Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull Read online

  “Have a life after you left? Guess again, buster.”

  Indy raised a hand. “That’s not what I—”

  “And it was a pretty good life, I might add.”

  “That’s great, I just—”

  “Pretty damn good life,” she added, punctuated with a sharp nod.

  Indy felt his blood rising. “Well, so have I, Marion!”

  She leaned on one hip. “Yeah? Still leaving that trail of human wreckage . . . or are you retired?”

  “Why, are you looking for a date, sister?”

  Marion took a threatening step toward him, but a guard grabbed her elbow. Off to the side, Mac was smiling broadly at her.

  Indy glared at him. “What’re you looking at, bub?”

  Marion fought the guard holding her. “Will you let go of me so I can punch that son of a—”

  Indy turned to her. “What are you mad at me for?”

  “How much time you got?” Further words died as one of the soldiers pressed the barrel of a pistol against her head.

  “Enough,” Spalko snapped. “Dr. Jones. You will help us.”

  She waved for the soldier to lower his pistol and raised her sword. She held it dead-steady toward Marion. An inch from her left eye.

  “A simple yes will do, Dr. Jones.”

  Indy sighed, frowning. “Aw, Marion. You had to go and get yourself kidnapped.”

  “Not like you did any better!”

  They simply stared at each other.

  Just like old times.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  LED AT GUNPOINT, Indy marched toward the camp’s bonfire. Mutt came with him, but Marion was kept under guard back at the tents, ensuring his cooperation. He had a thousand questions for the kid, wanted all the details of Marion’s life, but Dovchenko slapped Mutt in the back of the head every time he tried to speak.

  Spalko kept her rapier at Indy’s back.

  Still, an inexplicable lightness filled him, a surge of hope.

  Marion Ravenwood was here. He had not spoken to her in years. Yet as soon as Indy had laid eyes on her, it was as if no time had passed at all. He felt younger already, drawn back to their earlier time together. Even now his heart thudded stronger, his hip ached less, and the bruising wasn’t as tender.

  But Indy also recognized the danger they all faced.

  Marion’s life depended on what he could learn from Oxley. Spalko would punish Marion for any failure. And Indy could not let that happen.

  Ahead, lit by the lire, Indy spotted Ox seated on a log. The professor stared at the flames. If anything, he looked even thinner, sagging within his poncho, a frail shade of the man he’d once been.

  Mutt noted the professors sorry state, too. The kid’s face screwed up with fear and worry. “Man, what happened to him?”

  This earned another cracking slap from Dovchenko.

  “The crystal skull,” Indy answered. He glared at the giant Russian. That was Marion’s kid he was hitting!

  Indy reached the log and sat down next to Ox. At least his friend appeared calmer. Oxley had even donned a khaki hat, decorated with several bright feathers. The odd choice of apparel concerned Indy. The Oxley he knew preferred bowlers, checkered caps, even top hats for formal occasions. The tips of the feathers bobbed as a slight tremor shook the professor’s body. Oxley’s right hand trembled and jumped on his knee, some form of residual palsy.

  Still, Oxley glanced over to Indy. His bleary eyes widened with recognition. “Henry Jones Junior!”

  “That’s right, Ox!”

  A surge of relief flowed into Indy. Mac had been right. Ox was back! Indy had to hand it to the Russian ice queen. Spalko had been right about how to free his friend. He felt a measure of hope that all would work out fine.

  Off to the side, two soldiers hauled up a reel-to-reel tape, ready to record everything. Clearly, Spalko did not want to miss anything crucial. Or maybe it was some form of record for her, a personal diary of her accomplishments here.

  Behind Indy, Mac spoke to another soldier. “Just so you know, I’m giving three to one odds that the Yank figures out where the City of Gold lies.”

  Ignoring him, Indy focused his full attention on Ox. Despite recognizing Indy, his friend still looked addled around the edges. “Now listen, we need—”

  The professor grabbed Indy and said intently, “Henry Jones Junior!”

  Uh-oh.

  Indy glanced to Mutt, then back to the professor. The boy’s eyes also narrowed with worry and suspicion.

  Oxley’s fingers clutched harder at Indy. “Henry Jones Junior!”

  “We’ve established that, Ox.”

  Indy studied Oxley’s face. Something was wrong. The professor was back, just not all the way back. Indy read the frustration in his friend’s eyes, teetering at the edge of insanity, trying to find a bridge across.

  Words flowed out of Oxley’s mouth. “To lay their just hands on that Golden Key . . . that ope’s the Palace of Eternity.”

  Indy tried to make sense. “The palace of—?”

  Spalko interrupted, standing stiff at his shoulder. “He’s quoting from Milton. He’s said it before.” Disappointment rang in her voice . . . along with something more menacing. “What does it mean?”

  Indy took a deep, shuddering breath. He didn’t know. And Marion’s life depended on answering that question. He needed more information.

  “Harold, listen to me. I need you to tell me how to get to Akator . . . Ak-a-tor. Do you understand me? You must tell us or they’re going to kill Marion.”

  “Through eyes that last I saw in tears . . . here in death’s dream kingdom.”

  Oxley’s palsy grew worse. His right hand jerked and bounced. How much longer until he was bounding around the campfire again?

  Indy grabbed his wrist, trying to keep that from happening. “They’re going to kill Abner’s little girl, Ox. You remember Abner . . . and his daughter Marion, don’t you?”

  Oxley’s brows furrowed with his frustration. “Eyes! That last I saw in—”

  Indy squeezed the man’s quivering wrist. “How do we get there, Ox? You’ve got to be specific.”

  The palsy in the professor’s trapped hand only grew more intense. It drew Indy’s attention. Restraining Oxley’s wrist, Indy noted how the professor’s fingers were held pinched together, as if he were holding something. Indy remembered Ox dancing around the fire, his scrawny arm up in the air as if conducting an orchestra. His fingers had been pinched then, too.

  Indy stared down.

  He wasn’t trying to conduct an orchestra.

  He was scribbling in the air . . . and now on his knee.

  Indy swung to Spalko. “Get me paper and pen!”

  She yelled, and in seconds someone ran up with a notebook and a pen.

  One-handed, Indy flipped open the notebook to a blank page and stuck it under Oxley’s scribbling hand. He jammed the pen between the professor’s clenched fingers.

  Instantly ink flowed across the page as Oxley wrote. A crude picture formed on the blank sheet. Yet the professor seemed mindless of what he was doing. He wasn’t even looking down at the paper. His gaze remained fixed on Indy.

  “Henry Jones Junior.”

  “That’s right, Ox.”

  The professor leaned closer, his voice lowering conspiratorially. “Three times it drops. The way down. ”

  “I’m sure it does,” Indy said, focused on what Oxley was scribbling.

  The professor finished one drawing—waves, or the ocean. Indy flipped to a new blank page, and the drawing continued. A pair of closed eyes.

  Spalko leaned closer. She glanced with grudging admiration toward Indy, then back to the sketching. “He’s auto-writing! Of course, I should have seen this.”

  Oxley’s scribbling began to speed up, completing three more sketches:

  The sun with an arc across the sky.

  A snake with a flickering tongue.

  A horizon over mountains.

  Then the palsy slowed, an
d the pen fell from his fingertips.

  Spalko studied the scattered sheets. “What are they?” she asked. “Pictographs of some sort?”

  “No!”

  Indy shifted on his log and reached into a pocket of his jacket. His fingers discovered crinkled papers inside. They were still there, the pages he’d torn from the book at his home library. Pulling them out, he flattened them on his knee. He compared Oxley’s drawings with what was on those pages.

  A dictionary of Mayan symbols.

  Indy worked quickly. In his element, he bent over the pages and became lost to his surroundings. “They’re ideograms! Bits of Mayan language. I think I may be able to translate them.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  MARION SAT WITH her arms folded atop a camp table. Two guards flanked her, pistols in hand. The weapons weren’t necessary. She wasn’t going anywhere, not without her son.

  She stared toward the flames of the bonfire.

  He shouldn’t have come.

  She meant Mutt, but her eyes were on another.

  Even from here, Marion made out his shape, limned against the firelight, a battered fedora in place. Her eyes traced his shoulders, the crook of his head in deep concentration. She remembered all the late nights. She would be in bed, and he would be at his desk, poring over a thick book or studying some bit of antiquity by candlelight. She would wait for him to come to bed, no matter how long it took. He would eventually blow out the candle, slip from his clothes, and slide under the covers beside her.

  She would turn and kiss him, reminding him that life was more than history, that there was also a present waiting for him, too.

  And she had waited.

  Each night.

  But one night he never came home.

  Then another.

  Still she waited.

  Eventually, there was nothing but an empty side of the bed.

  She knew the truth then . . . as she knew now.

  The man had only one love.

  And it wasn’t her.

  So she had stopped waiting and turned her back. She found a good man, a home, a family. They had married. It had been a happy time: birthday candles, scabbed knees, Christmas trees, long green summers, and even longer winter nights with someone in her arms.

  Then a war stole that life away, too, snuffed it out like one of those midnight-burning candles, leaving her dark and empty.

  Only her son was left, a bright spark in the night.

  As she gazed at the bonfire, its flames ignited a bitter ember in her chest. Now he was here again. After so many years.

  As she stared toward the fire, she recognized a painful truth.

  Though she had moved on with her life, a small part of her—buried deep in her heart—had never truly stopped waiting for him.

  She recognized both this reality and the delusion that lay beneath it.

  She looked over at Mutt. She was no longer the carefree young woman who would drink men under the table on a wager. She was a mother, tempered by responsibility and life into something far greater. It was time to set aside such girlish fantasies.

  Still, her gaze drifted back to Jones.

  Her heart burned—not with passion, only anger.

  At Jones, at herself.

  She was done waiting.

  Mutt sat on the log as Jones worked on his pages. Off to the east, the skies had begun to brighten with the approach of dawn.

  He stared into Ox’s face. This couldn’t be the same man. The one who had taught him how to ride a bike, who had helped him pick out his prom tux, who had listened to him late in the night when he couldn’t deal with his mother. He’d been like a second father.

  Mutt reached out and tried to hold the professor’s shaking hand—but Oxley just jerked it out of his grip. Mutt leaned forward, trying to make eye contact.

  “Ox?”

  The man’s red-rimmed eyes stared off into nowhere, seemingly blind to the boy whom he had helped raise.

  “C’mon, Ox,” Mutt begged. “Look at me, man.”

  Mutt had lost one father to a war. He couldn’t lose another.

  But there was no response, no recognition, nothing.

  Mutt wiped at his eyes. “Please, Ox . . . I need you, man. I . . . I love you.”

  Mutt had never said that to Oxley, the man who had filled the void in his home and heart after his father died. Wasn’t love supposed to heal all?

  Oxley continued to stare into the firelight.

  Apparently not.

  “I think I got it!”

  Indy straightened and sifted through the papers. He brought up each sketch, one after the other.

  “Wave lines, that was water. A closed eye meant sleep. The sun with the arc across the sky stood for a span of time. The horizon and the snake represent vastness and a river.”

  Spalko shook her head, not comprehending.

  Indy slowly put it all together, like working a jigsaw puzzle. “Water and sleep. A span of time. A vast river.” He swung to Spalko and shook the papers at her. “Don’t you see? These are directions.”

  Her eyes grew larger.

  Indy sprang to his feet. “I need a map!”

  “Over this way,” Spalko said.

  She waved them to their feet. All of them, including Oxley and Mutt. Dovchenko and the guards did not leave any choice in the matter.

  The group shifted across the camp to where Marion was being held at gunpoint. She sat slumped in a chair before a table. Indy moved toward her, but Marion glanced up at him. He read the fiery look in her eyes and shied away, but her gaze mellowed into something warmer as she spotted her son.

  Mutt went to her side, hugged her, then took a guarding position over her. The kid clearly was not going to let anyone hurt her. And from the way Mutt glared in his direction, that included Indy.

  A soldier ducked into a nearby tent and returned with a rolled-up map. He unfurled it across the table and weighted the corners down with rocks.

  “Planning a vacation, Jones?” Marion asked.

  “Just looking for somewhere well off the beaten path.”

  “I’ve heard Hell is nice this time of year. You should try it.”

  “Already been there, sweetheart. Remember that year we spent together?”

  Marion’s eyes narrowed slightly, wounded. Indy regretted his words, but it was too late to take them back. Her features hardened. He silently cursed himself. What was he doing?

  Spalko interrupted them by slapping a hand on the map. “Where do we go, Dr. Jones?”

  Indy returned his attention to the task at hand and smoothed his palms over the map, leaning in close to read. Damn fine print. The letters were just blurry shapes. If he was going to solve this puzzle, he needed to see every detail. He gave in, reached to his pocket, and donned his reading glasses.

  “Priceless,” Marion muttered, staring at his bifocals.

  His face heated up, so he focused on the map. “The vast river must be the Amazon,” He said and traced a finger along the twisting, curving river. It did look like a snake. “But I’m not sure what water and sleep mean . . .”

  Spalko leaned next to him, her shoulder touching his. She tapped the map. “Here. The Sono. It’s the Portuguese word for ‘sleep.’ It’s a smaller waterway. It joins the Amazon here.”

  Indy nodded, excited. “That’s got to be it!”

  Off to the side, Marion scoffed, “I knew you two would hit it off.”

  Indy ignored her, lost in the riddle. “He wants us to follow this curve of the Sono River—for a span of time—all the way until it hooks up with the Amazon to the southeast. After that, I’m not sure.”

  Indy leaned back and ran through the sketches in his head. What was he missing? Maybe something from the verses that Oxley had quoted. But what?

  Through eyes that last I saw in tears . . .

  Death’s dream kingdom . . .

  Indy returned his attention to the map. “This route has to be right. It heads off into a completely unexplored part of the
jungle. See, the map maker only sketched in a few rough—”

  Suddenly the table crashed up and struck both Indy and Spalko in the face. He fell back but kept his footing. Spalko tripped over Dovchenko, and they both went down.

  Mutt grinned proudly on the other side of the table. “Run!” he yelled and plucked Marion out of her chair.

  Before any of the guards could react, mother and son fled between two tents and headed for the jungle beyond.

  Indy had no choice.

  He swung, swooped up Oxley around the waist, and sprinted after Mutt and Marion. Gunfire erupted behind him, shredding foliage and chasing him into the dark forest.

  He cursed Mutt’s rash action.

  Leaping without thinking.

  Like mother, like son.

  THIRTY

  MUTT FLED DOWN the narrow animal trail, leading the others. Wet leaves slapped and tangling vines snagged. He fought a path through the dense jungle. Rifle blasts chased them; soldiers called out in Russian. Some creature howled up in the canopy like a strangled kitten, protesting their passage. Something stung his neck. He ran, panting. The air grew thicker under the canopy, heavy, almost too thick to breathe.

  Still, he kept going.

  He had spotted the narrow path earlier. He didn’t know where it led, but as long as it was away from here, he was happy to follow it. He kept a grip on his mother’s hand.

  Behind him, something heavy crashed after him, cursing loudly and in a steady stream. Mutt risked a glance over a shoulder. He spotted Jones, sweaty, frantic. The man clutched his fedora to his head and dragged Oxley with his other arm.

  “Harold!” Jones hollered. “For God’s sake, keep up!”

  Mud grew heavier underfoot as Mutt slogged ahead. It slowed him down. He struggled harder, but the muck fought him.

  Jones caught up with them, half carrying Ox. His face burned red, but not just from exertion. He drew even with Mutt and stomped along beside him.

  His voice was hard and unforgiving. “Kid! What the hell was that? What were you thinking?”

  “They were going to kill us!”

  “Well, maybe!”

  “Boys,” his mom said and tried to step between them. “Maybe we’d better—”