Buried Secrets (23 page)

Angry to be worrying about relationship issues at a time like this, Jo scowled through the windshield at the reddish dust that billowed, like a living thing, into the headlights. Or like living
things. She could almost swear she saw shapes in it, a face here, a shoulder there. Amorphous. Eerie.

Visibility had increased to four car lengths, at best—and that, only sporadic. But it would have to do. With the death of this latest evil, and Nature's rebellion, they seemed to be running out of time. And in the meantime, Zack slouched on the passenger side of the front seat, hardly winning friends.

Jo, for one, was
glad
to have Ashley and Cecil along. They had good ideas, for one thing. Ashley had provided goggles from the clinic, and Cecil found some bandannas to wear over their lower faces, like Old West outlaws—though currently, both hung at their throats. And Ashley and Cecil had information.

“If that symbol Jo found is Hebraic,” said Cecil, from the back seat, “then it might point toward King. He wore that Kabbalah pendant. But if it's a rune, I'm more inclined to suspect Dane Thorson.”

“If it's a man at all,” added Ashley, beside him. “Crazy Bud may have been speaking in the abstract. And if we truly are dealing with zombies, Angelique Dupres may yet be involved.”

Zack said, “
Now
you distrust the voodoo queen.”

Ashley firmly said, “Vodoun.”

“And snakes,” Cecil interrupted loudly from the back seat, before Zack could retort. “They're involved as well. They are used in Vodoun, though of course not rattlesnakes.”

Ashley said, “And snakes have goddess connections, which throws the Garden of Eden story into an interesting light, don't you think?”

Zack didn't seem to appreciate that.

“And immortality,” added Cecil. “As long ago as the
Epic of Gilgamesh,
snakes have represented everlasting life.”

Zack muttered, “Well, if
Gilgamesh
thought it was true…”

Jo surreptitiously smacked him in the leg while she caught Cecil's gaze in the rearview mirror. “Go on.”

Zack surreptitiously flipped her off. And to think she'd slept with…

But damn it, even now she didn't regret that. They hadn't just had sex, no matter how volatile things felt just now. They'd made love. Her and Zack. Because she loved him.

Even the traits that were currently making her teeth ache.

Cecil said, “It seems to be the skin-shedding. To ancient cultures, it looked as if the snake died and was reborn from its skin. That makes snakes the guardians of immortality.”

Something about that felt right.

Zack shook his head. “Immortality. Peachy.”

“It would explain why Nature is upset, though,” suggested Ashley. “Assuming she is. No matter one's beliefs about the afterlife, we do all have healthy options for becoming immortal. It's a natural part of living a full life, leaving an impression on the world. We can create works of art—poems and sculptures—for example. Or save lives. Or bear children! If someone is scorning those options for a darker, less natural means of living forever…”

Jo thought about the years she'd spent in Spur, making no more impressions than necessary, and felt guilty. And foolish. And she hated driving in this damned blowing sand!

Zack said, “So you're thinking the guy we're after decided against the poetry option, huh?”

Ashley sighed.

Cecil said, “Jo, can you make out that split-rail fence to our right? When it opens into a gate, that's where we turn in.”

She had to lean closer to Zack to see the fence. That meant feeling Zack's nearness again. Breathing him.
Sensing
him.

She didn't want him to die. She'd rather go alone, herself.

“Here,” he told her gruffly.

She turned, and the truck swooped down a sharp bank, rocky and uneven. Jo stomped on the brake, slowing their rushed descent, and only eased off it in short starts until the land leveled out. But level out it did—and right in front of her was the opening in the fence.

“Thanks,” she murmured, easing onto the gas again.

“Yeah,” Zack said, then hooked his elbow on the seat back to ask Cecil, “So if this guy's doing some kind of immortality ritual, what would it entail?”

In the mirror, Jo saw Cecil and Ashley exchange uncertain glances.

Zack turned to face front again. “Crap.”

“It's just, we don't know what tradition he's using,” insisted Cecil quickly. “Santeria, Quimbanda, Vodoun, Wicca—”

“Wiccans don't do necromancy,” said Ashley.

“Not normally, but my point is, he could be following any magical system from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn to some paperback called
Spells to Be Immortal.
There's no way to tell.”

Jo felt she ought to mention, “And Crazy Bud said he's mixing traditions. Mixing powers, anyway. Willy-nilly.”

“Which means Jo and I are going in blind.” Zack thumped a closed fist against his window, like he wanted to get out.

Cecil said, “To our left, the track should veer down into a ravine, right around here. It may be difficult to find….”

It was difficult.
Jo crept the truck forward, then braked, then crept forward, then braked, craning her neck as if those extra few inches between her and the windshield were going to somehow cut through the blowing dirt and whatever lurked in its swirling frenzy. For a moment, the path seemed to smooth into something like a trail—

Suddenly figures seemed to lurch out of the darkness, throwing themselves at the windshield. Gasping, Jo not only stopped but yanked on the parking brake—and stared into the nothingness of dirt again. No bodies. No faces.

The words hit before the thought. “Something's wrong here.”

“What?” Zack already had his hand on his pistol, peering out his own window as if he'd seen nothing. “Some
one,
or some
thing?
”

“I thought I saw…” Frustrated, Jo pulled her goggles back on, then her bandanna. She wasn't sure what she'd find, but she knew she needed to look. Even out there. “I'll just be a minute.”

When she opened her door, the wind jerked it out of her hand. She needed all her strength, after climbing out, to push it closed. Dirt filled her clothes and her ears, flapping the triangular end of the bandanna and scraping across the goggles as she felt her way around to the front of her truck. Then, her stomach shrinking into a small, hard thing, Jo peered through the blowing sand at the ground not a yard ahead of the tires.

It was a sheer drop. If someone or something hadn't stopped
her, she would have rolled the truck, possibly killing herself and her friends too.

And Zack.
She'd only just found him, and she could have killed—

A sharp whistle in her ear, over the wind, made her jump. It was Zack, bandit-masked, eyeing the ravine. She punched him in the shoulder for scaring her—then kept her hand on him, because he was solid and sure in the midst of this blowing, howling uncertainty. And he didn't make a half-bad windbreak.

He yelled, “So did we overshoot, or turn too soon?”

Damn it, she'd
only just found him!

“I don't know,” she admitted. When he yelled “What?” she clutched a handful of his shirt for support, rose onto her toes, and repeated more loudly.
“I. Don't. Know!”

“So we'll figure it out,” he shouted back. “Get inside!”

Jo didn't want to. She didn't want the responsibility anymore. She didn't want to fight evil, she didn't want to risk driving her friends over cliffs, and she sure as hell didn't want to watch this lover die. She
was
scared. Finally terrified.

Because her only other option seemed to be not to watch.

She yanked on Zack's shirt, and he bent obligingly closer to her, and she asked, “Will you drive?”

She felt guilty for being a coward. But who else was she supposed to ask for help?

Zack's intense eyes searched hers from behind his plastic goggles. But all he said was, “Sure.”

When they climbed back into the Bronco on opposite sides than they'd gotten out, neither Cecil nor Ashley mentioned it. They simply looked over the map, double-checked the trip odometer, and decided they'd turned a tenth of a mile too soon. So Zack backed the truck up, then continued to carefully parallel the ravine until they hit a better ford.

Jo sank back into her seat, on the passenger side, and marginally relaxed. At some point, when she wasn't looking, she'd gotten used to this. Zack driving. Zack carrying the weight of everyone's safety on his broad shoulders.

Hers included.

It didn't mean she couldn't do it herself. But she no longer fought him doing it either. Life was too short.

Maybe literally.

B
y the time Zack pulled the truck to a stop beside the box canyon outside where the cave should be, Jo no longer suspected the transitory faces and figures in the blowing sand were mere illusions. They were taking on momentary form.

A shoulder here. A glimpse of blowing hair there. Saddened eyes reflected the struggling headlights, then vanished.

It was downright creepy. But the creepiest part was watching for Gabriella to appear. And Jo didn't even know the woman.

What must Zack be going through?

She knew him better than to ask if he was okay, anyway.

“Wear these,” Cecil insisted, passing two-way radios with hands-free headsets over the seatback. “The channels are already set. I don't know how well they'll work through rock, but it's worth a try. If you see something, describe it so Ashley and I can try to narrow down what traditions
are
being used and, if possible, how.”

“I hate going in dead blind.” But Zack took the radio.

Cecil's eyes widened mournfully. “Don't say dead!”

So maybe we
don't
go in,
Jo found herself thinking, even as she secured the earplug of her own headset, even as she slid the
goggles over her eyes and pulled up her bandanna mask.
We can leave. You and me. We can pretend none of this is happening, that we imagined it.

It hadn't worked so badly for her last time, had it? She'd been alone, sure, but she'd survived. If the world could go on after parents or lovers died, why wouldn't it continue with an evil immortal or two in it?

This time she wouldn't even be alone. She would have Zack.

Let me have you.

But Jo knew damned well that she
would
be alone if she gave up. Even if she pleaded Zack into leaving with her, she wouldn't have the whole man, only a ghost of who he could be. She wouldn't have all of herself, either, just the hollow reflection she'd been for years. Being lost from oneself was an even worse kind of aloneness, a worse kind of death, than even the grave.

Or maybe it wasn't really worse—just more avoidable.

That had to be enough.

So she shrugged on her backpack, heavy with explosives and the hand-held blasting machine. She popped the cylinder on her revolver and added a sixth bullet before snapping it into place. When Cecil offered his machete, she hooked its hilt to her belt. There would be no such thing as overdoing it, today.

Too much of her—her blood and bones and soul—sensed danger out past that sand. She hoped to never ignore that sense again.

“Ready?” asked Zack, looking like a nearsighted bandito.

I love you too much to ever be ready for this,
she thought. But with so many other factors stealing their attention, now was not the right time to mention that. “I am if you are.”

He got out of the truck. She did too, into screaming wind.

Her and Zack. Alone—but together.

Or maybe not alone.

As they waded through buffeting dirt, nearing the crevice that seemed to be the cave entrance, a figure moved. A whole, solid figure, not just a glimpse of skin and sand. They both dropped to the ground, in the shelter of a sandstone boulder.

And Jo landed nose to nose with one of the largest rattlesnakes she'd ever seen.

The snake wasn't coiled in a threat to strike; its swollen-jawed, triangular head rested casually across a few of its heavy, arm-thick coils. It stared at her through tiny, cold-blooded eyes. Its tongue flicked out and in, out and in, tasting the scent of her.

Jo didn't move. At all. Even to breathe.

In her ear she heard Zack's murmured voice sound more clearly than the storm around them—except for the rush of the wind, like static, in his mike. “Some kind of guard,” he told Cecil. “Only caught a glimpse through all this damned Texas blowing around. I'm gonna look closer, see if it's human.”

Nobody wanted to end up hurting a living human being—although, in the case of their
diablero,
they might have to.

Jo wasn't sure if she sensed Zack rising up for another look, or merely heard the heavier wind on the headset. She was too busy watching the snake's forked tongue flicker at her, in their little sheltered pocket out of the worst wind.

After a moment, Cecil's voice prompted, “What do you see?”

Zack didn't answer.

Uh-oh. Still holding the snake's beady gaze, Jo found she could move after all. She reached behind her, hand wide and grasping—and could have moaned her relief when her fingers touched the denim of Zack's jeans. He was still there, at least.

But something was still wrong.

Snake, or Zack? Snake, or Zack?

The snake didn't seem to be buzzing a warning, not that she could hear anything over the wind. He still lay casually coiled.

Oh hell.

Jo fisted her free hand tight around her own microphone and whispered to the reptile, “We're taking care of it now, okay? Let us do our job.”

She doubted even a snake could hear her, in the midst of this dust storm, but logic held that it couldn't understand anyway. In for a penny, in for a pound.

Cecil's voice sounded increasingly worried. “Zack? Jo?”

She uncurled her fingers from the mike. “I'm here.” Then she made herself turn to Zack—giving the snake her back.

Zack wasn't just staring over the boulder. He was standing.

Jo rose onto her knees—her back tensed, waiting for fangs that didn't come—and looked too.

The “guard” walked slowly closer to them, her mascara-lined eyes cold. Dead. Nothing else about her seemed dead, not even the dry, glittery sheen of her skin and clothes, and certainly not the rock clutched in one carefully manicured hand. But the lack of expression in those eyes, that was enough.

Even if Gabriella Lorenzo was merely existing, like Jo had for all these years—letting her heart pump forgotten blood, letting her lungs draw unnoticed air—her eyes were dead.

That was when Jo fully understood just how close she'd come to walking-dead status herself, before Zack arrived. With one big difference. Jo hadn't been killed or buried yet. Jo still had a chance. If she took it.

Gabriella wore a blue, silky dress, flapping around her in the wind as she stepped within arm's reach.
A funeral dress.

And she was raising the rock, while Zack stood and stared.

 

Zack had readied himself for this for four years. Seeing Gabriella again, that is. Maybe seeing her dead.

He hadn't expected her to try to kill him.

If she'd succeeded, it would be because he'd underestimated things. The punch to his gut that just seeing her caused. His guilt at not having understood. His pain at her not telling him.

And he'd underestimated the horror.

This was a worse horror than toothy monsters or unstoppable killers. The worst those monsters could do, generally, was kill a person. Awful though that was—and God knew it was terrible—people did die anyway. Sooner or later. Everyone. No exception.

Gabriella, whom he'd once loved body and soul—whom he would in some ways always love—
hadn't been allowed to die.
Suddenly, clearly, that was worse. She'd lost her life but was imprisoned in some kind of in-between, outside the flow of Nature, outside the peace of God. And Zack could barely swallow in the face of that horror, could barely see, could barely breathe.

Gabriella.
His wife. His love. His responsibility.

He barely noticed that she was swinging one arm back….

Which is when Jo rammed herself into his ribs, body-checking him to the ground.

Zack jammed his elbow, breaking their fall. Chunks of sandstone rained across them, heavier than the blowing sand. “What the hell—” he began to protest.

Then he noticed the snake coiled by Jo's boots as she sprang back up. “Jo,
snake!
”

“I think it's friendly,” she gasped back, more audible through his earphone than from standing over him, and vaulted the boulder. Zack scrambled up too, and away from the snake, just in time to see Jo duck another swing from Gabriella's vicious-looking rock. “Friendlier than her.”

Crap.
He jumped over the boulder himself, and grabbed Gabriella—or tried. For the first time in four years, he reached for her, and it was to keep her from hurting Jo.

But she vanished in a blown-away armful of sand, the rock dropping harmlessly to the desert floor.

A trick. It had been some kind of sick
trick.
“Maybe something's just reading our minds,” he guessed—prayed—as he watched the sand flutter out of his palms. The hurt in him, deep in his chest and his soul, was only an echo of the moment he'd first seen Gabriella in that damned bathtub, first known he'd lost her…but even the echo choked him. He wondered how he'd survived it full-strength, how anyone did.

But he also knew he
had
survived. Just like Jo had, more than once. Just like almost everyone else had to, sooner or later. It took more strength and courage than fighting evil—but they'd done it. And now it was time to clean up the mess.

He remembered Cecil and explained, “The guard was Gabriella, but she turned into sand. Maybe something's just reading our—”

Jo said, “So why don't any of those look like Diego?”

Zack looked up from his empty hands to see, between gusts of flying dust, three more figures standing between them and sandy glimpses of a jagged-looking cave entrance. Two boys and a girl, late-teens, early-twenties. Two held rocks, and one held some kind of branch as a club. All of them wore somber fineries appropriate for a funeral, except for the boy in the let
terman jacket. Zack could imagine grieving parents burying their son, the proud athlete, the star player, in that….

His anger was what freed him.
Damn
this thing! Bad enough that kids had to die, but for someone, anyone, to use them for his own twisted attempts at outsmarting God—

Not just no, but freakin'
Hell
no!

“Okay, so it's not reading our minds. They're the kids from that club, the Life Force,” he explained curtly, both to Jo and the headset. “They're probably just sand, too, but their weapons aren't. Whoever's sending them probably knows we're here. I say we go through them and go in fast, and whatever happens, happens. You with me?”

Silence. Except for Cecil's murmured, “I'm not sure those are the best possible tactics, Zack. Perhaps if you—”

It was their
only
possible tactic, so he switched off the headset. “Jo?”

When she still didn't answer, he dragged his gaze off the approaching…ghosts? Zombies? He glanced down at Jo and saw how pale she'd turned. It was different from a few minutes ago. Her goggle-covered eyes weren't on this newest batch of walking dead.

She was staring at the dark rock crevice.

Oh crap. He'd forgotten.
Caves.

Zack looked from her to the approaching trio and back—and felt a selfish surge of hope. This was the perfect opportunity to send her away.
Go back to the truck, let me do this.
It would be so easy, and then he wouldn't have to worry so much about her getting herself killed the way Gabriella had, and he could keep her. For himself. Maybe even for forty to sixty years before,
boom,
it all happened again.

That's when Zack realized just how well he did already know Jo, and just how much he must love her. It would kill her not to go on, at this point, to not finish the job she'd started. It wouldn't kill her quick; would maybe take years, decades. In the meantime, he would have some of her. But she'd be a zombie, all the same. The worst kind. The most common,
living
kind.

That's when he knew that he didn't just love her enough to die for her. He loved her enough to let her die, too.

If that was the chance she took, in order to live, he loved her that much.

The thought shook him, hard—but he didn't have time to be shaken. He grabbed Jo with rough hands, turned her toward him, and switched off the radio clipped to her belt, too. This wasn't for Cecil's ears. “Jo!” he shouted. “You coming or not?”

She glanced away from him, toward the cave entrance.

The kids—the sand-kids—were maybe ten feet off. They weren't moving fast. He guessed when you were already dead, you didn't have to.

“Josephine!” And Zack took a deep breath through his rapidly dampening bandanna. “I dare you.”

Her gaze darted back to his, and she blinked, startled.

He looked from her to the approaching danger to her again, and he actually felt himself grinning. Hell, he had to do
something
with all this adrenaline. “
Double
-dare you.”

And blessedly, her blue eyes flared back at him. “Zack—”

The kids had almost reached them. “You gonna come fight evil with me, or just stand there like some scared
girl?
”

And he stepped forward to throw a punch at the closest of the sand guards, fairly sure that—

Yeah. There was Jo, dusting the little female one. Good! He didn't want to have to hit a girl, even one made of sand. Sure enough, the guards dissolved and blew away once hit, their weapons thudding ominously to the ground.

“Race you!” Jo called, bolting for the cave.

Like he needed an invitation. Zack ran after her—and when she slowed, staring, he caught her around the waist and half carried her the rest of the way into the stony windbreak that was the jagged cave entrance.

He prayed he wouldn't have to leave her, comatose with fear, while he went on alone, and not just because she'd be helpless.

Because he'd been fighting alone for too long.

To his relief—and admiration—Jo managed to tug her goggles and her bandanna down around her neck without any help from him. She was breathing harder than maybe she had to, sure. And her face remained weirdly pale under her tan as her too-wide eyes took in stone walls around them, the harsh contrast
of thickening darkness and flickering light from deeper inside. But she was moving, breathing.
“Double-dare?”
she demanded, her voice uneven.