The city was deserted. Everyone cleaned the
sweat of their heads as they began walking through the empty stone yards that
were covered in moss and roots. Most houses were made of solid rock but had
crumbled centuries ago due to earthquakes and the growth of plant life. It was
a beautiful but eerie sight, to see so many buildings all empty, no sign of
life. They were covered in beautifully done “bas reliefs” depicting various
images from the people that had apparently built the city.
Every member of the expedition was now
working, no longer trekking through the jungle to get nowhere. They had arrived
and this was their price. The camp was built very fast, consisting of sleeping
bags for everyone and mosquito nets to prevent people from getting sick during
their sleep. They also one tent for meetings only where they held several weird
apparatus and various maps of the region.
When they began really exploring the city,
they discovered it was much bigger than anything they had imagined and that
they need to have more people in to help them with the cause. They asked one of
the younger members of the party to go back to the town on the coast they
departed from in order to call for more people to help them. The kid complied
and left fast, on one of three donkeys they had brought with them.
An entire day passed before they realized most
of the art in the city depicted a fantastic creature: they were birds, in a
flock. But, according to the drawings, the flock could transform into a bigger,
gigantic bird that could sleep in the sun or have the power of the sun. That
last part wasn’t very clear yet, as there were only images and no alphabet in
any of the houses. The whole site was just about the imagining and the
architecture, which consisted in at least a hundred houses in a roughly cube
like form.
Meanwhile, others decided to make a map out of
the city and discovered the city was even bigger. Maybe it had been a very
large city in the past but had shrunk before finally falling to time or some
other reason. Some rocks looked older, and more affected by time. The site were
they slept, with the houses still holding on in most of their structure, had
apparently been abandoned. Some of the members of the team were sure this had
happened only a few centuries ago, maybe even only a hundred of years ago.
Others were not so sure.
The more ancient parts of the city were
difficult to recognize as the trees and the ground had quickly eroded the stone
floor. The specialists did some testing and discovered something strange: the
rocks on the “older” part of the city were actually not older than the rest.
Tests found out the whole city was only a few hundred years old, at most. So
something strange had happened were the center of the old town had not been as
affected as the rest of the city.
Two more days passed and some were already
worried about the boy. The trip back to the port should have only taken him a
day and he had been away for three. Some thought that maybe something bad had
happened to him but the strange thing was that, in their way there, they had
not encountered any ferocious animals or difficulties to surpass. They had cut
through the jungle and had to stand the mosquitoes and the heat but nothing
else. They realized they had never thought about it and decided, the ones that
were botanists and biologists, to make a tour around the ancient city to find
which species lived there.
The search was useless as they found only some
insects and a couple of bird species. Something was very wrong, as close by
regions were known because of their rich fauna and flora. And this place seemed
almost dead. Only the trees were really living there. Besides them, only some
ants seemed to play a role in the environment. The following day, they decided
to widen their range: they would walk a whole kilometer and then circle the
city. But again, nothing appeared. There were no mammals or big reptilians, no
frogs or big birds. They weren’t even nests in the trees. The botanists took
some tree bark and decided to do tests on it to see if they jungle floor was
somehow toxic.
By the fifth day, the team was a little bit
hopeless. They had traveled half way around the world and the place they had
arrived to seemed dead, with nothing that interesting to see. All the bas-reliefs
had been accounted for, not that it made any difference. In every house or
building, there were exactly the same drawing of the flock of birds and the one
of the gigantic bird attacking people with fire. For all intents and purposes,
the people that had lived there had been dead for only a hundred years but had
not made any real advancement except for their architecture.
Some scientists, in the meeting held late at
night, thought it was possible that the people that lived there had come from some
other region and had quickly left after realizing the area was, somehow, toxic.
But the tree bark’s tests didn’t show any massive toxicity. It was very normal
although its cells looked strange in the microscope. They looked like the cells
of a younger tree and not as big as one of those who grew there. They decided
one night to stay only three more nights, in order to arrive at the port at the
same time that the boat that took them to the capital city and then to their
home.
The thought of home was interrupted the
following day, when one of the few women in the group yelled desperately. Many
came to her aid and realized she had discovered something awful: the kid they
had sent to the port had been found hanging inside one of the houses of the old
city. The woman had woken up early to check the art there again and had found
the poor creature. They took him down from there and realized he had a big
splinter on each eye, almost used as a stake.
The child was buried that afternoon but then,
something else happened. It rained. But it wasn’t normal rain. It felt cold at
the start, like normal rain, but then turned warm and strange. They soon
realized it wasn’t water coming down from the sky but blood. Hot, red blood
dripped from the trees and onto everything they had around. When it finally
ended, all their clothes were tainted red, and so were their faces. Some of the
members of the group were really scared, wanting to live the place as soon as
possible. But that couldn’t be done just like that because they had to prepare,
organize and that would take a while with so much to pack.
They started the following day, after cleaning
the blood of most of the clothes. But then, other people started to feel sick.
They vomited and were tainted green. Their face grew even greener as they got
worst. They had to delay their journey back as half of the scientists were sick
in just a few hours. They had all eaten the same thing and had been careful
only to drink water from their personal stash. They could only blame the blood
rain, that had maybe poured into their mouths or eyes and then had contaminated
them.
Soon, only the leading expeditionary was fine.
The rest were all sick and vomiting. The ones that had become sick first, were
the same tone of green than the surrounding forest. That had become sort of
paralyzed, unable to move at all. The man that had led them all there was not
feeling sick but guilty. He had convinced personally everyone there to come
with him to explore this jungle, promising them fame and glory, as well as a
best name in the scientific community He had traced every one of them, had
asked for the money and had paid many of their expenses with his own savings.
And now, everyone was dying. It was hard for
him to sleep the last night, before leaving, but when he finally did, his sleep
was soon filled with nightmares and sweat. He woke up in the middle of the
night and realized there were thousands of birds flying over the jungle. They
were circling the center of the city. He stood up fast and tried to find his
fellow expeditionary men but they were nowhere to be found. Somehow, they had
disappeared.
The man didn’t stood by and decided to run out
of the forest, that had become thicker all of a sudden. He felt the presence of
the birds and stumbled upon roots and rocks as he ran. When he fell again to
the ground, he helped himself up with a tree and then screamed, like no one had
screamed in the jungle before. The birds then flew down onto him and formed a
bigger creature, or so it seemed. They attacked him viciously and killed him,
drinking his blood and the flying away. Where the remaining of the scientist
where, there was a young tree and, between the bark, there was the shape of a
face, a screaming face.