It was Phuong’s turn to blush.
“We’re burning daylight,” she said. “We have a long hike ahead of us.”
He donned his backpack and followed her into the jungle on a path the trees seemed desperate to reclaim even as they traversed it. During the three-hour hike in the dim twilight provided by the dense canopy, they had caught up with each others’ lives and the accomplishments of the intervening years, while swarms of insects hummed and buzzed around them, finches and wrens chirped, and snub-nosed monkeys screeched. He’d been somewhat embarrassed to explain why he had left his post at Washington State to work exclusively for GeNext. It still felt like a betrayal of the anthropological tenets he had preached to his students, but Phuong understood. After all, she was one of the select few who’d seen the remains beneath Casa Rinconada, a sight that no one who witnessed it would ever forget. GeNext had given him the opportunity of a lifetime. He had carte blanche to travel anywhere in the world, to dig wherever he wanted, without having to beg for grants or even give a second thought to the financial side, and rather than focus on the evolution of a single society, he had the unprecedented chance to broaden his scope to encompass the entirety of the human species.
He approached the hole in the ground slowly, taking in even the most seemingly insignificant sights and sounds with each step. This was the part that he loved the most, those first eager steps toward a discovery held captive by the earth for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, as if patiently waiting for the perfect moment to reveal her secrets. Or perhaps for the perfect person to whom to reveal them. So what if he hadn’t instigated the dig or troweled out the loam one scoop at a time? It still belonged to him. Of that there was no doubt. It called to him like a mother’s song only remembered subconsciously through the memory of a child.
His hands trembled as he shed his backpack and withdrew his digital camera.
“We discovered it almost by accident,” Phuong said. “A monsoon swept through here just over a month ago. The rain exposed the hint of a brick wall built into the hill. It took a while to clear the dirt from around it, but after that, the bricks were easy enough to unstack.”
“What am I looking at?”
Reaves walked a slow circle around the clearing, taking pictures of the linga from every possible angle.
“It’s a Sivalinga, which symbolically represents the god Shiva himself. The Champa built these all across the countryside before they abandoned the region in the early fifteenth century to the Viet. This one’s similar to those back at the ruins where you met me, only much more elaborate. The chamber beneath it, however, is completely unique.”
“The photographs you sent me…they were taken down there?”
Phuong nodded and gestured toward the shadowed orifice. Reaves couldn’t quite read the expression on her face.
He leaned over the hole and took several quick pictures. The flash limned decomposing brick walls crawling with roots and spider webs, and a decrepit stone staircase leading downward into the pitch black. He removed his flashlight from his pack and followed the beam underground. Dust swirled in the column of light, which spread across the brick-tiled floor riddled with moss and fungal growth a dozen steps down. He smelled damp earth and mildew; the faintly organic scent of the tomb. His rapid breathing echoed back at him from the hollow chamber.
When he reached the bottom, he snapped several more shots. The brief strobes highlighted stone walls sculpted with ornate friezes, a scattering of bones on the ground, and a central altar of some kind, upon which rested what he had traveled all this way to see in person. He walked slowly toward it, taking pictures with each step. The carvings on the wall were savage. Each depicted a malevolent Shiva lording over a scene of carnage with his adversaries lifeless at his feet or suspended from one of his many arms. The bones on the floor were broken and disarticulated and heaped into mounds, aged to the color of rust, and woven together by webs that housed the carcasses of countless generations of insects.
His heart rate accelerated. This chamber was similar in so many ways to the one back in Chaco Canyon, which had dominated all of his thoughts during the last five years.
He finally brought the flashlight to bear on the altar.
“It gives me the chills every time I see it,” Phuong said.
Reaves felt it too, almost as though the object seated on the rounded platform radiated a coldness that was released by the exposure to light.
“Carbon dating confirms that it was sealed in here more than five hundred years ago, about the time that the Champa vacated the area.” She wrapped her arms around her chest and shivered. “It’s just like the others, isn’t it?”
Reaves could only nod as he approached. His beam focused on the skull seated on the dusty platform and threw its shadow onto the far wall, which made the hellish designs waver as though the many Shivas were laughing with a sound his mind interpreted as the crackle of flames.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.
Fissures transected the frontal bone, the orbital sockets given sentience by the reflected light from the spider webs inside. A large stone had been thrust between its jaws with such force that the mandibular rami to either side had cracked.
And then, of course, there were its teeth.
BLOODLETTING
MICHAEL McBRIDE
Now available in paperback and eBook
From Delirium Books
The butchered remains of twelve year-old Jasmine Rivers are discovered in the cellar of an abandoned farmhouse on the desolate eastern plains of Colorado, the fourth mutilated body found in the last two months. The FBI is still searching for the missing parts of the previous three.
Hundreds of miles away in Arizona, eleven corpses are exhumed from the Sonoran Desert. They’ve been mummified and bundled in the traditional Inca style. But the Inca lived in South America, and these bodies aren’t centuries old.
Seemingly unrelated victims that share a common cause of death: exsanguination.
Special Agent Paxton Carver follows the trail of blood, which leads him to the continuation of genetic experimentation that began during World War II and a designer retrovirus capable of altering human chromosomes. Can he track down the virus and prevent further exposure before the real bloodletting begins?
Prologue
El Mirador Ruins
North of El Petén, Guatemala
30 Years Ago
Torrential rain laid siege to the jungle, beating a discordant melody on the broad leaves of the sacred ceiba trees and tropical cedars. No celestial light penetrated the smothering black storm clouds, beneath which a damp mist rolled across the muddy ground. Somewhere in the darkness a parrot cawed from an enclave in a mahogany tree and the hooting of howler monkeys echoed from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Until abruptly the world fell silent.
Four shadows peeled from the night at a crouch and emerged from the undergrowth into a small clearing at the base of the steep hillside that had grown over the ancient Maya temple La Danta, converging upon a rickety aluminum shack surrounded by drilling and earthmoving equipment sinking into the detritus. One of the shadows reached the door of the flimsy building, and after a few seconds, a padlock dropped into the mud. Another shadow drew the door wide and all four disappeared inside. Wooden crates and packing material lined the wall to the left, while middle Preclassic Era artifacts from narrow-mouthed tecomate jars to jade and obsidian figurines were displayed in a staged jumble on a table to the right as though someone had merely stepped away from their task of boxing and shipping. It was all for show. As were the baskets brimming with small picks and brushes, the dirty jackets hanging from nails, and the row of hardhats mounted with halogen lamps.
The rear of the shack abutting the slope had been retrofitted with a door to match the front, beaten and dirty, hinges rusted, yet it was secured by more than a simple padlock. Two of the shadows isolated the external detonators rigged to bricks of C4 and deactivated the remote triggers, while a thir
d removed the cover of a breaker box on the wall, revealing a small black screen. The shadow produced what looked like a lollipop from an invisible pocket and held it up to the scanner. A red light projected from the screen, spotlighting an excised brown eye at the end of a short metal post.
They removed the aluminum door as the reinforced steel door behind slid back into the recessed wall, revealing a stone tunnel reaching back into the black heart of the pyramid. Merging with the darkness, they inched deeper, Steyr AUG 5.56 mm assault rifles sweeping the rocky passageway illuminated only by the pale green glare provided by the unwieldy night vision apparatuses strapped over their eyes. They advanced in silence, infiltrating what had once been a temple to a long dead god, but now led to the altar of technology, modernized to feature track lighting on the rock roof, the circulated air blowing in their faces, and the humidity controls that held the jungle at bay.
As one, the shadows flattened against the wall where the tunnel opened into a vast square chamber from which several dark passages branched. A row of gas-powered generators rumbled to the right beneath a hood that vented the fumes to the surface.
“We’re too late,” the first shadow said. “They knew we were coming.”
“No,” another said, shoving through the others into the room. “They have to be here somewhere.”
Though none could see the man’s eyes, glistening green tracks of tears streaked the mud he’d rubbed on his face. He headed straight for the widest branch, passing between walls composed of great cubes of stone, decorated with seventh century hieroglyphics barely visible through layers of dust and spider webs, until he reached the terminus, from which twin tunnels forked to either side.
The man turned left and nearly barreled into a stainless steel door. Beside it was another retina scanner that granted him access thanks to the eye in his pocket. The impenetrable slab hissed back into the wall and he stepped into a small tiled room with lockers to either side and clean suits hanging by another door directly ahead. He blew through and the door opened for him into a small chamber with a pull-cord chemical bath. As soon as the door closed behind him he was buffeted by scalding hot steam from the vents surrounding him, but he didn’t care. All that mattered now was finding them.
After a blistering moment, the door in front of him slid back to expose a sterile laboratory more than thirty feet long, a recent addition with shiny steel walls that reflected his distorted black image. A series of metal drums dominated the center of the room, vaguely reminiscent of round horse troughs with domed lids upon which were mounted circular pressure, temperature, and humidity gauges. Racks lined the wall to the left, brimming with chemicals, glassware, pipettes, and Petri dishes. To his right was a long counter with several work stations demarcated by powerful electron microscopes, centrifuges, and other equipment beyond his comprehension.
The caustic scent of disinfecting agents was overwhelming, but beneath it lurked a more organic stench similar to stagnant marsh water that he recognized immediately.
“God, no,” he whispered, running to the back of the room where a half dozen surgical lamps were mounted to the ceiling, directed toward the same point beneath. “No, no, no.”
An agonized moan wrenched loose from his chest.
A body was draped across a steel table. The gutters to either side were sloppy with congealed blood and bone chips. Its abdomen had been opened and all the viscera removed, revealing the exposed spine framed by ribs that had been cracked open and drawn apart like a clamshell. The legs and arms were untouched, though a marbled shade of gray, the digits dark from necrosis. But her face…her beautiful face…
He leaned forward and gently caressed her waxy cheek, glancing only briefly into the hollow sockets where her blue eyes had once been. Sobbing, he wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. He lowered his chin to her forehead and stroked her tangled blonde hair, now crusted with blood.
Bellowing his sorrow, he had to look away, finally catching sight of the message they’d left for him, smeared in blood on the wall.
She died slowly.
The man roared, grief and rage forcing aside rational thought. He whirled and punched the nearest metal drum. The hatch of the dome opened and a gust of what looked like steam billowed out. Within was a liquid nitrogen-cooled system filled with organs in numbered containers. Before he could turn away, he saw a liver, kidneys, a heart, and two long, coiled ropes that he wished had been intestines. Deep down, he knew exactly what they were and collapsed to his knees.
“Get up, Colonel,” a firm voice said from behind him. Fists knotted into his jacket and he was pulled to his feet. “We’re registering heat signatures down the hall.”
And with that, the Colonel was running, through the lab and the decontamination chamber, through the locker room into the corridor where two men stood before the other door with a thermographic infrared camera directed at the steel slab. The eye was in his hand before he shoved them aside and thrust it up to the scanner. He slid through sideways as the door opened, welcomed into the darkness by a cacophonous riot of crying.
There were plastic incubators to the left, rows of bassinettes to the right. Toward the back were clear plastic cribs with cage lids. The screaming was all around him.
“Jesus Christ,” one of his men said from behind him, but he was already dashing toward the incubators. The heating elements over two of the incubators provided a faint green glow through the goggles. The first unit was empty. Beneath the second was a squirming infant, arms stretched stiffly from beneath a blanket, tiny fists clenched and trembling. Its mouth framed a scream, its eyes pinched closed. A tuft of light hair capped its wrinkled, round head.
The Colonel reached in and gently lifted the child from the incubator, cradled it to his chest, and sobbed anew.
There had been two umbilical cords in the cryogenic freezer, two heat lamps over the incubators.
“Where’s the other one?” he shouted.
“There are more over here,” one of the men called from his right. Children swaddled in blankets, none of them newborn, all crying. He passed them by, noting that only every other bassinette was occupied.
“More back here!” another man yelled.
The Colonel ran toward the voice, but there were only toddlers and small children wailing behind the vented plastic walls of their cages. He spun in a circle. There were no more infants.
Only the terrified cries.
“Where’s my child?” he screamed, his voice echoing into the dark stone corridors beneath the temple.
Chapter One
The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
- T.S. Eliot
I
20 Miles Southwest of
Wren, Colorado
The words of the dying man haunted him in whispers.
You’ll never find her in time.
Special Agent Paxton Carver cranked the wheel to the right, the black Caprice Classic fishtailing on the gravel road in a cloud of dust before the tires finally caught and launched the sedan down the long, rutted dirt drive toward the distant farmhouse. Fallen barbed wire fences blew past to either side, tangled with tumbleweeds and overgrown by wild grasses and sunflowers, the fields beyond a riot of vegetation, prematurely browning from dehydration.
He could barely hear the distant cry of sirens behind over the pinging of rocks against the undercarriage.
The crows were already waiting when he reached the house and jammed the brakes, lining the steepled roof of the white clapboard house, the aluminum outbuilding, and the thick black wires stretching back to the telephone poles. The setting sun beyond cast a scarlet glare over everything, limning the feathers of the raucously cawing birds as though they’d bathed in blood.
The transmission had been well masked, bouncing from one satellite to another. They had finally isolated the source, but it had taken so long... Too long.
Twenty-two hours and nineteen minutes.
Carve
r leapt from the car and hit the front steps at a sprint, tightening the Kevlar vest over his torso, his official windbreaker still on the passenger seat. He drew his M9 Beretta 9mm from his shoulder holster and pointed it at the front door. The porch planks were bowed and gray, pulling the nails from their moorings; the siding of the house sandblasted, white paint peeling in curls. Two rusted chains dangled from the overhang to his left where a porch swing had once been suspended, the window behind covered from within by dusty drapes and cobwebs. He threw back the screen door, hammering the wall with a bang, tried the front door, then kicked it in.
“FBI!” he shouted, shoving past the shivering door through the cracked and splintered threshold and into the living room, arms tensed in front of him, taking in the room along the sightline of the Beretta.
Single level; no stairs. Dusty sheets draped over a couch and chair to the right. Twin framed oil landscapes flanking a single window guarded by floor-length maroon drapes. Older television on a stand. Magazines on an end table, glossy covers dulled by dust. Open bedroom door to the left. Stripped, stained mattress. The mirror on the inside of the open closet door reflected a rack of empty hangers, nothing beneath. A bathroom door stood ajar beside the bedroom. Shower curtain missing, the toilet and rim of the tub stained by rust. Mirror on the medicine chest spider-webbed.
The buzzing of flies drew him toward the kitchen ahead before being drowned out by the rising sirens and the grumble of tires on gravel.
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