Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1)

by Jeremy Robinson

  Probably best to avoid that topic altogether, he thought.

  After about forty minutes of driving, they came upon a pair of old Land Rovers parked along the roadside. Beneath a layer of mud splatter, Pierce could make out the blue United Nations logo on the doors, but there was no sign of the occupants. Cooper pulled his pick-up off to the side of the road, just ahead of the other vehicles.

  “Where are they?” Pierce asked.

  “In the bush, bossman,” Cooper said, as if that explained everything.

  As they got out of the truck, Cooper reached behind the seat and took out a rust-spotted machete, which he handed to Pierce.

  Pierce hefted the blade, recalling his promise of the night before to start carrying a knife. Not exactly what I had in mind. He took an experimental swing at the tall grass on the roadside. “Are we going to have to do a little trail-blazing?”

  “Maybe so,” Cooper said, still rooting behind the seat. Pierce expected him to produce a second long knife, but instead Cooper took out a pump-action shotgun. “Maybe other things.”

  Without further explanation, Cooper headed out across the grass and soon located a well-traveled path that headed south into the forest. The temperature in the interior was hotter, and the air was more humid than in Monrovia. Cooper handed Pierce a one-liter bottle that looked as if it had been used in a soccer game—as the ball—but the seal on the lid appeared to be intact.

  How do I want to die, Pierce thought, from dehydration or dysentery?

  He thanked Cooper and jammed the bottle into his pocket. He knew he would eventually be desperate enough to take a chance, but he wasn’t quite there yet.

  The trail took them through dense woods, where the shade offered no relief from the heat. The pace was urgent but the path was well-trodden. Pierce didn’t have to swing his machete even once.

  After an hour of relentless trekking, Cooper signaled him to stop with a raised hand. Pierce raised his blade, ready to swing it at whatever had aroused his guide’s concern, but the forest was quiet.

  Unnaturally quiet.

  No birds chirping, no insects buzzing.

  They waited there for several minutes, but the pervasive silence did not lift. Finally, Cooper indicated they should resume, but when he started walking again, his steps were softer and more deliberate. He offered no explanation for the eerie phenomenon, but his anxiety was palpable. And contagious.

  Ten minutes later he stopped again.

  “What is it?” Pierce asked, unable to suppress his curiosity any longer.

  Cooper turned a slow circle, then pointed at the ground. “This plant. I do not know what it is.”

  Because he was not familiar with the native flora, it had not occurred to Pierce that anything was out of the ordinary, but it was easy to see why the plant in question had caught Cooper’s attention. It was everywhere, blanketing the ground and partially obscuring the trail, climbing up tree trunks and smothering all other plant life. The dark green three-lobed leaves and coiling vines reminded Pierce of creeping kudzu, which had infested parts of the American South.

  “I have never seen this before,” Cooper reiterated. “It should not be here.”

  Pierce was not sure how to react. Of all the potential hazards he had been worrying about—cutthroat bandits and revolutionaries, predatory wildlife, infectious disease—the one thing that had not even appeared on his radar was an infestation by an invasive plant species. In hindsight, he should have added dangerous plants to the list, but risk of getting skewered by a thorn or developing a nasty rash did not quite rank alongside getting mauled by a lion or contracting hemorrhagic fever. But Cooper seemed genuinely alarmed by the situation.

  “We should keep going,” Pierce said. “Find the WHO scientists. They might know what this is.”

  The last statement snapped the guide out of his paralysis, and he started forward again with more urgency. As Pierce moved after Cooper, he felt something tugging at his feet. He looked down and discovered that his boot had become entangled in thread-like tendrils that sprouted from the stems of the strange plant. The vines broke apart when he lifted his foot, releasing a faint noxious odor that made Pierce’s eyes water.

  He hastened after his guide, doing his best to avoid contact with the plant, but as they went along, the encroachment became more pronounced, with vines scaling every tree and covering every inch of open ground. The trail was completely overgrown, and the only hint of its existence was a faint depression where someone—presumably the WHO team—had crushed the plant down during their earlier passage. But even that was vanishing as the stems rebounded from being trampled. The acidic smell in the air grew stronger, and every glancing contact with the leaves released more of the stinging vapor. It was not quite strong enough to be painful; it was more like the effect of cutting onions, but each step forward took them further from fresh air. Pierce was about to admit defeat and suggest they turn back when Cooper gave a cry of triumph.

  “This the place, bossman!”

  For a moment, Pierce thought his guide might be hallucinating. There was no sign of a village, no buildings, not even a clearing. Just an endless tangle of the weird vines, covering everything. Then something moved in the corner of his eye. Through a blur of tears, he saw an astronaut emerging from behind a tree.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” The astronaut’s sharp tone was audible despite being muffled by the suit.

  Pierce blinked, trying to bring the approaching figure into focus. Not an astronaut after all, he realized, but someone wearing a bio-safety suit.

  A cursory glance showed that the over-garment was in bad shape, patched together with silver duct tape. Although designed for Bio-Safety Level Four conditions, this suit offered about as much protection as a raincoat. Instead of an internal air supply, the suit’s wearer was breathing through a HEPA filter that had been taped in place alongside the plastic face shield. Pierce knew that such suits were meant to be used once and then destroyed, but he also knew that the efforts to combat disease in West Africa were woefully underfunded. Personnel on the ground had to make do with whatever they had, which evidently included the reuse of disposable environment suits.

  “Sorry,” he croaked. “I’m looking for Dr. Carter.”

  The suited figure drew closer. Through the fog of breath vapor on the transparent faceplate, Pierce could see that the person within was dark-skinned and female. “I’m Dr. Carter,” she replied. “Who are you? What are you doing out here?”

  “Looking for you. I need your help.”

  He meant to say more, but the pervasive fumes were making it tough to speak.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” Carter repeated. “It’s dangerous.”

  Pierce managed to shake his head, but before he could plead his case, he heard Cooper ask, “Dangerous? Is this why you are out here? This strange plant?”

  The woman frowned, but her gaze came back to Pierce. “Who are you? Why are you here?”

  “My name is George Pierce, and I’m here to…well, to offer you a job.”

  “I have a job. You should leave.”

  She began to turn away, so Pierce blurted, “I’m friends with Jack Sigler.”

  That stopped Carter in her tracks. She faced him and replied in a low, almost threatening voice. “I don’t want anything to do with Jack Sigler or any of his friends. Leave. Now.”

  16

  Archaia Nemea, Greece

  “Is it just me?” Fiona said, staring through the windshield of Gallo’s aging but reliable Volkswagen Fox. She was looking at the free-standing Doric columns illuminated in the headlights. “Or do all these ruins look alike?”

  Gallo glanced over at her. “Bite your tongue, girl.”

  Fiona yawned. “Maybe it’s different in daylight.”

  “This was your idea,” Gallo pointed out. “Perhaps a little enthusiasm is in order?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know it would take so long to get here.”

  There were no direct flights between
Gibraltar and Athens. The closest thing to a direct route took them first north to London Heathrow, where they caught the connecting flight headed south again to Greece. Gibraltar remained a remote destination in spite of modern conveniences. It was already dark when she and Fiona disembarked at Athens International Airport, but after retrieving her car from the long term parking lot, they set out for their next destination.

  Fiona’s plan, in a nutshell, was to retrace the journeys of Herakles, connecting the dots, so to speak. Many of the legendary Labors were associated with real locations. From ancient times, geographers had used the legend to inform their map of the world, and vice-versa, but since the stories could not always be taken literally, the accuracy of those known locations was also suspect. They knew, for example, that there had been a ferocious feline beast whose skin was impervious to all known weapons, but whether the events described in the story actually took place in the Peloponnesian village of Nemea was not something that had been definitively proven.

  If they could find evidence that Alexander Diotrephes—the real Hercules—had been in those places, it would help narrow down the list of possibilities for places that were harder to pin down, such as the entrance to the Amazon city’s Underworld. It promised to be a long, tedious search, but it was definitely better than staying cooped up in the citadel, waiting for Pierce to return.

  Finding proof was only part of Fiona’s plan. She was also looking for graffiti, specifically, examples of the Mother Tongue that might have been overlooked or dismissed by modern archaeologists. If they could find even one inscription, like the one carved on the wall of the Labyrinth, it would help prove that Alexander had indeed been in some of those places. Additionally, such a discovery would advance Fiona’s ongoing quest to decipher that ancient and powerful language.

  Although Gibraltar was associated with Hercules’s Tenth Labor—retrieving a herd of cattle from the three-bodied giant, Geryon—it seemed prudent to begin at the beginning, in Greece, where the first six Labors had allegedly been undertaken.

  The town of Archaia Nemea looked about as deserted as the ruins of the Temple of Zeus that were its main attraction. The local archaeological museum that housed artifacts recovered from the ongoing excavation was closed for the night, as was every other establishment in the tiny village.

  “Dead after dark,” Fiona observed. “Reminds me of the town where I grew up. Except for the ruins, of course. Should we come back in the morning?”

  “Probably,” Gallo admitted. “But we’re here, so we might as well have a look.”

  Armed with only a pair of flashlights retrieved from the trunk of Gallo’s car, the two headed into the site, where by day, archaeologists were excavating the temple and re-erecting the limestone columns, restoring a small portion of the sanctuary’s former glory.

  As she swept the columns with her light, Gallo explained the site’s history. “This temple was built in the fourth century BC, but it was built over an earlier shrine that dates back at least to the sixth century BC. After he killed the Lion, Herakles came here and offered a sacrifice to Zeus before returning to King Eurystheus with proof of his victory.”

  “That’s the legend,” Fiona replied. “What do you suppose he was really doing?”

  Gallo had no answer to that, nor was there anything noteworthy in the excavation. After twenty minutes of looking around, inspecting the columns for inscriptions and finding none, Gallo was ready to call it a night. “We’ll come back tomorrow and visit the museum. If we don’t find anything, we’ll head to Myloi and start looking into the Hydra legend.”

  “Sounds good to me.” Fiona tried, unsuccessfully, to stifle another yawn. “I feel like I’ve been up forever. Oh, wait. I have.”

  Gallo checked the GPS map on her phone, plotting the most direct route to the nearby city of Argos, where she had made hotel reservations earlier in the day. Although it was only a few miles away, in typical Greek fashion, getting there would require them to follow a circuitous route through the Peloponnesian hills, in this case, backtracking almost halfway to Corinth before turning southwest toward their destination, but navigating to the highway would be the trickiest part. She drove with one eye on the phone and one on the road.

  Beside her, Fiona made a humming noise. Gallo glanced over and saw that she was looking back through the rear window. “What?”

  “That car. It wasn’t there a second ago.”

  Gallo felt a twinge of worry, but shouted it down. Fiona was just being paranoid. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  Nevertheless, she pressed down on the accelerator a little harder. A moment later, she reached the intersection with the highway, but on a whim she decided to ignore the guidance from her phone and turned in the opposite direction.

  A few seconds later, a pair of headlights appeared in the rearview mirror. “Is that the same car?”

  “Yep.” Fiona’s voice grew more anxious.

  Gallo took the next right turn, dipping back into the maze of old Nemea, trusting her GPS to lead her back to the highway again. If the trailing car stayed behind them, there would be no doubt.

  “He’s following us,” Fiona confirmed.

  A cold numbness flooded into Gallo’s extremities, fear and adrenaline, but there was another emotion in the mix. Guilt.

  Pierce had warned her, made provisions for her safety and Fiona’s, but she had ignored him. She had chalked his caution up to jealousy and over-protectiveness. And now both of them were in danger.

  She made another turn without slowing. The Fox’s tires squealed. Gallo fought the steering wheel to maintain control.

  She could just make out the silhouette of Doric columns against the moonlit sky. The Temple of Zeus. They had come full circle. At least now she knew where to go without consulting the GPS.

  Their pursuer made the turn a moment later, his headlight beams filling her mirrors.

  “Okay,” she said, trying to put forth a tone of calm determination. “They’re just tailing us. Maybe they’re hoping we’ll lead them to something.”

  “Except now they know we know,” Fiona said.

  “Damn.” I’ve made a mess of things, Gallo thought. One bad decision after another. So how do I keep from making this worse?

  The answer was practically staring her in the face. Her phone.

  She handed the device to Fiona. “Call the police.”

  The European emergency services number was 1-1-2. Did Fiona know that?

  “Uh, you’re getting a call.”

  Wonderful. What else could go wrong? “From whom?”

  “Unknown number. Should I answer it?”

  Gallo felt the chill return. Kenner. Who else could it be?

  She steered onto the highway, left this time, but suddenly she had no idea where to go. Part of her wanted to take her chances on the road, drive like hell and try to elude the pursuer. If she had been alone, she might have tried it, but she was not alone. She had to think of Fiona’s safety. She had to come up with a better solution.

  Without letting off the gas pedal, she nodded. “Answer it.”

  17

  Liberia

  Cooper regarded Pierce with a grave expression. “We ought to go, bossman. Dark soon.”

  Pierce ignored him and headed after Carter, who was already striding away. “Five minutes, Dr. Carter.”

  “I can’t guarantee your safety out here for five minutes, Mr. Pierce.”

  “It’s Dr. Pierce, actually.”

  That stopped her. “You’re a doctor?”

  “Archaeologist. Not an MD,” he added. “But if you’ll give me five minutes, I’ll explain.”

  He could see that she was intrigued but not enough to get her to lower her defenses. “Well, Dr. Pierce, I’ve no idea what the consequences of long term exposure to this plant might be, so I strongly suggest that you head back now, take a long shower…with some bicarbonate of soda if you can find it. I’ll be back in the office later this week. You can call for an appointment.”
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br />   Pierce was sorely tempted to follow that advice, but he had come too far to turn back. He decided to try a different tack. “Are you staying here tonight? Do you have a camp?”

  “There’s no room at the inn, if that’s what you’re asking. Your man is right. It will be dark soon. If you hurry, you might be able to make it back to the road.”

  “But you are staying here? In the middle of all this…” He waved a hand around. “Whatever this is.”

  Carter stared back, hands on hips. “Let me show you something that might help you understand the urgency of this situation.” She gestured for him to follow, but went only about twenty yards before stopping at a veritable wall of the greenery. She carefully pulled some of the vines aside to reveal a dark opening, like a cave entrance. Pierce balked until she unclipped a flashlight from her belt and shone it inside. That was when he realized that it was not a cave, but a house.

  The structure was just a one-room, cinder block shack, but the plants had intruded here as well, with vines snaking through the doorway and window openings, and even through cracks in the mortar. The ceiling was crowned with an eruption of green where the vines had crawled through the gap between the wall and the corrugated sheet-metal roof. For the most part, the floor was clear of growth, but there were a few clusters where the plants had grown like crazy. Carter directed her light to the nearest of these and Pierce could see bits of color—synthetic fabrics, something that might have been the sole of a shoe.

  A shoe?

  “Was that…a person?”

  “The entire village was consumed by this plant,” Carter said.

  “That’s…” He was going to say impossible, but he knew better.

  Carter took something from a belt pouch and passed it over to him. It was a slim booklet bound in red leatherette, which Pierce recognized as a European Union passport. Many of the pages within had partially dissolved, but the laminated photograph of the document’s owner was still intact, along with a name.