Age of Aztec (29 page)

A scarlet dot appeared at the centre of one of the lumps, just above Mulac’s right nipple. There was a splitting sound like a blister bursting, and from the Mayan a sharp gasp that was almost a sigh of relief, as if the worst was over.

The worst was not over. Far from it.

The scarlet dot grew. A droplet of blood trickled down from it. Something was pushing its way out from Mulac’s pectoral muscle.

No, not pushing.

Gnawing
.

A tiny black and yellow head forced itself through a gap it had created in Mulac’s skin. It chewed rapidly round in a circle, widening the hole. All over Mulac other similar apertures opened up and more tiny heads poked out. He looked down and watched as countless little creatures birthed themselves bloodily from his body. His expression was that of someone who had passed beyond pain and reason. His face showed nothing but a kind of sickly wonderment, a look that said,
This is me. I’m doing this. This vileness is coming out of
me.

The creatures were hornets, and the first thing they did after vacating their host was wipe his blood off their wings with their rear legs and take to the air. They hovered around Mulac in a darkening cloud, their communal buzz mounting in volume as more and yet more of them broke free from him. Mulac sank to his knees, his body a glistening moonscape of deep raw gouges.

Some of the hornets had burrowed upward rather than outward, through Mulac’s throat. They flew out of his mouth in ones and twos as nonchalantly as commuters filing out of a subway tunnel. Others exited the other end and crawled out from his trouser cuffs.

At some point during the whole terrible ordeal, while he was slumped in a kneeling position, Mulac died. It wasn’t easy to pinpoint the exact moment, as his body continued to twitch and spasm. The activity of the hornets still within him gave him a semblance of life long after his heart gave out.

Above Mulac’s drooping head, the hornets gathered into a swarm, forming a single rough sphere that started to split into two smaller spheres.

Loud as he could, Stuart yelled at the two guerrillas near Mulac, telling them to move, run,
now
. Chel added his voice to Stuart’s. He had no way of knowing that the hornets were under the control of Azcatl, but he’d seen the ants in the forest, as they all had. All he knew was that the swarms spelled obvious danger and his two men were closer to them than they ought to be.

Too late, the guerrillas roused themselves from their ecstasy of horror and stirred their numb limbs into action. The swarms launched themselves separately at them, in arrowhead formations. A dense whirring cluster of hornets overtook and engulfed each of the fleeing Mayans.

The winged insects set to work stinging every inch of skin they could find. Their victims screamed and slapped frantically, but the hornets were legion in number and remorseless. For each that got swatted or crushed there were another dozen to take its place. In no time the two men were festooned in red welts. Their eyelids puffed shut, blinding them. Hornets crawled into their ears and stung, into their noses and stung, into their mouths and stung. The build-up of venom in the men’s systems reached fatal levels in less than a minute. They fell. They writhed on the ground. Their windpipes swelled and sealed up. Their hearts failed. They lay still.

The hornets took off and coalesced into a single swarm once more. Zotz levelled the l-gun at it, but the swarm didn’t go on the offensive again. Instead it moved off, meandering out of the clearing. The noise it made as it departed was a satisfied, contented drone, a noise that spoke of orders discharged, a job well done.

Silence fell. It was broken by sobbing – one of the Mayans weeping as helplessly as child.

Then the aerodisc’s neg-mass drive started up.

Chimalmat was in the cockpit, and through the disc’s windshield she could be seen gesticulating urgently to the guerrillas and mouthing the words, “Come on!”

It spoke well of Xibalba’s bravery that the notion of retreat hadn’t even occurred to any of them until then. Chel had been confident they could ride out the attack, and his men had shared that confidence. Events having proved otherwise, it now seemed eminently reasonable to think in terms of a tactical withdrawal. Chimalmat had been well ahead of everyone else in this respect; her forethought was going to be the salvation of them all.

The aerodisc thrummed loudly, like a bass note on an organ pipe. The grass and shrubs beneath it stood on end, vibrating like a rat’s whiskers as electromagnets excited the antigravity particles inside the drive chamber and the disc started to lose mass and resist the earth’s pull. At Chel’s command the guerrillas fell back from their positions, ducking under the camouflage netting and making for the gangplank. The netting itself began to strain at the pegs tethering it.

Stuart took a step forward to join the exodus. Then a hand fell on his shoulder.

Quetzalcoatl, in full armour, stood behind him, pinning him to the spot with a powerful gauntleted grip.

Quick as a flash Stuart lashed out with his rapier, but Quetzalcoatl deflected the blade easily with his free hand.

“No,” he said.

“Let me go,” Stuart hissed.

Again, “No,” this time accompanied by a resolute shake of the head.

“Then kill me. Get on with it. Just make it quick.”

A third “No.”

Quetzalcoatl’s eyes were sombre, and Stuart grasped his meaning.

He wasn’t going to die.

The guerrillas were.

The aerodisc lifted off, and several of the netting pegs were wrenched out of the ground. The gangplank was still extended, like a beckoning arm. Chimalmat was gazing down at Stuart as she manipulated the controls, her face a mask of pity. Stuart was in the enemy’s clutches. As far as she was concerned, he was doomed.

“Hey! Englishman!”

Stuart turned to see Zotz crouched in the doorway at the top of the gangplank, sighting down the barrel of the lightning gun. Chel was beside him, brow furrowed with concern.

“I can zap him,” Zotz called out. “Buy you time to get over here. Just break free from him if you can.”

“Reston!” Chel yelled. “You can do it!”

Neither man fully believed what he was saying. They, like Chimalmat, reckoned Stuart was a goner, the next in line to be eliminated by these implacable and seemingly unstoppable aggressors.

Little did they realise who was really next.

“Don’t do this,” Stuart said to Quetzalcoatl. “Please. Let them live.”

More of the pegs pinged loose, and the camouflage netting slithered off the aerodisc. The disc bobbed upwards, free.

“Too late. Can’t be stopped.” Quetzalcoatl cast a glance skyward. “Huitzilopochtli is here.”

Stuart’s gaze met Chel’s. Each, in his way, said a silent, solemn farewell to the other.

Directly above the aerodisc, unseen by Chimalmat or any of the guerrillas, a man in iridescent armour hovered. Shimmering translucent wings kept him aloft. In his hands was a large tubular device like a cross between a harpoon gun and a bazooka. Some kind of conical-tipped missile sat snug inside.

Huitzilopochtli, the Hummingbird God, thrower of flame spears.

The aerodisc gained more height, rising in a smooth vertical. The gangplank began to close, hydraulic rams hauling it up to slot into the hull. The undercarriage retracted.

From on high, Huitzilopochtli took aim with his spear launcher. The weapon was pointed at the dead centre of the disc.

“He’ll hit the neg-mass drive,” Stuart breathed. “He can’t do that. It’ll kill us all.”

“Not necessarily. Not all,” said Quetzalcoatl, and the metal plumage sprouted from his shoulders and all at once he and Stuart were enclosed in a bubble of light. It was bright but not dazzlingly so, and it appeared to have substance, a sort of just-tangible jelly-like texture that put faint pressure on the skin. Stuart couldn’t help but think of egg albumen, or a cocoon.

“We’re protected now,” Quetzalcoatl said. “Nothing can get through.”

The aerodisc lifted level with the treetops. Everyone aboard was under the impression that they had escaped; they were safe.

Huitzilopochtli’s launcher bucked in his grasp and the spear lanced down.

The disc recoiled, then detonated. As the drive chamber was breached, the sudden escape of antigravity particles caused a complete localised disintegration. Everything within a hundred-metre radius lost cohesion. Subatomic binding forces were negated. There was a temporary, catastrophic disruption of the laws of physics.

Organic matter broke down at a cellular level.

Metal turned to dust.

Water vaporised.

The very air came apart, molecules hissing asunder.

It all took place in a microsecond and was followed by a gargantuan implosion, a violent reassertion of the proper order of things. The fragments of the aerodisc and the nebulised remains of the people in it were collapsed back together into a tight ball some three metres in diameter. The vacuum thus created sucked up debris from all around: dirt, leaves, blades of grass, bits of shredded tent, splinters of the cabin. A hurricane-holocaust of particles filled the air.

Through this the ball that had been the aerodisc plummeted, hitting the ground with an almighty
whump
and shattering into a million pieces on impact. Granules of wreckage were strewn across the entire floor of the clearing and into the muddy wallow that had been the pool.

It took minutes for the fog of debris to clear, and when it finally did, a scene of utter devastation stood revealed. A rainforest glade was now, almost literally, scorched earth. Nothing was left that lived or grew. The surrounding trees were scarred and battered; some had toppled, their roots yawning like giant mouths. The waterfall oozed grey sludge.

Within Quetzalcoatl’s protective bubble of light Stuart had seen everything and felt nothing. He’d not been buffeted even slightly by the colossal destructive power being unleashed around him. Not so much as a hair on his head had been disturbed. It was an eerie experience, like being in a car crash, that same sense of disembodiment, as though the disaster were happening to someone else, somewhere else.

The bubble vanished as it had appeared, abruptly and without a sound. Dazed, Stuart watched the snow-like settling of the last few floating flakes of detritus. He breathed in smells of ash and ozone.

He looked behind him. He looked up.

Both Quetzalcoatl and Huitzilopochtli were gone.

He was alone.

Silent, the wounded rainforest swayed and grieved.

PART THREE

TENOCHTITLAN

TWENTY-TWO

3 Rain 1 Movement 1 House

(Thursday 20th December 2012)

M
AL
V
AUGHN GOT
the call at 4am. The phone next to her hotel bed rang shrilly and insistently. In the adjacent bed, fast asleep, Aaronson moaned and swore. Mal herself had been only drowsing. She groped for the phone in the dark and pressed the receiver to her ear.

“Vaughn.”

As the voice on the other end of the line spoke, Mal slowly sat up. Then she lunged for the bedside lamp switch.

“Really? You’re absolutely certain?”

“Whassat?” said Aaronson.

She shushed him. “Hold on,” she said into the phone. “Wait just a second.” She rummaged in the bedside table drawer for a pad of hotel stationery and a pen. “Give me the name of the town again.” She jotted it down. “And your name?” She jotted that down too. “You’re the arresting officer? The duty officer. Okay. Well, if he is who you say he is, Mr Necalli, then I reckon you and your whole station are in line for some kind of citation. I’ll be there as soon as I can. How far are you from Teotihuacan? What’s that in miles, about seventy? Give me an hour and a half, then. And don’t, whatever you do, let the slippery bastard out of your sight.”

She planted the receiver back down in its cradle. There was a look of something like elation on her face.

Aaronson propped himself up on his elbows. Beneath the bedcovers he was sporting a prominent morning glory that he did little to hide. Aaronson being who and what he was, an erection on him meant nothing to Mal, just a biological function. Besides, she’d already seen every bit of him, in every conceivable state, during the fortnight he and she had been travelling together to and fro across Anahuac. He was a remarkably immodest hotel room sharer.