Judgment Stone (9781401687359)

by Robert Liparulo

  The man released her, said again, “Shhh. It’s Leo.”

  “Leo? I—”

  “Shhh.”

  “They’re coming,” she said, barely louder than a breath. “From both sides.”

  “Shhh.”

  The clomping grew louder. A muffled voice said, “Elias?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said she came this way.”

  Elias said something too muffled to understand. The clomping faded, along with Phin’s complaining voice.

  Leo said, “The tunnels have doorways few people know about. They’re painted to look like the walls.”

  “Why?”

  “Never know when you’re going to need them. Come with me.”

  He brushed past her in the darkness. She followed his sounds around a corner. A click, similar to the ones before, and she felt the air pressure around her change. “Come on,” he said, pulling her arm, leading her past him. She heard a gentle creak and a light came on, dull, but hurting her eyes after the Stygian darkness. She blinked, looked around. They were in a room, an old monk cell built into a corner. Everything was dirty and dusty. Lumber was stacked against a wall and a big rusty toolbox sat in one corner. Opposite the door through which they’d entered was another.

  “At one time or another of its long history, the monastery housed many more monks than it does now,” Leo said. “As many as a hundred or more. There are monk cells and extra rooms everywhere.”

  Beth nodded. It didn’t take wandering too far off the tourists’ route to see how superfluous most of the buildings were.

  His mouth fell open when he saw her arm. “Are you all right?”

  “Nothing a bottle of aspirin won’t fix. It doesn’t feel as bad as it did, or I’m getting used to the pain. Where are the other monks?”

  “The Tribe has them in the Church of St. Catherine,” Leo said, meaning the basilica. He was that way, using the proper names of things even after they’d become familiar and routine. “We were all in there for the memorial service. We heard gunshots and ran out, but that man, Elias, chased us back in—with a flamethrower.”

  “That was me firing the gun,” she said. “They tried to drug Tyler and me. Nevaeh said she wanted to take me to find out what I said or did that made God forgive Ben. I told her it wasn’t me. Whatever happened was between Ben and God.”

  “Of course.” Leo rubbed his scant beard, thinking. “Nevaeh’s been frustrated for a long time. I think Ben’s passing turned that into desperation. She’s a seeker. She knows she needs God but doesn’t know how to find Him. So she’s grabbing at anything and everything.”

  Despite the pain and danger Nevaeh’s wayward quest had caused her family, Beth felt sorry for her. The answer was simple, but Nevaeh was convinced that nothing as profound as eternal life with God could be easy or simple.

  “If you were in the basilica for the service,” she said, “how’d you get here?”

  Leo grinned. “The rear windows look like stained-glass panels mortared to the building, but they’re hinged.”

  She remembered the two small windows above the roof of the Chapel of the Burning Bush, whose altar protruded into a round addition at the back of the basilica. Or rather, the basilica was the addition: the chapel had been there first. Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, had ordered it built upon finding the bush. Two hundred years later Emperor Justinian I ordered the construction of the walls, and all the other buildings had sprouted like mushrooms over the next fifteen hundred years.

  “You climbed out onto the chapel room and dropped down?”

  Leo nodded. “Into the courtyard of the burning bush, me and Gheronda.”

  “Gheronda?” She couldn’t imagine the old man performing such a feat.

  He smiled. “I gave him a hand. He insisted, said he knew the place better than anyone and could get around without getting caught.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Should be back soon.” He gave her a concerned look. “I hope.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Still in the church. If too many of us disappeared, Elias would have noticed. He pokes his head in now and again.” He walked to the other door, cracked it open, peered out. He turned his ear to the opening and listened.

  “Are they coming? Can you hear them?” she said.

  He closed the door. “I wasn’t checking for the Tribe. The connecting rooms lead through several buildings, all the way into the Chapel of Martyrs. Gheronda left to see if he could go from there to his office.”

  That was on the Colosseum’s third floor.

  “The monastery’s satellite telephone is there, and a gun.” Leo looked at her, his brow furled. “Where’s Tyler?”

  “I don’t know. He escaped through the roof of the panic room Jagger built in our apartment. That little Tribe boy, Jordan, was chasing him, but I think something happened to him. When I got out, I couldn’t find Tyler.” Why hadn’t that been the first thing she told Leo? It was the most important. But with everything happening so suddenly, she’d gotten caught up in the story of how Leo had come to be here, to save her. “We have to find him,” she said. “That’s what I was trying to do when they spotted me. How did you know I was in the tunnel?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I’ve been watching for Gheronda to come back. If the way he went gets cut off, he’d try to get back here another way. I’ve been checking periodically, in case he was injured or needed help. I knew I’d hear the Tribe if they were coming through. They have these boots—”

  “Tell me about it,” Beth said. “Those things let them run like cheetahs and jump like . . . well, nothing I’ve ever seen. Forty feet straight up.”

  Something banged in the other room, and the door flew open. Gheronda rushed in, out of breath. His crinkly old face smiled when he saw Beth, and he said her name like a father welcoming his prodigal daughter home. He moved in to give her a hug, then paused, frowning at her arm.

  “It’s broken, but it’s not what bothers me now. Tyler’s out there somewhere.” She told him what had happened.

  Gheronda said, “I saw Jordan. He’s walking on top of the walls.” He rubbed her good shoulder, smiled—sort of—and said, “If they found Tyler, they probably put him in the basilica with the others.”

  “If they found him,” she said, “they’d parade him around the compound, calling for me to come out.” Or . . . she didn’t want to think about it, but her mind kept pulling it into her consciousness: what if they’d found him and hurt him? Nevaeh had said they wanted only to put him under. She had also said she wanted to take Beth with her. If that was true, why had Phin shot at her? Why had Elias blasted the tunnel with fire? Either the others had not gotten the message about not hurting them, or now that Nevaeh was out of commission—probably not for long and certainly not dead—all bets were off.

  She said, “Help me find Tyler. Please.”

  “We may soon get some help,” he said, pulling the satphone from under his cassock. “I called the police from the office.”

  Leo stepped forward. “They’re coming?”

  “They weren’t very enthusiastic, but I believe I convinced them. And look . . .” He flipped a switch, turned a dial on the phone. Voices came through.

  “. . . she all right?” Elias.

  Phin: “She’s coming to now.”

  “They’re talking about Nevaeh,” Beth said, and told them what happened.

  Leo said, “Fall like that would have killed anyone else.” He turned to Gheronda. “We can hear them. Can they hear us?”

  “Only if we want them to. The phone uses radio signals to communicate with a satellite transmitter in the office,” Gheronda said. “The transmitter is connected to a dish on the roof. It lets us use it anywhere in the compound, even under all these buildings.” He looked at the ceiling as if seeing through it. “It’s a regular 2 meter/440 band radio. I scanned for communications outside the wall, even though it doesn’t have much range. That’s when I picked
up the Tribe’s chatter.”

  Nevaeh’s voice came through the tiny speaker. “Toby, tell me you saw where she went.” She didn’t sound so good.

  Toby: “I saw her while she was on the roofs. Phin was right there. I thought he was going to get her.”

  “Nothing since?”

  “Negative.”

  “What about the kid? Tyler?”

  Beth tensed.

  “I haven’t seen him at all. He’s holed up somewhere.”

  That’s my boy.

  “Lot of good you’re doing up there.”

  The three of them tilted their heads toward the phone. Finally they heard Nevaeh speak again.

  “Get down here, and bring the Barrett. We’re going to tear this place apart.”

  [ 66 ]

  Tyler held on. The deck threatened to fall with or without him, and he couldn’t bring himself to let go. He believed any shift or change to the deck now would be the thing that brought it down. But he couldn’t hold on forever. He looked down at the stone buttress—a black wedge in the darkness, but he could tell it was a lot farther below his feet than he thought it would be, and he decided maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

  The support post from which he hung creaked, moaned, and shuddered.

  He lifted himself and hooked an arm over the support post to relieve his muscles, which had begun to feel like Silly Putty. He hung like that for another few minutes, then reached to get his other hand onto the platform.

  That’s when the platform released its hold on the wall and fell.

  Tyler couldn’t help it: he screamed. He dropped to the top of the buttress, not feeling anything at first. In a blur of motion and fear, he hit, collapsed, and started to tumble.

  The deck, weighted by its front edge, fell away from the wall, striking the buttress halfway along its slope to the rocky ground—exploding into its pre-deck form of loose planks, supports, nails.

  Tyler toppled after it, instinctively protecting his head with his arms while attempting to grab at the stones of the buttress whenever his hands slapped against them. He somersaulted, rolled, smacking his head, his arms. He twisted and rolled toward the shattered deck, which had abruptly settled as a pile of wood at the bottom. He crashed into the debris, feeling pain now.

  He felt dizzy, sleepy. He wondered if he was hurt more than his mind detected, in more places, more severely. He thought about moving to find out, but partly he didn’t want to know and partly he was too achy and tired. He lay sprawled among the wood, staring through a cloud of dust and a fog of pain at the edge of the wall and the night sky beyond it. The stars grew bright and began to swirl, leaving tiny comet trails behind them. Wow. The edges of his vision became blurry, as though heavy smoke were seeping in from all sides. He blinked, blinked, and upon the third closing of his lids, they stayed that way.

  [ 67 ]

  Jordan bounded over the crumbling section of wall and ran along its top toward the crashing sound and scream that had come from near the monk-cell structure in the center. He stopped before reaching the parapet and turned his flashlight beam toward the ground on the outside of the wall. He raised his radio.

  “I see him!” he said, his beam holding on the wreckage below. Floating dust and dirt obscured the scene like a smudge on a photograph. “It’s Tyler! He’s outside the wall, on the east side by the dig.” The kid must have been hiding on the platform. Jordan had passed it at least half a dozen times, even looking out at the dig. If he’d angled his eyes closer to the wall, he would have spotted him.

  Tyler wasn’t moving, only lying there, forming an X with his arms and legs, one knee bent, the foot tucked back under his thigh. His head was downhill—rather, down-buttress—from his feet. It was tilted up as though resting on a pillow, but what propped it up was rotten, broken wood.

  Tyler appeared dead, and Jordan was surprised to feel an aching sadness about that, felt it in his stomach as hollowness and in his heart as heaviness. He’d experienced the sensation before, whenever he’d heard about one of the Tribe’s offspring dying. He’d talked to Elias about it a long time ago. Elias had nodded slowly, the way he did, and said he felt the same way. He’d said it had something to do with what the Tribe did, always taking away things from the world, taking away lives—wasted lives, for sure, people who’d used their time on earth for evil. But people nonetheless. That made them takers, and over time it made their existence small, growing tighter and more compact with each life they took, like a collapsing star that sucked in everything around it and gave back nothing.

  Ben had argued this point, saying they were not takers, but givers, giving to the survivors of the evil people’s bad deeds the closure they needed, and to their would-be victims life without the pain they would have caused.

  Jordan didn’t know on which side of the argument he came down—both, he guessed—but he did know that any time one of them married and bore a child—something he would never experience and sometimes regretted, but usually didn’t ponder much—he felt wonderful. It was like a loosening of that tight knot they’d become, a relaxing of a bind around his chest so he could breathe: they were giving back, putting something into the world. And when that child died, the knot tightened again.

  “Get him,” came Nevaeh’s voice over the radio.

  “I think he’s dead,” Jordan said. “No, wait—”

  Tyler was moving, pulling his leg out from under him, blinking and squinting against Jordan’s flashlight beam. “He’s alive,” Jordan reported.

  Tyler turned, his bottom half sliding around, down off the buttress. He rolled onto his stomach and rose to his hands and knees, then up onto his feet, glancing into the beam now and then. He went around the pieces of the platform and limped away, heading into the archaeological site. He picked up a round length of wood, using it as a crutch. Glancing over his shoulder into the light, he hobbled away.

  “Hey!” Jordan called. “Wait!” He panned down to the ground below him. It was a long way down. He’d never tested the boots’ ability to cushion a jump from this height, let alone onto such uneven, rocky ground.

  “What’s going on?” Nevaeh said.

  “He’s walking away, limping.”

  “Elias, where are you?” Nevaeh said. No answer. She said, “Jordan, Phin’s coming. Make sure Tyler doesn’t get away.”

  Jordan swept the beam up to Tyler, heading for one of the two big excavation holes, each looking like an Olympic-size swimming pool in progress. He brought the light back to the ground below. If he weren’t at least down there when Phin arrived, he would be in serious trouble. Phin would push him or throw him over the edge, at the very least. If Tyler got away . . . he didn’t even want to think about that.

  He bent and straightened his knees, feeling the magneto-something fluid ripple under his feet, reading his movements, interpreting his intentions. The disks on the outsides of his knees hummed quietly. Better to jump than face Phin. He took a deep breath and leaped. The hip clamps tightened; the braces forced him to bend his knees. He concentrated on landing flat, not immediately straightening when he did—which would cause the boots to propel him into the air—and not tumbling forward.

  He landed, stumbled forward, tripped over a rock, and fell. Not too bad. He rolled onto his back and shined the light up at the top of the wall, way, way up there. Totally sick. He rose and realized he’d dropped the radio. He scanned the ground with light and saw it in pieces among the stones. He picked up the largest piece, most of the rectangle that made up its body. The digital screen that was supposed to show the channel it was on and the signal strength was shattered. He depressed the Talk button. “Nevaeh? Phin?” Nothing.

  He dropped it and raised the flashlight, looking for Tyler. His stomach rolled when he couldn’t find him. Then he saw him: his head just dropping over the edge of the nearest hole. Jordan took long, sailing strides over the rough terrain to the leveled-out smooth ground around the hole and jumped in. He shined the light into the darker-than-night hole stre
tched out before him. At the far end it sank down, and he couldn’t see the bottom. He was about to move forward when he heard the crunch of rubble on rubble behind him, breathing. He spun and caught Tyler in the light—swinging a piece of wood at his head.

  [ 68 ]

  Gheronda had held the phone up in his hand, Leo and Beth facing him, when Beth heard Jordan say he found Tyler, say he was dead. Emotions pounded her brain like waves on a beach, and she felt faint. Tears instantly filled her eyes and her hand shot to her mouth, slapping back a scream, not wanting to give voice to her grief, not wanting to make it real. Then Jordan had said, “No, wait,” then he said “He’s alive.” Beth blinked.

  Please say I heard that right. Please let him be alive.

  She realized Leo had stepped to her side, had his arm around her back, was holding her broken arm, pulling her tight against his side. They’d listened to Jordan’s description of Tyler limping away, Nevaeh’s order to make sure he didn’t get away, that Phin was on his way.

  Now Beth said, “It’s Tyler! Tyler.” She stepped out of Leo’s embrace and started for the door to the adjoining monk cell.

  Leo grabbed her arm. “Wait. We have to—”

  She yanked her arm from his hand. “We have to get him. That’s all we have to do.” She turned toward the door, clicked it open.

  “Beth,” Leo said. “We have to think this through.”

  “There’s no time!” Glaring at him. “You heard Jordan. He’s outside the walls. He’s hurt. They’re going for him.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  Gheronda stepped between them. “Calm down now, both of you.” He looked at Beth. “Hysteria’s not going to get Tyler back.”

  She could have slapped him. “Hysteria? You haven’t seen—”

  “Dear,” he said, “I shouldn’t have said that.” He held the phone to her. “At least call your husband, tell him we need him and Owen back here now. Owen will know what to do.”