Sheathing her knife, Zahra drew her Glock. She refrained from shooting him in the back and, instead, she used the firearm as a hammer. Zahra was mindful of the trigger, keeping her index finger off it. She leaped forward and bashed the gunman over the head with the steel slide. He crumpled in on himself but hadn’t been knocked unconscious. Zahra didn’t give him a chance to recover. She treated his skull like a soccer ball and kicked him in the temple as hard as possible.
That did it.
Zahra grabbed his boots. Using mostly her right arm, she dragged him off the main road and into the darkness behind the hut. The effort of moving his body caused her head to swim. Zahra was losing blood fast. She needed to rest, but the voices shouting at one another across the city backseated that idea. She’d need to escape this place first.
There had to be one. The builders would have needed another access point besides the one Zahra had used. She glanced up, but quickly deduced that the residents would have used an entrance that was less…
Listening for movement, Zahra heard nothing and moved on.
Staying low, she continued toward the middle of Z, stopping at one of the structures that ringed what looked like a ceremonial altar. The light coming down from the ceiling illuminated the city center nicely. The sight caused Zahra’s stomach to lurch.
There were more bodies here. Hundreds of them.
“Oh, god,” she mouthed silently. What struck her the most about the grisly sight wasn’t the numbers. It was the smell. Some of the dead were recent kills — fresh enough to reek of decomposition. Zahra focused on the ground around the bodies, and her eyes opened wide. It was wet. Some of the blood that had been spilled was only a couple of days old.
Looking past the mayhem, Zahra could barely see something else. The other side of the cenote was lost in the dusky haze, but she thought she saw a tunnel. That would be her target.
She kept to the outskirts of the city center and hugged the front of the ring of buildings. It would have been quicker to go straight through, but she would have left herself open for attack from all directions. There was nowhere to hide, either. She made it to the three o’clock position before something caught her eye. Two bodies had been laid on raised altars out in the middle of the carnage. For whatever reason, they had been placed in more prominent places than the rest.
Zahra stopped and checked the eastern road. It was clear. Then she looked back toward the duo of altars. She growled as her adventurous side took over. Slinking away from the relative safety of the darkness, Zahra skirted across the open expanse. She made her way to the altars, tiptoeing through the revolting, carnal exhibition. Zahra took one more look around the immediate area before mounting the short staircase beneath the ceremonial stone slabs.
The men were long dead. Based on their clothing, Zahra estimated that these two had been here for nearly one hundred years. Interestingly enough, the particular styles looked British. The pants and the boots were a dead giveaway. Both men’s shirts had been ripped open… as had their chest cavities. Zahra sneered in disgust and entered the space between both altars. She tripped on a rectangular object that had been veiled by the shadows created by the overhead light.
Glancing down, Zahra knelt and picked up the object.
“A book?” she whispered, looking it over.
It was leather-bound and well-used despite it being here for nearly a century. Zahra carefully opened the cover with an artist's touch and examined the script adorning the first page. It wasn’t a book, per se. It was a journal.
“Jack Fawcett.”
This was the first time any of Joe or his team had entered the lost city. To his knowledge, no outsider had stepped foot inside the hellish place in decades — and for good reason. The stories did not end well for those curious and foolish enough to explore it. Even now, Joe could feel the icy chill of Death just over his shoulder. Soon, he and his team would be beckoned to the underworld by the evil that inhabited Z.
“Where are you?” Joe muttered.
The question wasn’t just meant for Zahra. He was also looking for this tribe of Amazonians. He had never seen one of the fabled tribesmen before, but those that had encountered them said that they moved like ‘ghosts in the night.’ Another man called them ‘spectral hunters.’ As the years went by, the people of Z had become something of a supernatural legend.
