BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

by Fernando Gamboa

  Was this what was in store for all of us?

  I swallowed. Dragging my eyes away from the anthropologist, who was fortunately sedated, I lost myself once again in the notebook on my knees.

  I turned the page, and the first thing I thought when I saw the next drawing was that it was something I had already seen. It showed a series of bas-reliefs, faithfully drawn, and I thought they were the ones that lay under my feet, in the cellar of that temple. But when I looked at them more closely, I realized they were different. Different symbols. And the story they related was a very different one.

  I began to study them carefully, trying to follow the plot just as I had with the ones that told the story of the Ancients, reading them like somebody following a comic book written in an unknown language.

  As before, some of the details were lost, but the story had been chiseled on stone—and then copied by a skilled draftsman—so that anyone, whatever time or culture he or she belonged to, could understand it without the help of a written text.

  In this way I turned page after page, trying to take in all the detail, my eyes growing wider and wider as I went on. I turned back several times to make sure I had not misunderstood anything. I went over each stroke, like a calligrapher, fearful I might skip over some fragment of narrative that might alter the meaning of what I was interpreting.

  Twenty pages later I reached the end of the reproduction of that unknown relief, and given the unbelievable story told in it, I wondered for a moment if it was pure invention.

  But after thinking about it for a while, with my gaze lost in the flames of the fire, I came to the conclusion that what I had just seen was nothing less than the painstaking reproduction of a real carving. A carving that must have been inside some building unknown to us.

  I wondered if that mural could be in some dark chamber in the depths of the city, in the diabolical underground realm of the Morcegos.

  It would make complete sense, because that was the subject of the story: the Morcegos.

  Or to be precise, the true origin of the Morcego people.

  86

  Instead of explaining what I had found in that sixty-year-old notebook with its brown leather binding, I urged them to find out for themselves. I had to shake the professor to get him out of his catatonic state, but soon the four of us, Iak included, were poring over the book. Cassie turned the last page with infinite care, and we came to the end of the story.

  Three minutes later, she shut the book abruptly as though afraid something evil might escape from it.

  She was also the one who made the first comment, even though it was hardly a strictly academic one. “Bloody bastards sons of la chingada…” she muttered. “How could they have done a thing like that?”

  No one argued against Cassandra’s way of phrasing it.

  Mainly because we all thought the same.

  The obvious reason was what we had learned from the drawings in those pages.

  According to the hundreds of engravings—which left room for very few doubts—it seemed that the Ancients had regarded themselves as chosen by the gods to rule the world. They alone had been given the knowledge which allowed them to create a writing system and an alphabet, not to mention techniques for building great temples, increasing their harvests, and improving their cattle through selection and crossbreeding. Naturally, all this meant that not only were their living standards raised far above those of their neighbors, so was their sense of their own importance. Inevitably, this led them to spread outward, seeking to dominate those others, and ultimately to military confrontation.

  The leaders of the Ancients realized that war against the villagers on their borders was imminent and made use of the rudimentary knowledge of genetics and hereditary transmission they had learned with their farm animals. They ordered their wise men to begin an unthinkable experiment.

  Using their experience of crossing horses, dogs, or oxen to obtain certain desired characteristics—faster horses, fiercer dogs or bigger oxen—they thought of doing the same with humans, or rather with what they considered to be subhuman beings.

  Apparently they would take prisoners from the region south of their kingdom (the professor suggested these could have been black Africans). They selected and mated the ones who met certain requirements of size, courage, and strength. Then their children were modified from infancy using primitive but evidently effective techniques. They made their limbs longer, kept them in darkness so they would develop night vision, and modeled their skulls and jaws with frames and molds that horribly deformed them.

  Once these people reached sexual maturity, they were forced to mate. This way their “creators” emphasized those characteristics they were searching for.

  For tens, even hundreds of generations they selected the features of those individuals who came closest to their sinister ideal. They managed to create some extraordinarily strong individuals to be laborers, as well as other especially attractive ones to use as sexual slaves.

  But most of all they achieved the underlying aim of this perverse experiment, which was none other than to use these techniques of physical alteration and brutal psychological conditioning to create a new race of terrifying, merciless warriors.

  Nevertheless, fate—or the gods, according to the authors of the engravings—decided to play the apocalyptic card and punish the arrogance of the Ancients. Their incipient empire of terror was wrecked, forcing them to cross the Atlantic with their few surviving ships.

  At this point the story of the Ancients and their genetic experiments should have ended with an act of contrition in which they repented their soulless pride. But this was not to be.

  Far from repenting, taking no notice of these exhibitions of divine fury, they brought a number of pairs of those wretched creatures with them to the New World. Then when they built the Black City, where we were now, they gave over the underground spaces of the city as living space for their deadly creations.

  The underground labyrinth we had followed, which the professor had identified wrongly as a sewage system, were really the streets of a city far removed from the light of day, home to those beings and their descendants.

  The copy of the engravings, so faithfully reproduced in the Nazi officer’s notebook, ended with a chilling image. Here those misshapen beings with their huge claws and elongated skulls worshipped a colossal statue which represented their masters and creators. It was a permanent reminder of those who had shaped them and to whom they owed blind obedience.

  There was no doubt that this was the same statue we had found covered to the top of its head by human remains.

  There was no mention in that story of the final fate of the Ancients, but at least it answered some of the questions we had asked about the nature and origin of the bloodthirsty demons.

  The Morcegos had not arrived from anywhere else. They had been the first inhabitants of that city they had built at the orders of their masters, with their own hands, stone by stone, thousands of years before.

  A city which was now in ruins, but of which, in all justice, they were legitimate owners.

  Because they were the last inhabitants of the Black City.

  It was their only home.

  As soon as we came out of the shock of that revelation, Cassandra, the professor, and I began to argue about what it all meant. Iak, still not trusting the apparent quietness of the Morcegos, preferred to go back to the entrance and keep watch.

  “But this “experiment” must have gone on for centuries. You can’t breed humans as if they were poodles. Besides… there’s something in all this that doesn’t quite add up,” Cassie said with disgust.

  “What do you mean?” the professor asked.

  “I mean I understand perfectly well what these drawings want to show. But what I find really hard to believe is that just by crossing some humans with others, you can create these… aberrations.”

  “I find it strange too,” I said. “I didn’t think this could be done to human beings.”


  Eduardo ran his fingers through his beard. “Well, after all, Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin set out the natural laws very clearly almost two hundred years ago, didn’t they?”

  Cassandra replied with unexpected sharpness: “Darwin? The theory of evolution has nothing to do with this.”

  It took the professor, perhaps surprised by Cassie’s tone, a moment to answer. “You’re wrong, my dear,” he corrected her. “During his famous voyage aboard the Beagle, which gave rise to his theory of evolution, he found that on every island of the Galápagos archipelago the same animal species had adapted in a different way to the different environments, to the extent of developing different behaviors and physical characteristics. For example,” he went on, filling his lungs, as if he were giving a lecture, “Darwin identified fourteen different finches which, although they all came from a common ancestor, had evolved in a very different way according to the resources available. So that some had spectacularly changed their appearance and size depending on whether they ate cacti, seeds, or fruits, and at the same time the shape of their beaks and their feeding habits had adapted to the available sources of food. They even went to surprising extremes, like Geospiza Difficilis Septentrionales, commonly known as the Vampire finch.”

  “Vampire finch?” I repeated, sure that he was joking. “Do you mean to say they—”

  “They feed on blood,” the professor confirmed. “The blood of other birds, usually.”

  “I had no idea…” I admitted, surprised.

  Cassie shook her head skeptically. “That doesn’t prove anything,” she said. “Human beings aren’t three-inch-long birds!”

  “But we’re animals, aren’t we?” The professor challenged her raising his eyebrows. “And that means that if you have the knowledge and time enough to breed for hereditary modifications, the principle is exactly the same.”

  “How can it be the same?” I asked. “Birds are one thing, but humans—”

  “A gene is a gene,” he said spreading his arms wide. “Whether it’s human or bird or cockroach, the possibility of modifications is identical in all cases. I trust you’re not going to bring up the divinity of humanity and such baloney.”

  “Okay, but even so, these experiments of the Ancients must have ended centuries ago,” I said. I thought I had found a flaw in his reasoning. “I can accept that physical modifications might stay true over time if the Morcegos go on mating among themselves, but what do you have to say about their behavior? If it’s five hundred generations since their masters were here to keep them acting murderously, why are they still doing it?”

  Cassie nodded. “That’s right. No matter how much humans might be physically modified, they don’t have that natural tendency toward extreme violence. In fact, I don’t know of any animal in the whole world as aggressive as the Morcegos. Not even sharks, tigers, or the deadliest snakes are anywhere near as brutal as they are.”

  The professor shrugged his shoulders looking tired. “I don’t have all the answers, Ms. Brooks. But all the examples you’ve mentioned are creatures which have evolved naturally over hundreds of thousands of years. What’s out there, on the other hand”—he glanced at the entrance for a second—“those… monsters, are anything but natural. They have been transformed over thousands of years. They were human to begin with, but they aren’t any longer, and we can’t even begin to guess how those changes affected their brains and turned them into something else, something outside the natural laws of evolution.”

  “Turning them into killing machines,” I pointed out following his reasoning.

  This time Cassie did not argue against him. In the light of my old friend’s explanations, that madness seemed to begin to make some warped sense.

  I pointed to the journal and said: “What it doesn’t mention here is why these creatures stink like dead dogs.”

  “Yes say.” Iak had come closer without our noticing. He took the notebook and opened it at a particular page. “Here is answer.”

  We all looked curiously at what the Menkragnoti wanted to show us. Soon enough I began to make out the familiar silhouettes of the Morcegos. A man in a tunic seemed to be telling them what to do with their dead enemies.

  At first I did not understand clearly what I was looking at. Or perhaps my brain simply refused to accept it.

  “Ugh, it can’t be…” Cassie muttered in disgust.

  Then I realized that it was not my own twisted mind playing tricks on me.

  Perfectly drawn on the page, we could see how they were taught to dismember the fallen enemies, feed on them, and finally rub their own skin with the blood and viscera of their victims.

  That explained not only the nauseating stench that emanated from them, but also the blackness of their skin, which was partly the result of the layers of dry blood and dirt which had accumulated over a whole lifetime.

  It’s not surprising that they struck the fear of God into anyone who dared oppose the Ancients, I thought. Or that people took them for demons.”

  “Why is it that the people who think they were chosen by God always end up as true sons of bitches?” I muttered gruffly.

  “Wait a minute, Ulysses” the professor said. “You can’t judge those people by the standards of our western civilization. Nowadays there are still caste systems in India, slavery in Africa, and discrimination against women in many countries, where they’re regarded not much higher than machines for cooking or making children. So, you must face this without prejudice. If you don’t, your feelings will get in the way of your judgment.”

  “To hell with judgment, Doc! What the Ancients did is a monstrosity!”

  “You have to see it in perspective,” he insisted, patiently. “No matter how hard it is, if we want to understand history we have to leave our morality aside. Otherwise, we’ll end up being judgmental, and we’ll come to the wrong conclusions.” He put his hand on the journal to emphasize his point. “This is history. It’s not ethics, or philosophy. It’s history.”

  Cassandra shook her head. “You can believe what you want, Professor,” she said. In the light of the faint fire there were orange reflections in her eyes. “I’m with Ulysses in thinking that those Ancients were real sons of la chingada, and I’m glad they died out. I honestly hope they paid for all their crimes.”

  Cassie’s comment triggered a switch somewhere in my brain and an idea made its way slowly to my mouth.

  “Fuck…” I said under my breath. “They did pay all right…”

  She gave me a questioning look. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that I now know what the final fate of the Ancients was.” I took a moment before continuing, a moment only broken by the crackling of the wood in the fire. “Don’t you see? It was clearly a very advanced civilization which also had the backing of an army of invincible soldiers, so they couldn’t have had to face any rivals in these lands. I don’t think what wiped them out,” I concluded, “came from outside.”

  “Wait a minute,” the professor intervened raising his hands. “I never said anything about them being wiped out. Maybe they just left their cities, like the Maya did.”

  “But the descendants of the Maya are still there, alive and kicking. There are tens of millions of them, and they are spread out all through Central America. On the other hand, where are the descendants of the Ancients? As far as I know, there weren’t any white bearded men in America when Columbus arrived.”

  “What’s your point?” Cassie asked.

  “My point is that if what wiped them out didn’t come from outside… it’s because it came from the inside.”

  The Professor gave an exaggerated frown. “Are you suggesting some kind of civil war among the Ancients?”

  “Not exactly. I was thinking about something even more… interior.”

  “But what…?” Cassie did not finish the question. I saw the spark of understanding in her eyes. “Are you suggesting the Morcegos—”

  “They did it,” I said with absolute conviction. “For some
reason, at some point, they did it.” I watched my friends’ faces as they came to accept the terrible truth which now seemed to me clear and unquestionable. “They killed and maybe ate all the Ancients, right down to the last one.” It was as if those events had taken place before my very own eyes. “They annihilated the race that had subjected and tortured them, until there wasn’t a single one of them left alive. They took their revenge on the people who’d created them to be used as animals, and thousands of years later they’re still doing the same thing.”

  “Genocide,” Cassie muttered. “The extinction of a race at the hands of the monsters they’d created themselves. I’d call that divine justice.”

  “I’d call it the moral of Frankenstein,” I said with a crooked grin.

  “Now everything makes sense…” the professor said, his mind on something else. “That horrendous mountain of human bones piled on top of the great statue in the cavern… It’s not an offering, it’s a joke.”

  “It’s a gesture of contempt,” Cassie said. “Of undying hatred for the human race, passed on generation after generation, century after century…”

  “That’s why they are what they are, and why they do what they do,” I summed up, lowering my voice. “That’s why they want to kill us, and to be honest, you can’t really blame them.”

  The moment I said this I regretted my words, afraid the professor might have heard. Fortunately he had not.

  Unaware of what I was saying, he was watching Valeria abstractedly, looking at her as only a father can look at a daughter on the brink of death. I guessed that deep inside, he too was cursing the Ancients, those people whose pride and immorality had created an abomination which was still, centuries after their demise, intent on revenge.

  Seeing Cassie also looking absorbed and distant, I picked up the notebook again.

  In the light of the fire I observed the drawings once again and thought of those unfortunate ones the Ancients had transformed, first into slaves and finally into deformed, bloodthirsty demons.