The Mayan Conspiracy (36 page)

He stepped off the dam and made a quick inspection of the surrounding area. Satisfied, he gave the all-clear.

“Strange formation,” McCarter said. “Seven pools. I wonder: Seven Caves, Seven Canyons.”

Danielle acknowledged him. “And the Place of Bitter Water,” she said.

Hawker aimed his flashlight across the plaza and into the cave beyond. Fronted by the lake, the plaza stretched
sideways for at least a hundred feet, with the back edge hard against the cave’s stone wall. On the side closest to them lay the dam and the pools and more open cave. On the far side, the broken trail of the pathway seemed to continue into a deeper section of the cavern. Hawker guessed that would be the way to go.

He brought the beam of his light back across the plaza, toward the path they’d just come down. He stopped. Ripples were moving slowly across the surface of the lake, a surface that had been like glass only moments before. His eyes darted back and forth, as he swung the beam of light through the depths of the cave and back out over the water once again.

“What’s wrong?” Danielle asked.

“Something disturbed the water,” he said. “Went in or came out.”

The dried swaths of blood on the stone showed that both victims had been killed in the open part of the plaza. Not a good place to stand. “Come on,” he said. “We need cover.”

Hawker led them to the back of the plaza, to a spot where the smooth floor butted up against the jagged natural stone of the wall. They pressed themselves against it, with Hawker on the right end and Verhoven on the left and the broad open space of the plaza in front of them. It was a good spot tactically, nothing could come at them from behind, only from the sides and front, and that would leave any attacker open to a withering fire.

“You see anything?” Verhoven asked.

“Just the water.”

Verhoven went to speak again but stopped as muted
noise reached their ears, a scraping sound, a raspy scratching, like stone dragged across stone.

Danielle switched off the Geiger counter so they could listen.

“What was that?” McCarter whispered.

No one could say. But their eyes darted around in search of its source, their lights crisscrossing in the dark.

The sound returned. Two long, slow scrapes, preceded by a strangely muted click.

The group fell into utter silence, barely breathing, their eyes straining into the dark.

“What if it’s Susan?” McCarter asked. They had tried to reach her on the radio several times since entering the cave, but to no avail. “What if there was a cave-in and she’s trapped and trying to signal us? Avalanche victims are found like that sometimes.”

Hawker listened as the sounds were heard once again. “It’s not her,” he said.

“Are you sure?” McCarter asked. “It could—”

“The sounds are overlapping,” Hawker said. “There’s more than one source.”

From out of the darkness the scraping noise whispered to them, soft but unmistakable now:
click, click, scrape, scrape
.

“Where the hell is it coming from?” Danielle asked, her eyes darting back and forth.

It was a fair question. With the strange acoustics of the cave, the noise seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.
Click, click … scrape, scrape, click, click
.

To Hawker’s left, Danielle and McCarter struggled to keep still. He ignored them, grimly sweeping his field of
view. He knew Verhoven would be doing the same, and that, armed and waiting with their backs pressed to the wall, they were in a good position. Whatever was out there, stalking them, crawling from the edge of the lake or moving toward them from the farther depths of the cave, it would have to cross the open ground before it could strike.

“Stay against the wall,” he whispered. “Whatever happens, stay back against the wall and out of our way.”

Click, click, scrape, scrape
. Louder this time, closer.

Danielle and McCarter pressed into the stone.

Hawker squinted into the darkness, waving the light around. To the right side—his side—the plaza ran for sixty feet before the jagged teeth of the cave took over once again. Beyond that, the cave opened up and a long finger of the lake appeared to stretch into the rocky formations beyond. That area offered the only real cover for anything approaching them, but a near-constant watch had caught nothing. “On your side, Pik.”

Verhoven shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Click, click
.

“Has to be.”

Verhoven bristled. “I’m telling you, there’s nothing over here.”

The hollow scraping sound reached them once again, slower and muted. And then there was only silence, more dreaded before long than the sounds that had come before it.

In that lingering quiet they waited, straining for any sign of danger, listening for the faintest sound.

But they saw nothing and heard nothing; there was
no movement, no clicking, only the pounding of their hearts, the rhythmic dripping of water in the distance and the unearthly feeling of time standing on end.

The stone floor glistened with moisture and the heavy sulfur fumes lingered in the air, but nothing in the cave was moving.

Hawker scanned to the left, to make sure Verhoven hadn’t missed anything, and then back to the right.
What the hell are we missing?

As this question ran through his head, a minuscule flash caught the corner of his eye: a speck of dust falling through the beam of Danielle’s flashlight, flaring incandescently as it passed, like a microscopic shooting star. Only now did he realize their folly. He looked up.

“Move!”

He grabbed Danielle and slung her out of the way as a shadow dropped from the ceiling fifty feet above. The animal hit the ground where she’d been standing, slashing the back of her calf with the sweep of its claws even as Hawker pulled her away. The group scattered, beams of light swaying wildly in the darkness as claws and teeth flashed and strings of vile saliva swung through the air.

The animal spun and lunged at McCarter.

A slug from Verhoven’s shotgun sent it reeling across the floor.

“Look out!” McCarter shouted.

A second beast had dropped in behind Verhoven. As it launched itself toward his back, flashes erupted from the barrel of Hawker’s rifle, staccato bursts lighting the cave in a strobelike effect. The bullets tore into the beast as it flew through the air and slammed down on Verhoven.

He tumbled forward as Hawker fired again. The animal shrieked and jumped. And as McCarter’s light hit its eyes, the thing hissed, spitting at him and shooting off into the darkness with a trail of bullets chasing it.

The beams of light crisscrossed in the dark. The sounds of the animals scurrying and hissing competed with the heavy footsteps of the men, shouts of warning and the booming sound of gunfire echoing through the chamber.

By now, Danielle had crawled back to the wall. Her leg was cramping, the muscles burning from the pain. She pulled out a flare and threw it across the plaza. The flash of the magnesium blinded at first but as the crimson light filled the cave, it exposed one shape sliding into the lake, another animal pulling its damaged body across the stone of the plaza and a third still on the ceiling, scampering away from the scene of the battle, its claws hooking into the crags in the cave’s roof, its back to the lake below.

“Hawker!” Danielle shouted, pointing to the ceiling.

Hawker twisted, sighted the creature and fired. It shrieked in pain—the voice of some tropical bird amplified a thousand times over. Its hind legs lost their grip and it dangled for a second as Hawker fired again. Hit a second time, the animal fell toward the lake, howling in agony. A stream of broken ceiling fragments followed it down as it crashed into the water with a thunderous splash.

Hawker now understood what had happened. The animals had come out of the water, gone up the side walls and stalked the humans from their inverted positions on the ceiling above. The clicking noise was the
sound of the animals’ claws grabbing and releasing the stone; the scraping, their stiff bodies sliding between the stalactites and other formations.

He scanned the ragged surface above. Stalactites and other projections guarded the pockmarked surface, making it impossible to search quickly or completely from a single location. His slid sideways, craning his neck around. Twenty feet away McCarter did the same, while Danielle threw out another flare.

As the others searched the ceiling, Verhoven got back on his feet. He’d landed on his wounded hand and it throbbed with a pain beyond anything he could have imagined. The tape holding it to the shotgun had been partially torn, but Verhoven managed to load one more shell before ripping the hand angrily from the pump. He scanned the plaza around him and then glanced briefly at the ceiling above. With no sign of danger, he turned his attention to the cause of his pain; the injured animal wriggling spastically on its side, desperately trying to drag itself to the lake.

Verhoven walked toward it, cursing as he struggled to shake loose the remaining tape. When he reached the creature, he aimed carefully and then blasted a slug through its skull. The thing slumped instantly to the floor.

With great satisfaction, Verhoven lowered the Mossberg. The others were still searching the ceiling. He made another quick scan himself and then a smirk came out. “They’re gone,” he shouted, the buoyancy of a conqueror in his voice. “Dead or gone, take your pick.”

Verhoven had been in more firefights than he could count. Each one had its own unique pace; this battle was
no different. With one animal dead, and the others gone, wounded and bleeding back into the lake, he could feel the energy of the fight dissipating already, blowing past like a storm on the wind. He took a final look around, ground level and roof above. They were in the clear. He walked back to Danielle.

“You all right?”

Danielle was sitting, first-aid kit by her side, pouring hydrogen peroxide on the slash across her calf. “I’ll live,” she said, as the peroxide bubbled and foamed.

Verhoven turned to where McCarter and Hawker were systematically checking the ceiling. “Give it up,” Verhoven shouted. “You’re liable to get hurt swinging your necks around like a bunch of bloody pelicans.”

McCarter paused in his search, took a few more peeks, then lowered his rifle and started back toward the others. But beyond his position, Hawker continued checking the deeper part of the cave, systematically scanning the shadows between the chandeliers of hanging stone.

Verhoven laughed. “Paranoid,” he said.

He turned back to Danielle, examining her injury. “A good war wound, that. Make you a nice scar.” Danielle glared at him and Verhoven laughed again, more animated than any of them had seen.

On his way back to the others, McCarter stopped for a closer look at the animal that Verhoven had killed. It lay on its side, very much dead, but still twitching in places. Dark fluids oozed from its wounds and an oddly pungent odor wafted from its body. The smell reminded McCarter of rotting vegetables. At close range the scent
was strong enough to compete with the sulfur of the cave.

This animal was smaller than the one that had attacked them on the chain the night before. Maybe half the size. It looked sort of gangly and long in the limbs, almost like a juvenile. He guessed its weight at two hundred pounds, though it had seemed much larger as it dropped toward them.

He examined what was left of its head, damaged badly by the shotgun blast that had killed it, a blast that would have disintegrated a human skull. The head was large in proportion to the animal’s size, and very angular, almost wedge-shaped, narrowing sharply at the front. Its remaining eye was unlidded, glistening beneath a viscous gel, like a polished, wet stone. It was black from head to toe, with stripes of a slightly lighter shade that were mostly visible as differently textured skin. The surface of the skin itself was slick with some type of dark secretion, which it seemed to be oozing from millions of tiny pores.

Whatever it was, it was unlike anything McCarter had ever seen or heard of. Even the shape was foreign. The body was all angles, like overlapping plates. The arms and legs were thick, but the joints were simple and exposed, like hinges on a door, one slot for the lower half and one slot for the upper. Muscular sinew could be seen where they bent, like bundled wires in a conduit. The severely pinched neck seemed almost insectlike and behind it stood distinct rows of stiff, bristlelike hairs that grew in a converging V-shaped pattern.

An evil-looking thing, McCarter thought, with all the tools of a predator: stereoscopic vision, a sleek, strong
body, claws that resembled angled steel blades. Its mouth hung open on a set of powerfully muscled jaws and was filled with teeth like sharpened railroad spikes.

McCarter looked up toward the ceiling, upon which the animals had been crawling. The image of that ancient Mayan painting came to him, humans standing erect on the ground, blithely unaware of the Xibalbans directly beneath them, walking inverted with their feet on the underside of the earth’s surface.
If I knew something like this lived down here
, he thought,
I’d consider this the underworld too
.

As he shook off a chill, Danielle and Verhoven came up beside him, gawking at the thing, just as he had. Danielle seemed especially interested in the entry wounds from Verhoven’s shot. The damage resembled a pane of glass punctured by an errant baseball, with long fissures radiating from the wounds.