What I hadn't counted on was the size of the explosion.
The blast slammed me against the base of the altar, and I felt both legs fly out from under me. The ball of flame engulfed the cavern and raced up the walls of the cave, consuming the oxygen and blowing the timeless creatures from their stone cocoons like so many pieces of useless debris.
Bert Johnson was burned and bleeding, staggering toward me, screaming out Polly's name. He still clutched the oversized revolver. Angie was behind him on the floor, scorched, her gaping mouth belching out the last vestige of life.
Bert suddenly stopped, steadied himself and leveled the gun at me. It was his final gesture.
Bert fired, and I heaved the second container at the same time.
The ensuing explosion was louder, bigger and more devastating than the first. For one terrifying moment I was at ground zero. The cavern became a white hot world of blast furnace proportions. The tumbling, madly careening ball of flame swelled up until it consumed itself.
Bert Johnson was instantly incinerated.
Choking, acrid gas and smoke filled the cavern, fanned by wild winds now roaring through the maze of connecting tunnels to fill the sudden vacuum.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Polly. One moment she was there, the next she wasn't; only a charred, deformed, grotesque shape remained.
The walls began to rupture, spewing massive chunks of jagged granite and cascading a violent rain of rocks and debris down on the frenzied beasts.
My only refuge was the small space between the two stone supports for Sate's sepulcher. I buried my face in my arms, felt the searing heat and prayed.
There was a chain of explosions. Boulders and chunks and fragments of the subterranean world synthesized into a deadly rain of destruction.
And just as suddenly, it was over.
It was the ultimate irony. The sarcophagus of Sate, Ancient of Ancients, Force of the Consummate Evil, had been my protector.
The area was a choking world of dust and fog, the damp grayness rushing in to fill the void and mingling to form a mask, a cloud, a cloak. Then there was silence.
The carnage was indescribable.
Everything had been destroyed.
Slowly, almost frantically, I began to inch my way out from under the sepulcher and claw my way through the rubble. The immensity of the situation was mind boggling.
I stood in a gray world void of detail and bathed in an eerie unreal silence. My numbed fingers fumbled along the length of the still intact utility belt looking for the flashlight until my fingers discovered it.
Praise the Lord, it worked.
The probing pale yellow beam ricocheted from one pile of rubble to the next. The scene was numbing. It resembled a battlefield. Charred remains of Korbac's army of generals were everywhere. The hooded true believers were now little more than piles of purposeless ashes. The still eviscerated mortal remains of the young officer Gregory were mercifully partially hidden by a jagged chunk of granite.
The final moments of Bert and Polly Johnson, along with the young woman called Angie, would forever remain a brooding secret. Little more than charred and twisted fragments of their once human forms remained.
I played the beam of light across the scene of devastation until my stomach revolted and the horrible realization of what I was witnessing stuck in my throat. As I slumped to my knees in the debris, I caught a barely perceptible movement out of the corner of my eye.
The beam of my flashlight snapped up and captured it.
It was Kelto, his face shredded into meaty ribbons of tortured flesh. His arms were outstretched and draped between them was a shapeless tangle of rotted rags. He stared dumbly into the light.
"My God, Kelto," I blurted, "you're alive."
"Is that really you, Mr. Wages?" he sobbed.
It was then that I realized that his eyes were open, but there was no way for him to see. The blast had burned out his eyes.
"I have it," he stammered. "I have it right here in my hands."
I staggered through the rubble toward him.
"After the first explosion I came out of hiding and ran for the sepulcher. I managed to get it open. I grabbed Sate and held onto him." His tortured voice was almost ecstatic. Then the laughter faded away into agonized sobs. "Now I have him — have him right here in my arms — but now I can't see him. After all this time. I can't see him. Tell me, Mr. Wages, tell me — what does he look like? What does my tormentor look like?"
I shined the beam of my flashlight into the tangle of rotted rags.
It was a grotesque and macabre collection of human parts, a pile of rotted, foul-smelling human odds and ends, a putrid assemblage of what the true believers and Emissaries had surgically collected over the agonized years. It was the pathetic, sick attempts of the followers to give a man long since dead the attributes of life.
I looked up into Kelto's seared and useless eye sockets. Tears of frustration streamed down his anguished face.
"Tell me," he pleaded, "what does he look like?" Consummate agony had invaded his voice.
Then I realized, once again, every plot has one final twist, one final bit of bitter irony.
"You are a true believer, too, aren't you?"
Kelto sagged wearily to his knees in the debris. Racking sobs engulfed his frail body. The admission was barely audible. "I tried not to be," he quaked, "but as I walked in these very woods, plotting my revenge, the hatred began to dissipate. It was subtle at first, only a question, but then I realized why the beasts did not attack me. They somehow realized that I was an emerging vehicle of Sate, that without me and others like me there would be no release from their curse of atonement." His trembling voice trailed off. "You must tell me, what does he look like? How magnificent he must be. Imagine… in my arms, I shelter the Ancient of Ancients."
Those were the last words he uttered.
There was one last tortured breath, and then there was silence.
The cluttered tangle of decaying human parts and mildewed rags trickled out of his arms and hands, spilling into the rubble and mingling with the dust.
For a moment I played the beam of light over Kelto's lifeless body and the barbarous collection of Sate's heathenish zealots.
Then I pulled myself together and began the long, arduous climb out.
PART 12
AN EPILOGUE
Cosmo's prickly sense of humor, coupled with his penchant for thoroughness in exploring every last detail, was beginning to get on my nerves. He had listened to the story of Chambers Bay, from start to finish, no less than five times. He was like an overzealous lawyer, probing, poking, searching through the seemingly endless fragments, looking for something that would allow him to pronounce the whole affair just so much bullshit.
I knew the old curmudgeon too well.
"Okay," he harumphed, "then what happened?"
"I've told you a dozen times already," I moaned. Having to endure one of Cosmo's relentless interrogations is bad enough under any circumstances. But when you're flat on your back, staring up at the wildhaired old coot from a hospital bed, it's even worse than bad; it's downright devastating.
"So tell me again," he snarled.
"Like I said, Kelto was dead. I saw that stuff crumble out of his hands and decided there was nothing more I could do for him, so I started to crawl my way out of there. That must have been when I passed out."
"Then what?"
"I figure I must have been out for quite awhile, because when I came to, there was daylight streaming in on all that rubble."