The Mayan Conspiracy (44 page)

He arched his brows. “Think about the description of the wooden people,” he said. “With no muscle development in their arms or their legs. No fat to speak of. With masklike faces and deformed bodies.”

“The body in the temple,” she said.

“Exactly,” he replied. “At the time of the wooden people, we have Seven Macaw holding himself out as a god, right? The leader, at the very least. But the authors of the
Popul Vuh
have him painted more as a usurper. He’s repugnant to the gods, something just wrong, foreign and unnatural.”

“Subhuman,” she said.

He nodded. “But in a place of power he becomes something more. Instead of a pitiable creature, he becomes an abomination: Seven Macaw.”

She glanced at the photo of the vandalized glyphs as he went on.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Seven Macaw was described as having a nest made of metal, and possessions that could create light. In fact, he claimed to be the Sun and the Moon and that he could light up the whole of the world, but even the writers of the
Popul Vuh
knew this claim was false. They knew the light he created could only reach a short distance out into the night.”

He nodded toward the temple. “If Danielle is right and that body down there is indeed the remains of a person who traveled here from the future, I’m guessing they would have come in some type of vessel; something ancient people might have described as a nest made of metal. I mean, what would they say if a plane crashed here, or a space capsule like Mercury or Apollo? Even our spotlights illuminated a large swath of ground before they were destroyed, who knows what type of lighting someone from the future might have.”

“But not enough to light up the world,” Susan noted.

“No,” McCarter agreed, “whatever they might boast.”

“That would fit,” she said, excitedly. “I mean, if they did have such things, primitive people would have a hard time describing them.”

McCarter nodded, but remained quiet for the moment. He was thinking of the skull in the cave and the golden filaments that ran from the eye sockets back across the top of it. He thought about his uncle, who had a titanium knee, a pacemaker in his chest and an artificial lens in his eye where a cataract had been removed. He guessed that the filaments they’d seen were something similar, a prosthetic or part of one, designed to aid sight in some way.

“Remember when Seven Macaw was shot with the blow dart,” he said. “The heroes took the metal from his eyes.”

She nodded.

“It’s probably a stretch,” he said, “but I suppose it’s even possible that the body you found down there, that actual body, could have made it into legend as Seven Macaw.”

Suddenly, Susan was the voice of reason. “Or,” she said, “perhaps the name and the term came into use later, to describe this malicious force that held the people down.”

More likely she was right—legends had a way of being embellished and expanded in the aftermath, and almost all tales of woe tended to derive their pain from a specific villain as opposed to a group, even if that had not been the case.

“Either way,” he said. “I have to believe there is some connection here. And if that’s the case, then I think perhaps it can help us understand these animals we’ve been fighting a little bit better.”

He watched as she worked it out, coming around to the same conclusion he’d now reached. “You think those animals are the Zipacna,” she said, guessing his thoughts. “The son, or apparently sons of Seven Macaw.”

“That’d be my guess,” he said. “Sons of his, but not in the biological sense. After all, George Washington is the father of our country and Ben Franklin is called the father of electricity, but they didn’t give birth to those things.”

“‘Father’ could mean
patron
or
protector
… or
creator
,” she said.

He looked toward the temple. “So if that body in the cave is Seven Macaw, either in fact or in general, then he could be Zipacna’s creator, his father in that sense. Growing the Zipacna in those pools, cloning them perhaps.”

“But whoever that is down there, he’s dead,” she noted. “Why are the animals still here?”

He’d thought about that. “Danielle was looking for machinery. Perhaps our presence here triggered some kind of alarm. Maybe when Kaufman placed the crystals back on the altar.”

“Or when we walked through the curtain of light,” she said.

“Booby traps do have a habit of sticking around,” he said. “Just look at all the minefields strewn across the world, littering the ground long after the wars have moved on. And if that’s the case here, then perhaps these wooden people or deformed humans—or whatever we’re calling them—set up a system like that here. It’s all guesswork, but …”

“Maybe not,” she said. “I didn’t remember to show you this when we were down in the cave. We were talking about the body and everything, and I just wanted to get out of there. But before you came down I had nothing to do but try to reach Kaufman on that radio and pray that those things wouldn’t reach me first. To take my mind off it, I studied those glyphs and the other marks as well. Among the geometric drawings, I’m quite sure there was a double-helix design. It could mean anything, it could be the infinity sign turned on its side, but it looked like a stylized drawing of DNA. Kind of like what you might see on a drug company’s logo.”

He nodded.

“And among the Maya writing,” she added, “I recognized glyphs referencing the children, unlearned, or they will not learn, and then violence. The last glyphs indicate retribution or destruction.”

McCarter took a breath, thinking. “In that order?”

She nodded. “I took it to mean the children would not learn,” she said, “and so were punished. I’m guessing the children were the locals, and they were punished by releasing the animals, the Zipacna.”

He looked over at the bandaged dogs, resting near the foxholes. “We have our loyal friends. Perhaps they have their own service animals.”

“But why?” she asked. “What’s the point? Why build the pyramid at all? Why would anyone want to live down in that cave?”

“Ahh,” McCarter said. He’d been waiting for that. “An important question. And I think a most important answer. That temple seems to be a deliberate cap on the cave, keeping the sulfur and the acid on the inside, increasing the concentration in the air. The environment down there is completely different. After we brought you out, you had to wash off with fresh water because your skin was burning, remember?”

“Of course,” she said, rubbing a hand over her forearm. “It still itches.”

“The water was extremely acidic. It killed the soldier you saw jump in and yet the animals lived in it without any problem. Danielle thinks it’s because they secrete an oily base substance to counteract the acid. From that alone I’m guessing they’re used to it, designed for it even. On the body you found, we saw similar pores in the bony plates. That leads me to believe an acidic environment was their natural habitat.”

“Acid rain in our future after all,” she said, sadly.

He nodded. “A ruined environment for which man and animal have evolved or been genetically engineered
to survive in. And when they came here they needed a similar place to call home.”

“So they capped the cave deliberately,” she said. “Trying their best to create an artificial environment down there, one that would keep them comfortable, or at least alive.”

“Their version of a bubble on the moon,” he said.

She seemed to be thinking it over, confirming it in her own mind, only to realize that they still hadn’t answered the original question. “Okay,” she said, “based on what we’ve seen, I can buy into what you’re saying. The wooden people and the Zipacna as real. I can even see them forcing these early Maya to build the temple as a cap to the cave because they need the acidic environment to survive in, but I still don’t see what that has to do with the Chollokwan.”

McCarter answered her question with one of his own, ready at last to link the two ideas together. “What happened to the wooden people when they ignored the call of the gods, when they exalted themselves and failed to keep the days?”

“They were killed off,” she said. “Hurricane and the other gods destroyed them. Turning their own animals against them.”

“Right,” McCarter said. “Their own animals, including beasts that attacked and ripped them apart, something that quite accurately describes what the Zipacna do.
They raced for the trees and they raced for the caves
,” he added, quoting the
Popul Vuh
again. “
But the trees could not bear them and the caves were sealed shut
.”

“You think the inhabitants of this place tricked
them,” she said. “Sealed the temple just as a storm came.”

He nodded. “If I was to take it all the way, and try to match it up with the legend, I would suppose that the Mayan people rebelled, injured Seven Macaw and sent him fleeing to that temple. And then they sealed him in. With a storm coming, and nowhere to hide, any Zipacna that may have been out here went crazy, attacking everyone and everything, including the other wooden people—if there were any. And then the storm hit, drowning one and all with burning rain.”

“
It rained all day and all through the night
,” she said.

“And the earth was blackened beneath it,” he added, quoting the ancient Mayan text one last time. As he finished, McCarter watched Susan’s face light up. He was certain that she’d made the connection, certain that she knew his next question and the answer to it as well. He asked it anyway.

“And what were the Chollokwan doing with those crystals when our friend Blackjack Martin so casually took them away?”

“They were praying,” she said. “Praying for rain.”

“Damn right,” McCarter said, slamming his notebook shut. “The Chollokwan care about this place, because they’re descendants of the Mayan tribe who built it. And they were praying for the rain, not to make the crops grow or the river flood or for any of the other reasons normally associated with such a request, but because their salvation, or at least that of their ancestors, once depended on it.”

ACROSS THE CAMP
Hawker stood beside Danielle, staring into an empty ammunition box, now covered with a makeshift grate. Scampering around in the box was the larva they’d retrieved from the body in the forest. It had been just two hours, but the thing barely seemed like the same creature. It had grown little arms and legs and the beginnings of the lethal tail. Viewed from above, it was beginning to resemble the animals from inside the temple.

Hawker could hardly believe the change. “How long did all that take?”

Danielle glanced at her watch. “Ten minutes after we got it back here, its skin hardened into the bony shell we saw on the adult animals. Then the tendrils separated and it ingested them.”

The little thing disgusted Hawker and this latest revelation did nothing to change that. “It ate its own arms?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, smiling at his discomfort. “You should have seen it.”

“No thanks,” he said, looking around. There was
only one grub in the box, a fact that concerned him. “Where are the rest of them?”

Danielle frowned. “This one killed them before I could stop it. As soon as its shell had hardened, it became very aggressive.”

“All of them?” Hawker said.

She nodded. “For the most part. I pulled one of the half-eaten things out before it could finish, but it would have gulped it down if I’d let it.”

“Hungry little bastard,” Hawker noted.

“It is,” she said. “And I think I know why. I took a sample from the dead one and looked at it under a microscope. Its cells are packed with mitochondria, maybe three to four times what a human cell has. That gives it a tremendous metabolic rate. To maintain such a metabolism it would likely have to eat its body weight in food every four or five days. I would guess the need at half of that for the adults. Maybe less, but still very accelerated.”

“That might explain why they’re so aggressive,” Hawker said.

“I think it explains something else too, something that might help us to fight them,” she said.

Hawker leaned toward her, interested in any detail about the creatures that might make them easier to kill. “Tell me,” he said.

“Let me put it this way,” she said, “there are many different rates of life in the natural world. A hummingbird has an extraordinarily high metabolic rate; its wings beat so rapidly that they’re a blur to the naked eye. To keep that rate up they have to consume their body weight in nectar every twenty-four hours or so.

“In comparison, a species like the tortoise or the starfish has a glacial metabolism. To the naked eye a starfish looks immobile. Yet they are moving, not just wafting around in the current but traveling—there are even great migrations of them roaming unnoticed across the ocean floor. You can see it with time-lapse photography.”

Hawker smiled at her excitement. “Let me guess, oceanography was another major.”

She shook her head. “A summer hobby really. I liked the sun and the surf, and I looked pretty good in a wetsuit.”

He laughed. “I bet you did.”

“The point is,” she said, “if a starfish could see us, we would be nothing more than a fleeting blur to it. Yet, to the hummingbird we move like molasses in winter. Almost as if we’re in slow motion.”