Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: The Lost Cult

by E. E. Knight

  “Borg, do you think you can stand?”

  “Yes. Let’s find the sun. But first, some food, Lara, to keep us on our legs.”

  They lit chemical lights and gasped.

  All around them, half submerged in stone, crystal arcs like great pieces of clamshell stuck up. In the cavern, which stretched far beyond the range of their lights. In the water. There were some even in the ceiling.

  The Tomb Raider got out her MagLite, probed the shadows.

  “It is like…” Borg gasped. “It is like Krypton.”

  “Like what?”

  “From the Superman stories. The planet where he was born…”

  Lara had spent much of her childhood reading Aristotle and Cicero—with a dash of Sappho or Ovid when she felt in the mood for something spicy—rather than comics. But she understood what he meant. “You’re right; it is like another world. But we need our strength, and we can’t afford to waste it on exploration. Let’s eat.”

  They sat next to one of the crystal outcroppings, an arc of mineral as clear as a pane of glass. Did the creatures that lived in the Whispering Abyss, presumably Von Junst’s Elder Gods, shape this crystal in some way? What had lived among these sloping old pieces of dome?

  There were bits of shell among the ruins. More sea bottom, thrust up into the Andes?

  Once they had eaten, they felt stronger. They rose and left the strangely beautiful crystal city, splashing through ankle-deep water at times as they followed the channel and the now-fading light.

  “It’s light outside,” Lara said, checking her watch.

  “Let’s run,” Borg said. “I thought I’d never see another sunrise.” He hurried toward the familiar surface world.

  “Just don’t hit your head again!”

  Later, she berated herself for not noticing that the cavern wasn’t inhabited by bats. They could see sunlight now, so bright to their dark-inured senses that they had to wince.

  That’s when they hit the web.

  It stretched, two volleyball nets across, over the cavern mouth, partially supported by a couple of roots descending from above. Borg hit it and stopped. Lara, partially blinded by the bright light, tried to pull up to keep from running into him and lost her footing in the loose riverside pebbles. She fell headfirst into the strands.

  They were as thick as heavyweight fishing wire and as sticky as superglue.

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw something dance down the web on horribly hairy legs, its body about the size of a snapping turtle’s.

  Not counting the swollen abdomen and long, hairy, frantically working legs.

  Her eyes adjusted, and she saw cocoons with a few parrot feathers sticking out, and something that looked like a monkey’s tail.

  “Lara, shoot!” Borg shouted as the spider alighted on his piton arm.

  “Hands … stuck!”

  His claw arm was free. He reached for the sheathed survival knife at his belt, pulled it out, dropped it next to her hand.

  She grasped the hilt, got a rush of strength from it, enough to pull the web far enough so she could saw at it.

  Borg fired a piton. He didn’t have a hope of hitting the spider, but the recoil startled it. It ran up the web.

  “Hurry, Lara,” Borg said.

  “I am!”

  It was hard to cut with the blade held so it faced back along her forearm.

  “Hurry very much!” Borg insisted.

  “Why?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  At the elbow, her arm was almost free!

  “I do want to know.”

  “It’s above you and coming down on a line NOW!”

  She took a chance, dropped the knife, and reached for her holster, not wanting to think about what would happen if the gun were tangled as well—

  The butt in her hand, safety flicked off, she pointed it upwards, unable to see.

  BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

  The hot cartridge cases landed on her uncovered thighs, burning, but she didn’t care.

  She felt wet goo strike her back.

  “It’s going back up!” Borg said.

  She fired twice more for good measure. Spiders were sensitive to vibrations, and she hoped it wouldn’t stop fleeing until it hit the Brazilian border.

  The hot gun went back in its holster, and she retrieved Borg’s knife, cut away the web from her face so she could better see what she was doing, and freed the rest of her. She drew her other gun, searched the roof with flashlight and eye.

  The wounded spider didn’t return. Just a thousand tiny ones, each with eight eyes glittering in the light. Babies.

  Hungry babies.

  She tore Borg loose, and they fled.

  The river spilled out into twilight. Lara and Borg stood on a precipice overlooking another stretch of river, westward flowing and therefore not the same one they’d followed to the canopy tower and ruins. The humidity felt like an old friend welcoming them. Squawks and howls of perfectly normal jungle life were like applause.

  They’d come out of the Whispering Abyss.

  “Not this time!” the Tomb Raider shouted at the heavens.

  “You are crazy, Lara.”

  She loved how he said crazy. Hell, she was one wet ponytail hair from loving him, period. Alison or no Alison. A kick about a meter below the teeth sends a clear message about a girl’s commitment to a relationship.

  18

  “That’s quite a story,” Heather said, looking out over Lima’s white rooftops from the plushly fitted top-floor El Condado hotel suite. She’d just heard an outline of the history of the Méne. She didn’t have to fake her interest in the story, just in Frys.

  Frys lounged in a gold-and-beige upholstered armchair, playing with his odd bit of glass on a handle. The affectation struck her as cute, like Leslie Howard’s Scarlet Pimpernel with his monocle examining the prince regent’s waistcoat and cuffs and criticizing His Royal Highness’s tailors. She felt a little better disposed toward him now that he’d revealed the reasons behind her kidnapping, although she had a strange feeling that he hadn’t told her the whole truth about what had happened to Lara Croft and Borg. He’d told her that they’d been tied up and left for the park rangers to find, but every so often, images returned to Heather as if out of a half-forgotten dream, images that told a very different story.

  Alison Harfleur, that Lara Croft wannabe, reclined on one of the king-sized beds, supported by a small mountain of fringed pillows, reading The Economist.

  “It’s the story of a lifetime,” Frys assured her. “And it can

  be yours to tell.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time the human race has had what it thought was the history of the world rewritten.”

  The blond version of Lara Croft threw down the magazine and punched her pillow. “You don’t mean to take her to Capricorn Atoll?”

  “Ms. Rourke, won’t you excuse us,” Frys said, escorting Alison to the connecting door between suites.

  “So it’s ‘Ms. Rourke’ now, is it?” said Alison bitterly.

  But Frys leaned close and whispered something, holding the crystal up to his eye, and Alison exited without further complaint, though she left the door open.

  Heather was intrigued by Frys, but she didn’t trust him, not for a second. She’d seen how he’d used Alison, then cast her aside. Now it was her turn. But nobody used Heather Rourke. And nobody, but nobody, cast her aside. “Can I go down to the café and get something to eat?” she asked when Frys returned.

  Frys shook his head. “There’s room service.”

  “I need to go to the pharmacy in the lobby. Splitting headache.”

  “Alison will go for you. Just tell her what you—”

  “Let her get her own damn Tylenol!” Ajay’s voice interrupted from the other room.

  “I’d like to stretch my legs anyway,” Heather said. “Besides, we have to trust each other if we’re going to work together.”

  Frys smiled. “Yes, of course.” He opened the
door, and six feet six inches of muscle looked up from a magazine.

  “Thirty-two, would you take Heather down to the chemist in the lobby and bring her straight back up?”

  “Yes, sir,” the cultist said.

  Heather followed the meaty guard down the elegantly wallpapered hall.

  He pressed the button on the elevator. The doors slid closed.

  “Do you have a name to go with that number?” she asked him.

  “I am Boris,” he replied expressionlessly.

  The elevator slid to a halt. The door opened, and Boris stood half in and half out until she exited into the lobby. Then he conducted her past a women’s restroom and into the chemist’s.

  There Heather picked out a suitable assortment of aspirin and travel necessities and a new lipstick, then tapped her foot as Boris paid. As they walked back to the elevator, she snatched the bag out of his hand and ducked into the restroom.

  “I have to pee,” she said, jumping through the door before he could interpose his bulk.

  Boris actually came in behind her, then blanched and withdrew at a glare from the Peruvian matron working on her eyes at the bulb-lined vanity mirror. Heather felt like a runaway heiress in a Depression-era screwball comedy as he pounded on the door and demanded that she come out.

  “Can you help me?” she whispered in Spanish. At first she’d just planned to leave a note in lipstick on one of the stall doors, but the woman might be a better choice.

  “Siiiii?” the woman said disapprovingly, one painted eyebrow rising almost to her widow’s peak.

  “Do you have a piece of paper and a pen? It is a crisis.”

  The one-woman-to-another, this-is-really-serious urgency in her voice brought a quick response. The matron produced a pen and a slip of notebook paper from her purse, suddenly eager to help.

  Heather wrote her name, a pair of phone numbers, and the words CAPRICORN ATOLL—BIG MEETING on the paper. “Please go somewhere with a … with a … fax.” She had to use the English word. “You know, fax?”

  “Si, fax, my office has one,” the woman said.

  “Fax this to both these numbers. Right away, please. Right away.”

  “What is this?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have time to explain. Please help me.”

  “If there is danger, I can call the police.”

  “They have friends in the police.”

  To her credit, the unknown woman didn’t look frightened. She glanced toward the door, against which Boris was still hammering. “I will do it. Don’t let a doubt enter your thoughts.”

  Relief flooded through Heather. “Thank you. If you give me your name and phone number, I’ll make sure you are paid for your trouble.”

  “No, no, please. I am happy to help.” A smile, not a bright one, not a charming one, but a reassuringly small one, appeared on the woman’s face. She squeezed Heather’s hand and walked out of the bathroom.

  Heather heard a growl, cracked open the door.

  Boris had grabbed the woman by the upper arm.

  “Wait, you,” he said in very thick Spanish. “Come with me.”

  The Peruvian matron, the top of her hairstyle not even reaching Boris’s shoulder, spun her head like a wolf snapping at a challenger. “Unhand me this instant!” she said through bared teeth. The opera diva Troyanos as Carmen couldn’t have put any more fire in her voice.

  Boris shrunk away from the matron, who walked off with what Heather could only describe as imperious dignity. Then Boris grabbed Heather by the arm—the thug had a thing for grabbing women, evidently—and walked her back to the elevator.

  ***

  Borg hardly flinched as the curved needle passed through his skin one more time.

  He looked a little like a lobotomy patient with the side of his head freshly, if poorly, knife-shaved. They were two kilometers from the cave, on the unfamiliar riverbank.

  “Last stitch is done,” she said. “I just have to tie it.”

  Six granny knots, stained with iodine, now held Borg’s scalp on. She dabbed up the blood. “It’s not a bad look, really. I can see it catching on with the soccer rowdies.”

  “I need another Tylenol,” Borg said.

  She handed him a tablet.

  “Strange. You’d think after what happened to my arms, such a minor pain would be nothing.”

  “Pain doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. It always finds a way to come back as strong as ever.”

  Lara knew a lot about pain. She’d been in a codependent relationship with it for most of her adult life. And on those occasions when she wasn’t bruised and bloody from one of her overseas challenges, she pushed her body to its limits with athletics or making a hundred round-trips through her assault course, feeling the burn of hot pistols through thin

  leather gloves, paying for her achievements with coins of freshly minted pain.

  She kept Borg talking as she put together a tent out of a parachute, her concerns about a possible concussion or him slipping into a coma fading.

  “Where is she, I wonder?” Borg asked in the middle of the chitchat.

  Lara knew whom he was talking about. “We can’t worry about Ajay now. We have to think about where we are.”

  She had her answer, calculated to within a meter, of course, thanks to the GPS, which had begun working again once they’d emerged from underground. The problem wasn’t that: It was that their location was a long, long hike from the nearest airport. The river they camped next to flowed west, toward the Pacific Ocean, but a mass of mountains were in the way. She looked at the stands of Peruvian hardwoods all around. Among them stood balsa trees: easily shaped and more buoyant than cork.

  “Borg, how much do you know about dugout canoes?”

  ***

  “The front provides power, the rear steers,” Lara said. Working with fire, Neolithic tools improvised from river rocks, and their knives, they’d managed to fell and then hollow out a balsa trunk. It looked like a conveyance from The Flintstones, but it would float and carry them.

  “I’ll take the front,” Borg offered.

  Lara added an outrigger, weighted with pitons, and fixed it to the body of their canoe with cording and parachute harness. Their biggest danger with such a makeshift float was tipping over.

  The oars looked like broken tennis rackets, built of bundles of trimmed branches roughly tied together and covered with parachute nylon. It would take days to whittle proper oars with knives, and they didn’t have days. Borg attached his to his piton arm with a D-ring and gripped it in the claw arm.

  Using their parachute packs as seat cushions, they got out on the river. They experimented with their canoe, tried some turns. Draft was the canoe’s only asset. Balsa would float on heavy dew; as long as there was a river, and no rapids, they wouldn’t need to portage. With a little luck, within a few hours they’d run into some natives, hopefully before whitewater wrecked their canoe. It wouldn’t be the first time Lara had traded a cheap watch and expensive sunglasses for transportation out of the bush.

  They heard the rapids before they saw them, which was always a bad sign.

  Whitewater appeared beneath them. It happened too fast to react. One second they hung at the top of a forty-degree slope of solid white froth descending into a gorge, the next they were plunging down into the wash.

  The balsa-wood canoe tore down the incline like an out-of-control Alpine schusser on one ski. You can’t fight white water, but you can control what it does to you by using your momentum. Lara paddled like a fury—if the canoe turned sideways in the flow, the outrigger would be ripped away, and then the canoe would turn over, and the river would win against them.

  Too busy trying to steer to even know if her voice carried above the roaring water, she shouted instructions to Borg.

  Then a rock—and ruin. She didn’t even see it until it was too late.

  It ripped away the outrigger; hours of labor turning raw materials into a careful balance of wood and lashing were destroyed with
a single sharp blow. The impact tore the paddle from Lara’s hands and set the canoe on its side. Lara and Borg plunged into the river.

  But they hung on.

  They rode the cool water, submerging and coming up for a breath, then plunging in again. Borg locked on to her and the canoe in a mechanical death grip. A rock struck her in the hip; the blow stunned her into letting go of the canoe.

  But Borg’s claw held.

  Somehow he hauled her back to the canoe, somehow pushed her atop it so she rode it like a lizard hugging a tree, Borg hung off the end, preventing it from rolling, performing the function the outrigger had. Then she discovered she could hear Borg panting and sputtering.

  And so they came through the rapids.

  The gorge opened into steep mountains at the base of the rapids; a little ways downstream a few huts on stilts fought against river, mountainside, and forest for a place on the bank. Dogs barked at the drenched pair and chickens flapped at the commotion.

  A single log fishing dock-cum-bridge, sort of a split rail fence for access to the river and its banks, projected out and across the river. No doubt it was torn away and rebuilt several times a year thanks to floods. She slipped off the canoe, and together they kicked toward the dwellings.

  “Boating never was my calling,” Borg said.

  ***

  Alex Frys got the call on the charter jet, an airbus, somewhere over Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific.

  “Lady Croft is in Lima, making a stink at the Tourism Bureau,” the voice said.

  “The Tourism Bureau? Not the Interior Department?” Frys wasn’t sure he’d heard right; the airplane phone had a good deal of static.

  Well, he hadn’t wanted her dead, after all. She’d been of service to the Méne Restoration. Shooting her and throwing her into the Abyss just hadn’t seemed—cricket. Killing unnecessarily was a failing of Kunai’s, not his. Not that he’d been too disappointed when she’d jumped. But not half as disappointed as he was now to learn that she had somehow survived.

  “Tourism Bureau,” his contact confirmed. “Talking about guerrillas and gunfights and getting stranded thanks to corrupt park officials. She’s threatening to write an article for the Times Sunday color supplement: Peru, a Journey Into Hell and Back. Needless to say, the men at Tourism are not amused.”