CHAPTER TEN
December 19, 2012 AD – 11:19 AM,
Mayan Archeological Dig, Yucatan
17:19 GMT
• • • • •
“Go back to town. You should’ve gone in with the rest of the crew. I’ll be fine.”
Marissé was gathering equipment at the base of the pyramid while she spoke to Jacinto.
He didn’t budge.
She sent all the workers home a short time earlier. She told Jacinto to go back to town, but he wouldn’t leave. She’d already decided she was going to spend the rest of the day and night here. Unlike her day laborers, she and Jacinto had their own sleeping tents next to the main work tents on the side of the plaza. She rented a small house in the nearest town, which was where they normally stayed. But she sometimes stayed out here alone; actually pretty often. Marissé wasn’t afraid of the jungle. Anything that she couldn’t handle with her fifteen-round Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter, she would take care of with her eight-round Mossberg Tactical Auto-loader 12 gauge combat shotgun.
Marissé reached down and checked the holster on her hip. The Smith had a nice, solid feel when it was strapped on her side. Even though she had no reason to take it into the bowels of her pyramid, she had an overwhelming urge to take it, anyway.
It was only early afternoon, but she was getting that feeling again; the feeling that something was about to happen. That was the reason she sent everyone home. Jacinto knew this. That’s why he didn’t leave.
Marissé knew it, too. And she respected her friend and apprentice for his defiance, especially considering the circumstances.
The solar-shower aurora show lasted for about an hour. But after the storm was over, the men in her crew began to get worried about their families back in the villages. They’d cleared the entire mezzanine to the subterranean levels, but the pile of rocks and broken columns were still on the main level. It would take them days to haul it down and over to the rubble pile. That job would still be here for her men when they returned, tomorrow. So she sent everyone home for the day. In the meantime, she’d decided that she was going to go down below as soon as everyone was out of the camp and on their way home.
Everyone, except Jacinto.
Now he was smiling and shaking his head as he stood there with his arms crossed. Finally, he started tapping his toe. Marissé gave in.
“Fine, you can stay. But don’t just stand around gawking. Pick up half this equipment and let’s get going.”
Now Jacinto moved. He quickly gathered up two full armloads of the equipment and took off up the pyramid.
Marissé chuckled while she watched him scramble up the steep side. ‘At least now, I’ll have some company,’ she thought to herself as she grabbed the remaining equipment and quickly followed Jacinto up the side of the pyramid. She appreciated the company most of all. Jacinto was a smart kid. Actually, he wasn’t a kid. He was twenty-five, which was still mostly a kid. But Jacinto was an excellent research assistant, even considering the late-night talking and speculation sessions he sometimes forced on her. He would let his still-childish imagination run wild and would start to hypothesize crazy ideas. But she didn’t really mind. It was a structured form of free-thought-synthesis, something Marissé had been familiar with since her freshman year in college.
She and Jacinto topped the last flight of stairs and stepped onto the mezzanine level. They made their way around the large piles of rocks and stone debris then turned and walked to an open section in the middle. In front of them, was the cleared expansive entrance to the stairs which went down to the first subterranean level.
‘These stairs were never meant to be opened, again,’ Marissé thought to herself somewhat hesitantly as she stopped at the top of the stone walkway and peered into the darkness below. Her mind was suddenly racing. Why was this so hard for her? She’d seen lots of things over her lifetime. Some were horrible things that she wished she’d never seen, but she always managed to handle it fine. Somehow, this was different.
Jacinto must have felt her hesitation. “Hey boss, you okay?”
He stepped up beside her at the threshold to the lower pyramid chambers and handed her a glowing LED flood stick. Then he looked down the dark tunnel and back at her. Marissé shook her head before she answered.
“Yeah… I just get a really bad feeling every time I go down there. Some serious evil happened here.”
Jacinto laughed at her.
“Yeah whatever, Indiana Joan… You got your Smith and Wesson firestick, so let’s go.” Then he started down the stairs as his water bottles banged against his legs with each of his double-steps.
Marissé snapped out of her zone and yelled down after him.
“I prefer Cleopatra personally… or we can go back to Your Majesty, my young impertinent subject.” She could only see the glow from his LED lamps now, which was probably best.
Jacinto shouted back up as he jogged down the last few steps. “Whatever you say…” Then he added, “Your Majesty.”
Marissé chuckled out loud. That was one of the reasons why she loved having this guy around. He always kept her laughing. She walked over to a console in front of a series of large, flexible air ducts of varying diameter all heading into the wide staircase and down into the darkness, like a bunch of enormous worms. She had her men install ventilation fans and ducts into the pyramid over the past week. She and Jacinto personally ran the fat tubes of air-conditioning all the way through the entire lower complex. The diesel generator was set up safely away from the pyramid on the ground-level plaza. That would keep any exhaust gas from gathering in the underground chambers. She also had emergency air testing gauges all over the place. She’d lost a colleague when he suffocated in an excavation deep in the South American mountains. The exhaust gas from his ventilation system generator had been caught by draft wind and ended up filling the tunnel with deadly carbon monoxide. They tried to climb out the ladder, but they never made it to the top.
Marissé double checked the wind direction one last time. The generator was currently downwind and forty feet below the intake vents. She turned the start switch on the panel console then just barely heard the generator start-up down on the plaza. Then she heard the fans turn on behind her. A second later, she saw air being pumped through the ventilation ducts down into the dark stairs. Everything seemed okay.
After she finished her final visual check of the artificial air system, she took off down the stone staircase. At the bottom of the main flight, she stopped and switched on her headlamp then entered the large room. As she approached one of the many large columns which supported the subterranean ceiling, she thought the design looked too precarious to stand. And yet, here it was. It had been standing for a thousand years, possibly thousands more than that. Marissé was the one who found this mountain pyramid. She knew more about it than any other human on the planet. She also knew that because of what she and her crew found in this basement horror show, she may never know what actually happened here or what this place was even for.
Whoever pushed the columns and the walls into the stairs from the mezzanine above had hoped to bury the levels below. They were only interested in keeping out humans, however. They did an adequate job of closing off the stairs, but they did not hermetically seal the passage to below. Once the complex was abandoned, the jungle began to cover over the entire pyramid and the mountaintop plaza. But before the mezzanine entrance was sealed over by growth, probably two or three decades of water and mud ran down the overgrowth and surpassed the advanced drainage system built into the overhangs and the stepped-sides of the massive man-made mountain. Seven or eight inches of dried mud and dirt covered the entire floor of the main hall one level down from the mezzanine, which was where they now were.
As she stepped next to Jacinto, they looked out into the room with their handheld LED flashlights and battery operated headlamps. The dried dirt on the floor was hard at the moment. It wasn’t the rainy season. Actually, it was always rainy season in the Yuc
atan. But it had been unusually dry this December. So the dirt was not mud.
As they started forward into the room, she pointed down for Jacinto to step aside from a pile of dirty looking dried gunk in a strangely squarish shape. This was why it was fortunate it wasn’t rainy when they finally opened this room. In the few weeks since they got into this first level, Marissé had been able to look closely at the square-shaped piles of dried gunk, which were everywhere. The entire floor, every corner and crevasse, was covered with piles of the strange material. She had no idea what they were. Then she found a relatively undamaged small pile, which had been in the far back corner away from the rainwater that seeped its way in from above. But when she finally examined the strange squarish shaped pile of dried gunk, she realized what the stacks were and almost got sick to her stomach.
They were Mayan Codices; books filled with Mayan writing.
There was more Mayan writing in this pyramid than the total amount that existed anywhere else in the world, by an order of magnitude. There was more Mayan writing than she could imagine in her wildest dreams. Marissé couldn’t know, but the destroyed store of Mayan Codices that she had discovered was the Holy Library of the Mayans. Like the fabled Library at Alexandria, this massive collection of writing covered the entire Mayan civilization and history from the very beginning. It had a complete record of everything the Mayans were and had learned. It also included a complete description of the complex mathematics developed by the Mayans.
Mayan math was based on twenty not ten, like our current common system of numbers and math. This unique number system, combined with their knowledge and use of the numeral zero, allowed the Mayans to make accurate calculations of extremely large numbers. This was something which European Mathematicians didn’t find an overwhelming need to do for another three-thousand years after it was developed by the Olmec and later adopted by the Maya. Nobody today knows why the Olmec or Mayans had a need to work with such large numbers.
The answers were actually buried inside several of the stacks of dried gunk in the back of the room where Marissé made her horrible discovery. No amount of technology would be able to save any of the manuscripts or codices. They were lost to time. But the information still existed. It still existed inside the God of the Maya, the God in the Clear Rock. She still held their secrets.
But Marissé didn’t know that.
What Marissé knew was that if she’d been here when this was happening, she’d have used her trusty Smith and Wesson to stop this obscene destruction. And she might have succeeded. Machetes were no match for Spanish steel, but Spanish steel could not possibly defend against a well placed nine-millimeter round. And almost 470 years earlier, her pistol would have seemed like magic, especially to the Maya. They knew all about magic. Their God could do magic. But the Maya also knew of the Olmec and the legend of what happened to them. They never built an iron-cage for their God. Instead, they finished building the Pyramid of Life. And when that was finished, they put the piles of holy stone just where their God commanded them to.
Then they sealed the room.
And like she also commanded, the Maya hid their God when trouble came. Trouble had followed the God for millennia, since her first awakening in the clear rock.
Trouble always followed the God in the Clear Rock.
But Marissé couldn’t know that, either.
She and Jacinto walked carefully through the minefield of dead knowledge, sidestepping the dusty and strangely smooth brown piles. The stacks looked like a forest of square trees all chopped down to a couple of feet tall and now covered in brown moss. The shadows from their lamps moved between the stacks like stealthy whispers. The only sound was the slight crunching of their boots as they approached the back wall of the molded library. Then they turned and went along the right side until they reached an opening into an extra-wide corridor that doubled back and led deeper into the pyramid. The long, dark tunnel ended in another massively large room.
Unlike the level above, there were only two towering columns in the middle of the room. The chamber was deep enough to make the ambient air cooler, but it didn’t have any circulation. It would get hotter and more humid the longer they stayed in it. The ventilation ducts were blowing full blast now, but it would take everything the fans could give to safely vent all the rooms. She could feel air coming from the long ducting which was snaked all the way through this level to the bottom of the whole structure. The ducts ended in the lowest level, in front of an enormous carved wall of religious symbols and writing. Marissé was familiar with some of the symbols and writing. But some of them also confused her.
However, that was the least of her concerns right now. Because before she could get to the final lower level, she’d have to get past this level.
She and Jacinto walked out of the corridor and entered the darkened chamber from one side.
This room was much deeper than the Library room upstairs. Rainwater didn’t reach down here. However, insects, rodents, and some other types of animals, obviously did. In fact, they’d found evidence of big animals in this room, which wasn’t something you normally found under the ground. Most large animals tended to stay out of man-made holes in the ground. Marissé knew there was only one thing that could make a wild animal crawl into a pit.
Food.
And there would have been lots of food down here.
But it didn’t start off as food. It started off as people. They were the Mayans who were on this mountain when the hordes of Conquistadors ransacked the temple and murdered everyone here. However, what the invading Spaniards did to them after they killed them must have seemed like a highly organized buffet to the predators and scavengers that found their way down to this underground feast. Because the gigantic room was filled with piles of bones, and all the bones had been separated into anatomical sections.
There was a pile of right legs; a pile of left legs; a pile of torsos; and two piles of arms with rights and lefts separated. Then there was the pile of heads. Not one body had a head still attached. The only adult skeletons not dismembered were the twelve bodies hanging on freestanding upside-down crosses, which had been fashioned from timber and erected down here. These twelve bodies were also headless, but they were intact otherwise. They were the members of the Mayan High-Council of Priests, who had been speared longways through the neck and torso then hung upside down and lashed to the pole in a gruesome inverted crucifix. The twelve freestanding spikes with skewered Priests were lined up in a large circle that surrounded the two giant columns in the center of the room. The gruesome piles of skeletal body parts were spread around the perimeter of the chamber. The only exception to the piles of bones were the tiny skeletons in between the two giant columns.
These bodies were obviously children.
Marissé hoped they were already dead before this happened to them. As she and Jacinto walked past the great columns, she could see the tiny heads that had been separated from their little bodies and lined up between each of the twelve spikes around the columns. It was like someone used the little skulls to play connect-the-dots between the crucifix posts. But it was what was in the middle of the two stone columns that would probably haunt Marissé for many years.
Between the two vertical beams holding the middle of the pyramid up, each of the headless bodies of the children had been laid out in a perfectly straight line next to each other, like they were all taking a nap. They had been painstakingly lined up from largest to smallest like keys on a life-size xylophone. And each of the skeletal remains had been hacked into two pieces at the midsection and then separated by almost exactly two and a half feet. Marissé stopped and looked at the skeletal remains of a young boy near the middle of the split children.
“Look at the hacking marks at the spine, here.”
She pointed to the severed spine of Quatze with her spotlight. Jacinto stopped and knelt down next to her. Then he leaned over and looked closely at the exposed spine that was clearly chipped by some so
rt of metal.
“Yeah, those are some pretty deep hacks. You think we can figure out what kind of blade it was? Maybe we would know a little more about who did this.” He looked up at his mentor.
Marissé looked around as she was kneeling next to the tiny mutilated skeleton. Insects had cleaned most of the bones over the 468 years since this atrocity occurred. But many of the skeletons still had some areas of mummified remains attached. However, none of them had any clothing or jewelry of any sort.
That started to give Marissé her first clue. It was only a hunch right now. But her hunches were usually good. She would find out yet what happened to her people. It was things like this that made her wish she could reach across time and stop things like this from happening. But she knew that was a stupid dream. You couldn’t study History if you could go back and alter it. And it would be at odds with her career, which she had been carefully creating and advancing at an astounding rate. She was just turning twenty-nine and already she had the largest pyramid on the planet to her discovery. And she alone had exclusive and unalterable rights to the entire site; guaranteed by the Mexican Government and sanctioned by every organization under God’s blue sky.
This was her mountain, and this was her pyramid. Which meant, this was her atrocity to figure out. And she would figure it out. By God, she would figure it out.
And Marissé knew where she was going to start her investigation. It wasn’t here in this horror show. It was all the way down in the bottom of the pyramid. That was where she intended to go next.
“Let’s start at the bottom. This is a layered pyramid. The first structure is the lowest. That was their beginning.” She looked at Jacinto as she stood up. “That’s where we start.”
Then she turned and walked past the neatly halved children and the separated body parts of the adults and made her way to the back wall that hid the hallway to the last set of stairs. When the final body count was made, the shocking human desecration would account for 567 adults and 111 children. Not all the bodies were complete. A couple of big cats made it in a few days after the massacre when a section of rubble caved-in up top and left a small opening in the rocks. The big cats left after they had eaten their fill. After that, came more scavengers drawn by the odor of death.
The back wall hid a large passage between two of the panels. This was where Marissé and Jacinto went next.
The walls began to get more simple in design and decoration. Then they became plain stone expanses. When they got to the bottom of the wide cutback stairwell into the deep earth, the corridor opened into a sloped hallway that was shaped like a long tunnel. It only went forward for a dozen meters before the stone hallway opened up into an extremely wide room about thirty feet tall with a forest of columns that went far back into darkness on both sides. As they made their way into the dark cavern, the sound from their shoes echoed up into the spaces between the giant stone supports. The room felt like it was far under the earth.
Marissé knew that if they went straight through this pitch black forest of columns, she would come to a massive wall of glyphs and carved art. It was enormous, over twenty feet tall and a hundred feet wide. And it was also covered with intricate carvings and more unknown Mayan glyphs.
But that was not where Marissé was headed.
She turned to the left as soon as she and Jacinto got into the petrified forest of stone. Then she started toward the far back corner as directly as possible without running into one of the multitude of vertical supports holding millions of tons of earth and stone above her head. When they got past the last of the giant columns, there was a small corridor which was outside the forest of cylindrical supports. She turned to the right and started straight for a large corbeled rock doorway against the side wall.
The stone entrance was several feet wide and went into a completely dark and quiet room. The lights from their LED lamps lit up the plain walls as they moved silently into the almost empty chamber. On the back wall, was a smaller version of the carved mural in the main room next door. There were three other rooms, just like this one, at the other three corners of the massive room outside this antechamber. But only this room had what Marissé was heading toward right now.
Only this room had bodies in it.
All the bodies were in the back of the room next to the carved wall. Actually, all of them were on one end of the carved wall. That was exactly where Marissé marched. When she got there, she began setting out her LED Sten-Lamps. These specialized lamps were on small aluminum extension poles that could extend up to about seven feet. And they used large replaceable batteries that could be recharged from small solar panels. The lightweight head had an array of bright LED lights under a fresnel lens plate that extended up out of the heavier battery pack, which sat on the ground.
The units put out a bright but ultracool light, which was important in places like this. One of the rules of underground archeology is not to put in any more heat than necessary, because heat from a living body was a big enough problem to deal with. Body heat combined with hot, humid breath was essentially caustic to priceless artifacts and all underground archeological locations. They were also potentially toxic to the humans who were responsible for putting the heat and moisture there in the first place.
Marissé walked over to the ventilation tube when she finished setting up her pair of Sten-Lamps and glow sticks. The air coming through the wide, flexible tube was not terribly cool. But it was more refreshing than the stale centuries old air that was in here. Jacinto joined her after he set up his lights.
“Now what Boss? You forgot the Corona Lights.”
Then he gave her that crooked smile. She smiled and grabbed her water bottle then took a sip.
“Better learn to pretend, my friend.” Then she turned her head-mounted LED toward the bodies in front of them. Jacinto laughed.
“Uh oh… She’s not only on her way to becoming the most famous female archaeologist of our time, but she’s a poet.”
Marissé didn’t look back. “The most famous archaeologist, period. Man or woman,” she said calmly. Then she turned to smile at him, but her headlight temporarily blinded him. Jacinto winced out loud.
“Ouch! Yes, Your Majesty. Anything you say, Your Highness. Just don’t shine the bright light in my tender Cuban eyes any more. No mas, por favor.”
Marissé ignored him. “Oh, shut up, you pussy.”
Then she turned and walked over to the six bodies on the floor. The area was now lit from the LED lamplights, like a small construction site with miniature work lights. She quickly looked over the scene from one side to the other. These bodies were mostly mummified remains. Very few insects must have found their way down here. They also were not mutilated or naked. She squatted down next to one of the Mayan remains closest to her. She could clearly see a stabbing puncture on the stretched and dried skin of the man. It was right over his heart. He was leaning against the back wall of carvings. A machete was in one of his hands. The other was between the legs of the mummified skeleton.
Marissé could see a few beads on the ground next to the dead Mayan Royal Guard. She leaned down to grab one, but when she did, she saw a glint from the Sten-Lamps on something behind the body. As she turned her head and looked against the wall on the floor, Marissé saw a piece of metal. Or at least, it looked like a piece of metal. She got down on her hands and knees and leaned into the lower torso of the skeleton while she reached around with her arm. Jacinto couldn’t help himself when he watched his professor lean into the lap of the dead Guard.
“Uh Boss, I know you’re only into old guys… I mean really old guys, like a couple of thousand years old… But come on. I don’t think it’s gonna work.”
Marissé sat up and back on her butt as she turned around to see her grad student.
“You have a dirty mind, young man.”
She pointed at him with the object of her apparent indiscretion. It was the broken tip of a sword, a Spanish steel sword. The first mystery was so
lved. The Spanish, most likely Conquistadors, did this. This was not really surprising. It was well known the Spanish Conquistadors sacked the Yucatan peninsula starting in the 1500’s and continuing into the 1600’s. After that time, the native population of the Maya went into cultural hiding. They blended into the jungle and became true natives once more. They still lived here in the Yucatan. Marissé was related to them. Her father had been a full-blooded native. She would never know, but she was directly related to the small boy whose body she and Jacinto had just examined upstairs. Quatze’s family continued to live in the jungle after the temple pyramid was sacked and their youngest son was murdered. There was a direct family lineage that led to Marissé. It was part of the reason she had such a hard time entering this tomb.
Jacinto noticed the shiny metal. “Whoa… Whatcha got there, Señorita?”
She smiled when she tossed it to him, and he clumsily caught it against his chest in the dim LED light. He held it up to his face and used his other hand to adjust the angle of his headlamp. He flipped it over just once then handed it back to his mentor, like a diamond cutter handing over a gem after an inspection.
“Spanish steel. Dual blade. Probably middle sixteenth century.” Jacinto smiled confidently.
“City of origin, por favor?” She smiled even bigger at him. It was pop-quiz time, and Jacinto knew it. He also knew he was about to fail.
“Madrid?” He squeaked out his answer mostly as a question.
Marissé shook her head at him. “Oh my poor, poor pitiful pupil. That is not correct. Just for that, you have to carry the object that you know so little about.” Then she tossed it back to him, and he caught it the same clumsy way. Marissé chuckled under her breath as she turned on her butt and looked again at the fallen Royal Guard. His right hand was out to the side. It was the one with the machete partially in its grip. But it looked like he was holding himself up with that arm. He couldn’t have used the blade to defend himself with it extended under his weight like that.
“Why do you think this one didn’t use his blade to fend off the fatal attack?” She was mostly just talking out loud now.
Jacinto knew this. He didn’t answer. She did it herself moments later.
“Well maybe, he was stabbed first, then died here… No, that can’t be it. We just found the tip of the blade that went through his heart. Surely, a Conquistador wouldn’t have thrust his blade so hard into an already dead man that he chipped the blade in the stone behind him.”
Jacinto loved listening to her when she did this. It was like watching a really hot female Sherlock Holmes. Marissé kept talking out loud to herself.
“No. This one was alive when he was stabbed.” She turned and imitated the sitting position of the dead hero. “And the death blow was delivered as he sat up against this wall.” She motioned into her chest while she looked at the cadaver. “And he never tried to block it with his machete… or his other hand.” She put her hands into the same position as the dead Guard and then looked at them for a moment.
Then she turned back and leaned into the crotch of the dead man, again. The left arm and hand of the Mayan Royal Guard was in-between his legs. As she looked closely, she could see his finger tips. The skin was gone from all of them. But she could also see the tip of his forefinger. It was crushed. But not flattened like it was stepped on or smashed with a rock. It was pushed in and crushed from the very point of the fingertip. As she sat there for a moment, she saw something else between his legs. On the floor below his mangled fingers, was a small curved piece of what looked like stone. Marissé reached tenderly between his legs and past his hand. Jacinto couldn’t resist, again.
“Should I wait outside… you could get a room.”
Marissé gave him a sideways look as she continued to sneak her hand in-between the mummified legs of the savior of the Mayan God. After her slender fingertips found the tip of the rock piece, she extracted it just as carefully. When she finally had the piece firmly in her grasp, she slid around on her butt to face Jacinto, again. Then she put on a bit of an English accent.
“Well, well… What ‘ave we ‘ere Guvv-nuhh?”
Jacinto loved it when she did that, too.
She focused her headlamp and looked at the mysterious piece of carved rock. She could see the remnants of dried bloody fingerprints on it. “Why would this piece of rock be so important, he would hold it rather than try to protect his own life?”
She was talking to herself, again.
Jacinto knew when she switched from talking to him to talking to herself. He had worked with her for two years. He planned on working with her forever, if he could. She was right. Marissé was on her way to becoming the most famous Archaeologist in the world, bar none. And he wanted to help; and get his PhD; and then become a tenured University Professor. Then he would be happy; maybe. But he would handle that when the time came. In the meantime, he’d made friends with the archeology legend from his hometown of Miami. Jacinto knew she had moved there when she was a little girl from her home, here in the Yucatan. And when she enrolled in the University, she promptly became the female equivalent of a young Indiana Jones, only with perky boobs.
By the time she finished her doctorate, she was already known around the world. She had spent every summer while in college back in the Yucatan excavating and discovering. She had a sixth sense for finding sites that had never been discovered. It was like she had been there before in another life. She knew right where they were; almost always. It was kinda spooky. When she discovered this pyramid, she let Jacinto in on the secret before anyone else. Marissé had also decided she wanted Jacinto as her assistant. She needed someone who had his drive and sharp mind. Everything Marissé ever did was first class, as far as the effort. She had to deal with the realities of research grants and money on everything else. Such was the life of a field researcher in the modern archeology game. And it was field research that both Marissé and Jacinto loved the most; like right now.
Marissé was getting on a roll. She reached back and grabbed one of the extension LED lights then put it next to the cadaver. After flipping the LED head around, she pointed it toward the Royal Guard’s left side and illuminated where she was looking earlier. Then she used her headlamp to look over the whole body starting at the feet. She noticed immediately that several bones on his feet had signs of abrasion from the top. It was the same with both knees, and these were not shallow abrasions. They were deep into the bone.
“This would have hurt… Maybe he was dragged here on his knees and feet.”
She was pointing, but not touching the cadaver. She was also not looking at Jacinto. She was not taking her eyes off of the Royal Guard’s partially mummified body. She continued traveling up the body with her headlight only inches away from the corpse. Then she pulled out a flashlight from her equipment belt and switched it on. The handheld tactical LED put out a concentrated beam, like a miniature spotlight. She moved the bright light over the sides of the Guard’s legs and then up to his hips. When she got there, she found abrasions on the outside of the upper leg and hip area. But these abrasions went the other direction. They stretched across the leg from anterior to posterior on the outside of the hip. The other abrasions were lengthways on the body, in the same direction as the head-to-toe line. These deep abrasions went laterally across the side of his upper leg, like something was sawing next to his hip.
She leaned forward and looked over to the other side of the body with her light. She could see the same marks on the other hip.
Marissé sat back on her butt again. This time she looked off into the distance and slightly tilted her head. She started thinking out loud again as she picked her knees up in front of her and leaned back on her hands.
“If you’re being dragged face down, then your feet and knees get scraped down the front, like these marks.” She looked nonchalantly at the bony feet of the cadaver beside her with her headlamp. “But if your feet are out behind you, then how do you get lateral abrasions on both hip
s?” She started bouncing one knee up and down.
Jacinto smiled. This meant she was onto something. She was like a book; an extremely complex and beautiful book. But he knew a few of the chapters by heart; like this one. She had something in her head. The only thing missing was—
Oh, there it was.
Marissé stuck out her tongue slightly as she was thinking. Now, Jacinto knew she had it. The beams from the flashlight and her headlamp lit up the dusty corpse as she suddenly leaned forward to examine the body again. She looked down at the outside of the knees and ankles with the mini spotlight. There were not any abrasions to speak of. Then, she carefully reached into the crotch of the Royal Guard, again. This time, she gently lifted his hand as she reached down with her penlight. She saw what she was looking for and carefully put the hand back down. Then she got up on her knees and looked behind the fallen hero. Both of his shoulders were scraped deeply. Finally, she sat back down.
“He wasn’t dragged. He crawled somewhere. Somewhere either very rough—“ She looked around. The floors were all pretty smooth. “Or he did it very quickly… Or maybe over a long distance… Or both.” She continued to survey the entire room with her penlight as she slowly spoke to herself.
She was doing that Sherlock Holmes thing, again. Jacinto wished she would let him videotape her, but she adamantly refused. He eventually stopped asking after she broke his video camera in front of him with the butt of her Smith and Wesson nine-millimeter. He got the message. You didn’t have to beat him over the head. Just his camcorder, apparently. She bought him a new one the next week; and a six pack of Corona Lights, his favorite.
Marissé got up on her knees again, which snapped Jacinto back into here and now.
This time she leaned into the area above the Guard’s head. She looked around on the front and the left side. Then she stood up and leaned over so she could see the top and the back of his head.
‘Bingo.’ Marissé thought to her self as she focused the spotlight on the dead man’s skull.
On the back of the Guard’s head, was the same sort of deep abrasions she just found on the other body parts of this one Mayan. She quickly turned and walked over to check the other bodies. A cursory glance told her what she wanted to know.
None of the other bodies had these marks.
Now she approached the Mayan hero’s body from its right side. She leaned in close and looked at his face. She tried to imagine how he must have appeared when he was alive. She knew what the gene structure would probably have made him look like. She grew up with the same structure in the mirror. While she was daydreaming, she subconsciously dropped the hand that was holding the powerful penlight down by her side. Marissé was just about to pull it back up and look at the dead man’s face again, when she noticed something.
It was on the wall behind the fallen Guard.
The wall had carvings from floor to ceiling. But the carvings at the top were not the same as the bottom. The bottom had large legs, beaks, and wings of mythical half-man half-creatures carved in vivid three-dimensional relief. The carvings had spaces behind them where the relief was on the back wall. It was in one of these spaces, right behind the body of the Royal Guard, that Marissé was now staring.
She would never know that the Royal Guard had crawled here on purpose just before he was stabbed in the heart by the murderous Spaniard. But the reason why he crawled over here; the reason he would not move when the Conquistador approached him; the reason he did not try to fend off the death blow, which he saw coming; was the same reason that Marissé now got down on her knees and looked closely at the wall with both her handheld spotlight and her headlamp.
468 years earlier, the Royal Guard, who was the chosen savior of the God of the Maya, saw with horrified eyes what he had done, what sign he had left. And he knew what that visible sign would mean to anyone who saw it with their own eyes.
So he did what he was trained to do; what he had been chosen to do; what he had to do in order to save his God.
He sat up from where he already lay dying from two stab wounds to the abdomen. Then he crawled over to the carved wall and laid against it, hiding the sign that he had mistakenly left behind. He held himself upright and balanced his weight on his right hand. He let his holy blade slip from his grip under his palm. Then he took his damaged left hand with its holy relic and slipped it between his legs.
Then he waited.
When the Conquistador pulled the broken sword out of his heart, the hero Guard was already dead. But he refused to let go. He held his body stiffly against the wall. His dying eyes were grateful to see the heartless murderer walk away after yanking off his holy necklace. But the Guard did not let his body move from the spot against the wall. Blackness fell over the hero, but his willpower froze his body in place. And it would not move for 468 years. He would keep the secret safe for all of that time.
But he would give up that secret, now.
Marissé looked closely at the slightly curved line in the back of the wall behind the carved legs of the mythical creatures. Extending down from a thin line that went back into the wall and looked like it was possibly a crack between two pieces of rock, were four dark-brown marks made from fingers.
They extended from the deep crack line down. The deep brown color was clearly old dried blood and the finger marks even had prints visible in several places. More importantly, there was nothing on the rock above the small curved line. She followed the crack-type line around with her headlight in a loose oblong shape behind an open area in the legs and arms on the wall carving. When she finished her visual inspection, she was back to the four fingertip marks. As she looked closer, she could tell they were probably from the dead body beside her. One of the fingertip marks had a smashed tip.
Marissé also knew what that meant.
There was a tunnel behind this wall.
• • •
The God of the Maya, who was first the God of the Olmec and dozens more before that, did not know it; but she was about to be rescued, again.
And her time as the God in the Clear Rock would end.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
April 11, 1995 AD – 10:42 AM
Unknown Testing Location, USA