Mulder bent over her, cradling the young woman’s head in his lap as a few remaining chunks of shrapnel pattered around him. Miraculously, he himself suffered only a large bruise on one shoulder blade and a nasty cut in his right leg.
The side of the great pyramid seemed to sag as rubble and stone blocks sloughed toward the base.
“Cassandra,” Mulder said, pushing his face close to hers. “Cassandra, can you hear me?” Her skin had a grayish color, and sweat broke out on her forehead.
The young woman groaned and sat up, blinking and stunned. She shook her head and then winced. “Bullseye,” she croaked, pressing a hand against her temple. “Ouch.”
Mulder gingerly felt around on her scalp, probing the seriousness of the gash. Though she bled profusely, it seemed to be a shallow wound. His main concern was that she had suffered a concussion or fractured skull.
“We can’t stay here, Cassandra,” he said. “We’ve got to find some kind of shelter, or we’ll have a lot more to worry about in a few minutes.”
He looked around, trying to focus in the uncertain strobelight of flares against the enveloping darkness. “If we can find my partner Scully, she’ll be able to give you emergency medical attention.”
He scanned the plaza, watched the scurrying figures, the smattering of gunfire like deadly fireflies blossoming into the night. Ahead, in the open plaza, he saw a tall figure hustling a woman’s petite form—obviously Scully—toward the tent. The two seemed to be arguing, and then the man pushed her inside, dropped the flap, and stood up to stand guard beside the tent.
Was the man protecting her…or holding her prisoner? Mulder couldn’t tell if he was one of the American commandos or one of Carlos Barreio’s guerrilla freedom fighters.
“Come with me, Cassandra,” Mulder said, draping her arm over his shoulder and helping her to her feet. She groaned, and her eyes blinked, unfocused, her pupils dilated in their muddy-green irises. The blood continued to flow down her face.
“Hey, I can walk,” she said, but her voice came out with a quaver, like a child trying to impress her father with her bravado. Mulder loosened his hold, but Cassandra began to slide toward the ground like over-cooked pasta.
“Maybe I’ll just help you out after all,” he said, placing his arm around her for support. The two of them stagger-walked toward the plaza. Mulder kept his eyes toward the indistinct figure standing next to Scully’s tent.
Continued gunfire prevented even an imagined moment of peace. A chain of popping sounds cut through the scattered background noise. The commandos scattered again, but the guardian figure beside Scully’s tent did not move fast enough. Mulder watched as the rain of automatic-weapon fire nearly ripped him in half. Several bullets tugged at the peak of the tent like thick darning needles, and Mulder prayed Scully had kept herself low.
“We have to get over there,” he said, with greater urgency. Cassandra stumbled as he walked with her, hunched over to present a smaller target. He expected to be shot at any moment.
He and Cassandra reached the more distant of the two feathered serpent stelae at the edge of the plaza. Both carved pillars had toppled over, smashing the already disturbed flagstones. Some of the rubble had fallen across the tarpaulin-covered corpses he and Scully had fished out of the cenote—but the victims didn’t seem to mind.
Mercifully, Cassandra seemed too dazed to recognize her team members, or even to know what the shrouded forms might be. He helped her to crouch beside the fallen limestone monolith, taking shelter.
Then, to Mulder’s surprise, the din stopped. The combat field grew still and oppressive…as if a blanket of silence had descended upon Xitaclan. Mulder stopped moving, letting Cassandra lean back against the fallen pillar. He craned his neck to look around. As he waited, the silence seemed to grow louder. Something strange began to happen.
He felt his skin crawl, and the hairs on the back of his neck tingled with static electricity. Mulder huddled next to Cassandra behind the stela. Some force in the air compelled his gaze upward.
He watched the light come down from the sky.
The glow came from inside and out of a huge vessel poised in the night. He saw it for only an instant—but his imagination supplied the remaining details. It was an immense construction, a dazzling chiaroscuro of angles and curves forming a geometrical shape that no architect had ever conceived. A blaze of light glowed around it like a halo, keeping all details indistinct.
A ship.
He knew it had to be a ship. When Cassandra Rubicon had accidentally fallen into the lifeboat chamber, she must have triggered a pulsing message, a distress signal transmitted across the starlanes…a beacon shining along an infinite distance.
Until finally the rescue craft had arrived.
Mulder recalled the blurred images of Kukulkan on the walls of the buried control chamber: the towering extraterrestrial visitor staring hopefully up at the stars. But the rescue craft had come more than a thousand years too late for him.
“Cassandra, look at that!” he said, glancing down and shaking her shoulders. “Look at it!”
She groaned and blinked her eyes. “It’s too bright,” she said.
Mulder looked up again. The moment the luminous craft reached the partially demolished pyramid, long spikes of searing light burned from the ship’s belly…glowing, pulling an invisible thread. Mulder gasped and shielded his eyes from the dazzling glare.
Beneath him, the ground trembled, strained, ripping like a thin sheet of iron tugged by a powerful magnet. Temple blocks flew off the top of the ziggurat. The rubble blasted away on all sides. Debris pounded down around them like meteors.
He tried to look again, but the blazing light blinded him, and he had to cover his eyes. Mulder heard the strange craft continue its excavations, oblivious to the covert U.S. squad, to the Central American guerrillas, to the FBI agents. The powerful beam knocked the entire broad-based pyramid down, razing it one stairstep layer at a time, like a child toppling a house made of building blocks.
Mulder understood everything now, knew his speculations must have been correct. Kukulkan had never been rescued because his lifeboat chamber had failed, entombing him—but Cassandra’s accident had once again summoned help from the stars.
And now the rescue ship had come to excavate the derelict.
The ground bucked and heaved as the dazzling craft devastated the remainder of the pyramid, leaving only ruins. Shouts and panic rang out from the jungle and from the surviving U.S. commando fighters.
Cassandra groaned again. “Please don’t break it,” she said.
“Not much I can do to stop it,” Mulder answered, trying to make out details through the cracks between his fingers. The light grew brighter, hotter, in the belly of the hovering ship. More glaring beams lanced out. Mulder watched, drinking in the details, still awestruck.
Finally, the inner pyramid lay bare—the original structure that enshrined the derelict ship. Sudden darkness fell again, disorienting Mulder as the rescue craft floated silently over. He supposed it was probing, scanning…and then the brilliant beams ripped out again, titanic forces stripping away layers of the ground to excavate the skeletal remains of Kukulkan’s ancient ship.
The earth cracked and shook—until finally, with a great rending tear, the piercing light from the hovering ship ripped free the remains of the crashed craft. Mulder was hurled to the ground as metallic girders and curved hull plates protruded through the base of what had been the great Xitaclan pyramid. Risking blindness from staring at a light as bright as the sun, Mulder tried to watch as the rescue ship heaved Kukulkan’s derelict entirely out of the ground, like a Maya blood priest ripping out the heart of a sacrificial victim.
Dirt and stone showered all around them. Mulder ducked, confused by the garish shadows that had become razor sharp in the backwash.
Defying gravity, the crushed remains of the derelict rose into the air. The glowing rescue ship gained altitude with astonishing speed, tugging the skeletal girders al
ong with it. Debris pattered around them, a blizzard of rubble that sprayed the entire site.
Mulder gazed into the sky, his mouth dry, watching all hope for finding artifacts and incontrovertible evidence rising into the sky…forever out of his reach. The rescue craft had come like a soldier crossing enemy lines to bring back the dead. Mulder had no idea where the craft might go, what descendants of Kukulkan might mourn his mummified remains.
Eyes stinging with tears, he stared as the brightness compressed itself and shrank into a blinding star that streaked off into the night, leaving him only with colorful afterimages on his eyes.
With a shock, Mulder realized that the Mexican police chief Carlos Barreio remained trapped in one of the lifeboat chambers. Perhaps Barreio would survive the passage. Or perhaps he had already been killed during the unearthing of the derelict. Either way, the extraterrestrial craft took the revolutionary leader along with it.
Mulder knew this was one abduction he would not mourn, one alien kidnapping he would never bother to investigate. He looked at the gaping, smoking crater where the pyramid had been. “Good riddance,” he said.
35
The ruins of Xitaclan
Wednesday, 4:19 A.M.
Feeling helpless and trapped, Scully huddled in the imaginary shelter of the tent while she listened to the tumult outside, destructive sounds like the end of the world…or at least a Maya version of the last days of Pompeii.
She heard explosions and crashing stones, but they did not seem to be coming from continued mortar fire. The commandos had dashed for cover, and the launcher had fallen silent. Several more bullet impacts had ripped holes like tiny skylights in the top of her tent. Scully heard nothing more from Major Jakes or his surviving men.
She tried to decide how long to wait before she made a break for it. She hated being sequestered in here, like some princess locked away in a castle tower. Jakes had thrown her inside this smothering enclosure just because she was a woman, or a civilian—but she had no better chance of survival cowering in a tent than if she actually dashed out across the plaza, to the ruins, to the jungle, in search of Mulder.
“Enough waiting,” she said. “I’m getting out of here.”
Scully yanked open the tent flap and crawled out, keeping low, expecting one of the soldiers to shove her back inside at any moment. A harried Major Jakes might even bash her in the head with the butt of his rifle, she thought, just to keep her under submission “for her own protection.”
But no one noticed her. She crouched beside the tent, ready to dive for cover. But no shots rang out to strike the flagstones at her feet.
She stood up on shaking legs to look around, blinking in the uncertain light of the burning jungle. Xitaclan seemed to be quivering in shock.
Scully found Major Jakes where he had fallen. Heavy-caliber bullets had ripped his chest apart. He lay sprawled in his own blood, staining the flagstones like another sacrifice to the ancient Maya gods. Even in death, his face remained expressionless, as if it were all part of his beloved mission.
A frantic soldier ran toward her, dodging fallen stone blocks and uprooted trees, his uniform torn and stained. His rifle dangled from his shoulder, out of ammunition. The clips on his utility belt hung empty, as if he had already used every one of the grenades and throwing knives he had carried.
“We’re under attack from the sky,” the soldier said. “I’ve never seen an assault like this—but we can’t resist! They’ve already destroyed the pyramid.” His face dripped with perspiration, his eyes opened wide and white.
Then he looked down to see the bloody corpse of Major Jakes. “Oh, damn,” the soldier moaned, glancing quickly at Scully in embarrassment. “Excuse the language, ma’am.”
“Don’t call me ma’am,” she muttered, recalling what she had said to Major Jakes, but she didn’t expect the young soldier to understand.
“Okay, it’s fallback time!” the soldier shouted to his unseen companions. He looked at her, his eyes haunted. “Ma’am, you’d best make your own way out of the jungle as soon as possible before that ship comes back. You can request asylum from any authorities you may encounter. Our team, on the other hand, does not have that option. If we’re captured, we’re dead. Only three of us left now.”
Without another word, the soldier dashed back across the plaza, holding his empty rifle in front of him, sprinting for the cover of the trees. Scully turned around to stare at where the tall Xitaclan pyramid had once stood—but now she saw only a gaping crater.
“My God,” she said, awed, feeling an uncontrollable urge to cross herself. The rubble lay piled up, massive blocks thrown hundreds of meters as if tossed by some titanic force. She glanced down at the major’s motionless form. “It looks like you accomplished your mission, Major Jakes.”
Deep in her heart, though, she suspected that no amount of mortar fire or grenade blasts could have leveled the centuries-old structure so utterly. She thought of what the soldier had said—an attack from the sky. Some other military force, an air force? A bombing raid?
Another tactical nuclear weapon, an atomic artillery shell?
“Scully!” The shout sounded like music in her ears, and she whirled around upon hearing Mulder’s voice. “Scully, over here!”
She saw her partner, bedraggled and exhausted, supporting another woman who staggered next to him. The two of them worked their way across the plaza.
“Mulder, you’re safe!” She ran toward him.
“Let’s not come to any premature conclusions,” he said. His face was flushed, his eyes glazed with shock—or amazement. “Scully, did you see it? Did you see it?” He gestured frantically over to the crater where the pyramid had once stood.
Scully shook her head. “I was stuck inside the tent, so I didn’t see much of anything,” she said. “Major Jakes is dead. So are most of his men. We’ve been told to move out as soon as we can. We’re all by ourselves, Mulder.”
Finally, as if getting a second wind, more sporadic gunfire popped through the trees, and Scully felt very vulnerable. Major Jakes’s three surviving commandos had already fled, piling onto one of the all-terrain vehicles. They roared off into the jungle without waiting for stragglers.
“She’s hurt, Scully,” Mulder said, indicating the reddish-haired woman he supported. “She was hit on the head by a piece of shrapnel from one of those mortar explosions…but at least she’s alive.”
Scully looked at the woman’s head wound, saw that the blood was already clotting, matting her hair in place over it. “Mulder, is this Cassandra? Where did you find her?”
“It’s a long story, Scully—and I’ll tell you right now you’re not going to believe it. But she’s here, living proof.”
Before Mulder could explain further, the ground began to writhe yet again. The flagstones shimmied from side to side, as if some legendary titan buried beneath the earth’s crust were trying to break his way out using a jackhammer.
“I don’t think it’s kidding this time,” Scully shouted.
A section of the flagstones blasted skyward as a geyser fountained up. The entire plaza shifted sideways as underground plates moved. The stress became so great that a fissure ripped the courtyard in two, tumbling the wall of the long-abandoned ball court off to the side of the pyramid ruins.
“The ground here is unstable enough.” Mulder shook his head as if to knock the dazedness from his brain. “With all the explosions, I think Xitaclan is about to become a thing of the past.”
Gouts of sulfurous ash spewed from the pyramid crater, an upside-down waterfall of lava and smoke. The limestone rocks cracked, igniting like candle wax. The ground split open, collapsing the sides of the drained and hissing cenote.
“Remember that new Parícutin volcano from 1948?” Mulder said. “My guess is that this place is going to erupt and keep erupting until we’ve got another national landmark on our hands.” He helped the dazed Cassandra to her feet again. “If it’s all the same to you, Scully, I’d rather not have m
y name on a little memorial plaque near the Visitor’s Center. Let’s get out of here.”
The gunfire had ceased, the guerrillas having scrambled back into the destroyed jungle, their victory complete now that virtually everything standing at Xitaclan had been destroyed.
Scully pointed to the remaining all-terrain vehicle. “We can take that ATV, get better speed through the jungle…though I have no idea where we’re going.”
“How about away from here?” Mulder said. “Do you know how to drive this thing?”
Scully looked at him. “We’re intelligent people, Mulder. We should be able to figure it out.” But as she said it, she wasn’t terribly convinced herself.
“Don’t be so sure,” he said. “It’s military technology.”
As she and Mulder helped the injured Cassandra Rubicon, they staggered toward the remaining vehicle under the lava firelight and the conflagration of the jungle.
36
Yucatán jungle
Wednesday, 5:01 A.M.
Orange gouts of lava shot up into the sky behind them as Mulder fought to control the all-terrain vehicle.
“You have to hurry, Mulder,” Scully said, her face flushed, her expression urgent.
Scully had settled Cassandra Rubicon into one of the vehicle’s seats and looked at the injured young archaeologist while glancing over her shoulder at the flames, the cracking ground, and the shooting fire and steam.
“I’m used to driving Ford rental cars,” Mulder said. “This is a bit more challenging.”
The ATV’s engine had started up with a cough and a roar. Mulder worked the pedals, the gear shift—and they lurched off with all the ease and comfort of a plane crash. They followed the trampled path hacked through the jungle by the commando team earlier that night. The vehicle’s thick tires swiveled and rolled over the dense underbrush, smashing down ferns and fallen branches.
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