“If you get dizzy again, lie down. But be careful not to tear your suit,” Mason said without turning to look her way. “A Racal is fairly durable but it won’t withstand sharp objects.”
“In spite of what you must think about my earlier… hyperventilation, Dr. Williams,” Lauren spat, “I am not stupid. I remember everything Suzanne told me when she suited me up.”
Without waiting for an answer, Lauren turned back to the group of tents and walked a short distance toward them. “Most of the students are over here. It’s where Charlie… Dr. Adams, set up camp for the students and about twenty-five yards farther on are the ones for the Mexican workmen.”
She hesitated. “I haven’t had a chance to go inside the tents just yet. I can see them lying on their cots, even from here…” She fought back a sob, not wanting the others to hear her.
“One of us can come over to assist you in a moment, Dr. Sullivan. Right now we’re all very busy,” Mason said, concern evident in his voice.
“It’s okay. I can do it alone. I just need a few minutes to work up the nerve. I’ve never seen so much blood. It’s all over everything.”
“Take all the time you need,” Mason said. “As you may have guessed by now, we expect to be here for a while. One of our portable laboratories is being flown in by chopper. This isn’t going to be easy, identifying the bug.”
“I wish you’d stop calling it a bug,” she whispered, once again forgetting the others could hear her.
“Here’s something!” Dr. Jakes exclaimed in his dry, caustic voice. “Meningorrhagia, hemorrhage into the cerebral meninges. I need another piece of that boy’s brain. Open his skull at the suprameatal triangle and I can see if the spinal meninges are affected.”
“Dear God,” Lauren thought, leaning harder against the tree trunk when she heard Dr. Jakes talk about opening Robert Conway’s head, as though he was breaking an egg for an omelet. Lauren wished for a way to turn her headset off. Listening to this grim discussion of her friends’ body parts and brain tissue was only making her feel worse.
Taking a moment to collect herself, she summoned all the courage she could muster and strode slowly to the nearest tent, pushing a veil of mosquito netting aside. She promised herself she would not look at the blood or the faces any longer than absolutely necessary.
“Tom Butterfield. Sally Ann Higgins. I’m not quite sure who this one… it’s David Wong… his face is so badly swollen I hardly recognized him. Carla Jenkins. The boy lying on the floor is Timothy Greer, a second-year graduate student with a four-point GPA.” She gulped, “He had a four-point GPA. I know his mother. All these ants are making it more difficult to see who they are…”
Lauren left the first tent to enter another.
She coughed and swallowed stinging acid, grateful again for the filtered air, which smelled only of rubber and not the stench of death that she knew surrounded her like a fog.
“In the tent on the right is Malcolm Collins. He was working on his dissertation this spring in Central American Indian studies. The blond girl beside him is Gertrude Wolf, a German student, a senior in the undergraduate program. The boy beside her is Wayland Burke, a kid from Wyoming who qualified for a Brinkman scholarship. I’m not sure about this one… I remember his face, but not his name. If I can, I’ll look in his luggage for his passport.”
She knelt beside a bloodstained cot and gasped. “Maggots! Oh my God! Maggots are crawling out of his nose!”
“Remain calm, Dr. Sullivan,” Mason said quickly from the center of the clearing. “Maggots are simply fly larvae. It’s to be expected in this heat. Don’t look too closely. All we need are their names.”
She took a passport from a duffle bag beneath the cot and opened it. “Richard Willis. He was only twenty years old.”
At least, Lauren thought, they were all beyond suffering now. Everything these bright young people had been or ever hoped to be was finished. Their hopes and dreams lay rotting here in the jungle, their bodies food for hungry scavengers and insects.
She stood up and walked to a nearby tent. “I think this tent contains local workers Charlie hired.” She glanced inside. “There is a man curled into a ball on one of the cots. He looks to be a local Indian, possibly a Tarrahu-marra, by his red hair and light skin coloring.”
Her worst experience was saved for last, when Mason told her a body was lying in the tunnel running underneath the temple. “Be careful, Lauren. This one might affect you more than the others,” he warned.
Not understanding how anything could be worse than what she’d already seen, she took a flashlight and entered the tunnel. When she reached the corpse she gasped, and then she sat down in the tunnel and cried as quietly as she could.
“It’s Charlie. Dr. Charles W. Adams, head of the Archaeology Department at the University of Texas in Austin. He has two grandchildren and a daughter living in Delaware. Someone must let them know right away.”
She couldn’t look at Charlie any longer and stumbled past his body to the entrance into a rock-lined tomb. There she saw the mummified remains of Montezuma and his pet monkeys, for he was known to keep a number of animals as household pets.
Several rotted wooden cages held decayed bodies of large lizards and snakes. Piles of hand-woven cloth, clay tablets, urns, and stone carvings were arranged in neat rows around his sepulcher.
Lauren stood there for several minutes, her training as an archaeologist momentarily overriding her deep sorrow for what had happened to Charlie and his students. Suddenly she noticed a distinct feeling of apprehension developing within her despite the importance of such a monumental archaeological find as if some ghostly apparition was in the tomb with her now.
She convinced herself it was merely her imagination and the horrors she witnessed here were working on her overactive mind. In order to take her mind off such superstitious meanderings, she examined Montezuma’s face in the beam of her flashlight, his twisted, wrinkled cheeks and distorted expression, the result of losing fluid from facial tissue and skin over time, exposing a row of yellow teeth that had been filed down to sharp points.
It almost looked as if the Aztec ruler was smiling — an evil, wicked smile adding to Lauren’s deepening sense of foreboding.
“There are no such things as curses,” she said to herself.
Dusk had begun to darken the sky above the jungle when the rhythm of a helicopter’s blades came from the east. Lauren was sitting on a canvas stool as far away from Mason Williams and his team members as she could, unable to watch any more of what was going on beneath their canopy, dulled by what she’d seen today, feeling drained to such a point she couldn’t cry any longer.
In truth, she felt strangely removed from what was happening now as if this were all a bad dream, a nightmare from which she would soon awaken. The strain of the previous eighteen hours had taken its toll on her, and she sat as though in a stupor, not listening to any more of what was being said by the doctors simply because it was too horrible to comprehend.
If she could, she would have turned her headset off to be spared the agony of hearing the doctors describe their gruesome dissections of her friends. The bodies of Charles Adams and twenty-six students had been identified, leaving five unaccounted for. She’d also found nine local workmen among the dead. Mason told her they could expect to find the others somewhere in the jungle tomorrow morning, and when the last identifications had been made Joel would radio for a helicopter to take her to Mexico City, and then she could fly home to Austin.
As promised, Mason had notified Dr. Cardenez and Dr. Matos of what they found here, along with an urgent request to have the Mexican Army establish a far-flung perimeter around the ruins at Tlateloco. They’d assured him it would not be too difficult as the few roads that traversed this part of the jungle were small and easily blocked.