“Let me try,” Lisa said.
The doctor stepped aside. “Be my guest.”
She covered his lips with hers and gently inflated his lungs. Before she could execute the chest maneuver, Nick’s eyes fluttered open, and he stared blankly into her anxious hazel eyes. Several minutes elapsed before he was awake enough to speak.
“How do you feel?” Lisa asked, as the others crowded around.
Nick glanced around the grotto. “I was . . . here the entire time?”
“Yes, you were. What’s the matter?” Lisa grew apprehensive.
“I can’t recall everything, but I can tell you this, Lisa: I was not in this fortress the whole time,” he insisted.
Lisa and the others were puzzled when he referred to their prison as a fortress.
“Fortress?” she repeated.
“Alick Tobhor, the builder, referred to this place as his small fortress in an alien world,” Nick answered in a dreamlike state.
“You actually saw Alick Tobhor?” Lisa was stunned.
“I certainly did. I watched him build this place, and I know what these stones are called, and what they really are. I saw what’s really beneath the fountain of youth,” he replied with rapid-fire delivery. He looked at Lisa. “And I was wrong about the demon eating the nurse and agent to recharge its strength.” He pulled Lisa close. “It’s Alick Tobhor. Alick Tobhor is alive within these walls, not the demon,” he whispered into her ear.
“We don’t give a shit about all that,” the doctor snapped. “We want to know if you found a way to get us out of here.”
His eyes fell. He had failed to get the words to remove the flagstone wall. Gibberish, he recalled. Unlike the simplistic command to open the south wall.
Lisa knelt beside him and whispered, “Use your common sense. You can remember.”
And like a bolt from the blue, the mumbo jumbo was there in his memory.
Lisa helped him to his feet, and he repeated Tobhor’s words. The wall inside the archway vanished.
A cheer swelled from the other prisoners as they streamed into the dark tunnel. Lisa kissed Nick’s cheek.
“How did you ever remember them so quickly?” Lisa asked, smiling.
He returned her smile. “You mean rohbot kcila?”
“What?”
He laughed. “It’s the mirror image of his name - Alick Tobhor.”
“His name is chanted forward to open the entrance upstairs, and his name is chanted backwards to open the exit down here. How clever,” she said thoughtfully. “What else did you see there?”
Nick’s face suddenly clouded, and he appeared troubled.
Lisa grabbed his arm. “What is it, Nick?”
“I’ll have to sort out the visions so they make sense to me before I can describe them to you,” he said absently. “But . . .”
“But what?” she urged.
“There is one thing that has me completely stumped.”
“Go ahead, ask me.”
An agent appeared in the exit. “Hey, guys, you better get in here before the exit closes again,” he warned.
“Right,” Lisa said. “Okay, Nick, ask me.”
The agent hurried away.
Nick sighed as he took a shaky step toward the tunnel. “Are you absolutely certain that we’ve never met before yesterday?”
She studied his face for signs of humor. “Are you kidding?”
“I’m one hundred percent serious, just as I’m ninety-nine percent certain that we know each other from a past encounter,” he responded.
Panic glazed Lisa’s eyes for a second, but it was long enough for Nick to identify.
“No, Nick. I’m sure we’ve never met. I couldn’t forget someone like you,” she replied hastily, and ran into foreboding blackness beyond the arched exit without looking back.
Nick shot after her and seized her arm. “Wait!” he shouted.
“What?” she retorted.
“Empty those fountain sample bottles into the pool.”
“Are you crazy? We need those samples to analyze this water or whatever it is, so we can pinpoint how it mutated the people who came in contact with it,” she argued.
“No way. You take those bottles out of this place, assuming that we do get out of here, and that demon guardian’ll come looking for you. I won’t take that chance. Empty them now,” he demanded.
Lisa reluctantly returned to the fountain and with her back turned to Nick, emptied all but one of the bottles. She stuffed the remaining full bottle down her top between her breasts.
“All done, just as the boss requested,” she said irritably, and stormed past Nick for the second time that night.
He exhaled a sigh of relief. Lisa was safe from Alick Tobhor’s demon.
23
“W
ait!” Nick shouted ahead to his companions as they moved deeper into the tunnel’s shadows. He and Lisa possessed the only flashlights, and both of them were at the end of the slender procession.
“Wait my ass!” the doctor exclaimed. “We’ve got to get the hell out of here.”
The others agreed in high-pitched, panicked voices that echoed along the square tunnel. The dimensions for both the width and height were nine feet.
“Hey look, at least let me lead. I’ve got the flashlight,” he told them. I’ve got to get to the front of the line, he thought. In their current emotional states, the group leaders could easily walk right into a clever Alick Tobhor trap in the hovering darkness.
A split second later, Nick found himself inexplicably transported to the front of the line, but he hadn’t moved a muscle. It was an anomalous sensation. For a moment, he was a diaphanous specter penetrating the stunned survivors ahead of him, and they seemed to freeze in time as he passed.
“How’d you do that?” one of the anxious nurses asked.
The others nodded nervously, their faces grim. Two accused him of being a witch.
Nick, shaken himself, raised his arms for silence. “I have no idea how I leapfrogged you,” he replied truthfully. “Until I sort this out, let’s keep moving.” He didn’t want them to know that he was not only a little frightened by the experience, he also had a bad feeling about the tunnel. Until they escaped unharmed, he would consider it as unsafe as the fortress.
“You just appeared there,” an FBI agent persisted. “It was magic, that’s what it was.”
That was the one word he abhorred in the English language. Magic. Since his last investigation involving the Mortal Eclipse project and sorcerers, he was wary of the whole concept. He was a meat and potatoes, science kind of guy; and even though he understood real magic existed in the world, he wanted to spend the remainder of his life without ever experiencing it again. At least, that was his plan before he moved to the head of the tunnel line.
Suddenly Gabriella’s ethereal voice drifted through his mind, assuaging his contempt for magic. You have special gifts, it said. Don’t be afraid of them. Use them to your advantage, Nick.
If teleportation and remote viewing were parts of his special bag of tricks, he had no use for them. He was a professional who didn’t rely on parlor tricks to get the job done. In fact, he considered them both special pains in the ass!
Lisa stood quietly behind the frightened group. Her eyes didn’t display the fear or awe Nick would have expected. If anything, she appeared pleased. He shook his head. What was up with her, anyway? She was definitely a difficult woman to read.
“Follow me,” he said at last, hoping he could just be himself for the rest of his life. “And be quiet. We have no idea what’s in this tunnel, and I for one, don’t want to be caught off guard.”
The others finally quieted and cautiously tramped after him. The tunnel floor was parched sand and gravel, which was an amazing development, Nick reasoned, considering the tunnel was buried in a swamp. The bleak passage curved like a serpent and was much longer than Nick anticipated. Each bend represented a potential ambush. And, the tunnel was ominously quiet; even their footfal
ls were muffled.
Nick stopped suddenly and targeted his flashlight beam at the floor. He knelt and inspected the monstrous aberrations in the sandy surface. Footprints, almost three-feet long with three prominently splayed toes, disappeared around the bend ahead. The demon guardian! Nick eyeballed the forbidding blackness beyond his beam’s reach, his senses alert. He drew his Glock, although he realized it was like hunting a rogue elephant with a peashooter. After all, a rocket launched at point-blank range into the creature had failed to kill it.
The others murmured anxiously, and Nick wished he could say something that would calm their frayed nerves, but he was too edgy to be convincing. Finally, he stood and moved cautiously forward, anticipating the worst. His flashlight beam probed the tunnel walls, but there was no sign of an exit. Just an impressive art display. Someone had carved a series of peculiar symbols in the rocky walls at intervals of ten feet. Pentagrams. Pentagrams inside circles. Pentagons. Trapezoids. Five floating points that represented the five tips of the pentagon. More pentagons and pentagrams. The artistic series recurred around every bend.
Nick didn’t have a clue what the symbols meant. Why did old Alick Tobhor mark the walls of this snake-belly passage? Obviously, they served a purpose. With the painstaking work required to create the symbolic art, it had to be a damn good one. But their significance escaped Nick at the moment.
He froze and quickly motioned the others back with his gun hand. He heard a faint shuffling around the next curve. Then, the eerie sound ceased. He waited expectedly for it to resume. His grip tightened around the Glock. What was it waiting for?
Nick heard the movement again. The hiss of scraping sand. Deliberate. Heavy. Anything but graceful. Much clearer this time. Much closer. He stood perfectly still, listening. His body was granite, his nerves fiery fuses, and his heart a pounding kettledrum.
Another prolonged shuffle, more audible this time.
“What is it?” someone whispered behind him.
Lisa inched her way to the front of the huddled group and motioned for them to retreat toward the fortress gateway. She joined Nick. “What is it?” she asked, her voice barely louder than a breath.
He didn’t answer. He remained focused on the movements. The gloom beyond the searching beam appeared to thicken and smother the small band of survivors.
“Lisa, I’ve missed something along the way,” he whispered.
“The symbols?” she speculated.
He nodded, his gaze still locked on the darkness ahead.
“What’s out there?” Lisa whispered.
“The demon guardian.”
Her eyes widened in alarm. “Can we get past it?”
Nick shook his head. “There’s nothing but a dead end past it.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do.” He took a wary step back. “I want to take a closer look at those symbols.”
Nick took a few more steps backwards, studying the symbols in the flashlight’s periphery light. Pentagrams. Pentagons. Encircled pentagrams. For godsake, what the hell did they mean?
His senses stayed alert as he attempted to solve Alick Tobhor’s riddle. Sweat glistened on his face. His kettledrum heart pounded out a quicker beat as the stuffy tunnel atmosphere grew stifling. His mouth was cotton; his palms were ice slick. He holstered the Glock before it slipped from his hand.
Nick edged along the walls, shifting sides and closely scrutinizing each symbol for a clue. The symbols were meant to communicate vital information to anyone trapped inside the tunnel, but he just wasn’t getting it. The mounting pressure for a swift resolution wasn’t helping his concentration. The lives of the entire group rested on his ability to solve Tobhor’s puzzle!
He lifted his eyes toward the hostile curve confronting them. He felt the demon guardian’s malevolent presence in the shadows, its hunger and fury. Nick closed his eyes and endeavored to block out the distraction. No concentration – no escape.
But time was running out . . .
He propped his free hand on the rocky wall, his whirling thoughts nearing a meltdown. Think, dammit, think!
The demon’s shuffling started again, but this time it quickened its pace. He tried to shift his attention to the puzzle. Tried to erase the demon guardian’s terrifying, Technicolor image from his mind’s eye.
Pressing his back tightly against the irregular surface, Nick focused the beam on a group of symbols on the opposite wall. His gaze widened. Could it be that simple?
Silence blanketed the tunnel like a tomb. Dead silence.
Their time was up.
“This way!” he shouted at the others and pointed at the tunnel wall.
They stared at him as if he were mad. The lunatic was asking them to march into the rocky wall!
“Hurry!” he urged, sensing that the demon guardian was gathering its energy for an attack. In its weakened state, Nick guessed that it would require additional rest to be at full strength; but in the restricted confines of the tunnel, it would have little difficulty dispatching the poorly armed group.
Lisa kissed his cheek and approached the rocky surface. With her face inches away from the symbols, she inhaled deeply, shut her eyes, and strode forward.
She vanished!
A throaty growl swept over them like a murderous tidal wave. Nick spun the flashlight around as the others disappeared, one by one, into the wall. The dimming light revealed the creature’s hideous form.
Suddenly, it leaped forward and quickly covered the short distance between it and its solitary prey. Nick didn’t freeze this time. He ran through the wall as the demon swiped at him with its lethal claws.
Swirling pink and gold brushstrokes brightened dawn’s gray canvas as the survivors strode from thin air eighty yards south of Tobhor’s fortress. Neo, the other FBI agents, and the National Guardsmen gaped at the incredible spectacle. Nick was the last to appear; he tumbled out among the other survivors and rolled to a stop in the damp muck.
They crowded around him and shouted out the identical question – how’d you find the exit?
Nick stood and brushed the muck clumps from his clothes. “As you may have noticed, all the symbols were completed. All the dots connected. The pentagrams, pentagons and circles, and so forth. Only the symbol of the five, unattached points was different. Since it wasn’t enclosed, I figured the builder was trying to tell us that, no matter how amazing it seemed, that symbol was the exit.” Nick explained wearily.
“That part of the wall was like a hologram,” the doctor remarked. “It only looked solid.”
“No,” Lisa disagreed, “it wasn’t a hologram. Science had nothing to do with it. It was magic. Just plain magic.”
“It was solid to the demon guardian, or it’d be standing here with us,” Nick argued.
The doctor laughed. “Magic. Bullshit! There’s a scientific explanation for everything.”
Lisa was about to reply when Nick pulled her to his side. He caught a glimpse of something wedged in her cleavage.
“Hey buddy!” Nick called to the doctor.
“What?”
Nick smiled. “When that demon bites off your pompous ass, then maybe you’ll believe in magic.”
Neo and several of his companions snickered as they arrived on the scene, but the doctor merely scowled and rushed away.
“Magic, huh? Your favorite subject, Nick,” Neo quipped. “Mind telling us how you managed your escape, Houdini?” He extended his large hand and slapped high fives with both Lisa and Nick.
“I’ll give you the scoop later,” Nick answered. “Right now, I’d give my right arm for a shower, a loaded pizza, and a cold beer.”
Neo grinned. “Can do.” He pulled his motel key from his slacks pocket and tossed it to Nick.
“I’ll take care of the pizza and beer,” Lisa volunteered. “I know a little hole-in-the-wall down the road from the motel that makes some great pizza. And best of all, they deliver.”
“Sounds wonderful. Damn wonderful,” Nick said, yaw
ning.
Neo accompanied them to the abandoned Range Rover.
“Did you run a trace on those Sikorsky helicopters?” Nick asked.
“We’ve got the FAA and our boys on it. They should come up with something pretty soon,” Neo replied.
“I hope so. We’re in for a world of trouble if that fountain water is distributed all over the world,” Nick said gravely.
Neo cleared his throat. “We found Blossom alive,” he declared.
Nick gave Lisa a quick squeeze as tears leaked from the corners of her eyes.
“Are we still going with the original kidnapping plan regarding Clay, Nick?” Neo asked.
“Until things get better, I’m afraid so.”
Neo exhaled slowly. “It’ll be tough on Blossom.”
“What will?’ Lisa asked, worried.
“I’m afraid that information is top secret,” Nick answered. “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to trust me again.”
Lisa tucked her hand in his. “So far, you haven’t let me down.”
“And I don’t plan to.” He looked over at Neo. “Did you arrest the kidnappers?”
Neo repeated the information he’d received from Blossom and Lieutenant Cartwright.
“So that leaves one bastard left,” Nick said thoughtfully. “You know which horse my money’s on for the target, don’t you?”
Neo nodded. “Yeah, the First Lady while she’s doing her hospital gig.”
“Right—but remember, the race hasn’t been run. That guy in the basement might have been there to rig a diversion from the actual target, too.”
Lisa frowned. “You mean the hospital murder victim was one of the kidnappers?”
“Yeah, the one who went to pieces down there,” Nick quipped.
Neo rolled his eyes. “Too bad you didn’t lose your sick sense of humor in that tunnel,” he groaned, then looked at Lisa. “Seriously, from our initial analysis of the evidence, it certainly looks like he was one of them,” Neo replied.
“I hope you’ve got Blossom’s room under a twenty-four hour watch,” Nick said.
The Ancient Breed Page 16