Текст книги "Black Rain"

Автор книги: Graham Brown

Соавторы: Graham Brown
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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

CHAPTER 42

As soon as he made it back to the camp, McCarter began searching for the things that had been taken from them, his notebook and drawings in particular. He dug through piles of Kaufman’s supplies and equipment, violently slinging aside anything that wasn’t what he was looking for. And feeling triumphantly empowered as he did so.

A cough from behind him put a stop to it. “Professor?”

He turned to see Susan, dirty-faced, her rifle slung over her shoulder.

“Shouldn’t you be resting?” he asked.

“I can’t sleep,” she said. “Every sound makes me jump, and I’d rather not sleep than keep waking up like that.”

He could understand that, he’d found sleep hard to come by himself.

“What are you doing?” she asked. “I mean, it looks like fun but—”

“Ah yes, I’m looking for something,” he said. “Trying to take back what’s ours, actually.”

She held up his old leather-bound notebooks. “I didn’t want you to forget them when we got out of here,” she said.

McCarter could almost feel his eyes welling up with tears. She was just a kid. He couldn’t imagine how she was dealing with what she’d been through. What they were all going through. “And your family didn’t think you could hack it out here,” he said.

“Can you believe it?” she said, tears welling up in her eyes just a bit. “I turned down Paris for this.”

McCarter took the notebooks from her and sat down. “We’ll get you there,” he said. “In the meantime, you want to help me with what’s basically a pointless academic question?”

She unshouldered her rifle. “Sure, maybe it’ll help me feel normal again.” She sat down next to him. “What are we trying to figure out?”

“Hawker asked me a question about this place,” he said.

“Hawker?”

“He’s quite smart,” McCarter said. “Despite what he’d have us think. He notices things. And of all people, he noticed that the Chollokwan have an unexplainably strong interest in an abandoned temple that has nothing to do with them. Any thoughts?”

She took a moment, looking around at their surroundings. “Only that he’s right,” she said.

They discussed the question for a while, talking the subject around and bouncing thoughts off of each other, but no real progress was made, until they considered a different question, one that had been with them from the beginning: Was this temple or city Tulan Zuyua?

“It all starts there,” McCarter noted.

“We can’t prove it either way,” Susan said.

“No,” he agreed. “But it does seem possible. Seven Caves, the Place of Bitter Water, glyphs that reference things that occurred before the original Maya left Tulan Zuyua.” He scratched his head. “If we were to assume it to be true, would that help us? I mean, what do we know about Tulan Zuyua that might tell us something?”

“Humans were given their gods there,” she said. “And they left in an exodus, of sorts.”

“Right,” McCarter said. “And from what we’ve found—or rather, what we haven’t found—it doesn’t seem like this place was occupied for very long.” He was referring to the lack of everyday items that formed the bulk of any excavation: the pottery for cooking and carrying water, the tools, the bones of animals consumed for food, all of which piled up in ancient garbage dumps. Nor had they found extensive writing.

“We saw glyphs on and inside the temple, as well as one of the smaller structures—the beginning of something, but not a body of work like the gardens of stone at the classical Mayan cities. And in certain places, the work seems to have been cut short, like half-finished sentences. All of which suggests a sudden exodus to me.”

“You think they fled,” she guessed.

“Abandoned the place,” McCarter said. “A little different than the orderly departure described in the Popul Vuh, but even there the imagery of them trudging through the darkness and rain evokes the look of refugees.”

She seemed to agree. “What else do we know?”

McCarter rubbed the sandpaper stubble on the side of his face and then reached for his notes. He began to flip through the pages once again, going backward this time, starting from the most recent and moving toward the beginning of the expedition. It was a trick he’d learned long ago, one that forced him to review the written pages, to study the words, instead of just scanning what he knew to be coming next.

Page after page moved through his hands—drawings he’d made, notes he’d scribbled that seemed almost indecipherable now. He squinted at the chicken scratch and racked his brain and then continued to backtrack. The pages flew by one at a time, until finally he stopped and held his place.

His fingers rubbed at the paper, the tactile sense of its fiber familiar to him, the half-circle stain from a coffee mug reminding him of the day he’d written on that particular page.

He stared at his own writing and the glyph he’d transcribed, one that he’d copied not in the clearing or at the temple but back at the Wall of Skulls. His eyes scanned it repeatedly as his mind made a leap it would not have been capable of just days before. He’d found his key.

He marked the spot in his notes, and began to riffle through the rest of them in search of a drawing he’d made at the base of the altar inside the temple.

He told Susan what he was searching for. She produced a printout of a photo she had taken with her digital camera, before it and the printer had succumbed to the electromagnetic degradation.

McCarter thanked her and took the photo. He scrutinized the image for a moment and then referred back to his bookmark. Firmly convinced, he turned the picture in Susan’s direction.

“This set of glyphs,” he said, pointing to the left side of a photo that had been taken inside the temple. “Do you remember what we decided about them?”

Susan examined the picture briefly, mumbling to herself as she translated. “The offering to the one for whom the temple was built. Which would be the Ahau: the king.”

“Correct. And this is the point of all that deference,” he said, moving his finger to the right side of the photo and pointing out another more opulent, yet unreadable glyph—unreadable because it was damaged, smashed as if by a hammer or a stone. It wasn’t the only glyph that appeared to have been damaged in that way but it was the only one on that particular section. It had left McCarter with the distinct impression of vandalism. The fact that it was probably the Ahau’s name only made the feeling stronger. He thought of the Pharaohs erasing the name of Moses from all the obelisks in Egypt.

Susan examined the photo again and sighed.

“Unknown,” she said. “The glyph clearly represents a name, but being damaged and this far from the rest of Mayan civilization, we might never find a matching symbol, in which case we would have to assign it a name ourselves.”

As always, McCarter thought, a textbook explanation. “That’s what we assumed at the time. But in fact, we already know who this is, though the answer will surprise you.”

She looked at him with suspicion.

McCarter folded the page of his notebook over and handed it to her. On the page in front of her was the drawing he’d made at the Wall of Skulls. The undamaged portions in the photo were identical to his markings. Next to it McCarter had scribbled a name, an English translation: Seven Macaw.

“That’s impossible,” she said. “Seven Macaw was one of the wooden people. Part of their pre-history, their pre-human mythology.”

He arched his brows. “Think about the description of the wooden people,” he said. “With no muscle development in their arms or their legs. No fat to speak of. With masklike faces and deformed bodies.”

“The body in the temple,” she said.

“Exactly,” he replied. “At the time of the wooden people, we have Seven Macaw holding himself out as a god, right? The leader, at the very least. But the authors of the Popul Vuh have him painted more as a usurper. He’s repugnant to the gods, something just wrong, foreign and unnatural.”

“Subhuman,” she said.

He nodded. “But in a place of power he becomes something more. Instead of a pitiable creature, he becomes an abomination: Seven Macaw.”

She glanced at the photo of the vandalized glyphs as he went on.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Seven Macaw was described as having a nest made of metal, and possessions that could create light. In fact, he claimed to be the Sun and the Moon and that he could light up the whole of the world, but even the writers of the Popul Vuh knew this claim was false. They knew the light he created could only reach a short distance out into the night.”

He nodded toward the temple. “If Danielle is right and that body down there is indeed the remains of a person who traveled here from the future, I’m guessing they would have come in some type of vessel; something ancient people might have described as a nest made of metal. I mean, what would they say if a plane crashed here, or a space capsule like Mercury or Apollo? Even our spotlights illuminated a large swath of ground before they were destroyed, who knows what type of lighting someone from the future might have.”

“But not enough to light up the world,” Susan noted.

“No,” McCarter agreed, “whatever they might boast.”

“That would fit,” she said, excitedly. “I mean, if they did have such things, primitive people would have a hard time describing them.”

McCarter nodded, but remained quiet for the moment. He was thinking of the skull in the cave and the golden filaments that ran from the eye sockets back across the top of it. He thought about his uncle, who had a titanium knee, a pacemaker in his chest and an artificial lens in his eye where a cataract had been removed. He guessed that the filaments they’d seen were something similar, a prosthetic or part of one, designed to aid sight in some way.

“Remember when Seven Macaw was shot with the blow dart,” he said. “The heroes took the metal from his eyes.”

She nodded.

“It’s probably a stretch,” he said, “but I suppose it’s even possible that the body you found down there, that actual body, could have made it into legend as Seven Macaw.”

Suddenly, Susan was the voice of reason. “Or,” she said, “perhaps the name and the term came into use later, to describe this malicious force that held the people down.”

More likely she was right—legends had a way of being embellished and expanded in the aftermath, and almost all tales of woe tended to derive their pain from a specific villain as opposed to a group, even if that had not been the case.

“Either way,” he said. “I have to believe there is some connection here. And if that’s the case, then I think perhaps it can help us understand these animals we’ve been fighting a little bit better.”

He watched as she worked it out, coming around to the same conclusion he’d now reached. “You think those animals are the Zipacna,” she said, guessing his thoughts. “The son, or apparently sons of Seven Macaw.”

“That’d be my guess,” he said. “Sons of his, but not in the biological sense. After all, George Washington is the father of our country and Ben Franklin is called the father of electricity, but they didn’t give birth to those things.”

“‘Father’ could mean patron or protector … or creator,” she said.

He looked toward the temple. “So if that body in the cave is Seven Macaw, either in fact or in general, then he could be Zipacna’s creator, his father in that sense. Growing the Zipacna in those pools, cloning them perhaps.”

“But whoever that is down there, he’s dead,” she noted. “Why are the animals still here?”

He’d thought about that. “Danielle was looking for machinery. Perhaps our presence here triggered some kind of alarm. Maybe when Kaufman placed the crystals back on the altar.”

“Or when we walked through the curtain of light,” she said.

“Booby traps do have a habit of sticking around,” he said. “Just look at all the minefields strewn across the world, littering the ground long after the wars have moved on. And if that’s the case here, then perhaps these wooden people or deformed humans—or whatever we’re calling them—set up a system like that here. It’s all guesswork, but …”

“Maybe not,” she said. “I didn’t remember to show you this when we were down in the cave. We were talking about the body and everything, and I just wanted to get out of there. But before you came down I had nothing to do but try to reach Kaufman on that radio and pray that those things wouldn’t reach me first. To take my mind off it, I studied those glyphs and the other marks as well. Among the geometric drawings, I’m quite sure there was a double-helix design. It could mean anything, it could be the infinity sign turned on its side, but it looked like a stylized drawing of DNA. Kind of like what you might see on a drug company’s logo.”

He nodded.

“And among the Maya writing,” she added, “I recognized glyphs referencing the children, unlearned, or they will not learn, and then violence. The last glyphs indicate retribution or destruction.”

McCarter took a breath, thinking. “In that order?”

She nodded. “I took it to mean the children would not learn,” she said, “and so were punished. I’m guessing the children were the locals, and they were punished by releasing the animals, the Zipacna.”

He looked over at the bandaged dogs, resting near the foxholes. “We have our loyal friends. Perhaps they have their own service animals.”

“But why?” she asked. “What’s the point? Why build the pyramid at all? Why would anyone want to live down in that cave?”

“Ahh,” McCarter said. He’d been waiting for that. “An important question. And I think a most important answer. That temple seems to be a deliberate cap on the cave, keeping the sulfur and the acid on the inside, increasing the concentration in the air. The environment down there is completely different. After we brought you out, you had to wash off with fresh water because your skin was burning, remember?”

“Of course,” she said, rubbing a hand over her forearm. “It still itches.”

“The water was extremely acidic. It killed the soldier you saw jump in and yet the animals lived in it without any problem. Danielle thinks it’s because they secrete an oily base substance to counteract the acid. From that alone I’m guessing they’re used to it, designed for it even. On the body you found, we saw similar pores in the bony plates. That leads me to believe an acidic environment was their natural habitat.”

“Acid rain in our future after all,” she said, sadly.

He nodded. “A ruined environment for which man and animal have evolved or been genetically engineered to survive in. And when they came here they needed a similar place to call home.”

“So they capped the cave deliberately,” she said. “Trying their best to create an artificial environment down there, one that would keep them comfortable, or at least alive.”

“Their version of a bubble on the moon,” he said.

She seemed to be thinking it over, confirming it in her own mind, only to realize that they still hadn’t answered the original question. “Okay,” she said, “based on what we’ve seen, I can buy into what you’re saying. The wooden people and the Zipacna as real. I can even see them forcing these early Maya to build the temple as a cap to the cave because they need the acidic environment to survive in, but I still don’t see what that has to do with the Chollokwan.”

McCarter answered her question with one of his own, ready at last to link the two ideas together. “What happened to the wooden people when they ignored the call of the gods, when they exalted themselves and failed to keep the days?”

“They were killed off,” she said. “Hurricane and the other gods destroyed them. Turning their own animals against them.”

“Right,” McCarter said. “Their own animals, including beasts that attacked and ripped them apart, something that quite accurately describes what the Zipacna do. They raced for the trees and they raced for the caves,” he added, quoting the Popul Vuh again. “But the trees could not bear them and the caves were sealed shut.”

“You think the inhabitants of this place tricked them,” she said. “Sealed the temple just as a storm came.”

He nodded. “If I was to take it all the way, and try to match it up with the legend, I would suppose that the Mayan people rebelled, injured Seven Macaw and sent him fleeing to that temple. And then they sealed him in. With a storm coming, and nowhere to hide, any Zipacna that may have been out here went crazy, attacking everyone and everything, including the other wooden people—if there were any. And then the storm hit, drowning one and all with burning rain.”

“It rained all day and all through the night,” she said.

“And the earth was blackened beneath it,” he added, quoting the ancient Mayan text one last time. As he finished, McCarter watched Susan’s face light up. He was certain that she’d made the connection, certain that she knew his next question and the answer to it as well. He asked it anyway.

“And what were the Chollokwan doing with those crystals when our friend Blackjack Martin so casually took them away?”

“They were praying,” she said. “Praying for rain.”

“Damn right,” McCarter said, slamming his notebook shut. “The Chollokwan care about this place, because they’re descendants of the Mayan tribe who built it. And they were praying for the rain, not to make the crops grow or the river flood or for any of the other reasons normally associated with such a request, but because their salvation, or at least that of their ancestors, once depended on it.”

CHAPTER 43

Across the camp Hawker stood beside Danielle, staring into an empty ammunition box, now covered with a makeshift grate. Scampering around in the box was the larva they’d retrieved from the body in the forest. It had been just two hours, but the thing barely seemed like the same creature. It had grown little arms and legs and the beginnings of the lethal tail. Viewed from above, it was beginning to resemble the animals from inside the temple.

Hawker could hardly believe the change. “How long did all that take?”

Danielle glanced at her watch. “Ten minutes after we got it back here, its skin hardened into the bony shell we saw on the adult animals. Then the tendrils separated and it ingested them.”

The little thing disgusted Hawker and this latest revelation did nothing to change that. “It ate its own arms?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, smiling at his discomfort. “You should have seen it.”

“No thanks,” he said, looking around. There was only one grub in the box, a fact that concerned him. “Where are the rest of them?”

Danielle frowned. “This one killed them before I could stop it. As soon as its shell had hardened, it became very aggressive.”

“All of them?” Hawker said.

She nodded. “For the most part. I pulled one of the half-eaten things out before it could finish, but it would have gulped it down if I’d let it.”

“Hungry little bastard,” Hawker noted.

“It is,” she said. “And I think I know why. I took a sample from the dead one and looked at it under a microscope. Its cells are packed with mitochondria, maybe three to four times what a human cell has. That gives it a tremendous metabolic rate. To maintain such a metabolism it would likely have to eat its body weight in food every four or five days. I would guess the need at half of that for the adults. Maybe less, but still very accelerated.”

“That might explain why they’re so aggressive,” Hawker said.

“I think it explains something else too, something that might help us to fight them,” she said.

Hawker leaned toward her, interested in any detail about the creatures that might make them easier to kill. “Tell me,” he said.

“Let me put it this way,” she said, “there are many different rates of life in the natural world. A hummingbird has an extraordinarily high metabolic rate; its wings beat so rapidly that they’re a blur to the naked eye. To keep that rate up they have to consume their body weight in nectar every twenty-four hours or so.

“In comparison, a species like the tortoise or the starfish has a glacial metabolism. To the naked eye a starfish looks immobile. Yet they are moving, not just wafting around in the current but traveling—there are even great migrations of them roaming unnoticed across the ocean floor. You can see it with time-lapse photography.”

Hawker smiled at her excitement. “Let me guess, oceanography was another major.”

She shook her head. “A summer hobby really. I liked the sun and the surf, and I looked pretty good in a wet-suit.”

He laughed. “I bet you did.”

“The point is,” she said, “if a starfish could see us, we would be nothing more than a fleeting blur to it. Yet, to the hummingbird we move like molasses in winter. Almost as if we’re in slow motion.”

She pointed to the grub now scratching around in one corner of the box. “These animals live somewhere between the hummingbirds’ scale and our own. They move rapidly, they react with incredible quickness.” She held up a pair of tongs. “Go ahead, try to grab it.”

“I’ll pass,” Hawker said. “Otherwise I’ll never be able to eat Chinese food again.”

“Chopsticks or tongs,” she said, “you’d be hard-pressed to catch this thing. It jumps out of the way; no matter how fast you go for it, it scampers around. I think it—and by extrapolation they—see our movements as ponderous and slow.”

So they would have to be quicker, he thought. It now made sense how he’d killed the one that charged him when Kaufman had been taken. He fired blind, acting on instinct. Not taking the time to think or even aim. It was a good point, a good lesson. “Any other cheery news?” he asked.

“Two things actually. First, the man we took this from had an enzyme in his blood that kept it from coagulating, allowing the larvae to feed off of it. It’s likely that the enzyme was injected at the time of death, like the mosquito does when it bites and draws blood. I think it is the same enzyme that retarded the biological decay.”

“And the second thing?”

She looked toward the tree line. “If these animals need as much food as I think they do, they face a problem. The more life they destroy, the less remains behind to feed them or to lay eggs in. Most likely they’ve killed or eaten everything in this area and then moved outward in search of better prey. I’m guessing that’s why we didn’t encounter them when we first got here. Because we basically entered a vacant space, like a burned-out spot in a forest fire; you’re safe among the charred timber because the fire has already moved on.”

Hawker thought about what he’d seen in the trees; all of it suggested that Danielle was right. “A break for us,” Hawker said. “But why are they coming back, then?”

“Maybe they picked up our scent,” she said.

Before he could ask her anything else, Professor McCarter and Susan Briggs came running over.

“We’re making a big mistake,” McCarter said loudly.

“What are you talking about?” Danielle asked.

“Sitting here, it’s a mistake. We should be out there.” He pointed toward the trees. “With the Chollokwan.”

Hawker raised his eyebrows. “The ones who put the curse of a thousand deaths on us?”

“I know,” McCarter said, holding up a hand to hold off the questions. “I remember what was said. But I think it was a warning as much as a threat. I think they made it because they knew what would happen if we entered the temple.”

“How could they know?” Danielle asked.

“Because it’s happened before,” McCarter said. “When we were looking for a radio Kaufman told me you had another team here before us, a team that got wiped out. I’m sure he was trying to con me into helping him at the time, but even then I didn’t think he was lying.”

“He wasn’t,” Danielle said blankly. “We didn’t know they’d come here, but we found some of their equipment.”

McCarter nodded, seeming to appreciate her honesty. “Kaufman told me that a man named Dixon survived. He crawled out of here with a broken leg, which was lost to gangrene—but Dixon held on to what he found, a crystal that came from inside the temple, one that matched the Martin’s crystals.

“Okay,” she said. “I’d believe that. What does it mean?”

“It means your earlier party did more than just find this place,” McCarter explained. “It means they opened the temple and went inside. Yet when we arrived, the temple was sealed shut. So who closed it up? Someone had to do it, and certainly not the men who were running headlong into the jungle, trying to escape. So who? The only possible answer is the Chollokwan. They came here and put the stone back in place to keep those animals inside.”

“What about the fire?” she asked. “The first one and then last night?”

“Same thing,” McCarter replied. “Bad conclusions based on false assumptions. Fire for fire, they said, remember. Fire for the plague. We assumed that we were the plague. But the fire was for the trees, where we found that thing.” He pointed to the grub. “I’m guessing it was to burn them out, to destroy the nests before the larvae hatched. And then last night we heard their voices and drums again. We assumed they were building a war party or something. But they didn’t attack, and if you remember the sequence, the animals disappeared just as the drums came. I’ll bet the Chollokwan were hunting them then too.”

“With spears and clubs?” Danielle said.

“And pits filled with water,” McCarter replied, reminding them of the strange trap at the wall of skulls.

“But why would they even try?” Danielle asked. “It’s almost suicide.”

“Because they’re not just primitive nomads who live in the rain forest,” he said. “They’re the descendents of the Mayan people who once lived here. The Chollokwan are the ones who stayed behind.”

“In the Tulan Zuyua story?” Danielle asked.

“Yes,” McCarter said. “And in reality as well. In fact, I’m pretty certain that there’s not much of a difference. At least as it concerns this place.”

He turned to Hawker. “Don’t you see,” he said, “it’s the answer to your question. You asked me why they cared about this place. The only response I could come up with was that they shouldn’t. They should pass it by as if it were just another spot in the forest, ignoring it or at most regarding it as some type of curiosity. But they don’t ignore it, they come here every year, they burn the trees back and keep this place clear of foliage, just like Blackjack Martin said they’d done at the Wall of Skulls. They tend to this place and keep outsiders away, year after year, century after century, because it’s theirs. Blessing or curse, it belongs to them.”

“But you said the city was abandoned,” Danielle reminded him.

“It was,” McCarter told them. “The inhabitants deserted this place. They sealed those animals inside—just like the story of Zipacna being sealed under the mountain of stone—but it’s not a rock-strewn mountain, it’s a structure shaped like a mountain, a pyramid made out of stone blocks.” He turned around. The pyramid of the temple stood behind him.

Hawker stared at it. He understood what McCarter was getting at. “So the legend is real.”

“It’s a version of reality,” McCarter replied, “distorted through time and retelling but essentially true.”

Danielle looked at the temple. “In the legend the Maya left Tulan Zuyua like refugees,” she noted, “while others—unidentified others—stayed behind. You think those remnants were the Chollokwan.”

McCarter nodded. “You paid me to tell you if this place was Tulan Zuyua and in my opinion it is, at least it’s one source of that legend, and the pyramid temple over there is likely to be a form of the Mountain of Stone. In the legend itself the two are not that closely connected, but legends have a way of morphing. A few thousand years and few thousand miles can wreak a lot of changes. But there are always touchstones of truth that remain, and in our case, we’ve found enough to convince me.

“I think this place was or is Tulan Zuyua,” he reiterated. “And I think those who built it were being tormented by a group of people who seemed only vaguely human to them—the body we found in the temple being one of them. They called those people the wooden people. If you’re right we might know them as our descendents, but to these people they were despots, and if we follow the legend, the people who lived under their tyranny eventually threw off their chains with the help of a thunderous storm. Finally free, but probably fearing it wouldn’t last, they took their possessions and left this place, leaving a band of warriors behind to keep this temple sealed forever. Perhaps they even continued to communicate with the ones who remained behind, but over time and distance it eventually became impossible, actions that are mirrored in the Popul Vuh as the departure from Tulan Zuyua, the receiving of different gods and the inability of those who left to communicate with the tribes who stayed behind. Over time the people who left became the Maya, while the warriors who stayed became the Chollokwan, and their one task became a religion of its own.”

“But they don’t write, or keep time, or build anything,” Hawker said.

“If our civilization was wiped out today, no one would be building skyscrapers or jet planes tomorrow. We’d be lucky if we could put up a house without a leaky roof. All civilizations build up a body of what we call societal knowledge, knowledge that’s only useful as long as the body stays intact; specialization leads to interdependence, interdependence leads to vulnerability. Break up any civilization and the specialized skills are the first to go as the people struggle just to cover the basics.

“In the Mayan world only the priests wrote and understood the calendars. Only the artisans could carve the glyphs and build. That’s how the elite controlled the masses. A legion of warriors wouldn’t have any of those skills. All they would know how to do is fight.”

McCarter’s gaze moved from Hawker to Danielle. “Here’s the proof: eighty-odd years ago Blackjack Martin stole those crystals from the Chollokwan after they were used in a rain-calling ceremony. Now ask yourself why the Chollokwan would even want it to rain. Agricultural societies want the rain, not hunting societies. The Chollokwan aren’t farmers—they’re hunters and gatherers, nomadic and migratory wanderers. The rain makes their lives exponentially more difficult. It turns the ground to mud and keeps the animals hidden in their dens and nests. It allows what game there is to spread far and wide instead of gathering at the edge of the rivers. If the Chollokwan were just simple nomads they would abhor the rains, but they don’t, they pray for them to come, just like the early Maya did.”