by K. T. Tomb
“Yes,” I replied.
“Archeology students? What school you from?”
“St. Paul University in Minnesota,” I answered.
The man let go of a long burst of laughter from deep in his chest. “That has to be the truth, because nobody around here would even think of using that school in order to tell a fib. Now that you said it, I thought I heard that accent in your voice.”
“I’m glad that you’re entertained,” Eva shot back. “Can we please be on our way now?”
“You’ve got a feisty partner there, a pretty young lady with plenty of curves too from what I saw earlier.”
“You’ve been spying on us?” Her voice was harsh.
“It pays to know who is in the jungle with you, don’t you think?” he replied. There was another long pause. “Well, if you’re not going to tattle on me, then there’s no point in keeping you here.”
“We won’t, I swear,” I replied.
“Can I give you one piece of advice first, though?”
“Why not.”
“Get the hell off of this island the first chance you get. There’s some damned weird shit that happens here and I’d hate to see nice young people like yourselves – especially that little Latina hottie there – get hurt or worse.”
“Why? It seems to be okay so far,” Eva responded. There was a little bit of acid in her voice even yet.
“Things aren’t all that they appear to be. Take my advice and pack up first thing in the morning.” As he made the last statement, he disappeared into the brush beside the trail.
Still spooked from the encounter, Eva and I picked up our pace and hurried down the trail toward the house, arriving nearly out of breath, but safe and sound.
Chapter Eight
Eva and I didn’t follow the dark figure’s advice. Once we were back under the roof of the house on the lagoon and had our stomachs filled with another of Inez’s incredible meals, we were feeling quite safe. Worn out from lack of sleep, we had every intention of going to bed early, but try as we might, we were still kissing by the light of the fireplace – the need of which I had finally understood – when midnight rolled around.
We were able to get a good night’s rest and left the house equipped in a similar fashion to what we were the day before, but with a newly cautious intention to be back to the house well before the sun set. Neither of us were eager to meet the dark figure from the jungle who had frightened us the night before. I had contemplated what his warning had meant and Eva and I had even discussed it a couple of times; however, other than his creepy presence and my discomfort whenever I looked into Andres’ eyes, we had been treated quite well and the only danger we had encountered to that point had been the dark figure who had issued the warning. Needless to say, we dismissed it.
“Can I tell you a secret?” Eva said suddenly. We had been eating our lunch among the ruins of the temple atop Kukulkan’s Pyramid in silence.
“Sure. What you got?” I replied. A part of me hoped that she would once again tell me how much she liked me and that she wanted me. I had a secret of my own; the image of her naked body pressed against me, but it wasn’t one that I was willing to share.
“Ever since we were told that the mangoes on this tree were forbidden, I’ve wanted to eat one,” she giggled.
“That’s it?” I smiled. “Not much of a secret. I have too.”
“There’s more.” She suddenly turned serious. “You’re going to think that I’m crazy.”
“I already think that,” I laughed.
“I’m serious!” She slapped me on the shoulder. “Promise me that you won’t think I’m crazy for what I’m going to tell you.”
“I promise.”
“Ever since that snake bit me, I’ve had all kinds of weird things start happening to me; some of them good and some of them more sinister.”
“You, sinister?” The idea was completely unbelievable. Sweet, intelligent, organized, OCD and sexy all came to mind, but sinister didn’t fit.
“Okay. Maybe not sinister, just bad temptations.”
I wondered if I was going to be classified under the bad temptations and braced myself for what was coming. She was about to say that she had enjoyed spending time with me, laughing and getting to know me better, but we were moving too fast and needed to cool it. I was sure of it. What actually came out of her mouth was completely different than what I was expecting.
“I’ve had this almost delirious craving for mangoes, but not just any mangoes, God knows there are plenty to choose from around here, but that big, fat, juicy one right there.” She extended her finger to indicate a particularly beautiful specimen just out of reach above a fallen slab of stone. “I have had my eye on it since yesterday.”
“What about the curse?” I asked.
“There’s no curse,” she laughed. “Didn’t you see how Andres’ eyes twinkled when he told us the tree was forbidden?”
The fact of the matter was, I did remember how his eyes twinkled, but I didn’t take it as a joke like she had. Still, I didn’t really believe that the fruit was forbidden either. “Yeah. So?”
“Let’s pick it and eat it.” The look on her face made it impossible to tell her no.
“How do you propose that we reach it?”
“If I was sitting on your shoulders, I could reach it.”
I stood and estimated the distance that the fruit was above the fallen slab of stone. “You may be right.”
“Let’s try it.” The look in her eyes had a devilish sparkle to it, like she was a naughty child about to do something that she knew she wasn’t supposed to do, but was thrilled by the excitement of it all.
We climbed up onto the slab and made our way to the trunk of the tree. She used the trunk to support herself as I squatted and allowed her to drape her legs over my shoulders. There was plenty of squealing and laughing as we worked on getting her into position, nearly falling from the slab several times before she was finally sitting precariously on my shoulders. Once I had gotten my balance with her on my shoulders, I stepped away from the trunk of the tree and turned around. Eva let out a squeal as her weight shifted suddenly and threatened to send us tumbling off of the slab. She steadied herself by wrapping her hands around my eyes as I fought to regain my balance.
“Um, Babe, with your hands over my eyes, this isn’t really going to work very well,” I said as I regained my balance.
“Oops, I’m sorry.” She moved her hands. “Okay. Keep walking until I tell you to stop.”
I moved slowly, careful to maintain my balance on the slab as I placed one foot in front of the other.
“Stop!”
I stopped.
“Yes! I got it!” She pumped her fist in the air as she celebrated her victory while at the same time lowering the mango in front of my face so that I could see that she had it. The fist pump was just enough to set us off balance once more. Try as I might, I simply couldn’t get my feet balanced back under me. With each stumbling try, Eva’s weight would shift anew and send me reeling in another direction. Tumbling off of the stone slab, we expected to land on the hard stone below, but when we hit, something like a thick crust crunched beneath us and we suddenly found ourselves plunging through darkness on a smooth, steep incline, which ended abruptly several dozen meters below.
“Oh, God, Eva, are you alright?” I patted around in the darkness and found her body beside me not far away.
“I’m okay, I think. What the hell happened?”
“We fell through the roof.” It was the only explanation I had.
“But Mayan pyramids don’t have roofs.”
“We crunched through something and fell into some sort of hole,” I replied. I suddenly remembered the small flashlight in my fanny pack. It was a good thing that we had them on, because anything else we might need was in our backpacks several dozen meters above. As I pulled out the flashlight and switched it on, I turned it toward Eva. She was sitting there, somewhat dazed, and still holding onto the mang
o. There was a small scrape on her left cheek and it was oozing blood. “Hold still a sec.” I brought a compress out of the fanny pack and pressed it to her cheek. By the time I had applied the bandage to her wound, she had fished in her own fanny pack and pulled out her flashlight.
“Let’s check each other over,” she suggested. “That was quite a fall.”
I discovered a couple more scrapes on her arms and legs, but nothing very serious. As she checked me out, she found pretty much the same thing, although there were certainly plenty of areas on my body that would have bruises. From all indications, we were not seriously injured.
“So, where do you think we are? I mean, besides being inside the pyramid.”
“That’s about all I know too,” I replied. I scanned the small chamber with my flashlight and then stood. Eva did the same. I shined my flashlight toward the ceiling and discovered what looked like a chute. Far above it was a small circle of daylight, where we had broken through. “Looks like some sort of chute.”
Eva glanced up at the chute and the hole and then continued scanning the walls with her light. “Duh! We have cell phones!” she said suddenly.
“Mine is in the small pocket on the outside of my backpack, up there. Do you have yours?”
“I most certainly do,” she replied, “and Enrique’s phone number.”
That last part of her announcement stung a bit, but I tried to fight back my emotions; if Enrique could save us, then so be it. I began to feel hopeful. I watched her open her up the screen.
“Crap! No service.”
“Figures,” I replied. I watched as she moved around the pit in an attempt to find a coverage sweet spot. Since we had arrived at the island, we hadn’t even considered using our phones. It was likely there wasn’t any cell service on the island at all. I turned away from her and continued searching the chute above us.
She sighed heavily and replaced the cell phone back in her fanny pack. “So, what do we do now?”
“I don’t think we can get back up out of here that way,” I announced after a long study, using the flashlight to try to find something that would allow us to climb out. I had no sooner gotten the words out of my mouth before Eva let out a terrified scream.
Chapter Nine
When a woman lets out a blood-curdling scream, it fires a man’s adrenaline into overdrive and sends a chill throughout his body. It was no different for me; in fact, the effect was doubled by the fact that we were in a dark pit somewhere inside of a Mayan pyramid. I spun the beam of my flashlight around frantically trying to find what had scared Eva, who was once again clutching my arms and pinning them to my sides. She was going to have to stop doing that. If we were going to be attacked, my arms were going to be useful for defense. I fought to get them free.
“What? What is it?”
“Over there… snakes,” she whispered.
I turned the beam of my flashlight in the direction she indicated and saw a snake wriggling through a hole in the wall and then falling to the floor of the pit with a plop. He had just joined a half-dozen others who were beginning to intertwine with each other. I heard several more plops and refocused the beam on the wall above them to see if I could figure out where they were coming from. There were at least a dozen holes in the wall and snakes were coming through them, dropping to the floor.
“What the hell?” The hair was standing up on the back of my neck. I tried to calm myself so that I could think. At the rate the snakes were falling into the pit, we’d be knee-deep in them in the space of 30 minutes. We had to do something, but ideas weren’t coming to me. I took several deep breaths. “Okay, Eva, I know you’re scared. I am too, but we’ve got to come up with a plan.”
“I have pepper spray,” she said, producing a small can from her fanny pack.
“Keep that handy, but for the moment, we’ve got to find an escape route. Up isn’t going to work, so we’ve got the walls or the floor. We’ve got to explore every inch of this pit.”
“You first,” she said. Her eyes were locked on the building pile of writhing bodies being added to at a rate of a dozen per minute. I had no way of knowing if they were venomous or not.
I took a deep breath, exhaled, swallowed the lump in my throat and moved toward the nearest wall away from the snakes. Eva did the same, though she spun her light back toward the squirming pile every few seconds. I did the same as well, initially, but finally realized that unless I focused my attention on the job at hand, our snake problem was going to get much worse. “You finding anything, yet?”
“I can’t concentrate,” she replied.
“You have to, sweetie, or we’ll have much worse problems in a few minutes.” The pile was already massive. There were at least 100 or more snakes and more dropping in. “Concentrate on the floor. Kick the dirt around and see if you uncover a handle to a trap door or something. I’ll stick to the walls.”
There were several minutes of silence while we both concentrated on trying to find something that would help us to escape. The walls seemed to be smooth cut stone with no breaks or cracks that presented themselves, neither were there any signs in ancient Mayan saying, “Exit here.”
“Adam. I was just thinking. Why would snakes be coming into this pit?”
I turned and looked at her, shrugging my shoulders.
“I mean, snakes have dens, nests, pits, whatever you call them, but they always have to get out to get food and water, right?”
“Not necessarily,” I replied. “Some reptiles can go months or years without eating, because of their very low body metabolism. However, you do bring up a good point.”
“So, somebody put the snakes in here after we fell in?”
“Who do you think…” I cut the question off before I finished it. The dark figure we had seen the night before came to mind first, but Andres still couldn’t be eliminated from my mind. Likely, both of them had been spying on us and looking for an opportunity to create an accident. The thing I couldn’t understand was, why?
Eva didn’t finish my question or answer it. “Adam, I’m scared. We could die in here and no one would ever know.”
“Let’s not go there just yet, okay? Keep searching. There has to be a way out of here.” I was as frightened as she was and I had to admit that I was equally skeptical about our chances of survival. I had searched the walls on three sides away from the snakes and came up empty. I was going to have to make a decision as to how I was going to check the other wall where the massive pile was growing continuously. I actually had pepper spray as well, but I wasn’t sure if it worked on snakes. There was really only one way to find out.
“Eva,” I said after a few minutes. “We’ve got to check that other wall and floor.”
“No thank you,” she whispered.
“We have no choice. Stay with me and get out your pepper spray. I’ve got mine too. We’ll try to clear a path, maybe they’ll move over to the other side of the pit.”
“What about the ones that are still falling through the holes?”
“I’m thinking that once we get the main mass to move, we can manage the ones dropping in one at a time.”
“Like, snake herding?”
“Well,” I chuckled, “I hadn’t really thought of it that way, but yes.”
Armed with our cans of pepper spray, we moved along the wall approaching the massive pile of slithering forms. My heart was thundering in my chest and I reached back to take hold of Eva’s hand. “You ready?”
“Yes. I hope to God this works,” she answered softly.
“You and me both.”
I opened up with my can of pepper spray on the mass of snakes. They hissed and instantly began to draw back. Okay, pepper spray does work on snakes.
“It’s working, Adam.” There was a hopeful tone in her voice.
“Just keep it up, let’s see if we can move them over against that other wall.”
With both of us spraying the pile of snakes, the pile slowly redirected toward the other wall. We discovered
that the new snakes that were dropping in were following the group, likely because the floor in front of us was wet with pepper spray, though I could feel that my spray can was beginning to feel much lighter; I was going to run out soon. “Stop for a second, Eva. We’re going to have to save some of this.”
“Too late,” she replied. “I’m already out.”
“We’ve got another problem,” I said, feeling my eyes beginning to burn and the mucous building up in my throat. “Without air ventilation, this stuff is starting to burn.”
“Here,” she said.
I turned back toward her and noticed that she had used some of the gauze in her fanny pack to tie a mask around her mouth and nose. Her eyes were watering, but she was in better shape than I was. She was extending another piece of gauze toward me and secured it over my mouth and nose as well. “That will help some, but we have to find that way out now.”
“Adam, look.” She shined her light on the floor where the last snakes had moved away from the massive pile. “Is that a handle?”
I saw it the instant she asked the question. It was a handle indeed, and I scrambled toward it without responding to her question. Excitement began to replace the sense of doom that had begun to grip me. I was like a man in the desert who had discovered a watering hole. Spraying the few lingering snakes to give myself a little bit of working room, I grasped the handle with one hand and pulled with all of my strength. It moved slightly, but didn’t open. I turned toward Eva, extending my flashlight and pepper spray to her. “Hold these. I need both hands.”
I spread my legs wide, squatted and took hold of the handle with both hands, kicking at a snake that had moved a little too close to back it away. It protested, but did not strike at me. With all of the strength in my arms and legs, I tugged on the handle and felt the door that it was attached to begin to break loose. It had been closed a very long time. The fact that it came open before the handle broke was a testimony to Mayan engineering. The handle had been firmly fixed.