Anya’s light drifted hauntingly in and out of the curtain of silt behind him. He felt an irrational urge to tell her to return to the surface, but managed to suppress it. Whatever was going on inside his head was no reason to worry the others.
At least not yet.
The walls abruptly fell away to either side of him. He paused at the junction and waited for Anya to catch up with him.
“What’s going on down there?” Jade asked.
“I think we found the entrance to the maze.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
He couldn’t quite describe the feeling, not even to himself. It was almost like the tingle he got in the pit of his stomach when he stepped to the very end of a high dive and knew that the slightest transfer of weight would send him plummeting to the water far below.
Anya must have sensed something, too. He didn’t think she’d gone this long without talking in her entire life.
Evans made room for her to swim to the end of the tunnel beside him and tried to get a good look at her eyes, which stared straight ahead into the murk. She caught him looking and nodded ever so slightly.
He blew out a long breath and drifted out into the open. While earlier the walls had felt like they were slowly squeezing the life from him, he missed the security they provided. He couldn’t see more than three feet in any direction, even with the addition of Anya’s beam to his own.
“Do you see anything?” Villarreal asked.
“Nothing more than you do,” Evans said.
He floated all the way out of the tunnel and fixed its location in his memory. He tried not to move any more than absolutely necessary. He couldn’t see a blasted thing as it was. If they stirred up the sediment, they might not be able to find their way back to the surface until it settled again.
“What’s that over there?” Anya asked.
He followed the beam from her headlamp toward what almost looked like a fallen tree. They were nearly upon it before he realized what it was.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
It was like swimming through the mouth of hell. The creation before him was unlike anything he’d ever seen. Its skeletal form was composed of the bones of any number of different species, bound together by copper windings, green with oxidation. The craftsmanship was astounding, which only served to make him that much more uncomfortable. It reflected the same style as the figures in the murals on the walls of the surviving structures, only somehow translated into three dimensions.
“That is Mictlantecuhtli,” Villarreal said. “God of the dead and king of Mictlan, the lowest level of the underworld.”
The hideous form sat on its haunches with its arms crossed and braced on its knees. It wore an elaborate headdress reminiscent of a samurai’s helmet, carved from the same smooth obsidian as the eyes fitted into its sockets. The framework of wings rose from its back with long feathers made from the ribs of multiple species of varying size.
The figure beside it was somehow even more unsettling. It knelt with its hands raised in supplication, and wore a crown of what looked like monkey skulls around its human cranium, and another hanging from a necklace on its breast. The articulated spines of a dozen snakes dangled from its waist like a grass skirt. Its bony wings were partially folded around it like a bat.
“Mictlancihuatl,” Villarreal said. “Wife of Mictlantecuhtli. Goddess of the dead and queen of the underworld. They are gods of the Aztec pantheon. I cannot tell you why they are here or the significance of their presence.”
“Seems like the whole hell theme speaks for itself,” Evans said.
“The Aztec came after the Teotihuacano. Their gods do not pre-date the construction of the city above you, and yet here they are.”
“They worshiped Quetzalcoatl, too,” Anya said. “Maybe the Aztecs built their pantheon upon the existing framework left behind by the Teotihuacano.”
“There’s another one over here,” Evans said.
He shined his light onto a sculpture lacking in all humanity. It had the head and body of a dog, but its legs had been mounted backward so that its feet faced the wrong direction. The way it was posed, with its head lowered and tilted back over its shoulder, reminded Evans of an animal accustomed to being beaten. Its outstretched front leg pointed deeper into the Earth.
“That is Xolotl,” Villarreal said. “Brother of Quetzalcoatl and god of sickness and disease. For as beautiful and revered as his brother was, he was equally ugly and reviled. There are many stories about him. Some say it was his lot in life to drag the sun through the underworld at night, while others claim he led the souls of the dead to Mictlan. There is one tale that stood apart from the others—at least as far as the context in which it was told—and now I am beginning to understand why.”
Evans floated closer to get a better look at the bone in the dog-thing’s mouth, but still couldn’t determine the species to which it belonged.
“Which story is that?” Anya asked.
“It is said that despite the efforts of his brother to stop him, Xolotl traveled to the depths of Mictlan to unearth the rotting bones of an extinct race of beings. He tricked Mictlantecuhtli into allowing him to drag the vile carcass back to the world of light where the gods of the sky blessed it with a rain of their own blood. And thus life was born anew from the blood of the gods and the bones of the dead.”
“And that, kids, is how your great-great grandfather became a zombie,” Evans said.
“You joke, but you would be wise to remember that entire civilizations were built upon such stories. The people found in them meaning that translated in some way into every aspect of their lives. I am certain that the presence of these specific gods is not accidental and you should proceed with an added element of caution. ”
“Did these ancients happen to draw a map of hell? That would probably be a lot more helpful than stories now.”
“Unfortunately, they did not. The early Mesoameri-cans were not as obsessed with every little detail of hell as your European ancestors, who brought it with them to Mexico many years later.”
Evans inwardly chastised himself. Villarreal seemed like a decent enough guy whose life’s work wasn’t so different from his own, but there was just something about him that made Evans instinctively distrust him, something more than the way he flirted with his graduate students or the way he looked at Anya, something he couldn’t quite pin down.
“Which way should we go?” Anya asked.
“Jade?” Evans said.
“I can’t tell. This map makes the maze look like a bunch of squares of diminishing size.”
“Surely you have some input.”
“Is that an insult?”
“For the love of God—”
“Go right. Nearly ninety percent of the global population is right-handed. The odds dictate that the majority of turns will be to the right.”
“Thank you,” he said. “Was that so hard?”
Jade said something in response, but he tuned her out and carefully propelled himself past the disfigured creations. It turned out that he could have gone in either direction, as both led to the same point on the other side of the wall behind the statues and what had to be the beginning of the maze, because there was only one opening in the limestone wall. He glanced back at Anya before swimming through the narrow corridor.
Evans wasn’t even to the end when he noticed a difference in the way the water acted around him. He shined his light straight up, smiled, and swam upward toward where his headlamp spotlighted the surface. His head rose above the water and he swept his beam around him. The smooth ceiling was barely high enough for him to keep his chin above the surface. A closer examination revealed it to be composed of sheets of sleek black obsidian fitted together like so many ornate tiles. They were dotted with orange circles about the size of quarters. A single scrape from his thumb confirmed they were composed of rust.
Evans felt Anya brush past his thigh and scooted to his left. Even from this vantage point, he could
barely see far enough to tell that the passage terminated in a T-intersection ahead.
The walls were paneled with obsidian, too, although they lacked the regularly spaced patterns of rust. The way his light reflected from them seemed to create rainbows inside of the volcanic glass. He imagined entering the darkness carrying only a torch and how intimidating it would be.
“That much obsidian would have cost a fortune in their day,” Villarreal said. “To the Teotihuacano, it is the equivalent of covering every surface with solid gold.”
Anya breached the surface ahead of Evans. When she turned to face him, there was no mistaking the fear in her eyes.
“What’s wrong?”
He swam toward her, heedless of the sediment rising beneath him.
“Go back down,” Jade said. “I didn’t get a good look.”
“Don’t move,” Anya said.
“What is it?”
“I said don’t move!”
Evans ceased his exertions and bobbed slowly toward her. The sediment rose past his legs and turned the surface of the water brown.
“This place is booby-trapped,” Anya said.
The idea of setting traps for tomb robbers and scavengers was fairly common in primitive societies. The builders of some of the more elaborate tombs of ancient Egypt employed systems of portcullises and falling stone blocks to bar access to treasure troves, although they didn’t inflict injury as much as they created immovable obstacles.
“Booby traps are more fiction than fact,” Evans said.
“Try telling that to the guy down there.”
Evans looked at her curiously for a moment before sinking straight down into the water. He shined his light past Anya, whose legs churned the swirling sediment, and toward the end of the passage.
“I don’t see anything.”
“To your right,” Jade said.
Evans drifted to the end of the flooded corridor and peered cautiously to his right, and directly into the face of a dead man. The majority of his skeleton remained intact, if only because of the rusted iron spikes that had impaled him from above and staked him to the floor.
“Holy crap.”
“He appears to be of Mayan ancestry,” Anya said.
“That cannot be right,” Villarreal said. “The Mayans came long before either the Teotihuacano or the Aztecs.”
“You can tell by the breadth of the cheekbones, shallow orbital sockets, and sloped forehead.”
“That spike was propelled from the ceiling at such a high rate of speed that he didn’t have time to look up, let alone get out of the way,” Jade said. “Either someone triggered the mechanism that launched it remotely, or he did it himself.”
“I can see that,” Evans said, although he wasn’t entirely certain what it meant. This wasn’t a simple trap meant to protect treasure or dissuade thieves; this was designed to kill. And while one victim could have been left as a warning to others, he couldn’t afford to take the chance that this whole place wasn’t similarly rigged.
“Whatever awaits us at the center of the maze must be of immense value,” Villarreal said.
Evans ignored him. No amount of treasure or artifacts was worth spending the rest of eternity down here with a pike through his head.
“We should take our time mapping this place before we explore any deeper.”
“Please,” Villarreal said. “Just a little farther.”
“You’re more than welcome to come down here and explore to your heart’s content, but we’re—”
“I’ll go,” Anya said.
Evans caught her by the wrist before she could get past him.
“Oh, no you don’t.”
He removed one of the lead weights from his diving belt and held it in front of her mask. Before she could ask what he was doing, he tossed it ahead of him and dragged her back into the main tunnel with him. The weight fell in a diminishing arc until it disappeared into the cloud of sediment.
“You need to stop telling me what I can and can’t—”
Thunk.
A greenish blur streaked straight past them. The spike embedded itself in the ground hard enough to shake the walls and cause the water to vibrate.
Anya reached out and touched it, as though confirming that it was indeed real and not a figment of her imagination.
“I think that’s enough exploring for one day,” Evans said, and swam—very carefully—back toward the surface.
20
BARNETT
Command Center, FOB Atlantis
By the time Barnett reached the command center, his thoughts were racing so fast he could barely keep up with them. He could positively feel the tumblers falling into place. He should have known from the start that nothing that had happened, since the very beginning, had been coincidental, least of all in the aftermath of the pyramid’s activation.
He’d already confirmed the arrival of Mr. Roche and Ms. Nolan and requested they be taken to Dr. Clarke’s lab, where he would meet them shortly. He needed Morgan down here with him now and, if he was right about the urgency of the situation, ready for wheels up again in a matter of minutes.
He sat at his desk, logged into his computer, and brought up the map showing the global ramifications during the twenty-four hours following the events that transpired inside AREA 51. Concentric circles marked the epicenters of earthquakes reported all around the world. None of them had registered higher than a six on the Richter scale, and yet all of them had caused considerable localized damage. Localized being the key word. The central courtyard of the ancient ruins at Teotihuacan had basically collapsed, while there were no reports of property damage in nearby Mexico City. The Pyramids of Giza and the Thornborough Henges had been similarly affected, although only passing mentions had crossed the newswires. Simultaneous earthquakes had been reported in the American Midwest and Central Africa, as well, but as far as he could tell, they didn’t correspond to any sites of cultural or archeological significance.
Barnett had been closely monitoring the situation in Mexico, but apparently not closely enough. And now he was forced to admit that he was so far behind he wasn’t sure he’d be able to catch up in time. While still ill-defined, his adversary, which until recently had been little more than a nuisance bird pecking at the edges of their investigations, was growing bolder with each passing day, and it was only a matter of time before it forced a confrontation. He had thought that securing the pyramid and what he believed to be the ruins of the Lost City of Atlantis would allow him to control that confrontation, but he’d been naïve. He should have realized that due to the interconnected nature of everything, his best efforts had accomplished little more than putting all his eggs in one basket.
He was having a hard time seeing the big picture. There was still too much he didn’t know. It felt as though the dots were all there, yet he couldn’t seem to connect them. All he knew with any kind of certainty was that—melodramatic as it might sound—the fate of the world potentially hung in the balance. He was convinced “the sleeping god” was a code name for some sort of covert operation. The first instance of its usage had been intercepted by Great Britain’s national intelligence agency, MI6, which had shared the transcript throughout the counterterrorism community. It was while investigating the ruination of the Thornborough Henges in the days following the catastrophe in Antarctica that the report was called to his attention. Not forty-eight hours later his own team decrypted another message involving the sleeping god, captured at a remote listening station near Guadalajara, Mexico. And now here was another instance that pointed at something going down south of the border. Either this unknown faction was getting sloppy, or it was preparing to step from the shadows to make its move.
As much as he wanted to do so, Barnett was in no position to handle the situation personally, not with events here threatening to spin out of his control. He had operatives on the ground in Mexico, whether they knew it or not, and he had no choice but to activate them and pray they were able to figure things o
ut before it was too late.
If it wasn’t already.
Barnett switched to the live satellite feed and zoomed in on the ancient Mesoamerican complex. While the resolution wasn’t what one would consider crystal clear by any stretch of the imagination, it was more than good enough to allow him to see the individual tourists strolling throughout the ruins, and the surprising lack of them inside the fortifications surrounding the Temple of the Feathered Serpent.
The . . . serpent . . . god . . . will . . . rise . . . from . . . the . . . dead . . . and . . . consume . . . you . . . all.
He shook off Subject Z’s words and scanned the ruins until he found what he was looking for. Unbeknownst to the scientists who survived the catastrophe inside AREA 51, their treatment regimen upon their arrival on the Aurora Borealis had included the implantation of a GPS beacon that allowed them to be located anywhere on the surface of the Earth and at any given moment in time, just like every other agent in his employ. Where he’d expected to find two tracers, he found only one, and definitely not the one he expected to find.
“Well, well, well. What do you know?”
Each global positioning implant broadcast a discrete electromagnetic signature that appeared on the map in small white numbers beneath the bright red beacon. He’d memorized the last three digits of each and every one, and he was more than a little surprised to find Dr. Jade Liang halfway around the world from where he’d last checked on her. A cursory glance at the saved GPS data corresponding to her implant confirmed that she’d only just arrived in Mexico after making what appeared to be a rather rushed journey from the hinterlands of Nigeria. He couldn’t help but wonder why.
He manually typed in the implant numbers corresponding to Drs. Cade Evans and Anya Fleming and initiated a search. Their last known GPS data corresponded to Dr. Liang’s current location, as expected, which suggested that their beacons were simply out of range. A blip from Dr. Fleming’s beacon roughly fifty feet diagonally to the southeast from the fenced hole beside the trailer proved as much. It popped up several more times before the satellite latched onto the signal. It captured Dr. Evans scant seconds later as he and Dr. Fleming approached the hole from what Barnett assumed to be a subterranean passage. He watched them emerge from the collapsed road on the satellite feed and head for the trailer.
Forsaken Page 12
