by John Farris
When he got to his feet and turned around, he saw a man with a shaggy mane of black hair standing fifty feet away, near the central core, leveling a big revolver at him.
"Good thing I hurried down," Tiernan Clarke said breathlessly. "So you made it without me, boy-o. Good enough, but I'll relieve you of your pack now. Which I assume you've stuffed with all the good things this treasure chest has to offer."
In the hour Simon Ovosi had been left alone in the antechamber of the Catacombs, armed with an ebony-handled knife with a five-inch lock blade and a .458 Winchester magnum rifle, he had stood his post despite the screams and gunshots emanating from below, the half-seen company of petrified creatures hung by their necks and tailbones from the crudely squared walls, the earth tremors that made him sweatingly sick. He survived even the lengthy silences that had him straining to hear footsteps, the familiar voice of Tiernan Clarke confirming his return.
But his mind wasn't equal to the sight of the fireball; when it appeared a moaning babble escaped his lips. The fireball was ovoid, bluish-purple in color, about the size of one of his own fists. Attracted to him, it moved slowly along beneath the low ceiling, crackling faintly. He backed up and raised his rifle and fired two roaring, deafening shots. The second of the ricocheting slugs, flattened and jagged, hit him below the right knee and cut deep, crippling him.
Simon fell back on the translucent floor as the fireball swooped and touched the muzzle of his gun. There was a flash and a bit of smoke and he was left holding a piece of smoldering stock; the rest of the heavy rifle had vanished, along with the fireball.
Simon rolled over, still moaning, and saw the creatures stirring on the walls, eyes flashing to life, jaws gaping, narrow feline heads switching side to side. Two of them were tensing to jump at him. He pulled his knife and hitched his way backward across the rough floor on the seat of his pants, sobbing in terror, slashing wildly at each threatening move.
As if she'd seen it yesterday, Raun had picked out the cul-de-sac from the air, although the moon's light was drastically cut by a cloud of grit by the time they ascended to the 16,000 foot level.
The Cayuse helicopter, rated for 15,800 feet maximum altitude, was already above its limit and difficult to maintain in ground effect, a condition made worse by the whiplash air currents, as heat from the mountain caldera and expanding gases collided with the cold air mass three miles above sea level. There was a danger of being flung against one of the triptych wall faces, and danger from the swarming ash that seeped hotly into the cockpit through the slightest aperture. Within minutes the fine grit could ruin the helicopter's hydraulic systems.
And the only good place to land was already occupied by another, larger helicopter.
Jade briefly debated turning over the controls to Lem and climbing down by means of a rope ladder to within a few feet of the ground, but he doubted if the helicopter would hover long enough for him to accomplish this.
Then his mind was made up for him as a dazzling streak of lightning flashed from the darkness of the huge ash cloud descending on them and struck a rotor-blade tip. For a few moments the inside of the cockpit was whitely incandescent. Raun screamed. Jade had his hands full trying to prevent a crackup as the engine lost power. The rotor slowed drastically, winding down to a stop. When the Cayuse nosed steeply down he quickly set the blades at a negative pitch angle, catching the airflow through the rotor as the helicopter began to drop. The flow was sufficient to keep the blades turning, fast enough to hold them shakily in the gusting air.
They had only about a hundred feet to go, not much time for maneuvering. He tried to bank it down behind the other copter, raising the collective pitch lever, calling on the kinetic energy left in the rotor to give them a few urgently needed moments of additional lift to slow the big machine for touchdown.
But one of the rotor blades struck the tailfin of the JetRanger, shearing it, and they lurched hard and jarringly to the right. All the weight of the copter was balanced on one skid, the supports of which buckled as another of the decelerating blades struck the ground. Instead of snapping off, it dug in and kept the helicopter from flipping over and possibly exploding,
There was another bolt of lightning as they crawled out of the disabled Cayuse. The air was so thick with fumes and grit, they were choking almost immediately. The ground shook; the helicopter fell over gratingly, just missing Lem, the last man off. Jade motioned for them to wrap their safari jackets around their heads, which afforded some protection against the ash. He grabbed Raun, who was down on one knee and looked stunned.
"How do we get inside?"
". . . The gully."
"Come on!"
Michael Belov's head ached so badly he couldn't keep his eyes open for more than a few seconds at a time, and one ear was filled with blood.
Nonetheless he said calmly to Tiernan Clarke, "Those photos can't be of any use to you. What you want are the bloodstones. And as you can see, there are hundreds of them here."
"I can see," Clarke replied, lifting the photo transmission machine from the backpack. "They've waited ten thousand years, boy-o. They can wait another minute for harvesting." He stared at the machine, perplexed. "Now what would this be for?"
Belov was lying on his stomach on the hot floor, which had begun to move from slowly intensifying seismic waves that added to his suffering. After rapping him on the skull with the barrel of the magnum revolver, Clarke had hogtied him with strips torn from his cotton safari jacket.
"It's a photo transmitter."
"That doesn't explain much." Clarke sorted through the stack of Polaroid shots again, plucked one and flashed it at Belov.
"So this was all you were interested in? And what do these symbols mean?"
"They have no value for you, compared to what one of the bloodstones is worth."
"Is that so?"
"Clarke, don't you realize what's happening here? Can't you feel it–the heat, the trembling–there's magma under this slab, maybe directly beneath it and it could come welling up at any moment, turning this chamber into a blast furnace. There's no need to keep me tied down. I have no use for any of those stones. You're welcome to leave with as many as you can carry. Let's just get out while there's time."
Clarke wiped his sweating face and laughed.
"Don't worry, I'll take good care of myself, as I always have. But why should I take, any interest in your well-being? As for these photos–" He unbuttoned a cargo pocket of his jacket. "I'll just keep them for souvenirs, like; decide what to do with them later. Let us say, for instance, when I'm enjoyin' the first cool gin of the evening on the stern deck of the gahr-jus yacht I plan to anchor permanently off my own Greek island."
A violent tremor threw him down; they both heard the grinding of rock, the rumble of gas expanding through narrow crevices all around the Catacombs. There was an odor of poisonous sulfides in the air. If the gas found a suitable outlet into the Repository, it would come with a roar, at a volatile one thousand degrees centigrade.
Clarke's revolver fell from the shoulder holster; the photos were scattered, curling up on the hot floor. Clarke got up looking dazed. He ignored Belov, reached for the backpack and shook it empty, carried it with him at a staggering jog across the broad floor toward the three rock-crystal diamond vaults. Each of the vaults was ten feet in diameter, hollow at the center. A vault was entered by means of an opening which a man Clarke's size had to squeeze through sideways. Inside lay the diamonds.
Belov struggled against the knots Clarke had tied, and nearly fainted from the effort. He lay on his side, coughing, his head sticky from the blood of the scalp wound Clarke had inflicted. His ears rang distressingly.
He felt a hand brush his forehead and jerked his head up. He looked at the pale intent face of Erika Weller, her head nodding slightly with the impact of each shallow breath she drew. The air in the Repository was fast becoming unbreathable.
"Untie me!" Belov said thickly.
"Who are you?"
"
A journalist. I came here with–Henry Landreth."
"Henry? Where–"
Anger flared in her dark glazed eyes. She looked up and around and saw the body forty feet away.
"Oh, God. He's dead?"
"Pulmonary edema. And we'll be dead too, if you don't hurry."
Her hands dropped to the tight knots in the twisted cloth, but fumbled there ineffectually.
"It isn't fair," she complained. "I wanted him to see me; and I wanted to see what happened to his face when he realized he hadn't got away with it, that I–I was still alive to expose him. The bastard. The rotten bastard!"
She was nearly to the point of a breakdown: sick, scared, and emotionally spent. He realized that. And she would be no good to either of them if the last vital supports of rationality crumbled.
Tiernan Clarke had emerged from the first of the vaults, having swept it clean of the red diamonds now bulging on one side of the canvas pack. He saw Erika crouched beside Belov.
"Erika!" he shouted across the chamber. "Let him alone, and come help me!"
"Erika!" Belov said sharply, and succeeded in getting her full attention. She glanced down at him, startled.
"Clarke hit me with his gun. Look at my head! Whatever he's represented himself to be, he's nothing more than a rogue and a murderer. He's here only to steal bloodstones, and he'll take no one with him when he leaves."
"Erika!" Clarke bellowed, and she looked up indecisively.
The chamber, large as an aircraft hangar, trembled. The air had worsened, and. Erika choked on it.
"Erika," Belov pleaded, "we have to get out of here before we're poisoned or incinerated."
"No! It can't happen. The Catacombs can't be destroyed. He worked so hard, it was a great achievement for Chips–"
"Erika, I have dozens, of photographs. Proof exists of what your team discovered here. But it's no good if the Catacombs become our tomb. Help me."
She stared at him for a few moments longer, then nodded. Her fingers flew at the difficult knots.
A hundred feet away Tiernan Clarke reached for his revolver, discovered that it wasn't in the holster, hesitated, then turned and ran and squeezed inside the next vault, drawn to the irresistible deep-red glare of bloodstones. He had to pull them, one at a time, like eggs from tight nests. He was fully absorbed in the task.
Coughing, weeping, Erika struggled with one knot, undid it, and attacked another.
There was a sound like the crack of doom and the portion of the floor they were on was heaved upward a good eighteen inches. A wave of suffocating heat like nothing Belov had felt before was accompanied by an intense glow from the molten heart of the mountain. Brilliant fireballs were jumping out of the air, revolving at incredible speeds, bouncing crazily from the walls, floating over their heads.
The noise temporarily deafened them. Erika's mouth was wide open; she was screaming as they slid slowly along the floor, which was now hot enough to singe exposed skin. Belov couldn't hear her, nor could she hear him shouting to keep working, to free his hands of the last knot. His precious photos were scattering everywhere, whirling upward in a hot draft, scorching at the edges. Heavy machinery groaned and slipped along the slightly tilted floor, huge sarcophagi vibrated like tuning forks.
The other part of the floor cracked again, tented from the pressure of magma that had the thickness of toothpaste. Tiernan Clarke was trying to edge his way out of the second vault when a section of floor the size of a basketball court heaved and tipped. The three vaults crashed together.
For several seconds they leaned precariously but in balance, forming a rough pyramid. Then the floor shuddered and the middle vault tipped, dropped out, and began to roll, slowly. It resembled a big hollow glass log with Clarke trapped in the middle of it. The vault rolled down a gentle incline toward a furiously hot mass of lava-like incandescent scar tissue running jaggedly through the chamber.
The tilt of the slab of floor on which Belov was lying shielded him and Erika from the worst of the heat from the magma scar. But as the massive rolling vault came within twenty feet of the glowing molten rock, taking on a glow itself, there was a puff of grayish smoke inside, as if someone had touched a lighted match to a moth in a jar. Clarke, suddenly a jet of flame from head to toe, was consumed in a matter of seconds. Moments after that the vault, containing an untold fortune in red diamonds, wallowed in the magma and slowly melted.
Erika's hair was smoldering, but she had freed his hands at last.
Their skin had begun to blister. Belov sat up and pushed her toward a port that opened onto the central core, shouting words neither of them could hear. He felt only the pain in his head, and heard nothing but a dismal low roar. Erika stumbled up, swiping at her hair with her hands, and ran.
Belov got his feet loose, wrapped the painfully hot photo transmitter in scraps of cloth and snatched it up, hugged it under one arm. He saw a block of photos on the floor; they had stuck together in the heat. He retrieved those, along with a few more photos that didn't look too bad, picked up Clarke's revolver by the butt, and ran after Erika. The soles of his boots felt sticky. He could no longer breathe in this inferno.
His lungs were raw, they felt stuffed full of sandpaper. With each dragging step he expected to suffer Clarke's fate and burst into flame.
The port to the central core was like a chimney, roaring with hot air and bits of ash at almost hurricane velocity. He crept through on hands and knees, nearly blind and deaf, pushing the photo transmitter ahead of him, and tumbled out into the relative coolness of the core.
Erika was there, face blank as a robot's. Some of her hair was in char. Her face was a mass of blisters. Her lips had swollen to twice their normal size. She lifted him up.
“Look”! she said. He had to read her lips to understand her.
The dynamic core was glowing with a new intensity, a deep pink blush. Hundreds of multicolored fireballs quivered around it.
Erika was trembling. She put her mouth to his ear. He dimly made out what she was saying.
"It's as if it's always been alive but dying now. Like the rest of us."
"You're not dying, Erika!" Belov shouted. "And we'll get out of here. Just walk!"
She shook her head sadly. Belov saw that she could absorb no more of this particular ordeal, and he wondered what hell she'd been through in the past month or so.
He twisted her arm painfully, but there was no response. He held her head up then, and made her look at him. Then he kissed her swollen lips.
Where force had failed, tenderness took effect. Something stirred in her eyes, a flicker of acknowledgment of the need to survive. Erika touched his own lips with her fingertips.
Yes.
"Let's go then."
A temblor hit; they were shaken. They stood their ground with only each other for support, then began to climb the path winding around the core, one sore dragging step at a time.
Raun, Jade, and Lem Meztizo pushed on into the Catacombs despite the violence happening below, which was transmitted in jarring waves through solid rock, audible as a low tortuous booming that painfully assaulted the eardrums.
But inside was better than outside, where a dusky blizzard sharp as glass was blowing through the cul-de-sac, illuminated by bitter blue flashes of lightning. Raun went first, remembering the way, through the twisting, cloacal passage. Jade had a flashlight; the beam filled the passage with light. Lem carried one of the Kalashnikov rifles, all he had salvaged from the wrecked copter.
"How far?" Jade asked, as they were slowed by a tight turn and a narrowing of the passage that forced them to their hands and knees.
"I think–just a few feet. Then there's–a little chamber, with more of the striped walls."
He held the light over her shoulder as she stopped to rest, saw the reflections from obsidian.
"There it is."
"My God, what if this place–falls in on us?"
"Seems intact so far. No loose rock. Now, let's move."
They crawled
another twenty feet and were able to stand. The chamber had a floor that sloped gradually up to a dozen vertical arabesques, six or seven feet high, on the uneven face of the wall opposite them.
"It's one of those markings," Raun said, looking around. "Third from the left?" She went scrambling up the tilted floor toward the wall.
As Raun reached the cleft in the rock face, Jade swung his flashlight beam toward it. Something stirred inside the cleft. Raun screamed and backed away. Simon Ovosi, his clothing in tatters, bloody slashes on his body and face, lunged at her, the knife with the five-inch blade raised high.
Jade was too distant to be of any use to Raun. Behind him Lem said sharply, "Matt!"
He threw himself out of the way and the Kalashnikov in Lem's hands blazed for a second and a half. All of the slugs hit Simon in the head and chest, stopping him. The blade that struck Raun on the shoulder had lost much of its force, and it spilled from his hand as Simon made a half turn on rubber knees and collapsed, rolling downhill toward Jade.
Raun held her shoulder, grimacing, and leaned against the wall, staring at the body.
"Who is that?"
Jade got to her as she began to tremble.
"Hurt bad?"
"He cut me. But I don't think– No, it's not too bad."
She took her hand away from the slash on the ball of her right shoulder. Her fingers were bloody.
"What's going on here?"
Jade threw the light into the cleft from which Simon had emerged. There was blood on the walls, as if he'd been lurking there for some time. On the other side of the opening his light picked up part of a wall of ancient mummies.
"Raun, take a look."
She glanced in, then turned her head sharply away.
"Yes. That's it. As much as I ever saw of the Catacombs. I wouldn't–couldn't go in there with those things."
She looked fearfully into Jade's eyes.
"So–do I have to go now?"
"We'd better stick together, Raun."
Lem was kneeling beside the body of Simon Ovosi. He looked up.