“Rook is on Level 2,” Asya said, intuiting Queen’s line of question. It wasn’t hard. She knew Rook and Queen were an item. Generally inseparable. She would never admit it, but Queen’s concern was personal as much as it was tactical.
Knight relayed the message and turned to Asya. “Ready?”
“Go,” Asya said from behind him.
Knight yanked the door open in one hard pull.
Standing on the other side of the door was a huge man dressed in black and wearing a camouflage Vietnam-era infantry helmet. His AK-47 was raised at Knight’s heart. As the man’s finger began to squeeze, Knight closed his eyes.
FORTY
Lake Bracciano, Etruria, 780 BC
“What...is that smell?”
“That…would be puppy,” the voice came floating back softly. King could just barely make out the man’s silhouette in the dark tunnel. They were coming up on some kind of light source in the distance, but it was faint.
“You called Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound guardian of Hades, ‘Puppy?’ Really?”
“I couldn’t bring myself to destroy the creature. He was...cute once. When he was small. Also, I have yet to weave the Cerberus story into the ancient religions. It started on its own, really, after puppy got free one night.”
“You’re telling me that the fabled twelfth labor of the mighty Hercules was basically catching your loose dog?”
“Actually, that’s probably the most accurate telling of the story I’ve ever heard,” Alexander whispered. “I found him in a cave. Brought him home.”
As more light filled the tunnel, King could finally make out the stone wall of the natural cave. Alexander’s form was fully visible ahead. The tunnel ended at a huge round arena-like space, all carved from a naturally formed cavern. King could see where stone ledges had been fashioned as seating, but there were also natural stalactites that connected with stalagmites, forming thin columns that supported the roof far overhead. Across the floor of the giant space was a thick iron chain. Each link looked large enough for King to crawl through. One end of the chain was pegged to a rock wall. The other end of the chain was out of view to the right of the tunnel entrance.
Alexander held a hand up, preventing King from entering the arena. “‘Hellhound’ was a bit of an exaggeration, although he is large.”
“How big are we talking here?”
“Ever seen a rhino up close?”
“You’re kidding.”
Alexander’s grim face said he wasn’t. “That’s how big he was when I got him.”
King’s jaw fell slack. “You said he was small when you got him.”
“Comparatively speaking,” Alexander said with a shrug. “And we can’t kill him, either.”
“Why not? And won’t he recognize your scent?”
“I’m afraid he might not. My body chemistry might have changed since the inclusion of the herbs and serums that give me my longevity and strength. But the reason we can’t kill him is more complex.”
King understood immediately. “The time-stream. He saves your life at some point?”
“I told you he was a good pup.”
Alexander strode out into the arena. King followed. Almost immediately they heard another rumbling growl that shook the stone on which they stood.
King looked to his right, down the length of the arena. A few torches burned along the walls of the broad expanse, but the thing he desperately wanted to see at the end of the chain wasn’t there. The end of the chain was a big iron ring and a bolt that went through it. There was no sign of the beast.
“He’s loose. Great. I hate you, you know that, right?”
Alexander turned to look at King, but his face angled up and above the tunnel entrance, far over King’s head.
“He’s behind me, isn’t he? I really hate you.”
King turned as the beast growled again, and this time he had a visual to go with the epic rumbling. He wasn’t disappointed. The creature stood crouched on a ledge above the tunnel entrance. It was probably twenty feet tall if it hadn’t been crouched. King expected a three headed dog to have three necks as well, but it didn’t. All three heads grew out of a single thick neck, and one of the three had grown at an odd angle, as if it were a genetic mutation. King could only count five ears on the creature. Where the other should have been, two heads were fused. Thick black fur covered the creature. Its tail had been docked like a doberman’s, but the overall shape of the beast reminded him of a terrier crossbred with a huge Labrador retriever for the shape of its body and a Saint Bernard for the shape of its heads.
One of the three heads appeared to have been sleeping but was rousing now. The other two were snarling, with lips pulled back and long ropes of slobber as thick as King’s arm drooling down to the ground like the cave’s stalactites.
“Distract him!” Alexander called. Then the man ran off to the side of the arena.
King looked around desperately. “With what!”
The hellhound stepped down to the arena floor with one massive paw, effectively blocking retreat down the entrance tunnel. The paw and foreleg were, by themselves, as tall as an African elephant, but in all other ways besides size, looked just like a dog—with hair the thickness of twine.
King turned and ran for the nearest cave column. The ground shook as the giant animal pounced down from the rock ledge and gave chase.
King got to the column and glanced back. Just in time. The gaping maw of the central head was inches behind him. He threw his body to the side, behind the column. The three-headed beast’s momentum carried it past, but the left side head turned in time to snap at him, spraying a long rope of frothy saliva at him. The moisture smacked into King’s face like a soaking wet towel.
He rolled on the floor and swiped at his face with the sleeve of his robe, hardly penetrating the thick coating of saliva. He ignored it after that. Had to keep moving. He had correctly guessed that the hound wouldn’t damage the delicate columns in the arena, so he planned to use them as shields, at least until the beast lost its patience and decided the cavern could lose a column and not collapse.
He got to his feet and ran for the next column. The slathering creature was right behind him. He heard metal grinding across the stone floor of the cavern. When he looked, he saw Alexander hauling on the giant chain like a sailor pulling in a simple rope. He hoped whatever Alexander had planned, he would do it fast.
As he ran, one of King’s rope sandals broke and went flapping off his foot. He shook his leg as he ran, flinging the broken sandal away. The thought flitted across his mind that if he was lucky, the three-headed monstrosity giving chase would fetch the slipper. The loud growl behind him disabused him of that notion. He kicked off the other sandal with a hop and sprinted as fast as he could across the cool stone floor.
Just as King reached the column and was about to make his jump, he felt his left arm painfully wrenched behind him, when he was pumping his elbow back. Then his whole arm was on fire and tugging him to a halt and upward. His body swung in the air and twisted.
Then he saw it. His entire left arm was in the jaws of the creature’s central head. King was lifted up, hanging from the thing’s jaws.
Then the hellhound violently thrashed its head from side to side, and King screamed.
FORTY-ONE
Under Alexander’s Villa, Etruria, 780 BC
The scream echoed around the arena until King’s limp form flew across the room and landed on the floor in a heap.
After a moment, King opened his eyes and looked at his arm—or what was left of it. The flesh had been torn just above the wrist and peeled off up past the elbow where the jagged skin and torn muscle dangled down from his shoulder. He could see his radius and ulna bones in his forearm, stripped clean of muscles and tendons. Yellowish-white ligaments were all that held his elbow joint together. His hand was still whole but looked grotesque now, like a Mickey Mouse glove on a stick figure.
His head fell back onto the stone floor with a
thunk, and his eyes closed. He tried to scream again, but no voice came. The overwhelming scent of his own body’s blood and meat filled his nostrils, churning his gut. But he didn’t panic. He’d gone through this before. Not the giant three-headed hellhound, but he’d survived mortal wounds on a few occasions. He knew what would happen next. With his eyes still closed, he turned his head. Then he opened his eyes and watched the impossible. The jagged flaps of skin at the shoulder stretched and grew as snakes of musculature slipped out from below it like alien tendrils probing for a meal. The flesh at his wrist grew upward toward the elbow. In a minute, the tendrils of muscle had joined and were filling out. The sensation was pure fiery agony. It sucked the air out of his lungs, but he fought against the building scream and remained calm. It would be over in moments.
Just a few more seconds of world class torture, he thought, then I’ll—
Movement across the arena caught his eye.
Alexander stood on the monstrous dog’s back. He held the massive chain wrapped around the creature’s single throat like a garrote. The hellhound snapped its three sets of jaws and thrashed its heads from side to side, but Alexander refused to let go. He looked like some kind of insane rodeo rider on a dog that weighed more than a tank.
The creature ran from side to side, then forward and stopped suddenly, like a maddened bull. Alexander struggled behind the beast’s neck, then cried out in triumph and leapt off the animal. He landed nimbly on the floor and raced for the side wall and the tunnel entrance.
Is he leaving me here? King wondered.
Cerberus chased him toward the wall. The massive chain sprang up off the floor behind the beast.
The chain pulled taut. The center head snapped up, and the giant animal’s momentum suddenly came to a complete stop. Its legs slipped up out from under it into the air, and the massive beast’s body slammed back onto the ground. The chamber shook from the impact. Dust cascaded down from the ceiling.
Alexander had successfully chained the dog. He smiled from the doorway of the tunnel, then began edging his way around the arena, as the giant creature got to its feet and began barking at him—each vocalization sounding like a peal of thunder in the enclosed cavern.
King looked down at his arm and saw that it had nearly finished knitting back together. He just needed a few more layers of skin. The process felt like a severe sunburn, but in reverse. The healing also left him ravenously hungry.
He rolled to his side and gingerly tested putting some weight on the arm. The muscles were as strong as ever. Like new...because they were. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, then stood.
Alexander ran around the perimeter of the stone arena. Cerberus kept pace at the end of its tether, barking at him in three distinct voices, each taking turns to create an unceasing wave of sound.
“You’re not out of the—” Alexander was yelling.
King looked down at the ground, then at the oncoming beast-dog. He wasn’t out of the radius of its arc.
Crap!
He turned and sprinted for the wall, his bare toes finding little crevices and impurities in the stone floor as he ran and gripping them, propelling him faster. At last he slammed into the stone wall at the far side of the cavern, just as Alexander zipped around the back of him and the massive dog passed him, hot on Alexander’s tail. The wash of air that swept over King reminded him of standing on the edge of a subway platform when a train slammed past without any plans of stopping at that station.
King edged around the circumference of the stone wall, scratching his itching forearm. He saw his sword in the arena. It was bent to hell and too far inside the arc of the hellhound’s tether.
Another lost blade.
He made his way to the opposite side of the arena from where they had entered. There was an identical tunnel mouth. Alexander stood there waiting, as though nothing exciting had happened. The giant dog barked twice more and then ran off toward the far side of the arena.
“Not a word about its bark being bigger than its bite. I nearly lost my arm,” King said.
“But your clever distraction worked. I was able to leash him.”
“Clever distrac—? Did I mention that I hate you?”
“Once or twice,” Alexander replied.
“Today?” King prodded.
“I think we’re up to three. Come on. The lab is this way.” Alexander led them down a long dark tunnel. King ran a hand along the dark wall until it flared away, leaving him only with Alexander’s dim silhouette to guide him forward. “Next, we will deal with the Forgotten. Then the creation of the body.”
Suddenly, the shape of Alexander’s body disappeared in the darkness ahead.
“Right. The Forgotten. But they’re all locked up. Hey, where did you—”
Something smashed into King’s body from the left, throwing him against a wall, hard. He rolled with the impact, and came up on his feet. He could hear a scrabbling in the dark and wished he had nabbed one of the lit torches in the arena.
Something hit him low in the gut, but through long years of rigorous exercise, King’s abdomen was like a rock. The blow still took air out of him, but it did little damage. He thrust down with two balled fists, hitting his attacker before it could retreat and launch a second assault from the gloom. The impact was hard and brittle under his fists, like he had just punched a wooden board encased in bubble wrap.
King could hear Alexander struggling in the dark. Then a match flared brightly. Matches wouldn’t first see widespread use in China for another twelve hundred years, but Alexander and King had agreed to make and use some modern amenities at times when others were not around. Matches were one of their creature comforts.
The match lit a torch sconce on the wall, casting orange light in all directions. They had entered a wider room at the end of the tunnel. Like the parking garage in Tunisia, every surface—floor, walls and ceiling—was covered in wraiths. There were hundreds of them chittering in the dark.
The Forgotten were free.
Unlike in Tunisia though, this time they attacked all at once. King watched as a swarm of the creatures mauled Alexander. Then they turned on King, a chaotic mass of fast, nimble bodies moving with the ravenous excitement of hungry lions who have just spotted a baby zebra. He tried to fight them, but it was no use. They moved too fast, and more often than not, his punches struck only their cloaks.
In just ten seconds, King was overwhelmed, buried beneath a mass of hungry wraiths reaching for his skin—and the blood beneath it.
FORTY-TWO
Ruins of Carthage, Tunisia, 2013
The sun would not rise for another hour, but the dark heavens were already lightening. Pale blue leached up into the Arab sky on the horizon.
Richard Ridley smiled.
It was all coming together. That bastard Alexander was dead. King was dead, too—both unexpected gifts. His rebellious brother, Darius, had walked into a trap. Chess Team was cut off and unable to contact support. Although they had robbed him of his genetic immortality, it made little difference. With the mother tongue, he could repair damage to his body and give himself longevity by forcing his cells to age slower, perhaps not at all. And now...the Chest of Adoon. The power it contained was said to be without comparison. A civilization destroyer.
His company, Manifold Genetics, was in ruins, like the landscape around him, to which Trigger and Carpenter had led him. But that made little difference. He had many holdings and subsidiary companies. He had the wealth, even without the labs. Soon he would have a destructive power to correct all the wrongs done to him. Combined with his superior intellect, the mother tongue, and a lot of money, he would be an unstoppable force.
No more toying with these people, he thought. It was time for real power. World changing power.
He slowed his pace, allowing Seth and Jared to walk ahead of him. At first, Jared kept glancing back, afraid he would miss something. Seth continued on ahead, secure in his role. They walked through the dark ruins, Trigger lighting the
way with a flashlight. Carpenter fell back to the rear to protect their small group.
They crossed La Goulette Road and headed into the trees on the opposite side, next to a house. Ridley still found it amusing that the wealthy Tunisians had built estates nestled in between the standing ruins. If they had been in a Western nation, the entire area would have been a World Heritage site, but here, the wealthy had managed to get every scrap of land that didn’t have an ancient rock on it.
They passed through a small copse of trees that ran along the backside of a house, and then they were in the necropolis. Beyond the tombstones lay another small forest, and then the ruins called the Antonine Baths. Beyond those, the Gulf of Tunis.
Richard Ridley looked around at the small stones of the darkened necropolis. He smiled again. The necropolis was as good a place as any. He raised the silenced pistol Trigger had provided him, and shot Jared neatly in the back of the skull. The sound the weapon made was like someone spitting in the dark. Jared’s body collapsed to the ground, draping over one of the low stones that acted as markers for ancient graves. Without time to prepare to use the mother tongue to heal himself, Jared was dead. His body went slack as it reverted to clay.
Seth turned at the act, shocked.
“Don’t worry, Seth. I know you are loyal to me. Jared dreamed of independence. From the moment I gave you life, you were all individuals, with personalities and emotions all growing further away from mine, based on your experiences. I didn’t like the direction Jared was going. Sooner or later, we would have butted heads. Or he would have gone to our enemies. That’s no good for business.”
Trigger and Carpenter looked unconcerned. They knew they were getting paid—and extremely well—to do their jobs. As long as they performed, they wouldn’t be getting bullets to the head. Besides, Ridley thought both men most likely imagined themselves capable of drawing their weapons on him faster than he could gun them down. Little did they know, in a few moments, he would no longer require their services.
Omega: A Jack Sigler Thriller Page 19