The Fall
Page 13
He didn’t like this at all. They were deep within a mountain in a country half a world away with their lives in the hands of one whose appearance suddenly made him the enemy. He cursed his liberal leanings and the political correctness that had been beaten into him during his public education, when the army had trained him to be able to recognize the enemy on sight. As soon as he saw that man’s dark skin and even darker hair, as soon as he heard that Arabic accent, he should have known damn well not to trust him. Now, because he was too blinded from the truth, he was going to die down here in the darkness. His family would never be able to claim his body. He imagined his mother kneeling in front of a list of names engraved into a wall like the Vietnam Memorial, tossing flowers against the monument with all of the others. Tears streamed down her wilting face, channeling through the wrinkles.
Kotter realized he was crying too, the tears stinging the raw abrasions surrounding his eyes.
“Where are you?” he shouted, enraged at the thought of his mother’s sorrow, at the bitter pain lancing his face like so many scalpels, at the man who appeared to have abandoned them to their fate.
He stopped, doubling over to try to replace his spent breath, the air in the confines of that tunnel hot and oppressive. Sweat bloomed in droplets from his pores. He sucked in a deep breath and screamed with fury.
The echo bled away into the darkness, stretching before him into infinity.
He didn’t want to die. Not down here. Not like this.
His breaths started coming faster and faster, filling his lungs too quickly to allow them to process any of the oxygen content before blowing it right back out. He was hyperventilating and he couldn’t even begin to calm himself enough to steady his ventilation.
Staggering forward, dragging his feet beneath him with his arms searching through the darkness for anything at all, he prayed for air, a hint of light from the surface, anything but the darkness that wrapped around him like a layer of cellophane. He couldn’t…couldn’t breathe…his vision…spotted with red blobs…choking…
Kotter fell to his knees, slapping his hands to the smooth floor. His throat felt as though it had closed up. He doubled over, a long strand of saliva slipping from his mouth, but he couldn’t force any air past his lungs.
“Come!” a voice boomed in front of him, the force blowing his wet hair from his forehead. Immediately, a gust of warm air filled his lungs.
He rose slowly to his feet, carefully taking that first hesitant step forward.
“Who’s ther—?”
Crack.
Something had broken beneath his right foot. He could still feel its remains beneath his tread.
Never allowing his eyes to stray from the impenetrable darkness directly ahead, he lifted his foot from atop whatever he had stepped on and took a small step backward. Kneeling, he brushed his hand along the floor, refusing to so much as blink as he stared down the tunnel. His fingers traced the outline of a circular shape set directly into the middle of the floor. A thin channel ran away from the circle to either side, perpendicular to the progress of the tunnel. Set perfectly within those precisely straight grooves was a thick length of chain; he could feel the rectangular links, the rust crumbling away like dust. Tracing the chain toward the center from either side, Kotter’s fingers reached the edge of the circular seam. Set in the middle was what felt like a flat plate made of clay. Ornate symbols had been carved into its surface. Delicately, he traced them with his finger. A long crack ran diagonally through the circle, so sharp that it immediately opened his fingertips.
“What the hell?” he whispered, finally looking down at the ground before him.
He again found the top of the circular seam and curled all four fingers from each hand to pry the plate upwar—
The chains.
God, please don’t—
The plate had been part of a mechanism that held the chains in place. A seal. The moment the crack began to widen, a pair of hooks arose from the center of the hole where the plate had once been, lancing through the dust of the broken seal.
Kotter opened his mouth to scream, but it all happened too quickly.
One sharpened hook drove through his left palm, while the other pierced his right. With the thundering sound of a drawbridge falling, the chains started to move, yanking his arms out to either side. Two gigantic stones fell from the ceiling in front of him, a flash of the iron chain trailing their descent. He was jerked up from the ground, his hands racing straight up to the earthen roof. It felt as though the hooks had ripped his hands right off, but he hadn’t been that fortunate. Dangling there, suspended from a horizontal beam of petrified wood where the stones had been precariously balanced for eons, his legs flailed helplessly beneath him.
He could hear the flesh and muscle in his hands tearing as gravity urged him back down to earth. It was a pain beyond anything he could have ever imagined.
Steaming blood rolled down his forearms, around his elbows and into his sopping shirt. It slithered beneath his clothing, all the way down his legs before draining over his shoes with a steady splatter. Each kick of his legs splashed arcs of blood across the smooth floor two feet below, marring the stones holding the opposite ends of the chains, tearing the skin and muscle in his palms more and more with each attempt to loose himself until finally he had no choice but to hold his legs still and try to control his shaking arms. He began to beg for the hook to shred the remainder of his hands and erupt between his middle and ring fingers. Dear God, regardless of the damage, just having those hooks that felt large enough to bait a shark out of his hands would be reward enough; just to feel the ground beneath him again…
“Help,” he gasped, trying to raise his voice without creating any additional movement.
“Where are you?” a voice echoed from somewhere far behind him in the darkness, a world away. “Kotter! Answer me!”
“Help!” he screamed at the top of his lungs, bucking back to force his diaphragm to propel every ounce of air from his lungs. The word trailed into an agonized wail, which he nipped off with his bared teeth, pinching his eyes tight and trying not to breathe.
Something tickled his hands, starting from the tips of his fingers and moving down his arms. At first he thought it was his lifeblood fleeing him in a massive deluge, but he was quickly able to discern the difference. Whatever crawled over his arms had something small and pointed on it, which poked his flesh like bramble. They were legs, insect legs, crawling all over him, pouring down the chain from the rafter above. In seconds they had covered his neck and chest and were making their way in a hurry toward his toes, swarming over his face. Tiny appendages with furry tips scurried in and out of his nostrils, tunneling into his ears with a sound like crunching potato chips.
Footsteps approached from ahead, though he couldn’t force his eyes to open with the sheer mass of bodies crawling across his eyelids. He didn’t dare open his mouth to scream.
“Desert Locusts,” Mûwth said, his voice stoically monotone. “Each day they must consume their weight in vegetation to survive. Each subsequent generation increases their numbers tenfold. Such beautiful and simplistic creatures.”
Kotter wasn’t listening. His breath had staled in his chest, and soon he was going to have to open his mouth to breathe. Those that filled his nostrils were already flattening themselves and squeezing into his sinuses, where they expanded like popping corn within the skeletal infrastructure of his face.
They felt like the grasshoppers they’d had back home stateside, but they were much bigger, their tiny feet sharper.
His chest was ablaze and his head was beginning to feel like it was filled with helium.
“Do not fight it,” Mûwth said. “Yours is a grand destiny.”
Kotter ripped his lips apart and sucked at the air, giving the locusts the opportunity they needed. A channel of the insects poured across his tongue. His teeth snapped shut over and over, crunching as many as he could, but unable to stop the flood that poured down his throat.
His body crumpled into a still heap on the stone floor, lumps rising and crawling beneath his skin. It looked as though his flesh was boiling, with those bubbles scurrying beneath every inch.
“Arise,” Mûwth said, raising his arms.
Kotter’s body floated from the floor, limbs hanging weakly. He opened his mouth, but the sound that erupted was of a million buzzing wings and the chirping of rear legs rubbed together. His skin was pasty white like children’s glue and the hair on his body had been bleached white from sheer terror. Eyes without irises snapped wide, as though the former orbs had been removed and replaced with cue balls.
“Take to the saddle, first of the God’s Horsemen.”
Kotter’s body twirled back to the floor, where legs unaccustomed to bipedal locomotion staggered, then finally rooted themselves to the ground.
“You are the first, the chosen purveyor of God’s wrath. You will sew His anger from the coasts to the mountains and drown them with His tears. You are the white horseman. Turn the soil unto salt, the forests to ash.
“Ride, Famine, scourge of the fields. Let no man stand in your way.”
* * *
“Where are you?” Keller shouted. “Kotter! Answer me!”
He clenched his knife in his left hand, blood crusted to the serrated edges from Mûwth’s recent use, the rest wiped in two dried smears on his fatigue pants. He swung his service revolver side to side in front of him, though with the constant immersion of swimming through the caves, he wasn’t sure whether it had any hope of firing or not. Part of him almost hoped he’d get to find out, though with the gushing hole in his palm, he couldn’t even hold it steady.
It felt as though he had passed through the mouth of the stone monolith and into its esophagus, the bowels of hell itself waiting ahead in the darkness, beckoning him deeper into the mountain.
His heavy footsteps pounded back at him from the smooth walls, louder even than the drumming of his pulse in his temples and the screaming of the voice in his mind, crying for him to forget about everything and just turn tail and flee. There was another equally insistent voice, however, one that yearned for blood to be spilled, begged for the chance to sink that knife to the hilt into forgiving flesh, to coat the walls with a spray of fluid and chunks of gray matter from the passage of a bullet.
There was no way he was running blindly through the darkness and making himself an easy target. He walked quickly but carefully, the butt of the gun in his right hand balanced on the base of the knife in his left, blade pointed to the floor, barrel directly ahead. He could hear Thanh calling for him from behind, but he forced the sound of her voice from his ears, peeling apart the layers of silence that cocooned him in the passageway.
He slipped, his arms wind-milling wildly. The blade of the knife clacked off of something hard while his right forearm slammed into solid rock with a crack. Bracing himself, though his entire upper body screamed in protest from what was assuredly an ulnar fracture, he quickly transferred his weight back to his legs, kneeling on the smooth stone floor. Warm fluid leeched through his pants to heat his knee. Whatever mess he now crouched in was the reason he slipped, he was certain. Still holding the pistol directed into the emptiness ahead, he placed the knife flat on the ground and dabbed his fingers into the liquid, bringing them to his lips. Unblinking, he scoured the pitch black down the tunnel. A dab of his tongue confirmed what he already suspected.
The coppery tinge, the biological taint…it was blood. And it was still warm.
Wiping his palm on his shirt, he took the hilt of the blade in his fist and rose carefully to his feet, swinging the sharpened tip before him like a blind man’s cane. It grazed a large stone to the left, from the top of which a thick, rusted chain stretched to the rocky roof. He reached across his body and examined a matching boulder to the right, an identical chain connected to an enormous eye-ring drilled into the surface. Both were slick with blood.
“Kotter,” he whispered, taking a tentative step forward. Something crunched beneath his feet like cereal. He didn’t even have to look down to know that he was walking on a carpet of insects, their exoskeletons snapping and crackling almost rhythmically.
They arose and buzzed in a cloud around him, wings beating at his face. He could feel them crawling all over him, thrumming in his ears, tapping his exposed skin. Where had they all come from? It was as though they had materialized from thin air. He swung his left arm through their midst, slicing through the cloud of swirling locusts just to have them refill in his passage.
If there were this many flying bugs, then logic would dictate that somewhere nearby there had to be some sort of exit to the surface. After all, locusts needed vegetation to survive and they certainly weren’t going to find anything growing down here in the abolition of light. He felt hope float up in his chest like a balloon. He just needed to make it to that opening. Damn the rest of them, he was getting out of this tomb.
Keller was barely able to keep his eyes open a slit against the barrage of bodies and wings. He slashed to no avail; swinging the blade against the creatures was like trying to cut a cloud, but what else could he do? If he tried to outrun them, maybe he would be able to leave them behind, but he’d be hurtling blindly toward who knows what, and turning back wasn’t an option he was prepared to consider. Whoever’s blood he had slipped in…their fate would not befall him. He was a warrior, and if death had finally caught up with him, then he’d send that skeletal bastard back to Hades in pieces.
The swinging blade met with resistance, cutting through whatever it was as though it were no more substantial than a cobweb. With a zipping sound, rope was drawn through a pulley somewhere in the blackness, causing a small avalanche of stones to cascade down the wall to his left. A pinhole of light blasted into the darkness just higher than his line of sight like a mote-infested laser. Frenzied wings flashed in the light like fireflies, the locusts swarming toward the hole, crawling frantically through one atop the other until the buzzing faded to a whisper.
Keller held up his hand, reflecting the nearly blinding light from the blade. If there was sunlight, then there was a way out. There had to be. Even if he had to tear through the stone wall with his bare hands, he was getting out of this hole in the ground. He’d sooner face a dozen armed Iranians than something he couldn’t even see down here in this passage to hell.
Sheathing his knife, he eased toward the wall, carefully watching the hallway to ensure that if there were something coming, he’d see it immediately. He rose to his tiptoes, but still couldn’t see through to the world without. A final glance down the tunnel produced nothing discernible from the darkness. He tucked the pistol into the front of his pants and reached up for the small hole, slipping his index finger through. The rock surrounding it pushed away in a larger circle, lighter than he had expected, the force cracking what appeared to be a stone disc before it fell. The opening was now large enough to shove his fist through, which ought to provide him with a decent view.
Running his palms along the smooth wall, he probed for any sort of leverage to propel himself upward. He found a small outcropping with his right hand, gripping it fiercely until he secured a similar handhold with his left. Forearms bulging, he pulled himself up, scrabbling with his feet until his toes caught hold. Veins popping out like cords in his neck, he strained until he leveled his eyes with the hole.
The sunlight felt blissfully warm on his face, though the sudden change in luminescence struck him temporarily blind. His eyelids batted against the flood of brightness, fighting to adjust from the pitch black to the sudden influx of light which cast red blobs across his vision. He was staring out at the same level as the ground. A wall of sandstone stood before him, three feet away and stretching upward well past the extent of his limited view. Several symbols were carved into the rock’s face, directly across from him, no more than six inches from the sand as though
chiseled to be viewed specifically from this vantage. תרות. He squinted to try to decipher the writing, and though he recognized it as old Hebrew script, he couldn’t translate it.
An orange and blue Uromastyx lizard scurried across the sand in front of him; stunted, round body dragging a thick gray tail like a pinecone. It climbed onto the disc of stone he had knocked from the pinhole to widen it, spreading its legs as wide as it could to lower its belly to the rapidly warming surface. It didn’t look like stone now that he could actually see it, but rather a circular clay plate with a tiny hole like a vinyl record. More symbols lined the edges, but with the fat lizard sprawled across it he couldn’t make any out.
What was this ornamental relic doing here of all places? He had heard the wall crumble away from the hole after slicing the vertical rope, so it couldn’t have been lodged there from the inside. Had someone placed the plate over the hole in the cavern wall from the outside? Was it because someone out there didn’t want something escaping from within, or to prevent it from gaining entry? The characters on the sandstone face were designed to be seen through this hole in the wall, which he never would even have been able to see through had he not knocked that clay saucer to the ground…a saucer etched with similar Hebrew characters.
Something wasn’t right. The whole scenario seemed too…elaborate. Too much effort had gone into the design of what should simply have been a crack between the inside of the mountain and the outside world. It could easily have been covered by a single rock, though how anyone would have been willing or able to scale the mountain for the sole reason of carving a word in the sandstone and widening a fissure to a circle large enough to press a clay seal into was beyond him. It was absurd.
And why the hell was he getting so hot?