Douglas Preston - Thunderhead

No, that was not quite all; her mind had never been far from Holroyd’s remains, waiting for them a quarter mile up the slot canyon. And with those remains came the message that the skinwalkers were close; perhaps watching them right now, waiting to make their next move.

She glanced back toward Aragon: the man had made it clear he wanted to speak to her about something. Aragon looked up, read the question in her eyes, and merely shook his head. “When we reach the body,” was his only reply.

Nora swam across another pool, climbed up a pourover, and squeezed sideways through a narrower section. Then the steep walls widened a little around her. In the distance ahead, she could make out the massive cottonwood trunk, suspended like a gigantic spar, wedged across the walls of the canyon. Just above it, in deep shadow, was the narrow ledge that led to the space where Holroyd’s body had been laid.

Nora’s eyes fell from the ledge, to the jumble of rocks below, to the narrow pool that stretched the eight or ten feet across the canyon’s bottom. Her gaze came to rest at a smear of yellow, floating at the near end. It was Holroyd’s body bag. Gingerly, she came forward. Now she could see a long, ragged gash in one side of the bag. And there was Holroyd’s body, lying on its back half out of the water. He looked strangely plump.

She stopped dead. “Oh, God,” came Smithback’s voice by her shoulder. Then: “Are we exposing ourselves to some kind of disease, wading about in this water?”

Aragon heaved himself up behind them. “No,” he said, “I don’t believe we are.” But there was no consolation in his face as he spoke these words.

Nora remained still, and Smithback, too, hesitated behind her. Aragon gently pushed past them toward the body. Nora watched as the doctor pulled it onto a narrow stone shelf beside the pool. Reluctantly, she forced herself forward.

Then she stopped again with a sudden gasp.

Holroyd’s decomposing body was swollen inside its clothes, a grotesque parody of obesity. His skin, protruding from his shirt sleeves, was a strange, milky bluish-white. The fingers were now just pink-edged stubs, having been cut away at the first joints. His boots lay on the rocks, slashed and torn, and his feet, that same pale white against the chocolate rock, were missing their toes. Nora gazed in mingled disgust, horror, and outrage. Even worse was the back of the head: a large circular whorl of hair been scalped off, and the disk of skull directly beneath drilled out. Brain matter bulged from the hole.

Working swiftly, Aragon donned a pair of plastic gloves, removed a scalpel from his kit, positioned it just below the last rib, and with a short movement opened the body. Reaching inside with a long narrow set of forceps, he twisted his hand sharply, then retracted it. On the end of the scalpel was a small bit of pink flesh that looked to Nora like lung tissue. Aragon dropped it inside a test tube already half filled with a clear liquid. Adding two drops from a separate vial, he stoppered the tube and swirled it around in his hands. Nora watched as the color of the solution turned a light blue.

Aragon nodded to himself, carefully placed the tube inside a styrofoam case, and repacked his instruments. Then, still kneeling, he turned toward Nora. One gloved hand lay, almost protectively, over the corpse’s chest.

“Do you know what killed him?” Nora asked.

“Without more precise tools, I can’t be a hundred percent sure,” Aragon replied slowly. “But one answer does seem to fit. All the crude tests I’ve been able to run verify it.”

There was a moment of silence. Smithback took a seat on a rock a cautious distance from the body.

Aragon glanced at the writer, then back to Nora. “Before I go into that, I need to tell you some things I’ve discovered about the ruin.”

“About the ruin? ” Smithback asked. “What does that have to do with his death?”

“Everything. I believe the abandonment of Quivira—indeed, perhaps even the reason for its very existence—is intimately connected with Holroyd’s death.” He wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “No doubt you’ve noticed the cracks in the towers, the collapsed third-story rooms of the city.”

Nora nodded.

“And you must have noticed the great rockfall at the far end of the canyon. While you were off searching for the horse killers, I talked with Black about this. He told me that the damage to the city was done by a mild earthquake that struck around the same time the city was abandoned. ‘The dates are statistically equal,’ he said. The landslide, according to Black, also occurred at the same time, no doubt triggered by the earthquake.”

“So you think an earthquake killed all those people?” Nora asked.

“No, no. It was just a temblor. But that rockfall, and the collapse of some buildings, was enough to raise a large cloud of dust in the valley.”

“Very interesting,” Smithback said. “But what does a seven-century-old dustcloud have to do with Holroyd’s death?”

Aragon gave a wan smile. “A great deal, as it turns out. Because the dust within Quivira is riddled with Coccidioides immitis. It’s a microscopic fungal spore that lives in soil. It’s usually associated with very dry, often remote desert areas, so people don’t come into contact with it much. Which is a very good thing. It’s the cause of a deadly disease known as coccidioidomycosis. Or, as you might know it, valley fever.”

Nora frowned. “Valley fever?”

“Wait a minute,” Smithback interjected. “Wasn’t that the disease that killed a bunch of people in California?”

Aragon nodded. “Valley fever, or San Joaquin fever, named after a town in California. There was an earthquake in the desert near San Joaquin many years ago. That quake triggered a small landslide that raised a cloud of dust, which rolled over the town. Hundreds became ill and twenty died, infected with coccidioidomycosis. Scientists came to call this type of deadly dustcloud a ‘tectonic fungal cloud.’” He frowned. “Only the fungus here in Quivira is a far more virulent strain. In concentrated form, it kills in hours or days, not weeks. You see, to get sick you must inhale the spores—either through dust, or through . . . other means. Mere exposure to a sick person is not enough.”

He wiped his face again. “At first, Holroyd’s symptoms were baffling to me. They did not seem to be from any infectious agent I knew of. Certainly he died too quickly for any of the more likely suspects. And then I remembered that rust-colored powder from the royal burial.”

He looked at Nora. “I told you about my discoveries with the bones. But do you recall those two pots, full of reddish dust? You thought they might be a kind of red ochre. I never told you that the dust turned out to be dried, ground-up human flesh and bone.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Nora cried.

“Let’s just say you were preoccupied with other things. And I wanted to understand it myself before I dangled yet another mystery in front of you. In any case, while puzzling over Holroyd’s death, I remembered that reddish dust. And then I realized exactly what it was. It is a substance known to certain southwestern Indian tribes as ‘corpse powder.’”

Nora glanced at Smithback and saw her own horror reflected in his eyes.

“It’s used by witches to kill their intended victims,” Aragon continued. “Corpse powder is still known among some Indian groups today.”

“I know,” Nora whispered. She could almost see Beiyoodzin’s drawn face in the starlight, telling them of the wolfskin runners.

“When I examined this powder under the microscope, I found it absolutely packed with Coccidioides immitis. It is, quite literally, corpse powder that really kills.”