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.It almost seemed like sacrilege to him.Still, he wouldn't buck Laika on this.She was right.They had to see what the hell they were up against.They drove onto the butte, from which they could see the house.In less than an hour, the people came out and piled into the cars.One of the older men on the porch walked to the station wagon, closed the tailgate, and started the procession, which seemed to head straight out into the desert.The ops followed.Three miles north, the cars turned onto another dirt road even less traveled.Tony could see the cemetery about a half mile away."Good enough," Laika said."Tony, where does this road come out?"Tony consulted the maps."Joins a paved road in three more miles.""All right," Laika said, driving on."That's how we'll come back after dark."Chapter 14In Gallup, Laika, Tony, and Joseph bought two shovels, a small digging iron, and a crowbar, then had dinner.They returned to their motel, where Tony got an infrared camera and three pairs of goggles.When it grew dark, they drove back out to the reservation and came down to the cemetery road from the north, the long way around, so that they would not have to go through Red Water.The road to the cemetery blended so well into the desert that Tony, who was driving, would have missed it had Laika not told him to turn.It was the saddest graveyard Tony had ever seen.The natural vegetation was sparse, mostly sagebrush and yucca, with an occasional clump of rabbitbrush, its yellow flowers closed tightly against the chilly night.A withered juniper stood at the entrance, next to a wrought-iron gate that seemed never to have been attached to a fence.Tony thought there once might have been a sign above it, but now there were only rusty bolts.There were hundreds of graves, the more recent ones covered with foot-high mounds of earth.Small decorative picket fences, only a few inches high, surrounded many of the graves, and plastic flowers adorned most of these.The sun and dry air would have leached real flowers dry in a day.Although there were a few actual gravestones, most of the markers were metal plaques stuck in the dirt with names and dates spelled out with snap-in letters.There were even a few faded plastic toys on what Tony assumed were children's graves.There was no sign of a caretaker's house nearby, and although they could see an infrequent car pass on the dirt road a half mile away, they felt confident that there would be no more visitors until morning.In fact, the few passing cars seemed to speed up as they drew nearer to the cemetery.Maybe Laika had been right about that fear of the dead, Tony thought.They found Ralph Begay's grave easily enough.It was near the back of the cemetery, and the earthen mound was darker than those of older graves.There was only a wooden stake with Begay's name written on an attached piece of brown cardboard.With little ceremony, they began to dig.Uncovering a grave, even a fresh one, was a tough job.Tony and Joseph were sweating by the time they had finished bringing the mound to ground level."What I wouldn't give for a backhoe," Joseph muttered, as his spade dug into the clods of dirt.Laika took her turn, too, and after an hour the blade of her spade scraped against the wood of the coffin."This is a helluva time to say it," Joseph said from where he sat on the edge of the grave, "but I think the batteries in my goggles are failing.It's a lot darker than it used to be.""Same with me," said Laika."I think we can use flashlights in the grave, though.There shouldn't be a glow, and if there is, maybe people driving by will think it's just another ghost."Tony, next to her in the grave, grunted his agreement.He didn't like this any better than he had liked their nocturnal visit to the graveyard in New York City, when they had uncovered a crypt that held not corpses, but a living, though extremely elderly, priest, entombed there as punishment for his attempt to free the prisoner they had sought.Under the trees or out in the desert, a graveyard was the one place that gave Tony the creeps.He wasn't afraid of anything or anybody living, but the dead were another matter.They all took off their goggles, and Laika, standing on top of the coffin, turned on a flashlight and got a foothold in the earth at the end of the open grave."Open it, Tony," she said.He fit the curved end of the crowbar under the lip of the coffin lid and strained upward.The nails shrieked as they were jerked out of the wood, and all three of them jumped at the sound.They looked at each other and smiled uncomfortably.Then Tony reached down and opened the lid, pulling it up and propping it against the dirt sides of the grave, while Laika shone the flashlight inside."My God," Joseph said softly, as close to a prayer as he ever came.The man inside the coffin had been dressed in a white shirt and clean denim pants.Someone had wrapped a bandanna around his neck.He wore no shoes or socks.But it wasn't his clothing that elicited Joseph's comment.Rather, it was the condition of his corpse.The flesh was uniformly brown, not the natural tan of a desert dweller, but the dark, muddy brown of an exposed tree root.The texture was similar to a root's as well, fissured and dried.But unlike a root, the skin showed no signs of ever having held an ounce of moisture.Tony had seen many bodies, and the unpleasantness of such contact had always come from the smell of the fluids and gases issuing from the tissues.In the case of Ralph Begay, however, there were neither fluids nor gases.The corpse did indeed look like that of a mummy.The eyelids had tightened and pulled open, revealing the sunken eyes.They looked, Tony thought, like white raisins, with little bugs where the pupils had been.The lips had drawn back from the teeth, and even though they had been poorly taken care of, they appeared obscenely white as they protruded from the brown gums."Like jerky," Joseph said."What the hell happened to this guy?"Laika snorted, unamused."Total dehydration." She knelt by the body and undid the shirt buttons, then drew back the cloth."Look, not a sign of burning.There's no charring, no ash, no sign of spontaneous or nonspontaneous combustion." She closely examined the man's neck and chest."I don't see a sign of an entry wound anywhere here.Come on, Tony, help me get off his pants—I want to check the whole body, just in case.Joseph, hold the light."Ralph Begay's naked body weighed so little that Laika turned it easily in her hands.Every now and then Tony heard crackling sounds, though whether it was the dry flesh cracking or the bones breaking, he wasn't sure."I think we can rule out vampires and chupacabras," said Laika."No signs of puncture wounds, not even small ones.Even if there were, that wouldn't explain why even his bones are dry.What could suck out the marrow, along with every other drop of moisture?""A super chupacabra?" Joseph suggested."Let's get a few tissue samples.And then some photographs.""It's bad luck to take pictures of the dead," a voice said.They had all looked up at the first word, and now saw a tall Indian, shading his eyes against Joseph's flashlight with one hand and holding his own light with the other, which he now turned on and shone at the three of them.He was wearing a dark-colored cowboy hat, a denim jacket over a blue work shirt, and jeans.A badge shone over his breast pocket."Not specifically photos," he went on, a smile playing over his heavy lips."But anything connected with the dead is out of bounds.Especially the kind of thing you're doing here
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