animals, charioteers and soldiers, muscular heroes and some rather shapely goddesses. With our torches held high, we still couldn’t see the end.
Behind us, Marat and gang dropped through the gap in the wall and made the same noises we had climbing out of the bone pile.
“How are we getting out of here?” Max asked.
Kate shrugged. “I’m depending on you for that.”
In minutes, we heard them on our heels. They had split up and were moving down the narrow corridors faster than we could. With us lighting the way, they’d be on us in minutes.
A lightning bolt smashed the wall to our left; it collapsed in a deafening cloud of smoke. Another bolt overhead scattered a chunk of stone into the passage in front of us. We peeled off to the last clear corridor, but with them now right behind.
And then, a minute later, we hit a dead end. A hole halfway up the white-painted wall showed where the ancients had wriggled through to the next chamber, but we had no wriggling time.
The two groups faced off in close quarters. There was a sudden lull, like maybe they’d caught up with us faster than they expected and nobody was quite certain what to do. Each breath sounded lurid, echoing against the high walls full of painted witnesses. A rumbling groan warned that the ruptured corridor nearby was breaking down and not slowly.
Max’s hand swiped the air in front of us and I could feel the shell forming. We held our breath but not for long-it got tight in the corridor all of a sudden, like a belt worn a notch too close. The shooters were eyeing us in no particular hurry. Marat held out several headpieces like an offering.
I felt the rock wall behind me creep upward a quarter-inch and then drop back into place. Even Max couldn’t maintain a shield and rearrange several hundred tons of rock at the same time.
“Come along,” Redbeard said. “Put on the headsets and we’re good. When this is over, you can tell anyone you want about us. Levitate cars on YouTube for all I care. We know your tricks, pal. Nobody’s getting close enough for you to do anything. Take the glasses or we take you down-your choice.”
I felt Max reach behind me, reach for Kate. “This isn’t the time,” she muttered but he pulled her close and whispered, “Remember what you did… at home? To amuse your boyfriends?” He nodded at the chalky walls, the gallery of Orthodox crosses and pagan gods. “Do it now… with all this.”
Kate’s eyes opened wide. And, right away, things began to change.
She leaned against us and I heard the rumble inside me like a generator, pulsing through my shoulders and trunk. I got a raging erection-it would be a problem if we had to run real soon. The shooters heads swiveled and I realized they could hear it too. But clearly they had no idea where it was coming from.
A moment later, the deep blackness turned to mist, chalky paint sifting off the walls into the boneyard air. The shooters, being he-man types, tried not to react but it was a real effort-their shoulders rose half a foot pretending nothing was happening.
This was good for about five seconds.
Then the ancient paintings began to dance off the stone walls and out over our heads. Painted chariots began racing up and down the shaft, the drivers lashing each other and the flailing shooters when they wouldn’t or couldn’t get out of the way.
Soldiers marched tight rows in thin air two feet above us and then broke ranks, laying bets on the chariot race, drinking from giant jugs and trying to make time with the shapely goddesses. Centaurs and unicorns dueled just below the ceiling, peacocks drank from fountains guarded by teasing nymphs and huge bushes flowered in every empty space.
None of this was even slightly realistic; these were the piecework no-dimensional paintings that came with your entry-level Roman funeral. But you could feel the air kick up when the chariots roared past and a drizzle hit your hair from the fountains. The fact that it was all totally unconvincing only made the whole thing eerier. All around us, paintings grew, changed shape, mingled, argued, fought and fornicated. Well, I’m not 100 % certain about the fornicating but it got difficult to keep track once the shooting started.
The shooting was kind of inevitable, once a couple hundred bones flew out of their burial chambers, arced into the air like somebody was chucking them and tore straight for the blueshirts. They were shooters, after all, so, when attacked in a very narrow space by pagan gods most of them had never heard of, they responded about the way you’d expect. Redbeard kept screaming at them to stop, as each discharge brought more and more of the ceiling down on us.
Crazily, in the midst of the insanity, I detached. I found myself focused on a sandy-haired shooter ducking under a chariot wheel because I saw the wheel close-up, inches from my face, just as it brushed by his.
This is the guy, I thought, the guy from the apartment and the airport, the guy I can read. Jesus, he was panicked! Not that you could blame him, attacked by Mars, Hercules, St. Peter and their really hot girlfriends all at the same time. It’s a trick, he kept repeating with mounting fervor. In his panic, he never noticed our connection- but I knew I’d remember him.
Max yelled, “Push!” We jumped forward, smacking the air shield into the wall. There was a spongy reaction and we bounced backward. He shouted ‘Again!” and this time, I heard his voice in my head saying Scream after you push. We pushed together and the wall teetered, wobbled and finally collapsed, locking Redbeard’s crew on the other side.
I was screaming the whole time but exactly nothing came out. Just as the wall came down, I heard all our voices at once-and then snuffed out just as abruptly. The screams came mixed into the sound of several other sections of wall giving way. Max emerged out of the dust with a finger to his lips and pointed in the other direction-we squeezed around a pile of rubble.
Kate still had her torch-she re-lit it and the dust in the air scrambled the light like a Seurat. You couldn’t see three inches in front of you. I could feel myself coughing but somehow didn’t make a sound doing it.
We were in some kind of huge high-ceilinged room. When we finally reached the staircase at the far end, Kate turned to Max and he held his arms out to her. She punched him hard in the shoulder.
“Ow! That’s the thanks I get.”
“For what? Almost getting us killed?”
“Hopefully for getting us killed-as far as they’re concerned. They had us cornered but we were crushed under a wall trying to escape.”
“They’ll buy that?” Tauber, ever the skeptic.
“Marat knows better-he’s probing and I’m blocking. But, for some reason, he’s not the boss-they don’t trust him. The leader, the guy with the beard, knows they’ll all be heroes-as long as they stick to their story. The other choice is to spend the next week digging through every corridor and passageway around here on the off-chance we escaped. So we’re dead. By the time they get back to headquarters, they’ll probably have decided there were fifty of us and we fell into a volcano.” He turned back to Kate. “Which gives us one more chance to surprise them when the time comes. Okay?”
“You could have told me,” she griped.
“If I’d thought of it a second earlier, I would have. Really. I’m just making this up as I go.” It was a pretty good Harrison Ford imitation, actually. She nodded grudgingly.
The mist finally began to dissipate. It turned out we were in a wine cellar and a beautiful one at that: floor- to-ceiling darkwood shelving, bottles organized by brand and years, the rows all aligned toward a grand modern staircase.
Tauber crept up and back in seconds. “Where are we?” Max asked.
“Guessing through the door slit, a fuckin’ palace.”
“Are we company?”
“After that bang? If they’re not down here already, six’ll get you ten we’ve got the run of the place.”
“Let’s have a look.”
Fourteen
The villa was a place out of time, one that had long since abandoned history and found its own solitary track.
