Raptor Read online

  “No one talks to the press—except ME! You try that again and you’re out of here, you amateur!” Boneid had shrieked. Zack had felt the anguish of his father’s humiliation as he watched him leave Boneid’s tent and walk past a half dozen silent workers and colleagues. Boneid had come out after his father. He wasn’t finished with him. Zack had stopped him in his tracks.

  “Don’t yell at my father,” Zack had said. “You don’t have the right to yell at anyone.”

  “Mind your own business.”

  “You’re lucky to have him on this dig.”

  “He’s lucky to have a job.”

  “Treat him professionally” Zack had warned, “or I’ll report you to the union.”

  Boneid had glared at him. “Oh, so you’re a trouble-maker just like your father. A chip off the old block.”

  “You bet I am,” Zack had said. He had watched Boneid’s thin blue lips curl into a smile as he turned and went back into his trailer.

  Zack had been working on the dig helping to set up the bullet hammer, a heavy steel device designed to fire shotgun shells into the quarry bordering the national dinosaur park. The sound waves resonated straight down through hundreds of feet of the rock and sand layers, then reflected back up to register seismic pictures of ancient buried beasts. His job was exciting, but watching the daily shame of his father was more than he could take. The last thing he said to Boneid when he quit to fry hamburgers at the Chile Cafe was, “Treat him with respect. You treat my father with respect or you’ll regret it.”

  Zack spotted his mother standing in the shade of a shed at the edge of the airstrip. She looked ghostly in white makeup broken only by a slash of black lipstick. Next to her, his father lay secured to a stretcher on the bed of a 4×4 truck. Several workers from the Uintah Reservation watched and waited beneath the branches of a lone pine.

  Mrs. Norak watched Zack speed toward them as a noisy twin-engine Cessna touched down on the airstrip. The medical plane, its engines roaring, blasted clouds of sand and dust as it taxied from the far end of the field. Zack raced the plane to his mother.

  “Glad you made it,” his mom said.

  Zack jumped off the bike and leaned it against the truck. “Is Dad going to be okay?”

  “I think so. There was a rockslide,” Mrs. Norak said. “He fell down one of the gorges. A couple of the Indians found him. They brought him into Vernal. His left leg was broken. Dr. Morrison set it, but there are head injuries. He needs a CAT scan. The closest machines are at Mormon Hospital in Salt Lake City.”

  Zack took off his helmet and swung up onto the bed of the truck. His father’s eyes were closed and his chest was rising and falling from rapid, desperate breaths.

  “I’ll go with you,” Zack said.

  “No,” Mrs. Norak said. “There won’t be room for you on the plane. Besides, it’s better if you stay at the house. Take care of the dog and anything that comes up. I’ll send for you if I need you.”

  Zack noticed a bloody mark beneath his father’s chin.

  “What’s that?”

  “Dr. Morrison said it looked as though he’d fallen on a spike or wooden stake in the mine.” Anger crept into his mother’s voice. “I told him to stay out of the north caves. That old mine up there has shafts that drop fifteen hundred feet. He’s lucky he’s not dead.” The door of the plane opened, and she walked out to meet the pilot and paramedic.

  Professor Norak’s eyes slowly opened. Zack held his hand.

  “Hi, Dad,” Zack said.

  Norak looked at his son, his eyes searching about as if to see if anyone else was listening. His lips moved, and Zack leaned closer.

  “What, Dad?”

  “The girl,” Professor Norak said, straining to be heard. “I … told the girl.” A shaking finger.

  Zack looked to an old rusted Jeep parked a hundred yards away near a cluster of juniper trees. He recognized Uta, a young Indian girl with dark bronze skin and straight black hair that fell to her waist. She’d been in a few of his classes at the local high school when he had transferred near the end of the term. They’d been assigned to do a science fair experiment together and sort of hung out sometimes. So far, she was the only thing good about Utah.

  Uta’s uncle, Larry Ghost Coyote, his face shriveled from a lifetime of badlands sun, circled the Jeep kicking dried clumps of mud off its tires.

  “I told her …,” Zack’s father said, his voice breaking.

  “Told her what?”

  Norak’s voice faded in and out. “I found it … something impossible. It dropped. You must find it, Zack…. Please find it….” He began to moan and his eyes rolled high up into his head showing only the whites. Tremors shook his body.

  “Help him!” Zack yelled to the medic. “He’s having a convulsion! Help!”

  Mrs. Norak and the paramedic came running with a cart of supplies. The medic thrust his fingers into the professor’s mouth to keep his throat open and stop him from swallowing his own tongue. He pressed the end of a stethoscope against the professor’s heaving chest.

  “It’s shock,” the paramedic said, thrusting an intravenous line in his arm. “He’ll be okay. Get him to the plane.”

  Mrs. Norak snapped her fingers at two of the Indian workers. They lifted the stretcher and carried Professor Norak toward the Cessna. Zack walked fast at his father’s side. The dark brown centers of his eyes fluttered back down into place.

  “I’m here,” Zack said.

  His father strained to look at him. A speck of gray had caked at the edge of his lips.

  “Find it …” his father whispered.

  “Find what ?” Zack asked.

  “You’ll know …”

  A mask of terror crawled onto Professor Norak’s face as his hand reached up to the wound on his chin. He remembered something more. “DON’T GO IN THE CAVE! DON’T GO IN!”

  Now he was screaming.

  Uta watched Zack waving good-bye as the Cessna took off toward the Shining Mountains. He was tense with worry, shielding his eyes from the low afternoon sun. She herself had made the trip a few times on the medical plane when there had been chain-saw accidents and other emergencies at the reservation. She knew the plane would fly over the Uintas wilderness. There would be Heber City, then Alta, and a sharp banking north of the distant Skull Valley Reservation before the plane drifted into the landing corridor for Salt Lake City.

  Zack gave a last wave good-bye and walked his motorcycle toward her. “Uta!” he called. “You found my father?”

  The girl, using her fingers to comb her hair to one side of her face, walked to meet him. Uta had liked him the second she’d seen his narrow, handsome face last spring. His wolflike eyes had reminded her of photos she’d seen of her own father when he was young and wore braids and danced her tribe’s dances in bearskins and buffalo hides. Somehow she knew that she wanted to be his friend. She didn’t care if he grew a long beard or three heads. Just the sight of him had caused a quickening of her blood.

  “You know my uncle, Larry Ghost Coyote,” she said. “We were scouting wild ponies above the power dam. On the way back, we saw the fresh rockslide on Silver Mountain. Your dad had broken bones.”

  Zack’s words caught in his throat. “You … you saved his life,” he said. He gave Uta a hug, and shook Larry Ghost Coyote’s hand long and hard. “Thanks for finding him. He wouldn’t have lasted alone out there.” Zack had worked with Larry Ghost Coyote the few weeks he’d spent on the dig.

  Larry saw Zack’s eyes were glistening. He had seen him working at his father’s side. He’d watched them sharing lunches together, laughing, and knew how close they were.

  “Bad scratches,” Larry Ghost Coyote said. “We got him out of the heat.”

  “The shocks are on the Jeep are shot,” Uta apologized. “Your dad was burning up. It was like he had sunstroke. We got him to drink some water, but he kept mumbling about something he’d left behind. He couldn’t tell us what it was.” Uta swung her hair now so it all hung str
aight down her back. “But he wanted you to find it.”

  Zack took a deep breath and glanced back to the sky. He saw the speck of the medical plane disappearing over the ridge of mountains to the west. He remembered his father’s face.

  Desperate.

  Frightened.

  He asked Uta, “Could you take me back to where you found him?”

  “When?”

  “Could we go now on my bike?”

  Uta looked up to check the sun. She spoke quickly to her uncle in Ute. The sound of the language was soft, like a mixture of Spanish and Aztec. When she turned back to Zack, she said, “I told my uncle we’re going. You can drop me off at the reservation later, okay?”

  “Sure,” Zack said. He swung an arm around Larry Ghost Coyote’s shoulder. “Thanks again for saving my pop,” he said.

  Larry smiled at him and climbed up behind the wheel of his Jeep. He started the motor, gave them both a wave, and drove straight down the center of the airstrip toward the Uinta River.

  Zack grabbed the spare helmet out of a rear saddlebag and tossed it to Uta. She put it on and straddled the passenger seat with her arms around Zack’s waist. She felt his stomach muscles tighten as he kicked the starter. “Hold on,” Zack said, opening the throttle. The wheels spun in the dirt, then grabbed, and the bike shot forward.

  They drove north along the arroyos and streams edging the Drive Through the Ages. Within a few miles, the sagebrush and dwarf piñon trees gave way to stands of ponderosa pine and moss-covered rock. Jackrabbits and a lone mule deer bolted across the roadway.

  Uta inched forward on her seat. “How come your motor is so quiet? My brothers let me drive their old Harleys and they sound like crop-dusting planes.”

  “I had a special muffler and converter extension welded on. Its cruising noise is pretty low”

  Uta laughed. “You’re always tinkering with something, aren’t you!” She pointed the way from the southern tip of the Flaming Gorge Reservoir until the roadway crossed over the power dam. The downstream rim of the dam was a low stone wall with a huge drop-off into a roaring spillway. Zack kept the bike near the center line of the road. “You’d better hold on tight. It would really suck to have an accident up here.”

  Uta looked at the drop-off and shuddered. Suddenly, Zack deliberately swerved the bike and she screamed. Zack laughed.

  “You’re sick,” Uta said, managing to laugh with him. “Really sick.”

  “Yeah,” Zack said proudly. “I know. Imagine falling seven hundred feet!”

  “Actually, it’s only five hundred and ten feet. I used to work summers as a dam tour guide,” Uta said. “I had lots of nightmares that I’d trip, fall in, and be chopped up in the turbine blades.”

  Uta pointed Zack away from the reservoir and farther north. The trees cast long shadows now and the setting sun transformed the mountains ahead into dark, looming giants. “Are we close?” Zack asked.

  “There!” Uta cried out.

  Zack looked ahead to where a wash cut into a narrow canyon. The bike’s motor strained to climb the sharp incline. Halfway up he saw an entrance to the abandoned silver mine. The debris of the rockslide spilled down a hundred feet from its mouth. Zack followed the ruts left by the SUVs of mineral hunters. He parked the bike, and he and Uta hiked up to the edge of the spill.

  “How do we know we won’t set off another avalanche?” Zack asked.

  Uta looked up to the high ground. “I think we’ll be okay. I’ve climbed around these hills half my life. This spot seems to have spent its energy. She pointed. “Your dad was up there. Lucky the avalanche wasn’t any bigger or no one would have found him.”

  Zack climbed to the area and kicked aside a few of the rocks. Uta hiked up the left side of the spill to where a cloud of flies hovered.

  Buzzzzz.

  “Shoo! Shoo, bugs!” she said, swatting at them. Something was glistening from under a cluster of stones, and she knelt down to take a closer look.

  She screamed.

  Zack scrambled to her side. “What?”

  She pointed.

  He looked down at the ground. A pair of swollen, clouded eyes were staring up at him. The sickening odor of rotting flesh socked up into his nostrils. His eyes watered as he kicked away stones until he’d exposed the head of the mule.

  “Jeez,” Uta said. “Your father wanted you to find this?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Uta took a stick and probed around the severed neck bone.

  “And you think I’m sick?” Zack said.

  “Hey, it looks like it was cut off like with a guillotine.”

  “The skin’s shredded.” Zack knelt to look closer. He saw splinters of skull and a series of slashing cuts across the animal’s ears. The neck wound was oozing a foaming, slimy fluid.

  “What is that gook?” Uta asked.

  “It looks like spit.”

  “Saliva?”

  “It looks like something bit it.”

  “Bit its head off?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Zack said.

  The stench was terrible now. They backed away and the swarm of flies scooted back to feast and lay their eggs. Zack looked farther up the slope. He saw something white lying near the mine entrance. He climbed up to what looked like a half-deflated balloon.

  “What is it?”

  Zack knelt beside the oval shape. “I’m not sure. It looks like some kind of an egg.”

  “An egg?”

  Zack poked it. “A very big egg.”

  “Can’t be. Eggs don’t get that big.”

  “It could be from an ostrich.”

  “This is Utah, not Australia?’

  “Doesn’t matter. Lots of people have started ostrich farms all over the United States now. It’s supposed to be like steak without the fat. Healthy and a good investment—and worth a lot of money.” He slipped his hands gently under the egg and lifted it. “I’m taking it.”

  Uta cleared her throat. “I don’t think you should.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s something my family taught me,” Uta said. “My tribe. Whatever it is, it belongs here and we shouldn’t mess with it.”

  “This is what my father was talking about,” Zack said. “Don’t you see? He wanted me to get it!” Zack stood up cradling the egg, and started back down the slope toward the bike.

  “Well, if you think I’m holding it on the ride home, you’re crazy”

  Zack slid the egg under his T-shirt and tucked the bottom of the shirt tight into his jeans. He reached the bike and climbed on, leaving the plump, long oval resting in the makeshift stomach sling.

  “A potbelly is very becoming on you,” Uta said, climbing onto the bike behind him.

  “Hold on.” Zack started the motor and revved the throttle. The bike lurched forward.

  Uta grabbed his shoulders as they started down the rutted slope. Before they reached the paved road, Zack glanced back for a last look. A half moon had begun to rise over the mountain, and he could swear he heard the faint screams of his father echo off the jagged rock face.

  3

  SOUNDS

  The headlight of the motorcycle was a cyclops’s eye shooting a beam of light several hundred feet through the darkness ahead of them. Zack shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “I think it’s leaking,” he said as they reached the south end of the Drive Through the Ages. “The egg. It’s leaking something … gooey.”

  Uta tried to hold back her laughter.

  “I’d better drop it off at my house,” Zack said. “Then I’ll drive you home. Okay?”

  “I’m in no rush.” She held on tight as they made a sharp turn and raced up a desolate dirt road. Zack felt his stomach rolling. “There’s meatballs and lasagna and stuff if you’re interested in something to eat.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  The road edged by a pond at the base of rolling hills. When they reached the Noraks’ ranch house, Zack’s dog, Picasso, was already barking his head off in
side. Zack parked under a breezeway, clutched at the bulge in his wet T-shirt, and ran inside. Picasso scampered about at his feet, wagging his tail and jumping up on his legs.

  “Easy, boy, easy,” Zack said. He flicked on lights and headed for the hall bathroom. When Picasso saw Uta, he growled.

  “Lay off, Picasso!” Zack yelled.

  “Don’t you remember me, Picasso?” Uta asked the scraggly white poodle. Picasso barked louder. “What a tough guy!” she said. “You don’t scare me. I know all your tricks.”

  Uta stopped at the edge of the sprawling living room. It had a massive granite fireplace, a worn leather sofa, and a couple of rattan chairs with big paisley pillows. She’d been to the house several times when she and Zack had collaborated on the science project. They had called their exhibit The Effect of Direct Current on Seedlings. Zack had joked that it should have been titled An Electric Chair for Lima Beans. They’d worked long hours at the kitchen table, soldering electrode grids into petri dishes and plotting growth charts. They’d had fun working together and got an A, to boot.

  Picasso stopped barking and began to sniff at her ankles and wag his stubby tail. “Now you remember me, don’t you?” Uta said, petting him.

  In the bathroom, Zack took the sticky egg and laid it in the white porcelain tub. He took off his shirt, tossed it into the hamper, and began wiping the slime off his stomach with a washcloth. “Hey, Uta, can you feed Picasso, please?” he shouted into the house intercom. “The dog food’s under the sink. He gets half a can.”

  “Okay.” Uta’s voice came from the speaker.

  “The meatballs for us are in the fridge.”

  Zack heard Uta rattling pots and pans as he checked himself in the mirror. His lips and mouth were dry, and he was about to brush his teeth when he heard a squishing sound. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the egg moving. He dropped down on his knees to get a closer look.

  “Hey, it’s moving,” Zack yelled out. “The egg is moving!”