“Our testing showed no adverse side affects. We had so little to spare, and so little time, it’s hard to say. But I don’t think the liquid is dangerous.”
Veronica rubbed her eyes. She had barely slept. She felt as if she were the star in a bad horror movie, propelling herself like a lemming toward the clichéd ending. Were Al-Miri’s men watching them right now? Awaiting the inevitable rush to sea?
The driver arrived just before seven, a tall and grim Bedouin man wrapped in layered robes and a flowing head cloth. He opened the warehouse and began loading a pile of boxes onto his truck.
The guide slunk over to Viktor. “Did you want me to talk with him?”
“No,” Viktor said, as the man finished loading and drove away. “We need to follow him.”
The guide stepped back. “I do not go where he goes. There are rumors. I am sorry. I take you to Cairo.”
Stefan looked from side to side, as if checking for observers, and then stepped close to the guide. Veronica edged in.
Stefan reached into his jacket and pulled out an envelope. He showed the edge of a stack of bills to the guide. “One thousand Euros,” Stefan said. “One thousand Euros to follow that man.”
The guide swallowed. “Maybe I follow path in sand from truck. Not so close.”
“Yes,” Stefan murmured.
• • •
They left the oasis and the guide quickly found the wide fresh trail of the truck, heading north into an area of the desert the guide referred to as the Great Sand Sea.
Veronica had not realized how different the desert could be until they started driving south of Siwa. Where the desert on the journey from Cairo had been flat or gently rolling, the massive knife-edged, parallel dunes of the Great Sand Sea dominated the landscape. Veronica felt as if she were riding the impossibly long crests of giant waves, the golden undulations stretching to every horizon.
Veronica shouted at the guide over the roar of the jeep. “Do you know this area?”
“No one know this area.”
“We’re looking for a limestone formation. In the shape of a gate.”
“Limestone everywhere in desert. Can look forever.”
“Someone did,” Viktor said.
Veronica felt even more swallowed by the vastness of the desert than before, and a vine of fear snaked its way upward, constricting her throat. They were deep, deep into this alien place, on their own in the remote center of the vastest desert on earth, rushing towards the stronghold of a violent cult, most likely right into a trap. They could only hope to somehow sneak into Al-Miri’s compound, free Grey and Jax, and flee back to Siwa with their guide.
She laughed at herself, an ironic snicker. In the face of searching for the eternal, she had come face to face with the leonine head of her own mortality.
G
rey watched Al-Miri stride down the hallway to the door of the empty, white-walled room in which Grey was being held. Grey had been awake for a while, and he had rolled and bucked and strained until he was sure the ropes couldn’t be loosened by any action of his own.
Al-Miri opened the door and marched into the room, followed by his men. Grey saw another of the men from Veronica’s living room: Cleft Lip. He sliced off Grey’s gag with a knife, and kept the knife against Grey’s throat.
“My test tube,” Al-Miri said.
Grey mumbled a response.
“What?”
“Come closer,” Grey said in a low voice. “My voice—something happened to it.”
Cleft Lip stepped back, and Al-Miri moved closer.
“Lean down,” Grey whispered.
Al-Miri leaned over him, and Grey spat in his face. Al-Miri recoiled as if stung by a pit viper, and made a disturbing mewling sound. One of his men rushed to wipe the spittle off his face, and Cleft Lip struck Grey in the face with the hilt of his knife. Grey’s nose flattened and blood splattered over the man’s robes. He struck Grey again, and Grey tried to roll into him. The man kicked him and stepped back.
Al-Miri spoke, and two of the other guards approached Grey. One put a foot on his back.
‘I’ll ask you one more time. No more. Your friend gave me an unacceptable response.”
Grey laughed. “Jax? I’m sure he did. He’s not my friend.”
“Where is the test tube?”
“Go to hell.”
Al-Miri nodded at Cleft Lip at the same time Grey noticed another man running down the hallway. The new man knocked on the glass door to the room, and Al-Miri turned and waved for him to enter. He stepped into the room and spoke rapidly with Al-Miri.
Al-Miri smiled.
Grey stopped struggling and watched them. He didn’t speak; there was nothing to say. Al-Miri left the room, and all five men approached Grey. They started kicking him in unison, a flurry of blows Grey had no way to avoid. His mind fled as the blows came, as it was trained to do.
Injury is real, but pain is mental
. Grey had training in both pain management and the internal martial arts, but his mental defenses took him only so far. Sometimes a particularly hard blow would take his breath away and wrench his mind back to the present.
They finished, and Grey lay on the floor, trussed like an animal. He was bruised so badly he couldn’t yet tell if anything was broken. He wondered when they would go ahead and end it. He was no more use to them. Jax knew everything Grey did, and Jax would give it to them.
They picked him up and carried him out the door and down the hallway. They stopped at the end of the long corridor, in front of a metal door.
One of the men opened the door, and they tossed Grey inside. Someone stepped on his back to hold him down, and he heard a sawing sound. He looked back at the same time he felt the bonds slip off his feet.
Someone kicked him one last time, and the men scurried out of the room. His hands were still tied.
Grey looked up, towards the far end of the room. The room was almost empty, dimly lit by a recessed ceiling light. Almost empty, but not entirely, due to the presence of a large object standing upright in the center of the far wall.
It was a red sarcophagus, covered with the scrawl of hieroglyphs, majestic in its silence.
• • •
Veronica heard Stefan shout. She’d been looking off to the side, and she followed his outstretched finger to a large blotch of brown in the distance. They had seen countless of these sandstone formations; they were looking instead for the mottled color of limestone.
Then she realized what had caused Stefan to shout and the driver to slow and then stop. She had only seen the edge of the wall of sandstone. As her eyes neared the center, she saw a glare of white against the golden sands, and the distant but unmistakable outline of a rectangular building. She saw tiny moving dots in front of the white structure, swarming around the blocky shape of what must be the truck they’d followed from Siwa.
Their driver pulled behind a sand dune and cut the engine. Veronica looked at Stefan, and then Viktor. Both were staring towards the building.
Before anyone had the chance to make a decision, a noise broke the stillness of the desert. A noise which caused everyone to huddle together in fear.
The rumble of the engine from another jeep, from a number of jeeps, drew nearer. Their guide looked ready to bolt, but Viktor had a steady hand on his arm. The engine noise drew closer and closer. Veronica prayed they were just passing by, more drivers bringing supplies to Al-Miri’s barren outpost.
Four jeeps rounded the dune, and Veronica saw with her eyes what she already knew. Men crowded the jeeps, standing with guns leveled at Veronica and the others. Their guide began to tremble, and he offered a steady stream of muttered entreaties into the desert wind.
G
rey knew why they had untied his legs. They wanted him to struggle before he died. They wanted him to feel the crushing weight of fear, to swing his bound arms in vain, to scurry around the room like a doomed rat in a lab. He wondered if the twisted cult these people belonged to possessed the same relationship with fear as had the Juju priest in Zimbabwe. The belief that the fear emanating from the sacrifice brought power to the priest in the spirit world.
He didn’t think so.
He thought they just wanted him to suffer.
Or maybe they wanted to placate whatever it was that was coming out of that sarcophagus. Whatever the reason, someone was absolutely sure that whatever was inside would have no problem killing Grey with his hands tied together with heavy rope.
Grey limped to his feet, every breath a strain, every nerve and muscle in his body screaming at him to stop moving. He shook his head to clear the sweat and cobwebs of pain from his eyes, and stared at the sarcophagus.
An icy dread overtook him. Not dread of anything human, but of the unknown, of Veronica’s story of the figure that had appeared outside her window, of the things in the world that lurk in the shadows, unknown and unseen by those that walk in the light. He had never had this fear before, not until Zimbabwe. He remembered his powerlessness before the strange powers of the
N’anga
, the Juju priest. He remembered how helpless it had made him feel. How he had waited in that abandoned hole to die.
He snarled and vowed that no matter what lay inside this sarcophagus, what happened in that pit wouldn’t happen again. He strode forward. He would not wait in silence to die.
He reached for the crease in the side of the sarcophagus. As he did, the sarcophagus swung open, striking him in the chest and sending him sprawling across the room. He landed in a fetal ball, his battered body taking even more abuse.
A huge thing burst out of the sarcophagus, wrapped head to toe in white bandages, just as Veronica had described. It looked as tall as Viktor, muscles heaving beneath the bandages, an enormous club with a round metal head grasped in its right hand.
A numinous fear struck Grey in the chest, harder than any blow. He lay on the floor in that split-second, a moment out of time, staring in disbelief at the creature in front of him, a thing from an ancient land, a thing that could not be.
It heaved and watched him. Grey refused to call it by its mythological name, refused to give them what they wanted.
It rushed Grey and swung the mace. Grey rolled to his right, feeling the air whoosh by his head. He scrambled to his feet and ducked another swing, then had to avoid the next by pressing tight into the bandaged chest. Grey couldn’t risk staying inside with his hands tied, not with a fifty pound mace on its way to his skull. As Grey pulled away the thing backhanded him with its free arm, sending Grey spinning into a wall and clutching his head. The thing was enormously strong; a few more hits like that and this fight was over.
The clinical precision of the fight overcame him, the odd calm in the middle of battle that veteran fighters can channel. He would worry about what the thing was later, if he survived.
His hands were tied together in front of him. There was nothing in the room he could use. He slammed his hands apart, testing the rope. It didn’t budge, but he realized he did have one weapon, a weapon it was unwise to leave a Jujitsu artist.
But he had to stay alive long enough to use it.
It rushed him again, and Grey dropped to the ground and kicked at its knee. He missed and struck the thigh. Grey rolled immediately, and kept rolling. He heard the mace clang against the metal floor once, twice, before Grey found his feet and scampered to a corner.
The kick to the thigh hadn’t bothered it, and Grey knew it would be watching for it now. Grey crouched and walked towards the center of the room. The thing watched him with its eyes, tiny slits of blackness cut into the bandages.
It moved forward to meet Grey, and Grey faked another leg kick. The thing was ready, and swung the mace down to where Grey would have been had he completed the kick. Grey had already stepped back in anticipation, and the mace came down in front of him, this time punching a hole in the concrete.
Grey rushed behind the thing, before it could recover from the swing. Grey looped the six-inch length of rope between his hands around its neck. It was far too tall, so Grey pushed his knee into the small of its back to lower it, pulling on the rope with everything he had. Grey pushed his own pain away and concentrated on one task alone.
The thing went berserk from the choke. It grabbed at Grey’s face, but Grey buried his head in its back. It tried to throw Grey off, but as strong as it was, Grey’s knee had it leaned back and off its center of power, and it didn’t have enough leverage.
It reached back and struck Grey with the mace. It didn’t have much striking power, but Grey took a kidney shot from that heavy metal head and almost lost his hold. Grey yanked harder and fell to his back, still clinging to the thing like a boa constrictor wrapped around its prey. Now it had nowhere to swing the mace.
Grey locked his legs around its front, holding the bandaged thighs apart with his heels, stopping it from levering itself to its feet. He lost the pulling leverage from the knee in the back, but in exchange he crossed his wrists, tightening the vice around the powerful neck.
It dropped the mace and tried to buck, and Grey heard it gag. It sounded not like a thing, but like a man, and that gave Grey a burst of strength.
Grey corkscrewed his wrists even tighter. His arms throbbed, his thighs burned, every part of his body begged him to stop, but the flailing had almost ceased, and Grey knew it was finished. Finally the struggling stopped altogether. Grey held on an extra few seconds to be sure.
Grey pushed it off him, and it rolled to its side like a lifeless doll. Grey stood, shaking from exertion. Sweat dripped into his eyes, and he wiped it away with wrists stained red from rope burns.
His hand hovered over the thing for a few long seconds, and then he bent and grabbed the end of one of the bandages around the neck that had come loose during the choke. He peeled it back, and the bandages around the head started to unravel. Grey kept pulling until the entire head was revealed, and then he swallowed at what he saw underneath the bandages.