by Rick Jones
And the darkness that was blacker than black kept rolling their way, a tidal wave of death that had no conscience, no remorse, and no agenda other than to rip and tear the meat from their bones.
It was nearly upon them.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The assault weapons were nearly useless, bullets ripping and tearing into carapaces and taking out so few that the action in itself was futile, a worthless exercise in self-defense.
The tide kept coming.
Savage, a man of true optimism who believed that there was a solution for everything, flashed his light in all directions behind him, above him, the light giving off enough illumination to tell him that the wall was about nine-feet tall, and above that a ledge that blended so closely in color with its background that it was hardly noticeable.
“There!” yelled Savage, pointing. “There’s a ledge!” He interlocked his fingers into a makeshift stirrup and allowed Alyssa to place her foot inside. When she did he hoisted her to the shelf above where she easily found her footing and reached a hand down, helping others to get above. Others joined in, making an assembly line of hoisters to lift those toward salvation.
The tide was closing in.
The clacking of mandibles grew intensely loud, opening and closing; their instincts driving them to seek and take new ground, to find prey and to devour it cleanly.
Most of Demir’s team made it to the ledge, Savage staying behind, helping, which caused concern with Alyssa. The oily mass was nearly upon them, less than 20 meters away and closing. Nearly a dozen men remained on the floor, including Savage.
She cried out. “John!”
He looked up, then behind, saw the tide closing in.
Demir reached a hand to him. “It’s time,” he told him. “You can do no more.”
John reached up and grabbed Demir by the wrist and tried to pull himself up. His hand was slick, the hold, at best, a tenuous one, and then he slipped.
“Come on, Savage!”
The wave of darkness was quickly closing, less than 5 meters away.
John jumped up, this time the connection a solid one with Demir and Savage both grabbing each other’s wrist.
But the climb was weak as Savage’s feet were unable to find traction against the wall, slipping, his legs dangling beneath him, bait for the taking.
“C’mon, Savage!”
John found minimal purchase with the soles of his boots and began to climb, finding marginal success.
“You do want to see the face of God, don’t you?” prodded Demir. “If you do, then pull yourself up.”
Savage found his footing. The remaining soldier who was on the floor with him did the same, both men scrabbling for the ledge as they were being pulled upward in unified effort.
But the soldier slipped, his feet hanging.
And the tide closed in, hitting the wall with incredible impact, the level of scarabs boiling upward as they clambered over one another, the level rising.
John made it topside.
The commando, however, was not as lucky.
The soldier screamed as mandibles locked on and tore away at the fabric and flesh, consuming the man as his eyes suddenly flared to the size of saucers, the pain becoming white hot.
Savage grabbed for the man, latching onto his assault weapon, a strong hold. But the moment became a game of tug-of-war with John pulling, the scarabs pulling, the man’s flesh pulling apart like strands of rubber, the muscles giving, separating, the soldier about to be divided in two.
John released the man, allowing the scarabs their bounty, the act drawing the look of ire from Demir.
In John’s eyes it was an act of mercy, the man lost beyond hope, his death hopefully a quick one.
In Demir’s eyes, however, he saw it as an act of sacrifice by surrendering a man who didn’t need to be surrendered, an act to buy them time.
The man was pulled underneath as the tide rose, his cries of anguish subsiding, and then gone.
Demir leaned over the edge. Another man lost. Then he reasserted himself by getting to his feet and driving his people forward before the tide rose above the lip of their landing.
They all ran on complete adrenaline, each person striving for every dark inch in front of them. They came to a series of bends and curves, the one and only route that led them towards the Chamber of the One.
#
There was a sound behind them like a chattering of teeth, the scarabs mounting the ledge and coming forward in a natural tide of overwhelming darkness with their mandibles snapping and clicking, their wickedly keen tongs waiting to strip meat from bone and to feed.
They were closing the gap.
“MOVE!” yelled Savage, taking glances over his shoulder. They were too quick, he considered, and far too many. And there was no way they could outrun, outgun, or outmaneuver these creatures.
The team moved forward with urgency, into deeper darkness, the shadows before them another formidable foe possibly hiding things within.
“They’re right behind us!” yelled Hillary. “Faster . . . We have . . . to move . . . faster!”
The black tide rolled forward, moving with liquid speed down the corridor.
When the team rounded a bend they were confronted by another wall. You have got to be kidding me, thought Savage. He shined the light upward. It was like the other wall, with a landing that led deeper into the temple. “Up! Everyone up!”
This time they were faster and more efficient, with Demir’s team hoisting the ministers and civilians topside before aiding their teammates.
As soon as the last man crested the ledge to the next level the beetles hit the wall, hard, the level of scarabs once again rising like high tide.
The team was on the move with everyone racing towards the salvation of the foreground.
After taking a series of right angles they came to another wall. There was no ledge, no landing to scale to—just a wall.
“Oh my God,” whispered Hillary. “There’s no way out. THERE’S NO WAY—”
“Shutup,” Savage said curtly. He then looked behind him. So far the corridor was clear. Then he turned to the wall and noted the markings of archaic script, perhaps a riddle:
তালিকার সমসাময়িক ыкавнь প্রকাশ рырыцы. ∑ыбар তাসভ্যতার
ліку быў асьв নাম মনুষ্য নাম স্থান পায়। হতে হয় ঐতিহাসিক ও ঐতিহ্যগত গুরুত্ব সম্পন্ন। পর্যটকেরা প্রথমлічб তএআশ্চর্যজনক
лічылася ьвятой лічбай প্রতিটি лёямёр প্রকাশিত праць এই স্থাপনাসমূহকেФіў,драцоўলিকাএকটিতালিকাданьнеьпінайвыда
কটিপ্রাচীনকালেসালের ей
“Alyssa! Here . . . on the wall! There’s script! I think it’s a riddle.”
She moved beside Savage. The lettering could be marginally seen, the inscription in blends of Sumerian, Egyptian and a language long since dead. Below the message were four crystal dials with symbols on them. The first dial had the archaic word ‘ICE’ engraved onto it, the symbol ᵮ; the second dial had the stamped symbol Ƣ, for the word ‘SEA,’; the third had the imprinted symbol ∂, for the word ‘SHADOWS,’; and the last dial had the symbol ﺟ , representing the word ‘WIND’.
ᵮ Ƣ ∂ ﺟ
“There’re dials underneath the writing. They appear to be symbols of elements.”
“Some,” she answered, running her fingers over the writing.
“Can you make out what it says?” asked Savage.
She nodded her head, and then she read the lines fluently: “They follow and lead, but only as you pass. Adorn yourself in darkest black, and still they are darker. Always they flee the light, though without the sun there would be none. Find me from the four below,
and to the Chamber of the One shall you go.”
“More riddles about darkness?” Hillary offered.
Everyone ignored him, assuming the question to be rhetorical.
Alyssa stepped aside and allowed John her immediate space. Deciphering the text was her strength. Solving riddles was his. It was a symbiotic relationship that served them well.
He stared at the riddle and recalled key words and phrases: Follow and lead, but only as you pass. They flee the light, but without the sun this element would not exist.
He then looked at the answers: ice, sea, shadows, wind.
‘Follow and lead’ could mean the path of a winding river that leads to the sea, but that didn’t make much sense to him since the key phrase was, ‘but only as you pass.’ But then again, when reading the next line, it states: they flee the light, but without the sun this element would not exist, which could mean that the ‘ice’ melts beneath the light of the sun. Do the sea and wind flee the light? The sea may shift during the phases of the moon. Or is that just the ocean?
John began to rake his fingers nervously through his hair.
The answers just weren’t coming to him.
Behind him, however, something else was.
#
They jammed themselves against the wall upon the moment of impact, the scarabs mounting one another in haste to attain a greater height, a higher level, the top of the wall getting closer, the black sea rising.
When they scaled the landing they progressed forward as a collective, an ink tide spreading across the floor as a pool of darkness heading for the only direction that was available to them.
The pores in their antennae had picked up the aroma of their prey, the scent jumpstarting their olfactory senses, telling them that whatever stood ahead was now staying their ground.
The masses pressed forward, closing the gap between them and their quarry at record pace.
#
The noise of mandibles opening and closing in pincer strikes was now a sound all too familiar and growing louder like the onrush of a train.
They had crested the landing and were moving closer, John knew this as he continued to rake his fingers nervously through his hair trying to figure out the riddle. They follow and lead, but only as you pass. Adorn yourself in darkest black, and still they are darker. Always they flee the light, though without the sun there would be none. Find me from the four below, and to the Chamber of the One shall you go.
He examined the dials, looked at the four possible answers. Then he studied the riddle, his concentration drifting as he became cognizant of the noise behind him, the sound of mandibles opening and closing in an orchestration of discordant melodies.
They follow and lead, but only . . . as you pass.
Suddenly a memory came to him, a fleeting moment when walking down a street at nighttime. He recalled an instant when walking beneath a series of street lamps, watching his shadow wax and wane as he moved out of the light from one lamp and into the light of another.
Shadows? Waxing and waning. They follow and lead as you go from one light to the next.
He looked at the second line: Adorn yourself in darkest black, and still they are darker.
Shadows are always blacker than black, aren’t they?
The last line: Always they flee the light, though without the sun there would be none.
Of course: ice can flee from the sun in an allegorical sense by melting in the sunlight. But it does not fit the criteria of the first two lines. Shadows, however, fits every criteria.
Behind him the noise was growing to a crescendo, the tide on its final leg of the journey.
“John,” Alyssa whispered. He could hear the slight tremor in her voice.
He simply reached out and grabbed the third dial, ∂. “This one,” he said. “It’s ‘shadows.’ The answer is ‘shadows.’”
“Then do something about it,” said Hillary.
The scarabs were so close that the sound of their exercising mandibles had become deafening.
But when Savage sensed the air of squeezing mandibles as close to him as a sighing breath next to his ear, he turned the dial.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Walls began to rise from the floor, creating barriers where there were none before, the scarabs suddenly finding themselves divided from their prey.
Areas of the floor began to rise and fall, becoming unstable as hidden weights and balances reconfigured the entire setting. The wall containing the ‘Riddle of Shadows’ slowly rose into the ceiling to unveil a hidden chamber. Plumes of dust sifted from shifting seams in the ceiling after millenniums of gathering sand and particles, the air becoming as thick and cloying as a gas canister igniting eddies of smoke.
Savage could hear the ticking of the scarabs’ mandibles against the wall that divided him from them, thanking God for the slight reprieve.
All around him people coughed and gagged against dust that was overwhelmingly dense, the air adrift with floating specks of desert sand so thick that the opposite wall appeared vague. People eventually fell to their knees coughing and hacking.
But as the air finally began to settle the room did not.
There was a circular emblem of an unknown symbol that was at the room's central point upon the floor, which began to rotate in clockwise motion and began to corkscrew downward, creating an opening in the ground, a hole.
The floor began to shift and reshape itself, rising and falling, the ground angling downward like the bell-shape of a funnel so that the slopes would lead to the opening of a hideous mouth of complete darkness, to another abyss.
John reached for Alyssa, missed, the tremors of the temple shifting and driving them farther apart from one another. Another wall cropped up. Another part of the floor angled. The temple was alive and angry, picking and choosing who would live and who would die.
People sought the purchase of solid footing that wasn’t there as the floor’s angle became too steep, the slopes too difficult to manage as arms began to pinwheel for balance. Eyes flared the moment their feet gave way beneath them, people falling, then sliding, their hands clawing against the slick floor to anchor them firmly, but failing, the men crying out in terror as they slipped into the hole, one right after the other.
Hillary was the first to go, his face a semblance of a man knowing that his mortality was about to come to a swift and horrible end. The faces of others weren’t much different as they slipped over the edge, the looks of impotence knowing that there was nothing they could do to stop the freefall.
A part of the floor lifted, an even plane, rising along the edge of the funnel where footing remained solid. Demir, half his team, two ministers, and Alyssa were rising above the funnel, the landing rising like an elevator toward a stationary ceiling that was coming dangerously close like the walls of a vise.
Savage fought for traction, his feet giving beneath him as he reached for Alyssa’s extended hand, their fingertips grazing, a glancing touch, and then his feet gave way, the floor too steep. And his eyes said it all, the sudden flash of hopelessness telling her that it was all right, that life was just a temporary stay and that he loved her with all his heart.
Then he slid away from her with his hand held out in her direction, a final gesture of his longing to touch her one last time.
But then he was gone.
John Savage had fallen into the abyss.
#
The elevator-like landing was closing in on the ceiling, offering them the decision to either jump to the funnel-shaped room below, or to become the mortar between the joining seams upon impact.
. . . Twenty feet . . .
The landing continued to rise.
. . . Fifteen feet . . .
Demir’s men seriously considered jumping, accepting the fall into the abyss as the lesser of the two evils.
But then the landing stopped, allowing a ten-foot gap between floor and ceiling.
Alyssa continued to look down to the room below, at the hole, believing that Joh
n Savage was so much larger than life that he would simply crawl from its opening.
But he didn’t.
And she broke, feeling incredibly hollow inside, the wound far more excruciating than anything she could ever imagine.
Demir moved to a bended knee beside her and placed a gentle hand upon her shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Ms. Moore. Savage was a good man.” But he wasn’t sure if she heard him or not since she never gave any indication or acknowledgement that he was trying to provide her with aid and comfort.
It wasn’t until a moment later when she finally reached her hand out and placed it on his, and then patted it with appreciation. All the while she continued to look into the abyss, all hope draining.
Then it was gone as reality set in like a hammer blow to the chest, the air knocked out of her as she lay herself down onto the landing, and grieved.
Demir allowed her the moment.
In the meantime Demir grieved his own losses, another three men lost to the abyss, leaving him with four soldiers under his command.
He looked at his MP5K and tossed it harshly aside, sensing its worthlessness in the temple of Mintaka, but not far enough where he couldn’t pick it up at a moment’s notice. His action was conducted more out of frustration and anger than it was out of a sense of the weapon’s futility.
He then leaned against a wall and slid down along its length until he was seated, his eyes staring at nothing in particular as the light of his shoulder lamp gave off a strong beam that settled against the opposite wall.
His men stood idle and waited. As did the two remaining ministers, each waiting for instructions.
But Demir offered nothing but a vacant stare.
Then in Turkish, and said in such a way that the commando sounded apologetic for disturbing Demir’s moment of meditation, softly asked, “Mulazim awwal Demir, what now?”
Demir’s eyes shifted and settled on the commando with a mechanical stare. And then he offered a false smile. “We move on,” he told him. When he got to his feet he looked down at Alyssa, who stopped sobbing but appeared like someone who had surrendered all hope to Mintaka’s fate. “Ms. Moore.”
