River of the Damned Page 7

  “Momma Killa?” mumbled Ishi. “There are no lions in South America.”

  “She is cat-like and an important deity of the Incas,” said Mayta. “Even in modern times many Incan descendants especially honor her. She—”

  “We don’t have time for the long version of her mythos in the Incan pantheon,” I interrupted her, mouthing another sorry to her for my gruff response. But rather than carry on with a similar speech, I pointed behind us where the sound of twigs snapping announced our pursuers from earlier were hot on our trail.

  We resumed our trek immediately with inspired urgency. Ishi led the way while keeping the cutting to a minimum. This meant scraping our arms and legs a bit more to squeeze through narrower openings in the dense overgrowth that had suddenly worsened and was once again difficult to pass through. Is this where the Jivaro caught up to the good doctor and his crew? I wondered. Meanwhile, Mayta scanned the cliffs as best she could along either side of the path for any large rocks resembling the king of beasts, and I kept a watchful eye on the area behind us.

  It was nerve-wracking progress, and it seemed we might get overtaken. I could see glimpses of brown legs and arms less than twenty meters away through gaps in the foliage. Surely the foursome could see us, too, but had to fight through the same obstacle as we. This went on for what seemed like nearly an hour, as advancement along the path was tedious despite our rush to reach our goal. The path abruptly veered to our right and began to climb—similar to how the first pathway we had encountered had progressed as it led to the ring of waterfalls. The sound of rushing water soon greeted our ears.

  “Do you hear that, Boss?” asked Ishi.

  “Yes,” I said, grinning sheepishly after an immediate ‘shush’ received from Mayta.

  Despite an impish look that accompanied her ‘tit’ for my earlier ‘tat’ deep worry shrouded her eyes. We remained far from safe from the guys pursuing us. The growing din from the rushing water as we approached spoke to a new liability, and if the foursome picked up their pace to overtake us, our only clues would come from what I could visually detect from behind. I pictured these menaces adapting easily to an environment foreign to us, spreading out to cut us off before we found a refuge.

  Nonetheless, we continued purposefully along our course through the narrow jungle, and picked up our pace as the forest’s denseness finally thinned out again.

  “Look!” Mayta pointed excitedly to an area less than a hundred meters away on our left.

  Fast moving water spilled over the top of the hillside—we could detect the upper edge of this event, and would soon see more of it. Late afternoon sunlight peered through the cloud cover above, casting the illusion of a faint rainbow.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” I whispered, reverently, as we emerged from the overgrowth. The stone walkway beneath our feet was still partially covered in dirt, and it headed straight for the waterfall’s apex, or so it seemed. From what I could tell, we had scaled an incline of several hundred feet—roughly one hundred and forty meters from the base of the path, and this waterfall bore a breadth of fifteen to twenty meters—at least five times the size of the widest mini-waterfall we had encountered earlier.

  The waterfall was truly breathtaking in its magisterial presence—so unexpected, and likely witnessed by very few human beings since the civilization that had built the path had died out from existence. Perhaps it was known by the conquistadors from Spain—the people overthrown in this region only by the Jivaro tribes who refused to give in and either be enslaved or murdered by the arrogant Europeans. Regardless, I would’ve wagered everything in my Honduras bank account that the Anglo-Saxons in the Pierce party and myself were the only ones to see this sight in the past century—and likely longer.

  This pristine waterfall wasn’t the only thing to capture my amazement—and if we weren’t worried about being followed and killed, it surely would produce one hell of a Pinterest or Instagram moment. A large boulder sat perched precariously across from us, not far from the waterfall’s northern border. You could call me a monkey’s uncle if the damned thing didn’t look an awful lot like a fully-maned African lion. Surely the descriptor mentioned in Dr. Pierce’s journal would be a different animal if written by an indigenous person from this continent.

  “It looks like the path goes just below the waterfall’s mouth!” said Mayta, excitedly. “My people have long talked about the ‘Waterfall of Gold’… could this be it? We’ll need to be careful. If the path is wet, we could slip and fall…”

  She didn’t need to finish, and Ishi nodded grimly. In the meantime, I expected our Jivaro friends to join our little sightseeing tour at any moment.

  “We can only move forward, so let’s get going!” I urged.

  Mayta nodded readily, as did Ishi, and we trotted along the path that began to descend again as it approached the water’s powerful flow. I glanced behind me, flinching instinctively as I expected a flurry of poison darts to drop us—either to the path or over the edge. My hunch was the guys tailing our asses wouldn’t care much either way.

  The stone path was completely void of dirt and other debris by the time we stepped in under the arc of water. Louder than a damned earthquake, too. More importantly, it was definitely slick…slippery as a frigging ice-skating rink. I had afforded myself one last glance behind us as we began our descent, and the coast was clear. I prayed it remained that way, since I wasn’t about to take my eyes off the less-wet areas of the path I hoped to navigate. Even with these precautions, I still slipped, coming close enough to the edge to have a wonderful view of where I would die if I drifted any farther, a football field’s length below our present point.

  But we made it through. I tried not to think about how much fun it was going to be when it came time to leave, since the path appeared to end at the mouth of another cave. Unlike the previous caves we had seen that day, the entrance was narrow, and only came up to my chest. Fit for someone Ishi’s size… although he was in no hurry to continue leading the way.

  “How would you like to someday introduce a gal like Momma Killa to your long lost auntie?” I teased him, pointing to the Incan goddess’s mug carved onto the rock wall to the right of the cave entrance. His response was a distraught look of horror.

  “Surely you have seen Incan artistry before, no?” asked Mayta, her tone defensive while eyeing me suspiciously.

  “Hey, I was just kidding… trying to keep things loose before they get hairy again,” I assured her, pausing to cast another glance along the other side of the chasm where the path remained vacant. Another glance through the waterfall’s arc confirmed the same status. The four Jivaro warriors had either gotten lost along the way, or were watching us from a distance. Hopefully that meant a safe distance. “Ladies first?”

  I offered my best shit-eating smile, and was surprised by the glint of admiration in her eyes.

  So, Mayta has a thing for naughty boys, huh?

  She removed her flashlight from her belt clip and led the way inside the cave. Initially, the path remained narrow, and under our flashlights’ collective glow cobwebs hung down far enough to be a nuisance. Some had been recently tampered with, as remnants of a fairly large web stuck to one of the walls as a tangled-slimy mess.

  We moved cautiously, passing a number of other deeper caverns attached to this one. All the while I kept an eye on the fading daylight behind us that was barely visible through the shrinking entryway. I began to notice more and more embossed figures similar to the style of Momma Killa’s face lying haphazard in these other caves. But it wasn’t until we neared the end of the initial pathway that we found anything significant.

  Ishi’s flashlight beam landed on something that gleamed in the dimness of the last cavern to our left. He drew our attention to it when he brought the beam’s focus back. An arm-sized statue covered in grime and thick webs glimmered again. The sheen was strong enough for me to safely assume we had struck pay dirt.

  “It looks like gold,” said Ishi, his voice hushed as
he moved up to the statue and blew away the dust—not something I taught him to do, by the way. “Look, Mayta and Nick—there are a lot more statues behind this one!”

  Indeed, there were literally hundreds of statues and other artifacts. Most were covered in enough grime to hide their true composition, and after wiping off a few more it became safe to say that this had to be the trove Dr. Pierce sought. And, yet, again there was no sign of him, his family, or anyone else associated with the professor.

  “We have found the site!” Ishi announced excitedly, as if we could lay claim to it—as we would in olden times. “We should explore the rest of the….”

  His voice trailed off, and while Mayta and I shared his wonder about the trove of golden relics lying all around us, it took a moment to realize what had seized my buddy by the throat. Nearly two-dozen shadowed figures were moving towards us and, all too late, I realized we had stepped into this room too deeply to attempt an escape. All of the figures were shoulder high, except one in the midst of the others. That one seemed taller than me… until all of them reached the glow of our flashlights.

  We were surrounded by Jivaro warriors, their dart shafts, spears, and machetes at the ready. The height of the one in the middle was consistent with the rest, as it was his tall headdress that had thrown me off.

  Shuratu!

  It had to be the guy we had heard about, and as he approached, his unnatural yellow eyes made us all instinctively step backward. He smiled wickedly, nodding approvingly as he continued his advance, with his belt of shrunken heads tapping one another like dull bells on a reindeer’s harness with each menacing step he took.

  Looking for proof of Incan gold and the Pierce clan’s survival, we found the perpetrators of their demise instead.

  Chapter Nine

  Shuratu proved to be one strange hombre.

  And, yes, in addition to that fun fact, the guy made it clear he was extremely dangerous—right from the start. Cunning and mentally unstable in a Hitler-ish kind of way, his initial antics also qualified him as the real deal in terms of being a shaman.

  How do I know this?...

  “Nick Caine and his sidekick Ishi Cuyamel!” Shuratu greeted us, his voice much deeper than I expected. It rumbled forth from his puffed-out chest and open throat, reverberating off the cavern walls. In response, the gooseflesh along the back of my arms and neck rose in painful barbs as I shuddered. “What brings you here?”

  Surely there are those who immediately would wonder why this spiritual leader for a reclusive tribe of warriors addressed us in English. Hell, that was the third thing that popped into my head as I stared stupidly at this menacing man. The first, of course, were the eyes—yellow and glowing like a cat’s peepers in the dimness. The second thing I noticed was his lips seemed to be making different sounds than what reached my ears. His lips spit out harsh consonants, and yet what reached my ears somehow translated to smooth, genteel English. It reminded me of watching Americanized Bruce Lee films as a kid, where the translated words rarely matched the delivery and timing of the actors’ diction.

  Very weird, indeed.

  “We’re looking for someone,” I replied. “Tall guy with salt and pepper hair, goes by the name ‘Doc Pierce’ and brought his wife, kids, along with some scientists that would probably be much obliged to run some tests on those eyeballs of yours. Ya seen ‘em around?”

  The witch doctor chuckled meanly, pulling his gaze away from me to regard his companions. He said something to them that was completely unintelligible to me, and I assumed to Ishi as well, although the stern concentration on Mayta’s face seemed to indicate she was following this other dialogue just fine. The men gathered around us laughed.

  Maybe I should’ve responded a bit more demurely—a worried glance from Mayta indicated as much, and even Ishi implored me with pleading eyes to behave. But crazy usually doesn’t do well with captives groveling in hopes of mercy. Not in my experience, anyway.

  “Doctor Nathaniel Pierce and his family are doing fine, and all but one of his other companions are resting peacefully in their current accommodations,” Shuratu advised. He lifted up his belt to show me one of the shrunken heads attached to the end. “This is the bodyguard named Jeb, from Dallas, Texas. He didn’t believe me when I told Dr. Pierce it would do no good to resist their imprisonment or try to flee. Tangawe introduced Jeb to the poison of a tree frog, and then Jeb gave up his spirit to serve me, Shuratu, as a tsantsa forever!”

  Well, at least we knew for certain ‘whom’ we were dealing with. My smug response elicited a smile from Shuratu that expanded with near-toothless glee when I refused to take a closer look at Jeb’s tiny face with the eyelids and lips forever sewn shut.

  “I have room on this belt for at least one more head—and perhaps I can squeeze in three!” he enthused, stepping back and nodding for his warriors to move in and subdue us. It would’ve been futile to resist, given how badly outnumbered we were right then. “Would you like to visit with Dr. Pierce and his lovely daughter, Sandra?”

  His tone was almost sweet, and yet he couldn’t hide the sadistic monster lying behind those unfriendly eyes. But in light of the fact that if we did mount a successful escape, it would mean fleeing this place without ever looking back, with no more than a passing thought about the professor and his ill-fated companions, I told him “sure.”

  “Ahhh, very good, Nick Caine. Follow me!”

  Shuratu waved his hand over a pair of dormant torches carried by two of the more diminutive Jivaro natives, and immediately they sprang to life. Each one’s flame reached toward the high ceiling of the cavern for a brief instant—long enough to illuminate the incredible expanse of golden artifacts. Granted, over the years I have seen more spectacular sights in that regard—priceless objects created many hundreds of years ago—often millennia stretching back long before what is generally accepted as recorded history.

  The hidden caverns that Ishi and I had witnessed in Honduras and the Maldives held nearly as much of the gleaming yellow metal. But I had never seen a trove of Incan gold such as this place. Hell, to be completely honest, only our recent journeys to Egypt and Scotland had anything comparable in terms of exquisite statues, chairs, bowls, and other items. The archaeological value alone was staggering to consider.

  “You like what you see, eh, Nick?” said Shuratu, without bothering to look back at us.

  He led the way, navigating the dimness ahead of the torches by means of a wooden staff. His long robe of bird feathers flowed behind him as if carried by a breeze that surrounded only him as he walked.

  “It’s not why we’re here,” I said, pausing to glance at Ishi and Mayta. Both were too terrified to utter anything—even a warning for me to watch my tongue. But it was written on their faces, and I kept it in mind as I continued to engage the shaman. “The gold doesn’t belong to us… not to anyone.”

  “Wrong!” he shouted, raising his staff to abruptly halt our progress. He turned around and approached me, and as he studied me with wild, angry eyes, I decided we could officially add ‘homicidal psychopath’ to my previous assessment of Shuratu. Even the warriors holding my arms tensed, as if fearing they could be destroyed along with me by the shaman’s wrath. “It belongs to us—the Jivaro who have not disobeyed our gods’ instructions to not mingle with modern society!”

  He waited for us all to acknowledge his assertion—and the three of us nodded, Ishi and Mayta somewhat more enthusiastically than I. Usually, this means something ultra smartass is brewing within… and it took a whispered plea from Ishi to get me to show a bit more support.

  “Okay, so it is no longer property of the Incan empire that coexisted with your people long ago,” I said, nodding congenially, and hoping my smirk would pass for something agreeable. “Would it surprise you to learn that Dr. Pierce came here on his own expense to try and preserve this treasure for all the inhabitants of Ecuador?”

  “Why should I care?” he said, after studying me intently for a moment. Admittedly, my he
art was thumping like a big band’s bass drum. “They are all infidels, and someday many of them will occupy new belts!”

  He raised ole Jeb from Dallas, Texas towards my face once more.

  “Okay… but if you hurt anyone else from Dr. Pierce’s group—who came here to help, and not plunder—then I must wonder what your gods think of that.”

  Dangerous, yes. But again, we were dealing with a lunatic given to faulty reasoning. I had already assumed that if a bodyguard to a man seeking to do the right thing for the poorer South American nations could be slaughtered easily and without remorse, then our chances of survival were bleak at best. I had no doubt that he would kill us if we became uninteresting, and I was far from convinced that the Pierce party hadn’t become boring and were no longer among the living.

  “You doubt my honor…. Come, I will show you that my word is true. It pleases our gods and goddesses… even Nungui, whom your guide, Mayta, worships,” he said, drawing a gasp from Mayta who looked at me incredulously—as if she thought she would be spared the ‘I know who in the hell you are’ game that Ishi and I encountered earlier. “Yes, tell them, Mayta, about who Nungui is.”

  “She is the goddess of Mother Earth,” she said timidly. “She and the arutam protect us from harm, while making the garden that is Ecuador so beautiful.”

  A Déjà vu from what I had encountered with Marie in Egypt and again in Scotland came to the forefront of my mind.

  No way! Surely not this shit again!

  But aside from the annoyance of having to deal with ancient deities, crazed killers, and events that could not be explained rationally, it was definitely Ground Hog Day all over again. The only way to play the survival game was by the seat of one’s pants.