by Alex Archer
The sound grew in volume, but now there was something familiar about it. She was certain she’d heard it before. Recognition hovered on the edge of her consciousness.
Something buzzed in front of her face, attracted no doubt to the blood still on her skin, and she shook her head, trying to make it go away.
Damned fly.
Annja froze. Flies?
She’d been in enough third-world countries to recognize the sound of a swarm of flies, but to produce a roar like that the cloud had to be enormous….
They’d never make the end of the bridge. They had seconds left, if that.
“Down!” she cried suddenly. “Everybody down! Hug the surface of the bridge and hold on tight.”
Ahead of her she saw Ephraim was already in motion, lowering himself and stretching out his arms, looking for a handhold, something to lock on to to secure himself against the coming storm. A glance behind showed Roux doing the same and then Annja had no time to worry about anyone but herself.
With her hands tied behind her back and the surface of the bridge slick beneath her feet, Annja had to move slower than everyone else, for fear of overbalancing. She bent one leg, lowering herself down on her knee. Flies were starting to gather around her now.
The drone grew louder, the sound jangling her nerves, making her flinch.
With one knee down, she concentrated on lowering the other. She was suddenly thankful for all the martial-arts and sword-fighting practice she’d been getting since inheriting the sword. Her core was extremely solid and it helped her maintain control as she finally got herself onto both knees.
Now came the hard part.
Without hands to catch her, her only option was to fall on her face.
Flies were buzzing all around her now, the drone of the approaching swarm blotting out all other sounds, and Annja had only seconds left, at best. She couldn’t wait any longer.
As the swarm rose up from below, Annja tipped herself down and fell forward.
Chapter 38
Annja watched the rock face rush to meet her and thought, This is going to hurt.
She was right.
The stone bridge hit her square on the cheek, as she slammed against the rock with a wicked crunch. She tasted blood. And then the flies were on her with a vengeance.
She could feel them in her hair, on her face, her neck, her hands. They crawled in her ears, over her eyelids, through the blood leaking out of her nose—threatening to block her nostrils. She didn’t dare open her mouth. They would have swarmed inside it in a heartbeat. They were already trying to force their way in. She could feel them pushing between her lips, their numbers grinding against her teeth. The sound around her was overwhelming, a droning hum that drove like a spike through her head, cutting off rational thought, making it impossible to think of anything at all except the cloud that swarmed around her.
Which was why it took her several seconds to realize she was moving.
At first she thought she was imagining it. With all those insects crawling over her it was no wonder she had the sensation of movement. But after another few seconds, she realized she was, indeed, moving.
Not just moving, either. Oh, no, that would be too easy. After all, she’d escaped from drowning in a vast pool of blood, narrowly missed being poisoned by the deadliest amphibians, taken captive by armed gunmen and then swarmed first by a cloud of gnats and now by flies.
She needed to have the weight of the flies sliding her toward the edge of the bridge. That was more her style, apparently.
Thank goodness Annja wasn’t the type to scream, since her face was crawling with flies.
The side of her face slid over first, with Annja becoming aware of it when the hard surface of the rock was suddenly no longer pressing against her face. Flies reached the newly revealed flesh, but there was no mistaking the fact that there was no longer anything solid beneath her head.
She tried to pull back, a turtle retreating into its shell, but all that did was slide her shoulder forward and over the edge.
She shoved downward with her feet, trying to find something she could lock on to with her toes and anchor herself, to prevent her from sliding farther.
For a moment she succeeded. The toes of her right boot caught against the edge of crevasse in the stone, halting her forward momentum, but then the weight of the insects tipped the balance and Annja began sliding forward once more.
I am not going to die like this. But the truth was, she didn’t see any way of stopping it. Her hands were tied too tightly to bring them around to help, her feet weren’t finding purchase and her head was too full of the buzz of flies for her to think straight.
Then, out of nowhere, a hand grabbed her boot.
It was so unexpected that she did scream, the force of the air coming out of her mouth momentarily keeping her from being smothered by an influx of flies. She clamped her lips shut and fought the urge to kick back against the hand that held her.
Only her instinct for self-preservation kept her from lashing out.
Fingers had locked themselves around her calf and the pull in the opposite direction stopped her slide. She hung there, her left shoulder and the top of her head still hanging over the side of the bridge.
The person kept pulling, dragging her, until, inch by inch, the rest of her body had slid backward far enough that there was solid stone beneath her once again.
In what seemed like another miracle, the cloud of flies at last seemed to be moving on. Annja was still covered with them, but there didn’t seem to be any more coming up from below and even those on her body began to take off, following their fellows into the air above like the gnats that had gone before.
Annja spat sharply several times, clearing flies from her mouth. A few violent shakes of her head removed ones that had been crawling in her hair and ears.
“You all right, Annja?”
She recognized Roux’s voice and realized that it had been he who had saved her life. Somehow, even in the midst of dealing with the flies himself, he had realized that she was in trouble and had pulled himself forward on his stomach until he’d been in a position to arrest her slide.
“I’m good,” she told him, then turned away and spat several more times. “Thank goodness they weren’t anything bigger.”
Anything bigger.
This wasn’t over yet.
Her eyes snapped open even as hands grabbed her beneath her armpits and lifted her. She saw Ephraim in front of her, climbing to his feet. In front of him Douglas and Beck were already up, brushing flies off with short, sharp sweeps of their hands.
“Are you all—” Roux began, but Annja spun around, cutting him off midsentence.
“We need to get off this bridge, Roux. We need to do it now!”
“That’s what we’re trying to do, now let me just check—”
“We don’t have time!” Even saying it aloud made her blood turn to ice. If the pace between the first two was any indication, they had only moments.
“There were three insect plagues,” she told him. “Gnats, flies and locusts!”
Locusts.
The cloud of gnats had been bad, the swarm of flies even worse. But both of those combined weren’t even close to what a horde of locusts could do.
An active swarm could cover four hundred and fifty square miles and contain billions of insects. Their weight alone would be enough to carry every single one of them to their deaths.
Roux began swearing savagely in French, which let Annja know he understood, but his next words surprised Annja. “Your sword!” he cried. “Give me your sword.”
For a moment she almost said no. It hadn’t been that long ago that both Roux and his former apprentice, Garin Braden, had been angling to take the sword away from her and claim it as their own. Roux had been
convinced the sword had the power to release him from his extended lifetime and had wanted it for the release it symbolized. Braden, on the other hand, believed something similar, but he wanted the sword to keep it safe and prevent Roux from making a rash decision they might both come to regret. The two men had done everything in their power to get Annja to relinquish the blade and, when that didn’t work, had actively tried to take it from her.
That time was behind them now. They both still coveted the sword, but they had acknowledged that she was its rightful bearer and had become content to let events play out as they would.
Without even asking what he wanted it for, Annja manifested the sword, calling it to her from the otherwhere. As always it appeared fully formed in her hands. Because of her position the sword appeared standing vertically behind her back. Roux took it from her and carefully slashed through the ropes that bound her hands. Her arms ached as the blood suddenly flowed, but she knew it would pass in a moment. She glanced at the sword and sent it back before someone else saw it and she ended up with a bullet in her back.
A deep thrumming reached her ears. To Annja it sounded like a million playing cards bouncing against the spokes of a million bicycle wheels, but she knew what it really was and it was terrifying. They couldn’t be caught in the open, not this time. None of them would survive.
Ephraim was staring back at them, fear on his face as the sound grew in the distance, and she gave him the best advice she could.
“Run!”
Chapter 39
Not being so worried about where she put her feet allowed Annja to instinctively make the right choices and every step she made was as swift and sure as a mountain goat. Annja watched Ephraim’s eyes widen as she gained on him and then he, too, turned and began rushing for the other side.
Ahead of him, Gardner and Douglas were standing like fools, staring at them charging forward. Annja had a sudden vision of them all slamming into one another at full speed and toppling over like bowling pins. To keep that from happening, she bellowed, “Run! Run!”
Just before Ephraim reached them they finally got the message, turning and taking off. Over their heads, Annja could see the end of the bridge and the entranceway to the room beyond. For all they knew that room might be another death trap, but Annja would take that possibility over certain death any day of the week.
The sound of the bugs blotted out Roux’s footfalls behind her. She was tempted to look back, to make sure he was still with her. But if she slipped and fell, it was over. If she didn’t topple off the bridge, she’d slow the others down and they didn’t have a second to spare.
Annja caught up with Ephraim as the surface underfoot grew wider. They were almost to the end, she realized. Just a few more yards. Rather than rush past her friend, Annja swooped in behind him, linked her arm with his and used some of her momentum to help carry him the rest of the way.
Gardner and Douglas had disappeared through the entrance at the end of the bridge, and Annja and Ephraim followed suit. They found the two security team members gasping for breath inside a small antechamber. Annja left Ephraim leaning against a wall and turned back to the entrance to find Roux standing just inside, facing the way they had come. Roux was waving his hands, beckoning those still out on the bridge to hurry.
Annja peered over his shoulder and watched as first Connolly and then Grimes ran past them into the room.
That left only Hamilton and Beck.
Hamilton was taller than Beck had longer strides. He had pulled a short distance in front of the other man when disaster struck and didn’t see it happen.
Annja watched as Beck’s foot came down on what must have been a slippery patch of stone, saw him stumble, then fall on the bridge. For a second she thought he was going to slide right off, but he managed to stop himself from toppling over.
Annja knelt by the doors with her hands pressed tightly over her ears and still she could hear the noise, pounding at her eardrums and threatening to render her deaf.
Hamilton, unaware of his colleague’s difficulty, reached the edge of the bridge and raced into the room where the others were waiting just as Beck lurched back to his feet.
Beck glanced down, blanched at whatever it was he saw and looked up again, his gaze meeting Annja’s. He lurched forward on unsteady feet and for a split second she saw regret flash across his face. He opened his mouth to say something….
The locusts erupted from below, a swarm so huge, so dense, that it looked like a solid mass as it swept over him.
One minute Beck was standing there on the bridge and the next he was gone.
The locusts continued to swarm upward in what seemed like a neverending stream and Annja watched in horror from the edge of the entranceway.
If they had all been caught on that bridge…
There was no guarantee that the locusts wouldn’t follow them into the room, so Connolly ordered them to continue moving. After all, there was nothing they could do for Beck. Leaving the bridge behind them, they cautiously made their way down a winding corridor until they came to another small chamber. This one seemed empty, so Grimes confirmed first with Connolly and then called a break.
Annja was just about to sit when Grimes strode across the chamber, lifted Ephraim by the lapels of his shirt and slammed him against the wall.
“What the hell is going on, Professor? I thought you said this was a fortress citadel, like Masada. A place for the royal family to use if they wanted to get away from it all. Right now all I see is one trap after another and no sign that anyone ever lived here at all. What’s going on?”
Annja stepped closer, ready to kick Grimes’s ass, guards or no guards, when she felt Roux stir next to her.
“I would think even an idiot like yourself could see what was happening,” Roux said.
That got Grimes’s attention. He dropped Ephraim and spun around, murder in his eyes.
“Excuse me?”
“I said it should be plainly obvious, even to an idiot like yourself. You’re right. This isn’t a citadel, it’s a vault to protect the staff. And the very plagues that Aaron called down upon the land of Egypt aeons ago are guardians for what the vault is supposed to be protecting. Seems rather fitting, doesn’t it?”
Grimes fumed, but didn’t advance on Roux as Annja had expected. Roux might look old, but there was a presence to him and when he was angry very few men tangled with him. Grimes glanced back at Ephraim. “Plagues?”
“Yes,” the professor said. “The Hebrew Scripture tells us that when the pharaoh refused to release the people of Israel from captivity in Egypt, Moses and his brother Aaron were sent to convince him otherwise. Aaron called down ten plagues with his staff to show the power of the Almighty to Pharaoh. We’ve already faced the first four and in their proper order—water into blood followed by plagues of frogs, gnats and flies. We’ve also faced one that was out of sequential order, specifically number eight, a plague of locusts.”
“That leaves five more,” Connolly said.
“That’s correct.” Ephraim counted them off on his fingers. “Number five was a disease that killed all the livestock in the land. Number six a dust-filled wind that produced boils on anyone it touched. Number seven was a massive storm full of thunder and hail. Number eight we’ve already encountered and number nine was a plague of darkness.”
Hamilton frowned. “That’s only nine. You said there were ten. What’s the last one?”
“The last plague was death,” Annja interjected.
Grimes was pacing back and forth. After a moment he stopped and said, “Are you telling me that we have to get through five more of these damned things before we reach the chamber where the staff is held?”
Ephraim nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”
A collective groan came from the group.
“You could a
lways turn back and forget about the staff,” Annja said. She knew Grimes and Connolly wouldn’t turn back now, even if she could convince what was left of the security detail to.
Grimes spun around to face her. “Shut up! If I hear anything like that again I’ll have you gagged. No one is going back now, not after what we’ve been through.”
Turning back to Ephraim, he said, “It’s your job to guide us through this, Professor. The lives of your students depend on it. So what can we expect from plague number five?”
Annja bristled at the information that the grad students who’d accompanied them on the dig had been taken hostage. She’d hoped they’d made it back to Jerusalem safely and she hadn’t stopped to consider that if Ephraim had been caught they might have been, too. If they were harmed, Grimes and Connolly were going to pay.
Ephraim had been considering Grimes’s question while Annja sat there fuming. “The fact that we’ve already faced the eighth plague, the plague of locusts, suggests that those who relocated the staff here after the fall of the Temple were more concerned with guarding the staff than they were at rolling out the plagues in order. With that in mind, I can’t see we’d have to face the fifth plague at all. Unless you’ve got some livestock I’m not aware of?”
That earned a laugh from both Gardner and Hamilton, which, Annja realized, had probably been Ephraim’s intention. Getting some of Grimes’s men on their side wasn’t a bad idea.
Grimes, however, didn’t find it amusing. “Oh, I’m sure I could find something to slaughter around here if necessary.”
Ephraim ignored the remark. “My guess is that we’re going to have to deal with either plague number six or seven next. The dust that causes boils or a storm of thunder and hail.”
Lovely, Annja mused.
Chapter 40
After some discussion, the decision was made to prepare themselves for the next plague on the list.
Everyone was ordered to cover any exposed skin. Pants were taped at the ankles, sleeves at the wrists. Hats and spare clothing were used to cover their heads and faces. For places that had to be exposed in order for them to keep moving, such as the skin around the eyes, large amounts of sunscreen and lip balm were applied in the hope that doing so would keep the dust away from flesh. Hands were either protected by gloves or, in Annja’s and Roux’s cases, generously covered in sunscreen.