You’ve claimed the find. It’s yours. Now we move as a team, and we’re done for today.”
Weyland looked up at Lex, then at the others. “You heard her,” he said. “Let’s move.”
“What should we do about those weapons, or whatever they are,” said Max.
“Take them,” Weyland commanded. “We can run further tests on the surface.”
Connors stepped up to the sarcophagus and reached inside. His fingers closed on the smallest of the weapons—a flowing, organic-looking metal barrel with a massive handgrip.
“No! Don’t touch them,” Sebastian cried.
Too late. When Connors lifted the weapon from its cradle, he triggered a mechanism hidden underneath it. There was an audible click, followed by a loud boom that reverberated throughout the chamber, shaking icicles loose from the ceiling.
Then the walls began to move.
“Sebastian!” Miller cried. “This happens in all pyramids, right?”
“No,” Sebastian replied nervously.
Like a giant Rubik’s Cube, the pyramid began to reconfigure itself. In an ear-splitting sequence of groans, thunderous claps and rumbles, gears grating and stone scraping against stone, walls slid aside to transform dead ends into passageways leading to more undiscovered portions of the pyramid. Other halls, meanwhile, were sealed by tons of solid rock or trapdoors that slammed tight.
Sebastian grabbed Lex, yanking her out of the path of a giant stone slab that descended from the roof. Other slabs closed off the passage leading to the sarcophagus chamber, crushing the string of glow sticks Lex had used to mark their path and sealing off their only escape route.
The movement in the ancient structure after so many millennia shook icicles, terra-cotta fixtures, and even stone blocks loose. Objects dropped all around them, bursting apart like mortar shells.
In the sacrificial chamber, Thomas and Adele Rousseau, along with several assistants, were instantly trapped when the entrances were shut by mammoth etched stone barriers that rose from the floor or dropped from the ceiling.
In the sarcophagus chamber, Lex gaped at the moving walls, the shapes surreally shifting, her perspective morphing, as if she’d been dropped into an Escher print.
“What the hell is going on?” Connors screamed.
But his cry died out in the cacophony of grinding gears and sliding rock. Within seconds there was no escape.
CHAPTER 20
Adele Rousseau had been standing in the doorway when she’d first felt the floor shudder. She locked eyes with Thomas, who’d been standing over the mummies, helping four of Weyland’s archaeologists catalog the vast array of objects inside the chamber.
Tremors followed, powerful enough to shake ancient dust loose from the masonry. Adele looked up to see a thick stone door descending on her. Just before the heavy portal slammed shut, Thomas yanked the woman out of the way.
In Thomas’s grip, Adele watched as another stone door came out of the ceiling, restricting access to the only other exit from the sacred chamber.
“Get something under there!” she cried.
Two archaeologists slid a heavy aluminum case under the door. It was promptly crushed.
“You okay?” Thomas asked, still holding her. Adele pushed herself away, eyes scanning the room.
“We’re trapped.”
Thomas looked around. “Not necessarily. Let’s try to trip the door. Maybe it will open as easily as it closed.”
“All right, let’s go,” Adele cried, addressing them all. “We’re going to try to open this door.”
The archaeologists—along with Thomas—placed their shoulders against the door’s ornate terracotta surface. Finally Adele joined them.
“One, two, three…. Push!”
For long, desperate moments they all strained against the solid stone, to no avail. The door defied the brute strength of six full-grown adults.
“I feel a little like Sisyphus,” said Professor Joshi of Brown University.
“Slab’s gotta weigh two tons,” Adele said mournfully. “We’ll never move it.” She slapped the stone door in frustration. At her side, Thomas gripped her arm and pointed.
“What is that?” he asked.
While they had been trying to move the stone door, a round, leathery sack had been deposited in the carved depression next to one of the sacrificial slabs. It was unclear where it had come from. The object was ovoid, organic, and it throbbed with an inner life. Four puffy, liplike flaps crisscrossed the apex. The entire egg fit snugly into the bowl—almost as if the indentation had been carved specifically to hold it.
As Thomas and Adele watched, the indentations on the other slabs silently opened in places where no seam had been apparent before.
“It’s like some gigantic machine,” said Dr. Cannon, an Egyptologist from London. There was awe and fear in his voice.
As they watched, more eggs appeared, to fill each stone depression.
“There… another,” Cannon croaked.
Now all seven of the sacrificial slabs had an egg sack quivering by its side. The humans instinctively huddled together to form a defensive circle. They sensed that it was already too late—that there
With a wet, slobbering gurgle, the lips on the first egg peeled back. Adele pulled her weapon from its holster. Out of the corner of her eyes, she glanced at Thomas.
“What did you say this room was called?”
Thomas stared at the pulsating ovum on the slabs. “The
Adele fired—too late. The bullet struck the egg a split second after the life form within it leaped at its attacker. The flaccid egg sack exploded like a melon as its contents latched onto Adele Rousseu’s face.
Her gun clattered to the floor as she frantically tried to tear the face-hugging creature off of her. But the tail wrapped itself around her neck like a boa constrictor, and the harder she pulled, the tighter the strangling tentacle became.
Adele fell backwards, her screams muffled by the smothering alien parasite pressed over her mouth. Thomas rushed to her side and tugged at the snakelike coils closing in on her throat. Everyone else backed away from the writhing woman and the remaining egg sacks. But in that confined chamber, there was nowhere to retreat to—just as the ancient architects had intended, Thomas realized dimly.
The archaeologists braced themselves as the other six eggs quivered and their fleshy tips parted. More pistol shots rang out, followed by cries of fear and terror, then howls of agony.
Just as Lex was preparing to move her people down a long corridor, the walls began to move once again. Gunshots and bright flashes, followed by frantic, tormented screams, could be heard through the grate from the chamber above.
“What’s going on?” Miller cried.
Lex turned to Max, who already had his communicator in hand. “Get Rousseau and Thomas.”
Both Maxwell Stafford and Sebastian got on their communicators, but neither of them was able to raise anyone from the archaeological party upstairs.
Charles Weyland stood before what had been a solid wall but was now a wide passageway, so long that it vanished in the gloom. He held one of the Predator weapons in his pale hands.
