by Rick Jones
She gave him a sidelong glance and took a side step away from him. He matched her with a side step closer. She lowered the pages and clicked her tongue. “What do you want, Hall?”
“Those pages,” he said. “It’s from your father regarding his journey to Eden, yes?” She ignored him, taking another side step. He mimicked her with a side step of his own. “The question is how it got into your hands, since he died in here.”
More silence.
“It speaks of this wall, doesn’t it? What your father referred to as the ‘Crystal Wall.’ If you look closer at the wall, you can also see what your father referred to in that journal of his as the ‘Tombs’ that lie beneath.”
She clenched the pages tightly in her grasp and gave him a long, hard stare of revulsion.
“Of course it doesn’t matter what those pages say,” he said. “I already know—even though they’re entirely encrypted.”
Now she looked nonplussed. “How would you know that?”
His smile took on the gleam of mischievous delight. “Simple,” he said. “I took your father’s journal away from Mr. Montario just before I had one of my men toss him off the balcony of his tenth-floor apartment.”
Her mouth dropped.
“I must say, however, that I was thoroughly impressed with the young man. He didn’t cry out once. But you should have heard the sound he made when he hit the pavement,” he stated with malice. “It was just awful. Just . . . awful.”
With unadulterated rage, she dropped the pages and went after Obsidian Hall with clawed fingers.
#
John Savage was sitting against one of the black silica walls, thinking.
Until he lost his wife to another man, he’d never known that such a raw emotion of misery existed. It had erupted so quickly that it had overwhelmed him. It was alien and brutal at the same time, something far more painful than the bullet he had taken in the shoulder or the draw of a knife across his chest, which had opened him nicely.
For a while, his mind had been in disarray; with decisions difficult to make, always questioning whether or not he was making the right move, the wrong move, or whether or not he should be in the position to make such a decision when commanding a SEAL team while on a mission.
Emotionally lost and racked with pain, he had worn his best bravado face, and he and his team went to the southern Philippines where a Muslim faction was holding four American hostages and demanding a seven-figure sum for their release. The American government, however, always maintaining the platform to never pay such demands, opted to use military force instead.
Heading up his team through the southern part of the country, through the dense forest and high humidity, under the most atrocious conditions, he could only think of her. When they discovered the encampment, his unit surrounded the area. In the center were the hostages: A mother and a father, and two teenage children, both boys. They looked thin, pale and war torn; their bodies wasted. But they sat there as if they belonged—the Stockholm syndrome.
Having lost the keen edge of prudence, his thoughts not completely aware or focused, he neglected to examine the perimeter, and had not realized that he and his team had been spotted by those hiding within the trees far beyond the outskirts of the camp. The rebels had moved up behind them, surrounding them in a pincer move, enveloping them from all sides.
Whereas the sixth sense of his teammates kicked in, his did not until the first volley, with bullets stitching across the backs and chests of his teammates, killing them. What was left of his unit formed a wedge-shaped offensive and moved into the stronghold with their weapons raised and firing, picking off the insurgents.
One rebel lifted his weapon, an AK-47, and shot the hostages dead with one pull of the trigger, blood everywhere.
Savage lifted his own weapon with deadly precision and fired, taking out the left side of the rebel’s head in a splash of blood and gore as he tumbled back into the bodies of those he just executed.
And then time seemed to stand still, his world moving with the slowness of a bad dream. It was surreal, with gunshots going off around him; the waspy hum of bullets flying past him but not one finding its mark; the cries and agony of his teammates as they went down. He looked at the victims as they lay dead, with their eyes and mouths open at the shock of their mortality.
He had failed them. He had failed his team.
He was not sharp while taking point.
And it cost him valuable lives.
When it was over and done with, as he knelt by the bodies, patches of blood that was not his own glistening off his skin, he dared not look around, did not want to see his dead or dying teammates. In fact, he was waiting for the kill shot, the one bullet that would take him away from all this. But it never came.
The one salvation—just a single bullet—never came.
When he returned to the States he lost his command, sending him deeper into despair. His wife, his job, and now his life were gone. He had never felt so lost or so alone.
When the commission to work for Vatican Intelligence presented itself, he saw this as the perfect escape. He’d be worlds away from the problems that had dragged him down. But he soon realized that he could not run far enough. Wherever he went, his problems followed and seemed to weigh him down even more.
Under the auspices of the Church, however, he believed in his own redemption by taking direction from those who could show him the way of Light. Simple direction! That’s all he wanted. But it seemed to be something well beyond the capability of the Church to grant, so he would be forever lost. And that is why he surrendered the collar to the clutches of a dead man. He didn’t deserve to wear it.
However, he did find a glint or sparkle of light, a sliver of promise that his life could be saved. When he had first encountered Alyssa, he was detached and unfeeling, a man who reacted with the cold fortitude of a machine. But as time went on, he felt something warm and compelling about her, something so magnetically wonderful that he wanted nothing but to hear her voice and smell her scent for the simple fact that he enjoyed her presence.
She was fiery and brilliant and compassionate to those she was close to, and not afraid to take on those with dissimilar attitudes bearing hostile traits. There was goodness in her, a strong sense to champion the causes of those who could not defend themselves.
He leaned his head against the wall, feeling a serenity that he hadn’t felt for some time. It was a warm sensation. The weight upon his chest and shoulders were still there, but not entirely. The pain was finally slipping away by inches. And whenever he got closer to Alyssa, that weight shed away even more.
Odd, he considered, that peace should find him the moment his life was most likely coming to an end. What an awful time for that bullet, he thought. But he was not about to give up. Not now. Not when he had the chance to redeem himself by saving the lives of those who needed him most: Eser, Harika and Alyssa. And he was not ill prepared to do so, either.
Since it’s the warriors’ way to bury their dead with their weaponry, Red’s team left him with his combat knife, a KA-BAR. So when he placed the Roman collar within the thin divides of Red’s fingers, and when no one was watching, he appropriated the weapon and stored it between his boot and pant leg.
Now to find the opportunity, he thought. And only at Alyssa’s call. At that moment, he heard an eruption of anger, a cry of anguish, only to see Alyssa charging Obsidian Hall with clawed hands. What now? But when he saw Obsidian Hall reach out and strike her with a closed fist, Savage took to his feet and went to resolve the matter on his terms.
#
A white nebula of light.
It was the last thing Alyssa saw as she hit the ground. Everything around her was shadow and shape. And when Hall spoke to her, it was as if he was doing so from a great distance. “Like I said, Ms. Moore, you really need to get a handle on that temper of—” It was the last thing he said before Savage came across with his own right hand, sending Hall off his feet and to the silica floor, har
d. When Hall came to, his world was covered in a veil of fuzziness.
Savage stood over him, his face expressionless. Is he really that quick? Hall considered. The billionaire worked his way onto a single elbow and with his free hand; he toyed with his jaw, checking the hinge factor to see if it was dislocated. It wasn’t. From the corner of his eye, Savage could see it coming, so he tensed and waited as Aussie hit him with the butt of his weapon, sending the former Navy SEAL to his knees, his world spinning in a violent vortex. Instinctively, Savage went for the knife but held up.
“On your feet, mate. You too, missy.” Aussie reached down and hoisted them both to a standing position, Savage and Alyssa finding their balance hard to come by. Hall got to a standing position with his hand to his jaw, and then he shook his head as if to wash away the cobwebs.
“What’s this all about?” asked Butcher Boy heatedly. “It’s bad enough that we have to fight against those things out there! We don’t need to help them with infighting!”
Alyssa raised a weary hand to Hall. “He killed Montario,” she said.
“What in the ‘ell is a Montario?” asked Aussie.
“I didn’t kill him. I said one of my men did.”
“But you ordered it!”
“Semantics.”
“Enough! You’re like a couple of kids, I swear!” Butcher Boy was livid.
The moment Alyssa wavered in her stance, Savage embraced her, becoming her crutch even though his head remained clouded. “Are you all right?” he asked her softly.
“I’ll be fine.”
Butcher Boy began to pace. “Let’s get one thing straight right now! I lost one good man to something I couldn’t even dream up in my worst nightmare! And now I have to contend with you people?” He turned to Aussie, and then to Carroll, their faces completely stoic. And then he faced off with Alyssa. “Are you sure you’re going to be all right?”
She stood straight, chin up, the entire motion a bit over-dramatic. “Just peachy,” she said.
“Then we move. How close are we to the lower chamber?”
She examined the crystal map. “We need to get to the Master Chamber on this level. It’s not too far from here. That room should take us below.” That’s if we can solve the riddle.
“Then grab your gear and ready up,” said Butcher Boy, looking around uneasily. “The faster we get to our point, the faster we can get the hell out of here.”
The mercs moved off to grab their gear but Alyssa and Hall were staring each other down when Savage came over and ushered her away. “Play nice,” he said.
“He had Montario killed.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
Eser, Harika, Savage and Alyssa readied themselves. The screen of the thermal imager was fuzzy and winking in and out, the batteries dying. Alyssa slapped at it but it was not cooperating. “We’re losing the imager,” she said out loud and to no one in particular.
“Bloody great,” responded Aussie. “It just gets better, doesn’t it?”
And then the picture on the screen faded, completely, the tool useless. She let her arm drop with the imager by her side. “It’s dead,” she said softly. Everyone stared at her.
“But you said it was run by lithium batteries.”
“No. I said the lamps were run by lithium batteries. Not the imager.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means that we run dark,” she said.
“Dark?” asked Hall.
Butcher Boy gave a worn-weary sigh. “It means that we won’t be able to see anything down the hallway beyond what the lamps can show us.”
Hall appeared rattled. “But that’s only what—fifteen, twenty feet?”
“If that.” Butcher Boy then called out to Eser and Harika, beckoning them with his hand since they didn’t know the language. They responded dutifully. And as usual, he forced them to take point with a lamp in each hand.
Alyssa looked at Savage, their eyes meeting. “They’re being used as bait,” she said,
“I know.”
“We need to do something,” she said imploringly.
“I’m working on it.”
“Like what?”
He looked at the Hall and his team, who were gearing up, then got on a bended knee as if to tie his shoe and lifted his pant leg. He showed Alyssa the knife attached to his ankle and lodged between his sock and shoe and then he brought a finger to his lips in a gesture of silence.
Her eyes grew wide and she mouthed the words: Where did you get that?
He lowered his pant leg, and then quickly glanced around at Hall and his team to see if he had drawn suspicion. He hadn’t. “I’ll tell you later,” he whispered, getting to his feet.
“John?”
He turned to her. At that moment, he saw eyes that were emblazoned with mixed emotions—courage, strength, fear, worry, care, and hope—and melted beneath her gaze. For the first time in a long while, he felt completely responsible for lives that were in the balance. By saving them, he thought, he would be redeemed. “I will get us out of this,” he whispered.
“I hope so,” she returned, looking at the Crystal Wall. “I really, really hope so.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The creature’s frill reacted by fanning out around its head, the tiny receptors in the flesh picking up vibrations and processing them within neurotransmitters inside its brain, thereby governing it by instinct.
It was alone. And it was hungry.
The behemoth moved within the shelter of darkness not too far from the fringe of light, its instinct telling it to destroy the device that cast the glow of illumination.
It moved closer, its massive tail moving in serpentine motion along the floor.
The light was getting closer.
. . . The passageway to the crystal wall was 20 meters away . . .
The light grew brighter.
The creature grew bolder.
. . . 15 meters away . . .
Slowly it advanced, still on course.
The fringe of light was now spilling out the doorway and into the hall.
. . . 10 meters . . .
Hunger consumed it, driving it by the instinctive need to feed.
. . . Five meters . . .
The lamp threw out a harsh radius of light.
It was at the door, its reptilian tongue moving in and out, picking up the scent of its prey. Very close.
Voices, whispers, noises—though the creature could not hear well, sounds were vibrations carried through the air and picked up by its highly advanced receptors. Its jaw distended slowly as gossamer strands of viscous saliva stretched between the upper and lower portions of its serrated teeth.
And then with the speed and agility of a great hunter residing at the top of the food chain, it attacked.
#
It came from the darkness so quickly everyone was caught off guard.
It cried out with a deep guttural sound, a noise from the back of its throat which erupted into an ear-shattering screech. It entered the room instinctively pawing at the light, failing in its quest, then turned and swung its tail, clipping two lamps and smashing them.
The light was gone and Carroll stood in darkness, stunned and slow to react.
Its tail came across with the speed of a bullwhip and caught Carroll across his abdomen, sending him in an impossibly long distance across the room, only to be stopped by the barrier of the Crystal Wall which shook mightily upon impact.
Carroll was still alive but coughing up blood.
Aussie and Butcher Boy moved forward, guns firing. The entire chamber lit up in strobe-light effect from the muzzle flashes. The creature screamed as bullets pelted its hide. They continued to advance, their MP-7’s going off, strafing, its hide decimated by the impacts.
But it fought on.
And then its tail came across once again in blinding speed, nearly clipping the soldiers, the tail cutting back once again, this time splitting the air with a whistling noise.
>
The firefight continued. Too many bullets were being expended.
And then the creature reared up on its hind legs. Aussie and Butcher Boy followed it as if they were watching the slow trajectory of a rocket, the creature growing to a bipedal height of fourteen feet. Holes appeared in its underside, its belly exposed, blood and guts erupted and filled the air with the scent of copper. In a final throe of agony, the creature succumbed by falling onto the black silica floor. Blood fanned out in a glistening black halo beneath it and spread across the floor. The soldiers stood winded over the creature as they attempted to catch their breath.
“This thing is much bigger than the other one,” said Butcher Boy. “Much bigger.”
“You know what’s got me worried, mate? It took a lot of ammo to bring that thing down. Pretty soon we’ll be running low, if we ain’t low already.” The big Australian used the toe-end of his boot to toy with the creature’s massive head. It lolled listlessly to one side. “It’s bloody dead all right.”
“Did you see what it did?” asked Butcher Boy.
“What?”
Alyssa moved beside them. “It went after the lamps,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“It knows how to take out our first line of defense, which is the light,” she added.
“Whatever these things are, they learn quickly.” And then: “How many lamps do we have left?”
Hall did a quick calculation. “We left two with Red, that thing took out two, so that leaves us with six.”
“Six bloody lamps. We’re getting low on ammo. It’s not looking too good, mates. Not good at all.”
And then it struck them: Carroll!
#
Carroll had struck the wall with such force Savage thought the man was dead on impact. When he bounced off the wall and hit the ground, he lay there for a long moment before getting onto his elbows and using them to crawl his way to nowhere in particular. Though feeble in his attempt, he at least knew enough to get away.