Текст книги "The Chosen"

Автор книги: Алекс Арчер

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Chapter 2

Reichenbach Falls, Switzerland

The wind from the glacier gorge whipped mist into the fat man's bearded face like ice-laden fronds. Far beneath him the famed cataract vomited its clouds of spray and roared ceaselessly. The sky above was crowded with clouds, their gray, gravid bellies hanging almost close enough to touch. A storm is coming, the man thought. How very appropriate.

Monsignor Paolo Benigni checked the Rolex watch strapped to his wrist. Next to the black of his overcoat, his skin looked bluish-white.

"Where isthe man?" he said in irritation. "It's almost time, and I see no sign of him."

The railed scenic viewpoint overlooking the Reichenbach Falls was deserted except for the fat man and his two younger, much larger companions. October's arrival a few days earlier had brought the annual closing of the funicular that carried tourists from the valley floor to just below the mighty falls themselves. A safe distance back from the sheer cliffs, the hotel in the village was temporarily closed for renovation.

Actually, it had closed at the special request of a man whose influence reached to the core of the Vatican itself. The public was scarcely aware of the name of Monsignor Benigni. But people who counted – the people who really ran the world – knew his name very well indeed.

To his intense annoyance he found himself compelled to meet here with an impudent bastard – a mere priest. A priest without a flock and a damned black Jesuit on top of that. Yet Benigni knew this disciple of the long-dead Basque madman Loyola had an unmistakable influence of his own that was scarcely less shadowy, or pervasive, than the monsignor's own.

Well, Benigni thought, today we shall settle that account. There were many in the Vatican who would thank him for his resolution of this turbulent priest.

"Monsignor," Volker, the German bodyguard, said, peering over the railing above the precipice. He had a lantern jaw fringed with blue-black beard. His pinstriped suit was tailored so immaculately no seam showed the least sign of strain around his vast powerlifter's bulk. Not even at the left armpit, where a Walther P-99 was nestled in a shoulder holster.

"What is it?" Benigni said.

"Perhaps you should come see, Excellence."

Grimacing and puffing in annoyance, the monsignor waddled to the edge. His face sank deep into his own neatly bearded chins as he leaned over slightly, all he could readily manage.

A path wound up the cold granite cliff from the notch where white waters arced down to the River Inn far below. Seemingly out of the falls' very spray came a solitary figure, trotting up the steps with a vigor Benigni would have had trouble matching when he was young and slim, trotting down. The figure wore a long black coat. The head of silver-gray hair was bare.

"That's doing it the hard way," Benigni's other bodyguard said. Semo, the Samoan, was even bigger and broader than Volker, with a mass of crinkly black hair held back from his great tanned face in a braid.

"The fool," Benigni murmured. "Still, if he wishes to exhaust himself in this manner, let him. He will have ample time to rest, soon enough."

As his guards laughed appreciatively, the monsignor pushed away from the white-painted steel rail with a ringed and exquisitely manicured pale hand. The height and sheerness of the drop made him queasy. All this cavorting about in nature was foreign to his constitution. He should be ensconced in a leather chair in some five-star hotel, basking in the warmth of a fire and a snifter of brandy.

As if to emphasize the inconvenience and discomfort to which he subjected himself – for the good of the church, of course – a snowflake struck his cheek and clung. Its cold seemed to bite like some horrid insect. Then he thought about what the immediate future held in store for the vexatious Father Robert Godin, Societas Iesu, who was responsible for dragging him out in this frightful weather. He smiled with lips moist, full and reddish-purple within his goatee.

Godin trotted onto the top of the cliff and slowed to a walk while approaching the waiting trio. He had his hands in the pockets of his black trenchcoat. His breathing seemed normal and his step springy. The monsignor might have suspected the man had a pact with the Devil – but he knew better.

"Monsignor," the new arrival said. He spoke Italian with a hint of a French accent. Benigni felt sure it was an affectation. He knew the Jesuit was as proud of his coarse Antwerp dock-rat beginnings as he was of the unspeakably brutal nature of his early career, before he had entered the bosom of the church.

Benigni smiled. He was not one to lecture another on the sin of pride. To his mind, of all the sins it was, frankly, among the least interesting. Besides, it never did any good to lecture Jesuits.

"Father," he said with false heartiness, extending a hand. Godin shook it. Although he exerted no more than brief, firm pressure it was like shaking hands with a vise.

With the ease of long practice Benigni masked his irritation. As an assistant chamberlain of the Vatican, Benigni was entitled to have his ring kissed. He was also accustomed to it. But the Jesuit has never been born who would bend the knee to less than a red hat, he told himself. And Benigni had purposely avoided becoming a cardinal. Dressing all in scarlet made it harder to operate properly in the shadows, where his most important work was done.

"What exigency drove you to request this urgent conference, Father Godin?" He tried to force an element of lightness. "Or should I say, Father Bob?"

Godin smiled. But briefly. He was sixty-two years of age, the same height as Benigni, but half the weight. He looked like an extremely fit man a decade younger and moved, the monsignor had to admit resentfully to himself, like a fine athlete. His hair was gray, buzzed to white sidewalls and a silvery flattop. His face was oblong and deeply creased, the only sign of age he showed aside from the hue of his hair.

His eyes, behind circular wire-rimmed spectacles, were the palest, most piercing green Benigni could conceive. He made himself not shiver when they looked into his.

"I have come to discuss retirement," the Jesuit said.

"You? The last knight in armor? Or should I say the last inquisitor? Are you ready to hang up the spurs? Or perhaps the scourge." Benigni laughed in vast appreciation of his own wit.

" Yours,Monsignor."

The laughter died. "Mind your manners, priest," Benigni said.

"I don't care about your peculations or your secular crimes, Monsignor. I don't care about your involvement in the murder of Roberto Calvi in 1982, nor your dealings with the outlawed Propaganda Due Masonic Lodge. I don't care what deals you worked with the late Archbishop Marcinkus."

Benigni had gone very pale. His breath hissed forth between rubbery lips. "Old man, you overreach yourself!"

"But when your self-indulgence leads you to invoke demons," Godin continued implacably, "entailing the sacrifice of a human life – then, Monsignor Benigni, you fall within my bailiwick."

"You have no proof!"

The creases of the bloodhound face deepened in a grin. "All the proof I need, I have in here," Godin said, tapping first temple, then heart. "And if I am satisfied, the church is satisfied."

"Absurd. You hurl accusations at random. You are a madman," the monsignor replied.

"Brother Luigi confessed, Monsignor. In Verona. He is now in custody. Your agents will prove unable to locate him and silence him. He will live out his years in silent repentance. His testimony, however, has been duly recorded and notarized. Should it prove necessary, I don't doubt several other of your confederates can be prevailed upon to testify. But with the videotapes in our possession – "

Benigni felt his lower lip quivering. He shut his mouth tightly, then barked, "My attorneys will laugh these accusations out of court!"

"Unlikely, were it to go to trial – especially in some of the nations that have jurisdiction in the case. But there will be no trial, Monsignor. I am authorized to offer you the opportunity to resign your offices and rank and retire to a monastery outside Addis Ababa."

"Ethiopia? But they are Copts!"

"No longer – they call their schismatic church Ethiopian Orthodox now. But as you would know were you properly attentive to your duties, Monsignor Benigni, the Ethiopian Catholic Church remains communicant with our Holy Father. They are holy men. They'll ensure you are cared for. And protect you diligently from the temptations of this world."

Benigni stared at Godin with eyes like boiled eggs. Then he looked down at the gray stone beneath the mirror-polished black toes of his Gucci shoes. It was polished almost smooth by generations of tourist feet, slicked by mist from below and snow from above.

"She was just a whore," he said.

"Even a whore has a right to live her life," Godin said, "and not be tortured out of it. Even a whore has an immortal soul. Or do you speak of what you tried to make of our mother, the church?"

Benigni brought his head up. His eyes blazed. "You dare to speak so to me, who bathed your arms in the gore of innocents in the Congo?"

"Anyone whose blood I may have bathed in, Monsignor, was hardly an innocent. But the sins that stain my soul are not under discussion here."

Benigni laughed heartily.

"I anticipated you might attempt some such quixotry, Father Godin," he said. "So I came prepared."

He gestured to the two huge bodyguards who stood flanking them. "As I said before, Father, you will be retiring this day. Volker and Semo will assist you. In the mist and the snow these steps up the precipice are so treacherous. Alas, you insisted on climbing alone despite the conditions – "

The two bodyguards stepped forward. Godin moved to meet Semo, who approached from his right. Volker reached for him from behind. Godin stopped, spun back and seized the German's thick wrist with his right hand. He dropped his left elbow over the elbow of the trapped arm and pivoted clockwise.

Volker's right elbow broke with a snap.

Godin stepped behind the huge German, twisting the broken arm. Volker, who had initially been too shocked to respond, bellowed in agony as parted bone ends scraped each other.

"Kill him! Kill him now!" the prelate roared.

Semo's bronze face had gone ashen at the brutal abruptness with which his partner's arm was snapped. From beneath his jacket he produced an MP-5K, a stubby pistol barely longer than a handgun, with a foregrip like a miniature table leg. He yanked back on the trigger and held it down.

The pistol bucked and rose left to right. Not even the Samoan's vast strength could control such a weapon firing full-auto. The muzzle flame, pale yellow and orange and dazzlingly bright in the drifting snow, set the front of Volker's black greatcoat smoldering. The burly German's Kevlar vest kept the 9 mm bullets from penetrating. But it only reduced their substantial impact. Ribs cracked and the breath was forced from Volker's lungs straining to draw in air against the blinding pain of his elbow.

Then a bullet hit the German in the throat. Blood spurted in a single thick stream. It gleamed almost black in the faint light.

HoldingVolker propped against him, with his own legs braced, Father Godin thrust a CZ-75 under the mortally wounded man's arm and shot Semo twice in his broad chest. The Samoan's vest stopped the slugs.

The Jesuit's third shot struck Semo in the center of the forehead. The huge man emptied the MP-5K into the ground as he sank to his knees. Then he fell to the side like a sack of rocks.

Godin stepped back. Volker simply slumped and pitched forward on his face.

Snow began to fall in earnest. Fat white flakes filled the air, thick as flies on a midsummer evening.

"And now, Monsignor – " the Jesuit said, tucking his Czech handgun back inside his coat.

"You devil!" Benigni put his head down and charged.

He was out of shape, his muscles deconditioned to the point his flesh felt like pudding to the touch. He could barely walk across a room without panting. But he weighed over three hundred pounds, and a supercharge of adrenaline lent strength to watery muscles. His momentum drove the older, lighter man back to slam his lower back cruelly against the metal rail.

Benigni's arms held Godin's trapped to his sides in a bear hug. His own strength surprised him. Ha! And so I best the vaunted mercenary and counterterrorism expert, he thought.

Godin snapped his head forward. His forehead smeared the monsignor's broad nose across much of his pie-plate face.

Benigni squealed as agony shot through his brain and eyes like an inquisitor's red-hot pokers. Tears streamed down his cheeks, hot as the blood that poured across and into his mouth and down his chin.

He felt the smaller man's body like a bundle of wire and steel rods, stooping down. Felt hard hands dig into the backs of his thighs.

Then, as Godin grunted once with effort, his jowl to the flab of Benigni's left side, the prelate felt himself dead-lifted. The soles of his Gucci shoes departed slick granite. Holding Benigni's soft, yielding bulk over his right shoulder like a sack of meal, Godin straightened his legs, upending the monsignor.

Benigni screamed in horror as he stared straight down into the almost black depths of the gorge. Then he was released, launched head downward like a crucified martyr. As the cold air's passage stung his cheeks and eyes he screamed and screamed for God to help.

Godin watched as the monsignor vanished from sight in the mist that boiled from the falls. He put his hands to the small of his back and stretched his body backward as a last thin wisp of scream echoed among alpine peaks. He was capable of dead-lifting far more than the obese prelate's weight, and had used proper form. But his muscles were not so durable as once they were.

Then he doubled over in a coughing fit. What the two huge, hard men and the one huge, soft man had not been able to accomplish, it did; it brought Father Godin almost to his knees.

He hung on to the rail until the fit passed. He dabbed moistness from his mouth with a handkerchief. He put it away without looking at it.

One more job done, he told himself. Doubtless two more will spring up in his place. Yet I can only do what one man can in the service of our Lord.

He checked his own wristwatch, a cheap digital that nonetheless kept time as serviceably as the miniature treasury Benigni had worn strapped to his fat wrist. Then he turned and walked briskly toward the hotel and the highway. He had a flight to catch from Zurich, back to Rome and a discreet rendezvous where he expected to receive the assignment that would cap his long, illustrious career.

And then I will have truly earned my rest, he told himself. But will I be allowed to take it?

Chapter 3

"Ms. Creed," the young Asian woman at the hotel's reception desk said. Her perpetually cheery demeanor had slipped slightly. "I'm afraid I need to let you know that we can't give you an option to renew your room after your reservation runs out the day after tomorrow."

The lobby of the new Ramada Inn on the south side of the small Española Valley town of Pojoaque was decorated in what Annja had come to think of as Southwest Typical. Rounded whitewashed forms hinted at adobe brick beneath – no matter what was really there – rich-colored tile and brass and smoked-mirror trimming were offset by the occasional horsetail-fern accent. It actually produced a pleasant, calming effect even if it had become something of a design cliché.

"Really?" Annja asked. "Why not?"

"We've had a run of new bookings," the young woman said. She had a round, pink face and wore severe black slacks and a white blouse with a bolo tie sporting a silver-and-turquoise sun symbol. "I'm afraid we've committed all of our rooms."

"Is something happening at one of the casinos?" The local Pueblos, clustered thickly in the fertile upper Rio Grande Valley, had already constructed several casinos, giant pyramids of neon and more faux adobe. In fact, the dig site a few miles north and east of the hotel lay on land owned by the San Esequiel Pueblos, who had earmarked the site as part of their own projected casino complex. The tribe would not permit the UNM team to camp on the land; hence the need to find rooms in nearby hotels. The rest of the group were lodged in a Days Inn down the highway.

"Oh, no," the desk clerk said. "They're pilgrims. And paranormal investigators. They're here about the Santo Niño."

"Santo Niño?"

"It means 'Holy Child' in Spanish," the helpful young woman said to Annja, who knew. Annja was fluent in the modern Western Romance languages of Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, as well as Latin.

"I see," Annja said.

"It's all over the Internet, you see. There've been sightings here for weeks. People have gotten really excited."

"Who or what is this Holy Child?" Annja asked.

"He's a little boy who appears standing by the roadside. He looks eight or ten. He's wearing some kind of funny clothes – they say totally sixteenth-century Spanish or something. People feel sorry for him and pick him up. He thanks them and warns them something terrible is about to happen. Then he vanishes." She leaned conspiratorially across the counter. "I even read that a Japanese family picked him up a couple days ago. And he talked to them in Japanese!"

"My," Annja said weakly.

Well, at least it's my room for a night or two more, she thought as she sat on the bed a few minutes later, freshly showered and wearing a white fluffy robe and a towel wrapped around her hair as she tapped at her laptop. With the dig winding down, Annja didn't have much holding her in New Mexico. Except –

She felt a strong sense developing that she needed to stay. She wasn't sure why. But she and her companions had seen that terrifying flying thing not two hours earlier. The fear it inspired still seemed to echo in her soul like the tolling of a distant bell.

And now this Santo Niño seemed to be resurrecting the classic vanishing-hitchhiker urban legend. Oddities seemed to be converging on this small area of New Mexico, which was plenty peculiar to start with. And Annja's life was all about strangeness, it seemed.

A few Google search words – "black giant bird anomalous" – took her quickly to a site for a movie from a few years back called The Mothman Prophecies. She hadn't seen it. She had little interest in supernatural stuff, being of a skeptical turn of mind. That site led her to a listing for an ostensibly nonfiction book by a man named John A. Keel, and then to a scattering of paranormal and cryptozoology sites. It was all the usual huffing and conspiracy theorizing. She skimmed for a while and then moved on to other subjects. It probably was just an eagle after all,she told herself.

A quick check of Snopes.com confirmed what she'd first thought. The tale the girl at the front desk had told her about the Holy Child played out pretty close to the classic vanishing-hitchhiker script. Except in those tales the eponymous prophetic hitchhiker wasn't a child in antique Spanish drag, but Jesus Christ, himself.

Strange,she thought.

She felt a rumbling in her stomach and leaned over to pick up an apple from a little basket she'd put on the bedside table. The Española Valley was famous for its apple orchards, and a fresh crop had just been taken in. The local apples were all they were made out to be, she had to admit, as she bit into one.

Next she did a bit of flash research into the Santo Niño stories. He was pretty much as the hotel clerk described him, with a gown and a cape and long locks flowing from under a slouch hat with a pinned-up front.

She read a couple of articles. It was definitely a strange apparition for the early twenty-first century – although if he was going to show up any-where, she had to admit northern New Mexico was just the place. It had a character unlike anywhere else she'd been in North America. It was a place where religious pilgrims walked on their knees at Easter to the sanctuary of the church at Chimayó, just a few miles beyond the dig site from where Annja had been working. And where lines of top-flight physicists drove hybrid cars or rode recumbent bicycles, making their own daily pilgrimage to Los Alamos National Labs not so far away to the west.

But Japanese tourists? There were Japanese Christians, indeed Japanese Catholics, Annja knew The Jesuits, austere, learned, ubiquitous and to Annja's mind, a little bit scary – they started out professedly as a conspiracy to take over the world, after all – had sent missions to Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Indeed, some authorities blamed the Jesuits and rumors that they were assembling an invasion force in the Spanish colonial stronghold of the Philippines, for Tokugawa Iyeyasu's closure of the country to outsiders. And the Philippines, Annja had just learned, was another locus of Santo Niño sightings.

But, come on. Japanese tourists?

She shook her head, letting the towel unravel and whip around her robed shoulders. Her damp hair tickled her neck and cheeks like seaweed strands. Closing the computer, she unwound off the bed and tossed the apple, now thoroughly denuded to the core, into a wastebasket. She realized she'd been up all night. She needed serious food, seriously soon.

Suddenly, her thoughts snapped back to images of the spooky sunset sighting, and the cold that probed through her that had nothing to do with the increasingly icy wind and falling snow. Unlike poor Alyson Simpson, she was anything but alarmed to find her companions on the dig had packed firearms. It wasn't uncommon, but some of the gun handling on display had been casual enough to disturb her. She wasn't sure guns would have been much use against the creature that had silently and effortlessly flown over them.

Twin voices clashed in her head.

Come on, it was only an eagle, said one.

It'sgood to have a magic sword on call,said the other.

"I'm hungry," she said aloud. She discarded the robe over the back of a chair and walked naked and glorious to the closet to pick out some clothes for dinner.

"There's no such thing as chupacabras," the lean twentysomething eating the Denver omelet said. He wore a scuffed brown bomber jacket over a white shirt with a pocket protector well stuffed with multicolored pens. He had a high, wide forehead and slightly sunken eyes with a tendency to stare. He sat back in his chair with one leg cocked over his knee. "It was a story made up for this Puerto Rican newspaper by a writer guy named Adrian something. El Vocero. That's the paper's name."

His bulkier friend with the backward ball cap grunted over his huevos rancheros. He was hunched forward with elbows propped on the table. "What's that got to do with the price of speed in Singapore?" he asked. With his moon face, black beard and black trenchcoat over T-shirt and jeans, Annja hopedhe was deliberately trying to look like Kevin Smith playing Silent Bob in one of his own movies. Most of all she earnestly hoped he wasn't really Kevin Smith.

The little diner across the highway from the Ramada Inn wasn't a greasy spoon. More a trendy New Age equivalent. A tofu fork, perhaps, Annja thought. More faux adobe – she thought it was faux, anyway – and sand-pink-and-sage decor than the white shoebox with chrome and Formica of the classic American roadside diner. The food was good, portions were plentiful, and they didn't try to foist veganism on the paying customers. Although the customers did pay a tariff appropriate to the famously well-heeled Santa Fe tourist crowd.

Outside, the morning sun shone down on the parking lot and surrounding hills so hard Annja, seated in a booth by the window, half expected it to rattle against the glass. Even though the air was already winter crisp and shot through with the inevitable tang of piñon smoke, the light would sting unprotected skin.

The gloom of the evening before seemed to belong someplace else.

"I mean, we have to maintain a balance as monster hunters," the skinny guy said.

"I prefer the word cryptozoologists," the third musketeer said in a surprisingly high voice. Surprisingly because it emerged from a chest the approximate size and shape of an oil drum, wrapped in a black T-shirt with the publicity photo for a band on it. Their getup ran to black leather and pointy metal bits. Annja guessed they didn't do polka.

The man paused, assiduously stuffing a hamburger piled high with mushrooms, red onion and chopped green chili – at this hour of the morning she was impressed – into his mouth. The anthropologist in Annja made him a South Plains Indian of some kind, probably Kiowa. Or maybe a Pueblo or even Apache with Kiowa thrown in. He had incredibly thick and lustrous black hair drawn into a ponytail hanging down his vast back, and a tiny black ball cap perched sideways on his head.

"Whatever," the first man said with a shrug. Annja was surprised to see the three out at such an early hour. They were clearly science fiction fans, or a closely related genus. She'd always thought the earlier before noon they rose, the more strain it imposed on their nerd metabolisms. Apparently they were dedicated to their mission.

"It's important not to let ourselves get sucked in by every urban legend and showy hoax that comes down the pike. I'm just saying."

"But scientists reported seeing it this time," the bearded man said.

"Maybe. How do you know they were real scientists? Do you know the report was real? And anyway, I read rumors this morning that that Chasing History's Monsterschick was on the dig site. Doesn't that strike you as just a teensy bit suspicious?"

"The chick with the – " The big Indian held his hands cupped an imposing distance in front of his metal band.

"Naw," the David Byrne kid said. "The skinny, flat-chested one. The archaeologist."

The loud tinkthat startled Annja, she suddenly realized, had come from her melon spoon falling to the dish. She hunched her head between her shoulders and concentrated hard on studying the half-eaten cantaloupe.

I am notflat-chested, she thought, looking down at herself surreptitiously.

The three young men, who sat at a table not ten feet away across the maroon-tile floor, paid her no mind. She had her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail and hadn't slept and had huge, round Jackie O sunglasses on to hide the dark shadows under her eyes. On the whole she looked nothing like she did on her occasional television appearances, where a team of people insisted on fussing and painting her heavily with theatrical makeup. She always suspected they felt they were working with a blank canvas when they got their hands on her.

She glanced out the window. Away past the self-conscious Santa Fe – emulating facades of the strip mall across the road, the land sloped to a line of big trees whose gnarled limbs were thronged with tanand-yellow leaves. Ancient cottonwoods, they marked the course of the Rio Grande – the Big River. It was seldom considered that big by eastern standards, and had probably only struck the Spanish explorers as such after they'd been stumbling around the parched Upper Sonoran Desert for a few weeks. It, not the Rockies and their tributaries that ran alongside it, was the state's true spine.

Annja thought she might walk through the brushy wood alongside it for a while this morning. The dig was done for the year. The Pueblos had gotten wind of last night's adventure and wanted things shut down immediately.

The tribal council was maybe spooked, and definitely pissed. Annja wondered who had talked about the sighting.

" – think about the Mayan calendar," the bearded guy was saying when Annja let herself tune in to the conversation again.

"How do you mean?" asked his leaner companion, who had turned sideways in his chair with his legs crossed.

The bearded guy shrugged. "Well, in connection with this holy kid's prophecies. He's always forecasting doom, right?"

"But sometimes the percipients have narrow escapes right after he vanishes," the Kiowa-looking guy said. "Maybe he's just warning them."

The bearded guy shook his head determinedly. "There definitely also seem to be undercurrents of long-term doom."

"So what does this have to do with the Mayan calendar?" the third one wanted to know.

"It runs out in December 2012, right?"

The kid in the bomber jacket nodded. Warily, Annja thought.

"So maybe that's what the holy kid is prophesying. The Mayan calendar runs out – time runs out."

The skinny guy had wrinkled his big, wide forehead like a shar-pei and was shaking his head. "I never quite got what's supposed to happen after the Mayan calendar runs out. I mean, what if it's like Y2K? Except instead of all the microchips that were supposed to break down and all, all the world's stone calendars don't work anymore. Hard to see the downside there."

"I read somewhere online that maybe Betelgeuse had gone supernova," the big Indian guy said.

"Hypernova," the bearded guy said.

"Hypernova, then."

"And that concerns us how?" the skinny kid asked.

"Well, it's, like, theorized this happened a couple hundred years ago. Supposedly the star shows signs of being unstable. Its spectra or something."

"But if it happened two centuries ago – "

"But, see, it'd take time for the explosion to get here. Even at light speed. You know how the Mayas made all these precise astronomical observations. So, maybe they noticed Betelgeuse was fixing to blow?"

"Wait," the skinny kid said. "This happened, what? Five hundred years ago? They predicted Betelgeuse would blow up two hundred years ago? Isn't that three hundred years in their future? I'm confused."

"Betelgeuse is 427 light-years away," the bearded guy said, forking up more eggs in salsa verde.

"God, you're a nerd."

"We're all nerds. Why else are we here in Snake's Navel, New Mexico? Anyway, wouldn't that mean, if the Maya made their calendar four – five centuries ago, Betelgeuse would've been blowing up more or less the same time?"