by Peter Ackers
51
Jacky shut off his mind, not wanting to imagine what it must be like to be trapped in one of these bizarre cells. He had registered the lack of noise for the last half hour and knew it could mean that they’d left him here to die. He was unable to sit down in this small cell. How long would it be before cramp set in, before tiredness -
- footsteps, coming down the stairs. Fear welled up inside. It was the not knowing, not seeing. He couldn’t help it. When the trapdoor was unlocked and yanked open, he ducked low, shielding his face with his hands, letting out a yelp of fright.
The hand that reach in belonged to Leo. “I am sorry, Jacky.”
He grabbed her hand.
Once out of the cell, the steely Jacky returned. He swept Leo’s leg and she went down hard on her face, letting out a grunt as her arm was forced up behind her back, straining the shoulder.
“Give me a reason why this arm shouldn’t break.”
“Here’s one: it should be my neck.”
Surprised, he let up a little on the pressure. “Perhaps it will be.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Know what?” Jacky demanded.
“About the attack. Yes, I’m one of the bad guys, but I didn’t want you hurt. That night on the beach. My orders were to leave once I’d gotten the information Gabrielle needed. I just left, then made a phone call. This is the truth, Jacky. I only found out today that she’d sent people to kill you. Christ, I even made her promise that you wouldn’t be hurt. Do you believe me?”
“When I think you’re lying, you’ll feel this arm snap. Carry on.”
“It’s awesomely simple, Jacky. I like money. Marcellus and Gabrielle are in this for the same reason, so I went with the one who paid the most. Gabrielle, she likes this sort of thing, corrupting people. Her ancestor, this Henry Wren, he turned one of Lawrence Marcellus’ men against him. She thought it would be cool to do the same with me. She told me everything, and I'll happily tell you, you don't have to force it out of me.”
Jacky let go of her then and moved back. Leo sat up, rubbing her shoulder. He noticed that she’d brought his gun and backpack. They lay on the floor. As he talked, he put on the backpack and slipped the gun into his thigh pocket. The bad guys had taken his waistcoat.
“They grew up together. The Marcelluses and Wrens were always close. These two played together as kids. Then the Wrens moved to England and that was the end of it.”
“Does Marcellus know this Gabrielle is stealing his show?”
“No. No way. And he wouldn’t be happy if he did. You see, it was always thought that Lawrence and Henry had died at sea while searching for the king’s tomb. Then someone actually started to read their logs and do a bit of research. Then it all came out, and it separated the families. They were bitter enemies not long after becoming partners, Lawrence and Henry. Always trying to outsmart each other. In the end, Henry Wren bought off Patrick, the guy who made the bone necklace that started all this. Wren boasted about it in his own diary, which Gabrielle got passed to her. Marcellus found you through your e-mail, right? Well, Gabrielle found out what Marcellus was doing by the same means. She knew he’d found a clue and so she basically followed him. Contacted me, waved a big cheque, and I snatched it.”
“You’re on a roll, don’t stop now. Try to shock me.”
“They found the tomb. Then Patrick and Henry Wren left Lawrence Marcellus to die, they dumped him. Took his men and his ship and all the treasure. Patrick stayed on in this country. Wren set sail. But Lawrence Marcellus had suspected treachery, it seemed, because he poisoned all the food on the ship. So all his own men died. The ship was found at sea. Wren’s diary was found aboard, containing a note claiming the poisoning, claiming that the crew were planning suicide to relieve the intense pain and torture of the poison. No bodies were found, just possessions, which were returned to their families.”
“Was any treasure found? What was it? What is all this about immortality?”
“The treasure they were after was nothing more than plant nectar blessed by magic, that’s all. Supposedly, this nectar could reanimate a dead body, make it live forever.”
“So that’s where the immortality part fits in. Ha, it’s the world’s oldest dream, its most amazing treasure.”
“I don’t much buy it, either, but that’s the story. The Babylonians invented this nectar. It was full of nutrients, and once blessed by magic, it supposedly kept the mind alive forever and stimulated the brain and the muscles. No need for food or sleep. There was one problem. The body had to be dead. If a living body drank the nectar, it had all sorts of weird side effects.”
“Like?”
“Insanity, for one. And if what Gabrielle told me is true, speeded up evolution. It enhanced everything going on in the body. That was its power. Only if the body is dead can this be avoided.”
“No growth, enhanced, equals no growth still. Makes sense. Not that I accept anything that comes from your mouth. But let’s say it’s true. Why are we all the way out here looking for a king’s tomb? Why not search for this juice in Iraq, which is modern Babylonia?”
“If I have the story right, the Assyrians were getting tougher, so the new Babylonian king sent the ex-king away to become immortal. Mudammiq was dying of tuberculosis. He was the prime choice. Sail far away, die, live again, come back and refresh the Babylon empire. He took a big ship, some architects and some magicians The Babylonians couldn't afford to let the stuff fall into the wrong hands. Immortal Assyrians was the last thing they needed. So Mudammiq took it all away with him. So the story goes.”
“That’s a nice fairy-tale.”
“There’s a not-nice ending. According to Wren, they found evidence that Mudammiq was buried alive with a servant who was supposed to feed the nectar into the king’s body after death. But when the king died, the servant instead panicked, battered himself to death trying to escape.”
Jacky laughed. “So the immortality of the Babylonian empire was foiled by a scared slave? That really is funny.” He shook his head. “So, after all these years, Marcellus gets hold of his forefather’s diary and realises he’s onto a chance at everlasting life?”
“Yes. Gabrielle too. Marcellus was just waiting for a break. Gabrielle was just waiting for him to make a move. You know why Marcellus is most bitter? Marcus, his dad, kept his diary from him until after his death because he wanted Theo to bring him back. Amongst the things left to Theo in the will was a note. Theo burned it without reading it. But in a second note left to Darren, Theo’s son, Marcus said he’d see the boy soon.”
“I don’t follow.”
Leo laughed. “Marcus kept the secret because he wanted life after death. In his note to Theo, he gave the location of the tomb. He had waited because he wanted Theo to bring him back to life. Theo burned the note.” Leo shook her head. “Theo realised after he’d read the note left to Darren. Wouldn’t that just kill you?”
Jacky didn’t see the funny side. He had another question: “What was Marcellus’ plan once I’d found the tomb? Kill me?”
“He’s no killer, although Gabrielle certainly is. He’s just a guy who wants his son and him to live forever. He told me you were going to be well-paid. He also promised that he’d give generously to charity. He really isn’t a bad guy, you know. There, erm, there was another reason, though.”
“All this teasing is turning me on.”
“Well, being the intrepid adventurer, he thought you were the sort to take the plunge, so to speak.”
Jacky realised what she meant. “A guinea pig? He was going to force -“
“Not force.” Leo interrupted defensively.
“Okay, he thought I might be willing to test this magical potion? That I’d allow myself to die and be brought back as an immortal?”
“You seemed the sort to him.”
"No thanks. I'd get bored. A hundred years will be enough for me, I reckon." He looked around the room. “I always wondered why he was so eager to have me on board. He didn’t real
ly ever need me for finding the tomb, did he?” Something stirred in Jacky’s brain. “If I was to be used to test the potion on a dead person, what about testing it on someone living? Based on what you’ve just told me, no one would dare risk that.”
“He wasn’t planning to force anyone, if that’s what you think. That’s more Gabrielle’s domain.”
Jacky thought about something else. Leo just watched him. In the silence, they heard footsteps at the top of the stairs.
“The trouble you mentioned?”
“Something else I didn’t want to happen to you.” She pointed at something. Jacky looked. There was a surveillance camera attached to the wall. But it was aimed up at the ceiling. “I turned it. She can’t see now. She wanted to watch the game. It was supposed to be tigers.”
“Tigers?”
“I’ll explain later. But these sound like people who are coming, not animals. I bet I know who. Gabrielle couldn't stop talking. I know there's a guy up there who isn't very happy with you. We should go.”
Jacky slung the backpack off his shoulders and put the diary in it. “Where do these doors go?” He put the backpack on again.
“You don’t want to know.”
52
The Games Room. Brainchild of the vicious Chief Gaoler, 99 years now in his grave, who built this subterranean floor to feed his sadistic ego.
The nine most hated convicts were imprisoned in the tube cells under the floor of the antechamber. When he was hungry for pain - someone else’s, of course - the Gaoler would pick one of the cells and the guards would extract the convict. He would be given a choice of three doors. Beyond each, a different horror awaited.
The door in the east wall led into a large round room with a concave floor and an exit on the far side. In the circular wall were two alcoves; set into each was an iron ball standing three feet high and weighing 600lbs. A tripwire set off this trap.
The northern door opened into a long corridor that sloped down at twenty-five degrees, the floor greased, at the bottom of which was a wall with a door. Set into the floor at 10 metre intervals was a row of jagged spears connected by a cross-bar just below the head. This wall of spears was tilted towards the top of the incline.
The western room dropped instantly away thirty feet. Forty feet away was another door. In the water that filled the hole swam creatures that liked to bite.
Jacky had already read this much on the map drawn by the French guide, Ramun. And he knew that all the rooms had been stripped of their horror features. The iron balls were missing; the spears had been removed; the water had been drained. However . . .
“Gabrielle has set one of them up. She planned to play some sick game.”
“Which one,” Jacky snarled, a whisper. The footsteps were close now, right outside the door. He pulled his guns, pressed his back against the wall beside the door, on the side it was hinged.
“Don’t know. Open them and see.”
“No time.”
The handle turned. Jacky had locked the door. It rattled as the person on the other side tried to open it.”
“Who’s in there,” came Angelo’s voice.
“Just me!” Leo called back.
“What the hell are you doing? Open this door.”
“I was going to ask Jacky some questions. Go away.”
The door flew open suddenly as a foot kicked it. It swung into Jacky, who stifled a grunt. At least the door was blocking his body from the three men who stormed into the room.
Angelo saw the open trapdoor. “What the hell’s going on?” he roared, moving quickly over, aiming his gun down into the cell.
“He went through one of these doors. Hit me. Ran through.”
“Shit!” the mercenary yelled. He grabbed Leo’s hair, yanked her up. A hand signal and his comrades quickly moved towards the doors, taking one each. They yanked them open. Leo struggled. Jacky pushed away the entrance door, charged, gun pulled. He fired to his right and a bullet took Marco in the shoulder as he was turning. He fell through the doorway and landed hard thirty feet below on the grimy floor of the empty pool.
Paul turned, raised his rifle. Angelo did the same.
“Bastard!” Leo roared, and threw herself into the room whose threshold she stood at. Still retaining a firm grip on Leo’s hair, Angelo was yanked inside also, stumbling, firing, falling. Bullets raked the roof and floor of the antechamber.
The loud report of the machine gun made Paul duck for cover. Jacky dove for him, narrowly missing being shredded by lead. He hit Paul hard and they crashed through the open doorway.
Gabrielle, it seemed, had enjoyed the idea of the circular room with the iron balls. The balls had been removed to one of the cells upstairs almost a century ago; earlier today she had had them moved back, the tripwire replaced.
Although they weighed 600lbs each, they were balanced so precariously on a single golf tee-like support each that they toppled easily when Leo and Angelo rolled through the tripwire. Two great spheres rumbled down the slope of the concave floor, like a big bowl, gaining a lot of momentum during that twenty-five metre downward journey. They would roll up the other side and down again, up and down, in all directions, crushing anything in their path, until gravity finally stopped them a whole two minutes later.
Leo dove aside as the first ball came at her. She felt the second one brush past her and clip Angelo, knocking him aside like a toy. The first ball rolled over the centre point and up, bending left with the shape of the floor, soon to come back. The speed they rolled, coupled with their unpredictable movements, would pose a tough problem, Leo realised, as she jumped the returning first ball. It would be like dodging busy traffic.
53
Next door, Jacky and Paul rolled over and over down the sloping floor. The spears were gone, so they were spared being impaled. But down at the bottom, the floor ended a good eight feet from the wall and the single door it contained, and there was no telling what lay in that intervening hole. The single light in this room was up near the top; the further Jacky and Paul slipped down, the dimmer it got.
They both seemed to realise the danger at the same time and let each other go. Paul scraped at the floor, trying to turn his body around, for he was sliding on his stomach, face-first towards that black hole. Jacky had managed to get himself into a kind of sitting position, pressing his boots hard into the floor, fingernails of one hand digging into the stone, gun butt in the other hand doing the same - trying to halt his progress. The chasm loomed.
54
Billy Smart was a chopper pilot paid handsomely by Gabrielle, like everyone else, to do his job. But not handsomely enough for this caper, he thought. Playing around with man-eating tigers, especially these messed-up creatures, was not supposed to be part of the job description. The new plan had been to wait for Angelo and the two other to return; why couldn’t they have just stuck with that?
Carefully, Billy opened the fuselage door, sliding it slowly across, slowly so the noise wouldn’t disturb the tigers. He gulped. There they were. In their cage, just lying there, meek as lambs. Big things, as big as they come, the male even larger than the female, and boy was she huge!
Billy didn’t know if it was possible to have an insane animal. He thought you had to have morals and a conscience and rules of society in order to even acknowledge the existence of insanity. Perhaps for animals it was different. Anyhow, he had seen this pair in action, and he certainly thought that whatever the animal kingdom version of insanity was, they damn sure suffered from it.
Strange how the blindfolds worked. These beasts had rotted minds, unwittingly - or not - crafted that way right from birth when the boss had got them and had begun messing about with them, experimenting with drugs, tortures, and Lord, all that metal stuff they’d implanted! Every waking moment was filled with roaring and violence, yet stick a blindfold on them and that was it, they became like old, loyal, domesticated felines, laying around as if they thought they were curled up at the master’s feet in front of a roaring h
earth fire.
Billy figured the boss had probably done something to their eyes as well, or used hallucinogens. So that perhaps they saw a world that was so freaky and horrific it made them more and more insane with every passing minute. Perhaps the blindfolds covered that world and . . .
Billy didn’t know, and he didn’t care. He just wanted to get this over and done with and be away.
He unlocked their cage. He stepped in. He had the taser, but what was that going to do to save him if one of those blindfolds slipped off? It’d just piss these guys off more, that’s all.
Back of the neck, he’d been told. Grab a cat by the back of the neck, its brain associates that feeling with being carried in the teeth of the mother as a newborn. Makes the cat go limp, pliant. He’d seen someone do it to this pair before.
The two beasts were wagging their tails, alert yet docile. Lord, it was like they were watching movies inside those blindfolds.
Two hands needed. He had to put the taser away. So he did. Stepped between the two cats and grabbed a fistful of fur and flesh in each hand. This was all theory and this was the moment of truth. He expected to lose both arms in half a second. But as he grabbed the fur and pulled, the big cats went limp, their heads dropping onto their paws. Billy was almost hauled off his feet. Lord, they were well-trained. If training was the word. He didn’t think so.
It took all his strength at tugging just for the cats to realise that they were expected to move. Slowly, they came at his urging. He'd never drag them without their help, but they gave him only enough to make sure he used every ounce of strength he had. Out of the cage, out of the chopper, across the ten metres of burned land and to the prison doorway. They didn’t walk but shuffled, keeping their heads on their paws and their white stomachs on the ground. It took what seemed like hours.
The doorway wasn’t big enough for both animals to pass through at the same time. He had to take one at a time. And it took some time. He let go of the one on his left. He was right handed. If it went wrong and he was going to lose an arm after all, well, better the left. But the cat just lay there, suddenly wide awake again and wagging its tail, watching movies or memories behind the blindfold, as he dragged the other one through the doorway.
Eventually, they were both inside the reception area of this old, abandoned prison. Billy used the string he’d been given. Tied it around both blindfolds. He passed it between the bars of the solid iron front door. Stepped out into the rain and shut that door. Slid the bolt. The door didn’t have a lock because it wasn’t for security so much as to stop wild animals from getting inside. He hoped to lord it would also stop them getting out. If not, they’d surely tear open his chopper and swallow him whole.
Billy yanked the string and the blindfolds came away. The transition from peaceful cat to snarling monster was so quick you’d need an atomic clock to time it. Jagged teeth and claws gnashed and scraped at the bars of the door, at the stone walls. Billy ran. He wondered how Gabrielle was ever going to get those blindfolds back on her pets. He jumped in the choppers and sent it upwards. He didn’t relax until he saw triple figures on the altimeter. Once the fear was gone, all he could feel was pity for anyone left inside that prison.
55
Leo rolled aside once more. The ball rumbled past and went up the slope. Angelo was up on his feet, coming for her, avoiding the two balls easily. They were slowing slightly, making his task easier. They were reaching their highest points about ten metres from the top of the bowl now.
“Traitors occupy the ninth level of Hell, you know?” Angelo called out over the sound of the rolling iron balls.
Leo got up. "Notice that on your way further down, did you?" She backed off, with Angelo advancing. Now Leo was high up so that the balls couldn’t reach. Angelo was still down there, but he was quick and agile enough to easily avoid the iron killers. Another minute and they’d be stopped, touching down there in the centre, the lowest point.
She backed up until her butt hit the wall. The wall moved slightly. Quickly, she turned, saw a door, remembered the second exit, and grabbed for the handle. The door opened outwards, but revealed only the stone wall. A fake. The Chief Gaoler had a sense of humour, it seemed.
56
Jacky and Paul slid to the bottom of the slope. Paul began to scream as his efforts to turn his body failed; he began to roll over, twisting fast, legs and arms flailing as he went into an uncontrollable, dizzying spin.
Jacky lifted his gun and fired. Butt and feet placed flat, back propped up by his backpack, which was surely going to be ruined after this, he was able to aim as well as he needed. The handle of the door down below burst into shreds; the hinges exploded. The door wobbled in its frame, then toppled forwards, falling out of the frame and disappearing into the black hole between the wall and the bottom of the slope.
Jacky didn't hear the door land, which was worrying, but what he saw was far worse than what he heard - or didn't hear.
In the gap left by the missing door was nothing but more wall. The frame and door, it seemed, had been nailed onto the wall simply to give false hope. Any convict who managed to reach the end of the slope, jumping the spears that had once been present, like some kind of malevolent hurdles event, would attempt to dive for the door, and even if he made it, somehow managed to grab hold and open that door - well, what then?
He thrust his gun in his pocket as his body slid to the end. The black hole widened alarmingly quickly. His ass started to burn from the friction against the cold stone. The slope had looked as long as a ski-jump from up top, but it was shrinking fast. Paul's screams still filled his ears. The guy was flipping over, cracking his arms and legs and head against the stone slope. He angled across Jacky's path, mere feet ahead. Jacky screamed himself now, but it wasn't all fear. There was anger and adrenaline there, too.
The edge was upon him. Paul went over, still spinning. The gloom was deep, but nothing compared to that chasm. As Paul slipped into the abyss, he might as well have been slipping into a lake of oil.
Jacky leaned forward, thrust with his legs, knowing his timing had to be perfect. He rose into the air just as the ground ended. He thrust as hard as he could and his legs straightened just as he felt the friction on his boots slip away.
He reached out, fingers curled like claws, almost willing his elbows to dislocate just for a few inches’ extra reach. In the blackness this deep into the room, he saw nothing but the pale wall and the doorframe nailed onto it. They were the only things convincing Jacky's mind he wasn't floating in space. The only thing in his life now, which he wanted more than anything he'd ever yearned for, was that little ledge of old wood at the bottom.
In the final nanosecond before he would know if that little ledge of wood was real or imagined, Jacky became aware that he hadn't heard Paul's body land yet, either.
His fingers touched wood, dug in. His body swung into the wall. Strangely, his only hope was that he didn’t smash his knees.
The thud almost knocked with wind out of him. He kept his grip, hanging from the bottom of what was nothing more than a rectangle of wood stuck on a wall.
Paul was silent. He’d heard no scream of death, no call for help. He couldn’t prevent his mind from imagining the guy falling still, turning over and over as he passed through the earth and out into space on the first chapter of his endless tumble through eternity.
Surprisingly, Jacky still had the strength to haul himself up. One hand on the left side of the frame, one on the right. Inches at a time, he pulled himself up, swinging his legs from side to side and using their momentum to help him throw his weight upwards. His feet could find no footholds and thus became useless, which put extra stress on his fingers. They began to bleed. The strain on his forearms was just as painful. But this was life or death. Aching forearms and bleeding fingers versus bottomless fall was no choice at all.
Soon he was up, and safe. His feet were on the bottom ledge and his hands grasped the sides of the doorframe. He sighed with relief. Then he a
ctually laughed, while still panting from his exertions. Safe? He was balanced on a little slip of wood that might tear away at any second, his face three inches from a blank wall, a bottomless chasm behind him, a slope too slippery to climb just beyond that chasm. And guys with machine guns somewhere up top. Yeah, crack out the cigars, Jackson, you're home free.
57
Forty metres above Jacky, Leo was running around the top of the inside of the circular room, chased by Angelo, who was laughing. He could have shot her dead, but that wasn’t as much fun as watching how she panicked.
“Where are you going, traitor?”
Leo stopped. Turned. “I thought I’d pop to the shops. Want anything.”
Angelo couldn’t believe it. “Always the joker. Where did these balls come from?”
“Vanishing twin syndrome,” Leo shouted back as she ran.
“Eh?”
Leo ran towards the centre of the room suddenly. The heavy iron balls were still rolling, criss-crossing each other’s paths, but slowing still, playing in a space only ten metres in radius.
Leo crossed the danger zone with ease, zipped quickly up the other side and stopped, turned, waved.
A test? Angelo rose to it. Down, through the danger zone, up. Leo had moved away slightly so the mercenary couldn’t attack her. No sooner had Angelo reached the top, Leo was racing back down. Angelo followed.
The two iron spheres kissed each other like billiard balls. With a resounding crack, they flew off in unplanned directions. One nearly hit Leo, who was forced to jump aside. It caught her foot. She landed hard on her stomach, hard.
The other ball had been coming across Angelo’s path. After hitting its mate, the rolling mass of iron veered off at 90 degrees, straight at him. He felt his lower right leg snap. Down he went, hard, and slid towards the centre of the room.
Leo got up and rushed for the door. Angelo let her, the mercenary’s current problem worthy of his undivided attention.
He rolled aside as one of the balls came at him. Then the other came at him. They were slowing quickly now, their journeys shortening. Soon, they’d crowd and crush him.
Leo left the room without a glance back.
58
Jacky stood in the doorframe, facing outwards, still panting. It had been tough, pulling himself up, then removing his backpack so he could turn around. The pack was now back around his shoulders, but on the front of his body. The leather and the buckles would provide more friction than the top he wore, and that help in the task ahead.
He dipped a hand into the pack, seeking something that would help him here. It was too dark to see anything clearly so he was having to guess at what he was touching. His fingers brushed against a packet of chemical flares and he pulled one out, activated it. His world turned green. He dropped the flare into the depths below him.
It landed about fifteen feet below his feet with a soft plop and all went dark again. Some kind of thick fluid. Oil. Quicksand, maybe. Something that had swallowed the mercenary, choking off his scream. He was down there now, dead, the latest addition. The door was there, too, floating, but the body had sank. The fluid explained the lack of sound. Jacky wondered how many bodies might be down there? He figured the French authorities who’d closed this place down either hadn’t noticed this tar pit, or whatever it was, or hadn’t been able to get down to investigate. And if no one could get down, how the hell was he supposed to get up?
Seconds later, the flare sank and was extinguished. The bright green light had closed his irises, and now the darkness that returned seemed blacker than ever.
He had an idea. Using his gun. He had spare magazines. Blast a series of holes in the stone floor right up to the top and use them as hand-holds. He had the bullets and the aim to manage it. Yes, he could -
“Jacky!” came a shout from above. He looked. Stood in the doorway at the top of the slope, what seemed like a hundred miles away, was a silhouetted figure. Leo, by the sound of it. “Are you okay?”
“Fine!” he called back, edging his tone with sarcasm.
“How are you doing?”
He couldn’t believe this. “Don’t mind me, you get off, or you’ll be late for the Village Idiot competition. I’ve got money on you.”
She vanished from the doorway, but continued to talk. Her voice was barely audible at this distance.
“Can you get back up?”
“Silly me, I never thought of that. Attempt to get out of this certain death situation. Good idea.”
“I have copyrighted the comedian sidekick part of this team, babe. I’ll sue you. Stick to being beautiful and tough.”
She was back in the doorway, carrying a bright ball of light that soon came bouncing down the slope towards him. A lamp on a wire. His hopes flared. At one point, the glass broke and the bulb shattered against the concrete. The metal casing continued its decent, tumbling over the edge and hanging there, just above the sludge.
“I don’t mean to be condescending here, but you have tied this to something, haven’t you?” he shouted up.
“My pet Tommy the tortoise. He’ll pull you up. See you in six weeks.”
Despite his situation, Jacky couldn’t avoid a little giggle.
He dove and caught the cable. This time he wasn't worried about slamming into a stone wall, and this time he cracked it hard, causing a grunt of pain. Hands, knees, elbows, all scraped. The backpack strapped to his front saved his chest from any damage.
He hauled himself up and over the lip and then got to his feet. He started to walk up the slope, threading the cable through his hands. He slipped a few times and banged already hurt parts of his body (again the backpack saved his chest), but he was soon at the top. Needless to say, it took less than six weeks.
“Thank you.” Jacky said when he was once more on flat, safe ground. He could have kissed the flat stone floor, but time was against them. He put his backpack on the right way after extracting another flare, which he put in his pocket, and after inserting a fresh magazine clip into his gun.
“Is the other guy dead?” Leo asked. Jacky just nodded. Leo said, “I don’t know about my guy, so we should go.”
Jacky was already halfway out the south door.
He raced up the stone steps, widening the gap between Leo and himself. He was panting by the time they got to the top. But there was no time to stop. Jacky raced along the corridor, looking through the bars of each cell, trying each door. Leo followed, just watching.
“I give up, what are you doing?” she said after a few seconds. Somewhere beyond the stairs at the other end, there was a loud clang, that of an iron door shutting. Both Leo and Jacky looked that way.
“They’ve locked us in,” Jacky said.
“Who? They’ve all gone.”
Leo was staring at Jacky. She watched as he stiffened. “You did say tigers, didn’t you?”
Leo turned her head. Seconds later, at the end of the corridor, Gabrielle’s two monstrous tigers appeared, racing down the stairs, forced to do it single file because of their size. Snarling, clawing the air as if fighting invisible enemies, their evil yellow eyes fixed on the two people who stood halfway down the corridor.
"Holy fucking shit," Leo said.
Leo and Jacky bolted at the same time. And of course, the killer tigers chased them.
59
On the monitor, her babies chased the man and woman down the corridor, and it stirred in Gabrielle a sense of pride. Pride because she had made them how they were, had ingrained into their minds the insanity that fuelled their bloodlust, into their muscles the hydraulics that powered their awesome bodies. For a brief moment she regretted leaving the animals behind. Then she felt the weight of their child in her arms, her little baby, and her sense of loss was vanquished.
The feeling of pride was good, better than the anger and hate she’d felt at seeing both Jacky and the traitorous Leona escaping certain death. Now they were both alive and her three highly trained men were dead. But that would soon change. The Jacky and L
eona being alive part, that was. Her pets would see to that.
Video, the male, was so much quicker. Because he was male? Because he was longer and more seasoned with his new body and had had more time to adapt? Because his was the role of aggressor? Gabrielle didn’t know. But it was good to watch. It was intriguing to watch the man and woman, too. Jacky and Leona. Once friends, then enemies, and now, under threat of death, fired by desperation, they were bonded again. Not as friends and not as enemies, but something else. Some other human emotion that might be worth studying at a later date and in a more controlled atmosphere. Volunteers were easy to come by; methods of torture and death easy to create.
Jacky and Leona left the range of Camera 3 and entered the area covered by Camera 4. They darted down the steps at the end of the corridor.
Camera 5 was on the ceiling of this staircase, aimed down. It showed Jacky’s and Leona’s receding backs. Gabrielle watched, fascinated.
60
Marcellus was on the phone to his son when Jameson yanked open the fuselage door of the chopper. Normally no power, event or problem on the planet would interrupt Marcellus’ time with his boy, but the look on Jameson’s face said this was time for an exception.
“The other troop is leaving.”
“Hang on a second, Choc,” Marcellus said into the phone. He climbed out of the chopper. Jameson pointed into the sky, but there was no need. A couple of miles distant, easily heard and seen, a number of choppers were rising into the air.
Everybody watched as the choppers flew further downriver, keeping low.
Jameson said. “They’re looking for something. No prizes for guessing.”
“Oh, there is one prize,” Marcellus remarked. Although he did love his son more than anything in the world, he was only human and therefore cursed with an imperfect memory. He threw the mobile phone away without thinking. “We follow them. They’ve obviously found some clue.”
“One chopper in the air to direct a ground assault?”
“That’s your department, remember?”
“I’ll set it in motion. What about Jacky and Leo?”
Marcellus just stared after the receding choppers, and eventually Jameson had to shake his shoulder. Jameson repeated his question.
“Oh, I’m sure they’re fine,” Marcellus said.
