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North northwest of the park boundary A
Suddenly a wind sucked the powdered earth up and wove it into veils, wings, plumes, fantastic blinding shapes. A
A
A rough track forked to the south. No signs marked the way. A
Seconds after she left the gravel the dust was gone. Winds raged unabated. The road began to deteriorate. Zeddie had warned her she'd need a high-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicle to navigate the backcountry. A
Twenty minutes later she knew she'd have to abandon the car and walk the last couple of miles or risk having to walk the entire sixty back to Carlsbad. Despite her leather jacket and another of Zeddie's sweaters, wind found ways into her bones. Leaning into it, she shoved her hands in her pockets, lowered her head, and barged up the bleak hills. By the time she reached the last bump in a line of thick places along a low ridge, she felt a kinship with a baked Alaska. Exertion had raised her body temperature till, beneath her layers, she'd begun to sweat, but the bite of the wind had nearly frozen the flesh from her cheeks and ears.
Over the years she'd nearly forgotten the unceasing winds of a Trans-Pecos winter. Moaning, godless winds that ripped through, carrying away sanity. Jason's harpies could have taken lessons from the Texas wind. Relentless, it tore at human nerves, snatching hats, doors, packages, whipping people with their own hair, scouring with sand and cold, never letting up, never letting go, sawing at the eaves in the night and the mind in the day.
"The wind is my friend," A
Sensible tourists, she thought as she pushed over the nub of the last hill. The sight of a four-wheel-drive Blazer rewarded her. If, after all the effort, Brent had stood her up, she might have been less than perfectly gracious when next they met.
Caves were well camouflaged in New Mexico. The entrances blended in with the scenery. One could easily pass within a foot of a major cavern and never notice it. A
Gray-brown hillsides rolled away in all directions, marked only by fragments of lichen-speckled stone and the unwelcoming beauty of desert plants. A
Fifty yards later the trail didn't so much stop as dwindle to nothing, and still A
"Brent?" A
There are postures that the human body does not adopt in life.
Roxbury had the broken-doll look of someone struck down from a standing position and dead or unconscious before he hit the ground. His feet were splayed at uncomfortable angles, legs bent when the knees buckled. He'd landed on his hip, his left arm flung back from his torso and falling behind him. His right was trapped beneath; his face pressed against the grid over the cave.
"Brent?" A
"Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" came a line from Shakespeare's Scottish play, one in which her husband had carried a spear. Brent's soul had been gored from his body by a bullet from a high-powered weapon. No neat black hole between the eyes had let his life leak away. A furrow chewed up from his clavicle into his neck, severing the carotid artery on the left side of the pharynx, then continued up till it blew away the point of his jaw, much of his dental work, and his left cheekbone.
Due to the severe facial trauma there was no way A