Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,127
followed for centuries, even millennia.
“That’s disgusting,” Jada said.
“But necessary,” Henriksen said. “Somewhere they’ll have a kitchen. They must hunt for their food and gather greens in secret. They might even go into the city to find—”
“We don’t care about their culture,” Drake said, giving him a hard look.
Henriksen nodded. Interested as he was, he understood this wasn’t why they had come. It wasn’t an anthropology study.
Drake threaded back through the rooms, ducking through doorways until he had led them back to the tunnel they’d diverted from to investigate the quarters. The river had him thinking, wondering if the ravine they’d jumped also once had had water at the bottom. He had a feeling they had almost reached their destination, so he was surprised when the contortions of the labyrinth began to take them upward.
The sound began as a dull roar.
“What is that?” Drake asked.
They backtracked along a dead end turn and then started along a zigzag tunnel that had started as a natural cave and been smoothed and widened by human efforts. The sound diminished and then built again, growing ever louder, until the hissing roar filled the tunnel around them.
When Drake’s flashlight beam picked up the gleam of moisture on the tunnel wall ahead, he knew what they had found.
The cavern was longer and wider than either of the others they’d encountered thus far. The river came rushing in from the right and over a ledge, creating a forty-foot wall of crashing water that filled the vast cavern with a damp chill and a deafening white noise. Their tunnel ended on a plateau at the top of the waterfall.
“It’s beautiful,” Jada said in surprise, raising her voice to be heard.
Their flashlight beams strobed the walls, picking out faded characters and symbols painted in some places and engraved in others. Far above, slits of moonlight provided no real illumination but a glimpse of eyelet crevices that would allow the tiniest bit of sunlight in on a clear day. Long strips of moss ran down the far wall and covered the rocks on either side of the waterfall, both there on the plateau and in the lower half of the cavern below them, and vines of white hellebore, long since adapted to this bizarre subterranean hell, were plentiful amid the moss.
Though the flashlights were powerful, they could make out few details below. But Drake saw at least one tunnel leading away from the area around the bottom of the waterfall, and he suspected that what looked like deeper patches of darkness beyond all but the dimmest glow of their lights might be other such tunnels.
“This is it,” he said. “Down there somewhere.”
Jada scanned her flashlight beam across the other side of the rushing river, then ran it along the plateau toward the edge of the waterfall. Drake saw the stairs the same moment she discovered them, carved into the wall beside the waterfall, descending into the lower cavern. They gleamed with spray, and he knew they would have to watch their step.
The violence began so quickly, Drake barely knew what was happening. Henriksen grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, reaching for his wrist. Drake held his gun in one hand and the flashlight in the other, and for several heartbeats he thought that Henriksen was attacking, making his move now to eliminate them to save the white hellebore. He cracked the man across the skull with the barrel of the Glock, and Henriksen staggered back, dropping to one knee, blood welling on his forehead.
But he was waving his gun the other direction along the plateau, toward the dark cave mouth from which the river spouted.
“There!” Henriksen shouted. “Turn the bloody light over there!”
Drake swung the flashlight beam. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jada just beginning to turn.
Then he saw them, five shadows rushing along the river’s edge into the pool of light. Only five, Drake thought, which had to mean that their numbers were thinning badly. Their odds of surviving to see the sky again were improving.
One of the figures broke away, picking up speed. Henriksen raised his gun, steadied his aim, and fired. The killer crumpled, but forward momentum brought him rolling along the rock shelf toward them, and in the circle of Jada’s flashlight beam, he tumbled to a halt and lay dead, gazing up at them with hollow, lifeless eyes.
Ian Welch.
Sick dread clutching at his heart, Drake directed his light at the others. Henriksen was taking aim again.