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BREEDING GROUND
By
Madelaine Montague
© copyright January 2007, Madelaine Montague
Cover art by Jenny Dixon, © copyright January 2007
ISBN 978-1-60394-043-6
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author's imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
Chapter One
He awakened slowly, reluctantly, uncertain at first what had sent ripples through his psyche to disturb his slumber. He had been drifting so long that awareness of his surroundings had slowly but surely eroded until only some event of magnitude, he knew, would have penetrated the deep, dreamless sleep that he’d sought. It was that realization that encouraged him to shake off the temptation to ignore the ripples, and he roused himself to see what it was.
People, he thought, surprised, not pleased, but it was not merely ‘the people’, he discovered, those he had once walked among, called brother—come to despise. Others were among them, pale skinned, pale eyed. This tribe he had no familiarity with.
He wavered, torn between curiosity about these others and the hate that had sent him into his slumberous state long, long ago, so long ago that the hate had become little more than apathy.
Rising finally, he stretched, expanding his psyche outward, and then he walked among them, studying the others, watching them. They were digging, he discovered, for what he could not determine, but it answered the question. This had caused the ripple, the disturbance that had shaken him from his rest.
His curiosity waned. He had no idea what they were about, but he had no real interest either.
Then he saw her.
Intrigued, he settled to watch her and he discovered that the longer he watched her, the more absorbed he was. This one was different.
* * * *
“Look out!”
“Rock slide!”
“Run!”
The ominous sound of colliding, rolling, bouncing rocks rapidly built from a warning rumble to a deafening roar punctuated by the shouts that first drew her attention and the screams of fear and pain that quickly followed the first shouts. Gabrielle LaPlante lifted her head like an animal sensing danger at the first rumble, freezing as her gaze swept the dig site and finally focused on the threat. Her eyes widened as she saw the wave of dirt and rocks racing down the mountain side like a black tide, but everything inside of her seized, even her breath in her lungs.
It was over almost before anyone had realized what was happening. Through the cloud of dust that rose from the foot of the mountain where the debris settled, Gabrielle saw a twisted human arm jutting skyward. Coated with dirt from the soil dislodged by the falling rocks, she stared at it for many moments before her brain finally registered that it actually was an arm, not a bizarre, twisted tree root that resembled a human arm.
Released finally from the shock that had rooted her to the spot, she surged forward, launched into a run as the workers that had scattered halted and turned to race back. She was among the last to reach the downed worker, but it wouldn’t have mattered, she saw, if she’d been the first. The man hadn’t suffocated. A rock twice the size of his head had crushed his skull.
As short as she was, the native South Americans that made up the bulk of the laborers for the dig were as short, or shorter, and she had no trouble seeing over the men that clustered in front of her. She was sorry that was the case. The image seemed to burn itself inside her mind. Nausea rolled over her. She stumbled back, turned, looked numbly around the dig site for several moments and fled to the tent that had been assigned to her as her temporary home away from home.
A forensic anthropologist on loan from the Dade Museum of Human History to investigate the first, and only, skeletal remains found at the scene, which turned out to be the body of a two hundred year old Indian who’d died while hunting not an ancient settler of the area, she had never considered herself superstitious. She’d learned to appreciate and respect the customs and beliefs of various cultures and ancient civilizations, but she didn’t believe.
She’d been uneasy ever since she’d arrived at the dig, however.
She’d dismissed it. This was her first field operation and a certain amount of trepidation was to be understood, particularly considering the remote location. They were miles and miles from the nearest speck of civilization, and even that couldn’t be truly categorized as civilization, not in her book, anyway. The village was a throw back, virtually untouched by modern civilization.
She’d regretted taking the assignment almost as soon as she’d agreed to it. She regretted it even more as they left the tiny airstrip and set off in ancient vehicles down narrow twisting roads, traveling deeper and deeper into thick, twisted jungle filled with more poisonous creeping, slithering reptiles and insects than any other part of the world.
The trip alone had been enough of a jolt to her system to account for her jitteriness—paddling for miles and miles in canoes that sat barely above water level and watching snakes and crocodiles slither past. It had comforted her somewhat when she’d arrived to find the dig well in progress. The jungle had been cut back. The dig site was populated with a dozen scientists and students and about twice or three times that many native workers. A tent village had dotted the periphery of the site—but the tents were the best money could buy and filled with every modern convenience that could be lugged this deeply into the jungle.
The conditions were still ungodly primitive, and she didn’t especially like the speculative gazes of the dark eyed natives—apparently fair women fascinated them. Not that she qualified as a ‘real blond’ in the real world. Her hair had darkened as she’d matured to a color closer to brown than blond, but she still had the blue eyes, pale skin, and freckles of a true blond and that seemed sufficient to the brown skinned pigmies that made up the bulk of the tent village to earn her more hungry male glances in the few weeks she’d been there than she’d had in her entire life before.
Loathe to encourage them to believe she might welcome their sexual overtures—and she didn’t think she was imagining that they looked her over like a particularly choice piece of ass—she spent most of her time pretending they were invisible, which was another thing that made her uncomfortable. She’d been accused of being frank to the point of bluntness—which no one seemed to consider a virtue—but part of that frankness was the tendency to meet everyone eye to eye. She’d been taught that ‘shifty eyed’ was a trait that spelled untrustworthy. She wasn’t a liar, a cheat, or a fraud, and she was as good as, if no better than, anyone. It made her feel dishonest to avoid eye contact.
Beyond the physical discomforts, though, beyond the uneasiness at having short, dark men staring at her as if she was Venus incarnate, beyond the very real dangers that lurked beneath every leaf, shrub, and tree limb, there was something about the ancient city they’d uncovered that was just plain otherworldly creepy.
She’d tried to convince herself it was nothing more than the real threats she sensed around her that was playing havoc with her imagination, but the fine hairs on her body—those primal sensors of danger—prickled as if the dormant animal inside of her knew something her conscious mind couldn’t detect.
The natives were uneasy, too. Her Spanish wasn’t all that great, but she didn’t need to understand the language to assess the behavior.
They were superstitious, though. They believed the tales of ghosts they scared themselves with.
She didn’t believe in ghosts, or spirits, or ancient gods that were going to be displeased about having their temples violated.
She hadn’t before she’d arrived at the grave site of the ancient, unnamed city. Now, she was trying to convince herself she still didn’t.
And yet the death toll was rising. More than a dozen workers had died since the dig had begun, eleven before her arrival, two since, and three of the original party of scientists and archeology students had come down with a mysterious ailment that had required them to be shipped back stateside.
They’d unearthed great segments of what promised to be a huge city that predated anything found before by at least a thousand years. And they still hadn’t found the remains of a single occupant of that city.
That was almost the creepiest part of it. They should have found something by now that would warrant her presence here.
If they didn’t find something damned soon, she thought angrily, she was going to high tail it back to her museum!
“What happened, Gaby? Who got hurt?” Sheila Lyndon demanded as Gabrielle neared the tent they shared.
Gaby simply stared at her blankly for several moments. “Got dead today, you mean? I didn’t know his name.” She didn’t know any of the natives’ names. She wasn’t certain she would have recognized the guy.
A wave of shock crossed Sheila’s features. “Somebody got killed?”
“There’s a shock,” Gaby said tightly, snatching open the tent flap and diving inside. “Someone getting killed on this dig.”
“Hey! Accidents happen,” Sheila said, following her inside as Gaby threaded her way around obstructions and flopped onto the cot assigned to her without even thinking about checking the bedding for crawlies first.
Gaby looked at the younger woman in outraged disbelief. “That’s callous, even for you.”
Sheila glared at her. “I didn’t mean it that way, and you know it!”
Right, Gaby thought, but she didn’t say it. She wasn’t up to an argument at the moment. She realized she might has well have voiced her opinion, though, because Sheila read it in her expression.
“Don’t tell me you’re starting to believe that voodoo crap the natives are always whining about?”
Gaby felt her face reddening in spite of all she could do. Since there was no hiding her reaction, she glared at Shelia, trying to pass off embarrassment for anger.
Not that she wasn’t angry!
“This isn’t Africa,” she said tightly, “or even the Caribbean. They don’t believe in voodoo around here.”
“Whatever witchcraft mumbo jumbo they call it.”
Gaby gave Shelia a once over, taking in the young woman’s better than average figure. “What did you say you were majoring in?”
Sheila’s eyes narrowed. “I happen to be in the upper ten percentile of my class!” she snapped.
“Yeah, but was it your brain that got you there? That’s the question!”
Sheila’s eyes glittered. “Well, nobody could be in any doubt that it was your brains that got you your position!” she snarled through clenched teeth.
“Now I’m going to cry!” Gaby shot back at her. “I’ll bet my brains stay sharp a lot longer than your tits and ass!”
“You’d lose,” Sheila snapped, her expression abruptly going from fury to complacency. “Daddy’s got plenty of money to keep everything right where it is. You should check it out Ms LaPlante. What are you, thirty five now? Forty? Honey, it’s already hanging low! There’s just so much they can do, you know? You should take out a loan on your car or something.”
Gaby glared at the woman’s back as she spun on her heel and sashayed out of the tent again. Ok, so Sheila wasn’t exactly stupid! She had plenty of ammunition to fight dirty. Cold blooded, self-centered, materialistic and, to Gaby’s way of thinking, probably a sociopath, but she wasn’t the bimbo her bleached blond hair and wide doe eyes implied.
She didn’t hate Sheila just because she’d been fortunate enough to be born within a wealthy family, nor because she was better than average in looks, had straight, white teeth, a great figure, was probably ten years younger, and knew how to use all those assets.
She hated Sheila because she was a bitch.
Actually, hate was probably a little strong. Ordinarily, she just felt contempt or irritation. The tent was supposed to be big enough to accommodate two people in reasonable comfort, but Sheila had hauled half of all she owned with her and it was next to impossible to move inside the tent.
They were in serious trouble if they ever had to exit it quickly!
“Bitch!” she muttered, resisting the urge to drag out a mirror and check her reflection. She didn’t need to to know she looked like hell. What would the mirror do besides depress the shit out of her?
She was thirty five. There was nothing wrong with it, or with looking one’s age! In fact most people seemed to think she looked as if she was in her twenties … late twenties, granted, but still twenty something.
The snide Ms thing irked the shit out of her, too.
She’d chosen to be single, damn Miss Hot Twat!
It wasn’t like she hadn’t had opportunities to get married. She’d had a couple.
Sighing, she rubbed her eyes and shifted to lay down on the cot. Remembering abruptly that she hadn’t checked the cot for scorpions or spiders, she sprang up and examined the bedding carefully before she settled again.
She was hot, drained, and upset about the man’s death, but aside from venting her frustrations on Sheila, she couldn’t seem to let go of the tension pent up inside of her. As she lay staring up at the ceiling of the tent, trying to block out the distant sounds of the accident site, she found herself reflecting on the reason she’d decided not to marry, not to even look. What was the point? The ‘accident’ and subsequent infection she’d had before she even reached puberty had eliminated any chance of ever having children.
Theses days there was some hope for women like her, of course. Despite the scaring on her fallopian tubes, she could probably get help from a fertility specialist, but that took money, a lot of money. And there were no guarantees with something like that. She could spend years, and every dime she’d worked so hard to put up for her retirement years, and still have nothing to show for it but heartbreak.
She was reasonably content with her life. Why turn her life inside out over something she didn’t need to go through to feel fulfilled?
Besides, as Miss Bitch had pointed out, she was beyond the prime age for child bearing. Women could, and often did, have children well into their thirties, even into their forties, but every year after thirty the odds got better for disaster and worse for a happy conclusion. She might spend most of her time studiously ignoring her biological clock, but she didn’t go around with her head in the sand. Here and there, she picked up little tidbits of information that encouraged her to just keep ignoring the tick tock of the clock.
Morbid, she thought, sitting up abruptly, dropping her legs over the side of the cot and covering her face with her hands. It was the deaths. She had spent most of her life either with her nose in a book, or surrounded by objects of antiquity. She had no close friends, no close family, having been reared in an orphanage. It was easy to cocoon herself from the passing years, unmarked by painful losses that would have made it impossible to ignore the fact that life was just passing her by.
Why else was she thinking, now, that she was going to live her entire life and pass completely unremarked by anyone? Why else was she thinking about being old and alone? She was alone now! It had never bothered her before.
Not really.
Dropping her hands, she huffed out an irritated breath and left the tent. The dead man had been borne off by the other workers. The archeology team was the only people at the dig site now. The students who’d been brought along were half-heartedly digging in the new area that Dr. Sheffield was certain concealed the temple that should have been the center of the community.
Had the workers left for good, she wondered? Or only left to carry out whatever burial ritual their people observed?
Drs. Sheffield and Oldman were kneeling in the pit, studying something she couldn’t make out from the distance that separated them.
Or maybe they were only studying Sheila?
She was on her knees, as well, bent over as if she was studying whatever it was they’d found, but more likely just so she could give both the professors a gratuitous view of her ample bosom, which was hanging half out of the shirt she was wearing tied at her waist.
Gaby didn’t especially want to be anywhere near Sheila at the moment, but she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts either. After a momentary hesitation, she decided to join the students and help with the digging. Shoveling and sifting and carting dirt was hard work. She needed something physical to work off her tension if she didn’t want her thoughts plaguing her tonight when she was supposed to be sleeping.
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