Текст книги "Black Rain"
Автор книги: Graham Brown
Соавторы: Graham Brown
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CHAPTER 46
Two hours later, the group had made it back to the clearing. Verhoven greeted them as they arrived, but from his tone it was clear what he assumed.
“What the hell happened?”
“We found them,” Danielle said, dejectedly. “And they don’t really care what we do. As long as we die alone and let them do the same.”
Susan and Brazos looked stricken as Danielle explained what had happened.
Hawker stepped away; he didn’t want to hear the details again. He stared into the western sky at the rapidly falling sun. There was an hour before dusk, maybe a little less. Enough time to put some distance between them and the clearing, if they dared.
He interrupted Danielle’s report. “Come on,” he said. “We’re getting the hell out of here.”
Brazos stood up, leaning heavily on a walking stick, but the others didn’t move.
“Grab your things,” Hawker said. “We have a lot of ground to cover, and we have to move while we still have some light.” He threw his own pack over his shoulder and reached for an extra canteen.
Danielle put a hand out, stopping him. “Where are we going?”
“To find a stream like the one that protected the Chollokwan village. We’ll follow it or build a raft and float on it or wade in the damn thing if we have to. But once we reach the water, we’ll be safe. And from there—all roads lead to Rome.”
He could see their confusion, their tired minds trying to make sense of his plan.
“The water is poison to these things,” he said. “And the sun burns their skin. An open stream with blue sky above would be sanctuary for us, but the water itself should be enough.”
He turned to McCarter. “You said it without realizing it; the river will take us home. And it will, but we’ve got to move now, while we still have a chance.”
“What about the helicopter?” someone asked.
Hawker shook his head. “Without Kaufman here to signal it, who knows if it’ll land? And even if it does, we might not be here to see it. We used up more than half our ammunition last night, and at that rate, three days of waiting will be at least one day too long.”
The group looked around at one another, beginning to understand his argument, beginning to believe in it.
“I passed over a couple of streams on my way back from the crash,” he told them. “If we hustle, we can reach the closest in an hour or so, before it gets completely dark. But we have to leave now.”
One by one, the others began to move, shaking off the sluggishness that despair had brought on. Brazos grabbed his pack and pointed to the water he’d collected, Susan began gathering the belongings that lay around them.
“Okay, let’s go,” Danielle said.
“About damn time,” Verhoven added.
Their pace quickened as a sense of hope began to spread through the gathering. They were excited again, energized by the possibility of survival, thrilled, at the very least, to be leaving the accursed clearing behind.
In the midst of the activity Professor McCarter remained still. He’d spent the entire hike back from the Chollokwan village dwelling on the subject of survival, pondering both life and death and trying desperately to shake the image of the playful three-year-old from his head.
And though he’d considered surviving the night an unlikely possibility—at least until the advent of Hawker’s new plan—he’d begun to realize that there was more at stake here than just their lives. Finally he spoke. “I think we should stay.”
The movement around him stopped.
“What?” someone asked.
“I think we should stay,” he repeated.
Devers dropped his pack. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“We won’t last here,” Hawker said, speaking in a more kindly tone. “If you want to see home again, this is the only way.”
“This is our responsibility,” McCarter replied. “Those things are free because we set them free. We opened the temple, just like Dixon’s group did before us. We ignored the warning. Now the stone is destroyed and the temple can’t be sealed again, and we’re just going to walk away? Leave it to the Chollokwan to fight these things … or die trying?”
The others were quiet.
“We’re not the only ones in danger here,” McCarter continued. “The whole place is in danger, the Chollokwan, the other tribes out here, the Nuree downriver. These things are a plague, like a swarm of locusts with no natural enemies, but it’s not crops they’re stripping, it’s every living thing in the area.”
He looked from face to face. “Aside from the Chollokwan, and the rain, there’s nothing to keep them in check. Well, the Chollokwan won’t last much longer, and with the temple open, even the rains will be powerless to do any harm to those things. They’ll crawl back inside like roaches hiding from the light and when the storms pass they’ll come out again and they’ll continue clearing the forest of life and moving on to new hunting grounds. They’ll burn their way through the jungle like a fire in search of fuel, until eventually they’ll reach other places where they can hide from the rains, places with windows and cellars and doors.
“The Chollokwan have taken it upon themselves to fight these things,” he added. “They’re honoring an oath made three thousand years ago, and they’re paying with their lives.”
Of all people, Devers spoke. “Who the hell cares?”
Verhoven shoved him to the ground. “You don’t get a vote,” he said, then looked at McCarter. “You’re bloody crazy if you want to stay here.”
McCarter was undeterred. “If we leave now, we may live. And then again we may not.” He turned to Hawker. “I admit, from everything I’ve seen, your plan should work, if we can make it to the water. But that’s not a certainty. Not with an hour of light left and the pace we’re likely to keep.” He looked at Brazos, who could hardly walk; he’d been hobbling around the flat ground of the clearing with great difficulty. How much he would slow their pace in the jungle was anybody’s guess, but it would be substantial. And Brazos wasn’t the only problem. Susan’s asthma made it impossible to run or walk quickly over long periods. Danielle had been limping since her leg had been slashed in the cave; she’d struggled to make the hike they’d just completed, her calf repeatedly cramping for the last hour back.
Hawker’s march of just more than an hour would take three or four, or maybe five—and most of that in the dark. As McCarter spoke, the others followed his gaze, and he hoped his thoughts as well.
“If we walk out of here now,” he said, “we leave knowing we’ve killed off an entire race of people, brought this curse down on them and then just left them here to die. Men, women and children—an entire village. But if we stay, we can hold the high ground, morally and physically. We can fight those things on our own terms and maybe keep them away from this place long enough for the Chollokwan to recover, long enough for them to get the upper hand.
“We can’t reseal the temple,” he said. “But we can keep those things from getting back inside, at least for a while. Who knows how much that could help?”
McCarter truly didn’t believe they would make it through the jungle if they left and he wasn’t sure they had the right to leave anyway. “Maybe it’s not about living and dying anymore. But what we live for and, if necessary, what we die for.”
When McCarter finished a heavy silence lingered. Some of them looked off into the distance, others at the dusty ground, anywhere but right at him.
Danielle had listened to McCarter closely, her own thoughts heavy with all that had occurred. She remembered Hawker’s words, his prediction that she would regret staying, that there would be a price to pay for what they’d done. Now she felt it with all her heart.
To her it seemed unlikely that any of them would make it out alive, but as she stared at Brazos, the only survivor from the group of porters she’d hired, she knew it would be almost impossible for him.
In fact, as she saw it, there was probably no way out. If they stayed, the animals would soon overwhelm them and retake the temple. And if they left, then the animals would reclaim their nest with ease and then branch back out into the jungle, foraging for food once again. They would find the NRI group quickly, long before the stumbling humans reached the nearest stream, and that would be the end of them.
Good people, she thought. Her people. And in a few hours they would all be dead.
Unless there was another way.
She’d come here and stayed because she finished things, that’s who she was. But for all her efforts, there had been nothing there to find. The only thing left to do now, the only job left to finish, was to get her team home. She guessed it would take everything she had.
She turned back to McCarter. “I brought you all here,” she said. “I lied about the reasons and the danger. The explanations don’t really matter, but you have to believe me when I tell you I’m sorry.”
She looked at McCarter. “More than that, I understand why you want to stay … but you can’t. You have to leave,” she looked around, “all of you. This is my responsibility. I’ll stay and I’ll hold those things off as long as I can. If you can help Brazos while Hawker and Verhoven cover the flanks, you’ll be able to move faster. I’ll stay behind and make life difficult for those animals while you make your way. Perhaps they’ll be distracted long enough for you to reach the stream. You never know, a couple of hours might make all the difference.”
McCarter smiled at the gesture. “That’s brave,” he said. “But it doesn’t change things for me. I’m not going anywhere. Not this time.”
Susan said. “I’ll stay too, if that’s what we all decide.”
Brazos nodded as if he knew he would not make it through the forest. “Maybe the helicopter will come?”
Devers cursed and complained, careful to stay out of Verhoven’s reach. And then all eyes turned toward Hawker.
All Hawker wanted to do—all he’d wanted to do since everything blew up—was get them the hell out of there. Take Susan, Brazos and McCarter back to Manaus, where they’d be safe, where their blood wouldn’t be on his hands. Apparently McCarter felt the same way, only in his mind, the arc of responsibility cut a wider swath. And Danielle … Hawker turned to her, gazing at her face, her sweaty, dirty, beautiful face. Apparently she agreed with McCarter. He hadn’t expected that.
“You know we can’t win this,” he told them. “You understand that, right?”
McCarter shrugged.
Danielle allowed a smile. “Sounds like your kind of fight.”
Hawker looked around him, and then out at the approach of dusk. He would have chosen to leave, out of his own survival instinct as much as anything else, but he understood better than the others just exactly what McCarter and Danielle felt, exactly why they would make this choice. To McCarter it meant living for something that mattered, dying for it if necessary, an act that gave life meaning in the process. For Danielle it was penance, a chance to make amends for past choices and mistakes. For Hawker, it might be both.
He looked at the two of them, almost thanked them. “We’re going to need fire,” he said, thinking about the Chollokwan village. “As much as we can build.”
Across from them, Pik Verhoven shook his head in disgust. He didn’t give a damn about the Chollokwan or the ecosystem or anything else on McCarter’s long, drawn-out list, but he believed in the soldier’s code: you never let your brothers down. Hawker had come back for them and even though Verhoven might have made it to the river by himself, he would not leave now. He glared at Hawker. “So that’s it, then. Another damn crusade?”
The two stared at each other for a long moment and then Verhoven turned to the others. “Well, you heard the man,” he said. “Let’s get him some damned fire.”
Over the next hour they built a small network of fires using splashes of fuel on bundles of cloth, dry brush and wood. Soon, thirty small blazes were burning around the perimeter, with others surrounding their cluster of foxholes. Bathed in the flickering glow, they waited as the shadows deepened and night fell.
CHAPTER 47
That night, Danielle Laidlaw saw herself in a dream. She lay asleep and unmoving, even as three great birds dove toward her from the midnight sky. Two owls and a falcon locked in combat, slashing and tearing at one another, falling headlong toward the jungle floor.
At the last moment they separated, peeling off in different directions and racing across the grass, before soaring back up into the gloom above the temple to renew the battle once again.
As they fell a second time, the trees began to shake and the Zipacna charged from the forest. In the dream, she could not run, or move, or even shout a warning to the others as they slumbered.
She woke with a start, her heart pounding, her shirt soaked with sweat. But as she looked around, the night was quiet and calm. A soft, humid breeze gently caressed her face.
Despite the dream and its unresolved battle, Danielle awoke feeling surprisingly refreshed. Perhaps a few hours of rest had done more good than she would have believed, or perhaps it was the feeling that she’d finally made the right decision in all the waves of madness.
Exhaling slowly, she eased back against the sloping wall of her foxhole and noticed Hawker on watch a few feet away. She couldn’t be sure but in the flickering firelight he seemed to be smiling.
“What are you up to?” she asked.
“Just watching you sleep,” he said.
“Don’t you have better things to do?”
“Yeah,” he said. “But none as entertaining.”
She looked at him suspiciously.
“You talk in your sleep,” he said.
She had always been a restless sleeper. “I was dreaming,” she explained. “McCarter has been telling me about these birds. Messengers of the gods: a falcon and a one-legged owl. In my dream they were fighting, ripping each other apart in some kind of death struggle.”
“A one-legged owl?”
“The messenger of Xibalba. We found the symbol on one of the stones I bought.”
“And the falcon?”
“The messenger of Hurricane,” she said. “The Sky God: the one who sends the rain. They were fighting over this place.”
She looked around. The clearing was quiet, the small fires burned in the distance.
“Who won?” he asked.
She rubbed the back of her neck. “I don’t know. But then the Zipacna charged and I … I …” Her voice trailed off. She wondered if the dream meant she’d killed them, her inability to speak and warn them standing in for bringing them here under false pretenses to begin with. She looked around the clearing for movement—looking for anything out of place. The absolute peace and quiet stunned her.
“It was just a dream,” she said finally, as if certain of it for the first time.
Hawker smiled at her, staring into her eyes long enough to make her nervous. “Maybe,” he said, and then he looked away.
Danielle studied his face. She recognized the smile now. It was the same cheater’s grin she’d seen on his face in Manaus.
“What are you hiding?”
He nodded toward the sky and she turned her eyes in that direction. The full moon shone like a beacon, luminous enough to cast shadows across the ground, something she never saw in the glare of the city lights. She studied it like she’d done as a child, when her father had brought home a telescope and her interest in science first blossomed. She tried to remember the names of the craters and the vast gray seas, searching for the Sea of Tranquility, where humans had first set foot on another heavenly body.
It was a calming sight, but not all that interesting, at least until her eyes drew back, relaxing their focus. Suddenly, she saw what Hawker wanted her to see: a ghostly white halo surrounding the moon.
“In Marejo, they call it the Lua de Agua,” Hawker said. “The water moon. Moisture in the air, diffusing the moonlight. It means the rains are coming.”
A pang of hope shot through her, accompanied by the fear that it might be false hope.
“The winds have shifted too,” Hawker said. “Coming from the north now, down from the Caribbean. You can feel the humidity on your skin.”
She did feel it; the air was soft, the moisture heavy in the type of omnipresent way one normally felt in the tropics, a feeling that had been strangely lacking since they’d left Manaus.
“The rains are coming,” he said again. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, but they’re coming.”
Danielle turned her attention back to the heavens, staring at the ghostly moon. For the first time since the chaos had begun, she felt they might somehow actually survive.
CHAPTER 48
The first half of the night passed quietly, perhaps due to the fires or the number of animals wounded the night before. But during the latter stages, the Zipacna began to prowl around the clearing once again. They set off the perimeter alarms at least ten times, drawing small bursts of fire in each instance, but only twice did any of them attempt to enter the clearing, and neither foray got very far.
Hawker killed both creatures with lethal shots from the Barrett rifle. The first Zipacna simply fell, unmoving. The second was blown apart, shattered, like a clay target on the firing range. A short while later, an explosion erupted in the tree line, as one of the animals attempted to reclaim the body the team had rigged with explosives.
After that the animals became more cautious, lingering farther back in the tree line, away from the flickering firelight and piercing red beam of the laser. By morning they were gone, and the NRI team went back to work.
As day broke, the team began moving their weapons and ammunition to the temple’s summit, a spot they would defend to the last.
The plan was simple: keep the Zipacna away until the rains came. From the temple’s roof they would occupy the high ground with a perfect field of view; the Zipacna would literally have to storm the castle to get back inside.
Initially, they guessed that a charge might come from all directions, but as McCarter examined the sides of the temple, he grew suddenly thankful for the level of Mayan workmanship. The three faces without the stairs were steep, a seventy-degree angle or more, the fit of the stones tight and unyielding, the surfaces smooth and slick. Even with the creatures’ incredible ability to climb, he doubted they would be able to scale those walls. That left a frontal assault and the stairs as their main concern.
To defend against this they excavated a shallow trench ten feet out from the bottom of the stairway. It stretched across the front and a quarter of the way around either side. They lined it with plastic sheets and trash bags, items that had been brought in to protect artifacts and other treasures. They filled it with kerosene, placing one of the two surviving barrels next to it. The remaining explosives were set at various points along it, and as a further defense, they relocated the metal spikes and other obstacles to its inner side.
They worked the day with their heads down as the color bled slowly from the sky. By midafternoon the horizon was sickly white and the air was thick with haze. The hills that had once been visible from the top of the temple were no longer in view, and the sun was a perfect orange disk, robbed of its glare and floating in a murky, white sea.
By now every member of the camp knew what Hawker had discerned the night before: the rains were coming and the rain would save them—if they could hold on long enough. But they also suspected that the impending storms would bring the Zipacna home, calling them like a siren to the one place they could find shelter for ten thousand square miles. And they raced to finish their preparations in time.
Out in the rainforest, Hawker and Danielle worked on the sensors, trying to recalibrate them so they would search the trees as well as the ground. Hawker stood by with the healthiest of the surviving dogs, while Danielle fiddled with the controls on the motion detectors. They moved from sensor to sensor, calling back to Brazos to shut the grid down momentarily and then having him bring it up again once the sensor had been reset.
The first few changes went off without a hitch, but on the fourth try a static burst snapped the air between Danielle’s finger and the sensor.
Brazos radioed them instantly. “What did you do? The whole screen’s gone crazy.”
Danielle backed off and Hawker asked Brazos, “How’s it look now?”
There was a delay, presumably while Brazos cycled the screen. “It’s okay,” he said, in obvious relief.
“The humidity is making the static worse,” Hawker said. “You might want to hurry.”
She cut her eyes at him and he spoke into the radio once again. “Shut it down.”
Back in the clearing, Brazos threw a switch and the screen faded to black. For the next minute they would live without eyes, and Brazos had found he could not stare at the blank screen for such a length of time.
He surveyed the camp. McCarter stood on the temple’s roof by the Barrett rifle, while Eric, the lone survivor from Kaufman’s team, carried two heavy boxes of shells to the roof. Out near the original center of camp Susan rooted around in the remaining supply lockers for anything else of value, while nearby Verhoven worked Devers mercilessly, forcing him to pile heavy stones upon an improvised sled, which he would then have to drag toward the trench and unload. A dozen trips had left the linguist drenched in sweat and his shoulder wound bleeding through its gauze.
Next to them the other surviving canine sat calmly, licking at its bandaged wound and panting softly.
Brazos picked up his radio. “Can I switch on now?”
In the forest, Hawker looked at Danielle. “I don’t mean to rush you, but …”
Danielle ignored him as she struggled with the tiny dials. Finally she stepped back from the sensor. “That should do it.”
Hawker pressed his talk switch. “Go.”
As they waited for Brazos’ response, Danielle bit her lip softly.
“How’s it look?” Hawker asked.
The reply came with some uncertainty. “More static. I think in sector two this time.”
Sector two was halfway around the circle. “Doesn’t make sense, we haven’t gotten there yet. He’s probably looking at the wrong thing.”
Hawker brought the radio up to call Brazos again, but before he could the German shepherd beside them stiffened. A second later distant barking reached them from the canine in the clearing and the dog beside Hawker bolted for its companion.
The air-horn alarm sounded across the clearing as one of the creatures burst from the forest and raced across the open ground, heading for the temple.
Caught in the space between, Susan panicked, dropping what she was doing and dashing toward McCarter, unwittingly putting herself right in the animal’s path.
Verhoven shouted to her, but she was gone. He grabbed his shotgun, stepped into the line and pulled the trigger.
The solid lead slug hit the beast and cracked its shell, but it caromed off the angled shape and failed to bring the creature down. Without his hand taped to the barrel, Verhoven could not reload.
The animal leapt.
Verhoven swung the shotgun like a club, but the Zipacna crashed through the blow, knocking him to the dirt and savaging him.
Brazos was the closest. He fired and the Zipacna spun back for an instant.
In the brief moment that the animal was off him, a bloodied Verhoven pushed himself backward with his legs and pulled Hawker’s pistol from his belt.
The animal turned and lunged for him, the open jaws coming down just as Verhoven swung the pistol upward, into the mouth. He pulled the trigger.
The top of the animal’s head blew outward and the head swung laterally, tearing the gun and huge chunks of flesh from Verhoven’s arm. It staggered back half a step and then fell to the side.
Hawker reached him a few seconds later, shocked at the damage the thing had done. Verhoven had managed to protect his face and neck, but blood was spreading rapidly from a wound in his side and squirting in pulses from a torn artery in his forearm.
Hawker ripped a section off Verhoven’s shirt for a tourniquet and shouted for Danielle.
Verhoven looked at his arm, his eyes drooping. “Where’s the girl?”
“She made it to the temple,” Hawker said, threading the fabric around Verhoven’s arm.
Verhoven nodded weakly. “Stop,” he said.
Hawker cinched the tourniquet, and started another.
“It’s too late for that,” Verhoven said, his voice dropping to a raspy whisper. “Better to go like this … than in a home somewhere.”
Hawker paused and Verhoven looked at him, coughing up blood.
“All sins forgiven?” Verhoven asked Hawker stared at his old friend, his old enemy. The man was a ghost already. Hawker shook his head. “None to forgive.”
Almost imperceptibly Verhoven nodded. “Damn right,” he managed. Then, as Danielle came over, he reached out and grabbed Hawker’s shirt. “You finish this,” he said. “Finish this, and get these people home.”
Verhoven shook him once, as if to emphasize the order. But his grip had already begun to fail. He held on for a moment, gazing at Hawker, and then his hand fell, dropping to the dry earth. With his eyes still open, Pik Verhoven died.
Danielle crouched beside Hawker, a hand on his shoulder. Hawker stared at Verhoven, finding it impossible to look away.
Brazos’ voice reached them, breaking the silence. “My God,” he said.
Both Hawker and Danielle looked toward him. Brazos was staring at the defense console with a grim expression on his face.
Hawker put a hand out and closed Verhoven’s eyes. The black pistol Hawker had given him lay on the ground. He grabbed it, stood and walked with Danielle to the console.
Targets were showing up, at least a dozen already, gathering on the western edge once again. Their numbers were growing rapidly, as if they were massing for a charge.
Hawker looked up. The haze above them had thickened into a solid layer of darkening gray and the sun had all but vanished.
On the brink of the storm, all of them, animal and human, had run out of time.
