desert painted by creosote and sage in choppy green and blue brushstrokes. Beyond rose a rugged backdrop of stratified buttes, red as the blood of his ancestors. Their spirits still inhabited the Sonoran Desert, lingering in the memories of crumbling stone walls and scattered potsherds.
He lowered his black eyes again to the ground. Those weren't roots. Not six feet from the shrub.
Turning the stick around, he shoved the duct-taped handle into the nearly invisible hole until it lodged against something solid and levered it upward. A tent of what appeared to be leather-wrapped sticks broke through the sand, smooth and tan.
His instincts told him to grab his sack and head back to the truck. Forget about the diamondback and the odd length of pipe. His mother had named him Kajika, he who walks without sound, as a constant reminder that there were things in life from which he would be better served to silently slink away.
But those weren't roots.
He kicked the sand aside with the toe of his boot, summoning a cloud of dust that clung to his already dirty jeans and flannel shirt, thickening the sweat on his brick face.
With a sigh, he unholstered the canteen from his hip and drew a long swig, closing his eyes and reveling in the cool sensation trickling down his throat.
'Couldn't have left well enough alone,' he said aloud, grabbing his bag and stick and heading back toward his truck, where there was a shovel waiting in the cluttered bed.
No, that wasn't a tangle of roots. Not unless roots could be articulated with joints.
The sun had fallen to the western horizon, bleeding the desert scarlet by the time he climbed back out of the pit. His undershirt was soaked, his flannel draped over a clump of sage. He dragged the back of his hand across his forehead and slapped the sweat to the ground. Strands of long ebon hair had wriggled loose from the braid to cling to his cheeks. Night would descend soon enough, bringing with it the much anticipated chill.
The rhythmic hooting of an owl drifted from its distant hollow in a cereus cactus.
Tipping back the canteen, he drained the last of the warm water and cast it aside, unable to wrench his gaze from the decayed old bundle he had exhumed. Tattered fabric bound its contents into an egg shape, a desiccated knee protruding from a frayed tear, exposing the acutely flexed lower extremity he had initially mistaken for roots, the mummified flesh taut over the bones. Even though the rest was still shrouded in an ancient blanket tacky with bodily dissolution, it didn't take a genius to imagine what the leg was attached to.
'Burnin' daylight,' he said at last, sliding back down into the hole.
He slashed the bundle with the shovel, the sickly-smelling cloth parting easily for the dull blade. The foul breath of decomposition belched from within.
'Moses in a rowboat,' he gasped, tugging his undershirt up over his nose and mouth, biting it to hold it in place.
Casting the shovel aside, he leaned over the bundle and grasped either side of the torn blanket. He could now clearly see two legs, both bent sharply, pinned side by side.
The stench of death was nauseating.
He jerked his hands apart with the sound of ripping worn carpet from a floorboard, the shredded blanket falling away to betray its contents.
A gaunt face leered back at him, teeth bared from shriveled lips, nose collapsed, eyes hollow, save the concave straps of the dried eyelids. Its long black hair was knotted and tangled, fallen away in patches to expose the brown cranium. It had been folded into tight fetal position, its thighs pinning its crossed arms to its chest. Lengths of rope, hairy with decay, bound the body across the shins and around the back, tied so forcefully the dried skin had peeled away from beneath. There was no muscle left, no adipose tissue. Only leathered skin and knobby bone.
Kajika was overcome by a sense of reverence. Could this possibly be one of his ancestors? Could the very blood that had crusted and rotted into the fabric and putrid sand now flow through his veins?
He felt the spirits of the desert all around him, dancing in the precious moment when the moon materialized from the fading stain of the sunset and countless stars winked into being.
Movement, a mere shift in the shadows, dragged his attention to the corpse a single heartbeat before a wave of diamondbacks poured out of the hollow abdomen where they had recently made their den and washed over his boots.
INNOCENTS LOST
MICHAEL McBRIDE
Now available in paperback and eBook
From Delirium Books
A young girl vanishes in broad daylight on her tenth birthday. Her father, FBI Special Agent Phil Preston of the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Team, devotes his life to finding her and
discovers a pattern in a recent string of abductions.
Dr. Les Grant leads a group of graduate students into the Wyoming wilderness in search of an unidentified Native American medicine wheel photographed by an anonymous hiker. Instead,
they stumble upon a macabre tableau of suffering.
Fremont County Sheriff Keith Dandridge finds himself right at the heart of the mystery when twenty-seven bodies are disinterred in the Wind River Range at the westernmost edge of his jurisdiction, with the promise of more to come.
All the while, an unknown evil is summoning the men to its killing grounds, where the remains of the lost innocents are left to rot...and a fate far worse than death awaits them.
INNOCENTS LOST
MICHAEL McBRIDE
(An excerpt from the terrifying novel from Delirium Books.)
PROLOGUE
June 20th
Six Years Ago
'Happy Birthday to yooouuu.'
The song ended with laughter and applause.
'Make a wish, honey,' Jessie said. She raised the camera and focused on the child who was her spitting image: chestnut hair streaked blonde by the sun, eyes the blue of the sky on the most perfect summer day, and a radiant smile that showed just a touch of the upper gums.
Savannah wore the dress she had picked out specifically for her party, black satin with an indigo iridescence that shifted with the light. She rose to her knees on the chair, leaned over the cake, and blew out the ring of ten
