The Pandora Room: A Novel

by Christopher Golden

  His expression crumbled, but only for a moment. When he recovered, he gazed at her with loving sadness and reached out to take her hands.

  “It wouldn’t matter what my orders were. No way can I let a bunch of psychotic jihadi pricks get their hands on this thing. Look what it’s already done. Most of the people in Derveyî are crazy or dying or both. If any of us survive this, it’ll be a miracle—”

  “Sophie and the others are making us an exit,” Kim interrupted.

  “It’s a Hail Mary, and you know it. We can’t rely on that,” Walker told her. “As for my job, it has two parts. First is to acquire the jar. Second is to make goddamn sure lunatics don’t get it. So my bosses may not be happy, but they’ll live with it. And to be honest, after seeing what I’ve seen here, I don’t really want them to have it, either.”

  Kim lifted her chin. Walker had been trained to fight, trained for combat. He had her in size and strength and weight. But she met his gaze without wavering.

  “I’m not going to let you do this.”

  Walker stared at her, brow furrowing. “Don’t make me choose, Seong.”

  She felt an icy certainty in her chest. “I’ve already chosen. It’s your turn.”

  Walker closed his eyes, exhaling slowly. “Fine…”

  A hand grabbed hold of Kim’s ankle.

  She let out a tiny scream as she jerked her leg away, staring down to see Carson had woken and reached for her. Even now he stretched his hand out. His eyes were red, and a lesion had opened on his left cheek that looked to be eating through the skin, but he had the strength to get to his knees.

  “Get back,” Walker said.

  As if she needed him to tell her.

  Carson pointed deeper into the column chamber, but not into darkness. He gestured toward a well-lit corner, where the flickering of the lights seemed less significant.

  “Don’t you … see them?” the ailing soldier asked.

  Kim and Walker stared where he was pointing.

  “What are we looking at?” Walker said.

  “The man … he keeps kicking that boy. Over and over. The pain … in the boy’s face…”

  Kim glanced at Walker. “Ghosts. He sees them now.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Walker said.

  But as Kim stared at that flickering corner and listened to Carson, she started to think she might be able to make out the silhouettes of the figures that had so disturbed him. A man in a robe, with a cloth wrapped around his chest and a tall headpiece. A small boy on the ground, curled into a fetal ball and barely moving. It was just the suggestion of figures in the light, but the more she stared, the more she felt sure it wasn’t just her mind reacting to Carson’s words. They were there.

  The evils of humanity. The cruelties.

  Carson began to struggle to his feet.

  Kim turned to look at Walker, to stare at the pack full of explosives that hung on his back, and she wondered if maybe his solution was the only way this could all end.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Beyza stumbled and turned to look at the tunnel floor, but if she had caught the toe of her shoe on something, she couldn’t see what it had been. When she glanced up again, the motion of moving her head made her sway, and she had to put out her hand to keep from losing her balance.

  She dragged in a sluggish breath, suddenly hating the filtration mask. The urge to tear it aside, to get a full, clear breath, tempted her. Instead, she stood for a few seconds and forced herself to inhale slowly. The wall felt slick, almost spongy, which she knew had to be impossible. The tuffeau might be soft enough to carve, but it didn’t stay that way. The walls were solid and permanent. Like the floor beneath her feet, they remained stable and reliable. Beyza thought of her marriage and nearly laughed at herself for the unintentional metaphor—or whatever the opposite of a metaphor might be. It wasn’t the reliability of stone walls that had her thinking about her husband but the fact that her lover had vanished. Here she was, risking her own self for a man with whom she could never forge a life.

  And yet …

  Despite what Dr. Tang and Ruiz had said, she went to the west wing first. She looked in every room, but there was no sign of Cortez. She whispered his name because, alone in those strange caves and tunnels, it did not feel right—or safe—to speak in full voice. The walls were striated with wan yellow light from modern bulbs and stripes of ancient shadow.

  When Beyza had not been alone, Derveyî had seemed rich with the promise of discovery, but now she felt the age of the place and the long-concluded lives of its people. Others had walked here, lived here, died here even after those original residents, and some of them had been infected, too.

  At the top of the steps that would lead her out of the west wing, Beyza leaned against the wall again. She coughed, choking up something bitter and bloody, but she swallowed it back down for fear of removing her mask.

  “What are you doing, woman?” she asked, her own muffled voice sounding deep and rasping and alien beneath her mask.

  This man is not your husband. If he is not here, he is gone. He is sick. You cannot stay behind. You cannot die for him.

  Panic rushed into her heart. What if the others found the way out and left her behind? She told herself that Sophie would never do that, but they were leaving so many colleagues behind, and after Lamar betrayed her, there would be no telling who Sophie might trust enough to risk her life for. If they had the jar and they were ready to leave, wouldn’t their need to get it out of here and away from the jihadis override any concern for Beyza?

  Shit, she thought. A loud voice at the back of her head kept repeating that Sophie would never abandon her, but what streamed from her lips was nothing but self-abuse and profanity.

  She started down the steps, still unsteady but determined. At the bottom, she turned into a curved corridor, off which there were several balconies that overlooked the atrium. The sounds of chaos had abated, but now she heard cries of anguish that echoed off the walls as if they came from the shadows instead of from the south wing. Her heart broke. She wanted to go to her friends there, to see if anyone could be helped, but that other voice in her head reminded her that she did not want to be left behind with them.

  Gunfire cracked and resounded, and she hurried faster, turning down a narrow set of steps that brought her to a small room. One more short corridor and she would arrive at the stairs that led to the worship chamber, and then the Alexander Room, and the path to the Pandora Room.

  Get the jar, she thought. And get out.

  The lights were out in this corridor. Not flickering as in other places. This was not the result of trouble with the generator. Beyza slipped the small flashlight from her pocket and clicked it on. Her pulse quickened as she saw the scattering of broken glass that littered the floor. The lightbulbs had been removed and smashed, one by one, all in the few minutes she had been up in the west wing. A deliberate act, and weighted with malice she could feel. The shards of glass were like eggshells all across the floor. Claustrophobia had been infiltrating her mind, insidious and suffocating, and with every breath, every step, the walls felt closer.

  Beyza had to get down to the worship chamber, had to get back to the others. She thought of her students and her friends back in Istanbul, and the safety of home. An image rose in her mind of Dorothy clicking her heels three times and saying those magic words—There’s no place like home. The girl had transported herself back to Kansas.

  But Beyza had never owned a pair of ruby slippers.

  As she hurried through the dark, she heard Cortez say her name.

  Beyza jumped, swung the flashlight toward him. Its beam turned him gray and pale. His eyes were wide and pleading, and his shoulders were slumped, his head lolling slightly to one side. A rash had spread up the left side of his face, and his lips were swollen with it. When he spoke, the words came out stunted and soft, their edges rounded.

  “Elio,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

  “Stay with me,” he said, his eyes
full of sorrow. “We’ll hide together. In the dark, we can be safe.”

  He shifted backward into the grotto where Beyza and Sophie had argued only days before. Days that seemed like months, like years. So many of their colleagues had been alive then and were dead or dying now, and Beyza felt the weight of their suffering. Felt the blame.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, wanting to reach out to him but unable to force her hands to do so. “I’m sorry you’re sick—”

  “If I’m sick, so are you,” Cortez said, words muffled by the swelling of his mouth. He smiled, and his lower lip cracked, dark blood trickling down his chin. “You fucked me good. Bet you never fucked your husband like that.”

  Beyza winced. He’d never talked this way to her, not even in the midst of sex.

  “Stay with me,” he said again, demeanor shifting like a weather vane. The pain in his expression made her forgive him. “We’ll hide. We’ll be together.”

  “It’s not safe here,” she said, moving toward him, trusting her filtration mask. She held up her hands to ward him off as if she’d stepped into the lion’s den. “We need to go with Sophie and the others. I told you I’d be back. You were supposed to—”

  “Wait for you. I did wait, but you never came.”

  “I’m here now.”

  Tears spilled from Cortez’s eyes. He hung his head and turned to lean against the wall, almost as if he’d forgotten he was not alone. Her flashlight beam lost him a moment, illuminating his denim-clad legs.

  “You’re too late,” he said. “I waited, but someone found me before you came looking.”

  “Someone…,” she began.

  Cortez raised a hand to dab at his eyes, and she saw something shift and resettle on his back. Something that moved independently of him, a pale gray thing the same color his skin had become, almost invisible in the darkness thanks to those shattered bulbs.

  “Elio.” Her face flushed with heat, her skin prickling with fear. “What is that?”

  He shuddered as he exhaled. His shoulders slumped farther, and he put more of his weight on the wall as if the burden he carried might crush him. As he turned, Beyza saw the eyes of the gray thing behind him, only now she saw that it had a bluish cast to it, and a blue mist seemed to smoke from its eyes, like her breath in the dead of winter.

  The ghost on his back stabbed a long finger into his spine, then sank its teeth into the fleshy lobe of his right ear. Cortez whimpered and stood straighter, the ghost yanking his strings as if he were its puppet. Attached to his back, using him, whispering to him words that Beyza could not hear. Words that made him cry all the harder.

  When Cortez glanced at her again, wisps of that same blue light puffed from his eyes, and he took a step toward her.

  Beyza backed away. Her boot heels crunched broken lightbulb glass underfoot.

  “It’s only a matter of time,” Cortez said through swollen lips, in a voice that might not have belonged to him after all. “You’re infected, and you know it. Stay with me, Beyza.”

  She turned and ran for the atrium, knowing there was no safety there.

  Behind her, the thing clinging to Cortez laughed and laughed.

  * * *

  Jihadis were piled up outside the entrance to Derveyî. The stink of blood and shit and fear filled the tunnel. Lieutenant Cobb had lost only two men in the ten-minute eternity since the New Caliphate fuckers had started their assault on this hole in the mountain, this anthill, this tomb to which they had all retreated. Jihadi terrorists—he didn’t want to think of them as soldiers—crouched or lay on the ground outside, using their dead comrades as cover, and fired indiscriminately into the darkened entrance. Bullets pinged off the stone walls and sent shards raining down on Cobb and his surviving troops.

  His people kept silent. Cobb had beads of sweat trickling down his face and neck, and his throat had nearly closed with all the dust he’d inhaled out in the camp while they’d been under attack, but he breathed through his nose and sighted along the barrel and squeezed the trigger. Bullets sprayed from the muzzle, and two of the jihadis sheltering behind their dead were knocked backward, blood spraying, and they fell into the spreading pile.

  One of the corpses moved.

  Cobb frowned. The woman beside him, Karnacki, shouted something to the others, so he knew they saw it, too. The dead man seemed to jerk and twitch, and then he slid backward out of the pile, and Lieutenant Cobb saw the top of a head on the other side and realized that the jihadis were starting to drag their dead away from the entrance.

  “Son of a bitch!” he shouted as he opened fire.

  He took two steps forward. Karnacki barked at him to stay in formation, despite his rank, and she was right, but he winged the bastard who had dragged the body out of the pile. Then three or four other bodies were dragged away, and Cobb shouted to his troops to rip them apart.

  Everyone opened fire, trying to kill as many of the assault force as they could. One jihadi went down, but another grabbed him by the collar and hauled him away. Most of Cobb’s troops were firing into the pile of bodies, hoping to kill anyone who might be trying to clear the hellish barrier that had built up there.

  “Stop!” Karnacki shouted. She grabbed his shoulder and shook him. “Lieutenant, stop firing!”

  Cobb released the trigger and glared at her. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Corporal? We need every advantage we can get. A clear path benefits the enemy, not us!”

  Karnacki nodded grimly. “Yes, sir! But nothing benefits them more than us using our ammo. We can’t hold them off if we’ve got nothing to kill them with but our hands, sir!”

  Cobb swore, dropping back in line. He lowered his weapon and shouted for them all to cease fire.

  The moment the echoes stopped, the jihadis charged in, sweeping toward the entrance in numbers that blotted out the indigo glow of nighttime outside Derveyî. They ran over the bodies of the dead, climbed onto them, leaped down from them, shooting all the while. Bullets strafed the tunnel inside the entrance. Two of Cobb’s soldiers went down. Karnacki and Ellison roared at the others to stay low and keep firing, and they did so. Jihadis died and fell, and their comrades stepped over them.

  A bullet struck Cobb in the left side, punched through his body, and exited out the back. His blood spattered Karnacki, but he let the wound spin him around.

  “Fall back!” he ordered.

  They’d been ready. They hustled back down the curving stairs, just a dozen steps. The wounded had already been moved to the bottom, but those who could still hold and aim a gun waited. The jihadis had to proceed two at a time now, perhaps four or five able to fire at once, ganged up on the steps.

  Cobb had the stink of blood in his nostrils and knew this time it was his own.

  He took aim and fired and kept shooting.

  It was the only choice they had.

  * * *

  Martin had lived what he had always considered an ordinary life. Growing up on a dairy farm had been idyllic some days, boring on others, but there had always been peace and beauty and fresh air. He knew he’d had good fortune to have two parents who were willing to strive and sacrifice for his education and to push him to pursue his passions. Before he had gone off to university and begun studying archaeology, he had never been farther from Belgium than the train could take him. Working with people from around the world, learning from brilliant, determined examples like Sophie Durand, had been for Martin like entering a wardrobe and finding himself in Narnia.

  Now he yearned for the farm, wished he could walk the fields and talk to the cows and get his hands dirty fixing the machines when they broke down. He missed his parents more than he ever had. His ordinary life had become extraordinary, and he had always thought he’d wanted that, but now extraordinary had killed him.

  Not yet, he thought. It hasn’t killed you yet.

  But it had, really. He felt the itch of his rash spreading, felt the thick mucus building up in his lungs, tasted blood and bitter bile on his tongue. And
he saw ghosts now. The people from the east wing had gone mad, more or less, and were dead or dying. Worst of all, though, had been the look in Sophie’s eyes. She had sparred with him in the past, teased him and bossed him about, laughed with him and sometimes outright dismissed him, but he’d seen the way she had looked at him when she realized he had been infected, like she had really noticed him for the first time, as if maybe she felt something for him. He had wished to see such a thing in her eyes for months, but now it came with something more—pity, sorrow, grief, mourning for a friend who still lived but whose clock was winding down.

  That look in Sophie’s eyes had galvanized him. Martin wasn’t dead yet, and that meant there was still a chance for him if they could get out of this place. It also meant that their colleagues who were infected but still alive, who were not so far gone that they had turned violent, might be brought along if an exit could be found. Martin was determined to find those people, and he was furious with Sophie and Beyza and the rest for not having thought of it themselves. If he had been up in the south wing, would they have left him there, not even tried to get him out? He thought he knew the answer, and it drove him onward.

  Coughing, he spit a disgusting wad on the steps as he climbed up into the south wing. He wanted to be quiet, tried to stifle his coughing and muffle his footsteps, but he had to pause halfway up just to rest, and there was only so much he could focus when he felt as awful as he did now. At the top of the steps, he paused to scratch through his shirt, and his fingers came away damp with whatever fluid leaked out of the lesions on his skin.

  “Fuck it,” he whispered.

  He stepped into the south wing corridor. On the verge of calling out to see who was still in their right mind enough to answer, he froze.

  There were at least three people dead on the floor in the corridor, one of them Zehra, who’d been his friend and who had been guarding Dr. Tang’s makeshift morgue the last time he’d seen her. Blood smeared the walls. A big, bearded man with lesions and deep scratches all over his body knelt, naked, as he defiled Zehra’s corpse. Any other day and Martin would have recognized the man instantly as Ed Pellegrino, whom they’d taken to calling Pelican, but it took him long seconds to reconcile this abomination with the man he’d known.