Thunderhead

“It may not be one of us,” said Sloane. “It may have been whoever killed our horses and wrecked our communications gear.”

“As I said, it’s speculation only.” Aragon spread his hands. He looked at Bonarotti. “Did Holroyd eat anything that the others didn’t?”

Bonarotti shook his head.

“And the water?”

“It comes from the creek,” Bonarotti replied. “I run it through a filter. We’ve all been drinking it.”

Aragon rubbed his face. “I won’t have test results for several hours. I suppose we have to assume it might be infectious. As a precaution, we should get the body out of camp as soon as possible.”

Silence fell in the canyon. There was a roll of distant thunder from over the Kaiparowits Plateau.

“What are we going to do?” Black asked.

Nora looked at him. “Isn’t it obvious? We have to leave here as quickly as possible.”

“No!” Sloane burst out.

Nora turned to her in surprise.

“We can’t leave Quivira, just like that. It’s too important a site. Whoever destroyed our communications gear knows that. It’s obvious they’re trying to drive us out so they can loot the city. We’d be playing into their hands.”

“That’s true,” said Black.

“A man has just died,” Nora interrupted. “Possibly of an infectious disease, possibly even by murder. Either way, we have no choice. We’ve lost all contact with the outside world. The lives of the expedition members are my first responsibility.”

“This is the greatest find in modern archaeology,” Sloane said, her husky voice now low and urgent. “There’s not one of us here who wasn’t willing to risk his life to make this discovery. And now that somebody has died, are we going to just roll things up and leave? That would cheapen Peter’s sacrifice.”

Black, who paled a bit during this speech, still managed to nod his support.

“For you, and me, and the rest of the scientific team, that may be true,” Nora said. “But Peter was a civilian.”

“He knew the risks,” Sloane said. “You did explain them, didn’t you?” She looked directly at Nora as she spoke. Though she said nothing more, the unspoken comment couldn’t have been clearer.

“I know Peter’s presence here was partly my doing,” Nora replied, fighting to keep her tone even. “That’s something I’ll have to live with. But it doesn’t change anything. The fact is, we still have Roscoe, Luigi, and Bill Smithback with us. Now that we know the dangers, we have no right to jeopardize their safety any further.”

“Hear, hear,” Smithback murmured.

“I think they should make their own decisions,” Sloane said, her eyes dark in the stormy light. “They’re not just paid sherpas. They have their own investment in this expedition.”

Nora looked from Sloane to Black, and then at the rest of the expedition. They were all looking back at her silently. She realized, with a kind of dull surprise, that she was facing a critical challenge to her leadership. A small voice within her murmured that it wasn’t fair: not now, when she should be grieving for Peter Holroyd. She struggled to think rationally. It was possible that she could, as expedition leader, simply order everyone to leave. But there seemed to be a new dynamic among the group now, in the wake of Holroyd’s death; an unpredictable urgency of feeling. This was no democracy, nor should it be: yet she felt she would have to roll the dice and play it as one.

“Whatever we do, we do as a group,” she said. “We’ll take a vote on it.”

She turned her eyes toward Smithback.

“I’m with Nora,” he said quietly. “The risk is too great.”

Nora looked next at Aragon. The doctor returned her gaze briefly, then turned toward Sloane. “There is no question in my mind,” he said. “We have to leave.”

Nora glanced at Black. He was sweating. “I’m with Sloane,” he said in a strained voice.

Nora turned to Swire. “Roscoe?”

The wrangler glanced up at the sky. “As far as I’m concerned,” he said gruffly, “we should never have entered this goddamned valley in the first place, ruin or no ruin. And now the rains are here, and that slot canyon’s our only exit. It’s time we got our butts out.”

Nora glanced at Bonarotti. The Italian waved his hand vacantly, sending cigarette smoke spiraling through the air. “Whatever,” he said. “I will go along with whatever.”

Nora returned her gaze to Sloane. “I count four against two, with one abstention. There’s nothing more to discuss.” Then she softened her tone. “Look, we won’t just leave willy-nilly. We’ll take the rest of the day to finish up the most pressing work, shut down the dig, and take a series of documentary photographs. We’ll pack a small selection of representative artifacts. Then we’ll leave first thing tomorrow.”

“The rest of the day?” Black said. “To close this site properly will take a hell of a lot longer than that.”

“I’m sorry. We’ll do the best we can. We’ll only pack up the essential gear for the trip out—the rest we’ll cache, to save time.”

Nobody spoke. Her face an unreadable mask of emotions, Sloane continued to stare at Nora.

“Let’s get going,” Nora said, turning away wearily. “We’ve got a lot to do before sunset.”

40

SMITHBACK KNELT BY THE TENT AND GINGERLY lifted the flap, gazing inside with a mixture of pity and revulsion. Aragon had wrapped Peter Holroyd’s body in two layers of plastic and then sealed it inside the expedition’s largest drysack, a yellow bag with black stripes. Despite the carefully sealed coverings, the tent reeked of betadine, alcohol, and something worse. Smithback leaned away, breathing through his mouth. “I’m not sure I can do this,” he said.

“Let’s just get it over with,” Swire replied, picking up a pole and ducking into the tent.

No book advance is worth this, Smithback thought. Reaching into his pocket for his red banda

Wordlessly, Swire laid the pole alongside the bagged corpse. Then, as quickly as possible, the two men lashed it to the pole, winding the rope around and around until it was secure. Swire tied off the ends with half-hitches. Then, grasping each end, they hefted the body out of the tent.

Holroyd had a slight frame, and Smithback raised one end of the pole onto his shoulder with relative ease. I’ll bet he weighs one fifty, one sixty, max, he thought. That means eighty pounds for each of us. Strange how, at times of severe stress, the mind tended to dwell on the most trivial, the most quotidian details. Smithback felt a pang of sympathy for the friendly, unassuming young man. Just three nights before, under Smithback’s journalistic probing by the campfire, Holroyd had opened up at last and talked, at unexpected length, about his deep and abiding love for motorcycles. As he’d talked, the shyness had left him, and his limbs had filled with animation. Now those limbs were still. All too still, in fact; Smithback did not like the stiff, unyielding way Holroyd’s bagged feet jostled up against his shoulder as they proceeded toward the slot canyon.

He thought back to the discussion about what to do with the body. It had to be placed somewhere secure, away from camp, elements, and predators, until it could be retrieved at a later time. They couldn’t bury it in the ground, Nora had said; coyotes would dig it up. They talked about hanging it in a tree, but most of the trees were inaccessible, their lower branches stripped away in flash floods. Anyway, Aragon said it was important to get the body as far from camp as possible. Then Nora remembered the small rock shelter about a quarter of the way through the slot canyon, above the high-water mark and accessible via a stepped ledge. It was a perfect place to store the body. The place was impossible to miss: the shelter was twenty feet off the canyon bottom, just above the trunk of a massive cottonwood that had been wedged between the walls by some earlier flood. The threat of rain had passed—Black had checked the weather report from the canyon rim—and the slot canyon would be safe for the time being. . . .