Fitzhugh continued to stare at the boy appraisingly, lighting another cigarette off the butt of his first. “I’ve got to go there, boy, it’s my job. I buy the things the scientists dig up and sell them in the city. You understand?”
Guatemotzi nodded, becoming very excited. Perhaps this Anglo would give him money for what he had found in the emperor’s tomb after the Americanos got sick.
He reached into the deerskin pouch slung over his shoulder, the one in which he carried his poison arrows for killing game. He pulled out a leather collar with green and red stones and hammered silver embedded in it.
Fitzhugh’s eyes bugged and his heart hammered and his mouth became dry as the boy handed him the collar.
“Like this, señor?”
Fitzhugh took the artifact in trembling hands, trying to calculate in his mind what it would be worth in Mexico City or Houston. “Where did you get this?” he asked, knowing it could only have come from the tomb itself.
“From cave where Emperor Montezuma lay,” Guatemotzi answered. “When Americanos got too sick to pay me, I took this for work I did. It was around neck of small monkey near emperor’s body.”
Fitzhugh’s eyes narrowed as he stared at the way firelight sparkled in the emeralds and rubies and reflected off the silver strands woven around the deerskin strap. He’d read stories of how Emperor Montezuma kept small jungle animals as pets, so he knew the boy was telling the truth. That this collar had been worn by one of Montezuma’s pets made it almost priceless in value.
He pulled a wad of pesos from his pocket and handed them to Guatemotzi. “I’ll give you twenty thousand pesos for it. Is that enough?”
Guatemotzi was astounded. That was more money than he had ever seen. His would be the richest family in the village.
“Si, señor!” he said, placing the bills in his deerskin pouch.
Fitzhugh grinned and scrambled to his feet. He ran to his jeep and placed the collar in his duffle bag before the boy could change his mind. He took a bag of army rations and handed them to the young Indian. “Here is some food for you. I won’t be needing it anymore. I’m leaving immediately for Mexico City.”
Without another word or a look back, Fitzhugh jumped into his jeep, started the engine, and roared off following his headlights down the dirt road, visions of untold riches flitting through his mind.
As he drove through the darkening evening, Fitzhugh pulled the collar from his bag and held it before his eyes, grinning and watching the moonlight play off the jewels’ facets.
With a gleeful laugh, he brought the collar to his lips and kissed it. He had no idea it was a kiss of death, or that he would be dead within a week.
Thousands of microscopic spores drifted off the deerskin collar where they had lain for four hundred years. They swirled in the moonlight and wind and were inhaled by Fitzhugh as he kissed the collar. They traveled in through his nasal passages and throat and lodged in the mucosa of his trachea and lungs.
The spores, tiny polysaccharide balls, were formed by the plague organisms when they were unable to find suitable hosts in which to multiply. Inhabiting the spores like tiny astronauts in individual spaceships, they were able to hibernate and survive almost indefinitely without food, water, or air, lying in suspended animation awaiting only moisture to reawaken them like some malevolent Rip Van Winkles.
As the spores were moistened by Fitzhugh’s mucosa, they split open and poured hundreds of thousands of plague organisms into his bloodstream. There they immediately began to split and multiply again and again, overwhelming the white blood cells his body sent in defense. Soon these organisms would begin to secrete toxins, which would destroy the parts of his blood that allowed it to coagulate, eventually causing massive hemorrhaging from every orifice.
The process could not be stopped now short of death.
Chapter 9
Lauren felt weak, as if her blood sugar had suddenly dropped. She had been gazing at familiar faces ravaged by decomposition and predators without a break almost since they arrived — identifying corpses while the doctors were setting up equipment, and worst of all, cutting, probing, and otherwise desecrating the bodies of her friends and colleagues.
She was emotionally wrung out, physically exhausted, and feared she was also becoming dehydrated. It was impossible to eat or drink while enclosed in a Racal and she had sweltered inside the space suit all afternoon, sweat running down her face, stinging her eyes, and irritating her skin. She lost count of how many times she swiped at her faceplate with a gloved hand, trying in vain to wipe salty perspiration away.
At least she was no longer crying — both her tear ducts and her grief had suffered overload from the enormity of the tragedy she found in Tlateloco. She felt emotionally numb and sat there on a box staring off into space trying to distance herself from all that was going on around her as if that might assuage her grief at all she had seen. She felt if she could only isolate her feelings of loss and grief and somehow put them outside herself she might just survive this hellish mission.
She was startled when Mason put a hand on her shoulder. The Racal hood prohibits peripheral vision and she hadn’t seen him approaching as she sat beside an escoba palm tree in the coming darkness, apart from the others and their grisly experiments on the dead, illuminated by portable halogen lamps.
“Dr. Sullivan, we’ve finally managed to get the mobile lab set up. If you’re ready, I’ll walk you and Dr. Matos through the procedure to enter and get out of your suits.”
“Is it air-conditioned?” she asked hopefully, watching Eduardo in his orange protective gear standing at the base of the Aztec temple with a flashlight, probing its stones with the beam.
Mason nodded to her inside his hood, and in dim light from the generator lamps she noticed a smile and how it changed his appearance. His temples crinkled when he grinned, softening his ice-blue eyes, making him look like a small boy playing Starship Trooper in his orange space suit.
He was handsome, in a bookish way, she thought. She sighed and struggled to her feet, crediting her feelings to some strange hormone flux, some inner chemical assault brought on by physical stress and exhaustion, not to mention dehydration and extreme hunger.
He led her toward the silver laboratory brought in by the helicopter, sitting at the edge of the clearing a short distance from the tents and cots that contained the bodies. “The procedure is really quite simple,” he said casually, “although it can be a bit frightening and… embarrassing the first time you experience it.”
She tripped over uneven terrain once in the half dark and said, “Just so it’s air-conditioned.” And then she thought, what does he mean by embarrassing?
“We’ll enter through a door at this end of the lab. The first chamber is quite small, only room for two of us at a time. Once inside, stand still with your arms outspread. I’ll pull a chain and we’ll be showered with three different solutions — phenolic acid, bleach, and water. That should disinfect us and kill any germs clinging to the outside of our suits.
“Once the shower stops, we’ll enter a larger inner chamber where we’ll help each other out of our Racals, which we’ll hang up on special hooks on the wall to your left.”
“That sounds simple enough.” She said it without really thinking about the procedure he described.
Mason cleared his throat, and his voice changed pitch slightly. She glanced at him and could see his cheeks flaming red.
“Then we have to remove all our clothes and shower again in a mild chlorine solution and then we will change into scrub suits. The clothing we wore under the Racals will be put into sealed plastic bags to be burned later in case of inadvertent contamination.”