He ran over. They were squeezing oxygen through a patient’s mask. “Were you guys on the scene? Who caused the accident?”
“Latino guy,” one of them said.
“Where is he? Here?”
“Look for a John Doe.”
Stanton studied the patient board. Another John Doe? Even if there was no ID on the driver, they should’ve tracked his car already.
Near the bottom of the board, he found an unnamed patient. He darted back toward curtain 14. Tore it open. There was a flurry of motion inside—doctors yelling orders and moaning coming from the bloody, writhing man.
“I have to talk to him.” Stanton flashed his CDC ID.
They looked confused but gave him room to approach.
He leaned close to the man’s ear. “Sir, have you had trouble sleeping?”
No answer.
“Have you been sick, sir?”
The monitors beeped loudly. “His pressure’s falling,” warned one of the nurses.
An ER doc pushed Stanton out of the way. Injected the man’s IV with more drugs. They all watched the monitor. Pressure continued to drop as the man’s heart slowed.
“Crash cart!” yelled the other doctor.
“Sir!” Stanton called out from behind them. “What is your name?”
“Ernesto had his face,” the driver groaned finally. “I didn’t mean to hit him….”
“Please,” Stanton said, “your name!”
The driver’s eyes flickered. “I thought Ernesto was the birdman. The birdman did this to me
These words sent a shiver through Stanton that he couldn’t explain.
“The birdman,” he pressed. “Who is the birdman?”
A long sigh came from the driver’s throat, then the familiar sequence followed: flatline, yelling, crash cart, paddles, injections, more yelling. Then silence. And time of death.
CHEL SAT IN HER OFFICE at the Getty, smoking her pack’s last cigarette. She’d never watched a man die before. After seeing Volcy expire on the table, she’d fled without a word to the doctors. For hours, she’d ignored phone calls from the hospital, including two from Stanton. She just stared numbly at her computer screen, refreshing the relevant sites again and again.
The CDC knew Volcy was a vegetarian, but the press was still focusing their coverage on how his disease probably came from tainted meat. The blogosphere was on fire with headlines about the Long Count and nutty theories about how it couldn’t be a coincidence that some new strain similar to mad cow had appeared only a week before 12/21.
There was a quiet knock on her office door, followed by Rolando Chacon popping his head inside. “Got a minute?”
She waved him in. He’d listened without judgment as she told him about the hospital, including how she’d lied to the doctors about Volcy’s reasons for coming to the States.
“You okay?” Rolando asked, taking the seat in front of her.
She shrugged.
“Maybe you should go home and get some sleep.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “What is it?”
“The C-14 dating came back: 930 plus or minus 150. Exactly what we thought. Middle of the terminal classic.”
Chel should have been ecstatic. This was the proof they’d been waiting for. Everything she’d learned and understood about her work had come together, and the codex could be a portal to immense understanding. Still, she felt nothing.
“Great,” she told Ronaldo without emotion.
“I’m also moving forward with the reconstruction,” he said. “But there’s a problem.” He passed Chel a piece of paper, on which he’d drawn two symbols:
In ancient Mayan, they were pronounced
“But that’s not how the scribe is using it.” Rolando handed her another page. “That’s a rough translation of the second paragraph.”
The father and his son is not noble by birth, and so there is much the father and his son will never fathom about the ways of the gods that watch over us, there is much the father and his son does not hear that the gods would whisper in the ears of a king.
“So it has to be one thing he’s referring to,” Rolando said. “One noble. One king. Something like that. Whatever it is, the pair of symbols appears all over the manuscript.”
Chel studied the glyphs again. Scribes commonly used word pairings in new ways for stylistic flourish, so it was likely this one was using the pair to signify something other than the literal translation.
“Could it have something to do with noble titles being passed down from fathers to their sons?” Rolando asked. “Patrilinearity?”
Chel doubted it but was having trouble focusing. “Let me think about it.”
Rolando tapped on her desk. “I know you don’t want to hear this, and I understand your concerns, really. But this is really a syntax question, and Victor’s the best there is. He could be very helpful with this, and I think you have to put your personal issues aside.”
“You and I can figure it out,” Chel said.
“Until we know what this is, it’ll be diffi cult to make much more progress. On the first page alone the combination appears ten times after the first paragraph. On some of the later pages it shows up two dozen times.”
“
Rolando retreated into the lab, and Chel went back to her laptop.
Checking the
STANTON STOOD WITH Davies in the morgue, deep in the basement of the hospital. The driver’s body lay on one metal table; beside them, on a second table, lay Volcy’s.
Davies made an incision from ear to ear on the driver’s skull, then draped the flap of skin and removed the skullcap to expose the brain.
“Ready,” he said.
Stanton stepped forward, cut the central cortex away from the cranial nerves, and disconnected it from the spinal cord. Reaching inside, he removed the brain from its skull. Hidden in the folds of this organ was his best hope for figuring out VFI. He placed the brain on a sterile table, trying to ignore the fact that it was still warm.
Stanton and Davies began to slice. During his gross exam of the thalamus, Stanton saw clusters of tiny holes; under the microscope he saw a wasteland of craters and deformed tissue. Textbook FFI. Only much, much more aggressive.
“Anything?” Davies asked.
“Give me a second.” Stanton rubbed his eyes.
“You look knackered,” Davies said.
“I have no idea what that means.”
“You look like shit. You need to sleep, Gabe.”
