The 13th Tribe

by Robert Liparulo

  He tossed the stone, watched it clatter over larger rocks and settle among a thousand like it, and he changed his mind: this inhospitable land wasn’t godforsaken; it was God-embraced, the perfect representation of the God he knew, a God more inclined toward punishment than compassion. Emotion stirred in his chest: not anger this time, but a grief at having lost something he’d once cherished.

  Before he worked it into a melancholy that would carry him through the rest of his shift, he was yanked out of himself by a woman’s screams.

  [ 6 ]

  She screamed again, and Jagger ripped off his glasses, scanning for the source. Workers were turning toward the tents, and he saw a canvas wall bulge out, then flutter back. He leaped forward, scrambling deftly over the treacherous surface—unlike his first few weeks here, when he’d spent most of the time twisting his ankles and landing on his butt.

  No more screams, but the tent was shaking as though caught in a wind much stronger than the breeze coming through the valley. Jagger hit the strip of earth that had been cleared and leveled for the tents and picked up speed. Skidding to a stop, he whipped back the tent’s entry flap.

  A man was holding a woman facedown against the tent’s plastic groundsheet, pulling an arm behind her back, pushing her face into the floor. Jagger recognized her kinky red hair: Addison Brooke, a doctoral student from Cambridge, here to work as Oliver’s assistant.

  Jagger grabbed the back of the man’s collar and hoisted him off her. The man turned, swinging a fist at Jagger, who parried it with his prosthetic left arm. The man’s face twisted in pain at the blow to his wrist. Jagger, still with a fistful of collar, got hold of the man’s waistband. He spun, ready to hurl the guy into a shelving unit.

  “No!” Addison yelled. “Not the shelves!”

  At that moment Jagger didn’t give a lick for the artifacts on them . . . but everyone else did, so he continued to whip his hostage around in a circle. He stuck out a leg, tripping the man. He put his muscles into making sure the guy hit the ground hard, then dropped his knee onto the man’s spine. He rose enough to roll his adversary over, then pinned his knee into the attacker’s sternum. Still the man struggled, ramming a fist into Jagger’s thigh.

  Jagger clamped the hooks that had replaced his left hand over the man’s neck, an act that effectively hit the off switch on the guy’s movements. Jagger glanced up at Addison, sitting near the front corner of the roomlike tent. “You okay?”

  She brushed hair away from moist eyes and nodded.

  “You know him?” he asked.

  She said, “M-muscle.” It was what the arcs called a local hired to move dirt and do grunt work.

  The tent flap pulled away and Hanif, one of the site’s guards, rushed in. Ollie followed and knelt beside Addison. “What happened?”

  “He . . . he . . .” She closed her eyes, covered her mouth with a shaking hand, and pulled in a deep breath. “I caught him stealing artifacts.” Her voice was thin and tiny, like a little girl’s.

  The workman rattled out something in Egyptian. The words were raspy, squeezed through a windpipe pinched under Jagger’s grasp. Jagger eased up on the pressure . . . a little.

  “He says it’s not true,” Hanif translated, his own speech heavily accented. “He was simply putting away some new finds.”

  Addison shook her head. “Look in his satchel.”

  Jagger rose up off the man. He yanked him to his feet, but didn’t release him.

  Ollie grabbed the canvas bag hanging from the man’s shoulder and pulled out what looked to Jagger like a broken ashtray. He shook it in front of Mumé’s face. “A potsherd. We uncovered it this morning.”

  Hanif reached behind him and produced a set of handcuffs—a piece of equipment Jagger had insisted his guards carry, along with walkie-talkies, canteens, and batons. He’d also instituted uniforms—Desert Storm–style fatigues—and weekly training sessions. Hanif stepped behind the workman and forced his hands around.

  When Jagger heard the ratcheting of the cuffs he let go, leaving a red mark on either side of the man’s neck. He went to Addison and held his hand out to her. She grabbed it and smiled up at him. Bloody teeth caused his heart to skip. Her bottom lip had split open. Blood oozed out, and it was smeared across her chin. He turned and swung his fist into the culprit’s face. The man flew back, out of Hanif’s grip, and crashed into a makeshift table. He broke through cheap plywood, sending tools, papers, and unidentifiable debris flipping into the air. By the time they rained down, he had hit the floor and slid halfway through the bottom of the tent wall.

  Hanif grabbed his feet and tugged him back in. The workman was shaking his head in agony, splattering blood from a shattered nose and wailing out a string of sharp words Jagger didn’t understand.

  Rubbing his knuckles on his hip, Jagger took in Ollie’s stunned look and said, “Sorry.”

  Ollie grinned. “Only thing to be sorry about is beating me to it.” He patted Jagger on the shoulder and turned to Addison. “Come on, I’m taking you to the clinic.”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “Go back to Annabelle. Just let me clean up a bit.”

  Ollie squeezed her arm, then slipped out. His voice returned, “Okay, everyone, back to work! Nothing to see here.”

  Hanif got the workman to his feet. Snot and blood covered the guy’s lower face like a veil. “I’ll bring him in,” Hanif said.

  “Don’t bother,” Jagger said. The village’s tiny police force didn’t give a squat what happened at the dig and would let the guy go as soon as Hanif was out of sight. “Send him on his way and tell him if I see his face again, it won’t be just a busted nose.”

  Hanif gripped his prisoner’s waistband and tugged him out of the tent.

  Addison touched Jagger’s hand. “Thank you.”

  “You sure about the clinic?” It was in the village a mile from the monastery.

  She made a face. “I’ve fended off boyfriends rougher than him.”

  Jagger didn’t believe it—she was way too smart to get entangled with people like that. But he understood.

  “You didn’t have to punch him, you know.”

  “Yeah, I did.” What he shouldn’t have done was grip the guy’s neck with his hooks. That could have gone terribly wrong. “Is the artifact he tried to steal worth much?”

  “Probably not,” she said. “We won’t know until we date it.”

  Jagger nodded. He’d spent two years as a special agent for the army’s Criminal Investigation Division. The more he learned about archaeology, the more amazed he was by how similar the two disciplines were. The best investigators never made assumptions, always pursued the smallest detail, and found connections that baffled others but in reality were based on a knowledge of human behavior—descriptors that equally applied to successful archaeologists.

  Addison touched her lip, winced, then stared at the blood on her finger. She sniffed back a sob.

  He suspected it wasn’t pain that had her on the brink of tears: it was the feeling of helplessness, of being overpowered. Being at the mercy of another person, someone malicious, was staggeringly frightening. Jagger was muscular, agile, and trained to fight, all of which put him at the top of the food chain. But he had learned the hard way that there was always someone bigger and tougher. He picked up a roll of paper towels, unrolled two clean squares, and pulled them off. He poured water from his canteen onto them and handed the wad to her.

  She dabbed at her lip and wiped her chin.

  “Why don’t you go see Beth?” he suggested. His wife and Addison had hit it off right away, and Jagger was grateful that Beth had a friend in this lonely place. He knew she would provide the balm Addison needed: a sympathetic heart and comforting words.

  “I will,” Addison said, “later. Really, I’m fine.” She tossed the bloody wad into the rubble of the table and its contents. She started out of the tent, then stopped. “For a moment I thought you were going to kill him.”

  Jagger tried to smile but ended up frowni
ng. “Me too.” And what frightened him most was the realization that he wouldn’t have felt much if he had.

  [ 7 ]

  Nevaeh strolled through a dark corridor, lighted only by a few candles set in small recesses carved close to the ceiling. This section of the tunnels had been wired with electricity, but she liked it this way better: she’d spent more time on earth without electricity than with it, and natural light calmed her like a warm bath.

  As she walked, she raked the nails of her left hand along a wall of jawless skulls. They screeched over a fleshless forehead, then slid off to click against the temple of the next skull. Screeeeech-click, over and over again, like a vinyl record skipping back over two seconds of static. Her fingernail found a gaping crack, and she wondered if it had been inflicted postmortem or if it evinced the event that had separated body from soul.

  Lucky you, she thought.

  Her S.W.A.T.-style boots padded softly against the limestone floor. She imagined watching herself at that moment in a movie: her dark clothes and hair drifting silently in the shadows, only her face and hands standing out, as if disembodied, perhaps a spirit looking for her bones among the thousands around her. In this long-forgotten place, she could forever pace the length of the corridor, slowly wearing grooves into the skulls, and no one would notice.

  On her right, the wall was made of stone blocks. Arched doors, spaced every thirty feet or so, marked the many rooms that lined the long corridor. In addition to the location’s seclusion and secrecy, these rooms were one of the reasons the Tribe had chosen to call this place home for the past decade. Each of the nine remaining members had his or her own room, except the smaller children, Jordan and Hannah, who shared one. That left rooms for a kitchen and dining room, bathroom, storage area, an armory, and a cell for the rare “visitor.” Most of the bedrooms doubled as something else: Ben’s was also the Tribe’s library and chapel; Sebastian’s was used for planning and for their computer needs; Toby’s was an entertainment center, with televisions and game consoles.

  Nevaeh veered across the corridor to listen at Toby’s door. Voices came through: Toby, Phin, and Sebastian were playing on the Xbox. She supposed playing wasn’t quite right. They were using a flight simulator to train for their upcoming mission, the one that had taken a huge leap from dream to reality now that they had the chips from MicroTech in hand.

  Good. Success of the Amalek Project, as Ben had dubbed it, depended on their ability to control the weapons.

  She scanned the tunnel and didn’t see light seeping under any doors. Though it was late morning, they had returned from Baltimore only hours before, and most of them had headed straight to bed. They could sleep on the jet, but it was never restful.

  Nevaeh suspected Creed was in his room brooding. He opposed Amalek and was becoming more vocal about it as the date approached. Tough. It would happen with or without him, and the fact that everything was coming together was proof God approved.

  But she didn’t like dissent among the Tribe, and just thinking of Creed stirred the beginnings of a headache. As usual, it wouldn’t be severe nor last long, but it intensified her exhaustion, and she considered heading for her own bed. No, as keyed up as she was about a lot of things—the events in Baltimore, Amalek, needing to kill something the way Elias needed his cigarettes—she’d only toss and turn.

  Instead she returned to the wall of skulls and skimmed her nails over them as she walked by door after door. She passed the last one, then the last candle, into the stygian darkness at the end of the corridor. Here, another tunnel crossed, forming a T-intersection. Nevaeh sat on the cool floor, her back against the wall, looking down the entire length of the corridor. The candles flickered against the ceiling, their patches of light growing smaller as they receded toward the opposite end.

  She heard a door click open but saw no new light until a flame kicked up and glowed on Elias’s face. Smoke turned the flame into a hazy ball of light, then it went out, leaving only a floating red cherry. The lighter flashed again, this time low, at his side, and went out. He continued flicking it as he meandered down the tunnel toward the bathroom. He let out a loud sigh and groaned.

  She knew how he felt. Their healing—which Ben said stemmed from the same biochemical change that prevented them from aging—was fast, but it wasn’t painless. For a few days after the physical signs of an injury had faded, they felt queasy and weak, as though a bit of their life force had seeped out. More likely, it had gone into the affected areas, leaving the rest of their bodies less than whole.

  The flicking lighter disappeared into the bathroom and the door clicked closed.

  Nevaeh wondered if it was indeed the aftermath of his healing that had Elias groaning . . . or simply the burden of living so long, the weight of a sin for which they were still awaiting forgiveness. She’d thought about it a million times. Actually, 1,274,000 times, last she’d calculated: every single night for 3500 years. In a Dantesque twist on justice, her dreams were less about sorting through psychological baggage and more about the torture of reliving their transgression over and over and over.

  The candles flickered, and her eyelids grew heavy.

  “Arella!” someone called, using her birth name.

  She snapped her head up and realized she had fallen asleep. The dream had been waiting for her, as it always was. She watched the candles dim as her lids drooped, and she lowered her head and stepped into the dream.

  [ 8 ]

  Arella gazed up at the mountain. Moses had been gone too long, almost forty days. Surely he was dead, slaughtered by his god for some transgression—leading all the people here without a plan, touching the wrong stone: his god was demanding and unforgiving. Or perhaps he’d left, gone to claim the Promised Land for himself. Day and night, the sky above the mountain was orange and red, flickering, waving. Not a good sign.

  And what were they waiting for? What god required so long to do anything?

  Moses’s god. Was he also her god, their god? Was he the One and Only God, as Moses had said? If so, why would Moses instruct them not to worship other gods? Was the God of Moses the same as the God of Abraham? What about El and the Ba’als—Asherah, Melqart, and Hadad? Her people had bowed to them, hadn’t they? And a good number had taken to including the gods of their Egyptian captors—Osiris and Thoth—in their worship. She was so confused.

  She looked around. So many people, scared, angry, impatient, crowding up to the foot of the mountain, as though that would bring Moses back faster. Some were even on the rocks, the mountain itself, though Moses had instructed them not to touch it. And what was that, anyway—“Do not touch the mountain”? Forcing his authority with petty restrictions. He was old and clambering for power over others as he lost the power over his own body.

  Who needed him?

  Arella knew her body was young and strong, attractive to men. She’d seen their looks. Her dress of brown linen, falling to midcalf, fringes down to her ankles—it clung to her body like skin, and she made sure the colorful shawl spilled down her sides, like drapes open to what she had to offer. So many men, muscular from years of building Pharaoh’s monuments. One would be hers before they left that desolate place. At least one.

  Abdeel rushed to her, grabbed her arms. Thinking he was after her jewelry, she tugged away. He grabbed her again and said, “Arella! There’s talk. Moses’s god is dead, or never was. Our true gods are angry with us! Remphan wants worship for bringing us out of Pharaoh’s clutches. Apis, Khnum, Sin—they demand our allegiance, our love! Come! Come!”

  Naram-Sin, yes! This was, after all, his place: Sinai—the Wilderness of Sin.

  Abdeel pulled her through the crowd. A group was gathering around Hur, whom Moses had left in charge, along with his brother, Aaron. Angry voices demanded that he craft an Apis bull for them to worship. Hur shook his head furiously and refused, spitting at their feet, saying he was disgusted by their impatience and ingratitude to the One True God, who had crushed Pharaoh’s army for them, fed them, freed them
.

  Arella spotted something—a shadow gliding over the rocks, formed by nothing she could see—and her mouth opened in shock as she traced its movements. Human-shaped, but not human: its head bore spear-like spikes, and the angles of its shoulders, elbows, hips were too sharp. It skimmed past the crowd, sweeping sand and pebbles away as no mere shadow could. It stopped at the feet of a man Arella recognized: Gehazi, from the tribe of Asher. He was watching the rest of the crowd, wide-eyed at the rising tension around him, oblivious to the thing at his feet. The shadow swirled around his ankles, then rose, engulfing him in a whirlwind of smoke. In a blink it vanished—seemingly into him, as though through his pores.

  She glanced around, but no one else seemed to have noticed; it had all happened too fast, and their attention was elsewhere.