by Jack Du Brul
“I’ve wanted to dance with you since Vegas,” Donny sneered as he backed out of the tunnel to give himself room. “And I’m gonna lead.”
Mercer tightened his grip on his hammer, testing the tool’s balance and trying not to show the fear coursing through his veins. He knew he’d never find his pistol so he followed Donny into the oracle chamber. Stepping into the cavern, Mercer felt like a gladiator entering the Colosseum.
The oracle sat in the middle of the cavern, an enormous sphere reaching for the chamber’s rocky ceiling. Mercer estimated it was at least four stories tall. Below the sphere was a partitioned area furnished with antique desks and divans. The floor under the furniture was layered in carpets.
Randall’s dyed hair gleamed under the lights atop the wood scaffold ringing the top of the oracle. His grin remained fixed, his feral eyes on Mercer, watchful and expectant. He was eager for the fight, confident that his superior size and strength gave him the advantage. He’d probably done this a few times before.
He wore a pair of loose workman’s coveralls and steel-toed boots. With his sleeves rolled up, Mercer could see his forearms were as thick as footballs. The four-foot length of the sledgehammer looked puny in his huge hands. He was back far enough from Mercer to hold the hammer out straight in one hand, and he slowly brought it to the vertical using nothing but the power of his wrist. It was a staggering demonstration of his strength, leaving Mercer to hope that his eyes hadn’t bulged.
“Mercer!”
The cry came from near the towering sphere. The way the light played against the oracle’s glittering surface, Mercer could barely see the diminutive figure at its base, but he knew the voice. Tisa. She appeared unhurt but was tied to a chair. That must be where the archivists interpreted the oracle’s predictions, he thought, although he had no idea how the device worked.
The instant his eyes shifted to see her, Donny lunged forward, swinging his hammer in a wide, powerful arc. Mercer stepped back a pace but was unprepared for how effortlessly Randall could reverse the stroke and move in on him. The hammerhead came an inch from his chest and would have shattered his ribs had he not fallen back another step. He had his hammer up when Donny cut the strike at him again, carving a wicked S in the air. The handles met with a dull knock. Donny shoved and Mercer went sprawling.
The big man stood firm, not pressing the advantage. He wanted to draw this out and toy with Mercer before beating him to death. His grin widened, showing a gap where two of his side teeth had been.
“All that money you make in an office someplace made you soft. You ain’t as tough as people say.”
Mercer remained on the ground for a moment longer, taking his time getting to his feet so that when he launched himself at Randall, Donny wouldn’t expect it to come. He swung in an uppercut, judging the distance so all Donny had to do was sway back on his heels to avoid the blow.
Donny remained rooted, tipping back so the hammer swung past his head. Mercer let the momentum carry him forward and around so as he pivoted he could chop down at Randall’s hip. Donny parried and the steel hammerheads crashed together with a ring like a cracked bell.
Mercer dodged away, unable to meet Randall’s brute strength when fighting on the inside. Randall came at him, swinging wildly. Some swipes Mercer ducked, others he parried. Each time Donny’s hammer struck Mercer’s, Mercer was forced to give ground. Even these deflected blows were taking a toll. His arms ached and his palms were losing feeling. His grip on the hammer was becoming lax. Donny Randall didn’t seem the least affected. He swung and chopped as though his hammer were a toy sword. While Mercer panted, Donny’s breathing was even and steady.
They had moved to within fifty yards of the oracle. Mercer saw for the first time that its surface wasn’t smooth as he’d assumed. It was rippled and made of either the most lustrous brass he’d ever seen or pure gold. It was also far larger than he’d estimated. He added another twenty feet to its height and diameter.
The two circled each other, making halfhearted feints. Donny lifted his sledge over his head, coming down on Mercer like a pile driver. Mercer caught the strike on the haft of his hammer and was nearly driven to his knees. The two hammerheads locked.
Donny heaved on his sledge, trying to pull Mercer’s hammer from his hands. Mercer managed to hold on but was bodily thrown ten feet when the heads separated. This time Randall gave no quarter. He stalked across the chamber, slashing back and forth with his maul. Mercer scrambled back, unable to parry the swipes, only just managing to avoid being hit.
He came up fast against a large antique desk. The oracle loomed overhead. Mercer barely had time to note that the ridges covering the outside of the golden orb were mountain ranges and plateaus. The oracle was an intricately detailed globe on an unheard-of scale! Donny swung again. Mercer rolled to his right, around the desk’s leg. The hammer split the wood, upending the heavy piece of furniture. The scrolls and leaves of parchment that had littered the desktop flew like scattered birds.
Randall fought through the mess, swinging his hammer again and again, as tireless as a machine. His face remained an expressionless mask. From the floor, Mercer drove his hammer at Donny’s ankle, a weak effort that forced the bigger man to move aside only to feel if the blow had been worse than it felt. Mercer scrambled up on the far side of the ruined desk.
Tisa was shackled to a nearby chair. She’d screamed when the table had shattered. Now she watched wide-eyed as Donny shifted away from Mercer and took three long strides across the work area toward her. He stopped when he stood above her, the head of his hammer resting on her bent knee.
“Hey, Mercer, wanna see something cool?” He raised his weapon.
Mercer got to his feet. The oracle chamber felt as hot as the burning monastery above him. He was bathed in sweat. His muscles felt drained, rubbery.
“I thought you were here to dance with me.” His voice came as a rough croak. “Can’t change partners now.”
“This will only take a second.” Donny had enough animal cunning to know if he injured Tisa, Mercer would come at him, blinded by rage. An easy victim.
He watched Mercer as he raised the hammer a bit higher. He could let gravity drop the heavy mallet and the bones around Tisa’s knee would turn to pebble-sized chips.
Something within the oracle lurched, a mechanism of some sort that gave a steadily rising ticking sound directly above the trio. Donny looked up, Tisa looked at Mercer and Mercer rushed Randall.
He caught the movement a moment too late. Mercer’s swing lacked power because it came from his off foot. Still, the steel head caught Randall in the stomach, driving deep into his flesh. Donny doubled over, curling tight in a spasm that ripped the hammer from Mercer’s hands. When he wheeled away, Mercer’s hammer was still lodged in place. Donny dropped his own.
Mercer bent to scoop it from the stone floor and went to finish the fight. He took his eyes off Donny for only the split second necessary to grab the fallen sledgehammer. Donny moved fast, faster than Mercer could have believed. His strike hadn’t been anywhere near as damaging as he’d thought. Donny had gained a firm grip on Mercer’s hammer. His face showed pain, but also a fierce hatred and a deadly determination. Mercer just got his hand on Donny’s hammer when Randall waded in. He swung once at Mercer’s shoulder, a glancing blow that spun Mercer in place, presenting his vulnerable back to his opponent. Donny couldn’t get the hammer to swing around quick enough so he rammed the butt end into Mercer’s spine.
The agony was a spike driven so deep Mercer felt the hammer was going to explode from his abdomen. He roared as pain flooded his nervous system, nearly short-circuiting his brain. Donny kept up the pressure, screwing the wooden handle into Mercer’s flesh, tearing the ballistic material of his fatigues and ripping into his skin. Perversely, his own blood lubricated the handle, allowing Donny to jam it deeper into the wound.
He was slowly being skewered.
Mercer let his legs collapse from under him. The handle tore from his ba
ck with a wet sucking sound. He rolled away from Donny as fast as he could. The wound left a trail of blood dappled on the stone. He got back to his feet in time to meet Randall’s charge, barely able to parry the hammer swing. He continued to backpedal, exchanging ground for the moments he needed for the worst of the pain to abate.
“Bet that felt good,” Donny taunted. “It’ll feel even better when I shove this thing up your ass.”
Mercer smiled around the agony. “You should buy me flowers or candy first.”
“In a minute I’m going to hammer that grin from your face and make you swallow your teeth. After that you’re gonna beg me, Mercer. You’re gonna beg me to let you die.” Donny wiped at his brow, smearing his hair dye across his forehead. “You still think you’re better than me?”
Mercer glanced around and saw something that gave him the start of a plan. “I have a better barber, that’s for sure.”
“You ain’t nothing. All that money, all them people talking about how good you are. It don’t mean shit down here. Here it’s just you and me. You think that Ph.D. of yours is gonna save your life?”
“No. The fact that you’re a goddamned moron is going to save my life. I came here with fifty Special Forces soldiers. While you’re bragging about how tough you are, they’re sweeping the tunnels. They should find this room in about two minutes.”
It was clear Randall hadn’t considered Mercer’s backup. His eyes narrowed. “Then I’ll kill you in one.”
Behind Mercer was a set of black iron stairs that spiraled to the scaffolding surrounding the top section of the oracle. Even as Donny was making his last threat, Mercer was in motion. The stairs were tight, a narrow corkscrew that made it impossible to mount more than two steps at a time. The confining structure shook as Donny raced after him.
Around they went, climbing ever higher. Halfway to the top, the oracle was close enough to the stairs for Mercer to reach out a hand and touch. He almost stopped running when he looked closer at the mysterious machine. The oracle was an enormous clockwork mechanism. Tiny brass gears and ratchets covered the oracle’s surface. Openings allowed him to see inside the device. Within the oracle was a complex collection of pistons, springs and cogwheels that drove plates on the surface. Some of the gears inside the machine appeared to be twenty feet in diameter, like something out of a factory.
That’s how they did it. The oracle was a model of the earth’s tectonic plates, the huge slabs of solid rock that glided on the planet’s liquid mantel. Somehow the builders had known about plate tectonics and crustal displacement long before it was discovered by Western science. Tisa had said that the plans for this machine were centuries old even before they were brought to China five hundred years ago. Meaning the designers had had generations to observe the earth’s movement, extrapolate how that motion would affect other regions and create a machine that could accurately predict future geological events.
As he moved past the globe’s equator he noted the Hawaiian Islands were sharp cones jutting from the near featureless plain of the Pacific basin. A cylinder half filled with mercury projected from the central island. It had to be Kilauea, Mercer realized, the volcano that had been erupting on Mauna Loa for years. The mercury must represent the volume of lava that belched from the volcano over a certain amount of time. Near it was another, smaller mercury vial. It was Loihi, the newest island in the Hawaiian chain. Mercer knew that the top of this volcano was still deep underwater. Craftsmen must be able to add to the oracle, he thought, when new discoveries about the earth were made.
He quickened his pace, climbing up the Pacific side of the oracle. There were the Aleutian Islands and the Bering Strait. He could see the rift valleys that crossed Alaska. Small brass armatures kept the miniature plates together but could allow them to shift suddenly if there was a significantly sized earthquake.
Mercer reached the top of the stairs at least one story ahead of Donny Randall. The platform ringing the oracle wasn’t nearly as wide as he’d hoped, and the wood scaffold was old and water seeping from the cavern roof had rotted it in places. He’d planned on waiting at the head of the stairs to ambush Donny, but there was hardly enough space on the landing to stand and nowhere to swing the sledgehammer. The scaffold was hemmed by rock on one side and a tall but rickety railing overlooking the globe on the other. The lights blazing off the oracle’s facade were blinding.
Donny reached the last twist in the spiral stairs. He paused, watching the landing, and once he was satisfied that Mercer couldn’t attack, he came all the way up.
“Two minutes for your rescue, huh?” He was slightly out of breath from the six-story climb.
“Among other things I’m an eternal optimist,” Mercer panted. He stayed well back from Donny on the circular catwalk, needing the space to think how he was going to get out of this.
Below them, at the top of the oracle globe, the gold sheets that covered the Arctic Ocean had been removed for maintenance. Looking down was like looking into the guts of a mechanical monster. Massive wheels turned slowly inside the oracle, driving ever-smaller cogs and gears, transferring the tremendous geothermal energy of the mountain redoubt into the finite movements of the delicate surface mechanisms, each capable of infinitesimal shifts along fault lines and tectonic plate boundaries. The interior of the oracle was as complex as an antique pocket watch but a thousand times its size.
Donny skulked forward, his hammer dangling by his waist. Mercer wasn’t fooled. Randall could have the sledge in position for a strike much faster than he could. Mercer continued to back away, keeping one eye on his opponent and one on the model world below them.
Randall suddenly lurched, halving the distance between them, his hammer arcing back and forth. When it struck the cavern’s stone wall sparks shot from the steel head; when it hit the wooden railing, splinters flew. Mercer timed his counterattack when Donny was at his full extension and his shoulder was exposed. He darted forward, ramming with the hammer rather than swinging it. While his strike lacked Donny’s power, it did connect. Donny grunted and he had to lower his hammer. Mercer tried for another hit, but Donny had already recovered. He swept aside Mercer’s thrust and twisted his upper body so he could drive his elbow into Mercer’s ribs.
Mercer went down. Randall tried to stomp on his head. Mercer rolled and the blow missed. Donny’s foot exploded through the wood floor and vanished up to his ankle. Mercer was just able to slide out of the way as Donny swept his hammer at him again. He couldn’t prevent Randall from yanking his foot from the shattered floorboard.
They fought their way around the ring of scaffold. Their hammers flew in furious strikes and the sound of their battle resonated across the cave. But neither could gain an advantage. Mercer was quicker than Randall, but the few glancing blows he’d inflicted only seemed to make the big man more determined. Donny seemed indefatigable. And as Mercer tired, he knew it would only take one mistake to lose the hammer dance.
Half the railing had been destroyed as they fought. Lights had been shattered and power cords ripped from their mounts so electrical cables arced and snapped, shooting sparks across the wooden deck.
Mercer was weakening. His back felt like a hot coal had been placed in the wound. He would have to end this soon or Donny would tear him apart. Donny fired a wild swing with his hammer. Mercer ducked under the blow and launched himself into Randall’s chest. They smashed into the cavern wall with enough force to burst the air from Donny’s lungs. Mercer choked up on his hammer and used the head as an extension of his fist, pumping punch after punch into Donny’s stomach, trying to stop him from reinflating his lungs.
Randall was dazed enough to stand still for five blows before he roared and shoved Mercer away, nearly sending him over the railing. Donny came at him, swinging the hammer over his head. The sledge smashed through the railing next to Mercer and the whole section began to collapse. Mercer spun away, managing to stay on the platform as Donny’s momentum started to take him over.
Randall grabbed
the banister with his right hand and Mercer slammed his hammer into the exposed appendage. The bones were crushed flat yet Randall the Handle managed to swing his own hammer using only his left. The shot caught Mercer under the arm. Donny didn’t have the angle to crack ribs, but the impact knocked Mercer aside and left him gasping. With his right hand dangling uselessly at his side and the big hammer clutched firmly in his left, Randall charged Mercer, any rationality driven from his mind by the pain of his near-severed limb. Spittle flew from his lips with each gusting breath.
It was almost as if the past fifteen minutes had been a game to Donny Randall, a prelude for the moment he was maddened enough to finish the fight. He swung savagely, slashing and chopping with his hammer. More of the railing exploded when he hit it. Fragments of stone flew from the divots his counterswing gouged from the cavern wall. Black-dyed sweat rained from his head.
Mercer could barely back away fast enough. He didn’t dare try to parry Randall’s immense swings. The impact would have torn the hammer from his hands. The stairs were halfway around the scaffold. If he turned to make a run for them, Randall would be on him in a second. There was only one option and he took it without hesitation.
The railing was four feet tall, but right behind Mercer was a section of rotted wood that had been damaged earlier in the fight. The instant he’d backed next to the opening he tossed himself from the platform.
The drop was ten feet, a relatively easy leap had he not been so seriously injured. He landed hard, sprawled against the top of the mechanical globe, nearly losing his hammer in one of the open access panels. He managed to turn onto his back in time to see Donny jump after him.
Randall landed a few feet away and tried to steady his fall with his ruined right hand. He shrieked as the sharp end of the broken bones shot through his skin in a dozen spots, saturating his hand in blood. Mercer got to his feet, bracing himself on the slick surface by wedging his foot against the six-inch-high ridge that was Alaska’s northernmost mountain range. Randall had his hand up and Mercer took aim. His swing didn’t need power, only accuracy.
