Shadow of the Tomb Raider--Path of the Apocalypse
Page 9
Miguel opened his mouth and then shut it.
“Ace, put him on a truck,” the commander said. “Come on, let’s move, everybody. We’ve got her.”
A burly man with slicked-back hair stepped forward holding a knife, leaning around to cut Miguel’s hands free. Miguel tried to swallow again, and again failed. He wasn’t going to mourn the Santo Almeda brothers, but he felt bad for Lara and Jonah. These people were psychopaths. His new friends were about to be in a world of hurt.
* * *
The tunnel from the first bat cave was wide and high at first, but quickly narrowed, the ceiling finally dropping so low that Lara had to edge forward in a crouch. She was starting to think she might have to go back, try one of the other tunnels, when it opened up into another chamber.
She stepped into a cavern that was even larger than the first. A shallow pool covered much of the floor, the water clear and still, rough calcite formations rising up in places. There was a lot less spoor. She was now firmly out of the system’s twilight zone and into the dark—she saw several troglobite species of small creepy-crawly, all with the characteristics of selective regression that typically evolved in dark zones: pale and slow-moving, long-legged with extended antennae, eyeless. There were crickets and millipedes and white harvestmen—Jonah called them “daddy longlegs”—skittering over the dung, eating the products of its decay—mold, fungi, bacteria. She didn’t stop to inspect the water but imagined that it, too, was teeming with life—small crustaceans, fish, salamanders and frogs. With these chambers flooding fairly regularly, there was no lack of nutrients coming in to oxygenate the water and support a fairly complex bionetwork.
Lara did pause long enough to check for unusual tracks or scat. That scream she’d heard… Every cave system had its own unique biosphere. New species were regularly discovered— mostly insects, but occasionally larger animals—with some so rare that they existed as a handful of individuals in a single cave, found nowhere else on Earth. It was most likely that the screamer was an “accidental”—a beast or bird that had become lost or trapped—but she couldn’t discount running into something unheard of that called the labyrinth home. Trinity had apparently ignored the lower caves; Marin’s documentation about them was sparse, noting only that the regular floods had long since destroyed anything of interest there.
She didn’t see anything unexpected. She put on her jacket, checked her compass and watch—it had only been about half an hour since she’d left Jonah, but she had a way to go—and moved on.
Three more tunnels led out of the chamber, but there were no markings from the Trinity team to guide her. Lara chose the southernmost but hit a dead end after less than fifty meters. She quickly backtracked and tried a second passage. It was a crawl, and she regretted not packing her good kneepads, but she was rewarded after ten minutes of wriggling through the dark: another large cavern, narrower than the last.
Over many years, calcite had leached from drip water through the limestone; monstrous stalagmites and stalactites—speleothems—ran across the chamber, looking eerily man-made in her torchlight. Gypsum crystals glittered here and there along some of the formations. A rugged stone wall led up to a platform on the east side of the chamber. The shadows up there suggested the platform was the start of another passage, though even her lamp and torch combined were too weak to illuminate much. She couldn’t tell if it was one of the labyrinth tunnels, but it seemed likely. The platform was fifteen meters up.
And it’s an easy climb, she thought, studying the wall. The caverns were smooth along the waterways, craggier at the walls, the result of abrasive erosion by the water that must flood the chamber regularly. Lots of hand and foot holds. At least some of them had to be steady.
She took a quick look around the chamber before climbing. There were fewer signs of life—no unusual animal spoor, or none that she recognized. She was surprised at how breathable the air was. Really deep caves were often filled with noxious gases. There must be vents in the tunnels higher up that were staggered all the way to the surface, which was encouraging. Exposure to the elements meant more wells and openings; the more opportunities, the faster she could get to the rooms and tunnels she was looking for. She’d have to free climb but she was confident in her skills, for as scarred and battered as her body was, Lara was in excellent shape. When she wasn’t traveling, she was training.
She suddenly thought of Conrad Roth, and the look he would have on his face if he could see her ditching safety protocols left and right. It had been his voice she’d heard in her mind, when she’d been falling. Roth, who’d stepped in when her father had died, who’d taught her how to climb, taught her survival tactics, who’d sparred with her when she’d first learned how to fight. She missed him, his calm guidance, his thoughtful frowns, his thing for pistachios. He had been exactly what she needed—encouraging, stable, committed to giving her a foundation of skills so that she could pursue her dreams. And he’d died on her first big expedition, so that she could have a shot at making it to safety. She remembered sitting at his funeral pyre, watching it burn, and how she’d sworn to herself that she would work harder to protect the people she loved…
“Shut up,” she mumbled, and tapped at a few protruding rocks with her axe’s adze. She found some good candidates and started to climb.
Her body warmed as she scaled the wall, stopping to hammer at stones over her head, checking for solid holds. The climb went quickly, and she was near the top when she heard an animal sound. A high-pitched chirp, behind her in the chamber.
Frog, she thought. It had that strange liquid quality and high pitch. There were a number of rainforest frogs that screamed during mating season. Was this her mystery bat-frightener?
Lara dropped a hand so she could half turn, her headlamp swinging across the cavern’s floor. There was no movement except for shadows, but she heard the chirp again, and realized it was coming from a bit higher.
She scanned where the sloping roof met with other passages in the room—and saw something scuttling into the dark, walking along the ceiling. She caught just a glimpse of what might be the slender whip of a white tail, and then it was gone.
Salamander? Had to be. It seemed to move awfully quickly for a deep-zone dweller, but cave biology was not her strong suit. Perhaps it ate bats, and could support a higher metabolism. And that might explain the bats’ reaction to its scream.
She turned to finish her climb. She’d keep an eye out, but wasn’t too concerned. The largest cave salamander ever measured was only about thirty centimeters. Even if this kind was twice the size and suddenly felt compelled to attack something hundreds of times bigger than its regular prey—a ludicrous idea—she had her bow.
She had pulled herself to the top of the wall and saw that the platform was, as she’d hoped, an opening in a passage that extended off in both directions. Darkness crouched beyond the reach of her lamp. It was cold and silent but for her breathing and the sound of her heart. She’d climbed up into the labyrinth proper.
Lara marked the wall and started walking south, ducking beneath drops in the ceiling, twice having to crawl up and over sharp rises. There was no sign that Trinity’s people or anyone else had traveled this way, no marks or trash or random destruction. Marin’s maps hadn’t been terribly specific beyond the top corridors, but Lara had the impression that the deeper tunnels had been partly surveyed and then ignored.
At the very first branch in the new tunnel, Lara got lucky—a rocky well in the ceiling that she could climb. It would be a tight fit, but it ran only a few meters before opening into another room overhead; she could see the rounded ceiling. Another tunnel? Getting back to the top would take time, but she could make up for the lost minutes on her way back through the top passages, once she got up.
Carefully, she promised herself, but glanced at her watch. She still had an hour and twenty-two minutes before Jonah would expect her. It was vitally important that they were on their way to Peru as soon as she got her pictures.
Lara edged higher, using her legs to hold her in place where the passage widened near the midpoint. The rock was uneven, and she forced her body into strange contortions to get to the top. The bow snagged again. Wriggling around in the tight space to work the bow loose, she took a breath. It was enough to make one a touch claustrophobic—stuck in a crack deep underground, unable to move, all those many tons of wet dirt and crumbling rock just over your head…
She pulled herself up and into the space above, scowling. It wasn’t a tunnel, but a room with no exits, empty except for—
A human skeleton was slumped by the chamber’s ragged edge, tucked beneath a low ledge.
Lara stepped closer, crouched to see. The skeleton was in pieces, everything that had connected the bones eaten away. The bones themselves were old, pitted in a few places by the weak acids dripping through the rocks.
There were a few items with the remains: a square metal belt buckle black with age, a few rivets, a broken, rusted compass from the early nineteenth century—and a small item wrapped in layers of oilcloth.
She picked it up, hefting it. A book. Lara quickly unwrapped the thing, the outer layers of cloth disintegrating into mush. The small notebook inside was still intact, mostly protected from the moisture. It was hand bound, its leather cover splotched with mold.
Lara opened the book. Printed neatly inside the front cover, she found the owner’s name and a date: Mateus Sousa Pereira, 1937. She carefully turned the thick pages, which were filled with thin, slanting handwriting. It was in Portuguese…
Mateus had been an archaeologist, it seemed. The first part of the book was filled with descriptions of an Aztec site, and small, careful sketches of artwork he had seen there. His observations were casual, unstudied, but he was excited by everything, rhapsodizing over his discoveries. Lara flipped ahead—and saw drawings of Mayan hieroglyphs. Sacrifice, stars, the twins, the moon. She saw the tiles representing Ix Chel and Chak Chel… Mateus had focused particularly on a room with pillars that had been painted with rings, drawing them from several different angles. And there were rough sketches of the labyrinth itself, at least parts of it.
The last few pages were smudged, the writing hasty and shaking. Lara read the final lines.
I am still trapped, and my supplies are exhausted. It has been days now, I think. The flood rages on beneath my feet, pounding the rocks, and I only want to sleep. I have marked this site with a cross, accepting it is my fate to die here. If this record is ever found, please return it to my beloved sister, Maria Sousa Oliveira, in São Paulo, and tell her that she was right: my enthusiasm far exceeded my amateur abilities. I rest now in God’s loving hands.
Lara flipped back to one of the maps Mateus had drawn, and found a shaky cross marked above a small rounded hole at the top of a thin tube. It seemed he’d mapped much of this level before getting trapped. Where the tunnel branched beneath the room, if she kept right, she would come to a chamber that had a number of passages branching from it. Almost every extending line ended with an X, suggesting that they were dead ends… But a lot could happen in eighty years. Regular flooding had a way of moving things around.
“Thank you, Mateus,” she said, tucking the notebook into her belt. His map might whittle away the time it would take to get through this… And she felt a kinship to him, for his geeky exclamations about the poetry of the past. He’d gone adventuring when there was no such thing as nylon rope or batteries or rescue teams, because he was in love with that particular awe that came from experiencing real history.
He was like you were, once upon a time. As long as Trinity still existed, love didn’t really play a part in what she did. She’d been forced to run full speed through temples and tombs filled with incredible artifacts, sites that she could have spent years happily documenting.
She readjusted her equipment and climbed back into the tight well. It should have been easier with gravity helping, but she still got caught up, this time because of the knife on her belt. The sheath snagged on a rock, pushing the handle into her side. The belt would snap if she tried to jam through.
She wormed her way up and twisted her hips, trying again—and when she was surrounded by rock, tight on all sides, she heard that raspy chirp in the chamber beneath her, a chirp and then a short, wavering, high-pitched cry that seemed to run straight through her spine.
Shit. She pushed herself through the tight spot, scraping the side of her arm, the bow smacking her in the chin. She dropped through the wide part and climbed down quickly. Before she lowered herself out, she unsheathed the knife, gripping it tightly. She was undoubtedly overreacting, but she didn’t really know what this thing was, yet.
Lara dropped to the floor of the chamber, quickly scanning up, left and right. Nothing.
The animal cried again, from the direction she’d come, shockingly loud. From the echoes, it had reached the cavern she’d climbed up from—
—and another cry rose up from the cavern. And a third, ahead of her somewhere above, the high shriek bouncing through the bare tunnels.
Lara put the knife away and unstrapped her bow, readjusting the quiver on her back. It seemed she’d arrived during mating season. That, or the creatures were hunting. Marin’s notes hadn’t made any mention of cave life… But Trinity had come in a group, soldiers and archaeologists stomping around in the upper tunnels. Quite different from a lone caver. It was most likely that the creatures weren’t even aware of her, and were behaving normally… But she didn’t know how many there were. She hoped they were smaller than they sounded. Otherwise they could turn out to be a problem.
Add it to the list. She had lost fifteen minutes, climbing into and out of Mateus’s room.
Lara marked the right-hand passage and started into the next tunnel.
* * *
Lara had been gone almost an hour when Jonah heard the trucks.
He’d been sitting in the dark with his eyes closed, listening to the jungle, enjoying the cool that seeped up from the cenote. Night birds squawked and trilled over the chants of cicadas and crickets. Some small animal he couldn’t imagine occasionally called from a stand of palms to his right, a few hundred feet from where he sat—it made a clattering sound, like a tiny jackhammer. Frog? Monkey? Baby sloth? He’d never heard it before.
Beneath the racket, the jungle was an ocean, a susurrus of life. Branches sprang up in the dark as creatures leapt from them. Bats cheeped and fluttered and smacked into bugs. There were whispering waves of cracks and rustles from the passage of small bodies through leaf litter. As carefully as he was listening, when he first heard the distant whine of the engines, they were still minutes away.
Jonah grabbed the radio. “Lara, someone’s coming.”
He repeatedly tapped the transmit button—emergency— but there was no response. He hadn’t actually expected one, but it never hurt to try.
Jonah turned on the lamp and left it by the rim, hopped to his feet and moved quickly to the truck. He grabbed the Mossberg, chambered a shell and stuffed more into his pockets. The twelve-gauge held eight shells and was pretty accurate up to a hundred yards. He wasn’t into guns at all, but when she’d told him they were going to be visiting Trinity sites, it had been his idea to have Lara pack something he could use. Couldn’t bring a fist to a gun fight.
He grabbed his pack and headed for the wall of trees east of the cenote, frondy palms and rubber trees and shadows in the pale starlight. He hustled in a few yards and then picked out his new best friend, a young banyan tree with thick branches that stretched back into the jungle, the lowest just over his head. He slung his stuff and started to climb.
He had just found the perfect spot—about fifteen feet up, screened by leaves, with a clear line of sight to the lamp he’d left burning—when th
e first truck pulled into the clearing. It was one of the wrecks from the Santo Almeda compound. A second came in after it, baked dust rising up in a haze. The two trucks parked between the cenote and the truck he and Lara had borrowed. He’d held onto a faint shred of hope that it was just the Santo Almeda crew, drunk and looking for trouble, but he could see immediately that the newcomers were Trinity. The figures were armed and dressed for a night raid, black face paint and all. They sat in the trucks, not moving.
Jonah steadied the shotgun in a crotch of the branch he was lying on, taking a breath. He counted six, maybe seven people in all, assuming the drivers had passengers. He couldn’t see into the dark cabs over the glare of the headlights.
The passenger door of the first truck cracked open, and a voice called out.
“Hey, anybody here? Don’t shoot, we’ve got a friend of yours, wants to say hello!”
The driver, a big muscly guy, got out of the truck, pulling a second man with him. Jonah clenched his jaw. It was Miguel. They walked toward the lamp, the driver pushing Miguel to the ground and then pointing a handgun at his head. The pilot looked like he was in shock.
The man in the truck called out again. “My name is Harper. If you throw down your weapons and come out, your pilot lives to fly another day, you’ve got my word. You have ten seconds to do it, or my man is going to shoot!”
“What if he’s not here?” Miguel’s voice was bleak.
Harper ignored him. “Ten! Nine! Eight!”
He’s lying, they’ll kill him anyway; they’ll kill you, too.
“Seven!”
Take out the driver now, one less to deal with. Renegotiate.
“Six! Five! Four!”
If you surrender, they’ve got another hostage. Or you’re both dead.
If you don’t, Miguel dies, right now.
“Three!”
Miguel had closed his eyes.
“Wait!” Jonah shouted, and the soldiers in the backs of the trucks shifted, pointing their weapons in his general direction.