At the center of this cave was a spring that fed water into a pool that glowed an eerie blue.
The young men and women would drink of the water and be made better than they were before. Then Shako would train them and send them back to their homes, where they would serve in secret: the fiercest warriors, the finest protectors. Generation after generation, they received just enough of the Water to make them strong, to make them superhuman. But she never allowed them enough to tempt or corrupt them. She made certain they were smarter than she was.
They called her Mother, for they were all her children.
CHAPTER 35
THEY WERE TEENAGERS. Boys and girls. But they moved with practiced ease and grace as they went among the dead, gathering their weapons, sliding clips and bullets from the guns and tossing them into a pile at the center of the room.
No matter what they looked like, they were warriors. Shako’s secret weapons.
“These are . . . our children?” Simon asked, incredulous.
“No,” Shako corrected him. “They are my children.”
“I never knew.”
“Would it have changed anything?”
Simon couldn’t answer that. She turned away.
Shako went to David and held him. She tried to kiss him, but he kept her at arm’s length.
“You might have told me,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” Shako told him. “I couldn’t risk them knowing about this. There was no way to explain. But you see? They would have been able to take care of themselves. It’s what I raised them for.”
“I understand now, I get it,” David said. He looked very pale now. “I just really wish you’d told me.”
Then he collapsed, a fresh red spatter of blood appearing on his lips as he began coughing.
A second later, Max, Peter, and Sebastian all hit the floor as well.
DAVID’S FORMULA, WHEN IT worked properly, introduced synthetic DNA that replaced the repair-and-excision sequences that kept errors out of the genome. Put simply, it cut-and-pasted new DNA that was flawless in place of the DNA that was old or damaged.
But that same process could be used to simply slice the DNA to ribbons, without replacing anything. It could, in theory, unwind the double helix and break down the DNA itself, causing cell disintegration on a massive scale.
Eventually, organs would fail. Tissues would break down. The human body would not know how to repair itself from the billion small tears and cracks that arose every minute of every day.
David figured it would take thirty minutes to an hour for the effects of a process like that to become apparent.
He was off by about ten minutes. He must have misplaced a decimal point somewhere back in Colombia, but it was a moot point now.
He and the others were all dying, falling apart at the fundamental level.
IT UNDID THE WORK of the Water. It was, in a way, a cure for immortality.
The men of the Council suddenly got very old, very fast.
Their skin withered and shrank and folded in on itself like a peach rotting in time-lapse photography.
Max screamed in pain.
Simon thrashed against the cuffs holding him, tried to stand up with the chair still attached. One of the boys shoved him back down.
“Please,” he yelled at Shako. “Let me—please. If you ever felt anything for me. Don’t let him die alone.”
Shako thought about it for a long moment.
In that time, the men on the floor shriveled before their eyes. It was not a quiet process. They all screamed now, as their muscles shrank and bones popped audibly from tendons. Their skin cracked and wept and bled.
Their eyes clouded over, years of macular degeneration blinding them in seconds. Their teeth fell out of their gums.
Simon could smell them, a rank foulness rising as their bodies rotted from the cells up.
“Please,” he said to Shako again. “Let me go to him.”
Shako eyed him coldly, then looked at Max, who was curling up into a ball now, his fine suit soiled with blood and fluids, hanging on him loosely as he boiled away to nothing.
Centuries of damage and disease and injury, all concentrated into a few brief minutes, all falling down on him at once.
“You want to comfort him?” Shako asked. “Give him some solace in his last moments? Ease his pain? Hold his hand?”
Simon was prepared to beg. “Yes. Please. I owe him that,” Simon said.
Shako took a step closer to Simon, blocking his view of all three of them.
“No.”
That was all. One word.
Their bones cracked under their own weight. Max screamed once more.
And the three immortal conquistadors died, leaving Simon alone in the world, the last of his kind.
Shako stepped away, and Simon could see them again. One last spasm had turned Max’s head. His skin was wrapped tight around a skull. It looked as if his jaw was open in an eternal scream of agony.
Simon looked at this for a long time before he realized that tears were running down his face.
No one cared. They were doing their best to save David.
One of the children—one of his descendants, Simon realized with the same shock as before—had a paramedic’s kit. He was trying to inject something into David’s arm. He couldn’t find a vein.
Useless, Simon knew. There was only one thing that could save David now. Shako had to know it, too. So why was she hesitating?
“There is another source of the Water,” Simon said.
“Yes,” Shako said.
David had lapsed into unconsciousness. He was younger than the others, but he would not last much longer. It was obvious.
“Then what are you waiting for?” Simon said. “Take him there. Save him.”
She looked at him. “And start all this over again?”
Simon sat for a moment. Then he spoke again. “Whatever I did to you, that was my fault. Not his. We brought him into this. First me, then you. All he has ever tried to do is the right thing. You can’t let him die for that.”
“You’re wrong,” she said.
But then she spoke to the two Seminole youths and had them pick David up.
“I can’t let him die, but that’s not the reason.”
She told one of the others to bring around a car. They needed to move quickly.
“We’re going to the cave,” she said. She pointed at Simon. “And he’s coming with us. I want him to see this.”
CHAPTER 36
THE TRIP WAS easier than it had been a hundred fifty years before, but it was still not easy.
The Range Rover that Shako drove—David rapidly deteriorating in the back, held by her two young warriors—ate up a lot of ground at the edge of the swamp. Still, it sank in muck to the axle when they tried to cross a field of mud flats near the river.
They went on foot from there. Simon was not bound, or even watched that closely. He wondered if he had won some small amount of respect from Shako for speaking for David’s life.
Probably not. More likely, she was just too worried about David to spare any more thought on him.
They covered the distance as fast as they could on foot, winding down trails between the trees, headed into the thickets. A hidden trail emerged from behind the overgrowth; Simon found himself placing his feet on stone steps half-buried in the mud, then turning into a seeming wall of vegetation to discover a tunnel carved into the branches.
For years he had suspected there was something still here. He swore he could almost feel it in his blood, the last remnants of the Water in his system vibrating in tune with a hidden spring somewhere underground. But they had never been able to find anything, in all the years they looked. Their attempts to claim the land were blocked, always by the remnants of the Seminole tribe. In the nineteenth century, h
is scouts were cut down by arrows and axes. And then, in the twentieth century, once the Seminole were recognized by the courts again, Conquest found itself cut off by lawyers paid for by the newfound wealth from Indian casinos. He was never able to purchase so much as an acre of Seminole land, and Simon eventually dismissed his feeling as foolish hope.
Now he knew he was right.
It was almost dawn when they found the small waterfall. Shako turned abruptly, almost into the rock face of the hill, and then simply vanished.
The Seminole boy and girl did the same, David supported between them, and Simon saw it. A dark fissure in the rock running eight feet high but only a few feet wide.
Carlos never would have fit through here, he thought, and turned to the side to ease through.
He stumbled immediately. It was pitch-dark, and the drop was sudden and steep.
The Seminole girl kept him from falling when he bumped into her.
In a few moments, his eyes adjusted. There was a slightly phosphorescent lichen on the cave walls that glowed enough to allow a dim view. The others moved swiftly, finding their footholds from memory. He moved as fast as he could behind them, feeling each step along the way.
Eventually, as they went deeper, the path grew wider. The rock and earth above him was cross-braced with old timbers, and holes were punched at the end of one cave to create entrances into the next.
He realized the timbers were not for support. They did not keep the passages open. Rather, they held back tons and tons of debris that had been shifted from the passage up to the ceiling. If the braces were to fall, the entire tunnel would collapse in on itself.
A safety measure, Simon figured. One of Shako’s ideas, no doubt.
They came to the final chamber. Now Simon saw the blue glow. It felt calm and welcoming. He stepped through the last passage, which was fashioned like an archway, with rough-hewn bricks curving over the top, where they met at a keystone.
That’s where he saw the bodies.
Their skin was as fresh as if they’d died yesterday. Simon felt the moisture in the air. The Water, the condensation, it must have acted as a preservative.
They all lay on the floor of the main chamber, at various spots around the eerie, glowing pool. They were on their backs, wearing clothes from hundreds of years before. There were chiefs in their full ceremonial finery, and some men wearing only loincloths. There was one body that looked Aztec, wearing long-decayed feathers and tarnished gold. There was even something that looked more ape than man, a hairy hominid with a face almost simian except for its disturbingly human eyes, open and staring at nothing.
He was about to ask how they died when it became obvious.
They were all suicides.
Some had slit their wrists, the blood long since run out but the neat slashes still open. Others had cut their own throats. One man, who must have had inhuman determination, had slowly wrapped a leather cord around his own neck and then twisted a wooden handle through it, over and over, until it tightened and strangled him. His face was mottled and bloated, but Simon could still see the hint of a smile on his lips.
“What is this?” he demanded.
Shako looked up from where she was hovering over David. She had a plastic bottle in one hand. She was trying to get him to drink. It wasn’t working.
“This is exactly what it looks like,” she said. “This is what I wanted you to see.”
“Immortals,” he said.
“Every one who used this pool before us. Strangers and travelers who stumbled upon it. My ancestors. Others, far older than them. Every one who lived long enough to know they were tired of it. There’s more to life than simply not dying.”
“My God,” Simon said. “The years in this place. And they all just gave up?”
“We’re not meant to be like this,” Shako said. “None of us.”
Simon felt somehow cheated. Another secret she’d kept from him. And always a moral at the end of the story.
“Then I suppose you should let him die,” he said, pointing to David.
“I told you already,” Shako said. “I’m not going to let that happen.”
“It doesn’t look as if it’s up to you.”
The Seminole boy was trying to get David to swallow the Water, too. It still wasn’t working. He shook his head. He looked up at Shako helplessly.
Shako picked David up in her arms. His flesh was practically dissolving now, sliding off in chunks as he was undone from the inside out. Water and blood dribbled from his mouth. If he was breathing, it was so faint that Simon could not see it.
But he could see Shako’s tears.
She lifted him and carried him to the edge of the pool. And then she dropped him.
Simon crossed the cave to stand with them and watch the surface.
The pool was not large, but it was surprisingly deep. The blue glow was all they could see on the surface. Below that was nothing but darkness.
They waited. Nothing.
The surface became still, the ripples from David’s body slowly flattening, then disappearing altogether.
The pool was once again as flat as a pane of glass.
Now? Simon wondered.
Shako and the boy and the girl were completely fixated on the Water.
Simon reached under his shirt and found the knife. So many years. So many times he’d replaced the handle and the blade. But it was the same knife. The one Shako had given him.
The only truly unselfish gift he’d ever received in his long and twisted life.
He prepared to draw the weapon. The boy was closest, so he’d get the blade at the back of his neck, right at the soft spot where the spine met the skull. Simon would pull it out and slice it around into Shako’s side. It would not be a fatal strike, but it would probably puncture a lung, which would keep her down long enough for him to use his fists to beat the girl.
Shako had brought him here to show him. He’d seen.
He’d seen a chance to make it all right again, to start over. A whole new source of the Water. A whole new beginning.
He gripped the knife.
Then something burst from the pool, gasping and blindly clawing for air.
Simon flinched back, startled. The boy reached out and grabbed one of the flailing hands. Shako grabbed the other. The girl put her hands around Shako’s waist, and they pulled, all together, yanking the flailing swimmer free, straining as if they were meeting resistance, as if the pool did not want to let the body go back to them.
With a final tug, they heaved David onto the stone floor.
He lay on his back, choking. The boy turned him over, and pure blue Water poured from his lungs as he gagged and vomited it out.
Shako was kneeling next to him, her iron control finally broken, weeping and saying prayers in Uzita, a language Simon still recognized, if only from his dreams.
Simon wanted to give them a moment. But he couldn’t.
There was still so much to do, and so little time.
He grabbed the knife again and stepped forward.
And was slammed back into the wall of the cavern so fast that he could barely see what had hit him.
He tried to bring the knife up to stab his attacker, and felt it plucked from his hands effortlessly, his fingers snapping like twigs as he tried to keep his grip.
Frighteningly blue eyes stared into his out of a face that was David’s but was as cold and still as stone.
Simon saw the knife spin in David’s hand, and then watched, helpless, as David drove it, blurring fast, into his chest.
It hurt, but more than that, it went deep. So deep that it scraped against something and then severed it completely. Simon felt it like a string being cut in him. His arms and legs spasmed once and then went dead. The knife was still buried in him, wedged between his ribs, angled with a surgeon’s precision dow
n and back into his spine.
David lifted him as though he was nothing. Simon stared into those deep blue eyes and saw nothing human.
“David,” Shako’s strong voice said. “No. Stop.”
David blinked. The blue vanished, returning to his own, normal coloring.
He looked confused, like a sleeper woken from a nap. And the strength fled him. He dropped Simon on the floor of the cavern. Shako came to him and pulled him away.
Simon kept trying to reach the knife. His arms would move only half the distance. He could not seem to bend past his waist.
He fell back.
Shako stood over him, her arm around David, who was still dripping wet, still looking confused and frightened.
“I showed you,” Shako said. “I tried. I still held out some hope. But you didn’t want to see. You never understood.”
Simon was filled with a sudden bottomless rage. “No,” he hissed at her. “I have lived too long. To let it end like this.”
She reached down and, surprisingly gently, stroked his hair from his face.
“You’re right,” she said. “You have lived too long. But everything ends. Sooner or later, everything ends.”
She rose and took David’s hand. “What you have to find is the one thing you cannot live without,” she said.
David did not speak. He shivered, as if struck by some bone-deep chill. He looked at everything with a kind of horror and awe.
Shako fit herself under his arm and led him away.
The Seminole boy and girl looked at him for a moment longer. Then they, too, walked away.
Shako paused at the passage out of the cave. Simon could just see her there if he turned his head. The boy and girl supported David while she reached above her head to the keystone at the top of the arch.
She slid it from its place. Then they all turned and left him.
The first block fell a moment later, gravity overcoming inertia, sliding slowly at first, then gathering momentum. The second fell after that, and then the next, and then two or three at once, and then the archway collapsed completely.
The Eternal World Page 32