Don't Look Back (38 page)

She began pulling on her socks.

Keeping in the clear shaft of light, he crossed slowly toward the temple, toward her.

She had her socks on now, and one shoe, and was working on the other.

Approaching the temple, he ran his hand over the polished stone surface of the tablelike jaguar carving on which the Aztecs had once placed still-beating hearts. He bent to put his head down in the sacrificial bowl, craning to look up at her at the same time. He showed his teeth.

A smile.

Then he trudged out of sight around the base of the temple.

Eve stood, surveying the sides of the pyramid, seeing no movement beyond the lazing snakes. Vigilant, she made quarter turns, peering down.

His head reared into view on the north side, bouncing as he jogged up. She started down the south side, minding the down-and-out
talud-tablero
steps, not checking behind her. She’d come to trust her estimates of his pace. She reached the bottom, near the jaguar carving.

He came into view atop the temple and paused with his hands on his knees, breathing hard. Pulling himself upright, he started down.

Again she felt that uptick of terror at the slow-motion chase. What should have resolved itself in a burst of adrenaline and a rapid, violent clash had instead been stretched long like taffy, soaked in anticipation, each hideous possibility given time to breathe.

She jogged down into the sunken courtyard and started across to the rubbled structure. When she reached the mouth of the catacomb, he was well back, still laboring down the last of the temple stairs. She ran inside. In the darkness her foot struck a snake, but she heard no rattle. The air felt dense with dust, which she imagined as particles rising from the skeletons on the stacked, inset ledges. She went maybe fifteen feet into the darkness and slid into a lower berth, feeling bits crumble beneath her hip. Something crawled up her arm, but she did not move. She lay in perfect silence, breathing death, and felt no need to cover her mouth.

The light shifted at the front of the tunnel. She heard breathing, sensed movement. His bare feet made only the faintest vibrations as they set down. A reptilian hissing echoed off the stone, and then there came a sweeping sound and a wet smack, and then the hissing ceased.

From her low, floating perch, she saw segments of his legs ease into view—midcalf to thigh. They breezed within a foot of her cheek. Paused. A thick hand descended, scratched at a meaty calf. His chin dipping into view. His breaths audible. She rolled her lips over her teeth, bit down. At last he moved again, progressing from view, his steps crunching softly away.

She leaned out and watched his diminishing form as it ran toward the square of light at the end of the passage. As soon as it vanished, she rolled out from the ledge and sprinted in the opposite direction.

Daylight struck her face, making her blink. She stumbled up the disintegrating steps out of the courtyard, jogged on screaming feet, and crashed into the jungle. Chopping with her arms, she breached the underbrush for a few hundred yards, and then at once the resistance ceased and there was nothing before her and she was tumbling into the open, onto a road. She pulled herself upright.

She’d come out on the far side of the blockage from the collapsed hill. The storm-battered road stretched ahead, the way mostly clear. Her legs wobbled beneath her. She wanted to stop, to lie down and sob, but instead she willed them to carry her.

Her jog felt like a half stagger. The hemp bag chafed her shoulders. Despite the cloud buffer, heat beat down mercilessly from above.

She reached the top of a rise and turned.

Sure enough a tiny dot pursued her, maybe a mile back.

She took a knee and immediately knew that it was a mistake. Her muscles locked up and wanted to stay put. She was down. She was down on the ground, and she couldn’t rise. Exhaustion overwhelmed her. How much easier just to stop.

Getting up felt like snapping herself out of rigor mortis. It took a few steps for her muscles to unknot, but still she walked for a time beneath the weight of a dull, steady ache. When at last she came off the back slope of the rise, the road simply ended, a casualty of the storm. Where it used to carve along a ridge, it now crumbled away, falling into a sheer, wooded slope.

She started down, her thigh muscles nearly unable to hold her upright. If she didn’t change direction, she’d never shake him. A fold came up, and she hugged a stone lip, moving around and beginning a descent into the adjacent gorge. Beyond, it seemed there would be many valleys, branching off, and she might lose him, but perhaps also her way.

Trying to slow her descent into the gorge, she pushed off tree trunks and sawed through plants. Five feet from the bottom, her ankle hooked a vine.

A spray of olive leaves rushed at her. They broke the fall but not the following tumble, and she rolled toward flat ground, the rocky bottom rushing up at her face, and then there was blackness.

Chapter 50

Bashir followed the broken twigs, the scuffs in the earth, and he came to the top of a gorge and looked down to where a feminine form lay at the bottom, twisted and still.

He allowed himself a rare smile.

Then started down.

Chapter 51

A tugging on her hand.

“I want French toast.”

More tugging.

“Get up. Mom, get up. I’m hungry. And? And?”

“I know,” she grumbles. “You want a sleepover at Zachary’s.”

“No.”

“Batman action figure?”

“A
puppy.
”

“A puppy day, is it?”

“Uh-huh.”

A glance at the clock. “Five fifty-three?”

“It’s light out.”

So it was going to be one of those mornings. She rolls over. Her white sheets seem unreasonably bright.

“Get
up
!” he says. “I’m serious.” His voice cracks.

She turns over, notes the tears in his eyes, and wriggles up onto her pillow. “What’s going on, Little?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Fingers out of your mouth.”

He complies.

“Why do you want a dog?” she asks.

“Look, I just do.”

“That’s not an acceptable answer.”

He blinks at her. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

“So you want a playmate?”

“Yes.” But his eyes dart away.

“What
else
?” she asks.

“I just … What if something happens to you?”

“Nothing’s gonna—”

He raises his voice to talk over her. “Or if you leave like Dad left, there’ll be no one around, okay? And a dog
would
be. He’d be mine, and he wouldn’t … he wouldn’t leave me. Not ever.”

The words move through her like electricity. She touches his impossibly smooth cheek. “Honey, I will never leave you.”

“What if you get in a car accident? Or cancer. Like Zach’s aunt? She got it in her utopian tubes.”

Utopian
tubes?

But his face remains so earnest, so vulnerable, that she cannot smile or correct him.

“What
then
?” he asks.

“I won’t.”

“But you can’t say that. You can’t
promise
that.”

Responses crowd her brain, a parental cue to hold her tongue, to take a beat. She makes a point of not lying to him. If she tells him she’ll look in on him after he falls asleep, no matter how tired she is, she drags herself down the hall and peeks into his room, just to have a clear conscience when he double-checks the next morning at breakfast. Where babies come from, why the lady at the gas station has a lower-back tattoo—all fair game. The birds-and-bees discussion had progressed only as far as “in the mom’s belly” before Nicolas lost interest, but she’d been prepared to go all the way. Rick gives more soothing answers, especially now on the phone, long-distance. Every time he takes a shortcut with veracity for the sake of comfort or convenience, she feels a pang.

And yet now she looks into her son’s watery blue eyes and she decides to lie. She cannot overcome her instinct to reassure him in this moment. “I
can
promise you,” she says. “I’ll be here until you’re all grown up and old enough to take care of yourself.”

His face actually lightens, like it says in children’s books. She can see the concern lifting, and then he is just seven and hungry.

“Anything else?” she asks.

“Yeah.” His small hands close over her fingers again and tug. “Get up.”

The memory vanished in a blaze of brightness. Clouds and trees peered down at her with minimal interest. Her head throbbed, and her ankle pulsed with pain.

Nicolas was gone. Bath time was gone, and holding his hand during the scary scenes of movies was gone, and so was the rest of him, the remaining parts—graduation caps and nuptials and a first house and—

Get up. Mom, get up.

She forced herself up onto her elbows, tried to lift her three-ton head. The view above was a haze of leaves and bark.

And a point of focused movement, growing larger.

She squeezed her eyes shut. Opened them.

There he was, al-Gilani, moving down the slope toward her in controlled hops. Twenty yards away. Now fifteen.

She shot up. The ache in her ankle nearly dropped her back to the earth, but she bit down and went, limp-running up the slope, lit with panic. Branches crashed behind her, closer, closer, and then finally farther as she—miraculously—opened up some distance between them.

At last she risked a glance over her shoulder. He was back there, tangled in a web of vines, hacking away. Her slenderness was to her advantage here, allowing her to slip through gaps in the vegetation. While she had the advantage over distance, he could beat her readily in a wind sprint and would have here if not for the denseness of the flora.

As she ran, she gauged her ankle. Not broken, then. But a respectable sprain. For now she could push through the pain, but as the swelling rose, it would slow her.

Up and ahead she spotted another road, a real asphalt road, and her sense of direction, of
location,
pulled into sudden clarity. The ruins behind and west. Which meant there, ahead, should be the village.

The hillside turned from a hike to a climb, and she used roots as handholds, finally hoisting herself up onto the baking road. She rose and looked back, but al-Gilani had vanished from sight.

Up ahead, looming like a mirage, were the brightly colored buildings of Santa Marta Atlixca.

—a person a vehicle a weapon—

Eve staggered into the public square. “Hello?
Hello?
Is anyone here?”

The windows, boarded up with plywood. The kiosk knocked over. Two of the school’s windows were shattered in, and a section of roof had collapsed, brown water drip-drip-dripping.

In disbelief she turned a slow rotation in the center of the abandoned village. Not a single sign of life. Ahead, the battered walls of the church rose. She limped toward them. The dented church bells that used to hang from makeshift scaffolding outside were simply gone. Washed up in their place, an old rusted truck with fronds sprouting beneath the hood.

She stepped through the torn-wide doorway into the building’s semi-embrace. The soft pastel walls had been blasted by the
tormenta.
More of the roof was missing, the meticulous gilded ceiling eroded to the skeletal rib arches, all that artistry gone to ruin. Swamp water filled the apse, and dark olive green slugs spotted the shattered pews.

Nothing here either.

She ran back toward the
zócalo,
shooting a desperate look down the road. No sign of al-Gilani yet. Had she been here two minutes or ten?

A whacking sound, irregular and loud, echoed from the space where the open-air market used to be. Eve went light-headed with relief. Overriding the pain in her ankle, she ran toward the sound. It had to be someone and—
yes
—there was a wizened woman at the edge of the forest and—
yes
—she turned, and Eve saw her face, another human face, the brown skin baked dry, like jerky. A rustic hovel stood behind her with the door ajar, and she held a machete and a length of firewood. She’d paused from the act of chopping.

Her deep-set eyes watched Eve approach, her face expressionless, unreadable, older than time itself.

“American?” the woman said, and for a moment, Eve thought she might be hallucinating.

Eve clutched at her, confirming that she was flesh and bone. “Oh, thank God. You understand English.”

The woman nodded.

“I’m being pursued by a man who is trying to kill me. He’s already killed others in my party. Do you understand?”

Another nod.
“Sí.”

“Do you have a vehicle—a
truck.
Something that can get me out of here?”

“Sí.”

Eve allowed in a ray of hope. “I need to go. Can I take your truck?”

“
Sí
.”

She realized that she was still clutching at the old woman’s blouse, speaking rapidly into her face. “Are there others around? Other villagers?”

“Sí.”

“Thank God. Thank
God.
Do you know the cascade? With the underwater channel and the grotto? My friends, they are hidden there. Something might happen to me. I might not make it. Will you send your friends? To rescue them?”

“Sí.”

“Okay, I have to go. He’ll be here any second. Where are the keys? Where’s the truck?”

The old woman nodded once again.
“Sí.”

Eve felt the held breath burning in her chest. She clutched it there in her lungs, holding on to it even as all hope drained from her body, tugging at her insides as it went, bleeding down her legs, pouring from the bottoms of her feet, mooring her to the earth.

Her fingers released the old woman’s shirt. The air leaked through Eve’s teeth.

A rustle of leaves at her back. She smelled him before she saw him, the body odor pronounced in the humid, breezeless air.

Thick arms wrapped her from behind, pinning her hands to her sides. She stared at the woman’s still-expressionless face.