BLACK CITY (Ulysses Vidal Adventure Series Book 2)

by Fernando Gamboa

  He made to raise his submachine once again, but I shot him twice more and he fell backward, dead before he touched the ground.

  Without a word, the echo of the last gun shots still ringing in our ears, we remained still like statues, unsure in the faint light of dusk whether the madness was over once and for all.

  The professor was still sitting on the ground, looking overwhelmed. Cassie, her shoulder bleeding, held the empty magazine in one hand and the submachine gun in the other. And I was lying on my stomach on the ground with my eye still on the gun sight of the smoking pistol, keeping it aimed at the dead soldier as if he might get up again.

  “By a hair’s breadth…” the professor said. He let out his breath suddenly, in relief. “I really thought we weren’t going to make it this time.”

  “You can say that again,” I said as I went to Cassie and bent down by her side. “How are you?” I asked, worried

  She put her right hand on her left shoulder, covering the thin trickle of blood that ran down her arm. “It hurts a lot,” she said wincing, “but it’s only a scratch.” She looked at the fallen bodies of the mercenaries with utter contempt. “I’m sure these bastards have a good first aid kit somewhere.”

  “I’ll look for it right away. ” I stood up and added, “By the way, bloody moron? Did you have to be so enthusiastic?”

  “It had to look like I was really mad,” she said innocently. “Anyway, it was the first thing that crossed my mind.”

  “Yeah… that’s what I figured.”

  “Well, the important thing is, we’re all safe,” the professor said getting up with difficulty.

  “Almost all,” Angelica remarked as she contemplated the bloodied mercenaries sprawled in the mud like broken dolls.

  Claudio went to one of the bodies and gave it an angry kick in the ribs. “The bastards got what they deserved.”

  “Probably. Although what I can’t explain is where this prick came from.” I looked at Souza’s inert body. “I was sure the Morcegos had finished them all off.”

  “Well, now you know they didn’t,” the professor said. “By the way, where did Valeria go?”

  So many things had happened at the same time that I had no idea what she had done after hitting Souza.

  “I don’t know.” I turned toward the thicket at my back. “She was right behind me when the shooting began.”

  “Valeria!” her father called out. “Where are you?”

  Silence.

  The professor and I exchanged a baffled look which rapidly turned to concern.

  “Valeria!”

  “Valeria!”

  “Valeria!”

  We each shouted in a different direction, using our hands to amplify the sound. But the result was the same: a deep, unbreakable silence which seemed to me like a perverse joke on the part of that merciless rainforest.

  Our worry began to give way to alarm. Eduardo was putting his hands to his face to call out his daughter’s name again when beyond the thick vegetation that bordered the small clearing we heard a woman scream.

  At once Professor Castillo lunged after the voice with no other thought than to reach its source. Gun in hand, I ran after my friend, who was already making his way through the tangle of bushes and lianas with an energy fed by panic and horror.

  A few seconds later we came out in the very center of the mercenary camp. We looked around anxiously.

  There was no one there.

  “Valeria! Valeria!” the professor yelled desperately.

  And again, a scream.

  But this time it sounded distant and hollow, like something coming out of an old loudspeaker system.

  We both turned toward it. And then we understood.

  The voice was coming from inside the cave where the mercenaries had held us. A gloomy cave that resembled evil jaws, anxious to devour us. Like an entrance to the depths of hell.

  On the basis of what we had found out so far, that’s exactly what it was.

  Without stopping to think, the professor leapt toward the mouth of the cave, yelling Valeria’s name. I ran after him again, but this time to catch him before he could go on, alone and unarmed, into the absolute darkness of the cavern.

  “Let me go!” he shouted, pushing me aside. “I must find her!”

  I was forced to throw him on the ground with a tight hold, then sit astride him to keep him still. “Professor, no! If you go after her they’ll catch you too!”

  “Get off me!” he insisted hysterically as he struggled with me. “I can’t let them take her!”

  “They already have!” I shouted as I grabbed him by the shirt. My face was close to his. “They already have her!”

  “But I have to go!” he said, and pointed at the cave entrance. “I have to go!”

  “Damn, Professor! I need you to calm down and listen to me!”

  “She’s there…” he pleaded, trying to convince me I was the only thing standing between him and his daughter. “Right there…”

  I shook my head and relaxed my hold on my old friend. I also lowered my voice. “I’m so sorry, Doc… I’m really sorry. But I’m not going to let you go in after your daughter. Maybe that’s what they’re waiting for us to do.” I nodded toward that gloomy threshold. “Maybe that’s why they took her.”

  At that moment, Cassandra, Angelica, and Claudio caught up with us and immediately grasped what had happened.

  Professor Castillo sighed deeply and closed his tear-filled eyes. When he opened them again, there was an excited spark in his blue pupils. “That means she’s alive,” he said. There was no trace of doubt in his voice.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But it makes sense!”

  I moved off him, and he got to his feet.

  “They don’t take people; they kill them on the spot. So, if they’ve taken Valeria, as you say… it must be to set us up.”

  I blew the air out of my lungs and passed my hand over my forehead, infinitely tired. “It could be,” I said at last. “But even if that’s true, there’s nothing we can do anyway.”

  “Oh, yes, there most certainly is,” he replied immediately.

  It was Cassie who asked the question I did not want to pose because I already knew the answer. “Oh, really? What could we possibly do?”

  The professor’s face lit up with a crazy smile. “Fall into their trap.”

  Professor Castillo went through the mercenaries’ backpacks, assembling flares, flashlights, ammunition, and anything else that might come in handy.

  “It’s crazy, Doc,” Cassandra repeated for the umpteenth time as she chased him all over the camp. “A pinche suicide. Have you forgotten what happened here yesterday? This place is a labyrinth, and there’s no way you’ll ever get out of it. What good is your death going to do for Valeria? You can’t… you can’t do anything for her… don’t you understand?”

  The professor stopped what he was doing and took Cassie’s hands in his. His gaze turned to the neat dressing Angelica had put on her wound after disinfecting it. “How’s your shoulder, my dear?” he asked her unexpectedly.

  “What?” she replied in confusion. “My shoulder? It’s okay, thanks. But that’s not what we’re talking about!”

  “Listen to me, my dear,” he said lowering his voice. There was a strange calm in it now, stemming from the acceptance of his own fate. “I came to this remote corner of the Amazon rainforest to look for my daughter, and I’m not going without her. I understand that going into those caves may seem like total insanity. And you’re probably right. But if there’s the slightest possibility that Valeria is still alive, I have to do whatever I can to rescue her.”

  “But they’ll kill you…”

  The old professor stepped closer to the green-eyed Mexican and kissed her on both cheeks. A goodbye kiss. “That’s not important.” He smiled.

  With tears streaming down her face, so that long grooves were left on the dust and mud which covered her skin like a mask, Cassie turned to me. Her eyes
pleaded with me to intervene, to force the professor to come to his senses again.

  But instead she saw me get up without a word from the trunk I had been sitting on, strap a radio to my belt, and stuff a bunch of flares in my pocket.

  “The great chingada take me!” she raged when she saw me following the professor’s example. “What the hell are you doing, Ulysses?”

  Eduardo turned to me with a look of disapproval and a retort ready on his lips.

  “Not a word,” I said before anybody else could open their mouth. I shook my finger in front of them. “If he goes, I’m going too,” I told Cassie. “I owe him my life after what happened last year at Yaxchilan. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him. So if we can’t change his mind about going, then I’m going with him.”

  The professor shook his head. “But you don’t—”

  “Shut up, Doc. You know that if there’s the slightest chance of saving your daughter it’s on condition you don’t go alone. So if you’re set on this folly, the best thing for you and Valeria is for me to come with you.”

  The retired Professor of Medieval History hesitated for a second, peering at me from behind his tortoiseshell glasses. He finally nodded in silent acceptance and murmured inaudible thanks.

  Cassie had plenty to say, however, as she rummaged through the backpacks, clicking her tongue and swearing in Mexican Spanish.

  When I saw what she was doing, I was uneasy. I could not help frowning. “You don’t have to come, Cassie.”

  She looked at me defiantly. “Are you going to tell me what I can and what I can’t do, patroncito?” She was bubbling with anger. “Have you forgotten I was there with you at that pyramid? Or that the professor saved my life as well?”

  He tried to intervene again. “Neither of you should feel obliged to—”

  “Shut up, Professor!” Cassie retorted turning to him. “If you go I’m going too, so let’s drop all this pendejada and hurry up. There’s not much time left before nightfall.”

  Someone cleared his throat a few yards away from us. It was Claudio, who was standing beside Angelica and was asking for a moment’s attention.

  “We’re going too.” He glanced at the Brazilian doctor out of the corner of his eye. “The more of us there are, the more chance we have of succeeding.”

  “Why don’t you go back to the temple?” the professor asked. “You’ll be safe there.”

  “Yes,” Angelica agreed. “But for how long? If you fail, we’ll be left alone. Without food or any chance of escape, and then in the end, we’ll die too.”

  “But—”

  “With five of us, there’s more chance of survival than with three,” Claudio said. “So that’s enough talking.” He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder. “You pick things up here while the doctor and I get the dead soldiers’ weapons over there.”

  And with this both of them turned and went back to the clearing we had left a few minutes before.

  “Can I ask you a question, Professor?” Cassie said when they had left.

  “Of course, my dear. What is it?”

  “How do you plan on finding Valeria in there?” She nodded toward the entrance to the tunnel. “I guess you still remember how last time we got lost. And that not even the compass worked in the tunnels.”

  Eduardo Castillo seemed to ruminate on the answer for a moment, as if he had a fish bone stuck in his palate.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted at last. “We’ll have to go through all the tunnels until we find her. If they’re using her as bait, I don’t think they’ll have taken her very far.”

  “But they’ll be waiting for us… We’ll be going into the wolf’s den blindfolded.”

  “I know.” He sounded downhearted. “But all we can do is follow their steps and trigger the trap. It’s the only way to locate her.”

  “Or maybe not,” I said, thinking aloud.

  They turned to look at me, intrigued.

  “What do you mean?” Cassie asked.

  “I think I know,” I said remembering what I had seen less than an hour before, “where they’ve taken her.”

  “What? How? Why?” The questions tumbled out of the professor’s mouth. “What are you talking about?”

  “I still haven’t told you what I found down there,” I said thoughtfully. “There’s a pretty weird place where, for some reason, they seem to take their…” I hesitated before using the word, but in the end there seemed to be no other one that fitted, “…victims.”

  “Where?” the professor cried anxiously. “What place is that?”

  “It’s going to take a while to explain, and there’s a pretty long stretch before we get there,” I said as I got a hundred-and-fifty-foot-long climbing rope out of one of the backpacks. “So, I’d better tell you as we go along.”

  79

  After a twenty-minute walk through the jungle in the last rays of the afternoon light, we reached the rocky mound where the monolith rose impressively.

  The five of us peered over the edge of the dark well I had crawled out of not even an hour before. The hole was as black as the monument that guarded it, and we had decided to go back into it willingly, even though we were fully aware of what awaited us down there.

  By the look on their faces, I knew that the decision did not seem such a good idea as it had when we had been considering it a few minutes earlier.

  “Last chance to back out,” I said. In their eyes I could see a trace of doubt that had not been there previously.

  The professor, anticipating any indecision, dropped the rope he had been carrying. “Where do we tie this to?” he said.

  While I made knots every eighteen inches to make the climb easier, Cassie reminded the professor, Angelica, and Claudio how to use the weapons we had: how to secure and take off the safety catch, change the magazine, and set them up for firing. I had learned all this at the army during my military service. Cassie’s father had taught her when she’d turned fourteen.

  Unfortunately there was no time to do any target practice.

  By the time she had finished, I had already secured the rope around the monolith, with two turns and a bowline knot. Before I let it fall into the void we lit several long-duration flares and threw them into the well in the hope that they would keep the Morcegos at bay while we descended.

  “Since I’m the only one who’s been there before,” I said resignedly nodding toward the dark hole, “I think I should go down first.”

  I was not really expecting anybody to contradict me, but the fact that no one offered to go in my place, even if it had just been out of politeness, was pretty disheartening. They simply nodded in silent acceptance of my good judgment. I don’t know how I did it, but somehow I always ended up in shit up to my neck. If I come out of this alive, I need to think seriously about seeing a psychotherapist, I thought.

  I climbed down the rope very carefully, but even so it seemed a lot shorter and easier than the hurried ascent of an hour before. I held onto the rope tightly, and with the help of the knots as well as the wall, I reached the level of the hall ceiling in a few minutes.

  It was easy to reach the top of that macabre mound from there. I spent a moment checking there were no Morcegos in sight and getting used to the brutal stench of the place again, then I signaled to my friends to come down.

  The place looked deserted, although I doubted it was really anything of the sort. Most likely the inhabitants were hiding, lurking, waiting for their moment.

  From that perspective, now that it was comprehensively lit by the torches we had thrown in from above, I could finally appreciate the real size of that huge chamber carved out of the rock. On the wall I could clearly see numberless cuneiform symbols, as well as the macabre border of stone skulls around the whole perimeter.

  And as if that was not enough, in the light of the flares I could see half a dozen pentagonal galleries, also adorned with carvings and symbols, which opened on both sides of the cavern. These I had not noticed before.

&nb
sp; “I’ll never be able to get these guys out of here…” I said to myself. I knew my friends would be awestruck by the place.

  I had not finished the sentence when I felt someone coming down the rope. An instant later, I heard the professor gasp behind me. “By all the saints in heaven!” he murmured.

  Amid cries of admiration and uncontrollable bouts of retching, the rest of the group came down the rope smoothly and joined me on the solid platform that crowned the mound of skeletons, piled up like a human garbage dump.

  In the end, even Angelica, who had been the most distrustful at first, decided to join us. I suspect it was more fear of being left alone than genuine scientific interest.

  “It’s the most grotesque, insane thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life” Cassie said as she turned in every direction, mouth agape and flashlight in hand. “It’s disgusting, horrible, disturbing…”

  “Inhumane…” Angelica added in a whisper.

  By then Claudio, the professor, and I were already climbing down the mountain of bones. When we reached the bloated headless body in the Amazonia T-shirt, the Argentinian confirmed it was their guide. Or rather, what remained of him.

  Just then, Angelica scared us almost out of our shoes as she tripped over a ribcage that caught on her pant leg. She tumbled down several feet, causing an evil-smelling avalanche and a deafening racket.

  “Right, if they didn’t already know we were here…” I muttered shining my flashlight on the passage which opened in front of us, expecting to see a threatening black silhouette appear in it, “they certainly do now.”

  I checked that the doctor was all right. I was helping her back to her feet amid her profuse apologies when someone swore out loud.

  “For God’s sake!” I muttered under my breath, turning in annoyance. “Will you stop making such a bloody—”

  I never finished the sentence.

  Neither I nor anyone else could say a word when we saw what that accidental cave-in had uncovered.

  What I had taken for a simple stone platform at the top of the pyramid of bones now revealed itself as the top of a stone head. The head of a colossal statue with a stern face jutting out of it, stained with the blood of hundreds, if not thousands, of men and women.