The Kukulkan Manuscript

by James Steimle

  And what were her convictions about the project? What did she really believe?

  She’d toss it all. It was the only conclusion.

  Kinnard hadn’t asked her here to discuss anything more about her dissertation anyway. In fact, Alred had the peculiar sensation that she wasn’t supposed to be waiting in his office at all, that she should stand and sneak out of the building immediately.

  A secretary had left the professor’s message on her answering machine. But what if the secretary had called the wrong person…no, that was silly.

  So why had she brought her dissertation?

  She refused to answer the thought.

  Standing, she went to the window and stared at the parking lot smashed between the buildings below. She saw shadows move among the Datsuns, mini-vans, Ford trucks, and cars with the letter Z hidden somewhere in the shadows on their bodies.

  From the voice inside her head, she heard new words: What if someone else had asked her to the office?

  One of the shapes in the blue light below stepped away from a red Ford van.

  Alred’s breath went solid in her lungs.

  His hair had grown longer than she remembered it. He walked a little more hunched over than she recalled. His large nose and balding brow, and the way he looked in every direction as best he could, like a textbook paranoid case—it all gave him away with a scream: It was Dr. Ulman, striding quickly toward the office structure’s rear entrance, three floors beneath Alred’s feet.

  She pressed her hands, her nose, her forehead against the glass as her heart doubled its pulsing pace. Ulman looked so small, standing far below in a woolen coat made of varying green threads.

  The professor moved with determination, leaning slightly forward, driving his toes ahead of him as sensors while his eyes looked behind, to the left, the other side, forward, and back again….

  Alred rapped on the window pane four times. She swallowed back the urge to shout his name, a useless gesture considering their distance and the obstacles between them. The window was locked permanently in place.

  But there he was in the twilight. And he was alive! And no doubt he had called her! The secrets he could tell! The answers!

  Her eyes touched quickly on the horizon, where the sun was now gone but firing yellow beams which the dark blue abyss overhead absorbed.

  An almost black Crown Victoria stopped between Ulman and the office building. The rear doors opened on either side of the car.

  What was this?

  The man closest to the professor looked directly at Ulman, who froze like a rabbit weary of predators.

  Alred watched words pass between Ulman and the stranger, though neither of them moved. She felt ice moving through her arteries. Both of the men who had exited the car stood within a footfall of the door that sprouted them. They wore dark suits, it seemed.

  FBI? she thought, considering their possible involvement with Mrs. Ulman. Had they tracked him here?

  Ulman had to get away from those men. Alred hit the window with the flat of her hand before remembering to control her emotions. The glass was cold.

  Ulman waved a finger at the man nearest him, his body shaking as he spoke. He moved to turn away, speaking quickly words Alred could never possibly discern.

  She watched the man nearest him nod once, twist his head away, and then duck back into the car.

  Alred wasn’t paying attention to the other man in black, who stood with the car between himself and the other two, until the first flash.

  Her forehead hit the glass pane as her eyes blew wide.

  The second blast of light also wasn’t followed by a sound. Had Alred not seen the outstretched arms aiming the tightly held gun over the roof of the Crown Victoria, she wouldn’t have realized a silencer was in use.

  Such man-killing paraphernalia were against the law in this country.

  These weren’t agents of the FBI.

  And Ulman was on the ground, torquing his body painfully.

  Alred banged her shoulder against the window as she spun and shot out of the office toward the stairs. The elevator would take too long, she figured, and Ulman might be in critical condition…perhaps taking his last breaths.

  She rammed Goldstien in the hallway.

  “Whoa!” he said, but Alred heard no more before she hit her destination.

  The door to the stairs slammed into the wall as she pulled on it and threw herself down the cement chasm. Down, her feet slapped the hard floor until she came to the landing, leaning her body and hanging onto the railing in order to whip around back the other direction, and down the steps, down, only to swing around again, and down….

  On the first floor, Alred thumped the door like a battering ram. The door exploded aside as she sprinted to the rear entrance. She pushed the glass door out of her way and skidded her heels on the asphalt only when she came to the spot where Dr. Ulman had dropped.

  But there was no body.

  The Crown Victoria had vanished.

  Her lungs burning, Alred looked up and scanned the parking lot.

  Oaks waved and glowed in the dim yellow lamplight. The darkening blue sky growled.

  She heard lost dogs barking and howling and chasing one another somewhere under the cloudy sky.

  She squatted and touched the ground where she thought Ulman had landed. It was cold, with no memory of a shooting.

  These men were masters. They hadn’t wounded the professor. It was silent. Their movements, balanced like one-legged cranes in shallow puddles. They’d killed him and left nothing to be found. Especially a body.

  There was oil…barely visible in the light.

  Alred touched the warm wetness. It wasn’t oil.

  The air escaped her lungs as she stood again, examining the parking lot exits, the quiet streets beyond them, the night birds…they would tell no tales.

  The moisture in her mouth evaporated.

  Ulman had disappeared months ago.

  No one would ever find him now.

  * * *

  7:40 p.m. PST

  “You shot Porter, Mr. Smith. We’d like to know what you were doing with him.”

  Smith sat tall in his leather chair. “Who here understands Mormons better than I do?” He looked around the dark table.

  “You have been our lead operative on LDS studies for the last fifty years. What does that have to do with Porter.”

  “Our young troublemaker does not fit the cultural norm in the Mormon society,” said Smith without moving. The air, a cool broth of sweet roses, stirred around him. “Porter is what Latter-day Saints deem a fanatic. His decisions would be condemned by most members of his faith. He intrigues me.”

  Andrews cleared his throat. “Your personal interests could jeopardize our careful and long existence.”

  “On the contrary,” said Smith with a scarecrow grin, “my actions could preserve our investments for another century. You know the Mormons believe they live in the last years of the Earth’s present existence. Their long-awaited Millennium is near, according to their own living prophets. John D. Porter is an abnormally unsociable member of his church. We see how endlessly and powerfully his fire burns.

  “Now what if a man arose among the Latter-day Saints who possessed the same inner strength, unstoppable endurance, and passionate intelligence John Porter exhibits before us. Add to that description…popularity.”

  Smith waited a moment to let the old committee stew over the disturbing vision.

  “A Porter who is highly esteemed among his spiritual colleagues…could crack the Earth and change Mormonism in the eyes of the public forever. We need to understand John Porter. I need to comprehend him fully in order to recognize other prodigies when they are still in embryo.”

  “You put two bullets into him,” growled Andrews.

  “And the men behind Porter were not about to do the same? Porter thought he knew me to some small degree. A polite old man was I. I have given him…paranoia. He will trust no one from this day forth.”


  “We wanted KM-3,” said the man at the end of the table.

  “That’s why I shot him. Porter would not reveal its location. I did not kill him, however, but immediately summoned an ambulance…an anonymous maneuver. He has been chased, so he’s scared. But even the hardest men, who have never been tortured, will change their minds after real pain. Porter has received his first bullet wounds. He knows what to fear now….Imagine if we put the tip of a revolver between his eyes. Young people often feel immortal…until they are hurt badly. I have made John Porter…moldable.”

  * * *

  8:59 p.m. PST

  When Alred was eighteen years old, she tried alcohol for the first time. The taste surprised her…she thought it would be good. Her older friends laughed when she drank the clear liquid, shushing one another as if someone could hear them doing what they shouldn’t be doing, when in reality the parents of the friend whose liquor cabinet they had raided had been gone for days on a second honeymoon and weren’t due back from the green hills of Ireland for another week. They’d never be caught; there wasn’t a chance.

  As the night progressed, Alred remembered the sinking flame in her chest. Her head throbbed as if she had a headache, but there was no pain. There was, however, the mild experience of flu symptoms after a time, her head swimming one way and then the other. Someone had lubricated the connection between her spine and the base of her skull.

  She laughed with her friends, but felt a grayness around her, unspoken echoes she could never later explain. Then came the sickness. The running. The embarrassment of making a mess in the cream-carpeted hallway. The accusations and bawling out her friend gave her, along with all the guilt of what would happen next—how could they clean it up right before the parents returned. And all this in an unfeeling haze.

  Alred remembered the desire to cry, the tears coming all the way to the bottom of her eyelids…but refusing to come out. She was so sorry for it all. Yes it was true, she couldn’t “hold her liquor.” Yes, it might have been better if she “hadn’t come over at all.” But she couldn’t cry. She chose to show no emotion. No sincerity in her words. Forced apathy.

  She drove home inebriated and stupid with a “Don’t Drive Drunk” sticker on the back of her Plymouth. She’d never drink again. She hated herself and her friends. But as time passed she hated herself for making the choice….

  Stumbling from her car toward Bruno’s cafe, Alred had the same sensation she’d suppressed so many years ago. She knew the fire inside her had to be heartburn, but she couldn’t explain the dullness surrounding her head. She didn’t understand why the world had gone foggy, when she knew the air was clear. Why couldn’t she cry…when she felt it rising inside?

  Well, she’d never wept in public and rarely at all—proud of her control over emotion. But she wouldn’t be able to let it out now if she wanted to. It was the same as so long ago…

  And Alred couldn’t stop thinking of her dead dog, Dorado, who’d run away never to return.

  This had nothing to do with pets.

  She’d look for Porter and take his approach to life, drowning herself in a few cups of the old man’s hot chocolate.

  Her dog was dead.

  “Alred!”

  She stopped, but her head continued to sway, filled spontaneously with synapse-destroying poison. Her eyes dug through the dark of the alleyway that bent between the cafe and another building and then behind Bruno’s place.

  “Back here!”

  It was a shouted whisper.

  Sighing with a drunk groan, Alred was thankful she was on friendly terms again with Porter. But she wished he’d stop all this spy vs. spy garbage. Didn’t he understand no one could do anything to him if he stayed in a populated area? Bruno’s would suit, but inside was where all the people were, not behind the place.

  “Hurry up!”

  She took a step into the alley. Her head rocked on her soft neck. Her mind seemed lighter, her brain somehow warmer than normal.

  Then Alred felt a hand against her, holding her away from the alley. But there was no one there, no one keeping her from walking alone into the darkness, away from the streetlights, away from the populated area where she was headed. It was as if all the molecules that made up her figure began leaning in the opposite direction, attempting to keep her out of the darkness.

  Was she losing her equilibrium?

  She’d found Ulman. Finally. But now…

  Putting a hand to her forehead, she closed her eyes and leaned against the cold wall. “Porter,” she said, not loud enough for him to hear, however, “I…think I’m in shock. I need to sit down.”

  “Alred!”

  “All right!” she said, throwing her body against the current.

  Weaving to the end of the alley crowded with rolled debris that looked like discarded carpets, garbage cans in perpetual use, and heaps of broken tiles and forgotten paint cans, she came out behind Bruno’s where there was little room but for the rubbish and the dark.

  Something moved among the filth. “Where are you,” she said, not afraid to talk out loud. She tried to examine the cans, the soaked boxes, the plastic bags with nifty ties that were already busted open to wait for the scavengers flying around Stratford. Opposite the back of Bruno’s, an ancient chain-linked fence protected an older wooden fence rising some seven feet behind the first. The rear door to a ‘70s style hair salon pinched off any other exit from the darkness. The black wall hugged Bruno’s building. Some useless two by fours were piled up against it, as far as she could see. Large boards leaned against the black wall behind her, which climbed another two stories. There was no light.

  “Porter?” she said, squinting, though it didn’t help.

  Alred could barely make out the details and frankly had little time to do so.

  “Turn around…slowly.” It wasn’t Porter’s voice.

  Alred did as directed and stared into the face of a dark-skinned man with a Latino accent. For all she knew, the voice could have been faked. She’d left all normality last semester. “Where’s John Porter,” she said.

  “I want the codex!” said the man before her. He lifted a hooked knife that had been there in the dark, but which she didn’t see until it came within inches of her face. “I know about the ancient book you got from Mrs. Ulman. She was stupid to lie. Now it’s gonna cost her. But not until you pay.”

  “You’re going to kill her,” said Alred, her lips quivering.

  Alred saw the gun go off twice in her mind, Dr. Ulman falling to the blacktop.

  She felt the blood rushing through every part of her figure, every appendage. The surge was powerful and her legs were ready to dart for the exit of this hidden hole in the city. But she’d never make the alley before he did, before he—

  “No talking!” His voice was a hiss as he closed in on her, pushing her backward with the knife point. “You’re gonna give me the codex, or you’ll tell me where it is, and all this will be over! Understand?!”

  “I haven’t understood any of this from the beginning. Did you kill Dr. Ulman?” she said, seeing the gun go off over the hood of the Crown Victoria. Again, the flare of light like a silent sun, there and gone, there and gone again. If this was one of the assassins who’d murdered her favorite professor a short time ago, she would definitely not leave this alleyway in her bodily form. Guns with silencers….

  But why the knife?

  “Who said anything about him?!! I said you’re gonna give me the codex, now let’s have it!!!” Alred could see him trembling with adrenaline.

  She smelled the twisting rot of tossed meat and wet salad thrown out days ago, and she wondered if it was the man’s breath. He was no professional. Not like the others. He wore a sweater with a pattern she couldn’t make out in the dark. A goatee hung lazily around his mouth. His eyes were full of shiny darkness, and she could make out no white. He wasn’t like the others.

  But he could kill her just the same.

  “How much longer do you wanna stay alive? Huh?!?�
�� he said, tilting his head with a jerk.

  “I don’t have it,” she said, backing up a little more, feeling the wall close behind her, the discarded waste at her heels.

  “I’ll end all your troubles here and now, little girl! Now talk to me!!!” he said, taking another step at her, jabbing the blade in the air.

  “I said I don’t have the codex!”

  “You wanna be in the hospital like your friend?!!” he said.

  Alred stopped, her heart sinking. Her head rocked without weight as she collated his words and examined the data. Hospital? Calmly, she said, “Porter’s…got it hidden away somewhere. He won’t even let me see it.”

  “You just don’t understand me, woman!” he said, pointing the cutting edge at her chin. “I’m supposed to kill you and make it look like a mugging! But you’re Snow White and I’m the hunter, got it?! I don’t have anything against women, and I wanna get outta here!!! You tell me—”

  Pinching her lips together into a twisted knot, Alred reached quickly with both hands for the fist holding the blade before her.

  His words still caught in his mouth, the assassin went silent as Alred grabbed the pinkie side of his right hand and swiveled it over up and left with a jolt.

  The knife disappeared.

  Slamming her left elbow into his right elbow as he screamed against the hyper-extension of his arm, Alred forced the man to the frigid ground in one second. As the blade chattered against brick and stone, she released him just in time to pull herself upright and drive the pointed tip of her shoe into the center of his chest.

  He yelled a painful moan as Alred started for the alley.

  But another man stood in her way, a shadow in the blackness. She could make out the dark suit coat with sharp shoulder pads, perfectly pressed, and the raven-colored turtleneck beneath the blazer, the slick hair, the hard gaze, and of course the raised 9 mm Smith and Wesson, silencer already screwed in place.

  The new assassin shook his head and glanced at the writhing thug on the ground. “Figeroa, you fool.” He looked up. “Good evening, Ms. Alred. Let me assure you that I never underestimate women.”