by A D Davies
“This way.” Jules took Bridget by the shoulder, his arm around her, guiding her on past a similar box to the one Garcia was examining in minute detail. He smiled all the way, urging her toward a pool of water in the middle of the cavern. “Here.”
In the water lay a glimmering plate in bronze or gold with red trim. A straight top, curved only slightly, pulling down like it was about to form a rectangle, then shaved to a point. She could make out grooves, possibly slashes, or maybe they were ornamental, or some form of writing on the surface, but under twenty inches of water, she couldn’t tell. She estimated it to be as long as she was tall.
“It’s…” Bridget couldn’t get her breath.
“The shield,” Toby finished for her. He was braced on the opposite side, his skin reflecting the pool and the shining yellow light. “Good grief, we’ve actually found it!”
Nervous laughter rippled among them.
Harpal nodded, a finger to one ear. “Yes, Charlie, it’s here. Just need to get it out. Our access tunnel is too small.”
“There are more tunnels,” Jules said, pointing one direction, then another, then a third. Two of the dark passageways appeared large enough for the shield. “Guessin’ they sealed ‘em up some time ago. We gotta figure out which way, then blow the—”
“Guys?” Dan said, an urgent inflection catching everyone’s attention. He stood over a semi-circular rim of stones set off in one corner, the highest point in what Bridget had started to think of as a tomb. “These aren’t fossils.”
“Nor are these.” Toby referred to the bones of people set into the wall in graves cut away like bunk beds. “They’re more… mummified. More recently than our friends on that side.”
“These aren’t mummies,” Dan said. “Take a look.”
Jules bounded up there first, Bridget right behind, then Harpal came up to the scene. Toby and Sally remained where they were, listening in.
Dan had indeed found skeletal remains, but these looked far less ancient. Rotted rather than fossilized or even mummified. Clothing still stuck to them. Some still had hair. Bridget couldn’t count how many, but it was at least five.
“How long have they been here?” she asked.
“Hard to tell.” Dan crouched by the nearest one, its head pointed toward him. “Conditions down here, could be ten years, could be a hundred.”
Jules poked the skull with his toe. “Wasn’t natural causes, either.”
It fell aside, revealing a jagged gap in the front.
“That’s a bullet hole,” Harpal said. Presumably bringing Charlie in on the conversation, he added, “No, they’re old. But not old-old, if you get what I mean.”
By now, Toby and Professor Garcia had joined them.
Garcia said, “I wonder what they did to deserve that.”
“Same as you.” The new voice came from behind, a deep baritone spoken with purpose. “Grave robbers.”
They all rotated slowly, following Dan and Jules’s lead with their hands to the sides. Bridget already knew who it was, the voice distinctive in both tone and timbre.
“Darkeen…”
“Hello, Bridget.” Darkeen Willis aimed a submachine gun, stock to his shoulder, a suppressor on the barrel. The two others with him, both men about the same age whom Bridget did not recognize, wielded identical weapons—one man black, the other appeared to be Hispanic or Native-American. “My nana said to trust you’d do the right thing. I’m glad I didn’t listen to her.”
“Just wait a second,” Bridget said.
Jules showed his hands were still empty and took a half-step forward. “Yeah, this is bigger than you realize. Let us explain.”
“Actually, it’s bigger than you realize.” Darkeen took his own half-step toward Jules, firming up the gun to halt any progress. “Now, all of you, on your knees. I won’t ask again.”
Chapter Sixteen
Jules assessed all three armed men in farmhand-style working attire as well-trained, organized, and deadly serious about their task. Only Darkeen spoke, the other two flanking him awaiting orders as they covered their targets who had conveniently grouped together.
“Ah, I got it,” Jules said. “You were already here. Waitin’ for the best time to show yourselves. We’re bunched up here, so this is it.”
One side of Darkeen’s mouth turned up. “Smart kid. Be smarter.”
All but Jules were on their knees, hands on their heads.
Jules joined them. “I’m a cop. New York, but still a cop. I go missing, they’ll find you. Plus, we got other people who know where we are.”
“You mean Tane Wiremu and Charlie Locke up top?” Darkeen said. “Phillip Locke in London? Yeah, we know about them, thanks. Charlie and Tane got crosshairs on ‘em right now. Y’all have had since you showed up by our field. We were curious to see how far you’d take it. Guess we know now. You’re thieves. And we’ll be treating you accordingly.”
“He’s a cop?” the Native-American gunman said, concentration never wavering.
“Cops don’t get to break-and-enter sacred tombs just because they carry a badge.” Like his companion, Darkeen remained focused. “I’m gonna zip-tie you now. Then you’ll be blindfolded and taken out, where we’ll bring in the cops.” A deviation to Jules. “You can sort this out with your brothers in blue. See how they feel about a trespasser on the force.”
Toby said, “You’re descended from the Guardians.”
This drew all three to him. Briefly. Only Darkeen held on Toby as he came forward, sighting on his head. The black and Native men spread out for an angle that wouldn’t catch Darkeen in a crossfire.
Toby closed his eyes, trembling but upright. “That’s why you inherited this land. The Indians couldn’t hold on to it. But even in the fifties, the government couldn’t touch it if you owned it.”
“No more talking. Move.”
Darkeen stowed his submachine gun on his back. He zip-tied Toby first, cinching the plastic cuffs tight, moving to Dan and Harpal, then Bridget, before ending on Jules.
“Unclench those fists, kiddo,” Darkeen told him. “This ain’t my first rodeo.”
Jules saw four different ways he could get out of this, but that would mean another crime to add to his list. Instead of assaulting a person legitimately defending his property, Jules had been pumping his fists tight, a means of expanding the muscle and ligaments around the lower arm so a zip-tie could only bind the expanded limb. When the prisoner relaxed, this allowed a few millimeters of give—plenty for Jules to have squirmed out of several times in his low-level criminal days.
He acquiesced to Darkeen’s demands and received an additional squeeze of the cuff for his trouble.
“Up, now.” Darkeen backed off, allowing Sally Garcia’s hands to remain free.
“What did I do?” the professor asked.
“I’m out of ties,” Darkeen said simply. “No offence, but you strike me as the least threatening.”
“Oh?” She put her dukes up like Scrappy-Doo in cartoons Jules used to watch as a kid.
“Not the time, Sally,” Toby said. “But talk to them. Explain it.”
Professor Garcia hesitated as she considered the situation. Jules tried to put himself in the eccentric woman’s shoes: her life’s work either embodied as fossils or an elaborate hoax; a fabled shield a pool of water away; the team who’d dropped out of nowhere and turned her life upside down before becoming her savior, now captured and helpless; her proof slipping through her grasp…
“We don’t want the shield,” Garcia said.
Jules nudged Toby before he replied with what would probably exacerbate things.
Darkeen’s men lined the group up with concise gestures, while Darkeen faced Sally Garcia. “You’ve been poking around here before. We’ve warned you before.”
“This is the same as lying,” she replied, her chin high. “You’re concealing truth from people who deserve to know.”
“Who deserves anything in this life? Your YouTube followers? Your Maori
bodyguard?”
At mention of Tane, Dan tensed. That was odd, and the shuffle of feet and lips moving like a bad ventriloquist alerted Jules that something was off. Charlie would comprehend the situation.
“Who else?” Darkeen pushed. “Who deserves to know things that are none of their business? Who are you to decide what the world needs?”
“I’m a scientist,” Garcia said. “I see people like you, like governments and private investors, concealing this, and I have to ask why.”
“But you haven’t asked why, have you? None of you have. You broke in, ready to take it. Like so many before you, you think you’re entitled to—”
“Hey, Darkeen, man,” Jules said. “Something’s up.”
“Don’t even bother.” Darkeen pointed at Jules before resuming with Garcia. “You called this place a graveyard, but that’s not quite right. They’re killing fields… they’re what you see after a massacre. After a genocide.”
He pointed at the nearest fossilized remains.
“The truth is lost. They pre-date Horace’s people by a long way.” A half-gesture to the Native American suggested he was Horace. “Lived alongside them for a time. But they died out, mostly, because of low breeding. Then, when populations from across the sea arrived—long, long before Europeans ‘discovered’ America—they were taken. Bred for labor. At least that’s what the oral histories say.”
Jules said, “And the Guardians helped them.”
“In some ways, yes.” Darkeen’s eyes flared with passion and anger. “But the Guardians weren’t a single race. They were individuals who amassed knowledge over centuries. Scholars as well as warriors. Folk who understood both who they defended and who they were fighting. They incorporated those they fought for into their ranks, training them, educating them—”
“They took the best from the communities they helped,” Jules said.
“Those people volunteered.” Darkeen seemed to struggle to hold his anger in check, something Jules thought of as misplaced. This was history, not a personal attack. “If the Guardians saved a town under siege, and that town wanted to give thanks, yes, they could offer their brightest and most capable to join the fight.”
Bridget said, “The ultimate pay-it-forward.”
“If you want to boil it down to childish nonsense, sure.” Darkeen fished in his cargo pants pocket and retrieved a fistful of black lengths of cloth. “Time to go.”
As Darkeen applied the blindfold to him, Toby said, “The giants received the Guardians’ help, then some of them joined the ranks.”
Bridget was next. As if using the blindfolds as cues to speak, she said, “And because they were the most distinctive, they were the ones that got talked about and painted most. The ones that drove the legend.”
Darkeen said nothing as he tied her off and moved on to Jules.
Jules picked up the narrative baton. “And the weapons got bigger. The tech got more useful. Not tech like we see it, right?” He caught Dan’s lowered head, his tense jaw, flexing shoulders. Definitely something going on in his ear. “Like my bangles. Like the Witnesses’ vaults and their transmitters. They didn’t have a clue how it worked, but they knew it did. I’m bettin’ that shield in there’s got some properties or function you can’t explain.”
“Bet all you like, my friend.” Darkeen approached Dan with the next blindfold. “You’ll get to explain it to the cops.”
Harpal jumped the queue and asked, “What happens when they ask to see the tomb you caught us in?”
“They’ll need a warrant. And what judge would sign off on something as silly as a child’s fairytale? All we need is to show you were trespassing, using explosives without a permit, and—”
“Others are coming,” Dan said.
Darkeen laughed, sharing the joke with his two comrades. “Okay, now it happens.”
Dan looked wearily at Jules. “I didn’t think they’d believe me.”
“Predictable play,” Horace said. “Pretend there’s worse than you on its way. Old as time itself.”
Jules absorbed the factors—Dan’s concern, Harpal’s attempts to conceal it, the fact Darkeen had eyes up top watching for activity, and that no one had contacted him yet. “Okay, no messin’ around. You lost contact with the guys on the surface, right?”
“We’re underground,” Darkeen replied, as if that was the most obvious thing in the world.
Ordinarily it would have been.
“We got that covered,” Jules said.
Dan tapped his ear. Harpal did likewise.
“Look, it’s true,” Jules admitted. “The little guy wanted the shield. He’s desperate to keep funding his archaeology club. And that chunk of metal would’ve pulled him out of a hole with his investor.”
“Hey. I don’t recognize that as entirely accurate.” Toby moved his head around as if searching for something in the dark.
Jules went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “In California, our guys got attacked. People who want the shield. People who shouldn’t have it.”
“You think it’s magic?” Darkeen asked. “It isn’t magic.”
“No, but it can do stuff if the right person’s using it, right?”
Darkeen’s eyes narrowed. He was holding the blindfold, clearly eager to strap it to Jules. “I never touch it. No one does. That’s our mission.”
Bridget said, “But you’ve heard of things it can do, haven’t you?”
“I got the bangles with me,” Jules said. “In my pack. I put it down, over there. Lemme show you. There’s things going on I can’t explain, but you need to see it.”
Darkeen chuckled without humor. “You think you’re one of the Guardian Warriors?”
“I don’t think I’m anythin’ but a guy trying to leave all this behind. I got some ancestral blood or DNA that means I connect to certain rocks or metals inside those rocks. And if that’s true, you gotta believe what I’m saying.”
Darkeen watched Jules’s bag for a long moment, then faced Sally Garcia. “Is this true, Mrs. Scientist? Is the cop brother special?”
Garcia flitted between Jules and the blindfolded Toby.
“The truth,” Jules said.
“I haven’t seen anything,” the professor confessed.
“Take them out.” Darkeen gestured to one of the pitch-black tunnels and approached Jules with the blindfold.
“In my ear,” Harpal said, twitching his head closer to his shoulder. “You don’t believe me, speak with the people up top. Our contact in England. It runs through packs designed to move signals through tunnels like the one we came through. Just listen. If you don’t believe me—”
Darkeen rushed forward and punched Harpal in the kidney, doubling him over, winded.
“You came here to rob this place. One of the few places that some other culture or religion has not usurped. People lie here in state…”
Darkeen gestured to the row of fossilized remains.
“We honor others for their service in the defense of the needy.”
He swept an arm toward the wall of armed skeletons.
“You think I’ll believe you just want to prevent other people getting it? Sorry, but our mission here is to stop you. Now get out. Stay close to the person in front, shuffle your feet. Any attempt at escape and we will shoot you. Clear?”
The reply came in the form of clenched teeth, of Harpal standing gingerly, and of Jules sighing, ready for the blindfold.
Sally Garcia shook her head in resignation with one last gaze toward the submerged shield. “Then you’re handing this over to the North Koreans without even understanding what it does.”
Darkeen’s hands hovered in midair, the blindfold above Jules’s head, about to apply it. “Did you say Koreans?”
“Yeah, she did,” Dan said, picking up on Darkeen’s surprised manner. “What was that name?”
“Name?” Darkeen said.
“He’s not talking to you,” Jules answered. “He’s talking to the surface.”
“Ah Dae-Sun
g,” Dan said. “You know him?”
Darkeen’s two men spread out farther, the Native American checking the exit they were aiming for.
They know that name.
Harpal said, “There’s at least six incoming.”
That didn’t sit right with Jules. “How’d they get so close without Charlie or Wiremu seeing?”
“Parachute,” Dan said. “We have to move! They’re dropping out of the damn sky.”
Darkeen consulted with his comrades.
Jules took the initiative. “You don’t believe us, fine. Let’s take it outta here and you can talk to whoever’s keepin’ watch. We’ll cooperate. Just, please… If they’re coming, they won’t take prisoners.”
Charlie was sick to the back teeth of trying to understand what the hell was going on. She had Tane on one side of her, urging her to get the hell out of there, while Dan and Harpal were struggling to convey events from below. So far, it had swung from wonderment and disbelief to the disagreeable confrontation they’d been hoping to avoid.
Find the object, with bonus points for fossilized giant human remains.
Get expelled for violating someone’s sacred resting place.
Now, mercenaries dropping out of the sky.
“Great.”
“No, not great.” Tane fussed around the hole, nodded to himself, then helped pack up the comms equipment, the laptop controlling the drone on autopilot. He prioritized pulling out spare ammo for his handgun. “Listen, Charlie, I have to tell you something. I have backup.”
“Backup? What backup? You never mentioned backup.”
“No time to explain exactly, but they had to stay loose. They’re based a long way out. They’ll be here, but not in time. Those guys above us? Three minutes, max. That leaves us two choices. Run on the bikes or head down.” He waggled a rope. “I don’t fancy down.”
Charlie scanned the horizon, then used her hand to shield from the sun as she checked the sky.