Passage Graves

by Madyson Rush

  “I thought you enjoyed studying the dead.” Asor stepped into the light of the glow stick. His tattered jumpsuit revealed portions of his emaciated, twine-wrapped body underneath.

  David’s heart stopped.

  Thatcher stood beside Asor, bound and gagged with the same prickly cord.

  Asor pulled her closer. “Your father called these ruins passage graves, portal tombs for those who believe.”

  Thatcher’s face was pale, her eyes dazed. Blood dripped from her fingers as she struggled against the twine. Asor noticed their connection. He stroked her neck. “She has more potential than I realized.”

  A large explosion sounded in the distance as an AVX discharge detonated hundreds of miles away. One of Maeshowe’s sister graves was wiped from the earth. The ground shook. Dust and rock fell from the walls.

  David lifted the seal towards Asor.

  The old man straightened his back. His chest heaved. He clicked his tongue. “You thought you were so different from Brenton, but in the end, lacking faith will have killed you both.”

  Thatcher blinked down at the ground. Her gun was in the dirt, hidden behind the corpse.

  The ground shuddered with another AVX eruption. This one was much closer. As Maeshowe’s walls crumbled, David dove across the floor. He grabbed the hilt of the gun and pulled the trigger.

  Five slugs ruptured Asor’s chest. The force of the bullets threw him into the eternal stone, but he clung to Thatcher, carrying her back with him. He looked at David with a smile. One of his teeth had broken from the impact.

  Dust swirled off the dirt floor. The room came alive.

  “Give me the seal!” Asor shouted over the noise.

  Thatcher cringed, trying to press one ear into her shoulder.

  David grabbed his ears. The sound reverberated inside his head, like his conscious mind had betrayed him by conjuring clangorous thoughts. His teeth chattered. Vibrations cascaded along the sinew of his tissues, a reverberation that liquefied his marrow. His muscles felt as if they could drop off his bones like overcooked meat. The cacophony was bizarre. Shrieking ghosts—their cries warped and distorted—soared around the room, winding in his ears and pulsing inside his throbbing brain. Their message was clear: Come mightily, come with horror, my Horsemen!

  Asor threw Thatcher to the ground. He pulled at the twine at his wrist. His chant mixed with the Maeshowe’s crescendo.

  Thatcher’s eyes widened with terror.

  “It’s not real!” David yelled. “Brynne, it isn’t real!”

  She tore at her throat, desperate to remove an invisible hand.

  David lunged at Asor, knocking the old man off his feet. Thatcher dropped and writhed on the floor. She couldn’t breathe.

  A third tremor rocked the passage grave, splitting the western wall. Isbister was gone.

  Asor snapped under David’s weight. He could feel the old man scramble madly beneath him, lashing out with razor-sharp fingernails and teeth, biting and scratching, everywhere at once. David flipped Asor onto his back, but dropped the seal into the dirt.

  The old man twisted unnaturally. With a harrowing crack, he broke the vertebra along his spine to reach for the seal.

  Close to the eternal stone, the diamond seal began to glow.

  Subsonic noise intensified resonating throughout the chamber. Asor dug his fingers into David’s cheek, clawing his way to David’s eyes. He wiggled free, dragging his broken body across the floor with his arms. He held up the seal. The black of his pupils caught fire.

  David reached for Asor’s feet, but the old man was out of reach.

  Asor pulled his body to the eternal stone. He inserted the key inside the lock.

  The voices muted. The world was silent.

  David reached for Thatcher’s hand. She was unconscious at the center of the grave. His watch alarm beeped the end of Maeshowe’s countdown.

  00:00:00:00

  David pulled Thatcher to him.

  In a deafening burst, the AVX exploded.

  Fluid fire engulfed them, lifting them toward heaven. To his surprise, there was no pain, only warmth and blinding light and Thatcher in his arms.

  Chapter 88

  MONDAY, 5:02 a.m.

  Wiltshire, England

  Rain pelted Thatcher’s face. A moment earlier, she had been soaring through the clouds. In her dreams, she was high above the earth. Everything was peaceful.

  She lifted her head from a puddle. The prickly twine was stuck to her body. David lay on the ground beside her. Surrounding them, dawn illuminated a tall circle of rectangular boulders. The giant sarsen stones, bearded with gray moss, were stacked in arches or standing solitary.

  “Stonehenge,” she whispered, carefully sitting up.

  David moaned. His wrist was broken. She lifted his head into her lap.

  The warmth of her dream slowly evaporated from her body. The morning chill took over. She shivered and brushed the mud off of David’s face.

  Somehow, they had survived.

  Chapter 89

  TUESDAY, 9:49 p.m.

  London, England

  Javan twisted the Mayan ring through his bandaged fingers. His face was knotted with anxiety, his jaw tightly clenched. The graves had been destroyed, the voices silenced. The first seal was lost, its final resting place unknown. Perhaps, like Maeshowe, it had been obliterated. His office was a disaster. It had been vandalized by intruders, most likely someone who rallied for his position as the leader of Abaddon. His authority over the largest remaining splinter group had come to a disappointing end. No one could be trusted. Now that the first seal was gone, only three could claim the post of Horseman and be saved from the Apocalypse.

  He set the Mayan the ring on his desk and looked through the papers stacked before him. A manila envelope near the bottom of the pile caught his attention.

  CONFIDENTIAL: HIGH PRIORITY - OPEN UPON RECIEPT

  The British Ministry of Defense had sent the letter days ago. He opened the envelope and removed a packet of medical results.

  There was a knock at his door.

  “What is it?” He looked up from the report. His face paled. He jumped back in his chair, away from the desk.

  A gun fired from the doorway.

  Blood spilled from Javan’s chest. He fought to lift his head.

  The pistol was placed against Javan’s forehead.

  “Please, I’ll tell you who killed your father!” Javan begged. “Ian, wait—it was you!”

  Ian pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 90

  WEDNESDAY, 3:04 p.m.

  London, England

  Grave markers spanned the rolling hills of Westminster’s Royal Army Cemetery. Around the line of tombstones were a dozen mourners, at the edge of the funeral party stood Thatcher.

  “God will call thee by thy name, William Marshall Lang,” the officiating priest said. “And when the trumpet shall sound at long last, awakening the dead, God shall beckon thee to wake saying, ‘Arise my beloved, my beautiful one, and come.’”

  Four uniformed policemen draped a British flag over Lang’s coffin.

  Gunfire blasted in salute.

  One by one, the crowd placed flowers over the casket and dispersed.

  ****

  Ian sat in the driver’s seat of a car. He watched the memorial service through tinted windows. His mother’s Mayan ring fit snugly around his thumb.

  The manila envelope from Javan’s desk sat open in his lap. The contents were interesting to say the least.

  CONFIDENTIAL: HIGH PRIORITY - OPEN UPON RECIEPT

  He skimmed through the analysis of DNA data.

  TEST SUBJECT: WILLIAM DAVID HYDEN

  IN COMPARISON TO: BRENTON GERALD HYDEN

  He stopped at the bottom of the page.

  CONCLUSION:

  SUBJECT is of no relation to Brenton Gerald Hyden

  Ian tossed the letter onto the passenger seat. He shifted into drive and left the cemetery.

  ****

  Dress
ed entirely in white, the old man hobbled through the grave yard. Many things had changed, but his disfigurement stayed the same. It was a disappointment. He hid the malformation beneath an oversized suit coat. A white top hat was pulled low over his eyes, its brim shielded his face from the sun. He shuffled forward, dragging behind him an ivory cane.

  As Ian drove by, the old man looked up with a smile. His eyes were pearl oblivion. Entirely colorless, they lacked both a pupil and an iris. Regardless, his vision was perfect. Power pulsed through his body. Energy vibrated from his pores. It was a subsonic hum, unrecognizable to the human ear. It merely disturbed the natural balance of things, unsettled nature around him. Strangers became dizzy, animals panicked.

  He turned in Ian’s direction. Soon, they would collaborate. The priest desperately needed direction. Few were aware of the approaching Apocalypse, and only the White Horseman understood the grand orchestration that was prepared for his Chosen.

  Three more were already selected. Asor had no doubt they would ascribe to his will.

  Chapter 91

  WEDNESDAY, 5:26 p.m.

  Box Cemetery in Swindon

  Wiltshire, England

  Thatcher walked along another line of gravestones. Moss-ridden, cracked, and buried under overgrowth, these markers were far more antiquated than those at the Royal Army Cemetery. Sunlight danced through the trees, illuminating portions of the soggy grounds. She stepped over the mud, careful not to slip. Passing under the thick boughs of a willow tree, she entered a familiar area encircled by eroded cherubim statues.

  “Thought I might find you here,” she said.

  David looked up from a freshly dug grave.

  “I report for work Monday, but it looks like my job has already been done.” She handed him a copy of the London Globe. The headline read:

  Hundreds of Thousands Return Home After Ebola Scare Ends

  He looked up at her. “So you decided to go back to work?”

  She shrugged. “What about you?”

  “Can I slip back into the mundane as if none of this ever happened?”

  Thatcher met his eyes.

  David frowned. “I can’t think of anything I’d like more.”

  “What would you study now that Maeshowe is gone?”

  He lifted an eyebrow to consider the alternatives. “Frogs, I think.”

  “I heard Cambridge has an impressive biology department.”

  “I heard that, too.”

  The footstep-sounding wind blew through the trees.

  “Lang’s ceremony was respectful,” she said, pulling a strand of hair behind one ear. “A little long-winded, but you would’ve appreciated it.”

  “He was a good man,” David said. He looked down at Brenton’s headstone and read the engraving. “‘Arise my beloved, my beautiful one, and come.’ What do you think that means?”

  Thatcher stood beside him and studied the marker. “I don’t know. Perhaps that the dead aren’t truly lost to us. Maybe, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be with us again.” She looked around at the other graves. For some reason, the place no longer felt diabolic. Instead, it held nostalgia, a strange type of serenity. This was somewhere she wouldn’t mind being buried. She looked at David. There was something different about him. The sadness he hid away had found its way to the surface.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” she whispered.

  He lowered his head introspectively. “I’m not the only one who has lost someone.”

  Thatcher took in a deep breath. David knew how to quiet her.

  “Marek was a good man,” she said.

  “And your uncle, too,” David said. “I think Hummer wanted to rectify his mistakes, especially when it came to you.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, listening to the wind.

  “‘Everything has an end, even death…’” Thatcher recalled the words of Mrs. Ehrman. “I think I finally understand what her husband meant. Those aren’t words of despair, but of hope.”

  “How so?” David buried his hands in his pockets.

  “If the Apocalypse is the end of all we know—we can fear it, fight it, run from it, or we can accept it as something good.”

  “‘The death of death into an eternal Spring?’” he asked.

  Thatcher turned to him in surprise. “You do know your scriptures.”

  “Tell anybody, and I’ll give you hell.”

  Thatcher snorted and shook her head. “What is the end of times but a transformation from death to life? There’ll be earthquakes and plagues, but our beloved dead will rise and return to us.”

  “So how do we survive to see those things?”

  “Maybe we aren’t meant to…” She paused, uncertain. “But I think we should try. What if we have a role in how things end? What if our ancestors need us?”

  “How would we help them?”

  She paused a moment. The conclusion was difficult. It was one thing to say it, and quite another to mean it. “We could start by forgiving the ghosts that haunt us.”

  David nodded. “Redeem the past to save the future?”

  What lay ahead suddenly felt overwhelming.

  A scripture came to her mind. She took his hand. “‘The dead shall save the living and the living shall save the dead.’”

  EPILOGUE

  WEDNESDAY, 1:44 p.m.

  Cayo District, Belize

  Deep in the jungles of Belize, the Mopan River snaked through acres of wild forest. Branches of leafy canopy drooped over the river. Catamarans crowded every dock along the sandy banks. Natives formed lines like work ants that spanned from the boats up to the Xunantunich ruins. They carried equipment into the hills. Archeologists, geologists, task men, laborers, everyone was working to unveil the lost city. The excavation was tremendous, both in size and in cost. Some were willing to pay any price to uncover the secrets buried in the earth.

  “Ven aca! Ven aca!” The voices of the workers echoed out from a cave inside the mountain.

  One of the task men ran into the tunnel. The chamber air was comfortably chilly compared to the outside heat.

  “Trae la luz!” the worker called.

  The path twisted into the mountain, a network of passages to a myriad of rooms. The task man flipped on the overhead beam of his construction helmet. Rock carvings reflected in the light on passage walls, stone faces with wide-eyed expressions, wild and frightening. The visages guarded the path as it forked into two partially excavated rooms.

  “Ven aca!”

  The task man followed the yells into the smaller of the two chambers. His worker held a small flashlight over the area where he was digging. A stone box was partially buried within the dirt.

  The task man knelt beside it. He dug around the edges. “Abrelo!”

  The worker joined him with a shovel.

  He tucked the metal end under the lid and threw his weight over the handle, forcing the box to unseal. A rush of air escaped, the exhalation of dust. They pushed the lid aside.

  “Dios mio.” The worker made the sign of the cross.

  An oblong clay pot rested in the corner of the box. A dusty seal clamped the casing together at the middle. The task man brushed dirt off the seal. It was entirely rubies, with a string of darker gems forming a crimson spiral that wound toward the center of the seal.

  “Tomalo—seremos ricos.” He reached into the box, pulled the seal off its container, and held it into the light. “Tiene que valer mucho dinero.”

  His lips curled with a greedy smile.

  The seal began to glow.

  The task man’s hands began to tremble. They would not open. He couldn’t let go of the seal. Every tendon and muscle twitched, and then froze in place. He collapsed in seizure. An excruciating, squeezing pain wrung his body like an invisible olive press. His sinew liquefied. Blood began to trickle out of his pores. Beginning at his fingertips, up his arm, across his chest, and then along his neck and face, blood seeped from every vesicle.

  The seal dropped from h
is hand. It rolled through the dirt and stopped beside the worker’s feet. The worker dropped his flashlight and ran out of the room.

  “Demonios! Espiritus!”

  Acknowledgments

  Someone wise once told me “if you write it, they will read.” Well, actually nobody told me that, I came up with it myself and I’m not very wise, but I’ve said it, it is out there, so on we go. I wrote it, so read this:

  This book is 2/9 Bird’s baby, so she deserves 22.2% of the credit. Bird has read PASSAGE GRAVES more than anyone—including myself. Many a long night, she stayed awake with me to debate the storylines of Thatcher, David, Ian, and Asor. Hands down, Bird is my most encouraging cheerleader—certainly the loudest and most consistent, and the best cook.

  Thanks Dad for working hard your entire life to give your children the privilege of dreaming big.

  I’d like to give a shout-out to Dr. Aaron Watson, whose monumental research on Maeshowe inspired the brain seed of this story. Julia Starr, thank you for your brilliant cover art. I look forward to working with you again. Cousin Chris, your boundless enthusiasm made Passage Graves a reality. Thanks to Sarah for walking my Jack Russell Terriers again and again so I could get this finished. Mulder & Scully, you taught me to never stop believing “the truth is out there.”

  At the top of this list, I want to thank the most important person: YOU!

  YOU determine the success of this book. Yes, YOU, the good-looking, sophisticated reader of these sentences. If YOU enjoyed Passage Graves, spread the word. Positive reviews on Amazon and Goodreads make a world of difference to an independent writer. Passage Graves is a part of Amazon’s “Kindle Library Lending”—loan this book to a friend for free. If YOU like it, lend it.

  Follow me on PASSAGEGRAVES.COM and “like” Passage Graves and Madyson Rush on Facebook for updates about the release of the second book in this series. You, yes you!