City of Screams

by James Rollins

  He struggled to catch his breath. The burning air tasted thin and dry. Did it even have enough oxygen? The other climbers seemed to be fine breathing it. They practically sprinted up the switchbacks like he was the grandpa and they were the fourteen-year-olds. He couldn’t even hear their voices anymore.

  The rocky trail—named the Snake Path—twisted up the sheer cliffs of the infamous mountain of Masada. Its summit was only a handful of yards overhead, sheltering the ruins of the ancient Jewish fortress. From his current perch on the trail, Tommy searched out over the baked, tan earth of the Jordan Valley below.

  He wiped sweat from his eyes. Being from Orange County, Tommy thought he’d known heat. But this was like crawling into an oven.

  His head drooped forward. He wanted to sleep again. He wanted to feel cool hotel sheets against his cheek and take a long nap in air-conditioning. After that, if he felt better, he would play video games.

  He jerked awake. This was no time to daydream. But he was so tired, and the desert so quiet. Unlike humans, animals and bugs were smart enough to take cover during the day. A vast empty silence swallowed him. Would death be like this?

  “Are you okay, honey?” his mother asked.

  He startled. Why hadn’t he heard her approach? Did he fall asleep again? He wheezed out, “Fine.”

  She bit her lip. They all knew he wasn’t fine. He yanked his cuff over the new coffee-brown blotch of melanoma that disfigured his left wrist.

  “We can wait as long as you need to.” She plunked down next to him. “I wonder why they call it the Snake’s Path? I haven’t seen a single snake.”

  She spoke to his chin. His parents rarely made eye contact with him anymore. When they did, they cried. It had been like that throughout the last two years of surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation—and now through his relapse.

  Maybe they’d finally look him in the face when he lay in his coffin.

  “Too hot for snakes.” He hated how out of breath he sounded.

  “They’d be snake steaks.” She took a long drink from her water bottle. “Sun-broiled and ready to eat. Just like us.”

  His father trotted up. “Everything all right?”

  “I’m just taking a break,” his mother lied, covering for him. She wet her handkerchief and handed it to Tommy. “I got tired.”

  Tommy wanted to correct her, to tell the truth, but he was too exhausted. He wiped the cloth across his face.

  His father started talking, like he always did when he was nervous. “We’re close now. Just a few more yards, and we’ll see the fortress. The actual fortress of Masada. Try to picture it.”

  Obediently, Tommy closed his eyes. He pictured a swimming pool. Blue and cool and smelling like chlorine.

  “Ten thousand Roman soldiers are camped out all around here in tents. Soldiers with swords and shields wait in the sun. They close off any escape route, try to starve out the nine hundred men, women, and children up there on the plateau.” His father talked faster, excited. “But the rebels stand firm until the end. Even after. They never give up.”

  Tommy tugged his hat down on his bald head and squinted up at him. “They offed themselves in the end, Dad.”

  “No.” His father spoke passionately. “The Jews here decided to die as free men, rather than fall to the mercy of the Romans. They didn’t kill themselves in surrender. They chose their own fate. Choices like that determine the kind of man you are.”

  Tommy picked up a hot stone and tossed it down the trail. It bounced, then vanished over the edge. What would his father do if he really chose his own fate? If he offed himself instead of being a slave to the cancer. He didn’t think his father would sound so proud of that.

  He studied his father’s face. People had often said they looked alike: same thick black hair, same easy smile. After chemo stole his hair, no one said that anymore. He wondered if he would have grown up to look like him.

  “Ready to go again?” His father hitched his pack higher on his shoulder.

  His mother gave his father the evil eye. “We can wait.”

  “I didn’t say we had to go,” his father said. “I was just asking—”

  “You bet.” Tommy stood up to keep his parents from arguing.

  Eyes on the trail, he dragged forward. One tan hiking boot in front of the other. Soon he’d be up top, and his parents would get their moment with him at the fort. That was why he had agreed to this trip, to this long climb—because it would give them something to remember. Even if they weren’t ready to admit it, they wouldn’t have many more memories of him. He wanted to make them good ones.

  He counted his steps. That was how you got through tough things. You counted. Once you said “one,” then you knew “two” was coming, and “three” right after that. He got to twenty-eight before the path leveled out.

  He had reached the summit. Sure, his lungs felt like two flaming paper bags, but he was glad he’d done it.

  At the top stood a wooden pavilion—though pavilion was a pretentious word for four skinny tree trunks topped by more skinny tree trunks laid sideways to cast patchy shade. But it beat standing in the sun.

  Beyond the cliff’s edge, desert stretched around him. In its dried-out and desolate way, it was beautiful. Bleached brown dunes rolled as far as he could see. Sand slapped against rocks. Millennia of wind erosion had eaten those rocks away, grain by grain.

  No people, no animals. Did the defenders see this view before the Romans arrived?

  A killing wasteland.

  He turned and scanned the plateau up top, where all that bloodshed had happened two thousand years ago. It was a long flat area, about five football fields long, maybe three times as wide, with a half-dozen or so crumbling stone buildings.

  This is what I climbed up here for?

  His mother looked equally unimpressed. She pushed curly brown hair out of her eyes, her face pink from sunburn or exertion. “It looks more like a prison than a fortress.”

  “It was a prison,” his father said. “A death row prison. Nobody got out alive.”

  “Nobody ever gets out alive.” Tommy regretted his words as soon as they left his mouth, especially when his mother turned away and slid a finger under her sunglasses, clearly wiping a tear. Still, a part of him was glad that she let herself feel something real instead of lying about it all the time.

  Their guide bounced up to them, rescuing them from the moment. She was all bare legs, tight khaki shorts, and long black hair, barely winded by the long climb. “Glad you guys made it!” She even had a sexy Israeli accent.

  He smiled at her, grateful to have something else to think about. “Thanks.”

  “Like I told everybody else a minute ago, the name Masada comes from the word metzuda, meaning ‘fortress,’ and you can see why.” She waved a long tan arm to encompass the entire plateau. “The casemate walls protecting the fortress are actually two walls, one inside the other. Between them were the main living quarters for Masada’s residents. Ahead of us is the Western Palace, the biggest structure on Masada.”

  Tommy tore his eyes away from her lips to look where she pointed. The massive building didn’t look anything like a palace. It was a wreck. The old stone walls were missing large sections and clad with modern scaffolding. It looked like someone was halfway through building a movie set for the next Indiana Jones installment.

  There must be a deep history under all that scaffolding, but he didn’t feel it. He wanted to. History mattered to his father, and it should to him, too, but since the cancer, he felt outside of time, outside of history. He didn’t have room in his head for other people’s tragedies, especially not people who had been dead for thousands of years.

  “This next building we believe was a private bathhouse,” the guide said, indicating a building on the left. “They found three skeletons inside, skulls separated from the bodies.”

 
He perked up. Finally something interesting.

  “Decapitated?” he asked, moving closer. “So they committed suicide by cutting off their own heads?”

  The guide’s lips curved in a smile. “Actually, the soldiers drew lots to see who would be responsible for killing the others. Only the last man had to commit suicide.”

  Tommy scowled at the ruins. So they killed their own children when the going got tough. He felt a surprising flicker of envy. Better to die quickly at the hands of someone who loved you than by the slow and pitiless rot of cancer. Ashamed of this thought, he looked at his parents. His mother smiled at him as she fanned herself with the guidebook, and his father took his picture.

  No, he could never ask that of them.

  Resigned, he turned his attention back to the bathhouse. “Those skeletons . . . are they still in there?” He stepped forward, ready to peek inside through the metal gate.

  The guide blocked him with her ample chest. “Sorry, young man. No one is allowed inside.”

  He struggled not to stare at her breasts but failed miserably.

  Before he could move, his mother spoke. “How’re you doing, Tommy?”

  Had she seen him checking out the guide? He blushed. “I’m fine.”

  “Are you thirsty? Do you want some water?” She held out her plastic water bottle.

  “No, Mom.”

  “Let me put some more sunscreen on your face.” His mother reached into her purse. Normally, he would have suffered the indignity, but the guide smiled at him, a stunning smile, and he suddenly didn’t want to be babied.

  “I’m fine, Mom!” he spat out, more harshly than he’d intended.

  His mother flinched. The guide walked away.

  “Sorry,” he said to his mother. “I didn’t mean it.”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll be over there with your father. Take your time here.”

  Feeling terrible, he watched her walk away.

  He crossed over to the bathhouse, angry at himself. He leaned on the metal gate to see inside—the gate creaked open under his weight. He almost fell through. He stepped back quickly, but before he did so, something in the corner of the room caught his eye.

  A soft fluttering, white, like a crumpled piece of paper.

  Curiosity piqued inside him. He searched around. No one was looking. Besides, what was the penalty for trespassing? What was the worst that could happen? The cute guide might drag him back out?

  He wouldn’t mind that at all.

  He poked his head inside, staring at the source of the fluttering.

  A small white dove limped across the mosaic floor, its left wing dragging across the tiles, scrawling some mysterious message in the dust with the tip of its feathers.

  Poor thing . . .

  He had to get it out of there. It would die from dehydration or get eaten by something. The guide probably knew a bird rescue place they could bring it to. His mother had volunteered at a place like that back home in California, before his cancer ate up everyone’s life.

  He slipped through the gap in the gate. Inside, the room was smaller than his father’s toolshed, with four plain stone walls and a floor covered by a faded mosaic made of maddeningly tiny tiles. The mosaic showed eight dusty red hearts arranged in a circle like a flower, a row of dark blue-and-white tiles that looked like waves, and a border of terra-cotta, and white triangles that reminded him of teeth. He tried to imagine long-ago craftsmen putting it together like a jigsaw puzzle, but the thought made him tired.

  He stepped across the shadowy threshold, grateful to be out of the unforgiving sun. How many people had died in here? A chill raced up his spine as he imagined the scene. He pictured people kneeling—he was certain they would be kneeling. A man in a dirty linen tunic stood above them with his sword raised high. He’d started with the youngest one, and by the time he was done, he barely had the strength to lift his arms, but he did. Finally, he, too, fell to his knees and waited for a quick death from his friend’s blade. And then, it was over. Their blood ran over the tiny tiles, stained the grout, and pooled on the floor.

  Tommy shook his head to clear the vision and looked around.

  No skeletons.

  They were probably taken to a museum or maybe buried someplace.

  The bird raised its head, halting its journey across the tiles to stare up at Tommy, first with one eye, then the other, sizing him up. Its eyes were a brilliant shade of green, like malachite. He’d never seen a bird with green eyes before.

  He knelt down and whispered, his words barely a breath. “Come here, little one. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  It stared with each eye again—then took a hop toward him.

  Encouraged, he reached out and gently scooped up the wounded creature. As he rose with its warm body cradled between his palms, the ground shifted under him. He struggled to keep his balance. Was he dizzy because of the long climb? Between his toes, a tiny black line skittered across the mosaic, like a living thing.

  Snake was his first thought.

  Fear beat in his heart.

  But the dark line widened, revealing it to be something worse. Not a snake, but a crack. A finger of dark orange smoke curled up from one end of the crack, no bigger than if someone had dropped a lit cigarette.

  The bird suddenly burst from his palms, spread its wings, and sailed through the smoke as it fled out the door. Apparently it hadn’t been that injured. The smoke wafted Tommy’s way, beat by the passing wings. It smelled surprisingly sweet with a hint of darker spices, almost like incense.

  Tommy crinkled his brow and leaned forward. He held his palm over the smoke. It rose up between his fingertips, cold instead of warm, as if it came from some cool place deep within the earth.

  He bent to look at it more closely—when the mosaic cracked under his boots like glass. He jumped back. Tiles slipped into the gap. Blues, tans, and reds. The gap devoured the pattern as it grew wider.

  He backpedaled toward the door. Gouts of smoke, now a reddish orange, boiled up through the splintering mosaic.

  A grinding groan rose from the mountain’s core, and the entire room shook.

  Earthquake.

  He leaped out the bathhouse door and landed hard on his backside. In front of him, the building gave a final, violent jerk, as if slapped by an angry god—then toppled into the chasm opening beneath it.

  The edges crumbled wider, only feet away. He scooted backward. The chasm chased him. He gained his feet to run, but the mountaintop jolted and knocked him back to the ground.

  He crawled away on his hands and knees. Stones shredded his palms. Around him, buildings and columns smashed to the ground.

  God, please help me!

  Dust and smoke hid everything more than a few yards away. As he crawled, he saw a man vanish under a falling section of wall. Two screaming women dropped away as the ground split beneath them.

  “TOMMY!”

  He crawled toward his mother’s voice, finally clearing the pall of smoke.

  “Here!” he coughed.

  His father rushed forward and yanked him to his feet. His mother grabbed his elbow. They dragged him toward the Snake’s Path, away from the destruction.

  He looked back. The fissure gaped wider, cleaving the summit. Chunks of mountain fell away and rumbled down to the desert. Dark smoke churned into the achingly blue sky, as if to take its horrors to the burning sun.

  Together, he and his parents stumbled to the cliff’s edge.

  But as quickly as it began, the earthquake ceased.

  His parents froze, as if afraid any movement might restart the quakes. His father wrapped his arms around them both. Across the summit, pained cries cut the air.

  “Tommy?” His mother’s voice shook. “You’re bleeding.”

  “I scraped my hands,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”


  His father let them go. He’d lost his hat and cut his cheek. His normally deep voice came out too high. “Terrorists, do you think?”

  “I didn’t hear a bomb,” his mother said, stroking Tommy’s hair like he was a little boy.

  For once, he didn’t mind.

  The cloud of blackish-red smoke charged toward them, as if to drive them off the cliff.

  His father took the suggestion and pointed toward the steep trail. “Let’s go. That stuff could be toxic.”

  “I breathed it,” Tommy assured them, standing. “It’s okay.”

  A woman ran out of the smoke clutching her throat. She ran blind, eyelids blistered and bleeding. Just a few steps, then she pitched forward and didn’t move.

  “Go!” his father yelled, and pushed Tommy ahead of him. “Now!”

  Together, they ran, but they could not outpace the smoke.

  It overtook them. His mother coughed—a wet, tearing, unnatural sound. Tommy reached for her, not knowing what to do.

  His parents stopped running, driven to their knees.

  It was over.

  “Tommy . . .” his father gasped. “Go . . .”

  Disobedient, he sank down beside them.

  If I’m going to die anyway, let it be on my own terms.

  With my family.

  A sense of finality calmed him. “It’s okay, Dad.” He squeezed his mom’s hand, then his dad’s. Tears flowed when he thought he had none left. “I love you, so much.”

  Both of his parents looked at him—square in the eye. Despite the terrible moment at hand, Tommy felt so warm right then.

  He hugged them both tightly and still held them as they went limp in his grasp, refusing to let gravity take them as death had. When his strength gave out, he knelt next to their bodies and waited for his own last breath.

  But as minutes passed, that last breath refused to come.

  He wiped an arm across his tearstained face and stumbled to his feet, refusing to look at his parents’ crumpled bodies, their blistered eyes, the blood on their faces. If he didn’t look, maybe they weren’t really dead. Maybe it was a dream.