They did not doubt me because of my youth, Po thought. I spoke truth, and they understood.
And when they lifted the great stone, the noise burst out of the rock as if it had been buried there for a thousand years.
Weeping. A woman weeping.
?Chapter Five
Mad. I'm going mad.
Dr. Elizabeth Drake bit her fingers to calm herself down, but the screaming wouldn't stop. Her screaming. Her fingers were raw and bleeding from trying to keep herself under control, her voice hoarse, her hands shaking, the food exhausted, and she was going to die. The fear lurched out of her like a living thing, the scream filling up the icebox-sized space where she had lived in darkness for— how long? Days? Weeks?
Ever since Diehl ran out on her. Men. They sniffed around you like dogs until you needed them, and then they sprouted wings. Dick Diehl, the archaeologist. The scholar. The scientist.
The rat.
How dare he assume she was dead? How dare he run away to save his own skin while she lay trapped beneath twenty tons of rock?
She panted softly to ease the pain in her chest from the racking sobs, the screams that shook her until she gagged. On her hands and knees, she felt her way over to the pile of now empty knapsacks stuffed into one corner of the small space.
She knew where everything was. This was her world now, the tiny, dark space where she lived, and she knew every centimeter of it even without the flashlight she carried in her waistband. Ahead, beneath the jagged stone, were the knapsacks. When Diehl threw her to safety during the attack, she had landed on the pile of canvas bags containing the dig's food supply. That was a stroke of luck, the only one in this whole luckless expedition. Otherwise she would have starved to death.
With trembling fingers she undid the clasp of her own knapsack and extracted the plastic vial that had kept her sane during her endless imprisonment. One Valium. The last one.
So long, sanity. She popped it into her mouth and swallowed the pill dry. Then she closed the clasp and replaced the knapsack where it had been.
A place for everything, and everything in its place. To the left of the knapsacks, in the low area where you had to squat, was the toilet, reeking, fly-covered. My fellow Vassar classmates, if you could see me now. And to the right...
She never moved to the right. Not since she had first explored the darkness with the flashlight and found the body lying beside her, with it's glassy eyes and pallid skin. The corpse's face was all that showed, poking out from under an enormous cut stone that had crushed out the man's life. She recognized him as one of the natives brought along on the expedition. She hadn't approached the body again. She hadn't had to. Its stink was a constant reminder to her that she was not alone.
It should have been you, Dr. Diehl, you cowardly creep.
No one had gotten out except for Diehl. He had escaped. Logic told her he had. She had heard Diehl shouting her name when the earthquake first shook loose the temple and buried her in its rubble. And then she'd heard the shots, those strange little pings straight out of Star Wars, firing in the opposite direction. And then the thunder of the rest of the temple coming down, cutting off the wild native screams. Oh, God, the temple. The Temple of Magic, the greatest archaeological find since the Dead Sea Scrolls, oh no oh no oh no.
She dug her fingernails into her face. That was the last Valium, Drake, she told herself. Don't waste it.
Stifling a sob, she forced her mind to recount the events again. That was real; it happened; it would keep her sane. At least as long as the Valium held out.
The letter. First there was the letter from the expedition at the Temple of Magic, hinting at some great archaeological find. And the samples. Old. Older than anything she'd seen since the Oxkintok discoveries. The dig at Oxkintok had unearthed a Mayan lintel from 475 A. D., and the discovery had made history. It had also made Dick Diehl, who headed the expedition, a famous man.
Things had been terrific during that dig at Oxkintok. The thrill of discovery, the easy find, the cameraderie. She remembered the early morning coffee sessions when she and Diehl would go over the work for the day, the jokes, Diehl's easy smile. The evenings when, exhausted and so covered with dirt and ash that they looked like end men in a minstrel show, she and Diehl would amble over to the river and bathe in the cold, deep water while the sun set in a blaze over the Yucatan plains.
And the nights. The tension, lying in her tent wanting him, knowing he wanted her, too, trying to keep her mind on the dig while she grew wet with longing between her legs.
And then that wonderful moment when he'd unearthed the lintel, and they'd all gone crazy with excitement, kids at Christmas, dancing, shouting, everybody hugging everybody else. He'd kissed her then. It had just been the joy of the moment for both of them, embarrassing later, never discussed, but when he'd taken her in his arms and put his mouth on hers, it had been the most beautiful moment of her life.
He'd stayed, wrapped in her warmth, not wanting to let go. Until he'd said those magic words.
"Let's catalogue this stuff right away."
Mr. Romantic. Not "Darling. at last." not "Come with me." Not even "Let's fuck." He wanted to catalogue the frigging lintel.
So they had. And it had been war since then. If Dick Diehl was going to be the supreme archaeologist, then, by God, Elizabeth Drake could out-professionalize him any day. They'd been competitors at UCLA after that, vying for the best digs, the most publications. She'd even topped him a few times. The fool. He hadn't even gotten mad. Her success seemed to please him, the jerk.
Everything was business with Diehl. Even when the two of them had reached the Temple of Magic and discovered the dead bodies of the entire crew from the first expedition, Diehl had gone immediately to the vases and bowls lining the walls, exclaiming that the temple was the most magnificent specimen of the Formative/ Classic Mayan period since the burial vault discovered at Palenque.
She had stared at him then, wondering when he would take notice that twelve corpses were sprawled at his feet. But then everything happened so fast that it now seemed to her like a dream. A bad dream.
First came the tribesmen, primitive, frightening. They wore ash dots on their foreheads, and for a moment, all she could see was the ash dots, everywhere, it seemed, surrounding her like unseeing eyes.
And then the weapons. Wild things. Certainly not in keeping with the stone spears and crude metal knives they carried. Someone else was here, she reasoned. Some superpower plotting an invasion of North America? No, that was too James Bond to believe. Maybe an experimental American base, testing new weapons? It was a thought. She would certainly write to her congressman and the American Civil Liberties Union about it when she got back. No Defense Department was going to monkey around with exotic weapons in the middle of the most archaeologically significant region in the western hemisphere. A lot of people were going to hear from Elizabeth Drake when she got home.
Home.
Don't think about it, she told herself. One second at a time, that's how you've got to live now. No thinking ahead.
What came next? Oh, yes, the earthquake. The tribesmen were zapping the members of her expedition with these weird weapons, leaving holes the size of baseballs in their victims. Dick Diehl came for her then— who would have thought he cared— and threw her into the corner, against the knapsacks. The stuffed canvas bags broke her fall.
She thought the natives with the fancy guns were going to get Diehl for sure then, and she screamed. As if her scream were a prayer, it was answered by the earthquake.
She'd been too terrified to move. Rocks that had been standing for millennia suddenly toppled around her. Two giant square stones fell from directly overhead. It was a miracle that she hadn't been crushed on the spot.