Gabriel Hunt - Hunt Through the Cradle of Fear

They climbed slowly, carefully. The path wound around the huge boulder, narrowing as it went till there was no more than a person’s width of stone beneath their feet, and nothing to their left but a sheer drop. The rock they walked on was slick and slippery, and pitted with shallow depressions that had accumulated puddles but looked solid in the flashlight’s glare. A misstep, a loss of balance, a moment’s error, and they’d be falling through the darkness. But not for long. Gabriel thought of the man who’d plunged to his death in front of his eyes back in New York. Even a fall of a hundred feet would take just two or three seconds, not long enough even to mouth a prayer. Not that Gabriel was a praying man, and he didn’t think he’d turn into one at the end, but—

He hugged the rock and climbed in minute steps. He didn’t want to find out.

Behind him, Sheba was saying something but the powerful winds were snatching her words away before they could reach him. He hung back so she could catch up. When she did, he could hear the fear in her voice. “Can you see…how much farther…?”

“Not much,” he said, though the honest answer would have been, No, I can’t see.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said, and reached out a hand to stroke her shoulder gently. “Just pretend you’re taking a walk down Grafton Street on a Sunday afternoon. Sidewalk there’s not a whole lot wider than this.”

“Maybe,” Sheba said, “but stepping off the curb’s not such a big deal.”

“I thought you said your father took you climbing and such,” Gabriel said, “and that you enjoyed it.”

“I enjoyed it when he took me hunting and fishing and camping out,” Sheba said. “I always hated the climbing.”

“Well, there’s not much of it left,” Gabriel said. “Just a little bit.”

“You’re fucking lying to me, Hunt,” she said.

“Yes,” Gabriel said.

“Well, thank you,” she said. “Keep doing it.” And she put out a hand again to find the wall beside her.

But it didn’t land on stone.

A noise arose as her hand hit the side of something soft and fibrous, an angry buzzing sound like a hundred cell phones set to vibrate going off at once. Gabriel swung the beam of the flashlight around and it slid across a cluster of dark misshapen sacs hanging from the underside of a small ledge of rock. Sheba’s palm had landed directly on one of them, crushing the side, and through the hole was streaming a cloud of—

“Move!” Gabriel shouted. “Now!”

Wasps. The so-called “wild bees” of Sri Lanka were legendary for their viciousness—some years back there’d been a newspaper article about a wasp attack that had left two hundred tourists in the hospital with swollen limbs and constricted breathing passages. And if you had the misfortune to be allergic to their venom—

He grabbed Sheba’s arm and pulled her around in front of him, putting himself in the raging insects’ path, an act of chivalry that was rewarded instantly when he felt a stinger plunge into the flesh of his neck. He swatted wildly over his shoulder till he felt the back of his hand collide with the wasp’s body, then slapped his hand against the rock, crushing it.

But there were too many to kill one by one. There were too many even to see one by one—what he saw, silhouetted against the general darkness, was a cloud with undulating edges made up of hundreds of enraged wasps unleashed into the thunderstorm. The rain was probably confusing them, but not enough—several dozen came flying toward Gabriel, who threw up one leather-jacketed arm in front of his face and slapped a flurry of the bugs aside.

“The towel,” he shouted, “hold it up and climb as fast as you can.”

He felt Sheba move beside him, saw the white of the towel out of the corner of one eye, heard her taking small but rapid steps along the precarious path.

A wasp darted in under his guard and jabbed into his chin. He could feel the swelling begin immediately.

He turned and ran, the wasps screaming angrily behind him, and not far behind at that. He felt his injured foot slip and caught himself with one hand, digging his fingers desperately into a crevice in the rock. Wasps flung themselves by the dozen against his back and legs, unable to penetrate the thick leather of the jacket or the fabric of his pants. But he felt one in his hair as well and another at his neck, which was already swollen and painful from the earlier sting. He brushed the one in his hair away and kept going, urging Sheba along when he caught up to her.

They rounded a corner and found themselves facing a passage between the rock face on one side and an artificial wall erected on the other. It was a huge barrier, like a restraining wall or a dam, five feet thick at the base and tapering toward the top some ten feet overhead. In the flashlight’s beam it looked like it was made of fired clay with some sort of glaze or veneer, and on the rock behind the wall, sheltered by it and by an overhang above, Gabriel glimpsed the paintings Dayani had mentioned, the maidens of Sigiriya with their jeweled headdresses and lotus blossoms between their fingers and no shirts on. He ran past them, Sheba in the lead and going even faster, neither of them at risk of falling off the mountain, temporarily, because of the wall to their left. The wasps continued to race after them—some hadn’t made the turn, but most had. Sheba came to a set of stairs carved into the rock and took them two at a time, and Gabriel followed, close on her heels. Then off to one side Gabriel saw the narrow entrance of a cave. Sheba ran past it, but Gabriel reached out, snagged her arm and pulled her back toward him. Squeezing inside the cave opening, he flattened himself against the wall on one side and motioned for Sheba to do the same on the other. He grabbed one corner of the towel from her hand and held it up against the wall at the edge of the opening. Sheba followed his lead, the towel hanging between them, covering the opening to about three feet down from the top. Gabriel shut off the flashlight and they waited in the dark.

They heard the sounds of wasps winging past, felt small collisions as some hurled their bodies against the towel. It took a minute or two for the sounds to die down and the collisions to stop. Still, Gabriel whispered “Wait,” and gave it another two minutes. When he’d heard no sounds for that long, he switched on the light again and let his end of the towel fall. The flashlight’s beam revealed, hanging from the fabric, the bodies of ten or eleven fat wasps, their stingers trapped in the towel’s fabric. Sheba threw the towel to the ground. Then she stepped on each one, grinding it to a bloody smear on the cloth.

“Did you get stung?” Gabriel asked.

She nodded. “Hurts like hell. You?”

He reached back to massage the inflamed lump on his neck. “I’ll live.”

“I’m sorry—I should have been more careful—”

“Stop it,” Gabriel said. He stepped outside. The storm was still raging, but the water almost felt good on his neck and chin. He glanced at the tracker. Fifty-two miles. It ticked over to fifty-one as he watched. Driving quickly, DeGroet might get here in less than an hour. “Come on,” he said and held his hand out. Sheba took it, and they continued along the winding path up the side of the rock.

“Not much longer now,” Gabriel said after a bit. He’d just reached the top of a set of stairs and Sheba was a few steps behind.

“I’m not falling for that again,” Sheba said.

“Good for you,” Gabriel said. “Except this time it’s the truth.”

And as Sheba climbed the last few steps a shattering bolt of lightning lit the sky, revealing the shelf of rock they stood upon—and at the far end, where the rest of the mountain still towered above them, two vast and trunkless feet of stone, the three carved claws on each gleaming, shining in the rain.