The Kip Keene Box Set: Books 1, 2 & 3

by Nicholas Erik

  “Announcement made,” Lorelei said. She passed a finger through the blue-orange flicker emanating from the butane lighter. The small light caused shadows to dance on the tan brick.

  The sudden illumination had revealed almost the entire cell. Ten feet on either side, square, the walls made of plain hewn stones with no ornamentation. Above, the light reached into an abyss of jet that stretched on forever.

  “Where’s the ceiling?” Strike said, straining to see above.

  “No skylight,” Lorelei said. “I requested a new room.”

  “Why’d they put us together?”

  “Because we’re such good friends.”

  “Anyone get a look at who snagged us?”

  “They gave me their business card.” Lorelei kept passing her fingers through the flame.

  “You might actually be less helpful than your brother.”

  “Look around. What’s there to help?”

  “I was looking,” Strike said. “While you were being snarky.” She watched the veins in Lorelei’s neck bulge in and out. She wondered, then, if provoking this woman, built solid as the walls that enclosed them, was a good call.

  If Lorelei charged, what were the options?

  Strike, by instinct, reached for her gun. Gone, of course, from when Catarina had removed it. But the holster was still strapped to her hip. Useless. Just as her fingers were about to retreat, they happened to brush against her pocket.

  Her new captors hadn’t emptied them. Nor had Catarina. Time to pool resources.

  Strike yanked out her wallet, set of keys, and Keene’s multi-tool. She dropped them on the floor, then unstrapped the .22 inside her boot.

  A clanging echo filled the chamber as Strike tossed it to the floor.

  “Nice of them to leave that,” Lorelei said. “In case we get bored.”

  “Empty your pockets,” Strike said.

  “This is it, babe. The cigarettes are mine. Not sharing.” Lorelei padded the pack against the fleshy part of her hand, then took one out, holding it between her teeth.

  The tip glowed that orange-dotted-black, like a signal flare rendered in pointillist style.

  Strike took a few steps forward and snatched the pack and lighter away. The lid snuffed out the flame, plunging the cell into utter blackness.

  “Stop wasting light.”

  “I’ll waste you.” Strike could hear Lorelei’s footsteps bang against the floor. But Strike’s eyes were better acclimated to nothingness, being further from the light. Maybe it was just a feeling, an instinct, from the academy. Or it could’ve been luck.

  But Strike saw Lorelei’s shadow a foot away, charging, so she sidestepped, sticking out a boot.

  The woman crashed into the pile of supplies with a tremendous thud, right on her face. Strike could hear the neck whip, snap, crash as Lorelei’s head bounced off the floor like an over-inflated ball.

  Then, silence, all parties unsure whether the proverbial Rubicon has been crossed. A groan and a low whine rumbled forth from the ground. To Strike, it was the best damn sound on Earth, other than the doors being flung open.

  “Put the light back on,” Derek said.

  Flicking the round wheel at the lighter’s top, Strike eventually managed to get a weak flame to spring forth. But it was clear the fuel was running low.

  “This better be good.”

  He crouched down and examined the pile, his hand stopping over the multi-tool. “This will do.”

  “Do what?”

  “Enough.” He took it from the pile and pocketed it. Then he turned his attention towards Lorelei, extending a hand to help her up.

  “Thanks for the aid, Casanova.” Lorelei batted his hand away and stood on her own.

  “Men, right?” Strike said.

  “Don’t get me started on you.”

  “Now what?”

  “We wait,” Derek said.

  “For what?”

  “Anything.”

  Strike, in her current state, was not well equipped for such directives. She brought a cigarette to her lips and lit it with shaking fingers. She leaned up against the door, made of rusted wrought iron, and tried to blow smoke rings. Nothing happened.

  Then, a great grinding noise rocked the room. Strike startled by the overwhelming racket, almost didn’t notice that the bars behind her were moving.

  Upwards.

  Strike forward, whirling around just in time to see the bars to the ancient cell recede into the masonry. Where they had been locked in only seconds before, a door to freedom now stood open.

  A voice, as if from the gods themselves, came from everywhere in the chamber, low and booming, ricocheting off the tall walls.

  It had a single instruction.

  Run.

  The ground began to shake beneath the group’s feet as they darted out of their former prison and into the bottom floor of the Last City. Strike stopped to grab the .22, slipping it into her waistband.

  It might come in handy.

  22 | Gauntlet

  For all her brilliance and finely-honed scientific senses, Catarina hadn’t expected the catatonic denizens of the Last City to have booby-trapped the nano-fusion cores.

  They were lovingly on display in the main chamber, which seemingly stretched all the way up to the surface, hundreds of feet above. It had been simple to avoid the bumbling, vacant-eyed Spanish and Incan warriors who passed as guards of this long-forgotten sinkhole. Sticking to the shadows had been enough to wind her way through the snaking stairwells and rickety ladders undetected.

  “Damn.” Catarina tucked the cores into her pockets. The ceiling began to shake, raining small handfuls of dirt down into the chamber. She took another glance at the pedestal upon which the cores had sat. Two imperceptible weight-activated switches jutted up from the finely carved stone.

  Dead man’s switches. From the stone shavings and dust around the altar, they were recent additions. Perhaps they had recently had problems with a thief.

  These people, brains stomped by the virus, worshipped these little cores. They were their gods.

  And they’d rather die than be without them.

  No wonder these things had been so damned difficult to find.

  Another problem.

  The natives were awakened. The rumbling and sensation of the Earth shifting had spurred the dozens of immortal warriors to action. Catarina could see them scurrying into position on the platforms above her.

  And a number of them were flowing in from the two hallways that fed into the main chamber. All the eyes were on her, staring down from on high, staring from across the room—seemingly surrounding her with stares from every angle.

  Catarina ducked behind the sacrificial slab upon the raised altar near the fusion cores’ pedestals. She took the rifle off her back and checked the chamber. A breeze shot up from her back, which caused her to turn around.

  An endless black pit.

  She gulped and peeked over the slab. Warriors marched forward in rows of two, brandishing ancient weaponry. Her brain had little time to register the strangeness of seeing Spanish and Inca united in destroying a common enemy.

  The torches lining the chamber from floor to ceiling cast strange shadows upon the procession that made the men look like demons from a forgotten realm.

  Her fingers trembled as she loaded the rifle. She raised it, steadying the stock on the stone, and fired. One of the men dropped, but his fellow soldiers didn’t stop, failing to acknowledge the blow. She’d hoped that it would either frighten them or trip a switch in their brains, same as Johnny. But that appeared to be wishful thinking. The rumbling had progressed from a low groan to a roar that drowned out all other noise. But the change in amplitude had never been great enough to shock the men. It had just been a steady, growing buzz.

  Fifty yards away and closing in.<
br />
  Then an idea came to her.

  Yes, that would be perfect.

  She unloaded the gun and began to work.

  Large chunks of stone weighing several tons crumbled from the ceiling. Whereas the prison cell had stretched upwards into infinity, the connecting hallway was narrow and cramped, no taller than six feet high.

  Derek had to hunch in order to move. The flickering light led the way and warned them of blocks that were about to fall. One benefit of the low slung ceilings: cracks and gyrations were readily apparent. Fewer surprises and crushed skulls.

  Strike crawled over a cracked stone block taking up half the hallway. Her escaped compatriots followed as their surroundings continued to rumble and quake.

  “It’s getting worse,” Strike said.

  “What?” Lorelei said.

  Neither woman could hear the other enough to discern their words, and without the benefit of bright light, it was impossible to convey much meaning at all. Strike dropped the warning, and decided to break into an all-out run.

  She rounded a curve of the serpentine hallway and saw light ahead.

  Her pace accelerated.

  Too late, however, her eyes adjusted and she saw that within the light stood a great many men, heavily armed and chanting. The smell that accompanied them was a familiar and unpleasant one. These were the same people who had captured her.

  And now they were looking directly at Strike, coming towards her and her friends. Too many of them to fend off with her .22.

  They had nowhere to turn.

  Catarina peered over the altar, taking a brief break from her work. The men coming towards her had stopped their slow, controlled march. Instead, their attention was directed towards the back of the room, at what was transpiring in one of the hallways. It was accompanied by an infernal chanting—so loud that it made the rumblings fade into nothingness—she could have done without.

  But if it gave her the time to get out…

  She pried at the last bullet with a knife, popping it open and dumping the gunpowder on to the ground. Then she turned her attention to the cores. This would be delicate. Too much pressure would render them unstable, cause this entire underground city to implode on itself.

  Catarina took a deep breath and looked over the slab once more.

  To her surprise, the men were prodding three familiar faces towards the altar, stopping not ten yards away. Where once she had been the warriors’ sole focus, now they circled about Lorelei, Derek and the blonde woman, poking and prodding, chanting and shouting.

  Then Catarina heard a word she understood, uttered by the apparent leader of the deranged troop.

  “Sacrificio.”

  A wild cheer spread throughout the ranks, until the sound seemed to become part of the walls themselves.

  Keene, too afraid to stand upright, crawled on his knees along the floor, exploring the path ahead with a cautious hand. More than a few times he found sections of the floor that had rotted away, the holes concealed by moss.

  Those were the parts of the rickety structure that hadn’t crumbled away in the earthquake that had almost sent him toppling from the top floor into the chamber hundreds of feet below. While he appreciated the ancients’ engineering ingenuity—carving out a hidden city beneath an already hard to find city—it lacked certain safety considerations.

  Like guardrails.

  The one benefit of all the rumbling and chaos had been the guards, or lack thereof. From what he could tell, they were all gathered in the chamber below. His watch beeped, indicating that thirty minutes remained before his recently sustained injuries became a pressing concern.

  Keene kicked at the ancient dust and bit his lip. Crouched down, high in the rafters, he had a hell of a long way to the bottom. What was going on down there? He leaned his head over the edge, praying the ground wouldn’t shake.

  The chanting grew louder, reaching a deafening crescendo. The slabs in the ceiling shook, enough that Keene thought, for a moment, that the entire place might cave in. But the chanting ceased, and the vibrations with them. The city’s fortitude had been tested for centuries. Today wouldn’t be the day it fell.

  He couldn’t be sure from his current vantage point, but the fervent cheers and excitement seemed to be directed towards the altar. Amidst the throng, three people were slowly raised up.

  Too far to make out their faces, Keene knew deep within his heart who they were, and what was about to happen. They were an offering.

  He watched as the people below fanned out.

  One came forward with a torch, which looked like barely a spark, and placed it at the bottom of the pyre.

  23 | Burned

  Strike was sweating profusely. First time in days that it wasn’t because of her vices. Or maybe it was her fault. Revenge was what got her in this predicament, right?

  She squirmed and writhed, trying to undo her bindings and get away from the flames lapping at her toes. But these guys, they were thorough and exact. This wasn’t their first sacrifice. No doubt there were technical difficulties in the beginning—escapes, premature roastings, death by falling onto a bunch of pointy hot sticks—that they had now sorted out, leading to the ironclad knots.

  Eagle Scouts would be damned jealous of these rope skills.

  The three of them had been let loose by design. In case of emergency, let the prisoners loose, capture them in a grand showing, and offer them to the gods with great humility.

  This whole operation had been something like the crown jewel of screw-ups.

  She blinked, unable to wipe her tearing eyes. Her wrists were chafed raw from trying to wiggle free. But there would be no fantastic escape today. Her blurred vision caught sight of the mass of onlookers, gathered in the chamber wearing hopeful expressions.

  They didn’t move, despite the thickening smoke and omnipresent rumbles.

  Strike vomited on herself, adding to the indignity of being trussed up like a pig in front of a bunch of overzealous morons.

  Strike spit into the embers at the bottom of the pyre, but the saliva did little to halt the growing heat. She tried to bring her feet away as flames began to lick further up the stake, but it was all pointless.

  She glanced to her left and right. Derek and Lorelei seemed to be handling the situation well, all things considered. Maybe she should be more stoic.

  Screw that. Strike screamed, so loud that it overtook all the other sounds glancing off the chamber. So loud that she didn’t notice the metallic tink of a grenade-like object bounce in front of her, didn’t realize it was happening until it exploded with a cataclysmic boom that rattled her pyre and sent it teetering towards the maw of the fire.

  24 | Escape

  Derek leapt from the ground, his hand shooting into his pocket with lightning speed. He ignored the embers singing his pants and burning his arms. Smoke filled the air as he listened to the distinct cries of his two companions amidst the wreckage.

  Finally, he got the multi-tool loose and instructed it to extinguish the fires. He flung it outwards, hoping for the best. A blanket of foam shot out from the small device, covering the area. Derek shielded his eyes.

  The whirring stopped, and he opened them. The fires were out. He rushed over to Lorelei’s pyre and unearthed her. Burned but breathing. He laid her upon the altar and went to extract Strike. She was in better shape, but smelled beyond terrible, like day old cheese and burnt hair.

  “Did you see her?” Strike said, the words coming in deliberate bursts.

  “Who?”

  “Catarina.” Then Strike lost consciousness.

  Derek looked out. He spotted a small device, no larger than a grenade. An emergency vaccinator had cured the once chanting lunatics, who were now standing about in a confused daze. Above, the structure still rattled precariously, announcing to all that it was unstable.

  Its centuries-
old inhabitants seemed less perturbed by this than their sudden sanity.

  Lorelei stirred, and Derek rushed to her side.

  He helped her to her feet and slung Strike over his shoulder. Making his way through the confused crowd, he turned into the hallway they hadn’t yet visited. An escape through the system of ladders and walkways would be impossible.

  Derek stepped through the doorway.

  “What the…”

  He almost dropped Strike to the ground, so shocked was he by the sight before him.

  A giant mountain of gold led upwards like a shimmering staircase, to a thin sliver of light hundreds of feet above.

  With no way to down, Keene took the only route available to him, heading above ground once again. He emerged from the secret entrance into the dank jungle and considered his options. He had to remind himself that there were almost none. There was no way down, the rumbling having caused the series of ladders and walkways to the bottom to collapse. Which meant his friends would have to traverse the chaos alone.

  He’d done all he could. Tossed the emergency vaccinator into the pack of loonies. Hopefully it had put an end to the sacrificial proceedings. After that, mayhem had broken loose on top of the mayhem, the whole place shaking even more.

  He set a foot forward, and a bout of wooziness overtook him. His vision swayed, and he had to lean against one of the giant statues, this one of Inkarri, to keep himself from falling. Where he had felt bulletproof minutes before, he now felt the consequences of his fresh bullet wound.

  Keene looked down and saw blood soaking through his abdomen. Fox’s field dressing, neat as it was, hadn’t been enough to keep the hole completely closed. The watch beeped, indicating that he had fifteen minutes before the pain would become completely unbearable.

  Further up the incline, towards the edge of Vilcabamba, Keene saw a flash of movement near one of the other statues. Too tall to be a jaguar or monkey. He narrowed his gaze. Maybe it was a hallucination, a side-effect of whatever medicine he’d been given.

  But then it moved once again, and his brain processed what it was.