Martin sighed and slid down the wall. “You’re not alone, Carson.”
Sophie stared at him. “What do you mean? You have a mask. We’re all sick, but not like the others.”
Behind his mask, Martin might have smiled, but his eyes were full of dour wisdom, all the youthful exuberance burned out of him. “I have a rash,” he said. “It itches like hell.”
“When we found him, he’d taken his mask off,” Beyza explained, with a baleful glance at Martin. “I’m not sure for how long. And there were…”
She faltered.
“Ghosts,” Dunlap put in. “You can say it. You have to say it.”
Sophie exhaled and turned away from them. Again, she leaned on the column, trying to figure out what to do next. Lamar had been her conscience in a crisis, and that felt like a bad joke. Beyza would be the closest to her now, and she knew the two of them ought to discuss this in private, but when she considered what to do, it seemed clear that there were zero good options. If Lou Redfearn and the others had become so sick so quickly, her first obligation was to keep the sickness contained, no matter the cost. Whatever the WHO investigators wanted to know, they might have to learn from the dead.
“Sophie,” Dr. Tang said from her spot on the floor, barely looking up from Lamar’s journal.
“What now?” Corporal Taejon asked as if Dr. Tang had not spoken. “Seriously, all you fucking smart people had better have an answer, because I’m on the verge of losing my shit. What do we do, man? I am not just sitting here and waiting—”
“Get it together, Corporal,” Dunlap growled. “I didn’t sign up for this either, but it is what it is.”
Private Carson laughed again. “It is what it is,” he echoed.
Dunlap ignored him but kept his gaze locked on Taejon. “I need you to rein it in.”
Taejon nodded slowly, thoughtfully, getting a firmer grip on his weapon.
“Sophie,” Dr. Tang said again, a bit louder. “You need to hear this. You all need to hear this.”
Her tone silenced them. Everyone turned toward her. Sophie knitted her brows, unsettled by the expression on Dr. Tang’s face.
“What is that, anyway?” Dunlap asked. “What you’re reading.”
“It’s Lamar’s journal,” Sophie said, glancing at Beyza and Martin. “From the second he entered the Pandora Room. It’s mostly translations, but some notes as well. The writing … changes. Something was happening to him.”
“Yeah,” Martin said. “He was selling us out to the jihadi maniacs who are going to kill us all.”
Dr. Tang stood up, the journal open in her hands like a priest about to give a sermon. “Sophie, tell them about Locri.”
A shiver went through Sophie then, a feeling of foreboding that had nothing to do with the illness inside her.
“What’s a Locri?” Dunlap asked.
Sophie glanced at him, then scanned the others in the room. Beyza, Martin, Taejon, Carson, and Dr. Tang, who had been bored with her historical explanation of Locri not half an hour ago.
“According to Lamar,” she said, gesturing toward the steps, “the walls downstairs include the story of a city at Akrotiri called Locri. A Minoan offshoot, an advanced society. They’re the ones who made the jar.”
Beyza started asking questions immediately, but Dr. Tang shushed her.
“I’m sorry, Professor,” Dr. Tang said. “You can read it for yourself afterward. Sophie was reading it, explaining it to me, when Sergeant Dunlap came to get us. She didn’t get very far, but I’ve read more of what Lamar had to say, and we have to consider the possibility there is truth in it.”
Sophie took two steps toward her, but stopped at the edge of a drying puddle of blood. They were separated by a gulf of disease-ridden corpses.
“Go on,” Beyza said.
Dr. Tang glanced down at the journal. “If you open that jar, you’re going to find flowers inside.”
“Flowers?” Private Carson said, barking a laugh. “Oh, that’s beautiful. Flowers are killing us.”
“Not only flowers,” Dr. Tang went on. “There are definitely contagious bacteria in there. More than one type, considering that we’re sick, but those who were exposed after the seal on the jar was cracked have contracted a virus whose symptoms haven’t affected the rest of us. The rash, the lesions, swelling, the burst blood vessels in the eyes, massive hallucinations—”
“We’re all hallucinating!” Martin blurted before hanging his head and repeating it quietly. “We’re all fucking hallucinating.”
“Maybe,” Dr. Tang said. “Lamar’s notes say the elders of Locri were frustrated with the failings of human nature. They had achieved great things as a society but felt themselves hampered by savage urges. Theft, murder, jealousy … Lamar translated one phrase simply as ‘animosity.’”
“Sins,” Taejon said.
“Offenses against the gods,” Beyza said. “Maybe you could call them crimes. They wouldn’t have used the concept of ‘sin,’ I don’t think.”
“Evil,” Sophie muttered. “Human frailty.”
Dr. Tang waved Lamar’s journal at them. “The Locritians, as Sophie called them, had some kind of priesthood, men who were said to forge the spirit and the flesh and guide the people to their potential.”
“Self-help guru bullshit,” Carson muttered.
“These priests—Lamar uses the term Forgers—created a ritual. They promised they could draw out the worst parts of themselves and the people of Locri. They wanted to extract people’s most horrific urges, as well as the guilt they felt for the evil they’d done in the past. But there’s more to it than that. A plague had struck Locri, and the Forgers told the elders that their worst fears were true, that these urges and crimes were the root of the plague, and that this ritual could draw out the sickness of body and spirit together.”
Sophie felt a numbness spreading inside her. With the thudding in her temples and the stinging pain in her throat, it came almost as a relief. She felt detached from herself, looking down on the room from afar as if reality had shifted away from her.
“Are you really suggesting what I think you’re suggesting?” she asked.
Dr. Tang shot her a withering look. “I’m not suggesting it, Sophie. Lamar translated this story from the Pandora Room. You can read the journal yourself. You all can. Do you honestly think that as the one doctor here, as a woman who has spent her life studying disease, that I want to admit I’m even considering the idea that any of this…” She opened the journal and stabbed a random page with a finger. “Any of this is true? That’s the last thing I want. But I saw ghosts, whatever they were. I saw one spirit murder another. And I know some of you have seen things, too.”
Taejon raised his hand like he was still in middle school. They all turned toward him.
“I saw some, down in the Pandora Room. A bunch of them,” he said. “Doing all kinds of heinous shit. But let’s say for a second that any of that crazy stuff is true. If these priests found a way to leech out the sickness in people and trap it inside the jar—”
“In the flowers,” Dr. Tang said. “They were poisonous to begin with, but—”
Taejon held up one hand. “Yeah. I got that. I’m saying, some of those ghost stories go back before Lamar tried to steal the damn jar. Before the seal cracked. And people were getting sick before that.”
“But not with plague,” Sophie said quietly. She went to the top of the thirteen steps, careful to avoid the dead and their drying blood, and she stared down the garishly lit stairwell into the entrance of the Pandora Room. The strange light seemed to shift and breathe below. “The malice in there, the dark urges, started leaking out early on, I think. Alexander’s warning hinted at the dangers. Maybe the ghosts were here, even then.”
She turned to face the others. “If this is true, they’re not ghosts at all. Just the echoes of the guilt and temptations of the people of Locri, locked inside the jar with all their physical ailments. Let’s say the mortar used to seal the jar was poro
us and some of that sickness leaked out…”
Beyza nodded. “Okay. I see where you’re going. So the seal cracks, those flowers are exposed to the air for the first time in thousands of years, and they crumble to dust. Microbes seep out through the crack, and some of our team breathes it in, and then it starts to spread person to person, just like it did in Locri.”
“Rapid contagion,” Dr. Tang said. “Rapid progression.”
Sergeant Dunlap stared at Sophie as if the two of them were alone in the room. “You’re talking about magic.”
“Am I?” Sophie replied. “A way to draw out disease and transfer it to some other object, some other organic matter … is that magic just because we don’t understand it?”
Dunlap shook his head. “Did you forget we’re talking about ghosts?”
A debate ensued. Beyza and Sophie attempted to discuss the possible contents of the jar and what else might have been inside it, what sort of infections might have bloomed from within it when the seal cracked, while Dunlap challenged their assumptions and Taejon described the ghosts he’d seen downstairs.
Martin Jungling shouted them into silence.
Sophie stared at him. For the first time, she saw the rash that had begun to blister the left side of his face. She wondered how long he had been without the mask and how long the masks would protect the rest of them if Martin hadn’t needed to be in close contact with someone already infected. There were three hazmat suits. Someone would have to decide who would get to wear those suits.
“Martin,” she said, wondering if he knew. If he felt it.
“I just want to know how much time I have,” he told them. “You can argue about ancient rituals all you like. You can dispute the ghosts I saw with my own eyes and whether they’re echoes of past events or actual lost souls, and how these Minoan priests put crimes and plague and sickness inside fucking flowers. A day ago, they would be the most fascinating arguments I had ever heard. But right now, all I care about is how long I have to live and how much it will hurt when I die.”
Sophie’s heart broke. Martin had been such a part of her daily life for a year, had made her laugh a thousand times, had worked hard and made himself invaluable enough that she had promoted him, and yet still she had taken his friendship for granted. Maybe it had been because he was only a graduate student or because of his crush on her. Perhaps it had been because she had relied so much on Lamar’s company that she had never fully appreciated Martin’s. Even now, in the midst of her own pain and confusion, she had barely recognized the truth of his situation. Upstairs, her friends and colleagues, her team, were sick with plague, even dying, and others lay dead on the ground before her. In the midst of that urgency, she had not stopped to focus on loyal Martin.
“I’m sorry,” she said, moving toward him, dropping to one knee. The words sounded so weak coming from her lips that once again she wished her tears would fall, but her eyes remained dry. “I don’t know the answer, Martin.”
Sophie turned to Dr. Tang, silently imploring her to respond.
“We don’t know this sickness will kill you,” Dr. Tang said. “I promise you, Martin. As soon as we’re out of here—”
“Then let’s get out of here!” Martin shouted, climbing to his feet too quickly, swaying a bit before he managed to steady himself. “Let’s go!”
He looked from one face to another, and Sophie knew what he saw on each of those faces because she saw it herself. The quarantine had to stay in place. The stakes were too high. If Martin were to attempt to leave, Dunlap and Taejon would help stop him. And with the battle being waged overhead, they had nowhere to go.
Carson sighed, the last of his amusement abating. He spat a wad of black phlegm on the ground, the sickness moving more swiftly in him for some reason they might never understand. Or symptoms arriving differently. Sophie didn’t know anything, and it made her want to scream with helplessness.
“Brother,” Carson said to Martin, “we’re not going anywhere.”
As if in reply, the whole room trembled. A crack ran along the ceiling and through one of the columns, and dust sifted down from above. An echo seemed to travel through the floor, and Sophie felt it in her bones.
Beyza swore in Turkish.
“What the hell?” Martin asked. “That was a direct fucking hit.”
Another boom shook through the chamber, through all of Derveyî.
Dunlap stared up at the ceiling, taking a tighter grip on his gun. “Which means if reinforcements are here … they’re not ours.”
TWENTY
By the time Walker reached the column chamber, he had already decided he wouldn’t be staying. All he wanted was to make certain that Kim had been safely reunited with the others. He didn’t say that, of course—they didn’t have time to argue about her ability to defend herself, or for him to remind her of his training and how many times he’d had to fight for his life. Kim Seong might be an eminently capable woman, but her firearms skills were lacking, and Walker had a feeling he would shortly have to shoot a lot of gun-toting jihadi motherfuckers.
Lights flickered in the corridor as Walker, Kim, and Ruiz ran into the column chamber. The whole labyrinth shook around them with another explosion, and he ducked his head. Motion among the columns made him whip around just in time to see guns pointed at them, and Walker threw up his hands.
“It’s us!” he shouted. “It’s Walker!”
Dunlap moved into the light, sweeping the barrel of his weapon left to right—Walker, Ruiz, Kim. “Come ahead. Let me see your skin and your eyes.”
Walker grunted. “Jesus, Dunlap, we’re not—”
“Come into the fucking light!”
Ruiz went first. He hoisted his weapon over his head and walked slowly into the lights beyond the columns. Walker heard other voices, people calling out to them, but then they were drowned out by the thunder of another mortar round striking aboveground.
Kim followed Ruiz. She pulled up the sleeves of her shirt, trying to show as much skin as possible. Walker followed her, stuffed his M17 into his rear waistband, and widened his eyes.
“I guess you’re all right,” Dunlap said, backing up to join the others.
“None of us is all right,” Walker replied.
The whole chamber shook. Walker scanned the room—Sophie, Dr. Tang, Taejon, a handful of others. Martin Jungling looked like shit, and he wasn’t the only one. Ruiz took up a post between two columns, anxiously watching the shadows, almost as if the corpses on the floor weren’t there at all.
“Do I ask?” he said to Sophie, gesturing to the dead, most of whom were covered with welts and blemishes and ugly pustules of rash.
“Why don’t we focus on what’s happening topside?” she replied.
“I’m on it. Meanwhile, you all figure out the safest spot to shelter down here. A hiding place would be nice.” Walker pointed to Dunlap. “You’re with me. Ruiz can help protect everyone else.”
“Make it fast,” Kim told them, eyes alight with fear and courage. “Evaluate, but don’t engage. Report back as quickly as you can. We need information more than anything.”
Walker snapped off a crisp salute, only halfway ironic. Urgent conversation kicked off again in the column chamber, but he had stopped listening. Dunlap fell into step beside him, and the two of them hustled back through the stairs and twists and corridors that led toward the atrium.
“Can I ask you a question?” Dunlap said as their footfalls echoed off the walls.
“I can’t tell you more about myself than I already have.”
“Figured as much. I just wanted to ask if you think we’re going to die tonight.”
Walker did not reply. They hurried up the last stairwell and then into the atrium. A crack had appeared in the floor. Walker pulled his gun from his waistband and shone his flashlight through the archways that led toward the residential wings. The lights strung about the atrium seemed to burn brighter than before, but that only deepened the shadows.
Nothing moved i
n the darkest parts of the cave. They hurried on through the atrium, up the sloping floor toward the exit. Walker felt every step in his back and leg, spiking pain in his old injuries, but he refused to let it slow him down. They reached the exit and started through and then up the spiral stairs that led to the surface.
“You going to answer my question?” Dunlap asked.
“About us dying tonight? Between what’s happening upstairs and what’s happening downstairs, I guess we’ll know soon enough.”
“Fuck that,” Dunlap said as they reached the top of the stairs and raced toward the outside. “I just wanted to see where you stood on the subject. I’ve got no intention of laying my head down.”
Walker appreciated the sentiment and would have said so, but voices were shouting ahead. Smoke billowed outside the mouth of the cave—the entrance to Derveyî—and in the midst of bursts of gunfire, at least two languages could be heard. Figures loomed in the smoke, and he realized the volunteer lookouts were gone. They had either run off or been killed.
“Incoming,” Dunlap said, and he put his back against the wall, just inside the cave mouth.
Walker did the same, both of them with their guns aimed toward the silhouettes emerging through the smoke. A lumbering shadow revealed itself, and Walker realized he had judged the volunteers too harshly. Two of them—a man and a woman—were helping injured soldiers limp through the entrance to Derveyî. Other soldiers flowed in after them, a stream of desperate, dirty faces, many of them wounded. They barely took notice of Walker or Dunlap, hustling into the gloomily lit cave mouth and smashing the lighting arrays one bulb at a time, throwing the space into darkness.
A dozen men and women. Two dozen. Walker lost the head count when he’d nearly reached forty soldiers, and then he spotted the towering form of Lieutenant Cobb. The expression on Cobb’s face, the cornered-animal glint of his eyes, told Walker all he needed to know, but Dunlap grabbed the lieutenant’s arm.
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