by Nick Thacker
The guard inspecting the artifact knelt down and spread the sheet away from the cart and peered in. She watched his back as he studied whatever it was inside.
Jenny waited a few seconds as the man froze, then lifted the radio to his lips and began to speak.
“Jonathan,” she whispered, interrupting the actor’s story. “We need to go.”
“What?” Jonathan asked.
“We need to leave. Now.”
“Why?”
She didn’t answer. At that moment the man who had brought the cart inside fell to the ground and stabbed through the sheet with his hand. He pulled out the small device that had been sitting on the bottom shelf of the cart and pressed a button on its side.
Jenny heard the guard’s radio squawk to life. “Confirmed,” a voice said, crackling in English. “Locating the nearest support.”
The first guard jumped backwards and pulled the pistol from his belt. He shouted something in another language toward the man on the ground, but the man just lay flat on the floor.
Jonathan and the actor were now watching the drama, as well as a few other tables nearby. Jenny started to stand up involuntarily, but Jonathan gripped her wrist.
“Stay down, honey,” he said. “We don’t know —”
“I don’t need to know what it is,” she hissed. “I don’t want to be around it.”
He opened his mouth to respond, but Jenny rose before he could speak. She whirled around and started toward the edge of the hall, where she’d seen an exit sign above a doorway that was partially hidden behind an archway.
She heard the guards both shouting now, the tables of guests growing quiet as they turned to watch the action. Glasses stopped clinking and silverware lay silent, but the two guards continued rattling off orders to the man on the ground and into their radios.
Jenny picked up her pace, nearing the archway and door to the exit. She assumed it led outside, but it didn’t appear to be a door meant for guests, as it was flanked on both sides by a trash receptacle and a table full of dinnerware.
She was almost at the door when she heard it. A high-pitched hum, throbbing as it rose in pitch and intensity. It sounded like a dog whistle, just a piercing, shrill note, at the stratosphere of her hearing. It continued upward and she found herself trying to pop her ears.
Jenny made it to the door and reached down to the handle. She grabbed it, but her hand slipped as she lost focus.
She stepped back, suddenly unsure of her footing. Was the floor moving? She couldn’t tell. She felt drunk, as if she’d been drugged or given some sort of sedative.
She struggled back toward the door, finally getting a hand around the knob. She turned it.
Locked.
She screamed as the sound rose even higher, now so high in pitch there was no sound at all — but she could feel it. The pressure level of the sound wave felt like a fork was stabbing at her eyes from inside her head. Her body felt heavy, weighted down by an invisible force, like a thick layer of blankets had been draped over her.
She tried to turn around, to see what might be causing the sound. Her vision grew blurry, but she fought it back. It took all of her focus, and she realized after a few seconds that she was having difficulty breathing.
She fell to one knee.
Through her blurry vision, the peripherals receding into blackness, she saw her table. Jonathan and the actor and his wife. All of them were holding their heads, mouths open wide.
She felt sick to her stomach now, but she couldn’t stop watching them. The pain grew to an enormous level, and then she noticed the guards and the man who’d wheeled in the cart. The cart sat idly by the huge bell, but the bell itself seemed to be throbbing. It was moving, pulsating in time with the pressure waves reaching her body, gently pushing the waves out into the room.
What the hell?
She had no idea what to make of that, or if it was just an illusion created by her failing vision. But regardless of what might be happening to the artifact, there was definitely something happening to the three men closest to it.
The man laying on the ground was still, looking as though he were asleep, but the two guards next to him were on their knees, their arms hanging at their sides.
Both of them were facing her.
Both of them had a shocked expression on their faces.
And both of them seemed to be made of liquid.
She tried to frown, to improve her vision enough to know if her eyes were playing tricks on her or not. It seemed to help, just a bit.
And that’s when she noticed.
The guards’ faces were melting. Their cheeks had slid downward, opening their eye sockets wider and wider, their bloodshot eyes now just empty, peering orbs, frozen in an electrified expression. Their chins drooped, their lips curling downward at the sides.
She tried to catch her breath. She tried to scream again, but it was impossible. The weight had increased to twice what it had been, and it was still increasing. The pressure wave throbbed around her, through her. It made her head feel mushy, as if someone had opened her skull and was stirring her brain around with a spoon.
She wanted to lie down, but she no longer had control of her muscles.
Oh God, what is happening?
It was the last thought she had.
With strength she didn’t know she had, Jenny reached up to her face, pushing against the great pressure of the bell’s pulsing wave, and pointed the fingers of her left hand to the side of her face.
A few more inches and she made contact. It was thick, a pudding-like substance, warm and syrupy.
She pressed on her jaw. Her cheek simply slid through her fingers and dripped onto the floor. It was happening to her, too. She didn’t feel it, couldn’t feel it, but she knew it was happening.
Her eyes closed then, her peripherals moving in sideways to block her vision completely, and she felt herself falling.
4
Sarah
The wall swelled up above her, as if it were alive. It hadn’t moved, but in the baking sun and the hot, arid air swirling up around her only adding to the effect, she could have sworn the wall itself was the thing moving.
It was hot, and the humidity from the massive lake nearby — Lake Superior — didn’t help.
She reached a hand up and placed the back of it onto her forehead. She couldn’t tell if it was her hand or her head that felt hotter. She sighed, blinking a few times to fight away the brightness, then looked back down.
This had better be worth it, she thought. I’m not an archeologist. I’m an anthropologist.
The two fields were closely related, and ever since her doctoral dissertation and subsequent publications, academia seemed to have a hard time deciding which typecast to fit her to. Her father was an esteemed and well-known archeologist, and while she loved that line of work as much as her own, she’d chosen — or at least tried to choose — many years ago to forge her own path in the world.
It hadn’t worked.
Everyone she encountered who recognized her knew her because of her father, Professor Graham Lindgren. She was ‘that famous archeologist’s daughter,’ and her own credentials and degrees were merely an afterthought.
If there’s something here, let me find it, she willed. She and her team were digging around in the dirt of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan. The park, a 40-mile tract of land situated on Lake Superior, was a national protected area and one that had taken a bit of maneuvering to access. Natural archways, sandstone cliffs, plenty of hiking trails, and immaculate beaches made the park a destination for outdoorsy types, but it was a bit more difficult to gain access when ‘digging up artifacts’ was the reason for visiting.
Her father would have been able to simply pick up the phone or send an email and he’d have been granted access.
Sarah, on the other hand, had begged, pleaded, and borrowed favors from her crew and their teams as well as from her own superiors at her university, and even then she was given only a th
ree-day OTG, or on-the-ground. It was hardly enough time to get a decent hole dug, never mind getting some useful data.
Her research hypothesis was fizzling out, and its demise was going to be slow, sad, and potentially dreadful for her career.
She slammed a shovel down into the gritty beach, the sun still bouncing off the cliff and directly onto the front of her body.
“Dr. Lindgren,” a voice called to her from behind.
Thank God, she thought. Anything to justify a break.
She unfastened the carabiner that held her water bottle from her pack, wondering if it was even worth the energy to trudge back to the tent. Maybe I can just have them come over here, she thought. This is technically my expedition.
But while she was the ‘boss’ and any of the three undergraduate field assistants she had under her employ would have rushed to her aide, she wasn’t about to lose the opportunity to stand inside the tent, in the shade, even for just a few minutes. Maybe she could even come up with some ideas for emails that just had to be written now, giving her a longer break…
“Coming,” she called back. She took a swig from the bottle and then screwed the cap back on. Every motion was calculated, measured, as every movement cost something. Energy was a resource now, every calorie of heat burned making her hotter still. She took a few steps forward, away from the towering rock wall where she had been working, eyeing the white canvas tent standing fifty yards away as though it were fifty miles distant.
This is the crap my dad put up with for forty years? she thought. She was happy to be an anthropologist — generally they got to stay inside, working with statistics and maps and other non-field data — but there were occasions, like this one, when the fieldwork could only be performed by her. This was her mission, so this was her field.
She reached the tent and collapsed into one of the four folding camp chairs that had been set up around the interior. The student who had summoned her was standing over the folding table on the opposite of the tent, examining something in front of him.
The boy’s name was Alexander Whipple, and he stood nearly a foot taller than her, which was especially striking since she herself was quite tall. He was devilishly handsome, a dark complexion and deep-set features, and it was only by reminding herself that he was nearly a decade her junior — and her employee — that she was able to keep from testing the man’s interest in her.
He was Egyptian, born in the United States, but he’d spent many of his summers in Cairo with his extended family, and he had opted to stay on as one of her research assistants until the semester started.
Or until the money ran out.
Sarah had been paying them out of her own pocket for two pay periods now, and she was quickly realizing that there wouldn’t be very many more pay periods unless she was able to find and turn in something tangible from this dig.
Alex towered over the tiny camp table, his long, muscled arms extended to their full length in order to reach down to the table. She walked inside the tent and stopped, swallowed, then continued forward, trying not to focus too intently on those arms in case he turned around quickly. She’d caught him making a few looks her direction, too, so she knew it wouldn’t be a completely fruitless endeavor. He was single, as far as she knew, and he didn’t seem at all interested in the other female undergrad in their group.
She watched his shoulder muscles tighten, then relax. She imagined her hand on them, feeling them flex and release, and —
“Dr. Lindgren,” Alexander said, turning around. “Thanks for coming. Sorry to bother you.” His voice was strong as well, deep and booming, but he spoke with a calm, even tone, like a midwestern farmer who’d studied at Yale.
She sniffed, shook her head quickly, and stood up. She felt herself blush. What’s wrong with you? she thought. Grow up.
She was nine years older than the young twenty-something, but they were on completely different hemispheres when it came to their professions. Alexander was smart, but he was book-smart. He had none of the drive and boundary-pushing swagger that was needed in a field such as this. Not that it mattered much — Alex was headed toward genetics as a career field, and his work with Sarah in the anthropology department was little more than an elective for him.
He would probably end up in a lab somewhere, taking orders from the edgier, more eccentric scientists who had better funding — nothing but a pharmacist filling geneticists’ prescriptions.
Dr. Lindgren wouldn’t end up like that — she wasn’t afraid to step on toes, but she was also tactful and did it with grace, never admonishing or publicly humiliating a colleague. It had earned her a reputation as a hard-working, easygoing academic who wasn’t afraid to get her hands dirty, and it didn’t hurt that many, if honest, considered her the most brilliant modern anthropologist in the world.
It certainly didn’t hurt that her career was permanently stamped with the words, ‘daughter of famous archeologist Graham Lindgren.’
And it also didn’t hurt that many of those academic types had been swayed at least a bit by her looks. Tall, dark-skinned, and fit, Sarah Lindgren was the daughter of a Jamaican woman and a Swedish man, but had grown up in America. Her petite facial features gave her the look of an innocent young woman, but her overall physical appearance had intimidated more than one of her male counterparts, for better or worse.
She was capable, strong-willed, and intelligent, but there was just something about a female anthropologist that the rest of the academic community just couldn’t wrap their minds around. Her father, her looks, and her gender had formed an unexpected triumvirate, constantly working against her.
“What’s up?” she asked. She stepped up next to Alexander, trying not to notice the size of the young man’s bicep as it extended and retracted when he picked up an object from the table.
“This came for you,” he said. His voice was deep, older than it should have been, but in a soft, smooth sort of way. It reminded her in some ways of her father. He handed her the envelope, a large, bubble mailer.
“Who’s it from?” She asked, turning it over in her hands a few times. She felt a distinct object inside, possibly round, with an enlarged section on one side. She began to open it as she waited for Alex’s answer.
“Your father.”
Speak of the devil.
If her intelligence, good looks, and charisma was half the reason for her success, having an esteemed archeology professor for a father was the other half. Graham Lindgren taught at Cambridge, had published volumes on modern archeology and how future discoveries in archeology would completely change the understanding of our anthropological history, and had already lived his own version of an Indiana Jones lifestyle.
And he was only in his early sixties — he had a lot of life to live.
Sarah was his only child, and had followed in his footsteps, choosing to study the history of humanity at large rather than focus in on the relative niche of archeology, and he had been delighted to watch her become a successful scientist.
She opened the large envelope and dumped out the object. It fell into her hand, and she was surprised at the weight of it. It seemed to have gained a pound since it had been inside the envelope, though she knew it was just a trick of her imagination. The object was indeed round, circular with a dent on one side of it and a protrusion on the opposite side, as if its creator had pushed the center of the disk outward with their thumb. The object was made of ceramic or some other stone-like material, and it was solid. The brown color told her it had been in the ground for some time. The slight deterioration of the edges around the perimeter told her it had been in the ground a long time.
There was also a letter inside, and she placed the object on the table while she retrieved the crisp paper. Typical of her father, the letter was handwritten on expensive faux-parchment and she carefully unfolded it. Only thing he’s missing is a wax seal, she thought. She smiled and made a mental note to add a ‘wax seal kit’ to her Christmas gift list.
Her father w
as an avid historian, and if he hadn’t decided to dedicate his life to archeology, he would have made a capable ancient history professor at any college in the world. He had a voracious reading habit, consuming nearly a book a week, and they weren’t short, simple reads.
Because of this lifelong habit and his love of history, he had taken up a new ritual when Sarah had attained her doctorate: his fanciful letters always started with an invocation — some intriguing line or sentence, often in another language.
So it wasn’t surprising to Sarah that the letter opened with a quote:
‘We are twice armed if we fight with faith.’
5
Al Jazeera
Transcript and translation from Al Jazeera JSN (Jazeera Satellite Network):
Breaking: 137 Dead, 4 Wounded in Greek Terror Attack
ATHENS, GREECE
ATHENS NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ARCHEOLOGY
At approximately 8:13 local time, a terrorist attack hit the Athens National Museum of Archeology.
The bomb detonated after the arrival of numerous VIP invitees, all attending the unveiling and celebration of the ‘Antiquities of Thera’ exhibit scheduled for that evening.
The event was hosted by the museum with private funding provided by undisclosed and anonymous business and personal interests. Initial police reports state that the attack was not carried out by any parties holding a vested interest in the museum.
The bomb, believed to have been some sort of chemical-based weapon, had been placed inside one of the artifacts on display that night, where it was allowed to heat until the chemicals boiled into a vapor-based toxin that spread throughout the room.
“It was unlike anything I have ever seen,” said one survivor, Vicard Floros, “It was no bomb, not in the traditional sense. We heard a popping noise, sort of like a gunshot, and then people began to scream.