The Third Antichrist (5 page)

On the very last day of his confinement, Dracul requested that the old monk reread him some of the key passages about the Second Coming, so that he could commit them to memory. This the old monk refused to do. When Dracul finally left the old monk’s care, however, the hermit grudgingly gave him a tattered copy of the Bible for his very own use.

Dracul secreted it in his new astrakhan coat, alongside the three silver candlesticks, the two icons, and the golden-coloured communion tray that he had pilfered from the chapel earlier that morning.

Diablada Cenote, Yucatan, Mexico
El Dia de los Muertos

(The Day of the Dead)
2 November 2009

7

Despite the funereal splendour of his adoptive name, Abiger Delaigue Fortunatus de Bale, Comte D’Hyères and Pair de France, Marquis de Seyème and Chevalier de Sallefranquit-Bedeau, was not a man easily given to mourning.

Abi’s twin brother, Vaulderie, was almost certainly dead. But that was just the way of things. If Abi had lost both of his legs to an anti-personnel mine, he would have viewed the loss equally pragmatically, and got on with learning to run on those fin contraption things you saw on TV ads for breakfast cereal. Or if he had contracted a terminal disease – gut cancer, say, or a fucked-up heart – he would have shrugged his shoulders and taken his medicine. Surgery. Pills. Death. Whatever it took.

But drowning whilst still in one piece, and with all his mental faculties intact, in a sheer-sided limestone sinkhole that resembled nothing so much as a prison-issue shit-encrusted lavatory pan, made Abi very angry indeed.

As far as his late brother was concerned, the two of them would meet again in either heaven or hell, depending on the luck of the draw. Abi could see Vau now, straight out of a Judgement Day painting, forging towards him in Satan’s antechamber, eager to give him a personal guided tour around the River of Fire.

‘Look at that, Abi. You see those couples over there? Climbing out of their graves? All dressed in white? And the animals? Each carrying a heart in their mouth? Those are the lost souls. And those animals are carrying the hearts of the creatures they killed and ate during their lifetimes. They are all heading towards God, who will sit in Final Judgement over them.’

‘And what about us, Vau? Will He judge us, too? Will He consign us to the Devil?’

‘Oh no, Abi. We are the Corpus Maleficus. We’ve already been judged. We have performed our function. So we are the righteous ones. All our sins have been forgiven.’

Abi sensed his mind starting to wander. Maybe his brain was getting waterlogged? Righteous? Him? He shook his head and increased his grip on the two dead bodies he was using as flotation devices. They weren’t reeking yet, but it wouldn’t take long.

Somewhere in the murky water below him lay a Suzuki, also filled with dead men. Also with suppurating wounds. But those ones weren’t as fresh as the bodies surrounding him on the surface. The Mexican narcos in the car below him had been there since the day before, so God alone knew what they’d already done to the water table.

What a joke. He’d probably end up dying of thirst in a million gallons of terminally polluted Evian.

Abi drifted back inside his head. He would miss Vau. His enthusiasm. His gullibility. His dimness. But above all his sheer convenience as a conduit for the thoughts Abi would otherwise have to keep to himself. Who could he bully now? Who could he feel superior to? Rudra? Dakini? Nawal? Christ. Fate and the whims of their adoptive mother had left him in command of a trio load of freaks.

And now here he was, mentally and physically intact, floating fifty feet down in the bowl of a Yucatan sinkhole whose sheer sides, and sheer isolation, made any thought of rescue impossible. He had no cell phone. He had no weapon. The owner of the crystal meth factory he and his siblings had inadvertently stumbled on during a compromised weapons deal had seen to that.

All Abi could do was to float aimlessly around in God knows what depth of water, the bodies of his brothers and sisters, his enemies and his erstwhile victims, half alive, half dead, first rotting, then bloating, then leaching their body matter into the piss-coloured water surrounding him. And the only emotion he could summon up was anger. A visceral, all-consuming, all-encompassing, anger.

It was the sudden extinguishing of hope that had produced this curious effect.

Just twenty minutes before, when Abi had already given up any thought of ever getting out of the cenote alive, he had unexpectedly heard shouting. Seen his enemies – the enemies who had until recently been taunting him, and calling on him to refund them ten million dollars in compensation for the destruction of their factory and the crippling of their chief – toppling off the lip of the cenote and plunging down into the pool beside him. Then he had seen his brother, Oni – still alive, still fighting for his family and for the Corpus Maleficus – appear on the cenote edge, fifty feet above him, brandishing a Stoner M63.

Oni had come back to save them all in the very nick of time. Oni the Barbarian. Oni the lemming killer. Oni the
deus ex machina
. The mighty one. His banshee of a mother’s seven-foot tall, tame albino.

It was then that the not quite dead drug cartel chief had reared up from his prone position on the rim of the cenote and shot Abi’s brother in the head. Oni had hesitated for a moment, as if not entirely sure that his brain really had been blasted out through the back of his skull. Then he had toppled over the edge of the sinkhole, his body creating a bow wave that had rocked the four remaining Corpus members like flotsam in the wake of the
Titanic
. And which had set the bodies of the dead and the nearly dead bobbing and jouncing like a jar full of corks.

Then the terminally perforated mafioso had grinned down at Abi, sucked on the barrel of his automatic, and blown out the top of his own skull. Way to go,
pendejo
.

But all this left Abi with one major problem. How to get himself, his remaining brother, and his two remaining sisters, out of the cenote and onto dry land before time, gravity, and pollution took their inevitable toll.

8

Abi latched onto a couple of the dead bodies and transformed them into a makeshift buoyancy device.

Dakini swam towards her brother. She grabbed one of his bodies and rested her chin on it. She twitched her lips like a horse. ‘Ugh. This one’s been shot in the head. I can see his brains through the hole. And he’s starting to reek.’ She sniffed a couple of times, her nose near the corpse’s ear. ‘It’s sort of like a mixture between liquorice and dog’s meat, with a bit of dead mouse thrown in for good measure.’

Abi fought down a retch. Dakini had always been the grossest of his siblings. As a child she had been in the habit of dissecting farm animals whilst they were still alive in order to check for nervous spasms and signs of respiratory failure.

‘Exactly how long is he going to float for? That’s what we need to know. You’re the scientist, Nawal. What’s your estimate?’

Nawal trod water in front of him. ‘That’s simple. He’ll float until the oxygen trapped inside his lungs and the air trapped inside his clothes is replaced by water. Then he’ll sink to the bottom until the bacteria in his gut and chest provide enough carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, and methane to send him back up to the surface again. It’s a bit like reflating a balloon. Sometimes the bodies will sink once again until they’ve generated more gas, and then they’ll pop up for a second time – the police call those ones “refloaters”. Face-first bodies, which are dead before they hit the water, tend to float for the longest, because the air can’t escape from their lungs. It’s obvious when you think about it. They used to think that women floated face up and men floated face down. Something to do with sex, I suppose – breast buoyancy, or the size of our arses. But that’s bullshit. Everybody floats face down. Look around you. You see anyone on their backs? I know research technicians who would kill for this sort of material. Face down is good for us, Abi, because the oxygen will remain trapped in their lungs for longer.’

Abi blew out his cheeks and rolled his eyes. ‘Anything else? Or are you finished?’

Nawal shook her head. ‘I think I’ve covered it all.’

‘Well if that’s the case, I suggest we gather all these floaters up, strip off their belts, and tie them together. Then we cut off their shirts and stuff their noses and mouths with them to keep the air in. Then we build ourselves a variation on the Raft of the Medusa. That way, we might even be able to get ourselves out of this fucking water and halfway dry.’

‘You don’t think that’s a bit ghoulish?’

‘Dying unnecessarily is ghoulish. Floating in a cenote amongst thirty decomposing bodies – some of whom we are related to – is ghoulish. And speaking of which, how long are we likely to last in this water?’

‘Last? You mean until we throw up our arms and let ourselves sink?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Depends if the water temperature is less than sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit in here or not.’

‘What are you talking about, Nawal?’

‘A normal, healthy person, fully clothed, and using a life jacket...’

‘We don’t have life jackets.’

‘But we’ve got the stiffs. Same effect.’

‘Okay. Continue.’

‘At forty to sixty degrees water temperature – well, you’ve got maybe three hours before hypothermia sets in. At thirty-five to forty degrees you can halve that. Less than thirty-five, you can halve it again.’

‘What are we talking about here, then?’

Nawal glanced up at the overhanging cliff. ‘The sun’s already gone in. We’ve had it for the day. So we’ll be in darkness – or near darkness – for the next sixteen hours. But I’d still call it seventy degrees or so in here. Like the man who just blew his brains out said, we could survive floating here for two or three days. Maybe more. Our main problem is going to be hunger.’

‘How about thirst? Would you want to drink this water?’

‘If I had to.’

‘Me too.’

‘Come on then. Belts off everybody. Let’s make ourselves a tight core of bodies, and tie the rest of them onto the sides, like ballast. How many do you think we have access to?’

‘I counted twenty-two in total. Including Oni and the doctor. But I may be short one or two. Shame that the big boss – the
cacique
– didn’t topple in too.’

‘That would have been too much to hope for.’

The four remaining Corpus members busied themselves constructing a raft out of the corpses.

‘What do we do when we’re finished with this, Abi? Switch on the TV and watch a rerun of
Prince Valiant
?’

Abi congratulated himself on having effectively set the tone for the quartet’s future interactions. ‘Business before pleasure, Rudi. Business before pleasure.’

9