The entire crew of Indians had already fled into the jungle with so much wailing and shrieking Scully doubted they would ever return. She wondered if the Indians had a village nearby, or if they had just found a place to huddle under the overspreading trees ... where they could tell each other superstitious stories and cut off their own fingers.
"Go see if you can find our cheerleading squad, Aguilar," Mulder said to the retreating guide. "We'll need those helpers to get out of here. Now that we've found our missing people, we can go."
"Yes, Senor," Aguilar said. "I will be back as soon as I can, and, uh..." He shuffled his feet. "Congratulations on finding your people ... though you have my sorrow it had to turn out like this, eh? Just like the old man." He scuttled off, disappearing into a fern-lined path, his dark ponytail bobbing.
Mulder fidgeted in the late afternoon light, gazing at the silent temples and overgrown ruins, listening to the brooding sounds in the jungle. He kept an eye out for anything suspicious, while Scully devoted her attention to the four wet corpses that lay beside Vladimir Rubicon's. Next to the bloated new bodies, the old archaeologist seemed like a contented retiree who had died peacefully in his sleep.
"Since we have such a limited pool of possibilities," Scully said, "it'll be fairly easy to identify the four bod-ies," she said, her voice droning, businesslike because she had no choice.
She had taken the dossiers from her pack inside the tent and looked at the sheets of paper, the photographs: smiling pictures of ambitious young grad students eager to make names for themselves in an obscure field. The team had gone off on an innocent adventure to the Yucatan, expecting that their future would hold guest spots on talk shows or slide presentations in academic venues around the country.
Instead they had found only death.
Scully glanced at the photos, the identifying infor-mation. She studied the hair color, the height, the gen-eral bone structure. After advanced bloating from prolonged submersion and the onset of decay, their handsome facial features were unrecognizable.
"This dark-haired one is Kelly Rowan," Scully said. "He was the tallest of the group, the secondary leader, easy to identify."
Mulder knelt down beside her. "This should have been one of his most glorious accomplishments," he said, looking down at the young man's destroyed features.
"Dr. Rubicon said he was a talented scholar with a great potential for archaeology, a good partner for Cassandra."
Scully did not dwell on the subject. In times like this, when performing autopsies and identifying corpses, she found it best to lock away the part of her mind that considered these figures ... these objects ... to be actual peo-ple. For now she had to be professional, despite the prim-itive conditions.
"The second man is John Forbin," Scully said, moving on to the next corpse.
"He was the youngest of the lot— you can see it on him. In his first year of graduate school. An architect with a specialty in large, ancient structures."
Mulder shook his head. "He must have felt like a kid in a candy store here, all these untouched temples to study."
Scully pressed on with the identification tasks. "This young woman is obviously Cait Barron, the photogra-pher and artist. She liked to paint watercolors more than she liked to take photographs. Her hair color and body weight are all wrong for her to be Cassandra."
Mulder nodded. Scully drew a deep breath, forcing herself to shut out the smell. She frequently rubbed cam-phor ointment under her nostrils to mask the stench dur-ing an autopsy, but here in the jungle she had to rough it.
"And that leaves this one to be Christopher Porte, the expert on Maya hieroglyphics," she said. "What did you call it, an epigrapher?"
Mulder nodded. "Not too many people have that knowledge, and now the field has one less." He cocked his ear, as if he had heard something, pausing....
A sudden noise made him spin around quickly, his hand on his pistol—but it turned out to be only a group of squabbling birds in the overhanging vines.
Looking sheepish, he turned back to Scully.
"So what did happen to Cassandra Rubicon? Are you sure you didn't find her body down there under the water? It was dark, and cold—"
"I searched, Mulder. All these others were clustered together, weighted and hanging at the same depth. Believe me, I spent a lot more time than I wanted to beneath the surface with this group of corpses." She nod-ded to the bodies.
"But there just wasn't anyone else. Unless something happened to place her in a different spot, Cassandra's body wasn't down there."
"So we've solved one mystery, and now we're left with another that could be just as difficult."
Scully felt hot and sweaty and dirty. The cloying putrescence of the waterlogged corpses clung to every-thing, a sweet nauseating odor that clawed its way through her nose and mouth to lodge permanently in her lungs. She desperately wanted a shower or a hot bath, anything to feel clean again. A swim in the cenote just wouldn't do it.
But she still hadn't finished her task. Afterward, she might treat herself to a quick sponge bath.
"Let's see if we can determine anything about the cause of death from the condition of the bodies," Scully said. She used her knife to cut away the clothes, exposing the torsos of each of the victims.
"It's been too long to determine if they'd merely drowned," she said, "because the air would have out-gassed from their bodies, and their lungs would have filled up with water anyway."
She moved John Forbin's head from side to side, see-ing the neck move, but not too flexibly. "Unlike Dr. Rubicon," she said, "the neck hasn't been broken."
She rolled Cait Barron over and looked at the grayish-white skin on her back.
Two circular puckered holes marked the base of the young woman's lower back.
"Bullet wounds," Scully said, raising her eyebrows. "I'll bet they were all shot before being thrown in." She shook her head, lost in thought.
"But where was Cassandra during all this?" Mulder asked, pacing on the flagstones. "She's still missing."
"Yes, we can keep our hopes up," Scully said. She examined each of the bodies.
All four had been shot ... most of them low in the back, in a paralyzing but not fatal blow. The similar placement of the wounds could not be accidental.
The victims had been thrown into the sacrificial well while still alive.
"We have some very bad people here, Mulder," Scully said.
Mulder frowned. "After seeing the severed finger and the blood sacrifice, and watching how superstitious these locals are, it seems that the violent old religion is really still prevalent. The Indians could have been the ones who per-formed these sacrifices, murdering convenient strangers.
"I read that the old tribes would take prisoners to slaughter in front of the gods, cutting out their enemies' hearts rather than killing their own people."
He turned to look up at the central Pyramid of Kukulkan looming in the center of the plaza.
"Their hearts weren't cut out, Mulder. These people were shot."
Mulder shrugged. "Tossing victims into the sacred cenote was another perfectly legitimate way to appease the gods. If the Indians paralyzed the archaeology team before hurling them in, the sacrifices would still have been living and breathing—appropriate offerings."
Scully stood up, feeling her knees ache. She wiped her hands on her already stained slacks. "Mulder, remember that these people were shot with guns, not attacked with primitive obsidian knives. It doesn't seem their style."
"Maybe they're modernizing their religion."
Mulder actually took out his pistol this time and held it as he continued to scan the jungle warily. "This is their backyard, Scully, and there's a lot of them. Why do I feel very much like another convenient sacrifice ... say, like a turkey feels around Thanksgiving time?"
Scully moved next to him, closer than she needed to. They looked out at the wilderness, the only human beings in sight. Even with Mulder next to her, she felt very, very alone.
Xitaclan ruins Tuesday, 11:17 p.m.
Full darkness had fallen, leaving them in the company of only the late-rising moon and their laughably small campfire. The looming darkness of the surrounding jungle threatened to swallow them up. Mulder felt very small and very vulnerable in the vastness of the wilderness.
Staring into the fire, Scully said, "Remember when I told you that Mexico sounded better than an Arctic research sta-tion or a chicken-processing plant in Arkansas?"
"Yes."
"I think I've changed my mind." In light of the unspoken threat from the Maya sacrifi-cial cult, or treacherous Aguilar, or whoever else was responsible for the numerous murders, the two agents had decided to take turns at watch throughout the night. But neither Mulder nor Scully felt the least bit interested in sleep.
Mulder sat on the flagstones watching the campfire, looking up at the moon, and listening to the songs of jun-gle insects. The smoke from damp, moss-covered wood curled around his nose, thick and pungent, a relief after the underlying stench of decay that arose from the corpses. He cradled his 9-mm pistol in his lap, fully atten-tive, alert.
Though night had fallen hours before, Scully had crawled out of her tent to sit up beside him. "We could heat some water," she suggested, "have coffee or tea. Seems appropriate for a night around the campfire."
Mulder turned to smile at her. "Did we bring any hot cocoa mix, the kind with the little marshmallows?"
"I think Aguilar took that with him."
Mulder stared out into the surrounding trees, seeing the silver dapple of moonlight. The Indians had not returned, nor—disturbingly—had Aguilar. Mulder wasn't sure if that was a good thing, or if he wanted the others to come back and lead him and Scully back to civilization.
Meanwhile, their only companions in the camp were the lumpy forms of the five corpses spread out not far from the tents, blanketed by a stained tarp Mulder had recovered from the team's supply cache. Mulder kept glancing over at the shapes, unable to dispel images of the bloated, waterlogged forms of the four archaeology team members and the bony body of Vladimir Rubicon, whose open blue eyes had looked surprised even in death.
He looked over at Scully. They were both grimy and dirt-streaked—they hadn't showered for days. Their hair hung in unkempt tangles from the sweat and humidity. He was glad to be there with her, rather than anyone else in the world.
"Scully," he said, his voice quiet and serious, "with the ... unorthodox explanations I often find when study-ing the evidence, I know you're always skeptical—but every time you're at least fair to me. You respect my opinion, even when you don't agree with it." He looked at his hands. "I don't know if I've ever told you, but I really appreciate that."
She looked at him and smiled. "You've told me, Mulder. Maybe not in words ...
but you've told me."
He swallowed, then brought up the subject he had been avoiding. "I know you're probably not going to believe this either, blaming it on a trick of the moonlight or my own grogginess from lack of sleep—but two nights ago I heard noises out in the jungle. I poked my head out to investigate, and I saw something moving, a large crea-ture that wasn't like anything I've ever seen before. Well, that's not completely true ... I've seen it many times before but not in real life."
"Mulder, what are you talking about?" she said.
Out in the jungle they heard other sounds, rustling noises, something large coming closer. Mulder perked up his ears and felt his blood run cold.
"I think I saw ... one of those feathered serpents. Just like that statue." He indicated the coiled snake engraved in the limestone column of the stela in the plaza. "It was larger than a crocodile, and it moved with such grace. Ah, Scully, you should have seen it. It reminded me of a dragon."
"Mulder, that feathered serpent is a mythological creature," she said, automatically falling back into her role as skeptic. "What you saw must have been inspired by looking at Maya carvings for days and all the research you've been doing into pre-Colombian legends. You probably spotted a cayman—those are large reptiles found in these jungles. When you saw it move, your imagination could have added other details you wanted to see."
"That's possible, Scully," he admitted, shifting the pistol in his lap from one hand to the other. He heard more branches cracking, additional movement in the jun-gle, creeping closer to them.
He spoke more rapidly. "On the other hand, look at the sheer number of feathered serpent images throughout the Maya artifacts, at all different sites
... here at Xitaclan in particular. It's such an odd thing. A snake with feath-ers? What could have inspired such a myth if the Indians of the Yucatan hadn't seen such a creature with their own eyes? It could even be an explanation for the prevalent myths worldwide of dragons and reptilian worms."
His words picked up speed as he followed his imagination. "Does it seem likely to you that dozens of cultures around the world would create an image so precisely similar? Think of the drawings you've seen of Chinese dragons. They weren't called feathered serpents, but they had the same configuration. Long feathery scales and a sinuous body."
Out in the jungle the crashing, lumbering sounds became louder and louder.
Some creature unmistakably was making its way toward Xitaclan as if drawn to a magnet. As the noise grew, it sounded as if many large creatures were converging on the plaza itself. Mulder raised his pistol.
"Listen to that, Scully. I hope we don't get a chance to meet one of my imaginary feathered serpents face-to-face," he said.
The sounds continued to increase. Trees bent, cracked, and fell over; ferns swayed. Scully cocked her ear and turned her head toward Mulder. They huddled around the campfire, both of them with their weapons in hand, ready to make a last stand, if necessary.
But Scully suddenly became more curious than frightened. "Wait—Mulder, that's a mechanical noise," she said.
As soon as she spoke, Mulder realized that the growl-ing, grinding sound he heard was indeed an engine noise, the crunching of tires, and the humming of generators.