The Calm Before The Swarm (13 page)

He wiped the sheen of sweat from his brow
and tried not to think about whatever was crawling on his skin
beneath his damp khakis. The assault of the insects had begun the
moment he stepped out of the rental Jeep at the My Son ruins,
arguably the crown jewel of the Champa Empire, which ruled Central
Vietnam from the fourth through fourteenth centuries. Phuong Dinh,
a former student who had been with him on the Chaco dig, had been
waiting at the A1 temple as she had said she would be, leaning
against what little remained after it was shelled during the war,
the first rays of dawn caressing her tan skin and making her rich
ebon hair glimmer with reddish highlights. She had smiled so
broadly when she saw him that he couldn't help but reciprocate. She
was no longer the shy and unassuming girl she had once been, but a
confident woman, now a colleague, whose dark eyes lit up when she
bounded down the slope and gave him a hug. He remembered the splay
of freckles dotting the bridge of her nose.

"Look at you," Reaves had said. "All grown
up."

"I can tie my own shoes now and everything."
She smirked. "You haven't aged a day, Dr. Reaves."

He tried not to blush.

"It's Brendan to you now, Dr. Dinh." His
relationship with Phuong had always been somewhat unique. She'd
been closer to his age than that of her classmates, and had been
driven by an inner fire that often eclipsed his own. As the
daughter of an American soldier who had quite possibly died
somewhere in these very hills, she had been raised in poverty by a
single mother who spoke only Vietnamese, yet she had risen above
her circumstances thanks to the desire to better understand the two
dichotomous worlds that she felt both a part of and alienated from
at the same time. It gave Reaves no small pleasure to see that she
was now totally in her element. "I can't tell you how proud I am
that you're doing exactly what you set out to do."

It was Phuong's turn to blush.

"We're burning daylight," she said. "We have
a long hike ahead of us."

He donned his backpack and followed her into
the jungle on a path the trees seemed desperate to reclaim even as
they traversed it. During the three-hour hike in the dim twilight
provided by the dense canopy, they had caught up with each others'
lives and the accomplishments of the intervening years, while
swarms of insects hummed and buzzed around them, finches and wrens
chirped, and snub-nosed monkeys screeched. He'd been somewhat
embarrassed to explain why he had left his post at Washington State
to work exclusively for GeNext. It still felt like a betrayal of
the anthropological tenets he had preached to his students, but
Phuong understood. After all, she was one of the select few who'd
seen the remains beneath Casa Rinconada, a sight that no one who
witnessed it would ever forget. GeNext had given him the
opportunity of a lifetime. He had carte blanche to travel anywhere
in the world, to dig wherever he wanted, without having to beg for
grants or even give a second thought to the financial side, and
rather than focus on the evolution of a single society, he had the
unprecedented chance to broaden his scope to encompass the entirety
of the human species.

He approached the hole in the ground slowly,
taking in even the most seemingly insignificant sights and sounds
with each step. This was the part that he loved the most, those
first eager steps toward a discovery held captive by the earth for
hundreds, maybe thousands of years, as if patiently waiting for the
perfect moment to reveal her secrets. Or perhaps for the perfect
person to whom to reveal them. So what if he hadn't instigated the
dig or troweled out the loam one scoop at a time? It still belonged
to him. Of that there was no doubt. It called to him like a
mother's song only remembered subconsciously through the memory of
a child.

His hands trembled as he shed his backpack
and withdrew his digital camera.

"We discovered it almost by accident,"
Phuong said. "A monsoon swept through here just over a month ago.
The rain exposed the hint of a brick wall built into the hill. It
took a while to clear the dirt from around it, but after that, the
bricks were easy enough to unstack."

"What am I looking at?"

Reaves walked a slow circle around the
clearing, taking pictures of the
linga
from every possible
angle.

"It's a
Sivalinga
, which symbolically
represents the god Shiva himself. The Champa built these all across
the countryside before they abandoned the region in the early
fifteenth century to the Viet. This one's similar to those back at
the ruins where you met me, only much more elaborate. The chamber
beneath it, however, is completely unique."

"The photographs you sent me...they were taken
down there?"

Phuong nodded and gestured toward the
shadowed orifice. Reaves couldn't quite read the expression on her
face.

He leaned over the hole and took several
quick pictures. The flash limned decomposing brick walls crawling
with roots and spider webs, and a decrepit stone staircase leading
downward into the pitch black. He removed his flashlight from his
pack and followed the beam underground. Dust swirled in the column
of light, which spread across the brick-tiled floor riddled with
moss and fungal growth a dozen steps down. He smelled damp earth
and mildew; the faintly organic scent of the tomb. His rapid
breathing echoed back at him from the hollow chamber.

When he reached the bottom, he snapped
several more shots. The brief strobes highlighted stone walls
sculpted with ornate friezes, a scattering of bones on the ground,
and a central altar of some kind, upon which rested what he had
traveled all this way to see in person. He walked slowly toward it,
taking pictures with each step. The carvings on the wall were
savage. Each depicted a malevolent Shiva lording over a scene of
carnage with his adversaries lifeless at his feet or suspended from
one of his many arms. The bones on the floor were broken and
disarticulated and heaped into mounds, aged to the color of rust,
and woven together by webs that housed the carcasses of countless
generations of insects.

His heart rate accelerated. This chamber was
similar in so many ways to the one back in Chaco Canyon, which had
dominated all of his thoughts during the last five years.

He finally brought the flashlight to bear on
the altar.

"It gives me the chills every time I see
it," Phuong said.

Reaves felt it too, almost as though the
object seated on the rounded platform radiated a coldness that was
released by the exposure to light.

"Carbon dating confirms that it was sealed
in here more than five hundred years ago, about the time that the
Champa vacated the area." She wrapped her arms around her chest and
shivered. "It's just like the others, isn't it?"

Reaves could only nod as he approached. His
beam focused on the skull seated on the dusty platform and threw
its shadow onto the far wall, which made the hellish designs waver
as though the many Shivas were laughing with a sound his mind
interpreted as the crackle of flames.

"Jesus Christ," he whispered.

Fissures transected the frontal bone, the
orbital sockets given sentience by the reflected light from the
spider webs inside. A large stone had been thrust between its jaws
with such force that the mandibular rami to either side had
cracked.

And then, of course, there were its
teeth.

INNOCENTS LOST

A young girl vanishes in broad daylight on
her tenth birthday. Her father, FBI Special Agent Phil Preston of
the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Team, devotes his life to
finding her and
discovers a pattern in a recent string of abductions.
Dr. Les Grant leads a group of graduate students into the Wyoming
wilderness in search of an unidentified Native American medicine
wheel photographed by an anonymous hiker. Instead,
they stumble upon a macabre tableau of suffering.
Fremont County Sheriff Keith Dandridge finds himself right at the
heart of the mystery when twenty-seven bodies are disinterred in
the Wind River Range at the westernmost edge of his jurisdiction,
with the promise of more to come.
All the while, an unknown evil is summoning the men to its killing
grounds, where the remains of the lost innocents are left to
rot...and a fate far worse than death awaits them.

(An excerpt from the terrifying novel from
Delirium Books.)

June 20
^th

Six Years Ago

Evergreen, Colorado

"Happy Birthday to yooouuu."

The song ended with laughter and
applause.

"Make a wish, honey," Jessie said. She
raised the camera and focused on the child who was her spitting
image: chestnut hair streaked blonde by the sun, eyes the blue of
the sky on the most perfect summer day, and a radiant smile that
showed just a touch of the upper gums.

Savannah wore the dress she had picked out
specifically for her party, black satin with an indigo iridescence
that shifted with the light. She rose to her knees on the chair,
leaned over the cake, and blew out the ring of ten candles.

The camera flashed and the group of girls
surrounding her clapped again.

"What did you wish for?" Preston asked.

"You know I can't tell you, Dad.
Sheesh."

"Why don't you girls run outside and play
while I serve the cake and ice cream," Jessie said. "And after that
we can open
presents
."

"All right!" Savannah hopped out of the
chair and merged into the herd of girls funneling out the back door
into the yard. More laughter trailed in their wake.

Preston crossed the kitchen and closed the
door behind them.

"So are all eight of them really spending
the night here?" he asked, glancing out the window over the sink as
he removed a stack of plates from the cupboard. The girls made a
beeline toward the wooden jungle gym. One had already reached the
ladder to the tree house portion and another slid down the
slide.

"Do you really think the answer will change
if you ask enough times, Phil?" She took the plates from her
husband, set them on the table, and began to cut the cake.
"Besides, they'll be sleeping in the family room with a pile of
movies. The most we'll hear from down the hall is a few giggles.
Could you grab the ice cream from the freezer?"

"So what you're saying is they'll be
distracted." Preston eased up behind his wife, cupped her hips, and
leaned into her.

She swatted his leg. "With a houseful of
kids? Are you out of your mind?"

"I wasn't proposing they watch."

"Would you just get the ice---?"

The phone rang from the cradle on the
wall.

Jessie elbowed him back, snatched the
cordless handset, and answered while licking a dollop of frosting
from her fingertip.

"Hello?"

Her smile vanished and her eyes ticked
toward her husband.

"I'll take it in the study," Preston said.
He removed the gallon of Rocky Road from the freezer, set it on the
table, and hurried down the hallway.

"He'll be right there," Jessie said. Her
voice faded behind him.

He ducked through the second doorway on the
right and closed the door behind him. All trace of levity gone, he
picked up the phone.

"Philip Preston," he answered.

"Please hold for Assistant Special
Agent-in-Charge Moorehead," a female voice said. There was a click
and then silence.

Preston paced behind his desk while he
waited. He pulled back the curtains and looked out into the yard.
Two of the girls twirled a jump rope on the patio for a third,
while several others fired down the slide. Savannah and another
girl arced back and forth on the swings. He couldn't believe his
little girl was already ten years-old. Where had the time gone? In
a blink, she had gone from toddler to pre-teen. In less than that
amount of time again, she would be off on her own, hopefully in
college---

"Special Agent Preston," a deep voice said.
He could tell by his superior's tone that something bad must have
happened.

Preston worked out of the Denver branch of
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, thirty miles to the northeast
of the bedroom community of Evergreen where he lived. The Lindbergh
Law of 1932 gave the Crimes Against Children Division the
jurisdiction to immediately investigate the disappearance of any
child of "tender age," even before twenty-four hours passed and
without the threat that state lines had been crossed. As a member
of the Child Abduction Rapid Deployment, or CARD, team, he was
summoned to crime scenes throughout the states of Colorado and
Wyoming, often before the local police. It was a depressing detail
that caused such deep sadness that by the time he returned home,
even his soul ached. But it was an important job, and at least at
the end of the day, unlike so many he encountered through the
course of his work, his wife and daughter were waiting for him with
smiles and kisses in the insulated world he had created for
them.

"Yes, sir."

"Check your fax machine."

"Yes, sir." Preston allowed the curtains to
fall closed and rounded his desk to where the fax machine sat on
the corner. A stack of pages lay facedown on the tray. He grabbed
them and took a seat in the leather chair, facing the computer.
"Okay. I have it now. What am I---?"

His words died as he flipped through the
pages. They were copies of slightly blurry photographs, snapped
from a distance through a telescopic lens. Even though they were
out of focus and the subjects partially obscured by the branches of
a mugo pine hedge, he recognized them immediately.