by Chuck Dixon
Caroline led the way, with Dwayne behind her and her brother bringing up the rear. Jimbo and Chaz stayed outside to keep an eye out for anything on the horizon.
To augment the night-vision lenses, they each broke glow sticks once they were inside the cave. This feeble light couldn’t be seen from outside the cave but was more than enough to illuminate their search. Every detail of the cave’s interior leapt into sharp contrast through the magic of digitized light amplification.
Caroline gasped. There was a depression in the floor of the trench, and skeletal remains lay there.
“Morry, these are the remains you uncovered?” she said.
Dwayne shifted to allow Morris to brush past him in the narrow passage the trench allowed. Morris crouched by Caroline.
There in the garish light were a single skull and set of ribs. The skull was broad, with wide-set eyes and inhumanly large orbital sockets and a pronounced brow ridge. The upper jaw was split in a jagged line leading down from a small hole punched through the occipital bone just below the left eye. A plate in the back of the skull was missing.
“That’s the shaman,” Caroline said. “I shot him with the gun Dwayne gave me, and he’s been lying here all this time.”
Morris couldn’t speak. The last time he had been here, there were three skeletons lying in a jumble. One of the skulls had a porcelain cap on a molar; the same crown a dentist put in place when Caroline was in her sophomore year in Chicago. That skull also had a round hole drilled through the temple; a hole much like the one in the face of the remains lying there now.
Here was proof that the past is changeable; that time is a malleable element that shifts and warps if interfered with. The universe is not a constant, and the evidence was here before them. Five weeks ago, he discovered this cave and uncovered what was clearly the suicide of his little sister, committed one hundred thousand years before her birth. Since then, the Rangers had gone back through the Tube to that same day and rescued Caroline and changed those events. It meant there existed, for a time, an alternate reality in which the Rangers’ rescue failed. It was baffling even to a mind used to working in a non-linear fashion as was Morris.
“Isn’t that astounding?” Caroline said in a rush. “I hardly know what to think of it.”
“Yeah,” was all Morris could manage.
“This confirms that the Tube holds the key to proving String,” she gushed.
“But we’d need to reproduce similar results and record them,” Tauber said.
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer asshole,” Dwayne cut in. “We’re here for the gold, right?”
“Dig here.” Caroline shifted mental gears. She patted the left wall of the trench. “Extend this back into this niche and the gold should be here. Might be here. Theoretically.”
“Based on what?” Dwayne said.
“Based on the fact that the head witch doctor’s body is still here,” she said with a touch of frost. “They left him here where he died. Maybe the aborigines thought the cave was cursed and the gold along with it.”
“So, they just left their own treasure behind?”
“Why not, Dwayne? It’s not like, the gold had actual value to them. It’s useless for tools or weapons. They obviously didn’t even have the means to alloy or refine it. They liked it because it was pretty and shiny and easy to work into trinkets and beads.”
“Listen!” Morris raised his voice, anxious to set his mind to anything but the anomalies his mind was struggling to get around.
Caroline and Dwayne turned to him.
“We came all this way,” he said. “Let’s dig and find out if it’s idle supposition or millions in gold, okay?”
The five of them took turns through the night, clearing away dirt and sand and rock with shovels and picks. They handed back buckets to be dumped outside the cave. They reached a layer of packed pebbles and shell that would take real work to scrape away.
Caroline, her clothes and hair and skin brown with dirt, crawled far back into the niche on her belly. She used a trowel and rock hammer to chop at the impacted detritus layered there through the millennia.
Jimbo was working behind her to scoop loose earth and gravel into a bucket. He played the dirt through his fingers, and there were roughly-rounded pebbles of irregular sizes left when the dust fell away. He crawled backward and followed the trench outside. Faint sunlight was just showing over the mesa top.
He pulled off his NODs array and looked at the pebbles rattling in his hand. They cast off a soft yellowish hue. They had holes drilled through them so they could be strung as beads. Dwayne rose from where he was sharing cold coffee and power bars with Chaz and Morris.
“What you got there?” He looked down into Jimbo’s palm.
“What’s it look like to you?” Jimbo grinned. “Pay dirt.”
From inside the cave came a whoop followed by Caroline’s voice.
“You’re going to want to see this!”
The Rangers and Morris jammed themselves into the narrow passage to the rear of the cave where Caroline sat grinning and holding a glow stick against the crudely sculpted face of undeniable ugliness glowing dully with the satin sheen of solid gold.
9
Excavations
THEY KEPT TO the shade of their camouflaged covers throughout the day. Chaz and Jimbo made a run back to the trucks before the sun was too high. They brought back water jugs. They’d stay cool and hydrated and out of sight until nightfall. Caroline argued for continuing the excavation.
“We need the rest,” Dwayne said. “The gold’s been there all this time. It’s not going anywhere.”
“We haven’t seen any activity at the compound,” she said. “There’s no one there, and there’s not going to be. Besides, isn’t the longer we’re here, the greater the risk we might be discovered?”
“You want to take a vote? The Rangers will vote with me. And, if he had the balls, your big brother would agree with me, too.”
The Rangers bedded down and were soon asleep. Caroline fidgeted. Her body hummed with the need to uncover the statue and the rest and get out of here. She was achy from the work within the tight space of the cave. Muscles that Pilates forgot to address, and Advil could not reach the burning in her legs and shoulders.
She lay alternately wishing to take a shower and thinking about the gold they found within the cave. Seeing the yellow metal again brought questions to mind. The hominids who held her captive in the past were not metal workers of any kind. Their spear blades were of chipped stone as were their knives. The gold was soft and malleable and melted at a relatively low temperature. Even as technologically primitive a species as the tribe that once called this valley home could fashion simple objects from gold by hammering the soft metal into shapes. But where had they found the gold? Did they pan for it? That seemed highly unlikely. They certainly didn’t mine it by digging for it. And there were no signs that they had the wherewithal or industrious nature to refine the gold in the amounts to be found in the cave.
Most of the artifacts they found were just hammered lumps fashioned into crude plates or the hideous fertility statue. But a few were more finished pieces like medallions stamped with stylized pictographs of deer and fish. That meant someone who could work harder metals to make a press.
What was the source then? Could there have been other hominids or protohumans present in that era? Maybe there were a more advanced Neolithic people or even a settlement of homo sapiens present in North America long before archeologists believed there to be such inhabitants. The man-eating creatures she so disastrously discovered were not supposed to be here either.
Along with her swirling thoughts, the heat wasn’t helping her get comfortable and nor were the flies. After what seemed like hours of sweating and scratching and changing positions, she finally dropped off only to be startled awake by engine noise.
She sat up. Morris lay still sound asleep by her. A figure was low by the tent opening, silhouetted in the sunlight coming through the cover.
It was Dwayne Roenbach crouched by the cover opening and squinting out through a narrow gap into the sunlight.
“A helicopter,” he said. “It buzzed the compound site and banked around to the south. Probably en route to Vegas.”
“Not looking for us?” she said.
“Not sure,” Dwayne said. “Could be surveyors like Chaz and I pretended to be. Or a routine flyover by Gallant.”
“For what reason?”
“Like I’d know? This Sir Neal character is one big question mark, isn’t he? But from here, we turn up our awareness factors. Eyes open. Ears open.”
“Don’t you ever sleep?” Caroline said.
“Maybe when I was a baby,” Dwayne said, smiling. “Can’t remember.”
The chopper’s noise died away to nothing, and he parted the opening and slipped into the light.
She didn’t get to ask him what he’d been doing in her tent in the first place.
THEY WORKED ALL through that night and entirely uncovered the fertility statue, along with a pile of other gold pieces in the form of plates, rough bars, talismans, and beads. They were found packed in a loose mix of sand and ash under the hard layer of compacted shell. They were able to use their hands to brush away the grit and fill the buckets with the dull yellow pieces. The pile of gold artifacts was deep, deeper than Caroline recalled. Their digging revealed a stash roughly six feet in height before they reached the original stone floor of the cave. Could the hominids have added to the heap before their extinction?
The primitive fertility statue slowly revealed itself. The weight of years and several tons of earth and sand had crushed it to a misshapen mass with only a vaguely human shape. The outsized breasts were flattened, and the phallus was broken off. But what remained still weighed hundreds of pounds, if not thousands.
They worked their way down around the base of the statue to what was the floor of the cave a hundred millennia ago. The three Rangers were crammed into the tight space and strained and cursed, in an effort to work the fertility statue loose. It wasn’t going to move with their muscle alone. In the end, they used a hatchet and a wedge to chop through the soft gold to break it into ten separate pieces. They found that it was thickly molded but hollow. Morris raised some objections about the fetish idol’s historical significance but was growled down. Caroline even told him to “grow up” again. The creatures that held her captive did not have the wherewithal to create a mold for an object like the ugly idol. Had they found it somewhere?
The statue sections were muscled out of the cave and into the moonlight.
“Gotta be fifty pounds total,” Jimbo said, regaining his breath. “That is one heavy bitch.”
“What’s that, in today’s gold prices?” Chaz said and sat in the sand by the head.
“Millions,” Morris said, and they all turned to look at him. “I haven’t checked the last quote, but it’s over seventeen hundred an ounce. Rounding it down means the statue alone could be worth over a hundred million if your guess is right.”
Chaz grasped the hideous, misshapen head and kissed it on the lips.
“The rest is easily half that in weight again,” Caroline said with a grin. “It could be as much as two hundred million.”
“Is half of that enough to fund your work?” Dwayne smiled back at her. Hers was the smile he recalled when he first saw photos of her; the smile that wrinkled the freckles across her nose.
“Well, let’s not leave any behind,” she said, and stooped to enter the cave again.
THEY WIDENED THE depression they made around the place where the gold lay. More plates and beads were there; embedded where they’d been crushed into the soil by the weight of years. There was a stratum of crusty flakes of oxidation starting at the edge of their excavation. Jimbo carefully uncovered a portion of it and found more skeletal remains―the bones of a human arm.
He scooped away the loose sand as the others searched for gold bits on hands and knees by the ghostly glow of the light sticks. Jimbo found what amounted to the full remains of a skeleton lying atop a streak of dark crimson earth. He cleared away the gritty red soil and shell all around the yellowed limbs and torso. The bones had fallen apart over time, but their placement described a figure lying prone. The skull was crushed in on one side. Whether while the owner was alive or postmortem, Jimbo couldn’t tell.
“I’m no expert,” Jimbo said to the others. “But this is no skinny.”
Caroline crawled over to the remains and poked a trowel at the skull.
“You’re right,” she said. “It’s an adult male. Homo sapiens. He was six feet tall when he was alive.”
“Renzi,” Chaz said and met the eyes of the other Rangers. “Has to be.”
“You think he died here?” Dwayne said. “I’d like to think he bought it on the mesa. You don’t think they took him alive?”
“If they had,” Caroline said, “they’d have eaten him, right?”
The Rangers turned to her silently. “Sorry,” she said and lowered her eyes.
“What’s this discoloration in the soil he’s buried in?” Jimbo said. “It’s not blood, is it? Not after all this time.”
“It’s rust. Something oxidized here long ago and decayed into the sand,” Morris said. He lay on his stomach and ran fingers over the soil. He picked up brittle chunks of soil that were fused with shells. They crumbled in his hand into flakes.
Chaz held a light stick higher and looked at the streak of red soil with which the bones of their Ranger brother Richard Renzi had intermingled in the thousands of years since it was laid here. The streak was more than seven feet in length and only a foot across at its most narrow.
“It’s the Ma Deuce,” he said. “Excuse me?” Caroline said.
“The fifty-caliber machine gun,” Dwayne said. “The one Ricky was manning to cover our asses while we evacced through the Tube.
“They brought it here as a totem,” Jimbo said. “They carried the Ma Deuce and Ricky up here and laid them at the feet of their god with the bodies of the old woman and the shaman. And I’m betting they never came into this cave again.”
“They were afraid,” Caroline said. “So many of their tribe died that day. And all at the hands of a kind of men they’d never seen before. And weapons they couldn’t understand. They brought this gun and this man to the most sacred place they had and prayed to their goddess to protect them.”
“That is badass,” Chaz said with a chuckle. “Ricky would have loved it.” Dwayne grinned. “Seriously?” Caroline said with an arched eyebrow.
“You never got to know Ricky Renzi,” Jimbo said. “Having the last word meant everything to him.”
THEY SLEPT AGAIN through the day, and this time Caroline succumbed to exhaustion and slept hard despite the heat, the grime, and the flies.
When night came again, Jimbo and Chaz went and retrieved the two four-wheel-drive trucks. They drove them slow, with lights out and using night-vision gear to steer. The plastic buckets of gold and the sections of the statue were loaded onboard and strapped down under a heavy tarp. Rick Renzi’s skeletal remains, in a canvas bag, were carefully placed behind the seat in the cab of Chaz’ Dodge Ram.
“What will you do with your friend’s bones?” Caroline said.
“We sure as hell can’t get him into Arlington,” Chaz said.
“We’ll bury him somewhere out of the way and have a few beers over him,” Jimbo offered.
“Bury him with a pack of smokes and a bottle of Jim Beam,” Dwayne said.
“I don’t mean to offend you guys so cut me off if I’m out of line. I have a friend in forensic archeology at University College London. She could tell us about Renzi, things we haven’t had an opportunity to study until now,” she said.
“You mean cause of death?” Dwayne said. “I think that’s pretty clear to all of us.”
“I mean the possible physical effects of travel through the disruption field. There are all kinds of data in these bones,” she said. “But if you guys think that�
��s a bad idea—”
“I think Ricky would like the idea of going to college,” Chaz said.
THEY WORKED ON covering the traces of their excavation until the first purple glimmer along the eastern horizon. They shoveled dirt over the remains of the shaman. It was lost on none of them the crime against paleo-archeology they were committing by callously concealing what would be The Find of the Century. They refilled the trench and smoothed the floor as best they could in the unlikely event that someone might wander across the dig site.
Sunlight was just touching the tops of the range to the west as they drove away down the valley toward the service road for the highway. The trucks rode low, burdened to their weight capacity with the tarp covered loads.
10
The Morning After the Night Before
LEE HAMMOND WAS sure someone had nailed his head to the bed.
He searched his forehead with his fingertips and was sure he’d find a nail head there. A big fat sixteen penny spike driven right between his eyes.
No nail.
It was moving from beer to Jaeger to tequila and beyond the night before that gave him this head. He ran a dry tongue over his teeth. They felt like slimy fur and tasted like onions. That made him feel like it was all coming up, and he sat upright and opened his eyes.
Worst. Decision. Ever.
The pain in his head made him upgrade the size of the imaginary nail in his skull to a tent peg. His vision swam like his head was pinwheeling on his shoulder. He glimpsed something pink and blonde in his peripheral. He didn’t recognize the room he was in. So damned sunny with sheer curtains over peeling paint wooden frames. The bed was a double, and he was sharing it.
