“Oh, yeah.” Did she want to go through that again? “I guess we could all head back.” After her physical and emotional breakdown, she still felt exhausted. But the thought of sitting in the graveyard in the dark again . . . She shuddered.
“No,” said Pete, digging into the pouch in his suit. He pulled out a slender cylinder—a keychain flashlight—and handed it to Kat. “I was saving this, in case, you know . . .” He looked down. “But I guess you could use it now.”
Kat gazed at the light. “You couldn’t have told— You didn’t—” She wanted to slap him and hug him at the same time. But what had awakened this altruistic side in Pete all of a sudden? Was he imagining he could sway her regarding the treasure?
Either way, she now had a light. She could start formulating a search plan and Megan would be able to inspect the tomb. “Thanks,” she grunted.
“You’re welcome,” said Pete. He turned toward the breakdown hillock. “Are you coming, Ray?”
The guide scowled, shot Kat a quizzical look, then joined Pete. They climbed with vigor over the massive tablets and descended from view. Soon even the crunching sound of their boots had faded. Megan handed Kat her canteen and motioned for her to drink. After Kat took a few soothing swallows, Megan helped her around the pillars, to the middle of the main cache and away from the bodies.
“Can I take the light,” she asked, “and . . . explore?”
Kat smiled and relinquished it, as she settled next to the statue of a jaguar. “Let me know if you find anything significant.”
“Sure thing.” Megan panned the beam over the nearest statues and motifs on the stalagmites and pillars. She began mouthing words as if she were reading to herself, squinting at the odd imprint and murmuring. Despite the discovery of the bodies, her face looked radiant. If anyone could describe rapture, it would likely be along the lines of an archaeologist unearthing a lost civilization and all its trappings.
Suddenly Megan squealed.
“What? What is it?” asked Kat.
“This really is the find of the century.” She beckoned with her hand. “You’re not going to believe this.”
Even though Kat felt as drained as a water bottle after a marathon, she pushed to her feet and trudged toward Megan.
“I’m ready to believe just about anything,” she said. “Show me.”
Chapter Twenty-six
“Wake up! Snap out of it! Do you hear me!”
The faint words naggingly penetrated the deep well of Mark’s mind. He was no longer a boy shivering in the dark. His parents had called in rangers after he’d failed to show up for dinner. They’d discovered his bike and the hole in the ground, then mounted a rescue. Hoisted out of the cave and hustled off to the hospital, he’d eventually recovered from his traumatic experience. Bones had knitted. Hypothermia had been reversed. He’d grown up, gone to college, and gotten married. But had he ever really recovered?
“Your wife may be dying!” the man yelled.
Mark shook his head, the memories still clinging like sticky cobwebs. “Cave, dark,” he murmured.
“Of course it’s a cave. It’s dark and there are creatures crawling around. So what? Are you the same man who turned the tables on a murderer? There’s nothing worse in this cave than what you’ve already dealt with.”
Mark looked up into Jorge’s face. He remembered now. The paramilitary, the revolutionary, and the sacrificial well. He’d survived all of that. Why did he have to crumble at the sight of a few bats and a spider? A fuzzy beast was still crawling over his leg, but at least he could see it. He stumbled to his feet, letting it plunge to the ground and scurry away. Another bat flapped over his head, but he ground his teeth and elbowed aside his fear.
“I’m okay now,” he said. “I just had some . . . bad memories.”
Jorge compressed his lips, looking exasperated. “If bad memories transform you into a cringing child, I don’t know if you can make it to your wife, let alone help her back out again.”
Mark took successive deep breaths, his heart rate gradually slowing. “I will make it,” he said. “I’m not going to leave Kat buried here. I— I know what it feels like.”
The Maya gave him a long cold stare, then jerked his head in a brief nod. “All right. Let’s keep going.” He wheeled and marched forward, through a thick crust of guano that crackled under his feet. Leathery wings flapped above and bulbous eyes peered from the ceiling. A shaft of light appeared up ahead, but that didn’t give Mark any comfort. It reminded him too vividly of the other cave.
“A surprising number of creatures can survive here because of the conditions. The narrow tunnels to the surface dribble vegetative debris—leaves and soil—and I believe the miniscule bacteria that feeds on the sulfur and limestone provide food as well. Just as at La Cueva de la Villa Luz, the conditions breed abundant life. However, despite what is presented on television, the bats rarely bite humans, and the spiders are not very toxic. Perhaps you had a bad experience in a cave, but obviously you didn’t die from it.”
Mark said nothing. Yes, he hadn’t died from his experience, but maybe a part of him had—the part that had thought itself invincible.
Jorge passed through the seepage of light and ventured into an area littered with stalactites. These weren’t the solid spears of limestone that Mark had seen before, but looked more like a gray Jell-O that swayed and jiggled from the vibrations of the men’s boots. The pungent rotten-eggs odor of sulfur permeated the air.
“Snottites again,” said Jorge. “Remember? Very acidic. Watch you don’t walk under them this time.”
Mark ducked around one dripping cone and side-stepped another. He watched some drips splash to the soft limestone floor and fizz, hollowing out a groove in the rock—another mechanism of cave development.
Jorge was approaching the next passage, where springs bubbled from the ground, when a device clipped to his belt began beeping. “Uh, oh,” he said, and backed away. If Jorge said “uh, oh,” it was time to skedaddle.
“Now what?” asked Mark, his voice like the squeal of a stepped-on mouse.
“Gas,” said Jorge. “I brought a monitor along. The hydrogen sulfide accumulates here, and it can get rather poisonous. One hundred fifty-two parts per million. Carbon monoxide too. It’s up to thirty-eight parts per million. Likely from the volcano, as you suggested after the earthquake. Although I don’t see it killing all the people above ground.”
Mark paused, and took a shallow breath. Now an encounter with lethal gas? Still, he noticed very perky vampire bats rustling in a corner of the chamber and pointed them out. “Wouldn’t they be dead, then?”
“Not necessarily,” said Jorge. “They’ve learned to live with it. Adapted, I guess. But more than a few people have succumbed to the gas in the Villa Luz cave. They have to don gas masks now. Here we can use our rebreathers.” Jorge slapped his dangling mask over his face. Mark hastened to do likewise.
With squared shoulders, Jorge ventured back into the tunnel with the frothing springs. Mark felt annoyingly faint, but he knew it stemmed from his pounding heart. The mask had an airtight and watertight seal—nothing could slip through.
A dense curtain of snottites hung across the cavity and shimmered in the weak light. Jorge ducked under it, crouching low to avoid contact, but some of the slime still managed to drip onto his shoulders, steaming and eating through the thick cloth. Mark followed, hearing the sizzle, feeling the weight of each droplet like lead.
“Into the water, now!” shouted Jorge, leaping into a pool in front of him.
Mark instantly obeyed, splashing up to his waist. But that wasn’t good enough, obviously, since Jorge was totally submerged. He surfaced and seized Mark by the neck, thrusting him under.
“What the hell—” said Mark, as he whipped his head out of the water.
“Don’t you dare complain,” said Jorge. “I’ve saved your behind too many times for you to say a damn word.”
Mark clamped his mouth shut. He eyed the ragged holes
in Jorge’s coveralls where acid droplets had eaten right through the fabric and reddened the skin underneath. The water had saved them from severe burns.
Jorge crawled out of the pool and squatted on the edge, shaking water from his body. “Those were slow-dripping snottites,” he explained. “They have a pH of zero point zero. Nasty stuff.”
“I’ll say,” said Mark, examining the breaches in his own clothes. He looked up and met Jorge’s gaze. “Thanks.”
The man’s eyes registered shock, at first, but then he nodded and said, “You’re welcome.”
Mark, chilled from the cool dip, and even more indelibly from the nightmare situation, sprang out of the pool and tried to shake and rub the circulation back into his body. Jorge didn’t allow him much time. He didn’t want to expend too much oxygen in this part of the cave, he explained. Which meant exactly what, Mark wondered, but he didn’t care to speculate. Jorge hastened forward, ducking under another archway in the tunnel and mounting a mud hill, which he said wasn’t composed of mud at all. “It’s a paste of gypsum and microbes,” he said. “Highly acidic. So climb through it quickly.”
Mark couldn’t believe this. Hadn’t Jorge just told him, after his episode of insanity, that this cave held far less danger than what he’d already faced?
“Is it like this all the way down?” he asked.
“No,” said Jorge. “Not like this.” He didn’t elaborate, as usual, which meant, of course, different, but still bad, or different, and far worse.
Mark bit back a comment and followed, the acidic paste causing his boots to smolder. In what felt like a tortoise pace but was actually quite fast, they skidded down the other side and found solid limestone underfoot. But the ground was still slippery and, at times, sticky. Mark aimed his helmet light at the ground, illuminating dark red puddles.
“What’s this?” he asked, tapping Jorge on the shoulder. “It looks like blood.”
“Oh that,” Jorge said, turning around and shrugging. “It is.” He smirked and Mark wondered what next? Jorge was about to turn back and continue the trek, but Mark couldn’t take it anymore.
“It is? What do you mean it is? Whose blood is it?”
“Not mine,” said Jorge, smiling now. “Certainly not your wife’s. Nothing to worry about.”
Mark clenched his jaw, exasperated beyond words. He finally managed to croak out, “Then whose?”
“It’s actually urine,” said Jorge, “from the vampire bats. It’s tinged red from the animal blood that they procure at night. They won’t be sucking at your neck, though, unless you let them.”
He chuckled and Mark felt the urge to tackle him and wipe his smarmy face in the bloody urine. He was enjoying this netherworld journey far too much. Mark snapped his hands into fists, but was immediately rebuffed by an odd breeze. A large specimen dove from the ceiling and flapped toward him.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Megan squealed again as she brushed dust away from a large stela and found copious amounts of writing. This must be the way Flinders Petrie felt, when he’d excavated the site at El Amarna in Egypt and discovered a lost civilization, a vanished culture, and the controversial King Akhenaton. Most of the hieroglyphs were clearly etched in the stone, although a few had eroded with time. Now that epigraphers had decoded more than ninety percent of Mayan glyphs, these should be easy to decipher. This passage clearly concerned the Serpent King.
“What is it?” asked Kat.
“I think this is a historical document,” Megan said. “A text that tells the story of the king and his people, his triumphs in battle. Maybe it will unlock the secret of this settlement—why its existence was expunged from most records.”
“Does it mention the cave?” asked Kat.
“Hold on a second. This doesn’t read like a textbook. Some of the Mayan symbols haven’t even been deciphered yet. I have to work through it. I’ll tell you what I can.”
“This symbol here, with the man’s face and the crown resembling a snake stands for ahaw—lord or in this case, king. The serpent symbol refers to the kingdom he rules. The next is the date of his rule. The Maya used different counts for short time periods and a long count. They calendar did not begin with the birth of Christ, of course, but at a point the experts calculate to be August 13, 3114 B.C.E. From the Mayan long count, I can determine that the Serpent King’s rule corresponded to approximately 810–850 C.E. in our calendar.”
“Forty years,” said Kat. “Not especially long. Was that typical?”
“Not unusual, but there’s a strange symbol at the end that I’m not sure about. Then there’s the symbol for Zotz.”
“Zotz?” asked Kat, her forehead puckered.
“Sorry.” Megan smiled apologetically. “I forget sometimes that not everyone is familiar with Mayan mythology. Zotz was a bat, but not just any bat. He was a vampire bat like those we saw in the cave above. In Mayan legend, he played a part in the story of two brothers who upset the Lords of Death and were forced to travel to the Underworld—called Xibalba. There they had to pass several death-defying tests. They hid in the house of Zotz, but when one of them peered out, Zotz swooped down and tore off his head.”
“Lovely,” said Kat.
“Most of the Mayan legends are similarly gruesome,” said Megan. “But in the story, the other brother managed to reattach the head,” she grinned. “In the end, they fooled the Lords of Death. They were ordered to kill themselves, and did, but magically sprang back to life again. The Lords of Death wanted the same trick performed on themselves, so the brothers killed them, but never brought them back.”
“Interesting,” said Kat, scanning the glyphs. “I wonder why so many legends and religions feature resurrection as a key belief, even when they’re worlds apart and have developed separately.”
“Perhaps there’s a human need to believe that we will come back in some form or other,” Megan said. “That death isn’t final.”
“Perhaps,” said Kat. She looked strangely pensive. “My largely atheistic, Darwinistic upbringing tells me that it is. But I still have trouble understanding how similar some religious beliefs are when they sprang up on different continents, in vastly different societies. Maybe you understand this better than I.”
Megan shook her head. “I studied some mythology. It doesn’t mean I can make great philosophical claims. I can see how belief systems develop in some cases—the corn god, for example, maize being a staple in this part of the world, or the jaguar. But I still have trouble rooting out the origins of the bloodletting ritual and human sacrifice. It stems from a conviction that blood is vital to life. That certainly seems logical. But the idea that letting it drain onto the ground will fertilize the earth, or that killing another will bring resurrection in the afterlife—that’s a primitive way of thinking, and I have no idea how it began. But there were parallels with sacrifice, resurrection, or both, in ancient Egypt, in Babylon, even in the development of Hinduism. Perhaps there’s a connection far back in our roots, when humanity evolved enough to begin asking questions of origin. It’s a foundational belief system. Or maybe it has some basis in truth.”
Kat looked up at her, startled.
“I was . . . am a Catholic,” said Megan. “You can take the girl out of the religious community, but it’s very hard to take the religion out of the girl.”
“I can imagine,” Kat replied. “But I can’t relate. My father was a Russian scientist. He emigrated to the U.S. after the Communist regime fell. Any religious beliefs his forbears might have had had been stomped out by the imprint of communism and the strict code of science long before. I never went to church, was the first to slam the door on fanatical witnesses to the faith, but sometimes I wish . . .” She stopped, dropped her gaze, and shook her head. “Oh, never mind. What more can you learn from this text?”
Megan stared at her for a long minute. She’d never heard a scientist express any desire for religious beliefs, except perhaps when they were at death’s door. Right now, Catholicism in h
er life had been shoved aside in her religious pursuit of Site Q. So had all the moral lessons of her youth. She couldn’t care less about the door that she might pass through at the end of her life. The only door that concerned her was the one right in front of her. The key to glory here on earth, and perhaps, revenge . . .
Of course, she hadn’t started out so ambitious. She’d meekly trailed her mother to mass every Sunday, confessing to the worst of crimes—failing to read a Bible verse every day, stealing some candy from a classmate’s desk, or sneaking the peas from her plate and letting the dog lick them from her hand. Worst of all was shirking some of her chores in order to watch another Indiana Jones video. And she’d felt guilty about these things. Oh, so guilty.
But why did she have to feel guilty after what had happened at Harvard? Why did guilt, shame, and revulsion still churn in her gut?
“Are you all right?” Kat asked.
“Y- yes. Of course.” Megan took a deep breath. “Well, actually no.” Was this the time to reopen the wound and spill everything that had festered there for years? They were trapped in a cave. No matter how incredible, how glorious a find this Mayan tomb was, they might never escape. It could become their tomb. She didn’t want to die, but if she was destined to, she didn’t want this burden weighing her down anymore. And something told her Kat would understand. She bit her lip and examined the ground, fingering an obsidian artifact. “Kat, I had a bad experience a long time ago. I still have trouble talking about it. You remember how I had to see Professor Dalton for help with my thesis?”
“Your classical studies prof?”
She nodded. “Kat, his help came with a price.”
She looked up to see Kat wide-eyed and pale. “Megan?”
“He made me do unspeakable things. He would have failed me if I didn’t agree. For years I blamed myself. I thought I could have been stronger, gone to the police, put in a complaint, something. But who would believe me? I’ve never been the slim, sexy girl most men pine for. I suppose he had a fat-girl fetish. And my parents had sacrificed so much to put me in that school. If I was expelled . . .”
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