Xibalba

CHAPTER 2

As the old Toyota Land Cruiser rounded the bend, Maria Trujillo saw the old woman standing in the middle of the road and slammed on the brakes. The rutted track was slick from an earlier rain shower and the four-wheel drive vehicle slid forward several feet, but the old woman made no attempt to get out of the way.

The Toyota skidded to a halt and Maria pulled the emergency brake, left the vehicle to idle, and jumped out to make sure the woman was all right.

The old woman stared back at her with rheumy bloodshot eyes. She looked as if she was about to collapse from exhaustion or dehydration, or both, but she managed to summon up a grim, toothless smile. “Curandera,” she said. “You came.”

Maria was not in fact a curandera, a traditional healer, but a medical doctor, educated at the Medical College of Honduras and presently working for the Ministry of Health. Nevertheless, she had long since accepted that rural folk, particularly those of a certain age, were incapable of wrapping their heads around the idea that a woman could be a physician.

“Si, Dona.” She knew the woman’s face, had treated her on numerous occasions previously, but in her role as a rural health care provider for the Honduran government, she had treated thousands of people. Keeping track of names in her head was simply impossible. “But why are you out here on the road?”

“I was looking for you,” the woman replied, forlorn.

Maria sighed. “Well, I am here. Now, let’s get you back home.”

She took the woman’s hand, guiding her around to the passenger side of the Land Cruiser. The old woman complied but remained agitated.

“Diego brought a curse upon us,” she wailed.

Maria nodded patiently, helping the old woman up and into the seat. She had no idea who Diego was, or what sort of curse he might have brought upon his fellow villagers. The likeliest explanation was that Diego had gotten drunk and done something foolish. Slept with someone else’s wife, most likely. That kind of behavior often resulted in violence. In rural outposts like Opalaca, which wasn’t a proper town but just a small community of less than two hundred souls in a cluster of houses and huts built along the side of the mountain road, it was still common for disagreements between neighbors to be settled with machetes.

That didn’t explain why the old woman had ventured out from her home, despite knowing full well that it was Maria coming for her once-a-week visit, but Maria figured she would find out the details soon enough. The village was only a couple miles further up the road.

The woman continued to wag her head, and Maria realized she was weeping. “Diego brought the curse. Now we will all die.”

Maria gave her a sidelong glance. “Why do you say that, Dona? What is this ‘curse’?”

“El Cadejo negro,” the old woman.

Maria had heard the term before. El Cadejo was a mythical phantom creature found in folklore throughout the region. It was said to resemble a dog with glowing red eyes. There was a white el Cadejo—sent by God to help travelers — and a black el Cadejo—sent by the Devil.

“Diego brought it among us. He is a saqueador.”

Now Maria understood a little better. Diego was a relic hunter, or to use the old woman’s preferred term, a looter. It was a common enough activity, particularly among young men with no other prospects for earning a living. He had probably found something in the rain forest, something which the old woman had linked to the superstition of el Cadejo. Something bad had probably happened in the village to coincide with that discovery, and the superstitious old woman had blamed the relic hunter.

Sounds like a job for a real curandero, Maria thought. Sometimes the only way to fight superstition was with more superstition. Maybe the mere fact of her presence would be enough to soothe jangled nerves.

As the first houses came into view, Maria saw that the old woman was not alone in her belief. Normally, the road would have been busy with children playing games and spinning tops on the ground, but there was not a single child in sight. A few older men and women stood at the doorway of their respective homes, like sentinels ready to turn away an intruder

“Where is this Diego, Dona?”

The old woman raised a withered hand and pointed up the road. Maria continued forward until the old woman’s finger moved, pointing off to the side of the road. She wasn’t pointing at a house, but at an open field dotted with wooden crosses.

“He’d dead?”

“Si.”

Maria frowned and pulled the Land Cruiser to the side of the road but did not shut if off. “How did he die?”

“The curse. It took him.”

Maria considered turning the vehicle around and heading back to San Pedro Sula. If villagers had blamed Diego for some misfortune, it wasn’t a stretch to believe they might have killed him in an effort to rid themselves of the imagined curse. “How, Dona?”

“The sickness. From the dog.”

Maria breathed a little easier. “He was bitten by a sick dog?”

“Not bitten. It was not a real dog.” She cupped her hands together. “A bowl, carved to look like a dog.”

Maria had to struggle to keep her frustration in check. She was wasting her time talking about cursed relics and a dead grave robber. Then the old woman added, “But the curse did not die with Diego. Many more are sick.”

That got Maria’s attention. Diego could have fallen victim to any number of pathogens during his foray into the rain forest — an infection from a cut or scrape, accidental ingestion of a poisonous plant — and the only way to know for sure would be to exhume his remains, and absent a health crisis, she wasn’t about to do that. But if there were others showing the same symptoms, then not only was there a potential crisis, but also other patients she could assess. And hopefully save.

But what kind of infectious disease could have acted so quickly? It had only been a week since her last visit, and nobody had been sick then.

“Show me.”

The old woman led her to one of the houses, ominously marked with a black rag tied around a doorpost. A grim looking woman that might have been the older woman’s daughter stood watch on the porch, and moved aside to allow Maria to enter, but conspicuously refused to follow. Maria decided to don gloves and a mask before going in, and was immediately glad that she had.

The smell was overpowering, the sour odor of sickness and unwashed bodies. Four patients, two male, two female, lay stretched out on the mats on the floor. One of them — a man, though it was difficult to tell for certain — appeared to be in the late stages of the illness. The only indication that he was even alive was his ragged, irregular breathing. Most of his hair was gone, and what little remained suggested that it had fallen out only recently. His cheeks were gaunt and hollow, but his mid-section appeared bloated, filled with gasses like a decaying corpse. His mouth was crusted with dried blood, as was his exposed skin, which looked like a map of scabs, drawn atop a scaly white rash.

The other patients exhibited similar physical symptoms, but to a less dramatic degree. The two women had most of their hair and only a few patches of the whitish rash on their cheeks and hands, but both were gripped with a racking cough that brought up flecks of blood. The second man’s rash was more advanced, and odd welts, almost like slashing cuts, were erupting from the skin of his face and arms.

The skin rash suggested a fungal infection, but the other symptoms reminded her of influenza or possibly a hemorrhagic fever. Even more dramatic than their physical condition however, was their behavior. The three appeared to be in the grip of a major psychotic break.

The man was drawing on the dirt floor with his fingers, leaving wet marks, not letters but strange symbols that surrounded his sleeping mat. His forefinger was a bloody stump at the first knuckle, the symbols drawn in blood. One of the women had begun a similar art project, while the other was content to merely wave her hands in the air, lecturing in a mixture of Spanish and — if Maria heard correctly — Ch’orti’, an old Mayan language still spoken in some of the rural villages.

Maria turned to the younger woman at the door. “How long have they been like this?”

The younger woman regarded her with grave expression. “Corazon and Mirasol began to cough three days ago. Ernesto four days. Raul six. He will die tomorrow. Sooner, maybe.”

Six days. That meant Diego must have brought the so-called curse to the village before her last visit.

“Is anyone else sick?”

To Maria’s chagrin, the woman nodded her head sadly. “Si.”

Maria’s gut churned. “Where are the others?”

The woman gestured behind her. “Out there.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The cough is not the beginning. First, they wander.”

Suddenly, Maria’s mouth was very dry. The woman was alone on the porch. The old lady who had brought Maria to the house was gone.

“First, they wander,” the woman said again, “then they start coughing up blood and fall while walking on the road.”

“How many?” Maria managed to croak.

The woman shrugged. “Twenty? Maybe more. We don’t find them all.”

The news staggered Maria. Four sick people — five if Diego was included — might be explained by exposure to tainted water or food, or perhaps some exotic toxin on the artifact Diego had recovered, but this was beginning to look more like an infectious disease outbreak, and that was something that neither Maria, nor the Ministry of Health, was prepared to deal with. Nevertheless, there was only one thing to do.

“You must keep them here. All of them. Bring back as many of them as you can find,” Maria told the woman as she stepped outside, starting for the Land Cruiser at a fast walk.

The woman chased after her, indignant. “Where are you going? They need medicine?”

“I don’t have anything that can help them,” she answered truthfully. “But I am only going to the nearest telephone. Then I will return.”

She decided not to use the word quarantine. That would only frighten the woman. The truth was, until the disease — whatever it was — ran its course, none of them, not even Maria herself, could be allowed to leave.

Chances were, they were all dead already.