The Seventh Stone (62 page)

“
We’re being watched,” Braydon said. “Stalked.”

“
I sense it, too,” said Christa. She scanned the shadows. Nothing. “Maybe it’s the volcano. I can’t see it beyond the forest, but it’s like the ground and air are electric. You saw the plume of smoke. The volcano was creating its own lightning.”

She helped Braydon to his feet, half carrying him as they pushed their way through the shallows of the pool to its far bank. She lowered him onto a bed of a sage colored groundcover with velvety leaves. They didn’t look deadly, like the pitcher plants big enough to feed on small monkeys that hung from the branches above them. She half expected a pterodactyl to swoop down from above.

Braydon fought to focus on it all. “Garden of Eden,” he muttered. “More like Jurassic Park.”

“
That’s good,” she said, as long as some dinosaur snake doesn’t find them. “It means it hasn’t changed much in the past five hundred years. The antidote plant, it’s got to still be growing here.” Somewhere. She pulled out Gabriella’s sketch. “One foot tall, hairy stem, low-lying serrated lobe leaves, and
a large flower.” The chaos of the jungle was like a damn kaleidoscope, with every color a hue of green. “Yellow petals, look for that, four of them on each flower, around a half-circle of purple. The green, bulbous pods, they’d be distinctive.” And they were nowhere in sight.

She laid her hand on Braydon’s forehead. Despite the air-cooled water saturating his clothes, he was burning up. He struggled to sit up. She tried to hold him down, but his strength was surprising.

He gripped her arm, but weakly. “Ghost tribe,” he said, forcing his lips to form the words. “Behind those trees.”

She spun around, saw only trees, menacing looking trees, heavy with vines, but rooted to the ground. Braydon could be hallucinating, like Liam had, or he had a better grip on reality than she did. The poison was moving fast through his system. Maybe that promise God had made wasn’t God promising anything after all. The high fever could kill quickly. She pried his hand away. “The shaman said the antidote plant grew along the river bank,” she said. “I’m heading upstream.” She grabbed her canteen out of her pack and splashed against the tepid current. The fleeting feeling of overwhelming joy in the presence of the Breastplate was darkened by an equal sense of dread, like a dark cloud blocking out the sun. Phantoms, she could feel them, watched her, and these were no heavenly apparitions.

She had faith, all right, in history, but the dam had changed the river’s course. Man’s mucking about with nature could have destroyed the delicate microcosm of the antidote plant. It wouldn’t be the first time that man playing god had ended badly. She ducked beneath an overhanging vine, mossy fingers grabbing for the water’s surface. An arrow of sun pierced the bank ahead. Around the bend, a yellow bloom, nearly hidden in the green. She rushed to it, a bed of poppies, piercing up out of the mossy groundcover.

Quickly, she unscrewed the cap of her canteen, dumped its contents, and plunged it into the warm stream waters. Air bubbled up as the clear water displaced it. She hurried back to Braydon and held the canteen to his trembling lips. He took a swallow, coughed. She steadied him, searching his eyes for the focus of regained lucidity. Gabriella said the results should be immediate. It had to work. They hadn’t come this far to lose now. Braydon grabbed for the canteen. He drank more. He pushed it away, the water sloshing out the top. His eyes were wide, as if evil flanked them from every dark shadow. “Leave me,” he said. “Get the antidote plant. Get out of here. Climb up to the Demon’s Wings. Donohue will see you there, airlift you out. It’s your only chance. I’ll hold them off as long as I can.”

“
We’re leaving together,” she said.

“
They’re surrounding us, positioning to attack.”

She peered into the dense vegetation and shadows. She could see no human, no movement beyond the wind rustling the leaves. But, after the past three days, if Braydon said they were out there, she believed him, poison or no poison. She pressed the Glock into his hand.

She raced upriver, slipping on the slick vegetation hidden by the water as she rounded the bend. She fell upon the poppies, grabbed a stalk, but it was thick, fibrous, impossible to snap off. She grabbed the pilot’s survival knife from its sheath. With the serrated blade, she quickly sawed off six bulbous seed pods and shoved them into the sack. She snatched a handful of leaves, packed them in around the pods. Then she dug into the ground around a mature, flowering poppy. The soil was moist and loose but the roots reached deep into the ground. Too much time was passing. She pried away a stone, its sharp edges scraping her fingers. The earth emitted a primeval odor as she violated the pristine ground. She yanked the last tendrils of the roots clinging desperately to the soil and stuffed the plant into her sack, tugging the drawstring closed.

A deathly quiet had fallen around her. The only sound was her splashing and the hammering of her heart as she rushed back to Braydon. She stopped, the water coursing around her ankles. He was gone. Only the impression he had left behind in the crushed vegetation remained. The ghost tribe could have attacked, dragged him away. Impossible. Braydon at least would have got off a shot.

She crept out of the river. Keeping low, she hurried to the shallow pool against the temple wall. Braydon was standing there, at its bank, to her right. His face was flushed, but his legs were steady. The antidote was working. But he wasn’t alone. Contreras dropped down from the hole in the temple wall, splashing into the shallow pool. He wore the Breastplate.

Contreras stood unsteadily. The water rippled around his legs. His white robe, bloody and tattered, undulated like snakes slithering from his knees. He raised his hands aloft, the Breastplate magnificent and gleaming golden even in the gloom of the dense forest. The gemstones sparkled and flared. He
breathed in deeply. A grimace of ecstasy contorted his face. “And he shewed me a pure river of water of life,” he shouted, “clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.”

“
You got the antidote plant?” Braydon asked her.

“
In the bag,” she said.

Braydon staggered. The antidote’s cure was immediate, but certainly not able to help his other wounds and pure exhaustion. “Then we got what we came here for,”
he said.
His eyes scanned the perimeter of the shallow pool. From the shadows, they materialized. The ghost tribe. Men, naked except for loin cloths and streaks of body paint, like skeleton bones, white against their dark skin. Half of them raised their blowguns to their mouths. The others stretched arrows back, taut in their bows.

Blood pounded in Christa’s ears. She reached for the pilot survival knife at her hip. Braydon laid his hand over hers, stopping her. “Only way out of this one, is diversion and retreat,” he said. “Priority one is getting that antidote out.”

Contreras squinted. He swiped the blood from his eyes. He closed one eye, opened the other wide. “You are my people,” he shouted. “My Adams. This is the genesis of our new world.”

The Indians swiveled toward him, targeting him with their blowguns and arrows. As the first circle of the ghost tribe closed in, more emerged from the shadows. But the ghost tribe was closing their circle in front of her and Braydon, as if they were just another tree on the edge of the pool. “They’re not after us,” she whispered. Her fingers flew to the El Dorado pendant around her neck. “I’m wearing the El Dorado talisman.”

“
More likely what you’re not wearing. They’ll never let that Breastplate go beyond the temple walls.”

“
I bring you peace, my people,” said Contreras. “I bring you the cure for your village. I fulfill my ancestor’s promise.”
He raised his arms, lolling his head from side to side. “Mother!” he wailed. “I did this for you! I am here, Baltasar. Mother, tell me I have earned your forgiveness.”

“
I almost feel sorry for the man,” Braydon said.

“
No matter what he’s done, we can’t just stand by and watch,” said Christa. “They’ll kill Contreras.”

“
Brutally,” said Braydon, “and I don’t intend to stand by. I intend to get us out of here.”

“
Contreras,” she called out. “Take off the Breastplate. It’s the only thing that might save you.”

He looked around wildly. He couldn’t see them. “Save me,” he shouted. “From my moment of triumph? Never.”

A guttural wail rose from the inner circle of the ghost tribe. They moved as one, a mighty predator pouncing for the kill. The intensity of their anger, the force of their determination blew across the pool like a hot gust.

“
Now!” Braydon yelled. He grabbed her hand, pulled her towards the steep slope that was once the temple wall. He pushed her ahead of him. “Climb up to the Demon’s Wings. When they’re done with him, they’ll come after us!”

She struggled and stumbled upwards, slipping on the slick moss, grasping at rough vines and roots. Contreras’s screams of agony and the murderous howls of ghost tribe filled the forest. The sounds of murder drove the animals, insects and birds into a frenzy. The ground, the air, everything was alive, moving, panicking.

Braydon stumbled behind her. He strove to gain ground, his energy flagging. “Keep moving,” he yelled to her. Below, the shallow pool was a mass of naked backs and arms and fists, rising and pounding down. Tendrils of red blood crept through the clear, blue water. The motion paused, then, as one, the ghost tribe looked up. They let out a horrifying howl, and surged towards the slope.

The ground shuddered violently beneath her. She flung herself down and grabbed onto a vine with all her strength to keep from being thrown down the hill and into the hands of the angry tribe. The very earth was disintegrating. Braydon’s hand pressed on her back. “Hurry,” he said. “The temple’s collapsing.”

The slope to their left exploded into an avalanche of dirt and stone. A huge tree heeled, groaned and toppled with a thunderous crash. She glanced down. The ghost tribe scrambled closer, dodging granite blocks that crashed downwards. On the eastern horizon, the crest of the volcano appeared above the tree line. Its black smoke plume was alive with lightning. It roared, a primitive beast clamoring to destroy the world.

Another sound filtered through the percussive bursts of destruction, an unnatural rhythm, a thumping. The Blackhawk! It rose above the Demon’s Wings from the west side of the pass. Donohue was perched at the open door, signaling to them, beckoning them, shouting something she couldn’t hear over the din.

She and Braydon fought their way up the hill, the wash from the rotors gusting down on them. The detritus swirled around her stinging her eyes. Soil gave way to the curved sheer granite of the rock outcropping. She clung on desperately as the earth jolted beneath her. Her palms scraped against the rough rock. The chopper’s skid touched down. She lunged for it. The ground lurched violently. Braydon’s arms embraced her from behind. Donohue’s hands grasped her wrists, his grip firm, crushing. She planted her feet on the rock and pushed as Donohue hoisted her into the chopper bay. Her knees slammed with a clang onto the hard steel. She quickly twisted around, grabbed Braydon’s hand. Donohue grabbed the other. They yanked together. Braydon dove into the chopper.

“
Go!” Donohue yelled. The chopper bolted up. Blowdarts and arrows pinged off its metal skin.

As the chopper banked, she clung onto a handhold. Below was total destruction. The entire temple was collapsing beneath the hillside that had buried and hid it centuries ago. Men, dirt, rocks and trees tumbled into the shallow pool, burying it in a mountain of rubble, Contreras and the Breastplate obliterated beneath it.

“
The Breastplate,” Donohue yelled above the roar of the chopper. “Where is it?”

“
Gone,” she yelled back, pointing to the rocks still piling onto Contreras’s tomb. “Buried.” She held up the canvas sack. “I’ve got the antidote plant.”

Donohue nodded, but, even as the chopper rose higher, his eyes stayed focused on the hell below.

DAY
6

CHAPTER
69

“
Baltasar Contreras is dead,” Christa said, more a question than a statement of fact. Braydon swerved around another smoldering taxi as he sped the Humvee down a vacant, deserted Fifth Avenue. She repeated that in her head. They were driving a Humvee down Fifth Avenue. “This is real. Isn’t it?”

“
He is dead,” Braydon confirmed. “This is real.” He eyed the bare-chested maniac in torn jeans howling at the twilight. “The National Guard is policing the curfew, distributing the antidote. They’ll track down the last stragglers.”

She had never liked the unnaturalness of the city, the scraggly trees sprouting from squares of earth cut out of the pavement, the sky only seen as a backdrop to synthetic canyons of steel, glass, and stone. For her, the people that coursed through the city’s automaton body like blood through its veins gave it life and meaning. Without them, the city was a dead hulk, not a testament to what man could build, but to what he could destroy.