Matt was the only one who could.
"It didn't overheat," the man said, drawing Matt's attention back to the truck. "It just stopped."
That seemed like a pretty mundane concern for a guy who was slowly being consumed by evil. Matt's pulse hammered faster as he moved forward and said, "I'll take a look at it."
He watched the man from the corner of his eye as he circled around to the front of the truck. If either of them noticed his caution, they gave no sign of it.
The truck was built high off the ground, on big tires. Matt stepped up onto the front bumper so he could get a better look into the engine. He came from a family where the men were expected to be able to work on just about anything mechanical and often did. He checked the wiring first and saw the problem right away.
"You've got a loose wire on your alternator," he said. "You've been running on your battery. Didn't you notice that on the gauge?"
The man scoffed. "I'm not a mechanic. The man who should be taking care of such things quit on us; otherwise, I wouldn't be driving this behemoth back out to the mesa."
They were on their way to the mesa? The same mesa that had drawn him to hike up this desolate road?
Considering the rot that he saw on the man's face, Matt wasn't surprised there was a connection.
"Your battery finally went dead," he said. "I can hook up the alternator again, but without any juice to start the engine, you're still stuck."
The woman said, "I think there's another battery in the back. Our driver . . . our former driver . . . said it was a good idea to bring along a spare, since we'd be so far from anywhere at the mesa. Come on, let's take a look."
She seemed to have decided that he wasn't a psycho killer. He followed her to the back of the truck, where she pulled the canvas cover aside and held it for him while he climbed in. The truck bed held a number of bags and boxes that appeared to be full of supplies, and sure enough, in the front corner, a spare battery.
"You're in luck," Matt told her. "I'll need some wrenches."
"There's a tool kit behind the seat."
In a matter of minutes, he had taken off the dead battery and replaced it with the spare, as well as hooking up the wire that had come loose on the alternator. The work was hard enough in this heat that it caused beads of sweat to break out on his face.
Better than what was breaking out on Andrew's face, Matt thought as he sleeved away some of the sweat.
"All right, try it now," he said.
Andrew climbed into the truck and turned the key. The engine turned over for a moment, then caught. Matt jumped down from the bumper and went to the open door. In other circumstances he might have stepped up onto the running board and leaned in past Andrew to check the gauges, but he didn't want to get that close to the rotting man.
Instead he said, "Leave it running and let me take a look."
He stepped back to give Andrew plenty of room as the man climbed out.
"Looks good," Matt said after he'd peered in at the gauges. "You ought to get where you're going now."
The woman said, "Obviously you have experience with trucks like this."
Matt shrugged. "I used to work at a sawmill. I drove a few trucks back there."
"Would you be interested in a job?"
Andrew said, "Wait a minute. We don't know anything about this man, even his name."
"It's Matt Cahill," Matt said.
"I'm Dr. Veronica Dupre," the woman said. "This is Dr. Andrew Hammond."
So they weren't married. Matt had figured as much from the lack of wedding rings.
"As I mentioned, the man we hired to be our driver and mechanic decided to quit without any warning. We dropped him off in Gallup when we were picking up supplies. We could use a replacement."
Matt was hoping she would say that. They were going to the mesa, and ever since he'd seen it from the interstate, something about it had reached out to him with an undenable compulsion.
Not only that, but the festering sores on Dr. Andrew Hammond's face told him that something bad was probably going to happen on top of that mesa.
Unless he could stop it somehow.
Matt cleared his throat and said, "And I could use a job. I accept."
Hammond frowned, which made more pus ooze from the sores on his face, and said, "Ronnie, I'm still not sure about this."
"Do you want to drive the truck and keep all the equipment working?" she asked him.
For a moment, Hammond didn't say anything. Then he snapped, "Fine. Consider yourself hired, Cahill. The job doesn't pay that much, though."
"I'm not worried about that," Matt said, which was true.
His real reward would be the opportunity to cross swords with the evil that he stalked.
And that stalked him.
CHAPTER THREE
Matt put his duffel bag in the back of the truck and climbed behind the wheel. Dr. Dupre slid in beside him, and Hammond sat beside the window. In the close confines of the truck's cab, the stench coming from Hammond made Matt want to gag. If he'd been sitting as close to the man as Dr. Dupre was, he probably would have thrown up.
She couldn't smell the stink, though, and for that she ought to count herself lucky.
Matt put the truck in gear and started it rolling along the blacktop. "Are you folks medical doctors?" he asked.
"PhDs," Hammond said. "Doctors of archeology, in fact."
"We're working on a dig on top of Blood Mesa," Veronica Dupre said. "There's an Anasazi settlement up there, or rather there used to be until it was abandoned about twelve hundred years ago."
"Blood Mesa?"
"That's what it's called. Because of the red sandstone, you know. When the sun hits it just right early in the morning or late in the afternoon, it's the color of blood."
That was a nice, cheery thought. He couldn't very well explain to her that he was here because he had felt the mesa calling to him in some way. She would think he had lost his mind.
"Are you familiar with the Anasazi?"
"I've heard of them," Matt said. "Disappeared mysteriously, didn't they?"
"For a long time that's what people thought. The name means ancient ones or people who came before, which certainly has a mysterious connotation to it." Like any teacher, she was warming to her subject. "Recent theories lean more toward the possibility that the Anasazi were simply absorbed into other tribes like the Navajo and the Hopi, but some of their cities do seem to have been abandoned rather abruptly, including the one on top of Blood Mesa. That's why we're here, to see if we can uncover any evidence of why they deserted this particular settlement."
"Sounds fascinating," Matt said.
Dr. Dupre laughed. "No, it doesn't. It sounds dry as dust to most people, and I know it. And I'm sorry I started lecturing."
"Don't worry. I like to learn new things."
He had learned more about certain things in the past few months than he ever wanted to. Things like evil and tragedy and degradation. The thought made him glance over at Dr. Andrew Hammond, who had his head turned away to look out the window on that side of the truck cab. Because of that, Matt couldn't get a good look at the rot on the man's face, but he knew it was there.
He drove along the two-lane blacktop for about a mile before he came to a dirt road that turned right off the highway and led toward the mesa. Dr. Dupre pointed to it and said, "That's where we turn."
Dust billowed up behind the truck as Matt slowed and wheeled it onto the dirt road. As he turned, he glanced at the big side mirror just outside his window.
Matt caught his breath as he saw the tall, skinny figure standing at the edge of the blacktop. The figure lifted an almost skeletal hand holding something—a lollipop, Matt knew from previous encounters—and waved it slowly in a mocking farewell.