“The woman is weakening,” he announced to the others.
“Give her ear plugs and Decomp, Thomas.”
He stopped momentarily, fumbling in the shouldered satchel he carried. Nina slid from his arm and dropped like a human droplet onto the cave floor, exhausted and gasping for breath. In her chest there was a distinct wheeze.
“I can’t breathe!” she exclaimed. Above her the ceiling of stalactites and glistening protrusions began to spin madly as she blinked rapidly to come to her senses, but to no avail. The claustrophobia had struck. “My chest is caving in!”
One of the men from the front rushed at her with his green lamp illuminating his hideous sneer, “Shut your fucking mouth or else you’ll never breathe again!” His growl was hushed but not an iota less furious. “We cannot be detected, do you understand, Olga?”
Nina was petrified and, to add to her fear of being murdered, she was suffocating rapidly. Her chest refused to expand under the urge of her lungs and the air she breathed was thin and useless. Clutching her chest, she closed her eyes, too afraid to face the mock yeti spitting threats at her. Under her she felt the bitter cold, damp surface penetrate her pants. The atmosphere had not only fluctuated in pressure, but also changed in substance.
From the moist smell of watery rock and rotten puddles, the air was filled with a queer odor none of them could really place. When Nina attempted to suck in as much air as she could, she picked up a distinct whiff of ammonia and somewhere in it, something similar to a tropical jungle. But the climate in the Himalayas could never allow a jungle, she thought. Without warning Thomas stuffed earplugs into both her ears and shoved a device right into her gawking mouth, hungry for oxygen. Like an asthma inhaler, the plastic dispenser sprayed a vile mist into the back of her throat. Nina choked and released a violent coughing spell into the thick padding of her parka, as to muffle the noise.
Thomas and Deiter stared down at her.
“What do you know, it has the capacity to learn,” Deiter told his brother, who managed a smirk at the remark before he pulled Nina to her feet again.
After her choking fit had ceased, Nina suddenly felt unbelievably strong. Her chest inflated with her lungs and the air just about flooded her respiratory system. Even her ears had stopped aching almost instantly and she was right as rain less than fifteen seconds after the application.
“What is this stuff called?” she whispered to Thomas when he started dragging her along, hunching over her in the low roof tunnel.
“Decomp,” he answered. “It’s not available at your local supermarket, little Olga. This is what the scientists of the coming race are capable of. Take note for your… your… Black Sun’s sake. It might be able to catch up with us in a few hundred years, but it’s doubtful,” he sneered arrogantly.
“What makes you think your members are so much more advanced than the members of the Order of the Black Sun, Thomas?” she asked, still taking long, deep breaths as they progressed.
“Simple,” he replied, “your scientists are human. Humans are primitive, but they delude themselves with a power play and they only fight with others equally small of mind.”
They actually believe they are higher than humans, when in fact they are a step down in genetic experimentation by a bunch of freaks that were equally insane, she thought to herself.
“Here!” one of them rasped. His whispers were hard to hear due to the low sound frequency of his deep voice. “Section 2. Fuck!”
“What’s wrong?” Deiter asked, joined by one of the others Nina did not have in her line of sight. “We have to get to Section 2. It is where the generator is.”
“Can’t. The next corridor is too small to even get my shoulders through and it is too low to even crawl through,” the scout reported. Thomas spared not a moment.
“Olga can get through. We’ll send her through.”
“Verrückt!”
“Nein, nein!” Nina begged, shaking her head furiously. She retreated from the black hole before them, but Thomas blocked her escape with his colossal frame.
“Oh, yes. You go through there, or you die right now,” he growled like the purring of a slumbering dragon.
“I have claustrophobia! That enclosed space would kill me! Or drive me insane! Please, don’t…” Nina pleaded, but she neglected to reckon their value for mercy.
“Olga, the generator is in a freezer under the duct you will be crawling through,” Deiter simply stated, ignoring the petite beauty’s plight. “It is bright green, the hue of these lights in our lamps, but think of it as the sun to these lamps, yes? Do not touch the generator. It will disintegrate your tissue on contact.”
Nina was almost hysterical.
“Do you understand? Do not touch it with your hands!” he repeated bluntly, lacking any feeling. All they cared about was retrieving the generator. Nina soon realized that protesting was futile and perilous to her as the threat of suffocating in that beckoning black eye of hell awaited her.
Chapter 8
Sobbing as softly as she could manage for the sake of her life, Nina crawled into the small space while the German giants looked on. It felt as if the roof of the little wormhole was closing in on her and the darkness became a malicious heavy, wet blanket that slowly wrapped her in its folds. Nina’s gasps bounced off against the walls of the tunnel as she progressed, her knees sore and ice cold from the rutted floor under her. Her lantern granted her no solace. It only illuminated her tomb, in her opinion, and to Nina’s wet, bloodshot eyes the green light just showed her the narrow path she had to navigate, the tiny space where not even the echoes of her weeping had proper space to reverberate.
“Oh, God, please don’t let this thing dwindle into a mole hole in front of me. How will I get back?” she spoke softly to herself, if only to remind herself that she was still alive. In her mind she heard Sam’s voice to soothe her, just as he did when they were forced and cramped into that old submarine during the Wolfenstein expedition and she thought she was going to die. Just take slow, deep breaths, Nina, she heard Sam’s scratchy Scottish in her ear. No worries, it’s just for a little while and you’ll be outside again. The voice was so vivid that she almost thought he was really there.
“Sam?” she said into the green darkness, her voice quivering and her pronunciation thrown off by a blocked nose. Nina felt like a helpless little girl; alone, cold and lost. It’s all right, Nina. I’m here. Just keep going.
“But how am I going to go back? I have nowhere to turn around. Oh, Christ, I’m going to die! I can feel my lungs shrivel up. The air just goes through like… oh, God… a sponge, sponge that… doesn’t take in any oxygen,” she cried, her chest burning under her psychosomatic torment.
Ahead of her a small speck of light appeared. She blinked rapidly to make sure that it was not some optical trickery or wishful thinking. As if the light held oxygen, Nina suddenly felt her lungs absorb enough air to help her breathe again. The solace of the light came in the nick of time too, just as she became too dizzy to continue. Something peculiar about her mission dawned on Nina as she approached the brightening exit.
This is an ancient dig site. How the hell could there be a generator down here, in a freezer, no less, she wondered. It was truly curious how her captors would think anything running on electricity or generators could run down here, after the place had been closed up and hidden for centuries, probably a millennium! It was all ludicrous, but she soldiered on solely to complete her forced task for fear of getting snuffed. On chafed knees and skinned palms, she crawled closer to the portal of light, placing her lantern aside for now. There was enough light to see where she was going. The portal was not ahead of her; neither was it a hole under her to pass through. It was tilted between the horizontal and vertical to make for a slight descent onto another lower platform of stone that would lead to a subterranean chamber, where apparently she would have to locate a great freezer and steal the generator from it.