His voice did not suit him. It was thin in tone and very raspy, reminiscent of an old narration from a 1940s film noir. Apart from his voice, the rest of him seemed like a three-dimensional replica of a villain from a science-fiction graphic novel, complete with a sick pinkish scar dripping jaggedly from his temple to his jaw. Elongated musculature erroneously marked him as stringy and weak. Nina was astounded at how easily he lifted the bar while it carried a dozen large steel discs on each side. She pretended to admire the streets below the second level window while her dark eyes haunted the mirror to observe him.
Even the body builders and power-lifters present had wandering stares, some even ceasing their sets to make sure that they saw what they thought they saw as the tall man pumped out rep after rep until Nina had counted close to thirty. She looked at the other men and caught the eye of the chivalrous babbler she’d sent off earlier. He, too, vaguely shook his head at her to convey a similar disbelief and Nina gave him a widening eye to confirm that she agreed.
As the strange man hooked the bar for a rest, all the people in the weights section snapped back into what they’d been doing. They didn’t want him to know that they’d been watching his unusual ability in awe and risk making the man so uncomfortable that he’d want to leave. He was simply too interesting, even to the coach and some of the other personal trainers leering from afar.
“It could be Samson, you know, after his bint cut his locks, aye?” one of the overweight football bullies remarked quietly a few feet from Nina. She chewed her lips in an effort not to laugh and dropped her eyes to the floor as the man stepped under the bar once more. Once more the peculiar man punched out a full set without much effort as the others watched surreptitiously in the vast mirrors while continuing their own feeble attempts.
Nina was impressed, but she would never show it. After all, her own recovery from a skeletal shadow to a staunch and symmetrical specimen was quite the feat as well. Considering the short frame of time it had taken her to build up her body to look like a minuscule Amazon, what she had accomplished had been nothing short of a miracle. But that was of no consequence here. She eventually tired of staring at the extraordinary man and made her way to the triceps machine. Gripping the handles, she pressed them down, going through the motions she’d been training so hard to do correctly these past months few months.
Yet something urged her to look up at him again. Through the cables and the sliding of the flat weight slabs Nina noticed that the strange man's water bottle contained something milky, unlike most water bottles the gym rats filled with their water bottles with. It perplexed her. What could be inside? Could that be what made him unnaturally strong, defying all rules of physiology? The buff little historian had to investigate.
How does one procure a bottle from under the nose of a patron at the gym without them realizing that it was missing? she wondered as she pushed the heavy weights downward, burning up her triceps. In fact, she was so distracted with this thought that she didn’t even notice when she exceeded her set. The bald man changed his weights again, leaving the peculiar liquid unattended. Nina had to act quickly, so she resorted to the prerogative of beautiful women — beguilement.
She looked toward the group of young men she’d previously shrugged off and singled out the babbler. His eyes instantly found her glare and Nina smiled. “Hey, Colin, could you do me a huge favor?”
Chapter 2
“Get the pulleys up! Get the pulleys… no, the rope things above you, dammit!” Purdue hollered through the cloud of dust that engulfed him. His helpers, four Egyptian men, scurried to keep him from being eaten up by the tumbling mountain, on which he was hanging down the throat of a gaping mouth of rock and sand. Under him everything exploded in debris and the cracking of splitting rocks as he grasped the rope tied to his flimsy harness. As the mouth closed around his dwarfed frame, collapsing from a probe gone wrong, Purdue's men finally hoisted him up rapidly enough to escape the cave-in, but gracefully enough not to have the old rope snapping from the sudden upward jerk.
Purdue's face was a plain canvas of powdery basalt of the earth upon which Aksum had been built thousands of years before, apparently angered by the disturbance of its sleep. His brown cargo pants and slightly over-sized shirt allowed for some free movement, but very little in the way of protection. Spitting profusely to expel the wetter bulk of the sand grains between his jaws, he dared to look through the obscured spectacles he’d miraculously kept on his nose during the ordeal. Peering from under the bottom frame of his glasses he could see that the wicked soil had swallowed the view.
Beneath him, the cavern that his men had meticulously been digging for the past few weeks had been drowned in the basalt deposits of Ethiopia's ancient earth. “Shit,” Purdue said to himself as he watched the once majestic hole diminish like the iris of an eye before closing up into nothing more than a disheveled patch of ground. From the height he was dangling from, Dave Purdue surveyed the damage to his part-discovery. “What a bloody waste of time and blood and sweat.”
“Yes — of others. Must be soul-consuming to lament the loss of labors performed by others so that you can just show up and bugger up the whole lot, hey?” someone yakked from somewhere behind the still floating fog of dust.
“Oh God,” Purdue hissed through his clenched jaws, not from disdain or annoyance, but the familiar voice no doubt proved that a third degree in morality between archaeologists and historians and other such nonsense was now due. “What do you want, Medley?”
Professor Medley was standing with her hands on her hips, waiting for the sweaty Egyptians to lower their temporary master safely. A dark-haired woman in her fifties, she had been a senior in the same league as Purdue while they were still fighting for a feature in the Scientific Journal of London and the infamous Metaphysics and Mythos Experiment, a tabloid for the snobs and lunatics of antique sciences.
“Why don't you stick to your inventions, Q?” she scoffed in amused gloating.
“Stout words coming from a Glasgow princess who cannot tell the difference between a mathematical model and a law,” Purdue snapped in between spits and moistening his lips with his tongue.
“Semantics,” she replied. “Like monolith and megalith is to you, I suppose. This was such a promising archaeological site, Purdue, and now it’s been reduced to a mole’s heap. Well done.”
“It was down there,” he argued as his feet lightly met the ground. As he fumbled with his harness, he gave her a steely eye. “The geo-sonar mapped it. I shall simply start over.”
“You shouldn't,” she advised rather dismissively, perusing the chaos sewn by the billionaire explorer and his ideals. “Why can't you just leave history be, Purdue?”
He dusted himself off. Purdue gawked at the thorn in his side with astonished perplexity. “Excuse me? You’re an archaeologist, Rita! Talk about leaving history be! Talk about letting sleeping dogs lie! You make a living unearthing history.”
“That’s not what I meant. I was referring to a selective and informed choice of plundering,” she said, shrugging.
Purdue was speechless. Her words bordered on lunacy.