by Farris, John
Dreams, or visions, of drowning. Rising through depths of black water toward a wavering light. Unable to reach it, or to breathe. Then breaking the surface and gasping, hearing scrapes and sharp metallic strokes on concrete. Seeing the worklight through a hole in the wall only half a cement block square. Then the light disappearing as the last block is snugged into place in the wall and cemented there. A final tamping sound in utter darkness. Then nothing but my own harsh breathing through clogged nostrils, I was dragging in air with enough force to pop a blood vessel, but it wasn't ever enough.
Don't panic don't panic goddammit no-no-no—
Ankles wired together. Wrists wired together, and to the ankles. Baling wire around the neck. No lateral movement. Hands spread about six inches, but so what? Mouth sealed shut, if I get nauseated again, will drown in my own vomit. How much air? A few hours, a day's worth? Did they leave any little chinks or spaces through which air could seep? Holmes and Watson at least two weeks away by hansom cab. Good work, Butterbaugh. You asshole.
Feeling weak. Low blood sugar. Hard to concentrate. But I'll get out. I'm going to get out. For Sharissa's sake, I must get out. I'll think of something.
Just as soon as I take a little nap.
"Buzzerball?"
Heavy, muffled pounding sounds. There was a lot of pain in my chest. My lungs felt as if they were pressed flat. When I tried to breathe, it was like drawing air through closely packed cotton wadding. In fact, I couldn't breathe at all. My throat was bulging, I was about to swallow my tongue.
Pieces of broken concrete block showered over me as a light pierced my eyes. Then there was air, and my lungs swelled. The shaft of light was cut off for a few moments. I heard voices speaking Spanish. The sledgehammer pounding started again, and the jagged hole in the wall got bigger with each stroke. Pieces of broken block fell all over me. There was a lot of dust in the precious air I was dragging in. I had to keep my eyes closed so I wouldn't be blinded by flying bits of concrete.
When the pounding stopped I blinked a few times and saw a lanky dark man grinning in at me.
"Ya boss!"
Another face shimmered under the light, and became more distinct.
Veronica Nespral said, "Next time pay a little more, and they give you a suite."
Very funny. Achille reached in through the five-foot hole he had made in the wall, touched my face with his fingers, then ripped off the layers of filament tape, along with a considerable patch of mustache. Then it felt as if my upper lip had been blowtorched.
He retreated and ducked out of sight; there were clinking sounds, as if he was rummaging in a tool bag.
"How . . . did you find me?" I asked Veronica. It was the voice of an old, old man. My throat was sore from dehydration.
"Momentito," she said. Her face was stiff and her eyes looked as if she were carrying a load of painkiller. Achille reappeared with wire cutters and leaned in to snip away. He was sweating from his exertions. But my skin was dry; I couldn't sweat.
Even when I was free of the wall and could move my tingling hands and leaden feet, I barely had the strength to get to my knees. I coughed hard enough to uproot a lung. My head throbbed and my heart was racing.
Achille handed me a liter can of tepid pineapple juice. I sipped some of it. The tingling in my hands had turned to needles of pain as circulation improved.
"Come on," Veronica snapped at me. "Get going, Buzzerball. There is a whole lot of shit in the fan, and we doan have much time."
". . . Time is it?" I wheezed, trying to crawl through the break in the wall with Achille's assistance.
"Cinco menos quatro." Four forty-five. My brain was as sluggish as my reflexes. I drank more of the juice with shaking hands.
"You mean it's . . . almost morning?"
She shook her head slightly. Every movement seemed to cost her something. "Not morning. Tardes. Saturday afternoon, Buzzerball."
"Saturday? Jesus. You're saying . . . I was in there for almost two days?"
I had climbed out of the improvised tomb, trembling all over, wobbly and disoriented. I couldn't stand without Achille's support. Veronica stared at me in dismay.
"You won't be any good to me like this," she complained.
"Oh, sorry. Just give me a goddamn minute here, and I'll be . . . leaping over tall buildings."
I shook Achille off and groped my way along the wall, away from the worklight he had rigged. Then I opened my pants with stiff fingers and pissed on the floor. There wasn't much of it, and the stream was discolored with rusty blood. My kidneys hurt like hell. Thirty-eight, maybe forty hours in that hole. I should have been dead. I didn't smell dead, but I didn't smell very good, either.
I walked a dozen steps back to Veronica and Achille without losing my balance. The pineapple juice was beginning to do me some good, elevating my blood sugar.
Achille had shouldered his canvas bag of tools. Veronica was carrying her Uzi rifle, or one just like it, on a sling. She also had a revolver in her shoulder holster, a Lady Smith .38, and a machete strapped to her side. I wondered just what action she was ready for.
"Where are we?" I asked her.
"Itzá Maya. The old part of the hotel they are restoring."
I nodded. "So how—"
Veronica reached into a pocket of her flak vest and pulled out my Hamilton Piping Rock watch. Achille flashed a grin.
"Jaquez," he said. "I see him in hotel lobby, wearing Rolex on one wrist, dese one on de other wrist. Jaquez collect manny watches, he known for dat. But I see dese old-time watch dat I know I am see someplace else, and I go, 'Yes!' to myself. I am afraid for you, mon, tink you must be in croc's belly. Jaquez known for dat also. But I go right away to cliníca. Veronica get up from her bed wit' manny curses and come to your rescue."
I said to Veronica, "You still couldn't have known—"
"Jaquez told me," Veronica said. "Come on, let's get out of here, we are late already. Glen is waiting for us at Kan Petén."
"I need a shower and a change of clothes."
"There is no time for bathing. Move it, Buzzerball."
We moved it. I gritted my teeth and got down two flights of steps without groaning aloud. I knew Veronica was in trouble too, from her deliberate pace, but otherwise she didn't show any distress. There was a resolve in her face that impressed and worried me.
"How did you get Jaquez to tell you what they'd done with me?"
"It was no problem. I shot him a couple times first, so he could be certain I had serious business to discuss."
I looked at her in amazement, thinking it was a joke. But I'd been close enough to the muzzle of her rifle to know it had been fired recently. I had been told that the Maya who remained in this land after twenty centuries were a tranquil and submissive people. Maybe Veronica was a throwback to the notoriously combative Itzá soldiers, who had been the last of the Maya to surrender to the Spanish. Or maybe she was a little crazy.
Her Land Cruiser was parked on a service road behind a neat hedge of heliconia, a few yards behind the old hotel building. There was a kid wearing a straw hat with a tall, banded crown behind the wheel. It was late afternoon, all right. The brightness stunned me. Temperature in the eighties and unseasonably humid, but I still couldn't sweat.
"Get in back," Veronica said to me. "I brought more of Kiki's clothes. Change while we are driving."
She turned and spoke in Spanish to Achille, who protested whatever it was she had said. She shook her head firmly and finally his shoulders slumped. He glanced at me, and I nodded my thanks for the rescue. Then Achille walked away from us.
Veronica got into the Land Cruiser. "This is my brother, Benito," she said. "Benito, you are meeting the famous Buzzerball."
The kid offered me his hand to shake. "Why did you send Achille away?" I asked Veronica.
"He has no part of this. I do not want him to get hurt."
"What about your brother?"
"I will look after him." She popped the top on another can of fruit juic
e and handed it to me. It was pink and heavily sweet. I drank it off as Benito drove down the road away from the hotel grounds.
I stripped to the skin. The shorts were bloody in front.
I could only hope the stomping I'd absorbed in the basilica hadn't finished off one of my kidneys for good.
Veronica gave Benito some instructions, then turned and looked me over, deliberately, but with little expression while I pulled on fresh boxers, triple-stitched duck pants I had to roll up six inches at the cuffs, and a well-worn denim workshirt. In the bottom of the duffel she'd brought along was a quart of rum and another of her husband's pistols: the 9mm Firestar, Spanish-made but a pretty good handgun, with nice balance and, I remembered, both range and accuracy—two-inch groupings at twenty-five yards.
"You have balls like a bull," Veronica observed. "When you get some common sense, you might be a man to take a chance on."
"Thanks a lot."
"But you have green eyes. No Maya woman would marry a man with green eyes." She smiled, as if to assure me that she didn't buy that particular superstition. "You are not sweating yet. Drink some rum."
I wasn't sweating, but the headache had dulled down acceptably. I took the cap off the rum and drank a little, passed her the bottle. Veronica had a good long pull, enough to unfocus her eyes for a few moments.
"I am not going to ask you how you fucked up. I am not even interested, claro? But there is no more room for fuck-up."
"Don't worry about me. Why are we going to Kan Petén?"
Benito swerved to pass a minibus on the lane-and-a-half road, then swerved again to miss a pothole. Veronica gave him a tongue-lashing. He grinned through most of it.
"The helicopter is at Kan Petén," she said. "We will need it tonight, I think. Glen will fly us where we must go."
"Where's that?"
"First we are stopping at the hacienda of my cousin Francisco."
"Is Greg Walker there?"
"I doan know. I hope so."
"Wait a minute. Saturday. On Saturday they were driving to the church mission at Usumucinta."
"They did not get there. Jaquez and other men employed by Francisco intercepted them at a roadblock. It was made to look as if guerrillas kidnapped Greg and Sharissa. That, of course, was not the real purpose. They are sposed to disappear, without a trace. A few hours from now Greg will kill Sharissa in a blood sacrifice."
"A few hours!"
"The sacrifice is timed to the eclipse, I know that much. The eclipse comes about half-past eleven tonight. Maybe we have enough time to save her. Finding the place of sacrifice will be the problem. I have this feeling that it is hidden in the jungle of what is now the biosphere. An old temple, restored and protected. There are many such temples, but they are as good as invisible beneath the canopy of the forest. Even so, our only chance to get there in time is by helicopter, before the sun sets. After dark, probably it will be hopeless."
We were heading northeast. I looked back at the sun, low in the western sky. An hour and a half, maybe two hours of daylight left.
"Does Francisco know where to find the place of sacrifice?"
"Of course. He is the Timekeeper now. And Greg Walker, who I think has been there many times, and could find the way by himself."
"What if neither of them is at the hacienda?"
She shrugged. "Then it is hopeless. We will not be able to stop this terrible thing from happening."
"Dammit, stop saying it's hopeless!"
Her mouth was turned down, her eyes half-closed in an expression of sorrowful resignation.
"Even if we find Francisco at his hacienda, it may do us no good. I believe he will be willing to die rather than betray his trust. He will suffer great pain, and never speak. Maya are accustomed to pain."
"You made Jaquez talk."
"Him?" Her eyes flicked to one side, contemptuously. "A mestizo. Too much white blood, he have no guts." She gave a deliberate pause. "Francisco is proud, tough, stubborn. I will have to kill him. To leave him alive would do him great dishonor. You see, I do not think of him as a bad man."
We didn't encounter northbound traffic at this time of day; there was nothing at the end of the paved road except Kan Petén, which closed at five-thirty.
Glen Hazen was waiting for us at the edge of the parking lot near the Inspectoría. I don't know how much Veronica had told him about Sharissa, but I think she was relieved to see Hazen there.
She turned and looked hard at me.
"Listen. I have been a complete liar to Glen. He thinks that Sharissa and her father were in the biosphere, exploring some little ruins nobody know about, and that she was injured in a fall. He likes Sharissa very much, so he is willing to fly us to the hacienda. To go that far, Glen will be in no danger. When we reach the hacienda, then we are on our own. I esplain you to be a doctor who is a friend of 'Turo Gùzman, visiting in the Petén. Benito, he is doing some hunting tomorrow."
"I met Hazen," I said. "I didn't tell him anything about myself."
"You agree we keep peddling this crock of shit? Because I doan want to involve Glen more than is necessary."
"Okay," I said. I was still feeling rocky, and I didn't have my wits about me, letting Veronica be in charge. Maybe she halfway knew what she was doing, but the government also had helicopters in the vicinity, and what we needed now was soldiers, some sort of authorization to go raiding the hacienda of her cousin.
Which might take only two or three days to secure, provided we could get anyone to believe what we were telling them.
Benito came to a skidding stop in the gravel parking lot and we got out of the Land Cruiser. Veronica moved carefully with all of her weaponry and a backpack. Her eyes were slitted from the pain of unmended ribs. It was amazing that she was up and around at all. I had a panicky heartbeat.
Glen Hazen looked at me, remembered, and smiled. "Here's the man from Sky Valley, Georgia."
"Go Dawgs," I said.
Hazen glanced at Veronica, who managed a smile, and at Benito, who was carrying a pistol-grip shotgun and wearing a bandolier loaded with shells. It was an awesome weapon he didn't seem well suited for.
"Hell of a shotgun," Hazen said, thinking the same thing. "What are you hunting up that way, some kind of booger bear?"
Benito shrugged. Hazen took the Uzi and backpack from Veronica and kissed her cheek. "You feeling okay?"
"Sure."
"We're gassed and ready." To me he said, "How bad off is Sharissa?"
"I don't know," I said truthfully, then made something up. "We didn't have much of a phone connection. It may be a broken leg."
"Seats come right out of the coptor to make room for her. Damn shame, I hope she's going to be all right. How far do we have to go?"
"I will show you on the chart," Veronica said.
We walked as fast as she was able through the shady patch of forest between the road and the site. The sun was below the peaks of the highest group of pyramids when we reached the Bell helicopter.
I hadn't seen any of the electronics the aircraft was stocked with on my first visit to Kan Petén; one seat of seven had already been removed to make room for some of it. Electromagnetic mapping equipment, a computer, other compact technology with small monitors that I couldn't identify.
The LongRanger III helicopter rocked as we all settled down, and my stomach sank almost as low as my confidence. I harnessed myself into a bucket seat behind the pilot and put on a headset. Benito was beside me, and Veronica sat up front with Hazen. His hands were already busy preparing for the mission of mercy. There were numerous switches on the two control levers, one at Hazen's left hand and one between his knees. He also had a couple of pedals and foot switches to operate. It looked very complicated to me.
The high-speed starter motor came to life with a shrill whine. The rotors began turning and the turbine caught. A sweet warm smell of kerosene seeped into the cabin. With an increase in pitch we lifted off, so smoothly the sensation was like falling up to the sky. Beside
me Benito grinned with pleasure.
I was flying into the sunset with a wounded bird and a kid and Sharissa's life in the balance. I put a hand on the automatic in the duffel I'd brought along, which gave me no answers as to what I was up against, but offered a small measure of satisfaction.
The sprawl of Kan Petén behind us was much larger than I had thought it would be. There were many plazas, each with its group of buildings, quarry pools like molten metal in the fading sunlight, the massive stair-step pyramids in colors from greenish-gray to pink and orange-red, probably different shades of lichen that still clung to the worn stones. And a lot more of the city-state was partly visible in areas still not fully reclaimed from the surrounding forest. How many people had lived in Kan Petén in the days of its greatest glory? It seemed so deserted now. They were all gone, and much of their civilization was a mystery. It couldn't all have been warfare and bloody ritual, obedience to demanding gods. And what god was Greg Walker seeking to honor by offering the heart of his daughter?
I didn't know if he was a phantom or a freak or a man-god himself, from a culture long extinguished. But I had stopped thinking of Greg as a human being. He was only something evil that needed to be destroyed, and the realization both sickened and excited me.
"Some of Kan Petén has been there since 200 B.C.," Glen Hazen said. "But it's more fragile than it looks. We have to fly in and out from the south, otherwise the vibrations could cause structural damage to the buildings."
Veronica had opened a map and was consulting with Hazen, pointing here and there with a forefinger. He seemed to know where she wanted to go, and made a course correction that in a few minutes had us cruising along the north shore of Petén-Itzá at five hundred feet. The damned thing really went fast. We passed a flight of red and blue macaws over a shady brown lagoon. The sun was burning low on the horizon, reddening in the nightly curtain of haze. There was also smoke from cookfires in isolated lakeside villages below, cayucos clustered like matchsticks on the shore in front of the huts.
