As McCarter kept pouring, the parasite hissed and spat, scratching at the smooth metal walls, trying to climb. It jumped and clung to the grate, falling back as he finished dumping the canteen over it.
By now, the water sloshed an inch deep in the metal box and there was no way for the creature to escape it. It shot to the front corner and tried in vain to climb the wall. It jumped and fell and jumped again. Springing repeatedly, doing all it could to stay out of the water, until it landed on its back and began convulsing in a series of violent spasms. The box shook with its movement as the convulsions became more pronounced. In thirty seconds it was writhing in a death spiral of agony.
Eventually the intensity of the reaction began to wane and the angles of the grub’s body began to soften, deforming into a thick, black ooze. The chemical bonds of its structure were breaking down and separating. It was melting, like a slug coated in a thick layer of salt. The water in the box was turning murky and dark with the residue.
“What the hell happened to it?” Hawker asked.
Danielle answered. “It’s secreting that chemical base I told you about: the dark oil that was destroying Verhoven’s jacket. A substance like that can be as destructive as sulfuric acid, only in the opposite way. It’s caustic instead of corrosive, but the results are similar.”
McCarter nodded his agreement. “In the temple their secretions were used to counteract the acidic water. But the canteen was filled with distilled water. No acid content. So the animal’s own secretions are destroying it.”
“It rained all day and all through the night,” he added, quoting the ancient Mayan text. “And the earth was blackened beneath it. This is how the wooden people were destroyed, and these are the Zipacna, the sons or creations of the wooden people.”
“From the legend,” Danielle said, and before he could correct her, she added, “and in reality.”
Hawker stared at the animal dissolving in its own fluids. At first it struck him as odd that the creature’s own reaction could destroy it, but even in humans the body’s overreactions were sometimes self-destructive and deadly. Autoimmune disease and allergies were a prime example. Anaphylactic shock could cause a sudden massive drop in blood pressure from a small quantity of otherwise harmless allergen. He could think of other examples, including a friend who’d died when his plane skidded off the runway into shallow but frigidly cold water. Undamaged as the plane was, all Hawker’s friend had to do was pop the canopy and release his seat belt. But the water was so cold that his body instantly restricted the blood flow to his extremities, a natural defense mechanism designed to maintain the body’s core heat. In this case, it caused the pilot’s hands to clench into unusable fists, and Hawker’s friend drowned in ten feet of water, otherwise unharmed by the crash.
As he stared at the dead grub, Hawker guessed that the thing had met a similar fate. As soon as McCarter had dumped the canteen over it, the grub began releasing the base secretions, manufacturing them as a defense mechanism possibly in proportion to the amount of water hitting it. Only, without the water being acidic, the animal’s secretions had nothing to counteract, and its own defense mechanism destroyed it.
He looked at Danielle, who nodded her agreement as McCarter began to summarize.
“I believe the body in the temple entered Mayan mythology as Seven Macaw. And these animals, as the Zipacna. In the legend, only the wooden people were present for the deluge, but they both came from the same place — or time.” He glanced at Danielle. “And the rain — our rain — will do the same thing to these Zipacna that it did to the wooden people three thousand years ago.”
Danielle had one more question. “And the natives?” she asked. “You think they know this.”
“They know,” McCarter insisted. “They’ve always known.” He jutted his chin toward the forest. “For three thousand years they’ve been coming here in their wanderings. Always to this place, always in the dry season, guarding it, waiting for the rains to come and grant them absolution for the rest of the year. Eighty years ago, when Blackjack Martin took those crystals from them, they were waiting for the rain to come, praying for it out of spiritual dogma, out of sheer habit. Now, somewhere out there, they’re doing the same thing, only this time out of a desperate need. If we want to survive, we have to find them, we have to show them that we know, and beg for their help.”
CHAPTER 44
McCarter’s explanation struck a cord with Danielle. And twenty minutes later, she found herself in the rainforest, hiking with Hawker, McCarter and Devers, following a trail to the Chollokwan camp.
Verhoven had volunteered to go in her place, both because the Chollokwan were a strict patriarchy and because her leg was injured, but Danielle had overruled him. To begin with, Verhoven’s hand was worse than her leg, and the jungle hike required almost as much hand work as walking. But more importantly, she had a feeling that this might be their best and possibly last chance to get out of the jungle alive. She wasn’t about to leave a moment like that to anyone else.
McCarter would have preferred it otherwise, and said so. But with little choice in the matter, he could only beg her not to talk unless spoken to. The male-dominated Chollokwan society would not respond to it, he insisted. She’d agreed to let him do the talking, but this was still her show and there was no way was she staying behind.
As they traveled along, the jungle thickened around them. They hiked through the rainforest proper now, not the edge of the clearing, where McCarter and Hawker had been before. Massive trees with overarching branches created the feeling of walking through a tunnel, while the tangled undergrowth hid scurrying things. It all seemed foreign to her now, as dark and sinister as the cave beneath the temple, and similar in many respects. And it created in her a low-level anxiety that seemed to grow stronger the farther they traveled from the clearing and its relative measure of safety, like the old sailor’s fear of losing touch with the shoreline.
With great effort she forced the thought aside. The animals, McCarter’s Zipacna, were out there somewhere. And while Hawker had guessed them to be nocturnal, they knew from the attack on Kaufman, which had occurred just before sunset, that such was not entirely the case.
After observing the grub in the ammunition box, Danielle concluded that it was not the daytime that the Zipacna avoided, but the daylight itself. The grub had cowered in the one corner that offered shade and when she’d covered half of the box with a rag, the thing had chosen the shadowed side no matter how many times she switched it. If she was right, then the animals could hunt in the forest twenty-four hours a day, for beneath the triple canopy, where the group now trod, less than ten percent of the sunlight made it through to the ground.
Knowing this, Danielle kept her eyes on the move. She walked beside McCarter in a loose formation, her eyes flicking between the jungle, McCarter and the traitorous William Devers, who traveled a few yards ahead, unencumbered but unarmed. She half expected him to try something, but he seemed to know it would be suicide for him to run off into the jungle alone.
A few yards in front of Devers, Hawker strode with a purpose. There was a strange rhythm to the pace he kept, moving briskly for many minutes, then stopping suddenly, before resuming the rapid walk. At each stop he scanned the jungle ahead and behind, sometimes pausing for agonizing minutes in complete silence and stillness, as if waiting for some spirit to pass over. At other times, he pointed out the marks that enabled him to track the natives — crushed plants, disturbed moss, churned ground. “A hundred white faces leave quite a path,” he said.