Blood Sun

22

They clambered down and moved across the shallow sandbanks into the edge of the jungle. Flint made them wash the blood away while he went foraging in the undergrowth. He soon returned and gave Max and Xavier a handful of leaves. “Chew these into a pulp, then put them onto the cuts,” he instructed them, shoving some into his mouth. Within a few minutes of dressing the wounds, the steady flow of blood from the bat cuts stopped.

The shadows were deepening, and a moment of silence fell across the forest before the night sounds started.

“We need to get out of the open and deeper into the jungle in case anybody sees us,” Max said.

“There’s no sign or smell of anyone. It’s been a tough day; we need food.” Flint took the straw hat off and ran his fingers through his long hair, pulling it back behind his ears. He was looking over the terrain.

“Where would you choose?” he asked Max.

Max looked around. There were slabs of rock that reminded him of a tor back on Dartmoor. Prehistoric man had once made his campfires on those rocks and used them for lookouts and shelter. He pointed with the broken spear. “I’ll climb up there and see what I can find,” he said.

“What do I do?” Xavier said.

“You come with me and I’ll show you how to catch a snake. Then you can skin it,” Flint told him.

Xavier’s face said it all. “I go with Max,” he said with a grimace.

As Flint turned away and quickly disappeared into the jungle, Max clambered up onto the rocks. Xavier had no desire to be left standing alone, so he exerted himself in trying to match Max’s mountain-goat agility.

When Max finally reached the top, he found he could see deep into the forest, and looking back to the river and the cave mouth, it was obvious they were on the bend of the river. The rocks sheltered a now overgrown clearing, in which stood an abandoned hut. Xavier was bent double from the exertion.

“Down there,” Max said. “It’s perfect. Out of sight but with a clear view of these rocks and the river beyond.”

“I’ve stayed in better slums,” Xavier said. “But after hanging out with you, that place is like a hotel.”

Xavier began to move forward, but Max reached out his hand and stopped him. He pointed with the spear. “Look at that,” he said quietly.

Xavier turned to face Max’s line of sight. The sun had already disappeared below the mountain peaks, needles edging against the dark sky, but far away in the jungle, a curtain of mist was drawn across the valley. And it was bloodred. They stood for a few moments trying to understand what they were looking at.

Flint, huffing and puffing with his smoker’s cough, climbed up behind them, a dead snake in his hands and fruit tucked into his shirt. Max recognized the diamond-shaped head of the snake, one of the deadliest pit vipers in the tropics. Without a doubt, Orsino Flint was an expert survivalist-no one tackles a three-meter fer-de-lance without knowing what they are doing. He turned back to look at the veil of blood. Flint’s eyes squinted. The breeze was picking up. He sniffed the air. “Aha. You smell that,” he said.

Max nodded. He, too, had caught the slightly disgusting smell of sulfur on the wind.

“That’s an open stream of lava. The rising mist is from the damp jungle. This whole area was once an active volcano. Now it’s just that one mountain bleeding into the land. The mist is the lava’s reflection,” Flint said.

“Dangerous ground. I don’t want to go anywhere near it,” Max said. “At first light, we’ll find a track and see where it leads us. The pyramids and buildings in my mother’s pictures are out there somewhere. We find them and I might find out what happened to her.”

“And then?” Xavier asked.

Max shook his head. He wanted to go home, but the thought of facing his father again twisted something inside of him. He felt no compassion or understanding for what his father had done. Max knew his dad had failed to beat his own fear about something out here. He was determined to find the truth about how his mother died, but there were moments he wished he had not embarked on such a torturous journey. From the very start, it had caused pain and hurt, and the truth of his father’s actions tore at him.

There was no point talking about it. He didn’t want his own fears bubbling to the surface. Best no one saw that.

The embers of the fire burned in the stone hearth that Max had made in the hut. They had grilled and eaten the snake, and even the reluctant Xavier had admitted it wasn’t so bad and that it tasted like chicken. But now the breeze began to blow through the hut’s windows. As Max peeled fruit and handed it to Xavier, Flint began closing the wooden shutters.

“It’s already hot in here,” Max said. “We need some air.”

“It is not good to have the night wind move across your body when you sleep,” Flint told him as he fastened the shutters. “Some winds are malevolent; they are night spirits. You understand that? Your ch’ulel, it can be attacked.”

“Ch’ulel?”

“Ch’ulel is your life force, your spirit,” Flint explained. “It is vulnerable when you sleep. We’re intruders here, but our presence will be known. There are different ways of stopping us. Shamans can take on the form of animals and travel on the wind.”

“The wayob?” Max asked.

Flint nodded. “The windows stay closed.”

Xavier pulled fruit strands from his teeth. “Y’see, chico? Peasants. These people live in the forest and they start thinking like monkeys.”

In an instant, Flint had a knife at Xavier’s throat. Xavier choked. Max’s reactions were just as quick as he gripped Flint’s knife hand.

“Flint! Stop it! We’re in enough trouble as it is. Leave him.”

Flint pulled back but gestured with the knife. “Do not insult a man’s beliefs, drug scum. They sit more deeply than the heart.”

“Apologize,” Max told Xavier, who stared at him in disbelief. “Go on,” Max urged him. “If he wanted to kill you, he could have. I couldn’t have stopped him. He was warning you. If I were you, I’d apologize.”

Xavier grimaced as if the fruit had been sour. “OK. So … so you believe in evil spirits. OK. That’s cool, amigo. It was a joke. OK? I was joking.”

Flint muttered and backed himself into a corner, where he lay down with his back to the wall. “You are the ignorant one, boy. Your ch’ulel has already been corrupted. The dark ones took your childhood. You should ask for forgiveness and one day, maybe, you will understand what it means to live like a human being instead of a cockroach.”

Xavier flinched, and this time Max’s hand restrained the boy. “Leave him, Flint. Xavier tried to start a new life for himself and his brother. He’ll come right.”

Flint grunted, rolled a cigarette and let it smolder in his lips as he pulled his hat down over his eyes. He gave a rattling cough, his lungs struggling with the smoke. Both he and Xavier settled down. Max gazed into the fire. He knew about shamans and the creatures they could become. The shaman in Africa who had saved his life had taken him through a terrifying experience. Max understood what it meant to feel your body turned inside out, to experience the sensation of becoming an animal. Some things you can’t explain. The subtle energies that moved through his body were a mystery, but he had stepped into that maelstrom on more than one occasion. If he were able to, he would beckon it at will, but it was beyond his capability. Something triggered it-he didn’t know what-so he accepted Flint’s explanation. The room was stiflingly hot, but he closed his eyes and let the exhaustion take him into the fractured world of dreams.

Outside, the jungle bristled. Max and the others had been seen by more than the cave-guardian warrior.

A hundred pairs of eyes gazed through the darkness toward the hut.

As daylight broke in the City of Lost Souls, it was the women who came to Charlie Morgan. Half a dozen pickup trucks with armed men had torn up the muddy street as they headed toward the jungle. Charlie wiped the sweat from her neck, tugged her clammy T-shirt away from her body, swallowed the last of a cold drink and crunched ice between her teeth as she waited for the dozen women who had gathered in front of her to speak. They were nervous. One nudged another forward, but the women seemed either shy or afraid. Charlie smiled. Time to be nice.

“?Hola!” she greeted them.

“You are English?” the woman asked. There was no trace of hesitancy. Obviously, Charlie reasoned, they had all been educated.

Charlie nodded. That seemed the right answer, as if it comforted and reassured the women.

“No one, no woman, has ever stood up to the men.”

“Well, there’s a first time for everything. Slimeballs need a bit of housecleaning once in a while.”

The women hesitated, seeming uncertain, until their spokesperson translated this into what Charlie assumed was Mayan. The women smiled, nodding. Charlie didn’t usually get on that well with other women, but this seemed to be going OK.

“I’m looking for a boy,” she said. “An English boy.”

“Yes. He said someone would come after him.”

“Max Gordon was here?”

“We do not know his name,” the woman replied.

Charlie tugged out Max’s picture. “Is this him?”

The picture was quickly passed around, and the accompanying shake of their heads answered Charlie’s question.

The woman handed the picture back. “The boy had long hair. He was tall. He had heard of a woman who had gone into the rain forest four, maybe five, years ago.”

Charlie nodded. “His name was Danny Maguire, and he was looking for a scientist called Helen Gordon.”

The woman shrugged. That part they did not know about. “And this boy you are looking for?”

“Her son,” Charlie said. She watched their faces register what it must be like for a young boy trying to find his mother. “The boy with long hair-Maguire-did he go into the jungle?”

“It is forbidden,” the woman said.

Charlie had to tease the answers out of them. “So is standing up to violent men,” she said.

They smiled again. “Yes, the boy got inside, but he became very sick. There is a place where they take supplies through. The man who drives that truck-he is a farmer-he helped him. The man is not like the others. He is Maya. He understands the old ways. He does not like the way these Creoles have been bought by Westerners.”

“Westerners?”

“Si. They come into the mountains in their helicopter. They are important, and they have bought the men here who run drugs, who kill and threaten us, but there is nothing we can do. You should not stay here. We came to warn you. You have shown how strong you are, but they will not forget. The reason they have not killed you is because they are unsure about you. No one has done to them what you did.”

“Where have the men gone?”

“We do not know. They do not tell us.”

“But something has happened. They’ve pulled out in a hurry. Are they after someone, do you think? Did they chase the Maguire boy when he was here?”

“We took a big risk when we helped that boy escape. Some of us were beaten badly, but we did not tell them how we got him to the city.”

“So they were after him?”

“Si. They are paid to kill.”

“And Helen Gordon?”

“Some years ago, we heard of a woman who passed through one of the villages. She said she was looking for old ruins, but everyone knew she was an environmentalist. They live a dangerous life. We do not know what happened to her.”

Charlie Morgan considered her options. She was so close to unraveling the mystery and knew that Max Gordon had to be out there somewhere. He was close. All her instincts told her that. But they also told her that she, too, could “disappear” once she ventured away from this town.

But imagine if she pulled it off. How cool would it be to find Max Gordon, to dig out the mystery and find out what Danny Maguire had discovered? She might even uncover the truth behind Helen Gordon’s disappearance. That would be a real coup. But could she do it on her own? She felt her heartbeat quicken.

“Can you take me to the man who drives the supply truck?”

The women fell silent, and then each of them shuffled past her; they touched her arm, as if they were already grieving at someone’s funeral.

“We can take you,” the woman said. “But we do not wish to be responsible for your death.”

Riga used a handheld flare when he ran into the cave. It helped him to see the tracks made by Max and the others. The grotto of saw-toothed images absorbed the light and became a snarling creature. Riga was not afraid of the shadow-riddled cave. He had never believed in myths and legends; they were lies told by storytellers to scare people or to make them feel good about themselves and create false heroes. Life was not a story. It was hard and unforgiving, and if you did not think for yourself and make your own decisions, then you became one of the followers, one of the herd. If you did not test yourself, you might be easily deluded into thinking you were better than you were. And that was where so many men entered the realm of fantasy. Riga had tested himself time and again. If he failed, he learned the lessons and became better; if he felt fear, he faced it, controlled it and mastered it. No one was going to make Riga a loser.

But the gunshot took him by surprise.

Searing pain creased his leg muscle and he fell, which saved him from further bullets that impacted dully against the damp walls. He rolled instinctively, found cover behind a stalagmite and saw the muzzle flash as his attacker kept firing blindly and stupidly at where he had been. The flare had distorted Riga’s body with shadow, and the gunman had shot wildly. They were the actions of a scared man, who betrayed himself as someone who thought he could kill without stealth.

Riga closed his eyes-it was nothing to do with the pain; he wanted them to adjust quickly to darkness when the flare he had dropped spluttered and died. Lying still, he listened for every movement. A boot crunched the limestone gravel floor thirty or forty meters away. He did not open his eyes. He saw the man’s approach in his mind’s eye. He had stopped and turned slightly, checking the area, his boots twisting into the grit; then he moved again. Riga could hear the man’s breathing. He opened his eyes and gazed into the darkness, his night vision clear, the subtle tones of black showing the dark-smudged features of the cave.

He knew he could not move quickly enough to take the man with his hands and make him confess who had ordered the attack. That was obvious enough. None of the gunmen used to patrol the forests would want to enter the Cave of the Stone Serpent, and none would dare attempt to kill Riga unless they faced something or someone more threatening.

Cazamind.

Riga lifted the rifle to his shoulder, waited, saw the slightest of changes in the darkness and fired. One shot. A body fell. Another couple of seconds and he heard the man’s last breath. He waited again.

A second man, who must have stayed still, fired at his muzzle flash. Riga felt the snap of air next to his head. He did not flinch but, with an instinct born of years of close-quarter battle, returned fire. There was a cracking splat of bone and blood and the hard, sudden thump of a body thrown backward onto the ground.

A rush of air caused a vibration, an almost imperceptible fluttering of dust, as a figure rushed from the darkness. This man was better than the others; he had waited, using animal cunning to get close to his adversary, which meant that he would use a knife. Riga silently took all the pain as he bent down on his wounded leg, his lower profile fooling the attacker. He came in high, found only air, then felt the agony of death as Riga dispatched him with one blow.

Riga quickly calmed his labored breathing. He listened. There was no one else. But others would come.

He pulled the tab on another flare and examined his leg. The bullet had torn across his thigh, but no bone was broken, no artery damaged. Butterfly clips would not hold a gash like this, especially with the exertion he would be placing on the leg. He would stitch and bind the wound. It would slow him down and there would be pain-though he was no stranger to that-then he would continue his pursuit.

And find out why Cazamind had turned on him.

Max acknowledged that Flint was the rain forest expert and at first light allowed him to lead the way into the jungle. Flint found the line of least resistance through the trees, and using the animal paths, they made good time.

Xavier was insistent that he go in the middle. Flint could lead the way, but Xavier wanted Max behind him; there was no way he was going to bring up the rear. He had seen plenty of movies where the man at the back always got taken out by whoever was hunting them.

As Flint moved forward intuitively, Max kept his eyes on the jungle. He could see no movement, and yet there was something out there that worried him. The dank smell of the undergrowth filled their nostrils, but Max was convinced he could smell the sweat of men. He whispered a gentle hiss to Flint barely ten paces ahead of him. By the time Flint and Xavier turned, Max was on one knee and gesturing them down. They dropped to their haunches at once. Xavier’s eyes were wide with fear, and Max put a finger to his lips to make sure the boy did not speak. Flint had not moved as he concentrated on the surrounding jungle. He would not question Max’s caution; the boy had good instincts.

He shook his head. Max nodded an acknowledgment. Maybe, he thought, the warning sensation was simply a state of heightened tension. Like a wary animal, Max felt a nerve-tingling threat. A sixth sense was at work. They moved on carefully, but within seconds Max’s fears were realized. It was as if a million butterflies had flapped their wings at the same time and created a fluttering current of air that jostled the leaves-a wave of unseen energy rushed toward them. They no sooner felt it than the jungle floor erupted.

Flint and Xavier were swept up into the air by a net, their bodies slammed together. Xavier yelped; Flint cursed. Their arms and legs were caught up in the rope weave. It had happened so fast. Max was barely a step behind them, but he twisted round, fully expecting someone to complete the attack. He was too late. As if from nowhere, dozens of spears angled at his chest and throat. He was surrounded by urchin-like children, some of them about ten or eleven years old, others no more than Max’s age. They were Maya, they were armed and they had Max trapped.

And they weren’t smiling.