Uncharted The Fourth Labyrinth - By Christopher Golden Page 0,15

an optical illusion had made it seem like an unbroken surface. Dr. Cheney had outdone himself in creating his labyrinth exhibit, but the time to appreciate it had passed.

Drake, Sully, and Jada followed her through the opening and around a sharp turn that brought them to a fork.

“Which way?” Jada asked.

The graduate student seemed about to go right, but then there came a crash of glass and the thump of a heavy impact against the walls. Drake darted past the woman, down the corridor to the left. The sound had been close, and with the thud on the wall, there was no question about direction now.

Drake darted around a floor display, brushed the fake stone wall, and took a jag to the right. It felt like he’d reversed direction; for a second he thought the maze had misled him, but then it split into two narrow passages, one in either direction, and he turned left again, rushing in the direction of the crash. He heard Sully, Jada, and their guide pursuing him but didn’t slow. That scream had been one not of fear but of pain. And more than pain. He had heard men scream like that only in the worst of circumstances, when blood had been shed and life was fleeting.

“Nate, watch your ass!” Sully shouted.

Drake slowed, taking heed of the warning. They’d heard no gunshots, but he had no way of knowing what waited for them ahead. He dashed past a yawning darkness to his right and wondered if that was where the Minotaur’s roar eventually would be heard. Then he reached a turn where the ceiling sloped downward to an arched entryway. He ducked through and nearly tripped over a man sprawled on the floor.

“Damn it,” he muttered, regaining his footing.

A quick glance at the man’s dull, vacant eyes—and the stab wounds in his chest and the blood staining his clothes and pooling under him—was enough to tell Drake he wasn’t going to make it.

4

Blood bubbled from Dr. Cheney’s lips as he tried to breathe, and his whole body shook.

Drake surveyed the scene in an instant. A display case had been shattered in the man’s struggle with the murderer. Blood smeared on the wall showed where the dying man had crashed into it, trying to keep himself from falling.

Sully, Jada, and their guide ducked through the low passage, and when the graduate student saw the dying man, she screamed his name.

“Maynard!” she cried, and rushed to kneel at his side, murmuring denials and prayers in a torrent of heartbreak.

“Don’t touch him,” Sully warned as she went to try to lift his head.

The woman glanced up in confusion, but Drake saw in her eyes that she understood Sully’s caution. The police would not want the crime scene disturbed. She wanted to help the curator, but anyone could see there was nothing she could do.

Drake turned away from her anguish. He ran to the next bend in the corridor and peered around the corner, listening for retreating footfalls. They were no more than thirty seconds behind the killer, but that could be an eternity if the bastard knew where he was going. He was about to give chase anyway but hesitated.

“Hey,” he said, rushing back to the others, realizing he didn’t know the graduate student’s name. “Which way is the staff entrance you were talking about?”

She blinked, lifted her gaze from the dying Dr. Cheney, and looked at him. “Back there,” she said, glancing the way they’d come. “Through the Minotaur’s alcove. It’s the dark area on the left as you—”

But Drake had stopped listening. He remembered. They had just passed it, probably only a second or two before the killer had gone into that darkness. He might even have been hiding there in the shadows, waiting as they went by so as not to make any noise.

“Stay with her,” he told Sully.

Sully nodded, though he didn’t look happy about it.

Drake ran through the passage in a crouch, standing as he emerged in the corridor. He heard Jada following, wished she would wait with Sully, but didn’t take the time to argue with her. A couple of hours with the adult Jada Hzujak and he knew she wasn’t the sort of woman who was going to sit idly by when it came time for action.

They raced through two turns of the labyrinth, retracing their steps, and came to the Minotaur’s alcove. Drake didn’t slow, plunging into the darkness, hands in front of him. He stumbled over loose cables on