Back to Eldorado

By Richard Shallow

This book is a fast-paced story about the fabled Inca city of gold that has been lost somewhere deep in the Amazon jungles of Peru for five hundred years. Against his better judgement, Dr. Fred Myers returns to that green hell called the Amazon jungle. But, this time, he brings twelve men with him to assist him as they encounter the perils of the Amazon, which include six-foot electric eels that can render a horse paralyzed; vampire bats that attack without provocation; flesh-eating fish; large swarms of bugs attacking them every night as they swarm over the campsites, biting and stinging; and thousands of flies laying their larva in their open wounds. They have a run-in with cannibals and headhunters deep within the Amazon and even encounter treachery within their own group.

Gold! Gold! Down through the ages, the search for lost gold treasures has motivated men to endure despicable dangers and hardships to discover riches beyond their wildest dreams. The two hundred Spanish conquistadors conquered ten million Incas and became rich.

There have been many pirates that have buried their treasures such as Captain Morgan, who buried his treasure somewhere along the coast of Panama; Captain Kidd, who buried his treasure somewhere along the coast of Virginia; the Beale treasure, said to be worth 45 million dollars; several Spanish galleons carrying millions in gold and silver back to Spain from the Incas and the Aztecs that got caught up in hurricanes and were sunk somewhere in the Caribbean; the lost Dutchman gold mine in Arizona; lost Nazi gold of World War II; the California gold rush; and the Alaska gold rush, to name a few.

This Indiana Jones-type of adventure brings to light many unanswered questions about how the Incas first arrived in Peru. Where did the white-skinned people from the mountainous regions of Northern Peru migrate from? Could they be the lost tribes of Juda? Come with me now as our heroes once more attempt to destroy the aliens, once and for all, before they destroy earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781532009624

Richard Shallow

I have developed this passion for writing. I have written three books of love poems, prose, and three short stories. I won first place and had my award-winning poem published in the Texas Love Poets Society yearly handbook. I have always been captivated by science fiction and the possibility of extraterrestrial life out there somewhere. So I thought I would try my hand at writing a science fiction story and combine it with adventure. My wife and my daughter first gave me the idea to write this story. I am somewhat of a dinosaur in today’s world. I have six adult children—of which two are adopted, four of my own, and a teenage daughter by my wife of forty-one years. I have twenty-one grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

My name is Doctor Fredrick Myers. I am Chairman of the Department of Antiquities of Mesoamerican Histories at UCLA. It was the weekend and I was relaxing in my favorite chair sipping on a glass of my favorite red wine with my face stuck into the daily newspaper reading about the war in Europe. I could only imagine what it must have been like to be bogged down in some cold muddy trenches in France with the dead or dismembered bodies of your friends strewn all about the battlefield and those that were injured, but still alive, calling out or help.

While overhead you would be hearing the constant whistling buzzing sound of artillery shells exploding all over the battlefield and wondering if the next one that came screaming overhead had your name on it! But then I realized that if it exploded close enough, you would not know if it had or not. You would be scattered around on the ground in a thousand little pieces. I say make the politicians fight the wars, let them kill one another off. I quickly shook the thoughts of war in Europe from my mind.

As I was about to put the newspaper down I noticed a story that caught my eye about Hiram Bingham discovering a lost Incan city known as Machu Picchu high up in the mountains of Western Peru. I read that article several times over and over thinking how exciting it would be to have made such a discovery. I guess my brain became hypnotized by the excitement of Mr. Bingham making such an important discovery. I closed my eyes and thought about what if it had been me instead of Mr. Bingham that had made that discovery.

The Amazon Jungle of Peru was certainly not a bucolic place to visit under any circumstances and I would have to put together a group of strong men to go in search of lnca lost cities and their unknown treasures!

I told myself over and over that going into the Amazon jungle with all of the unknown dangers I would face would be like playing two-handed poker with the Amazon drawing four aces and me holding a lonely pair of deuces. It was a stacked deck and guess who the deck was stacked against? Good guess. I knew I would probably be killed but I wanted the adventure of a lifetime so I wanted to try anyway! Deep down inside of me I was totally afraid of going on such an adventure and my brain wouldn’t get any arguments from me but somehow I could taste it and feel it deep within me!

I thought about all of the nasty creatures of all shapes and sizes hiding in the depths of that jungle that you could not imagine! Hells-bells I did not have a dalliance with that green hell, not even a fugacious one, but I knew If I stood bye and did nothing then my world would be brought to its destruction. I had no concept of the size nor dangers of the Amazon Jungle it opened up a new dimension of reality for me.

It reminded me of that old adage Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I must admit that deep inside I was totally and completely afraid of what lay ahead if I went back but; the macho man in me hungered for the challenge! Here I was five foot ten and if I was soaking wet I would be lucky to tip the scales at one hundred and fifty pounds. My dark hair had been invaded by the tell-tale signs of graying and I was beginning to develop a widow’s peak. I was also beginning to get that middle age spread, my chest had slipped down to my waist. My blue eyes were still just as inquisitive as they had ever been and I still ran two miles a day around the university track.

But I am getting ahead of myself. As you may recall from my last book, EL Dorado my son-in-law Cody and I barely escaped our previous Peruvian adventure with our lives. And in July of 1917 we were considering going back! We had encountered aliens from the planet Anarka living in an extinct volcano where we also found the ancient lost city of La Cibola. The Anarkans had methodically killed off the entire population of the city. And they were stock piling human blood for future use.

The aliens had constructed a giant radio transmitter that was hidden from the outside world inside a dead volcano where they had been transmitting back to their planet requesting an invasion force to be immediately launched to conquer our world. And then relocate their entire planet’s population here on Earth. At least that’s what we thought their plan was!

Their planet was in the path of a giant meteor that was about to collide with their world and destroy it! They had also discovered that their life span could be increased by several hundred years by consuming human blood. And they possessed advanced technology that could destroy our cities and our populations whenever they wished.

These slimy bastards had evolved into little more than space age vampires and we the human race were their victims! We had managed to defeat the Anarkans by sheer luck the last time we met them in La Cibola but it wouldn’t be so easy next time. I figured I would need two teams of at least five or six strong men who would stand everything to lose if our trip back to the Amazon region of Peru was unsuccessful. Actually, a company of U.S. Marines is would be a whole lot better but unfortunately, I didn’t have a company of Marines handy!

Of course there was the prospect of each member of our group getting their hands on a vast fortune in gold if we were successful in eliminating the blood hungry Anarkans! The romanticisms of finding lost treasures of gold and jewels has motivated mankind for thousands of years and it was the same today as it was throughout the beginning of time. The aliens had been stockpiling vast quantities of gold ever since their arrival to Mesoamerica before the untimely arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors in the 1600’s and it was to be used by them for the colonization of Earth.

We had been back from our first visit to Peru for less than ninety days. Sometime between almost being killed by coldblooded group of native Peruvian Indians, or having my head shrunk to the size of a tennis ball, or being eaten alive by the largest Anaconda I had ever encountered in my life, or almost being massacred by and Indian uprising, or being zapped by an Alien ray gun, I had lost my nerve to go back! One trip to Peru was all I knew I could take. I had already paid my duty to mankind!

My parents had always taught me that being afraid, was an emotional feeling that only belonged to cowards. Of course all cowards would flee at the earliest sign of a dangerous situation or the possibility of any face-to-face confrontation. They were afraid of attacking that danger, whatever it might be, head on. Bottom line they were mostly afraid of failure. When all they had to fear was fear itself and that was only a preconceived notion which was actually built up in your mind.

My Father likened it to an ostrich, when an ostrich was faced with danger, the Ostrich would stick its head in the sand, thereby leaving the rest of him exposed to the real danger. If the ostrich thought if he couldn’t see the danger, then the danger wasn’t real, therefore, he would not have to face it and if he waited long enough, the danger would soon disappear!

Try as I might I could not forget the gruesome memories of our last journey; they kept creeping from the back roads of my subconscious into the highways of my conscious. The memories are always there, locked away in some part of the back roads of my mind and whenever I hear a particular sound, or smell a certain smell, or see a certain thing, it resurrects the memory of my terrifying experiences of Peru.

It’s like, I tried to bury those horrible memories, and a certain word would open the lid of my coffin of dead memories and out would come a zombie from my past. Deep down within the inner sanctum of me, I am a nervous wreck and because of my re-occurring nightmares I had already made up my mind that I was not going back this time! Yes, I admit it, I was afraid. I barely made it out of Peru with my life on my last trip and I had no intentions of tempting fate again!

I had promised the guys I would have a meeting to discuss our next trip to Peru. I was going to spring my decision of not going on them at that meeting. They would have to pick someone else to lead them! I knew they wouldn’t like it but my brain was saying it didn’t want to go and deep within my knower I had this gut feeling none of us would ever see home again.

I would share what knowledge I had of the past meeting with the aliens but my nerves were shot. I called each of the guys and asked them to be at my house tonight by seven o’clock sharp. I asked everyone that might attend tonight’s meeting not to bring their wives or their children to the meeting since the topic of conversation might be too scary for any of them to comprehend.

I also asked each one to bring at least one or two friends that they could trust with their lives, because, if we were to go back to Peru we would need all the help we could get. I would pick a total of a dozen men for this trip no more, no less. I didn’t want our group to become so large that is was uncontrollable or unmanageable.

I remember coming face to face with the Amazon for the first time. It struck me as beautiful infinite and impenetrable. It was a forsaken land where the soil is agriculturally poor, mosquitoes carry lethal diseases, and predatory animals and vipers in all shapes and sizes abound or lurk in the forested canopy ready to strike without warning. Behind every tree or just over the next hill were the continual fear and the ever-present danger of a violent death. And how could I forget the howling and screeching of the Jaguars night after night.

The continual fear of the unknown and the ever present danger of a violent death played on my mind over and over again like a broken record. In the Amazon jungle there were no bucolic settings worthy to conflate a mindset of happy surroundings. Mile after mile of that green hell was evocative of a sempiternal setting of being condemned to a life sentence in purgatory! I called it a sempiternal death to anyone that was stupid or foolish enough to enter the Devil’s domain or should I say the Devil’s playground!

Climbing trails into the mountains during the rainy season were no picnic either. We faced hardships on the trails that were slick with mud and algae covered rocks and boulders that were so slippery that you couldn’t stand up. The constant summer monsoon rains began as little trick lets of water but very quickly became raging torrents of rivers running down from the mountains with current that could wash away anything in its path, almost brought me to the breaking point. There are no Doctors or hospitals just around the corner waiting for your beck-con call to doctor a broken bone!

And I must not forget those damn Zanacudos bugs! They are nasty biting bugs that looked like a large black gnat. When they bite they raise a big welt on the surface of the skin that itches for weeks after. And no surprise to anyone, they love the taste of human blood. Why God put them on this earth is a mystery to me! There were some nights in the jungle when they would hover over our camp site waiting for our campfires to die down and when the campfire was negligible they would swarm down on us and bite any portion of your body that was left exposed. It was like a black rain but instead of fighting water you would fight bugs of every shape and size searching for your blood.

The Jungle was so thick that it seemed like there was a net of vines, giant roots and lianas covering our trail along with spiny ferns, and buriti palms, in an endless mesh that grew everywhere in the jungle. Without our machetes to hack away the under growth, we would have never made any headway in the jungles.

I remembered many times that we would only make maybe ½ mile a day at most hacking through the thick jungle underbrush. The roots from the underbrush were as big as tree roots. By the end of the day my arms would be so tired and heavy, I could barely lift them. Dangling leaves would snatch at our hair and low vines and branches would tear at our arms and faces as we proceeded forward. Our exposed skin would be covered with our own blood.

I remember one night in particular when vampire bats were circling our camp overhead. I was absolutely astonished to see so many bats diving down from the sky and attacking our donkeys and us. The bats had front teeth that were exceptionally large that were razor sharp. Hell I venture to say they could cut a 4x4 in two with those teeth! They would puncture the skin of our donkeys so swiftly that the donkeys didn’t even know that they had been bitten. Many of our donkeys had ugly wounds that were streaming with blood with just a blink of your eye. The bats would land on our donkeys and lap up their blood for at least a half an hour. The bats secreted some kind of a substance in the wounds of our donkeys that would keep the wounds from clotting. We were even bitten by the vampire bats on numerous occasions.

Sleeping was an absolute nightmare in the jungle for if any part of you was left exposed then you would wake up saturated in your own blood. In the mornings, first thing we would do is to check or animals and ourselves or any open wounds we would clean our wounds and then use needle and thread to stitch up our wounds as well as the wounds of our animals to eliminate the possibility of infection. Then of course there were the maggots!

These giant flies would land on the animals or us depending on which of us they wanted to use as a host animal and plant their eggs in our open wounds. Shortly thereafter the eggs would hatch and little white worms would crawl out of our wounds. I still get the shivers just thinking about it! We were all a feeding farm and an incubator for those damn maggots! The Devil’s playground was a living breathing hell for anyone that dared to enter. I must have been crazier that a hoot owl to think that the Amazon Jungle was a beautiful place.

I had to admit to myself that going back to Peru to track down the Aliens was more than a little bit scary to me. It gave me the shakes, but the real problem, was my encounter with that giant Anaconda snake. I had lost my nerve and I never got it back.

And secondly, I was captured and almost killed by the Aliens. Bottom line, I was afraid, yes, I had to face it…. I was flat out afraid to go back and risk my life again! If you want to know what it must be like to live in Hell; then take a trip deep into the Amazon Jungles of Peru! The rigors of the last trip had taken their toll on me! I had convinced myself that this kind of a perilous adventure should be left to the young at heart, and my heart didn’t feel very young.

We had barely gotten out of the clutches of the aliens last time with our lives intact. Thanks to Randy and rescuing us. Randy had wandered off from our group looking for gold so he was not captured. He watched us as we were captured and taken into their space craft. When all but one of the Anarkans had left the Mother Ship, Randy slipped into the ship undetected and killed the lone guard and set us free.

If we went there again, we may not be so lucky next time! They possessed weapons that we only dreamed of and they knew how to use those weapons too. And their technology was so vastly superior to ours. From what I observed last time we were there, we didn’t stand a snow ball’s chance in Hell of defeating them.

They had developed and mastered interplanetary space travel, so they were free to transport their people to the four corners of the universe and back; while on the other hand, we the people of earth had airplanes that could barely get off the ground! The human race did not possess the technology necessary for space travel or space warfare or anything close to it.

We would be out manned, out gunned, and out maneuvered, if it came down to a war between the peoples of Earth and the Aliens, with their superior technology, they would chew us up and spit us out in a heartbeat!

I could just see our feeble attempt at stopping these blood sucking monsters. They would push right through us like a sharp knife cutting through hot butter. Yes, we had to stop this advance party of Aliens now, before the main party arrived. I knew the question well enough, but unfortunately, I didn’t know the answer!

I had an internal conflict within me and I was waging war within myself. I was calling this meeting to see if someone else would take up the lead and go in my place back to Peru. Because ever since I got back, I was having nightmares about me dying in some god forsaken lonely place along the back roads of the Amazon Jungle in Peru. I didn’t want to die!

I remember being zapped by one of their paralyzing rods and taken into their spacecraft on our last where I saw their giant human food chamber. The grotesque looks on all those nameless faces suspended on meat hooks hanging upside down with their throats slit from ear-to-ear. There were at least a dozen humans with their life giving blood being drained into air tight jars for later consumption by the aliens.

The sight of all those humans dangling front those meat hooks, still brings chills to my body! Even worse yet, when the blood of their victims had been completely drained; we saw the Aliens take those lifeless bodies to the volcano pit and discard their lifeless bodies into the fire.

If it hadn’t been for Randy’s timely entrance coming to our rescue when he did; none of us would be here today to share our story. We too would be suspended from some meat hook with our throats slit and drained of our blood and tossed into the bottom of that volcano when we were all used up!

One thing I remembered about the Aliens, were that they moved much slower than we did. It looked like they were moving in slow motion. It must have something to do with the gravity of Earth being different from the gravity of their own planet. That’s the only weakness that I could bear witness too. Still, it might be something we could use against them when the time came. I decided to keep that in the back of my mind for further use when our group returned to Peru. I had a million questions stampeding through my head without answers. But one thing was for certain if we didn’t go back I knew the answer to that. It would be total annulation of the human race!

The Inca civilization began as a tribe of the Killke in the Cuzco area of Peru circa 1200 where the legendary first Sapa Inca named Mano Capac founded the kingdom of Cuzco. Under the leadership one of his America. Pachacuti son Tupac Inca added the lands of Peru, Bolivia, and what is most of present day Ecuador and a large portion of began his Chile and his conquests even extended into corners of Argentina and Columbia.

The Inca empire eventually split in two by civil war between the two sons of Huana Capac Atahualpa a half-brother and Huascar. That is when the Spanish Conquistadores led by Francisco Pizarro landed off the coast of Peru. In the decade of the 1550’s the Spanish extracted some 6,000,000 ones of gold and some 20,000,000 ounces of silver from the New World thus making Spain the most powerful and richest country in Europe.

CHAPTER TWO

Meanwhile, in another part of town, Jose Sanchez was sitting in his chair at his favorite watering hole drinking a beer and reading the morning funny papers and at the same time trying to stuff his cold lunch into his mouth of what was left over from yesterday’s dinner.

Cold spaghetti not his all-time favorite, but it was better than nothing to eat at all, besides his stomach was growling loud enough that he was sure that his next door neighbors would start banging on the walls of his apartment at any moment telling him to keep the noise down. His empty stomach was shaking hands with his backbone.

Then he saw something in the funny papers that pushed his memory button and jogged loose a piece of his past that he had suppressed in a hidden corner of the chambers of his mind from long ago. It was like someone had turned on the lamp light of his yesteryears. He started to have flash backs of his childhood. He remembered his drunken father would come home from work and as soon as his father’s foot would hit the front porch the yelling and cursing would begin.

For no particular reason he would start screaming at everyone. If us kids including our mother did not jump as quickly as my father expected, he would give all of us the back of his hand. My mother said, our father would drink up his entire paycheck weekend after weekend at some local honky tonk run down saloon. We would go without food and clothing so he could have his liquor.

I remember walking to school in the wintertime without a warm coat, shivering constantly I was walked. The cold weather chilled my bones from the incessant drizzle of the rain and my clothes would get soaked to the bone. I remember walking through my neighborhood asking the neighbors for their old coats because we needed them on our beds at night to keep warm from the bitter cold of winter.

The fire in the one little stove we had in the dining room would go out at night because we did not have enough coal to keep the fire going and mom and us kids couldn’t keep warm. God, how I hated when winter came at our house because we never had enough fuel and we would freeze our butts off every winter. I can still remember pulling my wagon around the neighborhood collecting empty pop and beer bottles to return to the store for the penny refunds to buy coal or down fences for fuel from our neighbors or collecting pieces of broken wood to heat our stove at night.

How could I forget the countless times I walked to school with large holes in my shoes because we didn’t have the money for new ones or to get the old ones repaired. While I was growing up I can still remember my Friday night beatings from my father. I left home at twelve and grew up on the streets, after a while, I guess I became what you would call a sociopath. I got so I hated everyone and everything having to do with money.

Many a night, I slept under a bridge fighting off people bigger than me that wanted to take what little I had. I felt like I was a victim of society and one-day society would pay me back! I still remember my first murder. It was my father! Yea, you heard me right the first time. Damn it, I just got tired of all those beatings while growing up. But most of all I got tired of always going to bed hungry and cold because there was no food or heat in our house.

I remember following my Father to his favorite tavern and waiting there half the night in the cold drizzling rain that was falling on me without mercy. I waited for him to finish his drinking orgy clutching my baseball bat. The hatred I had inside of me was driving me insane. The rain never let up the entire time I stood there in the dark waiting for him to come out.

The cold rain was so heavy I was soaked to the bone in a matter of a few minutes. I had the shivers so bad I could barely hold my baseball bat in my hands. But I was there to end the endless torment from this man once and for all. One of us was not going to walk away from this night alive!

The only thing that kept me out in the bone chilling rain was my hatred for my father and remembering all the beatings Mom and us kids got! I was almost to my limit of endurance when the tavern door opened and he staggered out the door, drunk. The light from inside the tavern lit up the street for a moment then the door shut and it was dark once again. He staggered as he walked towards me. He took two steps forward and one step back as he made his way towards our house.

He was muttering something incoherent as he bumped into the walls and occasionally used them to hold himself up. I could see the steam from his breath as it escaped from his lungs it was like a fog misting out in front of him as he walked closer and closer to me. I began to challenge myself whether or not if I had the guts to really go through with it. Then a peace came over me as I heard a whispered in my ear. The voice said to me "Joe, you have got to do this; it’s the only way you can free yourself from your torment.

I finally ducked deeper into my darkened doorway and waited silently as he approached. I heard his slow methodical footsteps as he approached his destiny and mine. I was so terrified of my father I didn’t even feel the freezing cold of the night air. Little drops of my sweat were beginning to run down my face at the same time!

I could feel my hands shaking with anticipation while waiting in the dark for him to walk past. For one fleeting moment I thought I might chicken out. My soul or whatever was left of it and that Demon of the Night that was locked within me were fighting a ferocious battle over what was left of my soul and my Demon was winning the battle.

That little Demon in my head kept tormenting me