Douglas Preston - Reliquary

“Campion, too,” Donovan said grimly, looking at the other SEAL. “Jesus, what would do this?”

Snow shut his eyes a moment, taking short choppy breaths, trying to keep a hold on the thin edge of his control.

“Whoever they are, they must have gone up that way,” Donovan said, indicating the pipe above their heads. “Snow, grab that magazine pouch.”

Doing as he was told, Snow leaned forward and snatched the pouch. It almost slipped out of his hands, and looking down he saw it was slick with blood and matter.

“I’ll set the charges here,” Donovan said, pulling bricks of C-4 out of his own haversack. “Cover our exit.”

Snow raised his weapon and turned his back on the SEAL, staring down toward the bend in the tunnel, flickering crazily in and out of sight in the lambent glow of the flare. His comm unit hissed briefly with the sound of static—or was it the sound of something heavy, dragging through the mud? Was that a soft, moist gibbering beneath the electrical cracklings and spittings?

The unit dropped into silence again. From the corner of his eye, he saw Donovan plunging the timer into the explosive, punching up a time. “Twenty-three fifty-five,” he said. “That gives us almost half an hour to find the PL and get the hell out of here.” He stooped, pulling the tags from the headless necks of his fallen comrades. “Move out,” he said, picking up his weapon and shoving the dog tags inside his rubber vest.

As they began to move forward again, Snow heard a sudden scrabbling from behind, and a sound like a cough. He turned to see the forms of several figures clambering down from the pipe and dropping into the muck by the fallen SEALs. Snow saw, with a sense of eerie unreality, that they were cloaked and hooded.

“Let’s go!” Donovan cried, racing toward the bend in the tunnel.

Snow followed him, panic driving his legs. They clattered down the ancient brick passage, racing from the horrible scene. As they rounded the curve, Donovan slipped in the mud and fell, tumbling head over heels in the murky gloom.

“Make a stand!” he shouted, grabbing for his weapon and snapping on a flare at the same time.

Snow turned to see the figures heading toward them, running low with a kind of sure-footedness. The brilliant flare light seemed to give them a momentary pause. Then they surged forward. There was something bestial about their scuttling that turned his blood to ice. His index finger eased forward, feeling for the trigger guard. A huge roar sounded beside him, and he realized Donovan had fired his grenade launcher. There was a flash of light, then the tunnel shook with the concussion. The weapon jerked and bucked in his hands and Snow realized that he was firing his own M-16 wildly, scattering bullets across the tunnel before them. He quickly took his finger off the trigger. Another figure rounded the bend, emerging from the smoke of the grenade into Snow’s field of fire. He aimed and touched the trigger. Its head jerked back, and for a split second Snow had the image of an impossibly wrinkled and knobby face, features hidden within great folds of skin. Then there was another roar, and the horror disappeared in the flame and smoke of Donovan’s grenade.

His gun was firing on an empty clip. Snow released his finger, ejected the clip, dug into his pocket for another, and slammed it home. They waited, poised to fire again, as the echoes gradually faded. No more figures came loping out of the smoke and the darkness.

Donovan took a deep breath. “Back to the rally point,” he said.

They turned back down the tunnel, Donovan reaching up to snap on his flashlight. A thin red beam shot into the murk ahead of them. Snow followed, breathing hard. Ahead lay Three Points, and their gear, and the way out. He found he was thinking from moment to moment now, concentrating only on getting out, getting to the surface, because anything else would mean thinking of the horrors that had scuttled out toward them, and to think of those would mean…

He suddenly ploughed into Donovan’s back. Staggering for a moment, he glanced around, trying to determine what had caused the SEAL to stop so suddenly.

Then he saw, in the beam of Donovan’s light, a group of the creatures ahead of them: ten, perhaps a dozen, standing motionless in the thick atmosphere of the outflow tunnel. Several of them were holding things, things that dangled by what looked to Snow like dense threads. He peered more closely, in mingled fascination and horror. Then he looked away quickly.

“Mother of God,” he breathed. “What do we do now?”

“We blow our way out,” Donovan said quietly, raising his weapon.

= 59 =

MARGO TOOK A deep drag from the oxygen mask, then passed it to Smithback. The oxygen cleared her head immediately, and she glanced around. At the head of the group, Pendergast was placing bricks of plastic explosive around the base of an open hatchway. Each time he pulled another charge from his pack and dropped it in place, clouds of dust and fungus spore billowed up from the ground, obscuring his face momentarily. Behind her stood D’Agosta, weapon at the ready. Mephisto stood to one side, silent and motionless, his eyes red embers in the dark.

Pendergast shoved the detonators into the C-4, then set the time carefully, checking it against his own Patek Philippe. Then he retrieved his pack and rose silently, signaling it was time to move on to the next position. From the circles of his night-vision goggles to the base of his chin, Pendergast was a mask of light gray dust. His normally immaculate black suit was torn and muddied. Under other circumstances, he would have looked ridiculous. But Margo was in no mood to laugh.

The air was so bad she realized she had placed a hand protectively over her nose and mouth. She gave up and took another pull from the mask.

“Don’t Bogart that oxygen,” Smithback whispered. He smiled weakly, but his eyes remained grim and distant.

They moved down the narrow corridor, Margo now helping Smithback through the darkness. Huge iron rivets, spaced about ten feet apart, hung from the ceiling. After a couple of minutes, they stopped again while Pendergast consulted his plans, then took the charges from Margo’s pack and placed them in a niche near the roof.

“Very good,” he said. “One more series and we can head for the surface. We’ll need to move quickly.”

He started down the passage, then stopped abruptly.

“What is it?” Margo whispered, but Pendergast held up his hand for silence.

“Do you hear that?” he asked at last in a low tone.

Margo listened, but could hear nothing. The close, fetid atmosphere was like cotton wool, muffling all sound. But now she heard something: a dull thump, then another, like rolling thunder far beneath their feet.

“What is that?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” Pendergast murmured.

“It’s not the SEALs, setting off their explosions?”

Pendergast shook his head. “Doesn’t sound powerful enough to be plastique. Besides, it’s too early.” He listened a moment, frowning, then motioned them forward again. Margo followed close behind, leading Smithback as the passage rose, then fell, tracing a crazy course through the bedrock. She found herself wondering who could have constructed this passage, perhaps three dozen stories beneath the streets of Manhattan. She saw herself as in a vision, walking along Park Avenue, but the road appeared as just a thin skin of asphalt, covering a vast network of shafts, tunnels, galleries, and corridors, plunging deep into the earth, crawling like a wasp’s nest with the activity of…

She gave her head a vicious shake and took another hit of the oxygen. As her thoughts cleared again, she realized that the muffled sound was still coming from somewhere beneath her feet. Now, however, it was different: it had a cadence, like the sound of a throbbing engine, rising and falling and rising again.