The Blood Mesa

brown and tan landscape was dotted with other mesas, too, as well as slender, towering rock spires and other formations in odd, twisted shapes.

'What do you think of it, Mr. Cahill?'

The voice belonged to Dr. Veronica Dupre. She had come up behind him without him hearing her.

'It's something,' Matt said noncommittally as he turned to look at her. 'And you might as well call me Matt, too. Mr. Cahill still makes me look around for my dad.'

She laughed. 'All right, Matt. And you can call me Ronnie. I know I should stand on ceremony, like Dr. Varley and Dr. Hammond, but I've never quite been able to do that. I suppose that comes from years of working to put myself through school.'

'What did you do?' Matt asked, curious about this woman. She was attractive, but that wasn't it. There wasn't really anything flirtatious about her attitude.

'Waitressed, bartended, you name it. I even worked in a lumberyard for a while.'

That was it, Matt thought. She might have transformed herself over the years, but she had started out in the same blue-collar world he came from. In fact, some of the boards in that lumberyard where she worked could have come from the sawmill where he had worked for so many years.

'That's why I was interested when you said you'd worked in a sawmill,' she went on. 'We're a lot alike in some ways.'

'I suppose so,' he said.

But they really weren't, not anymore. She had become a professor, and he had become . . . something. He wasn't sure what. But he wasn't an average joe anymore, no matter how he might wish that were the case.

Ronnie laughed. 'Come on. If you're through unloading, I'll show you around. There's a little daylight left, but when night falls out here, it falls hard and fast.'

CHAPTER FIVE

The supply tent and mess tent were full of bottled water, crates of food, cases of toilet paper, tents, and supplies that would be used in the dig, such as stakes and rolls of twine for marking off grids, mallets for hammering the stakes into the hard ground, framed screens for sifting dirt, boxes and bags for storing artifacts, and portable lights that ran off the generator that also was in the back of the truck. Matt had already seen all of that, but Ronnie Dupre pointed it out to him anyway.

Then they roamed around the ruins and Ronnie showed him the three dig sites, which were separated from one another by several hundred yards. To Matt they just looked like holes in the ground, but as he stood looking down into one of them, he suddenly tensed.

The surrounding area was just a stretch of hard-packed ground with a few rocks littered around it.

But as Matt looked down into the excavation, he seemed to feel a pulsing under the soles of his boots, almost like the ground was alive, with a heart buried somewhere down there underneath its surface.

Whatever was down there didn't need to be dug up.

He couldn't explain that to these rational scientists, though, not in any terms they would understand or accept.

'Is Dr. Hammond in charge of this part of the dig?' he asked. Surely there was a connection between what he felt here and the sores he saw on Hammond's face.

'No, Dr. Varley is supervising this excavation,' Ronnie replied.

'Oh.' Matt was surprised by that answer.

'I'm sure he'd be glad to tell you more about it, if you're interested. I'll introduce you to him at supper, along with the others.'

'Thanks,' Matt said. He cast an uneasy glance over his shoulder at the excavation as they walked away.

Ronnie was right about night falling quickly. The members of the expedition gathered in the mess tent, which was lit by oil lamps, and she introduced him to everyone as she had promised.

The grad students all seemed like good kids, and even though he wasn't really that much older than them, Matt couldn't help but think of them that way. April Milligan, Jerry's former girlfriend, was the sort of sweet, wholesomely pretty young woman who reminded people of somebody's little sister. Scott Conroy was the handsome, athletic guy who had been the quarterback in high school and on the honor roll. Ginger Li was the smart, pretty Asian woman. Brad Kern was another former high school athlete, although with his lanky height he'd probably been a forward on the basketball team. With one exception, the rest still blended together in Matt's mind.

That exception was Chuck Pham, who looked Vietnamese. But when he opened his mouth, what came out was the good-ol'-boy drawl of a West Texas redneck. Matt figured that Chuck had been born and raised a long way from his parents' homeland.

Dr. Howard Varley was a soft-spoken man in his seventies, lacking in the arrogance that made Andrew Hammond such a prick, but he had an air of casual superiority about him. He gave Matt a limp handshake and said, 'Glad to have you with us, Mr. Cahill. Andrew has told me how you helped out with that mechanical crisis this afternoon. You seem to be something of a godsend.'

'I'm always happy to lend a hand,' Matt said. He didn't bother telling Dr. Varley to call him Matt. He knew the man would never be that informal.

Supper was simple fare: biscuits and spam cooked on a propane grill, along with canned vegetables heated in a microwave powered by the generator. The members of the expedition ate by the light of the oil lamps, which gave the meal an old-fashioned feel.

Ronnie came over and sat down beside Matt, who was using a large flat rock as a seat. 'You've worked really hard since we got here, Matt,' she said. 'Maybe Alberto's attack of nerves was actually a stroke of luck for us.'

Matt shrugged. 'The way I was brought up, when I see something that needs doing, I usually try to do it.'

He was aware that Andrew Hammond was watching the two of them from the other side of the circle formed by the expedition members. Hammond didn't look happy that Ronnie was talking to Matt. Of course, to Matt's eyes it would have been difficult for Hammond to look happy with all that rotting flesh and those oozing sores.

Matt wondered what was in Hammond's mind to cause that ugliness. Sometimes when he came across the people Mr. Dark had touched, it took a while for the creature's plans to become clear to Matt. All he was sure of was that something bad was going to happen, and it was up to him to stop it if he could, or try to minimize the damage if he couldn't.

After supper the members of the expedition split up and headed for their tents. Technically, the two students in each tent were supposed to be the same gender, but Matt had a hunch there had been some mixing and matching since they'd been here. The three professors had individual tents of their own because they needed room to work. As Matt looked around, he realized that he didn't have a tent. When he asked Ronnie about that, she confirmed it.

'Alberto had been sleeping in the truck. There's a sleeping bag in the back, along with some extra blankets you can use for padding. Do you think you can get by with that?'

'Sure,' Matt said without hesitation. 'I'm liable to be more comfortable than the rest of you. I've never liked cots very much, and a sleeping bag on the hard ground can be pretty uncomfortable.'

Ronnie yawned and said, 'I know it's early, but I may go ahead and turn in anyway. It was a long day, driving all the way into town and back, and we're always up early in the morning to get started on the day's work.'

'Good night, then,' Matt told her.

She started to turn away from where he stood beside the truck, but she paused and looked back at him. 'I'm convinced it really was a stroke of good luck when you came walking along that road, Matt. Good luck for us, I mean.'

'And me, too,' he said.

He pulled himself up onto the lowered tailgate and sat there for a few minutes, watching and listening to the night. The students had taken the lamps with them when they went to their tents. He could see some of them