Rohn was trying to organize the men, directing their fire and orchestrating their inevitable retreat, but the creature pushed them toward the bubbling cauldron that Lazarus’s explosives had opened. There was no escape for the men, and no way to stand against the guardian of the Underworld’s gates. One by one, the men threw down their rifles and tried to scramble up the ravine’s steep sides, but the creature’s rage was fixed on them now. There was no escaping it.
Then, a lone figure, taller than any of the men, but still dwarfed by the creature, advanced and took up a position directly in front of it. Tyndareus in his TALOS suit appeared to be challenging the bear-elk to one-on-one combat.
Powered armor or not, Pierce expected the outcome to be the same. The creature would swat the old man aside like the insect he was. The suit might survive, but Tyndareus would be pulverized inside it like an egg in a tumble dryer.
But Tyndareus had a trick up his sleeve, or rather, on it. The right arm of the TALOS suit came up and pointed at the beast. Pierce glimpsed something mounted to the forearm plates, like an extra piece of armor.
There was a loud, hollow sound, deeper but not quite as loud as the report of a rifle, and then Pierce was face down on the scorched ground next to Carter, with Lazarus covering both of them.
Another explosion blasted through the ravine, but the shock wave that socked Pierce in the gut felt more like the Primacord detonations that had felled the trees in the Amazon — firecrackers instead of dynamite.
Even before the last echoes of the blast died away, a new sound filled the air: a tortured, braying howl. The smell of burnt hair and cooking meat briefly overpowered the stink of sulfur. Pierce raised his head and saw the massive shape of the bear-elk writhing on the floor of the ravine. Pierce could not tell how serious the injury was. The creature might have been in its death throes, or it might merely have gotten a nasty shock.
“Forty mike-mike grenade launcher,” Lazarus muttered. “HE rounds. I wonder why the old man was holding back?”
Tyndareus stood his ground, hand still extended, ready to fire again, but the creature abruptly righted itself, and with astonishing swiftness for something so enormous, it bolted for the stone wall and the safety of the Underworld. It ran at the seemingly solid obstacle, as if aware that there would be no resistance, and disappeared into the stone. If not for the carnage littering the ravine floor, the whole episode would have seemed like a bizarre night terror.
The calm following the creature’s defeat did not last long. Tyndareus swung around, his arm still extended, the barrel of his grenade launcher now aimed at the three figures huddled near the ravine wall.
Although he had not seen the 40mm high-explosive round hit the bear-elk, Pierce had felt its destructive power, and he knew that there would be no surviving the explosion. There wasn’t even time to flee, but that didn’t stop Lazarus from springing into motion. But he wasn’t running away from the impending grenade blast. Instead, he ran toward its source.
The unexpected charge surprised Tyndareus. He took a step back, recoiling in the face of aggression, despite the fact of being impervious to almost any attack that Lazarus might hope to bring against him. Lazarus surely knew it as well, but the knowledge did not slow him down.
Just as he was about to pass within Tyndareus’s reach, Lazarus veered to his left and launched himself up at the outstretched arm. The TALOS suit weighed as much as a small car, but the weight was distributed very differently. When Lazarus hit Tyndareus’s arm at a full charge, it was enough to spin the armored figure around. Tyndareus flailed, and in so doing, flung Lazarus twenty feet away. But he could not prevent gravity from taking him down. He crashed to the ground, releasing another grenade as he fell. The explosive round arced high and then came back down a hundred and fifty feet away, exploding with a harmless flash and bang.
Pierce saw Lazarus scrambling up and charging Tyndareus again, and then something like a wall blocked his view of the combatants.
Rohn.
Pierce was just starting to focus on the figure standing in front of him when something metallic flashed in front of him, tugging at his chest, spinning him halfway around. Starbursts bloomed in his vision as a heavy fist crashed into the back of his head and sent him stumbling away to sprawl face down on the searing hot ground.
He rolled over, not as gracefully as Lazarus, but with the same urgency, groping for his machine pistol. That was when he noticed the dark sticky substance smeared all over his hands and down the front of his combat vest.
Blood. His own blood.
Rohn had slashed him with a knife, a very sharp knife, judging by the fact that he was only now beginning to feel the faintest tingle of pain across his chest, where the blade had struck.
Screw it. I’m still alive.
He brought the gun up, but Rohn was now advancing on Carter. Pierce tried to settle the red dot sight on Rohn’s moving form, but his grip was sloppy, his hands slick. In the corner of his eye, he saw three more gunmen, the last remnants of Tyndareus’s small army, moving toward him.
Rohn’s back erupted in a spray of blood as Carter triggered a round, point blank into his body, and then fired again and again. The big man lurched with each impact, but kept advancing. Carter stumbled back and fell, the gun slipping from her hands, a look of terror on her face. Rohn’s hand came up, the blade poised to end Felice Carter’s life.
53
Gallo expected some kind of sensory feedback as she passed through the rock wall. Would it feel like walking through a dust cloud? Would it be like swimming through something denser than air but not quite liquid? The only noticeable difference was the absolute darkness. She couldn’t even tell if her eyes were open or shut. She held her breath, afraid to inhale the…whatever it was. That meant she had about forty seconds to cross the threshold of the Underworld, but how would she know when she reached it?
The answer to her question appeared suddenly before her, a faint glow directly ahead. It had to be Kenner, heading into the depths with Fiona. She looked back and could just make out a rough stone wall right behind her, looking as solid and impenetrable as it had on the outside. She reached out, probing it with her fingertips. There was no resistance at all. The rock might have been a hologram, a magician’s projection of smoke and mirrors. It occurred to her that she should mark her path or risk spending the last hours of her life wandering around in the dark looking for the exit, but she had nothing at all with which to do so.
I should have thought this through a little first, she mused. But how do you prepare yourself for walking through solid objects? It’s not like there’s a YouTube video that tells you what to expect.
The glow was receding, growing dimmer as the source of the light moved further along the passage. Gallo put aside her hesitancy and hastened forward. The passage, formed from an old lava tube, was wide with smooth walls, sloping downward. With each step closer to the light source, her ability to see increased, allowing her to move even faster. She picked up speed, running toward the light.
The slope bottomed out and opened into a vast chamber, at least as large as Gorham’s Cave. It was hard to be sure in the dim light, yet Gallo realized that there was more illumination in the cavern than could be explained by Kenner’s single flashlight. The chamber walls glowed red-orange, like coals in a barbecue.