Black Rain

“Right,” McCarter said. “Their own animals, including beasts that attacked and ripped them apart, something that quite accurately describes what the Zipacna do. They raced for the trees and they raced for the caves,” he added, quoting the Popul Vuh again. “But the trees could not bear them and the caves were sealed shut.”

“You think the inhabitants of this place tricked them,” she said. “Sealed the temple just as a storm came.”

He nodded. “If I was to take it all the way, and try to match it up with the legend, I would suppose that the Mayan people rebelled, injured Seven Macaw and sent him fleeing to that temple. And then they sealed him in. With a storm coming, and nowhere to hide, any Zipacna that may have been out here went crazy, attacking everyone and everything, including the other wooden people—if there were any. And then the storm hit, drowning one and all with burning rain.”

“It rained all day and all through the night,” she said.

“And the earth was blackened beneath it,” he added, quoting the ancient Mayan text one last time. As he finished, McCarter watched Susan’s face light up. He was certain that she’d made the connection, certain that she knew his next question and the answer to it as well. He asked it anyway.

“And what were the Chollokwan doing with those crystals when our friend Blackjack Martin so casually took them away?”

“They were praying,” she said. “Praying for rain.”

“Damn right,” McCarter said, slamming his notebook shut. “The Chollokwan care about this place, because they’re descendants of the Mayan tribe who built it. And they were praying for the rain, not to make the crops grow or the river flood or for any of the other reasons normally associated with such a request, but because their salvation, or at least that of their ancestors, once depended on it.”

CHAPTER 43

Across the camp Hawker stood beside Danielle, staring into an empty ammunition box, now covered with a makeshift grate. Scampering around in the box was the larva they’d retrieved from the body in the forest. It had been just two hours, but the thing barely seemed like the same creature. It had grown little arms and legs and the beginnings of the lethal tail. Viewed from above, it was beginning to resemble the animals from inside the temple.

Hawker could hardly believe the change. “How long did all that take?”

Danielle glanced at her watch. “Ten minutes after we got it back here, its skin hardened into the bony shell we saw on the adult animals. Then the tendrils separated and it ingested them.”

The little thing disgusted Hawker and this latest revelation did nothing to change that. “It ate its own arms?”

“Uh-huh,” she said, smiling at his discomfort. “You should have seen it.”

“No thanks,” he said, looking around. There was only one grub in the box, a fact that concerned him. “Where are the rest of them?”

Danielle frowned. “This one killed them before I could stop it. As soon as its shell had hardened, it became very aggressive.”

“All of them?” Hawker said.

She nodded. “For the most part. I pulled one of the half-eaten things out before it could finish, but it would have gulped it down if I’d let it.”

“Hungry little bastard,” Hawker noted.

“It is,” she said. “And I think I know why. I took a sample from the dead one and looked at it under a microscope. Its cells are packed with mitochondria, maybe three to four times what a human cell has. That gives it a tremendous metabolic rate. To maintain such a metabolism it would likely have to eat its body weight in food every four or five days. I would guess the need at half of that for the adults. Maybe less, but still very accelerated.”

“That might explain why they’re so aggressive,” Hawker said.

“I think it explains something else too, something that might help us to fight them,” she said.

Hawker leaned toward her, interested in any detail about the creatures that might make them easier to kill. “Tell me,” he said.

“Let me put it this way,” she said, “there are many different rates of life in the natural world. A hummingbird has an extraordinarily high metabolic rate; its wings beat so rapidly that they’re a blur to the naked eye. To keep that rate up they have to consume their body weight in nectar every twenty-four hours or so.

“In comparison, a species like the tortoise or the starfish has a glacial metabolism. To the naked eye a starfish looks immobile. Yet they are moving, not just wafting around in the current but traveling—there are even great migrations of them roaming unnoticed across the ocean floor. You can see it with time-lapse photography.”

Hawker smiled at her excitement. “Let me guess, oceanography was another major.”

She shook her head. “A summer hobby really. I liked the sun and the surf, and I looked pretty good in a wet-suit.”

He laughed. “I bet you did.”