Just like the kerosene lantern Ela had used to light the root cellar where they’d made love and gotten zonked out of their minds on peyote.
Dylan stepped off the lower rungs of the ladder, onto a cushion of soft, moist dirt pitted with pools of standing water. The lantern-lit, winding tunnel before him didn’t look man-made so much as it seemed like an underground extension of the caves that were dug out of the hillside overlooking White Eagle’s property. It was like some kind of beehive, combined with a maze that twisted and turned this way and that.
Dylan started to reach for his dad’s pistol, then stopped. He hadn’t bothered to turn off the ringtone of the ancient-looking flip phone forming a bulge in the front pocket of his jeans, because nobody had the number he’d made himself memorize. He could take it out right now and call his father, or Caitlin, and tell them what he’d uncovered. But something pushed him on instead, gun left tucked in place until he was sure he needed it.
Drawing deeper down the labyrinthine path, he was struck by a rising odor on the air, something rotten and spoiled. Not a carrion or death smell, though, nor a scent resembling excrement of any kind. This was a different smell, foreign and yet vaguely familiar, as if the far reaches of his mind held some notion of it. The stronger and more acrid the stench grew, the less familiar it became, until Dylan began to consider the original thought an illusion.
Only he couldn’t, not totally, because he was sure it held some meaning for him, some memory he couldn’t quite grasp.
A bit farther along, the path canted upward, toward a smell of freshly dug earth that was strong enough to break the persistent oily, stale stench, at least for a moment. The path seemed to widen where it forked to the left, seeming narrower to the right. Then Dylan realized that the right path actually led to an evenly carved, door-size breach leading to a passageway forged by man and not nature.
The acrid stench seemed to peak, and Dylan saw he’d entered some kind of chamber. But it was too far from the spill of lantern light to discern anything more, until he noticed a matching pair of lanterns on either side of the dug-out entryway and turned one of them up.
A chamber all right—a storage chamber, encased by limestone walls.
He spotted what looked like tarpaulins thrown over uneven heaps and piles of something that seemed to hold the source of the stink, overpowering in the tight confines. Breathing through his mouth, Dylan peeled back the edge of one of the tarps as unobtrusively as he could, pulling—stupidly maybe—a clump of whatever was concealed beneath it free and up to his nose.
Its powerfully sour scent almost made him retch, and it was all Dylan could do to steady his stomach. He recalled the same scent emanating from the patch of fungus on the mold-riddled ear of corn that he’d made himself eat after Ela had called it a delicacy.
It’s a secret my people have kept for centuries, our greatest secret.
Dylan moved deeper into the chamber, into the shaft of light illuminating almost all of it.
And that’s when he saw the bodies.
87
DALLAS, TEXAS
“A blessed target,” Hatim Abd al-Aziz proclaimed, seated at the picnic table across from Razin Saflin, Ghazi Zurif, and Daniel Cross in Klyde Warren Park. “How many do you think are here now who could be dead tomorrow by the grace of God?”
Al-Aziz said that in a way that sent a chill up Cross’s spine, reminding him of how close he’d come to a moment like this a decade ago, of the lives he had wanted to take in his crowded school cafeteria. And that made him wonder whether Caitlin Strong had noticed him the other day outside the Comanche reservation. A decade ago, she’d done her best to convince him he was worth something, but the feeling had only lasted until the other kids started up on him again. Caitlin Strong might have talked him out of pulling a Columbine, but he knew his day was going to come. Now that it finally had, he found himself fearing her disapproval.
Why’d she have to be at that damn reservation?
“I only wish I could be here to see it,” al-Aziz continued, smiling so placidly at the prospect that it utterly unnerved Daniel Cross.