“What the hell?” he asked.
Tom flashed his headlamp across each tunnel. “The marks couldn’t have simply disappeared. Besides, I watched Billie follow Genevieve and Elise into this tunnel only ten minutes ago.” He shined his headlamp onto the ground, where a few small handprints remained. “See, these would have been made by Elise.”
Sam’s gaze swept the ground of the cavern. He looked closer at what he was seeing and felt the prickly finger of fear tease him as understanding finally reached his mind. The ground was completely smooth. Far too much so to be natural. The rest of the cavern floor showed a multitude of pockmarks and deep indents where dripping water had eroded the ground. In front of him were tiny grooves in the sand.
He touched it with his hand. His fingers easily penetrated the loose sand. A wry smile curled his lips, as though he’d finally discovered the answer to a great mystery. Only the discovery itself almost certainly confirmed his worst fears.
Sam said, “Someone’s intentionally raked this area. By the looks of things, they’ve done so after the girls went through here.”
“Which means, either they didn’t want us to know where the girls went, or they intentionally made sure we couldn’t escape.” Tom flipped the safety on his Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun over to F for fully automatic. “Either way, I think they lost their rights to a fair fight.”
“You might be right, although I’m not sure who we’re fighting yet.”
The sound of four hundred warriors charging echoed like thunder through the cavern. A sign their pursuers were still closing in on them.
Sam said, “All right, we can’t go back the way we came. We’ll keep moving and see if we can find a way out. They can’t have raked the entire cavern since the girls went through this way.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Tom said. “You head to the left and I’ll go right. We’ll meet back here as soon as we find something.”
Sam nodded. “Good luck.”
By the time Sam reached the edge of the three separate tunnels that headed to the right, he heard Tom call out to him.
“I’ve got something.”
Sam raced along on his hands and knees. “Where?”
Tom pointed, using his flashlight to shine directly on the hand and knee marks in the sand. “What do you think?”
“It looks like only one person went through this way.”
“Could it have been Billie?”
“I don’t know. It might have been, or they could have come from whoever tried to cover the tracks in the sand to make us lose our way down here. Either way, we’re going to have company any minute now.”
Tom shrugged, as though he would deal with whatever company they had when it reached them. “So, we follow it?”
“Yeah.”
Tom, already ahead of him, led the way through the shallow and relatively narrow cavern. It meandered around a series of stalagmites that were larger than either man, before heading in a straight line for more than forty feet, and then making a sharp turn to the left.
It was the first sign they’d deviated from the route they’d taken on the way in, and Sam instantly knew there was something wrong. Behind him, the sound of the pursuing Pirahã tribe was getting louder. They no longer whistled in a soft, melodic way. Instead they were chanting something. The words were incomprehensible, but there was no doubt about their purpose — this was a war cry.
Sam said, “Not to rush you or anything, but our company’s nearly here.”
“Just a minute,” Tom replied. “I think I can see an opening up ahead.”
Sam rounded the next corner and the shallow tunnel opened into a sizeable oval shaped room. It was approximately thirty feet long by twenty wide. He was able to stand up. The entire room — and he thought room not cavern — had been excavated using hand-tools. Rough grooves and indents covered the walls and floors, where rocks and simple tools had been used to hollow out the area. The ubiquitous crystals that had made up most of the rest of the caverns beneath the Tepui Mountains had been removed, and only one single stalagmite remained in the center of the room, as though it had been required to support the ceiling nearly fifteen feet above.
On this giant stalagmite, a man had been bound by his wrist and ankles. The skin over his wrists had been worn off, as though he’d fought to free himself in vain, by pulling his hands through the electrical cable ties. Unable to free himself, the wretched man had spent his last efforts alive staring at something on the wall directly opposite him.
Sam’s eyes darted to the wall. There was a large TV monitor. Ninety inches at least. A complete anachronism in an underground temple built entirely by hand using rudimentary tools. The monitor displayed multiple images from secret digital cameras recording video throughout the temple and its maze of stalagmites, stalactites, and giant quartz crystals.
His eyes returned to the remains of the bound wretch. Two bullet holes wept blood from the man’s chest. It meant that whoever killed him did so only minutes earlier.
His dead eyes were fixed in a state of abject horror.
Sam felt his stomach churn with fear and a sinister and pervasive sense of impending disaster, as he spotted that the man’s eyes were a deep violet color.
There was only one other person he’d ever met who had eyes like that. Her name was Elise, and as far as he knew, she descended directly from the ancient race of Master Builders.
Tom said, “What do you think?”
Sam swallowed. “I don’t know, but it raises the question — has there been a quarrel among the remaining descendants of the Master Builders?”
He swept the entire room with his flashlight. There were no tunnels leading out of it. One way in and one way out. And an army of brutal warriors approaching.
“What do you think?” Sam asked.
Tom leveled his Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun at the entrance. “I think we’re trapped.”
Chapter Seven
Sam’s focus shifted back to the huge display monitor.
It showed hundreds of Pirahã guards mobilizing quickly through the crystal maze. The giant pieces of quartz were vibrating in a strange harmony with their deep war cry. He stepped closer, and realized his pursuers were now coming through the section where they’d first discovered the raked sand. He put his hand on the screen. The image size changed. It was a touch-screen. He used his thumb and two fingers to expand the image.
He could now see their faces clearly. Their lips were entirely still, but a strange sound resonated out of their open mouths. The tune was completely unrecognizable, but mesmerizing. It gave Sam a momentary pause.
He smiled, mystified. “Truly fascinating, isn’t it?”
Tom ignored the comment. “We’ve got to go, Sam. I thought you were supposed to be finding a way out of here?”
Sam grinned. “So I was.”
He opened his hand and then ran each of his fingers together until it minimized the screen into a series of smaller mapped documents. It revealed a dozen separate video images. He glanced over them. To the left corner, an image showed Billie approaching the end of the crystal cavern, where the ropes were still hanging at the entrance. Just past that image, was an external video depicting the sandstone face of the cliff. In the middle of the image, he could just make out the two figures of Elise and Genevieve prusiking up the rope.
His gaze swept downward, where he spotted an image of Tom and himself staring at the computer monitor. Two screens to the right displayed the narrow, empty tunnel, through which they had recently crawled to reach the room they were now in. A second or two later, the first of their pursuers entered the tunnel.