Deity

by Theresa Danley

  From the moment she climbed out of the cenote in Chichen Itza, KC had detected a strong connection between Peet and Lori. She noticed the way Lori watched Peet climb every last rung of that ladder. She noticed the surprise on Peet’s face when he saw her waiting at the top. Sure, they may have convinced the world that they were only a professor and student to each other. They might have even convinced themselves of that. But KC recognized something that perhaps neither dared to acknowledge.

  She wondered if Peet was acknowledging it now.

  “I’ve never been good with death,” KC admitted.

  “What do you mean?” Father Ruiz asked.

  “What do you say to people in mourning? What do you do?”

  Father Ruiz already had the answer. “You say nothing,” he said flatly. “You just sit with them.”

  “I don’t know. People seem to prefer to be alone during times like these.”

  “Do they? Or would you rather leave them alone? God never intended for us to weep alone.”

  KC bristled. “All right, cut the sermon, Father.”

  Father Ruiz sat back in his seat as though given a punch by her remark. “Why does God offend you so?” he asked.

  KC snorted. “God doesn’t offend me. It’s the way all you Jesus freaks believe in something you’ve never seen that I find annoying. And if that isn’t bad enough, you insist that everyone else join you on your bandwagon.”

  “You don’t believe in God?”

  “I believe God is nothing but an overrated Santa Claus and I’m not about to believe in something based on someone else’s say so.”

  “So you’d rather believe mankind evolved from monkeys than trust in God’s creation?”

  “At least there’s cold, hard evidence behind the monkeys. You can’t dispute science.”

  The priest studied her for a long uncomfortable moment. KC suddenly wished him gone.

  “I sense I may have touched upon a tender subject,” he said.

  She shook her head and forced a grin for cover. “No, no,” she insisted. “We were talking about Peet, remember.”

  “But given your distrust in God, you must have experienced a great loss yourself,” he pressed.

  KC shifted in her chair. “What makes you think that? I’ve been lucky. Nobody in my life has died.”

  “Death is not the only form of loss.”

  “Well you’re barking up the wrong tree, Father. My life has been very happy.”

  “I might believe you if you weren’t so threatened by me.”

  KC snorted. “You, of all men, are not threatening.”

  “So men are the problem.”

  KC’s voice lifted as if carried by the heat rising along her collar. “I’m not talking about men, Father. Quit twisting my words.”

  “Yes, but as Jesus said, ‘out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks.’”

  “Dammit! There you go getting all preachy on me again!”

  “Do not harden your heart against God’s word. It will comfort that emptiness within you.”

  KC had had enough. How the conversation managed to spiral down against her was infuriating. “Look,” she barked. “If you don’t take that Jesus talk to the back of the plane I’m going to fly us straight into a cliff. Then we’ll all see what exactly lies between Heaven and Hell.”

  Father Ruiz didn’t even flinch. “You are not prepared for the eternal consequences.”

  KC narrowed her eyes. “Or is it you who’s unprepared?” she challenged between her teeth.

  She held the priest’s firm gaze but the little man refused to back down. KC had confronted stubborn men before, but Father Ruiz displayed an unapologetic will that graveled her nerves. Was he truly daring her to crash the plane?

  As he held her glare she knew that her last ace had been played. KC gritted her teeth.

  “Why don’t you take your own advice, Father, and go sit with the one in mourning,” she growled. “I’d prefer it if you didn’t say another word.”

  To her relief, the priest relented in that smug little way that little men reluctantly do. He quietly rose to his feet but before abandoning the cockpit he said softly, “Just remember one thing. Men will never fill that space intended for God.”

  KC sighed as she returned to her controls. What did that priest know anyway? She glanced over her control panel but in the background, behind the drone of the engines, she could hear Peet’s voice. She bit her lip against his inquiring words.

  “Is everything all right up there, Father?”

  * * * *

  Peet’s stomach had leveled with the plane but his headache lingered on. Flying still played its role on him, but this time its havoc was compounded by a long night’s lack of sleep. A million thoughts had swarmed for hours in his head and they’d all centered around Lori. What little sleep he did manage to catch was plagued with darkness and the sensation of fleeing invisible predators, awakening him in the dawn to sore muscles, a troubled memory and an aching heart.

  And that was before he overheard the conflict brewing in the cockpit. He thought it unwise to anger a pilot in mid flight and had just convinced himself to go forward and referee the situation when to his relief, Father Ruiz surrendered to the cabin seat beside him.

  “She is an incorrigible woman,” the priest said as he strapped himself in. He took a deep breath as though restructuring his thoughts and then, turning back to Peet, he asked in a more sympathetic tone, “But I imagine your thoughts are on another.”

  There was no denying the statement, but Peet couldn’t talk about Lori. Not now. It didn’t feel right to be on a plane headed to Chiapas right now. There was too much unsettled back in Yucatan. It was certainly a struggle to focus his attention on the business set before them, but he had to force his attention, even if all the while it was distracted by the wait—the wait for a phone call from Chac. The call that would inform him that Lori’s body had been found.

  Focus. Just focus.

  “Father Ruiz,” he began heavily. “I must tell you about something we found in the cavern just before that bomb went off.”

  The priest quietly waited for him to continue.

  “We found a cross.”

  Father Ruiz’s eyes lit up. “Where is it?” he asked.

  Peet shook his head to clarify. “It wasn’t your reliquary cross. It was only a drawing. But this cross had a peg on the ends of the head and cross arms. Is your reliquary cross pegged like that?”

  “No.”

  Peet slumped in his chair. He hoped he’d found a link in all of this mess, but just like before he only found disappointment. “What is so important about this reliquary cross you’re after, Father?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the question,” the priest said.

  “The cathedral must have hundreds of crosses. I saw some that looked like they were made out of pure gold. Is the cross we’re looking for anything like that?”

  The priest shook his head. “No. It’s nothing like that. It’s a simple, wooden cross. No gold.”

  “So what is so important about it?”

  “It’s not necessarily the cross itself, but its history that is so important.”

  “Its history?”

  “Are you familiar with the Caste War of Yucatan?”

  “Vaguely. As I recall the war liberated the Yucatan natives from their oppressive Spanish landlords operating under the caste legal system.”

  “Mexico’s history is riddled with native uprisings and revolts. Even today there are paramilitary groups spreading violence through some of the poorest regions of the country. They spread hate and distrust toward the government and it all began in 1848 when the Mayan Cruzob challenged the government in the Caste War.”

  “What does this have to do with your cross?”

  Father Ruiz lifted up a hand. “Be patient and listen. By 1850 there was a stalemate between the Cruzob and the Yucatecan government, but the natives were encouraged to keep fighting by their belief in the Talking Cross—
a cross through which they claimed to hear the voice of God.”

  Peet rubbed his chin. “Chac mentioned that the Calendar Deity had been drawn some time in the nineteenth century. Perhaps it was drawn by the Cruzob. They could have drawn a picture of their Talking Cross in the hole behind the Kin piece.”

  Father Ruiz shrugged. “Maybe. In 1901 General Bravo surrounded the Cruzob stronghold in Chan Santa Cruz. I’ve been told that during a skirmish that year, one of his troops recovered the Talking Cross, thus removing the Cruzob’s access to God. Fifteen years later the Mexican government entrusted the cross to the cathedral.”

  “Are you telling me the reliquary cross you’re looking for is the Talking Cross?”

  Father Ruiz nodded. “The Talking Cross represents spirituality gone loco. There is power in what one entrusts their faith. You see, the power of the cross is strictly a mental apparition of a desperate people. When they believed God was protecting them, they fought harder for the cross. When the cross was taken away, they believed themselves defenseless and were ultimately defeated. Isolated groups remain hostile to this day but the Maya resistance has been kept to a minimum, mainly because the true location of the Talking Cross has long been forgotten.”

  “Until now.”

  “That is why we must get the cross back. If a Mayan paramilitary has the Talking Cross in their possession, there’s no telling what their primordial belief will lead them to do.”

  Chiapas

  KC McCulley noticed the pickup tucked within the cocoa trees, its bed laden with farmers. She dipped the nose a little more, dropping the Ladybug right over the top of them.

  “Greetings from America, boys!” she laughed, imagining their surprise as the landing gear buzzed the tops of the trees.

  A hand suddenly choked the back of her seat. It was Anthony Peet.

  “Where are we?” he asked. “This doesn’t look like Tapachula.”

  “Chill, professor. I got a radio transmission from traffic control. The Tapachula runway is closed for maintenance and they’re diverting small aircraft to that abandoned runway ahead.”

  She pointed through the cockpit window to the poor excuse for a landing strip splitting the middle of a short open field. “Need a better look?” she asked, dipping the plane’s nose again.

  Peet braced himself, his face draining of color. KC laughed. “Better buckle yourself in, professor. It won’t be the smoothest of landings on that dirt track.”

  As Peet stepped back to his seat, KC adjusted the flaps on the wings and heard the adjustment in the air flow. The Ladybug dipped and wavered as she zeroed in on the strip, and even as she did so, a strange feeling came over her. Although she was focused on her touchdown point she became acutely aware of one thing—there were no other aircraft around.

  But there were more pickups.

  They charged out of the trees just as the Ladybug took her first bounce. They came from all sides, ambush style. It was as though they’d been lying in wait for this very moment and, like a pack of wolves, they were pouncing upon their prey. Pickups, Jeeps, there was even an old Volkswagon convertible spilling with men—

  And rifles.

  “Holy shit!”

  The wheels slapped the ground a second time. KC quickly adjusted, opening the power to the twin turbines.

  “Hang on, boys!” she called back to her passengers as she pulled on the controls.

  The cockpit pinged with hail, but the storm she was taking off in wasn’t weather-related. “They’re shooting at us!” Father Ruiz yelled.

  No shit, Sherlock!

  The Ladybug took large, air-gulping bounces toward the end of the landing strip. KC urged more speed from the plane. “C’mon, baby! Go!”

  She pulled back on the controls with all her might just as the wheels rumbled off the strip and into the field. A jolting bounce off a rock, a ditch or whatever, and the Ladybug finally caught air.

  GobabyGobabyGobabyGO!

  A spray of bullets pelted the plane. The trees bordering the field reached for them, tearing off the landing gear and jerking them right. KC nearly lost control as the Ladybug rolled to the side.

  Son of a…

  The right wing dipped dangerously for the trees. KC corrected, but it wasn’t enough. The wing clipped the groping vegetation, sending the plane into a tumble for the ground.

  KC clinched her eyes shut against the oncoming collision. For a moment she saw nothing. There was only the crunch of metal and the rattle of her body jerking in her seat. The controls shook violently in her hands.

  And then there was silent stillness.

  The Ladybug was quiet.

  KC opened her eyes. Through a crack in the cockpit windshield he saw the world ninety degrees from normal. Dangling awkwardly over the broken co-pilot seat, she unbuckled her safety harness and fell to the mangled ruin of her plane.

  That’s when she smelled smoke.

  “You guys all right back there?” she called, pulling herself through the horizontal cockpit frame.

  A groan returned from somewhere within the overturned cabin. KC slipped over the cracked cabin windows and noticed the metal skin of the right wing buckled just inches beneath her feet. Flames lapped through a broken window near the leaking fuselage, belching black smoke into the cabin. A voice took immediate command.

  “We have to get out of here!”

  It was Peet, emerging from the smoke with the priest thrown over his shoulder. The pale archaeologist looked near collapse himself. Clearly the landing hadn’t done any favors to his fear of flying.

  Without further hesitation, KC reached for the cabin door above her head. She flipped the locking lever, cranked it around and the door broke its seal. With a shove, she threw the door open and reached for the priest.

  “You first!” she ordered and Peet reached up and pulled himself through the opening.

  Next went the priest, hoisted out of the cabin between the two of them, and then Peet reached down, grabbed her wrists and pulled her out like a rag doll. When she stood atop the side of her demolished plane now boiling in choking black smoke, KC noticed the men—dozens of them masked in black balaclavas and pressing rifles to their shoulders.

  The muzzles were all aimed directly at them.

  There was no escape, no getting off the burning Ladybug except for the farmer’s pickup backing its crew of armed men up to the wreckage that had buzzed them moments ago.

  Zapatista

  “I knew I shouldn’t have come down here. Now I have no plane, no job… I should have gone back home after I dumped you off in Mexico City.”

  For the most part, Peet wasn’t listening to KC’s lamentations. He had other worries on his mind as they bounced in the bed of the small pickup—one in a parade of pickups, rifles and balaclavas following a two-track road that plunged deep into the humid forest. Another jungle. Where they were going Peet couldn’t say but if his previous experience with balaclavas meant anything at all, he knew he was in a bad situation.

  Peet wasn’t sure how far they’d driven through the forest when they suddenly broke into a clearing planted in corn and cocoa. In the midst of the nearby forest swells climbed a small, tin-roofed adobe village. There appeared to be nothing of consequence there, but it seemed to be the caravan’s destination. They rolled into the village where near-naked children studied them with curious, brown eyes, widened as though witnessing a Disneyland parade maneuver their rain-eroded streets. Women peered at them from airy adobe facades, slapping out tortillas in front of their hot comals.

  The caravan pulled up to a squatty, windowless block of a building, fronted by the skeletal framework of a coverless veranda. Across the blanched side of the building, just above the place where their pickup parked, were slapped the words which Peet silently translated, PEOPLE OF WHITE AND YELLOW CORN CLAIM YOUR LAND. Peet’s sketchy Spanish could translate the sign, but he couldn’t understand a word from the masked man suddenly barking orders at them as he leaped out of the back of the pickup.

>   “Just as I suspected,” Father Ruiz grumbled. “Mayas.”

  “What is he saying?” Peet asked.

  “I’m only familiar with the dialect, not the words themselves.”

  The man barked again, this time in Spanish. Even Peet understood him then and promptly climbed out of the pickup behind KC and the priest and followed them into the building.

  There was only one room inside, an open community hall, as best Peet could tell. A good hundred or so folding aluminum chairs stood propped against each other in a row lining one wall, a rudimentary stage dominated the adjoining wall. On a table just off stage left stood a carved wooden figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a fold of her long blue robe bullet-shorn just below the hip. Another slug left a ghastly hole dead center above her soft, pious eyes. There was little else to the room, except two opposing windows on the east and west walls which permitted the only light into its dim confines.

  Peet noticed his hollow footsteps as they marched through the empty room. They were dismal steps, almost captive to a death march until they stopped short behind orders to sit against the stage front. Obediently, they slid against the wooden stage until they were sitting on the floor, waiting. Waiting for what, Peet couldn’t tell. The majority of their masked captors mingled within the entryway at the other end of the room, glancing at them from time to time and speaking to each other in hushed Mayan tones. It wouldn’t have mattered if they yelled at each other since neither Peet, KC or the priest understood their language, but even without words, Peet could see their captives were uncertain what to do with them.

  “Who are these guys?” KC whispered.

  “The Zapatistas,” Father Ruiz answered flatly.

  “Now how the hell do you know that?”

  He pointed to a black banner hanging on the far wall. A lone red star boldly stood out from its center. “That is the flag for the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación National, or the EZLN. More commonly known as the Zapatistas.”