“I am in here,” she called out in a strangled reply, tasting blood, coughing when it thickened her throat.
Father Hidalgo entered the bedroom. He halted a few feet away from the bed, surprise and shock rounding his eyes. “Maria, what has happened to you?” he gasped. “Your sheets are drenched in blood, and your face…”
Tears flooded Maria’s eyes. “I am dying, Father. Please, I beg you. Give me the last rites.” She coughed again, spitting up a mouthful of blood. Please hurry.” In her mind she saw a bright light when her eyelids fluttered.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” Father Hidalgo said, and his voice seemed farther away.
She heard him leave the bedroom. Moments later he spoke to someone, giving the address on Water Street. She closed her eyes and prayed for the safety of her children and husband, until she felt the priest touch her forehead, making the sign of the cross as he began reciting extreme unction in Latin, the same words he spoke to her brother when he came to the hospital last year to give Roberto last rites only a few hours before he died.
Maria kept her eyes tightly shut, gritting her teeth so she would not cry out from the pains in her chest while Father Hidalgo prepared her soul for the journey to eternity.
Her mind wandered, back to the airplane ride from Mexico City to Houston, remembering the Anglo who sat across from her on the trip, bleeding from his nose and mouth, shivering with the same chills she felt when her fever started, wiping blood off his face with paper towels.
She saw the strange white light clearly now, and felt the sensation of moving toward it even though she was still lying on the bed. Father Hidalgo’s voice became indistinct, and then there was silence and a feeling of peace as she was drawn ever closer to the circle of light.
Rodolfo Gomez was traveling west on Interstate 10 driving an eighteen-wheel tanker truck full of gasoline near Beaumont with a roll of paper towels between his legs. The floor of the cab of his White Freightliner was covered with blood.
Wiping his face and particularly his bleeding eyes, he knew he had to stop at a Beaumont hospital to find out what was wrong with him — he could not make it home to Houston as he planned when he first noticed the blood pouring from his nose, then his eyelids, and now from his rectum and ears.
Driving at seventy-five miles an hour, he pushed the Cummins diesel engine as hard as he could despite an increasing dizziness blurring everything in front of him. It was like being drunk, he decided, this odd feeling. But what would explain all the blood?
Rodolfo passed out three hundred yards from a convenience store at a bend in the highway where it entered the city limits of Beaumont. His tanker filled with eighty thousand gallons of gasoline plowed into a row of parked cars in front of the Stop and Go Drive-In, moving at sixty miles an hour until it rammed a blue Pontiac Grand Am, jackknifing truck and trailer at a ninety-degree angle only seconds before the tank trailer ruptured.
A ball of flame erupted, shooting exploding fuel hundreds of feet into the air that engulfed everything within a six-hundred-yard perimeter with heat so intense it melted automobiles, turning them into unrecognizable heaps of blackened metal.
Eleven customers of the East Side Stop and Go were incinerated. There were no survivors. Rodolfo Gomez was thrown through the windshield of his White Freightliner. His charred body was later found on what was left of the flat roof of the convenience store, identifiable only by means of dental records.
Walter Simmons died within two hours of entering the emergency room of Ben Taub Hospital in Houston. Emergency room staff handled his body with latex gloves and surgical masks.
Simmons’s wife, Beatrice, was admitted directly from the ER and her room quarantined while the Chief of Pathology, Dr. Wilson Brewer, began a cautious autopsy of her husband, wearing a fully self-contained space suit in the hospital morgue, suspecting a rare and highly contagious virus, one of the African varieties. He found no viral evidence, only a strange bacterium-like organism in tissues and blood. He called for a staff meeting at two o’clock to show photographs of the microscope’s findings, puzzled, unable to apply routine diagnostics to the evidence he prepared for the staff meeting.
Beatrice Simmons drifted in and out of consciousness, at times able to remember the sale of the jeweled Aztec artifact to a private collector in Miami who had flown into Houston within hours of being told about the royal symbols on it. He wrote a check for four hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars on the spot without even trying to bargain and took the collar with him back to Florida, delighted with his new acquisition, certain that it once belonged to the Aztec Chieftain Montezuma, an incredible find.
Mexicana Airlines flight attendant Carmen Villarreal died at Santa Rosa Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, after her flight to Mexico City had been diverted there due to her ill health.
She’d been taken directly to the hospital from the airport and the flight had continued on to Mexico City.
Four hours later the flight landed in Mexico City and three hours after that, Rosa Hernandez, the stewardess who found Carmen in the airplane’s bathroom, went to see a curandera to purchase a special mix of garlic and herbs to quiet the bloody dysentery she’d been experiencing since she got home.
Her mother told her garlic powder and tincture of rosemary never failed to cure loose bowels. Rosa failed to mention the blood to her mother or the herbal healer since it was an embarrassing subject, and her boyfriend, Victor, had only last week introduced her to anal intercourse and this could be an explanation for the intermittent bleeding.
Jesus Contreras, an employee of Mexicana Airlines on the janitorial staff, collapsed at home in Colonia Santa Maria two days after cleaning blood from a bathroom of a 737. He had been coughing up blood for several hours and called in sick at work that day, wondering if he had contracted tuberculosis, for his lungs burned fiercely the night before and he’d been unable to sleep. His wife went screaming though the neighborhood asking for someone to call an ambulance, since she and Jesus were unable to afford a telephone.
Chapter 19
Mason was conferring with Suzanne and Lauren in the dining area of the lab and had just checked Jimmy Walker’s name off the list of students on the dig the university had given Lauren. It had been the last name without a checkmark.
He looked at her with warm, sympathetic eyes. “That’s it, then, Lauren. All of the members of the expedition are accounted for. Now we’ve got to see about getting you off-site and back to Texas so you can get back to your life.”
She smiled at him, her face a strange mixture of sadness and anticipation. “So many dead, and for what? To unearth some old bones and artifacts that no one except dried-up old museum curators will ever see.”
He reached over and placed his hand on her arm. “They died doing what they loved, Lauren.” He sighed and looked around at the cramped quarters of the laboratory. “And that’s about all any of us can wish for.”
He glanced over his shoulder. “I’ll get Joel to see if he can schedule a chopper to come pick you up for the trip back to Mexico City.”
“Are you in such a hurry to get rid of me, then?” she asked in a quiet voice, her eyes looking shyly down at her feet.
Mason glanced at Suzanne as his face flamed red in a deep blush. “Why… er… um… no, not at all,” he said, wondering if she felt the same smoldering attraction for him that he felt for her.