Serpent's Kiss

by Alex Archer

  “Did you just say sacrifice?” Doug’s voice rose.

  “I did.” Annja regretted telling him that detail at once. If she hadn’t been distracted by the building storm she wouldn’t have.

  “Human sacrifices?” Doug asked.

  “And animal.” Annja heard a keyboard clatter to life.

  “Are you digging up human or animal bones?”

  “Today we uncovered a pit containing several human skeletons.”

  “Bodacious.” Doug’s excitement grew. “Always interested in pieces on human sacrifice. Who did you say was doing the sacrifices?”

  “Followers of Shakti.” Annja spelled it out for him. She glanced back into the tent and saw the dig crew seated around long folding tables on a collection of lawn chairs.

  Everyone on the crew was young. Most workers on archaeological excavations were interns or students. Generally there was barely enough money to fund a team with provisions, much less to make a profit. They sat playing board games, reading or telling stories. None of them acted like the storm worried them, but Annja knew they were concerned.

  She was concerned.

  “Shakti,” Doug said. “Consort of Shiva.”

  “That’s her.” Annja sipped green tea from a bottle. It was one of her few extravagances for the dig. “That’s not something you would know. You’re looking on the Internet, aren’t you?”

  “You gotta love Wikipedia,” Doug said.

  Annja had written or corrected more than a few entries on subjects on the site.

  “Wasn’t Shiva the god of death or something?” Doug asked.

  Annja really didn’t want to get into a lesson on Hinduism. That would be a long discussion and Doug would only hear what he wanted.

  “Yes,” she replied. It was the simplest answer. Annja knew, as with all Hindu gods, Shiva was much more than one thing.

  “This human-sacrifice thing has potential. We haven’t done a piece on a god of death in months,” Doug said.

  “I’m not doing a story,” Annja said. “I’m here to work a dig.”

  “I know, I know. I was just wondering if there was a way we could get a twofer.”

  “I’m not interested in a twofer. I came out here to work.”

  “Hey, don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

  Annja swallowed a sharp retort. She couldn’t complain about the television show. Chasing History’s Monsters had been good to her. Real archaeology didn’t pay a lot. To be part of Lochata’s dig Annja had had to pay her own way over. The community meals were free and the cot was a loaner. She had to buy her own bottled green tea.

  The television show offered the glamour and glory. It also came with a paycheck that enabled her to do things like this dig.

  “Okay.” Annja stared out at the dark sky. She couldn’t see the edge of the cliff. The crash of the surf against the rocks below remained audible.

  “Okay what?” Doug asked.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Annja Creed stalks mysterious cult that carries out human sacrifices.”

  “This particular cult’s been dead for hundreds of years. Probably more than a thousand.”

  “They gotta have descendants, right?” Doug asked.

  “Possibly, but I wouldn’t know how to get in contact with—”

  “I’m looking at a news story that says these Shakti cultists have been up to their old tricks in different parts of India.”

  “Old tricks?” Annja asked.

  “Creative license on my part,” Doug said. “Makes them sound more devious and threatening. Ups their coolness quotient, trust me. Anyway, there are Shakti cultists springing up. No human sacrifices have been found yet, but that may be because they’ve hidden the bodies. Or buried them.”

  Annja could tell Doug was selling himself on the idea.

  “Maybe you could take some footage of the local jungle as you make your way through a forgotten trail.”

  “If it was a forgotten trail,” Annja said, “I wouldn’t know about it.”

  “Of course you would. You’re a world-famous archaeologist.”

  Annja smiled a little at that. If Doug hadn’t been trying so hard to flatter her, she might have enjoyed his efforts. But she’d known him long enough to be aware that he seldom did anything without an ulterior motive.

  “How much longer are you going to be there?” Doug asked.

  “A few more weeks.”

  “See? You can work in a piece on human sacrifices,” he said.

  “I’m busy. When you work a dig, you’re putting in eighteen-to twenty-hour days.”

  “Don’t you have a day off?”

  “When I do, I like to have it as a day off.” So far there hadn’t been one of those. Annja watched one of the students run back through the jungle from the cliff area. The young woman’s boots splashed across the drenched ground. Panic pulled her face tight. She was one of Professor Rai’s students and knew the area well. If she was frightened, there had to be a reason.

  “Doug,” Annja interrupted as he launched into a guilt-inspiring speech, “I’m going to have to call you back.” She closed the phone and put it into her pocket. She knew Doug hated being hung up on and wasn’t surprised when he called right back. Annja ignored the ring tone and lunged out into the driving rain.

  Lochata ran out to meet the student and reached her before Annja. The older woman grabbed the younger one by the shoulders and forced her to calm enough to talk. They spoke rapidly in their native tongue, and Annja didn’t understand a word. The student kept gesturing toward the cliff.

  Her boots heavy with the mud that had collected on them, Annja joined the professor and student. Rivulets ran down the bill of Annja’s baseball cap, and she was drenched at once. She reached into the otherwhere and felt the sword. The hilt felt familiar in her hand and she took comfort in it.

  From the reddened state of the student’s eyes, Annja knew she was crying. But the tears mixed in with the rain so quickly they disappeared at once.

  “What’s wrong?” Annja asked.

  Lochata gathered the young woman into her embrace for a moment, then spoke soothingly to her and pushed her toward the main tent. Immediately the professor headed toward the cliff. “She says the sea has withdrawn,” Lochata stated.

  “Withdrawn?” Annja matched the older woman’s stride.

  “Receded.”

  “An outgoing tide will do that.”

  “She says this is more than just the tide.” Lochata’s face looked grave.

  Annja studied the irregular line of broken rocks at the foot of the cliff. They had been at the dig site for five days. She’d walked out to the cliff on several occasions to take a break from digging through the hard-packed earth and stared out at the ocean.

  She’d never seen the rocks or that much of the sea bottom before. As she watched, the water seemed to draw back even more.

  “The sea’s never done that before,” Annja said.

  Lochata’s face drained of color. She turned to face Annja. “Tsunami,” she said, and the hammering thunder overhead almost swept her words away.

  Fear shook Annja.

  The horrifying images of the December 26, 2004, tsunami had shocked the world. And the devastating waves killed a quarter of a million people. She grabbed Lochata’s arm. “Run!” She pushed the older woman into motion.

  Despite her age, the archaeology professor proved fleet-footed. She ran through the dig site and avoided the pits the team had dug in their search for the sacrificial well.

  Together, they ducked through the trees and scrambled through the bushes. Lochata stumbled and would have fallen twice, but Annja caught her and kept her vertical. Then, just when the tents became visible, the ground shook so hard that Lochata and Annja both lost their footing and went down.

  Mud coated Annja’s clothing and the right side of her face. She wiped it out of her right eye and tried to ignore the burning sensation it caused. She pushed herself up and hauled Lochata to her fee
t.

  Unable to stop herself, Annja looked back toward the sea. In the distance, barely discernible through the haze of fog, a giant wall of water raced toward the coast.

  For one frozen second, Annja stood locked in place. Even with everything she’d seen with Roux and Garin, she wasn’t prepared for the tsunami wave. It was a huge, rolling curl of ocean that was closing on the shoreline quickly.

  At first Annja had hoped that the cliff might be above the crest line of the tsunami. The wave that had struck the coastline in 2004 was reportedly 108 feet high. Annja couldn’t tell how high the water was, but she could see it was higher than the cliff.

  The site crew stared at the approaching wave in open-mouthed horror. Then the screaming started.

  “Get into the trees!” Annja yelled. “Climb the trees!”

  She didn’t know if that would work, but there was no way they were going to outrun the wave. Climbing was the only option.

  “The trees!” Annja yelled again.

  Lochata gave more orders in her native tongue.

  The dig crew started climbing trees as another tremor shook the ground. Annja had a quick image of the cliff shearing off and plunging into the sea with them on it. It was a terrifying thought.

  She ducked into the small tent she’d been issued, grabbed her backpack and slid it over one shoulder. On her way to the nearest tree, she took a coil of rope with a grappling hook from the back of one of the four-wheel-drive vehicles they had to help with transportation.

  Rope was always important on a dig, and she knew it would come in handy while they were in the trees. If nothing else, they could use it to lash their supplies together or as a safety line until the floodwaters subsided.

  The ground rumbled again. The approaching wave drowned out all other sounds.

  Nearby, one of the young men opened the door to one of the SUVs and tried to clamber inside. Annja grabbed the young man’s shoulder. She pulled him out onto the muddy ground harder than she’d intended. He hit the ground and rolled, but fear gave him springs and he bounced up at once.

  “What are you doing?” the young man demanded. His name was Nigel. He was one of the Brits on the team. He’d been something of a troublemaker who didn’t always pull his full shift and couldn’t be counted on to be thorough. Many of the team had started resenting him.

  “If you climb in that vehicle you’re going to drown,” Annja shouted over the growing roar.

  “We can’t stay here, you bloody cow!” Nigel started for the SUV again.

  Annja moved into his path.

  Nigel threw a vicious punch at Annja’s head.

  Annja shifted, dropped her hips to lower her center of gravity, blocked his punch with the back of her left wrist and turned it outside, away from her head. She responded with a jab and almost caught him full in the face with it before she opened her hand to slap him.

  The young man went down again. This time he remained on his hands and knees for a moment while his senses whirled. He spit curses.

  Ignoring the venom in his tone, Annja grabbed him by the shoulder and hustled him to the nearest tree large enough to support their weight. Four other site workers had already taken refuge among the thick branches.

  “Higher!” Annja shouted.

  The others clambered higher.

  “Get up the tree, Nigel.” Annja pressed him against the rough bark of the teak tree.

  Teak grew freely in southern India, especially in the Tamil Nadu district. The trees towered over a hundred feet and provided plenty of branches for the climbers to use to haul themselves up.

  Growling curses, Nigel climbed the tree. Annja followed just as the wave smashed into the cliff face hard enough to make the ground shiver. In the next instant, the wave rolled into Annja like a battering ram and knocked her into the tree trunk with enough force to stun her.

  The rough bark smashed into the side of her face, and burning pain followed. She hung on to the tree out of desperation, but as she realized her grip would hold, the wave rolled over her. In the next second she was underwater and drowning.

  3

  Annja clung to the bark and hoped it didn’t give way beneath her fingers. All she saw was swirling water. The floodwaters muted her hearing, but she heard her heart beating frantically. Stay calm, she told herself. You’re going to be all right.

  She knew from experience that she was prone to tell herself that lie every time things turned out badly.

  She tilted her head back and looked up the tree. She couldn’t tell how high the water went. She felt the tree quiver under the onslaught of the flood.

  Staying underwater wasn’t an option. Grimly, Annja slid her arms and legs up the trunk and felt the bark bite deeply into her bare flesh. She crept up slowly, only inches at a time.

  Just as her lungs felt near to burst, her head broke the surface. She managed a quick breath and turned seaward. Another wave slapped her in the face and almost knocked her from her precarious hold. She caught a branch above her head and hauled herself out of the water.

  Almost full dark had rolled in with the tsunami. Annja surveyed the trees for the survivors. The roar of the water made conversation almost impossible. But she heard her name.

  “Annja!” A flashlight beam lanced through the darkness.

  “Here!” Annja shouted.

  The bright beam stung her eyes. She turned her head away. She sat on a branch eight feet above the water. The level didn’t appear to be rising.

  “They said you were underwater,” Lochata shouted from the nearby tree.

  “Not anymore.” Judging herself to be at a safe height, Annja shrugged out of her backpack and checked it. It was constructed so the main cargo area, where she carried her notebook computer, her camera and her other electronic equipment, was waterproof. She’d carefully packed it when the storm approached. The only worry was that debris might have smashed it.

  Everything felt all right. She didn’t want to open the backpack in the rain to find out. After selecting a sturdy branch above her, she used the straps to secure the backpack. She took a flashlight from one of the outside pockets.

  For the moment, no sign remained of the cliff as the water continued to surge through the jungle and inland.

  That’s got to be at least fifteen feet deep, Annja thought. She tried to remember how high the lowest tree branches had been from the ground. Then she realized she didn’t know where the lowest branches were anymore.

  “How long is this going to last?” someone above her asked.

  Annja looked and saw Jason Kim sitting a few branches up. He clung to the tree bole. A young German woman had her arms wrapped around his waist. Both of them looked terrified.

  “I don’t know,” Annja said. “Could be only a few minutes. Might possibly be hours.”

  “Is it over?” the young woman asked.

  Annja was hesitant to answer. “I think so.” Given the amount of water that had flooded the land, she knew that whatever had happened at sea to cause it had to have been powerful.

  The massive tree swayed under the constant bombardment of the waves. They were lessening, but still dangerous.

  Lightning burned through the night and revealed the dark clouds swirling and twisting overhead. The harsh peal of thunder came immediately.

  Another crack, this one different from the thunder, issued from the left. A chorus of yells and cries for help followed.

  Turning in the direction of the voices, Annja spotted a teak tree as it fell into the water. Three dig members clung to the branches as it went down. Annja guessed that the tree had been poorly rooted or had rotted and weakened. Either way, the surging sea started to carry the tree away.

  “They’re going to get killed,” Jason Kim said.

  Other people voiced the same concerns.

  Annja knew that death was a possibility. If they stayed with the tree, if they didn’t get smashed by the branches, they might survive. But the water might carry them a mile or more into the interior, just far eno
ugh for them to get lost and possibly die from some other cause.

  She grabbed her rope and shimmied along the thick branch she was on. Just as the branch started to sag beneath her weight, she jumped forward for the next tree. The teaks overcrowded the area and the branches grew close together.

  By the time she caught a thick branch in front of her, she’d already chosen her next landing point. Like an aerial gymnast working uneven bars, she made her way through the trees faster than the floodwaters could carry away the huge tree. She also got closer to the water level. Her hands burned from friction against the bark.

  After her fifth jump, when she knew she was out of trees, Annja shrugged the rope from her shoulder. Setting herself on a limb as wide as her body, she shook out the rope, swung the grappling hook and cast.

  The grappling hook landed in the branches of the fallen tree. It jerked and bounced as it slid along the length of the tree without securing a hold.

  C’mon, Annja thought. Take hold somewhere.

  The grappling hook snugged up against a thick branch. Annja yanked on it like fishing line to set it. Satisfied it was securely in place and knowing that she’d never be able to hold the tree on her own, she dropped over the back of the branch she was on and paid out rope as she plunged into the water.

  For a moment as she entered the water, she was afraid. The drop was little more than six feet, but she knew anything could be under the water. If she was knocked unconscious or seriously injured, no one would be able to help her.

  The flashlight beams of the other dig site members played over the water as they tracked the tree caught in the surge. The glowing light continued moving away from Annja.

  When the rope bit into her hand, Annja paid out more line and fought the current to get to the base of the tree she’d dropped from. Once she had hold of the tree, she pulled herself around it and looped the rope. Then it, too, became a deadly threat.

  If she got caught in the rope, if the weight didn’t amputate her fingers or a hand or break them, it might trap her below the water and leave her to drown. The coarse fiber burned along her palm.

  The rope pulled taut. The tree she’d attached it to shivered under the assault. But it held.