Rohn was trying to organize the men, directing their fire and orchestrating their inevitable retreat, but the creature pushed them toward the bubbling cauldron that Lazarus’s explosives had opened. There was no escape for the men, and no way to stand against the guardian of the Underworld’s gates. One by one, the men threw down their rifles and tried to scramble up the ravine’s steep sides, but the creature’s rage was fixed on them now. There was no escaping it.
Then, a lone figure, taller than any of the men, but still dwarfed by the creature, advanced and took up a position directly in front of it. Tyndareus in his TALOS suit appeared to be challenging the bear-elk to one-on-one combat.
Powered armor or not, Pierce expected the outcome to be the same. The creature would swat the old man aside like the insect he was. The suit might survive, but Tyndareus would be pulverized inside it like an egg in a tumble dryer.
But Tyndareus had a trick up his sleeve, or rather, on it. The right arm of the TALOS suit came up and pointed at the beast. Pierce glimpsed something mounted to the forearm plates, like an extra piece of armor.
There was a loud, hollow sound, deeper but not quite as loud as the report of a rifle, and then Pierce was face down on the scorched ground next to Carter, with Lazarus covering both of them.
Another explosion blasted through the ravine, but the shock wave that socked Pierce in the gut felt more like the Primacord detonations that had felled the trees in the Amazon—firecrackers instead of dynamite.
Even before the last echoes of the blast died away, a new sound filled the air: a tortured, braying howl. The smell of burnt hair and cooking meat briefly overpowered the stink of sulfur. Pierce raised his head and saw the massive shape of the bear-elk writhing on the floor of the ravine. Pierce could not tell how serious the injury was. The creature might have been in its death throes, or it might merely have gotten a nasty shock.
“Forty mike-mike grenade launcher,” Lazarus muttered. “HE rounds. I wonder why the old man was holding back?”
Tyndareus stood his ground, hand still extended, ready to fire again, but the creature abruptly righted itself, and with astonishing swiftness for something so enormous, it bolted for the stone wall and the safety of the Underworld. It ran at the seemingly solid obstacle, as if aware that there would be no resistance, and disappeared into the stone. If not for the carnage littering the ravine floor, the whole episode would have seemed like a bizarre night terror.
The calm following the creature’s defeat did not last long. Tyndareus swung around, his arm still extended, the barrel of his grenade launcher now aimed at the three figures huddled near the ravine wall.
Although he had not seen the 40mm high-explosive round hit the bear-elk, Pierce had felt its destructive power, and he knew that there would be no surviving the explosion. There wasn’t even time to flee, but that didn’t stop Lazarus from springing into motion. But he wasn’t running away from the impending grenade blast. Instead, he ran toward its source.
The unexpected charge surprised Tyndareus. He took a step back, recoiling in the face of aggression, despite the fact of being impervious to almost any attack that Lazarus might hope to bring against him. Lazarus surely knew it as well, but the knowledge did not slow him down.
Just as he was about to pass within Tyndareus’s reach, Lazarus veered to his left and launched himself up at the outstretched arm. The TALOS suit weighed as much as a small car, but the weight was distributed very differently. When Lazarus hit Tyndareus’s arm at a full charge, it was enough to spin the armored figure around. Tyndareus flailed, and in so doing, flung Lazarus twenty feet away. But he could not prevent gravity from taking him down. He crashed to the ground, releasing another grenade as he fell. The explosive round arced high and then came back down a hundred and fifty feet away, exploding with a harmless flash and bang.
Pierce saw Lazarus scrambling up and charging Tyndareus again, and then something like a wall blocked his view of the combatants.
Rohn.
Pierce was just starting to focus on the figure standing in front of him when something metallic flashed in front of him, tugging at his chest, spinning him halfway around. Starbursts bloomed in his vision as a heavy fist crashed into the back of his head and sent him stumbling away to sprawl face down on the searing hot ground.
He rolled over, not as gracefully as Lazarus, but with the same urgency, groping for his machine pistol. That was when he noticed the dark sticky substance smeared all over his hands and down the front of his combat vest.
Blood. His own blood.
Rohn had slashed him with a knife, a very sharp knife, judging by the fact that he was only now beginning to feel the faintest tingle of pain across his chest, where the blade had struck.
Screw it. I’m still alive.
He brought the gun up, but Rohn was now advancing on Carter. Pierce tried to settle the red dot sight on Rohn’s moving form, but his grip was sloppy, his hands slick. In the corner of his eye, he saw three more gunmen, the last remnants of Tyndareus’s small army, moving toward him.
Rohn’s back erupted in a spray of blood as Carter triggered a round, point blank into his body, and then fired again and again. The big man lurched with each impact, but kept advancing. Carter stumbled back and fell, the gun slipping from her hands, a look of terror on her face. Rohn’s hand came up, the blade poised to end Felice Carter’s life.
53
Gallo expected some kind of sensory feedback as she passed through the rock wall. Would it feel like walking through a dust cloud? Would it be like swimming through something denser than air but not quite liquid? The only noticeable difference was the absolute darkness. She couldn’t even tell if her eyes were open or shut. She held her breath, afraid to inhale the…whatever it was. That meant she had about forty seconds to cross the threshold of the Underworld, but how would she know when she reached it?
The answer to her question appeared suddenly before her, a faint glow directly ahead. It had to be Kenner, heading into the depths with Fiona. She looked back and could just make out a rough stone wall right behind her, looking as solid and impenetrable as it had on the outside. She reached out, probing it with her fingertips. There was no resistance at all. The rock might have been a hologram, a magician’s projection of smoke and mirrors. It occurred to her that she should mark her path or risk spending the last hours of her life wandering around in the dark looking for the exit, but she had nothing at all with which to do so.
I should have thought this through a little first, she mused. But how do you prepare yourself for walking through solid objects? It’s not like there’s a YouTube video that tells you what to expect.
The glow was receding, growing dimmer as the source of the light moved further along the passage. Gallo put aside her hesitancy and hastened forward. The passage, formed from an old lava tube, was wide with smooth walls, sloping downward. With each step closer to the light source, her ability to see increased, allowing her to move even faster. She picked up speed, running toward the light.
The slope bottomed out and opened into a vast chamber, at least as large as Gorham’s Cave. It was hard to be sure in the dim light, yet Gallo realized that there was more illumination in the cavern than could be explained by Kenner’s single flashlight. The chamber walls glowed red-orange, like coals in a barbecue.
The air was blast-furnace hot, sucking both moisture and energy from her body. Gallo wondered how long she could survive here. How long before organ and brain damage occurred? Probably less than an hour. Maybe a lot less. And Fiona had already been showing signs of serious dehydration related to her diabetes.
Gallo forced herself to move even faster. She had to reach Kenner, had to get Fiona away from him before the damage was irreversible.
“Liam! Stop!” She tried to shout, but the sound that came out seemed to evaporate into nothingness along with everything else.
Kenner couldn’t have heard her, yet after just a few more steps, he stopped. The beam of his light hung in t
he air, sweeping back and forth, but moving no further into the cavern. Gallo could just distinguish the pair—Kenner and Fiona—silhouetted against a flame-red glow. With each step forward, more detail was revealed, as was the real reason Kenner had stopped. When she was still twenty feet away from them, Gallo saw a precipice. Kenner and Fiona stood at the edge of a wide fissure that bisected the entire chamber.
“End of the road,” she called out.
Kenner whirled around, surprise on his face. “Augustina?” His voice was strained with the fatigue of enduring the oppressive heat, but the conditions had done nothing to dampen his enthusiasm. “I didn’t think anyone would come after us.”
Beside him, Fiona barely moved at all. Gallo wasn’t sure how she was still standing, but doubted that she would be able to walk out under her own power. “I’m not leaving without Fiona, Liam. If you want to stay, fine, but let her go.”
“Oh, I can’t very well do that. She is, quite literally, the key to getting out of here.”
“She’s dying. You can see that. And if she dies, then we’ll be trapped in here.” Gallo pressed the point home. “We can all leave together. There’s nothing here.”
Any progress she might have been making vanished at that moment.
“Nothing?” Kenner sounded offended. He pointed to whatever it was that lay beyond the edge of the precipice. “You call that nothing?”
Despite herself, Gallo took a step closer and looked for herself. What she saw defied belief, but one thing was certain.
Kenner was right.
It was far more than ‘nothing.’
54
The knife came down, but not with the expected fury of a deathblow. Instead, Rohn’s entire body seemed to deflate, as if the impact of his mortal wounds had finally hit home. He did not collapse but tottered unsteadily for a moment, and then he turned slowly around.
Pierce could see that something had changed in him. Although he was still standing, still very much alive, his eyes were dead, without any trace of emotion. On the ground behind him, Carter appeared to be in the grip of a seizure. Though there was no outward sign of injury, her muscles were rigid, her body shaking violently.
The trio of gunmen fanned out, their weapons ready to finish what Rohn had started, but they were clearly confounded by the man’s strange behavior.
Rohn lurched into motion, walking toward them with the shuffling steps of an unhinged derelict. The nearest man called out to him, but Rohn seemed not to hear. He just continued stalking forward on a collision course with the man who had spoken. The man stepped to the side to get out of Rohn’s way, but Rohn adjusted course. Then, as soon as he was within reach, he slashed his blade across the man’s throat.
The other two gaped in disbelief as the stricken man went down, blood spraying from the wound, but as Rohn turned toward them, his face ashen from blood loss yet otherwise utterly blank, they turned their guns on him.
Rohn’s chest exploded as twin bursts of rifle fire ripped into him, staggering him back. But he kept coming, walking headlong into the barrage.
Pierce wrestled his own gun around and without bothering to aim, emptied the magazine into the men. Both went down.
Rohn stopped in his tracks. He stood there, an automaton waiting for a command that never came, as the last of his life leaked away. Then he simply crumpled to the ground, dead.
Fifty feet away, Lazarus and Tyndareus were locked in a struggle that was not as one-sided as it should have been, but Pierce barely took note. The mystery of what had just happened to Rohn was screaming for his attention. The change had come over the man as suddenly as if someone had thrown a switch and turned his brain off.
No, not someone. Carter had done it, or some part of her unconscious mind. The latent ability that slumbered within her, the ghost of a prehistoric human ancestor, linking her to every living human on the planet. It was a link that, if threatened, could transform a human into a mindless drone, and if severed, might do to the entire population of humanity what it had done to Rohn.
“Felice?” He let the spent machine pistol fall. Carter’s convulsions had abated, and from the rise and fall of her chest, he could see that she was still very much alive. But was she still Felice Carter? And if he went to her, tried to help her, would the same thing happen to him?
He was not about to risk it. There was nothing he could do for her. If anyone could reach her…
Lazarus was still fighting, anticipating and dodging most of Tyndareus’s lightning fast attacks. Most, but not all. As Pierce watched, the fist of the TALOS suit struck Lazarus in the shoulder. It was a glancing blow, but it spun him around and sent him cartwheeling away. He landed on his feet, catlike, but his right arm hung from his shoulder at an impossible angle. Lazarus gripped the injured limb with his good hand and twisted his body until the dislocated joint slid back into place. Then he dove out of the way an instant before Tyndareus slammed the same fist down on the place where he had been standing. Sulfurous vapor erupted as the ground split apart under the impact.
Lazarus hurled himself at Tyndareus, wrapping both arms around the suit’s helmet. Tyndareus reached up and peeled his attacker away, as effortlessly as if brushing off an insect, and Lazarus went flying again.
Pierce felt helpless. It was nothing short of amazing that Lazarus was still in the fight, but he couldn’t hope to win. Safe inside the armored TALOS suit, Tyndareus had beaten back the monstrous bear-elk. How could an ordinary human, or even an extraordinary one like Lazarus, hope to defeat technology like that?
“Talos,” he muttered the name, thinking of a similarly mismatched showdown recorded in the legend of Jason and the Argonauts, and the answer came to him. He raised a bloody hand to the side of his head. His Bluetooth earpiece was still there. “Cintia? Are you still with me?”
Dourado’s frantic voice sounded in his head. “Dr. Pierce! What’s happening there? What happened to Dr. Carter?”
“No time to explain. I need you to do something.”
“Of course.”
Fifty feet away, Lazarus charged again, ducking under Tyndareus’s reaching arms and throwing himself at the armored legs. He attempted to sweep the armored legs out from under Tyndareus, but he might as well have been trying to roll a locomotive onto its side. Tyndareus kicked at him, but Lazarus managed to wrap his arms around the extended leg. He planted his feet on the ground and then heaved upward with such ferocity that the ground beneath him crumbled, dropping him into a knee-deep pit of boiling acid, but his attempt to throw Tyndareus succeeded. The man in the TALOS suit landed flat on his back.
Lazarus howled in agony as he clawed his way out of the steaming hole. His legs were wreathed in smoke as his boots and trousers disintegrated, revealing skin that was bright red and beginning to blister, but as soon as his feet were on relatively solid ground he started toward his foe again. Tyndareus was already back on his feet, swinging his arms back and forth to meet the attack.
Pierce charged, too, leaping over the steaming cracks in the Earth, acutely aware of what the consequences would be if the ground beneath him gave way. Tyndareus’s head swiveled in Pierce’s direction, but then looked away just as quickly. Lazarus may have posed a bit of a challenge, but Pierce was hardly worth the bother.
Big mistake, Pierce thought. Brains beat brawn.
He circled behind Tyndareus, searching for and finding the chink in the smooth metal armor. He peeked around Tyndareus, trying to telegraph to Lazarus what he was doing.
Keep him busy, he wanted to shout. I just need a couple seconds.
Lazarus must have understood, because Pierce got all the time he needed. He darted in close, much too close for comfort, and fought with the clamps that held a square metal plate in place. When he failed to move the clamps with his hands, he pried at them with a knife, using leverage to move what his fingers couldn’t. He put all his strength into the effort, until the tight clamps snapped free. The plate fell away to reveal a metal box from which sprouted three thick cab
les. Pierce plunged a hand in, gripped one of the cables, and just as Dourado had instructed him, gave it a hard twist.
The cable popped loose, and the TALOS suit froze in place.
In Greek mythology, Talos, a gigantic living bronze statue, was defeated by the guile of the sorceress Medea, who had discovered his fatal weakness. Talos’s lifeblood—a molten metallic liquid called ichor—had been poured into his body through an opening in his ankle, the hole stoppered by a single bronze nail. The TALOS suit was powered by electricity, not ichor, but it had the same exploitable weakness. To shut it down, Pierce merely had to pull the plug.
Pierce backed away, half-expecting the suit to begin moving again, reactivated by an auxiliary power source or some other measure designed to prevent an enemy from doing what he had just done, but the armored figure remained statue-still, a seven-foot tall gray mannequin.
Lazarus arrived a moment later, his face contorted with pain. “Are you all right?”
“I should be asking you.”
“I’ll live,” Lazarus said, making it sound almost like a regret. “But you’re wounded.”
As if in response to the question, Pierce felt an ache across his chest. He looked down and saw the damage that Rohn’s blade had caused. His body armor had taken the brunt of the attack and no doubt saved his life, but the skin underneath was a bloody perforated line. It could wait.
“I’m going after Augustina and Fiona. Take care of her.” He nodded his head in Carter’s direction.
Lazarus stared at the woman for several seconds then he shook his head. “You need me.”
“She needs you more.”
A different kind of pain twisted Lazarus’s features, one that had nothing to do with his injuries. “I don’t know what to do for her.”
Pierce extended a hand and gripped Lazarus’s shoulder. He sensed that this admission of helplessness was a harder thing than any battle the man had ever fought. “You’ll figure it out.”
Herculean (Cerberus Group Book 1) Page 31