by Maxey, Phil
A short while later Marina was outside sitting on a bench in a playground, watching Jess and Jasper climb a small set of stairs then slide down the other side, giggling all the way. Flint was barking at them, while Shadow seemed content to sit by her side and watch. She looked at the space on the wooden seat to her side and a wave of sadness moved through her. She swallowed and looked back at the children, trying to find refuge in their joy. Footsteps came from the main building and continued growing close but she resisted turning around, she knew who was approaching anyway.
“You didn’t seem too happy in that meeting,” she said to Alfredo, keeping her eyes on the playground. He walked to her side and gestured towards the empty spot. “Please.”
He smiled. “It was that obvious.”
She looked at him. “Yes.”
“From early on, after the scourge hit these shores, and the civilian authorities were wiped out, the colonel has been in control… with help from others. And that is the reason your children are playing in front of you now and not running from vamps.”
“You think he should still be in control?”
“Ha, well he is a soldier, and outranked by the general. Far be it from me to argue against that, but Galloway and those close to her have not lived here, they did not have to go through what we did. We know this island…” He sighed. “I do not want to lose what we have.”
She looked back at the playground. “I don’t want you to lose it too… the general though made good choices before. Jankle would never have survived as long as it did without her. Maybe this place can last longer, because it’s an island… Unless vamps can swim.”
He chortled. “I do not think they can, but do not quote me on that!” They both laughed. “Well, I hope you are right because if you are not…”
She turned, looking directly in his eyes. “I want this place to be my home, Fredo. There is nowhere else to run. I will defend it will my life.”
He nodded in silent agreement as she looked back to her kids. “When we explore the caves. I would like you to come with us. What do you say?” He noticed her hesitation. “I will find someone I trust to look after them while you are gone, and it should only be a few hours. I do not expect us to find anything!”
She smiled while nodding. “I would like that.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Nelson placed the notebook on his lap, then looked at Joel in the copilot’s seat. “So we got ourselves a good and base news situation.” Both were wearing headphones and talking into the attached mikes.
“Bad news first.”
Outside the sun beamed across a clear sky and the tops of clouds which they were flying over.
“We got enough fuel to get most of the way to Puerto Rico.”
“Okay…”
“And that’s also the bad news. We’re going to have to put her down somewhere over Haiti, if we’re lucky maybe as far as the border with the Dominican Republic.”
Joel looked away in thought. “The earlier we land the more vamps we have to fight through to get to the east coast.” He looked at Nelson. “Can we make it to the border?”
“Maybe, but we’ll be running on fumes. If we were lighter, I reckon we’d make it and that’s if there’s a runway there. You know what’s in those crates in the hold?”
“No idea, but why don’t we find out.” He placed the headphones on the seat, and descended the steps to the cargo hold, and examined the first of the huge crates. He then looked along the aisle at the winged creature taking up three seats.
“What’s wrong?” said Anna seated near Joel.
“We need to be lighter.” He walked to Copeland, who looked up.
“What do you want?”
“What’s in these crates?”
“What is it to you?”
“Because the lighter we are, the further we can fly.”
“Are we going to crash in the sea?” said Corine anxiously.
Joel turned to her. “No. We can make it to Haiti—”
“We’re not going to the island?” said Barry.
Other concerns flew at Joel. He raised his hands. “We’re not going to crash. We’ll find a safe place to land, but we can’t make it all the way to Puerto Rico. We don’t have the fuel. But—” He looked back to Copeland. “If we were to lose some weight—”
The Drak sprung up, hitting the curved ceiling and making something there creak. “This is my plane! And my crates!”
Dalton stood, as did Kizzy. Joel didn’t budge, but had to lean back someway to keep the gaze of the creature leering over him. “I appreciate what you’ve done for us, helping us get this far. But we need to lose weight. Otherwise we land on the ground, and have to fight a long way to the east coast. Or we fly longer and fight less. What would you rather do?”
The Drak let out a breath looking away, then to the crates. “You can get rid of the first two, but the last one stays.”
Joel looked at the first five-foot square metal net covered box. “I can live with that.”
*****
A three vehicle convoy of humvees weaved between abandoned cars and trucks, on an eight-lane road. Fast food restaurants sat between palm trees at the side, as the rain began to fall heavier.
Marina sat in the middle truck, with a dark-haired woman to her right who had been introduced as Sophia, one of Alfredo’s team, and the man himself was in the front passenger’s seat, while a soldier drove.
They moved past what appeared to have been the scene of a battle with a burned out armored personnel carrier and small walls of sandbags, then took an exit and moved onto the highway. It wasn’t long after leaving the outskirts that the lanes had reduced and a rich dense green forest slid by on both sides.
“How do you know there are no vamps out here?” said Marina, trying to look into the gaps between the leaves.
“We don’t,” said Alfredo. “But vamps need blood and the city is where that is. The last attempt to climb the fence was a month ago, so we assume there are no more.”
As Marina looked further into the shadows of the lush tropical vegetation, his comment sounded more like hope than a concrete plan, but that was good enough for now.
As they moved deeper inland, heading west, he told stories of how he met Sophia and some of the discoveries they had made on the island. Marina smiled and nodded when appropriate, but had trouble staying engaged. The landscape around them was too idyllic. She was on vacation after the world had ended, and grinned despite what her instincts were telling her, that the corporation were coming. It was just a matter of when and how they would be stopped when they arrived. Looking for a mythical fourth king seemed like a waste of time. The island needed to prepare, but then, maybe that’s exactly what Galloway was doing back at the headquarters.
The hour to the cave system felt like minutes and she was surprised when they slowed near a turnoff with a large curved sign above it. “This cave system is the one?” she said.
Alfredo frowned. “That is what the longitude and latitude indicate.” He looked over his shoulder to Sophia. “But we have explored these caves many times, us and other archeologists and sure there are unexplored areas, which are impossible to get to and history that goes back thousands of years, but nothing more than that. This is not Egypt, there are no ‘hidden’ rooms to be discovered.”
The convoy passed under the sign, then past a ticket booth and along a single winding road, bordered by a forest and with red and yellow blooms almost lost to the undergrowth.
“It’s beautiful here,” said Marina.
Alfredo nodded. “Yes, that is something the scourge could not take that away.”
They passed an empty parking lot, as the road curved around ending in another. The vehicles parked up and everyone got out onto puddle infested concrete, including Evan with excitement in his eyes. The rain had stopped with hints of blue amongst the clouds.
Marina looked around as soldiers waved their assault rifles at the damp forest around them, and Alfredo, Sophia and Mad
dison placed backpacks on their backs. He passed one to Evan then Marina who did the same, then held up a plastic device with a small digital readout and a series of numbers. He moved it left and right then settled on the correct direction.
“This way,” he said.
They moved along a concrete path, four soldiers ahead of them and four behind, heading towards a series of single-story buildings. Sat against one of the white walls was a tourist buggy with accompanying train.
They moved further in, passing restaurants and signs mentioning ‘tickets, this way’ in English and Spanish while Alfredo kept his eyes on his electronic guide. Marina kept her attention on the wall of trunks, branches and leaves, tens of yards away, as did the soldiers around her.
The drenched ground angled downwards as the forest climbed steep slopes in the opposite direction, and they moved into a concrete walled structure with a set of stairs that descended deeper.
Alfredo turned to the group. “This is where we start to enter the cave system. There are probably no vamps here, but we will be in a tight space, so stay alert.”
Marina nodded, being more nervous than the human soldiers around her, who in turn switched on flashlights strapped to their helmets.
They quickly ascended two flights to another, longer tunnel and kept going, turning a corner to a huge jagged, stalactite covered cave entrance lost in a sea of vegetation. The path moved steeply down into it, which they followed and Marina looked up as the sky became an ever shrinking patch of brightness. They walked past ancient rock faces covered in green flora, moving deeper until finally the sun had been extinguished completely and their light beams lit beige and yellow walls of a cave interior.
Shadows clung to the walls but Marina could see through them and was amazed at how far back the space went.
Alfredo waved his box around, then moved off along the path. “This way.”
The group bent down to move under a low hanging ledge and emerged into a cathedral-sized area, with small whispers of sunlight visible through breaks in the cave ceiling above them. Towers of rock as big as redwoods sat on both sides of the path, while other structures extended all the way to the ceiling, combining with rock teeth which threatened to crush anyone beneath.
The path ended and Alfredo looked back at the others. “This is as far as the visitors go. But my little box here is saying we need to go further.”
“Is that a problem?” said Maddison.
He leaned over the guardrail to where the cave fell away to a void. “See for yourself.”
Maddison looked down, lighting surging, rushing water.
“Even without the recent rain, we would need diving equipment to explore those other tunnels, with no hope of finding anything!”
Maddison looked at Evan then Marina. “They can do it.”
“Err… what?” said Marina.
“Are you insane?” said the archeologist. “They may have many abilities we do not, but they can still drown!”
Marina wasn’t actually sure she would, but she had no desire to find out.
Before the young scientist and Alfredo could argue some more, Evan had grabbed the GPS device and was over and off the edge of the cliff. A large splash quickly followed and everyone looked over the rail in shock.
Evan flailed amongst the turbulent waters and was quickly lost from sight as the river moved into another tunnel.
“Shit,” said Marina. She climbed over the rail and dropped into the oily depths as voices shouted at her from above.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Bubbles mixed with flickers of light as Marina’s flashlight went out. She was submerged within the torrent, swept along with no control over where she was heading. Solid rock surfaces came and went, some she bounced off with a crack or a scrape, her hybrid healing quickly mending the damage until a hand grabbed her arm and pulled her free from the chaos.
She landed on a smooth rock plateau and took her first breath in minutes. She still wasn’t sure if she could drown or not, but water spluttered from her mouth when she tried to speak. Hitting the side of her hardhat produced a weak beam, giving a limited view of where she was.
Evan stood a few yards in front of her in a small cave, waving the box across what appeared to be a sheer wall of rock, with a network of vines entrenched across it.
“The last reading on the GPS said we go through here, but there is no ‘here’, it’s just rock.”
Marina slowly stood. “That wasn’t very smart, Evan. You could have been killed.”
He started to pulled the reeds and branches away. “We’re hybrids. We can’t die remember. Anyway, nobody made you come with me. I was fine.”
“You know that’s not—” She noticed a patch of rock which appeared smoother than the area around it, and walked forward.
“What is it?” he said.
She cleared more leaves away revealing a split in the surface which looked rectangular and before he could tell her to stop, she pushed her palm into it, pushing the square inwards. She turned around to him crouched, his hands over his head. “What you so—”
The ground shook with dust falling from the ceiling just feet above their heads, and in the beams from their flashlights the rock wall slid slowly away. They both stood, mesmerized, until it and the ground stopped moving.
“Have you not seen the movies!” he shouted, looking in three different directions at once. “You push shit in old caves and you’re on the end of a spike! Or a giant—” he looked upwards. “Boulder crushes you!”
“I admit, this is weird. Never seen a stone wall do that before, but look around, nothings trying to kill you.” She looked back at the void that had opened up. “There’s another tunnel. Lets go.”
Stalactites and their inverse brethren, meshed together to form walls which they quickly made their way past, but the deeper they moved into the heart of the earth the more regular the shapes appeared on the surface of the tunnel, until they were clearly moving through an artificially created space. She stopped and drew her fingers across ridges and raised areas. “This wall’s been… constructed. This is no longer a cave…” She looked at the smooth ceiling. “I think we’re somewhere else…”
“I knew it!..”
She looked along the tunnel, which narrowed. “I think there’s an end up there.” They quickly arrived at another rock face, but on this one were distinct lines.
“That… looks like a—”
“Another stone door.” She looked at the walls on both sides for any holes and then at the ceiling inches above her head. Maybe the movies were going to be right. She looked at Evan. “You ready?” He nodded and she placed both hands on the four-foot wide surface and pushed, but this time nothing happened.
Evan held up his positioning system, which now showed ‘Error’ on its screen, then looked back at the vertical stone slab. “This has to be it.”
She looked at her hands, the palms of which were completely covered in dust and grime, then at Evan. “If it’s true, and a fourth Alkron king is behind this door, which...” she studied it again. “I can’t see any keyhole for. What else would be used to gain entry?” She already had an answer and waited for the young man to catch up, but after a few seconds of him not knowing she licked her finger revealing a dried smear of blood from her earlier aquatic journey through the cave system.
“Blood!” he shouted.
“Yup.” She placed her cleaner hand back on the cold surface and this time the ground trembled and the solid block of stone slid back as before. As it did a rush of cool air emerged from the widening gap and once it was big enough for her to squeeze through, she pushed past into a cavern so large it dwarfed the earlier ones at the entrance.
“Woah…” said Evan behind her.
Sunlight filtered through leaves and plants hundreds of feet up in the ceiling, lighting a central mound, upon which sat a large ornate sarcophagi, covered in reeds and flowers.
“We found it!” His excitement was momentarily tinged with sadness. This was
a culmination of many late nights and hours spent studying with his grandfather. He would have been proud to have found it with him.
They both walked forward across stone slabs in silence until the GPS box beeped, making them both jump.
Evan held it up. “Hey, we got a signal and… yeah, this is it. Exactly where it should be.”
But Marina didn’t care. She walked up a series of stone steps, each one with symbols carved into it, until reaching the summit, some twenty feet above the temple floor and ripped the plants that had taken root across the kings resting place. It wasn’t long before she could see the guilt metal and stone surface, still reflective despite its age, and on the sides, stone etchings depicting battles. She went to place her hand on its surface but hesitated, then went to move her hand forward again.
“Hey don’t touch it!” said Evan stopping her. “We don’t know what kind of magic or technology it is. Maybe touching it will do something to you. Who knows.”
He had a point. She pulled her hand back then looked down at the surrounding rocks, some of which looked like weathered statues and further to the walls around the circular room. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t fancy another swim.” She looked up at the small circular region of light. “How good are you at climbing?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Joel!”
He opened his eyes, blinking and trying to take in the lit dials in front of him combined with the complete lack of anything outside the plane’s windscreen. He looked at Nelson to his left. “I’m awake. What is it?”
Nelson pointed to the headphones and Joel put them on. “You been asleep a good while and I thought you should know. We only got forty minutes’ worth of fuel left.”
