When he killed the last wraith by ripping its throat out, King fell over onto its corpse, breathing hard and waiting for his regeneration to bring him back to full vitality.
“I was…right about…one thing,” Alexander said weakly. He must have been worse off than he looked, but King knew he would be back to his hearty self in a few minutes. “They didn’t…recognize my scent.”
“My God. Did you have to go through this every time you wanted them locked up?”
Alexander laughed softly. “No. They obeyed the younger me.”
“You told me once that their embrace was an awful thing,” King said, breathing heavily from his pile of corpses.
“I was telling the truth,” Alexander said, finally sitting up.
“I see that now.” King tried to stand, but his body wasn’t ready.
“You understand now, why I cannot let this happen to her.”
King just nodded and the men fell into silence.
After a few minutes, they had recovered sufficiently to stand. King was pleased to see he was able to stand first.
“We’ll need to get the bodies out of here. Can you drag them to the edge of the arena, while I start work on the duplicate corpse?”
“You want me to feed them to puppy?” King asked.
“It’s the quickest way to dispose of the bodies,” Alexander said. “The Forgotten occasionally have it out with Cerberus, so even if some scraps are left behind, my younger self will think nothing of it other than wishing he’d seen the fight.”
King nodded. “What about her face? Can you recreate it?”
“If I can’t get it right, I’ll finish it when she gets here. We won’t have a lot of time — he’ll arrive not long after.”
King started dragging the Forgotten bodies out of the lab. Some of the equipment had been damaged too. He’d have to ask Alexander about that. It took him several trips, dragging the pathetic withered bodies by the capes or hoods of their dark gauzy cloaks. He felt slight regret. To hear Alexander describe them, the Forgotten were like animals or children — not fully capable of taking care of themselves. Leaving their bodies in the arena for the hellhound was probably a fate they did not deserve. But there would be no time for a memorial service.
By the last load, Alexander had nearly finished with his lifelike corpse. The body was naked, but it was withered in places, and definitely female. The hair was right — just like King had seen in the market earlier in the day. The face was still a blank slab of creamy flesh. Alexander stood over the body repeating a sentence in a language King could only hear as grunts and rumbling murmurs. The corpse’s arm was growing less withered instead of more, and King realized where Alexander had gotten his raw materials for the body.
At last the man stopped speaking, but the face on the body was still blank.
“You used one of them,” King asked, indicating the Forgotten behind the bars.
“It seemed…right. I don’t know how else to explain it.” Alexander shrugged.
“I’m not questioning your choice. I know this can’t be easy for you. What about all this blood? And the broken equipment?”
“I thought about that,” Alexander said, standing and stretching his neck from side to side. “When I found her, I saw her body, and the spilled glass of water. We’ll need to remember that. But I didn’t see anything else. The whole room could have been in shambles and I wouldn’t have noticed. Afterward…well, there won’t be much lab left when I’m done.”
King nodded. If something were to happen to Sara or Fiona, whatever inanimate objects surrounding him would get the full force of his vented anger. He felt his concern over seeing them again well up, but he and Alexander were almost done. Alexander had sworn King would be returned to his time, his family, friends, daughter and future wife. The end was in sight. “Okay. Let’s get the glass of water,” King said.
“You could have mine, if you asked politely.” Standing in the door, watching the two of them, an earthenware cup of water in her hand, Acca Larentia looked angry.
FORTY-EIGHT
Alexander’s Lab, Mountain of the Roman Rock, 780 BC
Acca Larentia placed a hand on her hip, waiting for an answer from the two men.
She wore the same dyed fabric dress from the market. Her sandals, interwoven with thin strings of gold, showed her wealth. Her hair was a little more windblown than it had been in the market, but it still strongly resembled the styles King had seen his mother wearing in photos from the 50s, when she was a young woman. Acca’s face was flushed with color, but her skin was perfect. The woman was absolutely beautiful, and once again, King could see waiting centuries for her.
“Acca…” Alexander whispered and took a step forward. “Do you recognize me?”
She took a step closer, lowering her cup. “You do look…familiar, sir. Perhaps a heretofore unnamed brother of my husband?”
Alexander took one more gentle step and then stopped. “Except you know he has no brother. You know the story of Iphicles to be a false one.”
Acca descended the remaining steps at the doorway to the floor, and walked close, but she kept one of the stone lab tables between her and Alexander. She also warily eyed King. He stayed still, waiting to see how things would play out.
“My husband, Carutius, told me only two people knew that story of Iphicles was false — he and I.” The anger on her face was replaced by confusion. She squinted at him. “You could be my husband’s twin, indeed.”
“You are also one of the few alive who know that your husband’s true name is not Carutius,” Alexander said cautiously. He moved closer to the center of his side of the lab table.
“Who do you think he is, then?” she asked. “And who are you?”
“You know who I am, my love. My appearance has changed slightly, but you see the same man before you. Others have called me Heracles, but you alone in this time know my secret name of Alexander.” A tear began to trickle from his eye down his bearded cheek.
Acca raised a trembling hand to cover her mouth with the tips of her fingers — as if she had suspected this truth, but the full revelation of it confirmed some madness in her soul.
“I left you in the market not an hour ago. Your hair was shorter. Your beard less wild. Your clothes different. Your manner, even, has changed. Is this some trick of the gods? How can this be?”
Alexander quickly related the story of his past — a future he hoped yet to avoid for her. He detailed his journey to the twenty-first century without her, and his constant search for first the secrets of immortality, and then later for a way to travel back into the past to save her. She handled it well, but King supposed the woman who married this man already saw the world as a far stranger place than most people would believe. Alexander finished by telling her his plan to replace her with a duplicate corpse and said, “I have waited a hundred lifetimes to return to this night, this very moment, and undo the darkness I allowed to befall you.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, her own tears now coming freely. “Why put yourself through that anguish again? Why not just keep me safe from your creatures now, and reveal what has happened to your younger self? Then return to your strange time, where events would have changed and caught up to you?”
“It won’t work like that. It…just isn’t possible. What happened in my past, happened. There’s no way to change those things — there is only the possibility of changing the appearance of those things. Do you see? I already know that’s not how things happen, because I’d already remember it.” He paused to sigh, glanced at King, and added, “And…I am a better man, now. Your death changed me. Broke me. Allowed me to be remade into someone who is more worthy of your love. I would not undo that.” He looked at King again. “Time has a way of giving us perspective…and strength to do what must be done.”
“Well, right now we’re a bit short on time,” King said. “The younger Alexander will be back from the market soon. We need to be gone when he arrives, and we need to finish.
” He glanced at the faceless corpse.
“Who is this man?” Acca asked.
“His name is Jack,” Alexander replied.
“A strange name, but who is he? Why is he here?”
Alexander smiled. “Look at him closely. Can’t you see it?”
Acca squinted at King, focusing on his eyes. She sucked in a quick breath. “He has my father’s eyes.”
Alexander nodded. “He is our descendant.”
This revelation brought a new concern to Acca’s mind. “Our children?”
“Will lose their mother tonight. But they will survive. They will thrive, for countless generations.” He nodded at King. “Long into the future. And Jack is right, Acca. Please. Let us finish what we must. We’ll take you somewhere safe, I’ll explain everything carefully, and if you don’t like what you hear, I’ll let you make your own choice as to how to proceed.” He stepped around the lab table to her, his hand outstretched.
She looked closely at his face, then reached for his hand. As King watched, he could see an almost electric jolt go through the both of them when their flesh met. Her face changed instantly.
“It really is you,” she whispered.
His tears streamed from his eyes. “Yes, my love. It really is.”
She threw herself into his arms, the cup of water flying from her hand behind them, crashing against the floor, right next to the mostly finished duplicate corpse. Alexander gently placed his arms around the woman as she sobbed into his chest. He laid the side of his cheek on the top of her head as gently as if she were an egg that might crack. King had seen his friend in many moods and manners over the years, but he had never seem him be so very gentle.
King’s eyes returned to the corpse, the spilled water and the shattered earthenware cup. It looked perfect to him, but he didn’t have the memories to confirm that.
“Alexander,” he said softly. “The face.”
Alexander took a deep breath, then stepped back from Acca and delicately raised her chin. “We must hurry.”
She nodded, and Alexander turned to the body on the floor.
“Is the cup right? The spill?” King asked.
“It’s fine,” Alexander knelt to the floor and gently placed his hands over the blank slate where the corpse’s face should have been. He began chanting under his breath. The floor rumbled beneath their feet. King turned to Acca to reassure her if she was worried, but the woman watched without fear. He guessed the touch was enough to convince her of everything.
King looked back to Alexander, as the man stood and stepped away from the false corpse.
The face looked exactly like Acca’s now — if it had been aged by twenty years, and had most of the vitality sucked from it. There was a black necrotic spot on the cheek, and the eyes were closed, but the corpse could not be mistaken for anyone else.
There was just one problem.
“Alexander — the clothes.”
The corpse was naked.
“Of course.” He turned to Acca. “We will need your robe. And your sandals.”
King was about to turn away to give the woman privacy, but she simply slipped out of the dress, and stepped out of her sandals, completely unashamed of her nudity. She picked up the robe with one hand and tossed one sandal to King. The other she handed to Alexander. Then she slipped the dress over the corpse’s head. King and Alexander fixed the sandals on the body’s feet and helped to roll the body over so Acca could pull the dress down to where it would be. Finally, she pulled a bronze bracelet off her wrist and placed it on the wrist of the body.
“The bracelet…I remember it now. I hadn’t seen it before.”
“I bought it at the market after I left you tonight,” she said. “I liked it.”
Alexander stood and rushed to a long cabinet against one wall. The cabinet was made of wood, and had several shelves built into it, like a cross between an armoire and a Chinese herbalist’s chest of drawers. He opened a drawer and pulled out a folded piece of burgundy cloth — one of his own robes. He handed it to Acca, and she quickly wrapped the fabric about her body, folding and twisting it until it covered all but her shoulders.
“We need to go,” King said.
Just then they heard a loud clanking in the stairwell beyond the doorway from which Acca had appeared.
“He’s back,” she whispered.
“Run,” Alexander said.
FORTY-NINE
Carthage Ruins, 2013
Queen’s fingers went slack. Her weapon fell to the ground.
Her jaw hung open, and a single phrase got lodged in her mind.
Not. Fucking. Possible.
To say that the immense statue rising from the sea was gigantic would have been an insult to it. She had been to Liberty Island once in New York. She had learned that the Statue of Liberty stood 151 feet tall — just over 300 feet with its concrete and granite pedestal. This thing was probably close to 300 feet on its own. The spires on its crown made the resemblance uncanny. This monstrosity could have been Liberty’s father. It wore a long cape of bronze with a greenish patina, and while the cape was stiff, and did not move like cloth, it did move. The rest of the statue was nude except for a small loin-cloth. The muscles of the bare chest were flat and chiseled — a bit un-lifelike, if she thought about it. The pecs were too square, the abs too circular. The sculptors had envisioned a perfect warrior, but the dimensions were off just slightly. The overall effect was compounded by the inclusion of sea growths of coral and large swatches of seaweed, draped over the joints.
Through her disbelief and shock, she recognized it for what it was.
The Colossus of Rhodes.
But how? I thought it had been dismantled years after it fell. And how the hell did it get here, all the way across the Med?
Bishop, ever the man of few words, simply leaned down, picked up her dusty MP-5 and handed it back to her.
Queen took her weapon and forced her mind back to the moment at hand. “Kill Ridley and Seth. That’s priority number one. We get them, and that fucker topples.”
“What I was thinking,” Bishop said. He started running for Ridley’s position on the shore, as the immense statue took another step out of the sea, and onto land.
Queen raced after him.
They were already within an effective range of Ridley’s group, but she held off until she closed to within seventy-five feet. She raised her weapon, and while still running at the group of men on the shore, she started firing a spray of bullets at a rate of 800 rounds a minute.
Bishop took cover behind one of the standing columns of the Baths. He joined her in laying into the enemy.
Queen took up position behind a block of stone at the end of a wall and kept firing.
One of the men in black was hit in the arm, but then both men quickly returned fire with their AK-47s.
The world’s most recognizable assault rifle had a much longer effective range than the MP-5 submachine guns, but they were all within range of each other now, so it made little difference.
Seth and Ridley had leapt for cover. To Queen’s satisfaction, the humongous statue had stopped walking once it reached the shore. Ridley needs to concentrate to control it. Hard to do that with bullets flying all around.
She smirked, but she knew the reprieve wouldn’t last long.
“Queen, you read?” Deep Blue was in her ear. “What the hell am I seeing on satellite?”
“That would be the Colossus of Rhodes, golem-style. We really need that support. Now.”
“They’re forty minutes out.”
“This will be over in forty minutes! This thing is 300 feet tall. And it looks pissed. We’re trying to keep Ridley and his twin under fire. If they can’t concentrate, they can’t use the language to work the statue. But that won’t last long. Especially if they have reinforcements on the ground already.”
“They do. I’m seeing close to a battalion of men coming your way.”
“Then you better tell them to hurry. That or bring body
bags. Lots of them.”
Queen switched channels, and called for Knight. No reply. She tried Rook.
“Where you at, ma puce? You better have some fuckin’ good news for me.”
Rook’s voice came through with a lot of background hiss, like he was in a wind tunnel. “Would it help if I said ‘I can see my house from here?’”
Queen raised her hand to shield her eyes from the glare of the morning sun as she looked up, up, up, to the top of the statue’s immense head. She could only just make out movement all the way up there. He actually looked like a flea at that height.
“Sweet holy Moses,” she said.
FIFTY
Antonine Baths, Carthage, 2013
Darius Ridley whipped his foot back and delivered another whopping kick to the tiny slant-eyed bastard’s stomach, a huge grin spreading across his face. His plan had gone completely to hell, but he was still having the time of his life.
Somehow, and he couldn’t figure out how it had happened, Richard’s lackey clones had co-opted his mercenary force, and turned at least some of them against him. It should have been simple. Wait until the doubles and the Chess Team were inside, then swoop in covering all the exits and kill everybody. But the Chess Team, had put up a fight, and his team was sloppy. Stepped all over each other. The facility had jammed their communications — although that should have worked to their advantage, preventing the Chess Team from coordinating their response to the unexpected attack. His men shouldn’t have needed the coms — they knew what to do and how to do it.
Still, things had gone pear-shaped. As soon as he heard that their communications gear wasn’t working underground, he had held back. After the first explosion, when he began getting reports back to him by runner that they were encountering heavy close quarters resistance, he had retreated to the safety of the loading dock vehicle tunnel. The enemy had dug in from the gallery and the security suite on Sub Level 3. Even though his men should have been able to flank the bastards from the north stairwell, they were suddenly encountering resistance on all levels of the facility — and his reinforcements never came. That was when he had left his men behind and run up the ramp to the parking garage, looking for his men at the fountain entrance.
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