The Mayan Codex

113

Pretty soon Oni could hear someone shouting. It was a man sitting in a director’s chair at the very lip of the cenote. Oni shook his head in disbelief.

The man and about thirty other men were all clustered in a bunch and staring into the pool. His remaining brothers and sisters must be down there. It seemed obvious to him.

He raised the Stoner and hitched it under his arm. Oni was nearly seven feet tall. The three-and-a-half-foot long Stoner looked like a child’s toy in his hands.

The man in the director’s chair raised one of his hands triumphantly.

Oni began to shoot.

The first drum was exhausted in a little under twenty seconds. He replaced it with the second drum. He got through that in under fifteen seconds. Then he felt around inside his shirt for the half-used drum.

Most everybody was dead. The lip of the cenote had crumbled away where they’d all been clustered together. Shooting them had been a little like playing one of those arcade games he’d been fixated on as a child. The one where the cowboys keep coming at you and your only chance of beating them is to keep on shooting.

He burped the Stoner at a moving man. Then at another. Not much left in the drum now.

He walked to the edge of the cenote and looked down. The water was littered with bodies. Some were still thrashing around. Others were just floating, face down.

‘Abi? Are you down there?’

‘I’m here.’

‘Who else is alive?’

‘Rudra, Nawal, and Dakini.’

‘Oh, I’m glad. I thought I’d lost you all.’

‘Can we come up?’

‘Yes. You can come up now. I’ll throw down the hosepipe for you. Everybody left up here is dead.’

Oni hurled the Stoner to one side and limped across to where the pump hose was neatly furled at the very lip of the cenote.

There was a noise behind him. He turned, just a few feet short of the hose.

Emiliano was on his knees. The morphine had temporarily numbed him to the Stoner bullets that had ripped through his body.

As Oni watched, Emiliano snatched at a mosquito that was hovering in front of his face.

Then Emiliano raised his pistol and shot Oni in the head.

Oni toppled over the lip of the cenote. There was a pause. Then a mighty splash.

Emiliano smiled. He glanced down into the cenote. Abi, Rudra, Dakini and Nawal were floating fifty feet below him, watching. There was no way out for them now.

Emiliano looked down at his wounds. There was no way out for him either. He touched the pistol barrel to the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger.