by Peter Ackers
61
Angelo raised his knife. He wobbled as he stood there because one of his legs was broken and a shoulder cracked, but the look on his face said he believed his injuries would be no hindrance.
Jacky and Leo came flying through the south door and into the antechamber and stopped. Jacky shoved Leo aside and she fell on her butt. Jacky just stood there in the doorway, hands raised in surrender. Angelo, stood in the centre of the room, approached, grinning.
“Jackson, I’m going to use this to widen -“
He stopped there as the next stage of events came into play. So quick, Jacky dove aside. In his place, almost as if by magic, was a huge monster with silver teeth. Angelo had time to remember that those teeth were coated with Teflon and then his body was crushed. He felt hot, stinking breath and then hot, searing pain.
Jacky landed, rolled, came up with his gun drawn. The door. He spun, a leg coming up, his foot landing square and hard against the open south door. It banged almost all the way shut, there was a sickly half-squelch, half-clang and the door was smashed open. The door nearly hit crushed Jacky's legs. It hit the wall hard enough to rain brick dust onto the floor. There was a great blood smear on the iron.
Still carried by momentum, unchecked by the door, the great adult tigress, Lampshade, sailed into the antechamber, toppled, skidded, and crashed into her mate and his still screaming dinner. Lampshade’s face was bashed in, a flap of flesh hanging loose, exposing a steel plate bolted to her forehead. The plate, Jacky knew, had certainly saved the animal from a crushed skull.
Video turned and snapped instinctively at the thing that had knocked him. He stopped when he saw it was his partner. That was the last logical thing his illogical brain ever did. After that, chaos reigned in the mad creature’s mind.
As the beast snapped its great jaws around the battered face of the tigress, Jacky unleashed a stream of bullets at all three of them, knowing that Angelo was dead and would therefore put up no complaint.
“Out!” was the simple order he shouted at Leo, who was on her feet in a second and out the south door in another one.
Video yelped just once as the bullets dug in all over his body. That one yelp and that was it, he was turning, his jaws bloodied, fixing Jacky with his evil yellow eyes. Bullets erupted flesh and sent blood splattering; but some also pinged off into the walls, deflected by hard metal below the flesh.
Lampshade was dying. She lay on her side, panting, face torn open. A small piston was visible at the point where the maxilla and mandible - upper and lower jaws - were joined. Jacky didn’t want to imagine the increased power that applied to already awesomely strong jaws.
Video leaped. He landed on top of Jacky, who tried to duck and roll aside as man and beast fell. His left leg was trapped under the surprisingly soft belly of the tiger. He scrambled free before those teeth could sink into his flesh. He rolled over, planning to sit up and fire off some more bullets. But as he rolled, the ground slipped away from him. Reacting purely out of desperation, Jacky dropped his gun and reached out for something to steady himself. He found himself clutching the doorframe in the west wall, one leg bent under him, the other hanging down into the room with the sunken floor . . . and facing the bloodied teeth of a monster.
He looked round. Thirty feet. It was preferable. He let go of the doorframe, pushed away, twisted in the air, and dropped into the room. The tiger snapped at where his head had been half a second earlier.
He landed hard, rolled over to lessen the impact, came up on his knees, staring up. The tiger was in the doorway, staring down. God, it filled the doorframe.
Jacky had seen domesticated cats attempting to jump down from heights they didn’t quite trust. The hind legs were flattened, creating a sturdy base, while the upper body was lowered over the edge, forepaws flat against the wall. This was designed to lower the animal as much as possible, decrease the height of fall, before it jumped. That was what this monster above him was doing now. Preparing to jump into this room after him.
Jacky backed off, looked around. The walls were smooth, not a single hand-hold. And why should there be - it was supposed to be filled with water. He could see the tidemark just below the bottom of the doorframe at either end of the room.
Marco’s body was here, broken and unconscious, or dead. His machine gun, too. Jacky snatched it up, aimed at the beast, fired.
No, it didn’t fire. Gun was bent slightly, battered in the fall, and the trigger wouldn’t depress. Damn!
He tossed the gun aside and once more backed off. The great tiger was shuffling its thick backside, tensing itself, mere seconds from launching itself into the air and joining him in the room. He was in a box, with no way out. Two doors, thirty feet up. For the second time in ten minutes, Jacky Jackson acknowledged that this might be the day he died.
With a growl of rage, it leaped.
62
It didn’t growl, it groaned, and it didn’t jump, it fell. And as it cleared the doorframe, Jacky was shocked to see Angelo stood up there, knife in hand, gored beyond repair but somehow standing. The look on his face was almost one of triumph.
Cats always land on their feet. Cats that aren’t part robot, that aren’t already suffering from knife and bullet wounds. This cat landed hard enough to shake the room, head first, flailing forelegs unable to break its fall.
“Bit me now!” Angelo croaked. Then he collapsed to his knees, one hand on the doorframe to prevent his own fall into the room.
The great tiger raised its smashed head. There was blood all over the place, and a steady jet of something darker, thicker erupting from its broken skull, pulsing in tune to its heartbeat.
Oil.
Its left hind leg began vibrating wildly. Mechanical breakdown? This didn’t negate the beast’s bloodlust: still it came, shuffling along, forcing Jacky to back off.
The oil meant for its mechanical components was pooling around the tiger, mixing with its blood. Jacky almost felt sorry for it.
A strange whine filled the air, a noise that was purely mechanical. Jacky stared in fascination as the beast opened its jaws wide, as if ready to taste him. Wider, wider. His own jaw dropped as he watched the tiger’s open to an almost impossible angle, forced by the haywire pistons at the back of its mouth. He visibly shivered as a resounding crack echoed around the large, empty room. Bone snapping.
The poor beast toppled onto its side, legs kicking. Its voice was a low moan now. Blood and oil leaked, confirming what Jacky suspected. The tiger was dead.
Jacky looked up. Angelo, still on his knees, his own blood dripping onto the floor thirty feet below him, had pulled his pistol and was aiming it. Jacky almost laughed at the absurdity of this whole day, and wondered just how much worse it was going to get.
63
The report of the pistol was deafening in the room, the sounds bouncing off every wall, the floor, the ceiling, the echoes and echoes of echoes making the nine fired shots sound like ninety. When it was over, Angelo dropped the gun. Jacky stared at the tiger, now very dead, its head and body punctured, battered, shredded by .45 calibre rounds.
As he watched, Angelo opened a long pocket in the thigh of his trousers and extracted a thin but tough rope. His movements were awkward, slow, and obviously causing him great pain. Despite all this, he eventually managed to tie the rope around his waist. He faced the doorway, braced a foot against each jamb, and lay back. Jacky was puzzled.
The free end of the rope came sailing through the doorway and into the room.
Jacky took hold of the dangling rope and began to climb. He thought about a setup, but then he thought about everything else that had occurred, and repeated a previous thought. Could this day get any more absurd?
64
In a chopper about eight miles from the prison, Gabrielle stared at a monitor and watched Jacky Jackson climb the rope given him by one of her own men and felt emotions she didn’t like. Anger, disappointment. She was not used to these feelings and wanted them gone. But they would not go. She had bee
n betrayed. Her enemy was still alive and her two babies were defeated. Video lay in that room all bloodied and dead. Lampshade was surely in the antechamber, whose camera had been turned aside, probably by another traitor, Leona.
If not for the fact that she felt she was close to her destiny, Gabrielle would have ordered the choppers to turn back. As it was, the knowledge that Jacky Jackson, Angelo and Leona were fated to die as mere mortals was enough to comfort her.
She tossed the monitor out the door. Trailing wires, it crashed into the river a hundred metres below.
65
Angelo spoke without opening his eyes.
“Don’t ask questions. I was betrayed, so I have helped that bitch's enemy. Lucky for you, I want her dead a little more than I want you dead, and I can't have both. So I have no choice but to let you go, because you're the only one who wants to stop her. You will do that for me and my men. You will kill her and say it was for me. Now get away from me. I don’t want to have to look at you.”
Jacky knew that the man was showing great restraint. Just because they’d survived a terrible ordeal, it didn’t make them friends. He was showing similar restraint himself.
“I’ll fetch help for you.”
“Don’t bother. Just get away -“
“I’m not cold-blooded like you,” he interrupted. "And I do what needs to be done. I'll put a bullet in the skull of a man who pulls a gun on me, but as soon as he's down I will try to save him." Jacky stood over him to make sure he knew he wasn't the one in charge here “I fancy a good night’s guilt-free sleep, so I'll fetch you help.”
And with that, Jacky left, with no intention of getting the killer any help.
He found Leo upstairs, stood by the door at the top of the stairs, looking ready to slam it if the wrong person appeared at the bottom. She looked terrified and tired because she’d spent the last ten minutes shaking like a leaf.
“Those creatures are dead," Jacky said "The men with guns are dead. So relax and tell me what the hell is going on here. Those animals?”
Leo was silent for a short time. When she spoke, it wasn't to answer his question. She turned away from him. "I didn't do it for money, Jacky."
"Do what?" he said, knowing full well what she meant.
"Gabrielle did contact me, but there was no money offered. She told me to get her any information you found or she would hurt Marcellus's son. If I told her what you found out, she promised not to hurt him. I said yes. That's it."
He didn't answer. He waited for her reaction to his silence. Truth was, he believed her.
Her reaction was to turn to him, compose herself, and say, “The tigers? Gabrielle loves experiments. When she gets hold of the magic in that tomb, she’ll seem all kind and benevolent because she’ll make others like her, immortal. Then come the experiments.”
“She sounds like a swell girl. Where have they all gone?”
“I didn’t catch all of the story, just a part, just something someone had found in a file.”
“File?”
“She came here to look through old files. She was hoping to find something , something that might yield clues to the tomb’s location. Exactly the same idea we had.”
“We? You aren’t part of the same group as me. Heck, I’m a group all on my own now. Did you give Baldy the idea?”
Leo hung her head.
“Silly me, of course you did,” Jacky said. “As soon as I’d told you back in Nova Scotia. I bet you got straight on the phone.”
“What do we do now? I’m trying to make amends, you know.”
“Very honourable. I’d knight you if I had a sword. Either that or cut off your head. What did they find? What was this ‘part’ you heard?”
“All I caught was something about a prisoner being tortured. He is supposed to have begged for mercy and offered a treasure aboard a sunken ship in the river. It was thought that this ship might be Lawrence Marcellus’s, one that he built after Henry Wren and his men abandoned him.”
“And it may have sank with these so-called magic seeds aboard? Let them believe that if they want. We’re going to try something else.”
“What?”
Jacky waved a hand, indicating the wide corridor with its two rows of cells.
“If Patrick’s descendent was in one of these cells, he might have been bored enough to scribble things on the wall. It’s the best option we have.”
66
A call came through on the radio. Gabrielle looked out the window and down. The sun was beginning to set; its light made the river look orange, almost like flowing fire.
“I can’t see anything.”
The pilot transferred this fact across the radio. An answer was quickly forthcoming.
Gabrielle looked. To help, the pilot dropped the chopper lower.
“Is that the point?”
The pilot spoke into his radio, then came back with: “Mr. Baxter thinks he’s seen something. But I can’t just yet.”
“Then let’s land and see.”
A few minutes later the choppers were down and asleep, and the sounds of the jungle reigned once more: the kiss of leaves against leaves in the wind that stirred the tops of the trees, the patter of the rain against the ground, the living sounds of the rainforest’s inhabitants, everything from golden toads to stinkbirds (so called because they smell like cow shit), monkeys to ferocious caimans. And of course the musical rustle of the massive Oyapock River coursing south south-west through the continent.
Gabrielle stood on the west bank at a sharp meander, staring into the water. Now that the sun’s rays weren’t bouncing off the water and into her eyes, she could see what Baxter had seen. The water was slightly murky, but not so much so that she couldn’t make out a firm shape about three metres below the surface.
A boat. Obviously, it had sailed too close to the bank, carried by alluvion, and had torn its hull on rocks in the shallow water.
“Please,” she called out, turning to face her men, to study their faces. “Someone, be kind enough to go and fetch my destiny, would you? The man who does gets a blank cheque.”
It was funny to see their faces, to watch them run and dive into the river without a thought for safety, for preparation.
67
At the exit-end of the corridor was a lever in the wall. It had no markings, and whatever wires or cogs it was connected to, they were deep inside the wall it protruded from. Jacky looked at it cautiously.
“It won’t bite,” Leo said, seeing his expression.
“When you’ve experienced as many levers as I have, you lose some of your optimism.”
“What can it possibly do? I bet it opens the cells. What else?”
Jacky examined it closely, looking for cracks in the wall and the floor, looking up at the ceiling.
Leo found this amusing. “You think it activates a booby trap? Come on!”
She pulled the lever before Jacky could shout a warning. There came a deep rumbling, and then all the cell doors opened.
“How else?” Leo said, a triumphant smirk on his face. “Don’t read so much Indiana Jones.”
He tried to think of a retort, but nothing came. "Come on, let’s search these cells.”
They took a side each. They needed to use flares because the two lights in the corridor weren’t bright enough to fully illuminate the dirty cells’ walls.
There were all sorts of scribblings on the walls, most of it in French. Words and pictures. Some of the doodles were lewd enough to require no translation into any language. Jacky saw poems mentioning sweethearts; these could be dismissed. In all the others on his side, there was nothing to indicate the name of the person who’d spent time locked up there, and certainly nothing that had relevance to Babylon or any other part of this whole mess.
Jacky exited the last cell. “Find anything, he called to Leo, who had just finished her own search.
Leo came out of a cell with her flare, looking at her finger. Then she put her finger into her mouth and sucked on it
. “Nada.”
“This is no good. What’s happened?” Jacky pointed at Leo’s hand.
“Cut myself. Someone’s toenail sticking out the wall. Been using it to draw pictures.”
“Nice.”
“Next move?”
Jacky thought. “Perhaps a visit to this sunken ship that was mentioned. It might . . .” Leo was studying something small that she held between her thumb and forefinger. She dropped it and kicked it. “What was that?”
“The toenail.”
Jacky had only glimpsed it briefly, but that nail hadn’t looked like a man’s toenail. He bent, looking on the dirty floor for it.
“What are you doing?”
He found it and examined it.
“Jacky? You aren’t one of these people who collects them in a jar? Uuugghh.”
Jacky’s eyes widened. “Which cell? Where’s this from?”
Leo pointed. Five seconds later, Jacky was in that cell, kneeling on the floor, running his hands over the engravings on one wall.
“Fifth time lucky - Jacky? No, he’s deaf. I’ll just talk to myself. How am I doing? Oh, fine, really.”
The engraving, which was really just grooves dug into the soft stone wall, showed nothing legible. It didn’t look like it was supposed to be anything at all, just marks. A line that forked into two, with words scratched below. “La Chaise.” However, someone had crossed out the “aise” and written above it “esis.” To create another word.
“I didn’t know what all that meant. I don’t know French. Is it relevant?”
Jacky passed the “toenail” back to Leo, without looking away from the scoured wall. “Does that look human to you?”
Leo had a good look. To be honest, no, it didn’t. It was tapered to a point. “More like some animal’s claw. Something small. Like a cat.”
“Or a lizard. Hylonomus lyelli, for instance.”
“I’m lost. And I don’t mean because I’m in an underground abandoned prison in the jungles of South America.”
Jacky was remembering the necklace. The toes. The one with the broken-off claw. “He broke it doing this?”
“Who?”
“Scratching this.”
“Who?”
Jacky went silent, studying the wall. “La Chaise.” Changed to “Lachesis.” It seemed like the bored defacing of someone else’s bored scribblings, but it had come from a mind that knew things he needed to know, and perhaps something at the forefront of that mind had unwittingly come through in this graffito.
“Is this relevant?” Leo asked again.
Something clicked in Jacky’s mind. He started to smile, but cut it off as something additional clicked. This new revelation sent a chill went down his spine. He looked at that word, Lachesis, and he thought about the necklace made of bone. He stood and left the cell, with Leo following behind, asking questions. He ignored them all until she physically stopped him
“Partners, remember. Tough, beautiful adventurer and comedian sidekick. Now where are you going?”
“King Mudammiq’s tomb, of course. I know where it is.”
This time when he walked away, Leo just followed.
68
One set of noises not made known to Gabrielle and her mob in the minutes after they’d landed and the choppers had quieted was that made by Marcellus’s squad as they crept through the jungle towards them. Some of the ex-soldiers in the squad had fought in jungles before and knew how to move quietly and safely. These were the ones who had led the way, who had cut a swath through the dense undergrowth and who had got them through areas infested with living dangers.
Whatever clues the enemy had found, they had brought Marcellus’s squad almost all the way back up the river. Two miles ahead, the river widened considerably, and gave into the Atlantic Ocean. Barely a hundred metres ahead, a team of men in black, obviously professionals just like Marcellus's men, were fussing around at the riverbank.
This close to the coast, the super humid forest had been left behind and the mangrove forest that fringed the entire northern coast of the Guianas had once more taken over. This was better. These evergreen trees had pneumataphores, breathing roots that rose from the muddy ground so they could absorb oxygen. This close to the river, the density of the trees was not so great that it hindered movement, but enough to provide adequate cover for a bunch of men with guns.
The other mob was situated where there was a break in the mangroves that had allowed them to land three choppers. Marcellus, wearing a canvas helmet with a netted face to stop insects, looked through a pair of binoculars at the activity further down. He wasn’t yet concerned with what was in the river, what had just prompted about eight men to rush and dive in; he was seeking the top player here, the boss and organiser of this mission. Whoever this person was, Marcellus was sure he or she had also instigated the attack on Jacky in Nova Scotia. He wanted to see the face of his newest enemy. A person who seemed to know almost as much as he did about King Mudammiq’s tomb. And that was the scariest part.
69
Gabrielle turned her face to the great wedge of sky visible between the tops of the trees lining each riverbank. It was turning a deep red now, as if blood had been pumped into its blue liquid form. She had hoped to complete this all before nightfall, but that wasn’t really likely now, not unless someone quickly found something -
“I found something!” someone shouted. She looked. A man was climbing out of the river, aided by some of the mercenaries who hadn’t dived in. The man in question was Peter. She laughed. All these highly trained soldiers, and the hero of the hour was going to be her electronics expert.
He pushed away his helpers and ran towards Gabrielle, lugging something that he dropped on the ground before her. He fell on his knees in front of her and the item, coughing, dripping water, rubbing mud off his face and out of his eyes.
The object was a small chest. It was adorned with engravings that looked old; the amount of rust suggested a long time in the water. Gabrielle’s hope soared like a hawk on a hot current of air. Peter beamed up at her. Gabrielle stared down at what he’d found. Everyone else watched the pair; the mercenaries were so intrigued that they didn’t even turn to help their empty-handed colleagues who had also resurfaced and were trying to climb up the muddy bank.
Carefully, like a mother cradling his newborn, Gabrielle took the chest into her hands. She fought the urge to rip open the lid, instead wanting to savour this moment, the apprehension she felt at knowing she was on the threshold of a new experience, a new life, a whole new world. She suddenly wished she had a mirror: her own expression right now would tell volumes.
70
They reached the closed metal door. Jacky stared through the bars, up at the sky.
“Dark,” he said. He snapped back the bolt and yanked the door open. Outside, the rain on his head was a welcomed friend after the musty air below.
“So that’s what that black stuff in the sky is. I did always wonder.”
“Good. Now that that part’s over, you can join me in wondering how the hell we’re going to move through a gigantic rainforest in the black of night. I don’t recall where I saw the last streetlamp.
Suddenly Leo didn’t feel like making any more jokes. “Gets quite black, I assume? Can I also assume that all the snakes and giant spiders come out at night?”
“You can, but you’d be wrong.”
Leo visibly relaxed.
“They wouldn’t dare because of all the alligators,” Jacky added.
“Please tell me you’re joking!”
“What can I say? This is a jungle, with jungle creatures. I don’t know what lives out here. But I do know I don’t want to be stuck out here when it gets dark. You can’t exactly navigate by the trees out here.”
“It won’t be that bad, will it? We’ve got the flares.”
“You know what a bright flare is out here? It’s a ‘please come and attack us’ sign in leviathan flying insect language.”
Giant mosquitoes a
ppeared in Leo’s mind. She raised a hand tentatively into the air. “Please, miss, can I wake up now?”
“Come on,” Jacky said, starting to walk. “We’ll go back to the camp. If we can bloody find it.”
“But what about Marcellus?”
“He doesn’t know you’re a traitor, and he doesn’t know I’m onto him. We’ll just pretend we found nothing.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t come after us. But what if he did? And what if he’s bumped into Gabrielle and all sorts of shit is breaking loose?”
“Don’t worry,” Jacky said. “We have pole position.”
“Eh? In what, the race to doom?”
“The race for the tomb.”
“Oh god!” Leo moaned, almost tripping over a dead branch “I really, really want to wake up now. I’ll toss and turn all night, I don’t mind.”
“Wake up later. For now, dream us walking a couple of miles through predator-filled jungle, back to camp.”
“Last time I dreamed anything like that, I had to boil-wash the bedsheets.”
