The other guerrillas trained their weapons on Xipe Totec. Zotz had the lightning gun and took careful aim. Xipe Totec, however, faded from view as soon as he had dealt with the last of his trio of victims. There was that shimmering heat-haze effect again, and he was gone. A few bullets zinged in his direction, but there was nothing to see to hit. Invisible or absent, either way he had evaded retaliation.
Xibalba was getting picked apart bit by bit. Stuart was appalled by the methodicality of it, the relentlessness of it. He had known that something like this might happen, but foreseeing an event was very different from actually watching it unfold in front of you. There seemed to be nothing any of them could do, except wait for the next attack, the next cold-blooded, merciless infliction of death.
A guerrilla came tottering out of the forest. He had been one of Tohil’s companions on the pre-dawn sentry shift, and he was lucky not to get shot as he stumbled into view. His nerve-rattled fellow guerrillas mistook him for an enemy, and would have planted bullets in him if Chel hadn’t shouted at them to hold their fire. He sent two of them forward to help the man, who looked dull-eyed and bewildered, as though unsure of where he was and why he was there.
The two approached him with caution, softly calling his name. “Mulac. Mulac. This way. Quick. Get to cover, Mulac.”
Mulac seemed barely to hear a word. He came to a standstill, his mouth slack, his gaze unfocused. Then he began feeling his chest and abdomen with his hands. The touching turned to scratching, some terrible itch needing attention. He ripped open his shirt and started clawing at his bare skin with his nails.
“In me…” he murmured. “He put them… in me…”
“Who do you mean, Mulac?” asked one of his confederates.
“Put what in you?” asked the other.
“Eggs. Made me swallow. And now they’re growing. Too fast. Hundreds of them. They want out.”
All of a sudden Mulac shuddered. A moan escaped his lips, rising in pitch and intensity as convulsions ran through his body. He was tearing at himself now, desperately trying to get at something under his skin. Stuart could see movement where his fingers were, small lumps pulsing and wriggling, dozens of them, like sentient cysts. The other two guerrillas exchanged looks of alarm. They didn’t know whether to go to Mulac’s aid or back away and leave him to whatever fate he was about to suffer.
A scarlet dot appeared at the centre of one of the lumps, just above Mulac’s right nipple. There was a splitting sound like a blister bursting, and from the Mayan a sharp gasp that was almost a sigh of relief, as if the worst was over.
The worst was not over. Far from it.
The scarlet dot grew. A droplet of blood trickled down from it. Something was pushing its way out from Mulac’s pectoral muscle.
No, not pushing.
Gnawing.
A tiny black and yellow head forced itself through a gap it had created in Mulac’s skin. It chewed rapidly round in a circle, widening the hole. All over Mulac other similar apertures opened up and more tiny heads poked out. He looked down and watched as countless little creatures birthed themselves bloodily from his body. His expression was that of someone who had passed beyond pain and reason. His face showed nothing but a kind of sickly wonderment, a look that said, This is me. I’m doing this. This vileness is coming out of me.
The creatures were hornets, and the first thing they did after vacating their host was wipe his blood off their wings with their rear legs and take to the air. They hovered around Mulac in a darkening cloud, their communal buzz mounting in volume as more and yet more of them broke free from him. Mulac sank to his knees, his body a glistening moonscape of deep raw gouges.
Some of the hornets had burrowed upward rather than outward, through Mulac’s throat. They flew out of his mouth in ones and twos as nonchalantly as commuters filing out of a subway tunnel. Others exited the other end and crawled out from his trouser cuffs.
At some point during the whole terrible ordeal, while he was slumped in a kneeling position, Mulac died. It wasn’t easy to pinpoint the exact moment, as his body continued to twitch and spasm. The activity of the hornets still within him gave him a semblance of life long after his heart gave out.
Above Mulac’s drooping head, the hornets gathered into a swarm, forming a single rough sphere that started to split into two smaller spheres.
Loud as he could, Stuart yelled at the two guerrillas near Mulac, telling them to move, run, now. Chel added his voice to Stuart’s. He had no way of knowing that the hornets were under the control of Azcatl, but he’d seen the ants in the forest, as they all had. All he knew was that the swarms spelled obvious danger and his two men were closer to them than they ought to be.
Too late, the guerrillas roused themselves from their ecstasy of horror and stirred their numb limbs into action. The swarms launched themselves separately at them, in arrowhead formations. A dense whirring cluster of hornets overtook and engulfed each of the fleeing Mayans.
The winged insects set to work stinging every inch of skin they could find. Their victims screamed and slapped frantically, but the hornets were legion in number and remorseless. For each that got swatted or crushed there were another dozen to take its place. In no time the two men were festooned in red welts. Their eyelids puffed shut, blinding them. Hornets crawled into their ears and stung, into their noses and stung, into their mouths and stung. The build-up of venom in the men’s systems reached fatal levels in less than a minute. They fell. They writhed on the ground. Their windpipes swelled and sealed up. Their hearts failed. They lay still.
The hornets took off and coalesced into a single swarm once more. Zotz levelled the l-gun at it, but the swarm didn’t go on the offensive again. Instead it moved off, meandering out of the clearing. The noise it made as it departed was a satisfied, contented drone, a noise that spoke of orders discharged, a job well done.
Silence fell. It was broken by sobbing — one of the Mayans weeping as helplessly as child.
Then the aerodisc’s neg-mass drive started up.
Chimalmat was in the cockpit, and through the disc’s windshield she could be seen gesticulating urgently to the guerrillas and mouthing the words, “Come on!”
It spoke well of Xibalba’s bravery that the notion of retreat hadn’t even occurred to any of them until then. Chel had been confident they could ride out the attack, and his men had shared that confidence. Events having proved otherwise, it now seemed eminently reasonable to think in terms of a tactical withdrawal. Chimalmat had been well ahead of everyone else in this respect; her forethought was going to be the salvation of them all.
The aerodisc thrummed loudly, like a bass note on an organ pipe. The grass and shrubs beneath it stood on end, vibrating like a rat’s whiskers as electromagnets excited the antigravity particles inside the drive chamber and the disc started to lose mass and resist the earth’s pull. At Chel’s command the guerrillas fell back from their positions, ducking under the camouflage netting and making for the gangplank. The netting itself began to strain at the pegs tethering it.
Stuart took a step forward to join the exodus. Then a hand fell on his shoulder.
Quetzalcoatl, in full armour, stood behind him, pinning him to the spot with a powerful gauntleted grip.
Quick as a flash Stuart lashed out with his rapier, but Quetzalcoatl deflected the blade easily with his free hand.
“No,” he said.
“Let me go,” Stuart hissed.
Again, “No,” this time accompanied by a resolute shake of the head.
“Then kill me. Get on with it. Just make it quick.”
A third “No.”
Quetzalcoatl’s eyes were sombre, and Stuart grasped his meaning.
He wasn’t going to die.
The guerrillas were.
The aerodisc lifted off, and several of the netting pegs were wrenched out of the ground. The gangplank was still extended, like a beckoning arm. Chimalmat was gazing down at Stuart as she manipulated the controls, her face
a mask of pity. Stuart was in the enemy’s clutches. As far as she was concerned, he was doomed.
“Hey! Englishman!”
Stuart turned to see Zotz crouched in the doorway at the top of the gangplank, sighting down the barrel of the lightning gun. Chel was beside him, brow furrowed with concern.
“I can zap him,” Zotz called out. “Buy you time to get over here. Just break free from him if you can.”
“Reston!” Chel yelled. “You can do it!”
Neither man fully believed what he was saying. They, like Chimalmat, reckoned Stuart was a goner, the next in line to be eliminated by these implacable and seemingly unstoppable aggressors.
Little did they realise who was really next.
“Don’t do this,” Stuart said to Quetzalcoatl. “Please. Let them live.”
More of the pegs pinged loose, and the camouflage netting slithered off the aerodisc. The disc bobbed upwards, free.
“Too late. Can’t be stopped.” Quetzalcoatl cast a glance skyward. “Huitzilopochtli is here.”
Stuart’s gaze met Chel’s. Each, in his way, said a silent, solemn farewell to the other.
Directly above the aerodisc, unseen by Chimalmat or any of the guerrillas, a man in iridescent armour hovered. Shimmering translucent wings kept him aloft. In his hands was a large tubular device like a cross between a harpoon gun and a bazooka. Some kind of conical-tipped missile sat snug inside.
Huitzilopochtli, the Hummingbird God, thrower of flame spears.
The aerodisc gained more height, rising in a smooth vertical. The gangplank began to close, hydraulic rams hauling it up to slot into the hull. The undercarriage retracted.
From on high, Huitzilopochtli took aim with his spear launcher. The weapon was pointed at the dead centre of the disc.
“He’ll hit the neg-mass drive,” Stuart breathed. “He can’t do that. It’ll kill us all.”
“Not necessarily. Not all,” said Quetzalcoatl, and the metal plumage sprouted from his shoulders and all at once he and Stuart were enclosed in a bubble of light. It was bright but not dazzlingly so, and it appeared to have substance, a sort of just-tangible jelly-like texture that put faint pressure on the skin. Stuart couldn’t help but think of egg albumen, or a cocoon.
“We’re protected now,” Quetzalcoatl said. “Nothing can get through.”
The aerodisc lifted level with the treetops. Everyone aboard was under the impression that they had escaped; they were safe.
Huitzilopochtli’s launcher bucked in his grasp and the spear lanced down.
The disc recoiled, then detonated. As the drive chamber was breached, the sudden escape of antigravity particles caused a complete localised disintegration. Everything within a hundred-metre radius lost cohesion. Subatomic binding forces were negated. There was a temporary, catastrophic disruption of the laws of physics.
Organic matter broke down at a cellular level.
Metal turned to dust.
Water vaporised.
The very air came apart, molecules hissing asunder.
It all took place in a microsecond and was followed by a gargantuan implosion, a violent reassertion of the proper order of things. The fragments of the aerodisc and the nebulised remains of the people in it were collapsed back together into a tight ball some three metres in diameter. The vacuum thus created sucked up debris from all around: dirt, leaves, blades of grass, bits of shredded tent, splinters of the cabin. A hurricane-holocaust of particles filled the air.
Through this the ball that had been the aerodisc plummeted, hitting the ground with an almighty whump and shattering into a million pieces on impact. Granules of wreckage were strewn across the entire floor of the clearing and into the muddy wallow that had been the pool.
It took minutes for the fog of debris to clear, and when it finally did, a scene of utter devastation stood revealed. A rainforest glade was now, almost literally, scorched earth. Nothing was left that lived or grew. The surrounding trees were scarred and battered; some had toppled, their roots yawning like giant mouths. The waterfall oozed grey sludge.
Within Quetzalcoatl’s protective bubble of light Stuart had seen everything and felt nothing. He’d not been buffeted even slightly by the colossal destructive power being unleashed around him. Not so much as a hair on his head had been disturbed. It was an eerie experience, like being in a car crash, that same sense of disembodiment, as though the disaster were happening to someone else, somewhere else.
The bubble vanished as it had appeared, abruptly and without a sound. Dazed, Stuart watched the snow-like settling of the last few floating flakes of detritus. He breathed in smells of ash and ozone.
He looked behind him. He looked up.
Both Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli were gone.
He was alone.
Silent, the wounded rainforest swayed and grieved.
PART THREE
TENOCHTITLAN
TWENTY-TWO
3 Rain 1 Movement 1 House
(Thursday 20th December 2012)
Mal Vaughn got the call at 4am. The phone next to her hotel bed rang shrilly and insistently. In the adjacent bed, fast asleep, Aaronson moaned and swore. Mal herself had been only drowsing. She groped for the phone in the dark and pressed the receiver to her ear.
“Vaughn.”
As the voice on the other end of the line spoke, Mal slowly sat up. Then she lunged for the bedside lamp switch.
“Really? You’re absolutely certain?”
“Whassat?” said Aaronson.
She shushed him. “Hold on,” she said into the phone. “Wait just a second.” She rummaged in the bedside table drawer for a pad of hotel stationery and a pen. “Give me the name of the town again.” She jotted it down. “And your name?” She jotted that down too. “You’re the arresting officer? The duty officer. Okay. Well, if he is who you say he is, Mr Necalli, then I reckon you and your whole station are in line for some kind of citation. I’ll be there as soon as I can. How far are you from Teotihuacan? What’s that in miles, about seventy? Give me an hour and a half, then. And don’t, whatever you do, let the slippery bastard out of your sight.”
She planted the receiver back down in its cradle. There was a look of something like elation on her face.
Aaronson propped himself up on his elbows. Beneath the bedcovers he was sporting a prominent morning glory that he did little to hide. Aaronson being who and what he was, an erection on him meant nothing to Mal, just a biological function. Besides, she’d already seen every bit of him, in every conceivable state, during the fortnight he and she had been travelling together to and fro across Anahuac. He was a remarkably immodest hotel room sharer.
“Look at you, boss. The cat that got the cream.”
“Ten fucking bowls of cream, with a mouse on top.”
“Another person’s seen him?”
“Better yet, he’s only gone and got himself arrested.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“In a town called Mixquiahuala. It’s north of here. Local Jaguars have him in the nick. Picked him up yesterday. Charge of vagrancy.”
“How are they sure it’s him?”
“Armour. Smug idiot had his armour on. Came wandering out of the rainforest, dressed as the Conquistador. Even carrying his sword.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Well, I do, so let’s get dressed and on the road.”
“What, no breakfast?”
“It’s four in the ruddy morning. Nowhere’ll be open.”
Grumbling, and now beginning to wilt, Aaronson climbed out of bed and grabbed his clothes.
As she drove the hire car out of Teotihuacan, through prosperous adobe-built suburbs slumbering beneath a pearly grey pre-dawn sky, Mal reflected on the two and a half weeks gone by and the fragile trail of clues that had brought her and her sergeant all the way from London to the Land Between The Seas.
After the unmitigated farce that was her second attempt to bring Stuart Reston to book, Mal had been certain
that summary execution lay just around the corner. No way was she going to be allowed to live, not after she’d had Reston in her grasp — chained up in the back of a paddy wagon, no less — and still managed to lose him. Never mind that it hadn’t been her fault. Never mind that she had been blindsided by Reston’s Mayan cronies. She’d had the man, had him, and he’d got away. No self-respecting Jaguar could screw up on so grand a scale and not expect to pay the penalty for it.
The two days she spent in hospital recuperating from a mild concussion were, she was sure, destined to be the last two days of her life. As soon as she was discharged and she reported back in for work, she would get the word from on high. Be in the quadrangle at midday sharp. Full dress uniform not compulsory but preferable. Serve her right, too. She had masterminded what she’d thought would be a textbook takedown, and it had degenerated into a total shambles, first with Reston leaping into the Thames, then with the Mayans ramming the paddy wagon side-on with their van. Net result for all her efforts? Eight Jaguars injured, including herself, most with cuts and contusions but a couple with broken bones. One paddy wagon written off. No villain in custody.
Oh, and she’d picked up a gruesome eye infection from the river water as well, which was going to take a while to fix with antibiotics.
All in all, execution was going to come as a relief. She wouldn’t have to live with her shame for long, or for that matter her sore, pus-gummed eyes.
When she tipped up at Scotland Yard on the morning of 13 House 1 Monkey, everyone shunned her. It was predictable, only to be expected. She was a pariah. Dead woman walking. Aaronson alone met her gaze and spoke to her more or less as normal. Even with him, though, there was awkwardness. He was too cheery, making too many forced jokes and studiously sidestepping any mention of the events of the previous Sunday.
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