It’s the same here, he thought. Nothing’s what it seems.
Making sure that his boots were solidly placed, he started down the uneven slope toward the valley, scanning the trees and rocks for signs of a trap.
6
Amanda threw another rock to the side. It was as big as a football. She ignored the cuts on her hands and grabbed yet another. It seemed she’d been doing this forever. She, Ray, and Viv were fifteen feet below the top of the spillway. Last night’s storm had flooded the reservoir. Water cascaded over the edge, pouring down the rocks, throwing up spray that chilled her face. To see what was in the reservoir, they needed to breach the dam and drain the water.
“Be careful!” Viv yelled amid the water’s roar. “Remember to watch for the snakes!”
Amanda didn’t need reminding. Twice already, she’d seen water moccasins slide past her, the force of the water carrying them over the rim and down the slope.
“This rock’s too heavy!” Ray shouted. “Help me tug it free!”
Amanda stumbled to him and gripped the rock. The blood on her hands made them slippery, but she squeezed as hard as she could and tugged. The rock came free, throwing her and Ray off-balance while it rumbled to the bottom of the spillway. She fell, banging her right arm.
“Are you all right?” Ray asked.
Amanda ignored the pain and reached for another rock.
“I finally see dirt,” Viv told them. “Four layers of rocks until I got to it.”
Amanda studied the embankment. “A lot more to do.” She stooped and pulled and threw. Her chest heaved. “This is taking too long. We need to reach into the water. If we expose the dirt there, the current’ll wash it away and undermine the other rocks.”
“The snakes,” Viv warned.
“No choice.”
Spray washed grit from Amanda’s face as she put her hands in the water and pulled at a rock. The force of the current helped tug it free. She yanked at another rock, and it, too, went with the current. She reached again and suddenly jerked her hands back. Something that looked like a piece of rope sped past her.
For a moment, she couldn’t move. She stared at the water, feeling as if the snake was inside her, writhing. When she mustered resolve and reached for another rock, the current pushed at her hands. She needed to brace herself to keep her footing. Then the rock came loose, and the roaring water carried it down.
Ray followed her example, but Viv concentrated on rocks away from the water, too phobic about the snakes.
The cascade sucked dirt from under a rock. It spread in the current.
“Yes!” Ray shouted.
Amanda found the energy to work harder. The icy water numbed her fingers. She pulled another rock. A moment later, another snake sped past.
Ray shouted, “More dirt’s flowing!”
A large plume of earth spread into the current.
“If we can make the hole deeper and wider…” Ray tugged.
Amanda helped him, pulling out another rock. And another. The plume of dirt widened. A rock moved on its own. The current became earth-colored, more rocks shifting.
“Get back!” Amanda shouted.
The old embankment hadn’t been maintained in more than a hundred years. Amanda realized that she was standing on the site of what amounted to a chain reaction. A half-dozen rocks toppled free. Earth washed away behind them, dropping more rocks, which in turn freed more earth. The force of the current was relentless. The top of the dam settled, opening a channel, more water roaring down the slope, taking away more earth. As the rocks beneath Amanda threatened to give way, she turned and tried to hurry across the uneven surface. But the slope moved as though something alive was under it, and she needed to struggle for balance, working toward the embankment’s edge. Ray was ahead of her, Viv behind.
She heard Viv scream. Pivoting, she saw Viv teeter on a section of collapsing rocks. Amanda lunged for her, caught her left hand, felt the jolt of Viv’s weight, and started to topple with her.
Ray’s arm snared her waist, straining to pull them to safety. The slope kept collapsing, the rush of water sucking at Viv’s boots. Viv twisted, the torque of her hand prying Amanda’s fingers open. As Amanda lurched back, Viv dropped, vanishing into the current.
“No!” Amanda wailed.
The top of the dam collapsed, a wall of water hurtling toward the bottom. Amanda glimpsed Viv’s brown jumpsuit in the plummeting current. A churning pool enveloped her.
“We’ve got to pull her out!”
Amanda raced toward the side of the spillway and charged toward the bottom. Hearing Ray’s urgent steps next to her, she saw Viv struggle to the surface, breathe, and get sucked under again.
“Her boots!” Ray yelled. “She won’t be able to swim!”
But Viv tried. Breaking the surface again, she stretched her arms, clawing at the water. The flood carried her along.
Amanda and Ray hurried along the water’s edge, trying to keep pace with its speed.
“Don’t fight the current!” Amanda shouted. “Let it take you! Where it’s slower downstream, we’ll grab you!”
She dodged sagebrush and rocks, desperate to stay next to Viv. She rounded a curve, lost sight of the brown jumpsuit, moaned, then saw it, and kept running. Viv got her head above the water, breathing frantically.
The flood rushed over the banks of what, until five minutes ago, had been a stream bed. The water made two sounds, one on top of the other, a hiss and a rumble. It picked up debris. It dragged Viv under. Her brown jump suit was hard to distinguish now in the earth-colored water.
As the flood spread over level grassland, Amanda charged into it, only to find that the current almost knocked her over. Ray pulled her to solid ground.
“Viv!” Amanda screamed.
The water kept widening. Amanda saw Viv struggle to keep her head above the surface while the current swept her along. She struck something—a boulder, Amanda realized—and clung to it.
“Yes!” Amanda shouted. “Hang on!”
As the torrent spread, it slowed. It dropped to a foot. Six inches. Viv released her hold on the boulder and slumped behind it.
“Keep your head up!” Amanda yelled. She splashed into the water. Even shallow, the current was powerful. She and Ray needed to hang on to each other to keep from falling. Then the water dropped to three inches, and Amanda hurried through it. Glancing upstream, she saw a massive hole in the embankment, emptiness beyond it, only a trickle coming out. She increased speed and came to the boulder.
Viv lay on her back, her face above water. Amanda reached for her. Ray pulled her hand away.
“Let go of me! We need to help her!”
“We can’t! She’s dead!”
“Like hell! I see her chest moving! Get your damned hands—” The words stuck in Amanda’s throat. A snake emerged from Viv’s jumpsuit, its black body slithering across her shoulder. The tail of another projected from Viv’s left pant leg. The snake made her leg seem to move. A third snake was halfway up her right sleeve.
“The force of the water,” Ray said. “It tore her boots off. It shoved the snakes into her clothes.”
Snakes writhed everywhere, visible now that the water was only a couple of inches deep.
“We need to get out of here,” Ray said, pulling her away.
“But…Viv…Maybe we can still help.”
“No. Look at her eyes.”
Despite the sun’s glare, they didn’t blink.
“Let’s go. Those snakes are awfully angry,” Ray said.
One hissed at them.
He tugged again, and this time, Amanda went with him. Numbed by grief, she kept looking back until the boulder obscured Viv’s body.
They reached dry ground. The snakes remained where the earth was wet. Amanda thought of Viv’s bulging eyes and trembled.
“When Viv saw how the dogs mutilated Derrick’s body, remember what she told us?” Amanda asked.
“She said she couldn’t bear this any longer.??
?
“Exactly.” Overwhelmed, Amanda sank to the ground. “I can’t bear this any longer.”
7
Balenger worked his way down a slope. His boots almost slipped on wet dead leaves, but he gripped a tree trunk, caught his balance, and continued down. He saw occasional patches of snow where the sun hadn’t reached and realized that here the storm the previous night had brought more than rain.
To his right, the foothills rose to mountains. A mile to his left, the foothills shrank, merging with the valley’s entrance. Knowing the Game Master’s fondness for monitoring devices, he expected that there’d be intrusion detectors. But four deer bounding away from him through the trees made him realize that intrusion detectors would be impractical. Animals would constantly set off alarms triggered by pressure sensors and infrared beams. Under the circumstances, video cameras were more reliable, and for now, the close cover of the aspen trees made this an unlikely area for the Game Master to hide any. The view would be limited. Better to aim cameras at open spaces where a few could accomplish a lot.
Balenger kept descending to the right, wanting to gain more distance from the valley’s entrance. He reached the slope’s bottom. Still encircled by trees, he took out his compass and terrain map. A mountain visible through the tree tops gave him a landmark to orient the map. He calculated that in another mile, he’d be in a north-south line with the reservoir.
He forced himself to drink some water, bit a piece from an energy bar, and continued through the trees, following the rim of the valley. He scanned everything ahead of him, reminding himself to think as if he were in Iraq, watching for any sign of an ambush or a bomb. He decided that buried explosives connected to trip wires or pressure plates weren’t practical in this location. Animals would constantly set them off. More likely, explosives would be radio controlled, triggered by a visual confirmation of the target. Just like the roadside bombs in Iraq. Although he remained convinced that cameras would be aimed toward open spaces, not into the limited viewpoint of the forest, he took the precaution of avoiding obvious routes through the trees—a game trail, for example, or a clearing.
A rumble made him pause. It sounded like distant thunder. The noise persisted, then faded. An explosion? he wondered. No, it lasted too long. Maybe the people on the embankment succeeded in breaching the dam. Although he couldn’t imagine why they’d work so hard to do that, he kept hoping Amanda was one of them. Worry for her made him want to hurry, but he restrained himself, knowing that he wouldn’t be any use to her if he allowed himself to get careless.
When his compass and map told him he was abreast of the reservoir, he turned left and moved cautiously through the trees. The forest thinned, revealing the extent of the valley and the mountains surrounding it. The passage of time weighed on him. Already, it was almost one p.m. Eleven hours until endgame at midnight. He held his gun at the ready and peered from the trees. Nothing on either side aroused his suspicions.
Wary, he stepped into the open. After the protection of the forest, the vastness before him was unnerving.
The BlackBerry vibrated. He took it from his camouflage suit and pressed its green button.
“Welcome to Scavenger,” the voice said.
Balenger studied the expanse in front of him. Sagebrush, a few pine trees, occasional boulders. Despite the rain the night before, the ground looked parched.
“After I learned about the Sepulcher of Worldly Desires, I bought this valley,” the Game Master said.
“Nice to be able to afford whatever you want.” Balenger turned to the left, and scanned the line of trees behind him, concentrating on the upper branches.
“I walked the valley until I knew it like an old friend.”
“You have friends?” Balenger turned to the right now, scanning the upper branches of the trees in that direction.
“I used a metal detector to search the cemetery in case the Sepulcher was buried there. But the only metal the detector reacted to came from jewelry that some of the townspeople were buried with.”
“You dug them up to find out?”
“I used the detector to scan the town, a painstaking process. As you might expect, the device reacted to all sorts of metal, from nails to hinges to rusted knives and forks. But no reaction was strong enough to indicate that the Sepulcher was buried under Avalon.”
“You assumed the Sepulcher was huge?” Balenger kept studying the trees as he pressed the phone to his ear. “Maybe it’s tiny, just room enough for a Bible and some handwritten prayers.”
“No,” the Game Master said. “It’s huge. I hired a plane and equipped it with an infrared camera, the kind that records variations of heat in landscapes. Soil absorbs heat, for example, while stone reflects it. Soil on top of rock has a different colored image than deep soil or soil with metal under it. Hot spots almost seem to glow on photographs this camera takes.”
Balenger saw what he looked for and nodded in a minor victory.
“The camera took thousands of photographs. It documented the heat signature of every part of the valley. The photography took days. Studying the results took weeks. A few aberrant images gave me hope, but when I had those areas excavated, I found nothing.”
“So maybe the Sepulcher’s a myth. Maybe it never existed. If it can’t be found, there’s another flaw in the game. Call it off.”
“Oh, the Sepulcher exists, all right. I went back to the original documents and finally understood that the clues were there all along. I just hadn’t looked at them in the right way.”
“You found the Sepulcher?”
“Indeed.”
“And it’s here in the valley?”
“Absolutely.”
“Where?”
“That would be too easy. It’s up to you to find it. If you do, you win.”
“And Amanda goes free.”
“Provided she overcomes the remaining obstacles.”
“Then I don’t have time to chat.”
Balenger broke the transmission and put the phone away. He removed the packet of Kleenex from his shirt pocket and took out a piece. He tore it in half, wadded the sections, and shoved them into his ears. Then he raised the Mini-14, peered through its site, and lined up its red dot with what he’d discovered in the upper branches of an aspen tree: a video camera. He hadn’t fired a rifle since he was in Iraq a year and a half earlier. Shooting was a perishable skill. Accuracy depended on practice. Hoping that the holographic gunsight would compensate, he held his breath and pulled the trigger.
Even with Kleenex wadded in his ears, the sound of the shot was palpable. The rifle bucked, an empty shell flipping away. He looked toward the camera in the branches fifty yards away, twenty feet up in the tree. A dark hole in the bark below the camera warned him that he’d jerked the trigger, lowering the barrel.
He aimed again. This time, he squeezed instead of jerking. Crack. The recoil swept through him. Fragments of the camera flew through the air. The rest of it dangled from an electrical wire.
He walked along the trees and saw another camera in the aspens, about fifty yards farther down. The valley was presumably flanked with them. So many cameras, so many corresponding screens. Balenger knew it would be impossible for the Game Master to watch all the monitors. Some kind of motion sensor probably activated individual screens if a human-shaped figure came into view.
Well, here’s another image that won’t take up his time, Balenger thought. He raised the rifle, lined up the red dot, squeezed the trigger, and blew the camera to pieces. The BlackBerry vibrated in his pocket. He ignored it.
He kept walking, scanning the expanse around him. The extent of the sky reminded him of Iraq. Amanda, he thought. Amanda, he kept repeating. Amanda, he inwardly shouted, the mantra giving him strength.
He saw another camera, this one hidden among rocks. He shot it.
Again, the BlackBerry vibrated in his pocket. But he had something more important to occupy his attention—a gully that stopped him from going farther. It was wide a
nd deep. Water from yesterday’s rain flowed at the bottom. It was a seemingly natural stream bed, but all Balenger could think of was that it couldn’t be avoided. Everything was a possible trap.
LEVEL EIGHT
THE DOOMSDAY VAULT
1
Amanda remained slumped on the ground, staring toward the boulder beyond which Viv lay dead.
“Let’s go,” Ray urged.
“I meant what I said. I can’t do this any longer.”
“No one leaves the game,” the voice warned through her headset.
“Who said anything about leaving?” Weariness muffled Amanda’s voice. “I’m just not playing anymore.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Ray said. “We need to see what’s in the reservoir.”
Amanda looked in that direction, toward the gap in the embankment and the emptiness beyond. “It doesn’t matter.”
“I can’t wait.” Ray walked toward the reservoir.
“Inaction is a form of playing,” the Game Master told Amanda. “It’s a choice not to win. What would Frank say?”
“Frank?” Amanda looked up. The name was a spark to her nervous system. “Leave him out of this! Damn it, what did you do with him? What sick way did you think of to kill him?”
“Leave him out of this? I don’t want to. In fact, I can’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Frank’s coming to play.”
The words didn’t make sense. Frank’s coming to play?
A gunshot startled her. It echoed back and forth across the valley, but as much as Amanda could tell, the initiating sound came from beyond the flooded area, from the mountains to the north. A second shot followed. Yes, from the north.
Coming to play?
With difficulty, Amanda stood. She heard another shot. Frank? Is that you? Coming to play? What’s that shooting about? She waited, listening hard, but there wasn’t a fourth shot.
Frank?
She looked toward Ray. Near the ruptured embankment, he, too, had turned, staring across the meager flow of water toward the northern mountains. As the air became still, his lean features toughened. In the harsh sunlight, he resumed climbing the slope toward the emptied reservoir.