Terminal (38 page)

‘Great choice,' Will said. ‘That's the way to the Mesopotamian and Ancient Egyptian gallery.'

‘Just tell me how to get up there,' Elliott snapped.

Will held up his fingers and moved them in a walking motion. ‘Stairs. Other side of this. You walk up them – round and round,' he replied in a sarcastic, clipped way, taking a few angry steps forward so that he could point out where the circular flight of stairs started at the side of the Reading Room. But the fact that he was irritated with Elliott was totally lost on her as she dashed towards the stairs and then sped up them without saying a word.

With a groan Will followed, and when he finally reached the walkway at the top, he went across it and into the first room of exhibits. She wasn't there, so he moved into the adjoining room. Puffing from climbing so many stairs, he called out to her, his voice sounding very small in the network of interconnecting rooms.

‘I'm here,' she mumbled.

He scanned around until he located her in the dead centre of the room he'd been in, standing so still he'd completely missed her. Her eyes were closed.

‘Oh, there you are!' Will laughed. ‘This room really is a great choice. Ever since I was young I used to come here to see the mummies because …' he trailed off, stepping over to a rectangular display case. In it was an open-topped casket of roughly hewn wood. Will pressed his head against the glass case to peer at the mummy so familiar to him from all his visits through the years. The small body was curled up in a foetal position on a bed of sand in the bottom of the casket. ‘Because they're so cool,' he finished saying, gazing down at the dried skin and cracked flesh of the mummy's face, its brown teeth showing through its ruptured cheek.

‘It's in here,' Elliott said quietly.

‘What?' Will replied, hurrying over towards the corner. She was by a huge stone sarcophagus, its surface covered in glyphs.

‘What do you mean, it's in there?' Will asked. ‘It can't be. That won't have anything left in it.'

Having removed her Bergen and put it together with her rifle on the floor, Elliott was running her hands over the lid of the sarcophagus. ‘No, it's right here,' she repeated. ‘I can feel it.'

‘Oh, brilliant,' Will exhaled wearily. ‘Trust you to choose the most humongous sarcophagus in the whole place.'

Elliott's hands had come to a stop on a panel showing two entwined snakes along the middle of the chunky lid. ‘Right here,' she whispered, moving her fingers over the snakes. She seemed to be in a desperate panic as she began to try to hook her fingers under the lid and lift it. It was futile; Will knew that she didn't have a chance because of the sheer weight.

‘Okay, just hold on,' he said, dumping his Bergen and Sten
on the floor beside Elliott's kit. ‘We need to find a lever of some kind. A piece of metal will do.'

Elliott refused to budge from beside the sarcophagus so Will began to search around. He eventually discovered a fire point out in the corridor where there were some buckets and a hose coiled on a roll. Next to this was an axe in a Perspex-fronted case, which he broke open with a kick. He came back with the axe, and even though he could just get the tip underneath the eroded stone of the lid, it was going to be of no use in lifting it.

‘This is hopeless,' he muttered, as his eyes fell on the large stone idol – a massive pharaoh's head carved in stone and some ten feet in height – beside the sarcophagus. He walked around the head to examine it from different angles, then checked very carefully how far it was from the sarcophagus. Last of all, he went behind the head to find out how much clearance there was between it and the wall.

‘I wonder …' he said under his breath, as he flicked the lens up from his eye to look at the head in the moonlight that poured in through a window higher up on the wall.

Then he nodded to himself. ‘Elliott, I need you over here. If we can tip this over, I reckon it should fall on your sarcophagus and maybe break it open.'

It took him a while to persuade her to leave the sarcophagus and come with him to the rear of the pharaoh's head. Then she seemed to understand what he was proposing. As he tried to tell Elliott where he wanted her to be, she suddenly clutched her hand to the nape of her neck.

‘What's wrong?' Will asked.

‘I don't know – just had a really bad pain here,' she answered. ‘It's gone now.'

As she seemed to be all right, Will explained his idea again and then, with their backs to the wall and their feet braced against the pharaoh, they both eased themselves up until they were five or six feet above the floor.

‘Three … two … one,' he counted down and they pushed with all their might. The pharaoh's head rocked slightly. ‘There! We moved it!' Will exclaimed enthusiastically. ‘Elliott, this could really work!'

For a moment he turned his head to glance through the window, his eyes lingering on the moon. ‘Howard Carter, if you're up there and watching this, I just want you to know I'm sorry,' he muttered. ‘Right,' he said, addressing Elliott. ‘We get into a rhythm until this bust goes over. And I just hope it goes the right way, or we'll be squashed like … very squashed things.'

Will repeated, ‘Push … push … push …' again and again as the pharaoh rocked backwards and forwards, and then with a last ‘PUSH!' it overbalanced and was tipping forward. Will and Elliott jumped to the side as it toppled straight on top of the sarcophagus with a floor-shaking thud.

They had both skipped around to the front to watch as the sarcophagus, in what felt like slow motion, also went over. Its huge lid slid onto the ground, smashing the glass display case before it finally came to rest.

‘What have I done?' Will said, as he saw the damage to the pharaoh's head, the sarcophagus lid, which was broken in half, and to the mummy in the glass case.

But Elliott wasn't the least bit concerned about any of these. She squatted down by the broken lid to pick something up from amongst the pieces. The lid hadn't been completely solid – inside it there had been an object.

She stood up with it. It was some sort of baton, almost two feet in length.

‘My God!' Will exclaimed. ‘It looks exactly like the tower!'

And it did; with the same section at the tip, it could have been a model of the tower from the inner world. It also seemed to be made from the same material as the tower, its surface smooth and grey.

And when the bare skin of Elliott's hand had come into contact with it, a band around the shaft glowed with an intense blue light. It was identical to the light that they had witnessed before in both the tower and the pyramid.

‘Ah, so the batteries are still good,' Will whispered, trying not to laugh with the strangeness of it all.

‘This is what I came for,' she murmured, as she got to her feet and held the object reverentially up before her.

‘But what is it? A weapon of some kind – a mace?' Will asked, then something occurred to him. ‘I hope it won't suddenly change into another tower, will it?'

‘It's a sceptre, and I have to take it back,' Elliott said, her eyes locked on it.

At the mention of the word, Will gave a small shrug. ‘Okay, it's a sceptre then, can I see it?' He stepped forward with his hand out, but Elliott snatched the object away.

‘No, don't,' she said sharply. ‘You shouldn't touch it.'

‘Fine, be like that.' He shrugged again, instead going to examine the broken parts of the lid from the sarcophagus where the sceptre had been concealed. There was a circular channel bored right into the middle of the thick stone of the lid, which of course was now empty. ‘So this sceptre thing of yours could have been hidden in there for centuries, and nobody had the faintest idea,' he thought out loud. ‘And, of
course, all these relics were brought back to England by Victorian collectors, like, a century or two ago, so this sarcophagus would have been in Egypt for all the centuries before that. Is that where your sceptre was lost?'

But Elliott had already gathered up her rifle and Bergen and was heading out of the room.

‘Hey, you with the magic stick! Where are you off to now?' Will shouted as he heard the door slam shut behind her.

Grabbing his Bergen and Sten, he rushed across the walkway and had just caught up with her several flights down when there was the sound of gunfire hammering away so loudly windows were rattling. Both of them froze on the spot.

‘That's close,' Elliott shouted. ‘And it's an automatic weapon.'

‘Could be the army?' Will suggested.

It was coming from outside the museum, and Elliott was right – it was very close. They raced further down the circular staircase until they could see through the main entrance.

There was another burst of gunfire and a huge crash.

‘A tank!' Will shouted. ‘Bloody hell!'

It had shot up the front steps and rammed straight into the doors, crashing through them and mangling the metal and glass.

It stopped there, half of it in the building and half outside. The automatic fire came again – the volume ear-splitting in the confines of the museum, as the forecourt beyond the tank was sprayed with rounds.

The hatch opened and someone climbed from it.

Elliott was the first to recognise who it was through her rifle scope.

‘Drake!' she cried.

‘Elliott?' he yelled back.

Will and Elliott flew down the stairs. Drake had climbed down from the tank. ‘We picked up the signal from your beacon,' he said, as Elliott threw her arms around him and held him tight. ‘But I didn't believe it could really be you two!' he added. Shaking his head, Drake smiled at Will. ‘But how did you get back here?'

‘That'll take a bit of explaining,' Will said, then interrupted himself as his friend's appearance registered with him. ‘Drake, what happened to you?

Elliott had also taken a step back so she could see his deathly pallor and not only that his arm was strapped up, but that his head and hands were covered in dressings.

‘It was the explosion in the pore,' Drake replied. ‘The radiation caught me.'

‘Oh, no,' Elliott said, barely audibly.

Just then the machine gun began to hammer away again. As it stopped, there was urgent yelling from inside the tank.

‘Who's that?' Elliott asked.

‘Jiggs,' Drake said. ‘The Armagi are building up outside, so we have to make tracks.'

Jiggs was shouting so much his voice sounded hoarse. ‘Bloody hurry it up out there!'

‘We've got to go!' Drake said urgently, already climbing back onto the tank.

The machine gun opened up again, drowning out Elliott as she said, ‘I've got to protect this.' Simply throwing her rifle aside, she tucked the sceptre inside her jacket and clamped her arm over it. Drake had seen what she'd just done and was finding it difficult to believe that she would discard her weapon like that. But now wasn't the time for explanations.

‘They're wall-to-wall! I can't keep them off!' Jiggs shouted, opening up at the Armagi again.

‘Jesus, get a move on, you two!' Drake shouted, beckoning frantically at them from the turret.

Elliott reached him and Drake grabbed her by the hand. ‘No! No room! Ditch the Bergen!' he shouted. She threw it aside, and he pulled her into the hatch.

Already up on the tank, Will had shrugged off his Bergen to pass it to Drake. ‘Bloody leave that too!' Drake shouted.

The gun was firing continuously now.

‘No way!' Will insisted. ‘Got all my stuff in there!'

Drake looked furious but snatched the Bergen from the boy's grip and was thrusting it down inside the tank when Jiggs cried, ‘Breach! They're through!'

There was a crash as the glass panels directly above the tank and above the two doors on either side burst inwards.

Even though he lost a second or two as he shielded himself from the shower of glass, Will might still have made it if the turret hadn't swivelled around at that point. Taking a step back in surprise, he slipped and fell on his knees.

‘Drake!' Will shouted, reaching out in desperation towards his friend, who was doing the same from the hatch.

Not just glass was falling around Will, but heavier objects.

Armagi.

Something nearly tore Will's arm off as it gripped it with its claws and yanked.

The last thing Drake saw before he slammed the hatch down was the boy being heaved from the rear of the tank by two Armagi as others landed inside the museum.

‘No, no, no, no,' Elliott was wailing and struggling with Drake inside the tank as it moved off. ‘We can't leave him! We have to go back!'

‘I'm sorry. He's gone,' Drake told her, trying to shake some sense into her. ‘There are too many of them.'

‘Drake, I need you on the L94,' Jiggs said, now he was driving instead of operating the tank's chain gun. As he steered through the gates and along the road at the front of the museum, there were dull thuds as Armagi slammed against the hull.