Black Rain: A Thriller (41 page)

“Either way,” he said. “I have to believe there is some connection here. And if that’s the case, then I think perhaps it can help us understand these animals we’ve been fighting a little bit better.”

He watched as she worked it out, coming around to the same conclusion he’d now reached. “You think those animals are the Zipacna,” she said, guessing his thoughts. “The son, or apparently sons of Seven Macaw.”

“That’d be my guess,” he said. “Sons of his, but not in the biological sense. After all, George Washington is the father of our country and Ben Franklin is called the father of electricity, but they didn’t give birth to those things.”

“‘Father’ could mean
patron
or
protector …
or
creator,”
she said.

He looked toward the temple. “So if that body in the cave is Seven Macaw, either in fact or in general, then he could be Zipacna’s creator, his father in that sense. Growing the Zipacna in those pools, cloning them perhaps.”

“But whoever that is down there, he’s dead,” she noted. “Why are the animals still here?”

He’d thought about that. “Danielle was looking for machinery. Perhaps our presence here triggered some kind of alarm. Maybe when Kaufman placed the crystals back on the altar.”

“Or when we walked through the curtain of light,” she said.

“Booby traps do have a habit of sticking around,” he said. “Just look at all the minefields strewn across the world, littering the ground long after the wars have moved on. And if that’s the case here, then perhaps these wooden people or deformed humans—or whatever we’re calling them—set up a system like that here. It’s all guesswork, but …”

“Maybe not,” she said. “I didn’t remember to show you this when we were down in the cave. We were talking about the body and everything, and I just wanted to get out of there. But before you came down I had nothing to do but try to reach Kaufman on that radio and pray that those things wouldn’t reach me first. To take my mind off it, I studied those glyphs and the other marks as well. Among the geometric drawings, I’m quite sure there was a double-helix design. It could mean anything, it could be the infinity sign turned on its side, but it looked like a stylized drawing of DNA. Kind of like what you might see on a drug company’s logo.”

He nodded.

“And among the Maya writing,” she added, “I recognized glyphs referencing the children, unlearned, or they will not learn, and then violence. The last glyphs indicate retribution or destruction.”

McCarter took a breath, thinking. “In that order?”

She nodded. “I took it to mean the children would not learn,” she said, “and so were punished. I’m guessing the children were the locals, and they were punished by releasing the animals, the Zipacna.”

He looked over at the bandaged dogs, resting near the foxholes. “We have our loyal friends. Perhaps they have their own service animals.”

“But why?” she asked. “What’s the point? Why build the pyramid at all? Why would anyone want to live down in that cave?”

“Ahh,” McCarter said. He’d been waiting for that. “An important question. And I think a most important answer. That temple seems to be a deliberate cap on the cave, keeping the sulfur and the acid on the inside, increasing the concentration in the air. The environment down there is completely different. After we brought you out, you had to wash off with fresh water because your skin was burning, remember?”

“Of course,” she said, rubbing a hand over her forearm. “It still itches.”

“The water was extremely acidic. It killed the soldier you saw jump in and yet the animals lived in it without any problem. Danielle thinks it’s because they secrete an oily base substance to counteract the acid. From that alone I’m guessing they’re used to it, designed for it even. On the body you found, we saw similar pores in the bony plates. That leads me to believe an acidic environment was their natural habitat.”

“Acid rain in our future after all,” she said, sadly.

He nodded. “A ruined environment for which man and animal have evolved or been genetically engineered
to survive in. And when they came here they needed a similar place to call home.”

“So they capped the cave deliberately,” she said. “Trying their best to create an artificial environment down there, one that would keep them comfortable, or at least alive.”

“Their version of a bubble on the moon,” he said.

She seemed to be thinking it over, confirming it in her own mind, only to realize that they still hadn’t answered the original question. “Okay,” she said, “based on what we’ve seen, I can buy into what you’re saying. The wooden people and the Zipacna as real. I can even see them forcing these early Maya to build the temple as a cap to the cave because they need the acidic environment to survive in, but I still don’t see what that has to do with the Chollokwan.”

McCarter answered her question with one of his own, ready at last to link the two ideas together. “What happened to the wooden people when they ignored the call of the gods, when they exalted themselves and failed to keep the days?”

“They were killed off,” she said. “Hurricane and the other gods destroyed them. Turning their own animals against them.”

“Right,” McCarter said. “Their own animals, including beasts that attacked and ripped them apart, something that quite accurately describes what the Zipacna do.
They raced for the trees and they raced for the caves
,” he added, quoting the
Popul Vuh
again.
“But the trees could not bear them and the caves were sealed shut.”

“You think the inhabitants of this place tricked
them,” she said. “Sealed the temple just as a storm came.”

He nodded. “If I was to take it all the way, and try to match it up with the legend, I would suppose that the Mayan people rebelled, injured Seven Macaw and sent him fleeing to that temple. And then they sealed him in. With a storm coming, and nowhere to hide, any Zipacna that may have been out here went crazy, attacking everyone and everything, including the other wooden people—if there were any. And then the storm hit, drowning one and all with burning rain.”

“It rained all day and all through the night,”
she said.

“And the earth was blackened beneath it,” he added, quoting the ancient Mayan text one last time. As he finished, McCarter watched Susan’s face light up. He was certain that she’d made the connection, certain that she knew his next question and the answer to it as well. He asked it anyway.

“And what were the Chollokwan doing with those crystals when our friend Blackjack Martin so casually took them away?”

“They were praying,” she said. “Praying for rain.”

“Damn right,” McCarter said, slamming his notebook shut. “The Chollokwan care about this place, because they’re descendants of the Mayan tribe who built it. And they were praying for the rain, not to make the crops grow or the river flood or for any of the other reasons normally associated with such a request, but because their salvation, or at least that of their ancestors, once depended on it.”

A
cross the camp Hawker stood beside Danielle, staring into an empty ammunition box, now covered with a makeshift grate. Scampering around in the box was the larva they’d retrieved from the body in the forest. It had been just two hours, but the thing barely seemed like the same creature. It had grown little arms and legs and the beginnings of the lethal tail. Viewed from above, it was beginning to resemble the animals from inside the temple.

Hawker could hardly believe the change. “How long did all that take?”

Danielle glanced at her watch. “Ten minutes after we got it back here, its skin hardened into the bony shell we saw on the adult animals. Then the tendrils separated and it ingested them.”

The little thing disgusted Hawker and this latest revelation did nothing to change that. “It ate its own arms?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, smiling at his discomfort. “You should have seen it.”

“No thanks,” he said, looking around. There was
only one grub in the box, a fact that concerned him. “Where are the rest of them?”

Danielle frowned. “This one killed them before I could stop it. As soon as its shell had hardened, it became very aggressive.”

“All of them?” Hawker said.

She nodded. “For the most part. I pulled one of the half-eaten things out before it could finish, but it would have gulped it down if I’d let it.”

“Hungry little bastard,” Hawker noted.

“It is,” she said. “And I think I know why. I took a sample from the dead one and looked at it under a microscope. Its cells are packed with mitochondria, maybe three to four times what a human cell has. That gives it a tremendous metabolic rate. To maintain such a metabolism it would likely have to eat its body weight in food every four or five days. I would guess the need at half of that for the adults. Maybe less, but still very accelerated.”

“That might explain why they’re so aggressive,” Hawker said.

“I think it explains something else too, something that might help us to fight them,” she said.

Hawker leaned toward her, interested in any detail about the creatures that might make them easier to kill. “Tell me,” he said.

“Let me put it this way,” she said, “there are many different rates of life in the natural world. A hummingbird has an extraordinarily high metabolic rate; its wings beat so rapidly that they’re a blur to the naked eye. To keep that rate up they have to consume their body weight in nectar every twenty-four hours or so.

“In comparison, a species like the tortoise or the starfish has a glacial metabolism. To the naked eye a starfish looks immobile. Yet they are moving, not just wafting around in the current but traveling—there are even great migrations of them roaming unnoticed across the ocean floor. You can see it with time-lapse photography.”

Hawker smiled at her excitement. “Let me guess, oceanography was another major.”

She shook her head. “A summer hobby really. I liked the sun and the surf, and I looked pretty good in a wet-suit.”

He laughed. “I bet you did.”

“The point is,” she said, “if a starfish could see us, we would be nothing more than a fleeting blur to it. Yet, to the hummingbird we move like molasses in winter. Almost as if we’re in slow motion.”

She pointed to the grub now scratching around in one corner of the box. “These animals live somewhere between the hummingbirds’ scale and our own. They move rapidly, they react with incredible quickness.” She held up a pair of tongs. “Go ahead, try to grab it.”

“I’ll pass,” Hawker said. “Otherwise I’ll never be able to eat Chinese food again.”

“Chopsticks or tongs,” she said, “you’d be hard-pressed to catch this thing. It jumps out of the way; no matter how fast you go for it, it scampers around. I think it—and by extrapolation they—see our movements as ponderous and slow.”

So they would have to be quicker, he thought. It now made sense how he’d killed the one that charged him when Kaufman had been taken. He fired blind, acting
on instinct. Not taking the time to think or even aim. It was a good point, a good lesson. “Any other cheery news?” he asked.

“Two things actually. First, the man we took this from had an enzyme in his blood that kept it from coagulating, allowing the larvae to feed off of it. It’s likely that the enzyme was injected at the time of death, like the mosquito does when it bites and draws blood. I think it is the same enzyme that retarded the biological decay.”

“And the second thing?”

She looked toward the tree line. “If these animals need as much food as I think they do, they face a problem. The more life they destroy, the less remains behind to feed them or to lay eggs in. Most likely they’ve killed or eaten everything in this area and then moved outward in search of better prey. I’m guessing that’s why we didn’t encounter them when we first got here. Because we basically entered a vacant space, like a burned-out spot in a forest fire; you’re safe among the charred timber because the fire has already moved on.”

Hawker thought about what he’d seen in the trees; all of it suggested that Danielle was right. “A break for us,” Hawker said. “But why are they coming back, then?”

“Maybe they picked up our scent,” she said.

Before he could ask her anything else, Professor McCarter and Susan Briggs came running over.

“We’re making a big mistake,” McCarter said loudly.

“What are you talking about?” Danielle asked.

“Sitting here, it’s a mistake. We should be out there.” He pointed toward the trees. “With the Chollokwan.”

Hawker raised his eyebrows. “The ones who put the curse of a thousand deaths on us?”

“I know,” McCarter said, holding up a hand to hold off the questions. “I remember what was said. But I think it was a warning as much as a threat. I think they made it because they knew what would happen if we entered the temple.”

“How could they know?” Danielle asked.

“Because it’s happened before,” McCarter said. “When we were looking for a radio Kaufman told me you had another team here before us, a team that got wiped out. I’m sure he was trying to con me into helping him at the time, but even then I didn’t think he was lying.”

“He wasn’t,” Danielle said blankly. “We didn’t know they’d come here, but we found some of their equipment.”

McCarter nodded, seeming to appreciate her honesty. “Kaufman told me that a man named Dixon survived. He crawled out of here with a broken leg, which was lost to gangrene—but Dixon held on to what he found, a crystal that came from inside the temple, one that matched the Martin’s crystals.

“Okay,” she said. “I’d believe that. What does it mean?”

“It means your earlier party did more than just find this place,” McCarter explained. “It means they opened the temple and went inside. Yet when we arrived, the temple was sealed shut. So who closed it up? Someone had to do it, and certainly not the men who were running headlong into the jungle, trying to escape. So who? The only possible answer is the Chollokwan. They came
here and put the stone back in place to keep those animals inside.”

“What about the fire?” she asked. “The first one and then last night?”