Fortune Favors (39 page)

No matter
, he thought.
That’s not what I came for anyway.

Suddenly, the wall of cuneiform writing exploded in a spray of stone chips. Leeds recoiled, incredulous, and turned to see Major Russell, pistol in hand, adjusting his aim for another shot.

Several reports thundered in the cavern, but none of them from Russell’s gun. The men he had recruited in Charleston had finally done something right for a change, and cut the treacherous army officer down with a concerted volley. Russell was blasted back into the wall, where he fell into a sitting position with his legs splayed out. He was still conscious, staring at his assailants in mute horror, and then his eyes turned pleadingly toward Elisabeth.

Elisabeth
?

Had the ruthless bitch tried to organize a mutiny? Leeds had never completely trusted Russell, much less understood how the actress had been able to so easily win him over to their cause, but now he saw a glimmer of what was really going on.

She wanted the prize for herself.
Typical
. She had seduced the officer with a promise of some fairy tale life together. Perhaps she had intended to make a similar appeal to Kismet, or the brutish Higgins.

Well, let’s just nip that little flower in the bud
. He nodded to his loyal hirelings and then pointed at the actress, his meaning perfectly clear.

The two men brought their weapons around and took aim at the now surprisingly defiant Elisabeth...

Suddenly Leeds’ men began twitching in place, their bodies exploding with gouts of blood.

At first, he thought it was some effect of the static storm above the pool. They had all felt its shocks upon entering, but no, this was something else.

The occultist watched in stunned disbelief as several men—all of them wearing dark military fatigues with matching tactical vests, faces concealed behind black balaclavas—swarmed into the cavern through the opening. Each man held a compact machine pistol equipped with a long sound suppressor, and they quickly moved into defensive positions, sweeping their gun barrels in all directions as if looking for targets.

Another man filed in behind the strike team, and strode purposefully toward Elisabeth. Through some trick of acoustics, Leeds could hear their voices as clearly as if they were right beside him.

“You took your sweet time getting here,” Elisabeth complained.

“You didn’t give us much time to prepare,” the man said, his voice smooth and unperturbed. “And we had to sort out a few loose ends topside.” He gestured at Russell, who still clung desperately to consciousness. “And it looks like you’ve started sorting them out down here as well.”

“He was about to take it.” She peered across the cavern and fixed her stare on Leeds. “I had to do something.”

The statement snapped Leeds out of his paralysis. Though he still had no idea what was going on, he understood that success—no, survival—depended upon just one thing.

He spun back toward the dais and charged up the steps, reaching blindly toward the altar, intent on seizing—

“No! It can’t be.”

The words were barely out before he felt a series of tiny stings all over his body, like biting wasps burrowing through his clothes and into his skin. His hook hand caught on the edge of the altar for a moment, and he saw splashes of red—his own blood—decorating the serpent’s head. Then he reeled sideways and pitched into the shimmering pool.

* * *

Annie felt her father’s hold go slack. Higgins was transfixed by the events unfolding across the cavern, staring at the mysterious strike team as if they were ghosts. She looked past him, at Elisabeth conversing with the leader of the commando element—at Russell, gut shot and bleeding out—at the pool where the diabolical Dr. Leeds floated like a piece of discarded trash—and at Kismet, dead at her feet.

Then she saw the flask. She’d left it at the cairn when she’d seen Kismet shot. There was still some of the water in it—she could heal him, save him.

She pulled away from her father and retrieved the silvery container, then knelt beside Kismet.

He wasn’t breathing. A bubble of blood sat on his lips, his last exhalation trapped within. She hugged his head to her breast, but his sightless eyes gazed right through her.

“Well that’s a surprise,” crooned a voice from just a few feet away.

Annie looked up and saw Elisabeth and her mysterious savior. Her eyes were blurred with tears and she couldn’t bring herself to look at his face.

“I guess we can finally close the book on the great experiment,” the man continued, chuckling sardonically. “Now, let’s get what we came for.”

She heard him speak again, a shout, but the words were unintelligible—an alien tongue she didn’t recognize.

“Wait,” Elisabeth said, hastily. “They’re not part of this.”

The man clucked disdainfully. “Loose ends, my dear.”

“We can debrief them, bring them into the fold.”

Annie started when she realized who Elisabeth was pleading for—Alex and herself.

“Please,” Elisabeth begged. “Hasn’t there been enough killing?”

“I’m sorry, my dear. To keep a secret such as ours, sacrifices are sometimes necessary.”

Annie felt her blood go cold as the man shouted again. The language he used may have been completely foreign to her, but she knew exactly what he had said.

Kill them
.

She cast her eyes down, at Kismet’s unmoving face, and waited for the silenced bullet that would reunite them.

But the bullet didn’t come. Instead, Annie heard a strange, guttural sound burbling across the surface of the pool. She looked up and saw someone standing waist deep in water, surrounded by a corona of violet electricity.

It was Dr. Leeds, and he was laughing.

EIGHTEEN

“Guns?” The occultist, wreathed in tendrils of plasma, tipped his head back and chortled. “You’ll have to do better than that.”

The static field surrounded him like a diaphanous blanket. Energy swirled around him as if he had become the living nexus of the Fountain’s strange power. He raised his hands and light coruscated between his fingertips.

Fingertips
!

His hook was gone; his maimed hand had been completely restored.

The commandos opened fire without any prompting and, despite the supernatural power surrounding him, Leeds staggered back under the onslaught, falling once more into the water. But he recovered from the attack almost instantaneously, as if they had done nothing more than push him off balance. His black garments were perforated with dozens of holes, but underneath, his skin was unmarked and radiating brilliance.

He stood again and stretched his hands in the direction of the nearest gunman. A tongue of plasma arced across the water to engulf commando, who evaporated in a cloud of red mist that was sucked back along the tendril and into Leeds’ body.

Like an angry god hurling fire at the unbelievers, Leeds reached out for another victim.

Annie felt her father’s hands close around her and he began pulling her toward the cairn. She didn’t have the strength to fight him, but she tightened her hold on Kismet’s body and refused to let go. Higgins just dragged them both, and then covered his daughter with own body.

For several seconds, absolute pandemonium reigned.

She heard shouts and more laughter from Leeds, but there was another noise—a crackling sound like a hissing live wire—that soon drowned out everything else. The harsh smell of ozone filled her nostrils, scrubbing away the sulfurous odor of burnt gunpowder.

And the light—the cavern was lit up like daylight. At the center of the Fountain, Dr. Leeds was blazing like a supernova.

Annie struggled free of her father’s protective embrace and gazed out at the chaos.

The remaining commandos continued to hurl rounds at the transformed occultist, but their resistance was merely a desperate effort to distract him so their leader and Elisabeth could escape. But instead of seizing that opportunity, the pair was trying to make their way to the dais.

Leeds seemed not to notice. He reached out from the heart of the plasma storm again, this time enveloping the still form of one of his fallen hirelings, instantly vaporizing him and consuming the resulting cloud of organic molecules. Annie felt a cold rush of horror as she realized what Leeds was doing.

He’s feeding
,

Behind the veil of pervasive energy, Leeds was undergoing a startling transformation. His hair spilled over his shoulders, a prodigious beard sprouted from what had been a clean-shaven face. Beneath it all, his skin had darkened to a feverish, ruddy hue, and before Annie’s eyes, he started to swell.

Another finger of fire lanced out, striking Major Russell, whose scream was cut short as his wounded body disintegrated.

At the center of the raging tempest, Leeds’ skin stretched like an overinflated balloon, and then burst, revealing new flesh underneath. Immersed as he was in the Fountain’s waters, there was no end to the process; it just kept rebuilding him again and again, and would continue to do so as long as it had the raw materials to work with.

Tendrils of lightning began reaching out of his body, seemingly at random, without any conscious control. The plasma trails stroked the walls, disassembling stone as easily as flesh. Limestone, calcium carbonate, was nothing but than the remains of ancient life forms, compressed together by time and pressure—the perfect fuel for the fire of Leeds’ astonishing and endless transformation.

The intensity of the lightning was both blinding and deafening. It soared up into the high reaches of the cavern, dancing between the dangling stalactites like sunbeams in a crystal chandelier. The cave resonated with thunderclaps, vibrations that shook the ground and sent cracks shooting across the smooth stone.

Leeds’ clothes had been completely burned away, or perhaps vaporized and ingested like everything else, and he stood naked and exposed in the center of the pool. His skin was peeling away like bark from a tree, but as soon as it sloughed off, new flesh was revealed. Annie saw that something else had changed as well.

Dr. Leeds was growing.

When it had begun, he had been waist-deep in the pool, but now he stood like a titanic colossus with the water splashing around his knees.

Except something was wrong.

The growth wasn’t proceeding uniformly. Some parts seemed to be growing faster than others, giving the impression of a hideously deformed creature. Under his beard, his face had become distorted beyond recognition. His torso had grown bloated, top-heavy, on legs that seemed to be atrophying before Annie’s eyes. The ribbons of skin peeling away weren’t dead layers of epidermis flaking off, but living tissue that also continued to grow haphazardly. In a space of time that might have been measured in heartbeats, Dr. Leeds ceased to be anything remotely human.

And still it did not end.

The misshapen giant form collapsed back into the pool; a grotesque island of flesh that grew like a tumor, drawing still more material into itself with cataclysmic discharges of energy.

Annie felt movement against her body and cried out as something squeezed her arm.

Was this what it felt like? Was it her turn to be ripped apart, reduced to a spray of molecules and consumed by the thing Leeds had become?

But it wasn’t the jolt of an electrical discharge she felt.

It was a hand.

Kismet’s hand.

* * *

Death, it seemed, had no secrets to reveal. Kismet's plunge into the abyss of darkness was unremarkable in its similarity to countless reports given of near death experiences. His world had collapsed into a tunnel of darkness, and at its end...heaven?

And he had died, hadn’t he? His lungs had filled with blood, drowning him and causing asphyxia. His brain deprived of oxygen, shut down. The electrical impulses from his central nervous system that regulated the rhythm of his heart were cut off. Neurological flat-line; the clinical definition of ‘dead.’

And yet, every few seconds, his heart contracted within his chest.

Another source of electrical stimulation was at work within him. The mysterious element that had empowered the water of the pool to rejuvenate his cells—the very substance that reacted with that water to create the stunning plasma storm in the air above the Fountain—was generating random and discordant electrical shocks throughout his muscles.

His blood pressure had dropped to virtually nothing, no oxygen was being carried by the red blood cells that remained in his circulatory system, but something more important was going on. There were still traces of the Fountain’s water in his body, generating those tiny sparks as they went to work stimulating his cells to keep regenerating and reproducing.

What had happened to Leeds on a grand scale was happening to Kismet at the microscopic level. Damaged and ruined cells were consumed, broken down into raw material, transformed into healthy tissue.

After a time, perhaps only a minute or two, his blood vessels were whole again, his chest cavity repaired, the deluge of blood absorbed back into his body. His diaphragm twitched and the tiniest gasp of air was drawn in. His heart gave a spasm, and the blood in his arteries and capillaries and veins...moved.

* * *

Kismet sat up, like a sleeper awakening from a bad dream, only to discover that he was in the middle of a much more terrifying nightmare.

“What the...?”

He looked up into Annie’s eyes, then past her to Higgins...

Higgins
! He felt a surge of anger as he recalled how his old comrade in arms had betrayed him, held him at gunpoint turned him over to Leeds...why exactly, he couldn’t remember.

Then what?

It came back to him in chunks. The ordeal on the lake bottom...traps...giant bats...
The Fountain. I drank from the Fountain of Youth
!

And that was it. The last thing he remembered.

He stared into the heart of the raging tempest at the center of the pool; there was something alive there, something that had once been human. “Leeds?”