Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1)

by Jeremy Robinson

  But survive they had. Even Cooper, who had experienced prolonged exposure to the acidic secretions, and who spent most of the trek back to the road unconscious on the shoulder of the man who now went by the name Erik Lazarus, would make a full recovery without even a scar to remember the ordeal.

  Before leaving the jungle, they had taken care not to accidentally transmit even a shred of plant fiber away from the infested zone, which meant stripping nearly naked and leaving everything behind. It was a small price to pay to ensure that the species would not gain a foothold somewhere else. Once back in the WHO facility in Monrovia, scrubbed clean and salved with a topical ointment, the scientists under Carter’s leadership had wasted no time analyzing the plant. They researched the possibility that it might be some naturally occurring mutation, while they waited for the arrival of the high-tech equipment Carter had requested. Pierce had little to do but sit and worry, while he waited for Dourado to run down the Cerberus group.

  He had contemplated returning to the citadel, but he rejected that course of action. There was nothing he could do there, not without Carter’s help at least, and he had not entirely given up hope of recruiting her into the Herculean fold.

  There was also the problem of what to do about Lazarus. The man whom he had once known as Bishop clearly wanted the rest of the world to believe that he was deceased, but Pierce could not imagine keeping such knowledge a secret from Jack Sigler, his best friend and Fiona’s father. But Lazarus had saved him from certain death. Pierce owed him a chance to explain, at the very least.

  He found Lazarus on the roof, alone, stripped bare to the waist and seated in a lotus position, eyes closed and deep in meditation. The tableau was so surreal, so incongruous, that Pierce almost forgot why he had sought the other man out. Feeling like an intruder, he was about to turn away when something caught his eye, prompting him to take a second look.

  Lazarus’s arms and bare chest were splotched with patches of stark white, much like Pierce’s own. The big man had applied the same healing ointment as the other survivors from the jungle nightmare.

  Why?

  Bishop…Lazarus…whatever he wanted to call himself…had gone missing at the bottom of Lake Kivu, at a crushing depth of more than 1,200 feet. The only possible explanation for his survival was that his body still retained the effects of Ridley’s regenerative serum. But if that was true, why had he treated the chemical burns on his skin?

  He should have healed within seconds.

  “Do you know why I chose the name Lazarus?”

  The low voice startled Pierce. The sound was like a rumble of distant thunder, yet the big man had spoken almost without moving a muscle. Pierce looked up and saw that the man’s eyes were still closed.

  “I…ah, assumed it was a Biblical reference. Lazarus died, but Jesus brought him back to life. Just like you. Back from the dead.”

  Lazarus’s dark eyes opened slowly to meet Pierce’s gaze. “Four days.”

  Pierce thought he understood the reference. In the Bible story, Lazarus had been dead and buried for four days before being raised.

  “He didn’t take it away,” the big man went on, in the same dispassionate but haunting tone. “We all thought he did, but it’s a part of me, and it always will be. All he did...was slow it down.”

  ‘He’ could only mean Richard Ridley. In the early days of his insane experiments, the scientist had sought to isolate the DNA sequences that gave certain creatures like sea stars and salamanders the ability to fully reconstitute damaged tissue, even regrowing lost limbs. In nature, that process took time and a great deal of energy, no different than the recovery period for any injury. Ridley had found a way to ramp up the effect until it was almost instantaneous, but the pain, physical and mental, of both the injury and the accelerated healing, was magnified to a point beyond the capacity of an ordinary human’s tolerance. The man who now called himself Erik Lazarus had not exactly been ordinary, though. His capacity for dealing with pain had been nothing short of astonishing, but even he had a breaking point.

  If what Lazarus was saying was true, then Ridley—using the Mother Tongue—had not stripped away the regenerative ability, but merely dialed it back to something more like the natural rate of healing. Which meant that if Lazarus sustained a serious injury or maiming, he would still recover, but it might take days or even weeks.

  Pierce struggled to wrap his brain around the revelation. He could only imagine what it would feel like to drown, and then a few minutes or perhaps hours later, have the spark of life return for a frantic moment, only to be doused again.

  “Four days,” Lazarus repeated. “That’s probably how long it took for me to reach the surface.”

  Four days at the bottom of a lake, drowning, dying and then waking up to do it all over again…and again.

  “Felice believes that decomposition must have started. It happens that way sometimes. The cells break down and release gases that make a drowned body buoyant enough to float to the surface.”

  Pierce shuddered involuntarily. “That’s…” He could not find the words.

  Lazarus shrugged. “One of the good things about being dead is that it switches off the black box. I have no memories of what happened. I woke up in a marsh on the edge of the lake. Probably got dragged there by a scavenger. After that, I remember everything.”

  He fell silent, as if daring Pierce to ask for more. Pierce did not. He had an idea now of why the man had not returned to his old life. Part of him, the part that was Erik Somers, was still dead, left behind at the bottom of Lake Kivu.

  “I won’t…” Pierce faltered, sucked in a breath and tried again. “I won’t tell Jack, if that’s what you want.”

  Lazarus stared back for several seconds, and then unfolded himself and rose to his feet. “You said Fiona is missing. Is there any news?”

  Pierce would not have thought the conversation could become any more awkward, but the change in subject snapped him back to the helplessness he had felt since Dourado’s call. “Nothing.”

  “Fiona is family to me. I’ll do whatever I can to get her back.”

  24

  Cerberus Headquarters

  The translation went quickly, so quickly that Gallo was at a loss to determine how Kenner had convinced Tyndareus that he needed her to do it. A first year student could have done the work in a few days with nothing more than a dictionary and a copy of the Iliad for reference. Like the works officially attributed to Homer, the Heracleia was a non-linear narrative in dactylic hexameter, a classical poetry scheme that measured out the syllables of each line. The method served not only an aesthetic purpose but also a practical one, facilitating the memorization of long epic poems that were primarily handed down orally. Gallo did most of the work in her head, consulting external translation resources only to verify her interpretation of a few tricky passages.

  Kenner sat beside her the whole time. Rohn kept his vigil from a distance, but neither man interrupted her. She was provided with a light meal and as much coffee as she could drink, and she was assured that Fiona would be taken care of, as well. After three hours of perusing scans of the old papyrus pages, she completed her first pass.

  “This is more or less what you thought it was,” she told Kenner. “The life story of Herakles.” Part of it anyway, she thought, but did not say aloud. “There’s no mention of ‘Labors’—that was probably something added later. But it does recount his battles against the children of Typhon—the chthonic monsters. After killing several of them, he embarked on a ten-year-long voyage to find Echidna, the mother of the monsters, in Erebus. The darkness, which was another name for the Underworld. I suspect that very round figure might be a slight exaggeration. Poetic license. But it certainly took a very long time for him to reach his destination. The gates of the Underworld, where he captured the three-headed hellhound.” She paused a beat and then added, “Cerberus.”

  Kenner did not react to the name, but his curiosity was piqued. “Does it say where the entrance
to the Underworld is?”

  “Not precisely. ‘In a burning land, with poisonous air, at the center of a lake of fire.’” That was a rough but mostly literal translation. “He learned the location from the Amazons and then continued on from there.”

  “That’s our starting point.”

  “We are confronted with the same problem,” Gallo said. “To reach the land of the Amazons, he had to ‘brave Poseidon’s wrath’ and ‘endure a month while Eurus slept’—presumably those are references to a long sea voyage—before arriving at ‘the land where Tethys resides,’ and where the Amazons made their home.

  “The mention of Poseidon’s wrath could indicate a long sea voyage lasting at least a month. Tethys was an aquatic goddess, the wife of Oceanus and the mother of several river deities. We can assume that means the Amazons lived on a river. Knowing what we now do about the possible range of his travels, that could be anywhere.”

  “Not anywhere,” Kenner countered. “I believe we can rule out a few of the traditionally accepted locations. Libya, for example. An ancient trireme could easily cover fifty miles a day, under oar power alone. At a bare minimum, we’re looking at a distance of no less than 1,500 miles, and probably much further than that. It would not have taken Herakles months to reach a destination on the other side of the Mediterranean.”

  “You’re assuming a direct line of travel,” Gallo said. “Ancient sailors never ventured far from a visible shoreline.”

  “To make that map, the Amazons clearly overcame that limitation.”

  Gallo had no rebuttal for that, but the comment made her reconsider her own biases. She’d made the same mistake as the ancient historians who had tried to shoehorn the epic voyages of Odysseus, Jason and Herakles into their map of the known world and the limitations of their belief system. As Kenner had pointed out, the map on Queen Hippolyte’s girdle suggested the Amazons, in addition to being unbeatable on the battlefield, were exceptional mariners.

  The realization nagged at Gallo. What else had she glossed over because of her prejudices? She patiently scrolled through the pages. The scattershot narrative was structured like the memories of an old war veteran, but she soon located the section describing Herakles’s arrival at the Amazon city. As she read the passage with fresh eyes, she became aware of a serious omission. “They weren’t all women.”

  “What’s that?”

  “This account describes a fortress city ruled by the Amazon Hippolyte, but it doesn’t say that everyone who lived there was an Amazon. In fact, it explicitly describes the city’s inhabitants as both Amazon women and ‘men who fought as fiercely as Spartans.’”

  Kenner frowned. “I’m not sure how that matters.”

  “In almost every version of the legend, the Amazons are exclusively female. Women without husbands, sustaining their population by mating with captured males who were either enslaved or slaughtered afterward. They killed all their male offspring.”

  “But that’s not the case?”

  “It’s another example of how taking the legends at face value can get you into trouble. The word ‘Amazon’ definitely applies to the female warriors who ruled the city, but it would be more correct to say that they were a female-dominated society, or perhaps that they were considered the equal of men. Given the attitude of the ancient Greeks toward women, it’s not surprising that the poets of the time would have exaggerated equality into a sort of pervasive hatred of men.” She didn’t add that the confusion may also have been an intentional deception perpetrated by Diotrephes.

  “How does that help us?”

  “It means that in addition to throwing out our preconceived notions about the limitations of ancient travel, we also need to stop looking for some mythical kingdom without men. The city of the Amazons probably wasn’t much different from any other city of the day. Except, of course, for…” She trailed off as she considered the implications of the unspoken thought.

  “Except for what?” Kenner prompted.

  “Warriors and mariners,” Gallo murmured. “I think the Amazons might have been the Sea Peoples.”

  Between the initial emergence of the Bronze era Mycenaean culture and the rise of Classical Greek civilization, was a period of time known as the Greek Dark Ages, a span of nearly three hundred years in which not only Greece but every civilization on the Mediterranean rim was terrorized by a marauding force, known to modern scholars as the Sea Peoples. The exact origin and identity of the Sea Peoples remained a controversial topic. Because of their apparent nomadic nature and lack of any permaculture, not to mention the wholesale destruction left in their wake, there was little hard evidence in the historical record to prove they existed at all.

  “That’s why Queen Hippolyte’s belt was the symbol of her power,” Gallo went on. “The Amazons were able to dominate the world of their time because they possessed a map of the world.”

  She scrolled to another page. “Hippolyte was prepared to give the belt to Herakles, to share that knowledge, but the rest of her people did not want to share. They turned against her and tried to kill him. Herakles defeated them and took the belt. He may have taken their other maps as well, or perhaps killed anyone with the ability to make new ones, effectively breaking the power of the Amazons. That’s got to be the truth behind the legend.”

  Kenner nodded slowly, but then he shook his head as if trying to wake himself up. “But where is the Amazon city?”

  “We’re looking for a city along a major river, at least 1,500 miles journey from Greece.” Gallo brought up the image of the belt again, studying the shorelines. “‘Endure a month while Eurus slept,’” she murmured. “Eurus was the god of the East wind. A month with no wind.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “That depends on where you are in the world. Along the equator, there’s a band of low pressure where the wind hardly ever blows. Ancient mariners called it the ‘doldrums.’” Gallo felt like she was missing something.

  Something important. Something obvious.

  She laid her finger on the center of the map, approximating the location of the equator. To the right—east—lay the Congo River basin. To the left—west, across the Atlantic Ocean—was the…

  “Oh, my God.”

  “What?” Kenner asked, urgently. “What is it?”

  Gallo took a deep breath. “In June of 1542, while exploring an uncharted river, a Spaniard named Francisco de Orellana, encountered a hostile force. Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, accompanying Orellana, wrote that the attackers shot so many arrows into the Spanish boats that they resembled porcupines. He lost his eye in the attack. Carvajal also reported that the attacking force was led by a group of about a dozen female warriors who fought as fiercely as the men, and it was only when most of the women were killed that the attack ended. The encounter made such an impression on the Spaniards that they named the river for the legendary warrior women of Greek mythology.”

  Kenner’s eyes went wide with disbelief. “You’re not saying…”

  “The land where Tethys, the mother of all rivers lives, where Herakles found the city of the Amazons,” She gave a helpless shrug. “It’s the Amazon.”

  Kenner stared at her for almost a full minute before slowly letting his breath out in a sigh. “Amazons in the Amazon. I seem to recall reading a rather indecent paperback novel on the subject when I was young.”

  “It fits,” Gallo insisted. “The story, the map. Everything.”

  “I believe you. But it’s not enough. The Amazon Basin is almost three million square miles.”

  Gallo rolled her eyes. “You asked me to translate it for you.” She added emphasis to the word so there would be no mistaking the sarcasm. “To identify the location of the Amazon city, so that you would have a starting point. I’ve done that. You don’t need to know exactly where it is to figure out where he went next.”

  Kenner glanced at the large television screen on the wall. Gallo wasn’t sure if he was looking to see if Tyndareus had further instructions, or if the l
ook was meant to remind her that Kenner was not the final arbiter of her fate. “Without certain proof, we would be shooting in the dark.”

  Gallo frowned and searched her memory for something that would convince him. “Carvajal described finding carvings of an elaborate walled city in several villages along the river, prior to that battle. The natives told him that the carvings were a symbol of their ruler, like a sort of national flag, and identified that ruler as ‘the mistress of the Amazons.’ The city was real.”

  “If there is an Amazon city in the jungles of Brazil, why has no one ever found it?”

  “It’s the jungle. You could walk within ten feet of a ruin and not see it. In the century following contact with the Spaniards, ninety percent of Brazil’s native population was dead from small pox and other diseases. The Amazons might have suffered the same fate. In fact, if they were concentrated in an urban center, they would have been even more vulnerable than smaller tribes in isolated villages.”

  Kenner looked as if he wanted to believe, but he could not overcome his skepticism. “It’s not enough. We have to find that city. You have to find it.” He stood up. “We’re going to Brazil. I hope you can narrow it down a little before we head upriver.”

  Gallo didn’t know where to begin. There was nothing in the Heracleia that even remotely approached the level of detail necessary for her to deduce an exact location for the ancient city, and she couldn’t even read the…

  She turned back to the displayed image of the Amazon Queen’s belt, weighing the possible consequences of the choice before her. If she did this, she would be complicit in helping Kenner and Cerberus find a secret that Diotrephes had kept hidden for more than three millennia. But if she didn’t, both she and Fiona would suffer. She had no illusions about Tyndareus letting them go, but while they were alive, there was always a chance that they might be able to turn the tables on Cerberus. And she knew Pierce would never stop looking for them.

  I have to buy more time, she decided.