The biting anger in the voice pursued Abe into his dreams that night.
Chapter Eight
It had been some years since Ryan and J.B. had ridden that part of northern New Mexico. A wild and barren land, a person could travel for three days in a straight line and never see a single living soul.
Their memories were of rolling hills, stubbled with sagebrush and mesquite, seamed by fresh rivers, with orange mesas and buttes dotting the higher ground and snow-tipped mountains away to the east.
The only life you ever saw, apart from the scattered and isolated villes, was the Navahoa single horseman on the skyline, watching over a few dozen sheep; an elderly woman, head covered in a patterned scarf, trudging along a winding highway, looking neither to left nor right, going from one unimaginable place to another. And the empty hogans, left open and deserted so that the night spirits of the dead could move away from them.
The passing of time hadn’t made many changes.
The region had been plagued by a number of fairly recent quakes, breaking open the blacktops and splitting the land into dark crevasses. One of them meant a change in plan, on the afternoon of the second day out.
Forty-four, as it wound through the Nacimento Mountains, had been wiped away, disappearing into a riven moonscape that even the off-road LAV would have found impossible.
J.B. had been at the driving controls of the eight-wheeler and he’d pulled over, switching off while he and Ryan consulted their precious old maps.
“There’s a road east,” J.B. said, pointing with his finger, “across to Coyote. Then north No, east again to Abiquiu.”
“Taking us the wrong way.” Ryan shook his head. “Gas is at a premium. Look, there’s a blacktop west through Chaco Canyon and then onto 371, toward Farmington or Cortez. Or Durango. Least it’s in the right direction.”
The Armorer took off his glasses and wiped them on his sleeve. “North and west. Probably only a dirt road. Still Yeah. Let’s go for that. Just one thing, Ryan, old friend.”
“What?”
“We have a breakdown in a region like this and the chances of getting out alive are somewhere between one and zero. The ass end of nowhere.”
“No choice, is there?” Ryan smiled, cracking the patina of dust that filled the fine lines in his face. “When is there a choice, J.B., tell me that?”
“I REMEMBER SOMEBODY once talking about this road, on War Wag One.”
“Who?”
“Can’t remember. Might have been Simon Lam. One was interested in the old Indian things. Said he’d visited Chaco Canyon when he’d been a young sprout in a ville on the edge of Monument Valley. Claimed that in predark days there were big arguments about this dirt road. Some said it should be upgraded to a smooth blacktop, to make it easier to visit the canyon. Others said it was good that only people who really wanted to go there would make the effort and keep the rough road.”
There was the worst section of the trip since they’d left the ordinary highway, the LAV rising nose-up, tike a breaching whale, then rolling to its left and sliding for fifteen or twenty feet, finally climbing again up over a series of bone-rattling humped ridges.
“Don’t need to ask who won the argument,” J.B. said. “And it’s your turn to spell me, Ryan.”
THEY REACHED THE RUINS of what had once been the Visitors’ Center in the middle of the afternoon, stopping in what was the overgrown, sandy remains of the parking lot.
“Doesn’t look the most hospitable place in the world,” Ryan commented, pulling on the brakes.
“Lam say it was worth a look?”
“Sure did. I think he said it was about the biggest and the best of the centers of the Anasazi culture, over a thousand years ago.”
“Mesa Verde,” J.B. said, throwing open the hatch and sucking in great gulps of clean air.
“Right. This was bigger. Much bigger.”
“Take a look in the building first?”
“Sure.” Ryan switched off the engine, relishing the sudden, delicious quiet.
The drinking fountain stood just outside the broken entrance doors. Ryan pressed the chromed button on the top and a tiny red spider with green legs fell out of the spout. It was long dead, curled into a ball.