Thunderhead

by Douglas Preston

  Nora looked over at her. Sloane was uncharacteristically unkempt; her eyes were red, her dark hair tousled.

  “Everything?” Nora asked.

  Sloane nodded. “The transmitter, the paging network—everything but the weather receiver. Guess they didn’t think to look up in that tree.”

  “Did anybody else see or hear anything?”

  Black glanced at Sloane, then turned back to Nora. “Nothing,” he said.

  “I’ve kept a sharp eye out all day,” Sloane said. “I haven’t seen anybody, or anything.”

  “What about Swire?”

  “He went out to the horses before we learned about it. I haven’t had a chance to ask him.”

  Nora sighed deeply. “I want to talk to Peter about this. Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know,” Sloane said. “He went down the ladder from the summit before I did. I figured he’d gone back to his tent to lie down. He was pretty upset and . . . well, frankly, he wasn’t making much sense. He was sobbing. I guess that equipment really meant a lot to him.”

  Nora stood up and walked to the rope ladder. “Bill!” she shouted down into the valley.

  “Ma’am?” the writer’s voice floated up.

  “Check the tents. See if you can find Holroyd.”

  She waited, scanning the tops of the canyon walls. “Nobody home,” Smithback called up a few minutes later.

  Nora returned to the retaining wall, shivering now. She realized she was still wet from the trip through the canyon. “Then he must be in the ruin somewhere,” she said.

  “That’s possible,” Sloane replied. “He said something yesterday about calibrating the magnetometer. Guess we lost track of him in all the confusion.”

  “What about the horse killers?” Black interrupted.

  Nora hesitated a moment. She decided there was no point in alarming everybody with Beiyoodzin and his story of witches. “There was only one set of prints on the ridge, and they led to the camp of an old Indian. He clearly wasn’t the killer. Since our equipment was smashed last night, that probably means the horse killers are still around here somewhere.”

  Black licked his lips. “That’s great,” he said. “Now we’re going to have to post a guard.”

  Nora looked at her watch. “Let’s find Peter. We’re going to need his help setting up some kind of emergency transmitter.”

  “I’ll check the roomblock where he stashed the magnetometer.” Sloane walked away, Black following in her wake. Bonarotti came over to Nora and drew out a cigarette. Nora opened her mouth to remind him that smoking wasn’t allowed in the ruin, but decided she couldn’t summon up the energy.

  There was a scuffling noise, then Smithback’s shaggy head appeared at the top of the rope ladder. “What’s up?” he said, coming over to the retaining wall.

  “Somebody snuck into the valley last night,” Nora replied. “Our communications gear was smashed.” She was interrupted by an urgent shout from within the city. Sloane had emerged from one of the roomblocks on the far side of the plaza, waving an arm.

  “It’s Peter!” her voice echoed across the ghostly city. “Something’s wrong! He’s sick!”

  Immediately Nora was on her feet. “Find Aragon,” she said to Bonarotti. “Have him bring his emergency medical kit.” Then she was running across the plaza, Smithback at her side.

  They ducked inside a second-story roomblock complex near the site of the burial cyst. As Nora’s eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, she could see Sloane on her knees beside Holroyd’s prone form. Black was standing well back, a look of horror on his face. Beside Holroyd lay the magnetometer, its case open, components scattered across the floor.

  Nora gasped and knelt down. Holroyd’s mouth was wide open, his jaw locked solid. His tongue, black and swollen, protruded from puffy, glaucous lips. His eyes were bulging, and a foul graveyard stench washed up from each shallow breath. A slight, thready gasp escaped his lungs.

  There was movement in the doorway, then Aragon was beside her. “Hold my light, please,” he said calmly, laying two canvas duffels on the floor, opening one of them, and removing a light. “Dr. Goddard, could you please bring the fluorescent lantern? And the rest of you, please step outside.”

  Nora trained the light on Holroyd, his eyes glassy, pupils narrowed to pinpoints. “Peter, Enrique’s here to help you,” she murmured, taking his hand in hers. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  Aragon pressed his hands beneath Holroyd’s jaw, probed his chest and abdomen, then pulled a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff from the duffel and began to check his vital signs. As the doctor opened Holroyd’s shirt and pressed the stethoscope to his chest, Nora saw to her horror a scattering of dark lesions across the pale skin.

  “What is it?” Nora said.

  Aragon just shook his head and shouted for Black. “I want the rest of you to get a tarp, ropes, poles, anything we can use for a stretcher—and tell Bonarotti to get some water boiling.”

  Aragon peered intently back into Holroyd’s face, then examined the man’s fingertips. “He’s cyanotic,” he murmured, fishing in one of the duffels and pulling out a slender oxygen tank and a pair of nasal cannula. “I’ll set the flow at two liters,” he said, handing the tank to Nora and fixing the cannula into Holroyd’s nostrils.

  There was the sound of feet, then Sloane returned with the lantern. Suddenly, the room was bathed in chill greenish light. Aragon pulled the stethoscope from his ears and looked up.

  “We’ve got to get him down into camp,” he said. “This man needs to go to a hospital immediately.”

  Sloane shook her head. “The communications gear is completely trashed. The only thing still functioning is the weather receiver.”

  “Can we cobble something together?” Nora asked.

  “Only Peter could answer that question,” Sloane replied.

  “What about the cell phone?” Aragon asked. “How far to the nearest area of coverage?”

  “Up around Escalante,” said Sloane. “Or back at Wahweap Marina.”

  “Then get Swire on a horse, give him the phone, and tell him to get going. Tell him to call for a helicopter.”

  There was silence. “There’s no place to land a helicopter,” Nora said slowly. “The canyons are too narrow, the updrafts on the clifftops too precarious. I looked into that very thoroughly when I was planning the expedition.”

  Aragon looked at Peter, then looked back at Nora. “Are you absolutely certain?”

  “The closest settlement is three days’ ride from here. We can’t take him out on horseback?”

  Aragon gazed at Peter again, then shook his head. “It would kill him.”

  Smithback and Black appeared in the doorway, carrying between them a crude stretcher of tarps lashed to two wooden poles. Moving quickly, they set Holroyd’s rigid body on the stretcher, restraining him with ropes. Then, carefully, they hoisted him from the ground and carried him out into the central plaza.

  Aragon followed them with his kit, despair on his face. As they came out from beneath the shadow of the overhanging rock and approached the rope ladder, Nora felt a cold drop on her arm, then another. It was beginning to rain.

  Suddenly Holroyd gave a strangled cough. His eyes bulged wider still, ringed red with panic, searching aimlessly. His lips trembled, as if he was trying to force speech from a paralyzed jaw. His limbs seemed to stretch, stiffening even further. The ropes restraining him creaked and sighed.

  Instantly, Aragon ordered them to ease the stretcher to the ground. He knelt at Holroyd’s chest, fumbling in his duffels at the same time. Instruments went clattering to one side as he pulled out an endotrachial tube, attached to a black rubber bag.

  Holroyd’s jaws worked. “I let you down, Nora,” came a strangled whisper.

  Immediately, Nora took his hand once again. “Peter, that’s not true. If it weren’t for you, none of us would have found Quivira. You’re the whole reason we’re here.”

  Peter began to struggle with mor
e words, but Nora gently touched his lips. “Save your strength,” she whispered.

  “I’m going to have to tube him,” Aragon said, gently laying Holroyd’s head back and snaking the clear plastic down into his lungs. He pressed the ambu bag into Nora’s hands. “Squeeze this every five seconds,” he said, dropping his ear to Holroyd’s chest. He listened, motionless, for a long moment. Another tremor passed through Holroyd’s body, and his eyes rolled up. Aragon straightened up and, with violent heaves, began emergency heart massage.

  As if in a dream, Nora sat beside Holroyd, filling his lungs, willing him to breathe, as the rain picked up, trickling down her face and arms. There were no sounds except for the patter of the rain, the cracking thumps of Aragon’s fists, the sigh of the ambu bag.

  Then, it was over. Aragon sat back, agonized face drenched with rain and sweat. He looked briefly up at the sky, unseeing, and let his face sink into his hands. Holroyd was dead.

  39

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, THE ENTIRE EXPEDITION had gathered around the campfire in silence. Swire joined them, wet from the slot canyon. The rain had ended, but the afternoon sky was smeared with metal-colored clouds. The air carried the mingled scents of ozone and humidity.

  Nora glanced at each haggard face in turn. Their expressions betrayed the same emotions she felt: numbness, shock, disbelief. Her own feelings were augmented by an overpowering sense of guilt. She’d approached Holroyd. She’d convinced him to come along. And, in some unconscious way, she realized she had manipulated his feelings for her to further her own goal of finding the city. Her eyes strayed toward the sealed tent that now held his body. Oh, Peter, she thought. Please forgive me.

  Only Bonarotti continued with business as usual, thumping a hard salami down on his serving table and setting loaves of fresh bread beside it. Seeing that nobody was inclined to partake, the cook flung one leg over the other, leaned back, and lit a cigarette.

  Nora licked her lips. “Enrique,” she began, careful to keep her voice even, “what can you tell us?”

  Aragon looked up, his black eyes unreadable. “Not nearly as much as I would like. I didn’t expect to be performing any postmortems out here, and my diagnostic tools are limited. I’ve cultured him up—blood, sputum, urine—and I’ve stained and sectioned some tissue. I took some exudate from the skin lesions. But so far the results are inconclusive.”

  “What could have killed him so fast?” Sloane asked.

  Aragon turned his dark eyes to her. “That’s what makes diagnosis so difficult. In his last minutes, there were signs of cyanosis and acute dyspnea. That would indicate pneumonia, but pneumonia would not present that quickly. Then there was the acute paralysis . . .” He fell silent for a moment. “Without access to a laboratory, I can’t do a tap or a gastric wash, let alone an autopsy.”

  “What I want to know,” Black said, “was whether this is infectious. Whether others might have been exposed.”

  Aragon sighed and stared at the ground. “It’s hard to say. But so far, the evidence doesn’t point in that direction. Perhaps the crude bloodwork I’ve done, or the antibody tests, will tell us more. I’ve got test cultures growing in petri dishes on the off chance it is some infectious agent. I really hate to speculate . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “Enrique, I think we need to hear your speculations,” Nora said quietly.

  “Very well. If you asked me for my initial impression—it happened so fast, I would say it looked more like acute poisoning than disease.”

  Nora looked at Aragon in sudden horror.

  “Poisoning?” Black cried, visibly recoiling. “Who could have wanted to poison Peter?”

  “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 sm
oke 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 bandanna, he tied it carefully over his mouth. Then he tugged a pair of work gloves over the rubber gloves Aragon had given him, picked up a coil of rope, and followed Swire into the tent.