The Vengeance of the Tau (14 page)

“You don’t believe. I didn’t, either. I … didn’t want to.”

Above them, Kamir’s bullets continued to echo, certain not to last for much longer.

“We don’t have much choice, in any event,” Blaine said, unwrapping her packages of plastic explosives.

“You’re still going to seal the entrance?”

“We let them come down here after us, we’re dead. You wanna choose?”

“There’s got to be
something
!”

“Right. I’m holding it.”

McCracken had the first packet open now. The explosives looked like a chunk of khaki-colored clay. The detonator was wrapped in plastic alongside.

“Nice equipment. My compliments. Transistorized detonator would suit our needs better, though.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Depends on how long it takes you to locate that secret passage out of here your father found.”

Melissa’s eyes swept the darkness around the chamber. “It must have closed after we pulled … him up. Damn!”

“How long?”

She thought fast. “A minute! I’ll need a minute.”

McCracken wedged the detonator into the first mound of
plastique
and set it to
1:00.
“That’s all you’re gonna get.”

He repeated the process with the second mound and wedged both of them against the front wall, making sure the opening above was centered between the two packets of explosives. The blast would blow the walls outward in a way that would ensure that the entire ceiling would collapse, filling this chamber with tons of rubble.

Kamir’s protective gunfire, meanwhile, had ceased. The enemy would be on its way down into the excavation above soon, if they weren’t already. McCracken activated the first detonator and the second right after it.

:59, :58, :57 …

“Oh, Melly, the clock’s ticking and we’re gonna take quite a licking if you don’t find that doorway.”

She was feeling with her hands about the same area where her father had been standing right before he found the hidden door, fighting to recall what little the tape had shown her.

:40, :39, :38 …

McCracken was at her side now, pistol aimed upward, ready to fire at any shape that showed itself. At last she found something that felt like a handhold and pressed. With almost no effort at all, a large portion of the massive wall receded outward with a grinding sound. She aimed her flashlight down and saw the staircase her father had died on. She looked back at Blaine.

:26, :25, :24 …

He nodded, and she stepped through the threshold onto a small plateau at the top of the stairs. McCracken stopped just behind her and started to work the door closed again.

“Why bother?”

“So no unfriendly boulders follow us down here. Blast percussion alone could shatter the foundation of these steps, if we leave an airway.”

It took almost no effort at all to ease the door back into the wall until the seal was tight.

:08, :07, :06 …

McCracken pressed Melissa against the wall and shielded her with his frame an instant before the explosion sounded.

Melissa had been around many blasts in her life from the time she was a child, but never anything like this. It felt as though she were on the inside instead of the outside, and the whole of her innards rumbled and shook with the debris caving inward in the chamber beyond. She pressed herself closer against McCracken. She couldn’t catch her breath. The world was shaking around her. Then there was silence, utter and empty.

She felt Blaine McCracken ease her slowly away from him.

“Only one way to go now,” he said.

And together they gazed down the steep steps into a black abyss.

“How many steps down was your father when …”

“Forty.”

“You’re sure? It’s important.”

“I counted from the tape.”

The stairs were just over four feet wide. The walls on either side of them stretched upward into the darkness; the effect created that of a tunnel funneling down. McCracken started to descend, flashlight carving a slim pathway of light from the darkness. The air was cold and … empty. Yes, he thought, that was it. Not damp or musty or dry—just empty.

Blaine took the steps carefully, testing what lay ahead of him the way a man on a tightrope might. His own silent count was approaching the thirty mark, when he heard Melissa gasp.

“Easy,” he soothed, as his flashlight joined hers on the bottom of the staircase.

The beams captured the bloody residue of what might have been Benson Hazelhurst.

Melissa had drawn to within a single step of McCracken. “It happened ten more steps down. That’s where my father was killed.”

Blaine drew his flashlight slowly along the remaining twenty stairs lying between them and the bottom.

“Back up,” he told Melissa.

She didn’t question him this time. McCracken retreated upward a few steps, staying in front of her. His hand rubbed against either wall the whole time, feeling for any sort of change in their surfaces. He had retraced a dozen steps when he stopped and took his hand from the wall.

“We’ll be safe now,” he said without further explanation.

“What? What are you talking about? We can’t get out this way. You said so yourself.”

“That’s not why we’re climbing up.”

“I don’t understand.”

Blaine leaned over and felt about the steps.

“What are you looking for?” Melissa asked him.

“A decent-sized chunk of stone or rock.”

“What for?”

“I want to test something out.”

“Let me see what I can do.”

She pulled a hammer and chisel from her shoulder pack and chopped away at a section of the wall. A fragment the size and shape of a wide shoe came free in her hands, and she gave it to McCracken.

“You said your father took ten more steps,” he said, gazing downward.

“Yes, from where you
were
standing. Not anymore.”

Blaine aimed the flashlight that way. “Okay.” He counted the steps out in his mind, then gave his flashlight to Melissa. “Aim both beams straight down,” he said, adjusting her hands. “Right there.”

He stood in the center of the step, the fragment of the wall held in both hands. He tested its weight and then measured off an underhand toss. Melissa watched it float out of his hands and impact on the same step Benson Hazelhurst had reached when his screams began.

Suddenly huge segments of both walls slammed inward toward each other, starting six steps down from them and continuing all the way to the bottom of the staircase. It happened so fast that it took an extra second for Melissa to see the gray steel spikes that had popped out in evenly spaced rows along both walls.

The deadly steel teeth glimpsed in the recording,
she realized. Once again the Dream Dragons had proven not to be real. But the nightmare continued.

The walls closed together, with the length of the spikes the only distance left between them. Then they began to chum sideways, working against each other.

Melissa thought of her father trapped between them and felt consciousness briefly sliding away.

The spikes had been fitted on each wall symmetrically to create gaps that merged when the walls melded. The pressure exerted was incredible. Anything caught between them …

“My father,” she said over the ear-wrenching grinding sounds beneath her, picturing him impaled by the spikes and then torn apart. She shuddered. A lump rose into her throat and choked her breath.

“You okay, Melly?”

“The others, too,” she managed faintly.

“And not a monster in sight.”

Suddenly the spikes receded into their hidden slots and the movable walls slid back into place. Impossible to tell where the deadly sections began and ended.

“You knew,” she said suddenly.

“The walls felt different after a certain point. Chalkier, not as cold.” His expression softened. “And I had the advantage of viewing the tape of your father a lot less emotionally.”

“We’re still trapped.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You don’t
what
?”

“Where are your archaeological eyes, Melly? Grooves were cut in those walls to match up with the steps. Accordingly, a gap was left on the bottom where there were no spikes.”

“So?”

“So that’s how we’re going to get through. Like this,” McCracken said, lowering himself onto his stomach. His body was suspended across four different steps like a snake’s.

“The walls will crush us.”

“No. Even if the trap springs, we can make it. It’ll be a tight squeeze, but we can still make it. And if we avoid putting any pressure on the trigger points, the walls might not be activated at all.”

She tried to smile. “You do this kind of thing every day?”

“Every other.”

McCracken squeezed her shoulder and dropped once more to his stomach, single flashlight in hand. The flatter he made himself, the more evenly his weight would be distributed, thereby increasing his chances of not tripping the trap. He slid down to the last step reached on his original descent and gazed back at Melissa. She had lowered herself just as he had.

“Grab my ankles now and hold on. Let me pull you. Don’t raise your head, and keep your eyes closed.”

McCracken started on again, feeling her dead weight tugging behind him, thumping down the steps in his wake. He pulled himself across the last step Benson Hazelhurst had touched, especially wary now. If his assumptions were correct, pressure on any of the steps remaining to the bottom would activate the deadly spiked walls. The movable walls extended several steps higher to ensure that entire parties would be caught in the trap once the member most advanced had sprung it. That accounted for the bodies of Winchester’s killers all lying at the bottom.

Blaine’s torso crossed over the death-promising steps effortlessly, finding a rhythm.

It was working! It
would
work!

Blaine’s hands probed ahead, easing his slithering descent. He could hear Melissa’s soft moans behind him, could feel her hands latch around his ankles. The next moment he sensed her fingers had slipped off, and she lost her grip on one of his legs. She began flailing around, searching to regain her hold.

“No!” he started.
“No!”

It was too late. In struggling to regain her grip, Melissa had dropped the entire weight of her shoulders on one of the deadly steps. The spikes snapped outward once more in the next instant, as the walls slammed toward each other. Blaine felt them stop with barely an inch to spare above him. Then the grinding began.
Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth …

“Stay down!” he yelled up at Melissa, never sure if she heard him.

The spikes scraped at the top of his clothes. He could feel them flirting with his hair. Above him Melissa was screaming. Blaine tried to push himself backward toward her, probe out with his feet and hope that she retained enough reason to grab on to his ankles once more.

“Come on, Melly,” he said, knowing she couldn’t hear him. “You can do it. You can do it. …”

McCracken got one of his legs too high and a pair of spikes sliced through his flesh. He grimaced, but kept pushing his feet backward until he struck something.

“Grab hold, Melly!” he yelled above the awful grinding. “Do you hear me? Grab hold!”

It took another second, but she latched on even tighter than before. Then he started his downward motion again. Before him, his flashlight illuminated the spikes gnawing the air. He had the sensation he was trapped in the mouth of some great beast, fighting to avoid its teeth.

At last his hands touched a hard stone floor at the foot of the stairway. He dropped the flashlight and the beam swirled to one side, catching more mutilated remains in its spill. McCracken continued to squirm along the floor and felt his hands swishing through the blood and gore the deadly trap had discarded down here yesterday. He steeled his mind against the stench and focused on Melissa’s hands still locked on his ankles. He was safe, but she was anything but.

Blaine angled to the right and kept pulling. He was able to gaze back now and saw her stiff form thudding down the last of the steps, only her booted feet and ankles still beneath the grinding spikes. She cleared the final step too dazed to know she was safe. Her hands still held his ankles in a desperate grip. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut. Blaine turned onto his back and sat up.

“It’s over,” he said, loosening her hold on his legs. “We made it.”

She opened her eyes and looked up at him with a blank stare. He gently lifted her to a sitting position and cupped her chin in his hands.

“Are you okay?”

Still rigid, she pulled herself to her knees and then stood up. Behind them, the spikes snapped back into their slots and the walls receded.

“I … think so.”

Blaine wrapped an arm around her shoulder and eased her away from the carnage. He stopped to retrieve the flashlight he had dropped and aimed the beam down the corridor to the left. The corridor sloped downward, but beyond that, the light showed nothing. It could have gone on forever or ended a hundred feet away.

“You’re hurt,” Melissa realized, seeing the blood seeping through his torn pants leg. “Let me have a look at that.”

She leaned over and inspected the gash. “I’ll need to dress and bandage this. Sit down.”

Blaine did so gingerly, as Melissa pulled a first-aid kit from a large pouch in her vest. McCracken was astonished.

“What else do you keep up your sleeve, or should I say vest, Melly?”

She ignored his attempt at humor. “You don’t believe it, do you?” she asked him, and started to clean the wound with alcohol-soaked cotton. “You don’t believe we’re standing very near to the entrance to hell.”

“I’ve seen hell plenty of times, Melly, and it’s got nothing to do with secret underground passages.”

“Oh, but it does,” she continued, starting on the bandage and dressing now. “You see, centuries before Christ was even born, our ancestors had no knowledge of a fallen angel named Lucifer. Instead they believed in the concept of two equal gods, one good and the other evil. Ancient writings tell of a vast underground temple where the evil god made his headquarters. The concept of it is nothing new. Archaeological dig teams have been searching for centuries in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq.”