Jungle growth so dense it was virtually impenetrable had hidden the temple for centuries, until chronicles written by Bernal Díaz del Castillo and sent by carrier ship to the King of Spain recording Cortés’s expeditions to the Aztec Empire were recently discovered in Madrid, pointing to Tlateloco as Montezuma’s final resting place.
Thus the need for so many eager students this summer: to clear away the jungle, begin establishing grids for excavation, and painstakingly dig beneath the jungle floor looking for signs of streets and avenues and homes in the area around the temple. An uncounted number of local workers, Maya Indians and local fruit farmers who knew this jungle, were also all working from a grant given by a couple of foundations, with enough funding to hire workmen and sustain thirty-two members of the university archaeology team for two months.
And now, after little more than three weeks working the site, they were all dead. Lauren still couldn’t quite make herself believe it and yet the evidence was here and undeniable no matter how much she wished it wasn’t so.
Rotting corpses covered the entire area — the bodies of friends and associates, which she must identify without breaking down in utter despair, an almost impossible task. Her friends were lying among dead Mexican laborers who would most probably remain forever unnamed as few of them seemed to be carrying any identification on their persons.
As she glanced around at the carnage surrounding her, she realized the fetid, ozone-laden recycled air she was breathing in her helmet was in fact a blessing — the smell of decomposition would have been so much worse, especially since much of it would have come from her friends.
She remembered entries from the translation of Díaz’s journal that Charles had sent to her, of the explorer witnessing scores of deaths like these as he himself lay dying in a chamber beneath the temple.
Lauren had only been able to glance quickly at four bodies, tasting bitter bile rising in her throat when she saw Bonnie Evans, half eaten by swarming ants, her gold chain with its tiny golden cross still around her neck. She wondered briefly if Bonnie had prayed for salvation when the first symptoms ravaged her body or if she cursed her fate when she saw her friends dying horrible deaths before her eyes.
Knowing Bonnie as she had, Lauren felt certain her response to the horror would have been prayers, not curses. But her prayers, like everyone else’s in the group, had gone unanswered.
Little Robert Conway lay a short distance away; a brilliant boy from Montana with the sweetest disposition, only a semester from graduation. He’d given Lauren flowers on her birthday and gotten a kiss on the cheek as a reward.
Kelly Woods was lying in Robert’s arms when they died, and the sight of them embracing in death had almost been too much for Lauren. She remembered Robert had given Kelly his fraternity pin the week before they left on the expedition. She wondered briefly if it was still pinned to the inside of Kelly’s bra, a university tradition.
Lauren had closed her eyes and said the names into her recorder, remembering who they were, how much they meant to her personally as students and as friends.
She glanced over at Mason Williams as he bent over a body, wondering if he and his team were as affected by the stacks of bodies as she was, or were they as doctors used to seeing such sights and just looked upon her friends as interesting mysteries to be solved?
Earlier, after hearing him and his team describe her friends’ bodies in graphic terms without the least amount of sympathy in their voices, she’d felt like screwing up all her courage and standing before him and telling him she would do what was necessary, not for him or for his damned team. But she would do her best because her friends deserved the very best she could do and she was damned if she’d let them or Dr. Adams down.
She grinned to herself, wondering what he would’ve done had she told him that if she were not enclosed in a helmet she’d spit in his eye.
She took a deep breath, trying to calm down. After all, he and his team had not really done anything wrong except to go about their jobs efficiently and professionally, and perhaps they were hurting at what they were seeing as much as she was but were just better at hiding their feelings.
She hoped this was true, for she found she really liked the team, even the irascible Dr. Jakes.
Now Lauren could hear members of Dr. Mason Williams’s party talking over their headsets, discussing blood and brain tissue and what they continued to call hemorrhagic shock. They talked about dead bodies in an almost conversational way, as if they were nothing more than objects.
But the bodies here were much more than mere objects to Lauren, and the doctors’ apparent detachment was difficult for her to comprehend and made it hard for her to give them the benefit of the doubt about whether they really cared about the students.
“These were people,” she whispered, gathering her strength and resolve before going to the tents to identify more corpses. “Why can’t those assholes understand these were real people…?”
“I suppose we should resent being called assholes,” a voice said through her radio headset. It was Mason who spoke to her.
“Lauren,” he said gently, “please don’t mistake our professionalism for heartlessness. While we are working, we must maintain a distance from our patients lest we let our feelings influence our findings.”
He hesitated, and then he added, “Believe me when I tell you that everyone here will grieve in his or her own way after we finish our work here today. There is no disrespect of the dead here, but we show our respect by finding out what caused their deaths and preventing it from killing more people across the world.”
She glanced in his direction as he spoke, realizing his good looks had been a distraction. His deep blue eyes conveyed sympathy his callous demeanor belied when he talked about body parts and tissue samples like they were pieces of machinery.
When they’d first met this morning in Atlanta she’d noted his sloppy manner of dress and only later, while they were talking, did she notice his angular jaw, muscular neck and arms, and his curious, catlike grace in his movements.
He didn’t look like a doctor, at least not like the ones she’d known at the University of Texas. She’d immediately realized he had a strong chin and had smiled, remembering her mother always told her men with weak chins were weak-willed and shouldn’t be trusted and that she should endeavor to find a man with a strong masculine chin.
Lauren shook her head, trying to put these thoughts out of her mind, realizing they were highly inappropriate given the circumstances. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I forgot everyone could hear me.”
“It’s okay, Dr. Sullivan. We understand what you are going through,” Lionel said. “In fact, I myself am more than a little pissed off! I don’t mind quite so much when our work brings us into close contact with middle-aged or older dead people, but these young ones were just getting started living their lives and were cut down in the very beginning of their careers.” He took a deep breath. “So, yeah, we may sound and act professional on the outside, but I assure you, Lauren, my heart aches at your loss as much as yours does.”
Lauren’s eyes teared up at Lionel’s confession.
“Are you getting a little more used to wearing the Racal?” Suzanne asked in an obvious attempt to change the subject.
“Not really,” she replied, glancing over her shoulder. Mason was standing under a canvas canopy a hundred yards away, setting up some type of apparatus at the end of a table. Seeing Williams and his team now, dressed in bright orange space suits, working diligently over decaying corpses, was like something out of a bad science fiction movie.