But it was an impossible task, and Jonathan finally swerved, knocking into a row of stalls lining the street, baskets and bottles flying, the vehicle slowing as Imhotep’s zombies clawed at the passengers, a pair of them latching on to Daniels and yanking him, screaming, out of the back.
“They’ve got Daniels!” O’Connell yelled.
Ardeth Bay was halfway over the back of the convertible, reaching out for him.
But there was no going back; the Dusenberg was swarmed with puss-oozing crazies and the remaining five passengers had their own waking nightmare to deal with. They did not witness what happened to Daniels . . .
. . . who managed to throw off the pair of zombies who’d torn him from the car, and tumbling across the pavement, came up shooting, blasting into the hideous teeming riffraff pressing in upon him, emptying his revolver into them, every bullet finding a target, curing insanity with death. But there was always another zombie to take the last one’s place, and then his revolver’s hammer was falling on one empty chamber after another, click!, click!, click! . . .
And yet the vacant-eyed, festering-faced crowd, surrounding him where he’d backed himself up against a wall, did not advance. They stood staring at him, like circling vultures, waiting for nature to take its course and provide them with supper . . .
And then the mob parted like the Red Sea and the mummy, regal in his black robe, walked through them as they very softly spoke the name of He Who Shall Not Be Named: “Im-ho-tep! Im-ho-tep! Im-ho-tep! Im-ho-tep!”
Daniels, who—in a soldier of fortune’s life of risk taking and adventuring—had prided himself on his unflinching strength, his stoic courage, threw himself to his knees, whimpering in pitiful, prayerful submission to the towering high priest who stood reborn before him.
From the pouch, Daniels withdrew the jewel-encrusted jar, and held it up to Imhotep, an offering to a living god.
And Imhotep accepted the offering, nodding, smiling faintly, as if in thanks.
Daniels grinned up at him, nodding back, hope flooding through him: He had paid homage to Imhotep; he would be spared . . .
In the Dusenberg, Jonathan and his sister and O’Connell were still trying to plow through the sea of zombies when the blood-curdling, death-rattling scream interrupted the mindless chanting of the boil-blistered battalion attacking them. The pause encouraged Jonathan to hit the gas hard again, and he charged through another series of stalls, swerving around the corner toward freedom. But instead they crashed headlong into a stone water fountain, fender crumpling, the convertible immobilized.
O’Connell grabbed Evelyn’s hand, yelling, “Come on, come on!,” and the three of them leaped from the car . . .
. . . but there was nowhere to go.
They were encircled by the dead-eyed, ulcerated faces of Imhotep’s zombie army. Panting, drooling, the former humans did not advance, poised though they were with weapons, just waiting to pounce.
Then, once again, the mob parted to allow its master to make his magisterial way to the fore, his flunky, Beni, following faithfully, like a dog.
Evelyn clutched O’Connell’s arm, and gasped. “He’s . . . he’s like a god!”
Imhotep stood tall, handsome, perfect, the tanned luster returned to his skin from his toes to his shaved head, the bandages all having long since dropped away, majestic in his black robe, no signs anywhere of corrupted flesh, just smooth, rippling muscle. Not a dung-eating scarab beetle in sight.
“We are lost,” Ardeth Bay said.
“He is fully regenerated,” the curator whispered solemnly. “Now he must raise Anck-su-namun from the dead. That will be their beginning, and the end for all mankind.”
“Not one to look on the bright side, are you?” Jonathan commented.
Imhotep—looking young and handsome, despite his three-thousand-some years—strode to Evelyn and stood before her, staring at her, his expression like stone, but his eyes intense.
“Keetah mi pharos, aja nilo, isirian,” he said in a commanding baritone.
Beni stepped from behind his master to translate for Evelyn: “He wants you to come with him.”
“For your information, you vile little man,” Evelyn said to Beni, “what he said was, ‘Come with me, my princess, it is time to make you mine for all eternity.’ ”
Imhotep took another step closer to Evelyn, who clutched O’Connell’s hand.
But the mummy was offering his hand. “Koontash dai na, aja nilo.”
Again, Beni translated: “Go with him and he will spare your friends.”
Evelyn snapped, “Do you think I need you to interpret for me, you little weasel?”
The mob was chanting very softly now: “Im-ho-tep. . . Im-ho-tep . . . Im-ho-tep . . . Im-ho-tep!”
Imhotep stood tall, hands on hips, a powerful presence, smiling at his cornered quarry with the arrogance of the ages.
“Let me go with him,” Evelyn whispered to O’Connell, trembling, eyes moist, but chin characteristically high. “You know where he’ll take me. If he kills you now, you can’t save me later, agreed?”
“Baby,” he said tenderly, “you got more guts than sense.”
“Yes. Well, your job is to see that they stay on the inside of me.”
And Imhotep lurched forward, grabbed Evelyn by the wrist, and pulled her to him, locking an arm around her in a terrible embrace.
O’Connell lunged forward, but Ardeth Bay clutched him by the arms, holding him back, whispering, “Be calm—there is still time. He must take her to Hamanaptra to perform the ritual.”
Imhotep grinned at Evelyn lustfully and kissed her cheek. This time the mummy’s flesh did not deteriorate. Fully regenerated, he was immune now from the infection of a mortal’s touch.
“If you let this beast turn me into a mummy, Rick O’Connell,” Evelyn said, chin high, but crinkled with emotion, “you’re the first one I’m coming after!”
Imhotep’s gaze shifted to Jonathan, who was at O’Connell’s side. It was as if the mummy sensed something, his nostrils flaring, as if picking up a scent . . .
Then, with shocking speed and force, Imhotep reached out and ripped the side pocket loose from Jonathan’s khaki jacket, revealing the golden puzzle box, which the mummy snatched, then handed to Beni.
“You might have asked,” Jonathan said, as if mildly offended.
Imhotep sneered at them and, an arm around Evelyn’s waist, withdrew into the opening the crowd had made.
“Goddamnit!” O’Connell yelled. “I can’t take this—”
And as he tried to follow, O’Connell felt the steel-like bands that were Ardeth Bay’s arms lock around him.
“No,” the Med-jai warrior said. “We give him this small victory, and deny him his final triumph.”
O’Connell was almost as crazed as the crowd around him, as he screamed, “Evelyn! No! Evelyn . . .”
Beni stepped in front of his incapacitated “friend,” and bowed, saying, “Good-bye, Rick. I would say it has been nice knowing you, but you know Beni never lies . . .”
Then Beni tagged after his master, who was dragging the struggling Evelyn along, and as the ranks of crazies closed, Imhotep’s voice bellowed a command in ancient Egyptian . . .
. . . and the vultures began to close in for the kill.
“I say!” Jonathan said, blinking at the encroaching madmen. “The blighter lied to us!”
“Never trust a mummy,” O’Connell said, already one step ahead, bending down and pulling open a cistern cover in the cobblestone road. “Come on!”
“What about my sister?” Jonathan said.
“If we can live through this,” O’Connell said, “we can save her!”
O’Connell shoved Jonathan down into the rainwater tank. The Med-jai chieftain and the curator were slashing with their scimitars, holding the crowd at bay. O’Connell grabbed Ardeth Bay’s arm, shoving him toward the hole.
“Get down there!” O’Connell said. “I need you!” Then O’Connell said, “Come on!” to the curator
, who shook his head “no.”
“One of us has to stay and fight,” the curator said. “Then they will move on. They are not thinking creatures! Trust me . . . you must go and find a way to kill He Who Shall Not Be Named!”
Then Dr. Bey shoved O’Connell into the hole, pushing the heavy stone lid into place, and returned to his task of hacking and slashing at the demented mob, which soon engulfed him.
Below, O’Connell held on to the lid handle with both hands, and all his strength, as the three men stood in three feet of rainwater. But no one above tried to open the lid: The curator apparently had been right. These were thinking men no longer, rather animals driven crazy by pain and sorcery. The sound of their footsteps and chanting soon abated.
O’Connell, Jonathan, and the Med-jai leader waited perhaps ten minutes before carefully, quietly emerging up onto an empty street, strewn with the bodies of the zombies they themselves had killed, and of course the tattered, trampled corpse of the curator, who’d given his life for theirs.
The bizarre bazaar thoroughfare was ghostly in its silence as the trio stumbled toward the battered Dusenberg, uncrumpled its fender, Jonathan getting behind the wheel, and starting it back up again.
And the trio of survivors rode away, undetered—battered, bruised, shaken, but united in their resolve to deny the mummy his final triumph.
19
Desert Storm
The headquarters of His Majesty’s Royal Air Corps, located five miles beyond Fort Stack, had seen better days, a ramshackle ghost town of battered Quonset huts, with a single biplane—a threadbare veteran of the Great War—sitting like a neglected museum exhibit on a pothole-ridden, obstacle course of an asphalt runway, with no control tower to oversee a takeoff, unless you counted the looming dunes of the Sahara.
O’Connell—who had been driven here by Jonathan Carnahan in the bashed-in, steam-seeping Dusenberg, with the backseat company of the Med-jai warrior Ardeth Bay—was not encouraged; nor was he thrilled at the prospect of allowing himself to be piloted by one Winston Havlock, that walrus-mustached, walking (flying) death wish.
Yet here they all stood, dawn painting the desert even more golden, begging Havlock, in goggled aviator’s cap and sand-dusted R.A.F. uniform, to take them to Hamanaptra.
Havlock was frowning in thought. “How does this matter effect His Majesty’s Royal Air Corps?”
Gunnysack-arsenal strap in hand, O’Connell said, “The creature we’re chasing murdered two men at Fort Stack yesterday.”
An eyebrow lifted over a bloodshot eye. “Creature? Interesting designation.”
“Winston,” Jonathan said, “we’ve witnessed bizarre events that we hesitate to even share with you—you might think we’d been drinking.”
“I’d be disappointed in you, if you hadn’t been.” Winston put a hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “He’s spirited your sister away, you say? Against her will?”
“Yes,” Jonathan said.
“Egad man, that’s kidnapping.”
O’Connell closed his eyes; how had it come to this, his destiny in the hands of booze-soaked, over-aged British fly-boy?
“Tell me,” Winston said, and his eyes narrowed. “Would you call this mission . . . dangerous?”
“We’ll be lucky to live through it,” O’Connell admitted.
“Really?” Havlock beamed. “Now I am intrigued.”
“Four of our men have died already,” Jonathan said.
Havlock’s smile made the tips of his walrus mustache point skyward. “This is a tempting challenge—save the damsel in distress, destroy the villain . . .”
“And come away with his treasure,” Jonathan added. “Let’s not forget that.”
Havlock straightened and gave them a snappy salute. “Captain Winston Havlock, at your service, gentlemen!”
O’Connell sighed, half in relief, half in despair.
Havlock began to trudge toward his plane on the torn-up tarmac. “Which of you gents intends to come along with me?”
“Well, all of us,” O’Connell said, falling in alongside the briskly walking flier.
Havlock shook his head, “no,” curtly. “Only have room for one.”
Jonathan, having to work at it to keep up with the quick-striding Havlock, said, “That just won’t do, Winston. All three of us will be needed—in addition to yourself, of course.”
Havlock stopped abruptly and the others stumbled on ahead, then came to a clumsy stop themselves.
“Jonathan,” Havlock said, pointing to the nearest Quonset hut, “I have a mission for you—you’ll find a coil of rope hanging on a nail on the wall over the workbench.”
“Rope?” Jonathan frowned. “What would that be for?”
Havlock shrugged. “Passengers, lad. Passengers.”
Soon the biplane was high above the desert, creasing the sky at a dashing angle, which no doubt pleased the pilot, but frustrated two of his passengers. O’Connell, sitting in the gunner’s seat, his back to Havlock, didn’t mind; but Jonathan and Ardeth Bay apparently found the slant disconcerting, roped spread-eagled to either wing as they were. The apparently fearless Ardeth Bay had finally found something that scared him silly, a state he shared with Jonathan, who had been scared silly before, just not so thoroughly . . .
“Are you all right?” O’Connell asked him.
Jonathan, belly down, looked over at O’Connell with wild eyes, wind whipping him, yelling above the engine noise, “Do I bloody well look ‘all right’?”
O’Connell glanced over at Ardeth Bay, who was muttering a prayer in his native language.
From the cockpit came Havlock’s jaunty call; “O’Connell! Take a look to your left, old chum!”
The tilt of the plane had been to give its pilot a better look at an unusual sight on the desert floor; A whirlwind of sand was gliding along, as if on a charted course.
“Sand devil!” Havlock said.
The wind the cyclone of sand was stirring was rocking the plane; Jonathan began to swear, colorfully, and Ardeth Bay’s prayers could be heard above the engine’s rumble.
“Is that unusual?” O’Connell yelled at the pilot.
“Never saw one like it! Never that big!”
O’Connell didn’t like the sound of that, and he certainly didn’t like the look of the “natural” occurrence. Was that the mummy down there? Traveling via supernatural sandstorm?
Then the whirling funnel began to dissipate, and suddenly O’Connell couldn’t discern anything below, just a haze of floating sand.
“Go closer, Havlock!” O’Connell said. “I want a better look!”
“Righto!”
What O’Connell couldn’t see from that height was the sand slowing to a stop, like a carousel nearing the end of its ride; and he also did not see two riders on that slackening carousel getting tossed rudely out and onto the waiting pillow of a dune.
Evelyn and Beni picked themselves up slowly, shaking sand out of their hair.
“What . . . what happened?” Evelyn asked groggily, dusting sand off her black dress.
Beni dug some grains out of one ear. “I don’t remember . . . Sand began swirling around us . . .”
Evelyn pointed. “You mean like that?”
And just at the bottom of the dune, the swirling particles seemed to be condensing, shaping themselves, fashioning a statue of sand . . .
. . . a statue of Imhotep.
Beni clutched his various religious icons, gathered on a chain at his neck, and prayed in several languages. Evelyn, fascinated, watched as the sand seemed to transform, colors and textures appearing to shift and then hold, until finally He Who Shall Not Be Named stood before them: a dark, handsome man, shaved head gleaming, eyes gleaming, lordly in a black robe that left much of his hairless, muscular chest exposed.
“Oh my God,” Evelyn said, though she wasn’t referring to the admittedly impressive sight of Imhotep, as he walked up the slope of the dune toward her. She had just noticed the shape of a familiar landmark: the volcan
o that marked the entrance to the valley of the City of the Dead.
She looked at Beni. “We’re back.”
Beni shrugged. “The boss has plans for you, lady.”
That was when the biplane swooped in for a closer look, its throbbing engine announcing its presence.
Evelyn looked up and beamed at the battered plane, knowing it was Rick—it had to be Rick!
Beni knew it, too, but he was smirking, shaking his head, muttering, “Doesn’t that guy know when he’s had enough?”
But Imhotep was taking it far worse than his servant: He scowled at the sky, and the handsome face turned grotesque, jaw unhinging to allow the mummy’s mouth to again open wider than humanly possible, to emit a hideous shriek, a battle cry that rallied the sands themselves to his cause, a sheet of sand rising from the desert, millions of particles flying upward, into the path of the dipping biplane.
Evelyn ran toward Imhotep, who stood like a demented, self-satisfied genie, hands on hips, grinning up at his evil handiwork.
“No! You’ll kill them!” she called. “Stop it!”
The mummy didn’t acknowledge her with even a glance.
Then she said the same thing—in ancient Egyptian.
And now Imhotep cast his gaze upon her, as she stood just a few feet from him, chin defiantly high, wind whipping her dress, and her hair.
“That is the object of the lesson,” Imhotep told her, in the same tongue.
In the biplane, O’Connell—who had witnessed the fantastic sight of the desert virtually coming alive and rising up toward the biplane—was holding on for dear life. Havlock had thrown the throttle back, sending the plane into a steep dive, crying, “Hold on, men!”
Jonathan’s reply was nonverbal—a scream interrupted only by the occasional intake of breath, before continuing on.
Ardeth Bay was screaming, too, but he seemed to be forming words, which were either more prayers or Arabic obscenities.
The biplane seemed to be heading straight into the dead funnel of the Hamanaptra volcano; then Havlock began a climb just as steep as his dive had been, swooping down into the valley beyond, as the sands swept into and buried the enormous volcano.
The Mummy Page 20