That Coyotl would hide the codex beneath a statue that was out in the open area while a battle raged in the city streets and perhaps in the center itself made no sense.
I wondered if the gods had possessed Huemac the Hermit’s mind, and he was mumbling dreams and not facts.
Moving back to a higher spot, I tried to visualize how the ceremonial center had been laid out. I saw something that puzzled me: The Thundering Paws faced east to catch the rays of the rising sun—all except one, and it looked to the north.
The north was where Mictlantecuhtli, the lord of Mictlan, presided over the Aztec netherworld. As with Xibalba, Mictlan was where the unhonored dead went to face violent demons.
I was certain the Dark Rift Codex was beneath the statue facing hell. But why would Coyotl hide the codex there?
Coyotl didn’t hide the codex in Tula.
The legend was true. He had taken it with him and had hidden it somewhere else, perhaps in Chichén Itzá, the city his king had rebuilt in Toltec fashion. Over the centuries, however, the Keepers of the Secret had brought the codex back to Tula’s sacred ground and hid it, choosing to place it beneath a Thundering Paw. Perhaps Huemac himself had done so, changing where the book was hidden when a previous hiding place was jeopardized.
Sparrow and Axe were coming back up the hill with a group of villagers. Since the local people would balk at moving a Thundering Paw, even at touching it, I could play on their fears. By telling them that the statue faced the wrong way, I could convince them that the statue was visiting the wrath of the gods on their village.
I stared at the statue with foreboding. Not because I identified the statue with sacrificial death and the codex beneath it foretold the One-World’s death, but because Huemac had predicted the death of the woman I loved.
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The villagers were apprehensive about even approaching the statue. Sparrow was smart enough to have bought a hammerstone and chisel from them, but when I started chipping away at the monument’s base, the villagers fled in fright.
“I will tell them their fear is an affront to the gods,” Sparrow said, starting to run after them.
“It’s all right,” I said, grabbing her arm. “Axe and I will be able to move it.”
When I had broken the cement bond ringing its base, Axe and I put our backs into it. My prodigiously powerful comrade made the difference, and we moved it far enough to expose the base.
I stared at the stone beneath it with dismay.
“There’s nothing here.”
Sparrow got down and cleaned the base. “It must be beneath the flooring.”
“No, it’s not there. If a hole had been made in the stone, you would still see it even after it was resealed. I was wrong. It’s not under the statue.”
“What if it’s not under it,” she asked, “but in it?”
“It’s not hollow.”
But even as I said it, I realized it didn’t have to be completely hollow. A book would not occupy a big space.
“We’ll turn it over,” I told Axe.
Eyo! If the villagers saw us flipping the sacred statue, they would come back armed with stones and clubs.
We pushed the statue until we’d jammed it up against a small ridge, and it wouldn’t go any farther. Undismayed, Axe put his shoulder against it, tipping it up over the ridge. When it rose to a hand’s breadth, I slipped a stone under it.
Squatting down, we shoved our hands underneath it. I had done this movement a thousand times, while lifting large chunks of limestone, and the Thundering Paw was composed of the same material.
Toppling it over with an earthshaking thud, I was sure the crash carried all the way to Montezuma’s palace. I shot a glance to the villagers. They had stopped their retreat and were turned around, staring at us in fright and shock.
I didn’t see a hole in its bottom, but I did find a small groove, which had been carefully cemented over. With the chisel and hammerstone, I chipped at the concealed cut until I was able to prise out the chunk of stone. My heart was pumping with excitement. I was now sure it was there, under the stone plug concealing the final codex, the One-World’s Book of Fate. After chiseling around its edges, I pried and pulled it out. An object covered in heavy cloth lay underneath it. I removed it with fear and trembling.
I looked up at Sparrow, but she wasn’t watching me. She was staring at something in the distance.
I got to my feet, thinking the villagers were returning, armed with rocks and clubs.
But it wasn’t them.
Flint Shield was coming.
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Axe was wrong. There were more warriors in Flint Shield’s band than he had estimated—fifteen, including Flint Shield—all armed with spears, swords, shields, and quilted body armor worn over chest-protectors of hard shafts lashed tightly together.
Flint Shield was festooned with the feathers of a Maya war lord. His men weren’t hungry farmers fighting for food but professional warriors. The markings on their shields identified them as members of the royal guard.
There were fifteen of them, we were three. They outnumbered us five to one.
I had a sword. Sparrow had her bow, arrows, and a dagger. Axe had a bow, arrows, and the hammerstone we had used earlier. We had shields, purchased en route to Tula, but they did not compare to those of the approaching warriors.
As they advanced, seven of the warriors broke off in a unit and began to circle around us. Flint Shield and seven others approached us head on.
The eight in front of us slowed their pace so that the others could position themselves on our rear flank.
We had the high ground, which was an advantage against the warriors in front. But the moment we engaged them, the attackers to our rear would impale our backs with spears.
The stoical expressions on the faces of my two companions told the story.
It was hopeless.
Fifteen were too many.
Sparrow’s and Axe’s arrows had a longer range than the spears, but the hard thick shields and body armor would provide the warriors with considerable protection.
“Stand back to back,” Sparrow said to Axe. “We’ll shoot for their legs.”
The true purpose of the poisoned tips came home to me—it gave an advantage over regular arrows when fighting a warrior with a shield. Even grazing opponents in places that the shield could not cover would kill them.
Protecting each other’s backs and shooting for their legs would take down some of them, but there were still too many. Splitting their force up had doomed us. When one of us went down, the backs of the other two would be exposed.
“No!” I said. “We kill Flint Shield, and the others will run.”
Was it true? If they were forced conscripts—who wanted only to survive and had no personal or professional interest in killing us—they might.
Whatever the case, killing Flint Shield was our only hope.
And it allowed us to utilize our sole advantage. We’d use our commanding height to kill him before the other men could position themselves on our rear flank.
Kill the head of the pack, and the others will run?
Flint Shield had a reputation as the finest warrior in Mayapán. I was stronger but not as battle trained and combat hardened as he. If we had to kill him as well as the seven other warriors besides him, the men to our rear would have time to spear us in the back.
We charged—not with war cries but with the twang of bows as Sparrow and Axe each let an arrow fly. One found its mark, and a warrior went down screaming, clutching his leg.
Flint Shield’s other men formed a wedge, with him in the center of the V.
Before we engaged in close combat, Sparrow suddenly grabbed my arm to hold me back.
Axe flew past me, his hammerstone-like battle club held high. He struck down the lead warrior in the pack as spears coming at him from both sides jabbed into him. He bellowed animal noises as he swung wildly, spears in his sides.
Crazed confusion erupted around me as I ra
n headlong into the group, wildly swinging my sword, insane with rage. The screams ringing out around me merged with my own into a single, deafening, protracted roar. My vision turned bloodred, then a blazing crimson, then blindingly, agonizingly bright—until the whole world burst into flame. One of Flint Shield’s warriors slashed my shoulder to the bone even as I hacked his sword arm off at the elbow, our combined wounds flooding my face with frothy gore.
Suddenly, Flint Shield’s yellow and green headdress thrust itself in front of me, and I swung frantically at it.
One of the men, who’d flanked us, hit me in the back of the head, and I pitched forward onto my knees. When I lifted my head, I was staring into Flint Shield’s malevolent grin. Howling like a rampaging beast gone mad with feral suffering, he lifted his sword high above my face and brought it down on me with both hands as hard as he knew how.
Sparrow threw herself in between us, her neck and shoulder intercepting his blade, her blood inundating me. Erupting in mindless rage, I threw myself at him. Twisting his sword arm, I heard him scream as I ripped it out of its shoulder socket.
As I tore off his headdress, he tried to stab me with his dagger, but my forearm parried his, blocking the thrust. Lifting him off his feet by the throat, I crushed his windpipe. Screaming in rage, I slammed him to the ground. Rolling him over, I climbed onto his back. Jerking his head backwards, I broke his neck as I had once broken the neck of a sacred beast.
Turning him over, I spat in his face.
Getting up, soaked in blood, I turned to face the seven warriors who were now joining the battle.
My sword was gone, and I faced them unarmed. Weaponless, I was no longer a man but a jungle animal. I let out a roar and started for them, but they fled, every one of them, running down the hill in terror.
I stood a long moment, drenched in death.
Kneeling, I picked up Sparrow and took her in my arms, saying nothing. Clutching her to me, I sobbed.
She had traded her life for mine.
The Hermit had been right.
The gods had called her name.
Then I heard Flint Shield moan.
I leaned down and looked deep into his eyes. “I’m going to cut out your heart and eat it . . . because I can,” I told him.
I cut open Flint Shield’s chest, grasped his heart with my hand, and squeezed hard as I pulled it out of his chest.
PART XVIII
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Dr. Monica Cardiff sat at the big conference table across from President Edward Raab, General Richard Hagberg, and Bradford Chase, former Director of the CIA’s Directorate of Covert Operations. Her friend and former student, President Raab, stared at her attentively. The other two men looked terminally bored.
She had once told Rita Critchlow: “If those two cretins can’t shoot it or bomb it, they’ll piss on it like dogs.”
At this moment, that was exactly how she felt about them.
Handing out her eyes-only, ultra-classified briefing paper, she began her presentation:
“We recently took our scientific data—including our databases, projected global catastrophes, past apocalyptic predictions, and estimated prognoses—then fed them into the new supercomputer at NASA. Running them through their recently developed, cutting-edge software program, we were able to evaluate the planet’s most probable disaster scenarios and those scenarios’ estimated outcomes. In this case, the Probable Catastrophic Scenario and End-Game Program (PCSEG) spat back some surprising results.
“We were a little facetious when we included analyses of past apocalyptic predictions. I personally felt that the odds of some ancient prophet—through chance, genius, or some preternatural predilection—might have anticipated our current crisis were remote. Still, I saw no harm in adding them to the mix. We factored in threat data on all kinds of disasters, including seismic, supervolcanic, global warming, nuclear terrorist catastrophes, and comet-asteroid bombardments.
“We never imagined that PCSEG would validate any of these threats, but who knows? There was always a chance. We threw them in as a lark as much as anything.
“PCSEG’s most likely end-time scenario and probable outcome prognoses prefigured in shocking detail the prophecies of Revelation.”
“You’re kidding,” President Raab said.
“Revelation tells us that at the world’s end, four apocalyptic horsemen will scourge humanity from the face of the earth. The first, the White Horseman, is often described as Pestilence. Dressed in red, Horseman Number Two is War. The third, the Black Horseman, is Famine. Horseman Number Four, the Pale Equestrian, will unleash hell’s horrors on mortal flesh.
“Revelation 16:2 and 16:11 depict the depredations of Rider Number One, the White Horseman of Pestilence. He covers the followers of the Antichrist—who are worshippers of Mammon and Money, not God—with ‘grievous sores.’ ”
“And you think we’re all about to be plastered with these lesions,” General Hagberg asked, his face incredulous, “because of some demented prophet’s babblings?”
“No, but global warming is destroying glaciers throughout the planet—that is an established fact—and many of the world’s most important, glacially fed rivers are drying up even as we speak. Many of the huge Himalayan glaciers feed such rivers as the Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Salween, Indus, Brahmaputra, and Ganges rivers, and they are shrinking at unprecedented rates. Over two-point-five billion people are dependent on these diminishing waterways and their vanishing drainage basins. Over five hundred million people rely on the Ganges River alone, and by some estimates, these rivers and basins supply as much as forty percent of the world’s population with food, water, and electricity. When we factor in the farmers, whom these rivers support and who feed many hundreds of millions of people who live beyond these river basins, the numbers of people sustained by these waters is almost incalculable; and these people are watching those glacially dependent waterways die.
“South America is also watching its water supplies vanish. The rivers of Bolivia and those in the Amazon basin, in particular, depend almost exclusively on the Andean glaciers for their water, and those waterways are disappearing with stunning speed. The death of the Chacaltaya and other Andean glaciers already threaten the existence of La Paz and El Alto.”
“And the disappearance of those glaciers will spread plague?” General Hagberg asked, confused.
“Look at your briefing paper, starting with paragraph number three,” Dr. Cardiff said.
The three men looked at her paper and read:
The deaths of those rivers and the consequent water shortages will inflate the already sky-high water prices in these threatened regions, forcing nations and individuals to restrict their H2O usage to cooking, drinking, and agricultural projects. The dearth of H2O will devastate sewage-treatment facilities as well as public and personal sanitation. Global warming will then have effectively closed the food–feces circle, proliferating diarrhetic diseases and inciting the sorts of plagues so graphically depicted in Revelation.
Global warming also encourages the spread of disease-bearing insects into regions whose climates had not previously supported them, and the lack of proper sanitation will aggravate those illnesses as well. The spread of mosquitoes carrying malaria, yellow fever, and West Nile virus are only three obvious examples of the White Horseman’s lethal labors.
General Hagberg raised his head to disagree. “Those diseases,” he said, “are disastrous to the people afflicted with them, but they hardly constitute apocalyptic, end-of-the-world plagues.”
“That could change,” Dr. Cardiff said. “Look at paragraph number four.”
The men lowered their eyes and read.
In the developing world—most notably in China—farmers raise pigs and poultry in close proximity. Those two species are uniquely susceptible to human influenza viruses, and when those viruses repeatedly circulate through people, pigs, and poultry, the viruses sometimes mutate into influenza pandemics. Global warming and the water shortages it provokes wi
ll stimulate the spread of those plagues.
We are just beginning to understand the significance of avian DNA in influenza viruses. For instance, we now know that most of the DNA in the 1918 Spanish influenza—the most fatally contagious influenza virus of all time—was avian. That plague killed far more people than World War I. The developing world’s countless pig/poultry farms are incubators for influenza. Without the domestication of pigs and poultry, these influenza viruses could never have achieved their pervasive virulence.
Eventually, those farms will breed a virus to rival the Spanish influenza of 1918, which killed as many as 50 million people worldwide, and humanity will be no more equipped to combat it today than in 1918. In all probability, Homo sapiens will die in far greater numbers than they did 100 years ago, because today’s world is so intensely and incessantly interconnected. A plague such as the 1918 Spanish influenza will burn through the species far faster, far more furiously than it did in 1918. The lack of water for proper sanitation will also fan the flames of that pandemic.
Nor are our pig/poultry farms breeding only superinfluenza viruses. In the United States, 84 percent of all antibiotics are being pumped into the animals we eat—North Carolina’s farm animals ingest more antibiotics than America’s entire human population—and these drugs are creating and spreading other superbugs as well. Microbes exchange genes in these prodigious pig and poultry pens, so the microbes that survive tend to be resistant to antibiotics. The use of animal antibiotics is thus breeding a superlethal generation of superbugs.
The most infamous of the superbugs is of course MRSA—a variety of the staph virus—which kills almost 20,000 people in the U.S. each year. Now, however, ESBL E. coli, Acinetobacter and KPC Klebsiella are challenging its pathological preeminence. Unleashing a widespread wave of superstrong ultravirulent, increasingly lethal diseases, these new megaviruses will be utterly resistant to antibiotics, and their spread will prove intrinsically unstoppable.