Cold River Resurrection (30 page)

Martin held her and waited.  He had heard sirens earlier, and now they were a constant background noise.  Claire turned into Martin and nestled her head against his chest.  Her face was pale, her eyes closing.  Martin felt himself slipping and he gripped her wound harder. 

Slipping.

The medics and police found them like that, and when they checked her he heard one of the medics say that she was in shock.

“Why did that man do this?”  She whispered to Martin, and then “tell my mommy...”  She was lifted up and placed on a gurney, the medics working fast, talking to each other in their own special language.  Martin lurched up and followed Claire, trying to grab her hand as it fell beside the gurney. 

The morning was still bright with sun as Martin came out and sat on the curb, feeling woozy, not wanting to feel, the parking lot a surreal scene of activity - jumbled police cars, S.W.A.T. vans, ambulances, parents arriving, police running to the school. He watched the ambulance as Claire was being loaded.  As the medic shut the doors, he looked at Martin and shook his head.

And the thread of hope ran out for Martin Andrews.

Later, sometimes at night, he could feel Claire’s breath on his face.

Four years later . . .

Chapter 1

Cordillera Blanca Mountain Range

Central Peru

As the morning mist burned off the western slope, the woman with no feet waited on the ground, facing south. She was in a meadow, away from the rocks, and would soon be in full sunlight. Her eyes clouded with the milky opaqueness of death.  Had she been alive, she would have been cold until the sun touched the meadow.  She wore a purple and brown robe, the traditional dress of the Quechua Indians, or Seranos, People of the Altitude.  Long pampas grass and yellow and red wildflowers pushed up around her. 

Although she was watched from the surrounding rocks, she was alone in the meadow.  As the air warmed the flies found her, and a trail of ants wound through the grass toward the body.  A bird of prey circled high overhead, riding the thermals. 

Others would soon join the circling bird.  The woman wouldn't be alone for long.

Her attackers watching from the woods heard voices on the trail above the plateau.  They heard laughter, a woman's voice.

They waited.

On the morning the woman died, Tara Eagle stood at the edge of the meadow and shrugged to relieve the pain in her shoulders, her shirt wet in a v-shaped stain under her pack.  She was slender in blue jeans and hiking boots, her long black hair gleaming in the sun. She closed her eyes and listened to the other hikers as they came up behind her.  She couldn’t explain how, but she suddenly knew there was a body in the meadow in front of her.  She could see the color of the woman’s clothes, the slack and uncaring face, feet bloody like bright red shoes.  Tara started to shake with cold, the skin on her arms going tight and bumpy, and dropped the pad and pencil she had been carrying.

When she opened her eyes, there was nothing but grass in the meadow.

This will be the worst day of my life.  Death follows me.

Pedro, their Quechua guide came up beside her and she had other thoughts, more chilling and frightening

You’re to blame for this, Tara.  You’ll never get out of Peru alive, any of you.

She glanced upward, hoping to shake the image of the body as the rest of the hiking group crowded up behind her.  She looked past the group of students and then at the jagged mountain peaks of the Cordillera Blanca rising behind them. In front of her the mountainside spread out as if it would go on forever, down the slopes to the Pacific Ocean, fifty miles away.  Tara had been okay until now, thinking only of a hot shower after a week of hiking.  They visited pre-Columbian ruins in the Andes, a group of nine Native American students and one professor, and with their three Peruvian guides, they had only one more lunch stop, then on to the bus at Huaraz.

Maybe I’m not to blame, but I can’t get away from death, and that’s the same thing . . .

Tara jumped as Steve approached her from behind, laughing, saying something to the group of hikers.  He grabbed the pad and pencil and examined her sketch.  Tara snatched it back and flipped the pad closed as her two friends, Delores and Sabrina, panted to a stop beside her.

“Hey, sports fans,” Steve said, “you’re blocking the trail.”

Tara glared at him, annoyed at his constant joking.  If only he would be serious. 

“Hey, Tara,” Steve said, grinning,  “my jokes too much for you?”

Pedro put his finger to his lips, motioning for the rest of them to be quiet. Her fear crept up her spine, her left knee buckled, and she straightened it, shaking.  She hoped she had imagined the body in the meadow below them, for she had seen bodies before that hadn’t actually been real.  Her legs felt weak. 

“Que es?”  Steve asked.  He was the only student in their group who spoke Spanish.

Pedro turned around, his eyes large.  He glanced quickly at the rocks and then the meadow.  He licked his lips.

Oh God, he's scared to death,
Tara thought.

Pedro replied in Spanish, rapidly, his voice getting higher at the end. Tara waited for Steve’s translation.

“Pedro, donde estan Mario y Ruppert?” Steve asked.  She recognized that much –
where are Mario and Ruppert?

Pedro pointed down the trail.  The rest of the group crowded up behind them.

“Is it lunch time already?” Sabrina asked.  Steve held up his hand.

“Pedro, call to Mario and Ruppert,” Steve said in Spanish.

Pedro called.

There was no answer.

Mario and Ruppert, their other young Indian guides, had gone ahead to prepare a lunch.

It's too quiet, and now Pedro is scaring me, Tara thought.  She shook the image of what she knew was in the meadow.  All morning the hillside had been alive with bird and insect noise, and now she could hear nothing.  Keeping her eyes on Pedro, she moved off the trail.  The others followed in a tight group as they passed through a rock outcropping and stood at the edge of the meadow.  The group huddled behind her, as if they were cold, the early banter gone.   She squinted toward the meadow where Mario and Ruppert stood.

“Sendero Luminoso,”
Pedro whispered.  He glanced from one to another, his hand shaking as he wiped his face with his shirt.  Tara felt her scalp go tight; sweat trickled down the middle of her back.  She knew what Sendero Luminoso meant.  They all did.  Sendero Luminoso - The Shining Path.  Peruvian guerrillas dedicated to a violent overthrow of the government.  Legs braced, Pedro appeared to be ready to bolt. Tara placed her hand on his shoulder.  He tensed, but she felt him trembling.

When she was ten years old, she had seen a gopher caught in a leg-hold trap.  She had been with a friend, taking a shortcut through a field, and they heard the gopher before they saw it.  The animal had been chewing its leg, an atavistic attempt at survival and the leg was almost severed.  As they approached, the gopher hissed and clawed, pulling on the chain.  Tara had been as scared as the gopher, and now when she stood next to Pedro, she saw a frightened man, as trapped and as afraid as the gopher.

He was already chewing on his leg, and he didn’t know it.

His eyes jerked to meet hers.

“Shining Path,” Tara said quietly.  “They told us in Lima that they were all in jail or dead, and with the search around the world for bad guys, we thought they were all gone.”  She lowered her voice to a whisper.  “After nine eleven, it was supposed to be safe to travel again.”

Pedro nodded.  Delores and Sabrina leaned in closer to her.

She watched Steve start across the meadow toward their guides. 

Tara glanced at the others and then followed Steve, the short grass reminding her of the high meadows on the Cold River Indian Reservation.  The sun was warm on her face, comforting, as she left the rocks.  Up ahead, Steve reached Mario and Ruppert, and stopped.  As she came up behind him she knew at the last instant there would be a body there, as she had dreamed it, the odor of blood and the swarm of flies telling her she didn't want to look. 

But she did.

Clasping Steve’s arm, she stared at the body of the Indian woman.  She took in the milky eyes of the dead woman. Flies that formed a black writhing veil where her face had been, the bloody, foaming mass where. .
Her feet, oh Christ she has no feet. 

Tara stepped back, her mind furiously attempting to deny what she had seen.

The woman has no feet, and I did this to her.  I must have, ‘cause death follows me.

She shivered.  Her mouth went dry.  She had seen violent death before.  You didn't grow up on a reservation and not see it, or in the city for that matter.  But this, this time . . .

Tara heard sounds of someone retching. Gretchen stared at the body, her hands over her mouth; then she turned and vomited, bending over at the waist, her glasses sliding down her nose and dangling crazily from one ear.  Tara caught the sunlight glinting on the silver frames.  The sounds of the retching jolted her stomach, yet she couldn’t leave.  The others came up quietly and clustered around the body in a curious half-circle, as if they were going to have to take notes and be held accountable later.  For once, Tara thought, the professor didn’t have anything to say.  Maybe he was just catching his breath.   

Standing to one side, Mario and Ruppert looked back across the rock formation they had just walked through.

What do they see? Tara thought. 

Pedro said something in Spanish. He was shaking now, his fear a visible thing, affecting all of them. Tara lay a hand on his arm. 

“Pedro, why did this happen, what's going on here?”  She turned to Steve, wanting him to translate when Pedro answered.

“She wouldn't join, she ran away,” he said in Spanish.  “They killed her as a message.  It's starting again.”  He glanced wildly around at the mountain, the meadow, as if he were picking where to run. 

Steve translated for them, somber, his earlier laughter gone.

Pedro suddenly shielded his eyes and scanned the sky, then down the mountain toward the coast. Tara heard the unmistakable sounds of a helicopter rotor.  She knew a helicopter this far up in the mountains in Peru meant army, either the Peruvian Army or U.S. Army advisers. 

The helicopter came up on the meadow from the south and below their line of sight, hidden in a lower valley.  It popped up over the rim of the meadow suddenly, as if it were the clever deception of a magician’s trick, a deadly rabbit bristling with guns.  The helicopter crabbed sideways to slow down, slowing and turning, the speed carrying it over their heads.  Tara spotted the helmeted pilots and the gunners in the open doors, the helicopter and the men in green, a clattering metallic thing, an intrusion on the dead woman's privacy. 

The dead woman with no feet.

The speed carried the helicopter to the far side of the meadow.  It hovered there, just inside the rock formation.  Tara froze.  It was like one of those dreams where you couldn't run, couldn't make your legs work when they had to.

Run.  We should all run for the rocks.

Tara turned to Steve, opening her mouth to tell him to run.  The helicopter moved toward them, slowly, at 100 feet, sideways, the side gunner covering them. 

No one moved.

“Steve, we've got to -”

An explosion shook the craft.  It dipped a few feet closer to the meadow, a trail of smoke coming from the rocks they had just passed through. Smoke poured from the open doorway.  Tara caught more flashes from the rocks and realized that people were firing at the helicopter.  She watched in horror as the plexiglass windshield shattered, the pilot’s body jerking with gunfire, holes appearing in the side of the helicopter, the crewman with the waist gun firing wildly over them, and then his body went limp in a spray of blood, the machine moving closer toward them and passing overhead, the turbine trailing black smoke.  Figures leaped up at the edge of the meadow, firing at the ‘copter.

Tara watched as the other pilot fought for control of the craft as it careened overhead.  She ducked instinctively, turned and stared as the helicopter roared by.  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Gretchen and Myoko still standing, Myoko wiping Gretchen's face, as if they were on a picnic, unaware of the death above them.

The helicopter rolled on its side as it neared the rock formation they had just left, and then it flared up like a wounded bear on its rear legs, in a final defensive, defiant stance. 

The figures across the meadow were still firing. 

The craft rose up and suddenly looped upside down, the blade striking the closest rocks, the rotor disintegrating as the helicopter exploded in midair, slamming to the ground.

“Get down!”  Steve yelled, and he hit Tara hard across the chest.  She dropped, going down on her back in the grass as the world around them exploded.  As she fell to the grass, she saw Gretchen blinking in the sun without her glasses, and then something struck Gretchen and she dropped, limp, in a shower of blood.  Professor Bauchman stood, upright and curiously untouched amidst the flying carnage around him, a bewildered look on his face.

Another explosion shook the ground and Tara felt the heat from the fire as debris rained down on them.

“Jesus Christ,” Steve muttered in Tara's face.  He rolled off her and she struggled to get up, but his hand came over her and pushed her down again.

“Crawl,” he said.  “Anything that stands is dead, either from the copter or whoever shot it.”

She nodded, her face inches from his, wondering as she crawled how a career college kid knew such things.

  They moved through the grass, away from the fire, slowly, using the heat as direction.  Steve led, working his way to Gretchen.  Tara watched as he gripped the girl's hand, held it a moment, then slowly placed Gretchen's hand on her chest. Tara crawled past, not needing to look. 

She heard a scream, followed by loud moaning.  Tara raised her head enough to see Myoko laying on her side, clutching her chest, a bright arc of red around her, her legs moving slowly, as if she were trying to crawl.  Keeping low, Tara reached Myoko.  She lifted the young woman's head and cradled it, listening to Myoko as she tried to breathe.  She put pressure against the wound, Myoko’s shirt slick with blood.  As Tara tried to stop the bleeding a twisted piece of metal poked up through Myoko’s shirt.