Shadow of the Tomb Raider--Path of the Apocalypse

by S. D. Perry

  Nineteen minutes on the outside, and he’d have his answer.

  Or you won’t. Maybe she doesn’t call in. Maybe Croft steps out in front of you in two minutes, and you get your shot after all… Unless Croft shoots first.

  The thought was unsettling. It wasn’t like him to doubt himself so. Croft couldn’t see in the dark, she wasn’t faster than him. This wasn’t over, not even close. If Mitchell didn’t get her, Harper would. He clenched his teeth against the cold, suffocating blackness and started counting down.

  * * *

  Mitchell had been waiting at the vertical well, near the dig’s north end. She’d found a crack in the wall to slide into, and could hear every sound that the Blue Labyrinth had to offer, coiling up through the rounded hole—the calls of the cave animals, the small storms of moving bats. Beneath that she could hear the steady whisper and tick of a billion insects and spiders, crickets and lice.

  The sound of Hux dying—the shots, his furious scream, the snap of bones—had whirled through the well like a dark, lovely song, brutal and brief. The tune told her where Croft was, and gave her some ideas about where she might go next.

  She heard Sergei come up from the lower tunnel to pursue Croft, his light, clumsy steps shuffling quickly away from Mitchell’s position. If Croft believed that her enemies were focused on the top tunnels, she would use the maze. It was possible she’d go all the way to the lakes at the bottom, bypass the tunnels completely, but Mitchell thought not. Too far to climb.

  She checked her watch and then edged into the well, stepping carefully on the rim of rocks. Some thoughtful engineer or tunnel mapper had installed a thin strip of bright orange netting between the first few openings going down the eastern wall, the stiff nylon web about three meters long. The well itself dropped fifteen meters through staggered layers of tunnels, the lowest too deep for her light to penetrate. If she fell, she would die. Her heart beat very slightly faster. This was exhilarating.

  Mitchell started climbing down. The labyrinth south of her was a mess, but Croft was a caver and not afraid of tunnels. To get to the surface, though, there were only a few places where she would have access to the climb. Mitchell had time to get there first.

  She’d reached the bottom of the net when Sergei started talking. She heard his footsteps overhead even as his voice sizzled in her ear. Harper responded, and she listened to their conversation as she lowered herself down, her boots scraping on the gritting rocks. Croft was still south, it seemed. There was a ledge only a meter beneath her feet.

  She let go of the web and dropped, landing easily. There was a low, flat passage that opened off from the ledge, a crawl that sloped down to a tunnel. She was at the top of the maze.

  She called in, requesting silence so that she could concentrate. As soon as Harper acknowledged, she pushed into the dark crack, pulling herself forward on her stomach. She was crouching into a narrow tunnel only a moment later.

  Mitchell heard chirps in the passage south, the small rasps of sound that came from the screaming cave animals. She only went a few steps before she saw one, scuttling into the light of her lamp, climbing on the wall not far from the bumpy ceiling. She had to smile, remembering Sergei’s anxiety about them. It was a lizard, white, blind, delicate-looking.

  The lizard—salamander?—darted closer. She could see its teeth, small triangles of bone tight behind lips so pale they were almost clear. The animal seemed to glow in the low, dirty light of her helmet’s lamp. There were small dirty pits where its eyes should have been. The thing flicked its wire-thin tail out into the air and chirped again, tipping its head.

  Mitchell unsheathed her new Interceptor, fascinated. Would it attack her? Was its blood red? She waited… But the creature chirped once more and then turned and darted back into the dark, running in that sliding symmetrical way that lizards moved.

  Neat. She wondered if they were eating what was left of Hux and Ace. The cave was uncomfortable, cold, but interesting. Lethal.

  To the north were the maze’s connections to the upper chambers. Mitchell crouched her way forward, knife in hand, boots sliding over the mucky, shitty rocks. If Croft came into the maze, she’d be headed this way. Mitchell had asked for twenty minutes but thought she might take an extension, depending on Croft’s movements. Harper would forgive the transgression, but only if it paid off. He generally ran a tight ship, but he wanted Croft dead as much as he’d ever wanted anything. Croft had killed soldiers he had personally trained, and now two of his top players in one-on-one. He wanted revenge. His pride was in play.

  Mitchell wasn’t troubled by such considerations. She was only pleased by the opportunity to meet with a peer and compare skills. If she got a chance to use any of her blades, Croft would fall. Harper would reward her, but the true reward was in the act itself. To kill someone was to remove them from existence. A shot to the head and all of their thoughts and dreams and potential would snuff out like a candle. With a blade, you could actually watch the flame flicker and die; you could savor that moment of transition as the target’s life spilled away, as the hope left their eyes. Mitchell had killed soldiers and civilians, strongmen and college professors, she’d seen fury, tears, disbelief, but at the very end, they always wore the same look: recognition.

  She looked forward to seeing it in Lara Croft’s eyes, that awareness that her brief, powerful life was over, that Mitchell had taken it.

  * * *

  Miguel woke and felt a gentle pressure against his leg. He’d been half dreaming that he was flying over a bleak desert, wide and empty and endless, but Jonah’s knee bumped him again, and everything came back in a rush.

  His whole body hurt. He opened his eyes, wincing at the pain in his wrists, his shoulders. Jonah was sitting next to him, his dark gaze moving between the guards. Reddy was pacing near the cenote, Smith was slumped on the fender of one of the trucks.

  Miguel rocked himself awkwardly back into a sitting position. He still felt numb, like his brain had been punched out, but better than before.

  “So, here’s the plan,” Jonah said, his voice soft. “I’m going to cut you loose, but keep your hands behind your back like you’re still cuffed. One of them’s going to come over to check on us pretty soon. When he does, I’m going to move, fast. Be ready. You only need to run, straight for the jungle. Keep low and don’t stop, even if they tell you to. There’s a shotgun in a banyan tree a few yards into the growth, directly southeast. Make sure you’re clear before you go looking for it.”

  Miguel’s heart was pounding. “What are you going to do?”

  Jonah shifted, leaning in slightly. A small, thin blade slid against his left wrist. There was a tug and then his hand was free, the plastic cuffs hanging off his right.

  “I’m leaving that open-ended, but I’ll get a gun, hopefully,” Jonah said. “Whatever happens, shots are gonna be fired. You just concentrate on making it to cover.”

  “Aren’t you scared?”

  “Sure,” Jonah said. “Who wouldn’t be? Keep low, okay?”

  Reddy clapped his hand to his helmet suddenly, tensing. “Yeah, copy. We’re—what?”

  There was a long pause, and then they could only hear Reddy’s part of the conversation, terse acknowledgements. The burly man started to pace again as he listened, then turned and snapped at Smith.

  “Put your helmet on!”

  The kid scrambled, almost falling off the truck in his haste to comply.

  “Copy,” Reddy said into his mic, then covered it to yell at Smith, his agitation coming out in a lash.

  “Did you catch any of that? Why the fuck aren’t you wearing your helmet? This is a live fucking op!”

  “What’d he say? Was that Sergei?” Smith asked.

  Reddy shook his head, disgusted. “You’re too dumb to be embarrassed, aren’t you? Get out the tape. The commander wants the insurance secured. The team’s falling back.”

  “What happened?”

  “Just do it,” Reddy said, unclipping the radio from
his belt. “And use a whole fucking roll.”

  Smith went to rummage through a bag on the ground.

  “Koboshi, come in. We’ve got casualties here. Commander wants everyone at the dig, ASAP. Lock down the plane. Bring the pilot, too.”

  “Copy that,” crackled a voice from the radio.

  Casualties? Not Lara, or Reddy would have said so. And the commander wouldn’t be calling in the rest of his team, or ordering the guards to strap him and Jonah down if they’d caught her.

  Smith was cautiously approaching, a thick roll of duct tape around his wrist, a few long strips hanging from his sleeve. Miguel had thought he’d been bounced around too much tonight to ramp up to terror again, but the killing machine aimed at his face was doing the trick. Knowing that Jonah was about to act slid him right up to the edge of panic. Reddy was stalking over to another equipment bag, scowling, but keeping an eye on Smith’s approach, his own gun in his hand.

  What if I freeze? What if I just freeze?

  “What’s happening?” Jonah asked, when Smith reached them. “Did something happen?” He sounded nervous and he leaned back, using his massive frame to hide his hands.

  “Shut up,” Smith said, brow lowering. “I’m going to tape over the cuffs. Try anything and I’ll put a bullet in you.”

  Miguel kept his eyes on Reddy. The man was armed and watching—he clearly didn’t think much of Smith—but he was also trying to look through the bag at his feet. Smith stepped around Jonah.

  Jonah shifted and rose to his feet so quickly that for a beat Miguel was afraid he had frozen, but in fact time had somehow slowed—Miguel could see that Reddy’s gaze had dropped to the equipment bag and he was only just looking up, even as Jonah shifted himself with a single step and went in tight behind Smith, wrapping around the blond guard like a shawl. His giant hand covered Smith’s, and he swung the semi toward Reddy through sheer physical force, using the blond to shield himself—

  Go, go!

  Miguel pushed off the ground and flew to the trees, faster than he’d run since childhood. The semis were exchanging rapid fire, two-three-one shots. The dark jungle pounded closer; someone was shouting but he didn’t stop.

  The dark dropped in fast away from the cleared area, Trinity’s lights quickly strained to nothing by the swerving trees. With the canopy blocking the sky, it was too dark to keep running. Miguel tried anyway, but a dead tree or a rock or something big and solid had other ideas. He tripped and went sprawling, and when he took a breath, he finally heard the words still being shouted.

  “It’s okay, you can come back! Miguel!”

  Jonah?

  Miguel sat up, turning toward the faint light and the sound of Jonah’s voice, shaking slightly.

  “Miguel! You all right?”

  “Yeah!” Miguel got to his feet, a little surprised to find that except for a scraped knee, he was unharmed. “Yeah, I’m coming!”

  He walked back toward the clearing, feeling a little shocked by how quickly everything had changed. Mama would say they had God on their side. But then, Mama also said that if you spit on a Sunday, a baby got sick.

  When he stepped back into the light he saw that Jonah held Smith’s gun, and was taking Reddy’s off of him. Both men were dead—Reddy had collapsed over the bag, bleeding out on whatever had been so important that he’d looked away. Smith had taken fire from Reddy’s gun, three rounds to the chest. He’d died with a shocked expression, wide eyes staring at the wheeling stars.

  Miguel was glad they were dead. He didn’t know if that made him a bad person but they’d tied him up and threatened him, they’d laughed about Lara being dead. Fuck these guys.

  “You okay?” Jonah asked again, walking over to meet him.

  “Yeah. Well, I scraped my knee.” The words were out before he considered how ridiculous they sounded.

  Jonah didn’t laugh at him. “There’s some antiseptic stuff in my bag.”

  “What happens now?” Miguel asked.

  “Seems like reinforcements are coming,” Jonah said. “I’m going to try and stop them.”

  “What should I do?” So far, he had successfully run when told. His knee stung. Not technically true.

  “You’re not obligated to do anything,” Jonah said. “All things considered, I wouldn’t blame you for breaking our agreement… Although when Lara gets out, we’ll still need a pilot. I hope you’ll stick with us. But I’ve got to deal with these people coming. You can hide and wait until this is over, or take a truck back to the strip. It’s your choice.”

  “Or I could help you,” Miguel said.

  Jonah nodded, a look of relief in his eyes. “Yeah, that would be my pick, but no pressure.”

  Miguel could drive back to his plane and fly away, file this whole thing under “regrets” and go back to giving tours. Except he’d be turning his back on the man who’d just saved his life, and then given him an out for the rest of the fight, against villains so obvious they might as well have mustaches to twirl. Trinity had sent trained killers after a bright young woman who was trying to stop some kind of tragedy. He still didn’t know what to think about the resurrected god thing, but he knew how he would feel about himself if he walked away from them.

  “I’m in,” he said. “This is all totally insane, though, can I just say that?”

  Jonah nodded. He was looking around, marking things with a careful gaze. “That’s the truth. You ever fired a semi before?”

  “Long time ago, but I remember the basics.”

  Jonah handed him Reddy’s heavy gun, carefully. “Good, because I barely know them myself. I emptied the chamber but it’s loaded.”

  Miguel checked anyway. He remembered that much, at least, and to keep the barrel pointed at the ground or the sky. “Okay. So what’s the plan?”

  Jonah outlined his idea, and Miguel listened, and started nodding along. Why not? It was no crazier than anything else that had happened since they’d set down in Colombia. Listening to Jonah’s plan, he felt a little bit like his much younger self, back when he’d been running peppers. Wide awake, fully alive. Gone was the cocky, youthful faith in his immortality, but it had been replaced by a feeling that he’d picked the right side to be on.

  Jonah went to get the stuff he’d stashed in the tree, tossing a tube of bacitracin to Miguel when he got back.

  “You can never be too careful,” he said. At the big man’s insistence, Miguel stopped what he was doing to tend to his knee, and then they set to work.

  * * *

  Lara kept to the top of the maze for as long as she could, but finally had to drop down a level; it was that or climb back up, but she was hopeful. As she’d expected, the Trinity site mappers had marked the passages when they’d passed through: Xs for dead ends and drops, a Y shape if the passage connected to others, arrows pointing up and down. Someone had made an effort to color code, red and yellow and blue, but it seemed they’d run out of paint or patience. The drippy marks were often all the same color.

  The tunnel she climbed down to was wide and low and thick with bat guano. She crept through the muck, bow in hand as soon as she heard the first chirps. She had her first run-in with the salamanders only a moment later, a trio of the pale animals appearing from a narrow crack in the stone on the passage’s west side, near the floor. They bleated at her, edging closer when she tried to ignore them.

  She didn’t dare yell but she tapped her foot, and when one of them opened its toothy mouth to scream at her, she put an arrow into its throat. The other two disappeared back into the crack when she went to retrieve the shaft. She wiped it on her pants leg. If they were particularly scent-oriented, perhaps the smell of their own blood would act as a deterrent… although she didn’t really know. They were unique. She didn’t want to interact with them at all, or kill any more of them than absolutely necessary; they weren’t deadly. Trinity had done enough to disrupt the cave system, blowing holes, surely chasing out colonies of bats, contaminating a contained environment. Perhaps they hadn’t
recorded the salamanders because there hadn’t been so many before, or the animals had never had to come so high. Who knew how their population had been affected by Trinity’s negligence?

  She nocked the arrow again. Didn’t mean she was going to let them eat her or chirp themselves up into an attack.

  She headed south at a Y passage, making her mark near the floor—if someone was fool enough to follow her, she wouldn’t make it easy for them—trying to estimate where she was in relation to the rooms overhead, the caverns below, and to the cenote’s opening. She stopped and checked her compass and then closed her eyes, trying to remember Marin’s maps. The center of the maze was a knot with several largish chambers; past that, she only remembered that the northernmost tunnels veered east before curving back toward the cenote. They’d looked like dead ends on his map, but one of them had to open up to that chamber at the beginning. Just because Trinity hadn’t climbed it didn’t mean it wasn’t possible.

  Fine, but what if it’s some piddling crack two levels down that leads to that chamber? Something you’ve already overshot? How long are you willing to spend crawling around down here looking for the magic tunnel? You don’t have time for any of this.

  No, I don’t have time. And?

  If she could walk a straight line from where she was to the drop site, she’d be back in ten minutes. Through the top tunnels, about half an hour.

  But that’s walking, and I’m going to run. No charges down here, no soldiers. If I’m not looking up a pitch in half an hour, I climb back up and take my chances with the killers.

  The man who’d been waiting for her in the puzzle chamber had been right about that much: she had things to do. Charging into an ambush was last ditch; she’d try to find the climb first, but she wasn’t going to just wander around if she couldn’t.

  And you’re also not going to throw caution to the wind. It’s not either/or. Work the problem in front of you before worrying about the next one. That was Roth talking. As usual, he was right.