“What about my daughter?”
“She shall remain here to serve me.”
“No! You fuck—” Before Matt could finish cussing Cromwell out, Rowles snatched his shoulder and lifted him, clamping his collarbone like the steel jaws of a lumber crane. Matt growled with pain as he wearily staggered to his feet. “You lay a finger on her, Cromwell…”
“Oh, rest assured. I plan to. However, I would be more concerned about returning to 2086 empty-handed. I’m sure the Renewal will discard you quicker than I ever could.”
Biting through the pain of Rowles’ grip, Matt was nearly foaming at the mouth with rage. “I’m going to kill you, Cromwell. Somehow I’m going to find a way.”
“I’m sure you’ll try. Now, tell me, what is your decision?”
Matt stood there and said nothing. His eyes burned into the ground before him, his fury now registering at peak levels upon realizing he may have gravely miscalculated the outcome of this mission.
“I’ll ask you again. What is your decision?”
“You’re not going to get a second chance, so you better kill me now.”
An indulgent smirk creased Cromwell’s plump jowl, his grey eyes staring, still as death itself. “So be it, soldier.”
Slumped in his throne, Cromwell watched as Matt and Rossiter were briskly marched up by Rowles to the edge of a huge circular pit that was capped with a metal lid. The monks surrounding them continued to pray softly in unison, hooded heads bowed as they formed ranks around the mouth of the pit.
Matt tried to ignore Rossiter’s whimpering as Iosef emerged from the crowd of devout fanatics. His expression was a stony mask. “I am saddened by your deception, unbeliever. The Devil sent you here, and now you will suffer the consequences.”
With the end only a few seconds away, Matt figured he’d try and plead with him. “Iosef, you found me. You saved me from those wolves. Was I foolish to assume you did not bring me here out of the goodness of your own heart?” Matt thought he saw Iosef’s eyes soften for a fleeting moment, but it was too dark to tell. “Iosef, I came here for salvation.”
“And it is salvation you shall find, brother,” he replied. As he stepped forward into the grim light, Matt saw his expression was now clearly indifferent and detached. “Admit your sins, and perhaps our Lord will take mercy on you.”
Matt gulped as Iosef calmly drew an ornate dagger from a hidden sheath inside his robe. He immediately knew it was Wraith steel as it was almost identical to the blade that had pierced his shoulder in the Washington subway tunnel. The weapon appeared to be old, with the sigil of the Zograf Order engraved into the blade. “The dagger of Basarab will set you both free.”
Matt exhaled and closed his eyes. All he could do now was wait for what came next.
Iosef turned to some nearby monks and nodded. They bent down and twisted the iron handle of the lid covering the pit. It gave after some effort, turning slowly with a metallic clunk. Several of them heaved it up to reveal thin shapes churning in the stale darkness below, hissing and groaning with an insatiable hunger.
His flesh now crawling, Matt mustered the will to open his eyes and peer into the inky blackness that awaited him below.
Several half-naked bodies scuttled forward into the torchlight, the heavy chains around their ankles clinking against the pit’s stone flooring. Their pale faces and black eyes immediately informed Matt they were Afflicted. They appeared to be early mutations of what was to eventually roam the planet, but they were terrifying to look at, nonetheless. Matt assumed these must have been young men and women taken from the village, either by these monks or by Cromwell’s spies.
“Put the doctor in first,” Cromwell ordered, keeping his eyes on Matt.
Iosef stood behind Rossiter and pressed the blade into his side. Rossiter whimpered as the sharp end pricked his flesh. His arms and legs began to shudder, and he kept his head bowed as he silently prayed for his death to be quick and painless, knowing it would be neither.
Iosef turned to his congregation and spoke a proud declaration. “Over the centuries, many agents of the Devil have attempted to disrupt our holy sanctuary. None have ever succeeded.”
Matt gritted his jaw, eyes fixed on Iosef now. “Don’t do this. Iosef, look at me! Hey!”
But Iosef was already absorbed by his mindless prayer, entranced like the rest of his brethren. Before plunging the dagger into Rossiter’s side, he turned to Cromwell’s throne. “Oh, you who turn justice to wormwood, and cast down righteousness to the earth. We thank you.”
Matt swung his eyes to Cromwell. “Let him go, Cromwell. Throw me in there but let him go!”
Cromwell smiled victoriously at Matt. “I am letting him go.” He then nodded to Iosef.
Iosef jammed the blade deep between two of Rossiter’s rib bones. He gasped with pain and wailed, his frail body slouching forward and buckling.
The Afflicted below began to thrash wildly with bloodlust, their teeth bared, diamond-hard eyes staring up at him ravenously. They could already smell the open wound.
But before Iosef could let go and shove him into the pit…
The entire chamber shuddered with a deafening boom.
The powerful shockwave of an underground explosion cascaded up through the ground, gouts of flame belching like uncapped oil wells. Ancient archways and support columns throughout the chamber ruptured from the impact, with large chunks plummeting from the ceiling onto rows of stunned guards and monks, flattening them like pancakes and silencing their screams. Within seconds the room had become a suffocating fog of dust and debris, visibility reduced to near-zero. Everything was starting to collapse from the chain reaction of the mysterious detonation.
With no time to think, Matt lunged forward and snatched Rossiter back from the mouth of the pit, just as an avalanche of stone fell on Iosef and the monks behind him. Some nearby Wraith guards went to fire on them but were crushed like bugs from a large iron girder.
Matt spun around and locked eyes with Rowles a fraction of a second before she was struck by a slab of falling stone. Matt thought it was odd she had not reacted to the explosion, and her expression was almost one of relief. She disappeared under a mountain of rubble with some nearby monks. Feeling a sudden pang of sadness, he had to remind himself that the woman he once knew as Special Agent Susan Rowles, died a long time ago.
He spun to Cromwell’s throne and could not see anything beyond a few feet due to the thick haze. Had he been buried under the collapsing stone? Matt had no time to dwell on that question. Even the idea that his daughter might have been behind this explosion barely had enough time to register in his mind as Matt grabbed a nearby Reaper-rifle and started dragging Rossiter. With countless tons of rock and metal raining on them, they were about to be sealed in here forever. They had to reach the nearest chamber exit.
Rossiter grimaced in pain while he staggered alongside Matt, his gaunt face now caked in the choking dust. The ground underneath him felt as if someone was giving the monastery a vigorous carpet-shake. He clamped his side, bleeding heavily as he tried to keep pace, his bony legs threatening to lock up with every step. “I thought you said you were alone.”
“I will be if we don’t hurry up and get out of here! Which way?” Matt yelled over the thunderous crashing of stone and steel. He exited the chamber, shielding his eyes from a hurricane of flying grit and debris.
“How the hell would I know?” Rossiter barked in return as the chamber collapsed behind them with a bone-shuddering thud.
Twenty-Eight
With everything now shaking violently, Ally tore up a long staircase, ducking under a hailstorm of rock and debris. The tunnels she had just exited were all collapsing behind her.
She had made certain the dynamite sticks were spread evenly around the cavern that housed Cromwell’s displacement device. She only needed to light one stick and throw it on top of a small pile resting at the base of the device to set off the chain-reaction. Making quick haste, she exited the room before th
e flame finished consuming the wick and reached the blasting cap.
The shockwave of the explosion was devastating to the structural foundations of the building. Now everything was coming down on top of her. She had to find an exit before she was entombed alive. Knowing what the future held if she did not stop Cromwell, there was little hope her pulverized bones would ever be dug up. She would be buried down here forever.
Running at warp speed, she raced through another downpour of stone fragments, feeling something wet and warm slide down her cheek. A falling rock had struck her head, and the gash was bleeding. When she reached the top of the stairs, she began to slide back down. The entire room was vibrating and swaying dangerously like a rudderless ship. Feeling like she was drunk, she found her footing and leaped forward as the stairs underneath her dropped away to form a giant crater of rubble. She did not slow as she charged through a new series of crumbling archways and corridors.
Ally had no idea if she was headed towards any type of exit. For all she knew, she could have been running straight into a dead-end. As she rounded a corridor, she heard nearby screams of panic. They sounded human. She slowed her pace, listening intently over the crashes and thuds. Whoever they were, they passed quickly. She pressed on again until she came to what she had been dreading this entire time.
A dead-end.
Or was it?
Massive triangular shapes of dark metal overlapped each other, sealing an entryway of some kind. She could hear a deep keening noise emanating from behind it, like the hum of heavy power generators.
She moved to the console beside the towering slab of alien metal. It vaguely looked like a high-tech abacus encased in carved stone. She ran her fingers over it and the door abruptly opened like an iris. A swoosh of coppery air greeted her as she stepped inside, reminding her of a smelting furnace.
The room was gigantic, scaled for machines and technology twice her size. The cathedral-high ceiling was covered in ancient religious frescoes, decayed by age and dust. Ally could barely make them out, but the images conveyed a sense of mythic beauty, depicting the origin of the Zograf Order. And while this massive room felt somewhat holy, that notion was quickly dispelled when she spotted a small pod-shaped ship resting in the center of the room, berthed in an iron dock of some type. The heavy cables attached to the dock hissed with steam.
Then it dawned on her. This room was a massive underground hangar.
Ally approached the alien craft, running her gloved hands across its smooth black hull in search of a latch or cockpit hatch. She had no doubt that piloting this thing was her only ticket out of here. Exactly how she would achieve that was still a mystery. She had no idea what she was even looking at as she had never seen such a craft before. She moved around its underbelly, growing more desperate by the second, searching for any type of entrance. This room was about to collapse any moment, yet she was still drawn to the craft’s bizarre details, almost reverential while studying this otherworldly technology.
“Ally?” said a soft, female voice from somewhere behind her.
Without hesitation, she swung around a raised her weapon, sighting down her barrel at the young red-haired woman emerging from the shadows.
Ally gasped. It was her mother.
She was not much older than Ally, the weak illumination from the hangar playing over her fair and freckled features. Karen’s expression was concerned and tentative as she approached, drawing Ally closer to her like a magnet. She wore a white gown of some kind, giving the impression of a pure and angelic creation. “Look at you. Look how much you’ve grown.”
Unsure if this was some insidious hallucination, Ally immediately felt as if she was being carried along by a need that had long been buried inside her, awakened now by something distant and bright. Something she had pined for since she was a child.
A mother’s love.
She stared at Karen with tortured empathy. “Mom?” she whispered. “Is that really you?”
Karen smiled warmly at the response. “Oh, Al. My little munchkin. Come here and give your mommy a hug.”
Ally lowered her weapon and moved towards her, entranced by her mother’s natural beauty. Karen gently motioned her into her embrace, running a finger delicately over the outline of her weathered and grimy face. “I missed you so much, Al.” She then ran her hands lovingly over Ally’s shorn scalp, now smoky with a light fuzz of auburn hair and dust. “Let me see you.”
Ally did not see the fist-gun her mother was concealing behind her back. She looked up at Karen and met her loving stare, but something began to feel off about the encounter. Perhaps it was the eyes. Her gaze was different from how she remembered it as a child. There was a harshness to it as if something sinister was being calculated just underneath the surface. Her skin was also clammy to the touch, and the pungent stench of her breath was next to unbearable.
As Ally pulled away, she did not even hear the deafening crack of plasma fire. She only felt a wisp of heat brush past her face before her mother’s forehead exploded in a cloud of black ash. The second shot burned through the base of Karen’s neck. It decimated her instantly, but it did not stop the lifeless body from vaulting forward onto Ally, knocking her to the ground like a bowling pin. The fist-gun flew out of her grip and clattered across the floor.
By the time Matt and Rossiter had reached Ally, she was not even aware she was screaming. She scrambled away from what remained of her mother’s ashy corpse, moving along the floor like a fleeing animal, desperate to escape this nightmare.
“Ally!” Matt knelt in front of her, halting her advance. “Ally, you’re safe. It’s me!”
Ally paused and blinked. She rolled onto her side, looked up at Rossiter then back to Matt, unsure of this was still part of the nightmare. Perhaps she had finally gone truly mad.
Eyes filled with tears, Matt threw down his rifle and scooped his daughter up into his arms. “I thought you were dead.” She did not struggle this time as Matt held her close to his chest. “That wasn’t your real mother, Ally. It was an Infiltrator.”
Ally looked up at her father, taking a moment to study his battered and bloody face as he cradled her in his arms. “I know,” she replied, struggling to form her words through heavy sobs. “But I… I just… I miss mom… so much… I miss you too.”
Through the tears, Matt smiled at her. Holding his daughter like this was a moment of joy he thought he would never get to experience again.
“I’m so sorry, dad.”
“You don’t have to apologize for anything.” She lunged at him with a hug that was full of forgiveness and the hope of a new beginning. “It’s OK,” Matt said, burying himself into her arms, allowing himself to be lost in the moment. But their moment of reconciliation was abruptly cut short when a strange klaxon began droning in the hangar. It took Matt a second to realize the entire space was now starting to collapse on top of them.
Rossiter watched with growing dread as a massive crack rippled across the wall of the hangar, slicing into two cracks, then four. “Um… that’s not good.”
Matt saw Rossiter was struggling to stay upright as he held his side. The blood had not stopped running between his fingers. It had already formed a small puddle underneath him. He was in bad shape. He stood with Ally and went to help him. “Come on, we need to leave—”
But Rossiter brushed his arm away. “Then leave.”
“You can’t stay here, you’ll die.”
“Maybe I want to.”
Matt glared at him with bewilderment. “What are you talking about?”
“Look.” Rossiter motioned to the damaged berthing cups that were entangled underneath the Death Pony due to some fallen debris. “There’s a console over there attached to those cables. They can be remotely unclamped, but someone needs to stay behind so you can take off.”
“Rossiter, we can argue about this once we’re—”
Rossiter cut him off by shoving him and Ally towards the Death Pony. “I’ve been stuck down here for years. The ups
ide to that is I know how to read some of their basic console commands. It’s the only way you’re going to escape this place alive. Now go!”
“I’m not going to leave you here to die. That’s insane.”
“I’m done with this war, Matt.”
“So am I. Listen, you can still go back to your old life.”
A rueful smile creased Rossiter’s sunken cheek. “Working for the DoD? Living at my cozy little Brownstone in Georgetown? Come on, man. Look at me. That part of my life is over. Knowing everything I know now; I could never go back to that.” He held up his blood-soaked hand to give them a glimpse of his stab wound. “Besides, I don’t have long.”
“Rossiter—”
“Remember what I told you earlier? I’m done being a pawn, Matt. I meant what I said.”
“Thank you,” Ally said, her eyes still welled with tears as she took Matt by the arm and led him towards the Death Pony. The shaking throughout the hangar was intensifying. They only had a few minutes before the entire place would be a mountain of rubble. “Dad, we’ve got to go.”
“Listen to your daughter, Matt. Get to the Moon and end this once and for all. Otherwise, my kidnapping will be worth nothing.”
“You sure about this?”
Rossiter gave a rueful grin. “Positive.”
“Good luck,” Matt said with a respectful nod.
“You too,” Rossiter replied. He then turned and staggered off towards the console.
Annoyed he couldn’t do more to help, Matt threw Rossiter one final look and leaped up onto the small indent on the side of the Death Pony’s hull. The second he did that; the entire hangar was no longer dormant. Everything around them was suddenly alive with blinking lights and holographic displays. The holograms shimmered and fritzed as rocks and debris fell through them, turning them into brief apparitions of light.
Ally took Matt’s hand and hoisted her up onto the hull.
“Since when did you learn how to fly one of these?” she asked.
The Revered (The Earth Epsilon Wars, Book 3) Page 19
