Her footfalls echoed as she bolted toward the thankfully-open golden door. More lizardmen boiled from the passage behind her, their screeches and hisses forming a dissonant choir.
Do they have a whole fucking city hidden under this cave or something?
The tomb raider rushed toward the mouth of the cave, her side throbbing from her earlier wound. She was hours away from Quito, and had only a single healing potion in the back of the Wrangler. If their claws carried any sort of venom or toxin, her agonizing death might soon await.
Shay shook her head. She needed to concentrate on escaping.
Rappelling back to the base of the mountain without proper safety precautions when she was already wounded wasn’t one of Shay’s better ideas, but she’d rather die quickly from falling than be torn apart by a horde of angry lizardmen.
“Here goes nothing.”
Shay slid into the harness and anchored a rope as quickly as she could, feeding the rope through the carabiner before she leapt off the edge. “Don’t look at the dog that’s chasing you,” she said between clenched teeth.
Pain in her side pulsed in time with her heart as she started her descent. A half-dozen lizardmen stood on the ledge, staring down at her with their red eyes as they hissed and screeched. They waved their claws.
“Damn, half-wish you guys would have run off the edge.” She gave them a little salute. “But I have to go now.”
The tomb raider continued making her way down the mountain, but the dark forms above didn’t retreat to the cave. Nothing but her car awaited below, so she wasn’t sure why they were waiting.
Hoping I just fall to my death, assholes? Good luck with that. I’ve been hurt way worse than this and escaped from much smarter killers than you.
Shay’s breaths came out shallow and ragged. Her side was on fire, but she had hundreds more feet to go. The pain focused her awareness on her body and the descent, the cave’s guardians pushed to a small corner of her mind. It was time to solve the immediate problem before moving to something else.
The Wrangler had started as a distant blur before growing into a flat angular shape. The minutes passed, and suddenly it looked three-dimensional again.
Sweet, sweet ground lay only a few feet below her.
Shay dropped from the rope with a hiss, unhooking herself from the anchor and stumbled to the back of the vehicle. She opened the back hatch and grabbed the first-aid kit to apply an analgesic spray. A long sigh of relief followed. Some pain remained, but at least the fire had been extinguished.
Slumping against the vehicle, she lifted her shirt to assess the extent of the wound. Deep lacerations lined her side. If she hadn’t had a healing potion, she would have needed stitches, in addition to a risk of infection.
Underestimated the raid just because I got here and didn’t see anyone. Damn it.
Shay took out the potion from her first-aid kit. She’d wanted to keep it for a worst-case scenario, but there was no way she could risk the bumpy ride back down the mountain without taking care of the wound first.
Shay uncorked the bottle and downed the sour-tasting contents. Her wounds knitted themselves closed over the next thirty seconds, and the residual pain left. Another sigh of relief followed.
After a deep breath, the tomb raider stared up toward the ledge. It was too far now to make out any details in the thickening mist. The guardians might still be waiting, or they might have started down the side of the mountain. Waiting here to go another round didn’t appeal.
With her heart slowing and her wounds taken care of, Shay’s water-soaked clothes weighed on her body, and their earthy, rotten stench turned her stomach.
She reached into her pocket. The Bomber rested comfortably inside. She’d found what she’d come for. There was no reason to stay.
“See you around, lizard assholes. If it’s any consolation, at least no one has a reason to come here anymore.”
Shay wrapped her hair in a towel and put on a fluffy terrycloth robe. A forty-five-minute shower might be excessive under normal circumstances, but she wanted to ensure she eradicated any hint of the smell of the cave water in her nostrils. Even after her shower, the slimy feel of the algae lingered.
Ugh, that was nasty. Next time I should bring a cargo drone and ferry some equipment up first in case I need it.
She laughed. Next time? She’d gotten out of the hitman business because she had worried about dying young and being forgotten, but she wasn’t so sure that being a hitman wasn’t safer than being a tomb raider.
In her career, she’d already faced, among other things, ghosts, lizardmen, witches, mercenaries, frog-men, the world’s strongest wand, and an invisible army. Being a tomb raider meant being shoved into the middle of dangerous locations to seek out powerful artifacts.
I’m not gonna die in my kitchen. I’m gonna die in some musty cave in the middle of nowhere, and no one will find my body for decades, if not centuries.
Shay stared at herself in a mirror for a moment. For whatever reason, the idea didn’t scare her. The plan remained the same—save money and retire—but tomb raiding filled her with satisfaction that went beyond a job well done.
She was pushing into dark history long since lost, uncovering truth. Sure, sometimes that truth ended up in some asshole’s private gallery, but better there than under hundreds of feet of water or in a destroyed ruin.
The only question she couldn’t answer was how long she could do the job. Years? Decades? The original plan had an end goal, but no real timeline. Given all the money she’d already saved, she could probably retire tomorrow if she wanted to.
But I just don’t want to. Fuck it,
