"Jerry Oltion - Laztec" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

Laztec
Jerry Oltion

When the children in the car in front of him turned around in their seats and screamed, Mimilticatl realized he'd left his face at home.

It was too late to go back for it. He was committed to going through the light when it turned green, and that would put him on 91 going west; he would lose at least fifteen minutes even if he tried turning around at the next exit, and he didn't think he had fifteen minutes to spare. The old woman, Maria Gonzales, was close to death, and he had many miles yet to drive if they were to reach the altar in time.

She sat beside him, oblivious, the seatbelt holding her upright. Her face looked little better than his; waxy, pale, the face of an old woman whose heart was about to give out. Her maize-yellow ceremonial cloak with its royal turqoise trim--wrapped under her left armpit and tied over her right shoulder in the way of her ancestors--only accentuated her sallow color.

"Hold on, Maria," he said to her, not knowing if she could hear him anymore or not.

The children were pointing now, their fingers quivering as they tried to explain to the driver--their mother?--what had startled them so. Mimilticatl felt a brief surge of stamina at their terror, and he let his foot off the brake so his car, a red '87 Firebird, rolled closer.

The drivers and passengers in the other cars around him at the stoplight stared straight ahead, oblivious. Most of them were talking on car phones, and some were tapping at the keyboards of laptop computers wedged into the spaces between dashboard and windshield. Faceless drivers were nothing new to them; they hadn't seen anyone else on the road for years.

Even so, Mimilticatl supposed he should try to disguise his condition somehow, if only to keep the driver of the car in front of him from reporting him on her car phone. He could probably form an illusory face if he exerted the last of his power, but he couldn't afford to do that. He hadn't been able to for weeks, which was why he had resorted to wearing a mask. Any strength he drew would have to come from Maria, and she couldn't spare any more. So he leaned over her lap and flipped open the glove box, rummaged through the napkins and the L.A. city maps for a felt pen, and sat back up in the seat just as the light changed. Dividing his attention between the road and his rearview mirror, he followed the traffic onto the freeway and began drawing eyes and nose and mouth onto his blank visage.

It would only fool people from a distance. He would have to think of something else when he got to the museum, but for now this would have to do.

This wouldn't be necessary if I had more worshippers, he thought, but Maria was the only one left, and she was so far gone her belief was no longer enough to define his being. She had never been very visual in her imagination anyway, which had made it doubly hard. He loved her even so, and it hurt to think of cutting her heart out with an obsidian dagger, but he could see no other option. The concept of blood sacrifice disgusted him, but the practice of it nonetheless revitalized him, and had done so for centuries. He only hoped her frail heart wouldn't stop before he could taste its life-giving arterial blood, and thus give himself a few more years to seek out another following.

It had probably been a mistake, coming north to the United States, but like most mistakes, it had seemed like a good idea at the time. Mexico was lagging behind its northerly neighbor in practically every way, and the Aztec gods appreciated a high standard of living as much as anyone. Southern California offered everything they lacked in Mexico: a technical civilization, hordes of people looking for something to believe in, and enough violent death to support a whole pantheon. When Huitzilopochtli had offered to lead the gods and what was left of their worshippers northward, just as he had led the first Aztecs to power in Tenochtitlan so many centuries ago, they had followed him without question.

The trouble was, the few dozen gods who survived the trip soon learned that gang violence gave them sustenance, but not nourishment. They needed the voluntary deaths of their own worshippers in order to thrive, and the few of the faithful who remained couldn't support them both physically and psychically. The bigger, more extravagant gods like Huitzilopochtli and Quetzalcoatl were the first to starve, losing their forms and gradually dissipating into the ether from which they'd been born, but the rest of them followed soon enough. Now only Mimilticatl remained.

He had been one of the minor deities, part of the pantheon laughingly called the "Four hundred rabbits" even by the faithful. God of the Wheel in a society where the only wheels were on children's pull-toys, he had been the least of them all. Now he was in a society that practically worshipped the wheel, but not him. Most of them--even his own people!--worshipped a dead carpenter even older than Mimilticatl.

And the meek shall inherit the Earth, he thought sourly. Much good will it do us.


The rumble of lane markers beneath his tires warned him he was drifting. He jerked the car back into the middle of the lane, checked to be sure he wasn't about to rear-end the station wagon full of kids, then turned his attention back to his drawing. The nose was giving him trouble. He'd drawn a triangle just below his eyes, but it hadn't looked right so he'd tried coloring it in, but that had only made him look like a jack-o'-lantern.

Great. How was he going to get into the museum looking like that? He wished they could have just done the sacrifice on the dining table at home, but of course that wouldn't work. The altar had to be sacred to the worshippers, not the god, and nothing would do for Maria but the altar her ancestors had used, now on display at the museum in Exposition Park.

The tires rumbled over the lane markers again, and this time the driver beside him honked her horn. Maria started at the noise, a good sign, but when Mimilticatl turned his makeshift face toward her, the purple-haired teenage girl driving the low-rider Volkswagen he had nearly hit veered suddenly into the next lane, narrowly missing a bread truck. Obviously the face needed work. Mimilticatl continued to draw, but less than a mile later the mirror filled with flashing blue and red light.

The cop was right on his tail. No way could Mimilticatl lose him. In better times, he could have incinerated him with a blast of divine fire, or stopped his heart with a glance, but now he would have to try talking his way out of trouble. He pulled across the now-empty lanes to his right, stopping in the emergency parking lane, and hurriedly smudged out the nose and tried again while he waited for the cop to get out of his car.

He was white, not a good sign. Mimilticatl would have preferred a Chicano, but his luck was running out along with Maria's life. The cop stepped up to the side of the car, staying well back of the window, and said, "Your license, please."

Mimilticatl dug his wallet out of his pants pocket and handed over his driver's license. That had a face on it--his real one, too, taken before he had degenerated so badly--but even so the feathers and serpent scales made him look like an octogenarian on a bad hair day.

The cop noticed the obvious difference between that and his present appearance. "Going to a party, Mr...."

"Mimilticatl," Mimilticatl said. "You may call me Milt if the name is difficult for you. And I'm taking one of my subjects to the sacrificial altar at the Museum of Natural History."

"Subjects? You a professor?" The cop laughed at his own joke.

"I'm an Aztec religious leader," Mimilticatl said, letting his voice take on a sincere note of wounded dignity.