Leaning against a boulder, she sobs uncontrollably, choking into her regulator.
Her transhuman companion stops. Climbs down to her and takes her hand, squeezing it.
Have… faith.
The message, delivered telepathically, is but a faint whisper in Dominique’s brain, but it speaks volumes.
Yes, she is marooned and desperate, but she is not alone. There is her other son, and maybe there is Mick.
And now-a friend.
If you have to die, go down fighting. Take that bitch Lilith with you!
Dominique stands.
The two women embrace, then continue climbing.
Hours pass.
The transhuman female reaches a plateau and stops climbing. Dominique joins her, the two humanoids staring at the challenge that lies before them.
Separating the plateau from the mountain’s summit is a great crevasse, its sheer thousand-foot drop disappearing into blackness. Even at its narrowest point, the gaping slice is still a good twenty feet across.
The face of the mountain on their side of the fissure curves around to the left, but the geology is a sheer wall, impossible to maneuver around without equipment.
‘Can’t go up, can’t go across, what the hell do we do now?’
The female points to a narrow ledge of rock, eight inches wide, which skirts the face of the mountainside as it curves around to their targeted destination.
‘That ledge? That’s way too narrow to walk on.’
The female motions with her hands, indicating that they are not going to walk on it, they are going to lower themselves over the edge and make their way along the rock face, hand over hand.
Dominique breaks out in a sweat, causing the thermostat of her bodysuit to kick in, dropping its internal temperature fifteen degrees. ‘It’s suicide. We’ll never… I know, I know… have faith.’
The transhuman leads her to the ledge. Points to her eyes, warning Dominique not to look down.
The long-skulled female lies down on her belly and rolls over the ledge, carefully lowering herself so that only her palms and the insides of her wrists are supporting the weight of her body.
Dominique bites nervously into the regulator’s rubber housing. She urinates into her environmental suit’s bladder cache, waiting for her companion to move farther along the cliff face before she kneels.
Just do it. There are worse ways to die.
Shut up! You’re not going to die, you’re going to make it and find your family! Now get your ass over that ledge!
She lowers herself gingerly, the muscles in her arms shaking, her boots searching for unseen toeholds. Palm over palm, she begins making her way around the narrow outcrop of rock.
Keeping her wrists tight, groping for toeholds here and there, she finds herself actually making progress. Right hand, left hand… right hand, left hand…
She ignores the white-hot ligaments straining in her wrists, continuing her mantra.
Right hand, left hand… right hand, left hand… only another fifteen feet. Right hand, left… not so scary. Scuba diving in that cenote with Mick-now that was scary.
She pauses, noticing that her transhuman companion has stopped.
The female’s eyes are looking up at the artificial sky, wide in terror-as if someone is scolding her telepathically.
How did you escape, Teresa? Did the other twin set you free?
Leave me be, witch!
Answer me, or I’ll feast upon your parents.
The transhuman smiles. Die in hell. The female kicks away from the edge, falling… falling ‘Oh my God!’ Dominique screams as the woman’s body disappears into the shadows of the abyss.
An unearthly flash of white light blinks in the ravine, then disappears.
Dominique stares at the spot, hyperventilating into her mouthpiece. What was that? What just happened?
For a long moment she simply hangs on, her mind threatening to crash.
Then she remembers Jacob.
Okay, come on… gather your strength and finish this. Haul ass!
The fingertips of her right hand press into the rock, the muscles of her lower back and buttocks clenching, straining to shift her weight.
Right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand… eight feet… focus on the ledge… right hand, left hand, right hand, left hand… three feet… two feet -
In a burst of adrenaline and sheer will, Dominique forces her right boot onto the ledge above her head as she maintains her delicate balance… pushing the knee up, then her thigh – then her upper torso.
She rolls onto the flat expanse of rock, panting, crying, smiling, all the while, sucking air from her mouthpiece.
Just breathe…
In time she sits up. Regains her feet and follows the plateau to its steep incline-a two-hundred-foot-high ridge that loops around the entire expanse of summit, blocking her view.
Dominique is beyond exhaustion. Her joints ache, her hands and wrists are raw, and her leg and lower back muscles burn with each painful step.
Above her head, the pyroclastic ceiling percolates like lava.
Come on, stop thinking about it and climb.
Sucking great gulps of air, she drags herself up the gradient, crawling the last fifty feet on her belly until she finds herself peeking over the edge.
Dominique looks down.
She is perched on the lip of a volcano, its craterlike valley resting several hundred feet below.
Nestled in the mountainous basin like some Tibetan hideaway is a village.
The Village of the Nephilim.
41
It is urban pestilence, an architecture of chaos haphazardly erected in uneven rows of single-story, poorly constructed, dust-caked dwellings. It is a maze of gray, a neighborhood worse than the worst parts of the cardboard-and-aluminum shantytowns of Olongopo and Subic after the volcanic eruption in the Philippines.
Soot-covered abodes on soot-covered streets funnel to the far end of town and the shoreline of a vast lake, its surface enshrouded in thick mist.
Dominique stifles her breathing as the thick clouds part along the subterranean ceiling, revealing a monstrous object, erected on the near side of the lake. Carved from rock, immeasurably old, it stands as tall as a ten-story building, its upper half appearing polished, its details lost in the returning haze.
Somewhere in the distance a bell tolls, its baritone gongs echoing across the valley.
As if summoned, the shadowy gray figures of the multitudes bleed slowly out from their dwellings, making their way en masse to the lake’s shoreline.
With a trembling hand, Dominique removes the smart-binoculars from her belt pack. She switches the viewer from day to night vision, then zooms in, focusing on the villagers, all of whom are covered in the same gray dust.
Something’s happening. I’ve got to get down there…
The outskirts of the village is a swampy cesspool of silvery brown ooze, stagnant with humanlike feces, garbage, bones and the smoldering remains of ashen flesh. Twenty-inch scarab beetles feast upon the offering by the tens of thousands, their sharp mandibles creating a nerve-wracking crunching sound as they feed.
Sucking hard on her regulator, Dominique hurries through the knee-deep slime, making her way to more solid footing. The dusty soil beneath her feet is now a spongy surface saturated with the same brownish gray liquid of the swamp, ooze rising from the porous earth with each step.
She comes to the first quadrangle of claylike, windowless shanties. The rows of odd-shaped dwellings are listing in this unstable mire, their foundations sinking into stagnant sewage.
Dominique gags into her mouthpiece and readjusts her nose apparatus, the stench of her surroundings almost unbearable even through her breathing apparatus.
Composing herself, she makes her way to the end of a row, then peeks around a fractured wall.
The dust-choked streets appear deserted.
A fluttering sound causes her to look up. Perched on the roofs across the street are four owl-like creatures, each the size of a twelve-year-old human child. Their bulbous, featherless heads are caked in gray dust, their pupilless round eyes blinded by white cataracts. The folded wings, incapable of flight, are scaly, ending in sharp talons.