The Daughter of Doctor Moreau(69)

It was late, and the candles burned low.

“Lizalde will return with his men in tow, and we have choices to make before that,” he said, because somebody had to say it, and he was tired. He wanted to lay his head down, and he couldn’t if they were sitting there, crammed into the doctor’s room, following a vow of silence.

“What choices?” Carlota muttered.

“Hernando Lizalde said he’s coming to take the hybrids and also to wage war on Cumux’s men.”

She shook her head. “Cumux’s men are not real. It’s a lie. No one at Yaxaktun ever helped insurgents.”

“Lizalde was not wrong about that,” Lupe said. “There is a trail nearby, I told you. It’ll take you to one of their camps. And Lizalde is going to find it, and he is going to follow it.”

“Those are stories you tell yourself,” Carlota said, twisting her handkerchief.

“It’s not a story,” Ramona said. They all turned to look at her. She stood firm and straight. “There’s a path the macehuales follow to get here when they come for supplies, and now that these dzules know of it they’ll be looking for it, and they’ll find them.”

Carlota dropped the handkerchief. “It was you then? You’ve been helping Cumux’s men? And Lupe, you’ve known all this time?”

“I told you it wasn’t my imagination,” Lupe said.

“But how could you! You never told me so!” Carlota yelled, turning to Lupe.

“I’ve told you that you are blind! Besides, he knew, too,” Lupe said, pointing at Montgomery.

Carlota’s eyes narrowed, and she stared at him. “Did you?”

“How couldn’t he? He’s the mayordomo. Food goes missing, supplies go missing…you think he can’t tell? Yell at him,” Lupe said.

“I didn’t know for sure,” Montgomery said.

“But you must have suspected.”

“A sack of flour, some beans and rice. Do you think it would have been worth much to Lizalde?” Montgomery asked. “It’s nothing to him. I didn’t know exactly who was dipping into our supplies and even how much they were taking, but why would I have been miserly?”

“You mean why would you have cared? You got us into this situation.”

“It’s not his doing, that,” Lupe said. “That’s your precious Lizalde. Why couldn’t you have married him and left immediately?”

“I was going to,” Carlota muttered, and she stood up and turned her back to them.

He thought of the stupid letter, the confrontation. Perhaps Hernando’s interference could have been avoided or handled more elegantly, but Montgomery couldn’t turn back time. He’d have the space to berate himself for it later, in the privacy of his room. Right now, there were other matters to be handled.

“What’s done is done. It won’t get us out of this mess. Cumux’s men are in danger, as are we,” Montgomery said.

“They’ll come with rifles and shoot us,” Cachito declared glumly.

“Then we’ll close the doors and shut ourselves inside,” Lupe told him. “They can’t walk through walls.”

“They can break doors down.”

“Then we’ll run,” Lupe said firmly. “Carlota said we don’t need the doctor’s drugs anymore. We’ll run away. They won’t find us. We can head south to British Honduras, to English territory. We’ll be fast.”

“Not all the hybrids are fast,” Montgomery said, thinking of old Aj Kaab and Peek’ and the others with the quirks in their bodies.

“And what about the macehuales? What of Cumux and his men?” Cachito asked. “They are also in danger.”

“They can fend for themselves,” Lupe said.

“They can’t fend much if they don’t know what’s coming their way.”

“It’s not our problem. We need to run.”

“Running won’t do any good. We’ll fight them,” Montgomery said firmly.

Carlota turned around. Her eyes looked red from all her crying, and tendrils were escaping from her braid. Her lips were trembling. “You want to kill them.”

“If it comes to that, yes,” he said.

“If you hurt them, then they’ll come again. You kill ten men, they’ll come back with thirty.”

“We are isolated. If we kill ten, people wouldn’t know of it for days, and by then we all could be gone. It’s better to have a week’s head start than none. And it’s difficult to put together men for this sort of chase,” Montgomery said. “When there are large Indian raids, the hacendados have to either fetch the peninsular authorities, which is a quest in itself, or beg their neighbors to send men. If they think there’s been a raid, the other estates will either take their time, or even panic and flee to the safety of a city. They won’t come back here. More than a week. We’d have more than that if we kill the first wave of attackers.”

Carlota shook her head. “This is not an Indian raid.”

“All I know is Hernando Lizalde intends to return. We should receive him with pistols and rifles,” Montgomery said.

“Yes,” Cachito said excitedly. “We tear them apart.”