In a doorway, the curtain half torn down, Delia French knelt and wept, leaning against the smooth stone of the doorway. Her clothes were stained red and black, and she picked at a lesion on her face that seemed deep and growing. But it wasn’t the sight of Pelican or Delia that had silenced him. It was the ghosts.
There were so many of them—at least eight or nine in the corridor, each committing unspeakable acts of violence and depravity.
Or, at least, they had been doing so until Martin had walked in.
Now, one by one, the ghosts paused in their perversity and turned to stare at him, their eyes little more than ice-blue mist. Martin’s breath caught in his throat. He began to tremble as he took a step backward. His whole body seemed to go numb as he took another step back, moving to the top of the stairs. The ghosts had gone impossibly still, but their eyes tracked him with the dire focus of a wolf pack.
Martin felt that awful tickle in his chest, the clogging in his lungs, and the urge to cough overcame him. He fought it, but his throat betrayed him, and involuntarily he cleared it.
Pelican whipped his upper body around to stare. His left eye had been gouged out. He grinned and stood, his cock erect and bobbing and slick with blood. In her doorway, Delia started to slide her back up the wall, rising to her feet, staring at Martin with a malice he had never seen before.
The first ghost moved, and then all of them together, like murderous birds taking flight. In pursuit of Martin.
He turned and fled down the stairs, chest burning, head thundering, coughing as he ran. Behind him came the ghosts, and Pelican and Delia shouting wordless rage, and others of the infected who were further along the road to madness and death.
Martin sobbed as he ran.
He prayed.
* * *
The ground hadn’t shaken in a while. Down in the corridor where they had made a new hole in the wall, Sophie worried that things had gotten quiet. A voice in the back of her head told her not to worry, that quiet might mean good things. Quiet might mean rescue or victory, or both. But she thought that if quiet meant survival, someone would have come running to tell her that by now. Instead, she thought quiet meant the calm before the storm. The screaming people had likely died or were too weak to scream. The jihadis had stopped shelling because they didn’t need to do so anymore. As for the gunfire … it had been so muffled down here that it was impossible to know what she was hearing, and now it was hard to make out any sound louder than her booming heartbeat.
Sophie tore open the package with her hazmat suit, and Dr. Tang showed her how to put it on. Inside the suit, she wouldn’t need the filtration mask she’d been wearing, but she kept it on for fear of exposure during the transition from one mask to the next.
Dr. Tang latched the headpiece into place, the two women staring at each other through layers of clear plastic face shield.
“Wait. You should have this.” Dr. Tang held out Lamar’s journal. “And there’s something you should know.”
Sophie took the journal. A few feet away, Taejon and Ruiz were smashing away bits of the wall, and the hole had been widened enough for them to step through, but Sophie didn’t yet know if the breach would lead them anywhere. It was time to find out.
“It’s going to have to wait,” she said, sliding the journal into the wide, deep pocket on her left thigh before zipping up the hazmat suit.
Dr. Tang helped her seal the suit and then aided her in securing the headpiece. “You can read it when we’re out of here. I just thought you’d want to know that, toward the end, Lamar described the ghosts he saw in more detail … and that one of them touched him. He had some pretty disgusting urges, and he understood that whatever this was, it would infect others.”
Sophie breathed deeply, trying to get used to wearing both the filtration mask and the hazmat headpiece. She stared at Dr. Tang.
“Are you suggesting Lamar stole the jar to … what … protect us?”
Dr. Tang shrugged, her hazmat suit crinkling loudly. “I don’t know. I never got to finish reading, and some of what’s at the end is either gibberish or some language I’ve never seen before.”
Sophie lowered her head, staring at the stone floor of the corridor and the debris gathered there. “I wish I could believe that. But the officer up top, Cobb … he told Walker and Dunlap the New Caliphate had someone on the inside. If it wasn’t Lamar, who was it?”
“I don’t have any answers.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Sophie replied, but her thoughts were churning.
Which was when Ruiz smashed a three-foot section out of the wall with one blow. Taejon unleashed a string of shocking profanity and leaped aside as a huge chunk of stone crashed onto the place his feet had been a moment before. He snapped at Ruiz and punched him on the shoulder, but Sophie barely noticed their squabble.
She clicked on the powerful light attached to her suit’s headpiece. Ruiz shielded his eyes from the glare and moved aside as Sophie stepped forward, climbed onto the fallen rock, and entered the hole. For the moment, Dr. Tang and Lamar and the journal were forgotten.
“So, what do you see?” Taejon asked. “We wasting our time?”
Sophie held out her hands for balance, but as soon as she was away from the debris of their breakthrough, the ground beneath her feet was rough, natural stone. Inside the hazmat suit, she couldn’t feel the breeze anymore, but when she glanced upward, her headlamp showed a wide ventilation shaft that turned at a slight angle as it shot toward the surface. No light was visible above, but it was still dark outside so she did not expect sunshine.
The words stuck in her throat. She ought to tell them that their efforts had been for nothing, that the time had come for them all to hide. This was just a ventilation shaft.
Then she glanced to the right and saw that the floor sloped downward and that the wall in front of her seemed darker in that direction, that the chamber she had entered seemed to widen. The thought of escaping, of fresh air, of leaving the plague and sickness behind, made her almost giddy.
Noise of running footfalls echoed to her from out in the corridor, and she paused. Voices reached her, a quick question and answer, muffled.
“What’s going on?” she called back to the others.
“Sergeant Dunlap,” Ruiz replied. “In a hurry. Didn’t slow down to explain. Kind of a prick, if you ask—”
Sophie shut him out. She didn’t have time for petty squabbles.
One hand on the wall ahead of her, she started down the slope. Though she knew it was for the best, she wished she had never put on the hazmat suit. She wanted to feel the stone, wanted to be more confident of her footing. The footgear that went with the suit didn’t have the tread of her own boots, which were underneath. Sophie tried to calm herself, breathing evenly despite being buried beneath the filtration mask and the hazmat suit. She felt sure her anxiety was mostly self-inflicted. She wished she had let someone go ahead of her, but whatever remained of the Beneath Project was still her responsibility.
She felt sweat on the back of her neck, felt a chill, and a flicker of claustrophobia that had not touched her in all the many months she had been down here.
“Come on, boss!” Ruiz called.
Sophie wanted to cuss him out, but then her left hand reached the end of the wall, and she stumbled and nearly fell over. With a glance, she turned her headlamp into the darkness, and a smile blossomed on her face.
“Beautiful,” she whispered.
“What did you say?” Dr. Tang called. “What’s going on?”
“Hang on!” she replied, wending her way carefully down a roughly hewn set of stairs.
They had been carved, but not adeptly, as if whoever had done the job had been in a hurry or simply never imagined a regular use for them. Or, as if the work had been abandoned partway through, as she now saw seemed to have been the case. There were no more than a dozen steps before the rift in the stone narrowed dramatically, barely wide enough for her to squeeze through, the height of the passag
e so low she would have to crouch if she meant to shuffle onward.
For a moment, the spark of hope in her dimmed. Then Sophie crouched to peer through the fissure, and her headlamp illuminated the way forward. Beyond the short, narrow crevice, the fissure slanted at an angle, but she could see that it widened. There, down on one knee, the draft picked up enough that it puffed against her hazmat suit. Sophie knew it would be impossible to tell if the wind came through a narrow gap in the mountain or if they would find a true exit, but she also knew they had little choice.
“Someone run and tell Kim and Walker we’re getting out of here,” she said. “I’m giving it about five minutes, and then we’re going.”
She heard whooping back in the corridor, but Sophie paid little attention to that celebration. Ahead of her, in the narrow crevice, she heard the whisper of something strange, the sort of susurrus that she thought she had heard elsewhere in Derveyî.
Ghosts, she thought, and she put a hand on her thigh, feeling the outline of Lamar’s journal through two layers of clothing. A shiver went through her, and she wondered just how old these spirits were, how entwined with the mountain. Entombed with the ancients.
Then the whisper took on a gentle tone, a musical note, almost a burble, and Sophie laughed softly to herself and leaned her plastic-encased head against the wall. What she heard issuing from deep within the mountain, beyond that crevice, had nothing to do with ghosts. It was the whisper of running water. A stream or an underground river.
It had to come out somewhere.
She stood, a fresh strength flowing through her, and turned her headlamp back toward the hole they’d made in the wall, but there was no one there to celebrate her discovery with her.
“Come on,” she whispered to herself. “Hurry.”
Sophie waited in the dark, and when she began to hear again the distant muffled sounds of gunfire and screams, she told herself to focus on the draft and the running water and the promise of getting out from underground and seeing her parents again.
TWENTY-THREE
Walker didn’t see any ghosts. The corner where Carson stared was so brightly lit that nothing could have been hiding there. If the infected soldier had pointed into the shadows of the dark part of the column chamber, he might have thought someone had been spying on them, but the lights were so bright where the ghosts were supposed to be that only someone suffering from hallucinations or madness could have seen anyone there.
The trouble was that Kim saw something, too, and she didn’t look sick.
“We don’t have time for this,” Walker said. “Get out of here, both of you.”
Kim glared at him. “Private Carson can barely stand.”
“If you want to carry him, go right ahead,” Walker replied. “But you need to go and join Sophie and the rest of them.”
“Walker—”
She touched his arm, and he shot her a withering glance, hoping she didn’t see how much it pained him. “Get the fuck out of here, Kim. It’s not safe for any of us.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she gripped the strap of his backpack. “You promised you would talk to me before you took any action.”
“I promised I would tell you, not that I’d abandon my mission for you.” He glared at her hand, but she didn’t release him.
“What if you make it worse?” she demanded. “What if the contagion spreads farther because of you instead of getting trapped down here?”
Walker grabbed her wrist, pushed her roughly away, and held her at a distance. “Better a risk of contagion than the certainty of it. I don’t have time to debate.”
Carson swore and dragged himself to his feet. He reached for Walker, who stepped aside, causing Carson to stumble and nearly fall. The man bent over, coughing, hands on his knees.
“Just go,” Walker said. “And fast.”
Before Kim could try to talk him out of it, he started down the thirteen steps to the Pandora Room. He had seen the fury and disappointment in her gaze but now he pushed it from his mind. No matter what it cost him personally, he had a job to do.
In the Pandora Room, he glanced at the jar but did not allow himself to be distracted. The room felt cold, and many of the lights had been broken and not replaced, so the jar sat on its altar half-cloaked in shadow. If there were ghosts down here in this room, he was determined not to see them.
Walker slipped off the backpack and set it gently on the floor in front of the altar. He opened it and looked inside. As he’d expected, the jihadis had put together an IED—an improvised explosive device of the sort used for roadside bombs, designed to obliterate everything in its vicinity. It wouldn’t just destroy the jar and the altar and scour away the ancient writing; it would bring down the roof and many tons of stone and earth.
He held his breath. This was an irrevocable action, what some would call the nuclear option. He had just set fire to his relationship with Kim, and it had cost a little piece of himself to do that, but it wouldn’t just be Kim he would infuriate. Walker knew what he was about to do would save lives—thousands, maybe millions—but nobody would thank him for his actions, at least not publicly. The U.S. Department of Defense would never admit he worked for them. The United Nations would condemn him. Sophie Durand and her employers—hell, anyone with an interest in history or archaeology—would want him in front of a firing squad.
His only comfort was the knowledge that he probably wouldn’t live long enough to suffer any of those consequences. Even if he got clear of the explosives before a cave-in could bury him, the jihadis would surely kill him once they’d scythed through Cobb and his troops. He would be fortunate if they didn’t decide to punish him for his actions by keeping him alive to suffer. His thoughts strayed to Charlie and what his death would mean to his son, but he cut off that thread instantly. Hesitation would not save him, but it might mean he would die for nothing, and he would not allow that.
Walker knelt in front of the backpack. He had unzipped it all the way and gotten a good look at the IED. It had a cell phone attached, so it could be set off that way if a signal got through, but it also had a timer—presumably in case no cell phone signal was available in the caves.
He set the timer to ten minutes, then reconsidered and shaved off two. There was no telling how long it would take the jihadis to get past the remaining coalition soldiers, and he needed to make this happen. Eight minutes ought to have been plenty of time to get people far enough away from the Pandora Room. They could retreat to the west wing, or through the hole Sophie and the others had opened up, if the tunnel on the other side actually went somewhere and didn’t trap them too close to the explosion.
Walker took a breath. Despite his efforts to put Charlie out of his mind, he thought of his son and the promises he had made to the boy—that he’d be safe, that he would come home, that they would have more time together. He had not been a great father when Charlie was small, but he remembered holding the boy, the smell of his head, the vulnerability of that tiny baby, and all the ways he had wanted to make himself a better father. Now, like he had so many times before, he had to pack away his love for his son into a compartment inside his brain. Charlie would be safer because of the actions he took today, but Walker doubted the boy would ever understand.
Eight minutes.
He pressed the timer, and it began ticking down.
“Back the fuck away from that right now.”
Walker put up his hands. The skin on his back prickled. He knew that voice and didn’t have to turn to know Dunlap had a gun aimed at his spine.
“You’re light on your feet,” Walker said.
“I put my training to use when I’m sneaking up on motherfuckers who get the drop on me and knock me the fuck out.”
Walker turned slowly, hands still up. Dunlap glared at him over the top of his filtration mask. Beyond him, Kim Seong had just reached the bottom of the steps, but she definitely wasn’t there to help him. She crossed her arms, her own eyes narrowed with fury. Her anger had apparently overri
dden her claustrophobia—though how would he have known? She had been so expert at hiding it before.
There they were, the three of them with their masks, yet to succumb to the poison and madness seeping out of the jar. How could the others not see that this was the only choice?
“This needs to happen,” Walker said.
“Not if we can get out of here,” Kim said.
“It’s leaking, anyway. Whatever it is, we’ve all been touched by it.” Walker lowered his hands but made no move to grab his gun. He stared at Dunlap. “Our government isn’t known for using its powers for good.”
“There are worse,” Dunlap said.
“I work for them, too, remember? I’ve been helping the DOD get their hands on dangerous shit for years, mostly making sure the folks with blacker hats don’t get that dangerous shit first. But this … no one wins. It’s death.”
“If it’s handled publicly,” Kim said. “The U.N. will do it right.”
“Maybe, but the jihadis have taken that choice away from us. I can’t risk letting them—”
Dunlap had been shifting closer to the backpack, gun still trained on Walker. Now he scuffed his boot heels even nearer and took a glance in through the open zipper. His forehead creased with anger.
“Is that thing counting down?” He shot a look at Kim, then back at Walker. “You’re wasting our time, and we’re about to get our asses blown up?”
“We’ve got at least seven minutes to get clear. We should get going,” Walker replied.
Kim swore and marched over to Dunlap’s side, staring into the bag. Walker admired her fearlessness as she reached into the backpack, but he didn’t want it to get them all killed.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “It’s not safe. Best to just leave it now.”
The Pandora Room: A Novel Page 27