Age of Aztec

by James Lovegrove

  When dawn arrived, the air turned to steam. The guerrillas resumed their journey in better spirits than before, strolling along, chatty and cheery. Stuart himself felt his mood lighten with every step, and his clothes lighten too as they gradually dried out. When Chel paused to take a compass bearing, Stuart asked how much further they had to go and was pleased to learn that it was only another day’s walk. Tomorrow morning at the latest they would reach their destination. If it had still been raining, he wouldn’t have dared ask. Any answer would have been too depressing.

  By the middle of the day, the heat had become ferocious, accompanied by a humidity that sapped the life out of you. Even the Mayans, who had struck Stuart as indefatigable, began to drag their feet. The air was a thick, unbreathable broth. Zotz collected some berries from a guarana vine and passed them round for all to munch on. The caffeine in the bitter-tasting fruit helped, giving an energy surge, but tiredness soon set in again. After a while every step was an effort. Clothing became wringing wet again, now with sweat.

  Chel sensibly decided they should make camp early. A fire was lit – a minor miracle – and hot stew was consumed. For Stuart it was a pleasure beyond all reckoning just to sit on the forest floor, not moving, with his bare blistered feet stretched towards the flames, soles gently warming. None of the forced marches he’d undergone during his Eagle Warrior training could compare to the yomp he was on right now. He couldn’t find a part of his body that didn’t ache. It took all his remaining strength just to crawl under canvas and lay himself out on a blanket; he was asleep before he knew it.

  And awake again, in the darkest part of the night. Someone was yelling frantically. Stuart scrambled out into the open. All the guerrillas were up, milling about. It took a while for the cause of the commotion to become clear.

  One man, Tohil, had got up and gone to the edge of the campsite to relieve himself. Mid-flow, he’d spotted something between the trees. A shape. A person. Watching him.

  Tohil had let out a cry of surprise and the watcher had fled.

  No, not fled.

  Kind of vanished.

  Definitely vanished.

  Melted into the darkness as though being swallowed up by ink.

  And Tohil was sure – not absolutely sure, but pretty sure – that it had been a woman. The watcher had had a female silhouette. Not too tall. He’d glimpsed the contours of hips and breasts.

  The other guerrillas scoffed. “A woman? You don’t think you just imagined it? You were maybe asleep and dreamed her?” Snide allusions were made to Tohil’s manliness and how long it had been since he’d last had a girlfriend.

  Tohil became indignant, insisting he had seen something. But the more he protested, the louder the mockery grew. Eventually he stomped off to his tent, muttering under his breath.

  Only Stuart considered his claims with any seriousness.

  Was it possible? Could DCI Vaughn have followed him to Anahuac? Be on his trail now?

  No. Absurd. How could he even think it? Vaughn was still in London. Had to be. There was, in fact, every chance that she was dead. If she hadn’t been killed when the Xibalba van hit the paddy wagon, the Jaguar Warrior code of honour would have swiftly remedied that situation. A high-profile murder suspect had been snatched from right under her nose. You couldn’t cock up an arrest that badly and expect to be allowed to live.

  If Tohil was right and a woman had been spying on the guerrillas’ camp, it wasn’t Chief Inspector Malinalli Vaughn.

  Which, Stuart was bemused to find himself thinking, was a pity.

  FOURTEEN

  7 Dog 1 Lizard 1 House

  (Tuesday 11th December 2012)

  THE FOURTH AND final day of the journey began innocuously enough. After a breakfast of maize cake and dried broad beans, Stuart and the guerrillas tramped off, reassured by Chel that there were ten miles remaining, perhaps less. Stuart’s inner compass told him they weren’t far from Lake Texcoco. They had more or less retraced his and Zotz’s river recce trip, overland.

  The mood was genial.

  That changed when one of the guerrillas spotted something overhead. Among the leaves. Too large to be a monkey.

  It was there one moment, gone the next. Nobody else saw it.

  “A jaguar?” Chel suggested.

  It could have been. The big cats did sometimes lurk in trees, balancing on a thick branch, poised to pounce on prey below.

  But whatever the guerrilla had seen was larger, he said, than a jaguar. And he could have sworn it had flown upwards as it disappeared from view. On wings that shimmered like a hummingbird’s. A hummingbird the size of a human.

  Tohil was gleeful. “Hey, so I wasn’t imagining things last night, was I? There was someone watching us.”

  “Something’s going on, that’s for certain,” growled Chel.

  “We’re close to enemy territory,” said Stuart. “Your men are getting jumpy.”

  “My men don’t get jumpy,” Chel snapped. “I’ve been feeling it since we struck camp. Haven’t you?”

  “Feeling what?”

  “That we’re being followed. Stalked.”

  “By something up in the trees?”

  “Not just there. Behind us as well.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “He’s not,” said Zotz. “I’ve noticed it too. I didn’t want to say anything, so as not to spark alarm, but I’m convinced we’re not alone.”

  “But who? A forest tribe?”

  “Not round here.”

  “Jaguar Warriors?”

  “I don’t think so. They’re not nearly this subtle.”

  “Serpents, then.”

  “Again, I don’t think so. They’re good, but this isn’t their style. Why follow us when they could just as easily ambush us?”

  “Maybe there’s only one or two of them. They’re waiting for reinforcements.”

  “No,” said Zotz. “It’s something else. Something I can’t figure out. Whoever they are, it isn’t natural, what they can do. They’re as stealthy as spiders.”

  “We have to keep going,” said Chel. “But we should break out the weapons.”

  The guerrillas armed themselves from their backpacks. In addition to bolas and blowpipe, they had brought along more contemporary items, including a stolen lightning gun and several conventional rifles and pistols. Stuart was glad to strap his rapier on again and have his flechette gun holstered at his hip.

  They carried on in silence, bunched together, aiming wary looks in all directions. The forest seemed denser and more oppressive. Every shadow held something. The moss on the tree trunks took on humanoid shapes. Leaves made faces.

  One of the Mayans suddenly opened fire. A couple of the others joined in. They raked a thicket of rattan palm with bullets, scything the stems and spiky fronds. Chel ordered them to stop. As the echoes rumbled away across the hills he demanded to know why they were shooting.

  “I heard a sound,” said the man who had started it off. “A rustling.”

  “And I fired because he did,” said one of the others, and the third nodded in agreement.

  Chel approached the demolished thicket and peered in. He gave a sour smile.

  “Unless we’re being hunted by agoutis, I think we’re all right.”

  Everyone took a look at the bullet-riddled remains of the agouti. There wasn’t much of it left, but it was still just identifiable as a harmless rodent.

  Nervous laughter was accompanied by quips at the expense of the men who’d let rip with their guns. “Fancied some lunch, did you?” “What’s next, a big scary guinea pig?” and so on.

  “Onward, men,” said Chel. “And less of the itchy trigger fingers, if you don’t mind. Those reports will have carried for miles, and who knows who might have heard them.”

  An hour later, they took a break beside a stream. Cigars were smoked, water boiled for tea.

  Over the next ridge, Chel promised, lay their final destination. The trip was nearly over. There’d be food and beds, a r
oof over one’s head. All the comforts of home.

  Still, no one could quite relax. Even Stuart, who had little in the way of jungle instinct, was convinced they were not alone. There was someone out there lurking, observing him and the band of guerrillas. He felt this not just because the Mayans were thoroughly spooked: he could actually sense eyes on him. That primitive, ingrained intuition. You knew when you were being watched. You just knew. He’d experienced it in London and had assumed it was the Jaguars keeping tabs on him – although it had in fact been Xibalba as well – and he was feeling it again, now, strongly.

  The guerrillas were preparing to move out again when Zotz noticed the ants.

  He drew everyone’s attention to the insects quietly, calmly. Remaining unflappable whatever the circumstances was one of Zotz’s defining characteristics.

  “They’re big ones,” he said. “Everybody keep still. Let’s see where they’re going.”

  The ants marched in a column, a dozen abreast, trickling out from the undergrowth like a leaking liquid. They were big, each the size of an infant’s finger, and they were red-brown, the colour of dried blood. They were coming straight towards the cluster of men, thousands of antennae and legs bristling.

  “Sauba ants,” Chel murmured. “Don’t let any get on you. They’re leaf cutters. Very sharp mandibles, very powerful too. They’ll give you a nasty bite and won’t let go.”

  Then another of the Mayans let out a hiss of dismay.

  “There’s more,” he said. “Coming the other way. Look.”

  A second column of sauba ants appeared from the opposite direction. They headed towards the first as if on a collision course. The guerrillas were sandwiched in between.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Chel. “This doesn’t happen. Ants go outwards from the central nest. They send out foraging parties in a radial pattern. You don’t get two lots at once like this.”

  “No one told that to these ants,” Stuart remarked. “Maybe they’re from different nests.”

  “Who cares?” said Tohil. “I’m not hanging around. I’m going that way.” He pointed to the side, away from both ant columns. Then his face fell. “Oh, fucking balls. There’s even more of them.”

  A third contingent of ants had appeared, approaching perpendicular to the other two. The guerrillas backed away, gathering in a huddle at the stream’s edge, clutching their weapons. All at once blowpipes, even guns, seemed wholly inadequate. You couldn’t deter ants with a bullet or a dart.

  The three columns of ants met and merged in the middle of the clearing. They became a single, almost perfectly circular carpet which expanded outwards as more of them fed into it. The perimeter of the carpet crept towards the guerrillas’ feet.

  “Cross the stream,” said Chel.

  His men didn’t need to be told twice. They splashed through the knee-deep water, retreating to the far side. There they waited to see what the ants would do next.

  Watching the insects, Stuart felt a horrified fascination, which he saw reflected in the expressions of the Mayans. Whether or not what the sauba ants were doing was standard practice for their species, there was something uncanny in the organisation they showed, the precision with which they coordinated themselves. It could of course be pure coincidence that they’d flowed in and overrun the space where a group of humans had happened to be sitting. But there seemed an element of deliberateness, even vindictiveness, in their actions. They’d not simply taken over, they’d ousted and occupied.

  And that wasn’t the end of it.

  Out of the scurrying ground-swirl of ants a pillar began to rise. It grew upwards, ant clambering over ant to add to it. Moments later a second pillar sprang up alongside. Each was several inches in diameter, and they climbed in parallel to a height of a metre or more.

  Then ants at the summits of both formed horizontal chains which reached out towards each other. The two chains joined, locking into position, and hundreds more ants charged up the pillars and got busy constructing a central pillar on top, this one oval in cross-section and as thick as a watermelon.

  “I don’t fucking believe it,” Stuart said in English. The Mayans didn’t understand the words, but they recognised the tone well enough and echoed the sentiment in Nahuatl.

  The central pillar mounted and swelled before branching out on either side. The ants were now building downwards as well as up. Two new long extrusions descended while a third, a sphere, formed in the middle at the top. It was obvious – eerily obvious – that the ants were working according to a specific plan. This was no random agglomeration. It had purpose and design.

  Chel was the one who identified it first – saw the pattern, the overall aim.

  “A figure. Fuck my mother, a human figure.”

  And it was. It could be nothing else. Thousand upon thousand of the sauba ants had come together to create a life-size mannequin, a shifting thing composed of hard little bodies whose exoskeletons glittered dully in the sun. The head was bulbous, the limbs stocky and featureless, but it was unmistakably a representation of a person.

  All of a sudden the ten-foot span of the stream didn’t seem wide enough. Stuart wanted to be as far away as was humanly possible from this... this thing.

  Then the ant mannequin raised an arm towards the guerrillas.

  As one, the Xibalba men responded with an involuntary communal groan of horror. Stuart joined in.

  That was when Ah Balam Chel, who had the lightning gun and more presence of mind than most, decided enough was enough. He slapped down the l-gun’s charge lever. He rotated the setting dial to maximum. The men beside him were still giving voice to their dread, and the ant mannequin still lifting its arm with appalling, zombie-like slowness, the sauba ants clambering over each other. A light winked blue on the side of the lightning gun, signalling readiness. Chel took aim and pulled the trigger.

  The plasma bolt blasted the ant mannequin, dead centre in its body mass. One moment there was a rust-coloured figure on the other side of the stream. The next, it had disintegrated into several thousand individual components. Ants and bits of ant sprayed everywhere like confetti.

  The parts of the mannequin not directly hit by the l-gun collapsed. The carpet of ants in which the figure had stood recoiled, a shockwave passing through it in concentric ripples. Order became chaos. The sauba ants dashed in all directions in a mad panic. They disappeared into the undergrowth they had emerged from, a marauding army put to rout. In less than a minute all that remained of them was a scattering of body parts on the ground – charred abdomens, frazzled thoraxes, tiny exploded heads, legs fried to a crisp.

  It was a while before anybody could speak.

  “We imagined that, right?” said one of the Mayans. “Please tell me we did. Too damn long in the forest. A mass hallucination.”

  “I wish it was,” said Zotz.

  “What the hell is going on?” said Tohil. “I mean, that wasn’t just ants. That was... ants gone crazy.”

  Stuart looked at Chel.

  “I don’t think,” the Xibalba leader began, “that that was anything. Ants can arrange themselves into structures. It’s been recorded. Bridges across crevices, between trees, to reach food or prey. Huge ball-shaped bivouacs that serve as temporary nests while they’re migrating. This was just that.”

  “But it looked like –”

  Chel chopped Tohil off, his voice an axe. “It didn’t look like anything. We thought it did, but it didn’t. Our minds made us think what we were seeing was a particular shape, but that was an accident of vision. The tendency people have to – what’s the word? – anthropomorphise things.”

  “But you yourself said –”

  “I was wrong,” Chel snapped, shouldering the l-gun. “I was wrong and that’s an end of it. Nothing just happened. We saw some ants, that is all, nothing more. Am I making myself clear?”

  There were hesitant nods all round.

  “Good. Then gather up your belongings and let’s get on with it.”

  He
set off at a fast lick. Everyone else exchanged glances and the odd shrug, and followed.

  Stuart reckoned he wasn’t alone in thinking that Ah Balam Chel had been too quick to debunk the bizarre phenomenon they had all just witnessed.

  The man’s eyes had given it away.

  He was profoundly unnerved and did not like feeling that way. Did not like it at all.

  FIFTEEN

  Same Day

  COME NOON, THEY emerged into a large clearing in the forest. The first thing Stuart noticed was a medium-range aerodisc parked on the grass. It was hard to miss, as it filled a good two thirds of the available space. A huge square of camouflage netting was stretched over it, with a garnish of vines, moss and other plant matter to make the disguise complete. The disc would be impossible to spot from the air, even to a vessel passing just a couple of hundred feet above.

  Near the aerodisc was a small plank-built cabin, its roof so overgrown with foliage that it too was effectively camouflaged. Beside the cabin sat a row of tents, military issue, made of green jungle-pattern canvas. A small waterfall gurgled nearby, cascading into a deep, limpid pool. The surrounding trees formed a sturdy stockade.

  This was the forward operating base Chel had spoken of.

  A pretty, petite woman stepped out from behind one of the legs of the aerodisc’s landing gear. She was dressed in dungarees and wiping her hands on an oily rag. Seeing Chel, she let out a cry of delight and made a beeline for him. She leapt on him, scissoring her legs around his waist, and they kissed passionately for several minutes, or at least so it seemed to those watching.