Blood Sport

by Lisa Smedman

  “Blessed Virgin!” Gus cried out in a choked voice. “Who is it? A military officer? Not my—”

  “It’s a sacerdote,” Águila answered. “I recognize him by his ear plugs and feathered headdress. His face is painted white—the color of Quetzalcóatl.”

  “What the frag?” I said out loud. The rebels looked at me. “That sounds like the bacab of Quetzalcóatl. But I thought he was already ...” I bit back what I was about to say and tried not to look at Soñador. I’d been wrong—he was the genuine article. A rebel leader, a dragon—but no more than that. But that was a small mercy, now.

  Águila’s next words stunned us all.

  “Get ready,” he said. “They’ve found the way in. They’re descending from both the church and the convent. We’re surrounded.”

  One of the rebels had the presence of mind to start clawing thermographic vision goggles out of a nearby case, while another dimmed the electric lantern to a dull glow that barely illuminated the cavernous sub-basement. I pulled a pair of the goggles over my eyes and hunkered down with the rebels behind the cases. The crates made a rather dubious cover—a shelter of high explosives. I knew enough about explosives to realize that only a “lucky” hit—a bullet that struck the shaped charge in the tail of a rocket—could cause its warhead to explode. But that didn’t make me feel any safer. Especially when those attacking us might start tossing grenades around. If one of those landed among the rockets, it would be game over.

  I looked around through my thermal-imaging goggles. The rebels nearest me were human-shaped blobs of orange, red, and blue, their own goggles a ghostly gray mask across their eyes. Soñador was the only one not wearing goggles—his natural thermal-sensing capabilities precluded this. I spotted Rafael—his arm was draped protectively around Teresa. Fede squatted beside them, his cybernetic legs a cool blue that contrasted sharply with his warmer torso.

  My cyberear picked up the cautious footsteps of people approaching from either end of the sub-basement—the sounds of professional guards, creeping along at a careful crouch. Then gunfire erupted around me. Streaks of orange heat emerged from the rebels’ pistols as they popped up from behind the crates to shoot at the approaching guards. I heard a grunt of pain from somewhere in the direction of the guards—and then a roar of gunfire drowned it out as the Azzies shot back at us. Bullets sang a deadly song as they ricocheted off the stone walls around us or thudded heavily into the crates, striking the rockets with dull metal clinks. One of the Cristeros cried out and collapsed in a limp heap a meter away from me, blood leaking from his chest. I kept my head down and prayed—to which god I wasn’t sure—that none of the rockets would explode. If they did, I’d never know it—we’d all be incinerated or torn to pieces in a hailstorm of shrapnel before we realized we were dead.

  I heard a whoosh! as one of the rebels fired a rocket. But then came the dull clunk of the rocket striking stone—without exploding. The rebel might as well have saved the effort. A rocket’s smart circuits are designed to prevent it from exploding unless it has traveled a minimum distance from the launcher—typically twenty meters. The tlachtli that formed the sub-basement of the church and convent was simply too short—or too cluttered with rubble—to allow the rocket to travel that far. Our most powerful weapon was useless.

  After a hellish minute, the gunfire stopped. A male voice called out to us. I guessed that it was the priest.

  “Surrender, and we will allow you to leave the church,” he said.

  I didn’t believe it for one minute. Neither did the rebels. They didn’t even dignify the offer with an answer—although one of them began softly praying in a tear-choked voice.

  My cyberear allowed me to pick up the soft command of the priest. “Kill them,” he told his guards. And in that moment, I knew we were well and truly fragged. I steeled myself to die . . .

  And then realized that there might be a way to buy us time. “Wait!” I called out. “There are crates of high-explosive rockets surrounding the itzompan. I am touching the barrel of my gun to the shaped charge in the back of one of them right now. Before I let you kill me, I will shoot it and cause an explosion that will tear this place apart. The itzompan will be lost to you forever.”

  Through my thermo-vision goggles, I saw a number of the rebels turn toward me, surprise evident in their open mouths. They obviously realized that I had come up with a powerful bluff—and it was equally obvious that they didn’t have a clue to what I was talking about. But one of them had the presence of mind to actually touch the barrel of his pistol to the end of one of the rockets, just in case the bacab used his astral-sensing capabilities to spy on us.

  The soft curse that my cyberear picked up let me know that the priest understood my threat very well.

  “Hold your fire!” he ordered his guards.

  I heaved a sigh of relief. We’d brought ourselves a few minutes’ grace. But I knew that it wouldn’t last long. If this Guillermo Acosta was anything like his fellow bacabs, he would be a powerful magician, fully capable of hurling spells that would disable us long before we could carry out our threat to explode the rockets.

  Our deaths had merely been delayed.

  26

  In the tense silence that followed, I heard Gus praying. It sounded as if he were confessing—but to whom, I did not know. Perhaps directly to his god.

  “I am sorry for these and all the sins of my past life, especially for...”

  I tuned out the rest as he began a long list of sins, real and perceived. Some—such as having betrayed the Cristeros to whom Teresa was to have made her courier delivery—made the rebels next to him turn and look upon him with shock and horror. Others seemed trivial in the extreme—unless you were a devout Catholic. Like deliberately failing to observe Sunday Mass once, a month ago, when he was ill with a headache.

  Then he began quoting the Bible.

  “Then Jesus said unto them, whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me, and I in him . . .”

  I shivered. Gus was starting to sound like the cultists. I turned to look at him and noticed something odd through my thermographic goggles. Gus was kneeling on the floor, and had cast off his own goggles. His arms were outstretched, his hands together in prayer. Most of his body appeared normal—with glowing yellow hot spots at the groin and head, typically the warmest portions of the human body. But bright patches of white had appeared between the palms of his hands, as well as over his chest at a spot a little left of center—over the heart.

  Now Gus switched to the Lord’s Prayer. The rebels—all except Soñador, I noticed, followed his lead, joining their voices to his. I heard Teresa’s voice—and then Rafael’s.

  And Fede’s. Compelled perhaps by fear of my impending death or by a simple need to join in spirit with those who were about to be butchered with me, I too began to recite the prayer.

  As it ended, Gus continued praying on his own—a prayer that apparently no one else recognized, for none of the others joined in. As he spoke, I saw him draw a cold blue object—a knife—from a sheath on his belt. He held it clenched in one trembling hand, then plunged its blade deep into his left palm. Drawing it free, he held it in the hand that now dripped with blood and repeated the process—stabbing his right hand so hard that several centimeters of the blade protruded from the back of it.

  “Father Silvio—no!” Teresa cried. But her voice was drowned out by the startled shouts of her fellow Cristeros. She lunged forward, trying to reach Gus, but Rafael drew her back. She turned, snarled at him with a sound reminiscent of the jungle cat that she really was—and then quieted as Gus began to quote from the Bible once more. Like the rest of us, she stared at him in gape-mouthed wonder.

  “And I saw heaven opened, and beheld a white horse, and he that sat upon it had eyes as a flame of fire, and on his head was a crown of fire, and he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood, and his name is called th
e Word of God . . .”

  The heat spot in Gus’ chest dimmed through yellow to orange to red as the spots of white light on his hands grew brighter. My cyberear caught the sound of blood dripping onto the stone floor—a steady plink, plink that seemed to occur with the regularity of the beating of a heart. And then my breath caught as I saw the thing that was forming in the air above the priest.

  The apparition looked like a horse ridden by a gaunt human with glowing red eyes and hair of flame. The rider wore a robe that blazed white-hot in my thermographic goggles—a robe that seemed to be melting and sliding from his body in long, steaming drips. I felt a splash of hot liquid on my arm, raised it to my nose, and sniffed. Blood. More drops fell upon my hair and shoulders. Then the spectral horse threw back its head and whinnied—a sound that shivered through my soul like ice.

  Now a crown of fire appeared around the head of the mounted man. It seemed to be forming from the blood of Gus, which rose from the priest’s outstretched hands in long, snaking spirals. The crown grew brighter and expanded, extending outward in a wide circle that encompassed the Cristeros. It spread into the sub-basement beyond, toward the Azzie guards .. .

  Gunfire erupted from one end of the sub-basement as the guards lost their nerve and started shooting wildly. I ducked, hiding as much from the spirit that Gus had conjured above our heads as from the bullets that whizzed harmlessly through it. As the creature’s eyes brushed past me, they seemed to be judging me, finding me wanting . . .

  Over the uproar, I heard the priest of Quetzalcóatl chanting. He was casting his own spell—raising his own demons, I saw, when I poked my head above the cases for a quick look. I could see the man clearly—he wasn’t bothering to keep under cover any more. He stood with one hand clenched on the jacket collar of the guard closest to him. The other hand held a macauitl. It was clear that he’d just used the obsidian-tipped sword—a warm river of orange-red gushed from the throat of the guard he held.

  Above the priest, a sinuous, serpentine creature was forming in the air. It writhed and shimmered, slowly becoming more distinct. Its eyes glared with a malevolent light as it opened its jaws wide, revealing fangs that dripped with what I imagined to be venomous blood.

  The ring of fire that had sprung from the crown of the spirit that Gus had conjured up continued expanding. Azzie security guards scurried away from it in panic, abandoning Guillermo Acosta. In seconds it would reach the serpent that writhed above the priest’s head .. .

  I swore softly to myself. Rafael, Fede, Teresa, and I—and the Cristeros—were about to be caught in a magical crossfire. I didn’t want to see what would happen when the two spirits collided.

  “Raf!” I cried above the din of screams and spatters of random gunfire. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  Fede heard me, too, and nodded grimly. I looked around for Soñador and Águila, but the pair seemed to have already bolted. A number of the Cristeros had also taken advantage of the cover that Gus’ spirit provided, and were scurrying away.

  Rafael rose to a crouch, preparing to run . . .

  And was yanked back by Teresa, who clung to his arm. She was already undergoing transformation into her jaguar form—her nails had turned into claws that dug into his arm.

  “We can’t leave Father Silvio!” she cried.

  I glanced over at him. Gus’ body was a uniform blue now, cold and dying. Except for his hands, which retained their vivid white glow.

  “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit...”

  He fell forward, face down. He landed with his arms outstretched and feet together, the image of a man who had crucified himself to save his friends. Slowly his body heat-signature faded from blue to black.

  “He’s gone,” I shouted back. “He sacrificed himself for us ... for you. Do you want his death to be in vain?”

  Angrily, the girl tore the thermographic goggles from her face. I saw cold spots sliding down her cheeks—tears. “No,” she said in a voice so soft that only my cyberear picked it up. “I do not.” And with that she completed her transformation, dropping to all fours and flowing into the shape of a jungle cat.

  Overhead the two spirits met, merged in a fierce tussle of flame and fang—and then split apart, staggering back like two battlefield combatants who had taken the wind out of each other.

  Then they turned, seeking easier prey . . .

  We ran for all we were worth as the blood spirits descended upon us. Their first victim was the Cristero next to me. I would have thought a good Christian would be immune to the spirit that Gus had conjured, but the horse reared up, striking the rebel down with hooves of fire. I nearly lost it then, knowing that the thing had judged me and found me steeped in sin. I crossed myself as I ran and began to pray in a mindless babble—snatches of every prayer I’d ever forgotten since my childhood church-going days.

  Miraculously, the spirit did not reach me.

  I heard the priest Acosta scream then—a wordless howl of rage and agony. Glancing back over my shoulder, I saw him stagger forward into the ring of crates, a cool, boxlike object clasped in his arms. I recognized it as the organ-transfer case. He must have found it after I left it on the floor of the teocalli. He reached into it and pulled out the severed head of the captain of the team that had won the ollamaliztli finals. Then he dropped the head into the hole at the center of the itzompan.

  Too soon, I thought to myself. Venus will not rise for several hours yet.

  I barely remember the rest of our scramble through the dimly lit sub-basement. The ground began to tremble underneath our feet, making it difficult to run. Rafael was ahead of me, racing along after Teresa and trying to keep up with her sleek, swift-footed jaguar form. After what seemed an eternity, we reached the staircase that led up into the convent. Teresa flowed up it like a dark shadow, and Rafael scrambled up behind her. He turned at the top to offer me a hand . . .

  And then the earthquake began in earnest and the rickety wooden steps leading to safety collapsed into a heap of splinters at my feet.

  I cried in my frustration, seeing the trap door that led to safety so far overhead. But then Fede was beside me. Wrapping his arms around my waist he crouched low—and sprang upward, using all the power contained in the hydraulic implants in his cyberlegs. Pain flared in my chest as his arms squeezed against my cracked rib, and stars sparkled before my eyes. As we sailed upward I had a giddy moment, imagining myself a ball that Fede was about to slam through an ollamaliztli ring . . .

  And then Rafael caught my outstretched arms and hauled me up through the trap door. My chest burned like fire once again as he continued to pull, yanking Fede—who still clung to my waist—through the trap door along with me.

  We staggered along a floor that danced under our feet with the shock waves of the earthquake, ducking falling chunks of masonry as we ran. It wouldn’t be long, I knew, before the entire convent crashed down upon us. I had a vision of being crushed under heavy wooden beams and chunks of stone . . .

  And then I was out the door and running through the darkened streets of Izamal. And not a moment too soon. Behind me the convent creaked, groaned—and collapsed in upon itself with a roar and a cloud of dust.

  As the ground suddenly stopped shaking underfoot, I slowed to a jog and turned around for a look. Then I stopped to stare, hugging my arms to my aching chest. Both the convent and the church of Izamal were no more than piles of rubble—grave markers for Gus, the bacab of Quetzalcóatl, and any rebels and Azzie troops who hadn’t been fortunate enough to get out in time.

  Mama G’s killer had at last come to justice.

  I thought that was the end of it, but then I heard a dull whumph of an explosion, deep under the rubble. And then another, louder one. I grabbed Rafael’s arm.

  “The rockets!” I said. “They’re exploding. We’d better get away from here.”

  “We sure as frag better,” Rafael said uneasily. He pointed up the darkened street at a pair of approaching headlights. “There’s an Azzie patro
l on the way.”

  I heard the roaring yeowl of a jaguar. Teresa stood a few meters away, her tail lashing. She jerked her head in a motion that was easy to interpret: follow me.

  Summoning up the last of our strength, we ran behind her, back to the hacienda of her employers. The tile-faced building was still intact, despite the fact that other houses nearby had collapsed. We reached it just in time to see Teresa transform back and use her human fingers to tap a code into the door’s keypad. And then the door opened and she, Rafael, and Fede ran inside.

  Something made me pause in the doorway and look up into the night sky. Overhead, silhouetted against the moon, I saw the sinuous body and outstretched wings of a feathered serpent. Soñador! The dragon too had made a clean escape.

  I touched my fingers to my temple in salute, then turned and followed the others into the darkened house.

  27

  I fastened the seals of my wetsuit and pulled on the rubber-soled boots that would keep my feet warm. After tucking the last few unruly strands of hair under my hood, I paused before putting on my gloves and face mask. Beside me, Fede had suited up also—in a wetsuit that ended at the thighs, since his cyberlegs needed no thermal protection.

  I turned to where Rafael stood on a sandy Yucatán beach that was bleached white by the moonlight.

  “Are you really going to stay?” I asked him. “Are you certain it’s what you want?”

  My friend nodded. He’d come to see Fede and I off—Teresa was waiting for him in Mérida.

  “I’m sure,” he said slowly. “I always wanted to belong to something. To fight the good fight. Back in Seattle, I thought it would be the chillest thing in the world to make it onto a combat biker team. To kick some hoop with the pros. But now I want to stay here in Aztlan and be part of the rebel ‘team.’ This is where I came from, after all. Where I was born. These people are my blood.”