Bentley Little - The Burning

Sclby must have gotten more through traffic than lie thought bci;ui\( farther along the highway was an entire motel row and alter getting a rate card from each of the six motor inns, he decided to stay at the

Budget Arms, the last and cheapest lodge in town.

There was a sign in the office window: help wanted. Out of curiosity, he asked the clerk behind the counter what the job was while the man ran his credit card.

"Uh, kind of ... my job." The clerk grinned sheepishly. "I'm bailing tomorrow for the Ramada Inn down the block. Why? You interested?"

Dennis shrugged noncommittally.

"Well, it's yours for the taking. The misers who own this place don't pay much, but they don't ask questions either. And they're under a deadline here." He motioned toward Dennis' loaded car. "If you're just looking for a quick buck, want to make a little gas money so you can keep on truckin', this is a good gig. Long-term, though? I wouldn't recommend it."

"Thanks," Dennis said. He finished checking in, then took the key and walked over to his room. He looked inside. Bed, TV, window air conditioner. It wasn't the best place he'd stayed ... but it wasn't the worst either.

He unpacked the car, put his suitcases into the room, took the boxes and bags off the roof-he was becoming an old hand at this-then locked everything up and headed back to the motel office. The bell above the door jingled as he stepped inside. Before the clerk could ask what he needed, Dennis took the help wanted sign from the window and carried it over to the desk. He looked at the man.

"I'll take it," he said.

Eight

Canyonlands National Park, Utah

"Jesus."

Henry glanced up at the surface of the cliff in front of him. Overnight, someone had defaced the petro-glyphs that had been etched and painted onto these walls over nine centuries ago and had withstood rain and wind, heat and cold, conquering Spaniards, westward-migrating pioneers and the National Park Service. He had been here only yesterday afternoon, stationed at this very spot to answer tourists' questions, and everything had been the same as it had always been.

Now, though ...

Now lizards had been changed into boats, spirals into squares, horses into cars. People had been crossed out and scribbled over, and geometric symbols had been obliterated entirely, leaving only indented sections of chiseled rock. He'd never seen anything like this before and had no idea how such a feat could be completed in a single night. Even with a team of vandals driving cherry pickers and wielding power tools, there was virtually no way such a massive and wholesale destruction of historically significant rock art could be accomplished.

His gaze moved from the lowest pictographs, at eye level, to the weathered etchings at the top, nearly two stories above his head. For some reason he imagined those naked Oriental twins crawling up the precipitous face of the cliff, stone implements in hand, chipping away at the ancient Indian drawings and purposefully disfiguring them, the two sisters working throughout the night, moonlight shining on their bare flesh as they scurried over the sheer stone wall.

He pressed down on the erection that was growing in his pants, grateful there was no one else here.

He needed to report this. Nothing of this nature had ever occurred in the park to his knowledge, at least not to this extent, and it was incumbent upon him to inform the superintendent and to set the wheels in motion for the investigation that would hopefully catch the perpetrators so they could not do it again. What had been lost here could never be regained, and the most important thing now was to make sure that it did not happen again.

He was about to radio in a report when he suddenly

thought of another nearby site with hundreds of Anasazi petroglyphs and pictographs. It was more secluded, not on the park maps given out to visitors, but still accessible by Jeep. Quickly, he made the call to the superintendent, explaining what had happened, giving the exact location, then said that he wanted to check another site and see if it, too, had been ^vandalized.

"Don't touch anything," Healey warned, and Henry switched the radio off without answering. Asshole. Who in the fuck did he think he was talking to?

Putting the Jeep into gear, Henry drove away from the butte, then took a barely visible trail over the flat ground toward an adjacent confluence of mesas, speeding around a freestanding column of weathered sandstone into a wide box canyon. Halfway to the canyon's far side, he braked to a halt, sending up a cloud of dust that quickly overwhelmed the vehicle.

He jumped over the side and moved away from the Jeep, toward the canyon wall, waiting for the dust to clear.

He saw what he'd known he'd see.

The pictures on the rock had been transformed.

A sun with extended rays had been changed into what looked like a train track going into a tunnel. Two stylized humanoid figures were now posts on the porch of a Western building, a small forest of pine trees had been turned into a collection of sledgehammers, and a herd of wild horses were now railroad boxcars.

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, something off to the left that darted quickly from north to south, but when he turned his head in that direction he saw nothing. Again there was movement in his peripheral vision, a furtive rush by something dark and vaguely formed, but once again when he looked directly at the spot where it should be, he saw only sand and rock. It was hot out, and sunny, but Henry suddenly felt as chilled as if it were a winter midnight.

It was impossible for a person or persons to have defaced the park's petroglyphs to this extent in one night.

But it might not be impossible for something else.

He whipped his head around quickly, hoping to glimpse one of those fleeing forms, catch it off guard, but there was only the canyon. He made his way back to the car, alert for any sign of movement. Leaning over the closed Jeep door, Henry turned on the two-way radio-and gibberish issued from the speaker, a harsh yet singsongy chatter that sounded like nothing he'd ever heard before and sent a rash of shivers down his body.

He pressed the talk button. "Cote here."

No answer, only that strange gibberish, clear above the static. He realized that the walls of the canyon were too high; the radio wouldn't work in this spot.

He was cut off.

Henry Cote had done a lot of brave things in his life, from facing down an armed Viet Cong to leaping off a cliff into Wolf Canyon Lake on a drunken dare. But he was not feeling brave now, and he quickly jumped in the Jeep, fired it up and hightailed it out of the canyon, heading for paved roads and other people and the rational world.

Healey was waiting for him in the administration building behind the visitors' center. The superintendent waved Henry into his office, then shut the door behind them.

"I found more vandalism at Little-" Henry began.

"There's more than that."

The chill was back. So much for the rational world.

"Something's going on here," the superintendent said quietly.

Henry looked at him.

"I want you to keep this under your hat. I know it's going to get out because the police are involved, but it isn't just the vandalism. For one thing, Laurie Chambers is missing. She's been gone nearly two days. I haven't told anyone, and I waited a day just to make sure myself-you know how she is; she could've just gone out on an overnight and forgot about the time- but she hasn't checked in and ... and no Jeeps have been checked out of the pool. Her truck's still at her cabin."

"Jesus," Henry said, sitting down. "Laurie?"

"I know."

"She knows this country like the back of her hand."