The Antiquities Hunter

by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

  Cruz stopped and stared at it momentarily, then put his hand on the rough patch of wall, studying where the smooth planes of the surrounding stonework met it. He wiggled the rock beneath his hand—a big, melon-sized thing. It scraped against its fellows. Then he ducked under the obstruction, motioning for me to follow.

  Once on the other side, he turned and threw his entire weight onto the log. The wall it impaled, now to our right, made a funny crunching sound. It was a booby trap, I realized, made just for this sort of situation. “Good guys” being pursued by “bad guys” had a way to keep said “bad guys” from getting to whichever temple they were trying to crack.

  I sent up a prayer to the thoughtful builders of Mama Bear and threw myself onto the log beside him, watching the corridor beyond. It was no longer unrelieved black.

  “Cruz . . .” I murmured.

  His response was to douse his flashlight beam. The passage beyond seemed to pulse and quiver in the fitful glow from Greg’s flashlight. We threw ourselves at the log again, making the wall of mismatched stones creak and complain. A sound that was equal parts slither and rumble issued from behind the wall.

  The passage here was long and fairly straight. Greg must have been a good thirty yards away when I caught sight of his flashlight beam.

  Cruz had seen it too. He shoved the flashlight into my hand. “Run,” he told me.

  I ignored him, throwing my body onto the log again.

  “Gina, now!”

  The rumble was louder, but not as loud as the shot Greg fired. I swear I felt the air of its passing. I know I heard it ricochet off the walls behind us.

  A couple of good-sized rocks hit the floor, followed by a spill of gravel. Dust billowed upward. Cruz grabbed my arm and dragged me backwards, then turned me around and shoved me down the passage. Light licked around us as we ran.

  I counted two more gunshots. The third one, I felt. It sent a burning pain along the outside of my right hip. Maybe a bullet, maybe splinters of rock blasted from the wall. I for sure didn’t have time to stop and check it out. I could only keep running pell-mell into the dark underground, hearing behind me the sounds of Cruz’s breathing and the roar of loose rock.

  Like Orpheus, I was terrified of looking back.

  I don’t know how far we’d gone when my hand encountered a break in the left-hand wall. I didn’t realize I’d been using it to support myself until I staggered and went down, pitching up against the wall of the cross corridor.

  Cruz landed almost on top of me, making my hip scream for mercy. His lips were against my ear. “The flashlight. You still have it?”

  “Yeah. Here.” I pressed it into his hand, then tried to sit up. My hip burned like hell.

  He flipped the light on, aiming it down the side route. Then he reattached the thing to the Velcro band at his wrist and scooped me up off the ground, dragging me bodily into the narrow tunnel.

  He let go of me after a moment and moved down the passageway several yards while I sagged against the wall. Warm liquid seeped down my thigh.

  It’s gotta be just a cut, I reasoned. If it were more than that I wouldn’t be able to walk.

  I turned my head and listened for sounds of pursuit, scanned for light in the outer passage. I heard and saw nothing.

  Cruz grunted in approval at something and came back to me. “There’s another turn just ahead. If he’s still in pursuit maybe we can—Dios!”

  I squinted up at him in the half-light. He was standing in the middle of the passage, staring at his left hand. Even in the weakening flashlight beam, it looked vibrantly red. There was more red on his shirt.

  I was overcome with the irrational fear that he’d been wounded too. “Cruz, are you all—”

  He was on me before the words were out of my mouth, lifting me off my feet and carrying me around the turn in the tunnel, where he deposited me gently on the hard floor.

  “I’m okay,” I protested. “Really.”

  “The hell you are. My God, your pants are soaked with blood. How badly does it hurt?” He was unbuttoning my khakis.

  “It burns a little, that’s all.”

  He raised his eyes to mine.

  “Okay, dammit, it burns a lot. But I can walk.”

  “We’ve got to staunch this.” He’d gotten the zipper down and was peeling the pants off my hip.

  I gasped as the fabric dragged over the wound. “Cruz, we don’t have time—”

  “Shut up, Gina.”

  “We need to keep moving. We’re sitting ducks here.”

  He made a hissing sound between his teeth, then said, “Only if he’s still following us.”

  “Well, what if he is?”

  He got up and moved back toward the main corridor, flicking off the flashlight as he went. I listened for the sounds of his passing, but lost them in the oppressive gloom.

  Well, I thought, if ever anyone were going to develop claustrophobia this would be a good way to go about it.

  I heard sounds of movement again and held my breath. The light popped back on.

  “There’s no sign of him,” Cruz said, stepping over me.

  When he squatted next to me again, he had a knife. It was only about a four-inch-long pocket knife, but at that moment, the blade looked about a foot long. I recalled all those old Westerns I’d watched in which the hero was required to dig the bullet out of his buddy or his lady love with his bowie knife. In this case, Cruz simply cut open the side seam of my panties.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “They were stuck in the wound. Hold this.”

  He handed me the flashlight, aimed it, and bent to inspect the damage. He shook his head, then murmured something under his breath. When he wielded the knife again, it was to cut the sleeves from his shirt. He turned them inside out, then wadded one up and daubed at me with it while I bit my lip and clutched at Saint Boris with my free hand.

  Cruz finally seemed to be satisfied with the results of his labor, stopped daubing, and studied the wound. “It’s shallow, but ragged. I’d kill for a proper bandage, but this will have to do.”

  The sleeves came back into play then—one to serve as wadding, the other to help hold the wadding in place. Then he pulled my pants gingerly back up to my waist and zipped them.

  “I forgot you were a paramedic.”

  “I did too for a moment,” he said, enigmatically. “Can you stand?”

  I held my hand out to him and he hoisted me up. I was dizzy, but tried not to show it. “I’m okay,” I said firmly. I hoped.

  “Really? Or are you just being macho? If you’re being macho, we’re about to have a ‘snap out of it’ moment.”

  I laughed. “I’m a little woozy. But I can move.”

  Move we did, back out to the main corridor and left, seeking a passage into the pyramid, up to the surface, anything. We encountered another of the log-lever booby traps, this time carefully avoiding contact with it.

  At the junction after, Cruz flicked his light up to read the notches. They told us to go straight ahead. Cruz started down that way, but I tugged him back.

  “What?” he asked, eyes intent on my face. “Your hip?”

  I pointed up at the notches. “Those say go straight?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would it take to make them say, ‘Go left’?”

  Cruz grinned. “Oh, you clever woman.”

  Well, didn’t that just beat the what-all out of being a clever monkey?

  Cruz stuck his flashlight into his mouth and aimed it up at the notches. Then he flicked out his pocket knife and used the knife to chip a hole in the stone just to the left of the vertical notch. In a matter of moments, the steel blade had dug a trench roughly the width of a man’s thumb into the rock. It was just deep enough to catch the light and turned a “go straight” rune into a “go left” rune.

  “Looks really new,” I opined. “D’you think he’ll buy it?”

  Cruz put the knife away, scooped up a handful of dirt and patted it around the new no
tch. “Better?”

  He didn’t wait for me to reply, but grabbed my hand and moved swiftly down the corridor. Refreshingly, it had not been sabotaged. It led us south thirty yards or so, then deposited us at the bottom of what looked like another pig tail switch-back. Man, those Mayans loved their switchbacks. I admit, I am not a fan. The upside was that it meant we were beneath and within the third temple.

  I required assistance to make it up the stairs. Walking I could get away with, climbing not so much. At the top, we reoriented ourselves and began notch-hunting. It was a laborious process, one that severely taxed my strength and our flashlight’s failing batteries. I was dragging my right leg by the time Cruz finally stopped in the middle of an intersection and helped me to sit down against the cool wall.

  He slid down the wall next to me and said, “We’ve risen hundreds of feet in the last half-hour. Let’s try your cell phone.”

  I pulled it out of my shirt pocket and turned it on. “No signal.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I handed it to him and he checked it himself. “I would have thought we were very near the surface now.” He looked the thing over suspiciously, using the flashlight as sparingly as possible. Finally, he shook it. It rattled in a most disconcerting way.

  “Oh,” I said. “But ’lectronics is your hobby, right?”

  Cruz got out his knife again and pried off the back plate. “One of them, but the receiver is in pieces—wires are disconnected. There’s not much I can do about that without a toolkit.”

  He handed me back the useless phone.

  “No toolkit?” I whined.

  “I left it in my other pants. You still have your camera?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  He held out his hand and I fished the camera out of my pocket. He extracted two of its AA lithium batteries and exchanged them for the ones in the flashlight. The flashlight came back to full brilliance in a way that I found absurdly cheering.

  He turned it off.

  “Oh,” I whimpered. “Why?”

  “I want you to try to rest for a while. That’s why.”

  “But we should keep moving.”

  I realized suddenly that I couldn’t tell whether my eyes were opened or closed. A few seconds later, I didn’t care.

  “Gina. Gina, wake up . . . Wake up, querida.”

  I stirred, opened my eyes and saw light. I found the thought of light exhilarating, exciting, awesome. I sat up. It was only Cruz’s flashlight. I was ridiculously deflated. I’d hoped for sunlight pouring through a Mayan skylight. No such luck.

  “How long was I out?”

  I saw his watch dial light up. “About forty-five minutes. Not nearly long enough. But I’ve found something. We need to go.”

  “Any sign of Greg?”

  “None. I hope we left his lifeless body behind us under a ton of rubble, but I’ll settle for having cut him off and forced him to retrace his steps . . . or at least some of them.”

  “You don’t mean that,” I said. “About Greg being crushed by tons of rubble.”

  He studied my face. Apparently, I looked disturbed by the thought, because he said, “No, of course not.” He held out his hand to me. “Can you get up?”

  It took more than just a hand up to get me to my feet, but once I was there, I found the pain of movement tolerable. Cruz took off toward the west, leading me by the wrist as if I were a recalcitrant child.

  “Gina,” he said, when we’d gone about five yards. “Have you ever shot anyone?”

  “You mean a real someone? A criminal? No. No, I haven’t.”

  “If it was Greg Sheffield or you, would you be able to pull the trigger?”

  “If this is because I didn’t want him squashed like a bug under a ton of rubble—”

  “Could you pull the trigger, Gina? Because you know you might have to before the night is over.”

  “I don’t have a trigger to pull at the moment.”

  “Gina, stop playing dodgeball with me.”

  “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “I guess I have to hope I would.”

  I felt what Cruz had to show me before I saw it. I was plodding along, working on my twentieth refrain of “Ten Little Monkeys,” when I had the most incredible sensation of having walked into an air current.

  I stopped dead in my tracks and sniffed. I smelled something besides damp earth. I smelled jungle. Dark, lush, damp, green jungle.

  Cruz tugged me forward again, and I went eagerly, following him into a broader corridor that reminded me of the entry hall to the maze in Pyramid One. Suddenly, I knew where we were. This was the sun-dappled hall we’d peered into earlier in the day. The one with the well-ventilated roof. And through that roof moonlight, beautiful, blessed moonlight was spilling down into the gloom, creating a bizarre topographical map, its hills and valleys awash in pale glory.

  Cruz turned off the flashlight again and pointed toward one of the larger holes. It was about fifteen feet from the floor of the room. “We have to climb. Do you think you can climb?”

  “To get outside, I’ll levitate if I have to.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  He led me to the bottom of a nice big pile of rocks and dirt and plant fiber.

  “Okay, you go up first, I’ll be right behind you. When you get to the top, climb out on your hands and knees, move to your left, and sit. Do you understand?”

  I figured I must look really awful to have him talking to me like that. “Me climb, get out, go left, sit,” I said.

  I saw his teeth flash white in the moonlight. “And no makee sounds, okay?”

  I tensed. “Is he out there? Did you see him?”

  “No. I haven’t seen anything or anyone. I just don’t want to take a chance. If that booby trap cut him off, he might’ve had to go back. Ready?”

  I wasn’t, but I climbed anyway. Slowly, excruciatingly, dizzyingly. I put one hand, one knee, one foot in front of the other, moving ever upward toward that growing patch of starlit sky. I wanted that sky more than I recalled having ever wanted anything, and I willed that wanting to overwhelm the growing agony that was running up and down my right side.

  I climbed out onto the overgrown ledge, achingly aware of the endless vault of the night sky overhead, and sidled to my left, just as Cruz had instructed. I sat and looked up at the star-spangled darkness in silence, not oohing or aahing or praising Brahman as would have been appropriate.

  A moment later Cruz was sitting beside me. We spent a few moments letting our eyes grow accustomed to the different quality of light and taking deep, delicious breaths of fresh air that was warm to the touch and honey on the tongue.

  Across from us on the other side of the clearing was Pyramid One. It looked like nothing so much as a sleeping dromedary. Rose was right, I have no sense of romance. We’d just Indiana Jonesed our way out of there; I knew what danger it contained, but I couldn’t force it to be a lion or a dragon or even a malevolent volcano.

  Cruz and I watched it for a while to see if there was any movement around the entrance. There was none.

  How long should we sit here, I wondered. I turned to ask Cruz. He was looking at me solemnly, his eyes glinting in the moonlight. Before I could say anything, he caught my face between his hands and made me meet his gaze.

  “He could be coming through the temple underneath us, or he could have doubled back to Pyramid One.”

  “Or he could’ve died in the rock fall,” I murmured.

  “We can’t assume that, Gina. I need to know that if he catches us—if he catches you—you’ll be willing to defend yourself.”

  “I can’t know that,” I said truthfully. “There’s no way for me to know that.”

  “Gina—”

  “Look, I could say ‘yes,’ but I don’t know if I really could . . . pull the trigger. Would it make you feel better if I lied?”

  He pressed his forehead against mine and shook his head, sighing. “How is your hip?”

  “Okay.” My pants weren
’t quite on fire, but they were very warm.

  “Are you all right? Really?”

  Well, other than a sudden reluctance to move, yeah. I nodded, rocking both our heads.

  Cruz rose wordlessly then, and led me carefully down the tumbled slope.

  Chapter 24

  Hide and Seek

  We made it back to the entrance of Pyramid One without incident. I regretted my bum hip, my broken phone, and my missing gun, but as they say: No matter where you go, there you are. Which I figure is a more esoteric rendering of Work with what you got.

  The Vestibule was dark and there were no more flashlights in Revez’s steamer trunk. Greg must have searched it and found the ones Cruz left behind. The maze was silent, giving up nothing. Greg could be anywhere. Lying under the rubble between Pyramids Two and Three, lying at the bottom of a pit in Pyramid One, or happily filling duffel bags with buried swag, singing, “Yo-ho, me hardies. Yo-ho!”

  Or he could be wandering, lost but well-armed, mere yards away from where we stood listening to the maze.

  Cruz took a long, slow breath as if he were getting ready to dive into a pool. “You wouldn’t stay here if I . . . asked you to.”

  It was not so much a question as a statement of fact, so I saw no reason to answer.

  “Por supuesto,” he said, then placed a hand on either wall. “Like this.”

  I followed suit and we moved off into the Underworld.

  If Greg had survived the rockslide and had found a way through, I reasoned, he would likely have taken a wrong turn and be lost somewhere in Mama Bear. If he’d doubled back, he would have taken his wrong turn just before the pig tail. If he had used the PDA to navigate. If he was also using the notches, that turn would at least slow him down. Cruz had told him the notches were unreliable, which might incline him to trust the PDA. Cruz had been lying, of course, but then so was the PDA he’d tried to hide from Greg’s notice.

  Cruz, I realized, had presented our adversary with the classic conundrum: Don’t trust me. Everything I say is a lie.

  At the top of pig tail stair, we stood and listened anew, trying to think like Greg Sheffield. He wanted to keep the site to himself, but he was scared. Would greed drive him to seek us out to finish the job, or would fear incline him to cut his losses and flee with whatever he could carry? He had a helicopter after all.