by Chris Vola
The detonation wasn’t as loud as he had thought it would be, though he could still feel the blast’s vibrations through several feet of solid rock and hear the rush of particles speeding in every direction, shattering the stained-glass windows, disfiguring the bodies that had been carved into the coffins that lined the walls.
Before Ryan could regain his composure and react to the situation, Vanessa grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him up, dragged him across a section of the floor that was sticky with the woman’s residue, down another set of stairs and into a long, rectangular room that contained dozens of rows of jewelry cases filled with gold signet rings, ivory and silver rosaries, and elaborate brooches. At the far end was a glass wall with the word TREASURY printed in bold letters above an open doorway, where Rodney was standing, fiddling with his watch.
He looked up, noticed Vanessa and Ryan, and did a double take, as if, for a moment, he didn’t trust what he was seeing. He shook off his disbelief and motioned for them to hurry up and join him.
“Can you run?” Vanessa asked. She was still holding Ryan firmly by the collar of his shirt.
“Yeah.”
She let him go. They sprinted toward Rodney and joined him in the smallest gallery that Ryan had been in so far. The section of the room where they were standing was only a few feet wide. After he’d put his pistol in its holster and spent a few seconds catching his breath, Ryan noticed that the room’s walls were covered in woodcuts depicting the Crucifixion and the Passion. For a moment, he wondered why this part of the museum was called the Treasury. The artifacts didn’t seem any more valuable than others they had passed. Was it a painfully obvious marker for anyone who knew what they were looking for, the tribe’s version of an inside joke?
“I thought I was the only one left,” Rodney said softly. “Troy?” he asked.
Vanessa shook her head.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Well, at least your boyfriend’s still with us,” he said, his voice dripping with false enthusiasm.
Though Ryan didn’t like the tone, he was glad to see a familiar face, even if it had taken a pretty good beating. Most of Rodney’s shirt had been singed off, revealing the intact body armor underneath. There was a minor flesh wound in the side of his neck and a bullet-sized patch of scar tissue bubbling on the back of his right hand.
“What the hell happened back there?” Rodney asked.
Vanessa turned and looked back in the direction she and Ryan had come from, completely at a loss for words. Ryan shrugged, equally muted by what they’d just encountered. The old woman’s face, right before Vanessa shot her, had been permanently etched into his brain.
“Were you able to get in touch with the team in the tunnels before the signal went dead?” Rodney asked, sounding more impatient with every word. “What’s the next move? We can’t just sit here. If you haven’t noticed, Xansati’s people are a little more prepared than we gave them credit for.”
Vanessa turned and flashed her usual stone-faced glare. “We’re finishing the mission,” she said. “You have the battering ram?”
Rodney nodded. “Yup,” he said, his somber expression suddenly shifting to a mischievous grin. “I think that’s the right move, boss. I really didn’t want to have to go back upstairs.”
He reached into one of his belt’s compartments and took out a gray plastic cube that was a little larger than a standard die. One of the sides was covered with a strip of black paper. He walked over to a recessed section of the wall that Vanessa and Ryan had run by when they’d entered the Treasury and ran his fingers along the edge of a nondescript, unmarked wooden door with no knob and no other way to conceivably open it. He pulled the strip of paper off the cube and pressed the newly exposed side onto the door near its right edge, about halfway up from the ground, where a hinge normally would have been. He began to fiddle with his smartwatch for a few seconds, then looked up at Ryan.
“You might want to turn around for this,” he said. “Pretty sure your eyes won’t be able to handle the glare.”
“What is that device?” Ryan asked.
“Long story short,” Vanessa said, “it opens things. Rodney’s right. Turn around.”
Ryan did as he was told and suddenly there was a grating noise, then several intense flashes that brightened the room to an extent that was beyond any kind of artificial light Ryan had ever experienced. He squinted, trying to focus on the woodcut in front of him, an image of Christ being struck by a Roman soldier, bleeding, while a woman knelt at his feet and an angel watched the scene from above, indifferent to what was happening. A plaque below the woodcut read: Donated by the Van Pelt Family Collection.
The noise ceased and the lights stopped flashing. When Ryan turned around, the door was flung open, revealing a narrow passageway that looked like it had been carved into the bedrock that formed the hill beneath the museum.
Vanessa ducked inside and motioned for Ryan to follow her. Rodney stood outside the entrance, attempting to extract a flare gun from his belt’s holster.
“What are you doing?” Vanessa asked. “You can’t use that in the passages. You’ll kill all of us.”
“Duh,” Rodney said. “I just want to make sure that no one who wants to kill us will be able to follow us.”
He lifted the gun, extended his arms, and aimed in the general direction of the stairs that led back to the upper level.
“The Committee won’t be too happy about having to clean up after that,” Vanessa said.
“Fuck the Committee,” Rodney replied. “I didn’t sign up for this shit.”
He pulled the trigger and a screaming fireball exited the chamber. He dropped the gun and dashed into the tunnel where Ryan and Vanessa were waiting, slamming the door shut behind him. A few seconds later, there was a muffled explosion, then the sound of dozens of glass panes shattering.
“Only one way to go now,” Rodney said, pushing past Ryan and heading briskly down the stairs.
The air in the passageway was damp and musty, and it was dark. The only source of light was a series of small antique lightbulbs that hung from the cavelike ceiling that seemed to increase in height the farther they walked. They descended for several minutes before the stairs ended and they were on level ground. The passage widened enough so that the three of them could walk side by side, but the lights were far more infrequent, so that Ryan could just make out each approaching glowing speck without seeing much of the passage itself. Something told him he wasn’t missing much.
They continued for half a mile or so in the unchanging darkness before Rodney and Vanessa slowed their pace and began to sniff the air, their noses scrunched and their brows furrowed.
“What is it?” Ryan asked in a voice that was barely above a whisper. “Is it human? Xansati?”
Vanessa took a deep breath, then another. “I … don’t know,” she said. “I’m picking up several different blood types, but all of them are faint, washed out. Everything has been corrupted, consumed by a…”
“A burning,” Rodney said.
He was right. Even Ryan could smell it. An intense odor of meat that had been left on a grill for a few days too long. And something else, a weird fungal aroma he’d never encountered.
The path curved sharply and for a moment they were bathed in total blackness. When they came around the bend they saw the vault—a massive stone-walled chamber whose entrance was a fifteen-foot-high archway like the ones in the Cloisters, but larger. The light from within bathed the remaining fifty yards of passageway in a soft golden glimmer.
The ground was covered in dozens of bodies, or, more accurately, the parts of those bodies that hadn’t been totally vaporized.
There were compressed piles of leaking skin wrapped in security guard jackets and white museum shirts, pink splatter marks and puddles with shattered dart cartridges swimming in them. But there were also charred husks that had once been limbs, torsos, and skulls. A few intact figures, totally blackened, their arms raised in defensive poses, their scorched
lips twisted in grimaces of pain and terror. It looked like they had been exposed to a heat so intense and sudden that they hadn’t even bled from their injuries.
As overpowering as the smell was for Ryan, he knew that it was exponentially worse for Rodney and Vanessa as they zigzagged around the heaps of biological sewage, scanning the carnage through their rifle sights.
Rodney stopped moving. He lowered his rifle and groaned in disgust. “What happened here?” he asked. “How is it possible to fry someone like—”
“The statues,” Vanessa cut him off. “We need to bury this place.”
They were about ten yards from the archway, where the trail of bodies stopped. Except for one. Xansati was lying on the ground near the back of the chamber, his head slightly elevated on the bottom of a set of stairs that led to a raised stone platform, on which sat a small, semicircular hut. He was shirtless, caked in dust, his chest and neck covered in emptied dart cartridges, looking like the victim of a sham acupuncture session. In his hand he clutched a stone figurine, identical to five others that were scattered around him on the floor. Its gaping eye holes and bared fangs sent a tremor of anxiety through Ryan, one that he quelled by focusing on Xansati’s permanently shuttered eyes.
Of all the corpses that he had seen, this was the only one that mattered, the one that would give Ryan peace when he’d have to confront his own swiftly approaching death.
It was over.
Vanessa clicked her smartwatch and raised her rifle. “We have confirmation of six statues and a body,” she said into the device as she started walking slowly toward Xansati.
“Oh shit,” Rodney exclaimed, softly, as if Vanessa had jogged something important in his memory. “I thought I was the only one left, I thought I was the only one,” he muttered in a weird monotone stammer that made him sound like the old woman who had been clutching the shard bomb in the museum.
Ryan frowned at the hulking warrior-turned-moron standing next to him. Why was Rodney suddenly unraveling now? “You told us that already,” he said, “when you, me, and Vanessa reconvened. Troy and Ramon and the other team are dead, but three of us made it. We’re about to finish the job.”
“No, you don’t get it,” Rodney said, snapping back to lucidity, taking a step forward so that he was between Ryan and Vanessa. “I fucked up. You shouldn’t be here. This was supposed to be part of the cleansing. We’re starting over, a new tribe. A younger tribe. One you could have been a part of if you’d let me turn you, but you gave up that chance. She never had one.”
He lifted his rifle and fired. The dart hit Vanessa squarely in the back of the neck. She dropped her gun and swung around, unsteadily, staring back at them with the same look of confusion as the first security guard Ryan had shot. Her eyes melted out of her face and she crumpled to the ground, another quivering mound of waste.
Ryan reached for his pistol. His holster was empty.
Rodney swung around, grinning, pointing the rifle at Ryan. “Looking for this?” he asked, lifting up his shirt. Ryan could see the grip of his pistol hanging out of the compartment that had held Rodney’s flare gun. “I took it after I shut the tunnel door and brushed past you. I’m surprised you didn’t notice it was gone until now. Pretty slick, huh?” he added, proudly.
Ryan nodded, trying to combat the fight-or-flight tremors that were surging through his body. He needed to think. He’d come too far to throw everything away. But even if he could somehow lunge and wrestle the rifle out of Rodney’s grip, there was no way he’d have time to fire it. Rodney could smash his face in without trying.
“So that’s why the Committee has been making a point of turning new members,” Ryan said, stalling as he remembered something, a possible way out if he could move fast enough. “That’s what the tracking implants are for. They want a new generation that will be easier to control, made up of people that will be so psyched to be immortal that they won’t question orders. And they’re going to make you, what, like a general or something?”
“Something like that,” Rodney said, moving closer to Ryan until they were less than a yard apart. “Pretty much. But now’s not a great time to discuss politics. It’s time for us to say good-bye. It’s nothing personal, man.”
Ryan took a deep breath, bent his knees, and lowered himself to a kneeling position, his hands at his sides. He began to slowly pull up his right pant leg while maintaining steady eye contact with Rodney, who grunted in annoyance. “Ah, come on, don’t try to pull some begging shit on me,” he groaned. “No matter what you say, I’m not going to turn you now. When has that ever worked? What crappy movie are you thinking of?”
Ryan didn’t answer. Instead, he gripped the handle of Arthur’s knife, which was strapped to his shin, and swung it in an uppercut motion that connected with Rodney’s groin and burrowed into the soft gut above it. When Ryan removed the knife with a sharp twist, Rodney dropped the rifle. He stumbled backward, eyes wide, staring at the clumps of intestine that had begun to spill out of his ripped track pants and onto the floor. Ryan stood up and stabbed Rodney between the eyes, twisting the knife until he heard a crunch. He pulled the blade out and Rodney collapsed facedown into a puddle of pink slime.
“Nothing personal,” Ryan said as he wiped the blade on his pants.
Before he could think about his next move, or about what had happened to Vanessa, a wave of vertigo overtook him, followed by a long coughing spell. He needed to sit down. He made for the chamber’s glow and stepped under the arches that, he now saw, were carved to resemble a bear and a wolf baring their teeth at each other, frozen in precombat aggression. The chamber itself was circular with a domed, rotunda-style ceiling, where a pair of industrial floodlights shone down. The walls were natural rock, into which dozens of massive alcoves had been carved. He approached one of them that was near the chamber’s entrance and saw thousands of bones—skulls, rib cages, femurs, vertebrae—stacked in no discernible order. Alongside the remains were arrowheads, carved wooden masks, pipes, and hatchets similar to the artifacts Ryan had seen at Natalia’s house.
This wasn’t just a vault. It was the original tribe’s mausoleum.
Ryan heard a grunting noise and swung around, facing the hut—whose roof and walls, he now saw, were made of tanned animal hides—and the staircase. Xansati had hoisted himself up two of the steps, into a near-sitting position. His gray suit and white undershirt were peeling off him in shreds. Most of his hair looked like it had been singed off; his scalp was coal-black. His eyes were open and he was staring sideways at Ryan as if he couldn’t move his neck. His brow and jaw were creased with muscular tension. The statue in his hand had turned a deep green color and seemed to be glowing, vibrating slightly. Something inside the jaguar was causing its eyes to pulsate, to shift in color from red to bright amber and back again.
Ryan walked over and ripped the statue out of Xansati’s clenched fist. It was almost weightless, and hot and strangely sticky against his skin, as if it were covered in some kind of adhesive gel, even though its surface looked smooth and dry. A sudden surge of electricity shot into Ryan’s fist and up his arm, a sensation that was both oddly invigorating and bewildering. Even after he dropped the statue and watched it land on the ground intact and upright, the tingling lingered.
He tried to ignore it and stood over Xansati, who seemed to be completely paralyzed. “You probably don’t remember me,” Ryan said, “and you don’t know why I’m here. But believe me, you deserve this.”
He raised the knife over his head, picking out a point of entry just above Xansati’s sternum. Just before he plunged the blade into its target, Xansati croaked out a word.
“What?” Ryan asked.
“Jacob,” Xansati said, a little stronger, stressing each of the syllables. “You’re Jacob Arrington.”
Ryan hadn’t heard anyone call him by that name, his original name, in nearly a hundred years. It was a name that had been all but forgotten. He held the knife in the same position for a few indecisive seconds, then low
ered it. “How did you know that?” he asked.
“Because you have my knife. The knife I gave to Arthur. He told me he’d buried it, left it for the young man he’d turned. A blond, pale man named Jacob who he said would be able to hold the kwènishkwënayas, just like I could.”
“Hold the what?”
Xansati chuckled, then cringed in pain. “A long word, I know. In Lenape it means something like a cougar or a puma. The stone vessel you just took out of my hand. It’s not the first time you’ve seen one.”
“No,” Ryan said, “it’s not.”
Xansati took a deep breath. “But you’re no longer Ànkëlëk-ila,” he said, “which means that you aren’t carrying the vessel and haven’t for some time. And you’re wearing the uniform of my former brethren.” His eyes widened in sudden trepidation. He gasped, trying to lift himself off the stairs. “Did you give them the jaguar?”
“That would really piss you off, wouldn’t it?” Ryan asked, the old anger flaring up. “But no, I didn’t. It’s still in Brooklyn. Van Pelt would probably kill me as soon as I gave it to him. Or have one of the goon squad do it for him. That’s how it works in Manhattan, right? You guys get other people to do the dirty work for you. It must have seemed so easy to find me, to attack my tribe, to destroy my girlfriend’s life. All you had to do was shell out a few bills to someone, maybe promise them a place somewhere nice and gentrified, like you hooked up for Nicki.”
“What reason would I have to try to find you?” Xansati looked utterly lost.
Ryan let out a bitter laugh. “You’ve been trying to collect all eight of the jaguars for years. You find out a few months ago that the second-to-last one has turned up at the Brooklyn Museum. Okay, easy enough, you’ll pay to have it stolen. Now you’re close, there’s only one statue left, the one that belonged to your friend Arthur. You remember that he’d turned someone named Jacob. All you have to do is find me. You don’t know how long it’ll take but you know I’ll turn up eventually, and you know that the Committee isn’t going to be cool with you adding another weapon of mass destruction to your collection. So you give them some bogus excuse about why you can’t be friends with them anymore and move everything up to the Cloisters, in preparation for whatever apocalyptic tea party you’re planning on having with your eight stone toys.”
