Passage Graves (30 page)

Chapter 73

SUNDAY 1:5
9 p.m.

The tiny pin-prick sores on her hands were festering. They had swollen into cankerous ulcers. She stared down at her fingertips and studied the marks. The tissue was inflamed with a red spotty rash. It looked like measles but she knew better. She casually slid her sleeve up her arm and noticed the rash extended far beyond her elbow. Her stomach sank. She quickly lowered her sleeve to hide the sores from the passengers around her. Her worst fear was confirmed. No longer acral, the boils had spread across her body, bubbling along her arm, her torso—she could feel them on her back. The creeping contagion spread in a serpentine pattern that was easily recognizable. If they knew she carried the disease it would mean chaos. Her extremities radiated heat. She was certain the man beside her could feel it. Her body was a convection oven, her sores vacuole plutonium. It felt like the transformation of nuclear fission across her flesh. The discomfort was hotter than hell. The disease was now systemic, which meant she didn’t have much time.

T
he subway train swayed as it moved along the underground track. She grabbed the safety bar in front of her and stared at the digital sign above the door. The next stop was Grand Central Station. She was so close.

Lights fl
ickered overhead. The man beside her noticed her hands. He clenched his jaw. She pulled her sleeve down to hide her hands. The last thing she needed was a panic.

Fluid dripped d
own her torso. If it was blood, she wasn’t going to make her stop.

A
burst of sound exploded through the cavern. The rumble slammed into the subway car, knocking it off the tracks. The train was spinning. Most of the passengers were dead before they hit the subway wall.

Asor
had found her.

He was
already inside her head.

****

The whir of the airplane engines awoke Thatcher from sleep. She sat up holding her stomach and looked at the pinpricks on her fingertips.

It had been
a vivid, disturbing dream, but nothing more.

All the adrenaline-charged events from the last few days
had left her body in perpetual state of panic. The few times she had slept, anxiety haunted her dreams. Everything could be explained away, though. The train car from her dream probably originated from her escape at basecamp. The violent subsonic detonation through the subway tunnel was similar to the lethality of the passage graves. Her contagion in the dream was derived from the sores caused by Asor’s bindings early that morning. It was just her imagination running wild. Then, there was the part of the dream when Asor found her. The thought still made her shiver. She looked across the cabin at him. The old man was curled in the seat, tucked in the fetal position, asleep.

Her skin was clammy
. She was sweaty but chills ran up her spine. Her vision was spotty. It was hard to concentrate. It hurt just to move her leg. Reality was catching up with her, taking its toll. She could only run for so long. Worse, where they were headed, there would be no hospitals or doctors.

Asor opened his eyes and returned her stare. His
thin lips curled into a grin.

For a moment, s
he was certain he was still inside her head. She could hear him breathing. He crowded her thoughts as he searched through them, looking for something. Was she crazy? Could he really be in her mind? Claustrophobia overwhelmed her.

“Stop,” she
said aloud.

For a moment, h
e released her.

All she felt was cold.
She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them.

Asor mimicked her movements.

“Stop it,” she insisted. She felt him reel away from her thoughts, leaving a trail of despair behind him that he wanted her to follow. He tempted her with doubt.

H
is eyes seemed to glow. “Aren’t you scared?” he asked. 

Thatcher
responded straight-faced. If he wasn’t inside her mind, she could mask her uncertainty. “I have nothing to fear.”

“Thy life shall hang in doubt before thee; and thou shalt fear day and night, and shalt have none assurance of thy life.’” Asor
knew she was terrified. He fed on her fear with frenzy. He smiled, showing his rotted teeth. “Do you believe in God, Dr. Thatcher?”

She pulled Marek’s crucifix out from under her shirt. “Damn straight.”

“I wonder...”

“What?”
She pulled her legs more tightly to her chest.

“
Will you still believe after God fails you?”

The
y sat in silence as she absorbed his words. She didn’t know what he meant, but she was sure it was significant. Mostly, she knew Asor could not be trusted. She watched him fall asleep, unwilling to let herself dream again. 

Chapter 74

Ian tried to roll onto his back,
but he was wedged between two crates in the bed of a Unimog truck.

Th
e jungle canopy arched over the edges of the roadway providing some shade, but the middle of the truck bed was awash with sunlight. He groaned, feeling every bruise as his sunburned body bounced against the metal lining of the truck.

Dust spewed up from the
road, amassing in a thick cloud that blotted out the trucks following behind. The haze cleared momentarily as they drove through a streambed, and Ian saw Javan in the passenger seat of the Unimog behind them.

A
person shuffled beside Ian’s head.

Ian recogni
zed Dettorio’s boots.

Sitting near
the cab on top of a crate, Javan’s henchman guarded Ian with a rifle propped between his legs.

Good grief
.

Ian c
losed his eyes. If he pretended to be unconscious, that might spare the last few non-bruised portions of his head.

Chapter 75

SUNDAY 3:20 p.m.

Wadi Musa, Jordan

“Keep her up until she dies!” As
or was yelling over a sputtering engine. 

Thatcher sat up and knocked her head on the roof of the cabin. It was a painful reorientation of her whereabouts. Despite her best effort to stay awake, she had drifted to sleep.
At least it was a dreamless sleep—one where Asor did not penetrate her mind.

Thatcher stood
behind the pilot chair. “Are we stopping for fuel?”

It was daylight. How long had she slept?
The sky was clear blue, the sun on the horizon, but her mind was in a fog.

Daylight penetrated the small porthole windows. They dipped to the left. Beneath the wing, water spanned every direction. The plane suddenly banked south, and she caught a glimps
e of Jordan’s rocky coastline.

“We made it all the way to the Dead Sea without refueling?” she asked, buckl
ing herself into the seat behind David.

“Don’t
ask me how.” David flicked the oil pressure gauge with his finger. The low voltage light blinked off and on. The needle stayed below zero. “Both engines aren’t generating enough electricity. They haven’t been for the last three hours.”

As if on cue, the turbines sputtered out. The propellers stopped spinning. The al
timeter spun counterclockwise. They tipped toward the water.

“Ho
pe y’all brought your swimsuits.” David gripped the wheel.

The old man
bounced up and down in the navigator seat. “Catch the wind!”

“There’s no wind!” David snapped.

As they dropped, the Red Sea overtook the view of the entire windshield. There was nothing but water. Gravity played chicken with Thatcher’s stomach. A sudden updraft caught the wings. The plane was tossed back into the sky. For a moment, the sea disappeared, replaced by stratosphere. David adjusted the wing flaps, catching as much momentum as possible. They tipped downward and glided toward the coastline. The landing gear sliced through the waves, and the relic heap threatened to break apart.

They were so close to land.

There was a terrible crack as one of the wheels broke off against the crags. They were a few feet above sea level with half the landing gear stripped away. Half a mile and they would make it.

Asor
pulled on the prickly twine around his wrist. He squinted in pain, and mumbled under his breath.

A
n unexpected burst of wind tossed the aircraft over the surf. The left wing collided with a boulder on the beach. With a gut-wrenching scream, the wing separated from the fuselage. The plane spun around backwards from the impact, tossing Asor into the windshield. The glass cracked.

They flipped left again and again
over the sand. Landing upside-down, the Anson slid across the rocky seashore loam. The ceiling ripped apart like it was cardboard. The scream of metal grinding against rock was horrible. They finally came to a stop, the cockpit inches from another boulder. One fractional change in velocity, and they would have been breakfast for seagulls.

David unbuckled his seatbelt and fell onto what was left of the ceiling.

Thatcher rubbed her neck. Reaching above her head, she unfastened her seatbelt and caught herself in the sand.

Asor stirred, face down on the ground
. His body was speckled with glass from the bone-breaking force that had thrown him into the windshield. He sat up, unbothered. “We don’t have much time!”

Chapter 76

The Unimogs rolled to a stop beneath a camouflaged shelter.
Vehicle doors opened and shut. Dettorio jumped from the truck bed, and relieved himself in the nearby brush.

The bed gate came down. Its rusted hinges squeaked as the door collapsed into position. Ian was pulled out by his feet and dumped
on the side of the road. He kept his eyes closed until he heard a flimsy door swing shut. The men rejoined the others to help set up camp. They’d placed him inside a cage of branches. Crooked sticks, half an inch in diameter, were lined side-by-side to form a square five-foot tall enclosure. The structure was probably intended for chickens or pigs. If he tried, he couldn’t stand or lay fully extended in any direction.

Through the trees near the road, Ian
could see Javan barking orders. Ian sat up slowly and leaned his head against the wood. His brain was throbbing. Surely his head was one gigantic bruise. He could taste dried blood within the cracks of his lips. His skin felt sticky and hot. He could tell Javan’s toxic substance had mostly cleared from his body.

Nobody seemed to care
that he was conscious.

He scooted
to the back of the cage and attempted to pry apart the bars. The sticks were weather-beaten but strong. The cage didn’t budge.

Plan B.

He noticed a rock partially covered with soil. Scooping out handfuls of earth, he clawed at the ground, trying to find the end of the rock. It was too big. He could never conceal something that large. He leaned against the wood frame, discouraged. The jungle canopy was too thick to see any significant distance. If he did escape, where would he go? 

He looked at the stone
protruding outside the cage. It broke ground again a few inches away. Although covered with pale green moss, he could see dark markings etched into its surface. Symbols, squares and circles, formed the shape of a cross.

Ian forced his hands through the
narrow separation between the bars and brushed moss off the stone. He cleared dirt from its center. The rock was ornately carved, the surface flat and the symbols bold. The blocky, swooping figures were ancient Mayan. The vertical portion of the rock had the form of a tall ceiba tree. Thick lines detailed the trunk. Its branches opened into the sky, reaching for the heavens and toward the Mayan symbol for the Milky Way. The horizontal portion of the cross depicted a double-headed serpent, a representation of the ecliptic pathway of the moon and the sun. The ceiba tree’s roots delved deep into the underworld, stretching into the bowels of hell.

He
realized exactly where they were.

“The Wakah-Chan.” Javan start
led him. “You found a
Tzuk te’
. Those rocks are scattered all over this area.”

Ian scowl
ed.

“The Mayans believed the world was flat
and had four corners.” Javan crouched beside the rock. “They had four gods, or four bacab, and each ruled a corner of the earth:  the north, the south, the east, and the west.” He pointed beyond the ceiba tree. There was another rock beside the petroglyph, inside Ian’s cage. Ian hadn’t seen it until Javan pointed it out. Smaller and roughly the size of a baseball, it was flat on top and composed of obsidian.

“Ea
ch bacab was assigned a color. The North is white, the East is red, the West is black, and South is, of course, yellow.” He smiled. “A startling choice of colors, don’t you think? Exact to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” Javan unlocked the cage. The door swung open. “Do you know where we are?”

Ian
’s voice was low. “Chichén Itzà.”

“
You’ve been here before?”

“No.”

“But you’ve heard the legends?”

“My father taught them to me
when I was a kid.”

“Did he tell
you about the Platform of the Skulls?”

Ian
cleared his throat. “The Mayans threw human sacrifices off the platform into a pit as an offering to the gods.”

“
According to tradition, the few who survived and escaped the pit were considered chosen by the gods.”

Ian was
tired of the cat and mouse. He came straight to the point. “Why are we here? We should be in Wadi Musa.”

Javan smiled. “Why
would I get caught up in one battle, when I can win the war?”

“I don’t understand.”

“There’s more at stake than one seal. There are four of them, remember? We’re here to make an offering and receive knowledge.”

Ian’s
stomach churned with nausea. “You’re throwing me into the pit to see if I can escape—to test whether I am the Chosen?”

“Do you think the god
s will spare you?” Javan’s face was serious. It was the same look he had given Ian at the Lothian post office. “Death is the doorway to life, son.” He shook his head. “I don’t
believe
you’re the Firstborn Chosen, Ian. I
know
it.”