Whatever in them was human was asking for blood. Our blood.
They wanted revenge.
84
Walking with the stretcher, under the erratic beams of the flashlights, was difficult. We splashed noisily as we went, trying not to trip on the roots hidden under the several inches of water that covered the forest floor.
I could hear the professor panting ahead of me, nearly worn out by the effort of hurrying and carrying the stretcher. I was afraid he would collapse any minute.
“Come on, Doc,” I encouraged him. “You can do it!”
“I’m okay, I’m okay.”
“Don’t stop, guys,” Cassie said turning to us. “We’re nearly there.”
We all knew she was lying, but nobody said anything.
For one long minute, we stopped hearing the angry howls of the Morcegos. But for some reason, that silence was even more menacing.
I knew they were coming for us and that sudden stealth could only mean they were getting closer and ready to attack.
Suddenly the premonition became real. All the vegetation behind us seemed to come alive.
What began as no more than a whispering in the undergrowth soon became a crackling of leaves and branches. Apparently they did not mind revealing their presence, sure in the knowledge that even if we knew they were there, we had no way of escape.
At first the noise and the snarling reached us from behind, but we soon began to hear them on both sides of the invisible path we were trying to follow in the dark.
“They’re surrounding us!” Cassie cried.
As she had noticed, the Morcegos were trying to cut us off so we could not reach our shelter.
“Fire at both sides!” I urged her, panting. “Don’t let them get ahead of us!”
Immediately she opened fire to left and right with both submachine guns, riddling the impenetrable vegetation. There was no way of knowing whether she had hit any, but she was still hoping to intimidate them for long enough to give us a free run to the temple. She fired, reloaded, and fired again amid furious cries.
I could not see what was going on behind me—although it did not take too much imagination—but ahead of me was this petite Mexican girl emptying magazine after magazine in a deafening noise and a cloud of smoke. In her eye was the unmistakable gleam of the “thousand-yard look” which is the one you get when you know that is probably the last distance in your life you will manage to cover.
The detonations and the rattling of gunfire in the midst of that absolute darkness turned the scene into something apocalyptic. It did not take much effort to see ourselves as the last people on Earth, fighting for our lives against all the demons of hell.
At that moment, unexpectedly, Claudio’s voice could be heard over the shooting.
“They’re going away!” he cried behind me, his voice exultant. “We’re leaving them behind!”
It seemed unbelievable. I turned my head around just for a moment to see if he was right.
There he was, standing in the middle of the path, lifting his gun high.
And then, before my eyes, a shadow darker than the black night dropped from a tree to fall brutally on his body. He fell on his face in the muddy water, crushed by the impact.
As realization came to him, the Argentinian lifted his head from the mud, looked at us, and opened his mouth to moan for help.
The moan turned into a chilling howl of pain when the dark shadow tore open his back with its claw.
Cassie turned around. When she saw Claudio in the Morcego’s claws, she screamed with horror.
Unable to let go of Valeria’s stretcher, there was nothing I could do to help Claudio. I felt impotent, like a macabre voyeur, helpless and yet unable to look away.
Then, two more silhouettes came out of the shadows beside the path and pounced on the poor wretch. I knew he would soon be dead.
Iak was the only one with the guts to do what had to be done. With amazing sang froid he took aim and shot an arrow between those eyes that were looking at us in terror, mouth open in a silent scream as he felt the Morcegos beginning to tear him apart.
The Menkragnoti turned to us. “You all run!” he shouted. “No stop!”
For a single everlasting second, we were unable to react. The professor was the first to come out of his shock. “Let’s go!” he cried. With blasphemies I had never thought I would hear coming out of his mouth, he urged us on as we fled for our lives.
Luckily for us, the Morcegos stayed behind to tear the unfortunate Claudio’s body apart. This gave us the chance to finally reach the stairs of the temple shelter and run up them as fast as we could.
We did not stop until we reached the center of the great hall. Here we fell on the floor in a heap, feeling safe at last.
Gasping from the enormous effort, we lay on our backs on the stone floor, unable to utter a word, trying to wipe out all memory of the terrible scene we had just witnessed.
My lungs felt totally drained, and all the hot humid air of the Amazon seemed hardly enough to fill them again. The only sound audible in that huge hall, for the best part of a minute, was the coughing and gasping of the survivors.
Until a pitiful moan made me raise my head and remember Valeria, who was still lying on the stretcher. Her father was beside her, holding her hand.
“Do you know if they had any kind of first aid kit with them?” I asked Cassie as I sat up with an effort.
She looked at me from the darkness and swept her headlight along the few belongings of the by now nearly extinguished anthropological expedition from Vienna University. She finally found a small red fanny pack with a white cross on it. Rather dispiritedly, she opened it and showed me the contents: a thermometer, a tube of iodine gel, some aspirins, a pair of scissors, a roll of sticking plaster, and a small package of bandages.
“Is that all?” I asked.
“I think the Morcegos took Angelica’s medical kit the night they were attacked,” she said. “This must have been Claudio’s emergency kit.”
“There are no painkillers, nor antibiotics, nor suture thread to close the wound.”
“There’s only aspirin,” she said, “and we can’t give her those or she’ll lose even more blood.” She took out something which looked like a small tube of yellow toothpaste. “And there’s some iodine. We should’ve taken the mercenaries’ medicine kit. They must have had one at their camp.”
Cassie was right, there must have been one. But trying to get hold of it now was totally out of the question.
I clicked my tongue with irritation, angry at myself for not thinking about it at the time.
Even so, we took what little we had and cleaned Valeria’s wound with water from the canteen, then put on the token gesture of iodine.
The professor choked back a cry of horror when we took off the improvised bandages.
His daughter had three long deep gashes in her abdomen, right above her navel. Three cuts, looking as though they had been made with a scalpel, which were bleeding profusely. The blood was thick and dark, almost black.
Cassie looked at me and shook her head in silence. We both knew what that meant. Despite this she went on to disinfect the edges of the wound with iodine, then covered them with the few strips of gauze we had.
“There now, my love,” the professor said. He was holding her hand, repeating the same words over and over. “There now, you’re going to get better.”
Valeria moaned in pain.
Her father stroked her cheek with infinite tenderness and kissed her forehead. “Shh…” he whispered in her ear. “You’re going to get better, my love.” He turned to me, his reddened eyes filled with tears. “Please…” he begged. “There must be something we can do.”
There was nothing I could say. I put my arms around him and let him pour out his grief on my shoulder.
“I’m so sorry, my old friend,” I said into his ear. “So very sorry…”
He pulled away and turned to Cassie. “Aren’t there even any painkillers in that emergenc
y kit?” he asked her, pointing at the red fanny pack.
She shook her head sadly. “There’s nothing more we can do.”
The professor turned to Iak, who was still, waiting a little way away. “What about you?” he asked. It was not so much a question as a plea. “Don’t you have anything that could help her?”
The Menkragnoti thought for a moment before he answered. “She die,” he said somberly. “But I can give same medicine I give you when you have sotuto worm on the back.”
The professor jumped to his feet, ignoring the first part of the diagnosis. “Do you still have ayahuasca?”
“No ayahuasca.” He put his hand in his bag. “But if I give a lot, she sleep and not feel pain.”
“Give it to her!” the professor shouted. “What are you waiting for?”
“She lose much blood,” he replied calmly. “If Iak give to sleep maybe she not wake up.”
The professor looked doubtful at this. Desperate for reassurance, he turned to Cassie and me for confirmation.
We both nodded.
Standing beside the native, the professor turned back to his daughter just as she cried out in pain. “Give it to her,” he said. He fixed his blue eyes on the Menkragnoti’s, as blue as his own. “Give her whatever you want, for the love of God, just so she stops suffering.”
A few moments later, a fire was burning on the stone floor, with Iak boiling the bark that contained the anesthetic for Valeria.
“Tomorrow morning,” I said to Cassandra, “we’ll have to go to Souza’s camp and bring back all the medicines we can find. We’ve got to keep her alive.”
Before answering, she looked to her left, where Valeria was lying a few feet away. Her father was sitting beside her holding her hand. “She’s not going to make it,” she said in a low voice. “I know it, you know it. Even Iak knows it.”
“We’re not sure of that. Tomorrow we will be able to sew the wound and give her antibiotics.”
Cassie snorted dismissively, as though she was sorry to be having this conversation with me. “That dark blood comes from the intestines, which means internal hemorrhaging and that can’t be sewn. She’ll either bleed to death or die of blood poisoning.”
“While there’s life, there’s—”
“Don’t give me your crappy proverbs!” she said angrily. “Even we won’t be able to survive much longer here.” She gestured at the temple entrance and added, “How long do you think we can stand? A week? A month? I almost envy Valeria. At least she’ll have a quick end compared to ours.”
“Iak survived,” I said, and pointed at the Menkragnoti as living proof. “By the way,” I asked him directly, “how did you survive the night with the Morcegos wandering about?”
Fawcett’s descendant shrugged his shoulders. “They not look for me. They busy hunting you.”
“Anyway, no matter how we do it,” I said, looking at where Valeria lay, “I suggest we try to keep her alive and sedated, then find a way to get her out of here as soon as possible and take her to a hospital.”
Cassie looked at me with hard emerald eyes. “What are you talking about?” she burst out. The muscles in her jaw had tightened. “Take her to a hospital? Have you hit your head on a rock? We’ll be lucky if we survive in here a few more days. In my opinion,” she added sadly as she turned to look at Valeria, “the best thing that could happen to her is if she never woke up from Iak’s medicine.”
“Do you… want her to die?”
“She’s already dead,” she said in a whisper, lowering her gaze. “I just want to spare her any more suffering.”
“And that’s why I want to sedate her,” I said while Iak got up to take the hot brew to Valeria, “but not kill her. Let’s try to keep her alive even if it means doping her to the ears, and then we’ll see.”
Cassie shook her head again, but in the end she made a gesture that seemed to say: Do whatever you want, it’ll all be the same in the end.
I could understand Cassandra’s argument. Ultimately it was what Iak had decided to do when he saw Claudio fall into the hands of the Morcegos. Maybe it was even what I would have suggested myself in his place.
But there was something important that she did not even suspect.
Something that could make her change her mind.
There was hope.
85
A little later, while Cassie and the professor were changing Valeria’s dressings, I looked around for Iak. I had not seen him for some time.
I searched the shadows of the great hall and finally saw him by the entrance. He was crouched just inside the portico, which opened onto the night and its demons like a great square mouth.
I walked to him quietly, although I was sure he could hear me, knelt down beside him, and said in a reassuring tone: “Don’t worry. For some reason they don’t come into this place. We’re safe.”
The Menkragnoti turned his striking blue eyes to me. “How you know that?” he asked distrustfully.
“Because I’ve spent a night here and Valeria’s spent many more, and she assured me that the Morcegos have never once tried to come into this temple.”
Restless, intently observant, Iak turned once again to the darkness, focusing on something.
I did the same, but however much I strained my eyes I could see nothing but dense darkness. All the same, I had no doubt that the Morcegos were lurking out there, waiting for an opportunity to catch us.
The Menkragnoti did not take his eyes away from the shadows. “You really believe,” he asked with almost palpable unease, “this night be like the rest?”
I had also considered the possibility Iak was hinting at, but I preferred not to think about it.
But now, as I went back to where Cassie and the professor were kneeling beside Valeria, as though at a premature wake, I realized we could not ignore the reality of the situation.
“You know, just in case, I think we should build a good bonfire in front of the entrance,” I said pointing at the place where Iak was still crouching.
Cassie raised her head and looked at me in puzzlement. “Why?” she said. “You know they don’t come in here.”
“No, what I know is that they haven’t come in so far. But that doesn’t mean they won’t decide to.”
“What makes you think they might decide to break their routine precisely tonight?”
“Just that,” I replied. “Because today’s been anything but routine, wouldn’t you say?”
The two of them looked at me without a word.
After a moment Cassie stood up. “Let’s find some wood for that bonfire,” she said.
Half an hour later, we had a massive pyre of branches and tree trunks burning on the stairs that led up to the great temple door. It was primitive but reassuring, much better than simply trusting in the conditioned behavior of creatures whose way of reasoning we knew nothing about.
Valeria was sleeping soundly beside us in her stretcher under the effects of the drug Iak had given her. There was nothing else we could do for her. If it had not been for the blood that stained her clothes and the growing pile of soiled rags at her side, it would have looked as though she were simply enjoying a healing sleep by the fire.
Sleep. That was a luxury the rest of us could not indulge in, for all our deep exhaustion. It was not so much because of the danger we knew was outside those walls, more because of the terrible images we had witnessed all through that day and which we could not get out of our minds.
The professor and I were wiped out, emotionally and physically, and sat around the smaller fire in a heavy silence. My old friend seemed lost in his own thoughts, as if his body was with us but his mind was somewhere darker and more desolate.
In an attempt to think of something more trivial than the death of other people and the prospect of my own, I looked around for the damned red backpack I had put the Nazi’s notebooks in. I got them out and settled down to take a look.
I began with the notebook numbered 1 under the strange symbol of the Deut
sches Ahnenerbe. Inside the cover was what I took to be the name of the SS Officer whose body we had found.
The dense handwriting read: “Oberst. Franz Stauffel” followed by an unintelligible paragraph in which the words “Führer” and “Schutzstaffel” stood out.
Contrary to what I had expected, the following pages were not a journal of that expedition’s daily activities, but some sort of chart of accounts. A very precise listing, accompanied by numbers and dates which I supposed gave details of what they had found and where.
The lists were indecipherable to me, so with dwindling interest I turned the pages until I got to somewhere around the middle. Here the yellowed pages were blank.
This is where you end, friend Franz, I thought with a grin. You should’ve bought a smaller notebook.
Disappointed with the contents, I put it aside and for a moment had doubts about looking at the next one. But when I raised my head and saw the silent, gloomy expressions around me, I decided to read the next notebook even if there was absolutely nothing of interest in it.
I opened it at random and immediately saw that my assumption had been wrong. This one was a sketchbook.
Going back to the first page, I began to look at the detailed drawings the author had made of both the inside and outside of many places of the city, most of which I hadn’t seen.
I got as far as the page where the author had skillfully recreated the mysterious black monolith, with a German soldier standing beside it, to give the reader a sense of the monument’s size. There was also a sketch of the constellation of Orion with its pentagonal shape—so familiar in that city—and a comment about how it had formed part of the constellation of the “Great Golden Feline” of pre-Colombian cosmogony.
At that moment, I felt a ridiculous urge to show Valeria that extraordinary drawing, so relevant to what she had explained to me the day before.
With that thought I looked toward where she lay. Seeing her on that sad stretcher, drenched in her own blood, I was overwhelmed with a feeling that almost reduced me to tears.
BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2) Page 38