Shadow of the Tomb Raider--Path of the Apocalypse

by S. D. Perry

  Soon. He walked back to his seat, pleased to see that most of the Dozen were already in Kevlar and had strapped back in to check their firearms and to go back over the maps. Croft wasn’t going to know what hit her.

  * * *

  The trip to the Blue Labyrinth was rough, to say the least. There was no insulation between the engine compartment and the interior, the roar of the truck’s unmuffled engine incredibly loud, the air reeking of burnt oil. Lara held on to the seat, her kit wedged between her knees, as Jonah drove, the truck jouncing along the dark road that wound through the jungle and into the hills. She gave up taking a last look at Marin’s maps after she bit her tongue when they hit a hole big enough to hide a crouching child, halfway to the dig. The metal taste of blood lingered in her mouth. The truck’s headlights illuminated the insects that smacked into the cracked windshield, caught crashes of sudden movement ahead, small animals running for cover. Wide nocturnal eyes watched them pass by from a safe distance.

  After the truck made a final nerve-wracking leap onto a low rocky hill, the headlights fell across the opening to the site—basically a sunken hole in the ground, about ten meters across and surrounded by jungle. There were signs that a team had worked there—a field of stumps crisscrossed by rutted tracks, a half-burned pile of refuse next to a jeep chassis being swallowed by crawling vines. How long had it been since Trinity had gone? Marin hadn’t said, but she’d gotten the impression it had been a while. Months, perhaps.

  There had been some kind of passenger elevator for the cenote—Lara could see a small metal platform hanging by ropes on the far side—but whatever machinery had run it had been taken out. A staked rope was strung around the hole.

  Jonah turned off the engine, the sudden cessation of noise making Lara feel she’d been struck deaf. She got out and started kitting up, climbing into her harness while Jonah walked over to look into the hole, leaning over the rope with a torch. He cast a long shadow walking back, the light from the headlamps thick with gathering moths. He reached into the truck and turned off the lights, popping open a small electric lantern.

  “Just more jungle down there,” he called. “Open spot in the middle.”

  “There’s water beneath that,” Lara said. “The tunnels angle off and down to a series of shallow lakes…”

  She turned, getting her bearings.

  “…that way,” she finished, pointing south and west. “The direction I need to go, actually. The tunnels are a real tangle, layers and layers of them, but the places Marin marked as relevant are all right at the top. I’ll hit the farthest out first and work my way back to the big room, the prize. Whatever it was Dominguez couldn’t figure out. Would you check me, please?”

  Jonah stepped over and pulled at the buckles on her harness. “So, you’re feeling good about this?”

  She nodded, pulling items from her bag, hooking them to her harness. Climbing axe, extra carabiners, flares. Her knife went on her belt, along with the radio, markers, matches… She had Marin’s maps on the disposable phone she’d bought in Mexico, the slim case buttoned into her hip pocket. She’d downloaded and run scan apps and the card seemed clean, but she still didn’t want to risk her own device. Anything from Trinity was suspect. “I really don’t think this will take long.”

  “That’s good,” Jonah said, looking around at their isolated surroundings. Even the trail they’d come in on seemed to have been swallowed back up by the jungle. “I was thinking I might catch a movie or something while I waited, but I’m pretty sure everything’s closed.”

  They walked to the rim of the cenote, Jonah carrying the rope and extra equipment. She helped him set up the simple winch and tie off an anchor rope; Trinity had left behind a hook post drilled deep into the rock. They dropped three flares, brilliant hissing sparks of red falling through the black, lighting up the abundant growth in the cavern—ferns and small rubber trees, mostly, but Lara saw a tall walking palm near the center, its spreading roots lit by the fiery glow. That meant the ground was solid. She had expected as much from Marin’s notes, but the confirmation made her feel better. She couldn’t see the entrance to the tunnels thanks to the overhang of the opening’s heavy lip, but there was a coolness in the air this close to the rim, a sense that they were at the edge of some hidden abyss. She imagined she could smell the flat mineral tang of water beneath the burning chemicals of the flares.

  They lowered her pack and the bow case off the edge of the well, watching the duffel settle on the guano-spattered dirt next to a spindly rubber tree, fifty meters down. She had a canteen and a filter straw in her pack, rope, a small first-aid kit, a light thermal jacket, two LED torches with extra batteries, camera, duct tape, protein bars… She was ready.

  A few dozen small bats spun up through the red light, whickering out of the cenote’s mouth and away. She doubted she’d run into anything more dangerous so far underground, but the tunnel system was set into karst—sinkholes and vents were inevitable, which could mean larger animals, and better safe than sorry; there were a dozen arrows with the bow if she ran across anything that meant her harm. She had no plans to fire a weapon underground, but with Trinity involved, she wasn’t taking chances. The 1911 R1 Enhanced held eight and she had both mags loaded, plus a single reload. Twenty-four rounds was undoubtedly overkill and added extra weight to her load, but Trinity’s demented ideology demanded that she be cautious; if they had guards in the area, they might send them, and to the self-proclaimed army of God, the end justified any and all means.

  Jonah helped her tether to the rope and pull up slack so she could thread the figure-eight and lock in. They both checked her work. Lara leaned back a little, and everything held as it should. She was ready.

  “How far do you have to go?” he asked.

  “Barely three kilometers, and it’s tunnels all the way. But the radios aren’t going to be much use well before I get there.”

  Jonah gave her a look at the understatement. They’d lose contact as soon as she walked out of sight, and they both knew it.

  “Try not to worry,” she added.

  “We’re in a Colombian jungle at night so you can tour a secret Maya labyrinth booby-trapped with mines,” Jonah said. “For real, why would I worry?”

  She grinned. Jonah could always get a smile out of her. With that flicker of thought, she got a hint of the emotional maelstrom waiting for her if she let her guard down. Somehow feeling even a moment of happiness brought up everything—that constant beat of dread, terror that she would fail to stop Dominguez in time, wrenching regret for so many things…

  Lara shut it down before it could go any further. Feeling shitty still wasn’t an option. She put on her helmet, adjusted the strap. “I’ll be back soon. If you see any wild pigs, climb a tree.”

  “You’re kidding, right? I thought the jungle had jaguars.”

  “Yes, but jaguars don’t hunt at night,” she said. “Wild pigs are nocturnal, and it’s mating season.”

  Jonah nodded toward the truck, a gray metal heap with a few flecks of red paint still on the panels. “I’ve got shelter. And failing that, the shotgun and a recipe that calls for pork. You worry about finding what you came to find.”

  Lara stepped to the rim, tapping her headlamp on. She donned her gloves and grabbed the rope.

  “Wish me luck,” she said.

  “You won’t even need it,” he said. “This is what you do.”

  Lara took a breath and walked herself backward, finally pushing off from the lip, lowering herself into the cavernous dark.

  * * *

  Jonah watched her drop neatly into the eerie, sputtering echoes of the cavern, touching down and climbing out of the harness in a minute. She turned and looked around, her headlamp flashing over the greenery, then waved up at him. She seemed impossibly small down there, a tiny figure bathed in flickering red from the flares.

  “Test, test, copy?” her voice crackled over the radio.

  “Loud and clear,” Jonah said. For what it was wort
h. Specialized mine radios were too heavy for a single caver to manage, so they’d opted for these. Waiting for Lara often meant being out of touch for extended periods.

  He watched her refit herself by the tiny light of her headlamp—putting a loaded magazine into the Remington, slinging her bow, tying her jacket around her waist. She finally took off the helmet and hooked it to her belt, turning on a flashlight. She aimed the narrow cone of light past a low clump of greenery to her right. Her voice was calm.

  “The entrance is just this way. Two hours or less. You can time me.”

  Jonah looked at his watch. “Don’t hurry on my account, Little Bird. Safe and steady wins the race. 2142.”

  “Take care, Jonah,” she said, and did her voice tremble the tiniest bit? “Over and out.”

  She turned and jogged into the thick red shadows. She was out of sight in the space of a breath, the glow of her flashlight disappearing a second later.

  Jonah sat back on his heels, frowning. He reached over and tapped off the small lantern, which was being bombarded by giant moths. It wasn’t like Lara to get maudlin, not at a dig site. Ever. He’d heard her scared, angry, and in a hurry; she always sounded determined, but never tearful. She’d been quiet on the plane, but she got like that when she was studying for an expedition. He hadn’t thought anything of it.

  That tiny quiver in her voice bothered him. He’d gone through a very dark time after what had happened at Yamatai, but had gained some valuable tools when he’d been putting his life back together. Maybe the best one was taking regular time to observe his emotions, good and bad, to feel them without judgment, and then let them pass by. He didn’t like the word “mindfulness,” he thought it sounded pretentious, but the concept was the thing. Lara agreed with the principle, but when her father was involved, her defenses took over. And this whole Maya thing—the reason they’d traveled to Mexico in the first place—was all about her father.

  Although it was unclear who had pulled the trigger, Trinity had murdered Richard Croft, and set it up to look like a suicide. Lara was usually very good at channeling her feelings into her work, which had gone from historical and archaeological research to putting out the fires that Trinity kept lighting… But when she’d taken that dagger back in Mexico, she’d inadvertently lit this fire herself, sparking an event that her father may have been trying to stop when he’d been murdered—a horrifying, cataclysmic tsunami, in which many had died. Of course she was freaked out, anyone would be, but Lara was still in the habit of setting unpleasant feelings aside, as if she could somehow store them until she was ready. He knew from experience that they had a tendency to seep up as anxiety, distraction, self-doubt. Lara was the most competent person he knew, hands down, but if she lost her focus, she could get hurt.

  She’s not going to lose her focus. And she’ll process or she won’t. Take your own advice and chill, or it’s going to be a long couple of hours.

  Jonah let his eyes adjust to the sultry dark and then leaned back on his hands, looking up. The sky was amazing, a deep velvet scattered with brilliant pinpricks of light. He could see the dust between the stars.

  He was still worried, but all he could really do now was wait.

  * * *

  The small patch of rainforest at the bottom of the well didn’t last far into the first tunnel, which was nearly high enough for her to stand upright in, and a bit wider. There were some slicks of moss and a few struggling ferns for the first dozen meters, and then it was moist packed dirt and rock and bat guano. Chilly. She’d dropped from the humid tropics to the dank cold of a leaking basement, and her sweat cooled quickly.

  She crouched her way down the long entrance tunnel’s gradual descent, the torch’s beam illuminating the roughly sculpted walls of dank sedimentary rock. Marin’s notes had been from memory rather than expedition logs, but he had supplied as much useful information as he could recall. A geologist had suggested that the labyrinth had been a natural drainage point for the local river system millennia ago, but had been cut off by geological changes. It was still a wet cave; the lower tunnels flooded during heavy rain seasons.

  There were signs that Trinity had been through—metal supports jammed into crevices to hang lights, along with cigarette butts and random garbage. Clearly, they hadn’t been concerned about polluting the delicate environment. From a strictly professional view, Lara was surprised that any respected archaeologist could work for them. The way their people treated digs was truly appalling.

  Lara shook her head at herself. Dominguez wanted to recreate the world, he wasn’t going to worry about embracing low-impact methodology or preservation ethics. And Trinity was operating so far outside the realm of such considerations it was ridiculous to even think about it.

  You’re distracting yourself, because you’re going to fail, her mind whispered. Pedro Dominguez has been studying Mesoamerican cultures since before you were born. Do you honestly believe you’re going to find something he missed? He could be laying his hands on the Box of Ix Chel right now, this second, while you’re chasing a long shot hundreds of miles away—

  “Stop it,” Lara said aloud, and hesitated, listening to the slight echo of her voice. There was an opening ahead, a large one. She’d already reached the first branch.

  Lara didn’t need to look at the map; she’d memorized her route. The tunnel opened into a small chamber, several meters high and about the size of a living room. There would be a second tunnel branching somewhat west from the chamber, which descended rather quickly to the deeper layers of the labyrinth and the true bottom of the cenote. She was to continue south. There was a stone bridge to edge across and another winding passage before she got to the first charges; she would look at Marin’s notes when she got there, although she could see the grid in her mind, knew where the trap was laid. There were only a few along her path, small charges set to trigger cave-ins at convenient joints and fractures.

  She reached the opening to the chamber, and shined the torch around. Someone had spray-painted on the worn stone of the walls: a red X for the western tunnel, a blue arrow for the southern. The floor was thick with fresh guano, the ammonia smell singeing her nostrils.

  Lara pulled out the radio. “Checking in. Jonah, do you copy?”

  She waited, and there was a long burst of static, and a buzzing that might have been talking.

  A hundred meters in. She was surprised she was getting anything.

  “Good, good, good,” she said into the radio, hoping he’d catch a word. She waited, then depressed the send button twice, quickly. Two taps meant “All’s well.”

  There were two short hisses in response: Message received. She hooked the radio to her belt and stepped into the chamber. She could hear squeaks and rustling overhead. She raised the torch as far as she dared, not wanting to startle the colony, and looked up.

  There were several dozen brown bats about two meters over her head, hanging and climbing, active. The largest was no bigger than a man’s fist. From the way they turned their tiny snub-nosed faces as they chirped, their delicate ears trembling, she thought they were insectivores. They had tiny eyes, too. Fruit bats generally had large eyes, and didn’t depend on echolocation to eat. Not that she was any kind of bat biologist.

  Chiropterologist. She remembered the order name, chiroptera, because it meant “hand-wing,” which she thought was an unusually apt description. Her father had taught her that.

  She lowered the light and hurried through the small chamber, trying not to step on the teeming insects that littered the floor—mostly roaches, but she saw beetles and crickets, too. She paused to put her own mark beneath Trinity’s arrow with a white grease pencil, then ducked her head and entered.

  The tunnel she moved into was similar to the one she’d left but narrower. It jagged upward for a dozen meters—not sharply, but enough to stretch her legs—and then down, the bottom curving out of sight, to the right. In a few places, the Trinity excavation team had wedged boards between the walls of the tunnel. Lar
a moved down easily, feeling the moist air cool further, her steps echoing back at her as she neared the bottom. This deep, the darkness had weight; the light of her torch sliced through it cleanly, but she could feel the black pressing against her from all sides.

  The curve at the bottom of the passage opened into a pit that staggered downward through many layers of tunnels, spanned by a descending, uneven stone bridge less than a meter wide. There were several such spots in the labyrinth, vertical holes connecting two or more of the passages. Lara stopped well back from the edge, looking across and slightly down. About six meters of bridge between her and the continuation of the tunnel. The ceiling was low enough that the Trinity people had put in clip line, running the length of the formation. Lara reached up and tugged at it. Solid. Her harness was back at the drop—she hadn’t expected to use it at all—but she had nylon rope and carabiners…

  Lara looked down, studying the slope beneath the bridge. The torch’s beam ran the length of what was essentially a giant, very steep slide, nearly vertical in spots. The initial drop was about four meters, to a lip of water-worn rock— beyond that, Lara could see the bottom of another length of tunnel, with another vast opening down into dense black.

  The bridge is wide enough to dance on—just go.

  And you’re alone down here. Take the time, do it right.

  Lara hesitated, and felt a flush of anxious irritation with herself for wasting time debating the point. She hooked the torch onto her belt and donned her helmet, activating the lamp, then put on her gloves. She grabbed the narrow line and stepped out onto the bridge.

  Edging forward carefully, hand over hand, she tested each step before trusting her full weight to it. About halfway across, the bridge dipped too far for her to easily reach the line, but by then she’d found her balance and the footing was firm, free of loose rocks. She let go of the line and crouched forward. If she fell, she only had to pitch forward and she’d be fine, she’d roll right into the tunnel—