Owl and the City of Angels (45 page)

That made sense—the Egyptians had picked their mummification spells off the supernaturals. From there they’d spread out to other regions, but a lot was lost in ancient games of telephone.

“It was talking about the dead,” Benji continued, “but there was some funny stuff that kept slipping in—modifiers and descriptors. It was weird.”

Supernatural spells in general were a bad idea. When humans started ad-libbing them, things went worse fast. “What kind of funny stuff?” I asked.

“Ah, images and words I’d associate with recruiting an army. I figured it was just a strange way of referring to a burial site for soldiers—and some stuff on the afterlife I thought might have traveled over from Egypt.”

I thought back to what Mr. Kurosawa had said about armies of the dead marching across the plains. There was only one reason ancient humans obsessed about burial rites. The Egyptians, the Norse, Nubians—you name it, all ancients had the same agenda. “Resurrection,” I said.

Benji frowned. “Well, yeah, that goes without saying—”

“No, that’s the thing I was missing. I figured this place was lived in by some ancient supernatural who used to control humans and terrorize the neighbors. Cooper’s forte was never Neolithic cultures in this region. He was always way more interested in the cultures who came after: the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Aramaics. All the cultures who’d obsessed with the afterlife and obtaining immortality through death.”

Oh man, my head hurt considering the implications: it wasn’t the supernaturals we needed to worry about, it was what the humans had done with all the cursed and magic garbage the supernaturals had left behind when they’d gotten bored and moved on or died.

I’ve always said supernatural spells are way more dangerous in the hands of humans, and Cooper had stumbled onto the ancients figuring out a way to get them to work. . . .

Jumping onto that logic, what better way for the supernaturals to get a free pass to come out in the open? If someone like Cooper and who knows who else was running around raising an army of dead, the supernaturals and IAA could kiss the anonymous supernatural underworld good-bye. It’d be well and out in the open.

But how did the three artifacts fit into it?

“Benji, I need to see that room now,” I said.

He nodded. “Down the right hall. I think it loops up with one of the other rooms Cooper had me translating—or should.”

“Carpe, did you hear that? Change of plans—I need you and Nadya to look for traps on the fly.”

“I thought we decided you were going to the Neolithic chamber one level down?” he said.

“Trust me, this is a better idea.” That chamber, the original resting place of the knife, would give me a better chance of finding the original curse instructions, but Benji’s chamber would tell me what the hell the ancient Aramaeans had been doing and what the hell Cooper was trying to replicate . . .

“Alix?” Benji said.

I ignored him for the moment. “Just make sure we don’t stumble into a trap,” I said to Carpe.

“Seriously—Alix,” Benji said, this time with more trepidation.

I muted my earpiece. “What?”

“What the hell is your cat doing?”

I glanced to where Benji was pointing. Captain was hunched in front of the right-facing tunnel, growling at something past the shadows.

Something growled back and reached out with a corpse’s rotting hand.

Dr. Sanders—or what I figured was left of my old supervisor—stepped into the light cast by our flashlights and reached for Captain. He was still wearing the tweed suit and tie I remembered from lectures and team meetings.

He growled and shambled towards us. I scrambled back out of sheer instinct.

Well, now I knew what had happened to him and why he hadn’t been more concerned about an ancient cursed dig site being opened up under his name. I doubted he cared much at all what Cooper was doing with this place anymore.

“Is that a-a-” Benji stuttered, stepping back.

“Zombie? Yeah, I was hoping that was obvious.” Unfortunately, what I know about the undead can be summed up in World Quest experience.

“What’s happening down there?” Nadya said.

“Found Dr. Sanders. He’s a zombie.” Well, he wasn’t rushing us yet. Maybe real zombies didn’t rush people like they did in World Quest.

He growled and bared his teeth.

No such luck.

“Do you know anything about them?” I asked Benji, forcing optimism I didn’t feel.

He shook his head and opened his mouth, but no words came out. At least he wasn’t trying to wedge himself between me and the zombie, like some other archaeology postdoc I know. “Do you think he’s contagious, like in the movies?” he asked.

“Those are movies, not real life.”

“Then why are you backing up?”

“Because now is not the time to find out.”

Captain was still sniffing at Dr. Sanders, curious more than anything why something that was dead was still moving.

The zombie moved faster than should have been possible for something in the throes of rigor mortis and lunged for my cat.

Captain took one look at the zombie’s outstretched arms and turned tail. His legs just about skidded out from under him as he propelled himself down the right tunnel.

For once I agreed with my psychotic cat. I grabbed Benji and bolted after Captain. I think the one bonus about fever is you stop noticing mild disturbances, like pain in the legs or shortness of breath. We kept running, Dr. Sanders growling in pursuit.

There was another fork up ahead—this time with three options. “Hey, Nadya, Carpe! Three-way split up ahead—straight, right, and left. Which has a really heavy door? Preferably one that won’t kill us.” That last bit wasn’t so much for Nadya’s benefit as Carpe’s.

“Ahhh . . . right tunnel, definitely right,” Carpe said.

Right it was. Captain had enough sense to wait for us at the intersection.

Up ahead I could see what looked like the entrance to a chamber.

“Is the genie still there, Carpe?” I said as I slid to a stop across the stone tile floor. Benji careened into me. The chamber held no obvious exit. I hoped that was temporary.

“Yeah, still here,” Carpe said.

Nomun and the genies were from this region of the world. “Ask him whether he knows any stories or legends about zombies from the city,” I said. Every good archaeologist knows most legends and tales have some basis in reality. Just in this case the dead leaving the city hadn’t been the nice, happy version of resurrection people always envision. Still, any stories Nomun had might hold a clue that would tell me how Cooper had raised Dr. Sanders and, more immediately, how to stop him.

“Little thief,” came Nomun’s voice.

“Stories about dead walking out of the city—any useful details?” I said.

An angled slab of stone sat above the entrance we’d just crossed through. Looked like a door to me. I crouched down and searched the edges for a trigger. Benji caught on and started searching the other side. Dr. Sanders was out of our flashlight range, but we heard him growl.

Eaten by supervisor—not exactly how I wanted to go . . .

“Thief, all I know are old legends. None of the living Jinn have any recollection of those events.”

“Legends are all I’ve got to go on right now anyways. Spit it out.” Where the hell was the release for that door? Come on, it had to be in here somewhere . . .

“In the story of the city we tell, the Jinn defeated the king, who held the army of the City of the Dead under his thrall by stealing a magic lamp that allowed him to drive the risen army across the lands. In our stories, the price our betters made us pay for interfering with the humans was banishment to live in the lamp until humans called us. But that does not mean there is a lamp or that it controls the dead. It is a legend to explain away a distasteful aspect of our history.”

“Wait a minute,” Benji piped up. “There was a lamp in the logs—taken out of this place when it first opened up a couple weeks ago. I should know, I had to handle part of the inscription earlier this week.”

A magic lamp. I was starting to think this was less some Neolithic gods’ resting place and more a dumping ground for supernaturals to dispose of dangerous magic shit.

“One last word of caution,” Nomun added. “In the stories, the risen turned those they touched against their rightful rulers.”

Great, these were the biting kind . . .

“What the hell did the inscriptions say?” I asked Benji.

“Partial translation—totally out of context. You think Cooper is a big enough idiot to give a single grad student enough to figure out he was raising an army of the dead? I would have gone to the IAA.”

No, of course not. Cooper would have used the army of grad students at his disposal to carry out his plan. Damn it . . . “Carpe, hypothetically, if I had another phone down here, could you get info off it?”

“Whose phone?”

“One I stole. What difference does it make?”

“I might be able to get into the files, but it’ll take me awhile. What’s the number?”

I read it off as Sanders rounded the bend. The zombie wasn’t running, but we were trapped in a dead end.

“Benji, did you find a lever on your side?”

“There isn’t any!”

“No one builds a ceiling slab like that unless they intend to drop it.” It just meant it was probably on the outside, to lock people in . . .

I grabbed Benji and dragged him back into the hall with me.

“What is wrong with you?” he yelled.

“Lever’s outside. You search left, I’ll search right—other left!” I said, giving Benji a shove as we collided.

OK, lever, lever . . .
I checked every stone slab on my side. Not one gave.

“Nothing here,” Benji said.

Maybe it wasn’t a lever. “Carpe, any pressure plates down this way?”

Nadya spoke up first. “It looks like there is one back in the tunnel a few feet.”

Farther back, in the direction of the zombie . . . I started to crawl out, feeling each stone as I went, to see if it might give. Benji swore but followed suit, covering the ones on the other side.

One of the stones shifted ever so slightly under my hand. That had to be the pressure plate. I pushed with all my weight.

It sunk—slowly at first, and then faster until it sunk a good foot. The ceiling above shook as the wedged, pillarlike slab started to slide down.

I called out to Benji and dove for the entrance, sliding under the lowering slab.

“Shit,” Benji yelled. I glanced back. He’d tripped, landing short of the entrance by a foot as Dr. Sanders closed in. If the zombie didn’t get him, the pillar would.

I grabbed Benji’s hands and hauled him towards me as Dr. Sanders dove on all fours with a burst of speed and wrapped his bony fingers around Benji’s sneaker, the joints cracking as they went.

I swore and pulled again. Benji moved but not enough, and Dr. Sanders wasn’t letting go.

“Benji, stop screaming and kick him!” I said, and put everything I had left into dragging him under the slab. I got further this time, dragging Dr. Sanders along with him.

I reached under, but Benji wouldn’t stop kicking long enough for me to get a hold of Dr. Sanders’s hand.

Bone cracked as the slab crushed Dr. Sanders’s first vertebra.

I slapped Benji hard in the face. “Sneaker—off!”

That did it. Still yelling at the top of his lungs, he kicked at his sneaker instead of Dr. Sanders’s head. His foot slipped free as I pulled, and the two of us fell back.

The rest of the stone slab slid into the groove, squishing what was left of my old supervisor.

We collapsed against the wall—me catching my breath, and Benji reorganizing his sanity.

“The inscriptions,” I said after a moment. “You said the room Cooper found that sword in had modifications—what kind?”

“Changing the order of the rituals mostly—adding something in here, taking something away there.” He shivered. “I can’t believe Cooper turned Dr. Sanders into a zombie.”

“What if Cooper isn’t looking for one item?” I said. “What if he’s trying to re-create whatever this ancient king did with the lamp?” I had Cooper’s phone with the images. “The lamp . . . do you know where it is?”

Benji shook his head. “Cooper’s been keeping it with him for study.”

“The lamp might be enough to make a zombie, but it’s not enough for whatever the hell it is Cooper’s trying to pull off,” I said.

“How the hell do you figure that?”

“Because the dig is still open. Dr. Sanders was left down here, and the rest of you are excavating like mad for one reason and one reason only—he either hasn’t figured out how it works, or he’s still looking for something.”

I grabbed the phone, but there was no picture of the lamp or mention of it in the pictographs that illustrated a ritual for the three items to raise a dead army . . .

Then again, if I were a king who’d figured out how to control an undead army, I probably wouldn’t leave all the clues in one place either. As Nomun so well illustrated, the problem with an undead army is its binary loyalty—in this legend’s case, whoever had the lamp. Cooper was always a little too fast in his dismissal of data he deemed irrelevant . . .

“I think I know what went wrong and what he’s missing,” I said.

“You know, I kind of figured that might happen if you made it down here.”

A voice I knew—that I’d know anywhere—echoed around the chamber.

Benji and I aimed our flashlights at the ceiling. Above us was a small opening, no more than a vent, carved out of the rock—Cooper’s face framed perfectly in it.

“Fuck.”

Cooper smiled. “I’ve been going in circles for a month now on how to get this army of dead to work. I only recently found the lamp. Then I remembered how you figured out where Cleopatra’s cuffs were, after everyone else gave up. Those made an awesome paper, by the way—for me, anyways, after your spectacular bail from the academic community. You know, if you had taken the gig in Siberia, I might have even given you second author.”

“You son of a bitch, you set me up in Algeria.”

“Didn’t let me down either, Alix—knew you wouldn’t. Though I would have preferred it if you’d just run straight here after I stuck the IAA on your trail. Two years ago you would have. Didn’t think you’d have the wherewithal to go for the artifacts first. Had to do some improvising there with the vampire. He was trying to get the bronze sword anyways, so I told him I’d throw something extra in if he gave you incentive to head this way.”