by Sean Ellis
A pillar of smoke, like a seventh arm, erupted from the creature’s trunk as a section of living tissue the size of a freight train engine was vaporized deep within. Simultaneously, a telepathic screech rattled through DiLorenzo’s head, and he realized that for better or worse, Tarrant had finally noticed them.
The monster whipped around, its orbs blazing with fury. Centered below the eyes was a dark wound like a gaping maw, a crater of scorched tissue and shattered bones that seemed to reach all the way through the huge beast. Yet despite the severity of the trauma and the torrent of blood that now cascaded onto the floor below, Tarrant’s presence was undiminished. There was more rage than pain in his strident disembodied outcry. “Oh, Mira. Now you’ve done it!”
Mira threw the spent rocket tube away. “Run!”
Since he didn’t know which way to go, DiLorenzo chose to follow her lead. His head instantly began pounding as he ran, but a surge of adrenaline pushed him through the effort. In the corner of his eye, he saw something descending—one of the creature’s humongous arms—to smash them into oblivion. Insect-like, they scurried from the path of destruction in the nick of time, and felt a blast of displaced air at their backs an instant before impact. The ground pitched beneath their feet as a tremor rippled out from beneath Tarrant’s open palm.
Mira kept running, but glanced over one shoulder both to check on DiLorenzo and to determine where the next blow might fall. At the same time, she reviewed the options that now remained. The LAW missile had been the most powerful weapon in her arsenal, and while it had done a considerable amount of damage, her enemy was nowhere near defeated.
Another of Tarrant’s hands began to fall just ahead of them, as if the mutated titan was trying to anticipate their movements. Mira cut hard to the left, adjusting course at the last possible second to avoid the crushing strike. DiLorenzo almost missed her maneuver, but she grasped his shirt collar and yanked him along a whisker’s breadth ahead of the collision.
Like mice seeking shelter under an elephant, she steered them closer to the monstrosity. As they drew near the towering mass, she saw that the blast crater from the missile was already beginning to heal. The same biological mechanism responsible for Tarrant’s runaway growth was also quick to efface any wound. For the first time, she began to wonder if it would be possible to kill him.
The answer hit her like a slap and she skidded to a halt.
“What?” DiLorenzo shouted, lost somewhere between incomprehension and panic.
“I’ve got an idea.” She unlimbered the grenade launcher and showed it to him. “Do you know how to use one of these?”
He nodded. A similar version of the weapon was used by the New York City police for riot control to shoot CS gas canisters and less-than-lethal munitions such as rubber bullets or beanbags.
She passed it over along with a handful of forty-millimeter grenades. “I need you to get his attention.”
“Get his attention,” he repeated, as if reciting a grocery list. “Meanwhile you will be . . . doing what?”
She reached down to her lower leg and drew her boot knife. “Surgery.”
DiLorenzo stared at the knife, then at the grenades in his own hand. “You’re kidding.”
Tarrant’s root-like feet began shifting as he lifted his massive bulk and commenced relocating in an effort to expose the bothersome duo hiding in his shadow. As he moved, his arms fanned out above them, with blue fire dancing at his multiple fingertips.
“Go!” Mira shouted the admonition as she herself broke away, veering back out into the open. “And for God’s sake, don’t shoot me.”
DiLorenzo started to follow, but the suddenness of her decision, coupled with his own hesitation, had given her an insurmountable head start. He remained where he was a moment longer, still debating what to do, and his indecision saved his life. Lightning from Tarrant’s hands licked at the stone floor and scorched a furrow between where he stood and where Mira ran.
Though he had no idea what Mira was planning to do, DiLorenzo knew she was counting on him to . . . what had she said? Get his attention? For the moment, Tarrant’s awareness seemed to be fixed on Mira, the ever-present monkey wrench in the works of his grand scheme, and if something wasn’t done to distract him, Mira would be blasted to cinders.
DiLorenzo ran in the opposite direction, trying to get the necessary range to implement the grenade launcher. It didn’t take long. Despite his bulk, Tarrant was moving rapidly away in his pursuit of Mira. The detective found a heap of rubble for concealment, then knelt and fitted a grenade into the launcher. Aiming just a little high, he let one fly.
If Tarrant heard the hollow pop of the gunpowder primer in the firing chamber, he gave no indication. But when the tiny explosive ball hit and erupted, blasting a second crater in his flesh, his psychic bellow was deafening.
“Oh yeah,” DiLorenzo muttered, ducking down behind the impromptu barrier. He slid another shell into the launcher. “That got his attention.”
Mira had managed to put herself on the opposite side of the creature from the detective. Her goal had been to reach the fractured rock wall where part of the twelfth level had broken away. It was a dangerous place to be, especially if DiLorenzo failed to distract the monster from its single-minded determination to stomp her out of existence. As it was, she was barely staying ahead of the thunderbolts, and wondered if the old grave robber wasn’t intentionally missing in order to herd her toward a literal dead end.
As soon as the first grenade blew, she sensed a lull in the intensity of the pursuit. Tarrant hadn’t forgotten about her, but he also knew that she had not been the one to sting him this time. His torso whipped back and forth, scanning the floor to find DiLorenzo without losing track of where Mira was. She knew she might not get a better chance.
A second blast struck close to one of the grotesque eye orbs, smashing it and spilling a torrent of ocular fluid down the creature’s chest. This time, the screams were equal parts frustration and agony, and the remaining eye burned with fury as it scanned the ruined floor for the impudent mortal who dared to menace it so. It was just the break Mira needed.
She scrambled over the shattered rubble and immediately began climbing the ragged wall. The broken stone was by no means sheer, an easy climb by comparison to the cliff face she had negotiated in order to gain access to the Nazi fortress in Bolivia, but the circumstances under which she made this ascent were far more extreme.
Tarrant lofted his arms overhead, his reach extending almost to the uppermost reaches of the ceiling. The energy arcing at his fingertips illuminated every crevice of the cavern like a spotlight. Mira squinted against the sudden brilliance and looked away. She could hear stone shattering and the hum of electrical discharges behind her, but focused her concentration on the sensory input from her fingers as they sought out handholds in the schist, expecting at any moment to be swatted off the wall like a fly. However, Tarrant’s attention had indeed been diverted and as he scoured the floor to find DiLorenzo, she finally reached the shattered remnants of the highest level of the city.
The circular terrace had broken nearly in half, and the division seemed almost surgically precise. It took her a moment to reconcile what she was seeing with her implanted recollection of the pagoda. It was like looking at a cross-section of a memory. And right in front of her, less than three steps away, was the crystalline altar and two-thirds of the Trinity.
She glanced over her shoulder and down. Tarrant still searched the floor for the detective, who wisely was keeping his head down. The Trinity continued to hover before her seductively.
She moved closer to the altar, feeling subtle resistance of its energy field. Part of her wanted to destroy it, and with it, all the future schemes of men like Tarrant, yet she knew she would not. It was a tool, which might also be used for good instead of evil. Her fingers pushed into the invisible matrix to touch the ancient talisman.
The blow caught her completely off-guard, and the abrupt translation from standi
ng before the Trinity to lying sprawled on the hard floor several feet away from where she had been left her momentarily dazed. As she rolled over, trying to clear the cobwebs, she caught a glimpse of her assailant moving in to follow up on the blind-side assault. A booted foot that slammed into the side of her head punctuated her astonished recognition.
She let herself go limp, trying to absorb most of the energy of the blow, and rolled away. Despite her last-moment preparations, the impact left her ears ringing and her vision blurred, but she retained enough sense to flip over to a seated position, with one arm raised to fend off the next attack. A tall, bloodied, blonde nightmare wavered before her like a mythic Valkyrie ready to send her to Valhalla. Through the fog in her head, she could just hear the strident accusation.
“You ruined everything,” Rachel Aimes screamed. “Can’t you just die?”
Mira couldn’t tell if Rachel was a Trinity zombie, brought back from the dead for one last battle, or if the woman was simply as relentless and determined as she was. Nor could she begin to grasp how Rachel had managed to recover from her fall and gain the twelfth level ahead of her. And at just that moment, she didn’t care to ask.
Rachel moved swiftly, but despite being on the ground Mira’s position was more defensible. She deflected the next kick, and lashed up with her own foot, striking her opponent in the knee. Rachel’s leg folded beneath her and she went down. Mira sprang onto the other woman’s back and delivered a chopping blow to the base of Rachel’s neck. She only got one good hit in before her larger and stronger foe bucked like an enraged animal beneath her and pitched her aside.
Rachel was on her instantly. Mira felt her head snap back as her hair was seized, but she flipped backwards, twisting free, and continued through a second reverse handspring that ended in a low crouch ten feet away. Rachel whirled and charged again, but this time Mira was ready.
At the moment of contact, Mira stepped aside and pivoted on her left foot as she brought her right leg around in a roundhouse kick that connected solidly with the back of Rachel’s head. The added momentum impelled Tarrant’s daughter forward, arms waving like windmills as she stumbled toward the precipice overlooking the abyss. Rachel fell to her knees at the edge, but it wasn’t enough to stop her headlong plunge.
Panting to catch her breath after the unexpected combat, Mira approached the precipice and looked over. In defiance of all reason, Rachel Aimes clung to the sheer wall, her fingertips just barely hooked on the lip. Mira felt a grudging respect for her foe’s tenacity.
With an almost superhuman effort, Rachel began hauling herself back up onto the smooth rock floor. “I’ll tear your heart out, you bitch!” she snarled.
“Not exactly a profound choice of last words,” replied Mira, raising an eyebrow. “I was hoping for something a bit more philosophical.”
What Rachel’s next utterance lacked in eloquence was made up for in decibels. She was still screaming as Mira wrestled the Trinity from the altar several seconds later. The chasm was deep and it took quite a while for her to reach the bottom.
DiLorenzo turned his head cautiously, moving as little as possible. He could feel the intensity of Tarrant’s lightning on his back, and although he was covered in dust and debris from the geological upheaval going on all around, he was certain the god-like monstrosity would at any moment spot him and smash him to a bloody pulp.
He had done his part, distracting the thing long enough for Mira to do whatever it was she had planned. Whether she was successful or not, he couldn’t begin to guess, but he knew his own time was limited.
The creature wasn’t invincible. He knew he had done more than just scratch it with the two grenades he had fired, and he still had three more in reserve. If he could just hit a vital area, it might be enough to end the threat once and for all. But how many chances would he get before the thing fixed his location and roasted him with a lightning bolt?
The towering pillar of flesh loomed directly over him, the arms spread out now like fiery tree branches, and suddenly streams of argent fire were spilling down onto the floor, striking at random targets, but in such rapid succession that the explosions seemed to be everywhere all at once.
DiLorenzo’s fingers tightened around the grenade launcher as he gathered his courage. It was a good effort, Mira. Sorry it didn’t work out.
From her new vantage, Tarrant seemed even bigger. Mira thought maybe he was still growing. It was time to do something about that. His one eye was turned elsewhere, still presumably looking for DiLorenzo, and she knew she might not get a better opportunity. Holding the knife in her right hand, she backed away, putting several steps between herself and the edge, then took off running.
Her leap described a high arc out over the rubble of the collapsed section of the twelfth tier. She dropped nearly sixty feet in a parabolic descent before slamming into the solid mass of Tarrant’s trunk. As she lit, she drove the blade into the tightly stretched skin, and clung to the haft.
The knife caught in the solid muscle tissue, arresting her fall long enough for her boot soles and fingernails to find a purchase. If Tarrant felt the sting of her knife in his flesh, he gave no indication. Although the growth of his skin was commensurate with the rest of his evolving physiology, it was nevertheless stretched to its limits, and her fingers tore through it like paper, exposing twisted muscle fibers the size of hawsers. Using the blade like an ice axe, she worked her way up and around the undulating mass.
The wound from the LAW rocket had begun healing, but remained an open and deep tunnel into which Mira did not hesitate to plunge. Yet, this weak spot in the monster’s flank was not her primary goal; what she sought would require a little more effort.
She abandoned the idea of cutting through the cable-like strands of muscle that sheathed Tarrant’s new form, not because to do so would have been so difficult as to be impossible, but because it was unnecessary. Although the fibers were themselves dense and impenetrable, they were held together only by a thin fascia, which she pulled effortlessly apart to create a narrow cavity. Drawing a deep breath, she plunged head and shoulders into the gap. A moment later, she was gone, completely swallowed up inside the creature’s living flesh.
DiLorenzo rose to a kneeling position, trying not to think about the holocaust that was raging all around, and fitted another grenade into the launcher. If he failed with the first shot, he might not get another, so his movements were deliberate and careful. Locking the barrel in place, he raised the gun to his shoulder and pointed up into the center of the fiery mass. But as his finger began to squeeze the trigger, the lightning abruptly ceased flowing from Tarrant’s fingertips, and the cavern was plunged into darkness.
DiLorenzo blinked. He could still faintly see the red glow where Tarrant’s conflagration had liquefied sections of the stone floor, but this afforded scant illumination to his light-scorched retinas. Somehow the sudden night was more disconcerting than the raging inferno had been. He swallowed and then resumed his preparations to fire the grenade.
“What are you up to, Mira?”
Tarrant’s voice rumbled in his head like the crushing of boulders, and he jerked his finger away from the trigger. Was Mira still alive? It didn’t seem possible. Yet, whatever she was doing, it was enough to distract Tarrant from his apocalyptic display of power. He blinked, straining his eyes to find her in the crushing darkness.
His night vision was just returning when a faint green glow appeared high overhead. He squinted, trying to look around the bright spots that still swam in front of his eyes, and was able to distinguish the source of the illumination. It was a chemical light stick and it was moving against the surface of the atrocity Tarrant had become. DiLorenzo strained harder and could just make out the silhouette of a person moving against the dark backdrop of the blast wound.
“Mira!” He was unaware that he had shouted, but his exclamation rang loud in the unexpected silence.
The light tube abruptly fell and with it the dark shape that he now knew to be
the unstoppable Mira Raiden. She tumbled from the crater, bouncing along Tarrant’s trunk until she rolled out onto the floor and lay prone, unmoving. In spite of the ominous threat still hovering above, DiLorenzo left his place of concealment and raced toward her. Before he could reach her, however, she began to stir, and rose to her hands and knees. Her head remained down, her face all but invisible behind a mask of blood and dust.
“You didn’t really think you could kill me, did you?” Tarrant’s voice was full of menace. He lifted his arms once more, and the sun seemed to rise over Agartha as baleful lightning leapt from his fingertips. He let the electricity build, as if by increasing the potency of the final blow he might erase all memory of the woman who had so nearly foiled his plans.
“Kill you?” Mira raised her head, looking up into his one good eye. “You’re already dead.”
In her left hand, she held a blood-streaked circlet of silvery metal, adorned with a single gemstone which, despite being marred by an ugly crack, pulsated with brilliant light.
Though he no longer had any sort of facial expression, Tarrant’s shock was plain. “No. Wait. . . .”
Mira flipped Atl’an’s Trinity into the air and in the same motion drew her Desert Eagle and fired. The .44-caliber round finished what she had begun in Panama, pulverizing the crystal completely.
Tarrant’s denial was instantly silenced as the flow of Beta waves to his reanimated cells ceased. The power building at his extended fingertips abruptly leapt toward the ceiling in a single cataclysmic discharge, then the darkness instantly returned. Although the three Trinity segments working in harmony had triggered his transformation, it was the artifact stolen from the museum that had given him back his life, and now, as simply as throwing a switch, it had been taken away. There was no lingering protest, no thrashing death throes. The undead grave robber was simply gone.