by Alex Archer
"Really," Annja said. "I didn't know."
"And since we speak of knowing, I know for a fact that the Maya did not regard 2012 as the end of the world, or near to it. Or in any event, not all Maya did."
"Why not?"
"First, in Palenque in the state of Chiapas, we find record of projections to October 13, 4772. For those Maya, history did not run out a handful of years from now. Also, a monument at Coba in Quintana Roo projects the end of creation at many powers-of-thirteen of the cycle of b'ak'tun. According to it we've barely begun the cycle."
"So the world," Annja said, "will not cease to exist on December 21, 2012? Or thereabouts."
"According to the Maya, I'd say there's no more likelihood than that it will end on any other given day, including this one." His smile frosted over. "There are times when I suspect that 2012 is a most optimistic date for how long we have left."
Annja sighed. "I hear you, Doctor. Thank you very much."
****
She had a bus ticket to Fresnillos in the central Mexican state of Zacatecas, north of the Federal District, for the following morning. Her modest but comfortable little three-star hotel was in Coyoacán, near the university. Instead of heading back there after parting company with the helpful young Dr. Márquez she decided to spend the afternoon cruising the bright, chattering street markets of the immense city square known formally as the Plaza de la Constitución and universally as the Zócalo.
She took a quick pass through the museum showing artifacts from the Aztec Templo Mayor unearthed during the construction of the underground station. Quickly, because she had done a lot of museums recently, and suspected more lay in her near future. She loved archaeology. She loved glazed doughnuts, too. Continuing to savor life's loves, she had learned, was done best by metering their doses.
She emerged blinking into the heat and spear-sharp sunlight – and eye-watering pollution – of the plaza. Leaving the climate-conditioned subterranean realm of the station was like getting hit in the face with a wet blanket. A none-too-clean one, at that.
Like Los Angeles and Denver, and, on a smaller scale Albuquerque, Mexico City was built in a big bowl in the desert, with mountains for walls, ideal for trapping both heat and pollution. It was also naturally humid despite high altitude and relatively low annual rainfall, being built in a lake, into which it was gradually sinking. Moreover, the world's third-largest square, after Tiananmen and Red, was well fenced by big buildings, from the cathedral to the Palacio Nacional. They served the same function for its microenvironment as the surrounding mountains did for the Valley of Mexico. The Zócalo, in short, was a heat sink wrapped in a heat trap.
Annja wandered past some rather tawdry and dispirited Aztec dancers and in among the brightly colored kiosks, and the crowds of tourists, notably less colorful. In fact the latter were mostly pale but well-larded North Americans, Northern and Eastern Europeans. The season had grown cool in New England and Europe. The sunbirds had begun early migration to warmth.
One place that caught her eye was a wooden booth offering pre-Columbian artifacts, mostly figurines of weird Aztec and Mayan gods. She made a beeline to it, a frown starting to furrow her brow.
Still a few feet away, it became apparent that these were all reproductions, not necessarily of museum grade, and not plundered archaeological treasures. Though when she picked up an effigy of Tezcatlipoca to find a yellow Made In China sticker on its base she thought that was a bit over the top.
Feeling somewhat chagrined, she moved on. She looked distractedly at white dresses with bright trim, hung next to sticks of cinnamon in clay vases and, improbably, brass Buddhas. I don't know why I bother, she thought. It's not as if I have any room for more stuff. Between artifacts – all legally held – and stacks of books, magazines and manuscripts, her Brooklyn loft apartment was well packed.
I've never been a shopping goddess, anyway. She took pains about her appearance, not a universal constant among archaeologists. But that was mostly confined to making sure her clothes were clean and color coordinated. Sturdy and serviceable were big items with her. As was cost. The closest she came to being a fashionista was her expertise at thrift stores. But that wasn't shabby chic; that was spending almost her whole life poor.
As for labels, it seldom occurred to her to look. People like her female associates from the Chasing History's Monsters staff sometimes caught her and forced her to spend a little money on nice clothes and accessorizing.
But her acquaintances had learned to their exasperation that unless they arrived at her loft and stood guard over her as she dressed, Annja was still just as likely to show up for one of the rare girls' nights out they could coax her to in khaki cargo pants, a secondhand man's shirt and comfortable boots. Exactly what she wore at the moment, except for substituting a lightweight saffron cotton blouse.
She was content, though, to let herself drift. Listening to the tourists natter in German and French and nasal English as they bargained with the cheerful shopkeepers, she knew that however strange, or even crass or tacky the goods on offer, she was participating in a ritual at least as old as civilization. More than likely Nahua vendors with plugs in their lower lips had dickered on this very spot, half a millennium ago, with copper-haired Tlaxcaltecans and cynical, pipe-smoking Mayan missionary-traders.
She found herself under an awning at a booth offering plates and pots and mugs of heavy, lovingly hand-painted pottery. She picked several up and examined them. No two were alike, and there was nary a Made In China sticker to be found.
A cat with a swirled brown-and-gray back and a white belly and nose lay in repose in a bin on top of a stack of serving platters, apparently enjoying the cool. As its pale green eyes caught hers it rolled over on its back with a loud, hinting purr.
She scratched its proffered belly. It writhed and purred louder in appreciation.
Maybe this is why I came here, she thought. It was as good an answer as any.
Chapter 9
Annja put her hands to the heavily tinted glass of the taxicab window. "Wait," she said in English. "Where are we going?"
"No intiendo," the driver said, a stout, sweating, droopily mustached man who had both understood and for that matter spoken English perfectly well when he had picked her up outside the hotel.
She repeated her question in Spanish, which was the first foreign language she'd learned in the orphanage in New Orleans – a city where the Spanish influence was almost as strong as French, though much less publicized. It attracted both the affluent and the penniless from all across the old Spanish Main and much of Latin America. Not to mention from right across the Gulf of Mexico.
The cabbie only shook his balding head and waved a handful of rings that had turned the fingers blue-green around them.
She was on her way, or so she thought, to the airport. Yet somehow the taxi had turned decisively off any kind of main drag. Initially the driver had muttered something – again in heavily accented but quite clear English – about avoiding traffic jams. And traffic jams there were aplenty, with upward of twelve million people poured together in the big, high bowl of the Valley of Mexico. At first Annja accepted he was dodging apparent gridlock because she could see he did so. The street ahead had been solid with cars immobile as some modernistic ribbon statue of sun-gleaming metal.
But they had wandered way too far from the beaten path. Annja's instincts were screaming.
The street was narrow, unlike the wide, tree-lined boulevards that veined the vast metropolis. That wasn't entirely unexpected of a back route. But the buildings all looked old, without either the affected quaintness or authentic grandeur of, say, the buildings around the Zócalo. They ran to cracked white or pink stucco and bulging, tilting walls that looked to consist of no more than random piles of ill-chosen rocks. Where much of Mexico City resonated with the energy one encountered in midtown Manhattan or Buenos Aires or Río, this place had a stealthy, half-deserted vibe.
Nor did it seem the lack of activity on the
claustrophobic street resulted from early-onset siesta. Annja had the acute sense of being watched, from every dark hole of a doorway or gap between badly fitting stones. By eyes that were anything but friendly.
Too late she remembered reading about taxis being a popular medium for armed robbery and kidnapping in the violence-plagued Federal District. But this taxi had an official emblem, she thought wildly. It was identical to the others lined up in front of the hotel.
"Turn around," she shouted.
Instead the taxi turned into an alley that been invisible to her a moment before and stopped. Instantly she yanked the door handle.
It came off in her hand.
The driver jumped out so ferociously his door scraped pink stucco dust off the wall of the building to the cab's left. He ran away down the alley.
Annja slapped her palms twice experimentally against the window. She couldn't remember if side windows were made from sugar glass the way windshields were, to minimize the risk of their turning into sprays of shrapnel sharper than any razor when broken. She wasn't too sanguine a Mexican taxicab would have such amenities anyway. Especially an outlaw cab – even an outlaw with official sanction.
Instead she lay back at her full length, which put the back of her head and shoulders against the far door. She placed the corrugated rubber soles of her hiking boots against the door and pushed with all her strength.
The flimsy door banged off a cracked concrete patch of wall and fell into the hard-packed alley dirt with a clatter and crash of glass breaking. With the strap of her overnight bag already looped across her shoulder, Annja flew out of the cab almost as fast.
She saw both ends of the alley were blocked.
There were six of them, spread out across the alley. The trio facing her, approaching the rear of the stalled cab, had two machetes and a rusty-looking revolver. The three coming from the front carried two semiautomatic pistols and a length of white-painted metal pipe.
Knowing her only hope was to act quickly, she darted straight at the bunch with the two big knives. The guy with the revolver promptly cranked off his entire cylinder.
Even before he cut loose, Annja had dropped flat on the ground, just catching herself, palms and toes. The bullets passed harmlessly over her. Two starred the taxi's rear windshield and made the red-and green-and-white fringe inside bounce. One knocked a maggot-colored divot in the pink wall on the driver's side. Two went who knew where.
The last smacked, audibly, into the forehead of the tall man coming up right behind Annja, a big 45 autopistol in his hand. The shot killed him so quickly his finger didn't even twitch enough to set off the sensitive single-action trigger.
When she heard the sixth shot crack Annja jumped. She snapped herself upright as if spring-loaded, then vaulted over the top of the car.
The guy on the far wing from the deceased pistolero, coming up on the cab's front passenger side, blazed away at her with some kind of 9 mm pistol. He held the piece on its side, rendering it utterly impossible to aim.
The impact of seeing his intended victim hurtling through space, apparently right at him, startled him. He sprayed the ground, the car, the walls, the sky even more comprehensively than the first guy had, and with a good deal more bullets.
Shooting the way he was, he would only hit Annja by sheer luck, even at close range and closing fast. Annja felt the left side of her blouse, which had come out of her cargo pants during the proceedings, tugged as if by invisible fingers. Another shot brushed her right forearm.
She cleared the entire taxi, hitting the far side on her feet. She went instantly into a forward roll as her target finished emptying his high-cap magazine through the approximate space she would have occupied had she stayed up. As she came over she drove both heels into his chest in a sort of combination ax-and-thrust kick. Impact shivered down her legs. She heard ribs crunch. Her target was thrown into a wild backward somersault. His head hit the pavement at a deadly angle and the pistol dropped from his lifeless hand.
Annja brought her feet down and snapped herself standing again. Then she threw herself into another roll. As she did the pipe came whistling down in a two-handed overhead stroke meant to turn her skull to mush. Instead it glanced off her left buttock.
Pained but not injured she came up yet again onto her feet. She turned left. The pipe man was cocking his steel club over his head for another crack. She skipped sideways and pistoned a side kick into the pit of his stomach. She didn't have time to roll her hip over and get the full weight of her body behind it; it was just a leg kick. And his stomach was well padded. But Annja had powerful legs. He doubled as if he'd sucked a slug to the belly and sat down hard.
Loud noises from just up the alley indicated the man with the revolver had managed to fumble at least a couple of cartridges into his weapon. Annja darted past the pipe wielder, who was struggling to breathe. She crouched by the front bumper as glass, blasted from the windshield by a back-to-front shot, rained down on her head and shoulders.
"I got the bitch," a voice shouted in Spanish from her near left.
"Kill her!" someone shouted.
Things were getting tight for Annja. She had a machete coming up fast on her left. There was almost certainly another coming down the other side of the car to catch her. And all too soon the pipe man was going to suck enough air back into his lungs to kickstart his central nervous system and get back to the party.
It was time.
She willed the sword into her hand. And sprang like a panther.
The man who'd claimed he had her howled and swung his big, wide blade at her from beside the front tire. Striking across her body, Annja caught it with the sword, guided it past her and down. As momentum carried her attacker by she rotated her wrist and swung her weapon backhand. Right up the line of his extended arm.
The sword caught him right between clavicle and Adam's apple. It cut through skin and cartilage with only the slightest hesitation. When the edge hit his neckbone she felt a jar. His head drooped. She pulled back the blade.
The man's body hit the ground hard and slid, limbs sprawling, neck pumping great gushes of blood into the dust.
Annja was already looking the other way, brandishing the sword in a glittering horizontal arc over the cab's dented hood.
The machete man coming around from her right yelped. He jumped back. The sword's tip swished harmlessly before his scrawny chest.
A shot cracked. The taxicab roof sounded like a Caribbean steel drum as the soft-nosed .38 slug skipped off it like a stone off a millpond. At the same time a shadow loomed in Annja's peripheral vision and her nose filled with the stench of stale sweat.
She threw herself into a forward roll as more ineffectual shots echoed down the alley. The steel pipe buckled the taxi's hood with a bang. She rolled to her feet in time to parry a downward machete stroke with a ring and a shower of sparks.
A blur of motion in her eye's corner brought her a quarter turn right in time to parry another ax-style stroke of the pipe with the flat of her long blade. For a moment she stared past the crossed weapons at the fat, astonished, sweat-streamed face of her opponent.
She pushed off to deflect a wild machete slash over her head. She was a whirlwind, parrying rapid hacks and slashes from both increasingly desperate men.
She was breathing hard, almost gagging on the diesel fumes and stench of blood and dust and viscera. The air was thin – but at 7,240 feet it was almost the same altitude as the San Esequiel dig, where she'd spent ample time to be acclimated.
But nothing drains like combat. It was why prizefighters did roadwork so obsessively. Intense exertion took it out of you. But the mental stress was what really sucked you dry.
The revolver began to go off like spastic firecrackers again. All three combatants ducked as a bullet moaned low over their heads, then jumped as another kicked up dirt right beside Annja.
The machete guy turned to curse out his buddy with the gun.
Annja was not feeling chivalrous. She side-kicke
d the pipe man in his capacious belly once more and turned right, unleashing a wheel-like stroke, looping high and down to the right.
Her sword took the machete wielder transversely across the back. It opened him right up. His head snapped back, his knees gave way and he fell into the alley grit.
Screaming with surprising shrillness for one so huge, the fat man rushed her with pipe held high. She pirouetted, lunged, thrust.
The tip of the sword took him in the sternum, punched through ribs, heart and ribs again to stand a foot out from his back.
He fell over backward.
The tight embrace of bone and flab pulled the sword right out of Annja's hands.
She looked back over her shoulder. Her final attacker stood thirty feet away. He had the revolver open and a new scatter of silvery empties at his feet. He was frantically trying to fumble a fresh cartridge into the cylinder.
Their eyes met. She experienced a strange sense of darkness, felt an inexplicable internal impact.
The cartridge at last slid into the chamber.
Annja spun and flowed forward as he shut the cylinder with a snap. As he raised the pistol with both hands, feet braced, she reached the fallen body of the second machete man. His weapon lay in the dust by his side.
She grabbed its hilt. The revolver came on line. The click as it was cocked seemed like the loudest sound in the world.
Annja was still twenty feet from the muzzle. She would never reach him before he dropped the hammer. And this time, it seemed, he aimed true.
She cocked her arm back, threw. The unwieldy two-foot machete turned over twice in the thick, humid air and punched its wide tip vertically through the gunman's forehead.
For a moment he stood there staring at her. His eyes had gone very wide.
