Chapter 10 - The Journey to Sucre, Part 2
The rest of the trip was hot, noisy, and bumpy, yet fairly uneventful as they traveled the 400 plus mile rubble road to Sucre. Buttercup decided the heat was too much and resumed her nap as Blossom frantically went through Professor's research papers again.
"What are you looking for?!" Brick demanded.
"I'm trying to see if there are any pictures of typical clothing in here. If Mojo's got people following us, our clothes are our worst enemy!" Blossom answered.
After what seemed like days, the bus arrived in Sucre. The four cautiously got off the bus, left the station, and headed down the street outside through an open air market. The Boys' stomachs growled with hunger as scents of roasting meats, baking breads, and fresh fruits filled the air around them.
"Man, I'm starving!" Brick declared.
Blossom stopped and threw the papers she had been leafing through on the ground in frustration. "There's nothing here about customs!" she raged. "How are we supposed to 'keep a low profile' if we stick out like sore thumbs?!"
Butch directed the two Girls into a darkened doorway, a determined look on his face. "C'mon, Brick, got a plan."
The two Boys headed off into the market. The Girls sat in the doorway, impatiently awaiting their return. Blossom reached out and collected the papers and resumed paging through them.
"Where'd they go?" Buttercup wondered, "This is bad. What if they get lost?"
The Boys returned soon afterwards, their shirts bulging. They motioned for the girls to follow them into a nearby empty shop. Brick ripped the padlock off the door and pushed it open. Inside, the Boys unloaded several articles of clothing they had stuffed under their shirts.
"Here's our stuff." Brick stated. He handed a pair of blue denim shorts, canvas sneakers, and a khaki coloured shirt to Buttercup. He gave Blossom another pair of blue denim shorts, white slip-on shoes, a white shirt with red trim and a pastel-blue scarf.
"How did you guys get all this?" Blossom asked. "I still have our money!"
Brick grinned. "The ole' 'five-finger' discount." he replied as he took off his red and black jersey and tossed it on the floor.
"How did you know what to grab is the better question." Buttercup asked.
Butch sighed. "We looked around. All you gotta do is see what everybody else around you is wearing to fit in, get it?"
The Girls smiled. "Yeah, that makes sense. Boy, am I thick sometimes." Blossom stated.
The Boys changed into short sleeved shirts, Brick's charcoal grey and Butch's yellow and red. Butch's had a number 45 on the back. "Some sorta soccer player shirt." he answered when Buttercup asked.
They stood looking at the Girls, who had not moved. "Well?" they both shrugged.
"Yeah, you look OK." Blossom answered.
Brick sighed and looked at the roof. "No, you gonna change or what?"
"Well,...uh...", Blossom began, looking embarrassed.
Butch realized their problem and said, "OOPS, sorry." He grabbed Brick by the shoulder and the two of them turned around with their backs to the Girls. The Girls changed quickly, tossing their dresses, stockings, and shoes in a pile with the Boys' shirts.
"OK, we're done." Buttercup stated.
The Boys turned around. Butch pointed to Blossom's head. "You gotta lose the red bow, Blossom."
Blossom pouted, but removed her bow and hair clip. She tossed them on top of the clothes on the floor.
"We have to cover yours and Brick's hair, too." Butch said.
Brick looked confused. "Why?" he asked.
"Look outside, Brick, you see many people here wandering around with long RED hair?" Butch pointed out.
"Oh, yeah, I guess you're right," Blossom agreed, looking at both Butch's and Buttercup's black hair.
"That's what the scarf is for, Blossom, so if you'll turn around I'll try...", he stopped as she turned with her back to them. The Boys looked at each other in stunned silence. The scarf Butch had lifted for Blossom only covered to just above her waist. Her hair, on the other hand, fell to just below her knees.
"Oh, man." Butch moaned.
"What?" Blossom asked.
"Uh, nothing, just hold still for a second. There's something in your hair." Brick lied. He grabbed Blossom's hair up in his hand, just above the scarf, and then hit it with his laser eye beams, cutting it off cleanly. The scarf now covered her hair.
"HEY!" Blossom yelled, spinning around to see a long handful of her hair still in Brick's grip.
Brick shrugged. "Gotta tough it for now, right?"
Blossom shot him an angry look as Buttercup held back her snickers as best she could.
"OK, now YOURS!" Blossom pointed to Brick. Brick shrugged, pulled a long piece of leather string out of his pocket, tied his hair into a ponytail with it, and then tucked it under his baseball cap.
"Done." he said with a grin. Blossom rolled her eyes in disgust.
"No good, Brick, the hat's gotta go." Buttercup stated. "Too bright."
Brick removed his hat, threw it on the floor, then jumped up and down on it. He kicked it around in the dust on the floor, then picked it up, shook it off, and put it back on. "Done." he snickered.
"C'mon, let's go." Blossom grunted.
They went back outside the vacant store, carrying their discarded clothes under their shirts, and looked around for anyone watching them. They passed a covered trash bin and dumped the clothes into it, then blended in with the people in the marketplace. As they passed an open bin with sunglasses in it, Blossom ripped off two pairs. She handed one pair to Brick and put the other pair on herself. "Red and pink eye colours aren't very common here, either." she explained.
"Yeah, we get all the hassles." Brick sighed.
Blossom studied the map drawn on the back of the second letter. She then compared it to where they were.
"OK, I think if we go down this street then turn left, the museum should be right around there." she explained.
"What kind of museum has mummies in it anyway? Do we have to dig them up or something?" Butch asked.
"No," Buttercup giggled. "This will be a strictly dirt-free cemetery."
Butch groaned. "Man, I just know this is gonna be sick. How many mummies do you think are in there?"
"I hope not too many, otherwise looking under every one could take longer than I think any of us really want to spend." Blossom stated.
"So," Brick started. "Who gets to do 'the looking'?"
"Ugh, I'm not!" Buttercup declared.
"Let's get there first, then decide, OK?" Blossom suggested.
Brick snatched a melon from a fruit vendor's cart as they passed it. Blossom grabbed him by the ear and dragged him back. She pulled out some of their money, smiled to the vendor, and paid for the melon.
"That hurt!" Brick complained as they walked away, "Conserve our money, remember?"
"Stealing from some poor guy on a street corner is not something I want to get into the habit of doing while we're here." Blossom shot back. "We've done enough of that already." She indicated their ill-gotten clothes.
Brick pulled the melon apart and handed each of them chunks of it. "Man, this is awesome! Where do they get this stuff?"
"It's probably imported. According to these papers on the country, there are zero permanent crops in Bolivia. They import just about everything." Blossom stated.
"So, if they import all their food, what do they send out?" Buttercup wondered.
"Bolivia is big into minerals, like potassium, lithium, magnesium and boron, and metals. Bolivia produces more tin than any other place in the world." Blossom answered. "It's just a tough living, since the land the stuff is in is hard to access and transportation here isn't very good once they DO get the minerals and metals out of the ground."
"So, what do they grow? I mean, we saw plenty of farmland, what do they use it for?" Brick asked.
"They only have two seasons here, their 'winter' is like our fall and spring, and summer the rest of the year. The upper regions of the country apparently concentrate on vegetables, since the coal they have is too uneconomical to get. They have coffee, sugar, and cocoa in some areas there as well." she continued. "Actually, their biggest source of income is tourism. Well, that and narcotics. It's apparently rampant enough here that they have several types of law enforcement to stop it."
They reached the museum, went inside and looked around. They saw pottery displays from ancient Indian tribes of eastern Bolivia, recovered skulls from the area pertaining to the same tribes, even a reconstruction of a mud house the Indians would have lived in.
Then they found the mummy room. Their jaws dropped as they saw the enormous room was filled with mummies in caskets, mummies in simulated earth graves, even mummies in glass cases.
"Aw, man, this is awful." Butch decided.
Blossom walked over to a mummy lying in a casket. She climbed up on its edge, looked around to see if anyone else was watching them, took a deep breath, then reached into the casket. She pawed around under the mummy, its dry, rough bandages rubbing on her hands and arms, its spice/musty smell filling her nose, but found no letter. She carefully lifted the mummy's legs.
"Don't mind me." she said to it. Still, she saw no letter. She floated back to the ground, leaned against the casket, bent over, hands on her knees, then looked at the others. They had watched her with mouths hanging open. She stood up, brushed her hands together and asked, "OK, who's turn is it now?"
Brick shook his head, paused, then proceeded on with the next casket. He, too, found no letter. "This could take all day." he complained. "C'mon, chicken-hearts, if we spread out and each take a section, we'll get done a whole lot sooner."
Buttercup made retching noises, but followed Brick's suggestion. She and Butch each took opposite corners of the room while Brick and Blossom continued on in their sections.
Buttercup swore she felt one mummy move, then reminded herself that the person had been dead for longer than she had been alive. With each mummy she came to, she hoped she would find the letter in question sitting directly in view, but knew they couldn't get that lucky.
Butch had his own situation as one of the earthen graves he reached into began to come apart. He jumped up and floated away from the mummy as it slid.
"Catch it!" Blossom shouted.
"Not a chance!" Butch answered.
Blossom shot over to the mummy, her pink streak glowing in the dark room and caught the corpse before it hit the floor. Her face twisted in a grimace as she noticed that one of this mummy's eyes was still very plainly visible. It stared at her with glassy oblivion as she gently placed the mummy back into its earth grave. She turned to Butch and said, "Please be careful, will you?"
After several hours and major cases of the creepy-crawlies, they felt they had looked under every mummy. But they did not find the letter.
"This is taking way too long. What does he mean by 'under the mummy' anyway? Under the caskets, under the displays, what?" Buttercup snapped.
Brick wiped the grit from his hands onto his pants. He looked around the room again. "He wouldn't have put it inside one of the glass cases, would he? I mean, how would he have gotten it in there without somebody seeing him?"
Blossom shook her head and answered, "No, he couldn't have. Those are in those cases to preserve them. The cases are airtight so the bodies won't decay any further."
Buttercup huffed, "You wanna bet on that?" She crossed her arms in front of her.
"No," Blossom replied, "If there's a way, Mojo would figure it out. It's worth a look, anyway."
They surrounded one of the mummy cases and tried to see inside. Buttercup and Butch searched the dark interior of the case with their night vision to no avail. They were beginning to lose hope.
"Under the mummy, under the mummy, under the mummy," Blossom repeated over and over. She wandered around the room, studying the first clue letter and its wording. She looked at the room of mummies, all of which had been searched. She shrugged. "Maybe there's another room somewhere else..." she thought out loud.
"Aw, c'mon, go through this again?!" Brick moaned.
Blossom looked up and noticed several shelves of skulls staring blankly back at her. She looked around the room and noticed that all its walls were lined with similar displays of skulls. She paused a moment to read a plaque underneath one set of skulls. "1905 - found in what was believed to be a residential dwelling." The Spanish description of the same set of skulls meant nothing to her. Something about the plaque and the first clue letter clicked in Blossom's head. She spun around with the letter upheld, her eyes wide with excitement, and faced the others.
"Butch, remember you said that Mojo was just playing games with us?" she asked.
"Yeah, so?" Butch answered.
Blossom pointed to the row of skulls. "These were all found in the same house. A family! What if Mojo is STILL playing games with us? He'd know we'd take him literally and search all the mummies first, right?" she explained. "I think he's trying to throw us off...instead of 'mummy', how about 'mommy'?" she finished.
The others looked around the room at the skulls. There were numerous sets of family displays on the shelves above their heads. The four of them zipped up and flew around the room, looking under all the skulls.
"Oh, for cryin' out loud, Blossom, that's it!" Butch yelled from one corner of the room. He flew back to the ground, holding one of the skulls he had looked under. There, taped inside the brain cavity, was the letter. He reached into it and grabbed for the letter.
" Niños?" they heard from behind them. They spun around to face a museum security guard. Butch slipped the skull behind his back, unnoticed by the guard.
"Uh, hola, señor," Butch replied and waved innocently.
" Dónde están sus padres?" the guard asked, looking around the room behind them.
"Casa de Café," Butch lied, pointing towards the exit "a nuestra madre no le gustan los muertos." He laughed and elbowed the others to follow suit. Once they did, the guard relaxed. He ushered them out of the room and waved to them as they headed toward the door. The guard turned from them and walked away.
Butch quickly pulled the skull from under his shirt, ripped the letter out of it, then perched the skull over the head of a statue of a pagan god on a marble podium. They left the museum quickly and ran down the now darkening street. Once outside, giggles held back for too long came bursting from them.
"What did you tell him?" Blossom asked.
"I told him our parents were next door at the coffee house 'cause our mom didn't like dead things." Butch answered.
"Can you imagine if he'd come through that door about 5 minutes earlier?" Buttercup said.
"Yeah, we'd be in deep doo-doo now." Brick replied. He looked around the street as the coming night rolled in. "We gotta find someplace with some light to read that thing."
"Yeah, that would be a plus." Blossom said.
" Ahh, niños, dónde están sus padres?" they heard from behind them. They turned to see a kindly woman dressed in a nun's habit. She smiled at them and asked, " Están desviados?"
"She thinks we're lost, I guess 'cause it's dark out." Butch translated for the others.
The nun began walking back up the street in the direction she had come from. She turned to them and motioned for them to follow her. "No soy picara."
"I guess she wants us to go with her." Butch guessed.
Blossom shrugged. "She's a nun. How bad can she be, right?"