The other dropped to my waist. To the pouch. I could feel the hardness of the folded knife there.
I think maybe I smiled, too.
Mercer stopped smiling when I cut his lips from his face.
16
THEY PULLED ME away from him.
Top and Bunny.
What was left of Mercer — what I had left of him — slumped down in red ruin. And as he fell it was as if time caught up with him all at once. His skin immediately caught fire and burned, the fats and oils sizzling and popping and steaming away as he withered to a blackened husk.
I shook free of the hands of my friends and saw that Top had the canvas bag the ammunition had come in. I tore it from his hands and pushed him away from the book, which had fallen to the ground.
“Don’t touch it,” I wheezed. “Don’t.”
I wasn’t able to do the job, though, so Bunny took the bag from me and used it like oven mitts to nudge the book inside. Then he zipped it up.
When I looked around I saw that the priests were dead. All of them. While I’d fought with the power of the book and with the evil of James Mercer, they had been doing awful work in the cavern. How many dead were there? I don’t know. Fifty? A hundred?
The last of the big spiders had retreated and were tearing at the cleft, which was now twice as wide as before.
“We need to get this to Lizzie,” I said, trying to stand. They caught me, and we staggered together to the dangling rope. Top took the bag and tied the handles to the rope and shouted for Lizzie to take it up.
The rope shivered and trembled, and then the slack went taut and the Book of Uttu began to rise. We three turned and faced the cleft. With palsied hands, we reloaded and stumbled across the death pit, firing at the spiders. Firing through the cleft. Waging war against the invaders for as long as we could. The pit got hotter and hotter, making it hard for me to breathe without my hood.
Then I heard Lizzie yelling.
“I have it. Get out of there. Joe, Top, Bunny… get out.”
“How?” asked Bunny bleakly, but then he turned and looked behind us. “Guys… guys. Look!”
We turned.
The rope was back. But instead of one, there were three. And fires burned more fiercely all around us. Fires that had not been there before. The mounds of priests were already starting to burn.
The wall of the pit had changed, and when I looked up there were no longer stars above us. Instead, through the gas and smoke, I saw the cloudy afternoon sky of Turkmenistan. The walls were no longer impossibly high. Up there, twenty meters above us, I could see Lizzie and Brock and a bunch of US Marines. And above them two Black Hawk helicopters.
I looked at Top and Bunny. We all glanced at the cleft and then at the ropes.
“Fuck this,” I said, and we ran for the ropes.
17
AS IT TURNED out, sealing the book was a process. A bastard of one, but Lizzie said she could do it. We lay sprawled at the edge of the pit. Burned, sweaty, half deaf, scared, watching her work. Not understanding a single damn thing of what she did. Trusting that she knew what she was doing.
Then she looked up, flushed and sweaty, with blue eyes as bright as a summer sky. She glanced at the helicopters and down at me.
“Do they have some kind of missiles or rockets or something?”
The Black Hawks had ESSS systems, which are stubby wings loaded with things that go boom. I grinned. “Yeah. They have all of that. Sixteen Hellfire missiles each. How many do you need?”
She chewed her lip for a second. “All of it?” she asked.
I made a call and then we started running away from the pit.
In the brief pause between my order and the execution, Lizzie said, “Hellfire?”
“Yeah,” said Top.
“Seems weirdly poetic.”
“Yeah,” he said.
And hellfire it was.
18
THE HELOS HIT the pit with all thirty-two missiles.
Then four choppers from the Turkmeni army came and threw in their own party favors. Four hours later — when we were all at a safe distance — a CIA black ops bird flew over and dropped a fuel-air bomb. Nothing survives that. The pressure wave kills anything organic and the fire cleans it all up. It’s the most powerful non-nuclear weapon in existence.
They’ve since done ground-penetrating radar. There’s nothing down there. Nothing moving. Nothing alive.
We survived our wounds. Time will tell if we would survive the memories, and the knowledge that there is an army waiting for us somewhere. Is it actually Mars? I don’t know. Certainly not the Mars we know. But I’ve learned that there are many worlds, and many versions of each world.
That army is out there somewhere. Now we know it.
And… now we’re ready.
I hope we’re ready.
ISIL is still out there destroying sanctuaries and churches and sacred places where things like the Unlearnable Truths have been stored and protected. We got lucky with this, but Lizzie said that there are many more of those books out there. A lot of them are in lands torn by war. In Iraq and Iran, in Syria. Elsewhere. Even in America. The Library of the Ten Gurus is searching. So are we. So are select friends.
We need to find those other books first.
We need to.
We need to.
THE DEVIL’S THROAT
Rena Mason
Dr. John Blake’s gloved hands floated between striated rock walls as he swam through the ancient lava tube toward Shelf 5. The color footage went gray before white horizontal bands rolled down the video screen.
Cyan leaned toward the glass and tapped the monitor. “What the—”
Static blasted from the speakers. “Bloody hell!” she said, jumping back.
“Dr. Blake?” Kau said, his timid voice unexpected from his broad, Māori physique.
Cyan slid the microphone from Kau’s hold. “John, what’s happening?”
“Wellington, we have a problem.” Fear skirted John’s voice.
She hated his Kiwi versions of Yankee phrases. They’d met in Corpus Christi, Texas during a Fossil Fuels Drilling and the Environment Conference, and bonded through marine biology, genetics, and ocean science. A perfect match since research consumed ninety-five percent of their lives.
A hazy image froze on every screen in the control room, and then all systems went down.
“Kau, get him back online!” Cyan rushed to the power box and flicked switches.
Kauri Tāmihana, the communications specialist, pounded the dash with his massive fist. Tribal tattoos rippled up his arm as a metallic clang resounded off the aluminum walls. Cyan glared at him from the other side of the room.
“Oops. Sorry.”
As it quieted, they tuned their ears into the silence. Panel lights flickered then steadied. Some blinked red.
Mackenzie Brown’s voice came over the loud speakers. “Sorry ‘bout that, Cy. Generator’s fucked.”
“Mack, get your ass to comms.” Cyan hunched over Kau’s shoulder and watched him reboot. “Can you pull up—”
The last bit of feed from John’s camera blinked onto his computer, cloudy and fixed.
“Thanks,” she said. “But can you clear it up and get it in color?”
“That is color.”
Cyan scrutinized the picture. “Are those knots?”
“Black ones?”
“Video cables?” she said. “Did he get tied up in old equipment?”
“What’s going on?” Kauri’s wife Maia, the station’s cook, stood in the doorway.
“Dr. Blake’s A/V stopped working,” Kau said.
“I’m sure it’s something you did.” Maia dried her hands with her apron. “Can I help?”