Once she got to the ground though, she realized she wouldn’t be getting back up. She was done. Her leg felt like it was on fire, and she was having trouble staying awake.
“Queen, are you alright?” It was Peter. He knelt in front of her. Lynn stood behind him, helping Asya stand. Asya had blood streaming down her face. Lynn looked pretty banged up too.
Queen reached out the knife to Peter. “Knight. Northwest ruins. Needs help now.” Another shot rang out. “Go.”
Peter didn’t question. He just took the knife and started running through the ruins.
Lynn brought Asya limping over and gently lowered her to the ground next to Queen. Then Lynn sat down next to them, breathing hard.
The three women didn’t say a word to each other. They just watched as the dust parted and settled, blown by the increasingly wild winds of the storm. The view to the beach cleared, revealing two figures emerging from the water. Bishop and Rook. They headed up the beach toward Queen’s position. Bishop looked fine besides a small limp. He was barefoot, and bare-chested, wearing only his black BDU trousers. Rook’s arm was coated in fresh blood. He was wearing only leg armor, his chest now bare also, his shirt tied over his shoulder as a makeshift tourniquet.
They walked up to the women, and sat wordlessly on the ground next to the ladies.
The shooting stopped.
Queen toggled her com. “Knight?”
“Seth is down. Won’t be getting back up. Peter and I are on our way to you.”
“Knight okay?” Rook asked her.
“He’ll live. They’ll be here in a minute. Nice swim?”
“Brisk,” Bishop said.
They lapsed into silence, all of them just breathing hard.
She turned at the sound of a grunt coming from the Colossus, which was hidden by slowly settling dust. There was a thunk, but then much closer, the sound of footsteps. From behind. Queen turned to see Peter helping Knight walk. Peter was covered in blood.
“It’s not mine,” he said to Lynn, before she could ask.
He plopped onto the sandy ground next to his wife.
Knight leaned down, and inhaled sharply. Then he lowered himself to the ground with the group.
“Seth?” Queen asked him.
“Papa Sigler dropped a big rock on his head,” Knight said.
Queen looked at the blood covering King’s father.
He glanced down at himself. “It was more of a column. And it rolled, more than fell.”
Queen squinted at the red covering Peter. “He bled?”
Knight nodded. “Looks like Ridley got one of them right, or maybe it was the healing mantra he was using over and over. But at the end, when he saw the blood, he looked just as surprised as us. Hate to say it, but he died with a smile on his face.”
While the others watched the storm coming in, Queen watched as the dust cloud still concealing the Colossus slowly melted away. She wondered how she was going to tell them she’d seen King again, and then considered not telling them at all. He’d suffered the same fate as Ridley. Why make them relive his passing?
A distant grunt followed by a wet slap tickled her ear.
She looked to Rook. He heard it too.
“What is that?” he asked. “Survivor?”
The clouds finally reached them and the bottom suddenly fell out of the sky. The rain came down in huge cold globules. Queen never would have guessed that the rain could be so cold with the temperature so warm. They were quickly soaked, but no one made a move to find shelter from the torrential downpour. None of them had the strength.
Queen heard the clapping noise again, and looked back to the Colossus. The rain dissipated the last of the dust cloud. She could see the immense headless statue on the ground.
Standing on its chest, still beating the shit out of each other, were Ridley and the man she thought might be King.
“Oh, wow,” she said. She struggled to her feet. The others all turned to see what she was talking about.
Ridley head-butted his opponent, but the man recovered quickly, pulling back and then launching into a spinning kick that connected with Ridley’s head. Ridley rolled with the impact, bringing the back of his fist into the other man’s throat. Instead of recoiling from the blow, the man pulled in tighter, jabbing a thumb into Ridley’s left eye socket.
Ridley grunted and pulled his head back, the thumb sliding out in a bloody mess. The rain spraying from the sky washed the blood down his face. Then the eye was back, whole again. His mouth never stopped moving, mumbling all the while he was in motion.
The two combatants flowed around each other in a ballet of violence. Elbows flew, kicks snapped, punches twisted through the air. For each strike made by either man, another rapidly followed by his opponent. Both men were covered in blood that washed down their bodies in the rainwater. Neither man slowed. Ridley reached in and gouged out the flesh of his opponent’s throat. The man didn’t pause. Barely noticed. He threw an uppercut into Ridley’s solar plexus, then hooked his fingers into Ridley’s nose, ripping the skin.
Ridley’s face was already healing, and the torn nostrils didn’t slow him. He used a forearm smash to hit his opponent in the face, but the man took the strike and bought up a knee, slamming it into Ridley’s kidney. As he turned, Queen saw the man’s throat looked fine.
The grunting and thunking noises of the two opponents beating on each other was the only sound besides the falling rain.
“Should we stop them?” Lynn asked softly.
“How?” Rook said.
Just then the dark-haired man caught Ridley’s forearm and twisted while thrusting with an open palm strike. The group heard Ridley’s bone break, and saw the jagged end of a shattered Ulna bone rip through the flesh in a bloody spurt. Ridley leapt up, driving a knee into his opponent’s chin. The bone jerked sideways with a loud pop, as the man’s jaw broke. And then unbroke. He retaliated with a double punch, straight ahead, hitting Ridley’s momentarily unprotected throat, as the man landed from his kick. Ridley staggered back a step, before launching a deadly kick at his opponent’s chest. The man slipped backward and started to spin, but he lost his footing. The chest of the statue on which they stood had become slick with blood and rain. His foot went out behind him, as he face planted into the statue, then he flipped backward and rolled off the other side of the Colossus.
Ridley raised his arms and started chanting, his voice rumbling over the rain. At his feet, the giant statue’s chest bubbled and boiled up. The surface broke, spewing rocks and pebbles like a miniature volcano. The almost liquid flow of rubble carried a small wooden chest up and out of the torso of the statue, and deposited it at Ridley’s feet. The box was a dark wood with stripes of glinting metal.
Ridley bent and picked up the box. He held it reverently. Then he lifted it up to the sky, as if it were an offering, and he began chanting again.
This time, the Colossus stirred. It tried to sit up, but without a head or a leg, and missing half an arm, it was unable. Ridley looked across the ruins, and began chanting again.
Queen heard rumbling from the stone behind her in the ruins.
Then she heard a voice that left no room for doubt. “Ridley! Put the box down. I’m not done with you yet!”
The man she knew was King climbed back up onto the chest of the Colossus from where he had fallen. He was once again holding the sword.
Ridley turned to King and smiled.
“Nor am I done with you.”
He held the box in front of him and began to open it.
Queen willed King to attack, to finish the fight. She couldn’t explain how he was alive or why he looked so different, but this was King, and she knew what he could do — and that he’d been holding back.
But instead, he just stood there.
Waiting.
SIXTY-SIX
Ruins of Carthage
Ridley didn’t mess around with trying to figure out the latching mechanism. He used the mother tongue to undo the lock and opened
the fabled Chest of Adoon.
The chest hissed as its airtight seal was broken and the lid came up. Accompanying the hiss was a loud ping as a curved piece of metal spun into the air. Ridley followed the spinning metal with his eyes and then looked down. His forehead furrowed.
Then his face, his hands and the chest were erased in a concussive explosion.
Ridley’s headless torso crumpled to the Colossus’s chest. Without his genetic ability to regenerate and no face with which to utter the language of God, he wouldn’t be coming back. Ever.
King stepped up next to the corpse, and he saw the mangled head lying nearby. He reached down the front of his shirt to a leather band he wore as a necklace. He had worn it around his neck for so long, that most days he forgot it was there. Some years he had worn it on a gold chain, and at other times, he had worn it on a string, but the pendant on the necklace was always the same. A reminder of things to come. Of this very moment.
The safety pin for the grenade he had planted in the box, back in 799 BC. He had taken care of and polished the pin for centuries, and when the metal was starting to give way from age, he had had it coated in silver, and years later in stainless steel. He held it up now on the end of the brown leather cord, and dangled it over his enemy’s body. He wasn’t sure the grenade would work after all these years in Alexander’s airtight box, but if it hadn’t, he had been prepared to use the sword.
He dropped the pin, the reminder having served its purpose.
As the rain pelted the back of his head, he turned and saw the group of people staring at him.
Queen was bleeding from a tourniquet-covered leg. Rook was favoring a wrapped shoulder. Bishop looked exhausted. Knight was coated in blood and clutching his chest with one arm. Ribs, King thought. Asya had cuts on her head and was holding a cloth to the side of her face. His parents were there too. They both looked like they had been dragged through an abattoir, but they appeared mostly unharmed. Besides being wet from the rain, every one of them had one thing in common.
They all stood with their mouths hanging open in absolute shock, staring at him.
He slid down the side of the Colossus, and dropped to the ground below. It was a thirty foot drop, but he took it with ease, absorbing the shock with bent legs. Feeling no lingering pain from his battle, he stepped over to his friends and family.
“Sorry I was late,” he said, but the joke was lost as his voice became shaky. He had done and seen things few people would believe. He’d witnessed the rise and fall of nations and empires, and he had played a hand in some of it. He had watched civilizations grow, had seen humanity rise from the ashes again and again. But none of that compared to this moment.
He had watched his team over the years. Watched his naïve younger self, too. On several occasions, it took all of his strength to not get involved. To let things play out as they had. But he’d managed to never once interfere in their lives. Because of that, this was the first time in over 2800 years that he had stood, face-to-face with these people. And it nearly broke him.
His mother saw the pain in his eyes first, and whether or not she understood it, she threw her arms around him, not just hugging him but keeping him on his feet. Peter was there next, then Asya and the others. King shook with sobs, the mental walls that had kept him strong through millennia crashing down.
As King calmed and the group began separating, Rook whispered, “King…”
King looked up at his old friend.
“That was the coolest friggin’ thing I have ever seen in my life.”
King laughed and wiped the tears from his eyes. “There has never been another man like you, Rook.”
“I don’t know about never,” Rook said.
King grinned. “Pretty sure.”
Asya stepped up to King. “I saw you die when Alexander’s machine exploded.”
King shook his head. “I’ve died many times, but that wasn’t one of them.”
Lynn placed her hand against the side of his beard. She looked into his eyes. She was seeing things only a mother could. “You’ve been gone a long time.”
He nodded. “It’s a long story.”
“We have time,” Peter said.
“It’s a very long story.” King smiled and pointed to the sky where the VTOL Crescent II descended toward them. “And I would really like to see my daughter and the woman I’m going to marry.”
EPILOGUE
Nazca, Peru
A solitary set of feet pounded the dry soil, barely filling the air with the sound of a soldier on the march. But this man was not a simple soldier. Not any longer. Now he was something much, much more.
He marched without cease, without pause for food, water or rest, across the arid, lifeless Nazca plains. When the man finally stopped in the shade of a tall hill, he turned and cast a cool gaze back the way he had come.
His sweat-dampened, long dark hair clung to his forehead, but the man paid it no heed. Nor did he wipe away the beads of sweat rolling into his eyes. The woven sack he carried hung lifeless at his side, so still and bland that anyone watching the man might not even see it. And the contents might as well be air. There was no one left who would mourn the object’s passing.
He dropped the shovel he carried down onto the ground, and then he tossed the sack down. Upon striking the hot, dry earth, the sack rolled and came to a lazy stop. A cloud of dry dust rose and then clung to the fabric as though the desert were already trying to claim it.
King looked at his single piece of baggage, which contained the shattered head of Richard Ridley. They’d taken it with them from Carthage, just in case. But it never regenerated and showed normal signs of decay. Deep Blue had wanted to incinerate the remains, but King insisted on a burial.
This burial.
It was…cathartic.
As he stood there, shovel in hand, he thought back on the past month. His reunion with Sara had shaken him. All of his long forgotten memories — the way her eyes looked in the sun, the smell of her hair, her lopsided smile, and so many other details he’d taken for granted — came back in a rush. She’d been confused by his tears and weak legs, but a quick explanation coupled with his long hair and beard had helped her to quickly understand. She was shocked and amazed that he had waited so long for her…and he had waited. 2,812 years of celibacy. The only descendants of Jack Sigler roaming the world would be the ones he created with her.
Seeing Fiona was harder. He’d fallen to his knees in the parking lot of her school. Sensing his heartbreak, she’d run to him and hugged him tight. She didn’t ask about the beard or the hair, she’d simply said, “It finally happened.”
Apparently, she’d seen her rescuer in Siletz and had always known it was King…but a different King, the one with long hair and a beard. She handled the explanation better than everyone else and made him promise to regale her with stories from history. She also made him take her out of the boarding school. He agreed before she finished asking, vowing to spend as much time with her and Sara as humanly possible.
Once everyone had been gathered at the base in New Hampshire, he’d told his friends and family an abbreviated version of his story, and they had been dumbfounded by the magnitude of it. King explained how he had placed the grenade in the ‘Chest of Adoon’ instead of leaving it empty, and how Alexander had told him that he eventually arranged for the relocation of the Colossus of Rhodes to Tunisia, where he had once hoped to build a small fortress. The fortress never happened. He’d treated the statue with a special solution to prevent corrosion and left it along the shore, underwater, where only he would be able to retrieve it. Later, he hid the Chest of Adoon inside the chest of the Colossus. He thought it was clever. But only King had known the joke, and the Chest was never recovered, or opened, again. Until Ridley got it.
King remained in New Hampshire for a month, reuniting with his family and watching over his mending friends while the team’s scientists studied Ridley’s remains and ensured he was, without a doubt, not coming back. Not that
anyone was going anywhere. The geopolitical backlash to the events in Carthage, which no one could find a reasonable explanation for, threatened to expose them. So they stayed silent. Waited for the world’s hackles to lower. And finally, Domenick Boucher, head of the CIA and one of the few people who knew Endgame existed, gave them the all-clear. Tensions had eased and a terrorist group was blamed for simultaneously releasing a hallucinogenic gas and detonating several bombs in Tunisia. The governments of several nations knew that was not the truth, but not one of them wanted to tell the world that the 300-foot tall Colossus of Rhodes had come to life and attacked the city. Bodies were disposed of. Videos were destroyed. Rumors were started and evidence was planted.
As soon as the all-clear had been given, King had taken Ridley’s remains and jetted to Nazca, Peru — where it all began — courtesy of Crescent II. The flight took just hours, and no one would be the wiser.
He stared down at the sack again, then looked at his watch. Crescent II was a stealth vehicle, but the Nazca plains sported more airborne tourists than anywhere else in the world. It was the only way to really see the giant geoglyphs carved into the desert by the ancient Nazcans and the occasional Greek demigod. He had an hour and a half before the first scheduled flight passed overhead.
He lifted the shovel and set to work, digging out the entrance to the cave his friend George Pierce had discovered under the massive stone, years ago. The memory was dim for King, but he knew it had happened for George only a few years back.
When the entrance to the cave, where King himself had once been trapped, was clear, he unceremoniously chucked the head into the cave, watching as it rolled along in its burlap.
He started filling in the entrance. Before the digging was done, he tossed the shovel itself into the tunnel and finished the work by hand. When he was done, he pulled a small hammer and a chisel from his belt and went to work on the side of the hot stone.
The symbol was simple, but he wanted it to be large. Large enough to be seen by anyone else that should come along in the next several hundred years. He carved it deep into the side of the stone, then he walked to the other side of the rock where Pierce had discovered the other carving, left centuries ago, by Alexander. The letters were in ancient Greek and the transcription read:
Omega: A Jack Sigler Thriller cta-5 Page 29