“There it is, mate. There’s what I was looking for.” Michael pulled up so forcefully, Dillon thought his spine might break in half.
Dillon grasped Michael’s index finger and bent it to the side at the knuckle. He felt the snap through the man’s glove. Michael screamed, and Dillon grabbed another finger, the pinky, and did the same.
Michael jumped up and ripped off the glove to check his hand. “I was gonna make it quick, but now you’re gonna die in pain.”
Dillon lunged for the rifle. He grasped the cold barrel then flipped the gun to point it at his assailant. He fired without hesitation. The spent casing sizzled in the snow. He fired twice more before Michael fell to his knees.
“You shot me.”
“Don’t take it personal,” Dillon said. “I shot a rabbit once, too, and he didn’t piss me off half as much as you.”
Michael collapsed onto his face with a final groan.
Dillon moved quickly. He stripped off Michael’s clothing and put it on his own freezing body. Never in his life had the simple act of putting on clothes been so satisfying, especially the boots, which instantly warmed his icy feet.
He covered his face and head with the scarf, beanie, and goggles then ran back in the direction of the other men. He found them a few yards away. “He’s over there, mates! Over there. Hurry. Hurry!”
The men scampered past him without even asking why he was running in the opposite direction. Blind devotion could be a good thing.
Dillon ran up to the cliff he’d fallen from and scanned for a trail. He spotted it on the east side and jogged over there. The suit wasn’t far away. He didn’t know how or why, but he felt it, almost as if it were calling to him.
22
Tyler sat in a limo as his construction crew finished another day’s work. That section of Miami was rundown and inhabited by government-subsidized buildings and liquor stores. Few people noticed the massive construction project over an empty parking lot. They had more important things to worry about.
Atlantis stood outside the car, wearing a white dress with gold trim. Wherever she went, she was dressed as if going to a ball, perhaps because she’d been without clothes for so long. Or maybe she had an eye toward the modern luxuries in dress. Tyler thought she probably just liked looking fancy. Women were all the same, no matter the era they came from.
A loud boom echoed through the neighborhood. The foreman had informed him that they just needed one more blast, and they would be through the top layer. He lit a cigar and got out of the limo.
“It’s ready, Atlantis.”
For a moment, she didn’t move, just stared into the basketball-court-sized hole in the earth. Then she walked forward and hopped into the hole. She jumped the full twenty feet, but he had to take one of the ladders that’d been set up for the crew.
Tyler followed her through the tunnel. Electric lanterns hung from the walls provided just enough illumination to see a few feet ahead, but he couldn’t see Atlantis. The walk seemed to take a long time, and Tyler regretted wearing his two-thousand-dollar Italian loafers, which were becoming caked with mud.
The tunnel widened then opened onto another hole leading deeper into the earth. Atlantis stood at the edge, looking down. He came up behind her. Every cell in his body screamed at him to touch her, to take ahold of her, kiss her, and never let her go. Not a woman in history was as beautiful… or as ruthless. He had come to understand that he valued those two traits more than any others in a mate.
Tyler looked down. Before them lay an army entombed in transparent coffins. But even from that far up and with only the dim light of a handful of lamps, he knew something was wrong. “They look—”
“No!” She jumped into the hole.
Tyler was forced to take another ladder. He walked over to where she stood next to a soldier entombed in the strange material that was like ice but not cold. The man was little more than a skeleton with a few bits of ragged flesh still attached to the frame.
“No.” Atlantis ran from tomb to tomb.
They were all dead, every one. She sprinted down an adjacent tunnel so fast that her figure was a blur. By the time Tyler caught up with her, she was running down the other rows of tombs.
She stopped at one and bent down to flip open the container. The soldier inside gasped then frantically began trying to fight his way out of the tomb.
“Calm, my servant,” she said. “Calm. Calm…”
He looked into her eyes and stilled. She lifted him out and set him on his feet. It took a moment for him to get used to his legs.
“Find your brothers that still live,” she said.
Atlantis and the soldier continued searching the tombs. Tyler stayed back. She was on edge, and he didn’t want to bother her. She often seemed to show some gratitude toward him, but he wasn’t stupid. She would have no more of an ethical problem with ripping off his head than she would killing an ant.
It took the two of them over ten minutes to check all the tombs. Tyler counted nine soldiers with Atlantis. The soldiers appeared to be savage memories from the past. Neanderthals, Tyler thought, heavily muscled and with menacing expressions.
Atlantis nodded at them. “They will suffice for now. And the king?”
“Who you refer to as the king is called a president. And I’m sorry, Queen. He has denied our request for an in-person meeting.”
She grinned. “Then we’ll just have to get his attention, won’t we?”
23
Dillon followed the trail up the mountain. Feeling had come back to his feet, and he wasn’t shivering, though his face still felt like an icicle. When he turned a corner, he spotted a mound of snow off to the side of the trail. He broke into a jog then dropped to kneel beside the black metallic piece of material sticking out of the snow. He began digging the suit free. Weak and still in pain, he had to stop every few minutes.
When he finally uncovered most of the Onyx suit, he couldn’t believe his eyes. Parts of it were missing. The chest looked as though it had been clawed apart by some monstrous cat. Half the helmet was gone, and large patches appeared to have been burned.
The suit was too heavy to move, so he stripped down to his thermals and lay next to it. He focused his mind, and when the suit opened behind him, he scooted inside so it could engulf his body.
Power flowed through him, but it was only an echo of the previous strength, weak and sporadic. His exposed skin stung in the icy wind.
Trying to get the same burst of energy he’d had before, he imagined a hose at the top of his head pouring water over him. The water pooled in his belly. Then it would spread to whatever section he wished, and he would explode with power. But the water seemed unable to run along the set paths, and he felt frail.
He rose off the ground, slowly, ponderously, the effort taking energy out of him in a way it never had. Rising high off the mountain, he angled toward the camp. The men in white were gone, but some climbers remained, bustling about in an attempt to restore order and help the wounded. He whispered a goodbye and thank you to Natalie as he headed in the other direction.
Just to time it, Dillon had once flown around the earth as quickly as possible. He had gone so fast that the suit had started heating up and cooking him inside it. He slowed enough that he wouldn’t pass out from the heat. The entire trip had taken him less than eight minutes.
But in the damaged suit, every movement pained him, and the more he forced the suit to gain speed, the more he feared it might give out and cause him to fall from the air.
Flying at an altitude of no more than five thousand feet, close enough to see the cars on the roads, he seemingly crawled to the Falkland Islands. When he finally did land, after spending more time in the air than he ever had, he felt faint and confused. Lying flat on his back in a small park, he closed his eyes, and sleep took him.
When Dillon awoke, the sun was setting. He sat up, his head pounding as if he had a horrific hangover coupled with the aftermath of a car accident. His entire body hurt. B
ut he had no choice. He had to get to the city made of ice. Not fully understanding why, he knew he had to get there. Something was there for him. He couldn’t put it into words, but he knew why he had chosen to come there without even consciously thinking about it.
The Onyx suit was taking him back to its place of origin. It had nearly been destroyed and was going back to what it knew.
Dillon got out of the suit. Without him being inside, it was almost impossible to move and certainly impossible to open. So he felt there was little risk in just leaving it in the park.
Barefoot and in thermals, he walked to the nearest street. A café was on the corner, and he went inside and sat at the counter. A waitress came over with a menu.
“Could I have a glass of water please?” he asked.
She nodded and brought the water, clearly thinking him homeless and taking pity on him. He moved to a table by the window and gulped the water as if it were the last glassful on the planet. The gray of evening turned to the black of night, and the stars came out of their caves.
He thought of Natalie after the bullet had torn through her. The life in her eyes disappeared instantly, replaced with a cold detachment. Ice in the eyes. But Natalie’s face wasn’t the one he pictured. He saw Jaime lying dead inside a tent, blood spreading across her chest and soaking her clothes.
“You okay?” The waitress, a young woman with blue eyes, stood next to his table with a broom in her hand.
“I’m fine. Thanks for the water.”
“Are you hungry? We have some donuts left over.”
“I would love a donut. Thank you.”
She disappeared into the back and came out with a sandwich, a donut, and a glass of orange juice.
He shook his head. “I don’t have any money.”
“It’s okay. It’s on me.” She put the plates and the glass on the table.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
He took a bite of the sandwich. “You would not believe how good something tastes when you think you’re never going to taste it again.”
“I can imagine.” She began to sweep the floor. “I haven’t seen you here before.”
“Just passing through.”
“To where?”
He was too tired to lie. “Antarctica.”
She grinned. “Really? And are you a great explorer or something?”
“Something,” he said around a mouthful of donut.
“Well, be careful. That place is dangerous.”
“Tell me about it. So does your family own this place?”
“No, I just work here. I was kinda like you actually.”
“Like me?”
“Wandering around. Without a place to be.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, the owner’s this nice older lady. She gave me a job, and I sleep in the back.”
“You don’t have a British accent. Where are you from?”
“Kansas originally.”
“Really? What’s a Kansas girl doing in the Falklands?”
She paused, not looking him in the eyes. “I just… had to get away. Everyone says you shouldn’t run from stuff, but I don’t think they know how bad some stuff can be.” Pain was written clearly across her face.
He nodded. “No, they don’t.” After taking the last bite of the donut, he stood up. “What’s your name?”
“Rebecca.”
“Rebecca, that food helped more than you know. I promise I’m going to pay you back.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
He left and went back to the park. The suit hadn’t been disturbed, and he climbed inside it. Feeling a little bit of renewed energy, he lifted into the night sky.
24
Tyler watched in amazement as the soldiers dressed in modern clothing bought from a trendy store at a shopping mall. They looked ridiculous because their features were clearly those of men from a different time. And watching them prance around a shopping mall, gaping in true wonder as if they were in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, felt surreal.
“My Queen… Atlantis, is this really the best use of our time? We should be recruiting mercenaries for—”
“A mercenary has no loyalty and fights only enough so as not to be accused of theft. They are useless to us.”
“The United States military and the FBI are searching for us right now. They’ll find us eventually. We need to be prepared. I don’t know if excavating these sites for a handful of men at a time is the proper course.”
“One of them is worth thousands of mercenaries. And they can wear the armor of the Cara. That is how we will defeat our enemies.”
He disagreed and was frustrated but held his tongue. “As you wish.”
Tyler sat on a bench at the mall and waited for Atlantis and his assistant to finish shopping for the men. Afterward, they piled into two stretch limos to go to the airport. Tyler sat in the back of one car with three of the men and two girls they’d managed to pick up without speaking a word of English.
Tyler was about to ask the soldiers how they’d managed that when he noticed the girls’ glazed eyes. They had somehow been hypnotized and were just responding to whatever the men told them.
The soldiers were unable to fly without suits, so they boarded the private plane with Tyler. They were heading back to California. Supposedly, another tomb existed beneath the Gulf of Mexico, and an underwater drilling team had been working its way down there for the past few days. Atlantis once again chose to fly herself.
The plane lifted off, and the soldiers clenched the armrests. Considering that they had flown in suits six thousand years ago, Tyler wondered why they would be frightened of flying on an airplane. Unfortunately, their dialect was the vulgar, populace version of Atlantian, not what the aristocracy spoke, certainly not what the queen spoke, and not the dialect Tyler had spent four years learning. He could communicate, but only on a rudimentary level.
Tyler sipped a martini with two olives. Outside the window, the square green and brown patterns of farmland came into view within an hour, and he wondered if that was the life he should have chosen—something simple and away from the mess of money and power. But money and power were the only things he had been interested in his entire life. And when he’d found a journal written by his grandfather—a man who had devoted his life to exploring the arctic—describing a lost city on the coast of Antarctica, a city rumored to contain vaults of gold and jewels, that lust for money and power had ripened.
He had learned all he could about the continent and searched for the lost city, which some thought was the city of Atlantis that Plato had written about twenty-three hundred years ago. He’d found small trinkets, occasional bits of jewelry, and other things indicating that a civilization had once existed there, but nothing that pointed him in the right direction.
Until the Black Onyx.
When he saw the suit on the news, he knew. His grandfather’s journal depicted that exact suit. Someone had found the lost city. From there, it was only a matter of finding the men who had shown the Black Onyx where the city was. He’d found a tour guide who claimed he had been to the lost city. And sure enough, he had.
His grandfather’s journals spoke of a queen who was in all the literature and religious writings of the period. His grandfather had learned the language from texts he had discovered and never revealed to anyone but his son. The queen, he had written in his journal, was immortal. And she held the secret to immortality that could be bestowed upon others, a secret having to do with a black substance that moved on its own.
Tyler sighed. He had hoped he would be able to spend time with Atlantis. Instead, he was babysitting six-thousand-year-old Euro trash.
Once the plane landed, he couldn’t get off soon enough. He ran across the tarmac, hopped into the waiting silver Mercedes, and told the driver to take him home. He needed a respite from the group, however slight.
His home was one of the finest in Bel Air but also the least used. With several offices th
roughout the world that seemed to always be having problems, he spent little time there. When the driver parked at his house and got out to open the door, someone stuck the barrel of a rifle through Tyler’s open window.
Tyler looked over slowly to see a man in full bulletproof gear with the letters FBI emblazoned across his chest. Several more identically dressed men surrounded the driver.
“Got you,” the agent said.
25
Dillon arrived at Queen Maud Land late. The suit wasn’t responding anymore. Its power, wherever it came from, had been drained.
Dillon slammed into the snowy ground and slid for at least fifty feet, creating a trail behind him. Lying facedown in the snow, his exposed skin bleeding from the scraping, he closed his eyes for a moment.
Pushing himself off the ground, he saw the mountain made of smooth ice. He walked toward it.
Much of the suit had been ripped away, and the cold slipped inside and didn’t leave. He lifted his hands, attempting to shoot energy into a rock and superheat it to use as warmth. But he didn’t have enough juice to do much more than melt the surrounding snow. So he wrapped his arms around his body and walked to the trail leading up to the entrance.
The suit normally enhanced every sense. He could smell things he didn’t even know had a scent, like insects or the roots of trees. If he focused, he could see the scars on a man who was miles away. But without power, the suit was little more than decoration.
His legs grew heavier with every step. The mountain trail wasn’t a steep climb, but at one point, it required crampons and ice axes. The suit’s boots and gloves would have to do.
Dillon attempted one more time to fly and got up about ten feet before falling back into the snow. He lay there a minute before getting up and continuing the climb.
Making his way to the halfway point, he could feel the icicles that had formed in his hair and on the suit. He had to consciously move his tongue away from his teeth because he couldn’t control their chattering. He circled around the mountain on the trail, his arms gripping his chest tightly, trying desperately to retain some body heat. A thin metal ladder lay on the ground ahead, the only bridge over the crevasse. He placed the ladder across the opening. Taking a deep breath, he took the first step.
Black Onyx Reloaded - A Superhero Thriller (The Black Onyx Chronicles Book 2) Page 6
