Ruins

by Kevin J. Anderson

  As Mulder had dreaded would happen, once the pilot turned off the seatbelt light, the senior citizens tour group got up and began to exchange seats, gossiping, walking up and down the aisles, waiting in long lines at the coffin-sized lavatories.

  To his horror, some vile ringleader got it into her head to start singing “family favorites”—and to his even greater surprise, most of the passengers actually knew all the verses to “Camptown Races” and “Moon River.”

  Vladimir Rubicon had to shout to be heard over the singing. “My little girl Cassandra accompanied me on some of my later digs. Her mother left us when she was ten, didn’t want to deal with a crazy man who spent his time digging in the dirt in uncivilized portions of the world, playing with bones and reassembling broken pots. But Cassandra was just as fascinated as I was. She went with me happily. I suppose that’s what sparked her desire to follow in my footsteps.”

  Rubicon swallowed and removed his half-glasses. “Now I’ll feel guilty if something terrible has happened to her. She focused more on Central American civilizations, following the Aztec and Olmec and Toltec southward as they swept into Mexico, one culture overtaking and adopting the best parts of another. I never could tell whether Cassandra was doing it for the love of the work itself, or if she was trying to impress me and make me proud of her…or if she just wanted to compete with her old man. I hope I get the chance to find out.”

  Mulder frowned solemnly, but said nothing.

  About an hour into the flight, the senior citizens performed an act that Mulder considered tantamount to a highjacking. One old man wearing a golfing cap stood up at the flight attendants’ station and commandeered the telephone handset used for the plane-wide intercom.

  “Welcome, everybody, to Viva Sunset Tours!” the grinning man said with a tip of his golf cap. “This is your entertainment director, Roland—are we having fun yet?”

  The senior citizens let out a loud cheer that rattled the inner hull of the plane. Someone whooped, while other scattered individuals made rude catcalls.

  “Think of it as a second childhood,” Scully murmured. Mulder just shook his head.

  Then Entertainment Director Roland announced that the flight crew had graciously agreed to allow them to use the intercom so they could spend the remaining hour of their flight playing a few rounds of Bingo.

  Mulder felt his stomach sink. Looking amused, the long-suffering flight attendants marched down the aisles, handing out stubby golf pencils and index cards printed with numbers.

  Entertainment Director Roland seemed to be having the time of his life.

  After a while, the intercom chatter ceased being entirely annoying and became instead a background drone, easy to ignore…except when a plump old woman literally leaped out of her seat, waving her card and yelling “Bingo! Bingo!” as if she were being mugged.

  Mulder stared out the window, seeing nothing but the blue ocean and tattered white clouds. “I wonder if we’re anywhere near the Bermuda Triangle,” he muttered, then smiled to show he had just been joking.

  If Scully had been sitting next to him, she might have elbowed him in the ribs.

  Vladimir Rubicon munched on one of the bags of pretzels the flight attendant had distributed, sipped from his paper cup of coffee, and cleared his throat, turning to get Mulder’s attention.

  “Agent Mulder,” he said, his words difficult to decipher above the roaring background noise of coach class, “you seem to carry a deep sadness yourself. A lost loved one? You still wear the pain like an albatross around your neck.”

  “The Rime of the Ancient FBI Agent,” Mulder said. But the humor didn’t work, and he looked seriously into Vladimir Rubicon’s cornflower-blue eyes. “Yes, I lost someone.” He didn’t elaborate.

  Rubicon placed a strong, blunt-fingered hand on Mulder’s arm. To his credit, the archaeologist did not probe any further. Mulder was reluctant to describe his memories about the bright light, the alien abduction, how his sister had floated up in the air, drifting out the window as he glimpsed the spindly, otherworldly silhouette that beckoned from the glowing doorway.

  Mulder had buried those thoughts himself for a long time and had only reconstructed them through intense sessions of regressive hypnosis. Scully suspected that Mulder’s memory of the event might be unreliable, that the hypnosis sessions had only reinforced images he himself wanted to believe.

  But Mulder had to trust his memory. He had nothing else to go by—except for his faith that Samantha must be alive and that he would find her again some day.

  “It’s the not knowing that’s the worst,” Rubicon said, interrupting his thoughts. “Waiting and waiting, hearing nothing.”

  Someone else in the back squealed “Bingo!” and Entertainment Director Roland set to work, meticulously checking the numbers off. Apparently the winner of each game received a free tropical drink at their tour group’s resort in Cancún.

  Mulder fervently hoped that the entire group would board a double-decker luxury bus and drive off to a hotel—any hotel—far from where he, Scully, and Rubicon had made reservations.

  Finally, the plane began its gradual descent, and Mulder could see the distant coastline of the Yucatán Peninsula, a curve that sliced across the azure waters of the Caribbean.

  “At least you can do something to find your daughter,” Mulder said to Rubicon. “You have a starting place.”

  Rubicon nodded and folded his notepaper, tucking it into his pocket. “Traveling again feels good—to get out and around, I mean,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I did, uh, field work. I had thought my days of Indiana Jones excitement were long gone.”

  He shook his head, looking very tired, very sad. “I’ve wasted far too much time teaching, lecturing about artifacts that somebody else discovered and brought to a museum. I’ve been reduced to an old fart who lives on his lost glory, doing nothing but puttering around.” He said the word with derision. “I just wish it hadn’t taken such an extreme event to wake me up.”

  Scully leaned over. “We’ll do everything in our power to find your daughter, Dr. Rubicon. We’ll find the truth.”

  7

  Yucatán jungle, near Xitaclan

  Thursday evening

  The jungle at night held a thousand noises, a thousand shadows, a thousand threats….

  The big silvery coin of the moon cast its watery light like rain, barely penetrating the clenched fists of branches above. Pepe Candelaria felt as if he had been transported into another universe, all alone.

  He stopped to get his bearings. He could see the stars, but was barely able to discern the trampled path through the underbrush. Even without the path, though, he knew his way back to the Xitaclan ruins. His unerring sense of direction was an innate skill, common among his Indian ancestors.

  Thornbushes snatched at his pale cotton sleeves like desperate beggars, holding him back. With his father’s machete, he hacked them away and moved onward.

  He felt greatly honored that his friend and employer Fernando Victorio Aguilar had such confidence in him. Pepe was Fernando’s most trusted guide and helper—although such an exclusive level of trust often meant Pepe had to accomplish his tasks without the luxury of assistance. Sometimes it seemed that his work could not be done by one man, that Fernando was taking advantage of him, pushing him too far—but Pepe could not refuse. Fernando paid him well enough.

  Pepe Candelaria had four sisters, a fat mother, and a dead father. On his deathbed, sweating and moaning from a fever that coursed like lava just beneath his skin, Pepe’s father had made him promise to take care of the family.

  And now Pepe’s mother and sisters took him at his word….

  He ducked under a low-hanging tangle of gnarled branches. As he jiggled the twigs, something small and many-legged dropped down on his shoulder. Pepe briskly swiped it away without taking the time to identify the creature. In the jungle, spider and insect bites were often poisonous, or at least painful.

  The moon continued to rise, b
ut shed little light through the gauze of high clouds moving swiftly across the sky. If he was lucky, and worked hard, he might be able to get back home before dawn.

  Pepe followed his instinct through the forest, making his way along the old paths, the uncharted roads used for centuries by descendants of the Maya and Toltec who had made their civilization here, before losing it to the Spaniards.

  Unfortunately, all the customary roads led away from the sacred site of Xitaclan, and Pepe had to chop his own path with the machete. He wished he had taken the time to sharpen the blade.

  His father had died from an infected wound, a sting from a deadly fire-colored scorpion. Father Ronald at the mission had called it the will of God, while Pepe’s weeping mother had pronounced it to be a curse from Tlazolteotl, the goddess of forbidden loves, an indication that her husband had been unfaithful to her.

  Because of this, Pepe’s mother had refused to stay in the same room with her husband as he died—and then, according to tradition, she had demanded that he be buried beneath the dirt floor of their home. Then the family had no choice but to abandon their small dwelling…and Pepe was forced to secure a new house for them.

  Building a new home had merely been the first of the new financial burdens Pepe had endured. Now, to atone for his father’s disgrace and fulfill his own grief-driven promise, the family counted on Pepe to take care of everything.

  And he did. He had to. But it wasn’t easy.

  The money he received from Fernando Victorio Aguilar kept them all fed, kept the new home repaired, and had even allowed him to buy his little sister Carmen a parrot. She adored the bird and had taught it to say his own name, much to his delight…except when it squawked “Pepe! Pepe!” in the middle of the night.

  A palm tree scraped dry fronds together with a sound like a rattlesnake. Now, as he fought the dangling vines, Pepe longed to hear the parrot, longed to hear his sisters breathing softly in sleep and his mother’s deep snores. But he had to get to Xitaclan first, in order to keep his friend Fernando happy.

  He understood the task well enough. So long as Excellency Xavier Salida was interested and anxious to buy, Fernando must have more artifacts from the ancient ruins. Fernando needed Pepe to help him take advantage of the timing.

  The ancient city was deserted, the American archaeological team now gone. He was particularly glad that the foreigners no longer rooted around in the ruins—Fernando couldn’t allow outsiders to make off with more of his treasures, while Pepe just didn’t want them touching the precious objects, cataloguing them, analyzing the pieces as amusing debris from a lost civilization. At least Fernando’s customers prized the treasures for what they were.

  Without Fernando’s help, Pepe’s family would certainly have starved. His sisters would have been forced to work the streets of Mérida as prostitutes, even little Carmen. He himself might have become enslaved in the marijuana fields of Xavier Salida or Pieter Grobe or one of the other drug lords. Recovering precious Maya artifacts from long-abandoned ruins seemed safer, more honorable.

  Pepe’s mother adored Fernando, flirted with him, praised his cologne and his ocelot-skin hat. She claimed that Fernando’s patronage had come to her son as a gift from the gods, or God, depending on whether she was thinking of the old images or the Catholic religion at the time. Pepe didn’t complain—he would accept such luck, whatever its source.

  In their church gatherings on Sundays, when the entire village came together to celebrate Mass, Pepe was entertained by some of the fanciful tales Father Ronald told from the Bible, but he doubted their relevance to his life here. Singing angels and white-robed saints might have been fine for people living comfortable lives and attending air-conditioned churches, but here in the thick jungle, in the primeval womb of the Earth, the older…more primal beliefs seemed to hold a greater credence.

  Especially at times such as now.

  A branch cracked overhead, settling into other twigs. Leaves whispered together as something moved unseen across the treetops…a snake, a monkey, a jaguar.

  Pepe splashed across a narrow stream, placing it in his mental map of the area, knowing indisputably where he was, how close he had come to his destination. Xitaclan lay just up ahead.

  In a thicket of fragrant hibiscus shrubs on the bank of the stream, the underbrush rustled. Something heavy splashed into the water. He recognized the reptilian eyes, the sleek form of a night-hunting cayman—large, and hungry, judging from the ripples that arrowed through the water toward him. Pepe quickly slogged through the mud, climbing the bank and rushing into the underbrush to get safely away from the crocodile-like creature.

  Above, he heard more movement, crashing branches, falling leaves. He hoped it wasn’t a night-prowling cat, ready to drop down on him to rip him apart with curved claws and powerful feline muscles—then he heard the scolding of a group of awakened monkeys, disturbed by his flight from the cayman. He sighed, feeling a shiver tingle through him. The old religion had revered jaguars, but he would not have felt blessed to encounter one of the jungle panthers alone in the night.

  For centuries, the Catholic priests had done their best to squash continued practice of the old beliefs. In the village Father Ronald railed with stories of hellfire and eternal damnation whenever he found evidence of ritually shed blood, of scars from self-scourging, even missing fingers or toes cut off with razor-sharp obsidian knives in personal mutilation.

  The villagers apologized, did their penance, behaved with meek shame in front of the priests…but altered none of their thinking. Their hearts had not changed since the coming of the Spaniards five hundred years earlier. Sometimes pure sacrificial blood washed away stains the frequent jungle rains could never obliterate.

  Pepe remembered quite vividly, while his father lay dying of the scorpion sting, his mother kneeling outside the door of their hut. She drew a thorny vine through her mouth, ripping her tongue open so that she could spit bright, fresh lifeblood onto the earth in her own sacrifice.

  The sacrifice had not worked, though. Pepe wondered if the old gods had demanded more blood than she was willing to give.

  In the golden past, the Maya gods had feasted on blood, on hearts torn out of willing victims, on sacrificed prisoners hurled to their deaths into the sacred limestone wells beside the great temples.

  Now only ruins and artifacts remained of all that glory. Perhaps the gods had tired of blood after all….

  Finally, after another hour of trying to slip like a thief through the jungle’s night, Pepe arrived at the forgotten metropolis of Xitaclan.

  Parting the wide, slick leaves of a banana tree, he gazed into the moonlit clearing, the rough hummocks of fallen temples, the sculpture-laden walls showing the hook-nosed masks of the rain god Chac, the numerous feathered serpent motifs now defaced by moss and vines, the impressive Pyramid of Kukulkan tall in the night, but smothered with vegetation.

  Some of the thick trees had been chopped down and hauled away as the archaeological team had worked on their initial excavations, clearing the site of the densest foliage to remove the blanket of undergrowth deposited by undisturbed time. The trenches and shorn tree stumps stood like raw wounds in the earth.

  The American team had been gone for only days, but the jungle had already begun to reclaim its territory.

  In the center of Xitaclan’s plaza, the stepped pyramid dominated the scene. The regularly spaced platforms had partially crumbled on one side, huge blocks tugged free by the strength of roots and vines. But at the ziggurat’s apex the temple to Kukulkan, the god of wisdom, flanked by his feathered serpent guardians, remained intact.

  Pepe would have to go inside the pyramid, rummage around the narrow passages until he found a few more alcoves containing jade artifacts, intact pots, glyph-painted tiles. Fernando Aguilar would make up a fanciful story or legend for whatever Pepe found, increasing its potential worth. Pepe had merely to bring back the treasures, for which he received his share of the money.

  With a lightness to h
is step, he started forward into the plaza clearing—then Pepe looked up as he noticed a flash of movement, mysterious independent shadows gliding down the pyramid’s crumbling steps, like hot oil trickling across water.

  He held still, but the shadows kept moving…toward him.

  Above, the branches rustled again with a slithering sound. On the ground, the tall feathery ferns waved as something large crawled through the leafy underbrush.

  Narrowing his eyes, Pepe flicked his gaze from side to side. Smearing cold perspiration away from his face, he held up the gleaming arc of his father’s machete, ready to fight an attacking jaguar or wild boar. He drew a long breath, his senses fully alert, then took another step away from the trees, glancing up to make certain that no huge predator could drop down on him from above.

  The moon slipped behind a cloud, hiding its weak but comforting light. Pepe froze, listening—and the jungle seemed to become alive with movement, creatures slipping toward him with imperfect silence. In the renewed darkness, he saw a faint glow limning the edge of the Pyramid of Kukulkan, like a luminous mist that seemed to rise from the dark mouth of the cenote well.

  Swallowing hard, Pepe stepped away from the dangling branches of a tall chicle tree, wishing he knew where he could find shelter. He was far from any village, from any help. Could he hide inside the pyramid or one of the other temples? In the debris-littered ball court where Maya athletes had played a violent sport in front of cheering crowds? Should he run back into the forest, away from Xitaclan? Pepe didn’t know where to go.

  With daybreak, the low jungle would be a much safer place. But not now, not at night. Never at night—he should have known.

  Then he saw two long, supple forms coming over the piled rocks, the stone blocks of another fallen temple covered by moss and time. The creatures glided with reptilian, liquid motions mixed with a bird-like grace, jerky yet somehow delicate movements: the two shadows he had seen descending the steep pyramid steps. He found it entirely unlike the ominous, sluggish advance of the scaly cayman he had seen in the jungle stream.