The Pandora Room: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  “Is this a retreat, Lieutenant?” Dunlap asked.

  “Bet your ass it is, Sarge.”

  “Where’s Major Bernstein?” Walker said, scanning the smoke outside as he listened to the constant percussion of gunfire coming nearer in the camp.

  Cobb shot him a dark look. “Not going to be joining us.” He shouted orders at his remaining troops to form up inside the cave mouth, to prepare for an assault on Derveyî itself, and the soldiers rushed to obey, even those who already sported bandaged wounds. Even those whose wounds were still bleeding, untended.

  Walker shouted for Cobb’s attention, and when he didn’t get it, he grabbed the man by both wrists.

  “Listen to me, Lieutenant. There’s contagion from the jar down below. It’s bad. You take your people down there and most of you are going to die.”

  Cobb scowled, towering over him. “Brother, we stay out there, none of us makes it out. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to hold these fuckers off from cover. If we have to, we’ll withdraw to the stairs and pick them off one at a time. Ambush after ambush. There’s only one way into this goddamn hole, which’ll make it hard for them to smoke us out.”

  He barked other orders. Some of the smoke rolled through the open entrance.

  Lieutenant Cobb turned to Dunlap. “Whatever happens, these New Caliphate assholes cannot get their hands on that jar.” He glanced at Walker. “You hide it, you protect it, you die for it, but you do not surrender it under any circumstances. Do whatever you have to.”

  Dunlap snapped off a salute and headed down the slope toward the stairs at a hustle. Walker glanced out into the smoke, heard the thump of artillery hitting the camp. Something exploded out there, and a spark ignited in his thoughts. Lieutenant Cobb and his troops had gotten back to doing their job, and the volunteers from Sophie’s team were helping tend to the wounded. Walker turned and raced after Dunlap, catching up to him on the stairs.

  He grabbed Dunlap by the shoulder and spun him around.

  “What?” Dunlap barked. “You heard him!”

  Walker let go of him but pinned him instead with a look. “The backpack you took off that jihadi. Where is it?”

  Dunlap stared at him. “Jesus Christ, Walker.”

  “You’re focused on Lieutenant Cobb’s orders. You heard him. We don’t surrender the jar under any circumstances. We do what we have to.”

  The sergeant hesitated.

  “We do what we have to,” Walker said again, slower this time, his stare unwavering.

  Another artillery shell hit the hill above their heads, and dust sifted down from the ceiling. Dunlap swore.

  “It’s in a footlocker in my quarters, under the bed,” Dunlap said, then he poked Walker in the chest. “But this is for when we have no alternative, man. I’m gonna need you to promise me—”

  Walker struck him hard, so fast that Dunlap didn’t have time to defend himself. With the second blow, he saw Dunlap’s eyes roll back to white, and the man staggered and went down on one knee.

  He knew Dunlap might hurt him for this, even shoot him, so he punched him a third time to keep him down for a while. If they were extremely lucky, he would have a chance to apologize later, but he couldn’t worry about anyone inside Derveyî anymore. Not Dunlap, not Sophie, not even Kim.

  Cobb had been right. All that mattered was the jar.

  * * *

  As a boy, Elio Cortez had been in dozens of fistfights—in the schoolyard, in a parking lot, at beach parties. He had never won such a fight, but that history of defeats had never impacted his willingness to stand up for himself. Cortez had courage and determination, and he could take a brutal pummeling and stay on his feet. But he couldn’t fight ghosts, and he couldn’t fight contagion, so as the long minutes alone in Beyza’s quarters stretched even longer, he paced the floor with the anxious purpose of a man used to settling things with direct action—settling them one way or the other.

  Patience had never been his forte.

  He had tried to sleep, even drifted off for a few minutes, but no matter how exhaustion had frayed his nerves and clouded his thoughts, the need to act overwhelmed him. Cortez paced, fists opening and closing at his sides. Occasionally, he muttered to himself. There were books on a shelf, but even if he had shared Beyza’s tastes, he would not have been able to calm his mind enough to focus. Instead, he went to the curtain and glanced into the corridor. He listened to the distant voices in the gloom. There had been screams, muffled and anguished. Lonely. Helpless. But there had been other cries as well, and he thought of tales he had read of Bethlehem Royal Hospital in England, the asylum that gave the word “bedlam” its origin. Derveyî had become an asylum of a different kind.

  “Come on, Beyza,” Cortez whispered.

  He sat on the edge of her cot, hands clasped, fingers interlaced as if he might be praying, but there were no gods he trusted. Cortez was done with waiting, done with attempting patience or faith in anything but himself. Beyza had a husband at home, but Cortez had taken the foolish step of falling in love with her, so he would wait here in this chamber with its still, suffocating air until she returned, and he would tell her that he was leaving and implore her to come with him.

  The cave trembled with the impact of the battle going on overhead, but only once. Whatever had been falling on them—bombs or shells or fucking mini-nukes—had abated almost entirely. That might be a good sign, or a very bad one.

  Don’t think about it. Just breathe. Just wait for her.

  Beyza would come back. Her dark eyes would shine in the dim, golden light of her quarters, and he would tell her that he was getting out of here, that he was leaving no matter how dangerous it might be. Cortez had never suffered from claustrophobia, but now the knowledge of the plague spreading down in Derveyî made his skin crawl. A scream lodged in his chest, just waiting for its moment.

  He would tell Beyza she ought to come with him, that she never needed to return to her husband. If she refused to go, Cortez would leave her there. He would see the answer gleaming in those dark eyes, and he would know.

  Either the coalition forces aboveground had driven the jihadis away or the jihadis had killed them all. No matter who might be winning up there, people would try to stop him from leaving, but he didn’t care. In the darkness, in the chaos, one man alone might slip out unnoticed. Even two people might. A man and a woman. Lovers whose meeting had seemed perfect out here, far from the complications of the world, but whose bond had never been tested.

  To hell with that. It’s being tested now.

  Someone coughed out in the corridor. Cortez stood up, took a step toward the curtain, a spark igniting in his chest as he thought, Finally. Finally, Beyza. We’re getting out of here.

  But the cough came again, and then a guttural stream of profanity followed by weeping. A choking sob, a man’s voice.

  Riveted to the floor, Cortez stared at the curtain. The lights in the corridor flickered, dimmed, brightened, went dark, and flared again. The generators had always been imperfect, but now they were sputtering as if they’d become ill in their own right.

  He watched a shadow move past the curtain and held his breath, staring at that silhouette. The figure lurched, dragged its feet, head hunched over. For a moment, he thought there were two people out there, the man with the hacking cough and a second person walking beside him, though its shadowy silhouette seemed merely a suggestion.

  Cortez had gone so still that he could not even feel his heart beat, but then the shadow passed by the curtain and his chest thundered with rhythm as if his heart rushed to make up for the beats it had skipped. Padding in near silence to the curtain, he drew back the edge, wary of any noise he might make.

  The voice cried out, “Just stop! Let me die! I don’t want to see anymore. Show someone else your…” The coughing erupted, wet and thick and sickly. “Show someone else your sins.”

  With a grunt, the man in the hall collapsed to the floor. Cortez bent forward and peered around the edge of the curtain. I
n the flickering lights in the corridor, he saw one of the workers—a digger named Yorkin—on hands and knees. Even at this angle, Cortez could make out the left side of his face and neck, could see the way his throat had swelled and blackened. Purple, weeping lesions marked his face. Yet as hideous as these plague sores were, the thing that froze Cortez with a fear he had never known was the thing standing just behind Yorkin.

  The ghost—for as translucent as it was, it could only be a ghost—carried a ragged-stumped human head in its right hand, dangling from a tangle of filthy, matted hair. With its left hand, the phantom held a slim, curved dagger, but it did not aim the blade at Yorkin. Instead, the ghost clutched the blade in its fist and drove it once, twice, a third time into its own face. Into its own eyes.

  Yorkin tried to scream but only choked on whatever bloody mucus lodged in his throat. He whimpered and pleaded. “Please,” he managed to say. “I can’t watch it again.”

  Weeping, Yorkin slumped to the floor.

  The ghost knelt by him, lay down beside him, the severed head vanishing from its grip. It slid closer, like a lover seeking intimacy and comfort, and then it began to vanish inside Yorkin, as if the dying man’s flesh absorbed its spectral body.

  Yorkin went rigid. The coughing ceased. In a moment, back still toward Cortez, he began to stand. Somehow that wicked dagger remained in his hand, still a transparent wisp of a blade, but real enough that when Yorkin raised it and drove it into his left eye, blood and fluid sprayed out. This time, the digger did not scream.

  Instead, he began to turn.

  Cortez allowed the curtain to drop. Fearful of making a sound, he managed to move just to one side so that he would cast no shadow of his own—nothing that Yorkin, or the malice in residence within the digger, might notice. Not breathing, barely allowing his heart to beat, he waited for Yorkin to shuffle past and then another two full minutes of silence went by before he exhaled.

  All thoughts of escape fled his mind. He went to Beyza’s cot, lay on the floor, and slid himself beneath the frame. There in the darkness under the bed, he waited for her to return. In his entire life, he had never avoided a fight, even when he knew he would face defeat. This was different. Blood and broken bones held no fear for him, but evil had just strolled by, and Elio Cortez decided there was no shame in hiding now.

  So he hid, and he waited.

  A tickle began in his chest, the beginnings of a cough, and he told himself it was just the dust. It had to be just the dust.

  He would wait for Beyza, and together they would decide what to do.

  * * *

  “There may be a way out,” Dr. Tang said.

  Sophie studied her, irritated and hopeful and high on adrenaline. “All due respect, Doc, but I’ve been here a very long time. There are other entrances we never excavated, but we’d need earthmovers to clear a path, and we don’t have the time or the equipment.”

  “The Pandora Room was hidden,” Dr. Tang replied. “Isn’t it possible there were other hidden rooms? Other hidden passages?”

  Propped against a column, Martin coughed. “We’d have found them. We’ve been over every inch of this place.”

  Ruiz had barely torn his gaze from the shadows of the column chamber, but now he glanced over at them. The barrel of his weapon remained pointed at the darkness as he spoke. “I don’t know about you folks, but I’m happy to listen to any idea that doesn’t end in us dying down here.”

  Sophie nodded, shuddering with tension. “Of course. I’m sorry, Dr. Tang. If you’ve seen something that suggests—”

  “A draft,” Dr. Tang said quickly. She held Lamar’s journal at her side and walked away from the steps into the half-lit space among the columns. “Back that way, toward the worship chamber. I snuck a cigarette and watched the smoke whirl in a draft that came from a crack in the wall. I knocked a bit on the stone, and I was sure there was a hollow area behind it.”

  “A ventilation shaft,” Martin rasped.

  “Maybe,” Dr. Tang admitted.

  Beyza pushed her hands through her hair, yanking it back as if she wanted to tear it out by the roots. “Maybe not.”

  Sophie turned to her. “What are you saying?”

  Beyza glanced up. “I saw a ghost along that hallway. Just a flicker, not much. I thought it might be imagination then. But it went through the wall, and I don’t mean passed through it … I mean it slid through a crack like it was made of smoke.”

  Taejon had been kneeling by the weakening Carson, but now he stood. “Going where?”

  Sophie exhaled, making a decision. “Wherever it went, I’d rather be finding the answer than standing here waiting.” She glanced at Kim. “You have thoughts on this?”

  Kim shook her head. “I’m going to wait for Walker and Sergeant Dunlap, and someone needs to make sure nobody else comes after the jar. I’ll stay with Martin and Private Carson.”

  The decision made sense. Over the past fifteen minutes or so, as the sounds of battle topside had begun to diminish, Sophie had realized that their fate would not wait until morning. If they were going to take action, it had to be now.

  “All right,” she said. “Beyza, you and Taejon are with me. You can show us where you saw that crack. There are some tools still in the Alexander Room. If there’s something on the other side of the wall, we’ll find it.”

  She turned to Dr. Tang. “How many hazmat suits are there?”

  “Three.”

  Sophie pointed to Ruiz. “Accompany Dr. Tang to retrieve those suits.”

  “And who gets those suits?” Ruiz asked. “I mean, I’m not ungrateful for this mask I got. So far, it seems to be doing the job. But a goddamn hazmat suit would make me feel a lot safer.”

  Taejon scoffed. “Not gonna happen. Three suits, that’s it. Sophie and Kim are in charge, and Dr. Tang is the best chance any of us have of living through this. That’s three. The rest of us will just have to stay lucky.”

  Martin laughed wetly, coughed a bit of blood into his palm, and smiled red-stained teeth at them. “More than one kind of luck.”

  Carson shot him a thumbs-up. Both men had begun to develop darker lesions on their skin. As Sophie looked at Martin, she saw his eyes begin to shift, following something she couldn’t see, and with a shiver she wondered if there were ghosts in the room with them even now, like the grim reaper waiting for these men to breathe their last.

  “All right, let’s move our asses,” Sophie said, thinking of Paris, of her parents. Thinking that maybe there would be one more day that her father would see her face and know her name. “If there’s a way out of here, let’s find it.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Dr. Tang kept silent as she and Ruiz moved through Derveyî. It felt as if the walls were closing around them, the ceiling lower, the air thinner. Though a cough built in her chest, she fought it, breathing evenly through her filtration mask. She padded along the stone corridors and up stone steps. Ahead of her, Ruiz did the same. He swept the barrel of his rifle in small arcs, careful with every corner they encountered. The thunder aboveground seemed to have ceased, but moving so quietly, they could not fail to hear distant shouts and cries from some of the Beneath Project’s staff.

  Gunfire, too, Dr. Tang thought. For what else could that sound be, the muffled, barely audible crackling noise that kept repeating itself?

  She watched Ruiz’s back, unsure what they would do if they encountered anyone. Most of their colleagues had been infected by now. Dr. Tang tried not to think about how many were dead. The walls seemed to breathe and flex, cold and dry and constricting. The tuffeau appeared to have darkened, the yellow turning sickly, but she told herself the effect was only her imagination.

  Lamar’s journal felt warm against her skin. She had tucked it into the waistband of her pants, and the cover scraped roughly on her abdomen as she walked. Why hadn’t Sophie taken it back? Had her mind been so distracted, or did she simply not want to hold it again so soon, this book full of secrets and ugliness?

  Q
uiet footsteps echoed off the stone, and Dr. Tang frowned, intending to admonish Ruiz before she realized they were not his steps at all.

  Her breath gave a small hitch, and she froze in the passageway, even as Ruiz halted and took aim at the dimly lit corner ahead. One of the lightbulbs strung along the hall had gone out, and the rest flickered as if the generator had lost its motivation.

  Dr. Tang stared at that corner long enough to begin wondering if she’d imagined the sound, but just when she might have spoken aloud, a dark figure slid into view, arm extended, pistol aimed at Ruiz’s chest. Ruiz juked to one side, and then both men were moving in some strange interpretive dance as they tried to find a kill shot.

  “Don’t shoot, you idiots!” Dr. Tang snapped.

  Ruiz took an audible breath, hesitated, and lowered his weapon. “Dr. Walker?”

  Walker let his pistol hang at his side. “Sorry. I’m in a hurry, and there’s no telling who’s a threat now.” He glanced at Dr. Tang. “Are we going to go through a whole health check? ’Cause I’ve got to tell you, the clock’s ticking. Our guardian angels have taken shelter in the entrance, and it’s not looking good. They can hold the jihadis off for a while, but not forever.”

  “Long enough?” Dr. Tang asked.

  Walker frowned. “Maybe,” he said, but what she heard was, Maybe not.

  “Get moving, then. Kim is down by the Pandora Room. We’ve all got work to do.”

  Walker shifted the backpack he’d acquired—Dr. Tang did not remember him having it before—and hurried past them. It occurred to her that she ought to have told him what Sophie and the others were up to, but if he was heading toward the Pandora Room, he would pass them on the way.

  “Come on,” she said, taking the lead.

  Ruiz picked up his pace. “How badly do we need these suits? If Walker’s right, we could be overrun anytime. I don’t want to be caught in the atrium if our only way out is behind us.”

  Dr. Tang broke into a light run.