The River of No Return

by Jon Voelkel

  The usher rolled her eyes. “This way, please.”

  “Better do as she says,” whispered Max, “if you want to get back to meet Eusebio.”

  “But Hoop, you don’t understand—”

  “Don’t tell me—it’s a Maya thing.”

  “The way she called us the Hero Twins … something very bad is about to happen.”

  “Please!” called the usher from farther down the corridor. “You will not have time for your preshow refreshments if you do not hurry!”

  “Or,” said Max, “it’s just a cute way of referring to their VIP guests. Now let’s get our preshow refreshments.”

  Security cameras high on the wall swiveled to track them as they followed the usher down a long, curving concrete tunnel.

  She stopped in front of a large steel door.

  “This is the control room,” she explained. She tapped a code into an entry system, and the door swung open. Another Maya woman—tall, thin, even uglier than the usher, and wearing the same uniform of embroidered white dress—stepped out. “Welcome to the show,” she said, sticking out her hand. “We are so excited to have you here.”

  Max shook her hand.

  Her grip was uncomfortably strong.

  She smiled, looked directly into his eyes, and would not let go.

  Her teeth were black.

  Unnerved, Max pulled back. With a loud squelching noise, the woman’s forearm detached from her body—her hand still firmly gripping his.

  “Ew! Ew!” In shock, he hurled the limb down the corridor. It came scurrying back on its fingers and pawed at him like a cat wanting to be fed.

  “What have you done?” screamed the woman. Her face turned purple, her eyeballs shot out of their sockets, and her mouth opened so wide that it ripped the sides of her cheeks.

  “What have you done?” echoed the usher. She clutched her stomach as if she had a pain, then threw open her hands as her intestines burst out of her body and writhed about like snakes on the floor.

  Max turned in horror to Lola, but she was standing there, hands on hips, looking completely unfazed.

  “Oh puh-lease,” she said. “Not the exploding-intestines trick again?”

  As the two women howled with laughter, their bodies morphed into their real Death Lord selves, Scab Stripper and the Demon of Pus.

  “Why am I not surprised to find you two down here?” asked Lola. “Now suppose you tell us what’s going on? What’s with all the Hero Twins references?”

  “If you want to pick my brains, Ix Sak Lol, I’ll make it easy for you,” said Scab Stripper. He pulled off the top of his skull like a cap, to reveal a tangled mass of worms where his brains should be.

  “You guys are sick,” said Max, his heart still pounding from shock.

  “We’ll take that as a compliment,” replied Pus, holding open the metal door. “Come on in, the boss is waiting.”

  It was a control room out of a movie set, with more gleaming technology than Max had ever seen in one place. On every wall giant screens pumped in information in a visual overload of news feeds, maps, charts, diagrams, video surveillance. On several screens giant slow-motion close-ups showed Max’s horrified face as he’d grappled with the breakaway arm.

  All around the room were rows of workstations where operators analyzed and edited the flow of footage. And dominating the room from the comfort of a large leather armchair suspended from the ceiling by a robotic arm was Ah Pukuh himself.

  Instead of his usual ancient Maya garb, the god of violent and unnatural death had squeezed his corpulent body into an expensive-looking modern business suit. His hair was short, spiky, and bleached white. With his headset mic and earpiece, he looked every inch the trendy TV producer (albeit with a bad case of plague boils).

  As Max and Lola stared at him in amazement, his high-tech chair brought him zooming toward them.

  “Ah, the Hero Twins! So glad you could make it!” he said in a voice that tried to be charming but merely came off as creepy.

  “I see you’ve finally got too fat to walk,” said Lola.

  “I will treat that remark with the contempt it deserves.” Ah Pukuh lifted an enormous buttock and let loose a toe-curling blast of gas.

  “Why are we here?” asked Lola, waving away the smell.

  “Why are any of us here? It is a good question. But please try not to worry about it, as I will soon be bringing your miserable lives to an end. But first, let’s have a little fun. I believe you have a gift for me?” He waggled his fat fingers expectantly.

  Lola spat in his hand.

  “You will regret that, little girl. Give me the White Jaguar.”

  “We don’t have it,” lied Lola.

  “Must we play games? It was all going so well.”

  Ah Pukuh jabbed at a control pad in the arm of his chair, and the steel door burst open to admit a squad of heavily armed security guards. Before Max knew what was happening, a few had peeled off to restrain him, while the rest surrounded Lola.

  Strong hands held him tight. He watched helplessly as Lola kicked and struggled but couldn’t prevent the goons from taking her backpack and passing it to Ah Pukuh.

  The god of violent and unnatural death soared out of reach in his mechanical chair, then plunged his greedy hands into the bag and pulled out the football-shaped object. “Come to Daddy,” he crooned as he pulled away the deerskin wrapping to reveal the alabaster jaguar head.

  Seeing the villain sitting smugly in his high-tech HQ, stroking a white cat, reminded Max of an old James Bond movie he’d watched with his father. What was it with international criminal masterminds? Why did they never take their limitless resources and use them for good? Or at least for fun?

  Ah Pukuh held up the Jaguar Stone tenderly. “Welcome home, my beauty! It’s time for a family reunion.” He clicked his fingers. “Where is the jaguar priest?”

  A man stepped forward, carrying a large pot of smoking incense. The pot was decorated in a jaguar pattern, as was the man. Every visible inch of his skin was painted in jaguar spots. He wore a jaguar-pelt cape over his shoulders, the head of a jaguar over his own head, and a jaguar-pelt loincloth. The only non-jaguar-patterned thing about him was a large deerskin shoulder bag worn across his body.

  He bowed low to Ah Pukuh.

  The god of violent and unnatural death lowered his chair to be level with the priest. He stroked the stone on his knee and blew it a little kiss. Then he placed the stone reverently in the priest’s deerskin bag, and watched as it was carried out with an escort of security guards.

  Ah Pukuh leered at Max and Lola. “And now, on with the show.”

  He jabbed at his control pad again.

  A wall of giant video screens rose silently into the ceiling to reveal an expanse of plate glass windows overlooking a big sports stadium. It was like being in the press box at Fenway.

  Despite the direness of his predicament, Max whistled in admiration. “How did you construct all this underground? It’s incredible!”

  “It was no problem for my Maya architects,” replied Ah Pukuh. “We have always built the impossible.”

  “Excuse me,” said Lola to Max, as she hugged her empty backpack, “but can you stop making nice with him? He has just robbed us of the White Jaguar. He is our mortal enemy.”

  Ah Pukuh’s chair came to rest right in front of her. “Make that your immortal enemy. You would be well advised to make nice with me, too. Soon I will rule all Middleworld. Wouldn’t you like to have friends in high places?”

  Lola spat at him again.

  A posse of guards ran forward, but he motioned them away.

  “You are an enigma to me, Ix Sak Lol. You act all high and mighty, yet you expectorate like a street urchin. You profess to support the Maya, yet you have no admiration for my glorious deeds. Soon I will make the whole of Middleworld sit up and take notice of the Maya. I will reassert our dominion.” He gestured to the stadium, where the seats were rapidly filling up. “See how they flock to my pleasure dome,
one and all.”

  Max surveyed the audience. “I wouldn’t call it one and all. It’s hardly a representative cross section.”

  Ah Pukuh stared at him. “You sound like my marketing department.”

  “See for yourself,” said Max. “You have skeletons and corpses on one side. And a lot of beardy guys in plaid shirts on the other.”

  “So half the audience are from Xibalba,” guessed Lola. “And the other half is from F.A.T.S.O.?”

  “Can I just say,” said Ah Pukuh testily, “that we did not pronounce that acronym out loud before we chose it and we will be voting on a name change very soon. But yes, my esteemed colleagues from the world of strip-mining and logging are here for their annual conference, and tonight’s show is in their honor.”

  “There’s the poncho family!” Max pointed into the audience. “They look a bit confused.”

  “Idiots! How did they get in here?” Ah Pukuh muttered.

  “Don’t hurt them,” Lola pleaded. “This is not their fight. They’re just innocent tourists.”

  “That concept is an oxymoron. But they are about to have the touristic experience of their lives. They will never forget what they see tonight. Not even years of therapy will erase it.”

  “What’s going to happen?” asked Max nervously.

  “A better question would be,” said Ah Pukuh, “what is not going to happen? Because tonight we are attempting to make history. We are presenting something that has never been done before: Maya myth brought to life in a spectacular live-action show that pits immortals against mortals in the never-ending circle of life and death.”

  “So it’s a ballgame,” guessed Lola.

  Ah Pukuh clapped. “Yes, indeed, the game of the gods.”

  Max wondered how long a game lasted. Maybe it was like British cricket, which he’d heard could go on for days.

  Lola narrowed her eyes. “I think I know where this is going. Could it be a Hero-Twins-versus-Death-Lords grudge match, by any chance?”

  Ah Pukuh smiled at her. “Clever girl.”

  “So we can win back the White Jaguar?”

  “In your dreams.”

  Max looked anxiously between the two of them. “Will someone please explain to me? So it’s a reenactment of some old ballgame. But the Hero Twins are played by actors, right?”

  Ah Pukuh ignored him and talked just to Lola. “It will be an inaugural game for my state-of-the-art ball court. How do you like it?”

  She looked down at the ball court and surveyed it critically.

  Max tried to see it through her eyes.

  The playing area was shaped like an uppercase I with a long, narrow center span and wider end zones.

  “What’s the playing surface?” asked Lola.

  Ah Pukuh puffed out his already corpulent chest with pride and popped several buttons off his suit. “It’s rubberized for extra bounce. Made from the sap of my very own rubber trees. We also have electronic boundary monitors and an automatic scoring system—both totally biased to the home team, of course. Best of all, we have embedded video cameras to capture all the action—with instant replays from every angle, projected in high definition onto giant screens.” He pointed to the massive pod of video screens, speakers, and stage lights that hung from the ceiling over the center of the court. “And, essential for spectators in Xibalba, we have digital betting consoles in every seat for continuous gambling throughout the game. Ka-ching!”

  A troop of monkeys dressed in little tunics and feathered headdresses ran out, and began doing acrobatics.

  “Looks like the show’s starting,” said Max.

  Lola pressed her nose against the window. “It’s Bahlam,” she whispered.

  The last jaguar of the Monkey River was crammed into a wheeled cage pushed out by the one-armed zookeeper.

  The arena went quiet as the cage was unbolted.

  The jaguar sprang out and paced around the floor, as if he was looking for someone in the audience. Then he threw back his head and roared with all the pain and anger and hopelessness of a wild heart in captivity.

  Lola banged on the glass. “Bahlam! I’m up here!”

  “Stop that,” said Ah Pukuh. “The glass is soundproof. And you’re making smudges.”

  The monkeys rolled on a huge, brightly striped rubber ball.

  The one-armed zookeeper cracked his whip, and the video screens zoomed in on the hatred in the jaguar’s green eyes. The zookeeper cracked his whip again, this time across the jaguar’s back. With a howl of pain, the animal jumped onto the ball and attempted to keep his balance, while all around him the monkeys juggled bananas.

  “You call that entertainment?” said Lola in disgust.

  “I agree,” sighed Ah Pukuh. “Boring, isn’t it? I wanted something more like the Roman Colosseum, with wild animals ripping apart human victims, but the focus groups didn’t go for it. Apparently, today’s audiences are too squeamish for that sort of thing. I suggested that we do it anyway and feed the focus groups to the animals!” He laughed at his own joke and nudged Max. “Whaddya say? Shouldn’t the Maya be more like the Romans? They knew how to entertain a crowd.”

  “If you want to be more like the Romans,” said Max, “maybe you should concentrate on building aqueducts and straight roads.”

  “Oh, we have plenty of those already—piece of cake—but we prefer to focus on the fun stuff. The Romans are so misunderstood. In truth, they were as productive as the Maya in the field of violent and unnatural death. In my humble opinion, I don’t think they get enough credit for it. We’ll be teaching a different kind of history when I’m in charge.”

  Max and Lola weren’t listening to his rambles. They were watching the progress of the White Jaguar as the jaguar priest and his warrior escort entered the arena, crossed the ball court, and walked up the steps of a square platform on the far side. An honor guard on the platform parted to reveal a stone altar composed of five jaguar heads arranged to echo the five points of the Maya compass: north (white), south (yellow), east (red), west (black), and center (green).

  Lola nudged Max. “The real White Jaguar is still in the priest guy’s bag, so the white one on the altar must be the dummy Hermanjilio carved from a gourd. It’s such a great replica, you can hardly tell the difference. But somehow we have to steal the real one back.”

  “Not a chance,” said Max.

  The jaguar priest was making a big show of lifting up the fake White Jaguar to exchange it for the real one. Lola groaned. “He’s making Ho Hool Bahlam, the legendary Five-Headed Jaguar, the source of ultimate power. We’ll never get any of the Jaguar Stones back now.”

  “Feast your eyes.” Ah Pukuh zoomed down behind them in his chair and put his head between them. His breath and body odor, a tangy combination of rotting flesh and raw sewage, hit them like a tidal wave, and they reeled back and gasped for air. “Giddy? It is understandable. For the first time in mortal history, the five Jaguar Stones are reunited. All they need now is mortal blood to fire their power. And when I activate them after the ballgame, all that power shall be mine.”

  Max rolled his eyes. “Can I ask you something?”

  “About what?”

  “Criminal psychology.”

  Ah Pukuh blasted him with his unholy halitosis. “My specialist subject! Ask away.”

  “Well, I just wondered why the bad guys always feel compelled to explain their evil plans to the good guys?”

  “So you can marvel at our genius.”

  “But why waste time talking about it? Why not activate the Five-Headed Jaguar right now?”

  “Whose side are you on?” murmured Lola.

  “The boy asks an excellent question, and I will be delighted to answer it. To activate the mighty Five-Headed Jaguar requires blood. But not just any blood. To launch the new age of Ah Pukuh, I require the most precious blood of all: the blood of the famous Hero Twins.” He listened to a voice in his headpiece. “Speaking of which, they are ready for you. Shall we go?”

  There
was nowhere to run and all exits were blocked. Max and Lola had no choice but to fall into line. Directly ahead of them, leading the parade, was Lord Kuy, the owl-man. Behind them, bringing up the rear, marched a full contingent of security guards.

  Ah Pukuh was clearly taking no chances in conveying his VIPs from the control room to the arena.

  As he walked, staring at Lord Kuy’s back, Max noticed that the normally restrained and solemn owl-man had a little spring in his step, and his feathers looked freshly groomed for the occasion.

  Lola, on the other hand, trudged along, her eyes fixed on the ground, as if she was in a funeral procession. Which, as it later turned out, she kind of was.

  “So, am I right in thinking we’re not VIP guests anymore?” Max asked her.

  “We’re the Hero Twins,” she said. “And we’re playing ball tonight.”

  “The Maya ballgame? But I don’t know how to play.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We could be the best ballplayers in the world, and they wouldn’t let us win. This version of the game is strictly ceremonial, like a ritual. The forces of good and evil battle it out for control of the cosmos. And I think we can be pretty sure that evil will win today.”

  “So it’s like a performance?”

  “Except it ends with the losers getting sacrificed.”

  “Approaching backstage area,” reported Lord Kuy into his headset.

  A door swung open, and Max and Lola were ushered inside.

  “This is the green room,” said Lord Kuy. “Just pop those on”—he pointed at two deerskin tunics hanging on a hook—“and make yourselves comfortable.”

  Since the room was completely bare, save for the tunics, a hard wooden bench, and security cameras that moved whenever they did, making themselves comfortable was easier said than done.

  “You can’t force us to play,” said Max.

  “Die now or die later, it’s all the same to me,” said Lord Kuy. He opened the green-room door to show the ranks of armed guards waiting outside.

  “But then you won’t get your ballgame.”

  “There is a family in ponchos who can be forced to play in your place.” The owl-man rotated his head smugly. “No one is indispensable.”