Chapter Thirty-One – Cid

 

Bright white lights starkly illuminated the grey and brown interior of the Aztec temple. Thick-cut stone blocks sat stacked on top of one another in an interlocking grid, kept together by their sheer mass as they climbed overhead.

Cid stood in the center of the room, remembering what it was like in the ancient days, when he’d first walked these lands. The smell of blood sacrifice hot in the back of his mouth, a sticky sensation that seemed to overtake all the other senses. The cries of pain and pleas for mercy. The cheers and prayers of the lesser humans as they’d worshipped at the feet of the gods.

Now, the racket of jackhammers and stone picks filled the air, chiseling and breaking away at the tumbled-down earth in the back as they attempted to dig through the long-collapsed tunnel. Dust and cigarette smoke, instead of blood and groveling, were thick on his tongue now as he watched the men and women excavating in the glaring floodlights.

“Sir?” a voice, barely audible above the din, called from behind. “A moment of your time?”

Cid looked back behind him, nodding to Simmons as he came picking through the rubble of rocks and debris littering the floor. He moved gingerly, with a certain kind of grace that belied his size. The kind of grace only trained killers moved with.

“How go things in St. Louis?”

Simmons didn’t respond.

Cid frowned. “Poorly, I assume?”

“Poorly. Yes, sir.”

“How many did she kill?”

“Five out of the seven. Had some help, though.”

Cid winced as he reached up and lazily scratched his cheek. Five men? They shouldn’t have had any problem getting the drop on her, dragonkin or not, and putting her out of her misery with the St. George bullets. That was their whole purpose, after all: slaying dragons!

He shook his head. “Five?”

“They were careful not to attract law enforcement personnel in any way,” Simmons said, leaning in so close to Cid that he could feel the American’s breath on his ear, “but I believe they may have underestimated her.”

Cid snorted. “May?”

Simmons grunted.

“The other two?”

“Attacked by another man, unidentified. Believe they may work together, or he’s her boyfriend or something. We haven’t been able to find much with our surveillance efforts, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Not enough time yet, sir.” He paused. “And, well, most of our operatives in the area are now deceased.”

Cid sighed, shook his head. Shoddy, shoddy, shoddy. “Yes, that would present an operational deficit, wouldn’t it?”

“Right you are, sir.” Simmons paused, coughed from the dust. When he was finished, he spoke again, saying, “Should I put together another team? We may be able to strike at her offices before she can fully recover.”

Cid shook his head. “No, you’ll only be dealing with the rest of her security men there.” He sighed. “This is not going according to plan.”

“What should we do then, sir?”

Before Cid could reply, a sound of tumbling rocks came from the far end of the chamber, from over where the workers were diligently tunneling into the collapsed tunnels of bygone eras. He was on the move immediately, nearly bounding over the rocks like a man in his early twenties.

The picks and jackhammers had fallen silent, and workers stepped back out of his way as he came, seemingly repulsed by an unseen aura as he moved through the small crowd that was already forming at the mouth like so many dust-covered zombies. Their eyes followed him for a brief moment before quickly lowering to their feet, and the rocks beneath.

“Out of the way!” Simmons called as Cid came through. “Back! Give El Cid some fucking room!”

Cid stopped at the mouth of the tunnel, waving a hand as he tried to dismiss the cloud of dust. Even thicker than across the room, it was like a pea soup of gravel that seemed to cling to and grit his eyes. He coughed as he moved into the new passageway, dipping his head down so he could enter.

Halfway down the tunnel, he heard the first scream.

“No!” came the voice of the worker. “Don’t touch it!” she screamed in Spanish.

“But—” Immediately, the second worker’s voice was cut off by a wail of agony.

Cid rushed forward faster as the pained screech filled his ears, following the twists and turns of the tunnel, now using his hands and feet almost equally as he scrambled forward through the narrowing space. His head bumped into rocks, and dirt filled his hair and eyes, but Cid moved forward with more speed, ignoring the small objects in his way.

“Out of the way!” he bellowed in Spanish at the backs of the first workers he saw.

They turned back to him, their eyes as fearful of him as they were of what they’d found up ahead. They tried to get out of the way, but with the way the tunnel was dug, there was no room to move.

Cid grabbed the nearest by his dirty collar, terrified eyes peering out at him from beneath a layer of dirt and dust, and yanked him back behind him. The woman up ahead, he shoved into the dirt as he went over her. The worker after that, an older man in his thirties, he forced off to the right, pressing his face into the passage’s rough-hewn wall.

Cid was close now. He could practically taste the thing’s power.

Up ahead, a group of workers were knotted together at the end of the tunnel. They swelled and moved in fear as the woman screamed again in Spanish. “Put it down! Rodrigo, put it down!”

“I can’t,” Rodrigo called, his voice splitting in the same aching way. “I’m trying, and I can’t!”

Another scream, with more voices adding to it, a great wave of human yells rising in a terrified chorus as the people turned to face Cid, their hands out as they came rushing towards him, past him, like ocean waves splitting as they beat upon the immovable rock that was the man in white.

Half a dozen of them went rushing past him to either side, and Cid kept moving to the two workers collapsed at the end of the tunnel in front of a small, recently uncovered alcove. One, a woman from the sound of her sobs, was on top of the other, her shoulders racked with sobs as she tried to move him.

Cid was already stripping his white coat from his body as he closed the distance.

“Rodrigo,” the woman sobbed. “Please!”

“I can’t, Gisela,” Rodrigo croaked back, his voice old and dry, as brittle as ancient Egyptian papyrus. “I can’t. God, it is so warm! It’s like it is living! I can feel it!”

“Move!” Cid bellowed, grabbing hold of her shirt and fully lifting her from the other worker, revealing a withered old man on the ground, a golden mask the size of a soccer ball clutched in his clawed hands. “Out of the way! You are not of the blood!”

“Hey!” Gisela shouted as she landed against the wall. “Who are—”

Cid looked back over his shoulder, scowling at her for a moment before turning back to Rodrigo with his coat in front of him.

“Please, sir!” Rodrigo pleaded, his watery and aged eyes looking up at Cid. “Please, help me!”

“I have you,” Cid said, lowering himself with the coat covering his hands. He covered the golden mask with the cloth, dislodged it from Rodrigo’s hands, and went to rise with it clutched against his chest. “I have you, my dear.”

One would have thought he was speaking to Rodrigo. But one would be wrong.

“It’s okay,” Cid whispered again, ignoring the two workers as he turned and began to leave the tunnel, “It’s all right. I have you, my dear.”

“Rodrigo?” Gisela called at Cid’s back. “Are you okay?”

Halfway out of the tunnel, Simmons met Cid, his eyes wide. “Is that it, sir?”

The man in white nodded gravely. “It is.”

The American went to touch it, but Cid yanked it out of his reach. “No! It is not for you.”

“What’s going on in there? One of the workers…?”

Cid nodded. “He held it, unprotected.”

Simmons winced. “Bad?”

“It will be a mercy to put him out of his misery.”

The American’s hand went to the pistol holstered at his side.

“Not in front of the others,” Cid said. “Take him into the desert.”

“Rodrigo!” Gisela screamed from far down the tunnel, her voice echoing in a heart-rending wail, which echoed out into the temple chamber beyond. “Someone, please help! Someone please help Rodrigo!”

“The woman, too,” Cid said, pushing past Simmons. “Just tell them you’re taking them for help.”

Simmons nodded.

“And Simmons?”

“Yeah, sir?”

“Make sure you bury them.”

A second later, Simmons called his superior’s name.

“Sir?” he asked as Cid turned briefly back to him. “What about the woman in America? Kris?”

“Ignore her. The time is right. At this point, there’s nothing she can do, and we need the resources here for when we strike out at the rest of the nation. I’ll not waste my soldiers a thousand miles away when they’re needed here for the fight.”

“Got it, sir,” Simmons said. He jerked his thumb back down the tunnel to the wailing Gisela and her friend Rodrigo. “I’ll go take care of this.”

Without even nodding, Cid turned back and headed out to the temple.

Tonight was a good night, after all.