The remaining mummy from the field descended on the truck with a long line of dead men in tow. The soldiers in the passenger seat scrambled out the door, firing their rifles, as the dead converged on them. As dozens of hands latched onto their clothes, they fought, thrusting the butt of their rifles into pale, slack faces. The English ghouls wrenched the carbines out of their hands and tossed them away. They were lifted and held up like witches on stakes, struggling but ineffective, as the mummy approached.
It reached out and took a head in each hand.
One of the soldiers wrestled an arm free, yelled, and dug a hand grenade out from his belt. Plucking out the pin, he released the spoon and clasped the grenade to his chest. The mummy cocked its head, unsure, but then seemed to understand and took a quick step back, tearing both of the young mens’ heads off their stalks. Blood showered the dead Englishmen below for a moment before the grenade exploded, sending out a wave of wire shrapnel that cut through the reanimated forces. Hit, the mummy staggered back and dropped the heads. A moment later it fell to its knees, one arm dropping off, then a hand, and finally, its head.
The mummy leading Priscilla prayed.
The remaining Italian troops, now reduced to a few dozen, fled between the tents. Screams followed as the men reversed their direction and returned. The dead English had surrounded the camp and invaded from the rear as well. The Italians ran, sputtering, darting back and forth, trying to find an exit, but the circle was closing. One put his service revolver inside his mouth and pulled the trigger. Another, not so lucky, attempted the same escape but was betrayed by his weapon when it jammed. The dead tore him apart.
The mummy followed the tire tracks out onto the field and Priscilla followed. The Englishmen, hunting down the last few Italian soldiers, ignored them as she goose-stepped along the remains of the sandbag wall, stepping over fallen men and body parts, slipping on scraps of uniforms drenched in fresh blood. As the last of the screams died away with the mouths they were issued from, a bone-chilling silence took hold. Even the night’s scent changed as the battle ended, burnt diesel fuel and gunpowder giving way to the early aroma of decay.
And it was over. Surveying the camp as she walked, Priscilla found herself in the center of a cemetery of unburied men, many sprawled on the ground, but an equal number standing upright, motionless now that their task was complete. No bugler played taps. Even the flapping of the canvas tents in the wind was inaudible. Following the creature, she wormed around the forest of unmoving dead men, a maze of mannequins.
The second flatbed truck’s door opened at the mummy’s gesture. The driver, hands mangled, stared back through the open doorway. He was the last alive, and from the expression on his pained and shocked face, knew it.
The mummy reached inside, grabbed him by the collar, and pulled him out. Pleading in Italian, the driver begged, “Children, I have children, my daughter, just two, two years, my wife, I have a wife—”
I had a wife, too, it said.
The creature lifted the driver up and tossed him onto the truck’s flatbed. The body bags came alive, swarming over him, burying him under a writhing black mass.
Turning to her, the mummy gestured for Priscilla to enter the truck. Crawling onto the bench seat, her hand slid across a blood slick pooled up on the cheap leather. Resting behind the steering wheel, she turned as the passenger side door opened and the creature lifted itself inside. Both doors slammed shut.
The dead came to the truck’s rear, grabbing hold, and pulling. More joined them down the length of the vehicle, and more pushed from the front, standing on the crushed bodies of their fellow soldiers. The truck rolled back, into the clearing, and the Englishmen stepped away.
The engine rumbled to life.
The key remained in the off position.
As the truck left the camp, Priscilla turned in her seat and watched the tents. Mason was still inside, unconscious, and surrounded by the dead British army.
“I’ll be back for you”, she promised.
Chapter 35
Mason woke, gasped, and swallowed a lungful of air that tasted like gunpowder, wet sand, and diesel fuel. His initial impression was that he was covered in a cool morning’s dew, his skin coated in moisture, lips ringed with salty water, but then he realized that his fever had broken and the wet sheen was sweat.
There was silence, but a fresh silence, the kind that followed a violent thunderstorm. He made an attempt to sit up but his muscles cramped. Gritting his teeth, he sunk back down onto the cot. A few lingering memories from the dreams in his fever sleep returned to him, their significance as fleeting as their details. He remembered soldiers on small ships, crocodiles in the water, and a beautiful young girl dying.
She reminded him of Priscilla. Not that she was so young, though he had caught glimpses of her as a child in her expressions and her eyes, or even beautiful. No, he was certain she once had been beautiful, though nowhere near as stunning as the woman in his dream, but like most things in her life, she’d turned her back on beauty. He could sympathize. A lifetime searching for closure could do that.
Still, she was more than simply attractive: she had a haunting, consuming presence, a pull as strong as gravity, her allure a riddle that promised a great reward for uncovering the solution. Her stare suggested a string of never-ending open-ended questions. Even now, with her story told, she was a mystery, like a species of animal thought extinct but rediscovered in the wild, the question no longer whether it had survived but how. How had Priscilla become Priscilla?
He intended to find out.
His second attempt to sit up proved more successful, though his head spun and the last shadowy remnants of the dream washed away.
Testing his voice, he called out, “Hello? Priscilla?”
His voice sounded like a rusty pipe dragged across old wood. Clearing his throat, he tried again with the same results. Feet on the floor, he pushed himself up and stood. His ears popped and his knees bent, but he remained conscious and standing. It was a start.
The steps through the tents were torturous, costing concentration and effort but yielding only a clumsy stagger. When he came to the war room, his heart sunk. The Italian commanders, dead on the floor, spelled out a clear message: death had followed them here.
Again he thought of Priscilla, this time not with wonder and love, but worry. The thought of her lifeless body sprawled out on the cold ground just outside the tent caused a flutter in his chest. His eyes squinted and his cheeks filled with heat. He hadn’t cried since Nadie—
Easing the tent flap out of his way, Mason had the odd sensation of pulling back the curtain on a stage play, as if the scene beyond had been primped by designers and painted by artists. He was unprepared for the sight that greeted him. Dead Italian soldiers covered the landscape, their bodies twisted and torn, and the a legion of pale young men in English uniforms stood over them, not moving, eyes fixed straight ahead. It took a full moment for Mason to realize these men were dead, too.
He steeled himself, ready for an attack, but when none came, he took a step outside the tent and approached the closest Englishman. The standing corpse had a lieutenant’s rank and a bullet hole under his right eye. Passing a hand in front of the dead lieutenant, Mason saw no movement in the dead man’s eyes, no flicker of life at all.
Pressing his fingertips to the cadaver’s chest, he pushed without exerting much force at all, just a little shove, not even flattening his palm to the uniform. The dead man fell, collapsing to the ground where it became indistinguishable from the Italian corpses. The contrasts in uniform fabric, color, and decoration made no difference anymore. Where politics and geography had separated these men in life, death brought them all together. In a body pile.
One by one they fell without being touched, as if a domino effect had been set in motion. Dead Englishmen fell in a random, patternless order. They fell with heavy thumps, like dropped sandbags, those who landed on soil kicking up earth. In other places, body piles were formed thr
ee and four deep.
In the end, only one dead soldier remained standing. He stood, still perfectly motionless, by the edge of the camp, his blank white face reflecting moonlight. Mason squinted and stepped toward the dead man.
Closer yet and his disorientation vanished. Swooping down, he snatched a service revolver out of a corpse’s hip holster, straightened up, and continued his journey across the field.
It can’t be, he thought, it’s impossible.
He heard Priscilla’s words—actually heard them—return to his ears, “You’re still worrying about what’s possible and not?”
Coming up on the Englishman, he stopped and stared at the dead man. He was older, of course, and the war hadn’t been kind to his complexion; small scars and burns marked one side of his face. But there was no doubt in his mind. It was him.
As if to confirm it, the Englishman’s mouth cracked open and he said, “You get on your way, no need to be tardy.”
His face flashed the same guilty demeanor Mason had seen outside the schoolhouse so many years before. Taking hold of a fistful of uniform, he shook the dead man. “Why? You tell me why—WHY?—YOU OWE ME—TELL ME WHY—”
The dead man repeated, “You get on your way—”
Mason raised the revolver to the murderer’s forehead.
“—no need to be tardy—”
He remembered his sister’s innocent, oval face, and the sound of her giggle, and the way she skipped as she walked. His jaw clenched and his brow tightened as his face flushed with heat—hotter than the fever had raged—and simmering tears began to brew in the corners of his eyes. “WHY WOULD YOU TAKE HER? WHAT DID YOU DO? WHY HER?”
The dead soldier stared back.
Mason cocked back the revolver’s hammer. He’d had this exact image in countless vengeful daydreams: placing a gun against this man’s head, spitting in his face, pulling the trigger. He had expected the moment to be full of transcendent release, as if the simple act of squeezing a trigger could untie the gorgon’s knot of anger and grief that he’d carried inside him. But now, staring at the man who had stolen Nadie away from him, he realized that he would feel even less than the dead man. There was no catharsis here, no purging of tragedy, not even revenge, really. Even if he had found this soldier years ago in London, perhaps during one of his late-night hunts into the pubs and back alleys, he would not have found any resolution.
You’ve come so far for this, a voice said inside his head. It was a voice he’d heard in his fever dreams and the sound of it unlocked his memory. The dreams returned, cloudless and vivid, and mixed with images from his childhood with Nadie. Finish it.
“She didn’t fight,” the soldier said, though now the voice was somehow wrong, a perfect imitation of pitch and tone but flawed nevertheless in a subtler way. It was not the soldier speaking, Mason knew, it was the thing from the boat, the man in his dreams. “After a while, it was like she was just a little doll, not even moving … never had such a young bird before, so tiny and fragile …”
Opening his hand, Mason let the revolver drop.
He turned away from the British soldier, stepping over bodies, and headed to the opening in the sandbag wall. Walking away, he resisted the urge to glance back and see whether the soldier still stood or had joined his brothers on the ground.
In his head, the creature spoke, This is why it could never be you. Why it always had to be her.
Passing out of the Italian camp, past the smoldering remains of a flatbed truck, Mason thought of Priscilla and wondered whether he’d ever see her again. At that moment it seemed doubtful.
The first rays of sun broke over the horizon, thinning out the shadows and giving the Egyptian fields a soft orange glow. He started a new day by stepping over the partial hemisphere of a mummified head.
٤
1153 B.C.
The dungeons under the temple at Karnak were legendary, the source spring of endless rumors of grotesque, unspeakable tortures performed there. The truth was obfuscated by the lack of firsthand experiences—none of the prisoners had ever emerged to tell their tale, and those who worked there—the priests known as Sobek’s Hand—ever spoke of it. The old women of Egypt gossiped with shopkeepers and delivery boys, spinning stories of unimaginable humiliations and slow, excruciating deaths.
Petosiris woke to discover that the old women hadn’t even begun to imagine the reality of the place. Six men shared his cell, all missing limbs, a few without eyes, odd numbers of fingers and toes on the hands and feet that remained. They no longer wept or prayed. They lived only because they were not allowed to die, and suicide would only result in a wife or child’s arrest to take their place. So they suffered, silent, and waited for the grace of Re.
Petosiris felt the misery swirl around him. It was almost strong enough to distract him from his own depressed stupor. A wooden cage over his head held his jaw in place and clasped his mouth closed. His sparse meals were administered through a hole the guards had drilled in his neck, water and soups forced down a funnel and into his stomach—and inevitably, some into his lungs. It was near impossible to cough it up, fighting gravity all the way while desperately struggling for air.
But that wasn’t the worst of what they’d done to him. None of the bruises that spotted his body, nor the cuts and slashes that divided his chest into strips of meat, nor the clamps that pinched his extremities, nor the burns and brands on his back could compete with the most hideous torture: Khafre, the doctor, had sewn a goat’s tongue onto the stump of his own.
“The gods,” Khafre explained, “do not listen to the prayers of animals.”
The oversized tongue, folded and filling his closed mouth, tempted his throat to vomit. He had expected the sensation to pass as he became accustomed to the circumstance, but it didn’t. His eyes watered constantly and his stomach rolled.
Months passed since his capture. The prisoners who shared his cell rotated, some finding mercy in death, others transferred to other chambers where different techniques were applied. The guards seemed less eager to touch him than the others, performing their duties with a studied detachment, so unlike the mumbled stories prisoners told of hysterical, laughing guards with whips, lances, and torches. Petosiris understood this: even in his current state, they feared him.
As, he knew, they should.
He felt confident he could escape if that was his wish. The guards were simple and over-trained, no more competent than show animals, and each time they wrestled him from his cell he learned their infinite weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Weak minded, they would have been easy to manipulate into his bidding. The other prisoners in his cell would have killed for his abilities, he knew. On the rare occasions when they did speak to each other—never to him—they often spun fantastic stories of escape.
But escape was not his goal.
There was no sense of day or night down in the labyrinth. None of Ra’s light could penetrate this far down in the earth. The only light came from the torches ensconced in the hallway walls outside the cells. The prisoners slept and woke without schedule.
So when the jackal-masked guards came to collect him, Petosiris had no idea whether it was day or night, and that was important. By Ra’s law, executions could only be conducted in his honor in daylight. If it was night, that meant they were taking him to a chamber for his daily torture and then he would be returned to suffer the aftermath. If it was day, they could have been escorting him to his death.
Petosiris prayed, in thought, it was day.
The guards struck him, their normal salutation, until he fell slack to the floor, belly down. He knew they assumed his lack of resistance was a product of near-starvation. They were wrong. He took the blows because it kept him focused, lit a path through the fog of pain, hunger, and sickness. He considered struggling just a little, enough to keep his head straight even longer, but knew that the beast inside him, the ancient god he’d invited, would never stop at a little.
They dragged him from the cell and down the ha
llway.
The dungeons were designed to confuse even minds not corrupted by continued abuse, but Petosiris had memorized the pathway from his cell to the various torture chambers. A quick left turn took him in a direction he’d not been before, and a short flight of carved rock stairs confirmed they were not taking him for routine whipping, cutting, or drowning. No, the lighting was brighter on the higher level, the passageways better maintained.
Passing a pair of guards in ceremonial garb, he was dragged into a long, oval-shaped hall with a polished black marble floor. In the room’s center a golden sarcophagus lay on a raised alter. The body of Pharoah Usermaatre Meryamun Ramesses III rested surrounded by dozens of canopic jars. The jars held not only his own organs, but also those of donors to ensure enhanced longevity in the afterlife.
The guards dragged him past murals of Hathor and Osiris without allowing him a moment for the customary prayers. Not that he could speak with his dead goat’s tongue anyway, but he could still think the prayers.
More guards entered the hall through hidden doorways, dragging prisoners. Petosiris didn’t need to see their faces to recognize them; he could feel their presence. They were Ankhhaf and Siatum. If he had needed their faces for identification, it was possible he wouldn’t have recognized them at all anyway. Scars and burns covered every inch of their bodies. Siatum had no eyes; instead, a long stitch ran across his face and connected his brow to his cheeks, the flesh bunched at his nose’s protrusion. Though he could still see, Ankhhaf fared worse: lips butchered, his mouth was now shaped like a star with flaps pinned back to reveal his broken teeth and crushed gumline.
Eternal Unrest: A Novel of Mummy Terror Page 24