Robert Liparulo - The 13 th tribe

“Probably not,” she said. “We won’t know until we date it.”

Jagger nodded. He’d spent two years as a special agent for the army’s Criminal Investigation Division. The more he learned about archaeology, the more amazed he was by how similar the two disciplines were. The best investigators never made assumptions, always pursued the smallest detail, and found connections that baffled others but in reality were based on a knowledge of human behavior-descriptors that equally applied to successful archaeologists.

Addison touched her lip, winced, then stared at the blood on her finger. She sniffed back a sob.

He suspected it wasn’t pain that had her on the brink of tears: it was the feeling of helplessness, of being overpowered. Being at the mercy of another person, someone malicious, was staggeringly frightening. Jagger was muscular, agile, and trained to fight, all of which put him at the top of the food chain. But he had learned the hard way that there was always someone bigger and tougher. He picked up a roll of paper towels, unrolled two clean squares, and pulled them off. He poured water from his canteen onto them and handed the wad to her.

She dabbed at her lip and wiped her chin.

“Why don’t you go see Beth?” he suggested. His wife and Addison had hit it off right away, and Jagger was grateful that Beth had a friend in this lonely place. He knew she would provide the balm Addison needed: a sympathetic heart and comforting words.

“I will,” Addison said, “later. Really, I’m fine.” She tossed the bloody wad into the rubble of the table and its contents. She started out of the tent, then stopped. “For a moment I thought you were going to kill him.”

Jagger tried to smile but ended up frowning. “Me too.” And what frightened him most was the realization that he wouldn’t have felt much if he had.

Nevaeh strolled through a dark corridor, lighted only by a few candles set in small recesses carved close to the ceiling. This section of the tunnels had been wired with electricity, but she liked it this way better: she’d spent more time on earth without electricity than with it, and natural light calmed her like a warm bath.

As she walked, she raked the nails of her left hand along a wall of jawless skulls. They screeched over a fleshless forehead, then slid off to click against the temple of the next skull. Screeeeech-click, over and over again, like a vinyl record skipping back over two seconds of static. Her fingernail found a gaping crack, and she wondered if it had been inflicted postmortem or if it evinced the event that had separated body from soul.

Lucky you, she thought.

Her S.W.A.T.-style boots padded softly against the limestone floor. She imagined watching herself at that moment in a movie: her dark clothes and hair drifting silently in the shadows, only her face and hands standing out, as if disembodied, perhaps a spirit looking for her bones among the thousands around her. In this long-forgotten place, she could forever pace the length of the corridor, slowly wearing grooves into the skulls, and no one would notice.

On her right, the wall was made of stone blocks. Arched doors, spaced every thirty feet or so, marked the many rooms that lined the long corridor. In addition to the location’s seclusion and secrecy, these rooms were one of the reasons the Tribe had chosen to call this place home for the past decade. Each of the nine remaining members had his or her own room, except the smaller children, Jordan and Hannah, who shared one. That left rooms for a kitchen and dining room, bathroom, storage area, an armory, and a cell for the rare “visitor.” Most of the bedrooms doubled as something else: Ben’s was also the Tribe’s library and chapel; Sebastian’s was used for planning and for their computer needs; Toby’s was an entertainment center, with televisions and game consoles.

Nevaeh veered across the corridor to listen at Toby’s door. Voices came through: Toby, Phin, and Sebastian were playing on the Xbox. She supposed playing wasn’t quite right. They were using a flight simulator to train for their upcoming mission, the one that had taken a huge leap from dream to reality now that they had the chips from MicroTech in hand.

Good. Success of the Amalek Project, as Ben had dubbed it, depended on their ability to control the weapons.

She scanned the tunnel and didn’t see light seeping under any doors. Though it was late morning, they had returned from Baltimore only hours before, and most of them had headed straight to bed. They could sleep on the jet, but it was never restful.

Nevaeh suspected Creed was in his room brooding. He opposed Amalek and was becoming more vocal about it as the date approached. Tough. It would happen with or without him, and the fact that everything was coming together was proof God approved.

But she didn’t like dissent among the Tribe, and just thinking of Creed stirred the beginnings of a headache. As usual, it wouldn’t be severe nor last long, but it intensified her exhaustion, and she considered heading for her own bed. No, as keyed up as she was about a lot of things-the events in Baltimore, Amalek, needing to kill something the way Elias needed his cigarettes-she’d only toss and turn.

Instead she returned to the wall of skulls and skimmed her nails over them as she walked by door after door. She passed the last one, then the last candle, into the stygian darkness at the end of the corridor. Here, another tunnel crossed, forming a T-intersection. Nevaeh sat on the cool floor, her back against the wall, looking down the entire length of the corridor. The candles flickered against the ceiling, their patches of light growing smaller as they receded toward the opposite end.

She heard a door click open but saw no new light until a flame kicked up and glowed on Elias’s face. Smoke turned the flame into a hazy ball of light, then it went out, leaving only a floating red cherry. The lighter flashed again, this time low, at his side, and went out. He continued flicking it as he meandered down the tunnel toward the bathroom. He let out a loud sigh and groaned.

She knew how he felt. Their healing-which Ben said stemmed from the same biochemical change that prevented them from aging-was fast, but it wasn’t painless. For a few days after the physical signs of an injury had faded, they felt queasy and weak, as though a bit of their life force had seeped out. More likely, it had gone into the affected areas, leaving the rest of their bodies less than whole.

The flicking lighter disappeared into the bathroom and the door clicked closed.

Nevaeh wondered if it was indeed the aftermath of his healing that had Elias groaning… or simply the burden of living so long, the weight of a sin for which they were still awaiting forgiveness. She’d thought about it a million times. Actually, 1,274,000 times, last she’d calculated: every single night for 3500 years. In a Dantesque twist on justice, her dreams were less about sorting through psychological baggage and more about the torture of reliving their transgression over and over and over.

The candles flickered, and her eyelids grew heavy.

“Arella!” someone called, using her birth name.

She snapped her head up and realized she had fallen asleep. The dream had been waiting for her, as it always was. She watched the candles dim as her lids drooped, and she lowered her head and stepped into the dream.

Arella gazed up at the mountain. Moses had been gone too long, almost forty days. Surely he was dead, slaughtered by his god for some transgression-leading all the people here without a plan, touching the wrong stone: his god was demanding and unforgiving. Or perhaps he’d left, gone to claim the Promised Land for himself. Day and night, the sky above the mountain was orange and red, flickering, waving. Not a good sign.