Assumed Identity

11

Holly’s blurred face hovered over him.

The Mayan chieftain, who’d confronted him in the ball court, seemed to hover next to her, the colorful feathers of his headdress radiant in the crimson sunset. Other warriors appeared, gripping blood-covered spears and machetes. Holly seemed not to realize her danger.

Buchanan tried to raise a hand to point and warn her. He couldn’t move the hand. He tried to open his mouth and tell her. His mouth wouldn’t move. The words wouldn’t come. He felt as if the earth spun beneath him, tugging him into a vortex.

The Mayan chieftain stooped, his broad round face distorting the closer it came to Buchanan.

In his delirium, Buchanan felt himself being lifted and placed upon a litter. He had a floating sensation. Although his eyelids were closed, he saw images. A towering pyramid. Statues that depicted gigantic snake heads. Evocative hieroglyphics. Magnificent palaces and temples.

Then the jungle rose before him, and he was carried through a clearing in the trees and bushes, a clearing that went on and on, his litter bearers proceeding along a wide pathway made of gray stone, higher than the forest floor. It seemed to him that everywhere, except on the pathway, snakes made the ground ripple.

Night settled over them. Nonetheless they continued, Holly staying close to his litter, the Mayan chieftain guided by moonlight, leading the way.

This is how it was a thousand years ago, Buchanan thought.

They came to a village, where through a gate, beyond a head-high wooden stockade, torches flickered, revealing huts. The walls of the huts were made from woven saplings, the roofs from palm fronds. Pigs and chickens, wakened by the procession, scattered noisily. Villagers waited, short, round-faced, dark-haired, almond-eyed, the women wearing ghostly white dresses.

Buchanan was taken into one of the huts. He was placed on a hammock. So the snakes can’t get at me, he thought. Women undressed him. In the light from a fire, the chieftain peered at his wounds.

Holly shrieked and tried to stop him, but the villagers restrained her, and after the chieftain sewed Buchanan’s knife wound shut, after he applied a compress to Buchanan’s almost-healed bullet wound, after he put salve on Buchanan’s cuts and bruises, he examined Buchanan’s bulging eyes, used a knife to shave the hair from one side of Buchanan’s head.

And raised a pulley-driven wooden drill to Buchanan’s aching skull.

The sharp point was excruciating.

As if a huge boil had been lanced, Buchanan fainted from the ecstasy of tremendous release.