When the bladed ball failed to kill the twins, the Lords forced them into accepting the challenges of the stone houses. They entered the House of Gloom, which was a dark, complex maze, with only one way out.
The Lords of Death’s plan was to have the twins wander aimlessly until they were so weak from hunger and thirst that demons could ravage them.
From the hundreds of times I repeated the story, I knew the route the twins took through the labyrinth. Missing from the tales told around supper fires, however, was the thing I faced at the entrance to the stone house.
Something was there; I could sense it. Perhaps the priests who had fled the chaos above were coming down to hide in the dark and wait for a two-legged meal? The ghosts of those I had killed? Was the spirit of Flint Shield waiting to take back his heart?
I heard it before I saw it. When I moved closer and it took form in the shadows, the sweat on my back turned to ice.
I was staring not at a ghost but a great grotesque thing covered from head to foot in the skins of people. As wide as Axe, the beast had two heads and wore necklaces of ears and fingers and belts festooned with human heads. Parts of faces were patched on his head and the heads on his belt. The heads still had eyes. Pieces of the cheeks and the foreheads clung to the heads in patches. The noses and lips were pulled around both sides of the faces.
Whatever the thing was, it was insane with madness and hunger or it would not have challenged a man with an obsidian sword. Even worse, the creature split in two before my eyes, and I realized it was two monsters in hideous costumes. My first guess was the correct one—before me were priests that had once flayed the skin and ripped the hearts from people in the temple above, and were driven down into the caverns as mobs who couldn’t find maize and beans, so sought out the flesh of their fellow men.
The two in front of me wielded clubs. Then more of the once-human creatures came out of the shadows. Armed with clubs and spears and rocks, they surrounded me on all sides. I let out a war cry and charged the two in front of me, lashing out with my sword, taking the arm off one of them at the elbow as he raised his club.
The other creature’s club hammered my left shoulder and sent me staggering. A spear hit my back but fell off after biting into the flesh. My sword came back around and hit the club wielder on the side of its leg before the thing could swing again.
Another one jumped on my back and bit into my neck. I smashed its head with my sword hilt. Knocking it off my back, I swung at another, which was charging me, slicing open its abdomen, spilling its guts. Spinning, I sidestepped a spear thrust and caught the attacker on the side of its neck, severing its head from its shoulders.
I ran for the black void that was the House of Gloom, the head of the creature bouncing behind me, a whirlwind of weapons and screeches of rage coming from the demons behind me.
I was determined to complete my mission. I would lead Sparrow’s spirit through this hell of hells and secure the codex. Only if I could safeguard both would my own soul ever find peace.
There was nothing left above to which I might return. That world was doomed, and I understood that while the codex had foretold its destruction, my life’s annihilation had begun much earlier—when I killed the white jaguar.
As a collector and teller of my people’s legends, I knew better than anyone what a proud and mighty civilization we had been. To see chaos reign and people turn on each other as food and water became scarce were not events I wanted to remember or tell.
I also realized why the beast I fought was a white jaguar, the holiest of all the One-World’s creatures. The death of the sacred beast symbolized the death of our own benighted land and also defined my own quest: I was to shepherd and secret the book, which foretold—and some said determined—my world’s extinction.
More than a messenger of death, I was to be the divine emissary of the One-World’s final doom.
I had to and would find a secure sanctuary for that last and fateful book—the Dark Rift Codex.
PART XXI
97
“What you mean they got away?” Emilio Luis Carrizo—el supremo patrón of the Apachureros army—asked his adjutant, Raphael Morales. “We sent three hundred of our best men after them.”
“Sí, and two hundred of them men no come back.”
Carrizo stared out over the lush Chiapas rain forest two hundred hundred yards from his patio, teeming with teak, mahogany, and fragrant frangipani. A lanky, hard-boned man with a black, carefully trimmed goatee and ponytail, shiny as burnished ebony, dark hard-mean eyes and skin like café con leche, he poured another cup of coffee from the sterling silver carafe into his white bone-china cup, then added cream and sugar. He was dressed in light-blue trousers, auburn cowboy boots heeled with sterling rowels, and a white long-sleeved shirt hand-tailored for Carrizo in Singapore. Carrizo was especially particular about his shirts, insisting that they accentuate his prison gym muscles which he had so painstakingly acquired during his five-year bit in the Pelican Bay supermax.
“Say here they escape in a federal helicopter.”
“Which we shoot down.”
“Sí,” Morales said, studying the field report spread out on the table before him, “but the puta-bitch with the codex, we shoot her out of the chopper, drop one hundred and fifty feet into white-water rapids, get swept over three waterfalls and . . . live.”
“We send twelve men after her.”
Carrizo was now staring fiercely at his second in command. Bald as a tangerine, short, squat, and middle-aged, Morales had been with Carrizo a long time. Unlike his patrón, Morales favored flashier attire—shirts splashed with primary hues, scintillating with yellow and red, black and white. Baggy and voluminous, always worn outside his pants—in part to conceal the small arsenal of guns and knives he carried inside his belt.
Carrizo found Morales’ taste in clothes . . . tasteless.
But long ago, Carrizo had stopped offering his subordinate sartorial counsel.
Fuck clothes.
He relied on Morales for other things.
Carrizo silently sighed. To the extent Carrizo trusted anyone, he trusted Morales. Unfortunately for Morales, Morales did not know this, and in point of fact, Carrizo did not truly trust him. He trusted no one. He trusted fear—only fear.
He knew Morales feared him 24/7, and he trusted the fact that Morales was and always would be afraid. Carrizo fixed him with his most menacing stare and said: “This report say they all dead. She kill all three?”
“Read the report again. Say they got mauled by animals. Skulls crushed, heads bit off, ripped to shreds by talons and fangs, even beaks. One hijo de puta live long enough to say they was wiped out by an eagle, a snake, a crocodile, and a jaguar—a white jaguar.
“He was hallucinating,” Carrizo said.
“I no think so,” Morales said. “They find eagle tracks and feathers all over the ground—eagle feathers in the men’s blood. They also find jaguar and croc tracks and the winding snake trails is leaving b-e-e-e-g trails, mucho b-e-e-g. Like this thing ain’t no grass snake. This thing, he be . . . huge.”
“You sayin’ a jaguar, a crocodile, an eagle, and an anaconda kill twelve of our men, and the puta-bitch escape again?” Carrizo’s stare was hard enough to drill through diamonds.
Morales tried to meet Carrizo’s diamond-grinding eyes. He couldn’t. “Tha’s what they say, patrón,” Morales said sheepishly.
Carrizo continued to terrify him with those fathomless orbs. “You find th-e-e-s-e puta-slut, you get the fuckin’ codex. You no find it, we got a problem, meaning you got a problem.”
“Patrón, she disappear like smoke.”
“Morales, no puta-gringas kill our hombres like she do’n walk away. We hunt them all down. We hurt and kill them all. You hear me? You hear me?”
“Sí, patrón.”
“You no find them, I decorate the trees out there”—he pointed at the lush rain forest on the far side of his lawn—“with the entrails of my puta-soldiers a
nd their officers. ’Cause if the commanders no command, what good are they? You get my meaning, Commander Morales?”
Mostly it was the eyes that got to Morales.
The eyes.
Eyes blacker than the grave, blacker than the abyss.
Blazingly black, blacker than the dark between the stars—balefire incarnate.
“Sí, patrón,” Morales said. Bowing slightly, he left his boss.
Sí, Carrizo thought, fear was a fearsome thing to see.
Glancing at his watch, he decided it was time to open the Maestro Dobel Extra-Anejo tequila, aged and distilled from ten-year-old blue agaves, each bottle labeled, numbered, and marketed with the name of the ranch where the agave was harvested. Cracking open the fresh bottle, he poured himself four inches, downed it, then poured four more.
Remembering the flicker of fear in Morales’ eyes, he smiled.
Yes, fear was a fearful thing to see.
He sipped the second drink, content—then threw that one back as well.
98
OCOSINGO, CHIAPAS, MEXICO
Skeletons and skulls—just what I need, Coop thought.
The Day of the Dead festival—which she and Jack Phoenix walked into after getting off the Chiapus bus—was a solemn event to honor the deceased. With eerie candies in the shape of skulls and coffins, however, and with street vendors selling “walking” wooden skeleton puppets and death’s-head candies, it was hardly solemn. “Ghoulish and ghastly” was how Cooper Jones saw it.
The sidewalks were crowded with people watching a religious procession coming down the street carrying candles in glass jars while behind them a stupendous skeleton towered over the festival on a parade float. People ate tacos and mangos on a stick bought from street vendors. Animated drunks laughed, argued, and talked in small groups, while she and Jack worked their way through the crowd with coteries of kids whirling about them continuously. On the run, dodging trouble, they had come to this city posing as tourists, and she hoped they could get lost in the crowded festival.
Situated between the Tropic of Cancer and the equator, Chiapas was, to denizens of the north, unbearably humid, its torrid tropical dampness clinging to Cooper Jones like a hot wet beach towel. Heavily dependent on agriculture, its people were mostly subsistence farmers, producing coffee, chocolate, cotton, and bananas as well as the standard staples of corn and beans.
It was also an Apachurero stronghold.
Well, at least, she knew they were on her trail. But what about the other guys? Who in the government was working with them? Whoever they were, their existence meant she and Jack were women and men without countries.
Coop stopped on the Ocosingo street and leaned against a building for support and pretended to be interested as a street vendor manipulated a skeleton puppet. Her head swirled, and her knees got weak each time the nightmare reality of her life sank in and set her nerve ends aflame.
“No gracias,” Coop said, shaking her head as the vendor offered her the puppet.
She and Jack started walking again. She periodically glanced behind them—to see whether they were being followed—but she tried not to be too obvious about it. She also tried hard to keep from worrying.
She was failing miserably at it.
Were she out of danger and discussing the codices with Cards over a drink at their favorite watering hole, they would have found the implications of Quetzalcoatl’s writings disturbing enough. But the apocalyptic portents implicit in the god-king’s prophecies combined with the armed men on their back-trail—both Apachureros and government killers, she now feared—made their situation truly grim.
The Mayans, who had saved Jack, had also rescued his computer. When they found an Internet café she thought might be safe, she’d e-mail her rough translation of the latest codex to Cards.
She and Jack also had their sequence of blind Web sites by which they could contact Reets surreptitiously.
If she were still alive.
Belay that thought.
Reets is alive.
Reets has to be alive.
Jack still had four grand in his money belt. More than enough for them to buy provisions, guns, trail garb, and gear—they could then vanish back into the deserts and jungles of southern Mexico, where they would become just two more peons.
Somewhere along the line, they would reconnect with Reets, Graves, and Jamesy.
And recommence their search for what Coop hoped and prayed would be the final Quetzalcoatl codex.
They had to find it.
The god-king was indeed predicting the Year of the Apocalyptic Jackpot, all the calamities of Revelation rolled up into one.
The final codex defining the exact nature of this extinction event—the who, where, when, how, and why of Questzalcoatl’s apocalypse—was indispensable to humankind . . . if the species had any hope of surviving the cataclysmic horrors to come.
They had to find it.
If they didn’t, there’d be hell to pay.
Book of Revelation–style hell.
And then?
And then?
And then?
Day of the Dead, indeed.
Cooper Jones wasn’t religious, but she instinctively, fearfully crossed herself.
May God have mercy on our souls.
99
Dr. Monica Cardiff stared at the three men sitting before her in the White House conference room. Usually, they fidgeted and studied the briefing papers from other meetings. Not now. President Raab had obviously told them of the nightmare to come.
“I suspect you know,” Dr. Cardiff began, “that I received an e-mail from Cooper Jones. It came via a dozen or so blind Web sites, and I doubt we’ll ever trace it back to its exact point of origin. Even if we did locate the spot from which she sent it, I doubt we’d find her. She’s with Jack Phoenix, and they know those southern Mexican deserts and jungles like squirrels know trees. I’m sure they have already gone to ground.”
“They sound a little paranoid, you ask me,” General Hagberg said.
Dr. Cardiff’s stare was hard enough to crack granite. “They have reason to fear us. Someone in our ranks has systematically ratted them out to the Apachureros. That we have not tracked the informant down by now is an outrage.”
“I share your anger and your concern, Dr. Cardiff,” President Raab said. “Please continue.”
“Coop e-mailed me her rough translation of the new codex. It’s not pretty.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Bradford Chase.
Dr. Cardiff cleared her voice and began to read from the e-mail in front of her.
The White Jaguar will bring pervasive plague
Such as the One-World has never seen.
Blisters, boils, bloody feces, contiguous, ubiquitous sores,
Wounds so vast, the blinding blood cataracts out.
The Red Jaguar brings war like nothing the One-World
Has ever known—millions of men in arms,
The eternal war of all against all, slashing, stabbing,
Deep in gore, bathed in blood till the land screams
Till the rocks themselves cry out from rack and ruin,
From pain and rage, from terror and from truth.
The Black Jaguar brings drought, the streams, lakes,
Croplands, cities drying up. Famine sweeps the land
Like nothing the One-World has known. Women scream,
Children cry, men murder and rend, all devouring all,
Till nothing, no one, no living thing is . . . left.
Then comes the horror of Mixlan’s hell. Through
The Dark Rift and the Underworld Road, from
The Black Abyss at the World Tree’s root,
Hell’s legions are freed, all the earthly woes
—Fire, earthquake, volcanic fury, the stars
Themselves crash down, locusts with stinging tails,
The planet splitting like a gourd, the lakes and rivers
Not soothing fluid but molten fire, brimming
blood.
All is lost.
The One-World is lost.
The People lost.
The world lost.
Time shall end
And eternity close.
President Raab stared at Dr. Cardiff a long time, then spoke a single world: “Revelation.”
“Four jaguars would have been the closest thing Quetzalcoatl could have conjured up that would have resembled Revelation’s four horsemen. Other than that, his prophecy is essentially the same—right down to the jaguars’ colors and the kinds of catastrophes Revelation describes.”
“The supercomputer was right?” Bradford Chase asked. “The prophecy of Revelation is at hand?”
“The supercomputer and Quetzalcoatl concur,” Dr. Cardiff said. “John on Patmos called the shot. It’s Year of the Jackpot.”
“And we’re about to get jacked,” Bradford Chase said.
“By an albino on horseback,” General Hagberg muttered under his breath.
“Indeed, General,” Dr. Cardiff said, sadly nodding her head. “The Pale Horseman is coming to call.”
Gary Jennings, The 2012 Codex
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