Scully did her best to prop up Cassandra Rubicon’s groggy form. She used a torn strip of cloth to probe her head injury, studying the seriousness of the gash. “What is this substance coating her?” she asked.
The young woman winced and tried to squirm away from Scully’s ministrations. “I’m all right,” Cassandra croaked, and with a sigh slumped back to half-consciousness.
Mulder plowed deeper into the jungle, but their pace remained maddeningly slow as he dodged tree trunks and boulders and crashed through thin streams and shallow trenches.
Flames from the fresh crack in the earth backlit the jungle. Spewing magma boiled up from the open wound where the immense alien rescue craft had excavated Kukulkan’s long-buried derelict. Greasy gray smoke roiled where the grenade launchers had blasted parts of the forest.
With the loud rumbling behind them and the continued hissing of the eruption in progress, Mulder could hear few subtle background noises, but he thought he spotted running figures scrambling through the underbrush. Some of the shadows might have been guerrilla soldiers fleeing, others might have been the surviving members of Major Jakes’s commandos trying to make their way back to a safe rendezvous point.
“This woman needs medical attention,” Scully said, “but she’ll be all right for the time being. Nothing serious, just a little banged up…but everything I see here are fresh wounds—not weeks old.” She looked over at Mulder, her blue eyes filled with curiosity, her eyebrows raised. “So where has she been all this time?”
“She was trapped down in the pyramid, Scully.”
Scully frowned skeptically. “She doesn’t look like a woman who’s been in hiding for days and days. I see no signs of malnourishment or physical stress.”
He looked at her with a deep intensity, feeling the passion of his convictions bring a flush to his cheeks. “I’ll tell you everything once we get out of this alive.”
Scully cradled Cassandra’s lolling head so that it did not bang against the side of the ATV. Far behind them another huge explosion ripped through the night, spraying more ash and lava into the sky, spitting fire in all directions. Mulder flinched, then tried to coax greater speed out of the groaning all-terrain vehicle.
The front left side of the ATV smashed into the bent bole of a tree, and Mulder overcompensated by swerving to the right, then zigzagging back to return them to their course. In the darkness and the chaos he had already lost the beaten track. Maybe, he thought, he could stop at a gas station for directions.
He squinted ahead and swerved again, struggling to find a reasonable course through the overgrown jungle. “I hope we’re not lost out here in the wilderness for the rest of our lives. I’ve got season tickets to the Redskins games.”
He looked down at the high-tech apparatus and control panels that equipped the vehicle. “Check in the glove compartment, Scully. See if you can find a Triple-A map.”
Scully reached over and scanned some of the screens. “Major Jakes showed me a dossier file—satellite images of an enormous crater left behind when a local drug lord was supposedly attacked by a tactical nuclear device. You’d probably consider it the result of some sort of alien technology gone awry…but let’s not get into that. The major had precise maps, topographical contours, detailed studies of the jungle.” She shuffled around before letting out a defeated sigh. “But all of that was in the other ATV, of course.”
On an impulse she switched on a flat grid in the dashboard unit, which displayed a digital compass and a glowing LCD map of the Yucatán. “Well, here we go,” she said. “I couldn’t find the cigarette lighter or the radio, but this should do the trick.”
Mulder heaved a sigh of relief.
Suddenly a slim and wiry figure charged out of the underbrush, striding in front of the ATV’s path. He looked sweaty and exhausted, his khaki vest torn, his ocelot-skin hat lost somewhere in the jungle. But his dark eyes narrowed with a fanatical gleam as he held a wicked-looking automatic assault rifle, no doubt taken from one of Major Jakes’s fleeing men.
“I will shoot you now, or I will shoot you later,” Fernando Victorio Aguilar said, thrusting the rifle toward them. “But either way you will stop. Now.”
37
Yucatán jungle, near Xitaclan
Wednesday, 5:26 A.M.
Wrenching the controls, Mulder pulled the all-terrain vehicle to a halt. Aguilar’s leveled rifle provided quite an incentive.
With the denseness of the foliage, the tight-packed trees, and tangling ferns and creepers, he didn’t have enough momentum or enough confidence in his driving ability with the clunky military vehicle to roar forward and trample the long-haired guide. If he missed the man on his first attempt, Aguilar could easily dodge them and shoot at point-blank range. He wouldn’t risk Scully or Cassandra that way.
From her seat, Cassandra groaned and brought herself close enough to consciousness that she blinked at Aguilar. “Him,” she said. “Bastard! Abandoned us…” Then she slumped back, as if that effort had cost her all the energy reserves she had managed to rebuild.
Aguilar looked at her in shock, then jabbed his rifle at them. “Where did you find the archaeologist’s daughter, eh? Barreio’s men searched for days, but they kept getting lost in the pyramid.”
“She found a very good hiding place,” Mulder said. “In fact, Señor Barreio found the same spot—but I don’t expect we’ll ever see him again.”
“Too bad. He was a political fool, anyway.” Aguilar held up the rifle, pointing it directly between Mulder’s eyes. He could feel the black hole of the barrel boring through his forehead, as if the long-haired guide were performing some sort of virtual trepanning operation.
“What do you want, Aguilar?” Scully said.
The man swung the rifle to point it at her. Mulder saw that his ponytail had come undone and his dark hair hung in greasy, ropy strands to his shoulders. Aguilar smiled at Scully. “For the moment I’d like hostages—and this vehicle, Señorita.” He rubbed his cheeks with one hand as if the faint stubble bothered him. All of his supposed plans had crumbled around him, but Aguilar still seemed amused by the entire situation.
“It’s too late to say that nobody will get hurt if you do exactly as I say…but, believe me, Liberación Quintana Roo meant to do this in a bloodless fashion. All I wanted was the artifacts, all they wanted were the political hostages. We could have gotten away without any casualties whatsoever, but alas, circumstances did not permit that. Thanks to your American soldiers, and your own stubbornness, eh?”
Mulder heard a crackle of branches overhead and glanced up at the trees. Aguilar saw the sudden movement and jerked his rifle back at Mulder. “Don’t move a muscle,” he said.
Mulder didn’t move, though he could still hear a rustling, creeping sound through the twigs high above. Other ferns began to stir behind Aguilar, but the guide kept his attention on the vehicle.
“We were obtaining artifacts from lost Maya sites,” Aguilar said. “Our Maya sites. It was like stealing, but no one got hurt, no one lost anything. Bueno! The jungle had buried these treasures for centuries, and now we were making money from them, eh?
“Barreio squandered his profits on political fantasies of independence and all the headaches that carried with it, while I put the profits to good use, making myself comfortable—for once in my life. I grew up on the streets of Mérida, Agent Mulder,” he said with a snarl. “My mother was a prostitute. From the time I was eight years old I lived alone, rummaging in garbage bins, stealing from tourists, huddling under a box when it rained.
“But thanks to Xitaclan I have made myself a reasonably wealthy man—and no one was hurt by it—until too many people poked their noses where they didn’t belong!” He tossed his head. “The locals knew enough to leave these ruins alone. The American archaeology team should have known as much…and so should you.”
“You’ve already promised to kill us,” Scully said. “Now are you trying to gain our sympathy?”
Aguilar shrugged. The
deadly end of his rifle bobbed up and down. “We all desire to be understood,” he said, with a smile. “It’s human nature, eh?”
Then the branches overhead snapped and broke. To Mulder’s utter amazement, a giant, sinuous shape dropped down like a gleaming tentacle, a coiled mass of muscle.
Aguilar looked up and screamed, swinging the rifle—far too slowly, far too late.
There was a gleam of translucent fangs as long as stilettos, as sharp as needles. A wide, hungry mouth flared. Feathery scales spread out in a crown around bony headplates, looking like beaten scales of precious metal. The monster moved, quick as lightning.
Aguilar fell to the ground under the weight of the creature. The vicious reptile wrapped around him, squeezing its serpentine body like a braid of steel cables.
“My God,” Scully whispered.
Aguilar screamed in pain as well as terror. His rifle fell away into the underbrush. He clawed and pounded at the armored, flexible body of the feathered serpent. Blood sprayed from his mouth, a fountain of red as the feathered serpent squeezed.
The man shrieked as his bones cracked like dry wood. Then the huge serpent monster moved off into the underbrush, dragging its crushed victim along until the foliage-entangled deadfalls shielded the carnage from view.
Aguilar screamed twice more, then the noise was cut off with a high gurgling pop. They could hear nothing more than rustling sounds…breaking bones and tearing meat.
Scully sat next to Mulder, transfixed, her face pasty white, her eyes wide, her lips pale and bloodless. “Mulder…I—”
Cassandra coughed groggily and croaked, “Kukulkan.”
Something fast and fluid rushed through the tangled underbrush on the other side of the all-terrain vehicle, moving too swiftly for Mulder to track. It slid through the creepers and ferns, then burst up with a spray of fallen leaves and moss-covered twigs. Looking at them.
Another feathered serpent—even larger than the first—reared up in front of them like a cobra before a snake charmer, baring its long fangs with a bubbling hiss, only feet away.
“Mulder, what is that thing?” Scully asked, her breath slow and thin.
“I’d suggest we don’t move for the moment,” he said through clenched teeth.
The sinuous creature weaved back and forth in front of them, huge and intimidating, larger than any crocodile ever born. Its feathery scales thrust out like spines. Its breath came in a sharp, unending hiss, like steam forcing itself out of a boiler.
“What does it want?”
The iridescent, oily serpent moved with a blur like an optical illusion, as if its entire body were made out of quicksilver, as if it had been bred for a different gravity, a different set of environmental conditions.
Mulder couldn’t move. He simply stared at the beast, hoping none of his actions would intimidate it.
As the monster fixed its attention on them, it stared with eyes of burning pearls, grunting with an unfathomable intelligence driven by a brain of incomprehensible alienness.
Mulder remembered the carvings, the stelae, the images of Kukulkan deep within the ship. These serpentine creatures had been the ancient extraterrestrial’s pets or companions or helpers…or something else entirely.
Though Kukulkan himself had died many centuries ago, his mummified corpse nothing more than petrified tatters of flesh clinging to naked bone, descendants of the original feathered serpents had remained behind. Stranded. Over the centuries they must have made their home in the Central American jungles, surviving hidden in the densest rain forests.
The creature in front of them stared, bowing closer. The moment froze in time.
“Mulder, what should we do?” Scully asked.
Mulder met the creature’s burning, opalescent gaze. They stared at each other for a moment, a flash of understanding passing across a gulf vastly wider than any simple species barrier.
Mulder realized he was holding his breath.
Scully sat wide-eyed next to him, her knuckles white, her fingers clenched against the seat. Cassandra Rubicon groaned, staring at the creature with glassy eyes.
Finally, the tension inexplicably evaporated, and the feathered serpent backed away, slithering into the underbrush. It vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving only broken and rustling branches behind.
The forest fell silent again.
“I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble with them,” Mulder whispered.
“I hope you’re right, Mulder,” Scully said, then swallowed hard. “But let’s get out of here before one of those things changes its mind.”
38
Jackson Memorial Hospital, Miami
Saturday, 11:17 A.M.
With a clean shave and clean clothes, and after a good night’s sleep, Mulder felt like a visiting relative as he entered Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, where Cassandra Rubicon had been taken to recover from her injuries.
Now that he had returned to civilization, the dense jungle wilderness seemed another world away, with its bugs and scorpions and snakes and miserable rainy conditions…though it had been only two days ago. The ordeal had still not faded from his mind.
With the aid of the ATV’s computerized map, he and Scully had managed to work their way east toward one of the paved roads in the state of Quintana Roo. Then, like a survivalist senior citizen driving a “Don’t bother me or else!” RV, Mulder barreled along the roads, terrifying shepherds and pedestrians, dark-haired Indians wearing colorfully embroidered Maya clothes.
Using a small first-aid kit she found in the all-terrain vehicle, Scully had taken care of the worst of Cassandra’s injuries, giving her painkillers and applying disinfectants. She could do nothing more until they found an actual hospital.
Finally, a Mexican police cruiser had stopped them, the officer demanding to know what they were doing there in a U.S. military vehicle. Scully had politely requested to be taken to the nearest American embassy.
During the grueling drive through the unmarked forest, they had found MRE rations in the storage compartment—“Meals Ready-to-Eat”—as well as bottled water. Cassandra had been unable to talk or eat, and she seemed so dazed by her ordeal that Mulder had doubted she would remember anything to back up his theory about the alien space craft rescue, any more than he expected to find witnesses from the commando operation. Scully and Mulder ate some rations, however, and by the time of their arrest they felt relatively comfortable again and ready to go back home.
Cassandra had been treated in a Mexican emergency medical care center while Mulder made the appropriate phone calls and Scully filled out the extensive paperwork. Upon arriving in Miami, Cassandra had been taken to Jackson Memorial for observation and recovery. The young woman was so weary after her ordeal that she viewed the forced hospital stay as a relief instead of a burden.
Walking down the linoleum-tiled hall, Mulder wondered if the archaeologist’s daughter would recognize him, now that he had cleaned up and changed clothes. She had never seen him in his suit-and-tie FBI uniform.
He punched an elevator button and rode up to see her. The heavy doors closed on him, sealing him alone in the small elevator—and he experienced an unexpected dread as he thought of Carlos Barreio trapped in the lifeboat chamber onboard the derelict ship, dragged into the air with the salvaged wreck…and from there to the stars.
Fortunately, the hospital elevator didn’t prove nearly so threatening.
Cassandra Rubicon lay propped on the bed surrounded by bleached white sheets, her head bandaged like a Civil War veteran’s. She stared at the television mounted high on the wall, wearing a look of combined boredom and amusement as she absorbed a women’s afternoon talk show. The topic of the heated discussion was “Women who claim to be married to aliens from outer space.”
“I should have remembered to set my VCR,” Mulder said. “I wanted to catch this one.”
Cassandra saw him standing at the door to her room, and her face brightened. “There are some things I don’t miss out in t
he jungle,” she said. She picked up the TV remote control and stabbed the POWER button; the picture on the tube winked out with a faint cry of dismay.
“Feeling better?” he asked, coming to stand beside her bed.
“Much,” she said. “And your own appearance is much improved.”
He glanced down at the uninteresting and uneaten meal on a tray at her bedside. “You should eat your Jell-O—after all, you’ve had a pretty rough time.”
She forced a smile for him. The heavy bandages covered much of her mussed cinnamon-brown hair. “Well, archaeology isn’t for wimps, Mr. Mulder.”
“Please, just call me Mulder,” he said. “I can’t help but think that Mister Mulder was my father’s name.”
At Mulder’s mention of his own father, the young woman’s face tightened again.
“I have to ask you this, Cassandra,” he said, growing more serious, “because everything we saw has been destroyed without a trace. Did your team happen to smuggle out any notes, any photographs, any hard evidence from the Xitaclan site?”
She shook her head, then winced as a flicker of pain crossed her face. “No, there’s nothing. My entire team died down there: John and Cait, Christopher and Kelly—all dead, struck down at the beginning of their careers. My own father was murdered because of me, because of Xitaclan.” She swallowed, then looked back at the television herself, as if wishing she could be distracted by the talk show again, anything but the discussion she was now having with Mulder. “No, Mulder. It’s all gone now, including our records. The only thing I have left is my memories—and even those aren’t too clear.”
Mulder stood next to her, momentarily turning his attention to the blank television set, trying to find the right words.
Cassandra seemed withdrawn, as if searching for an inner reservoir of strength. When she spoke, it surprised him. “There are still a thousand unexcavated sites in the Yucatán, Mulder. Maybe when I get back on my feet I’ll put together a new expedition. Who knows what else we might find?”
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