The Codex

73

They ran up the carved staircase, the sound of the shots still echoing from the distant mountains. They reached the trail at the top of the cliffs and sprinted for the green walls of lianas and creepers that covered the ruined ramparts of the White City. As they reached the covering shade, Tom saw his father stumble. Streaks of blood were running down one of his legs.

“Wait! Father’s hit!”

“It’s nothing.” The old man stumbled again and grunted.

They stopped briefly at the base of the wall.

“Leave me alone!” the old man roared.

Ignoring him, Tom examined the wound, wiping away the blood, locating the entrance and exit wounds. The bullet had passed through the right lower abdomen at an angle, traversing the rectus abdominus and coming out the back, where it seemed to have avoided the kidney. It was impossible to tell yet whether the peritoneal cavity had been nicked. He pushed that possibility aside and palpated the area; his father groaned. It was a serious wound and he was losing blood, but at least no arteries or major veins had been cut.

“Hurry!” Borabay cried.

Tom took off his own shirt and with one savage pull tore a strip of cloth away, then another. He bound them as best he could around his father’s midriff, trying to stem the loss of blood.

“Put your arm around my shoulder,” Tom said.

“I’ll take the other,” Vernon said.

Tom felt the arm go around him — it was skinny and hard, like a cable of steel. He bent forward to take some of his father’s weight. He felt his father’s warm blood trickling down his leg.

“Let’s go.”

“Uff,” Broadbent said, staggering a little as they set off.

They jogged along the base of the wall, looking for an opening. Borabay plunged through a liana-draped doorway, and they scrambled across a courtyard, through another doorway, and along a collapsed gallery. With the double support of Tom and Vernon, Maxwell Broadbent was able to move rapidly enough, wheezing and grunting with pain.

Borabay headed straight into the thickest, deepest part of the ruined city. They ran through dark galleries and half-collapsed underground chambers with massive roots bursting through their coffered stone ceilings. As they ran, Tom thought of the Codex and all the other things they were leaving behind.

They took turns supporting Broadbent as they moved on, passing through a series of dim tunnels, Borabay leading them in sharp turns and doubling back in an effort to throw off their pursuer. They came out into a grove of giant trees, surrounded on two sides by massive stone walls. Only the dimmest green light filtered down. Stone stelae, decorated with Mayan glyphs, dotted the grove like sentinels.

Tom heard his father’s ragged breath and a muffled curse.

“I’m sorry that it hurts.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

They traveled for another twenty minutes and arrived at a place where the jungle became riotously luxuriant and thick. Creepers and climbing vines smothered the trees, giving them the appearance of huge, muffled green ghosts. At the top of each suffocated tree, tendrils of vine seeking a new purchase grew straight out, like spiky hair. Heavy flowers hung everywhere. Water dripped incessantly.

Borabay paused, peering around. “This way,” he said, pointing to the thickest part.

“How?” Philip said, looking at the impenetrable wall of growth.

Borabay dropped to his knees and crawled ahead, into a small opening. They did likewise, Max grunting with pain. Tom saw that hidden under the matted vines was a network of animal trails, tunnels going every which way through the vegetation. They crawled into the thickest of it, squeezing through the tunnels the animals had made. It was dark and rank. They crawled for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably no more than twenty minutes, through a fantastical maze of branching and rebranching trails, until they came to an open area, a cave in the vegetation underneath a vine-choked tree whose lower branches created a tentlike space, impenetrable on all sides.

“We stay here,” Borabay said. “We wait until night.”

Broadbent sagged back against the tree trunk with a groan. Tom knelt over his father, stripped off the blood-soaked bandages, and examined the wound. It was bad. Borabay knelt next to him and carefully examined it himself. Then he took some leaves he had plucked from somewhere during their flight, crushed and rubbed them between his palms, and made two poultices.

“What’s that for?” Tom whispered.

“It stop bleeding, help pain.”

They packed the poultices over the entrance and exit wounds. Vernon volunteered his shirt, and Tom tore it into strips, using them to tie the poultices into place.

“Uff,” said Broadbent.

“I’m sorry, Father.”

“Quit saying you’re sorry, all of you. I want to groan without having to listen to apologies.”

Philip said, “Father, you saved our lives back there.”

“Lives that I put into danger in the first place.”

“We’d be dead if you hadn’t jumped on Hauser.”

“The sins of my youth, come back to haunt me.” He winced.

Borabay squatted on his heels and looked around at all of them. “I go now. I come back in half hour. If I no come back, when night come you wait till rain start and cross bridge without me. Okay?”

“Where are you going?” Vernon asked.

“To get Hauser.”

He sprang up and was gone.

Tom hesitated. If he was going to go back for the Codex, it was now or never.

“There’s something I have to do, too.”

“What?” Philip and Vernon looked at him incredulously.

Tom shook his head. He couldn’t find the words or the time to defend his decision. Maybe it wasn’t even defensible. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll meet up with you at the bridge tonight, after the storm hits.”

“Tom, have you gone crazy?” Max rumbled.

Tom didn’t answer. He turned and slipped off into the jungle.

In twenty minutes he had crawled back out of the vine maze. He stood up to get his bearings. The necropolis of tombs was to the east: That much he knew. This close to the equator the late morning sun would still be in the eastern sky, and it gave him a general direction. He didn’t want to think about the decision he had just made: whether it was right or wrong to leave his father and brothers, whether it was crazy, whether it was too dangerous. It was all beside the point: Getting the Codex was something he just had to do.

He went east.