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“This has got to be it,” Murph replied. “We’re going to need help exploring all these side tunnels.” He tried radioing Linda but couldn’t get reception this deep into the earth. “Rock, paper, scissors?”
The two men made their choices, paper-covered rock, so Mark turned himself around for the laborious climb back to the surface, his echoing grumbles diminishing as he retreated.
Eric Stone shut off his light to conserve batteries, but when the weight of darkness pressed in on him like a palpable sensation he quickly flicked it back on. He took a few calming breaths to steel himself, shut his eyes, and killed the light again.
It was a long thirty-minute wait until he heard the others crawling down the tunnel.
When Mark’s light swept Eric’s face, Murph chuckled. “Man, you are as white as a ghost.”
“I’ve never been fond of tight spaces,” Stone admitted. “It’s okay with the lights on. Not so much in the dark.”
Normally, Mark would have ribbed him more, but considering their situation all he said was, “Don’t sweat it, dude.”
Linda quickly drew up a plan of attack to survey the subterranean warren of interconnected tunnels and caves. Whenever they came to a fork, one team would check the left tunnel, the other would head right. They would meet back at the branch after ten minutes no matter what. Whichever option looked the most promising was the way they would all go.
Another hour passed as they laboriously checked each section. It was all the more difficult because of the weapons and extra ammunition the three Corporation people carried. Knees and palms were scraped raw from contact with the rough stone, and without proper equipment each one of them had struck his or her head at least once. Eric had a piece of gauze taped near his hairline where he’d gashed his skin. Blood had dried coppery brown in the furrows of his forehead.
The four of them were together walking down a long gallery with heaps of shattered stones on the floor when Eric happened to play his flashlight on the ceiling ten feet over their heads. At first he thought the hundreds of projections hanging down were stalactites formed from mineral-rich water seeping into the cavern, but then he saw one was wearing pants.
Horror crept up his spine. “Oh my God.”
Alana looked up and gasped.
Hanging from the ceiling were dozens of pairs of mummified legs, some showing just the foot from the ankle down, others hanging from the upper thighs as if materializing from the living rock. One person was suspended on his side, half of the corpse contained within the matrix stone while the other half dangled grotesquely. The neck was bent at such an angle that the back of the skull was hidden, and the cadaverous face leered down at them through sight-less eye sockets.
There were animal legs, too, long, awkward camel legs ending in big skeletal feet and horses’ limbs with their distinctive fused hoofs. The dry air had retarded putrefaction, so skin hung from the bones as brittle as parchment and clothing remained intact.
Mark studied the uneven floor, stooped, and came back up holding a leather sandal that began to crumble almost immediately.
Linda asked, “What happened to them? How did they get fused in the rock?”
Over his initial shock, Eric studied the ceiling more carefully. Unlike the rest of the cave system, the ceiling here was black and glossy under a coat of dust.
“Everyone cover your ears,” he said, and brought his assault rifle to his shoulder. The crack of the shot was especially brutal in the tight confines.
The bullet had knocked free a splinter of the ceiling. He retrieved it, looked at it for only a moment, and tossed it to Mark Murphy.
“Completely solidified,” he commented. “When the cave below the pit collapsed it left them hanging.”
“Of course,” Alana said, examining the material.
“Little help for the nonscience types.” Linda didn’t bother looking at the rock sam
ple. Her only exposure to geology was a “rocks for jocks” class back in college.
“Above us is the bottom of a tar pit,” Eric answered, “like La Brea in L.A., only smaller and obviously dormant.”
“It’s actually asphaltic sand,” Alana corrected.
“During the summer months, it warmed enough to get sticky and entrap the animals. My guess is, the people were thrown in as a form of execution. Then, at some point over the past two hundred years, the bottom of the pit collapsed—that’s all this rubble on the floor—and exposed the victims at the very deepest part of the pit.”
“There was something I was told by St. Julian Perlmutter a couple of days after our initial meeting,” Alana said, suddenly remembering. “He’d come across one additional scrap of information. It comes from a local belief about Al-Jama’s tomb. It is said he was buried beneath the ‘black that burns.’ That’s why they had us digging in an abandoned coal mine. The terrorists thought the black was coal, but it was this.”
Eric took the shard of hardened tar from her and held the flame of a disposable lighter to the thumb-sized lump. In seconds, it caught fire, and he dropped it to the ground. The four of them watched it burn silently.
Linda snuffed it out with her foot. “I would say we’re getting close.”
But another hour of exploration still hadn’t revealed the hidden tomb.
