Andy Mcdermott - Temple of the Gods

‘No, I’m dead,’ came the weak reply. He pulled the entangling sheet and cords aside to find Nina sprawled face-down in the sand. ‘I must be dead. We couldn’t have survived that. Could we?’

‘Well, I’m alive, more or less — and like you said, we stay together, so you must be too.’ He quickly checked her for obvious signs of injury, finding nothing beyond plentiful cuts and grazes.

She sat up and blew sand off her face, giving him a pained smile. ‘Wow. So we actually made it.’

‘Yeah, we did.’ He kissed her — then they both recoiled.

‘Ow,’ said Nina, putting a hand to her face and finding it bruised and swollen. ‘My lips hurt.’

‘My everything hurts,’ Eddie complained. ‘Think you can stand?’

‘I’ll try.’ Grunting, he helped her up. Nina winced at a sharp pain in her ankles; her touchdown had been far from soft. ‘Oh, crap.’

‘What?’

‘I just realised, we’re still sixty miles from town in the middle of a desert. And I’m really not up to walking all that way.’

Eddie jerked a thumb towards the approaching helicopter. ‘We’ve still got a ride.’

Nina regarded it in relief. ‘I guess Larry’s okay, then — shit!’ She looked round in alarm. ‘What about Sophia?’

He indicated the nearby smoke. ‘I know where she is. Let’s take a gander.’ Supporting each other as best they could, they hobbled towards it.

A little impact crater came into view, the smouldering line rising from the charred remains of a parachute backpack atop a broken, huddled shape within. Jagged spikes of broken bone jutted out from ruptured flesh. Splashed across the surrounding sand was an oozing starburst of dark red. ‘Well,’ said Nina after a long silence. ‘I guess she’s finally dead.’

Eddie had been through the experience of believing his ex-wife to be deceased twice before; this time, he was almost out of sympathy. Almost. He moved closer, pulling what remained of the parachute over the mangled body. ‘Goodbye, Soph,’ he said, then paused for a moment before reaching down.

Nina cringed in revulsion as he picked something up from amongst the viscera. ‘Eddie, what the hell ?’

‘Thought we should take care of this,’ he said, limping back to her. In his hand was the piece of meteorite Sophia had taken from the Temple of the Gods. ‘What do you want to do with it?’

Nina considered the question. The chunk of purple stone contained within it the secrets of earth energy, the untold history of all life on the planet, and potentially more besides. But…

She still didn’t believe that there were things man was not meant to know. But there were things man was not meant to have . This was one of them. ‘Get rid of it,’ she finally said.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah.’ She watched as he turned and threw the stone with all his remaining strength into the empty wilderness. It landed with a puff of dust amongst other nondescript rocks, half buried already; in time, it would be completely lost.

‘So that’s it?’ Eddie asked.

She nodded. ‘Earth energy, the meteorite, the Group, Stikes, Sophia… they’re all gone. Finished.’

‘Thank fuck for that. Now we can take a break.’ He gave her an exhausted smile and put his arms round her.

The noise of the helicopter made them turn. Larry had brought the AW101 into an unsteady hover a few hundred yards away, gradually descending into a cyclone of sand. Eddie watched — then stiffened. ‘Shit, that’s not good!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘That wobble, something’s wrong — Dad!’ He released Nina and waved his arms, frantically signalling for his father to ascend again. ‘Dad, go back up, it’s not gonna—’

Too late.

The tremendous downwash from the main rotor was bouncing back up off the desert floor as Larry lowered the helicopter, drastically affecting the aircraft’s handling. With a completely inexperienced pilot at the controls, the results were inevitable. The AW101 rocked like a toy boat, veering sideways. Larry tried to level out, but overcompensated — and the chopper lurched back, losing height.

Its landing gear dug into the ground, tipping the fuselage over—

The rotor blades carved into the desert with great sprays of sand, shearing off from the hub and flinging broken pieces high into the air. Torque twisted the aircraft’s body round, crunching its nose into the dirt before it fell back down on its belly with a shrilling crash of torn metal.

‘ Dad! ’ Eddie cried, breaking into a staggering run. Nina caught up, and they hurried towards the wreck. Its engines cut out, leaving an eerie silence punctured only by the thumps of debris returning to earth. By the time they reached it, the stubs of the rotor blades had come to a halt.

The front windows were broken. Through them, Eddie saw Larry slumped over the central console. ‘Dad! Shit, Dad, are you all right?’ No answer. No movement. He opened the side hatch and climbed inside, going to the cockpit. ‘Dad!’

For a moment, he thought his father was dead — then Larry coughed and took in a shuddering breath. ‘Eddie?’ he gasped.

‘Yeah, I’m here, Dad.’ Eddie carefully lifted him off the console. A line of blood ran down his cheek where he had hit a sharp protrusion on the instrument panel. ‘How bad are you hurt?’

‘Not too bad… I think.’ Larry opened his eyes, squinting in the sunlight as he tried to regain focus. ‘Tell you something, though.’

‘What?’

‘I definitely need more flying lessons.’ A faint laugh.

Eddie joined in. ‘Yeah, one or two. You’ve just wrecked a twenty-million-dollar helicopter!’

‘Like father, like son,’ said Nina with a grin as she recovered a first-aid kit.

They patched up their various wounds as best they could, then took stock of the situation. Some of the Group’s supplies were still secured at the cabin’s rear, giving them a supply of water, and while the helicopter itself was a complete write-off, the radio was still functioning. Eddie sent out a Mayday. The eruption of the volcano had already roused official attention; while the Ethiopian authorities were surprised that anybody had been near the isolated mountain, they nevertheless assured him that help was on the way, though the lack of precise GPS coordinates meant it might take a while to arrive.

He climbed out of the chopper and joined Nina and Larry, sitting nearby. ‘So,’ said Larry, mopping the blood off his cheek, ‘this is what you do for a living, then?’

‘It’s not all like this,’ Nina told him. ‘Sometimes there’s actual archaeology involved.’

‘All the same, I’m impressed. Still quivering with terror, but impressed. I can’t believe the things I’ve seen today. Floating rocks, exploding volcanoes…’ He shook his head. ‘My daughter-in-law throwing herself out of a helicopter at eight thousand feet…’

Eddie gave him a mock shrug. ‘Meh. You get used to this stuff after a while.’

‘Speak for yourself!’ Nina cried. ‘You know, before I met you I’d never once had anyone shoot at me. Or been in a car chase. Or a plane crash, or jumped a Humvee over a canyon, or been attacked by tigers and hippos and crocodiles—’

‘They were caimans, not crocs,’ Eddie corrected. ‘But if you hadn’t met me, you wouldn’t have found Atlantis either, would you? Or the Tomb of Hercules, or Excalibur, or the Garden of Eden…’

‘The what ?’ said Larry. ‘Did you just say…’

Nina nodded. ‘Uh-huh. But… yeah, you’re right, Eddie.’ She signalled for him to sit beside her. He did so, and she leaned against him. ‘I’m glad we met.’

‘So am I,’ Eddie replied. This time, bruises weren’t enough to stop them from kissing.