Age of Blood

64

All but two of the Zetas had joined the many dead along the temple floor. The survivors stood beside the Desollados on top of the pyramid. Ramon still held Senator Withers like a shield several steps down. Yank and Holmes had both been cut by the obsidian butterfly. They’d managed to shoot away an edge of a wing and one leg, but it was still mobile. And it was even more dangerous now that it was wounded.

Ramon held a pistol in his hand. He kept it leveled at the senator’s side. The senator’s eyelids were all but shut. The beating had taken its toll.

Hoover ran low and fast to the base of the pyramid, capturing Ramon’s attention. The dog dodged to the right and out of Ramon’s line of sight and began to move upward, careful to keep something between not only her and Ramon, but the men atop the pyramid.

Walker raised the Fire Serpent and unloaded an entire clip at the place where the right wing connected to the obsidian butterfly’s torso. Chips and sparks flew, but nothing more. Still, it got the creature’s attention.

As it turned toward Walker, he shouted, “Remember me? We’re not done yet.”

He didn’t know what reaction to expect. The thing’s face seemed incapable of an expression. But by the way it unrolled its insectile tongue then rolled it back into its proboscis, it was definitely a comment thrown back at him that needed little translation.

Still aiming at the creature, he dropped the empty magazine, reloaded a full one, then rained thirty rounds into the front of the spot he’d so recently peppered.

“Come on you wannabe fucking Mothra!”

He dropped this magazine and inserted another. As soon as it was in place, he let loose. The rounds were on target, but the last ten never found a home. The weapon jammed. Instead of clearing it, Walker dropped it and ran.

He heard the swoop of the creature’s wings. He ran six more paces, then threw himself to the ground.

It came in close, the edge of a wing just missed slicing him from hip to sternum.

When it passed, he jumped to his feet and ran back the opposite way. Barely pausing to grab the Ultimax, he also scooped a drum from the belt of the dead gunner. Then he was diving into the entrance to the lower temple, the place of Xipe Totec. It was nothing more than an unearthed pit, the ground stained with blood and littered with skeletons of hundreds of women. He remembered the stories of all the missing women in the border towns and wondered if they hadn’t died in a similar fashion, maybe in support of some arcane power grab, maybe to fuel the excavation of this unholy place, or maybe both. The ceiling was seven feet high and pressed down upon him. It was made of new wooden beams that held up the dirt and rock. Small mounds of dribbled earth showed how tenuous the support structures were.

A wave of nausea struck Walker like the backhand of a giant fist. He let go of the weapon and magazine as he dropped to his knees. His hands went to his helmet, which he unsnapped and ripped off. Then they went to his head.

A man suddenly stepped in front of him from the shadows in the back, dressed in the ragged skins of dead women. “It spoke to me, your demon. We talked.” He reached out and stroked Walker’s cheek, and where the man touched, Walker felt his skin curl and crack. “It wants to come back, you know? It wants to be with you again.” The man in front of Walker chuckled, the sound of marbles inside a baby’s skull. “It wants to do the things you used to do. Remember the old man? Remember how you tormented him? Do you know that he took his own life because of you? Do you know that his last thought before he resigned his soul to hell was of you? Imagine a man who’d rather spend an eternity in hell than spend one more moment with a child. Much like your father.”

Walker felt his skin begin to necrotize, but the man’s words were like a salve, feeding him just enough so that he could reach out, grab the magician’s neck with one hand and squeeze. “How do you know it’s entirely gone from me?” He let the crazy spill into his eyes. “How do you know he doesn’t want you to join what’s left of him inside me?”

The magician grabbed at Walker’s hand, but it was still covered in a ballistic glove. He could let go to get to a piece of skin, but then Walker would be free to throttle him. So instead, he tried to break the grip of the SEAL. But he might as well have been trying to bend an iron pipe.

Walker brought his other hand up to finish the job. For a moment, he had two killing hands around the man’s neck. Then he changed his mind. In one blurred movement, one hand grabbed the magician’s forehead and the other grabbed his chin, and then he snapped the man’s neck.

Parts of the ceiling started to fall.

Walker spun and saw the obsidian butterfly, bent and moving awkwardly across the dead bodies toward him. Occasionally, the point of its wing would break through the ceiling, causing rock and dirt to rain down upon it. He scanned the area around him and saw nowhere to go. The Ultimax was unreachable behind the creature, so Walker did the only thing he could think of. He led the creature on, making it take a tortuous route over the bodies of the dead women. Walker fell, his feet slipping between the bones. Each time he managed to stand and keep away from the creature as it tried to hurry more and more, wing tips ripping through the ceiling.

Walker had managed to maneuver it so that it was at the back of the chamber. Then, in a final rush, he ran in a crouch toward the entrance. He made it and fell upon the weapon, clearing it and inserting and charging the drum in a blur. He didn’t wait for the obsidian butterfly to get to him. Instead, Walker staggered to his feet and began to rake the ceiling with gunfire, concentrating on the beams. He cut one in two and a great gush of soil began to fill the chamber. He backed into the entrance and trained the Ultimax on another beam, with the same result. Just as the drum began to whine and spin emptily, the entire ceiling collapsed.

He turned and ran, trying to keep from being buried himself. He barely made it out of the Yopico, diving into the main chamber as a gout of dirt billowed out and up. When he got to his feet, he saw that Holmes and Yank had killed the remaining men, while Hoover was savaging the Desollados. Hoover had the neck of the one in his mouth, arterial blood pulsing into the air atop the pyramid, much as it had five hundred years before.

Senator Withers lay gasping halfway up the pyramid. Blood poured from a gory wound in his shoulder. Walker ran to him, shouting to the others, “Where’s Ramon?” Then he heard the sound of running feet. His gaze went to the stairs that climbed up the side of one wall. He saw the man pause, throw a mocking salute, then run the rest of the way up the stairs. Walker was a thousand miles past exhaustion, but he knew what needed to be done. If they didn’t get Ramon now, he’d be stalking them until they were all dead. Walker gritted his teeth and started to follow.

Holmes came to the senator’s aid. “Go,” he said. “Get the son of a bitch.”

“Wait,” came a voice he hadn’t heard in a while.

Walker spun. “YaYa—you’re alive!”

Laws had his arm wrapped around the gray-skinned SEAL’s shoulder. YaYa had lost the arm, but the stump had been tourniqueted and bandaged.

“What happened?” Walker asked breathlessly.

He stepped closer but YaYa shook his head and pointed at the bodies of Ramon’s accomplices. “Necklaces. Get them.” His voice was little more than a whisper.

Walker looked down at the two linen-suited men, then knelt. He ripped open their bloody shirts. Each of them wore gold necklaces with a small vial containing a milky substance. He grabbed them.

“’Cabra. Drink,” YaYa said, pointing weakly toward the steps. “Chase. Kill.”

“Drink this?” Walker asked, holding up the vial. But YaYa was out. He glanced at Laws, who looked at him with widened eyes and shrugged.

YaYa had said “’cabra.” Would the substance turn him into one of the creatures? Walker found it hard to believe. “Fuck it.” Walker rotated his red mask from where it rested on his back, placed it over his face, and tightened the straps. Then he opened the vial. “Drink me,” he said, invoking the craziness of Alice in Wonderland and laughing a little too maniacally. He tilted his head back and let the liquid flow into his mouth. As the substance hit his system, the entire aspect of the universe changed right in front of his eyes.