by Ian Woodhead
Another screech blasted down the corridor. It sounded to Dane like a screech of triumph. When he heard the bird’s galloping feet, he knew he was right. Dane willed his legs to go faster, knowing that it was now just behind him. He shone the light in front of him and finally saw the older archaeologist. He was facing Dane, with his hands on his hips. What the hell was he playing at? Dane then saw the chasm. A gap of about five feet of nothing separating him and Benedict.
He had no other choice. Dane swallowed down the terror, preparing himself before he leapt. The other side was slightly higher. Even so, Dane was still confident that he would be able to make the jump. His first foot touched the lip and he jumped, only for the terror bird’s beak to catch the bottom of Dane’s trousers.
Screaming, Dane slammed into the side of the rock, the tips of his fingers managing to catch the other edge of the rock.
He felt the sharp stone biting into his skin. He gritted his teeth against the searing pain while listening to the frustrated howl of that nightmarish creature behind him, still trying to get to him. Dane looked up, past his bleeding fingers, to find Benedict staring down at him. What the hell was he doing just looking at him like that? “Help me up, for crying out loud. I don’t know how long I can hold on for.”
The man got down on his knees and wrapped his thick fingers around Dane’s wrists. “Okay,” he said slowly. “You can let go now. I’ve got you.”
Dane didn’t believe a word. That face suggested that as soon as he did remove his fingers, Benedict was going to drop him. Yet, he knew his grip on the stone was already slipping. His blood had seen to that. “Pull me up, please!”
The older archaeologist looked around the walls, as if looking for something. He then did something that made Dane doubt the man’s sanity. He winked at the bird before sticking out his tongue.
“Up you get,” he said before dragging Dane up.
He didn’t start to relax until his knees were on the ground. Dane rolled away from the edge. He tucked his fingers under his armpits before opening his eyes. “Thank you.”
Benedict simply nodded before standing over him. He walked over to the edge and waved at the furious bird. “You can stop your shouting, birdy. Go back where you came from. Go on, bugger off!”
“I don’t think it can understand English, Benedict. If anything, you’re just making it more upset.” Dane got to his feet and examined his sore fingers. The damage wasn’t as bad as he’d initially feared. A hot bath and a scotch would soon have them back on the road to recovery. “Come on, let’s see where this goes.”
The other archaeologist looked directly at him. He opened his mouth and muttered something, but the noise from the terror bird drowned out his words. Dane leaned against the wall. He had no idea what had got into the man. Dane was about to confront him, to find out exactly what his problem was, when the wall behind Dane shifted. “What the hell?” Dane spun around and watched in horror as what he previously believed to be a jutting-out rock, slid into the stone.
“What have you done now?” Benedict jumped towards him. “Oh, you bloody shit. I knew I should have…” Benedict ran past Dane.
He stepped away from the wall, his mouth drying up when he saw a wide stone platform sliding out from the stone face, heading towards the other side of the path, towards the waiting bird. “That’s so not fair,” he shouted while scrambling after Benedict. He raced down the dark corridor while listening to the huge claws on the bird’s feet crack against the floor. He should have just gone into that narrow gap while he could and just throttled the bloody thing.
Benedict was just in front of him, but it looked as though he was slowing down. Dane caught up to the older archaeologist and found they’d reached another junction. This time, there were four more corridors, all of them narrow.
“What the hell do we do now?” screamed Benedict. “All of them are going to contain one of those birds, I just know it.”
Dane looked the way they came and saw that their pursuer had slowed down. He looked at Benedict then at each of those entrances in front of them. He didn’t need to possess Benedict’s superior sense of hearing to know that the other man was right. “There must be another way out of here. There has to be!” Dane rubbed his hands along the walls, trying to find another hidden lever that might open up another safe way out of there. His searching fingers found no levers, but they did expose some more geometric shapes.
“Why has it stopped, Dane? What’s going to happen now?”
“Will you stop that? How am I supposed to know what’s going to happen? There’s no agenda here, no script.”
“Are you sure about that? Because I’m not sure that I believe you.”
Dane just shook his head; he had more important things to worry about. For a start, he was now very much aware of movement coming from those other narrow tunnels. His fore finger fell into a shallow groove. His finger moved along the groove, only stopping when the tip smacked against a dome-shaped point.
“Interesting,” he said.
“Oh no! There’s four of them now. No, make that six. Look at the bloody size of them!”
Dane rested his finger on the stone button, uttered a silent prayer, then pushed it in. A section of wall a couple of feet from the floor slowly slid upwards, revealing a rectangular patch of total blackness. Before Dane had time to express surprise, Benedict climbed inside and threw himself forward.
The sight of seven huge birds racing towards him took away any hesitation. Dane jumped into the gap and screamed out in shock as a chute slid him down to some unknown destination.
A mountainous pile of brittle bones broke his fall. Dane tumbled and rolled. He tucked his arms and legs into his body and held closed his mouth to stop himself from breathing in the choking dust. Finally, the inertia slowed and he came to a halt beside Benedict’s feet. Dane gazed in awe at the vast size of this cavern, as well as the sheer amount of animal remains in here. The entrance to the chute was way up at the top of this cavern. “There’s no way we’re going to leave that way,” he muttered. Dane reckoned that the pair of them must have dropped over a thousand metres.
He slowly got to his feet while instinctively checking his body for anything broken. Dane was sore in a few places, but he’d come out of it relatively intact. He was about to ask Benedict if he was okay when the other men grabbed his hair and viciously pulled his head back. Before Dane could respond, he felt the razor-sharp edge of a long blade pressed against his throat.
“Time for some answers, Dane,” he snarled.
“Get off me, you idiot!”
“Start with what the game is.” He leaned closer. “I can’t see any cameras in here, so I’m guessing we must be out of their vision.” Benedict pressed the knife a little harder. “That’s good, really. It means I can do this without any of your mates sounding the alarm. Don’t worry, as soon as you do tell me what I want to know, I’ll move us towards a camera so your mates can rescue us.”
The blade had broken the skin. Dane felt his hot blood streaming down his skin. It didn’t hurt, not yet. What the hell was this fool going on about? What cameras? He took a deep breath, desperately trying to stay calm, to stop his anger from boiling over. Whether he wanted to admit it, Dane needed to keep this idiot alive, even if he had begun to lose his marbles.
“I guess there’s no point in denying the cameras,” he replied.
“So, I was right about you. I knew it!”
The pressure eased off just a bit. Dane eased his body closer to Benedict. “Did you notice them right from the start?”
“No, not at first. It’s only when the spiders moved along the ceiling. One of their legs dislodged some webbing. Your torchlight reflected from a lens. That was a stupid thing to do, Dane. I guess you must have forgotten where you put that one. Still, these things happen.”
Benedict had no time to engage in another gloating revelation as Dane slammed the back of his head into the bridge of the older man’s nose. He then grabbed Benedict’s wrist
and twisted it around, not stopping until he heard the knife clattering on the floor. Dane pushed the man back, scooped up the knife, and stepped back holding the weapon in front of him. “Listen to me, you silly old bastard! I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. I know nothing about any cameras, nor do I know why we are down here!”
“I don’t believe you.”
Dane wiped his fingers across his throat. He couldn’t tell whether the blood on his skin was from his throat or his previous wounds. “Do you think I care what you think?” He paused. “You were going to drop me. I don’t believe this. You really were going to let me fall to my death just because you thought I might have had something to do with what’s happened to us?”
“What else did you expect?”
“I expected you to trust me,” he screamed. “What, you think we’re in some television game show, that a live audience is betting on who live or dies? That there are fabulous prizes to be won?” He picked up one of the bones and threw it at Benedict. “That all this is pretend.” He slid the knife into the back of his trousers and walked away from the other man. “Perhaps, those birds are fake too.” He turned and sneered at Benedict. “Perhaps it’s just a man in a costume.”
“Where are you going?”
Dane didn’t stop walking. “Away from you.”
He could hear the other man following him but didn’t turn around. Dane no longer cared about him anymore. He kept his eyes fixed on the distant ceiling. There were more than one chute leading down here to the floor. Enormous piles of bones surrounded their exits. As Dane moved from one to the other, he saw the bones were getting fresher, as evidenced by the stench emanating from the piles. He had to lift his jacket and hold it over his mouth and nose before continuing.
“Some of these bones look human,” replied Benedict. “Plus, I think there is at least one other human-like species.”
Dane ignored the man. He’d already seen two human skulls lying at the bottom of a bone pile. What caught Dane’s eye was the sight of what looked like an exit, about half a mile from where they stood. To get to the exit involved climbing over some of the fresher piles of dismembered carcasses.
“Look, I’m sorry, Dane. I was wrong about you. I apologise.”
“This must be what happened to the remains of the terror bird’s meals.” Dane turned around, looking past Benedict’s imploring face and gazed back at the chute that had dropped the pair of them in here. That was the first one and, he guessed, the oldest. It’s entirely possible that he and Benedict were that chute’s unwilling passengers in over a few dozen thousand years, back when those murderous animals actually roamed the land above.
“Tell me when you stopped seeing the cameras,” he said abruptly. “I bet you still haven’t seen any in here, and don’t lie to me by telling me you haven’t been looking.”
“I haven’t seen any cameras since we were separated from the others, but that doesn’t mean they’re not up there somewhere. Look, can I have my knife back, please? I feel naked without it.”
Dane shook his head. “I’ll think about it. Where did you find the knife? My assumption was that we were all searched before waking up down here. Did you pick it up on our journey?”
Benedict shook his head. “It isn’t mine, but I did find the article upon my person, a few moments after opening my eyes.”
There wouldn’t be any more cameras. That much, Dane did know. He crouched down and brushed aside enough bones to allow him to sit on the floor. “Benedict, we are both scientists, in a sense. We might not wear the lab coats, but our thought processes still mirror our cousins in the labs.” He sighed heavily and glared at the other man. “Do you agree?”
“Well, yes. I guess so.”
Dane pulled out the knife and tossed it towards Benedict’s feet. “So, if I was complicit in this abduction, I would give you a weapon?”
“But the patterns. You solved them with ease!”
“And that makes me suspect? If your mind hadn’t been full of your paranoid fantasy, I know you would have arrived at the solution before me. Benedict, you can stop looking for the cameras. There won’t be any down here.”
“How can you be so sure?”
He tapped the floor. “Because we are the first ones to set foot in here. This is the equivalent of Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon.”
“But—”
“No buts. I’m right about this. You see, whoever discovered this place was only able to explore the tip of the iceberg. To go further required the expertise of some very specific individuals.”
Benedict picked up the knife. “I suddenly feel very foolish. Why didn’t they just ask us?”
“Unknown. I would have jumped at the chance to explore this place. It is one of the questions I intend to pose once we find our companions.”
“Wait, you know what this is?”
Dane motioned Benedict to join him before he wiped away a section of thick dust in front of his knee. “I wish I had my brush,” he muttered. Dane grinned at what his fingers had uncovered. “Isn’t it interesting?” He glanced at Benedict’s shocked face. “Do you not think that it’s a little grandiose to have this magnificent and intricate mosaic tile floor under a waste collection area?” Dane brushed away more of the debris. “My guess is this was once used as a theatre or debating hall, or whatever analogous concept the species used in their society. The chutes and subsequent animal waste are a result of some unforeseen catastrophe.”
He stood and helped Benedict up. “We have discovered a Nephilim city.” Dane held up his hand. “Remove that incredulous look from your face, Benedict. Nelson and I were already on our way to investigate rumours of giant humans before our unfortunate apprehension.”
“This could be the greatest discovery of the millennium. If, of course, you’re right.”
“I am right,” replied Dane. He lowered his voice. “Of course, we still have to find details of them and our friends. Not to mention find a way out of here and get home before the ones who shot down my plane turn up.”
Benedict shrugged. “We had better get a move on then.”
Chapter Nine
A single drop of Nelson’s sweat fell from his forehead and landed in the middle of the huge spider’s back. It took every strength of his being to fight the overwhelming instinct to scream and stamp on the vile animal. As instructed, he stayed totally still, only shifting his eyeballs a fraction until Bradley’s serene features swam into view.
The bodyguard responded to Nelson’s silent plea for help with a brief shake of his head. Oh Jesus, two more of the horrible hairy bastards were now crawling along the stone ledge, heading straight for his other boot.
“Kill the bloody thing!” he hissed. “Do it now before his pals get any closer and start to have a party.” This was just unbelievable. The bodyguard’s idiotic grin had yet to leave that gormless face. It was all right for him to look so smug and superior; he didn’t have an eight-legged monster making its way towards his tender ankle!
“If you move even an inch, Nelson, those spiders eating into your leg will be the last thing on your mind.” His grin grew wider. “Move and I’ll bury my fists in your face.”
There were another three spiders heading towards him now! Nelson didn’t know what to do. As much as he mentally berated the thug and thought Bradley was missing a few brain cells, Nelson didn’t doubt the man wouldn’t honour his threat.
This just wasn’t fair. Having his face shoved in seconds before a swarm of spiders turned him into burger meat was not how he expected to end his existence! The thug’s savage threat did the trick, though. Nelson didn’t move a muscle. The sheer idea of Bradley’s hard fists breaking his face utterly terrified him. He looked away from the bodyguard’s glower and found his gaze drifting down to his feet, only to discover that the spider had already moved away from his foot. In fact, they were all crawling up the side of the walls. His eyes followed the lead arachnid, not daring to breathe until its disgusting body and legs had v
anished from sight.
Nelson quietly gasped when Bradley grabbed his upper arm and jerked him away from the crawling column of arachnids.
“It was the lead one we needed the keep an eye on, the spider exploring your foot. That’s the head honcho, you see. Old Sam spider is like a scout or something, but more than that, I reckon that fellow’s venom contains a chemical, a pheromone. Once its fangs break the skin, that chemical sends all the others into a total frenzy.”
Benedict felt physically sick.
“They’re not normal spiders. That much I do know. Then again, what is normal around here?”
“Why didn’t you just say that right at the beginning when we first saw that spider?”
Bradley shrugged. “The way I figured it, you didn’t listen to me when I said we should have stayed where Branch left us, so why should you listen to me now?” Bradley winked at Nelson before spinning around and walking off.
Perhaps if he hadn’t been so preoccupied with the damn coins, Nelson might have noticed their unusual behaviour. It would have been right at the beginning, not long after their awakening. While he and the others were quietly panicking over their situation, David Attenborough over there was scrutinising those bloody spiders.
Nelson gripped the side of his thighs to try to ease the shaking. He watched the thug head back towards that overhanging rock. He cut a fine figure of a man. Cool, calm, and collected, just as he was when Nelson watched those spiders take that poor man apart.
He took a deep shaking breath before rushing after the bodyguard, while vaguely wondering if the thug had taken notes.
“How are you holding up, Nelson? You don’t look too good.”
Was he making fun of him? “I’ve had better days,” he replied. It did occur to him that Bradley, the great white hunter, might not be far from the mark with his rather demeaning observation. Nelson hadn’t been feeling himself for quite some time now, ever since he woke up in this place, to be honest.