THE MAYA HIGHLANDS ARE ANCHORED NORTH TO SOUTH BY A SPINE of volcanoes that have been active for millions of years. Early highlanders worshipped the volcanoes, but their powerful eruptions, which could swallow an entire tribe at once, eventually drove the Maya south to the Land of the Trees—as they called it in Qu’iche—Guatemala.
Four hours into the flight, with the C-2 Greyhound flying at less than two thousand feet, Stanton and Chel looked down at the green canopy that gave the country its name . Uranam, the pilot, was using a radar system to search for the proper coordinates, but from the window all they could see were forested hills in all directions. The colors of the foliage darkened as they circled the perimeter of the area, and Chel worried they might not find Kiaqix before nightfall.
If her assumptions were correct, Kanuataba had to be somewhere between sixty and a hundred miles from her village, at a bearing of 230 to 235 degrees southwest. Volcy had found the city in three days’ walk, so the total range couldn’t be greater than about three hundred square miles. They’d scour every inch.
“Are we expecting to see macaws?” Stanton called above the roar of the engine.
“Only in the migration season,” she told him, adjusting her eye shield. “The village is a point on the migratory path, and in the fall there are thousands, but by now they’ve moved on.” She continued her search for the cypress-covered hills that would signal they were near the village landing strip. Before they could find Kanuataba, they had to find Kiaqix.
“Hold on!” Uranam yelled out.
Every time they made the transition from the mountains to the valleys and back again, the plane bucked up and down, and just then the port-side wing caught a current and was kicked upward, jostling the entire aircraft. For a minute it felt as if the plane might snap in two.
When it righted itself, Chel saw the ground below. They flew over alternating patches of thick forest and cleared farmlands, where North Americans’ appetite for corn and beef had stripped the earth.
A minute later, she saw the massive cypress-covered mountain abutting the valley. Here, fifty generations of her ancestors had lived, worshipped, and raised families. She pointed Stanton toward the valley her father had given his life for. Beya Kiaqix.
“There.”
THE RAINY SEASON HAD made the earth soft, but there were half a dozen mahogany and cedar trunks and large branches blown over in the path of Kiaqix’s landing strip. The plane’s wheels barely cleared them. Final slivers of daylight were leaving the forest, making the landing even more treacherous. It looked as if no one had landed here in months.
On her last trip to Kiaqix, hundreds of villagers came to the airstrip to herald the return of Alvar Manu’s daughter, the great scholar. There’d been a dozen round-faced children holding incense and candles. Now she had to remind herself that today no one knew they were coming.
The plane rolled to a stop.
Uranam hurriedly jumped out and threw open the cargo doors at the back. The crushing heat of the jungle poured in immediately.
They put the biohazard suits, tents, prion samples, metal cages, test tubes, and other glass into the jeep, lowered the lift, and Stanton drove into the mud. When they were ready to make the five-mile drive to Kiaqix proper, Chel rolled down the window to let in some air.
“You’ll be here?” she confirmed with Uranam. “We’ll be back in twenty-four hours.”
Fear crawled across the pilot’s face. “No,” he said, backing toward the plane. “I’m not staying.”
“He agreed to stay,” Stanton said after Chel translated. “He has to.”
“I don’t know what this is about,” Uranam said. “But I don’t want to find out.”
He pointed above the forest. Chel turned to see thick wisps of smoke trailing into the sky, almost as if there was a factory deep in the jungle.
“They’re just clearing for next year’s harvest,” Chel explained, first to Uranam, then to Stanton. “That’s all it is.”
Uranam looked like a man with his mind made up as he climbed back into the cockpit. “No. This is something else,” he said, eyes fixed on the smoke. “From the gods.”
Within a minute, he was firing up the engine.
After the plane took off into the night, Stanton tried to reassure Chel. When they found what they’d come for, he insisted, he would find a way to get someone to pick them up.
But Chel knew it would be impossible to get another plane back in here anytime soon, and she was afraid that, if the weather turned, they might not be able to get out for weeks. Then she turned to look again at the black trails of smoke, and fear gripped her throat. Whatever superstitions drove the pilot away, he was right about one thing: No one would be burning fields this late in the rainy season.
SO THEY STARTED DOWN the road to Kiaqix with no idea of how they’d ever get back. The jeep had a full tank of gas, but Chel knew there had to be a hundred miles at least between them and the nearest Esso station. And, in this part of the Petén, roads were mostly just lines on the map, as hillside erosion and mudslides rendered them impassable for much of the year.
The plan was to stay for the night in Kiaqix and set out again at dawn into the jungle in the opposite direction of Lake Izabal, recreating the path that the Original Trio had taken here but in reverse. The five-mile path from the airstrip was so rutted that Stanton could barely get the jeep out of first gear. A light rain fell. Though they drove over cleared land, the sounds of the jungle were always near: the shrill calls of the keel-billed toucans, the monkeys making their wolflike cries.
Even as they drove through the darkness, Stanton tried to make out what little plant life he could identify around them for any sign of whatever might have protected the king and his men from the disease. On the way down he’d studied the flora that grew in this tropical forest, and he recognized a few trees by their shapes in the headlights: Spanish cedars with their coupled leaflets that looked like outstretched arms, vanilla vines that climbed up the small, thin trunks of copal.
“Where do we stay tonight?” Stanton asked, wiping the blinding sweat from his forehead. He had never been this far south, and he couldn’t believe the wall of heat that greeted them when they landed.
The heat wasn’t new to Chel, but with this much humidity, even she felt like she was seeing the world underwater. “Maybe with my mother’s cousin Doromi. Or with one of my father’s sisters. Anyone will let us stay with them. They know me.”
Neither of them dared mention the fact that there wasn’t any telling what they’d actually find in Kiaqix. But not even those dark fears could keep Chel from feeling some of the excitement she always did when she made this drive. Kiaqix was as vivid in her memory as the streets of L.A. The long causeways, the aroma-fi lled market, rows of thatch, wood, and concrete houses, like the one she was born in. Then there were the modern stone buildings built recently: the stained-glass church, the expansive meeting hall, the multi-room school.
The medical facility on the road in, for which Chel had helped raise the money, would be their first stop. The twenty-bed mini-hospital was built at the edge of Kiaqix a decade ago. Once a month, a doctor flew in to administer vaccinations and antibiotics. Otherwise it was run by the elder women of the village and a shaman who dispensed traditional remedies.
The road bisected a patch of mahogany trees. Some spots between them were covered with unripened stalks of maize. Though it was drizzling now, there had been a terrible drought in the Petén. Even where tree stumps were too large to uproot, the villagers had planted around them. They were clearly desperate for fertile land.
Soon the medical facility came into view. The villagers called it ja akjun, Qu’iche for doctor’s house. To Stanton, it looked more like a Medi-terranean church than a hospital. Wooden columns buttressed a white roof, and an outdoor spiral staircase led to the second floor—an architectural touch that could be found only in a place where it never got cold.
The last time Chel arrived here, nurses had swarmed her, eager to show how the modern and traditional remedies were brought together under one roof to treat machete injuries, complicated births, and the myriad other ills that were part of life in Kiaqix. Now there wasn’t a person to be seen. The red door to the hospital stood open, and the only sounds were of the jungle giving over to night—trees whispering in the wind and those eerie cries of the spider monkeys.
“You ready?” Stanton asked her. He squeezed her hand and they got out of the car. He stopped to pull two flashlights out of their supply bag and, as casually as if pocketing car keys, tucked his Smith & Wesson into his waistband.
Once they both had on eye shields, he led them toward the open door.
Something felt wrong right away. The entrance was pitch-black. Stanton scanned the room with his flashlight. It was the clinical bay. Curtain rods separated one examining area from the other. Splintered wooden chairs marked where patients usually waited. There was no life here, and it didn’t feel like there had been for a long time.
“In ri’ ali Chel,” Chel called out as they stepped inside the darkened room, her voice echoing. “Umyal ri al Alvar Manu.”
I am Chel, daughter of Alvar Manu.
No response.
Rounding the corner into the examination area, their flashlights caught paper strewn across the floor. Then chairs, turned over, soaking in puddles of antiseptic that had been spilled on the ground. A ceramic container was shattered, and shards were mixed with soaked cotton balls and long Q-tips. Flies the size of quarters buzzed around them. The space reeked of ammonia and what smelled like excrement.
Stanton reached into his pocket and pulled out two pairs of latex gloves. “Don’t touch anything with your bare hands.”
As she struggled to maneuver her sweaty hands into the gloves, Chel called out loudly again in Qu’iche that she was the daughter of Alvar Manu and that she had come to help. Her own voice sounded weak to her, but it echoed in the empty room.
Continuing through the building, her worry grew. These rooms were not just abandoned—they had been vandalized. Beds lay on their sides and the stuffi ng had been ripped out. There was glass everywhere. Stanton opened the cabinets and rummaged through the drawers, looking for the medical supplies: Someone had taken most of them.
At the far end of the hallway, Chel pushed open the doors to the small chapel. She scanned her Maglite across the front and saw that the large wooden cross had been pulled from above the pulpit and smashed into pieces. The beautiful stained-glass window was in shards on the ground, and ripped pages from Bibles and copies of the Popol Vuh were strewn over the pews and into the aisles.
Then she saw a familiar symbol, and all Chel’s remaining hope vanished.
Chel heard Stanton come into the chapel behind her. “Even the indígenas believe it now,” she whispered. “Maybe it’s true.”
He said nothing, but Chel felt his hand squeezing her shoulder. When she reached up to take it and her glove made contact, she noticed the hand was bare.
She whipped around. “Who are you?”
The stranger didn’t answer. He was tall. He wore a hooded sweatshirt with a rust-colored stain splashed across it. And he wasn’t Maya.
“Qué está haciendo aquí?” she said in Spanish.
How or why a ladino was here now, Chel didn’t know. Her mother’s words of warning echoed in her ears. Her heart pounded as she backed away. “Estoy aquí con un médico. Gabe! Gabe!” She screamed, but her voice felt so weak. She couldn’t breathe.
The ladino lunged at her and pulled her down. He ripped off her eye shield and jammed his hand over her mouth. She tried to scream again, but she couldn’t. Chel pawed at his face, but he bore down, wrapping his other hand around her throat. She knew what could be on his hands and squeezed her eyes shut as tightly as she could. Only it was no use: She’d be dead long before she was sick.
I am Chel Manu, daughter of Alvar. Kill me like you killed my father.
That was her last thought before the gun went off.
STANTON’S HANDS SHOOK AS HE TURNED THE KEY IN THE IGNITION and started the jeep. He’d killed a man. The gun he’d used was on his lap, ready to be used again. There had to be others infected out there in the darkness ahead. But it seemed better to start moving again than to stay here.
Chel slumped in the passenger seat next to him, numb. It would be some time before they would know if her attacker had managed to infect her before Stanton killed him. Even the rapid blood assay wouldn’t tell him anything for a few more hours.
Tiny clouds of mosquitoes swarmed the headlights as they drove down the road leading on to the village proper. But as they made their way closer, Stanton could see in the high beams what must’ve been the source of the black smoke they’d seen at the landing strip. It was a smoldering building about the size of the medical facility. The walls had collapsed; limestone had shattered. There was no roof.
“That’s the school,” Chel said, all emotion gone from her voice.
They kept going. The remains of single-room houses cropped up on both sides. Four or six stood in clusters every several hundred feet, each with its single door and no windows. Adobe-covered wooden walls had been knocked down; palm fronds that once covered roofs, pulled off. In the middle of the road were dozens of hammocks that looked as if they had been dragged from one of the houses and abandoned. Red and yellow and green and purple cloths were cast aside and covered in mud, and the jeep’s tires ran unsteadily over the graveyard of color.
Part of Stanton wanted to drive the car out of town and stay the night in a field. They were done looking for others; now they were trying to avoid them. But he also thought the jeep might draw more attention to them than they’d elicit if they hid it and sheltered themselves in one of the abandoned buildings.
He pointed at one house they drove by that still appeared untouched. “Do you know the people who live there?”
Chel didn’t seem to hear him. She was somewhere else entirely.
Stanton decided it looked as good a place as any. He parked the jeep and led Chel toward the house, holding the gun with his free hand. He knocked at the door, and, when there was no answer, he kicked it open.
The first things his flashlight caught were two bodies in a hammock. A young woman and a toddler. It looked as if they’d been dead for at least a week.
Stanton tried to stop Chel from getting any closer, but she was already in the doorway, staring at the bodies.
The sound of her voice surprised him. “We need to bury them. I need incense.” She obviously wasn’t thinking clearly.
“We can’t stay in here,” he told her.
He grabbed her hand again, and they kept going. In the next dwelling, there were no corpses, just clothing strewn on the ground, a broken hoe, and ceramic bowls. Stanton cleared everything out.
“You think it’s safe?” Chel managed.
He had no proof, but it was the best they had. “We need to keep our eye shields on.”
They collapsed against a wall, huddling together, exhausted. Stanton pulled granola bars from the supply pack and forced Chel to swallow several bites. Finally he turned off the flashlight, hoping she might be able to sleep. He would try to stay awake, on guard.
“Do you know why we burn incense for the dead?” she whispered.
“Why?”
“When a soul is taken, it needs the incense smoke in order to pass from the middleworld to the underworld. Everyone here is stuck between worlds.”
Over the last couple of days, Stanton had heard her talk quite a lot about her people’s traditions, but not this way. He wanted to reassure her but didn’t know how; only the faithful had the right words for times like these. Instead, he turned to what he knew. She was still convinced that something had protected the king and his men from VFI before the outbreak of disease in Kanuataba. Tomorrow they would find it. “We have the map and the coordinates for Lake Izabal,” he told Chel, “and as soon as it’s light, we’ll start searching.”
She nestled her head in the crook of his arm. Stanton felt the weight of her on him and the touch of her skin on his.
“Maybe Victor was right,” she said. “Maybe all we can do now is run.”
STANTON WOKE WITH A START and pulled out the gun. Something was trampling wet leaves just on the other side of the wall. Chel was already crouched by the back wall, listening. There was a high-pitched noise, something squeaking in the rain.
Chel made out a voice speaking in Qu’iche. “Let the evil winds out, Hunab Ku.”
“What’s going on?” Stanton asked.
“My name is Chel Manu,” she called back in Qu’iche. “I am from Kiaqix. My father was Alvar. I have a doctor here. He can help if you are sick.”
A tiny old woman with hair to her waist appeared in the doorway.
She wore thick eyeglasses over her wide nose.
Stanton lowered the gun. Thunder groaned in the distance, and the woman stepped toward them, looking like she might tip over.
“Are evil winds in this house?” she called out in Qu’iche.
“We are not sick. We are here to find where the sickness has come from. I’m Chel Manu, daughter of Alvar. Are you sick?”
“You came by the sky?” the woman asked.
“Yes. Are your people sick?” Chel repeated.
“I am not cursed.”
Chel glanced at Stanton, who pointed at his own eyes. Her glasses must have saved her. The same thing that might have saved both of their lives back in L.A. a week ago.
“When did you come here?” the woman asked.
Chel told her they’d arrived in Kiaqix about five hours ago.
“Ask her if there’s anyone else alive in the village,” said Stanton.
“Fifteen or twenty are in the houses still standing,” the woman replied. “Mostly on the outskirts. There are more hiding in the jungle, waiting for the evil winds to blow away.”,
“When did this begin?” Chel asked the old woman.
“Twenty suns ago. You are really Chel Manu?”
“Yes.”
“What was your mother’s name?”
“My mother is Ha’ana,” Chel said. “You know her?”
“Of course,” she said. “I am Yanala. You and I met many years ago.”
“Yanala Nenam?” Chel said. “Daughter of Muram the great weaver.”
“Yes.”
“Is there anyone from my family who is alive?”
“One of your aunts is among the few survivors,” Yanala said. “Initia the elder. She might have come and found you herself, but she does not walk easily. Come.”
THEY TRAILED THE old woman down a series of side roads and across milpas. When they turned in to a clearing toward a set of houses nestled on a hillock, Chel was struck by her one and only childhood memory of this place. For a moment, she was a little girl again, bouncing on her father’s shoulders as he carried her down the causeway.
But now there was no one trading cornmeal, no music coming from the houses. There was only silence.
They approached the entrance to a small log-built house with a strong thatch roof, still intact. The woman led them into a room stuffed with aging wooden furniture, hammocks, and an indoor clothesline. A stack of tortillas was baking on top of a hearth with large stones, filling the room with the smell of corn.
Yanala disappeared into a back area of the house. A minute later a door swung open, and an even older woman emerged. She had long silver hair braided into a crown above her head, and she wore a purple and green huipil draped with a dozen strands of colored beads. Chel recognized Initia immediately.
Without a word, the woman walked slowly toward them, leaning on the furniture. “Chel?”
“Yes, Aunt,” she said in Qu’iche. “And I’ve brought a doctor from America.”
Initia stepped into the light, and her eyes became visible. Both her irises were covered in a milky white film. Cataracts, Chel realized. They’d probably saved her from VFI.
“I can’t believe you are here, child.”
“You’re not sick, Aunt?” Chel asked as they embraced. “You can sleep?”
“Much as one can at my age,” Initia said. She motioned for them to sit around a small wooden table. “It has been so long since you have come, and here you are, of all times. How is this possible?”
Initia listened in disbelief as Chel described the events in L.A., from Volcy’s arrival on.
“You’ve been in the causeways, you’ve seen the village center, so surely you understand what the evil winds have brought to us too,” Initia said when Chel finished.
“Ask her who was the first person here to get sick,” Stanton said.
“Malcin Hanoma,” Initia said after Chel translated.
“Who is that?” Chel asked.
“Volcy had no blood brothers, so Malcin Hanoma, son of Malam and Chela’a, was his planting partner. They went off in search of these treasures from the lost city together. Volcy never returned, but Malcin did. He was injured, and with him he brought the curse upon us, the wrath of the ancestors.”
“How quickly did it spread?”
“Malcin’s family was the first to be taken. Their children became sleepless, as did the entire family who shared a home with him. Punishment came from the gods, and within only days the winds spread faster and faster.”
Chel closed her eyes, envisioning the destruction that followed. How quickly had her people turned on one another? How long had it taken for the people of Kiaqix to devolve? To tear down the church, burn the school, and loot the hospital?
“So many terrible things have happened here, Aunt.”
Initia pushed herself up and motioned for them to follow her out a back entrance. “But not only terrible things. Come.”
THEY TRAILED HER to a dwelling directly behind the house, the door of which was covered with stacks of palm leaves. Together they pulled away the fronds and created an opening.
“Do not let the winds in,” Initia called behind her.
Chel stared in disbelief as they stepped inside. Swaddled in colored hammocks draped from the ceiling, were at least a dozen babies. Some were crying softly. Others lay still with their eyes open, silent. Some slept, their tiny chests rising and falling.
Yanala attended to several at a time; Initia joined her, coddling a little girl who wouldn’t stop crying while spooning liquid corn into another’s mouth. Initia placed a baby boy in Stanton’s arms, then handed a little girl to Chel. The girl was small, with patches of hair across the crown of her head, a wide nose, and dark-brown eyes that darted around the room, never quite catching Chel in her sights.
“A baby must be shown closeness with its mother, sleep in the hammock with her, and take from her breast when it’s hungry,” Initia said. “They have grown disconnected because they have been denied their mothers.”
“Where did you find them, Aunt?”
“I knew which houses recently had births, for everyone comes together to celebrate a new life. Yanala and I went in search of survivors. Some were hidden beneath palm fronds, and others were left in the open.”
Chel glanced at Stanton. “How long will they be immune?”
“Six months or so,” he said, cradling the boy. “Until their optic nerves mature.”
“That is Sama,” Yanala said as Chel rocked her little girl back and forth.
The name was somehow familiar. “Sama?”
“Daughter of Volcy and Janotha.”
“She’s their daughter? Volcy’s daughter?”
“The only one of the family to survive.”
Astonished, Chel looked at the child. Her eyes were open and wet. This was the daughter Volcy had desperately longed to see as he lay dying in a strange land.
“Do you see what this is, child?” Initia asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The end of the Long Count cycle is but one rise and fall of the sun from now,” Initia said. “And when it comes, we will witness the end of all we’ve known. Perhaps we already have. But our youngest survived by the grace of Itzamnaaj, most merciful, and they will be our future. It is said in the Popol Vuh that, with each cycle’s end, a new breed of men in-herits the earth. These children are the fifth race.”