TimeRiders: The Mayan Prophecy (Book 8)

by Alex Scarrow

  The seeker had stepped far enough away from the column that the arcing electricity was no longer leaping across from chaos space to hint at its outline. It was invisible now – the only thing giving its location away, the tell-tale shimmer of heated air. From where Billy was, closer, much closer, he had obviously picked out that faint outline and was now emptying rounds of ammo into it.

  Liam stopped beside Maddy and looked back. ‘Billy!’ he cried. ‘GET OVER HERE!’

  Billy was shouting as he fired. Curses in Spanish or Tawahka or Zambu.

  ‘BILLY!’

  All of a sudden, their guide spasmed, dropped his gun and was lifted up. He thrashed around, mid-air, screaming with agony and fear. Maddy thought she could make out the fleeting, phasing form of a long arm ending with three claws holding him aloft. Then another one appeared out of nothingness, claws wrapping round the top half of Billy’s torso. One savage twist and the guide was torn clean in half. His separated body hurled casually in two different directions, and the long arms of the monster phased out of sight once more.

  ‘Jay-zus, help us!’ cried Liam.

  Maddy felt hands tugging at her shoulders, pulling her towards the stairwell. Adam. ‘Come on!’ He pushed her on to the stairs ahead of him.

  She clambered up the slippery-smooth stone steps; steep steps that had her thighs burning by the top of them. Rashim, Bertie, Becks already there. Liam, Adam and finally Bob emerged from the stairwell behind her.

  ‘Yes –’ she was gasping for air again, answering Liam’s question of a minute ago – ‘it’s a seeker. Or … maybe it’s several … merged into one mega-seeker. I don’t know.’

  Adam looked at the stairwell descending down into the darkness of the lower chamber. ‘It can’t follow us up that narrow space, can it?’

  ‘It is constructed from pure energy,’ said Bob. ‘It can change form.’

  ‘You are not safe staying here,’ Becks added.

  They heard something heavy impacting the steps below. Felt the vibration of it through the stone floor, through their feet. Followed by its mournful chorus-cry of tormented human voices echoing through the lower chamber.

  Liam looked at Maddy. ‘It’s coming up.’

  They headed for the narrow exit out of the small chamber. Bunched up, they tangled with each other.

  ‘One at a time!’ bellowed Liam. ‘One at a time. Go! Go!’ They squeezed through the narrow doorway, one after the other, an impatient queue to escape. Liam and Bob the last to go through. Liam turned to look over his shoulder, aiming his torch at the hole in the floor, and thought he detected a thin vapour of shimmering air coiling out of it.

  ‘Go! Go! Go!’ He pounded at Bob’s fleshy shoulder, pushing him roughly through the gap, then stumbling through after him. ‘IT’S UP THE STAIRS!’ he shouted to the others waiting just outside the gap in the wall. ‘RUN FOR IT!’

  They turned on their heels and ran, all of them weaving their own paths through the forest of support columns.

  Liam was about to do likewise when he noted Bob, unslinging his antique rifle.

  ‘Bob? What’re you doing? Come on!’

  ‘I will be able to delay the seeker at this chokepoint.’

  ‘Don’t be a flippin’ idiot, Bob. You won’t win against this one!’

  ‘I understand, Liam … but I will provide you with additional time to escape.’

  ‘The hell with that, you big idiot. Just run!’

  Bob shot a glance through the narrow gap in the wall. It was too dark to see anything clearly, but he could sense the energy building up inside that small room as the creature’s distended cloud emerged from the confines of the stairwell and consolidated in the antechamber. The seeker’s form had adapted to the narrow stairs, was now pouring into the room like liquid filling a bottle, breath filling a balloon.

  ‘Bob? For Chrissake don’t make me smack your big arse! RUN!’

  The support unit nodded. Logic making a better decision than some badly timed notion of courage.

  ‘Affirmative.’

  They turned and ran, picking separate routes through the ranks of support columns. Up ahead Liam could see the others had converged on the exit. He saw their silhouettes as they stumbled out of the small doorway and on to the steps outside.

  Behind Liam came a loud thump and the crash of shattering masonry. He chanced another hurried glance backwards, flinging his torch beam wildly behind him. The seeker had just exploded through the narrow gap, knocking blocks of sandstone out of the wall, creating a much wider opening. His torchlight pierced through a thick rolling cloud of dust that hung lazily in the still air for a moment, before suddenly it swirled, disturbed, as something unseen surged through it, pushing the billowing cloud to both sides.

  A support column that lay between Liam and the ruined entrance to the antechamber suddenly seemed to explode into fragments, as if impacted by a heavy cannonball. Then a few seconds later another one, closer to him, lurched and toppled to one side as though rammed by a charging bull. Several large slabs of ceiling stone, now robbed of the support from the toppled column, collapsed to the floor.

  Shards of salmon-pink evening light speared down through billowing clouds of dust.

  The chamber was suddenly filled with a roar that sounded half like the trumpeting of an elephant and half like the mournful, echoing call of a humpback whale.

  Panning the torch back behind him, the beam piercing the thickening dust, he picked out movement and, for a moment, the invisible monster phased into view. He caught a glimpse of its form changing shape: the giant head twisting and elongating, morphing from human to an almost boar-like extruded snout; spines and jagged protrusions erupting through its ‘flesh’.

  Dark-as-coal eyes settled on Liam, before the beast phased out of sight again. Then a moment later yet another column even closer to him erupted in a shower of dust and fragments.

  The thing was heading directly towards him. He turned and resumed running for the faint glow of the exit.

  Maddy and the others emerged from the trench into the wan glow of a setting sun. Long purple shadows and stripes of rose-pink sunlight striped the basin of the city. Around the entrance the people were gathered, thousands of them. At the first sight of them emerging from beneath the plaza, voices rose in unison into a shrill, deafening wail, drums stirred to life and beat a threatening rhythm among them.

  The crowd surged forward.

  ‘We have been holed up down below, the last two days,’ said Rashim. ‘Our hosts were getting very agitated outside. But they would not follow us down.’

  Becks stood out front, using the butt of her Martini-Henry rifle as a club, jabbing and swinging at the pressing crowd to force them back, to create a space for them to escape through.

  Bertie was doubled over by the entrance, one hand resting against the weathered stone, trying to get air into his lungs. ‘What the Devil …’ he called out, trying to be heard over the clamour of voices and the beating drums. ‘What the Devil was that three-legged monster? That tripod beast?’

  She shook her head. She didn’t really know anything about it other than what Foster had once told them. ‘It’s what I told you before about seekers! That’s a frikkin’ seeker!’

  Adam glanced back behind them. ‘Do you think we’ve lost it?’

  Just then, emerging from the low archway of the entrance, they heard a deep boom and felt the thump and vibration of some heavy impact occurring inside. Voices in the crowd cried out in alarm as several sections of the plaza floor collapsed, a column of dust mushrooming up into the sky.

  ‘My God, it’s followed us up,’ cried Maddy. ‘It’s still coming for us!’

  Another shudder, another boom of impact. More sections of the plaza floor collapsed. The belligerent crowd now suddenly seemed far less interested in pressing forward and getting their hands on their unwelcome guests. They began to back away from the entrance. Then they all heard it. The deafening roar of something huge, something tormented, echoing throug
h the upper chamber.

  The crowd’s angry chanting disintegrated into thousands of individual cries of horror and panic. The drumming stopped. The press of people around them began to thin as they started to turn and flee in terror.

  Maddy looked around at the others. ‘Where’s Liam?’

  ‘He was right behind me,’ said Rashim.

  ‘And Bob?’

  Another thump. Louder. Closer.

  Rashim ducked down and peered back into the entrance, shining his torch into the darkness. ‘I think there is someone coming this way!’

  ‘Liam?’

  Rashim squinted as he played his torch around. He could see the flicker of movement in there; rolling clouds of dust and something disturbing them. Something big. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Another loud roar and Rashim turned to look at Maddy. ‘RUN!’

  He pushed past her, scrambled up the shallow steps of the trench and up on to the paved thoroughfare. Maddy beckoned at the others to follow.

  They were up on the flagstones and now mingled among the few remaining city people. These onlookers were no longer determined to get their hands on the ‘pretenders’ who had deceitfully gained their trust and access to their holiest place, but, like them, their eyes were glued to the small arched entrance to the chamber below – both terrified and fascinated to see what was about to emerge from it.

  The small stone blocks around the entrance suddenly erupted. As if propelled by an explosion, shards of stone arced into the sky, dust rolled upwards and outwards like a volcanic pyroclastic surge. The setting sun painted the thick cloud of dust a candy pink as it billowed out over the crowd of awestruck, horrified onlookers.

  Amid the cloud, something large raged, stomping and swaying from foot to foot. It was only an outline in the cloud: the mass of the invisible beast displacing dust-thick air. An enormous bulk, twenty feet high and across, three elephantine legs stamping the ground.

  From an open ‘mouth’ – if that’s what it was – something long and sinewy shot out. An arm? A tentacle? It extended quickly and curled round a hapless young man who had remained too close for too long. He was yanked into the air kicking and screaming. The pall of dust had begun to thin and the entity’s outline became harder to determine. Just the faintest edges of heat-seared air.

  The young man now seemed to be flying from side to side thirty feet above the ground. A smoke trail followed him as his skin seared, burned; the smell of cooking flesh filled the air. His agonized screaming suddenly ended with a sickening crack. Then his body, ripped in two, was tossed into the fleeing crowd.

  One half landed just a few yards from Maddy. The top half, smouldering and blackened by the intense energy; the open ragged ruin of the boy’s torso was almost completely cauterized by the creature’s furnace-like heat.

  Oh, God help me … what did I bring back?

  Maddy had seen more than enough. ‘Come on! We’ve got to get out of here!’

  They joined the people streaming away from the plaza, and quickly found themselves funnelled into a narrow street, all of them now united in terror, united in the direction they were running and the mindless imperative to escape.

  Behind them there was another roar, amplified by the curved acoustics of the city, a roar that sounded as loud and all-encompassing as the forbidding rumble of an earthquake.

  A section of the plaza floor had collapsed on to Liam as a column nearby had been casually knocked aside like a stack of poorly balanced books. The thing had been bearing down on him and he had been certain that this was it.

  This is me done. Smoked like a kipper.

  However, the debris from above – not just flagstones but a trader’s cart, several woven sacks of guavas, bushels of straw – had all but buried him.

  He found himself hidden from view and watched, petrified, as the beast had stamped and swirled mere feet away from him. Where his skin was exposed and not covered in dirt and dust, he could feel the heat from this thing radiating like a blast furnace.

  It was his first proper close-up glimpse. It was invisible mostly. But occasionally small portions here and there flickered into view, visible for a moment; blink and you’d miss it. Its form and texture seemed to be changing from one second to the next. Spines and bone-like protrusions extruded one moment, then collapsed inwards the next, as if the creature’s form was in a constant state of wretched indecision.

  A patch of the entity’s ‘skin’ appeared, then turned semitransparent, revealing a spinning, churning mulch of human body parts inside. A face was suddenly pressed up against the membranous ‘skin’, nose squashed, eyes wide, mouth far wider – an unheard scream of torment from within this beast. Then the next moment it was gone, whisked away.

  Liam thought, lying here, trapped under the avalanche of debris, that he was certainly going to die. The thing would find him, sniff him out.

  But it didn’t.

  It stamped angrily for a moment, then paused. The roaring ceased and Liam thought he could hear a muffled chorus of wailing voices coming from deep within its mass.

  Then, invisible once again, just shimmering air, he heard it move off. Heavy booming footsteps taking it away from him. He saw another column, further away, lurch to one side like a pile of playschool building-blocks spitefully knocked over by a child’s hand. It appeared to be heading towards the faint outline of the distant entrance.

  A shadow loomed over him, blocking out the pink evening sky above, and he felt the pressing weight of fallen stone blocks lessen as Bob began to dig him out of the mound of debris.

  ‘Are you damaged, Liam?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Nothing seemed broken. ‘I think I’m all right.’

  Bob helped him up on to his feet. ‘Where are the others?’ asked Liam.

  ‘The others left the chamber through the entrance.’

  Liam shook his head, steadied himself. Pulled in a couple of breaths. ‘How the hell are we going to fight this thing?’

  ‘It is pure energy. There is no way to fight it, Liam.’

  ‘Then what do we do?’

  ‘Evade it.’ Just then the entire chamber shuddered. Grit and dirt cascaded down from the low ceiling. The entrance on the far side, a second ago a pinprick of faint light, was now a much wider, ragged hole.

  ‘We will have to evade it until its energy has been fully depleted.’

  Chapter 62

  1479, the Lost City of the Windtalkers

  Becks suddenly became aware that she had lost visual contact with the others. She was being carried along by a press of fleeing bodies, up a narrow alleyway. Taller than most of the people around her, she craned her neck to be sure. But she could locate none of them.

  ‘Enough,’ she grunted.

  She barged through the desperate natives until she was out of the ‘flow’, her back pressed up against a cool stone wall. Systematically, her eyes swept across the faces passing her, but none of them were Maddy, Liam or the others. She realized that in the turmoil of panic she’d become separated from the others, pushed up a different narrow alley. Her lips stiffened; if she’d had a decent enough database of profanities and curses, she might have tried one out. Instead she put her mind to something more useful – determining where she might locate them again. They needed her.

  The only likely place they would try to head towards was surely the exit tunnel. The only way out of this natural basin. The highest probability: that would be where they’d make for.

  She pushed her way back into the flow of people, against it this time, roughly shouldering fleeing men, women and children out of her way as she made her way back towards the plaza, to go round it and towards the tunnel exit on the far side.

  The tide of terrified people carried Maddy and the others up the narrow stepped street. Many of them seemed determined to flood into the various temple buildings, either because they believed those stone structures with their thick wooden doors were robust enough to keep this thing at bay, or because they believed their gods
and their priests would protect them. Others filtered off into narrow passageways, presumably hoping to hide in their small dark homes.

  Maddy and the others went with the flow, with little choice in the matter, and finally felt themselves being carried, pushed and jostled through the large doorway of the main temple building. The sounds of screaming and wailing coming from the women and children now bounced off the high stone walls around them: a cacophony of panic and terror magnified tenfold.

  Some men pulled the thick wooden door of the temple firmly shut. It slammed with a deep boom that silenced many of the voices inside.

  We’ve just gone and sealed ourselves in. Maddy looked around at huddled family groups, mothers with babes-in-arms, holding the hands of petrified, ashen-faced children. Husbands and fathers convened in little groups, speaking in hurried, hushed tones. And eyes – so many pairs of suspicious eyes – settled on the strangers in their midst who’d brought this evil down upon them.

  ‘This isn’t good,’ said Adam. He looked at Rashim. ‘This isn’t good! Remember all those bones you discovered …?’

  Pat-ishka, the city’s shrivel-skinned elder and – as far as Maddy had been able to work out – spiritual leader, began to talk calmly to his frightened people. His thin, reedy voice and birdlike frame belied the hold he had over them. They instantly hushed and listened as he spoke. Maddy wished Billy was here with them. He’d had some vague understanding of the language, and while he might not have been able to tell her precisely what the old man was saying, he could have given her an impression of what was being said.

  Through the thick reinforced wooden door they heard the entity rampage outside. They could hear the crashing and splintering of buildings, that chilling trumpeting roar of chorused inhuman voices raised in unified torment.

  The elder hushed the frightened cries of his people with raised withered arms. He then turned round slowly to look at Maddy and the others as he resumed talking to his people.

  ‘They are frightened,’ said Rashim. ‘They are blaming us for this.’