I wondered if it would survive the decades and centuries to come. Assuming they had any, depending on what happened with the priests.
“I mean, your two girls there,” Vance continued. “Would you be willing to sacrifice them?”
“I don’t want to, but I’m willing to,” Jackson said, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sting. Holly’s gaze on him didn’t change at all, though. “Same goes for my own life. For the mission. But that’s the way these things go. A total commitment has its own kind of force. A complete willingness to risk life means you’re less likely to lose it.”
Something like admiration in Vance’s eyes, but also still that lingering fear. “You’re willing to lay down people you know. Willing to lay down yourself, just the same. What about us three? You don’t know us. I want to believe this would be for something greater, whether it’s the Three Sons or something else. How do we know, though, you’re not asking us just because as much as you’re willing to sacrifice your girls, you’d rather let it be three nobodies?”
It was a good point. I certainly didn’t care if they lived or died. Holly wouldn’t, either. Jackson, as ever, was different. “You can come with me or not,” he said. “I can’t guarantee you’ll survive. I don’t know if I will, either. I can promise I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you all come through.”
“I still don’t get why you would,” Vance said.
“Old habit from my soldier days. I’m not in the habit of leaving men behind.” Vance, Zoe, and Ethan looked skeptically at him, not quite understanding so human an answer. Jackson corrected himself: “Besides, a prophet needs to keep his believers on this side of Hell, right?”
To that they nodded.
“Okay, cool,” Zoe said. “One thing, though: how are we actually going to murder them?”
What Jackson said next came out as if it were the most obvious answer in the world: “With a really big bomb.”
9
The Black Ziggurat
“You know, Jesus didn’t have much to work with during His ministry, either,” I said.
“Watch it,” Jackson said.
It was two nights later, and Jackson and I were sitting on his porch. Our feet—mine in some fashionable New Balances, his in shined army boots with a knife sheathed at his calf, rested up on a 30 gallon, party cooler. Through its semi-translucent walls, you could see the inky liquid inside. We’d used half-a-roll of duct tape to secure its top in place. On top was a cheap cell phone taped to the box, the phone’s face still accessible. You couldn’t see it, but a small hole was punched into the plastic top, and a bit of tightly wound cord running from the phone’s vibrator into the box’s liquid contents.
“Think it’ll work?” I asked.
“Should. Our detonator isn’t exactly mil-spec, but this is the same stuff Timothy McVeigh used.”
We’d spent the night before brewing our fertilizer bomb because the military didn’t issue Jackson real explosives. Plausible deniability, and all that. I’d been an honors chem student, but he definitely had me beat on homebrew incendiaries.
“Actually, I was referring to the plan,” I said.
“I don’t make plans to fail.”
“No one does,” I said. “Your flock didn’t seem especially proficient during weapons training.” This had consisted of Jackson handing out guns to us a few hours earlier. Vance at least had some rural familiarity with hunting, so Jackson had just given him a shotgun. As for Ethan and Zoe, Jackson had just given them revolvers, while Holly and I had ranked AR-15s like the one Jackson would be carrying.
“They’re .357 pocket pistols—five shots,” he’d explained to them. “Good when you don’t want to leave casings. There’ll be bad recoil out of those two-inch barrels, but you’ll both be strong enough to handle it. Just point and pull the trigger. No safeties or mags to worry about like autoloaders.” Zoe had looked at the small, black gun she’d received like it was a merit badge. Ethan, by contrast, seemed to understand that they were being given these only because they were idiot-proof.
“The priests are in some abandoned mines up in the mountains,” Jackson had continued. “Holly will guide us—that’s why she gets a good carbine. Vance and Holly will be with me. We’re the security element. We will walk point, provide protection for the rest of you. Ethan, Zoe, and Ginny—you’re the delivery element. You’ll be carrying the bomb, responsible for getting it into position deep in their inner sanctum. If anything goes wrong, the security element will engage any hostiles, and the delivery element will carry on with its mission. Those of you that have revolvers, obviously, bullets won’t kill them, but a magnum load can break their bones, buy you time. Hopefully you won’t have to fire a shot. We’ll also give you some wooden stakes for close-quarters.”
“Why do we have to go deep into these mines?” Ethan had asked, his khaki fishing vest, crisp chinos and polished boots looking more like he was going on a pretend safari at an AARP photo shoot than a search-and-destroy mission. “Why not just blow up the mouth of the mine?”
“The explosion will be noticed if it isn’t deep,” Jackson had said. “We don’t want to attract the attention of the living. Also, we have to go into the heart of the place because that’s where they are. It’s not enough to bury them just so they can eventually dig themselves out and kill us later. I want them reduced to a fine, red mist.”
“Will a bomb be enough?” Vance had asked. Unlike Ethan, he wasn’t searching for a reason to cancel the mission, but genuinely curious. The way he asked it, and new as he was, it was clear he wanted to know if he might be bombproof too.
“We’re vulnerable to fire,” Jackson had said. “Think of this as basically fire combined with a massive amount of concussive force. Forty-eight hundred pounds of this stuff caused damage out to a 16-block radius back in ’95. We’re using a lot less here, maybe 140 pounds. Ginny figures it to be about a half-a-block’s worth. The mines’ closed spaces will channel the blast. It’ll be enough, if they’re close enough.”
“Um, how are we going to get away from it?” Zoe had asked.
“It’s a cell phone detonator, only there won’t be any service in the mines so we can’t do a remote detonate.” Jackson had said. “We ran some homemade detonator cord from the phone’s vibrator into the main explosive. Once it’s in place, Ginny will set its alarm—that’ll trip the vibrator, sending an electric current through the det cord, blowing the package.”
“So a time bomb. We ought to have plenty of time to clear,” Ethan had said, probably to reassure himself.
“Yeah, but we’ll still have to be careful,” I chimed in. “The only detonator cord I could come up with even after breaking into Ramsgate’s chem department was a dish rag dipped in mercury fulminate. It’ll detonate if it’s impacted with enough force, setting off the main bomb too.”
Everyone had been given their instructions. We’d be moving out shortly. I could hear Vance and Zoe banging inside the house. Ethan had been nervously pacing in the woods. Holly was probably finding another deer to drain before it was go time.
“Nice of you to leave me in charge of bomb duty, by the way,” I said, looking at the explosive as my feet rested on it.
“I need to watch Holly, and I needed someone I could trust to both watch the new kids and work the bomb.”
“Awww—you trust me now?”
“Compared to my other options right now? You win hands-down.”
“So you don’t think you can trust Holly?” That made me happier than it probably should have.
“We’ll find out soon enough. She’s either leading us to the priests, or leading us into a trap. Besides my AR, I’ll have a stake in my coat along with my 1911. If she tries anything, she won’t survive.”
“Finding them is great, but I’d think a military guy like you would also care about their capabilities. Did she tell you anything about their magic?”
“She says that that’s blocked from her. She doesn’t know how their magic opera
tes.”
“Convenient.”
“If we do this right, though, they’ll be blown to pieces before it even matters,” he said.
“When have things ever gone that smooth for us?” I asked.
“Hope springs eternal.”
“I know I sure as Hell hope it does go that way for us this time. You saw how Erasmus struck Ethan with his glowing hand. Barely touched him, and almost ended the guy,” I said.
“Yeah, that was interesting. I wonder if that’s what his magic is—amplifying force or something. Meaning if they don’t touch us, we’ll be okay.”
“They could still bring the mine down on us.”
“Hopefully they’re not that suicidal. Speaking of suicide, shall we?” he asked.
I think I sounded passably tough. “Game on.”
We caravanned up to the mine, Holly and Jackson riding with Ethan in his Prius, me with Zoe and Vance in their battered Buick Riviera.
Lonely roads lace over Echo Valley’s mountains like frayed bits of thread. Tree branches reach across the roads’ width for one another, sometimes dense enough to make you feel like you’re traveling through tunnels. If a line divides the road, its paint is weathered to be almost impressionistic. The pavement itself is filled with potholes, chunks of macadam breaking free like picked scabs.
The mountains are different from the Valley, into which I suppose the money has always settled. Once it was Pennsylvania steel and coal magnates that set-up shop there, and now it’s college kids using borrowed money to buy mostly useless degrees.
Along the road, we saw a shuttered woodmill here, a closed mining operation there. They sat massive and brooding behind a screen of trees, memorials to once-proud work, now gone, never to return.
Eventually we came to the rusting gate of Red Totem Coal, further than I would have thought from where the Endet Hibernis ceremony had been held. Jackson texted me from the lead car: “holly says this is it”.
We ditched the cars inside the gate where hopefully a cop on DUI patrol wouldn’t see them. Even as new to the Nightfallen as she was, the lock was sufficiently rusted that Holly could rend it off its chain.
“Here,” Holly whispered when we came to the mouth of a mine, yawning from the mountain’s face. The rail tracks leading to it were covered with a quilt of leaves. Per the plan, Holly, Jackson and Vance took point, guns extended. I was in front of Ethan, who’d gotten stuck carrying the bomb-in-a-cooler like we were going to a college football tailgate. Zoe guarded the rear.
While the entrance itself was relatively small, it opened immediately to a wider space. My vision having already shifted into infrared, I could see empty lockers and bits of machinery left behind to rust.
Holly led us through the large passageway, ignoring the tunnels that branched off from it. I stared into them, so dark even my vision couldn’t see into them more than a few feet, wondering if the priests might be watching us from just beyond the threshold.
But nothing came for us as we continued forward, our footfalls no louder than mist on the sidewalk.
The main passage ended at a series of deep shafts, descending at a 90-degree angle. From the metal superstructure, wood supports, and cut cables, clearly there’d once been elevators here. Now there was just empty space, but the mwood supports were easy enough even for a new Nightfallen to climb down.
Assuming they didn’t have to carry an awkward bomb, that is. I was the oldest of the group, meaning the strongest, so suddenly it was on me instead of one of the new guys to carry it. One hundred forty pounds in one hand, using the other free hand to brace me as my legs stepped down for the next wooden support beam. I felt the strain. I didn’t breathe hard, of course, but we move our living-corpse selves through willpower, and this was taxing me. The hand and footholds were easy to find, but I was fighting to keep my balance all the way down. The cooler’s plastic siding occasionally slid against the rock wall held back by the wood supports, and once a few pebbles fell painfully into the darkness below. We’d know soon enough if anyone was down there to hear the falling stones.
The shaft couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet, but it felt like a mile.
When I finally got to the stone floor below, I wished we’d been smart enough to bring some blood. I felt weak, and something to drink would have helped. Ethan wordlessly took up his burden again, and I was grateful that I only had to carry a rifle.
The darkness was more oppressive with depth. Away from the more regular looking tunnels was one whose entrance supports were marked with at what first looked like graffiti. But as Holly led us closer, I could see it wasn’t spray paint but a very precise fire branding of the old wood. At the passageway’s top support were branded two snakes facing each other, the one curled into an “S”, the other its mirror image. Between them was an upside down triangle, in the center of which was drawn a human eye with a snake’s iris.
I’d assumed the symbols had been added after the priests had taken up residence, but then I saw a sign nearby, covered in dust, almost unreadable in the darkness even to my eyes:
Initiates Only Beyond This Point!
Above the words was Red Totem Coal’s company logo, and beneath them was that same dual-snake symbol.
The tunnel we moved in now was narrower and winding, as though constructed more by giant ants rather than men. It wasn’t framed in wooden supports, but smooth. Its uneven floor carried us first down, then up, then down even further. This hadn’t been built by any mining company. Perhaps it was something they had stumbled upon.
Up ahead, I could hear water rushing, and there was a soft, green light. Jackson held up his hand, and though none of us had military training, we all stopped and crouched low.
After a moment, it was clear that the light was not approaching us. It wasn’t Erasmus with his fists aglow.
Slowly, we began advancing again, and soon emerged into a wide cavern. Across from us, a river cascaded from high above, crashing into the cave’s basin.
Crystals extended in shafts from the cavern’s ceiling. Each crystal as long as a man, there were dozens of them. They looked like quartz, but glowed with a soft, steady, emerald light. A perpetual verdant twilight hung over the place.
The scene could almost have been beautiful. But whatever chance at loveliness it had was surely ruined by what rose from the center of the spherical cavern’s black lake.
It was a stepped pyramid—a smaller version of the massive ziggurats the Sumerians once raised to their gods. Its first tier rose twenty feet from the water before sharply tapering to a terrace. A fifteen-foot level then rose from this terrace until the next. So it went, each level smaller than the next until at the top, fifth level, there was nothing save an altar situated thirty feet beneath the ceiling’s giant crystals.
The ziggurat was made of carved black rock, glistening wet with the waterfall’s mist like the scales of a snake. I saw no lines where blocks had been mortared into the place. It was as if the entire structure had been carved from a single piece of stone.
There were windows cut into the ziggurat’s thick walls at its lower, larger three levels. Torchlight flickered from inside each. Torches also lit the outside. Someone was home. There was only one-way to its entrance: a rope-and-plank bridge spanning the forty feet from the cave wall to the ziggurat’s base.
I saw Ethan to my side starting to tremble, and I reached out, gestured for him to place the bomb on the ground, and then, slinging my rifle, I picked it up. Zoe too was staring forward, and with a hiss that I hoped would drowned out by the waterfall’s raging, I reminded her to keep watching our backs.
Up ahead of me, our three warriors were similarly trying to take in the priest’s home. Being our guide in all this hadn’t prepared Holly sufficiently, and lowering her rifle, she was slack-jawed as she looked around, like a tourist in Manhattan.
I could see Jackson scanning the cave. Then he looked back down the line to me. Our eyes met, and we both knew that the bomb we had, powerful as it was, wo
uldn’t destroy the temple. Not from the outside, at any rate.
Vance’s jaw meanwhile was tight, looking at the windows for signs of the enemy. But then his vision looked down into the water below, and I saw him jump back.
I was too far back to see immediately, but I saw the surprise and horror wash over Holly’s face, and then even over Jackson’s. I only saw what they were looking at as the things began to move towards the surface.
They were long, over fifteen feet, and glowed with a phosphorescent whiteness. I wondered if they were some distant relatives of Pennsylvania trout, changed by generations being trapped in the black lake’s unknowable depths, or whether it was the work of the priest’s magic. Whichever, they did not break the surface. Instead, two of them, eventually joined by a third, lashed just beneath it, and I could see their thick yet translucent teeth. Then in unison they dived far below, as though sensing prey or fleeing a larger predator. Their glowing bodies grew dimmer as they achieved greater depth until finally they disappeared, and the cavern’s basin lake was again nothing but India ink.
Along the cave entrance’s was a lip of rock, acting as a bannister between the path and the water below. All of us hid behind it—decent cover, I suppose, but it didn’t feel like it was enough. Nothing by then probably would have.
I would have been fine with detonating the bomb at the cave’s mouth and hoping for the best. In fact, I’d have been happy leaving without being noticed. Assuming we got out of there alive and without vampire priests seeking vengeance, we could always come up with some new plan to help Jackson’s mission.
Jackson silently led Vance and Holly back towards my group. He shouldered his AR, and took the bomb from me. All our eyes were fixed on him. He gestured at all of us, then pointed back into the tunnel.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
He winced at words being spoken aloud even if, at six inches away from him, it was barely audible over the waterfall’s roar. Looking irritated, he gestured again for us to go back the way he came.
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