Read Come In and Cover Me for Free Online Page B

flat and brown. Nothing but juniper—great bushes of it towering over their heads. Ant piles like mounds of kitty litter were scattered across the landscape. And cholla, much of it dead, with the look of Swiss-cheese driftwood.
    â€œWe had this college kid last year,” Silas said. “No attention span. We warned him and warned him about the cholla, but he was always horsing around. One day he was talking to the kid behind him and ran straight into a cholla—smack into it, head to toe. Hugged it like a brother.”
    â€œWhat did you do?”
    â€œWent looking for the pliers.”
    Away from the water source, it was one endless tan-and-brown landscape up here, broken only by the occasional burst of dark green. Silas pointed out sites previous groups had excavated, most still marked by rebar planted vertically in the ground, physical reminders of grid points.
    They kept walking.
    â€œHere,” he said. “There’s where we found it. Feature Forty-eight.”
    There was a dead juniper in the center of the site, dense and wide and low to the ground, the smallest branches like gray toothpicks. The rooms seemed to spread from the juniper. Here, by her feet, was the only feature actually excavated. The entire hole was less than three meters across. Only dirt and the round circle of adobe at the hearth remained.
    â€œI’m going to sit here for a while,” she announced. “You don’t need to wait.”
    The beginning of a question flickered across his face.
    â€œReally,” she said, before the question took form. She tried not to sound like she was dismissing him. “You don’t need to wait. I’d like a little time to take it all in. But thanks.”
    He nodded once. “
Bueno
. The guys will be up shortly. We’re working on the next-closest block. I’ll be three juniper bushes over.”
    She stood by the excavated room, her shadow pointed straight ahead, shadow hat blanketing one stone. She knew people who loved the exactness of this, the mathematical precision of breaking a site down into a grid of square meters. Identifying each tidy square on the X and Y axis—this would be 500 N 1001 E. She remembered Ed staring out at Crow Creek four summers ago, saying every new site was like beginning a game of Battleship.
    She did not see this as mathematical. She did not want to think of grids or meters or tape measures and string. She stared over the landscape, blotting out the rebar, the silver buckets, the folded blue tarp, the wooden frame of the screen already set up on the sawhorses. A branch behind her brushed the back of her knee. Beside her right foot was a string with a level, looped carelessly, tossed there probably the last time someone measured the depth.
    She started with the dead juniper bush in the center. It would have been gone—she erased it, then erased the other bushes. The stones ran in curves and uneven lines, mazelike, wrapping under and around the other dead junipers rising out of the dirt and dry grass. The stones were walls, some obviously caved in, but an aerial map to what was below. There were a dozen rooms that she could see—uneven rings of stone, some with slight depressions. Not all of them connecting. Here she had a T-shaped room block with three rooms across and three down.
    She stared until her vision blurred. The lines of rocks shifted. They rose from the ground, forming sun-baked walls. The walls wavered, unsteady, perhaps shoulder-high, more mud than stone. The flat roofs were rough with sticks and adobe, and the rooms themselves melted into the ground. It was architecture the color of dirt, springing from the ground as inevitably as shrubs and rocks. The adobe room blocks always made Ren think of prehistoric Legos, almost-cubes and almost-rectangles making almost-straight lines.
    No people. They should have been climbing up ladders, chatting on the rooftops, bringing water from the creek. But she could never