Mayan prophecy

 Excerpt from "After the Maya"

....... Hidalgo slewed the pickup around with a squeal of tires and followed the Beetle down the ramp onto the highway. Osram had just realised he was running without lights and switched them on. 

Fring peered through the windshield, trying to spot the Beetle. “There he is, behind that big semi! Just keep in touch with him.” 

Hidalgo was quiet for a moment. “He’s tailing somebody. See how he keeps changing lanes to make up ground.” 

“I think you’re right, plus he’s going pretty much as fast as that old bug will go!”

 “It’s the pickup. He’s tailing that pickup.” 

Fring looked for the pickup, “I see it!” 

Hidalgo changed lanes and sped up, “Do you see what is strapped on the load bed?” 

Fring shook his head, “Would you believe it!” 

Hidalgo glanced at Fring, his face expressionless, showing no pleasure in the chase. “That’s the original.” 

“It’s got to be. Just hold this position. They won’t spot us. If the pickup breaks, we go after it.” 

“Agreed.” 

Clifton took an exit and branched off onto a paved country road. By now it was dark and there were no other vehicles going that way. 

“I think he’s figured we’re tailing him.” 

“Looks like it.” Hidalgo gunned the engine, overtook the Beetle and tucked the pickup in behind Clifton. “Now he’s not going anywhere.” 

Clifton shot down a side road and through a set of farm gates, throwing up dust in his wake. The road opened up onto a wide area of level dirt, bounded on three sides by sheds. For a moment they lost sight of Clifton’s pickup through the dust. Hidalgo did not see the parked tractor until it was too late. His pickup ploughed into the giant rear wheel on the tractor, smashing the radiator in a cloud of steam. 

Fring was out of the damaged vehicle first. He spotted Clifford’s pickup crest a rise behind the sheds, stop, then reverse out of sight behind the buildings. For the first time he noticed the buildings were backlit by a pulsing, roaring orange light. Fring ran for the opening in the front of the main shed, closely followed by a limping Hidalgo. 

The inside of the shed was vast, built into the high ground behind and divided into a number of levels, with mezzanine platforms joined by catwalks. Fring almost collided with a worker in a heavy overall, protective boots and wearing a fireproof helmet that extended to the man’s shoulders. The worker was engrossed in arranging rows of interconnected boxes, in their hundreds, on the glistening wet, concrete floor. 

Hidalgo slipped on the wet surface as he careened through the door opening, falling to his knees. As he made to stand up, his eyes were drawn to the source of the pulsing light at the far upper reaches of the shed. A furnace door opened and a giant foundry ladle wobbled forward, suspended from the steel roof girders on a crane hook. At each lurch of the bubbling crock, a dribble of fiery larva threatened to escape over the rim, only to be held back by an invisible physical force within the molten core.

Chapter 25

Clifton backed his pickup onto the loading ramp, crunching the tailgate against the restraining bollards. Unclipping the cargo straps he snatched up a length of pine board and levered the meteorite over the edge of the loading dock. The iron mass bounced off the concrete lip on the safety barrier and fell with a ringing clang onto the wide leather feed belt below. The belt jerked steadily forward on its chain drive, tipping the meteorite, together with an assortment of iron scrap, into the bubbling foundry cauldron.

Smoke erupted from the surface of the shimmering larval ooze, accompanied by a dense shower of burning fragments, some so bright in their incandescence that they hurt the eyes of the foundry workers behind their heavy black goggles. Clifton shielded his eyes with a hand and stumbled back against the side of the pickup, his hand and face lit up blue, vermilion and violent white from the radiation emitted by rare metals and elements in that lump of iron. 

The molten iron smoked and sputtered at the lip of the slowly-tipping foundry vessel, finally defying the elastic surface tension in a wobbling yellow bulge, surging over the lip and into the crucifix moulds arrayed one hundred per row on the floor of the foundry. The molten river surged down each row, filling mould after mould in a quivering, shimmering smoking release, before rolling on to form the next Christ on the cross, His tortured face pressed into the compressed sand like a gritty shroud. 

Hidalgo swung the shovel above his head and brought the blade crashing down on the smoking row of rapidly cooling metal trinkets. The barely solidified crosses, each with its messianic, sacrificial traveller nailed securely in place, were freed from their concrete caskets and arced into the air, raining down, sizzling, on the slick wet floor. 

A steaming relic that had skidded to a stop up against his moccasin and Hidalgo kicked at it. Broken and crucified figures of that patron of the conquistadors, an army strong in number, stared heavenward with cold iron eyes from beneath their crowns of thorns..........................

After the Maya at  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009WZWQ56