by David Wood
“Where is this Diego, Dona?”
The old woman raised a withered hand and pointed up the road. Maria continued forward until the old woman’s finger moved, pointing off to the side of the road. She wasn’t pointing at a house, but at an open field dotted with wooden crosses.
“He’d dead?”
“Si.”
Maria frowned and pulled the Land Cruiser to the side of the road but did not shut if off. “How did he die?”
“The curse. It took him.”
Maria considered turning the vehicle around and heading back to San Pedro Sula. If villagers had blamed Diego for some misfortune, it wasn’t a stretch to believe they might have killed him in an effort to rid themselves of the imagined curse. “How, Dona?”
“The sickness. From the dog.”
Maria breathed a little easier. “He was bitten by a sick dog?”
“Not bitten. It was not a real dog.” She cupped her hands together. “A bowl, carved to look like a dog.”
Maria had to struggle to keep her frustration in check. She was wasting her time talking about cursed relics and a dead grave robber. Then the old woman added, “But the curse did not die with Diego. Many more are sick.”
That got Maria’s attention. Diego could have fallen victim to any number of pathogens during his foray into the rain forest—an infection from a cut or scrape, accidental ingestion of a poisonous plant—and the only way to know for sure would be to exhume his remains, and absent a health crisis, she wasn’t about to do that. But if there were others showing the same symptoms, then not only was there a potential crisis, but also other patients she could assess. And hopefully save.
But what kind of infectious disease could have acted so quickly? It had only been a week since her last visit, and nobody had been sick then.
“Show me.”
The old woman led her to one of the houses, ominously marked with a black rag tied around a doorpost. A grim looking woman that might have been the older woman’s daughter stood watch on the porch, and moved aside to allow Maria to enter, but conspicuously refused to follow. Maria decided to don gloves and a mask before going in, and was immediately glad that she had.
The smell was overpowering, the sour odor of sickness and unwashed bodies. Four patients, two male, two female, lay stretched out on the mats on the floor. One of them—a man, though it was difficult to tell for certain—appeared to be in the late stages of the illness. The only indication that he was even alive was his ragged, irregular breathing. Most of his hair was gone, and what little remained suggested that it had fallen out only recently. His cheeks were gaunt and hollow, but his mid-section appeared bloated, filled with gasses like a decaying corpse. His mouth was crusted with dried blood, as was his exposed skin, which looked like a map of scabs, drawn atop a scaly white rash.
The other patients exhibited similar physical symptoms, but to a less dramatic degree. The two women had most of their hair and only a few patches of the whitish rash on their cheeks and hands, but both were gripped with a racking cough that brought up flecks of blood. The second man’s rash was more advanced, and odd welts, almost like slashing cuts, were erupting from the skin of his face and arms.
The skin rash suggested a fungal infection, but the other symptoms reminded her of influenza or possibly a hemorrhagic fever. Even more dramatic than their physical condition however, was their behavior. The three appeared to be in the grip of a major psychotic break.
The man was drawing on the dirt floor with his fingers, leaving wet marks, not letters but strange symbols that surrounded his sleeping mat. His forefinger was a bloody stump at the first knuckle, the symbols drawn in blood. One of the women had begun a similar art project, while the other was content to merely wave her hands in the air, lecturing in a mixture of Spanish and—if Maria heard correctly—Ch’orti’, an old Mayan language still spoken in some of the rural villages.
Maria turned to the younger woman at the door. “How long have they been like this?”
The younger woman regarded her with grave expression. “Corazon and Mirasol began to cough three days ago. Ernesto four days. Raul six. He will die tomorrow. Sooner, maybe.”
Six days. That meant Diego must have brought the so-called curse to the village before her last visit.
“Is anyone else sick?”
To Maria’s chagrin, the woman nodded her head sadly. “Si.”
Maria’s gut churned. “Where are the others?”
The woman gestured behind her. “Out there.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The cough is not the beginning. First, they wander.”
Suddenly, Maria’s mouth was very dry. The woman was alone on the porch. The old lady who had brought Maria to the house was gone.
“First, they wander,” the woman said again, “then they start coughing up blood and fall while walking on the road.”
“How many?” Maria managed to croak.
The woman shrugged. “Twenty? Maybe more. We don’t find them all.”
The news staggered Maria. Four sick people—five if Diego was included—might be explained by exposure to tainted water or food, or perhaps some exotic toxin on the artifact Diego had recovered, but this was beginning to look more like an infectious disease outbreak, and that was something that neither Maria, nor the Ministry of Health, was prepared to deal with. Nevertheless, there was only one thing to do.
“You must keep them here. All of them. Bring back as many of them as you can find,” Maria told the woman as she stepped outside, starting for the Land Cruiser at a fast walk.
The woman chased after her, indignant. “Where are you going? They need medicine?”
“I don’t have anything that can help them,” she answered truthfully. “But I am only going to the nearest telephone. Then I will return.”
She decided not to use the word quarantine. That would only frighten the woman. The truth was, until the disease—whatever it was—ran its course, none of them, not even Maria herself, could be allowed to leave.
Chances were, they were all dead already.
CHAPTER 3
Fighting back her panic, Miranda groped for the supply line for the small pony bottle attached to her main tank. The pony bottle was her emergency reserve—her “seatbelt,” she called it, because like the seat belt in a car, it was something she used even though she truly believed she would never need it. And like a seat belt, she knew there was no guarantee it would save her life. The bottle held only a few minutes of air, and if she didn’t choose a passage—and choose right on the first try—all it would do for her was prolong the experience of dying.
She let the regulator mouthpiece fall away, replacing it with the one from the “octopus” regulator attached to the pony bottle. This time, she did not indulge her desire for a deep, calming breath, but merely drew in enough to quiet the burn of excess carbon dioxide in her bloodstream.
Think, Miranda.
She closed her eyes, trying to remember exactly what the cavern had looked like when she had emerged from the passage.
The altar, she thought. The golden disk had been on the opposite site.
Miranda opened her eyes again and saw the settling cloud of silt at the base of the carved stone altar. She swam over it, positioning herself against the wall of the cavern, and turned around, trying to match what she now saw with what she remembered. When she thought she was correctly positioned, she turned to the wall and was confronted by three possibilities.
Her first impulse was to pick the center passage, but something about it looked wrong. It was narrower than the passage she remembered, barely wide enough to pass through without scraping her shoulders. She took another breath from the octopus and contemplated the remaining choices, searching her memory for other details about the passage that had brought her here.
She remembered that the passage had sloped down at the end, but unfortunately, so did both of these, the one to the left at a steeper angle. She swept both openings with her l
ight, kicking herself for not leaving marks on the limestone walls or stringing a guide wire.
I screwed up, she told herself. Rookie mistakes. I knew better.
Her lungs started to burn again. She blew out the breath she had been holding and took another, deeper this time. There was no point in rationing her air now, and maybe a clear head would increase her chances of making the right choice.
Get over it. Make a choice. Trust your instincts. She almost laughed at the thought. Trusting her instincts had gotten her in this mess.
The light revealed nothing to uncomplicate her decision. She was wasting time and wasting air.
At least conserving battery life in the flashlight wasn’t something she would have to worry about.
The answer came to her. Light!
She switched the dive light off and closed her eyes.
True darkness was a rare thing in the modern world. Even on the darkest night there was always some source of artificial illumination close by—light pollution from distant cities and street lamps, the faint glow of electronic devices in sleep mode. It was palpable, something that could be felt even blindfolded. True darkness, the kind of darkness that inspired absolute terror, was reserved for places like this. Underground. Underwater.
But not completely sealed off.
Miranda opened her eyes to the blackness and waited.
A faint blue glow was visible in the passage to the right. Daylight, filtering down through the entrance to the cenote, reflected by the dull white limestone and refracted through the water to reach her here.
The darkness wasn’t absolute after all.
She triggered the light switch again and kicked forward into the passage, taking steady breaths from the pony bottle. It seemed to take forever, and for a few seconds, she almost thought she had misread the signs, chosen the wrong passage despite the glow of distant daylight, but then she rounded a bend and saw the roots partially barricading the mouth of the tunnel.
She wriggled through and saw the shimmering blue circle of light fifteen feet away and just a few feet above her head.
She disconnected her buoyancy compensator from the main line and attached the octopus to it, filling it up so there would be nothing dragging her down, and then kicked out for the center, but something held her fast. Her flipper was caught in the tangle of roots.
Miranda felt like screaming. She thrashed for a moment, trying to tear her foot loose, but then stopped herself. Maybe she didn’t need the flipper to reach the surface, but then again, maybe she would.
She willed herself to a calm state once more and used her arms to propel herself backward, until the pressure on her ankle lessened. A slight twist of the foot was all it took to slip free, allowing her to kick herself away, shooting through the water like a torpedo.
As she neared the shimmering plane that marked the transition from one environment to another, the image of the surface world came clearly into view. She could see her father, leaning out over the edge, staring anxiously into the depths, even though he surely must have seen her.
Miranda broke through the surface and spit out the mouthpiece of the octopus, sucking in fresh air greedily, even though the pony bottle wasn’t empty.
“Dad,” she gasped. “I’m okay.” She pushed the mask up onto her forehead and gasped down another breath. “You won’t believe what I found.”
His expression did not change, and as she gazed up at him, she could tell from the set of his jaw that he was not merely worried, but in pain. “That’s great, honey,” he said, his voice barely a whisper, as if merely speaking intensified his agony.
“Dad, what’s wrong? Is it your lungs?”
Despite being a non-smoker and leading a healthy active life, Charles Bell had been diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which was why Miranda, and not Bell himself, had made the dive into the cenote. She felt a pang of guilt at the thought that her solo dive and the fact that she had clearly pushed well beyond the limits of safety might have induced a stress-related flare-up.
He was breathing fast, breathing hard, but without difficulty. Whatever was causing him distress, it wasn’t his COPD.
“Dad?”
Another face came into view, a man with a swarthy weathered complexion and the distinctive broad facial features of someone of Maya ancestry. “Si, señorita,” the man said, and then continued in broken English. “Come up out of there and show us what you found.”
And then he pushed Charles Bell forward, just enough to show Miranda the knife pressed to her father’s throat.
Miranda’s blood froze in her veins. She took a deep breath, and raised her hands out of the water. Her buoyancy compensator kept her from sinking. “Hey, take it easy. Don’t hurt him.”
“Come out of there,” the man said again, giving Bell an emphatic shake.
Miranda lowered her hands into the water and dog-paddled over to the rope ladder hanging down from the edge of the cenote. She held herself in place with one hand, and with the other reached down to remove her flippers. Her plan was to also draw the knife sheathed to her right calf, but before she could do this, the man with the knife leaned out to keep an eye on her. She decided to leave the knife where it was. With one thumb hooked around the ankle straps of the fins, she began pulling herself up the ladder.
When she cleared the edge, she saw that the man holding a knife at her father’s throat was not alone. A second man stood behind them, a few paces away, machete held loosely in his right fist. Miranda was careful not to make eye contact with either man, or do anything else that might be interpreted as threatening behavior. That was the only way she and her father were going to survive this.
She raised her left foot to the next rung, settled all her weight onto that limb, and then stood up with an explosion of energy. As she straightened, she hurled the dive fins at the man with the machete.
The flippers looked like bat wings as they flew through the air. The man reacted, predictably, by slashing at the fins, knocking them out of the air with his blade. Even before he made contact though, Miranda landed in a crouch a few inches from the edge of the cenote, right beside her father.
The man holding Charles Bell also reacted predictably. Instead of threatening Bell, he focused on the immediate threat. He shoved his hostage away, and swiped his knife at Miranda.
But Miranda was already gone, twisting out of the way. As she came back up, she slipped out of her dive harness, gripped it with both hands, and then spun around like an Olympic hammer-thrower, gathering momentum. The empty 80-liter bottle whooshed through the air and slammed into the man’s arm, knocking the knife away.
She struck again. The SCUBA tank arced around and slammed into the man’s shoulder with enough force to topple him over the edge, into the cenote.
Miranda planted her foot and hurled the tank at the man with the machete. The projectile struck the raised blade, and although the man did not drop the weapon, the impact staggered him back.
He recovered and got the long knife back up again, but Miranda had her dive knife out and was stalking forward like a panther about to strike. Her fearless aggression must have been too much for the man. He turned and bolted toward the trees.
Miranda started after him, but halted after a few steps. She was barefoot, and if the man changed his mind and decided to take his chances in a knife fight, the reach of his machete would give him the advantage. Besides, she wasn’t about to leave her father.
She turned back just as the other man hauled himself out of the cenote. He looked at Miranda and the blade in her hand, then past her at the retreating back of his accomplice, and then he too was running, fleeing the area down the same trail Miranda and Bell had used to reach the cenote.
Miranda sprang forward, trying to block his escape, but she was a half-second too slow. Yet, as he slipped past her, he stopped suddenly, rebounding as if he had just collided with a tree.
No, not a tree, Miranda saw, but something...someone rather, almost as unyielding. It w
as a man—a local she guessed, judging by his complexion, but he was just about the biggest Mexican she had ever seen. He stood well over six feet tall, with his long black hair pulled back in a ponytail. He wore dark gray cargo shorts and an open Hawaiian floral-print shirt over a black T-shirt, emblazoned with the message “I’m not saying it was aliens...” The tight fitting T-shirt accentuated a broad, muscled chest, and his powerful arms, clutching dive tanks, were as thick as Miranda’s legs.
“Whoa, amigo,” the big man quipped in a voice that was deep and sonorous. “Donde esta el fuego?”
His accent, not to mention his choice of words, told Miranda he wasn’t a local after all, but an American. A second glance told her he was, in fact Native American.
The soaking wet would-be assailant popped back up and tried to slip around the big man, only to come face to face with another man. There was no mistaking the second fellow for a local. He had blond hair and eyes the color of a stormy sea. He stood about half a head shorter than the first man, but was built just as broadly.
The fleeing man turned and bolted away, crashing frantically through the vegetation beneath the trees.
Miranda advanced on the newcomers. “Why the hell didn’t you grab him?”
The big man raised an eyebrow then turned to the shorter man. “Yeah, why the hell didn’t you grab him?”
The fair-haired man ignored his companion’s clearly disingenuous question and stepped forward. “Sorry about that. I guess our timing could have been a little better.”
“I’ll say.” She put her hands on her hips, placing herself directly in their path. “You must be the so-called dive experts my father hired.”
The big man’s lips twitched into a smile. He cast a mock-accusatory stare at his friend. “Hired? You mean we’re getting paid for this gig? You holding out on me, Maddock?”
The other man maintained his patient expression. “I think we got off on the wrong foot. I’m Dane Maddock. This buffoon is Bones.” He gestured to a third person behind them on the trail. “And this is Angel.”
