Doomsday Warrior 15 - American Ultimatum (20 page)

As usual, Rock just sat back and let the big bull elephant do his thing. The animal seemed to like tearing ass, to be huffing and puffing and stamping through the sands like the Pony Express. He was in his element out here in the midst of the desolation. Like Rockson. And suddenly Rock realized with a mad kind of enlightenment that he and the war bull were probably more alike than he could imagine. Too alike.

There was a mist-streaked sky on that night of adventure, with stars peeking through here and there from above, not giving a whole lot of light for travel. With the moon in hibernation the desert was dark, a long flat highway of smooth impenetrable blackness, as if one would just fall off into nothingness where they went. But Sesostris beelined in one direction, and they kept on behind him, following his mount’s pale blue guide-light.

They went over smooth fields of sand miles long, then rolling slopes like waves across a pond. At last, after about six hours of riding hard with only two quick oasis rest stops—for the elephants to water—they came to a very high dune. They climbed to its summit and, as they started down, Rockson could see—just barely—a series of tall obelisks set hundreds of feet apart, forming a monumental roadway to the Great Pyramid of Cheops. And that great pyramid stood perhaps a mile ahead of them, the most majestic silhouette against the stars Rock had ever seen. In the center of the giant columns, Cheops lowered a good 500 feet into the air.

They stood there, silently taking in its grandeur, lingering as the new day’s sun began lightening the sky to the east—a violet, rippling color. Rockson felt his breath quicken. The place was overwhelming, built on a scale as if the gods themselves were coming down to live and die there. Cheops looked so ancient, so eroded by time, yet so strong, still withstanding the elements which were ceaseless.

Sesostris mumbled aloud, as if he were remembering things. Rock hoped he was remembering entrances, passages he had forgotten since being a child so many years ago.

The Southern Egyptians had taken it all over nearly sixty years before, and he’d had to flee with his father to the Northern Army, where he had friends. It had been a long, long time, but now he was back.

At last the wizened witch man turned his war bull around and led them down the dune to what looked like a wall of dark sand nearby. Sesostris had them get their elephants to use their tusks and trunks to dig through the stuff for about ten minutes. Suddenly an opening appeared—and inside they could see a stone door, elaborately carved.

“Yes, still here,” Sesostris said. “My childhood memories do not deceive me.” He spoke with terrible solemnity. Rock expected an exultant smile. Not so. He just stared out at the world as if he knew too many nasty secrets about the great mysteries of life to smile anymore. “We go in through here. The tunnel leads the way beneath the dunes, and over to the pyramid. We’d never get through the guards around there.” He had his elephant reach out with its massive trunk, the laser beam retracted inside for the moment, and wrap it around an immense circular brass handle that looked as bright as the day it had been put on. The black sand of Cheops had kept the whole thing preserved in mint condition for four thousand years. The immense stone doors, each one a single block the size of a truck, swung open on perfect stone-ball bearings situated beneath them.

Sesostris led his elephant in on foot, since the rock ceiling was too low to ride beneath. Even then the great beasts had to half kneel down as they made their way through the carved stone entrance into the square tunnel ahead. Rock jumped down, and Rahallah followed suit. Each walked a yard in front of their war beasts, which followed on their tethers, looking around nervously. War elephants didn’t like being cooped up on every side. Their sheer size made them wary of getting stuck in anything smaller than a valley.

The air smelled dank, filled with death. Why not? Whatever was in here had been rotting and mildewed for aeons. The place was cold too, bizarrely cold considering that it had stood in the sun for so damned long. You could have preserved meats inside there. They had to move very slowly through the narrowing tunnel, the war bulls getting increasingly nervous.

Suddenly, they were through into a larger chamber a good hundred feet on a side, a perfect square with high ceilings and small obelisks standing ten feet apart all along the walls. The floor here was stone as well, big squares cut into ten-by-ten-foot pieces and then set alongside one another with perfect fit. A virtually flawless juncture of joints. Whoever had built all this sure knew what they were doing, and used tools unknown to modern man.

Suddenly it dawned on Rock that he was seeing—without sunlight, without torches! How was it possible? He glanced around, and realized that it was the walls themselves; they were emitting a very faint greenish blue light that appeared almost like early twilight to the eye. It was phosphorescent, like the water beneath the surface of a swamp, which can glow with the microscopic life below. But this glow was buried in the rock. It seemed to emanate from deep within, as if something had grown in the very walls.

It gave enough light even after thousands of years so they could clearly make out the major details of the place. And he could feel that the longer he was down there, the more his eyes were adjusting, allowing the dim light in. Shecter would have given his right frontal lobe to see some of this stuff! Rock hesitated for a second, thinking to scrape a little off one of the walls. Then thought better of it.

“We leave the war bulls here,” Sesostris said.

Twenty-One

R
ock and Rahallah followed the witch man down one of a dozen smaller tunnel systems which snaked out from every side of the vast stone chamber. Here the greenish light was a little dimmer, but because it was narrower they could see well enough. It was strange, seeing by the low and evened-out glow that came from the very rock walls. What secrets was the wizard priest leading them to? Rockson wondered if Sesostris really knew this place. Especially how to get back out.

The tunnel grew narrower and narrower, until it was shrunken down to perhaps four feet high and not more than thirty-six inches wide. Talk about feeling like you were walking in a sardine can! Rahallah had it the hardest, being in the six-ten range. He ended up almost crawling along, smashing his shoulders, head, and knees into outcroppings of stone ornamentation which were everywhere in the tunnel. They moved in deeper, heading at a steeply downward angle. The air just grew thicker and thicker now, more like dust than air, as if the very oxygen were petrified. Rock let out a few violent sneezes, and Sesostris looked around angrily, as if it wasn’t the greatest idea. Then, with no warning, they turned a corner and were into another chamber, this one’s green light brighter than the others by far. Bright as a shopping mall by comparison. Rockson could see every part of the chamber.

And he could hardly believe his eyes: mummies, golden coffins, statues of lions, of serpents, and of giant scarab beetles forged out of gold and silver. Rock knew all the treasures of all the museums of the twentieth century hadn’t contained the glitter and wealth that lay before their mesmerized eyes. It was a veritable warehouse of the stuff.

“What—what—is all this?” Rockson asked hesitantly as they stood side by side just inside the tunnel, staring out over the nearly ten-acre underground site.

“It is the resting place of the really great pharaohs,” Sesostris answered, making a circular motion over his heart several times. His craggy face was even more sucked in, and Rockson knew he could feel the gods within this place, gods both good and evil. Rockson could too. The past was everywhere, the ghosts of the ancient dead darting along the walls, among the massive columns. The caskets were bigger and more bejeweled than any Chicago gangster’s hearse could ever be. They
knew
how to die back then!

“Your Colonel Killov has taken the Qu’ul power-sticks from the level that is above this one,” Sesostris said. He looked straight up. “Maybe two hundred feet above, far too thick a layer of stone for us to be found out wandering down here. This chamber is older than that which was thought to be the oldest by Egyptologists and historians. This was built at least a thousand years before the First Dynasty. Built when men were giants and hundred-foot serpents still roamed the earth. Egypt is the most ancient civilization, gentlemen.” He sighed reverentially, scanning back and forth what was the resting place of those who had lived back then. “The beginning of recorded history dates back to 4241
B.C.
, when our ancient ancestors created the first calendar. Tukyur, the Yellow Kingdom, had existed for a thousand years before that. And the Scarab Worshippers perhaps another thousand years before that. There is no culture more ancient than ours. None more connected to the secret mysteries of the beginning. These creatures,” he said, pointing around at the sculptures made out of gold and onyx, out of pure blue crystal rocks ten feet high, out of substances not known on the earth today, “these lions with wings, jackals with human heads, the great scarabs which kept men as slaves, were once real. These are not myths—they are facts. This is how it truly once was in the very dawn of man’s history. These statues depict real beings!”

Rockson didn’t need a hell of a lot of convincing about any of it. The mummy cases themselves seemed huge, nearly twelve feet long, far bigger than what he remembered from the spooky ruined museum he had visited in Denver when he was a child, when his father had taken him. Parts of it were still there, untouched. It had been a powerful experience, but he hadn’t seen anything like this! The carvings of solid gold, of horned and winged creatures which hung suspended on chains in various parts of the granite block ceiling seemed almost real, as if they might move at any moment. The detail and size of everything was absolutely astounding. Rock knew that in the old days any one of these pieces would have been worth millions of dollars.

“There—that is what we came for,” the wizard said as he suddenly spotted the object of their journey sitting dead center in the room, in what looked like a glass bowl atop a golden-legged lion-pawed table. “The Gizeh Jar—and inside it the three Ra sticks! These are what was used to create the great pyramids, to lift their huge stones!

Rockson and Rahallah both sighted the objects sitting about a hundred and fifty feet away, surrounded by what looked like twelve or so upright golden caskets with huge faces sculpted onto them, jeweled eyes staring out.

The glowing green/blue sticks that sat upright in a bowl of clear crystals seemed to almost waver in the air, their appearance becoming sometimes indistinct, as if they were fading away into another dimension—and then with sharp little crackling sounds become fully visible again. They were filled with an electrical life-source that touched back to the birth of the planet, back to when forces beyond modern man’s ken were at work. Rockson felt himself hypnotized by the items, wanting to reach for them, walk toward them, possess the Ra sticks!

“No, do not move!” Sesostris shouted. “Approach them wrongly, and you will die! Don’t even look directly at them!”

Twenty-Two

T
he three men of the 21st century stood looking at the glowing Ra sticks of the year 6278
B.C.
On a golden table nearby, Sesostris found gloves that looked as if they were woven from gold. They were shining and flawless. “These have to be put on to handle the Ra sticks,” Sesostris explained.

Rock only looked out of the corner of his eye at the iridescent tubes, remembering the wizard’s warnings. The three crystal tubes of incalculable power were standing up on end, one against the other, on one side of the crystal container. They called out for him to reach for them, to hold them. But he found it easier to resist now that he wasn’t looking straight at them; the hypnotic strength was far less. Gingerly, they approached the sticks.

“The Ra sticks draw all men,” Sesostris said in awe, squinting down at the things from different angles as if trying to absorb their godly powers without actually gazing on the face of god. “These were designed to draw your soul. Only those pure of heart can resist. Those with base desires for the Ra—would touch. Or try to. And die a most horrible death, for they can’t be taken out of the crystal container, unless in direct proximity to their opposites, their antitheses on a molecular level—the Qu’ul sticks! Then the Ra sticks will direct their energy toward the Qu’ul. And the two combine and annihilate one another. It is better that the world not have any such things. They are the tools of the ancients. Mankind has done enough damage, using them as weapons!”

“Amen to that,” Rock said, having no desire to take any of these super-weapons back to the U.S. of A. Like the man said, humankind wasn’t ready. It hadn’t risen much above the ape stage as far as he could see. “But—what about Killov’s Qu’ul sticks?”

“Now, we must take these and try to carry out a mission of total destruction of the Qu’ul sticks, Rockson,” Sesostris intoned. “Even if we die saving the planet Earth, the gods and demons, the nether-worlds themselves would honor us. Such an honor has not been bestown on any mortal man since time immemorial!”

With the rippling gold-seamed gloves on his hands, the high priest reached forward and grasped hold of the crystal jar containing the Ra sticks. Rockson watched the gloved hands close around it incredibly slowly and carefully. The container, which was vase shaped but with subtle in-and-out curvations, was made of some kind of crystal that was seamed with networks of veins of a more shimmering ultra-blue. The whole thing looked somehow alive, as if it had to pump energy through those veins to withstand the pulsing green sticks inside, to contain them.

Rahallah and Rockson both held their breaths as Sesostris lifted, and the crystal container rose free of the table with a slight popping sound, as if a small vacuum had been broken after many thousand years. They had both half expected the universe to explode or a genie to appear—but nothing happened at all.