He died, then, amid a chorus of screams.
SIXTEEN
Olivieri stood inside the stall he’d been using as his own sleeping quarters. His bedroll had been bundled into a corner and three plastic chairs and a table now stood in the middle of the stall. Chunks of broken bitumen from the coffin casing lay in a pile on the floor. A dozen smaller pieces sat on the table, glassy smooth but with sharp edges. Some of them were those discovered with the cadavers Professor Marshall’s team had studied, but the rest they would have to prepare for themselves.
Chloe sat in one of the chairs, using a cordless drill to make holes in the new bitumen shards while Errick threaded thick, rough twine through the holes. Olivieri had chosen the new pieces of bitumen for size, preferring bits that had lines engraved in them from that ancient, inscrutable language that Father Cornelius thought he could translate. Olivieri had tried not to think too much about the priest’s ability to make sense of those engravings. He didn’t have time for envy.
“This one,” he said, selecting another piece from the floor. His back and knees ached from crouching to examine the bitumen.
Over the whine of the drill, Chloe hadn’t heard him.
Olivieri tapped her shoulder and she took her finger off the drill’s trigger.
In the resulting quiet, they heard screaming. Olivieri snapped up his head, muttered “no.” Errick stood so fast that his chair crashed over backward. His hands opened and closed and he swore, realizing he was weaponless.
“Chloe,” he said, reaching for the drill.
She frowned and turned her back on him. Olivieri understood. No way would she give up her only weapon so that he could have one. Chloe faced the stall opening, finger on the trigger of the drill. Olivieri took a step backward, though he knew that it meant his back would be against the wall. More screams came from the passage. He heard a thump that could only be a body hitting the floor, and then people were rushing past the stall opening, fleeing, and Olivieri knew they had to go.
“Run!” he snapped. “Both of you, go!”
Errick glanced at the pile of bitumen, snatched up the biggest, sharpest chunk from the pile, and stepped into the passage. A scream swept in on the wind and Olivieri saw one of the staff crash into Errick, who tried to sidestep, to free himself from entanglement. Olivieri watched Errick look up, ready for a fight, and then a climbing ax flashed through dim light as it whickered down and stabbed into Errick’s flesh. He jerked aside at the last moment and the point pierced his shoulder instead of his chest. He went down, and his attacker rode him down, raising the ax for another swing.
Olivieri shouted, as if he might stop murder with only his voice.
Chloe hurled herself out of the stall and used the drill like a club, batting at the skull of Errick’s attacker. The man swayed backward and Olivieri saw it was Zeybekci. Or the demon, inside Zeybekci.
Crying out, Chloe jammed the drill into his cheek and pulled the trigger, the bit whining as it dug into flesh and bone. Zeybekci only smiled wider as he reached up and grabbed Chloe by the hair. The drill bit plunged deeper into his face, blood spraying Chloe as he curled his fingers into claws, dug in his nails, and ripped out her throat. Inhumanly strong, the demon in Zeybekci stood as Chloe crumpled to the floor, blood gouting from her throat. The drill thumped to the floor next to Chloe’s twitching, dying flesh, and Zeybekci turned to stare at Errick.
Olivieri could not move. He refused to breathe, for if he did, the demon might hear him. Might see him. Might come for him.
As if it heard his thoughts, the demon turned and looked into the stall. Zeybekci’s mouth grinned.
Then someone else was there, moving fast. A fist crashed into that mouth, and Olivieri heard the demon snarl in surprise and fury. It didn’t like that anyone might dare to fight back.
* * *
Walker heard people shouting his name. Kim and Hakan were right behind him, running along the level-two passage, but there would be no hesitation now. Mr. Avci would wonder, later, if he had done all he could to save Zeybekci. The Turkish government would launch a formal inquiry. As the UN observer, Kim Seong would have to do her best to explain what happened next. But for any of that to happen, there needed to be a next.
He threw the punch on instinct, but Walker’s instincts had been honed through years of practice and deadly experience. When he hit Zeybekci, he did it from the waist, snapping his fist forward with the strength of his whole body. That blow would have dropped an ordinary man. Lights out. Zeybekci staggered back, twisted around and hissed at him, the hiss rising into a bestial snarl.
Walker had pissed off the demon. He wanted to be proud of that, but then its grin returned and he saw the corners of Zeybekci’s mouth rip, blood running from the edges, the smile too wide for a human face.
He’d have given anything for a gun just then. He had one, but not in his hands. Not now. Hakan probably still had Zeybekci’s, but he couldn’t bank on probably.
The demon lunged at him. Walker sidestepped, dropped his elbow on top of Zeybekci’s skull. Its hooked fingers clawed at his leg, tore his pants, and dug furrows into the flesh of his thigh as it went down. Walker pivoted, gave himself room, and snapped a hard kick at its head, pistoned his leg, and did it twice more.
With a scream, the demon wearing Zeybekci’s flesh surged up at him, grabbed hold and lifted him off the ground. The stink of blood and death filled the passage. Red life steamed off the timber floors. The demon held Walker off the ground and rose up, its face only inches from his. Its breath made him retch, and its touch made his skin crawl. Fear moved like infection through his blood. He fought it, but its stink, the filthy grime that seemed to coat his own flesh just because it stared at him …
Unclean, he thought. This is what evil feels like.
“You wanted something to believe in,” it rasped in Zeybekci’s voice. “Believe in me and the things I will do to your little boy when I finally touch his flesh. The ways I will pull him apart. The door is open now, Benjamin. I am here. And now others will wake and feel my presence and they will remember the world of men and the pleasures of human flesh, and they will join—”
Walker heard a crack as Zeybekci went rigid. The demon’s grip relaxed and Walker flailed as he dropped to the floor. Rage flooded him as he started to reach for Zeybekci, but the Turk was already collapsing on top of him. His eyes had gone blank, and Walker caught him by the arm and throat. As he twisted the body and dropped Zeybekci on his side, the body slumping, he knew the man was dead.
“Oh, no,” Kim said, coming up behind him.
Meryam stood in the passage, the bloody climbing ax in her hand. Pale and shaking, bent over and dragging in big gulps of breath, she stared at the man she had just killed. The man she had murdered to save Walker’s life. Behind her, like some kind of carrion creature, Calliope stood, filming it all.
“Where the hell did you two come from?” he asked, one hand on the wall as he pushed to his feet.
“Heard screaming…” Meryam said, sucking in breaths between words. “We went through level one, came up the steps. Thought it might be … better than following … in your footsteps.”
Calliope kept shooting, and he wondered how much her footage would show.
Walker stared at Meryam, curious as to just what was wrong with her. The circles beneath her eyes were dark and sagging and her skin had a sallow quality that made her look pale despite her natural hue. Not possessed—not like Adam—but something had taken hold of her just as powerfully as any demon. They’d all gleaned enough from her fight with Adam to know Meryam was ill, but Walker wanted to know just how ill. He thought he ought to know whether the woman would be able to continue taking care of herself.
Considering she had possibly just saved his life, he thought maybe Meryam would take care of herself just fine.
Walker glanced at Hakan, saw the gun in his hand, dangling uselessly at his side, and silently damned him for not getting there sooner, for not pulling the trigger and takin
g Zeybekci’s death on himself so that Meryam would not have the man’s blood on her hands. That might not have been fair to Hakan, but he couldn’t help thinking it. Besides, a bullet would have been cleaner.
“You killed it,” Olivieri said, emerging from the stall just beside them, staring down at the corpse of the possessed man.
Meryam glanced around the passage. Walker did the same. Errick held one hand over a bloody wound on his shoulder. Chloe lay dead, and there were several other corpses scattered on the ancient timber floors.
“No,” she said, hollow-voiced. “I only killed Zeybekci.”
The monitor lay facedown with blood pooling up through the hair at the back of his skull like groundwater from a fresh hole. Little rivers spilled down through the man’s matted hair. It was no way to die. Walker glanced at the faces now beginning to gather and saw that they felt the same. Meryam had done it to save his life—maybe all of their lives—but still it seemed unfathomably cruel. Had been cruel, but the cruelty had not been Meryam’s.
You wanted something to believe in. Believe in me, the demon had whispered.
He glanced up at Calliope, right into the eye of the camera, and pointed at her. Not at the camera, at her. “You’re going to delete the vid you just shot of this. All of this.”
Calliope ignored him, so Walker turned to Meryam. The footage would show her murdering Zeybekci. Nobody watching it would believe there had been something else driving him, something possessing him. Nobody who hadn’t been inside the ark would know the way it felt to be tainted by that evil, to feel it on your skin and taste it on your tongue, to breathe it in the air.
“It’s a conversation for later,” Meryam said. “When we know who we’re really talking to.”
Walker looked around and studied their faces, watched their eyes as they processed her statement. Realization came to them slowly, but it did come to them. It began with Kim, then Hakan. One by one he saw brows furrow and eyes narrow and then they tore their gazes from the corpses and began to glance at the others in the passage around them, wondering—just as Walker worried—where the demon had gone. As Meryam had said, Zeybekci was dead. But the thing that had possessed him, and Adam before him, was still among them.
None of the faces around him betrayed the demon’s presence. The wildly cruel grin and those ancient, knowing eyes were nowhere to be seen, but if Walker had learned anything thus far about his adversary, it was that the demon knew how to hide.
He nodded at Meryam, a silent acknowledgment that he shared her distress.
Meryam straightened up, hand still gripping the bloodstained climbing ax. “I want to cry. I want to scream. But I’m going to put all of that off until the time comes when I can do it knowing this thing is not going to be able to kill anyone else.”
“So you’re … you’re sure?” someone asked.
Olivieri uttered a broken, humorless laugh. “You must be joking. Are we sure? You’ve just seen it with your own eyes!”
“So what now?” Errick asked, wincing as he kept one hand clamped over his shoulder wound. “If this … if it can just jump from one person to another, it’s going to keep picking us off until we’re all dead.”
“You know we’re working on that,” Olivieri said, unclenching his fist to reveal a piece of carved bitumen with a strand of twine threaded through a hole in its center.
Errick shook his head. “This is insane. It can’t be real.”
“No?” Hakan said, stepping forward. “Ask him.”
The guide nudged Zeybekci’s corpse with one foot, as if to make sure he was dead. Unnerved, the others stared at him. Slightly hunched, Hakan’s eyes were hidden, and Walker had a breathless moment when he wondered if the demon had not gone very far at all. Then Hakan looked around the circle. Gun still in his hand, as if he feared he might need to use it at any moment, he used his free hand to point at one of his workers and an archaeology student.
“You two. Go down to level one and bring everyone back here. Everyone, without exception. If anyone argues, tell them I will be unhappy if I must come and fetch them myself,” Hakan said. “I will go and gather Father Cornelius, Feyiz, and the others, and we will bring Adam here as well.”
The worker started to turn immediately, but the student—Walker didn’t know her name—hesitated and looked at Meryam. It was her project, after all. She was the boss, and Walker felt certain the entire staff was aware of the animosity between her and Hakan.
Meryam gave a single nod. “Go. Quickly.”
The two rushed off even as Hakan continued, this time speaking to Meryam directly.
“We must remove them,” he said, gesturing at the bodies of Zeybekci, Dr. Dwyer, and the others. “Anyone who has yet to see this horror should be saved from it.”
“I’ll handle it,” Walker offered.
Kim volunteered to help, and immediately began poking into some of the stalls for blankets and things with which they might wrap the remains of their dead.
Meryam rapped on the wall between two stalls to get everyone’s attention.
“I’m guessing there’re a few hours left till morning,” she said. “We’re going to pull the heaters together. Bedrolls and tents and blankets. We’re going to get a hot meal in us and then we’re packing our gear, so we can be ready. At first light, we’re evacuating the ark. We’ll take it as slowly as we must, but we’ve got to get out of this cave and down the mountain.”
“If the blizzard’s still raging, we could die out there,” Errick argued.
Meryam stared at him, and Walker knew what she had to be thinking. With that wound in his shoulder, Errick was in no shape to make a descent. But whatever disease had been eating at her, neither was Meryam. The difference between them was that one had already realized that they had no other choice.
“You could die out there,” she said. “Chances are that some of us will. The difference is in the guarantee. You could die if we go. But you’ll most certainly die if we stay.”
* * *
Meryam stands in the front room of the third-story flat in Mayfair where she and Adam have made their little nest. The view from the window is quintessential London, off-white row houses lining a road so narrow it can barely accommodate a taxi and a bicycle at the same time. Gray morning light creates a peculiar aura, a surreal quality that makes it seem like Faerie might be only steps away. In small flower boxes, vivid colors blossom amid the gray. This is spring in London.
The window is open just a few inches, the morning still a bit chilly, and she can hear the distant laughter of children. She imagines them playing some sort of game and steps to the window, craning her neck for a better view. A laughing boy careens into view, kicking a football into the road, careless of whatever traffic might wend its way along the narrow road. Morning dew glistens on the curb and the street, and shines on the windows of the flats opposite Meryam’s.
A young woman rides by on a bicycle. Her hair is a vibrant, cobalt blue. Years ago, Meryam spent the better part of a year with her hair that color, and she wonders why she ever changed it. Then she spots the little girl in pursuit of the boy with the football. She runs with ferocity, arms pumping at her sides, face scrunched intensely, and it’s clear to Meryam that the football belongs to her. The little boy has stolen it, perhaps for amusement, but stolen it nevertheless. The young woman on the bike calls out a warning and swerves, barely able to avoid the little girl.
Meryam wants to shout, her heart pounding. They don’t need her warning, this young woman and little girl who each look something like Meryam herself. Other Meryams, from other times. Her face flushes even as she shivers with the chilly spring air snaking in through the gap in the window. The accident’s been avoided, but her gaze tracks the running girl.
“Mother,” a voice says, just over her shoulder.
Icy fingers touch her arm and Meryam flinches. Where is Adam? Not here. Not where he ought to be. And where is her cancer? Not here. Not where it ought to be.
“Mother.”<
br />
Her eyes track the running girl as she catches up to the little thief, the boy who took her football. She is fierce.
Those fingers clutch at her forearm, cold enough to sear her. Again, that young voice whispers her name. Meryam forces herself to tear her gaze from the window, and she turns.
What is it, Jo? she asks.
Jo smiles back. JoJo, her little Josephine. “Don’t be sad, Mother,” her little girl says. “You were never meant to have me. They only let me live so they could take me away. If you’re sad, you’re only giving them what they want.”
Confused—but you’re not confused, are you—Meryam crouches in front of her girl. Jo has the loveliest eyes, a bright copper that gleams and offsets the soft brown of her skin. Her hair falls in natural ringlets, such a beautiful little girl. One day she will make people catch their breath from the mere sight of her. One day.
But why is Jo up here in the flat? How can she be here and down there on the street, chasing the boy who stole her football, all at the same time?
Have you caught the boy? Meryam asks her.
Jo takes her hand and clutches it tightly, staring into her eyes. “Don’t look out the window again, Mother.”
Meryam hears the laughter of the little boy, the little thief, carried on the breeze and it seems to grow louder. The room around her is cast in the same gray, fairy light as the view out the window, but in here with her, among the meticulously arranged furnishings and the mementos from the adventures she and Adam had before Jo came along … in here the only color is the gleaming copper of her daughter’s eyes.
“Don’t turn around,” Jo warns, but now her bright, new-penny eyes are more vivid than ever and the rest of her is fading. Those ringlet curls are little more than smoke.
No, she says, and reaches out for her little girl. Her JoJo. But Jo vanishes as her hands pass through the place where she’d been only a moment before, as if it’s the very act of trying to touch her, trying to hold on to the love that fills Meryam’s heart, that makes her daughter turn to smoke and fade away. Those copper eyes are the last to fade, followed by the echo of her voice.
Ararat Page 21