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dead. Covered in a layer of blood. Ruiz forced himself to stare and take notice. Blood had poured out of all of them.
    From their eyeballs, their nostrils, ears, mouth, every opening. Skin that wasn't covered in blood had angry black welts crisscrossing it with open pustules.
    Ruiz finally turned away. Harrison was staring. Ruiz grabbed his arm. "We must go, senor! Now!"
    "We must look for survivors," Harrison said.

    Ruiz shook his head. "There are none."
    "We must check all the huts."
    Ruiz frowned. "All right. I will do it. Go back to the boat. We must go downriver as soon as I get back."
    Ruiz quickly ran to the next hut. It was empty. The next four held bodies, or what had once been bodies but were now just masses of rotting flesh and blood.
    In the next-to-last hut there was a person lying on the floor. A young woman.
    She turned her head as Ruiz opened the curtain. Her eyes were wide and red, a trickle of blood rolling like tears down her cheeks. Her skin was covered with black welts.
    "Please!" she rasped. "Help me."
    Ruiz stepped in, every nerve in his body screaming for him to run away. He knelt next to the woman. Her face was swollen and her breathing was coming in labored gasps. From the smell, there was no doubt she was lying in her own feces.
    Suddenly the woman's hands darted forward and she grabbed the collar of Ruiz's shirt. With amazing

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    strength she half pulled herself off the fouled mat, toward Ruiz's face. Her mouth opened as if she were going to speak, but a tide of black-red matter exploded out of her mouth into Ruiz's face and chest. He screamed and slammed his arms up, but couldn't break her grip. Struggling to his feet, he moved backward to the door, but the woman was still attached to him.
    He jammed the muzzle of his pistol into her stomach and pulled the trigger until no more rounds fired. The bullets literally tore the woman in half, but even in death her hands held on. Ruiz threw his gun out the door, then pulled his bloodied shirt up and over his head and left it there, clutched in her dead fingers.
    He staggered out into the clearing river, heading toward the block and the boat. "We must go back!" Ruiz screamed in the direction of the boat as he wiped at the blood and vomit on face. "We must go back!"

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    -4-

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    Yakov was seated on a stone block, his flashlight wedged between his large feet, pointing straight ahead. He had a camera in his hands and he shot several pictures of the flat stone set into the wall in front of him. Satisfied, he put the camera away. Then he pulled out a notebook and a pad of paper.
    The notebook held copies of high rune symbols—the language of the Airlia—and the translation of those symbols, at least those Section IV had been able to make over the last fifty years, which was to say less than 25 percent of those they had found.
    Slowly and carefully, Yakov began translating the runes on the stone. It was frustrating work and would have been impossible, except that Yakov had a very good idea of what he was looking at.
    It was a record of history. Or, more appropriately, the end of a history for a people. Tiahuanaco had been founded in 1700 B.C. Historians agreed on that. But when the Incans began expanding their empire and came across the city in the thirteenth century, they found an empty place, devoid of human life. Sometime around A.D. 1200 this teeming city, home to several hundred thousand souls, and the empire it commanded for over 2,500 years, running along the Andes, down to the

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    Pacific Coast in the west and deep into the Amazon rain forest in the east, had simply disappeared.
    What had happened to the people? It was a question no one had the answer to.
    Except now, translating the stone as best he could, Yakov had that answer, and it was one he had feared to find. There were two symbols that he had seen before, at other places on the planet's surface, that he recognized all too well. It gave the reason:
    The Black Death.
    Rain