BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

by Fernando Gamboa

  “Well then, we’re toast,” I muttered. “If the compass is no use, I can’t think of anything else that could guide us through this goddamned labyrinth. We could be days wandering in here, looking for a way out.”

  Cassie cleared her throat to catch our attention. She passed her hand in front of the flashlight beam a couple of times and said, “In fact, I don’t think we have that long. The battery’s running out.”

  “Great.” I snorted and shook my head. “What else could go wrong?”

  As if answering this badly-timed question, we heard something that silenced us immediately. It came from the gloomy depths of that gallery, beyond the point where the fading glow of the flashlight vanished into the shadows. It was a kind of panting, like the sound a tired dog, followed by a deep growl. But it was not a dog.

  It was something bigger than that.

  Much, much bigger.

  Then, a terrible roar echoed in the darkness of the narrow stone tunnels. It raised every hair on my body and froze the blood in my veins.

  61

  “Come on, Cassie! Hurry up!”

  “I’m going as fast as I can!”

  Cassandra had given me Luizao’s Zippo with the AZS logo. Every few steps I turned around and lit it to make sure there was nothing behind me, while aiming the machine gun.

  I was terrified.

  We were not alone down there and it did not take too much imagination to guess who—or rather what—was with us in those claustrophobic tunnels.

  I was running hunched over, bumping my head all the time on the low stone ceiling, following the beam of Cassie’s flashlight ahead of me without thinking.

  She stopped at the umpteenth crossing. “We’re lost,” she said panting.

  She was also carrying Luizao’s handgun. As she turned, she leaned the dying flashlight on this and aimed it, jumpily, in every direction.

  “That doesn’t matter anymore, Cassie.”

  “But we don’t know where we’re going! We’re running blindly!”

  The terror of knowing we were lost in that labyrinth had touched us now. The atavistic fear unleashed by that roar from beyond the grave had been the last straw.

  Yet from previous experience I knew that our worst enemy was neither the mercenaries who were searching for us nor the unknown dangers lurking in the darkness. Our worst enemy was ourselves.

  To be more precise, our own unhinged minds.

  Panic is always the true danger. If we gave in to it we would end up making some fatal mistake.

  We needed to raise our spirits and calm down, whatever way we could. But of course that was easier said than done.

  “You know what I think?” I said.

  Neither of them replied, but I knew they were listening.

  I thought for a moment and then said, “Why don’t we stay right here and wait till morning?”

  “Are you serious?” the professor asked.

  “It might have slipped your mind that we’re underground,” Cassie said.

  “I’m absolutely serious, Doc. Cassie, that’s exactly why it’s a good idea. If there’s a way out of this labyrinth, we’re not going to find it in the dark. There’s not much life left in that flashlight, so why don’t we stop, wait for dawn, and search for any traces of daylight coming through from the surface?”

  “And what about that animal, or whatever it is, that’s down here with us?”

  “We don’t know what it is, Doc. But in any case”—I patted the submachine-gun—“we have enough artillery to keep any animal at bay if it comes close.”

  Once again they said nothing as they considered my suggestion. They needed something to hold onto, and I had just provided it.

  “It might work…” the professor said at last.

  Cassandra agreed reluctantly. “What’s pretty clear is that running around in the dark isn’t doing much to help.”

  “That’s it, then,” I said. “Dawn should come in less than three hours, so I suggest we rest till then. Let’s switch off the flashlight to save on the battery, then we can calm down and stop thinking about mercenaries, or animals chasing us, or anything else like that.”

  Cassie turned off the flashlight, and in the blink of an eye we were enveloped in a thick darkness.

  It was not the comfortable darkness of shadows and suggestions of outlines. It was not even a darkness of noise and whispers, like that of the rainforest. It was a palpable, overwhelming darkness in which only the gentle brush of our bodies against the water assured us that we had not gone deaf as well as blind.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever… ever been in a place as dark as this,” Cassie whispered.

  A certain tight spot we had been in together came to my mind. “I don’t remember there being much more light in that Mexican cenote,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” she said after a moment. “But at least that time we didn’t have to turn the flashlight off.”

  It was true. The previous year we had been involved in the search for the mythical treasure of the Templar Knights, and among other adventures, this had involved us risking our lives in some unknown underwater caves in southern Mexico.

  On that occasion, as Cassie had said, we had two flashlights. And despite the great danger we were in, at least we had some idea of what we were doing and where we were going.

  But now it was different.

  Now we were stuck, waiting. With nothing else to do but let our senses, already affected by our imagination, wander along these flooded tunnels like tentacles feeling for whatever might help to feed our worst fears.

  Despite this, all we could perceive was a dismal darkness with no gaps in it and a silence that was thick, dirty, warm: like an eerie breath on the back of our necks that we couldn’t get rid of.

  There are many types of silence.

  There are comforting silences, transcendental ones, lonely or sad ones…

  This one was evil.

  I could not explain why. There are atavistic reactions which are beyond reason, engraved as if with fire on our genetic memory. They only awake in extreme situations, when the animal core of our brain tells us it is time to hide, fight or flee.

  At that moment mine was shouting at me at the top of its voice. It was telling me to start running and not stop until I got home.

  That is why I nearly jumped out of my clothes when the professor asked, in an undeniably shaky voice, “What could have… roared? Do you think it was the same thing that… beheaded the mercenary?”

  We did not answer. In part because we did not know, mostly because we did not want to know.

  “Ulysses is the only one who saw anything.” Cassie was pretty good at concealing her fear, but it still filtered through every word she spoke.

  “I already told you that I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know what I saw… and obviously I have no idea what killed Luizao. I thought I saw some kind of… long arms that were holding him in the air.” The image I did not want to remember leapt up in my mind. “But that’s all, and surely it can’t have anything to do with the roar we heard. Maybe it was a howler monkey that fell in that hole, just like we did.”

  “A monkey?” Cassandra said. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Yeah, a monkey. Why not?”

  “It didn’t sound like a monkey to me.”

  “I’m just thinking out loud. Maybe it wasn’t a monkey after all, but a jaguar.”

  “You know what?” the professor said before Cassie and I could end up in another argument. “This would be a good time to talk about what’s going on.”

  “What’s going on?” I exploded with all the pent-up anger that had built up inside me. “What’s going on is that those bastards of the AZS want to flood the region for their fucking dam, and they can’t afford to have anybody revealing the existence of this place. That’s why they want to get rid of us and that’s why we’re here, lost in a fucking prehistoric sewer, fleeing from a bunch of guys with guns who’re trying to kill us. That’s what’s going on!”
>
  “So, you mean you’re convinced they already knew about the Black City?” he said, forcing his voice to stay as cool as a father trying to calm down an overexcited kid.

  “Is there any doubt? They must have come upon it during some previous scouting mission. Maybe years before they started building.”

  “That’s why they had no trouble locating us,” Cassie said thoughtfully, “and why they didn’t react to the ruins. The hydroplane that brought us belonged to the company too. And they knew where we were headed. They only had to put two and two together.”

  “With the wisdom of hindsight,” the professor said with a touch of regret, “it does make sense.”

  “Look at the bright side,” I suggested. “Now we have one more reason to get out of here alive: to sue the construction company.”

  “I agree. After we find Valeria, of course.”

  “Don’t you worry, Doc. We’re not leaving here without your daughter.”

  It was an empty promise, as I knew perfectly well, Cassandra knew, and of course, so did the professor. But empty though it might be, it was still comforting.

  To be honest, I thought it would take a miracle to find the professor’s daughter by now, even assuming she was still alive, which I very much doubted. But if there ever was a moment that justified a white lie, it was no doubt this one.

  “Thanks to both of you. Without you I wouldn’t have got as far as this.”

  “You don’t need to thank us for anything,” Cassie said. “Besides, if we hadn’t come with you, we wouldn’t have discovered this incredible archeological site.”

  Unable to restrain myself, I was going to tell Cassie how little excitement those piles of abandoned stone stirred in me when a gust of putrid air reached my nostrils, and the words died in my throat.

  I had breathed that smell before.

  It was the smell of death.

  Holding my breath and with my heart galloping in my chest, I reached into my shirt pocket, drew out the lighter, and lifted the cap with a click that sounded like a slamming door. I made an effort to control my panic and pressed the little steel wheel.

  I stretched my arm out into the darkness, very slowly, as I heard the ghost of a rasping breath.

  62

  The fire of the little flame lit up the narrow passage with a tiny explosion of light. A light that did not reach further away than a few feet into that dense darkness, and which revealed a vision like something out of the most disturbing nightmare.

  Just beyond my outstretched arm was a menacing black silhouette. It was roughly human, but all out of proportion and huge: a tall, lean, uncouth figure with neverending knotty arms that were reaching for me threateningly. They had the same long fingers, with claws sharp as knives, that I had seen tearing off the head of a man.

  But that was not the most terrifying thing.

  It was worse to be suddenly aware that there was less than a second left before that hallucination jumped on me.

  The inadequate blue flame of the lighter managed to stretch that second out as it surprised the monster an instant before attacking from the shadows. It was a ridiculous little flash, but it was unexpected enough to stop him in his tracks.

  Not only that. Dazzled, the creature clapped his left arm to his face of evil features, to protect his huge black eyes from the light. Then he took a step back, bellowing furiously, surprised and angered by the brief flash.

  All this happened in the course of one second. Two at the most.

  By the third second I was already yelling myself hoarse as I wielded the machine gun I still had across my shoulders. I put my finger to the trigger and pulled with all my strength, not bothering to aim.

  But all that resulted was a disappointing click. The safety catch was still on.

  I felt for the catch without lowering my gaze. Unfortunately, in that poor light and with my nerves on edge, it eluded me.

  At that moment, Cassie shone the flashlight in my direction, and I finally managed to find the damned thing. But when I lifted my eyes, the abomination had vanished into the darkness as if it had never been there.

  In any case, that brief instant when we had met face to face had been long enough to let me recognize those enormous eyes, that jutting jaw, those sharp teeth, and that absurdly elongated skull.

  I had just faced the same creature I had seen the day before, sculpted in stone. Only this one was real.

  Very real.

  And it was coming for me.

  For a moment which seemed an eternity the three of us remained motionless, in absolute silence. Like the child that suddenly wakes up from a nightmare and looks toward the doorway, expecting any minute to see the profile of the monster that has terrorized his dream.

  “Is it gone?” Cassie whispered.

  I waited a second to answer, just so that my voice would not tremble.

  “Looks like it.”

  “What do you think it was?” the professor muttered.

  “I’ve no idea,” I said as I tried to regain some sort of calm. “All I know is, it was about to attack me.”

  “But… was it a man or an animal?”

  “You tell me, Doc. I’m just a simple diver.”

  “I thought I heard you say something under your voice,” Cassie said as she swept the flashlight from one end of the corridor to the other. “Something about how it looked just like the carving we found that first day, at the top of the pyramid.”

  “No, Cassie. I said it was one of those things, not that it looked like one.”

  “But that’s…” The professor hesitated, but finally said, “That’s impossible. Those stone reliefs are allegorical representations, pure metaphors.”

  “I give you my word there was nothing metaphorical about what I just saw. Besides, as far as I know, metaphors don’t smell of rotting flesh.”

  “That’s true,” Cassie said, “I smelt it too. It was disgusting.”

  The professor, who in all that confusion had not really seen anything, insisted. “But the images we found must be hundreds, maybe thousands of years old. How can a civilization have died out, and yet the images of demons it made have come to life?”

  “How the hell do I know? Perhaps those things were the civilization!”

  The professor and Cassie shook their heads at the same time. She pointed above our heads.

  “The people who built a city like this would hardly be going around cutting off heads, would they? Or crawling through sewers.”

  “Haven’t you read The Road?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that at least in literature and cinema, after a civilization collapses, its “civilized” citizens end up turning into savages or zombies.”

  She clicked her tongue.

  “That only happens in movies, Ulysses,” she said disdainfully. “There have been all sorts of examples of great civilizations that have fallen, but even though they might have gone back a few centuries, they’ve never turned into beasts.”

  “There’s always a first time.”

  I must confess…” the professor said thoughtfully, “that your theory, extravagant as it sounds, can’t be entirely discounted. Although you’re missing the fact that what we saw carved on that wall wasn’t a human being.”

  I stared down at the machine gun that had proven so useless. “Demon is good enough for me,” I said.

  “The truth is that whatever they are, those things already have a name,” Cassie said nonchalantly.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Don’t you realize, Ulysses?” She attempted a wry grin. “We just saw a Morcego.”

  Cassie’s revelation, obvious as it was, did not help me see those creatures in a kinder light.

  Rather the opposite, after the horrors we had been told about them.

  But either way it hardly mattered. The only truth was that we still had to get out of that sewer, and that the rats living in it were more than six feet tall and looked like aliens from outer space.


  “Do you still think it’s a good idea to stay here?”

  Cassie’s question took me by surprise.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I did not feel up to thinking. “Have you thought of anything else?”

  She did not answer me directly. “Now they know where we are.”

  “Even if we left, they’d find us again.”

  “Perhaps they would… but, at least in Mexico, perhaps is always better than for sure.”

  I could not help but agree with the aphorism, so I nodded.

  “All right. The argument might be weak, but you’ve convinced me. What do you think, Doc?”

  He was leaning against the wall, his face the picture of weariness, shoulder to shoulder with Cassandra. He opened his mouth to answer, but then frowned in disgust, wrinkled his nose theatrically, and looked from one side to another. “Can you smell that?” he asked uneasily.

  “Shit!” I said. “They’re back!”

  I did not think twice this time. The safety catch was off, so I fired a round of bullets into the darkness, saturating the air with smoke and dust.

  “Come on, Cassie!” I yelled, without stopping to turn. “Start running and don’t stop for anything, do you hear me?”

  I lit the Zippo but this time I could not see a thing. The strong stink, though, indicated they were very close.

  I heard Cassandra and the professor splashing as they went deeper into the tunnels. I set off after them, running backward, lighting the Zippo every now and then and praying that I would not come face to face with one of those creatures again.

  Cassie kept yelling at the weary Eduardo, pushing him as she went. At the same time I urged them to keep up the pace. The stink of rotten flesh, far from fading, was growing stronger.

  I heard, or at least thought I heard, a snort coming from the dark only a few steps away from me. I pulled the trigger and fired at random, until the deafening rattle of the weapon stopped echoing on the stone walls.

  I had emptied the magazine.

  Then I remembered that the ammunition we had taken from Luizao’s body was still in Cassie’s trouser pockets.