Then, with a ululating howl that tore the air, they all swarmed toward us.
9
I GENERALLY LIKE to know who the hell I’m fighting. I’m a long damn way from the concept of “kill ’em all and let God sort it out.”
Most of the time.
This wasn’t one of those times.
10
THE PRIEST—AND I had to accept that it was what he was—closest to me raised an adze and swung it at my head. I shot him in the face. Twice. Because I really meant it.
The back of his head exploded and showered the priests behind him with red-blue and gray brains.
Top shouted, “They can bleed.”
Bunny yelled back. “Fuck ’em.”
The priests swarmed toward us, and as they did so they ran to put themselves between us and Mercer. Two of them swung their weapons in the air, and through the pall of smoke I saw that they were aiming at the drone, but Lizzie steered it sharply away.
Bunny and Top fell back a few steps to give the attackers a long run. It wasn’t because the priests were particularly hard to kill—they had no armor, no advanced weapons—but because there were so damn many of them. If we were all in the belly of a Black Hawk helicopter, hunkered down behind a minigun, then maybe this would be a quick fight. This was a different kind of fight. We had the best weapons and we had enough ammunition, but there was no guarantee at all that we had enough time to kill our way to Mercer and that damn book. Now the sheer number of people we needed to kill exceeded the time it would take to do that.
Which was bad enough. And then the spiders stopped chewing at the wall and attacked. The little ones moved like a black carpet across the ashy floor, swarming through and around the feet of the priests, climbing over the bodies that fell as Bunny fired blast after blast of his shotgun and Top burned through one magazine after another with his rifle.
I pivoted and fired over the carpet at the first of the big spiders, hitting it with three clean shots. Pieces of its carapace blew off and green muck vomited from the wounds, but the three heavy legs propelled it forward. It screeched, though; the sound was eerily like that of a child in pain. As it barreled toward me, I lowered my gun and aimed at the cluster of blazing eyes and fired again. Once, twice, three times, blowing those eyes apart but not stopping it. Not even slowing it. It was the fourth shot that hit something vital. The creature suddenly canted forward and collapsed, its momentum and weight sending it into a clumsy, broken tumble.
I tried to replay that last shot to identify exactly what I’d hit because two more of the brutes came at me. I backpedaled and fired until the slide locked back. The last bullet killed another and it fell clumsily as the third tripped over it. By the time the beast clambered back up, I had a new magazine swapped in and shot it from three feet away. Two bullets and it fell. Maybe the first killed it. I’ll never know.
More of them were coming and the pit was filled with the thunder of gunfire and the horrific cry of the monsters. I holstered my sidearm and swung the MP7 from my back, switched the selector switch to semi auto and began firing in short, controlled bursts. Top was still hosing the priests, but I needed more precision to kill the spiders. Four of them were circling the priests to try and get behind my guys. I whirled and fired.
The creatures died. The priests died.
And we kept losing ground because we were trying to use buckets to stop a tsunami.
“Cap’n,” huffed Top as he fired, pivoted, fired, “I can get Mercer from here. I have the grenade launcher. I can blow that asshole all the way into orbit.”
“No,” cried Lizzie. “Not while he’s holding the book. Not until I can see what he’s reading.”
I shot a spider in the head and needed two bursts to knock it down. “Lizzie,” I yelled, “how do we end this?”
The drone flew over my head and over the heads of the throng of priests. They swatted at it, but she kept it moving, dipping and swooping and dodging.
“Shit,” she hissed. “I can’t get a clear image.”
“Listen to me,” shouted Bunny. “There’s a green button on the lower left. It’s a Steadicam feature. Hit that and then hold the blue button to take high-speed high-def pics. Oh...shit...”
I saw him turned and kick a priest in the groin and then chop him across the face with the stock of his shotgun, then wheel right and fire three times at the men behind him. The shotgun was loaded with double-ought buckshot that tore ragged red holes and set priests screaming away as they clutched stumps of arms or tried to plug gaping wounds in their stomachs or chests. It was a dreadful thing, though, to see that most of them somehow managed to fight past the immediate reaction of pain and fear, and stagger forward again. Christ. Even knowing they were dying they kept attacking. I heard Top and Bunny both make sick sounds because it was immediately clear to all of us that wounding our enemies was not going to be enough. We had to kill them all. They were either fanatics or they were insane. Or both.
And killing requires a lot more precision—and often more ammunition—than wounding. It takes a fragment of each second to aim with precision, and we didn’t have that time to waste.
Nevertheless, Top roared, “Center mass, god damn it.”
“I am shooting center mass, Old Man,” complained Bunny. Then he saved the rest of his breath for fighting.
11
LIZZIE CORBETT KNELT in the ash at the edge of the pit, holding the drone controls in both hands. She followed Bunny’s instructions and fired the high-def camera over and over, playing with both optical and digital zoom functions. Images popped onto the screen and she froze one, discarded it because it was still too blurry; repeated the process. Again and again.
And then, on the tenth try, the image of the page popped up as clear and readable as if she held the book in her own hands.
She bent over it, eyes inches from the screen, lips moving as she worked. When doing translations, it helped her to mouth the words as she read them. It somehow made them more real.
The process of interpretation and translation was something that would normally take days or weeks, even for someone who knew the language and understood quite a bit about the culture. What confused the process was that the writing on the page was not all in a single language. There were blocks of text that were in Sumerian, but the style of the translation suggested that the translator was Akkadian. Other sections were in Latin and some short phrases, scribbled in the margins, were written in Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, and Hebrew. She fumbled her way through it, digging deep for the right words and meanings.
She stumbled through it, feeling the terrible burden of seconds burning off as Joe Ledger and his men fought for their lives down in the pit. The sounds of their battle rose with the smoke, though it was oddly distorted, as if their battle was a mile or more away.
Sergeant Brock leaned over the rim, coughing and using his hand to fan away the noxious fumes. He held a pistol in his other hand, and the other marines stood nearby, all of them looking as helpless and impotent as Lizzie felt.
“I can’t see a fucking thing,” complained Brock. “I mean... I should be able to, but I can’t.”
Lizzie hit a section of the text that suddenly jumped out at her. She yelled into the microphone. “Joe, Top...they’re trying to open a gate down there.”
“No shit,” growled Bunny’s voice. “It’s already half open.”
“Can you see what’s inside?”
“Red light,” said Top. “Can’t see more than that.”
“Listen to me,” she said urgently, “I thought that this was an attempt to invoke an ancient goddess, Uttu or Atlach-Nacha. But it’s not. Everything on that page is about numbers. It’s not a spell...it’s a series of mathematical formulae.”
“The fuck...?” said Bunny.
“I think I know what this might be, but I need to know what’s on the other side of the gateway. If it’s a cavern with glowing moss, then we have to handle it one way. If that’s all it is, then I think I know how to de
stroy the book. If it’s somewhere else, then we need to get the book and bring it up here. But I have to know one way or the other. We need to know. Can you get closer to the opening?”
“Not a chance,” said Ledger. “We’re falling back...”
“No! You have to tell me what you can see through the gateway.”
There was a heavy rattle of gunfire, screams, shouts and curses. Through it all, Ledger managed to spit out some words. “Use the...fucking...drone...”
Lizzie wanted to smack herself upside the head. Of course!
She took the controls again and went to work.
12
I SAW THE drone go sweeping overhead, moving in a straight line toward the cleft, which seemed to be swelling as more of the intense red light pushed through from the other side.
And I realized what I was seeing. This wasn’t just the priests and spiders trying to break through from the pit—something over there, on the other side of the wall, was fighting to get out. To break free.
To come here.
I shifted to my left to get a better view, but had to shoot my way there, killing a priest and three more of the tripodal spiders. Smaller spiders were climbing all over me, and I could hear them scratching at the fabric of my Dragon suit. The material would stop a bullet, but, like most fabric body armor, it wouldn’t necessarily stop a blade. Or a claw.
I paused to slap at the little bastards, squashing several and brushing dozens to the ground, but they immediately swarmed back up my legs. Top and Bunny were likewise covered with the little monsters.
A big one—much bigger than the others, nearly as large as a baby elephant—came scuttling toward me, with two priests flanking it. I switched to full auto and burned through the rest of my magazine to cut them down. As I swapped in a new one I crabbed sideways to try and get a better look at the cleft. The light was blinding, making it difficult to see anything clearly, but I thought I saw shadows. Small and large. There were more of the tripodal spiders, but also larger shapes. And stranger ones, but none that I could identify. They crowded the entrance and I knew that if they broke through, we were lost. Me and my guys. Maybe more than that.
Maybe the world.
Every fiber of who I was, and all of my instincts told me that was not an exaggeration.
Top and Bunny had backed all the way to where we’d first come down the slope. There was nowhere else to go. I was separated from them by a running sea of spiders. No matter how many of the little freaks I killed, there were always more. Were they somehow squeezing through the cleft? Or had Mercer conjured them from some nightmare reality? I didn’t know and wasn’t sure I wanted that answer.
The priests tried to swat the drone out of the air. They jumped up and swung their weapons at it, but Lizzie was sharp. Damn, she was sharp. The pigeon wings flapped, and the little machine tilted and dipped and swooped and even though the axes and mauls and waving arms came close, they could not not tear it down.
The opening was still narrow, though. A few inches, though the spill of light created the illusion of it being larger.
“The drone won’t fit,” I warned.
“I know,” she snapped. “I’m going to try something.”
The drone accelerated, the wings becoming blurs as it shot forward toward the wall. A priest climbed onto the shoulders of two others and leapt at it, trying to grab it and pull the machine down.
He missed, but only just.
The drone smashed into the wall.
No. It smashed into the cleft. The head buried itself into the narrow opening and lodged there. The wings snapped and the body sagged down.
“Shit,” cried Bunny, but I understood what Lizzie was trying to do. She needed to see what was on the other side. The cameras were in the drone’s small head.
I heard a sound, though. From Lizzie.
She cried out as if in physical pain.
At the same time, Bunny glanced up, probably to judge how far above them the ends of our rappelling ropes were, and I saw him stagger. Actually stagger, as if someone had hit him. His knees began to buckle and he had to visibly fight to keep standing.
“Jesus Fucking Christ on the cross,” he breathed.
I looked up, too.
I wanted to scream.
No, I wanted to lay down my weapons and sit down and cry. And let the monsters get me, because there was no reason to keep fighting. The world was broken. Everything was broken.
Above us should have been the slopes of the pit. Above us should have been the ropes and the smoke rising into the air over the Turkmenistan desert. Above us should have been the world.
That’s not what Bunny saw. It’s not what I saw.
Above us there was darkness.
Above us there were stars.
It was like looking up from the surface of the moon.
The sky was gone. And the world was gone and where in Heaven or Hell were we?
“Joe,” came Lizzie’s voice. “Look at your computer screen.”
“Not now,” I said, firing and firing.
“Joe...you have to see this.”
I backpedaled and took a grenade from my belt. “Frag out!” I bellowed and rolled it like a bocce ball beneath the closest of the giant spiders; then I spun, crouched and covered my head with my arms. The blast, even muffled, was like thunder, and I was splashed with green ichor. I cut a look to see that everything in the blast radius was dead and it gave me a few seconds to check the screen.
If I thought it was going to be as bad as seeing the stars above us on a clear afternoon, I was wrong.
It was worse.
So much worse.
The computer screens we wore were small, but they were ultra-high-definition and the colors were accurate to an incredible degree. I gaped down at the image fed to me from Lizzie. The image of what the drone was seeing through the cleft.
There were thousands upon thousands of figures on the other side of that wall. But it was not a cave or cavern over there. It was not anything on Earth at all.
Through the proxy of the drone’s video camera eyes, I looked onto the landscape of another world. I saw vast stretches of sandy, rocky ground and towering mountains. It was all painted a lurid red. Sand and rocks and blowing grit. All red.
Filling much of that landscape was an army.
It was the only way to describe it. An army. An invasion force. Countless thousands of them. I saw hundreds of the three-legged spiders, some of them as small as the ones I’d been killing, but most many times bigger. Bigger than full grown bison. And people. If they were people. Bipedal, with round, erect heads and large eyes in dark sockets; their bodies fitted out with armor like exoskeletons, as if their limbs were unable to support themselves. They marched forward like slaves being forced into battle.
Behind them were other creatures and it was instantly clear that they were the masters of these combat slaves. They rode in devices like a kind of chariot, with flat bases and lots of devices whose nature I could not begin to guess. These chariots moved nimbly on mechanical legs. Three legs.
Worse still were the things that towered above them.
Monsters made of glittering metal that stood a hundred feet tall and walked on three titanic legs, many flexible metal tentacles whipping with furious agitation in the air. Behind each, bolted to its body, was a massive steel net, and with each step jets of green gas erupted from its joints. Each tripod had a clear dome and inside I could see the masters of this ungodly army. They were hideous, with octopoidal bodies, and massive heads with bulging eyes and v-shaped beaks. Smaller tentacles framed their mouths, twitching and obscene.
My mind felt like it was cracking, breaking apart, and taking the last of my sanity with it. I knew these things. These metal monsters. I’d read about them as a kid, saw them in movies. They weren’t real. They were the creations of a British science fiction writer from more than a century ago. They were fiction.
Except that they weren’t.
And I immediately underst
ood why this was real. How it could be real.
Just like H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth writing about Elder Gods, the Great Old Ones and other cosmic horrors, HG Wells had not created the Martians in his novel, War of the Worlds, from whole cloth, but had seen these horrors in dreams or visions. He had glimpsed the terrors of another world and knew, on some conscious or subconscious level, that these creatures coveted our blue world and had, in literal point of fact, drawn their plans against us.
Here was proof.
Right here, in this pit. Monsters from that world had already slipped through. These spiders. And in a flash of terrible insight, I realized that perhaps the spider goddess Atlach-Nacha was very real. Maybe she was one of those monsters who had come through a similar crack thousands of years ago and had become trapped here. She, and the mad priests who worshipped her, had labored all these millennia to help her open the door, so that her masters could come through with their armies and their fighting machines to make war on humanity. To conquer and own this world and leave their own dying world.
I had no proof of that, but I believed it. I knew it.
And I had to stop it.
Somehow.
Jesus Christ.
Somehow.
13
LIZZIE CORBETT HAD seen some very strange things in her life. Most of them over the last few years, since discovering a vast portion of the lost treasure of the Knights Templar and then being recruited into the Library of the Ten Gurus. That group, run by Sikhs, fought a bizarre war on two fronts. The public face of their group worked with the United Nations and UNESCO to preserve artifacts, religious items, and books that were targeted for destruction by extremist groups like ISIL.
The other arm, which was smaller and much less passive in important ways, worked to reclaim books like the Unlearnable Truths. To take them away from whomever had them and make sure they were protected and properly locked away. She had not shared this part of her life with Joe, Top and Bunny. Only Mr. Church knew about it, and he had provided funding and material support for the Library’s work.
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