12.21: A Novel

by Dustin Thomason

  “Of course,” he said. “I’ll be right down.”

  “I need to make a call first,” Chel said. “Can I use the satellite phone?”

  Stanton handed it to her, and she went back down below.

  Nina whispered, “That woman just lost her friend, she was screwed by her mentor, and people took that book from her. If I’d been through what she has, it’d take me years to even think straight again. But she’s down there working. I’ve only known one other person in the world who could do that. So don’t be so damn rational. Get to it, for God’s sake.”

  THE DIGITAL DISPLAY on the phone told Chel it was just after eight A.M. on December 18. Three days to the end of the Long Count cycle. Three days until Victor and all the rest of them realized they’d murdered Rolando over a fucking calendar.

  She would never be able to understand what her mentor had done or forgive herself for letting him back into her life. She’d played every detail over in her head—from the moment she’d showed up at the MJT until Victor left the lab—searching for answers. Trying to find some clue she missed about what he was really capable of.

  Slowly, Chel dialed the number she knew best. The cell towers were overwhelmed, but this time, after three rings, she got an answer.

  Her mother’s voice came through static. “Chel?”

  “Mom, can you hear me?”

  “Where are you? Can you come to the church?”

  “Are you okay?” Chel asked. “Are you safe?”

  “We’re safe. But I’ll be better when you come.”

  “Listen, Mom, I can’t talk long. But I wanted to tell you that I’m not in Los Angeles anymore.”

  “Where are you going?” Ha’ana asked.

  “Kiaqix. From there, we’re going to find the lost city.”

  When Ha’ana spoke, her voice sounded resigned. “I never wanted you to take the risks I did, Chel.”

  “What do you mean, Mom? … Mom?”

  The phone cut out before Ha’ana could respond. Chel tried to get service again, but they’d run through a patch of cloud cover, and she didn’t want to use too much battery. Besides, what else was there to say? Ha’ana was talking again about the risks she’d taken to get them out of Kiaqix. But Chel knew the real courage would have been in staying there.

  Stanton descended the stairs. He sensed that she needed distraction. “You want to tell me what we should expect in Kiaqix?”

  Chel said, “Trees hundreds of feet high, with pink flowers and green moss that looks like tinsel. More animals per square mile than the best safari in Africa. Not to mention the sweetest honey you’ve ever tasted.”

  “Sounds like Shangri-La.”

  Stanton reached out and took her hand. She was surprised but happy when he leaned in and kissed her softly on the lips. He tasted like salt. Like ocean air.

  Chel never took her eyes off his. But once they pulled back, she reached down and picked up one of the maps. “Shall we get to work?”

  BAHÍA TODOS SANTOS was the Pacific inlet that led into Ensenada; Plan A made it there just before noon. Nina steered them toward a thirty-six-foot Hatteras fishing boat floating five miles offshore. Stanton had insisted they couldn’t risk getting any closer, because Mexican authorities were on the lookout for American vessels trying to escape the epidemic.

  They hitched up and Nina made introductions. The captain of the other boat, Dominguez, was stocky, and wrinkled from all his time in the sun. Years earlier, Nina had profiled him for a magazine because he was known along the Gold Coast for his ability to find mackerel in the most difficult stretches of ocean. He spoke little English but welcomed the Americans onto his boat with a tight smile.

  Once all the gear was transferred and they’d paid him the agreed-upon four thousand dollars in cash, they were ready to go.

  Chel called to Nina from Dominguez’s boat. “Thank you. Again.”

  “Good luck,” Nina said. She nodded at Stanton, tears welling. “Take care of him.”

  Stanton jumped back onto Plan A. A brisk wind blew hard as he rubbed Dogma’s head, then stood and embraced Nina.

  “Guess it’s a waste of time to tell you not to do anything stupid,” she said.

  “Too late for that. I hope you know …”

  Nina cut him off. “Just get your ass home, all right?”

  THE TRIP THROUGH the Mexican portion of the California Current passed in a blur, and just after daybreak the following morning, they rounded the Baja peninsula and headed east across the gulf. With their native captain, they had no problem getting past the few coastal patrols near Cabo, and finally they made landfall at Mazatlán. The aroma of fried dough from the mestizo street carts filled the air. Life seemed to be going on as usual here, and if anyone was particularly concerned about VFI, they didn’t show it.

  After docking, Dominguez paid off a harbormaster, then told the man they needed a van or SUV. Half an hour later, they had an old silver jeep for twenty-five hundred dollars. With the gear transferred, Dominguez waved goodbye.

  At Mazatlán International, men with machine guns manned the entrance. People inside eyed Stanton and Chel warily. This was a major hub, and unlike at the port, the sight of Stanton’s gringo face clearly unnerved some of the travelers here. At the private air terminal, he and Chel got the bad news: All charter planes were booked, ferrying Mexico’s wealthy farther from the epidemic. Complicating matters, they needed a plane large enough to carry the jeep they’d just procured.

  After half an hour of fruitless efforts, Chel overheard two diminutive, twenty-something Maya men having a conversation in Ch’orti’, a branch of Mayan spoken in southern Guatemala and northern Honduras. Chel didn’t speak the modern dialect, but it was a close descendant of ancient Mayan, and from the content of the conversation, it sounded like the guy doing most of the talking was some kind of freight pilot.

  “Wachïnim ri’ koj b’e pa kulew ri qatët qamam,” she told the man, whom even Chel towered over. “Chakuyu’ chäb’ana jun toq’ob’ chäqe. Chi ri maja’ käk’is uwi’ wa’ wach’olq’ij.”

  We go to the land of the ancients now. Please, you must help us. Before we reach the end of the calendar.

  Ancient Mayan could be spoken with Chel’s fluency by fewer than a dozen people in the world—all scholars—and the pilot, who introduced himself as Uranam, had probably never heard anyone speaking it outside the few words his own daykeeper knew. But he understood exactly what she was saying.

  “How do you know the ancient tongue?” he asked, staring as if she were a ghost.

  “I am descended of a royal scribe,” Chel said, her voice commanding. “And he has told me in a dream that if we do not reach El Petén, the fourth race of man will be wiped from the earth.”

  Several phone calls later, their new friend had procured a decommissioned U.S. Navy plane in from Guadalajara to take them south.

  Two days after leaving L.A., they were headed into the jungle.

  12.19.19.17.18

  DECEMBER 19, 2012

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE MAYA HIGHLANDS ARE ANCHORED NORTH TO SOUTH BY A SPINE of volcanoes that have been active for millions of years. Early highlanders worshipped the volcanoes, but their powerful eruptions, which could swallow an entire tribe at once, eventually drove the Maya south to the Land of the Trees—as they called it in Qu’iche—Guatemala.

  Four hours into the flight, with the C-2 Greyhound flying at less than two thousand feet, Stanton and Chel looked down at the green canopy that gave the country its name. Uranam, the pilot, was using a radar system to search for the proper coordinates, but from the window all they could see were forested hills in all directions. The colors of the foliage darkened as they circled the perimeter of the area, and Chel worried they might not find Kiaqix before nightfall.

  If her assumptions were correct, Kanuataba had to be somewhere between sixty and a hundred miles from her village, at a bearing of 230 to 235 degrees southwest. Volcy had found the city in three days’ walk, so the total ran
ge couldn’t be greater than about three hundred square miles. They’d scour every inch.

  “Are we expecting to see macaws?” Stanton called above the roar of the engine.

  “Only in the migration season,” she told him, adjusting her eye shield. “The village is a point on the migratory path, and in the fall there are thousands, but by now they’ve moved on.” She continued her search for the cypress-covered hills that would signal they were near the village landing strip. Before they could find Kanuataba, they had to find Kiaqix.

  “Hold on!” Uranam yelled out.

  Every time they made the transition from the mountains to the valleys and back again, the plane bucked up and down, and just then the port-side wing caught a current and was kicked upward, jostling the entire aircraft. For a minute it felt as if the plane might snap in two.

  When it righted itself, Chel saw the ground below. They flew over alternating patches of thick forest and cleared farmlands, where North Americans’ appetite for corn and beef had stripped the earth.

  A minute later, she saw the massive cypress-covered mountain abutting the valley. Here, fifty generations of her ancestors had lived, worshipped, and raised families. She pointed Stanton toward the valley her father had given his life for. Beya Kiaqix.

  “There.”

  THE RAINY SEASON HAD made the earth soft, but there were half a dozen mahogany and cedar trunks and large branches blown over in the path of Kiaqix’s landing strip. The plane’s wheels barely cleared them. Final slivers of daylight were leaving the forest, making the landing even more treacherous. It looked as if no one had landed here in months.

  On her last trip to Kiaqix, hundreds of villagers came to the airstrip to herald the return of Alvar Manu’s daughter, the great scholar. There’d been a dozen round-faced children holding incense and candles. Now she had to remind herself that today no one knew they were coming.

  The plane rolled to a stop.

  Uranam hurriedly jumped out and threw open the cargo doors at the back. The crushing heat of the jungle poured in immediately.

  They put the biohazard suits, tents, prion samples, metal cages, test tubes, and other glass into the jeep, lowered the lift, and Stanton drove into the mud. When they were ready to make the five-mile drive to Kiaqix proper, Chel rolled down the window to let in some air.

  “You’ll be here?” she confirmed with Uranam. “We’ll be back in twenty-four hours.”

  Fear crawled across the pilot’s face. “No,” he said, backing toward the plane. “I’m not staying.”

  “He agreed to stay,” Stanton said after Chel translated. “He has to.”

  “I don’t know what this is about,” Uranam said. “But I don’t want to find out.”

  He pointed above the forest. Chel turned to see thick wisps of smoke trailing into the sky, almost as if there was a factory deep in the jungle.

  “They’re just clearing for next year’s harvest,” Chel explained, first to Uranam, then to Stanton. “That’s all it is.”

  Uranam looked like a man with his mind made up as he climbed back into the cockpit. “No. This is something else,” he said, eyes fixed on the smoke. “From the gods.”

  Within a minute, he was firing up the engine.

  After the plane took off into the night, Stanton tried to reassure Chel. When they found what they’d come for, he insisted, he would find a way to get someone to pick them up.

  But Chel knew it would be impossible to get another plane back in here anytime soon, and she was afraid that, if the weather turned, they might not be able to get out for weeks. Then she turned to look again at the black trails of smoke, and fear gripped her throat. Whatever superstitions drove the pilot away, he was right about one thing: No one would be burning fields this late in the rainy season.

  SO THEY STARTED DOWN the road to Kiaqix with no idea of how they’d ever get back. The jeep had a full tank of gas, but Chel knew there had to be a hundred miles at least between them and the nearest Esso station. And, in this part of the Petén, roads were mostly just lines on the map, as hillside erosion and mudslides rendered them impassable for much of the year.

  The plan was to stay for the night in Kiaqix and set out again at dawn into the jungle in the opposite direction of Lake Izabal, recreating the path that the Original Trio had taken here but in reverse. The five-mile path from the airstrip was so rutted that Stanton could barely get the jeep out of first gear. A light rain fell. Though they drove over cleared land, the sounds of the jungle were always near: the shrill calls of the keel-billed toucans, the monkeys making their wolflike cries.

  Even as they drove through the darkness, Stanton tried to make out what little plant life he could identify around them for any sign of whatever might have protected the king and his men from the disease. On the way down he’d studied the flora that grew in this tropical forest, and he recognized a few trees by their shapes in the headlights: Spanish cedars with their coupled leaflets that looked like outstretched arms, vanilla vines that climbed up the small, thin trunks of copal.

  “Where do we stay tonight?” Stanton asked, wiping the blinding sweat from his forehead. He had never been this far south, and he couldn’t believe the wall of heat that greeted them when they landed.

  The heat wasn’t new to Chel, but with this much humidity, even she felt like she was seeing the world underwater. “Maybe with my mother’s cousin Doromi. Or with one of my father’s sisters. Anyone will let us stay with them. They know me.”

  Neither of them dared mention the fact that there wasn’t any telling what they’d actually find in Kiaqix. But not even those dark fears could keep Chel from feeling some of the excitement she always did when she made this drive. Kiaqix was as vivid in her memory as the streets of L.A. The long causeways, the aroma-filled market, rows of thatch, wood, and concrete houses, like the one she was born in. Then there were the modern stone buildings built recently: the stained-glass church, the expansive meeting hall, the multi-room school.

  The medical facility on the road in, for which Chel had helped raise the money, would be their first stop. The twenty-bed mini-hospital was built at the edge of Kiaqix a decade ago. Once a month, a doctor flew in to administer vaccinations and antibiotics. Otherwise it was run by the elder women of the village and a shaman who dispensed traditional remedies.

  The road bisected a patch of mahogany trees. Some spots between them were covered with unripened stalks of maize. Though it was drizzling now, there had been a terrible drought in the Petén. Even where tree stumps were too large to uproot, the villagers had planted around them. They were clearly desperate for fertile land.

  Soon the medical facility came into view. The villagers called it ja akjun, Qu’iche for doctor’s house. To Stanton, it looked more like a Mediterranean church than a hospital. Wooden columns buttressed a white roof, and an outdoor spiral staircase led to the second floor—an architectural touch that could be found only in a place where it never got cold.

  The last time Chel arrived here, nurses had swarmed her, eager to show how the modern and traditional remedies were brought together under one roof to treat machete injuries, complicated births, and the myriad other ills that were part of life in Kiaqix. Now there wasn’t a person to be seen. The red door to the hospital stood open, and the only sounds were of the jungle giving over to night—trees whispering in the wind and those eerie cries of the spider monkeys.

  “You ready?” Stanton asked her. He squeezed her hand and they got out of the car. He stopped to pull two flashlights out of their supply bag and, as casually as if pocketing car keys, tucked his Smith & Wesson into his waistband.

  Once they both had on eye shields, he led them toward the open door.

  Something felt wrong right away. The entrance was pitch-black. Stanton scanned the room with his flashlight. It was the clinical bay. Curtain rods separated one examining area from the other. Splintered wooden chairs marked where patients usually waited. There was no life here, and it didn’t feel like there had been f
or a long time.

  “In ri’ ali Chel,” Chel called out as they stepped inside the darkened room, her voice echoing. “Umyal ri al Alvar Manu.”

  I am Chel, daughter of Alvar Manu.

  No response.

  Rounding the corner into the examination area, their flashlights caught paper strewn across the floor. Then chairs, turned over, soaking in puddles of antiseptic that had been spilled on the ground. A ceramic container was shattered, and shards were mixed with soaked cotton balls and long Q-tips. Flies the size of quarters buzzed around them. The space reeked of ammonia and what smelled like excrement.

  Stanton reached into his pocket and pulled out two pairs of latex gloves. “Don’t touch anything with your bare hands.”

  As she struggled to maneuver her sweaty hands into the gloves, Chel called out loudly again in Qu’iche that she was the daughter of Alvar Manu and that she had come to help. Her own voice sounded weak to her, but it echoed in the empty room.

  Continuing through the building, her worry grew. These rooms were not just abandoned—they had been vandalized. Beds lay on their sides and the stuffing had been ripped out. There was glass everywhere. Stanton opened the cabinets and rummaged through the drawers, looking for the medical supplies: Someone had taken most of them.

  At the far end of the hallway, Chel pushed open the doors to the small chapel. She scanned her Maglite across the front and saw that the large wooden cross had been pulled from above the pulpit and smashed into pieces. The beautiful stained-glass window was in shards on the ground, and ripped pages from Bibles and copies of the Popol Vuh were strewn over the pews and into the aisles.

  Then she saw a familiar symbol, and all Chel’s remaining hope vanished.

  Chel heard Stanton come into the chapel behind her. “Even the indígenas believe it now,” she whispered. “Maybe it’s true.”

  He said nothing, but Chel felt his hand squeezing her shoulder. When she reached up to take it and her glove made contact, she noticed the hand was bare.