Robert Walker - Zombie Eyes

"How long have I been out?"

"Ten minutes, maybe less," Kendra said. "Are you all right?"

"Yes, fine ... and you? Wiz, Sam?"

"No problems."

Esruad had selected his time wisely, Stroud thought as he stared at the outer hull of the ship, the belly of the beast, the temple that had become the demon.

"We've had a report from Nathan," said Kendra.

"Did you tell him about my condition?"

"We were afraid you'd slipped back into a coma, Abe," said Wiz. "We had to tell him."

"Well, radio him now; tell him I'm on my feet." With that, Stroud got to his feet, saying, "I'm really all right."

"We were worried," she said.

"Frightened," added Leonard.

"What's going on aboveground?" he asked, changing the subject, embarrassed over what must appear to the others as a weakness.

"Nathan says he can only stall so long before the military takes complete control."

Leonard added, "Those CBS and NBC film crews got the tunnel digging on tape, at least what they could make out of it--the slag heaps outside. At any rate, everyone up there is terrified, Abe ... everyone. And you can't blame them."

Stroud was impressed by the intricacies of the tunnels dug by hand by the legion of zombies.

Wiz raised Nathan, telling him that Stroud was fine, just a temporary thing, he called it. Stroud got on the line, using his comlink. "Commissioner, we're just penetrating the exterior of the ship now. We've run into ... obstacles."

"Understood, Stroud, and make it as fast as possible. People up here getting real antsy."

"We expected obstacles," he said, "and we've gotten them."

"The tunnels?"

"Took us away from the ship. Long arm of the beast within."

"So what does that make the ship itself? The damned bowels?"

"Something like that."

"You're sure you all want to step into its gut?"

"Not a whole lot of choice, Commissioner. This ... this event is rather complicated, and you might say I had my ticket reserved about three thousand years ago."

Nathan chuckled nervously into the radio, not understanding the implications of Stroud's remarks. Static was beginning to break up the communication. Nathan said that he was pulling for them, and if Stroud made it back alive he'd buy him a New York pizza and a beer.

"You're on, sir. Just plea..."

"What's ... at?"

"...keep ... pack off for ... time we ... greed ... pon."

"Roger ... til dawn. Do every ... in my power."

"Thanks, Commissioner."

"You're thank ... me? Stroud, e ... you're the bravest ... I ever met, or the ... idiotic ... goes for your traveling companions-sss-well ... til next ... Stroud, over'n..."

Kendra went about monitoring everyone's gauges and giving a full report. Everything was in working order, but they had only half the oxygen supply they had entered with. The physical turmoil and emotional stress had taken its toll. Leonard was looking very weak, and even Wiz sat in a depressed slump against the wall just staring at the hull of the ship that now confronted them.

Stroud was fatigued himself, and he did not find fault with the others. He wondered now if perhaps he should not have come alone, but the skull had said three good men with faith and courage were required. He had two men and a woman with him, but he wasn't at all sure of their faith, despite their obvious courage in coming so far with him.

"Once we're inside the ship, gentlemen," said Stroud calmly, "you can turn back at any time."

It was said with such simple sincerity that Kendra and the others just stared at him. Kendra glimpsed the old Stroud in him now, the man she had slept with.

"Is that what your skull tells you?" she asked.

"It is what my heart tells me."

"We just may take you up on that," said Leonard. "My own heart is flapping like a chicken trying to take flight." He tried a laugh but it became a cough.

"If that's the case, what're we sitting around here for?" said Wiz. "Not that I have any intention of leaving you here alone, Abe."

"You face no shame in turning back once we penetrate the hull. It's the reason I was so ... upset when you all ran from the first entranceway we found. So far, we've been playing the demon's game. Now we begin to play our chess pieces."

Kendra stared across at Stroud. He was once again distant, distracted. He was playing some kind of mental game with the demon of the ship. It was as if that byte of information had come straight from his mind to hers earlier when she had thought of it in exactly those terms. She wondered if she and the other two doctors weren't Esruad's pawns in this bizarre war game.

"Yes, let's get on with it, Dr. Stroud," she said.

Before them stood the smooth wall of the ship showing no planking marks, nothing to pin the eye on. It looked like the great belly of a whale. Her eyes used to the dark, her nose used to the damp and clay, she still thought that she could smell the leviathan's rotting carcass, and that she could see the nearly imperceptible, inaudible breathing as the ribs of the whale moved in and out. She eerily wondered if they were about to be swallowed up by the whale.

It was as if the thought had been spoken aloud, for Stroud stared at her, drawing near to her mask so that she could see the expression on his face when he said, "Yes, Kendra, the beast has become the ship, and the ship the beast; we are about to step inside the beast once we lance a hole in its belly."

What he was saying, and the way he said it, frightened her more than anything she had seen down here. "You must all return after you enter," he said.

"What about you? Do you expect to die here?" she asked.

"Leave me to my fate."

Deceptive appearances had made of the ship wall an impenetrable leviathan, but it was far from impenetrable. It gave at the touch. Breathing heavily on it made it move like cardboard.

Decay was the operative word here in the bowels of the ancient ship. Immediately the archeologists went to work, examining the petrified wood that had become like stone to the touch, almost like charcoal. Yet covering the exterior, was a layer of living fungus and mushroomlike growths which turned into a profusion of flying spores at the slightest touch. "What holds the damned thing together?" asked Stroud.

"The earth here is almost pure clay. It has retarded the natural decay of the wood, and the wood itself--teak would be my guess--" began Wiz.

"Yes, teak beams, imagine it," agreed Leonard, staring.

"The Estrucans were master shipbuilders."

They had stepped inside the ship, and the moment they did so the Etruscan skull, which had somehow fallen into the hands of the pharaoh of Egypt, and had been buried with him, began to glow with a singular orange-to-yellow light. It went bright with the color, dimmed and became bright again, dimmed and brightened, dimmed again, as if breathing, until it finally settled on a glow similar to the sodium-vapor light of a modern streetlamp.

"Damned thing gives me the creeps almost as much as this ship," said Kendra.

"Don't you see that the closer we get to the true cause of the evil here, the stronger Esruad's power becomes?" asked Stroud.

"All I know is that our time is running out."

"Look, look here," said Wiz, pointing. It was a stack of terra-cotta bowls, ladles, jugs, cups. "These will help to date the ship," suggested Wiz.

"Very similar to the terra cotta taken from the Kyrenia ship," said Leonard, "somewhere about 700 b.c."

"Closer, then, to the Yassi Ada ship discovered--"

"We haven't time, gentlemen," Stroud told them.

"Over here," said Leonard. He led them to a collection of double-headed axes, pickaxes, a hoe, a shovel, billhooks, pruning hooks, hammers, knives, punches, gouges, files, chisels, bits and thousands of wooden peg nails.