by Billy Wells
The words had no sooner passed his lips than they heard a series of explosions and saw sporadic bursts of light not far away.
“What was that?” Angus asked, pulling his 45 from his holster.
Mustafa answered matter of factly, “The first layer of our defense is a barrier of minefields surrounding the perimeter of the camp. Apparently, a number of those lunatics have blundered across the trip wires that are virtually invisible after dark and, unfortunately, have just had their legs blown off.”
Brian and Angus looked at Mustafa in disbelief as he dipped another morsel of beef into a brown sauce and devoured it.
In a short while, they heard the pitiful cries of the victims from the minefields begging for mercy.
“Christ, Mustafa, the poor bastards are suffering. Can’t we put them out of their misery?” Brian groaned, unnerved by the screams that grated on him like sand on a tin roof.
“Don’t worry, without medical attention, they will bleed out in no time. Would you care for another steak?”
Brian and Angus shook their heads and placed their plates on the slate table in front of them. The agonized shrieks continued for several more minutes, and just as Mustafa predicted, one by one, they ended, and the night became as silent as a tomb.
The next morning, Mustafa woke them with an update that eleven mutilated corpses comprised of both men and women had been carted off to the nearby buzzard heap.
After a meager breakfast, Brian and Angus met Mustafa and his crew at a site directly between two prominent pyramids on the skyline. Other archeologists had found the tombs of these massive structures over fifty years before.
Brian took some measurements with a laser device while scrutinizing a dog-eared piece of parchment. After fifteen minutes, he pointed to three gigantic boulders in their path. “By my calculations, the entrance to the tomb is about thirty feet below these boulders. They mark Usercari’s tomb.”
Mustafa seemed astonished at Brian’s certainty of the tomb’s location, and said, “As I had hoped, the bulldozers and the crane will come in handy.”
Brian nodded in agreement. “Once you remove the boulders, you must have the laborers dig by hand. The depth may have changed in three thousand years, and we don’t want to blunder into the tomb with a dozer.”
Brian saw the skepticism in Mustafa’s eyes regarding the depth, but the digging would come later in the day. For now, the crew began the process of hoisting the huge boulders out-of-the-way with a dolly and a crane. After a half day of clearing the site, the crew of laborers started with their shovels.
During the next week, just as Bokar had warned, thirty-two more men and women joined the others in the buzzard heap. The ones who made it through the minefields were cut down by machine gun fire or incinerated by flamethrowers.
Mustafa commented as Brian and Angus watched his men load the corpses into a dump trunk and haul them away, “The Bedouins, as you call them, carry only the ancient weapons of their ancestors. Killing them is as easy as stepping on a scorpion. They pose no real threat. I assure you we have more bullets than they have suicide victims.”
At the end of the week, Brian and Angus stood alone at the edge of a giant crater fifty feet square and thirty feet deep. Mountains of sand surrounded them. Whenever Brian left the tent to urinate, he felt as if he were stepping into a blast furnace. He did not know how the laborers could work in this heat.
Angus shook his head, “Are you sure you got the numbers right?”
“I’m positive. I checked it three times. You know the old saying, ‘measure twice, and cut once’. Somehow, I didn’t think it would be this deep.”
Angus reminded him. “Like you told Mustafa, a lot can happen in three thousand years. We’ve only been here ten days, and in case you didn’t know, tombs are always hard to find. The pharaoh had the tongues cut out of all the people who worked on his tomb, and when he died, they were buried with him.”
“Somebody had to close up the hole.” Brian countered.
“You have a point, but they made a pact to commit suicide as part of guarding the secret. In any case, I’ve been on digs that lasted for years.”
“Well, this one better not take that long,” Brian groaned. “I only have $150,000 to spend.”
“You’re kidding. I thought you said that was just the first installment.””
“I lied; that’s all Archibald, in his infinite wisdom, would authorize.”
Angus looked at the legion of men in the pit and wondered if this would be another wild goose chase financed by the museum. Grabbing a canteen of water, he asked, “Why did you wait so long to tell me?”
“The truth gets worse. I’m spending my severance pay on my last chance to save my job.”
Angus looked at him in disbelief. “Why did you go along with such a preposterous proposal? You’re looking for the only tomb left to discover in all of Egypt. Your chance of actually finding it would probably be less than winning the lottery.”
“It’s not quite that bad,” Brian said with a gesture of pulling a rabbit from his hard hat. “I’ve had an ace up my sleeve in the form a map to the tomb for twenty years.”
“Twenty years! Why did you wait so long to use it?”
“The dying man who told me where to find the map warned me that entering Usercari’s tomb would lead to Armageddon. It would spell doom not only for those violating the tomb, but also for all humanity. He claimed that opening Usercari’s tomb would be like opening the door to Hell.”
Angus interrupted him, “Get to the good part. I still want to know why you let the ravings of a dying man stop you from using the map to find the tomb. I admit this character surpassed the run of the mill pharaoh’s curse with a real whopper, but you know and I know curses are simply bullshit.”
Angus listened to the horrific story, but gave no sign he thought it would change his mind about Egyptian curses.
Brian looked at his father’s skeptical expression wearily and said, “This is the good part. When I arrived at this man’s home, I found the front door standing ajar and heard someone inside crying out in mortal pain. Reluctantly, I went inside to see if I could help. To my utter horror, I found a man writhing on the floor surrounded by the mutilated bodies of a woman and several children. I really couldn’t tell how many there were since the body parts were scattered about the floor in pools of blood and gore. Are you awake, Dad?”
Angus repositioned his butt cheeks in the director’s chair and said, “Go on.”
“I could tell the man hadn’t long to live from the massive swelling all over his body. Despite his condition, he grabbed my shirt with the strength of a madman and pulled me closer so I could hear his last mutterings. He told me when he came home; he found the monster of the curse had slaughtered his wife and children. He fell to his knees, and while he wept uncontrollably, he received several lethal bites from cobras slithering among the body parts. He couldn’t move and was dying an excruciating death when I found him.”
Angus interrupted, “Brian, look at that circle of buzzards over the pit. Do you know there are morons who believe when buzzards appear when nothing is dead, it’s a bad omen?”
Brian ignored this remark and continued, “Right before he took his final breath, he begged me for the sake of all that’s holy to go to the secret place he had hidden the parchment I’m holding now and destroy it. That’s when he told me that Usercari’s tomb is the portal to Hell, and if anyone broke the golden seal and violated this sacred place, it would lead to the mass extinction of mankind.”
“And you believed that bullshit,” Angus bellowed, in disbelief. “It’s a sad story, but shit happens and sometimes nice people get hurt. I’m still shocked that some cobra-bitten, delirious Bedouin could, pardon the expression, “poison your mind” with such inane mumbo-jumbo. Pretty soon, you’ll tell me you believe in the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. A curse is the same thing.”
“You had to be there to feel the emotional enormity of that moment. Something in
the man’s eyes scared the hell out of me even more than the pools of blood, the body parts, and the possibility of a cobra biting me. The poor man gripped my wrist so tight I thought he had broken it.” Brian’s faced turned ashen, and his eyes grew wild as the memory of that fateful day twenty years before returned like a hellish nightmare he would have until the day he died.
Looking down at the laborers still digging in the heat of the blazing sun, Brian said, “I found the map right where he said it would be, and I put it in a safe deposit box at Chase Manhattan Bank twenty years ago. I never thought I’d ever have the inclination or the balls to use it.”
Brian’s cheeks reddened with embarrassment, and tears rolled down his face, “I regret it now after several people are dead because of me, but after the meeting with Archibald in my darkest hour while totally shit-faced, I might add, I said, ‘fuck mankind,’ it’s every man for himself on this mountain. At that moment, I stood at the edge of the abyss and knew that map was my only chance to avoid taking my own life.“
Angus tried to console his son who was crying like a baby. Placing his arms around him, he hugged him for the first time in forty years. After a long embrace, Angus said as a tear rolled down his own cheek, “I never told you this, son, but I’ve been on that mountain myself a time or two. I’ve looked into that abyss, and I know it’s a scary place. No one would ever go there if he could find another way out. Sometimes, getting yourself out of a hole that deep requires not just getting your hands dirty, but your soul, as well.”
Angus grabbed his son and shook him, “Stop blubbering a minute and listen to me.”
Brian lifted his tearstained face, looked into his father’s cold steely eyes, and let his words pour over him, “I’ve done some things in my life I’m not proud of, son, but if there is someone out there who says he hasn’t, they’re either a boldfaced liar or some kind of pussy who never dared to take that leap of faith you need to take sometimes. Either way, I’d never pay them any mind, and I’d certainly never turn my back on them. What do you say, we get drunk tonight, and see if we can solve all the world’s problems?”
When they stepped apart, they both felt better they had shared that special moment. Brian was first to break the silence. “Oh, there’s one more thing that made me believe that cobra-bitten, delirious, old Bedouin.
“What was that?”
“I grabbed a piece of what looked like mummy wrappings on the doorstep and had them analyzed. The lab report confirmed they were three thousand years old.”
“The killer probably planted them at the crime scene to perpetuate the curse. Why didn’t the mummy come after you when you took the map from its secret hiding place?” Angus smirked, not giving an inch in Brian’s attempt to validate the man’s belief in the terrible curse.
“The only plausible reason I can think of was I never intended to proceed with the dig. Look, Dad, think about what has happened since I did decide to go ahead with it. Two people are dead, and someone tried to kill you with the cobra the same as the poor devil with the map.”
“So now you’re trying to tell me the mummy could read minds and knew if you intended to violate the tomb. I still don’t buy it, Brian, think about what you’re saying.”
Suddenly, victorious screams resonated from the pit, and Mustafa bounded up the ladder to where they stood and shouted, “We just broke through the golden seal of Usercari’s tomb.”
Looking past Mustafa’s beaming face, brimming with tears of pride and excitement, Brian muttered, “Oh shit” when he saw the legion of laborers clutching their throats and struggling to breathe. A foul, black smoke spewed from the gaping, gold encrusted entrance to the pharaoh’s tomb. The three men watched in horror as the exposed flesh of every man in the pit withered and crumbled into black dust before their eyes. In seconds, all that remained were piles of ash lying among the clothes they had on when the black, hellish cloud billowed over the landscape from the depths of Hell.
Brian turned to Mustafa and his father who stood paralyzed in horror watching his body disintegrate like a maniacal time-lapse video. The last thing he saw was the flesh on their faces turning black and their ballooning eyes popping from their sockets like enormous wads of veined bubblegum.
In minutes, the sky became as black as the devil’s soul, and the blood-red ball of the blazing sun exploded in a sonic boom, obliterating every trace that anything had ever been there at all.
From Billy Wells
Thanks for reading my book. I hope you enjoyed it.
Reviews In Today’s World
In the past, when everyone knew everyone else in their neighborhood, people used to share information about the good and bad things they discovered to help each other in their day-to-day living.
Now, in this global village where we are in touch with everyone and everything in nanoseconds, Amazon monitors what readers say about the books they read in order to distinguish the good from the bad. Amazon is particularly interested in what the readers that actually bought the book say about it.
Since reviews are the life’s blood of today’s authors, and we depend on them more than ever before, I would sincerely appreciate it if you would place a review of this book on amazon.com. It does not have to be long; only a minimum of twenty words is required.
Other Short Story Collections by Billy Wells
In Your Face Horror
My most gruesome stories from Black As Night and Shivers and Other Nightmares.
Thrillers & Chillers
My least gruesome stories from Black As Night and Shivers and Other Nightmares for my readers who love thrills and chills, but not so much horror that includes vampires, werewolves, and hairy monsters. They prefer deranged human monsters.
Places To Find Out More About Billy Wells:
Billy Wells Amazon Author Page
billywellshorror.com home page
Billy Wells Horror Pinterest
Billy Wells Horror You Tube Channel
Billy Wells Coffeesmoke You Tube Channel