“Quickly,” she whispered, and raised her weapon.
THIRTY-SIX
Lake Bracciano, Etruria, 780 BC
“Ostentatious much?” King asked.
Alexander frowned. “I admit I was a bit full of myself in those days.”
The men were looking across the lake to a villa built up on a hill that would come to be called the Mountain of Roman Rock, but which at present was unnamed. The villa resembled the medieval castles that wouldn’t come to the region for centuries yet. A round stone tower attached to the villa’s side rose up two stories. Other homes nearby were much smaller, and most were made low to the ground and from wood. The landscape was dotted with trees — absent in King’s own time — and he once again marveled at how different the landscape of Italy looked millennia before he would be born.
The building was their final target after almost twenty years of living in the past. They had fought countless battles, and even spent years as farmers and shepherds, living quietly, and waiting for the perfect time to save Acca from death at the hands of Alexander’s Forgotten wraiths. By this point, Alexander had practiced with the mother tongue so much that he had gotten the body perfect, including the withered nature of the corpse after the Forgotten had sucked her dry of blood. But he still needed the face. They had stayed away from the woman for fear of creating problems with the timeline, or from running into Alexander’s younger self. Now they needed to glimpse the woman, so Alexander could practice the face as well, before they needed to exchange her for a duplicate desiccated corpse, while the younger Alexander was away.
“You sure a five-years-too-young Acca will do the trick for practice?”
Alexander, who had on many occasions told King stories of the woman’s beauty, just smiled. He had that far-away look King had seen so many times, when the man thought of his wife. Then he nodded. “Yes. She changed little in those years, when our sons were grown men. And after the incident…” Alexander always referred to her death as ‘the incident’, “…her face was shriveled from blood loss. Nearly unrecognizable. But it needs to be perfect.” Alexander had rarely spoken of the twin sons he had had with Acca, but when he did, it was always obliquely and brief. King got the impression that Alexander didn’t like his sons much, so when the man mentioned them again now, he let the comment pass.
Alexander had long ago described the full scope of his plan. King ran through it all in his head again. They would surreptitiously contact Acca, explain about the details of her death and how Alexander had come back to save her. They would leave the pseudo-corpse for Young Alexander to find and mourn over, setting in action a course of events that would lead them back in time. While Alexander’s younger self grieved, they would use a machine in another of his laboratories to get home — separately. King didn’t know where or when Alexander considered home. They’d lived a lifetime as brothers now. But that was one secret Alexander had yet to reveal.
“This isn’t far from Rome,” King observed.
“You mean, from where Rome will be,” Alexander clarified and then shook his head. “Only about twenty miles. But there’s a village to the south where we can get rooms. They make great wine too.”
“Where are we most likely to spot her?” King asked, as they left the view across the lake behind and turned for the village. King’s body was now deeply tanned, his healing abilities strangely not affecting the pigment in his skin. His hair was longer now too, down below his shoulders, and to fit in with the era, he had grown a thick luxuriant beard. The few times he caught a reflection of himself in shined metal, he thought he looked more and more like Alexander. The robes and sandals helped with that image.
“Either in the village or we’ll make a call up at my villa at some point.” A wistful look came over the big man’s face. “We spent a lot of time there.”
“Let’s get some wine before you start crying.”
Alexander smiled. “You have a way with words, Jack.” The two had become close friends over the years, and King had long since forgiven him for the abduction that led to their travel into the past.
But King had yet to shake the pain he hid. He spent time every morning, sitting in the glow of the rising sun, eyes closed. To the observer, he was praying or meditating, but all he was really doing was remembering. He played the events of his modern life through his mind each morning, when his imagination was most fertile, and he watched his life like an ongoing TV show, watching key events repeatedly like reruns. He thought about Fiona and Sara most of all, but his parents and Asya were always present in his mind, as were Zelda, Stan, Erik, Shin and Tom. At first, he’d thought of them by their callsigns, but three years ago he had trouble recalling Bishop’s name. He’d had to ask Alexander. Knowing he and Alexander were closer to their goal filled him with an anxious tension that threatened to tear down the mental blocks he kept in place through hardened discipline. If those barriers ever broke and the full weight of the despair he felt from missing his loved ones washed over him, he would be useless. So he fought, and worked toward Alexander’s goal and the promise of home, in the arms of his girls, with the same passion as Alexander, who was near the end of his much longer, but similar struggle.
“I still haven’t seen why you needed me on this little adventure of yours,” King said, distracting himself from thoughts of home.
“As I’ve said before, I needed someone I could trust — and we have yet to face any real problems.”
“Real problems?” King asked with a raised eyebrow. “You nearly lost your head in Corsica.”
“How was I to know that arrogant bastard was a Prince?
“Prince or not, you didn’t have to urinate on him…”
“He was a ponce.” Alexander let out a guffaw.
The two joked as they wandered into the nearby village, which was a collection of low buildings and ramshackle wooden structures nestled between picturesque chestnut and olive trees. King watched a man walking toward them. Unlike most of the people he saw, this man looked like he was taking in all the sights around him for the first time, the way King felt he must look every time they traveled. But the man’s manner didn’t resemble that of a stranger to the region. Rather, he was nodding to himself at things he saw, as if he were ticking things off a mental checklist. King didn’t think of the man as a threat — hardly anyone was a threat to him and Alexander. Still, he found the man’s manner interesting.
The man looked to be in his forties, and had a graying beard, with a high tanned forehead and a receding gray hairline. His eyes were a pale blue, nearly gray. Small crow’s feet around the man’s eyes lent wisdom to his already intelligent face. Like King, he wore a robe and sandals. As the man neared, King was about to move his eyes away from the man, when something on the man’s arm caught King’s eye. The man had faded rope wrapped around his forearm like a bracelet, but underneath it, King could have sworn he had seen a glint of metal or glass. Circular…like a watch.
Before he could be sure, the man had walked past them. King turned to Alexander and put his hand on the big man’s bicep to stop him from walking on.
“Did you see that?” King asked.
Alexander whipped his head around and instantly noted the man to whom King was referring. He mumbled a name that sounded like, “David,” and added “Steer clear of that man, Jack. He’s nothing but trouble.”
With that, Alexander turned and strode on toward the village.
Shrugging, King followed. If Alexander didn’t come forth with a full explanation on something, no amount of cajoling would get it out of the man. King knew if the story was important enough, it would come out eventually — usually with wine.
Alexander found a place he remembered and told King it had the best bread he would ever taste, when suddenly the large man stopped in his tracks and grabbed King painfully by the arm.
King turned his head and looked. He quickly identified the man Alexander had seen. His hair was shorter, and he wore a thin cloth band around his forehead that look
ed like a kind of crown. His robes were far richer than those King wore — dyed fabrics, and elaborately stitched roses along the hem. The man’s bearing was regal, as if he thought himself far above the people around him. People stepped out of the way as the man moved through, as if they knew and feared him.
King was looking at Alexander. The young Alexander.
He turned and looked up at his friend, who had grown his hair and beard long, and who was dressed in a poor man’s robes, like King. King’s Alexander was over 2800 years older, but to see the man’s face, he was just ten or twenty years the senior of the man in the wealthy robes. The resemblance was there, but you’d have to know to look for it. The hair and disparity in appearance of wealth made a large difference. Anyone besides King was unlikely to link the two men, even if they stood near each other.
King looked back to the younger Alexander with the burgundy robe and took in the man’s bravado. King’s Alexander had certainly mellowed over the years. This younger man acted like a hoodlum, pushing into people who got in his way, talking loudly with shopkeepers, and bragging about everything. King had learned several of the Etruscan dialects during his years in the past, and this man, naturally, spoke with a wealthy, educated dialect.
They watched quietly as the younger, brasher Alexander wandered the market in the center of the village, almost as if he were killing time.
Then they saw her.
King did a double take when he saw the woman. He could not believe his eyes. He was looking at a woman that looked almost exactly like photos he had once seen — of his own mother.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Etruria, 780 BC
“That’s her…”
Alexander spoke with a reverence that made King take note. He’d known his friend for years now, and heard the man in every kind of mood. But the sudden appearance of his lost love in the busy village market had taken the man’s breath away.
The woman, like Lynn Machtchenko in her younger years, had a slim build, but wider flared hips. Her hair was lustrous and dark, cascading over her shoulders in waves. High cheekbones and a subtle smile made her face come alive. Not a man in the market could keep his eyes off her. She looked to be about twenty-five, but Alexander had said she would be closer to forty. No matter which way you looked at her, Acca Larentia was a stunningly beautiful woman. If she didn’t look so very much like his own mother, King could see falling under the woman’s spell. Alexander had told him story upon story about the woman’s tenderness and generosity as well. Her beauty was only a bow tied around an amazing package.
“I thought my father was your descendant,” King said. The likeness to his mother left no doubt that she’d been the one to pass on Alexander’s bloodline.
“Actually,” Alexander said. “Both of them are.”
While Alexander’s bloodline had been thinned over millennia, having two parents descended from the man rather than just one made King’s and Asya’s blood a little more…Herculean…than usual. King wondered if that’s what had drawn Alexander to him, but he didn’t ask. It was ancient history now.
King turned to watch his friend admiring the woman. He felt an odd satisfaction at seeing Alexander’s eyes wide with wonder, where before there had always been something dark in them. In the future, when they had first met, King had taken that look for deviousness, planning and machination. Over time, he had come to know it instead as a look of dark bitter regret — regret at the life lost with his wife in the pursuit of eternal life for them both.
As King watched, Alexander’s look of hopeful joy turned sour. King reached out and whispered, “Your wait is almost over.”
Alexander turned and started away from the village, back toward the lake. King raced to keep up.
“That’s not the problem, Jack,” Alexander’s voice was almost a growl. “I screwed up the timing. We don’t have five years to prepare.”
“I’m afraid to ask. How much time do we have?”
“Closer to five hours. It happens tonight, Jack. She’ll return from the village on her own. She pokes around the house and stumbles onto my secret lab. She’ll find the Forgotten. They look famished. They haven’t been fed in some time. In those days—these days — I was lazy about such things. Left on their own, they go mad. But kept in herds and fed in captivity, they thrive.” Alexander’s face was lost in remembrance for a moment. King let him have the space instead of prompting him for more.
They kept up a fast pace, hiking along the trail back toward the lake. Just when King thought Alexander wouldn’t speak again, the man cleared his throat.
“You remember how it will happen?”
King nodded. “She’ll find them parched. Offer them a drink.”
“That has always been my assumption. I never saw it happen. When I came in, the cup and the water were on the floor, her body laid out of reach, but sucked dry and withered. She offered them a drink. They accepted. Tonight. We have to get there first. We have to stop her, and we have to create a perfect duplicate corpse — but I’ve had no time to practice her face.”
“Will the look you had tonight be enough for that?” King asked.
“It will have to be.”
They circled the lake in silence and the afternoon turned into evening. The sky filled with rich hues of deep blue and streaks of orange as the sun set behind the hills southwest of the lake. The few people in the area had already retired for the night, and the duo had the trail to themselves.
Alexander’s villa sat high up on the side of a hill, almost 1500 feet above the level of the huge lake, but Alexander led King away from the hill, and around to the north of it.
“There’s a tunnel entrance on the other side that leads directly to the lab. We’ll go in that way.”
They circled around the hill until the gloom of the oncoming night cloaked the forest in shadows.
Alexander led them closer to the base of a rocky wall, and they trudged through the forest until the going was so difficult, King thought he might trip over a tree root.
Alexander stopped suddenly, as if he heard something.
“What is it?” King whispered.
Alexander let out an exasperated sigh. “It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten exactly where the stone is. I think we have to go back a bit,” Alexander chuckled.
“I thought you were supposed to be a genius.” King smiled.
Alexander’s tension melted away slightly. “It’s not like that time in Poseidonia, you knew where you were going…”
“How am I supposed to know the difference between a temple to Poseidon and a temple to Hera, when they don’t even have any Doric columns yet?”
Alexander smiled. “I told you those wouldn’t come for another few hundred years. I’ve never seen a priestess so angry.”
King rubbed his cheek. “I can still feel that slap.”
They moved back the way they had come, Alexander mumbling to himself and running his hand along the rock wall as they went. King could just barely see the man moving his arm in the deepening dusk.
“Aha!” Alexander stopped and hugged the rock wall, stretching his massive arms around a huge protruding rock. The man took a huge breath and then struggled until King could hear a grinding sound. Alexander rolled the massive round stone to the side, revealing the dark yawning mouth of a cave.
“That’s a little Biblical, isn’t it?” King asked, raising an eyebrow. He was frequently amused, and sometimes disturbed, by Alexander’s stories of the hubris of his youth. He had certainly seen improvements in the man’s behavior over the last two decades, and he attributed the change to their friendship. Alexander himself professed to not having had nearly enough close friends over the years in whom he could confide.
“It was practical at the time. No one else around would have been able to move the stone but me.”
Alexander stepped into the darkened tunnel. King looked around and voiced his concern. “Should we close it up after us?” He couldn’t see how it could be done, but it went against
his nature to leave his six unprotected.
“No need,” came the soft reply from down the tunnel.
King walked cautiously into the dark, feeling for the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, but they were broad enough to allow Alexander to move through them swiftly. Then something occurred to King, and he slowly pulled his sword from his belt.
“Why are you whispering?”
The reply took a second, and King knew he was about to receive bad news.
“I forgot to tell you something.”
Before King could ask, he heard a low snarling sound that rose in volume until the bass of the growl shook his bones, like amplifiers at a rock concert.
“I forgot to mention the dog.”
“The dog?” King asked. But then understanding dawned on him. “Please tell me it doesn’t have three heads.”
Alexander’s reply was drowned out by a robust growling that vibrated the stone under King’s feet. Three heads or not, the thing sounded huge and hungry.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Viewing Gallery, Manifold Omega Facility, 2013
The heavy door smashed hard into the Plexiglas wall, dislodging the explosive Rook had set, and knocking it to the floor against the aquarium wall, where the door promptly landed on top of it. Rook had been thrown backward by the blast and ended up on his back, struggling like a tortoise to get onto his legs.
Asya let a burst of bullets fly from her position on the second level, strafing the doorway. Rook heard her utter a Russian curse as a heavy mercenary fell through the doorway onto his face. Then he saw something arc down from the balcony, hit the door and bounce out through the open doorway and into the corridor.
Rook got to his feet and let out a grunt as he raced for the wall. Asya had tossed a grenade she had taken from the armory down the length of the gallery. It was a good throw. A deflection off the 45 degree angled door, and straight out of the room and into the waiting arms of the mercenaries was a nearly impossible shot. But with the door open, Rook could find himself on the receiving end of more metal fragments. He heard screams behind him and then the explosion. The shockwave sent him slamming face first into the wall. He missed Asya’s outstretched hand and slid down the wall to the floor.
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