The monsters did it, he thought.
But there were no monsters, only other people.
He looked around him at the bodies on the ground. They were savages, barbarians, but they were not the fiends he and the other townspeople had originally believed them to be. One man was still dressed in street clothes, jeans and a T-shirt and tennis shoes, and Mike found it hard to look at that one. The dead man was a reminder of the humanity they'd lost, and he felt sad and sick.
But then . . .
But then he realized that this man was part of the attacking force that had driven across the desert with the specific goal of invading their town, killing their people, and taking over.
He wondered if the man still carried a wallet with identification. Mike rolled him over, pulling an overstuffed billfold from the back pocket of the dead man's jeans. He sorted through the contents. There it was, a driver's license.
He looked up. He hadn't noticed before, but he was surrounded by people. His people: policemen, firemen, sales clerks, tree trimmers, construction workers, high school teachers, secretaries, housewives. All were looking at him expectantly.
"Jasper!" he announced. "They're from Jasper!"
A cheer went up. Somehow, knowing where they came from, knowing who these people were, made everything seem more manageable, less scary.
Mike reached down into the blood with his finger, painted a stripe across his forehead, bars across his cheeks.
From South Street, where the weakest of the barricades had reportedly collapsed, a police car drove up. The chief got out, walked over. Around them, everyone had gone back to the business of stripping the dead and taking souvenirs.
"Sorry," the chief said.
"For what?"
"Some of them escaped. We didn't get 'em."
Mike held up the driver's license. "That's okay." He smiled broadly. "We know where they live."
Twelve
1
On the road again.
Glen was not only getting used to driving across the long stretches of empty highway, he was getting to like it. He was like Bronson, and if the route he'd taken to get to this point was circuitous and more than a little hairy, it didn't detract from the sense of freedom and bedrock contentment he felt while traveling.
Well, it didn't entirely detract from it.
Melanie had called one of the friends who'd gone with her to the roadside attraction that featured the mummy, and the woman had confirmed that it was up north, between Flagstaff and the New Mexico border. They'd left this morning, after breakfast, McCormack remaining behind to take care of his wife, Vince staying with his nephew at a nearby motel.
His nephew.
The boy.
He'd told Melanie about his reaction to Cameron, and she had immediately recognized his resemblance to the figure in the triptychs. That didn't make him feel any better. He'd been hoping she'd tell him he was crazy, tell him he was overreacting. Nothing against Cameron, he seemed like a nice kid, but the idea that the two of them were part of some ancient prophecy scared the crap out of him.
The landscape outside the car was shifting from low desert to high chaparral. Saguaros and chollas were giving way to pinon pines and juniper. Rocky sandstone mountains were flattening out into rolling weed-covered hills.
They had an early lunch in Flagstaff at a Del Taco, the first he'd seen since leaving California, and then continued on their way, heading east on Interstate 40, looking for tourist traps.
The first one, some twenty miles out of town on a lonely stretch of high desert, promised on an oversize rooftop sign: FREE PETRIFIED WOOD! DINOSAUR BONES! Melanie didn't think it was the one, but she and her friends had stopped at quite a few and she couldn't rule it out entirely, so they parked in the dirt lot--the only car there--and went in.
He'd never stopped at one of these and didn't know what to expect, but it certainly wasn't this pathetic little gift shop housed inside a dilapidated and only partially completed building. He thought there'd be . . . more. He'd seen these kinds of roadside attractions while traveling with his parents as a child, but his dad had always planned vacations with strict itineraries, even working out where they would eat lunch and for how long they'd stop, and they had not even slowed to read the signs. Truth be told, he had never felt the slightest bit curious about these places. Sure, they were kitschy and had been considered cool in an ironic retro way, even when he was a boy, but they'd always seemed crappy and kind of sad to him. That impression was only reinforced by the crass downscale commercialism of the store.
While Melanie talked with the man behind the counter, a leather-faced senior citizen with a white handlebar mustache, Glen walked up and down the shop's two aisles. One whole shelf was filled with copies of a self-published book titled How to Find Dinosaur Bones in the Southwest. On the cover was a poorly drawn picture of a Tyrannosaurus stomping on a saguaro cactus. On the back was a photograph of the shop's proprietor.
"Not it," Melanie said, tapping his shoulder. He put the book down. "Let's go."
Outside, she handed him a piece of white card-stock paper on which was glued a small reddish rock.
"Our free petrified wood," she said. "Keep it for a souvenir."
Ten minutes down the highway, they came across the next one, a stucco building made to resemble a pyramid. It housed a museum as well as a gift shop, although the museum contained mostly taxidermied animals and bad clay sculptures of celebrities. The star attraction was a spooky-looking plaster face that was purported to be the death mask of John F. Kennedy.
"Taken by the coroner who did the autopsy," the gleeful old man behind the register said. "This is one of only three masks in the world made from that original cast."
They were beyond Meteor Crater, past the Petrified Forest, and well on their way to New Mexico, with six roadside attractions behind them, when they finally found what they were looking for. "That's it!" Melanie said, pointing ahead at a rainbow-colored building by the side of the highway. "I recognize the place."
Indeed, as they drew closer, a large sign on the other side of the tilting fence that abutted the interstate announced: SEE THE AZTEC MUMMY!
Glen felt weird, like someone experiencing in real life something that he'd previously encountered in a dream.
There were actually other cars at this place: two mini-vans, a Ford Explorer, and a small red sports car. Inside, three obviously related boys were drinking root beer floats at three adjoining tables near a small grill and a soda fountain. Their parents and several other families were scattered throughout the store's long aisles, looking at the well-stocked merchandise. While this wasn't his type of place, Glen had to admit that it was definitely a step up from the other tourist traps at which they'd stopped.
Even the entrance to the obligatory museum was impressive--a faux rock door that looked like something out of The Flintstones set in the center of a colorful mural depicting an Aztec city. But once they paid their dollar apiece for admission and stepped through the doorway, all that changed. The goal was obviously to get people to part with their money, to entice them into going inside. A place way out here certainly didn't rely on repeat business, so as little effort as possible had been put into the creation of the museum itself. Where the store was new, modern and air-conditioned, they now found themselves in a homemade barnlike structure with plywood walls and glassless windows. There were no electric bulbs; only occasional skylights (or, more accurately, holes in the roof) augmented the natural illumination provided by the windows. It was hot as hell, and humid, and by the time they reached the first exhibit, they were both sweating.
Glen stopped, looked at a bunch of cracked flowerpots containing dead dried plants placed on top of a folding card table. GARDEN OF CARNIVOROUS PLANTS, the sign above the exhibit read. "These rare South American flowers, inspiration for the hit film Little Shop of Horrors, eat insects and small animals. WARNING! Don't get too close!"
"That's pathetic," Glen said.
"You think that's bad? Look over here."
Melanie pointed at a rake, shovel, and hoe hanging on a piece of pegboard. ANTIQUE FARMING IMPLEMENTS, the sign said.
"Let's find that mummy," Glen told her.
They walked past a rusted Volkswagen, a department-store mannequin, and a refrigerator painted in psychedelic colors, not bothering to read the accompanying descriptions. At the far end of the building, just before a red door marked EXIT, a square, oversize, black coffin with a Plexiglass lid lay atop a specially constructed cement stand.
"That's it."
Against his will, Glen felt a little spooked. And Melanie was right. This part of the room had a strange smell, a sour, sickly sweet scent that reminded him of rotting flowers.
Melanie's grip tightened on his own as they leaned over to look in the glass-covered sarcophagus.
It looked nothing like the afro-haired figure.
Glen didn't need to see the Polaroid to know this wasn't it, but he took the picture out anyway. Not even remotely similar. This one was thin and bony, with a bald blackened head that looked like a stereotypical Halloween skull.
"That's not it," Melanie said firmly. "That's a different mummy."
"Maybe you just remember it differently."
"You don't forget that hair."
They returned to the store. The boys at the soda fountain were gone, as were some of the adults. At the counter where they'd bought their tickets, a pert blond girl and her equally perky mother were paying for museum admission. After they stepped aside, heading enthusiastically toward the rock door, he and Melanie moved forward. "Excuse me," Melanie said.
The weary-looking, middle-aged woman closing the register did not even glance up at them. "No refunds," she said. "It's there on your ticket."
"We--" don't want a refund, Glen started to say.
But Melanie was already slicing through the formalities. "Where's the mummy you used to have?" she asked. "That's a new one in there now."
"That's the Aztec mummy."
"It's different than the one that used to be there. Where's the old one?"
"We have one mummy, the Aztec mummy, discovered in a pyramid in--"
She was starting to go into a rehearsed spiel, and Melanie cut her off. "Look, I'm not in the mood to play games. We came here to see that mummy, and it's very important that you tell us where it is."
"Look, I just work here," the tired woman said.
"You don't know?"
"No."
"Well, who owns this place?"
"Nate Stewky."
"Is there a way to get ahold of him? We need to talk to him."
"Nate's retired."
"I told you, this is important. We're archeologists--" Both of them saw the expression of mistrust and suspicion that passed over her face at the mention of that word. "And that old mummy may help us with a critical problem," Melanie added quickly. She pulled a ten-dollar bill out of her purse, handed it over the counter. "A phone number for Nate Stewky," she said. "That's all we ask."
The woman looked at her, looked at the money, then took the bill. She reached under the counter, withdrew an old-style rotary phone, and placed it on the counter. She pointed to a phone number taped to the side of the cash register. "Call."
Melanie glanced at him, but Glen motioned toward the phone. She was better at this stuff than he was.
Sure enough, despite an initial denial, she had him admitting within two minutes that the Aztec mummy currently on display was not the original, and within three minutes inviting them to his house in the nearby town of Beltane. Melanie wrote down directions on a scrap of paper she pilfered from behind the counter, thanked him, and hung up. "Let's go," she told Glen.
Nate Stewky's house was a 1950s tract home decorated in a pseudo-Japanese style. Bushes cut into bonsai shapes that made them look like pampered poodles were lined up in front of a square trellis that resembled a folding screen and blocked off a small patio. The roofs of both the house and garage were neither shingle nor shake but loose white rock, and in the center of the black garage door was a vaguely Oriental design made from raised red wood.
Nate himself was out of the house and on the stoop before they'd walked halfway up the driveway. He was an old man, short and bald and skinny, wearing plaid Bermuda shorts, a light pink polo shirt, and a huge smile that lit up his entire face and made him look like a satisfied gnome. "Thank you for coming!" he said, holding open the door as they approached. "Come in, come in!"
Glen shook the other man's hand. "Thanks for inviting us, Mr. Stewky."
"Nate. Call me Nate."
The Asian motif continued inside the house. Japanese watercolors lined the walls, and the living room was decorated primarily with Chinese antique furniture of dark red wood. "I was stationed in Japan during the Occupation," Nate said by way of explanation. "Got a lot of this stuff cheap. Here, sit down, sit down." He motioned toward a loveseat upholstered with red silk fabric. "Can I interest you in a cold beer? Or water? Or . . . a cold beer?"
Glen laughed, shook his head. "No, I'm fine."
"No, thanks," Melanie said.
Nate sat down opposite them in an incongruous reclining chair of worn and heavily faded vinyl. "So you want to know about the Aztec mummy." It was a statement, not a question, and Glen could tell that the old man was tickled to death that someone--self-identified archeologists, no less!--was curious about the star attraction in his homegrown museum.
Melanie nodded, leaned forward. "I was there several years ago, when you had the other mummy. Like I told you over the phone, we're part of an excavation team working over in Bower under the auspices of ASU. I know this seems a little weird, but we uncovered a very . . . unique skull at the Bower site, and we have reason to believe that there is a connection with your old mummy."
They had discussed ahead of time how much they should reveal, and they'd decided to hide nothing. What was to be gained by such a strategy? People inevitably gave more information to questioners they thought were being straight with them.
On the other hand, neither of them were about to jump right in with the supernatural stuff. That could get them tagged as a couple of loonies and shut off all communication.
So they were going to play it by ear, reveal as much as necessary to find out what they needed, answer all questions honestly.
"You know where I got that mummy?"
"No. Where?"
Nate scooted forward in his seat. "It's an interesting story. A friend of mine name of Jack Carpenter found it in an old ghost town down around Rio Verde. He and a buddy were hunting javelina out there, and they came acrost this little town, just a couple of houses and a bar and a store. Place was intact, all the furniture still in place, nothing looted, no graffiti. Inside one of the homes, in what he said was like a shrine built into the wall, Jack found the mummy. Jack was . . . well, Jack was kind of a looter himself, I guess. He'd already found a bunch of old Indian ruins on his travels, and he'd taken the best stuff he'd come across, metates and such, and given them away to his friends or sold them to gas stations or what have you. So he didn't think nothing of taking that mummy. This must have been around, oh, 1960 or so. I was just putting my museum together back then--we were on Route 66 in those days--and he knew that I was looking for something big, something unique, that would make my place different from all the other ones popping up along the highway.
"So Jack and his buddy--Kent Iverson, I think it was. No, Tommy Heywood, Tommy Heywood--made sort of a makeshift stretcher out of some boards they found in one of the buildings and some twine they brought along. They strapped in the mummy, carried it through the desert all the way out to their truck, then brought it up here to me. It was just the kind of thing I was looking for, and I offered to buy it from 'em, but Jack said, nah, it was a gift, and just gave it to me. Jack was a good guy that way. Always treated his friends right.
"I don't remember how I got the idea of saying it was an Aztec mummy." Nate squinted hard, thought for a moment. "You know what? I didn't call it an Aztec mumm
y at first. I just said it was an Indian mummy. Which it was. Or at least I think it was. Hard to tell for sure with that hair. Jack and Tommy thought so, too, although we never could figure out why some old cowboys or miners or whoever lived in that little ghost town would put up a shrine in their house for an Indian mummy. That's a better story than the one I came up with, and I don't know why I didn't just use it. Habit, I guess.
"Anyway, I called it an Indian mummy at first. But this whole area's reservation central. There's a lot of Indians around here, and some of 'em didn't take kindly to my star exhibit. Not that they came to the museum or paid to see it. There was one young hothead who started telling everyone in town that I had no right to own that thing, let alone display it, that I was being disrespectful and sacrilegious and all that. He did pay to see it, but he didn't stay long. Seemed scared of it, if you want to know the truth--"
Glen broke in. "We wanted to ask you about that, too. Did you ever feel that way? Or do you know of any stories of customers or coworkers or anybody being scared or frightened of the mummy?"
"Do you have any ghost stories to tell?" Melanie prodded.
Nate looked at them with narrowed eyes. "What's this about?"
"What do you mean?" Glen asked.
"You're not archeologists. Or not like any archeologists I ever heard of."
Glen sighed. "All right. We're not archeologists. Not technically. But we have been working on an archeological excavation outside the town of Bower." He explained about the skull and the rash of strange occurrences that had been centered around Anasazi archeological sites and artifacts. "The Anasazi disappeared nearly a thousand years ago and no one knows why, but one theory is that a . . . creature, a supernatural being of some sort, was responsible for their disappearance. This is what we believe. And we know a boy who we think got a picture of it." He took out the Polaroid, showed it to the old man.
Nate looked at it, nodded, and handed the photo back. "Hmm."
Glen looked at Melanie. He wasn't sure whether Nate believed him or thought he was crazy, and he could tell from the expression on her face that she couldn't tell either.
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