What’s wrong with this picture?”

“You know, there are plenty of people in this world who’d
love to be in a tent with me,” Winn said. “You could consider yourself lucky.”

“Lucky if I wanted some quick sex and to never see you
again,” Deem replied.

“Oh, it’s not quick,” Winn said. “I’m much better than that.”

“You missed my point.”

“No, I got your point. It’s always the same point, over and
over. I just chose to make a joke about it.”

Deem propped herself up on one elbow to look at Winn’s dim
face in the moonlight, poking out of the top of his sleeping bag. “What’s the
longest relationship you’ve had since Brent?” she asked.

“Brent wasn’t really a relationship,” he replied.

“Are you kidding? I’d say it’s the founding relationship of
your life. You never knew your dad, your mother was always checked out. Brent’s
death has kept you from becoming close with anyone, hasn’t it?”

“We were ten, and I wasn’t romantically involved with him,”
Winn replied dismissively.

“He was your best friend,” Deem said. “Things are different
when you’re young. It wasn’t sexual, but it was emotional. I could tell, when
you told the story the other night. He meant a lot to you.”

“He did, before he became the nightmare of my life,” Winn
replied.

“That’s my point. You’ve let that take over your ability to
have a real, lasting relationship with anyone.”

“When did you get your psych degree, exactly?” Winn asked.

“Just answer my question,” Deem said. “How long?”

“How long, what?”

“How long has your longest relationship lasted?”

Winn paused. “Six months.”

Deem lowered back down to her sleeping bag. “I rest my case.”

“I should have never told you that story,” Winn said. “I was
just trying to explain how I became blank — or how I think I became blank.”

“It doesn’t take someone with a psych degree to see that
you’re afraid of becoming close to someone because of what Brent used to do to the
people you became close to,” Deem said. “I’ve only seen Dr. Phil once or twice and
I could figure that out.”

“Brent’s been gone for years,” Winn said.

“But what he did to people you cared about still lingers,”
Deem said. “Doesn’t it?”

“I think you’re just sensing how many men and women I’ve
fucked in this tent,” Winn said, “and you’re feeling all prudish about sex like
you usually do, and you’re projecting it all on me.”

Deem didn’t know whether to be hurt by his comment or whether
it was just a defense mechanism in reaction to her observations.

“I am not prudish about sex,” Deem said. “You always say
that, but it’s not true.”

“You get all nervous and squirmy when the subject comes up,”
Winn said. “I have normal, healthy sex all the time, and you haven’t got a
single nice thing to say about it.”

“What, like I’m some frat buddy who’d be high-fiving you?
Forget it.”

“If you’re not a prude, then let’s have sex, right now.”

“Dream on.”

“See?”

“There’s no way I’m having sex with you, Winn. You’re not my
type,” she said.

“Give me five minutes,” Winn said. “I guarantee you won’t
care about type.”

“No way,” she said.

“If you weren’t a prude, you’d just say, ‘Yeah, Winn, let’s
do it,’ but you’re a prude.”

“I am not a prude, and I’m not afraid of having sex,” Deem
insisted. “I just have my eyes set on someone.”

“Warren?” Winn asked. “Two dates and you’re in love?”

“I didn’t say that,” Deem replied. “But yes, I like him, and
I like where things are going. And I feel really shitty sneaking around behind
his back like this.”

“What, in a tent with me?” Winn snickered.

“Sneaking into his canyon,” Deem replied.

“It’s not
his
canyon.”

“I know that. But I feel like I used him to get info on the
place, all the while intending to come in here. It feels dishonest.”

“You’re doing it for a good cause,” Winn replied. “Keep that
in mind. Plus, he’ll never know.”

“Let’s hope.”

“Can we get some rest now?” Winn asked. “I sleep for shit in
tents, and morning will come early.”

“Well, stop talking and quit elbowing me, and yes, we can
sleep.”

They lay in the tent together quietly, listening to each
other breathe.

“Five minutes? You couldn’t really mean that,” she said.

“I wasn’t serious about having sex, no,” Winn said. “But five
minutes, yes. True.”

“What happens in five minutes?” she asked.

“Mind-blowing ecstasy,” Winn said. “After five minutes
they’re
always
begging me to keep going. Always.”

“God, you are so full of yourself,” Deem replied.

“
Begging
,” Winn answered.

“Good night,” Deem said, rolling away from him in her
sleeping bag.

Above her, Winn jammed another cam into the crack, tugged on
it, and ran a rope through it. She could see the edge of the brick wall about
five feet above him. She looked down, fifty feet to the ground. She’d rock
climbed before, but this face was the sheerest she’d ever encountered, and it
made her very nervous. Luckily, Winn had some expertise, and they were up and
over the brick wall within another couple of minutes.

“I still don’t understand why they built in such hard to
reach places,” Deem said, catching her breath from the climb.

“I suspect they had ropes and were good at using them,” Winn
replied. “Enemies show up, pull up the ropes — you’re protected.”

They glanced around the small dwelling. There were arched
doorways allowing access to other rooms, all interconnected.

“Ever been to de Chelly?” Winn asked. “Or Mesa Verde? This
reminds me of those.”

“I’ve heard of them, but never been,” Deem said. “Hinton’s
got an historical treasure here. I’ll bet the feds would turn it into a
National Monument if they could.”

“Probably why he keeps it secret,” Winn answered. “As secret
as he can. I suspect the feds already know about it anyway but aren’t
interested in some standoff like Bunkerville.”

“Hinton should pay his grazing fees, then,” Deem said as she
explored. “Not paying them means the feds will show up, sooner or later. If he
paid them, he’d stand a chance of keeping this place private longer.”

Deem had the feeling that she was being watched, and turned
quickly within the dwelling, scanning out to the canyon floor below. She didn’t
see anything, but she still felt unnerved. “The granary is going to be round,”
she said to Winn. “Let’s find it and get this over with. I’d like to hike out
before we’re caught.”

“We won’t be caught,” Winn said. “They don’t come this far
in, remember?”

They prowled through the dwelling’s rooms, hunting for the
granary. Deem found it near the back, where the ceiling of the shallow cave was
very low. She called Winn over.

“This must be it,” she said, and hopped over the edge,
landing at the bottom six feet below. The back half was covered over by the
sloping of the cave ceiling, and Deem turned on her flashlight to see in the
dark.

“Did you find the opening to the cave?” Winn asked from
above.

“Yeah,” Deem called back from under the covering, “but you’re
not gonna like it.” Her face came back into the light.

“How big?” Winn asked.

Deem held up her hands, about two feet apart.

“Fuck,” Winn said. “Can you tell how far it goes?”

“Not far, maybe six feet. Can’t see anything after that.”

Winn jumped down into the granary and walked with Deem under
the rock ceiling until she showed him the hole. “Looks like it slants down just
a little, but it’s straight for the most part. Almost looks like a lava tube,
it’s so round.”

“Fuck,” Winn repeated. “That’s a ‘take off your backpack and
push it ahead of you while you crawl on your elbows’ kind of hole. I don’t know
if I can do it.”

Deem saw the sweat rapidly forming on Winn’s brow, and she
felt for the guy. She knew he’d had some pretty horrific things happen to him
in tight places, and she knew he was running every possible excuse for not
going into the hole through his mind.

“I’ll go first and let you know what it’s like,” Deem said.
She slipped off her backpack and removed a headlamp, which she strapped to her
head. Then she took out a twenty foot section of rope and tied it around her
ankle. She pushed the backpack into the hole and followed it face first,
stopping to shove the pack forward every few feet. Having the rock within
inches of her face from all directions was claustrophobic even for her, and she
felt her own panic rise once when she was in the exact middle of the passage.
Still, she focused on what was ahead of her, and continued the routine, pushing
the backpack and sliding herself forward a few inches. It took a minute, but
she soon reached the other side and saw her backpack tumble out of the
passageway ahead of her, landing somewhere below that she couldn’t see, and
panic rose in her throat once again. As she reached the opening and passed her
head and arms through, she looked down, her headlamp lighting the ground. The
backpack had rolled about four feet away. She extricated the rest of her body
from the hole and stood up inside the room. It was so large her headlamp
couldn’t illuminate the far side. She listened, and heard nothing, so she
turned back to the hole.

“Can you hear me?” she whispered back to Winn.

“Yes, I can hear you,” he said back. The tunnel seemed to
carry their voices easily.

“Keep your voice down,” she replied. “I can’t see anything in
here yet, so I don’t know how close we are to the necropolis. Did you bring the
camping lantern?”

“No, it’s down with the camping gear,” Winn said.

“There’s plenty of room on this side,” Deem whispered. “The
room’s so big I can’t see it all with my headlamp. Push your backpack in and
come through. It wasn’t too hard.”

She saw the faint light at the far end of the passage dim as
Winn pushed his backpack into the hole, then she saw the dancing light of his
headlamp. Every few seconds she heard the sound of the backpack’s vinyl
scraping against the rock as Winn gave it another push. After a few seconds,
the sound stopped.

“Deem!” Winn called. “I can’t. I have to back out.”

“Just follow the rope,” Deem said. “I’m going to start
pulling on it, so you grab it, OK?”

She didn’t hear a reply, and she guessed he was freaking out
inside the tube, probably hyperventilating. She began to pull on the rope and
it came easily.
He’s not holding it,
she thought.

“Grab the rope, Winn,” she said. “Do it.”

She tugged again and there was some resistance. Then she
began to pull, and she knew she was dragging all of Winn’s weight. The downhill
angle of the tube made it easy to pull him, and after a minute Winn’s backpack
emerged from the hole. Deem grabbed it and set it down, then grabbed one of
Winn’s hands as they appeared. She pulled him out, and his legs hit the ground.

“Jesus Christ!” Winn whispered loudly. “That’s so much worse
than zombighosts.”

“You made it,” Deem said. “Take a deep breath and calm down.”

As Winn gathered himself, Deem dug a brighter flashlight from
her backpack and cast its beam around the room. Its light just barely reached
the other side, exposing a huge space dotted here and there with small
structures that rose off the ground, some six or eight inches in height, others
a couple of feet tall.

“Didn’t Aldus say the necropolis was in the second room?”
Deem whispered to Winn.

“Yes, and the chandeliers we need are in the room after
that,” Winn answered.

“Well, this room is huge. We’ll have to search for the
passage to the next room.” Deem began to walk, but Winn stopped to open his
backpack. He removed two glow sticks, cracked them to activate them, and
propped them up by the hole to form a glowing X.

“In case we need to find this hole in a hurry,” he said.

The green light from the glow sticks helped light the area
around the hole, but once they were thirty feet from it the darkness settled in
again, and they relied on their flashlights to navigate between the structures.

“They must have burned fires in here,” Winn said, glancing
down into small circular holes in the ground, surrounded by stones. “For light,
if nothing else.”

“The ceiling is very high, so they could probably get away
with it,” Deem said, looking up. She noticed movement on the ceiling. “Aw,
shit, Winn, are those bats?”

Winn stopped to shine his light upward with hers. “Yep. Not
as many as I would expect in a cave this big, but a few.”

“Do you think they come and go through that little tunnel?”
Deem asked, lowering her light and scanning for the entrance to the next room.

“Very possibly,” Winn said. “Imagine being in that hole when
they wanted in or out.”

Deem shook with the willies.

“There might be more farther in,” Winn said. “And there might
be small entrances they use to get out back there, passageways too small or
thin for people to get through.”

“No more talk of bats,” Deem said. “They creep me out.”

“Listen, once we reach the necropolis, we’ll have to stop
talking,” Winn said. “We’ll have to communicate silently. We’ll find the third
room, place the vacuum box on the gypsum, and then we’ll wait for a couple of
hours, in silence. I’ll time it on my watch. When it’s been two hours, I’ll
signal you, and we’ll head back out. No talking until we’re back here, OK?”

“I’m fine with that,” Deem said. “Look! Up ahead, to the
right!”

Winn swung his flashlight where Deem pointed, and they saw
the entrance to the next room, ahead another fifty feet. It was an arch in the
rock, about ten feet high. They passed under it, and their flashlights caught
the sight of raised mounds.

Hundreds of them.

The room they were in seemed half the size of the first. They
stepped silently, walking among the graves, taking care not to step on any of
the mounds. They were scanning the far wall at the end of the room for some
indication of a passage to the third chamber, but nothing was immediately
apparent.

Deem looked down and saw objects on some of the graves — animal
bones, skulls. One had the skeleton of a snake carefully twisted into an S on
top of it.
No looting going on in here,
she thought.
If anyone’s
discovered the place, they were too frightened to touch anything.

She thought of some of the other ancient sites in the area,
long ago looted for any artifact or arrowhead. Walking through this place, so
untouched by modern man, filled her with awe. She imagined what the place
looked like when the Anasazi used it, when people came here to mourn.
The
Hopi cry on the one year anniversary of the death of a loved one,
she
thought.
I wonder what the Anasazi did.

She felt Winn touching her arm, and she turned to look at
him. He was pointing to a spot on a far wall ahead of them. It looked like a
split in the rock.

Deem nodded back, and followed Winn as he made his way
through the silent graves, the only sound that of their feet and their
breathing. Once they reached the split, they climbed through and into the third
room. It was smaller still, and Deem could easily make out the entire room with
her flashlight. When she saw the giant chandelier descending to the middle of
the room, she almost gasped. The light hit the gypsum and it reflected back,
lighting up the whole room. Large jagged waves of the mineral had formed
massive structures with intricate designs, reaching from the ceiling to nearly
the floor. Deem approached the gypsum and touched a part of it that appeared
solid, running her hand over the cold rock.

Then she slipped off her backpack and removed the vacuum box.
She set it on a small shelf formed by a fold in the gypsum, and lifted the lid.
She heard the sound of a seal being broken as it opened.

Winn made note of the time, and the two of them looked for a
place to sit and relax while they waited for the vacuum box to collect the
lifesaving callum they’d worked so hard to find.

▪ ▪ ▪

Deem felt Winn’s elbow in her right side and she awoke with a
start. She’d turned off her flashlight just before she fell asleep, and she
instinctively reached for it where she’d left it, between her legs. Winn
reached down to stop her, grabbing her hand. His flashlight was on but facing
the ground, and only the dim light that seeped out from the plastic ring of the
flashlight’s edge provided any illumination.

Deem tried to make out Winn’s features, but they were very
dim. Finally she could see that he was pointing to the split in the rock where
they had entered the room. Deem focused in that direction, and Winn turned off
his flashlight. She saw it.

The figure was faintly glowing, moving toward them, drifting
off the ground. It knew they were there, and it was rapidly approaching.

Deem wanted to lean over to her right and whisper to Winn,
but she thought better of it, worried that the sound might set the figure off.
As it approached, she could see that it was a Native American man. He stopped
about five feet from them, and hung in the air, observing them.

Then a chill went down her spine as she heard the words,
“it’s safe” whispered in her left ear. She turned with a start, and was shocked
to see the man now next to her, his mouth just inches from her ear.

“It’s safe,” he repeated, and vanished. She turned her head
back toward the split in the rock, and the man had returned to his position
five feet from them.

She decided to take him at his word, and dropped into the
River. The man sat down cross-legged in front of them.

You can tell him it’s safe, he can see me,
the man said. Deem dropped out of
the River and leaned over to Winn. She whispered, “Drop in, it’s safe.” Then
she reentered the flow.