by Otto Schafer
Reflexively Apep ducked as the inferno exploded to life, flames blocking the only exit.
With Apep distracted, Phillip reached for something else.
Apep turned back to him with his sword at the ready. Then towering over him, he pressed his blade to Phillip’s throat as his face contorted. “You missed.”
Phillip had known all along this was a one-way ticket. Raising his eyes to meets Apep’s, he stared obstinately into the man’s soul then choked out a mouthful of blood onto Apep’s feet. “I wasn’t… aiming at… you,” he said quietly.
Stepping forward with his left leg, Apep bent closer to hear the dying man’s words.
“I was distracting you!” Phillip shouted, swinging his right hand from behind his back with all the force he could muster. He saw the revelation in Apep’s eyes as the long prong sank into his left thigh with a sharp sting of metal.
Phillip let go, made a fist, and then hammered it down onto the handle of James’s sai, sinking the weapon through Apep’s leg and out the other side. The two shorter curved prongs didn’t stop until they reached bone.
Apep cried out, scrambling backward away from Phillip.
Phillip sagged back and let his butt rest on his heels. Now, son – do it now! he thought.
Apep screamed again but this time his voice wasn’t full of pain… it was full of rage! He rushed forward, dragging his left leg behind him, the sai fixed deep into flesh and bone, with the long center spike protruding from the back side of his blood-soaked thigh.
Phillip could see Apep drawing his sword back like a lumberjack preparing to fell a tree. He lifted himself off his heels and raised his head proudly. As the swing came, Phillip found Apep’s eyes again and steeled his own. He shouted as loud as he could, making sure the message was clear as a raging Apep struck out with the blade. “You will never defeat us! Turek forev—”
Phillip’s head toppled to the floor.
Flying up the basement stairs two at a time, James scrambled to break free of the neighbor’s house. He shouldered through the back door, not even bothering to unlock it, then nearly fell down a short set of steps leading to the backyard.
In the background, a young boy’s panicked voice shouted, “Mom! Dad! What’s going on?”
“James, wait for us!” Garrett yelled into the yard. Then James did wait. He stopped cold, freezing in place, looking at the side of their house from across the fence.
Garrett caught up, followed closely by Elaine and Lenny.
“What is it?” Garrett asked, noticing that even in the darkness of the neighbor’s backyard James had paled, his face white as the moon.
James’s shoulders slumped as his eyes glazed over, wet with emotion.
“James?” Elaine asked.
He looked at her.
“Phillip?” Her voice cracked.
James looked down at his feet and let out a shuddering breath.
“Oh no, Phillip. No. God no!” she said.
“What is it?” Garrett said, looking back and forth between them. “Tell me! What!”
“Finish it, James – finish it now!” Elaine said.
James nodded, swallowing hard. “Lenny take Elaine across the street into the cornfield. We’ll meet you there. Garrett, come with me,” he said, turning away from them. He ran toward the chain-link fence that separated Glen’s yard from their own.
Garrett followed, hopping the fence with ease. “James, are you going to shoot him?” he whispered.
“What? Oh… no,” he said, tossing the shotgun to the ground.
Garrett looked at his brother like he had just lost his mind and bent to pick up the gun.
“Leave it and come on,” James ordered.
They made their way to a small wooden shed where his father kept the rabbit feed and gardening tools.
“I don’t understand. Why don’t you just shoot this guy? What is he – bulletproof? Is that what the God Stones do – make you bulletproof?” Garrett asked.
“Maybe, but we’re not going to find out.”
“Goddammit, James – I need some answers! What the hell is going on? I’m running around with a sword and Lenny has a stick, and we just tossed a perfectly good shotgun to the ground!”
“I thought you knew what’s going on,” James said, pulling open the door to the shed and stepping inside. “That’s what Brother Brockridge was supposed to do, tell you what was going on.”
Garrett followed him into the shed. Brother Brockridge? “Yeah, well, psycho showed up and I’m pretty sure…” Garrett struggled with the words. “Killed him. So, I think I missed some key parts.”
James knelt, sliding his hands along the bottom of the wall until he found whatever it was he was feeling for. Garrett heard a click, and James stood and walked to the other side of the shed. He quickly moved the push mower and knelt again, this time pulling up floorboards. “Listen, we don’t have time for this now, but I will do the best I can to answer your questions.”
“I need to know what’s going on! I can’t be expected—”
James cut him off. “Look, we can’t risk going back in there to try and shoot him.”
“But our dad’s in there fighting him!”
James looked up, eyes sharp. “Our dad is… he’s dead, Garrett. It’s up to us to finish this!” He turned back, reaching beneath the floor.
For a moment, Garrett just stared at his back as he dug around. How could he say that? How could he even say their father was dead like that? Then finally he shouted, “You don’t know that!”
“Yes. Yes, I do, Garrett,” James said, retrieving something from the hidden compartment.
Garrett caught a whiff of something. Smoke. It was smoke. He leaned out the door and noticed it. His house was on fire. Smoke was coming from the back porch on the other side of the house. He couldn’t see flame, but the smoke was rolling across the yard. “Jesus Christ, James, our house is on fire!”
“It’s about to get a whole lot worse than fire,” he said, uncoiling something as he backed toward the doorway.
Garrett didn’t understand what he was looking at. It looked similar to a small coil of thin rope. “James. Who are you?”
Ignoring the question, he pushed past Garrett and out the shed door. “Come on! Let’s go!”
Garrett followed him out of the shed, the cool evening wind nipping at his cheeks. He was too busy puzzling over his brother’s strange behavior to even notice the cold.
When James was a few feet away from the shed, he knelt down and removed his Zippo from his jeans pocket. Flipping the lid open, he struck the flint. A small flame materialized from the lighter, illuminating his face and eyes in the soft glow.
Garrett could see it then, something beneath the scars on his cheeks. Something beyond the fiery reflection in his eyes. Something.
He lit the end of the rope and it burst to life like a sparkler. “You burned me once, you son of a bitch. Now feel your flesh burn!”
Garrett’s eyes stretched wide at the realization. His brother had just lit a fuse.
James flipped his Zippo shut and leapt to his feet. “We should run – fast!”
It took them less than thirty seconds to run around the side of the house, past the collapsed porch, and across the street.
They jumped the ditch and ran into a barren field, recently plowed and ready for this year’s planting. Elaine and Lenny waited about twenty yards in, watching the flames as they began to flicker up from the back of the house.
“Back! Back! Everybody back!” James shouted, running toward them.
Elaine and Lenny turned to run. Elaine’s foot caught on a dirt clod and she fell to the ground. Lenny reached down and quickly pulled her to her feet.
“Please work, please work!” James said to no one as he ran. Then, turning to Garrett, he said, “I isolated everything to protect the fuse from the energy of the God Stones, but obviously I had no way to test it.”
Garrett looked at James as though he were speaking Portuguese. “What
are you talking about?”
James stopped abruptly and turned to the group. “This should be far enough,” he said.
“You okay, Mrs. Turek?” Lenny asked, looking down toward Elaine’s ankle.
Elaine nodded to Lenny and forced a smile.
Garrett watched James as he stared intently back toward the house. James’s scarred face was barely visible in the barren field, but his eyes – they reflected lifetimes of pain. In that very moment something clicked, and Garrett knew who James was. A veil was pulled back, revealing the truth. The scars on James’s face, arms, and torso weren’t the result of a child playing with fire. Even more, he knew who his father was. His artificial hip wasn’t from a car accident. The last several hours had been so tangled up it was like watching two spiders wrestle, but those few words James had spoken when lighting the fuse provided Garrett with critical comprehension. He heard the words from Mr. B echoing in his mind:
There was a fire – it burned all around us. I could see Turek through the flames, but I couldn’t get to him without abandoning them. Two other Templars made it to him and stood with him, battling Apep, but neither were powerful enough to stop him.
After freeing his wife and child from the flames, I arrived only in time to pull the two Templars out before they were killed. One of the Templars had been nearly burned to death and the other was partially crushed by a collapsing beam while trying to save Turek.
He gazed at James through new eyes. No longer did he see his brother, but rather an ancient man – a Templar Knight!
Suddenly several deep flashes emitted from below Garrett’s house, momentarily pulling him from his revelation. The flashes were followed in rapid succession by just as many concussive blasts. Chunks of foundation exploded outward as the house collapsed in upon itself.
Through the dust Garrett could see his house was now nothing but burning rubble. The roof was sitting at nearly ground level, consumed in flame. Everything Garrett owned was gone. His home, his clothes, everything – all lost. But what dropped him to his knees was the loss he could never replace. He knew now that what James said was true. If his stepfather hadn’t already been killed… he was dead now.
11
Sentheye
Wednesday, April 6, moments earlier – God Stones Day 1
Petersburg, Illinois
Apep stared down into Phillip’s hollow eyes.
He placed his boot on top of Phillip’s head and rolled it back and forth with his foot before giving it a booted kick into the hungry flames.
He looked down at his own leg. The blade had not only left three puncture wounds in his outer thigh, but it had come out the other side just below his ass. For the first time, Apep felt a hint of real panic pulse through him, radiating like a cold shiver on a chilly night. He reached down and grabbed hold of the sai’s hilt, clenched his jaw, and pulled. He felt every inch of the metal prongs as they slid through his flesh and across his bone. He retched in agony as the blade tugged free. Blood pulsed out in spurts with the rhythm of his heart. For the first time since waking up under the sand, he found it difficult to hold the human form. Normally he didn’t even need to think about it. It was as simple as breathing. But now he felt the façade slipping away. His skin began to change color. His hair turned silky black and began to lengthen as his body lengthened too, easily stretching another foot in height.
Apep closed his eyes and chanted the word Sentheye. A word of immense power. A word spoken by the seven gods. Focusing on the Sentheye of the God Stones, Apep let his mind relax. He wasn’t ready to return to his true form – not yet. He needed to stop this bleeding. He had to focus.
Since reclaiming the stones, he’d found drawing on the Sentheye was easy, even after so much time separated from it. It was like having amputated legs given back to him strong and fully functional years after they had been lost. He didn’t need to learn how to use them – they were just part of him once again. The ancient Sentheye was again his to command. He could feel it rushing forth in him like water from a powerful stream.
As the Sentheye drew into him, the center of his mind pulsed, then throbbed, filling like a balloon on the verge of bursting. Mumbling the ancient word, he placed each hand over the wounds on either side of his leg and focused on the power of the seven God Stones. The Sentheye took the form of dense, blue-grey shadows. The shadows obeyed, snaking from his palm and fingers – like smoke, but alive, moving with purpose and direction. The shadows slithered into the punctures, and seconds later his bleeding stopped. Apep continued to concentrate, and the shadow smoke wormed its way inside mending the tissue in the deepest parts of his wound. With a little more focus he was easily able to pull himself back into human form. For the second time that night, he had healed himself with the power of the Sentheye.
As the Sentheye repaired Apep’s injuries, it also elevated his senses. Abruptly he stopped and the shadows dissipated. Something is wrong. Something is very wrong, he thought. The panic he had felt before returned, but this time it came back tenfold. He looked around. The basement was filling with smoke very quickly and the flames were out of control. No, something else. A trap!
He turned to the tunnel, but it was sealed with concrete. Then back to the door consumed in flame. He moved toward the flaming doorway.
Then he heard it – a strange sizzling sound.
Every precariously stacked brick column in the small basement exploded, virtually simultaneously. Hundreds of bricks became projectiles, launching in every direction. The instant disintegration of the columns and foundation left nothing to support the house and it dropped like a rock.
Apep screamed.
12
The Grooves Are the Key
Wednesday, April 6 – God Stones Day 1
Rural Chiapas State, Mexico
Fredy ran forward, shouting after Sarah, “Be careful, compañera!”
“I’m good, Fredy!” Sarah shouted back. “There’s just not much room in here to rappel. I’ll have to go really slow.”
Gabi peered over the edge, shining her headlamp down at a dangling Sarah.
“Careful, Gabi,” Fredy said.
“Why in the hell wouldn’t she go slow?” Andrés asked, as he assessed the rigging of Sarah’s anchor point to ensure it was holding secure. They had decided the giant statue’s ankle would make as solid an anchor point as anything they could create. As expected, it was holding fine.
“I have worked with Sarah for a long time, compadre – you don’t know her like I do. The woman is fearless and maybe even a little loco,” Fredy said, twirling his finger next to his head.
Gabi stared down, unblinking. Her own heart pounded against her chest as Sarah jumped back a few inches off the wall and dropped away. Again and again, she jumped back and dropped down, the light from her headlamp retreating a little each time she repeated the technique, slowly making her way down the shaft. A moment later the swaying light stopped.
Fredy depressed the button on the radio. “Everything okay, Sarah? Over.”
As Fredy released the button, the radio crackled to life. “Yep, I’m good. Just taking a pause to investigate and check for gases. Gauges are good. I don’t know, Fredy, part of me thought maybe it would just be the top, but it’s still perfectly circular and I can’t find one tool mark. They couldn’t have just bored a hole through solid stone.” The radio went silent for a long second. “I think this must have been a natural hole. The shaft started out smaller, then its creators must have widened it into this perfect circle. I suppose it’s possible they rubbed away any tooling marks with harder stone using an abrasion technique. Everything else must have been formed around it. The chamber, the stairwell, all of it. The question is why? Why would they go to the trouble? Maybe they widened it out to allow sacrifices to pass through to the underworld. I can buy that. But to create this perfect shaft and hide the marks… I don’t get it. I have never seen anything like this.”
Fredy shared a confused look with Andrés then with Gabi. “We
agree, Sarah. This makes no sense.”
Gabi watched on, eyes fixed as Sarah’s light began to sway hypnotically. Her mind reeled as she tried to puzzle out the mystery, but it simply made no sense. When the light finally stopped its metronome cadence, it was a faraway glow, a fading light at the end of a long vertical tunnel.
“I’m down,” Sarah announced.
Fredy pressed the button. “What do you see, Sarah?”
María and Itzel stopped their work and joined the others, everyone gathering around Fredy and the radio. Gabi continued to peer over the edge, watching the light below.
“I must be around one hundred feet below you. The floor feels soft and uneven but stable. Wait! There are smooth curved structures protruding from the material making up the floor of the shaft. Jesus! Stand by.”
“Sarah!” Fredy shouted.
“It’s okay. They’re bones, Fredy. Bones upon bones – god, there’s no telling how deep these go.”
“Or how long this shaft was used for sacrifices?” Andrés muttered. “Tell her to check her gauges.”
“Check your gauges, Sarah. Are they still clear?” Fredy asked through the radio.
“Shit, I forgot! Stand by.”
“Come on, Sarah.” Fredy sighed but he didn’t depress the button on the two-way. “She knows better. All those bones. They could be releasing poisonous gases as they decay!”
“She is just excited, Fredy. She will be fine,” Itzel reassured him.
“Just excited! She could be breathing lethal doses of methane—”
The radio chirped and Sarah’s voice rang out, “I’m good! The gauges are flat, but my god, Fredy, there’re bones everywhere!”
“What’s your next move, Sarah?”
Sarah’s voice came back. “It would be easy for me to spend the next several days, maybe even weeks, sorting through the material under my feet. But I am telling you there is something more to this than a hole created to toss sacrifices down.”