City of Screams

by James Rollins

  Atherton stood silent for a breath, then suddenly spoke again, as if he had never stopped. “And once Genghis Khan breached those walls, he did as he had promised. He killed everyone in the city, over a hundred thousand people. But he didn’t stop there. It is said he slaughtered every beast of the field, too. It was those dark acts that earned the city the name it bears today.” The professor shuddered. “Shahr-e-Gholghola. The City of Screams.”

  “And what happened to the daughter?” Jordan could tell that the professor was a nervous talker. He needed an ancient story to distract him from the reality of what had happened to his colleagues.

  “Genghis put her to the sword, for betraying her father. It is said that her bones, along with the bones of the other dead, both man and beast, are still buried within that hill. To this day, they’ve never been found.” Atherton glanced up the bloody trail to a cleft in the mountain a few hundred yards away, and his eye twitched. His voice dropped to an imploring whisper. “But we were close. We had to get as much work done before this winter as we could. We had to. We had to get any historical artifacts unearthed and secured before they risked succumbing to the same fate as the Buddha statues. We had to work fast to get artifacts out. To save them.”

  “Could the team have been attacked because of what they found over the last couple of days while you were gone? Maybe some sort of treasure?”

  “Impossible,” the professor said. “If the stories are true about this place, Genghis Khan cleared out anything of value before destroying this city. We’ve never found anything valuable enough to kill for. But superstitious tribesmen did not want us to disturb this mountain-size tomb of their ancestors. Stories abound around here of ghosts, djinns, and curses, and they were afraid that we would awaken something evil. Perhaps we did.”

  Jordan let out a soft snort. “I’m less worried about dead enemies than I am about live ones.”

  He was glad to have the Rangers at their backs. He didn’t trust the professor or the locals here, not even the Afghani trainees under his care. Out here, loyalties shifted in less than a second. Hell, that Shansabani king had lost his kingdom because he couldn’t even trust his own daughter.

  He turned from the ruins and stared at a pair of CH–47 Chinook helicopters that sat a kilometer away, snow collecting on their blades, positioned at the edge of the neighboring town of Bamiyan. They had a team of investigators questioning the townspeople. They were all fighting the night.

  He turned off the camera. He’d study the video later, but for now he wanted to think, to feel the scene.

  What could he tell by the setting? Someone had attacked the archaeologists with a brutality he’d rarely seen. Blood was everywhere. It looked like a knife fight, not a gunfight, blood arcing out in thin spatters from a flurry of cuts, not single blotches as from a bullet wound. But the sheer amount of blood made it hard to be sure.

  Who had done this . . . and why?

  Had the Taliban taken some religious affront to the work here? Or maybe opportunists in town grabbed the researchers as a part of a ransom scheme that got out of hand? Or maybe the professor was correct—superstitious tribesmen had killed them because they feared what the researchers might disturb here. He hoped the Rangers were having more success than his team, because he didn’t like any of these answers.

  By now, the ice mist had grown thicker, the snowfall heavier, slowly erasing the world around them. Jordan lost sight of the choppers, of the distant town of Bamiyan. Even the neighboring ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola had almost vanished, offering mere peaks of rubble and ruin.

  It was as if the world had shrunk to this small village.

  And its bloody secrets.

  The professor took off his glove and bent to pick something up.

  “Stop!” Jordan called. “This is still a crime scene.”

  The professor pointed to a scrap of sea-green fabric frozen in a pool of blood. His voice shook. “That’s Charlotte’s. From her jacket.”

  Jordan winced. There were so many senseless, savage ways to die. “I’m sorry, Professor Atherton.”

  Jordan looked from the professor’s anguished face down at his own hands. His right hand was twisting his gold wedding band around and around on his ring finger. A nervous habit. He let the ring go.

  Heavy footfalls, rushed and determined, sounded from his left. He swung around, freeing his weapon—a compact Heckler & Koch MP7 machine pistol.

  The shadowy form of McKay appeared out of the mists, trailed by Azar, his Afghan trainee.

  “Sarge, look at this.”

  Jordan shouldered his weapon and waved McKay forward.

  The corporal closed in and used the bulk of his body to shield his Nikon camera from the blowing snow. “I took pictures of some tracks I found.”

  “Footprints?”

  “No. Look.”

  Jordan stared down at the tiny digital screen. It showed a trail of bloody tracks across a snow-crusted stretch of rock. “Are those paw prints?”

  McKay scrolled through a few more shots, showing a close-up of one of the prints. “Definitely an animal of some sort. Maybe a wolf?”

  “Not wolf,” Azar interjected in stilted English. “Leopard.”

  “Leopard?” McKay asked.

  Azar huddled next to them and nodded. “Snow leopards have lived here for thousands of years. Long time ago they were a royal symbol for this place. But now, not so many are left. Maybe a few hundred. They attack farmers’ sheep and goats. Not people.” He scratched his beard. “Not enough rain this year and early winter. Maybe they came down here to look for food.”

  That wasn’t even a threat Jordan had considered before now. He felt better thinking that animals had attacked the archaeologists. Animals could be dealt with. Leopards didn’t have weapons, and they weren’t likely to be sheltered by the locals. It also explained the ferocity of the attack, the firefight, and the blood. But could it be that easy?

  Jordan straightened with a shake of his head. “We don’t know that the cats killed them. They might have come to scavenge afterward. Maybe that’s why we didn’t find any bodies. They were dragged to wherever this pride of leopards—”

  “Leap of leopards,” McKay corrected, ever the stickler for details. “Lions come in prides.”

  Atherton hunched in on himself. “If the cats have taken the bodies, they are close.” He pointed his cast toward the ruins. “This place is riddled with hiding places. And also land mines from the many decades of war up here. You have to be careful where you step among those ruins.”

  “Great,” McKay grumbled, “like we don’t have enough problems with man-eating leopards. We get land mines, too.”

  Jordan had maps of the area with the land mines marked on them, but he didn’t look forward to hunting through that maze to recover the bodies—especially in the dark—but he knew that might become necessary. Any clues to who killed the archaeologists might still lie with those mauled corpses. It couldn’t have been leopards, he realized. Leopards didn’t whisper in ancient languages. So the words must have come either from a survivor or a murderer. They had to go now. The longer they waited, the less likely the survivor would still be alive, or the murderer would be brought to justice.

  “How big are these cats?” Jordan asked.

  Azar shrugged. “Big. I’ve heard of males as big as eighty kilos.”

  Jordan did the math. “That’s about a hundred seventy-five pounds.”

  Scary, but not too bad.

  McKay chuffed his disagreement. “Then you’d better look at this.”

  He flicked to another picture and showed a paw print with a shiny quarter next to it, using the coin to reveal the perspective of its size.

  Jordan felt a deep-seated cold fear, a primal reaction to when his ancestors huddled in caves against what hunted the night. The paw print looked to be eight inches wide, the size of a small din
ner plate.

  “I found another line of tracks, too.” McKay showed them on his camera.

  He ended on another paw print, again photographed with a quarter, only this one was smaller—not by much, but clearly different.

  “So there are at least two cats hunting here,” Jordan said.

  “And both a lot larger than a hundred and seventy-five pounds,” McKay added. “I’d estimate twice that, maybe more. The size of African lions.”

  Jordan stared over at the misty ruins, remembering the tale of two African lions, nicknamed The Ghost and The Darkness, who terrorized Kenya for almost a year during the turn of the century. The two lions were said to have killed over a hundred people, often pulling them out of their tents in the middle of the night.

  “We’re going to need more firepower,” McKay said, as if reading Jordan’s mind.

  Unfortunately, his team had traveled here light, one weapon each. They had expected to come and go before dark. Plus, with the Ranger unit standing nearby, it had seemed like plenty of protection.

  That is, until now.

  A crackle from the radio caused both Jordan and McKay to wince and grab for their earpieces. It was Cooper.

  “I’ve got movement over here,” Cooper radioed in. “Inside the village. Spotted a flicker through one of the windows.”

  “Stay put,” Jordan ordered. “We’ll join you. And be on the lookout for leopards. We may not be alone out here.”

  “Got it.” Cooper’s voice sounded more annoyed than frightened. But he hadn’t seen the tracks.

  After Cooper passed on his location, Jordan led the others to the far side of the village. He found Cooper crouched with Farshad by a jumble of boulders at the edge of the village. The ruins of Shahr-e-Gholghola rose behind their position. Jordan felt uneasy turning his back on that mountainous graveyard to face the village.

  “Over there,” Cooper said, and pointed his rifle at a small mud-brick house with a snow-dusted thatched roof. The door was closed, but a window faced them. “Someone’s in there.”

  “Or maybe you’re jumping at shadows,” McKay said. “The Rangers cleared every building. They found nothing.”

  “Doesn’t mean someone didn’t sneak back here when we weren’t looking.” Cooper turned to Jordan. “I swear I saw a flash of something pale pass by that window. It wasn’t a gust of snow or a trail of mist. Something solid.”

  McKay showed Cooper the pictures of the giant paw prints.

  Cooper crouched lower and swore. “I didn’t sign up to be a big game hunter. If that’s some big lion in there—”

  “Leopard,” McKay corrected.

  “I don’t give a flying fart what it is. If it’s got teeth and likes to eat people, I’ll let McKay’s big ass take point.”

  “Fine by me,” McKay said. “Especially since we know there are at least two of them and the professor here thinks they’re holed up in that craggy hill behind you.”

  Cooper glanced over his shoulder and swore again.

  Jordan settled the matter. “Cooper and Farshad, stay here with the professor. I’ll take McKay and Azar and check out that house.”

  With his H&K pistol in hand, Jordan led his two men toward the targeted house, feet silent in the newly fallen snow. He was confident his weapon had enough firepower for whatever hid in this house. Still, he kept looking over his shoulder, wishing he had more ammunition.

  As Azar kept his weapon fixed on the window, he and McKay approached the door. They slipped to either side and readied themselves. Jordan glanced over and got a silent confirmation from his teammate.

  Upon Jordan’s signal, McKay stepped up and kicked the door in.

  It burst open with a loud crack of wood.

  Jordan ran low inside, weapon at his shoulder. McKay kept post, standing higher, sweeping the room with his own gun.

  The home was a single room with a small table, a corner stone oven, and a pair of straw beds, one large and one small. Empty. Just as the Ranger search team reported. Cooper had been wrong, which both surprised and relieved Jordan. He should have known—

  “Don’t move, Sarge,” McKay said from the doorway.

  He obeyed, hearing the urgency in his teammate’s voice.

  “Look slowly up. At your eight o’clock.”

  Jordan shifted his eyes in the direction indicated, barely moving his head. He followed the mud-brick wall to where it met the thatched roof. Half hidden by a rafter, a pair of eyes shone back at him, as if lit by an inner fire. A rustling of straw whispered in the quiet room as the hidden watcher slipped deeper into the nest of thatch, a perfect hiding place, using the musty, stale straw to mask any scent.

  Smart.

  Jordan slung his weapon back and lifted his empty arms.

  “It’s okay,” he said softly, gently, as if he were encouraging a skittish colt. “You’re safe. Come on down.”

  He didn’t know if his words could be understood, but he hoped his tone and mannerisms made his intent plain.

  “Why don’t you—”

  The attack came suddenly. The shadowy lurker leaped from the rafters, coming down with a rain of dry thatch. McKay’s weapon twitched up.

  “Don’t!” Jordan warned.

  He caught the diving shape in his arms, recognizing the simple need in that falling form. He had been raised with a passel of brothers and sisters, and now nieces and nephews. Though he had no children of his own, he knew that plain desire. It went beyond language and country and borders.

  A child needing comfort and reassurance.

  Small arms clasped around his neck, a soft fiery cheek pressed against his own. Thin legs wrapped around his waist.

  “It’s a little girl,” McKay said.

  A terrified little girl.

  She quaked in his arms, shivering with fear.

  “You’re safe,” he assured her, while silently hoping that was true. He turned to McKay. “Bring Cooper and the others inside.”

  McKay dashed out, leaving Jordan alone with the child. Jordan guessed the girl was no more than ten. He crossed to the table and sat down. He unzipped his coat and wrapped it around her, cradling her thin form against his chest. Her small body burned against him, feverish through the pajama-like garment she wore. He read raw terror in her every twitch and soft sob as she hovered at the edge of shock.

  What had she seen?

  He hated to treat this small child as a witness, especially in this state, but she might have the only answers to what really happened here.

  The other men crowded into the small room, which only made the girl cling more tightly to him, her eyes huge upon the newcomers. He squeezed as much reassurance as he could. Her small round face, framed by black hair parted down the middle, constantly glanced at him, as if making sure he didn’t vanish.

  “Leopard tracks all around the house, Sarge,” Cooper said. “It’s like they had a dance party out there.”

  Atherton spoke from the door. “She’s the cook’s daughter. I don’t know her name.”

  The girl looked at Atherton as if she recognized him, then shrank back against Jordan.

  “Can you ask her questions?” Jordan asked. “Find out what happened?”

  Atherton kept his distance from the girl. He rapped out questions as if he wanted to get through them as quickly as possible. His eye twitched madly. She answered in monosyllables, her eyes never leaving Jordan’s face.

  Holding the girl gently, Jordan noted the two Afghanis standing by the smaller of the two beds. One man knelt down and picked up a pinch of white powder from the dirt floor and brought it to his lips. It looked like salt and from the squint and spit probably tasted like it, too.

  Jordan noted that a whitish ring circled the bed, and a cut rope hung from one bedpost.

  The two Afghanis kept their heads bowed together, looking from the circle of
salt to the girl. Their eyes shone with suspicion—and not a small amount of fear.

  “What’s that about?” McKay whispered to Jordan.

  “I don’t know.”

  Atherton answered their question. “According to folklore, ghosts or djinn often attack someone as they sleep, and the salt holds them at bay. The mother probably believed she had to protect her child, what with them working within the shadow of Shahr-e-Gholghola. And perhaps she did. Things happen out here in the mountains that you cannot believe when you are safe in the city.”

  Jordan kept himself from rolling his eyes. The last thing he needed was for the professor to start spouting nonsense. “What did the girl say happened here?”

  “She said the team had a breakthrough yesterday.” He tapped his cast and grimaced. “I missed it. Anyway, the tunnel they had been digging had broken into a cache of bones. Both human and animal. They were to begin removing them in the coming days.”

  “And what about last night?” Jordan asked.

  “I was just getting to that,” Atherton said with a pique of irritation.

  He returned to questioning the girl, but Jordan felt her body stiffen. She shook her head, covered her face, and refused to say more. Her breathing grew more rapid and shallow. The heat of her body now burned through his coat.

  “Better leave it for now,” Jordan said, sensing the girl retreating into shock.

  Ignoring him, Atherton grasped her arm roughly. Jordan noticed a loop of rope dangling from her slender wrist. Had she been tied to the bed?

  Atherton’s words grew harsher, more insistent.

  “Professor.” Jordan pulled his hand off her. “She’s a sick and traumatized little girl. Leave her alone.”

  McKay drew Atherton away. The professor retreated from the girl until his back was flat against the mud wall and then stared at her as if he, too, were afraid of her. But why? She was just a scared little girl.

  The girl glanced up at Jordan, her body burning up in his arms. Even her eyes glowed with that inner fire. She spoke to Jordan, pleadingly, faintly, before slipping away.