Xibalba

CHAPTER 34

After clobbering Kasey, Isabella Beltran had run, but not very far, only a hundred yards or so down the length of the balcony and around the corner of the base of the pyramid, just enough to be sure that none of Maddock’s group would pursue her. Once concealed there, she watched Maddock and the others arguing about what to do next. She couldn’t hear what was going on, but she could see everything through the night vision goggles she had taken from Kasey.

It looked as though Maddock had figured it out, for all the good it would do any of them.

She swung the goggles down to the ball court. The enhanced infrared display showed the large arena in startling detail, allowing her to see not only Scano, Carina and the surviving rogue Serpent Brothers as they attempted to follow Maddock’s escape route, but also the distant end of the court, and all of the skull-balls that were still bouncing wildly throughout.

She waited until they were gone, and then shouldered Kasey’s backpack and darted from her hiding spot to the edge of the balcony.

She peered over the side. Through the night vision device, the floor of the ball court looked deceptively close. Stuffing the goggles in the deep cargo pocket of her trousers, she dropped onto her belly and squirmed out over the edge, lowering herself down until her arms were fully extended and her fingertips supporting her full weight.

Only now did she feel a trace of panic. A two-story drop waited below, but there was no other way to get where she needed to go, and even if she had been inclined to change her mind, getting back up the wall would have been nearly impossible, especially as the muscles in her arms were quivering from the exertion of simply holding on. Bracing herself against the expected shock of impact, she forced her fingers to uncurl.

The landing was about as bad as she expected it to be. A flash of pain shot up through her feet, all the way to her hips. She pitched sideways, landing hard on her left shoulder. Another flash of pain went through her chest, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe.

Just knocked the wind out of me, she told herself, fighting back a fresh wave of panic. She lay there, waiting for her body to recover from the shock. When she finally caught her breath a moment later, she rolled over onto hands and knees, then stood, wincing as the pain returned. Her ankles and knees screamed in protest, but she didn’t think anything was broken or sprained.

She took out the night vision goggles again and held them to her eyes, locating the safe path to the distant end of the ballcourt, and watching for incoming balls. Then she started moving.

After a few steps, she figured out how to mostly compensate for the constant pain in her feet and ankles, limping forward with a shambling gait that nevertheless allowed her to cover ground quickly. She only had to stop twice to avoid the hurtling skull-shaped projectiles.

The steps out of the ball court and back up to the passage into Bat House proved similarly challenging. She had to lean forward over the steps, supporting some of her weight with her hands, like a chimpanzee, in order to make the ascent, but she did so because she knew what had to be done.

Bat House was no longer a mad flurry of activity. Most of the bats, roused from their slumber, had fled, lighting out through fissures in the ceiling. The narrow crevices were a link between Xibalba and the outside world, emerging in the jungle a mile or so from the entrance to Naj Tunich, though they were much too small for any other creature to get through or even notice.

Isabella knew she would not be leaving through that route.

She unslung the backpack, and dumped its contents out onto the stone floor. There were three large red cylinders — incendiary grenades — along with a few other similar devices in varying shapes, sizes and colors. She was familiar with most of them and quickly located what she was looking for — paper-wrapped blocks of Composition C-4 and four pencil detonators. She set the latter to their minimum time delay and pushed them one at a time into the blocks of plastic explosive compound, which had the consistency of stiff modeling clay. Only after the first fuse was activated did it occurred to her that there was no undoing this, no going back.

She armed the rest of the improvised explosive devices, shoving them all back into the pack. When she was done, she heaved the bundle out into the midst of the guano pile. Then, she pulled the safety pins on the incendiary grenades and hurled those out as well.

At first, she couldn’t see where they landed, but a moment later there was a soft pop as the first of the grenades ignited, followed by a brilliant flash that lit up the whole cavern, and a harsh hissing sound as the white phosphorous inside the cylinder began to burn.

“Forgive me, Tio,” she whispered as the other grenades sizzled to life. She felt certain he would not only forgive, but approve. Indeed, she knew now that this had been her destiny all along.

You are dead already. The Shadow has touched you.

Isabella’s pronouncement rang in Alex Scano’s ears as he followed Carina and her warriors up the stairwell into the transverse passage beneath the pyramid.

Doug Simpson, that bleeding heart cretin, had done this to him, exposing him to the Shadow pathogen with his crazed suicide mission to destroy the lab and all traces of the fungus. Simpson probably hadn’t counted on Alex being able to get away before the explosion, but in breaching the BSL–IV safety barrier, he had just as effectively doomed his employer.

“No,” he muttered, clenching his teeth. “No, no. I’ll beat this. I’ll find the cure.”

That was, after all, why he had made the journey into Xibalba.

In his backpack, sealed inside multiple bio-hazard bags, was the little figurine of a dog—el Guia, was what Carina had called it — the vessel that contained the dormant fungus which, when exposed to a human host, began to multiply. Alex supposed he was also a vessel for the pathogen, but it didn’t matter because soon, he would have the cure as well.

Shadow and Light.

His designation for the project wasn’t just poetic; it was on-the-nose literal. He had realized that the moment he laid eyes on the glowing city. The phosphorescent blue lichen was the cure. He knew it, to the depths of his soul.

As he stepped out into the passage, he knelt at the first patch of the glowing material and began scraping some into an empty bio-hazard bag. The lichen clung to his fingers like damp soil. He held up his hand, staring at it as if hypnotized, and then touched one finger to his tongue. It didn’t really taste like anything.

“What are you doing?” Carina called back to him.

“This is the cure,” he said, reverently. “Light to banish the Shadow.”

When she didn’t reply, he looked up and found her staring down at him with a perplexed expression. “Your eyes. They’re… ” She shook her head. “Your man, Bell. He’s dead. Maddock and the others left him behind.”

“Where are they?”

“They headed out into the city.”

“What are you waiting for?” He gave her a perturbed frown, and then looked down in order to begin filling another sample bag. “Kill them. We can’t have them getting out with the cure, can we?”

“We don’t know what they’re doing,” Carina said, her voice strangely uncertain. “They might be looking for a way out.”

“Good point.” Alex stuffed the bags into his pocket and stood, wiping his hands on his thighs, leaving traces of glowing blue on the fabric of his pants. “All right. We’ll ask them about that. Then we’ll kill them.”