by Layton Green
Someone kicked him one last time, and the men scurried out of the room. His hands were still tied.
Grey looked up, towards the far end of the room. The room was almost empty, dimly lit by a recessed ceiling light. Almost empty, but not entirely, due to the presence of a large object standing upright in the center of the far wall.
It was a red sarcophagus, covered with the scrawl of hieroglyphs, majestic in its silence.
• • •
Veronica heard Stefan shout. She’d been looking off to the side, and she followed his outstretched finger to a large blotch of brown in the distance. They had seen countless of these sandstone formations; they were looking instead for the mottled color of limestone.
Then she realized what had caused Stefan to shout and the driver to slow and then stop. She had only seen the edge of the wall of sandstone. As her eyes neared the center, she saw a glare of white against the golden sands, and the distant but unmistakable outline of a rectangular building. She saw tiny moving dots in front of the white structure, swarming around the blocky shape of what must be the truck they’d followed from Siwa.
Their driver pulled behind a sand dune and cut the engine. Veronica looked at Stefan, and then Viktor. Both were staring towards the building.
Before anyone had the chance to make a decision, a noise broke the stillness of the desert. A noise which caused everyone to huddle together in fear.
The rumble of the engine from another jeep, from a number of jeeps, drew nearer. Their guide looked ready to bolt, but Viktor had a steady hand on his arm. The engine noise drew closer and closer. Veronica prayed they were just passing by, more drivers bringing supplies to Al-Miri’s barren outpost.
Four jeeps rounded the dune, and Veronica saw with her eyes what she already knew. Men crowded the jeeps, standing with guns leveled at Veronica and the others. Their guide began to tremble, and he offered a steady stream of muttered entreaties into the desert wind.
– 59 –
Grey knew why they had untied his legs. They wanted him to struggle before he died. They wanted him to feel the crushing weight of fear, to swing his bound arms in vain, to scurry around the room like a doomed rat in a lab. He wondered if the twisted cult these people belonged to possessed the same relationship with fear as had the Juju priest in Zimbabwe. The belief that the fear emanating from the sacrifice brought power to the priest in the spirit world.
He didn’t think so.
He thought they just wanted him to suffer.
Or maybe they wanted to placate whatever it was that was coming out of that sarcophagus. Whatever the reason, someone was absolutely sure that whatever was inside would have no problem killing Grey with his hands tied together with heavy rope.
Grey limped to his feet, every breath a strain, every nerve and muscle in his body screaming at him to stop moving. He shook his head to clear the sweat and cobwebs of pain from his eyes, and stared at the sarcophagus.
An icy dread overtook him. Not dread of anything human, but of the unknown, of Veronica’s story of the figure that had appeared outside her window, of the things in the world that lurk in the shadows, unknown and unseen by those that walk in the light. He had never had this fear before, not until Zimbabwe. He remembered his powerlessness before the strange powers of the N’anga, the Juju priest. He remembered how helpless it had made him feel. How he had waited in that abandoned hole to die.
He snarled and vowed that no matter what lay inside this sarcophagus, what happened in that pit wouldn’t happen again. He strode forward. He would not wait in silence to die.
He reached for the crease in the side of the sarcophagus. As he did, the sarcophagus swung open, striking him in the chest and sending him sprawling across the room. He landed in a fetal ball, his battered body taking even more abuse.
A huge thing burst out of the sarcophagus, wrapped head to toe in white bandages, just as Veronica had described. It looked as tall as Viktor, muscles heaving beneath the bandages, an enormous club with a round metal head grasped in its right hand.
A numinous fear struck Grey in the chest, harder than any blow. He lay on the floor in that split-second, a moment out of time, staring in disbelief at the creature in front of him, a thing from an ancient land, a thing that could not be.
It heaved and watched him. Grey refused to call it by its mythological name, refused to give them what they wanted.
It rushed Grey and swung the mace. Grey rolled to his right, feeling the air whoosh by his head. He scrambled to his feet and ducked another swing, then had to avoid the next by pressing tight into the bandaged chest. Grey couldn’t risk staying inside with his hands tied, not with a fifty pound mace on its way to his skull. As Grey pulled away the thing backhanded him with its free arm, sending Grey spinning into a wall and clutching his head. The thing was enormously strong; a few more hits like that and this fight was over.
The clinical precision of the fight overcame him, the odd calm in the middle of battle that veteran fighters can channel. He would worry about what the thing was later, if he survived.
His hands were tied together in front of him. There was nothing in the room he could use. He slammed his hands apart, testing the rope. It didn’t budge, but he realized he did have one weapon, a weapon it was unwise to leave a Jujitsu artist.
But he had to stay alive long enough to use it.
It rushed him again, and Grey dropped to the ground and kicked at its knee. He missed and struck the thigh. Grey rolled immediately, and kept rolling. He heard the mace clang against the metal floor once, twice, before Grey found his feet and scampered to a corner.
The kick to the thigh hadn’t bothered it, and Grey knew it would be watching for it now. Grey crouched and walked towards the center of the room. The thing watched him with its eyes, tiny slits of blackness cut into the bandages.
It moved forward to meet Grey, and Grey faked another leg kick. The thing was ready, and swung the mace down to where Grey would have been had he completed the kick. Grey had already stepped back in anticipation, and the mace came down in front of him, this time punching a hole in the concrete.
Grey rushed behind the thing, before it could recover from the swing. Grey looped the six-inch length of rope between his hands around its neck. It was far too tall, so Grey pushed his knee into the small of its back to lower it, pulling on the rope with everything he had. Grey pushed his own pain away and concentrated on one task alone.
The thing went berserk from the choke. It grabbed at Grey’s face, but Grey buried his head in its back. It tried to throw Grey off, but as strong as it was, Grey’s knee had it leaned back and off its center of power, and it didn’t have enough leverage.
It reached back and struck Grey with the mace. It didn’t have much striking power, but Grey took a kidney shot from that heavy metal head and almost lost his hold. Grey yanked harder and fell to his back, still clinging to the thing like a boa constrictor wrapped around its prey. Now it had nowhere to swing the mace.
Grey locked his legs around its front, holding the bandaged thighs apart with his heels, stopping it from levering itself to its feet. He lost the pulling leverage from the knee in the back, but in exchange he crossed his wrists, tightening the vice around the powerful neck.
It dropped the mace and tried to buck, and Grey heard it gag. It sounded not like a thing, but like a man, and that gave Grey a burst of strength.
Grey corkscrewed his wrists even tighter. His arms throbbed, his thighs burned, every part of his body begged him to stop, but the flailing had almost ceased, and Grey knew it was finished. Finally the struggling stopped altogether. Grey held on an extra few seconds to be sure.
Grey pushed it off him, and it rolled to its side like a lifeless doll. Grey stood, shaking from exertion. Sweat dripped into his eyes, and he wiped it away with wrists stained red from rope burns.
His hand hovered over the thing for a few long seconds, and then he bent and grabbed the end of one of the bandages around the neck that had come loos
e during the choke. He peeled it back, and the bandages around the head started to unravel. Grey kept pulling until the entire head was revealed, and then he swallowed at what he saw underneath the bandages.
It was a human being, a man, but with a horribly disfigured face. His skin tone looked Egyptian, but his nose and his mouth looked like they had been grafted together into one bizarre opening, a repulsive cavernous hole in the center of the man’s face. The hole had stretched the rest of the facial skin, turning the man’s visage into an uneven, vile leathery mask.
Grey’s stomach turned, and he looked away. He remembered what Stefan had said about the horror of true genetic defects. He couldn’t imagine entering the world with the curse of that terrible disfigurement.
Grey thought of Nomti, and of the man with the cleft lip, and of the man with the birthmark covering his face. Had Al-Miri gained their loyalty by offering hope to these unfortunate scions of a dispassionate Mother Nature? Had he offered them a potential cure with his elixir?
Grey tried to hate the man that had just tried to kill him, but he couldn’t. He could only pity him for the unbearable life he must have had, for the monster he had become.
He picked up the mace, and then dropped it. It was far too heavy for him to use as a weapon. He wished it had a sharp edge so he could sever his bonds. He rethought that. If it had a sharp edge he would be dead, one of his vital organs pierced by a backward thrust during the choke.
He went to the door. Locked, and made of solid metal. He had a thought and he walked to the sarcophagus, which had swung shut after the man had burst out of it. Grey’s fingers found the crease, and he pulled it open.
An opening was cut into the wall behind the sarcophagus. The opening to a white-walled passageway.
– 60 –
Veronica saw a blur of vivid colors: the saffron glare of the sun, the flash of green robes, the swirl of golden sands stirred by the vehicles. The men hustled them into the jeeps, and they sped through a cloud of dusty air towards the structure in the distance.
At first Veronica thought the driver had tipped them off, but judging by the rough treatment afforded him, she discarded that notion. It didn’t matter; they had known the risks. They knew the figure standing in the palms, whatever it was, had seen them.
Viktor looked grim but calm. He had been here before. Stefan’s face showed signs of eagerness. Not fear, not worry. Eagerness.
Veronica looked inward. She was petrified.
They drew closer, and Veronica covered her mouth with her hand. A white building shone against the brown clump of sandstone with the feverish purity of a Cycladic chapel. At first she thought the building was standing in front of the mound of sandstone, but as they drew closer, she realized the rectangular building had been built into the face of the hill. It made Veronica think of the rock-cut architecture of Petra, redesigned with modern sleekness.
She saw a plane a hundred yards to the left, where the slope of sandstone ended and a paved runway vanished into the desert like a ribbon of shaved pencil lead. An enormous satellite dish and cell tower, both blindingly white, stood atop the hill.
She saw no sign of an outside source of electricity—how could there be? They must have some serious generators working that place, she thought, if it functioned as a lab.
The jeeps rolled to a stop within feet of the structure. The men herded them out, gun barrels glinting in the sun, arms waving. One of them strode forward and swiped a card through a nearly invisible white slot set into the face of the structure. A portion of the wall, a man-sized doorway, slid open. Veronica and the others stepped into the welcome coolness of an air-conditioned building.
The entrance was a large, empty foyer with a polished cement floor. Three white-walled hallways led into the building, and the guards ushered them down the central one. Recessed fluorescent lighting provided illumination, and the place had a dry chemical odor, as if the ventilation system contained a mixture of desert air and antifreeze.
The inside looked similar to most labs: gleaming, industrial, sterile. The impersonal aura of science. They were led past numerous closed doorways, a few open ones displaying laboratory equipment, and side hallways that branched off in both directions. I could be back in New Jersey, she thought. I could be anywhere there’s a lab.
They reached the end of a long passageway, and stood before an enormous metal door. Another hallway ran perpendicular to the doorway. Veronica glanced down the passage to the left and saw a series of glass doors. The hallway to the right looked barren.
The same guard slid his card through another slot next to the door. After a loud click the door swung inward.
Veronica corrected her previous thought. Labs in New Jersey did not have rock tunnels lit by torches behind doors at the ends of hallways. Nor did they have prehistoric cave art chiseled into sandstone tunnel walls. The guards ushered them forward, down the sloping passage. The art covering the walls was crude: outlines of humans and animals, mostly avian and bovine figures, all facing in the direction the guards were leading Veronica and the others, as if in silent procession towards some ancient theater.
The artists had utilized the natural fissures, curves, cracks and arches in the sandstone to form the figures, as Veronica had seen with other examples of primitive art. A long crack served as the back of a bovid, a curved fissure the sweep of a thigh.
It didn’t take an archaeologist to recognize the faded authenticity of the drawings, and a hushed awe overcame her. These clumsy attempts at human expression had existed for thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of years. The artists had wanted what everyone wants, what has remained unchanged since prehistoric times: recognition by the cosmos, justification for existence. They were shouting to the heavens, immortalizing themselves on these prehistoric walls.
The cave art switched the ambitious corner of Veronica’s brain back on. She tried to store every detail in her memory. What had the guards done with her camera bag? She reminded herself that she was, that all of them were, in mortal danger, but her mind kept running to another place, to the potential of this story, to whatever it was that waited at the end of this tunnel. Was it ambition, or was it a survival mechanism, a forced naiveté? She looked at her captors in their silly green robes, and almost giggled out loud.
The tunnel narrowed, and they proceeded two abreast. Viktor, dark and solemn, fell in behind her. Stefan moved to her side. Stefan’s head took in the surroundings as if set on a swivel, eyes wide, mouth slack.
The tunnel dead-ended at a wall of solid limestone. The guards kept moving them forward, and when they drew to within a few feet of the wall the ceiling opened. The wall in front of Veronica ended ten feet in the air, and a group of jagged ridges, like limestone stalagmites, topped the wall. She couldn’t see what lay above this: subterranean darkness reigned above the top of the wall, as mysterious and opaque as an ocean bottom.
She noticed an open space on the right side of the wall, and she realized it wasn’t a dead end. From a distance they had flushed together and looked as one.
The guards forced them through the opening at the end of the wall. Veronica slipped through and had to turn back to her left almost immediately. What she had thought was the end of the tunnel was a curved lip of sandstone, five feet thick and ten feet high, almost as wide as the tunnel, and with those curious spiked edges at the top.
When they reached the other side of the odd formation, the tunnel began again. She glanced back as they continued down the tunnel. The limestone formation looked, she thought, like a natural rock gate. She noticed Viktor looking at it with raised eyebrows.
The murmur of voices began as soon as they reached the other side. She could see a group of people in robes, clustered at the end of the tunnel. The guards urged them on. Her step faltered as she moved forward.
Who are these people? Where are they taking us?
The tunnel spilled onto a ledge. A huge cavern sprawled before her, both above and below the ledge. The immensity of the open spa
ce surprised her, but it was at the bottom of the depression, far below the ledge, that she saw the unbelievable thing.
She forgot the danger of their situation, forgot about Nomti and disfigured assassins and eerie figures swathed in white bandages. She forgot everything, and could only stare in awesome curiosity at what lay below.
Stefan gripped her arm from behind. “Do you see it,” he said in a cracked voice, speaking not to Veronica, she knew, but to himself.
“Do you see it?”
– 61 –
The passageway behind the sarcophagus didn’t extend far. It ended at a doorway, which opened for Grey. On the other side was a corridor, identical to the hallway outside the room where he had first been held. The door leading to the sarcophagus had been painted white, such that it blended into the corridor.
Grey eased the door back, but didn’t let the lock click into place. The corridor stretched a hundred feet in both directions, white and bleak. He had no idea where to go. He just knew he needed to find Jax and then an exit.
He chose left. He passed a few empty glass-walled rooms, and then the corridor dead-ended. He backtracked and tried the other way, passed more rooms, and this time the passage ended at another hallway. He turned left again, and fifty feet later he found Jax.
Jax was just as Grey had been, trussed up in the center of an empty room. Jax saw him through the glass. His mouth opened, words formed, but the glass must have been soundproof, because Grey heard nothing.
Grey simulated kicking the glass with his foot, then signaled for Jax to back away. Jax rolled to the rear of the room, and Grey put his foot to the glass with as much force as he could muster. It didn’t budge, and the pain in his leg from his earlier beating caused him to grit his teeth. He grimaced and kicked a few more times, then stopped and panted. Jax just stared at him, eyes wide.
Grey held a finger up, then returned to the hidden doorway and the room with the sarcophagus. He avoided looking at the bandage-wrapped giant lying on the ground, and picked up the mace with both hands. The thing weighed a ton.
