The Betrayed Series: Ultimate Omnibus Collection With EXCLUSIVE Post-Shiva Short Story (101 page)

Davidson didn’t bother to give Lopez instructions. The corporal turned the wheel hard to the left, slamming on the emergency brake, spinning the SUV in a tight circle. Davidson let the world blur before him. The desert, the building didn’t matter. Only one thing did.

The glint of the man’s watch.

Davidson let loose the shot. As the SUV kept spinning, Davidson didn’t need to look back at the man to know he was down. He’d heard the garbled scream.

Once out of the spin, the SUV leapt forward, speeding between two of the outbuildings and then into the desert only to skid around a right turn and head back to the main building’s entrance.

No other gunmen.

This hadn’t been a large enough distraction. The Disciples hadn’t sent up any reinforcements. Brandt was still facing the full contingent down there.

“We’ve got to create a bigger ruckus,” Davidson said. “Draw them out.”

Lopez looked to the detonator on the seat. Davidson picked it up. They both looked to Rebecca. They shouldn’t of course. She was a civilian, but then again so was he. And this mission was so off-book, it wasn’t even funny.

Rebecca frowned for a moment. Then a fierce grin emerged. The woman in the backseat wasn’t the same woman Davidson had met a year ago in the Amazonian jungle.

The change became her.

“Hell yeah,” Rebecca said. “Let’s blow some stuff up.”

* * *

“Enough!” Aunush yelled as the men fired at the metal. She pushed her receiver in hard against her ear. “Say again.”

The transmission was garbled nearly beyond recognition. The man sounded wounded…fatally if she wasn’t mistaken. Somehow the additional guards provided by the master had gotten themselves killed. Just as well. They had seemed tepid at best.

But he was trying to say something else. Something about C-4?

Then she heard it. An explosion. Not huge. A target bomb. The noise sounded like it came from far above. Why would they target the ground level? Then another sounded and another as the walls began to shake.

Were they trying to bring the roof down?

No matter their intent, her prize was just beyond that metal slab.

“We cannot afford any delay,” Aunush hissed, hearing another explosion. This one closer.

The sniper though didn’t fire. Instead, he held up a handful of grenades.

He was right. The time had come to commit fully to God’s grace.

Backing out of the room, Aunush headed for a good fifty feet from the grenades the sniper was planting before stopping. Not that Aunush didn’t trust God, she just found He helped you best if you helped yourself first.

* * *

The walls shook all around Brandt. Chunks of salt fell from the ceiling.

So, okay, now it really was just like being in a saltshaker. Large blocks of wall tumbled down, sending shards of the crystalline material flying like shrapnel. Little known fact. Salt was fucking sharp.

And it turned out, not all that strong. The far wall began to crumble. Actually the salt tumbled away to reveal…a passage?

“Go!”

Harvish tossed aside the torch and dove through the opening. Talli crashed through as the ceiling threatened to cave in. Brandt was only halfway across the chamber when an explosion caught him in the back, picking him up, carrying him through the hole, throwing him a good ten meters down the hallway.

The ride was great. The landing not so much.

Shell-shocked and nauseated, Brandt couldn’t resist as Harvish and Talli picked him up by the arms and hauled his ass out of that tunnel as it collapsed around them. They made it out of the decimated passage, stumbling into a huge cavern.

Shaking off his men, Brandt tried to find his feet, but lost them again, dropping down to his knees. Salt stung his palms as he steadied himself. Now was not the time to pass out. Not the time at all. First he had to stop his stomach’s attempt to leap out of his abdomen, and it wouldn’t hurt if it didn’t sound like the National Church Bell Ringing annual competition wasn’t going in inside his skull.

“What the hell?” Harvish stated in an almost reverential tone. Really? The guy had made fun of St. Basil’s tomb.

Then Brandt looked up.

What the hell…
was exactly right.

* * *

Aunush brushed away the dust as the sniper helped her up.

They’d wanted to blow the damn metal, not the whole facility. She shoved the sniper’s hand away. “What have you done?”

She stalked down the hallway to the storage room. To her surprise it was still intact. The grenades had done their job and taken down the large metal blockade. But what was revealed beyond made her take pause.

Even with all the destruction, the chamber clearly had been a salt cave. Tentatively she stepped over the threshold and into the most hallowed chamber.

“There is still the risk of a complete cave-in,” the Chinese guard warned.

Aunush ignored him. She also ignored the smashed refrigerator with its petty contents. She had eyes only for the small alcove. Stepping over mounds of salt and rubble, she made her way to the resting place of the tablets.

Her hand hovered over the sacred spot. Even though the air was choked with dust and smoke, Aunush sucked in a deep breath.

They had found it. The ark that was no ark.

The house that God had built for his greatest gift to man.

“The Rinderpest is gone,” the Chinese guard snarled. “This has been a waste of time.”

Aunush swung around, pulling her gun in the same motion, shooting the guard in the forehead. As the man dropped, dead before he hit the salt-covered ground, his guards pulled their weapons. She noticed though they did not even attempt to fire as the sniper had a gun on each of them.

She indicated to the far wall where there clearly had been a passage.

“I’d suggest you put down those weapons and start digging.”

The two men looked to each other, then turned over their guns.

Smart men.

Aunush looked past the men to find Nannan at the opening. His eyes sought hers.

“How does it feel to be the first Watcher to actually touch the Words?” she asked.

For the first time since she’d met the pinched-faced man, Nannan smiled.

As he had every right to.

* * *

Brandt leaned against the chalky wall still trying to get his bearings.

“You guys are seeing this too, right?” Brandt asked, not sure if the sight before him wasn’t just the result of a major concussion.

But as Talli walked around, slowly spinning in a circle, looking overhead, it became clear this was no mirage.

Above them stood—well, not stood because it was above them. No, what
hung
above them was a city. A full-on city.

Covered in pristine white salt was an ancient city. If you tilted your head just so, you could make out the city’s wall. The shops, the guard tower, and much farther down the cavern, the palace.

Again though…
what the hell?

This was impossible, right? A salt-encrusted statue should not be
above
your head. And the place reeked of sulfur too. What was up with that?

As much as Brandt tried to dismiss the sight before him he couldn’t. These were no random stalactites. What covered the cavern was man-made. Those were real houses. Real markets. Real people?

He squinted, his vision finally expanding past a pinpoint. Amongst the buildings were people. Or at least the extremely detailed forms of people. Their robes flowed as if they were running down the street. Only they were frozen midstride, coated in salt.

“This is…” Talli’s voice shook and then took on the tone of a prayer. “And He shall turn the city upside down, and rain down on them brimstones hard as baked clay, spread layer on layer, marked from your Lord.”

“I don’t recognize the passage,” Brandt admitted, but with his head throbbing both from the explosion and the sight before him, he probably couldn’t recognize the Lord’s Prayer.

“Because it’s from the Quran,” Talli said in a rush. He turned to Brandt. “This all around us, above us…this is
Sodom
.”

CHAPTER 22

══════════════════

GID Outpost, Jordan

11:04 p.m. GMT

“That was not me,” Davidson said, again.

Rebecca believed him. That explosion had been like ten thousand times worse than their little C-4 mini-bombs. The sound of crashing walls had filled the desert air. Sand and rocks bounced along the ground, dancing to the tune of the explosion.

Then nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

She scanned the world around them. No light came from any of the vents. They were all dark.

Had Brandt survived? Had Davidson’s bombs detonated the much larger one? Had she doomed Brandt and Harvish and Talli? Had she doomed them all?

“I think we should—” The words weren’t out of Lopez’s mouth when a shot pinged off the hood of the car. The corporal gunned the engine and as usual the SUV responded, leaping forward, but then it came to a stop. A hard stop.

Lopez revved the engine as the SUV finally made it over a hump of some kind. But what kind of hump? Wasn’t this desert flat as a board?

More shots as Rebecca felt the sensation of sinking.
Literally
sinking, not metaphorically.

“Damn it,” Lopez cursed. “We’re in a sinkhole.”

And with each passing second they were sinking even farther. Far deeper than their four-wheel drive was going to be able to overcome. They couldn’t exactly flee out into the desert, not with a gunman, make that
two
gunmen, as a shot ricocheted off the shattered rear window.

Davidson held up the remaining block of C-4.

Lopez stopped gunning the car. “Looks like the only direction we can go is
down
.”

“Oh God, this isn’t happening,” Bunny moaned.

Clutching the younger woman, pulling Bunny farther down into the well of the car, Rebecca squeezed her eyes shut because yes, this really was happening.

* * *

Brandt couldn’t have heard right.

Sodom.
As in Sodom and Gomorrah. From the Bible. Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt and all that.

He’d asked Talli a few times to clarify, but the man had just wandered deeper into the cavern. Harvish too seemed mesmerized, nearly running into a wall because he was looking straight up.

Shaking his head, Brandt forced himself to snap out of it. Sodom or not. A city turned upside down and turned to salt or not, they needed to get the hell out of here. They still had an enemy on their tail. They still had team members topside. They still had to get home.

With the Rinderpest destroyed their first priority was to—

Lashing out, Brandt caught himself on the wall as the cavern shook violently.

“Get down!” he yelled as the other men snapped out of their trance and hit the deck.

A loud crack emanated from above. Rocks and chunks of Sodom fell from the ceiling, crashing all around him. Brandt backed as far as he could until a wall stopped him. He normally wasn’t a Chicken Little, but it didn’t just sound like the world was coming down all around them, it
was
coming down all around them.

Covering his head, Brandt waited for the inevitable.

Something besides huge pieces of the city fell from overhead, landing with a reverberating
boom
not a few feet from him. Wan moonlight streaked from above, mottling the dust that clogged the air.

He wiped his hand in front of him trying to clear his vision.

Again it seemed that blow to the head was messing with his mind because he was pretty damned sure there was an SUV in front on him. That was
not
inevitable.

Then Rebecca’s face popped up in the window.

“Brandt!” she cried. “Look out!”

* * *

Rebecca reached a hand out as if she could do anything to save Brandt from the man with the gun.

Luckily, Davidson could.

One shot and the man was no longer a threat. That didn’t stop the other men from coming out of a passage, nor did it stop the men from ground level from shooting down at them.

She popped open the door. “Get in!”

Shots pinged from all sides as everyone with a gun shot at something. Brandt dove into the vehicle as Lopez stepped on the gas. The momentum of their sudden acceleration slammed the door closed behind the sergeant.

“Get ready, Bunny,” Lopez said as he sped straight toward Harvish and Talli.

“Ready for what?” Bunny asked, but then as Lopez swerved to the side, bringing her door right alongside the men, it became obvious.

Bullets pierced the roof as Bunny opened her door and the other two men piled inside. They weren’t even seated when Lopez fishtailed them again, driving deeper and deeper into the cavern system.

“Where are we going?” Brandt asked.

“How would I know?” Lopez asked, never taking his foot off the gas. “I just figured the direction with less bullets was better than the direction with more bullets.”

Next to her Brandt checked his arm, dabbing blood away from a bullet’s trail. “Yeah, good idea.”

“I second that,” Harvish said as Bunny ripped off a part of her sleeve for him to use on the wound on his neck.

The SUV was clearly feeling the punishment of the nearly two-story fall, rattling and creaking as Lopez asked it to accelerate faster than even at its best it wasn’t designed to go.

“Something doesn’t seem weird to you?” Brandt asked Rebecca.

What didn’t seem weird? The brightest idea they had to get away from armed gunmen was to blow a hole in the ground and hope that they landed somewhere safe only to find Brandt and the others about to be attacked.

“Nope, nothing.”

Brandt point up.

Craning her neck, Rebecca looked out of the front window. Wait. Did the ceiling have bas-reliefs? Was it an elaborate work of art? No. This was no scaled-down version of an ancient city. It was an ancient city.

“What the hell?”

* * *

Brandt couldn’t help but chuckle. “That is the question of the hour.”

But Rebecca’s mind worked far faster than his or even Talli’s. She reached out and picked a large chunk of salt from his shoulder.