Catacombs (57 page)

For several seconds they leaned precariously but in balance, forming a rough pyramid. Then the floor shuddered and the middle vault tipped, dropped out, and began to roll, slowly. It resembled a big hollow glass log with Clarke trapped in the middle of it. The vault rolled down a gentle incline toward a furiously hot mass of lava-like incandescent scar tissue running jaggedly through the chamber.

The tilt of the slab of floor on which Belov was lying shielded him and Erika from the worst of the heat from the magma scar. But as the massive rolling vault came within twenty feet of the glowing molten rock, taking on a glow itself, there was a puff of grayish smoke inside, as if someone had touched a lighted match to a moth in a jar. Clarke, suddenly a jet of flame from head to toe, was consumed in a matter of seconds. Moments after that the vault, containing an untold fortune in red diamonds, wallowed in the magma and slowly melted.

Erika's hair was smoldering, but she had freed his hands at last.

Their skin had begun to blister. Belov sat up and pushed her toward a port that opened onto the central core, shouting words neither of them could hear. He felt only the pain in his head, and heard nothing but a dismal low roar. Erika stumbled up, swiping at her hair with her hands, and ran.

Belov got his feet loose, wrapped the painfully hot photo transmitter in scraps of cloth and snatched it up, hugged it under one arm. He saw a block of photos on the floor; they had stuck together in the heat. He retrieved those, along with a few more photos that didn't look too bad, picked up Clarke's revolver by the butt, and ran after Erika. The soles of his boots felt sticky. He could no longer breathe in this inferno.

His lungs were raw, they felt stuffed full of sandpaper. With each dragging step he expected to suffer Clarke's fate and burst into flame.

The port to the central core was like a chimney, roaring with hot air and bits of ash at almost hurricane velocity. He crept through on hands and knees, nearly blind and deaf, pushing the photo transmitter ahead of him, and tumbled out into the relative coolness of the core.

Erika was there, face blank as a robot's. Some of her hair was in char. Her face was a mass of blisters. Her lips had swollen to twice their normal size. She lifted him up.

“Look”! she said. He had to read her lips to understand her.

The dynamic core was glowing with a new intensity, a deep pink blush. Hundreds of multicolored fireballs quivered around it.

Erika was trembling. She put her mouth to his ear. He dimly made out what she was saying.

"It's as if it's always been alive but dying now. Like the rest of us."

"You're not dying, Erika!" Belov shouted. "And we'll get out of here. Just walk!"

She shook her head sadly. Belov saw that she could absorb no more of this particular ordeal, and he wondered what hell she'd been through in the past month or so.

He twisted her arm painfully, but there was no response. He held her head up then, and made her look at him. Then he kissed her swollen lips.

Where force had failed, tenderness took effect. Something stirred in her eyes, a flicker of acknowledgment of the need to survive. Erika touched his own lips with her fingertips.

Yes.

"Let's go then."

A temblor hit; they were shaken. They stood their ground with only each other for support, then began to climb the path winding around the core, one sore dragging step at a time.

R
aun, Jade, and Lem Meztizo pushed on into the Catacombs despite the violence happening below, which was transmitted in jarring waves through solid rock, audible as a low tortuous booming that painfully assaulted the eardrums.

But inside was better than outside, where a dusky blizzard sharp as glass was blowing through the cul-de-sac, illuminated by bitter blue flashes of lightning. Raun went first, remembering the way, through the twisting, cloacal passage. Jade had a flashlight; the beam filled the passage with light. Lem carried one of the Kalashnikov rifles, all he had salvaged from the wrecked copter.

"How far?" Jade asked, as they were slowed by a tight turn and a narrowing of the passage that forced them to their hands and knees.

"I think–just a few feet. Then there's–a little chamber, with more of the striped walls."

He held the light over her shoulder as she stopped to rest, saw the reflections from obsidian.

"There it is."

"My God, what if this place–falls in on us?"

"Seems intact so far. No loose rock. Now, let's move."

They crawled another twenty feet and were able to stand. The chamber had a floor that sloped gradually up to a dozen vertical arabesques, six or seven feet high, on the uneven face of the wall opposite them.

"It's one of those markings," Raun said, looking around. "Third from the left?" She went scrambling up the tilted floor toward the wall.

As Raun reached the cleft in the rock face, Jade swung his flashlight beam toward it. Something stirred inside the cleft. Raun screamed and backed away. Simon Ovosi, his clothing in tatters, bloody slashes on his body and face, lunged at her, the knife with the five-inch blade raised high.

Jade was too distant to be of any use to Raun. Behind him Lem said sharply, "Matt!"

He threw himself out of the way and the Kalashnikov in Lem's hands blazed for a second and a half. All of the slugs hit Simon in the head and chest, stopping him. The blade that struck Raun on the shoulder had lost much of its force, and it spilled from his hand as Simon made a half turn on rubber knees and collapsed, rolling downhill toward Jade.

Raun held her shoulder, grimacing, and leaned against the wall, staring at the body.

"Who is that?"

Jade
 
got to her as she began to tremble.

"Hurt bad?"

"He cut me. But I don't think– No, it's not too bad."

She took her hand away from the slash on the ball of her right shoulder. Her fingers were bloody.

"What's going on here?"

Jade threw the light into the cleft from which Simon had emerged. There was blood on the walls, as if he'd been lurking there for some time. On the other side of the opening his light picked up part of a wall of ancient mummies.

"Raun, take a look."

She glanced in, then turned her head sharply away.

"Yes. That's it. As much as I ever saw of the Catacombs. I wouldn't–couldn't go in there with those things."

She looked fearfully into Jade's eyes.

"So–do I have to go now?"

"We'd better stick together, Raun."

Lem was kneeling beside the body of Simon Ovosi. He looked up.

"Matt, these slashes–he might have done it to himself, with his own knife. I don't think he was in a fight."

"What about an animal?"

"Well, it's possible."

"Leave him and come on." To Raun Jade said with a slight smile, "Me first this time."

"Gladly."

She was panting; they all were. It was difficult to draw a full breath. And, following the shock of the attack, the blood of her wound, Raun felt nauseated and light-headed. Her skin was dazzling cold.

Jade
 
saw it coming on and made her sit with her head between her knees. He left Lem to guard her with the Kalashnikov and proceeded through the final short passage into the first of the Catacomb chambers. The walls were ringed with hideous, not altogether-human remains. His light gleamed on tawny faces, broken fangs, rudimentary claws.

It was hot in the chamber. His face was streaming. He stumbled across the big-bore rifle Simon Ovosi had dropped, and picked it up. The rifle had recently been fired. Three cartridges left. Along one wall there were some bulky field packs, one of which contained excellent cameras and miles of unexposed 35-millimeter film. Another contained water in canteens, a loaf of plastic explosive, and a timer-detonator. He also found two large cylinders of oxygen.

"Lem; bring Raun." He already had learned that it was needless to raise your voice here. A whisper carried surprisingly far.

He gave Raun oxygen from a cylinder, and went exploring.

There was a second chamber. A strong draft of warm air, faintly tinged with hydrogen sulfide gas, was coming from somewhere. He searched the oblong room carefully.

In an altar area littered with relics of prehistory he discovered a crude passage with stone steps that dropped fifteen feet, then widened and angled toward an unknown light source. The Catacombs shuddered and fumed. Jade turned his head away from the updraft of unhealthy air and coughed retchingly. When the mountain settled down again he thought he heard voices, but could not distinguish words, from below.

He started to descend into the tight stairwell, which had a diameter of less than six feet. He hesitated, then went back for Raun and Lem and the cylinders of oxygen. On impulse he also shouldered the pack which contained the water and explosives.

N
ear the third level on their way up and out of the Catacombs, Erika and Belov found the cylinder of oxygen abandoned by Tiernan Clarke in his impatience to get to the bloodstones.
 
Between them, they nearly exhausted the remaining liters of the life-preserving oxygen.

The air in the core, already thin, had steadily worsened in quality, but it was still breathable. But they were both so depleted by the physical ordeal that their limbs had begun to tremble erratically as they dragged themselves up the helical path. When they tried to crawl they found themselves going in blundering irrational circles like insects dazed by the power of the core, moving around and around each other instead of making steady progress toward the top. Their brains had been starved for oxygen.

Belov looked at his watch while they rested. There was time, but barely enough time, for him to make his rendezvous with the satellite. The volcano was still shaking the Catacombs. But he didn't believe there would be further danger from the viscous, slowly extruded magma that had split the floor of the Repository.

Erika, however, was staring at the core, her jaw sagging, her face almost a parody of stunned surprise. The core had changed, in less than half an hour, from pinkish-white to a claret shade. The light had changed accordingly; only the myriad swarming fireballs retained their plasmic brilliance.

Erika and Belov's faces, having suffered too much abuse, now looked sinister and ghoulish. And, mysteriously, the core, the path, the walls around them, appeared subtly misshapen. It was as if they had breathed in too much oxygen too quickly, precipitating hallucinations, a waking nightmare.

"What is it, Erika?”

Belov's ears still rang from the bludgeoning he had taken; he couldn't hear himself speak too well. His words sounded distorted, as if he were hearing a recording played, irritatingly, at slightly the wrong speed. When he raised a hand it felt heavier, weighted. The tilt of his head toward the core was a little ponderous. Only enough to puzzle, not to frighten him.

"Do you think it'll explode?"

"I don't know. All the laws–of physics break down here. I told you–that the core was beyond any means of physical calculation. It's not made of any material we've ever encountered. It exists. It's here. But–what in God's universe can it be? And what is it doing now?"

"Obvious that it's reached some sort of crisis," he said dully.

"I think–the core must be vibrating tremendously faster, setting up a resonance that eventually could vaporize tungsten steel. Or crystalline carbon. That's why we're heavier. Slower."

"I don't understand."

"As the core vibrates–one hundred, two hundred trillion times a second, time and space and matter are distorted around it. Eventually the core will simply vanish. Long before that happens, we'll be frozen in place, unable to move away from it. Then we'll be pulled apart, separated into atoms. I thought the volcano precipitated this crisis in the core. But it could be just the other way around. The crisis could have something to do with all the stones that are missing, or destroyed. We always felt that it was a–a very great risk to remove them from their vaults, even for short periods of study."

"Why?"

"You had to–live in here for a while, absorb the rhythm of the Catacombs, in order to understand. It's always been a living, not a dead place. Until now. We've destroyed it, somehow."

Belov stared at Erika's face, which looked as dark as if he were viewing it through an infrared filter. The waning of the light had been troubling him for some time. It was difficult to judge emotions in the flat red light, but she looked rational, just a little frightened by her own surmise.

When he moved to touch her, the slight bothersome heaviness, as if his hand were being held back by a puppeteer's string, caused a buzz of alarm near his heart. He pulled Erika to her feet and picked up the photo transmitter. Tiernan Clarke's big magnum revolver, the heavy chrome frame a smear of pink, was tucked into his waistband.

Belov saw, as they labored upward, that the fireballs clinging to the core had decreased in number and size. And the strangeness, his sense of distortion and dislocation, grew. Despite the brutal red glow of the core he felt drawn to it, as if every atom of his being longed to merge with it. He might have been experiencing the first stages of nitrogen narcosis–a heady, heedless rapture, subtly orgasmic.