Arena (37 page)
Something stirred beneath her, galvanizing her to action. She pushed up, seized her SI, and stumbled out of the tent, shaking away the dizziness. Then on the riverbank ahead, a mound of rock exploded, the boom reverberating across the valley. Clearly, Inner Realm Trogs had more than crossbows at their disposal.
Mutants were rousing around her now, still groggy enough for her to elude them before they reacted, but gaining their senses all too rapidly. A pair of giants lurched into her path, and she ducked around a tent. But they cut her off, closing in. She shot them both as three newcomers closed from the right. She jerked the SI around, but they fell before she fired. Somebody on the bank ahead was helping.
Racing into the opening, she was hit by another quarrel at the bank’s edge. The blow hurled her down the slope in a rolling, bouncing tumble that ended in the river. Its icy chill shocked away the pain and brought her senses back. She staggered up coughing and dripping, her SI lost. People scrambled onto the opposite bank, aswirl in dust. Figures crouched behind rocks, and the blue-purple spurts of the SIs flashed there and there and there. Others splashed across the river past her. Someone called for her to hurry. As she slogged across the water, a high-pitched whine sliced the tumult and a chair-sized rock at the base of the talus slope began to jump around. She stopped in amazement and watched as it exploded, a wave of hurtling shards flinging her backward into the river. She came up sputtering as gravel banged hard upon her helmet and splashed the water like rain. Staggering onto the bank, she scrambled up the slipping talus under a withering rain of arrows, taking two more hits before she managed to fling herself behind a boulder. Whit crouched there, too, surrounded by expended pink E-cubes. Someone must have fallen for him to have a weapon. He wore no armor, and his dark skin was gray with dust and streaked with sweat and blood.
Drawing her SLuB, Callie peered around the boulder. A three-man rear guard stood on the opposite bank, their body armor and camos blending with the mottled earth. Beyond them Trogs fell on every hand, but for every one that fell, two more staggered upright in the rear. Worse, the rest of the camp had finally organized, two groups now closing rapidly on the defenders’ flanks. A few more minutes and the trio on the bank would be cut off.
Apparently they saw that, for one by one they raced across the river to take up new positions among the boulders. The last was starting across when another rock exploded somewhere behind Callie, pelting them all with fragments.
“Where’s that coming from?” she asked Whit as he fired.
“I don’t know,” he growled. “Why don’t you get to the slit? You can’t do a thing with that SLuB.”
He was right, but she didn’t want to leave. Not yet. “Come on, you guys!” she heard Ian yell from behind. “They’re trying to close the opening!”
“Get out, Cal,” Whit said, firing over the rock.
She ignored him, watching as the last rear guardsman joined his comrades on her side of the river and they scrambled up the slope. She moved aside to make room as Pierce and Gerry dove in beside them, ejecting E-cubes and slapping in new ones as Whit told them what was happening.
“I can’t pinpoint the weapon,” he said.
“They’re doing it telepathically,” Pierce said. And then Callie remembered: The fire curtain produced more than physical mutations— there were mental ones as well. Some mutants could levitate objects, create fire—or cause stones to blow up.
As if in confirmation, another rock exploded, and a whole slab slid free of the cliff wall, crashing down mere yards away from them.
Gerry yelled, “We can’t stay here!”
Two more rocks burst simultaneously to either side of them.
“He’ll get tired,” Pierce said. “This won’t last much longer.”
“Neither will we.”
“I think I know which one it is.” Pierce laid the barrel of his SI across the rock. “I’ll see if I can take him out. Callie, get out of here. I can’t concentrate, and you’re not accomplishing a thing.”
He bent over his weapon, taking aim. Beside him, Gerry and Whit started firing. Already the mutant frontline was spilling down the face of the bank, climbing over the fallen bodies of their comrades without hesitation.
Suddenly Pierce pushed away from the rock, grabbed Callie’s arm, and shoved her toward the cliff wall. “Get
out
of here!”
Another boulder exploded, and they hunkered down, shielding faces and fronts. As the thunder faded, Callie ran.
She hadn’t gone ten steps before a quarrel slammed her to the ground. She came to, struggling to drag air into her lungs and spitting dirt. Pain knifed her chest as she staggered upright, uncertain in the dust where the slit was. And then another explosion ripped out of the rock behind her, the concussion hurling her into the dirt again, battering her with a deluge of rocks and gravel.
Someone yanked Callie up by the arm. As she tried to get her sluggish legs under her, she was shoved through a narrow opening, her helmet clunking the wall, rough rock rasping her shoulder. As the impetus from behind stopped, she staggered toward the dim light ahead and came out in a chamber with twenty-foot ceilings and fire-blackened walls. It smelled of sweat and blood and something foul. Field lamps stood at various spots, casting ghostly illumination throughout the room, as well as the one adjoining it. Across from her, a milk white river of rock, streaked with red crystal, flowed from ceiling to floor. A passage led off beyond it.
People had congregated in the second chamber, four of them laid out on blankets and parkas, six more clustered nearby, moaning. One man’s foot had been smashed to a bloody pulp. Wendell had a quarrel in his rear, and Brody had one in his thigh, which John was in the process of removing. Evvi lolled against the wall behind them, dead eyed, blood trickling ominously from her ears. LaTeisha and one of the women they’d rescued were working on a man who was the source of an awful sucking sound, his chest working grotesquely as he labored to breathe.
John called Callie to help him with Brody, instructing her to hold the gauze padding in place while he wound a bandage around the man’s leg.
Brody’s handsome face was scratched, his dark hair was coated with dust, and he smelled of sweat and faded aftershave. Beneath the shadow of his beard, his jaw muscles rippled over clenched teeth. Still he managed a sneer for her. “I thought this was supposed to be a Safehaven.”
Callie glanced around. He was right—it wasn’t what she’d expected. “There’s probably a door somewhere.” She eyed him again hesitantly. “Do you know what happened to Meg?”
He hissed as John tied off the bandage, shaking his head. “I think she got away with Morg.” John handed him a pair of pain pills and a cup of water. “She was one of the first to go. I was keeping up the rear.” He tossed the pills into his mouth and washed them down with the water.
A series of thunderous explosions rocked the cave, the ground, the air. Dust and rocks cascaded from the ceiling as a new chorus of screams began. But the ceiling held. The dust settled. The rumblings faded.
Tuck emerged through the slit, Whit following closely with a body draped over one shoulder. Gerry barreled in behind them, and he and Tuck turned back to cover the opening. Whit carried his burden to where LaTeisha was finishing with the chest injury and laid it down.
Suddenly everything but that form faded from Callie’s awareness. “No,” she moaned. “Oh, please, no!”
Pierce was laid out on his side, his back to Callie, a crossbow quarrel sticking out of it. The way LaTeisha dropped what she was doing and knelt beside him slew any hope that his injuries weren’t serious. By the time Callie reached him, Teish was slicing through the shoulder straps of his armor to remove the breastplate, and Whit was unfastening its Velcro sides.
“What happened?” LaTeisha asked as Whit lifted the front away. Though there was little blood, Pierce’s skin gleamed an unhealthy gray.
“Rocks blew right beside him,” Whit said. “Threw him into the cliff like a rag doll.”
“There’s probably internal injuries, then.” She lifted away his undershirt, revealing the quarrel’s head protruding from his chest. Blood streaked the skin around it. “And he’s going into shock. Okay, we’ll cut off the back and pull it through.”
Swaying with nausea, Callie averted her eyes. Her hands hurt from clenching each other.
After Teish removed the back of the shaft, Whit pulled the quarrel through Pierce’s chest, blood puddling the ground beneath it. Muttering about the filth in which they worked, LaTeisha applied gauze pads and strips of torn undershirt to the wound.
“Here, roll him onto his back—”
“Where’s the Safehaven?” Whit asked.
“Ian’s searching for a passage now,” LaTeisha said. “Oh, look at this—busted ribs. And maybe a ruptured spleen. He needs a hospital.”
Pierce coughed, and bright blood foamed over his lip. Callie turned and fled, bouncing off Ian as he came around the flowstone curtain.
“The passage!” she said, grabbing his arms. “Did you find it?”
“No. There doesn’t—”
“Then we have to keep searching!”
“Callie, there isn’t any passage.”
She gaped at him.
“There are only three rooms here,” he said, waving a big rawboned hand. “They’re all dead ends.”
“That can’t be.”
But it was. Callie examined all three passages herself. Two were obvious dead ends. The third led into a crawlway that accessed a room behind the main chamber. Gerry was already there, in the process of conducting his own search.
Their field lamps cast bright circles around them, sluing off a ceiling hung with ranks of short flowstone draperies and glistening nets of redorange crystals. To the left, tiny blue-green box crystals encrusted an entire wall, but at the top of a talus slope ahead, the light bounced off flat ochre rock. A dank mineral smell tainted the air.
“The manual said something about the Devil’s Window and the Blood of Sacrifice,” she said.
“Well, if the arch is the Devil’s Window,” Gerry drawled, hands on his hips, “we’re under it.” He looked around. “There’s a breeze in here. Feel it? Must be another opening.”
“Could that be the Blood?” She spotlighted the red crystals on the ceiling.
“Where’s the door?”
She swept the room again with her lamp.
“Maybe we have to ask,” Gerry suggested.
But their request only faded into silence. No device glowed in the wall, no door opened, not even the air stirred. She clenched her teeth against the scream trying to rip out of her throat and said, “Maybe we missed something in the other passages. Or maybe we should try asking there.”
But though she went back again, and again after that, nothing had changed. There was still no device, no door, no way to get through. When she returned to the main chamber, Pierce had regained consciousness. As she knelt beside him he tried a smile—the effect was ghastly.
“You’re not dead,” he whispered.
“No.”
“I thought you were.” His voice rasped like dry leaves. He seemed distant and distracted. “My belt went off. . . .” He lay listless and horribly gray, a vacant gleam in his eyes. “I guess you didn’t find the passage?”
She brushed hair back from his bloodstained face, desperate to touch him. His skin was cold, clammy. “No.”
Disappointment flitted across his face and vanished as if forgotten.
She told him about the red crystals in the central room. “I’m thinking that could be the Blood of Sacrifice. Remember that passage in the manual?”
He swallowed. “I’m thirsty.”
Catching her lip between her teeth, she went to get him some water. LaTeisha stopped her on the way back. “He can’t have that, Cal. He’s bleeding internally. If you give him—” She glanced at Pierce, then at the men by the slit, and sighed deeply. “Never mind. You might as well make him as comfortable as you can.”
She went back to stitching up a gashed arm. Callie stared after her, cold to the core. By the time she got back to Pierce, she was shaking. It was all she could do to lift the vessel to his lips and let him sip.
The water revived him. He wanted more, but she refused. After that he grew restless, his gaze shifting around the room. He reached for her arm, his grip weak and so very cold. “Did you find the passage?”
“Not yet.” She felt brittle, unreal, as if this were a very bad dream from which she would soon awaken.
“The Door of Hope,” he quoted, “lies beneath the Devil’s Window, where the water of life mingles with the Blood of Sacrifice. . . .” He coughed and that bright foamy blood flecked his lips. She wiped it away with her fingers, rubbed them on her pants leg.
“I shouldn’t have walked through the curtain,” he said. “That’s why this happened. My belt was off. If your belt’s off, you can’t see.”
She squeezed his hand.
He smiled. “You know, for not being able to die in this world, this sure is uncomfortable.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’re not going to die.”
“Don’t worry. They’ll send someone else.”
“I don’t
want
anyone else!”
His eyes fixed upon her gravely. His bloodied hand touched her cheek, fell to her shoulder, and slid down her arm. “Do you have your key?”
“Of course.”
“Well, then—” He swallowed and his eyes wandered away. “You should open the door.”
“We don’t know where it is.”
“He who has eyes to see . . .” His voice dropped to a whisper.
“. . . let him see . . .”
“There’s nothing here.”
“It’s here.” His hand fell to his side, and he faded before her, his eyes half closing, his breathing so shallow that for a moment she feared he was dead.
Gerry returned with her to the central chamber, and they searched every inch of it. Nothing. She ended up back at the wall atop the talus slope, where she pulled out her key and touched the smooth surface— here, and here, and here. Still nothing. She asked again and was reduced in the end to tearful pleading.
Gerry stood by silently, his lamp aimed at the floor.
“If Pierce was here,” she said, “I’m sure
he’d
see something—”
