Sex and Murder Magazine

By Brenna Watry

They say that when you hear an owl screech, someone’s about to die.

Candie scrubbed sleep from her eyes, surprised to realize that she had actually dozed for part of the night. But she had slept in worse places before, following slimmer trails of clues. At least this time the artifact she had come to collect had already been found for her by a local man, so she didn’t have to scour the area for it. Treasure hunters weren’t generally this lucky. Then again, they said half the fun was in the hunt. The other half was escaping with the prize.

Gingerly, Candie rose to her feet, massaging her muscles back to life and wincing as pain sparked up and down her legs. Stretching her back, she left the tent. She picked up the various charms she had left the night before at the four cardinal directions around the tent: garlic, a wishbone, a rabbit foot, and the rattle from a snake she had killed herself several months back. They said treasure hunters were the most superstitious people in the world. Well, they had every right to be.

After last time, Candie had sworn left, right, and center that she would never enter the Sierra Madres again, and yet here she was. Admittedly, last time she had been in Mexico and now she was in Guatemala, but the thrill of unease was still there. She told herself she came because she owed Jason a visit--it had been well over five years since she last saw him at her father’s funeral, after all--but she knew that really, the only reason she was here was because of what he had hidden in his lonely cabin in the mountains: the original Popol-Vuh, the sacred book of the Mayans. It had been thought lost for centuries, survived only by a copy made by a Dominican monk. But the original had been found in a hidden shrine to Ah-Puch, Mayan god of death.

Which, considering the owl she heard last night, should have made her turn back right away. She didn’t need to go messing with another Mesoamerican pantheon, not after the last time, when the Aztec gods had killed her father and nearly killed her as well. The Aztecs were a brutal lot, far more potent than the Mayan gods, whom they had replaced, and thus stolen some of the older gods’ power. In that respect, Candie was lucky. She was in Mayan territory now, an empire that had stretched from Mexico to Honduras.

And in that respect, Candie was also unlucky. She was in Guatemala, not Mexico where the Mayans were weakest. The Aztecs had taken Mexico and most of the Mayans’ power there. The Mayan gods were nevertheless still weak enough even in Guatemala, so that if they wanted her dead, they couldn’t kill her outright the way the Aztecs could. But there were certainly enough accidents just waiting to happen, and if that owl was anything more than an owl—Muan perhaps, the messenger demon of the gods--then she was already in trouble, and she hadn’t even stolen anything yet.

Candie started the Piper-23 Aztec’s engine with a spectral smile. That 250 horsepower roar was as familiar to her as her father’s hand rocking the cradle. She eased the throttle back and started her taxi, the wheels jolting over the uneven field. At least the tailwind was light and the trees still young and therefore short. At the far end of the field, she turned the plane, increased the throttle, adjusted the flaps, and shot into the sky.

If she hadn’t been concentrating so hard on the plane, she might have noticed the owl sitting in the nearby ceiba tree, watching her intently.

*****

Jason Gutierrez was waiting as Candie touched down on his private airstrip. Once a month one of the men from the town flew necessary supplies up to him, but beyond that, Jason had no contact with the outside world. Candie didn’t know how he did it. She would have gone crazy, cooped up by herself like that. But insanity wasn’t part of Jason’s job description.

Candie turned off the engine, leapt out of the plane, and flung herself into Jason’s arms. “Jason!”

“Candace, alhaja!” Jason returned her hug with crushing force. “Look at you. You’re all grown up.”

Candie kissed him on the cheek. “And you haven’t aged a day.”

And indeed he hadn’t. When he had left her after her father’s funeral, he had been a man built like a coyote, his skin sun-dried but barely wrinkled, his long black hair pulled behind his head, wearing his customary leather coat, silver earring, and necklace of skulls. And here he was today, same old Jason, not a wrinkle older, the only difference the sachet of garlic around his neck and the second silver earring in the same ear as the first. He was her father’s oldest friend, and had been like an uncle to Candie her whole life.

“Look, Candace,” Jason said, not budging toward his cabin, even as Candie looked impatiently that direction, toward the warmth within, protection against the chill mountain air and the eyes of prying gods. “We need to talk. It’s wonderful to see you again, but we need to talk.”

“About what?” Candie asked, already certain she knew where this was going. Given half a chance, everybody told her that this life she had was far too dangerous for her.

“I don’t think you should do this.”

Candie, about to object with a roll of her eyes, was pulled up short when Jason said, “I don’t think I should do this either.”

Candie looked at him in bemusement. She had never known Jason to back down from a challenge. “What? Why?”

“The man who found the book is dead.”

“What?” Candie felt a chill run up her spine and settle at the base of her skull.

Jason’s normally bright eyes were shadowed. “He was a sensible man, Candace. Stable. He had a family. Now I have a body in my hangar that I cannot touch for ten more days or else Ah-Puch will take me too. The book is cursed, Candace. Leave it in the mountains where it belongs.”

“Is his plane still here?” Candie asked, ignoring him.

Jason nodded. “I can’t leave the mountain, even to tell his family he’s dead. That was the deal I made with the Mayans in return for their protection from the other pantheons. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether I even have that.”

Candie turned and headed at a brisk pace toward the hangar, trying to ignore the crawling skin on her back as she remembered the owl’s cry last night. Jason wasn’t the type of person to shrink from danger--at least, he hadn’t been. The Jason she remembered was the man who had tried to steal the Tablets of Destiny from Marduk, their Babylonian guardian, and although he failed, he narrowly escaped with his life, which was more than enough. The Jason here on the mountain was someone else entirely.

“Candace, don’t go in there,” Jason said, hurrying after her.

“I want to see,” Candie said.

“You don’t need to see,” Jason said, catching hold of her arm and trying to pull her away. “Listen to reason, Candace. I was a treasure hunter for far longer than you. You know the sort of things I used to get away with. But this isn’t worth it. The Mayans may be conquered gods, but they’re still powerful enough to influence a man to kill himself.”

“He killed himself?” Candie looked at Jason sharply.

He nodded mournfully. “The Mayans consider suicide an honorable death.”

“I’m going in.” Candie pulled free of Jason and slipped through the hangar door. Jason didn’t follow her.

It was dim inside compared to the frigid sunshine without, but as her eyes adjusted, Candie made out the shape of a King Air 90, a twin-turboprop plane slightly larger than her Piper. In the rafters of the hangar, she caught the rustling of wings, but when she peered upward into the darkness, she couldn’t make out any birds. The air was somehow cooler in here than it had been outside. Candie walked slowly around the plane, giving the shadows in the corners of the hangar a wide berth. Just as you weren’t supposed to pass between the moon and a fresh grave, you didn’t step into deep shadow if you could help it. Things lurk in shadows.

She found the body in the shadow of the plane, under the empennage. The man had blown his brains out. The spatter of blood and gore on the ground and across the tail of the plane was still fresh, but at least the body hadn’t started to decay too badly yet. The gun that was the cause of death lay in a pool of blood. Candie swallowed back bile and backed quickly toward the hangar entrance. She should have listened to Jason. And yet she hadn’t quite wanted to believe him until she saw the body.

Candie turned around and nearly screamed, clapping her hands over her mouth. As if the dead man hadn’t been enough, now she was standing face-to-face with a woman too horrible to look at: a leering, bloated corpse with a noose around her crooked neck.

“I suggest,” Ixtab, goddess of suicide, said, “you do the same as Juan.” She grinned widely, exposing blackened gums.

Candie flinched backward. “You want me to do that?”

Ixtab nodded, but since her neck was broken, it made her head bobble eerily. “I’m offering you the same way out I did him. He was trying to take the book too.”

Candie frowned. “No he wasn’t. He just found it.”

Ixtab smiled, blowing a wave of putrid air at Candie. “Is that what Jason Gutierrez told you? Juan found the book. Then he took the book. But I convinced him that it would be better to avoid Ah-Puch’s anger. I suggest the same to you.”

Candie shuddered. “You’ve gotta be crazy if you think suicide is an easy way out. And there is no way in Mitnal I’m letting a suicide goddess scare me away from the find of the century. Do you know how long scholars have been searching for the Popol-Vuh?”

Ixtab looked hurt. “I’m just trying to be considerate.”

“Thanks,” Candie said dryly, “but I think I can handle this.” She turned toward the plane again, even though it made her spine tense to turn her back on the gruesome goddess.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Ixtab called after her in a friendly voice. When Candie glanced back, the goddess was gone and Jason was entering the hangar, pushing the doors wide open to let in the light and a brisk mountain wind.

“Candace,” he said. “Forget the book. It isn’t worth the danger.”

Candie stared at him. This was Jason? She couldn’t believe it. She set her jaw. “Why didn’t you tell me you tried to get Juan to take the book?”

Jason had the good sense to look abashed. “I didn’t want to put you in danger. I’ve been having dreams, Candace. Hearing owls.”

There went that shiver up her spine again, as Candie remembered the owl’s hoot last night. “That never stopped you before. And I’ve been in danger a million times, Jason. I can take care of myself. Is the book in here?”

Jason stared at her for a long moment, the expressions on his face warring between resignation and respect. At last he waved her away from the plane. “I’ll get it for you. Juan had a secret compartment. Fuel your plane. You need to leave as soon as I hand it over to you. Otherwise you’ll never make it out of here alive.”

Candie forced a wicked smile onto her face to hide the shaking in her knees, the same shaking she got just before any treasure run. The goal, once you had the artifact you were looking for, was to get out of the pantheon’s territory as quickly as possible, to avoid any retribution. It was those hours or minutes of uncertainty that every treasure-hunting adrenaline-junkie lived for, until the escape was complete and the purloined artifact could be presented to the world. As she topped off the fuel tanks, Candie even managed to whistle.

She was closing the left wing fuel tank when she heard the owl screech. Candie tensed automatically, shoulders hunching against the noise, and stayed facing the plane for a long moment, afraid to turn around. She tried to tell herself it was probably nothing, but if there was one thing stealing from the gods made you, it was superstitious. An owl--and an owl in daylight, even worse--meant death was near. Too near.

But the owl didn’t screech again, and Candie was eventually able to go around to the right wing to begin fueling there, though her heart was still pounding abnormally fast. She waved at Jason as he exited the hangar holding a dark wooden box and brought it to her plane.

“Where are you flying to?” he asked.

“Havana,” Candie said. The South American territories were usually the easiest to escape from, because they bordered the Caribbean territories so closely, and the Voodoo gods didn’t extradite and generally didn’t give a damn who you had pissed off—but only as long as you didn’t piss them off too, in which case you were officially, royally fucked.

“Good.” Jason looked up at her like he was trying to memorize her face. “I’m going to go clean up the hangar as best as I can without touching the body. Give me a shout when you leave.”

“Will do.” Candie watched him walk away and debated telling him about the owl she had heard, but decided that would only worry him further. It was a shame that this was what Jason had come to. So many things had changed over the last few years. The world no longer felt as large as it used to, and Candie no longer felt as invincible.

She finished fueling the right wing when she saw the man. He was standing by the hangar doors where no one had been a second ago, and there was a queer smile on his face. In fact, there was something rather odd about his face. Candie hastily capped the fuel tank and started around the nose of her plane. It looked like there was a black stripe around his eye and down his cheek, like a rotting wound. But that couldn’t be, because the only person who came to mind with a face like that was—

The hangar, and everything in it, exploded.

Candie screamed and threw herself to the ground as one of the hangar doors flew past, a burning cartwheel of flame, and narrowly missed her propeller. Jason had been in the hangar. And the man outside hadn’t been a man at all, but a god, one of the most feared Mayan gods: Buluc-Chabtan, the god of war, sacrifice, and violent death.

Candie leapt to her feet and started running for the burning hangar. Jason might still be in there, trapped. “Jason,” she screamed. “Jason!”

But the heat was too much for her, and she couldn’t even get close enough to slip inside, between the flames. “Jason,” Candie called one last time, but all she could hear was the crackle and pop of burning wood and melting metal.

Then, through the smoke and the flames, Candie caught the shape of a figure moving toward her. A smile of relief stretched itself across her face, faltered, and fell. Something wasn’t right. The figure lurched as it walked, like there was something wrong with its legs. Then the smoke cleared momentarily, and Candie saw what she had thought was Jason for what it really was.

It was Jason, that much was clear, but it was even clearer that what approached her now was only Jason’s body—what was left of it. The legs, which had seemed to move so oddly, were broken. Candie could see a shaft of bone sticking out of the left thigh. And every visible inch of Jason’s skin was blackened and burnt. His necklace of skulls had melted into his skin. All that Candie could have handled if it weren’t for Jason’s hair. It was tied with bells now, little bells made out of shrunken skulls, that clanked as he lurched toward her.

“Jason?” Candie whispered, even though she knew that this wasn’t him, not anymore. She took a step back as Jason came closer to the hangar entrance.

Then the burned lips pulled back into a skeletal smile.

Candie spun about and sprinted for her plane. She could hear Jason running behind her now, the clank of his bells coming faster and faster. He shouldn’t have been able to run with his legs broken like that. But on he came, faster with every step, as if something supernatural propelled him on. She didn’t want to admit what.

She was jerking open the door to the cockpit when he caught her, one burned arm wrapping around her neck and tightening. Candie screamed, gripping the doorframe with one hand while she groped around inside for the gun she kept under her seat, just in case. Her fingers touched metal; she cocked it, and shot over her shoulder.

The gun was loud in her ear, but it made Jason loosen his grip enough that a second shot was able to free her completely. Candie put her back against the plane, panting. Jason had stumbled, but he was still standing, in spite of the two bullet holes in his forehead. Candie shook her head, unable to believe it. There were no zombies here. Zombies were property of the Voodoo gods, and the Voodoo gods weren’t good at sharing. Whatever Jason had become, she had never encountered it before.

“Get back,” she said, shooting him in the chest. “I don’t know what the fuck you are, but get back!”

Jason smiled that skeletal smile again. “I,” he said, “am Ah-Puch.”

This time Candie managed to leap inside the cockpit, slam and lock the door before Jason could reach her. He hit the plane and snarled, but when Candie put both her hands on the window, fingers splayed, he stumbled back, the look on his face murderous. Candie glared back at him, but bravado and the magic number ten wouldn’t last forever.

The box with the Popol-Vuh was on the copilot’s seat. She started the engine and began her taxi. The sooner she was in the air and away from Jason’s dead, possessed body, the better. Only eight hundred miles to Cuba and safety.

Then she saw it, as she was nearing the end of the runway. Its eyes burned red like the fire in the hangar and its beak was a cruel hook. The owl was sitting in the ceiba tree, glaring at her. Candie grit her teeth until her face hurt and pulled back on the steering shaft. The plane left the ground, and soon the owl was out of sight behind her.

Out of sight, but not out of mind. Now that she was in the air, adjusting the elevator and engine power for level flight, Candie felt her whole body begin to shake. That had been far, far too close. You heard stories and stories about cursed Egyptian tomb robbers or archeologists who all died one after the other in strange accidents, but all that was nothing compared to pure Mesoamerican fury. Mayan gods didn’t fuck around, and if she hadn’t gotten into the air when she did, there was no telling whether she would have made it off the mountain at all.

The rain started a few seconds later, rattling across the plane from the dark clouds that were piling into the sky. Candie swore under her breath. She should have checked the weather conditions before flying away, but just try being a safe pilot with the corpse of an old friend possessed by a death god on the rampage. She could hope that what she was flying into would only be a mild storm, but she had a sinking feeling in her stomach that said the next couple hours were going to be anything but pleasant. She reached over to the copilot’s seat and pulled the box containing the Popol-Vuh into her lap. If she was going down, she was going down clutching this thing like a lifeline.

But as time went by and the rain continued unabated but not quite worsening, Candie began to wonder if maybe she had been wrong. There was rain, a little lightning, and a quartering tailwind that constantly buffeted her plane and made the handling rough, but it was nothing that she couldn’t fly in. The sky continued to look an ugly gray color that she didn’t like, but as long as the weather remained manageable, Candie didn’t see any harm in keep her course straight through the storm.

She began to have doubts, however, as the quartering wind became steadily worse. She couldn’t continue to fly safely with the wind like that, so she turned away from the wind, reluctantly amending her course. The wind had been throwing her off course as it was, anyway. At least, with the wind at her back now, she could decrease engine power and use the wind to push her along, conserving fuel until she reached Cuba. Hopefully the weather conditions there would be safe enough for her to land.

But the wind kept increasing, until a small worried voice at the back of Candie’s mind asked her if she had any idea what she was flying into. The winds had to be over ninety knots by now, and she had to keep her wings angled severely low just to keep the wind from forcing her into a climb.

And then she saw it. It was still a good twenty miles away from her on the sea, still half-formed and only just beginning to churn up the waves, but the sight alone was enough to send chills through Candie’s bones. It had been too much to hope for that Ah-Puch wouldn’t involve Hurakan in his fight. The dark funnel of the hurricane lashed the ocean, a deadly whip just waiting for her to come within striking distance. It already had her in its clutches, after all, so far in that there was no way she could possibly get out now. Unless she could skirt the edges of the storm, the possibility of survival seemed ludicrous.

That was when everything went wrong. The plane lurched suddenly, its right wing dipping dangerously, and Ah-Puch swung into view, one arm clinging to the wing while he wrestled with the door.

Candie tried frantically to compensate for the lack of lift before she entered a spin, the fingers of one hand automatically digging into the Popol-Vuh box like she thought it could give her protection from the figure rattling at the door.

And then Ah-Puch managed to wrench the door open, further unbalancing the plane. Wind swirled into the cockpit, screaming in Candie’s ears. The necklace of skulls burned into Jason’s flesh had become a necklace of eyeballs. “I guarded that book for centuries untold,” Ah-Puch howled.

Candie swallowed hard and forced herself to think, to speak. “I think that’s a little selfish,” she shouted, wrestling with the controls. “Knowledge like this is meant to be shared.”

Ah-Puch hissed and clawed at the copilot’s seat. “The Popol-Vuh is mine. Mine to guard, mine to protect, mine!”

“No it isn’t,” Candie said, kicking his hand away with her foot. “It belonged to the Mayans. You were just the guardian. And as soon as I make it to Cuba, this book belongs to the world.”

“The world doesn’t deserve it.”

“Then it at least belongs to the descendents of the original Mayans. Who are you to decide anyway?”

Ah-Puch hissed and spat, shaking his head angrily until the bells on his hair jingled. In the wail of the wind, the discordant jangle sounded oddly like the screech of an owl. Candie’s grip tightened on the box reflexively, her heart pounding.

“I’m taking the book to Cuba,” she stammered as she pulled the gun out from under her seat again. “So get the fuck out of my plane.”

She shot twice, once in the hand and once in the arm. For a moment, Ah-Puch was suspended in the air outside her plane. Then Jason’s body spun away, the door Ah-Puch had opened banging back and forth in the wind. Candie leaned across to close the door as the plane shuddered, once, as though something large had struck it. Then the world dropped out from underneath her.

The nose of the plane went first, diving down toward the gray waves below. The spin began next, as the one wing that had been higher than the other threw off the plane’s angle of descent. Candie’s world became a gray vortex of wind and rain and waves and plane and hurricane. She screamed. Impossible. Impossible. She couldn’t die here. She couldn’t let Ah-Puch keep the book hidden from the world for another century. She couldn’t drown beneath the waves with her plane, forgotten by the world. She had a name to make for herself. She had a whole life ahead of her. She had a goddamn hotel room reserved in Havana.

Candie released her grip on the Popol-Vuh box and pulled back on the throttle, giving the engine as much power as she dared. She returned the ailerons to a neutral position. The ocean loomed up before her and her lips moved in silent prayer. She stamped down on the left rudder pedal and felt the spin ease off. Thank the gods, thank the gods. But she was still stalling. The choppy surface of the ocean was closer than ever now. Candie pushed the elevator control back, her heart in her throat. She had fallen thousands of feet, nearly too far, and if she couldn’t pull out of this then that was it. The end.

And then she felt it: the catch of wind across the wings of her Piper, the feeling of buoyancy again, of lift, of flight. Candie gently adjusted the controls, brought the nose up, and leveled out. At first Candie thought she was just looking out the window through the rain again, until she realized she was crying. She was alive. She had fought death and won.

The Popol-Vuh had tumbled from its box and fallen to the floor of the cockpit when Candie entered her spin. She picked up the ancient book now, gently running her fingers over the cracked vellum pages. Her breath came shaky. She was holding history in her hands. It was the kind of thing she’d risk her life for again and again. It was what her father had died for. All the gold and jewels in the world couldn’t compare to what she held right here. And she had stolen it from the Mayan god of death himself.

Candie wiped her eyes and managed a quaky laugh. She looked out past the nose of the airplane, at the glint of daylight just across the horizon. The hurricane was behind her, already preparing to vent its anger on the coast. Candie grinned her defiance at the world. This was what she lived for.