Armageddon (17 page)

I could make out faint green blobs maybe another twenty yards in front of us. I closed my eyes so I could switch back to regular vision and shouted, “Light up your headlamps.”

I didn’t want my team stumbling around in the dark. I also didn’t want to go blind when they all switched on the light gear strapped to their helmets.

When I opened my eyes again, I saw 150 shafts of tungsten light shooting through the misty gloom.

I also saw bats.

Thousands and thousands of bats. Startled from their roosts by the light beams, they flooded up the mineshaft.

“Take them out!” shouted Willy.

But before the strike force could squeeze off a single round, the bat swarm washed over us like a leaf-choked stream rushing down a sewer drain during a downpour.

“Hold your fire!” I shouted. We were completely swallowed up by a dense cloud of squealing, flying rodents. I could feel their fuzzy bodies and rubbery wings brushing across my face, arms, neck, legs—every inch of my body. Claws became tangled in my hair. This was no place for weapon fire. If we started blasting the bats, we’d be simultaneously blasting one another.

The swarm of flying rodents became so thick there was
barely room to breathe. We were more than surrounded. We were engulfed.

And then things got even nastier.

The thousands upon thousands of bats transformed into Abbadon’s full-bodied alien henchbeasts.

And, believe it or not, they looked (and smelled) even nastier than they had as buck-toothed vampire bats.

WE WERE OUTNUMBERED a thousand to one—no, more like
five thousand
to one.

“Hold your fire!” I shouted again.

Our targets were still too close. Yes, Agent Judge’s handpicked team was full of brave warriors and skilled marksmen. However, very few of them had ever actually dealt with the kind of alien firepower they were currently carrying. A blaster gut-shot to the alien creep standing directly in front of you would bore straight through the creature’s cockroach-crusty shell, shoot out his backside, and take out one of the mine’s support beams, bringing down an avalanche that would bury us alive.

This is why blasters, when sold by legitimate dealers, come with warning labels:
NOT RECOMMENDED FOR INDOOR USE
.

All we could do was wait for Abbadon’s slobbering lackeys to make the first move. And when they did, it wasn’t the move I had been expecting.

They lined up in rows like a high school marching band, did an about-face, and started tromping down the subterranean passageway—
away
from us.

Were they retreating without firing a single shot? Then I noticed that none of the freakazoids were even carrying weapons. It was like they were a drill team without the toy wooden rifles.

And the weirdness kept getting weirder.

The massed legion of alien thugs, who moved like the synchronized marching machines North Korea likes to put on parade, pivoted their heads in unison and began chanting over their shoulders at us.

“Follow us. He waits below. Follow us. He waits below.”

My new friend, Lieutenant Russell the SEAL, pushed his way to the front of our jumbled pack.

“It’s a trap, Daniel,” he said. “They want to lure you down there so they can ambush you.”

“Maybe. But it’s not an ambush if we’re not surprised. I’m going down after them. The rest of you can stay here if you want, but I need to push on.”

I started marching down the mineshaft, following Abbadon’s followers.

Agent Judge, my friends, and the strike force?

They were maybe one or two steps behind me.

WHEN WE REACHED the cavernous room where (ages ago, it now seemed) I had witnessed Abbadon’s pep rally, I realized that this sweltering underground cathedral with its stalactite-studded ceiling was only the entryway into a vast and hidden labyrinth of passages.

My father, unseen by the other members of our force, including my four best friends, walked at my side as I followed the dark legions and descended farther and farther into the lower depths. Our conversation was telepathic. Nobody heard our thoughts except us.

Lots of legends about this place
, he said.
Dante wrote of being lost in a dark wood, assailed by beasts he could not evade, unable to find the straight path out, falling into a deep place.

I swiped away the sweat dribbling down my forehead. The deeper we journeyed toward the center of the Earth, the hotter it got.

You’re feeling the effects of the “furnace of fire” the Bible
speaks of
, my father continued.
There is a reason hell is described as a burning wind, a fiery oven, and a lake of fire. The underworld is closer to Earth’s mantle, a dense, hot layer of semisolid rock. It’ll keep getting hotter the deeper we burrow.

I had a feeling a lot of our strike force would be peeling off their tactical armor before we reached our final destination, wherever that might be.

Ancient civilizations knew of Abbadon’s kingdom. For the Greeks, his home was known as Hades, an abyss used as a dungeon of torment and suffering.

When my father said that, I thought again of Mel.

Being held prisoner.

In Abbadon’s dungeon.

And when I thought about her, I knew I had to keep pressing on, no matter how high the devil jacked up his thermostat.

When you encounter Abbadon—and you will, Daniel—trust none of what you hear, and less of what you see. Satan knows how to manipulate and deceive. There is only one way to defeat an adversary this cunning and shrewd….

Don’t let him tempt me away from who I truly am
, I mentally muttered.

Exactly.

Hours passed. We slogged on through the pressure cooker of heat and humidity, winding through a maze of narrow tunnels.

Our strike force was slowing down. The horde of aliens up ahead was not. According to Joe’s radar sweeps, the distance
between our two armies had grown to two, maybe three miles.

I’m growing weary
, I heard my father say telepathically.

I never think of my dad as old, but right then he sounded ancient. Feeble.

Suddenly the cramped passageway we were shuffling through opened up, and we moved into an alpine valley beneath towering, snowcapped mountains—all of it eerily illuminated by glowing patches embedded in the earth, forty thousand feet above our heads.

“Incredible,” said Dana. “It’s like we’re outdoors, underground.”

“Only the sky is pitch black,” said Willy. “And it looks like there’s a couple hundred moons.”

“Because that isn’t the sky, and those aren’t moons,” said Emma. “Those are phosphorescent mineral deposits. We’re looking
up
, at the Earth’s crust.”

“According to my readings, we’re nine miles underground,” Joe said, consulting his super-intelligent smartphone, which was loaded up with apps they don’t sell in any store on Earth.

I used my 128:1 zoom vision to track Abbadon’s black-hooded throngs.

“They’re heading up into the mountains,” I reported.

Then, son
, said my father,
you better head up into the mountains, too.

JOE DID SOME reflected laser readings and simple triangulation geometry and confirmed what I already suspected: Number 2’s minions were leading us up a mountain taller than Everest, the highest peak on the face of the Earth.

“The ascent, however,” said Willy, “is more similar to K2, the
second
-highest summit.”

That was not good news. K2 is a much more difficult and dangerous climb than Everest, with hanging glaciers clinging to the ridges near the summit and a narrow mountain gulley filled with ice and snow that rises at an eighty-degree angle. For every four people who reach K2’s summit, one dies trying.

“We don’t have time to acclimate to the altitude,” Dana said, adding another problem to our growing pile.

I turned to Agent Judge. “It’d be suicide to march the entire strike force up the face of that mountain.”

“What do you suggest?”

“That my friends and I go forward with two dozen of your top mountain climbers.”

“We’ve got some airborne guys from the Tenth Mountain Division. And some of the Special Ops guys did time up in the Hindu Kush range of Afghanistan and Pakistan.”

“Excellent. They’re with us. You lead the others out of here. Backtrack the way we came in.”

Agent Judge shook his head. “I’m not turning back, Daniel. Mel is my daughter.”

“Yes, sir. But she’s already lost her mother, and I refuse to allow this mountain to turn her into an orphan. With all due respect, sir, there is no way you can make the climb. And if you tried? We’re all tied together on the safety line. You slip and fall to your death, you’re taking people with you.”

“I’m coming,” said Lieutenant Russell. “We’re trained to survive in extreme environments. Plus, I’m particularly good in low-oxygen situations. I can hold my breath underwater for three full minutes.”

I grinned. I had to admire the guy’s guts.

The thirty of us moving forward started our ascent up the craggy face of the mountain in the frigid air. Wispy clouds shrouded us in total darkness, taking visibility down to zero. Of course, I don’t need to “see” to see, so I led the way. I had materialized crampons (spiked climbing shoes), carabiners, and climbing ropes—not to mention helmets, gloves, goggles, and tons of North Face thermal wear. We had left all the alien weapons with Agent Judge and the guys heading home.

So far, Abbadon’s forces hadn’t attacked us with overwhelming firepower. In fact, they hadn’t attacked us at all. If things changed, I’d quickly create all the alien-frying heavy artillery we needed.

Snug in our webbed harnesses, tethered to a safety line, we were making slow but steady progress up the frozen face of the mountain. The strike force members were fit but fatiguing, fast. At high altitudes, starved for oxygen, muscles chill. Brains tend to turn to mush.

“Blue ice!” Willy shouted as he probed the ground with his ice ax, looking to secure another anchor. “We need to change course. Rappel under that overhanging glacier.” He pointed to a three-hundred-foot-high hanging ice cliff, chunks of which could break off at any moment. “When we get to the other side, we scale the final four hundred feet up that steep ridge to reach the summit.”

“Let’s do it.”

Dana and I were the first ones to swing from a dead snag over the jagged ravine that plummeted beneath the projecting prow of ice. With lines belayed, we brought the rest of the team across in their slings, one by one.

Until the giant block of ice broke and rained down frozen boulders.

The avalanche swept six of our brave warriors off the face of the mountain.

I stood staring down in horror at their crumpled bodies, scattered across the glacial plane more than fifty meters below.

“We press on,” said Lieutenant Russell, who had been
the last man to safely cross before the rockslide, grimly. “It’s what they would want us to do. It’s for the salvation of our world.” He gave one last look to the fallen, as if paying his last respects.

And then we did as he said and pressed on, shaken to the core by the horrible loss.

Hours later, twenty-four of us reached the summit, but there were no cheers of elation. A blinding blizzard immediately swept in and attacked us—a whiteout with winds that whipped our hard-shell climbing jackets like tent flaps in a tornado.

“Hang on!” I shouted.

The mountain rangers struggled to find hand- and footholds in the rocks.

“It’s a fast-moving storm,” Joe said, consulting the high-tech weather-radar app in his handheld unit. “It should blow through in a minute or two.”

I just prayed it didn’t blow away any more of our crew.

Ninety seconds later, just as Joe had predicted, the snow tapered off.

And moments after that, I felt water dribbling down both sides of my face.

Because all the ice that had accumulated on my goggles and climbing helmet was thawing, fast. So, too, was the snowcapped peak of the summit.

Like a freezer set to Defrost, the roof of the underworld was melting.

“What’s the temperature, Joe?” I shouted across the roar of ice floes rapidly splitting apart.

“Ninety-eight. And rising!”

Chunks of ice and rock sloughed down the sides of the mountain, burying the passes we had taken on our climb to the summit.

We would not be going out the way we had come in.

ON THE OTHER side of the mountain, an extremely flat and crackled plateau stretched out in front of us for miles. On the far horizon, I could make out a faint dotted line of black-shrouded henchbeasts marching toward the brightly burning sun.

“Um, what’s the sun doing down here?” asked Dana.

“I think it’s Abbadon’s doing,” I suggested.

“How?” said Dana.

“I don’t know. Maybe the same way he magically dissipated my supposedly impenetrable protective dome.”

“True,” said Joe. “The smooth dude always seems to be one step ahead of you, Daniel.”

“Two steps,” Dana corrected. “Maybe three.”

“Gee, thanks for the pep talk, you guys. Come on. We need to find his hidey-hole.”

Willy, the best drill sergeant you could hope for, turned to the nineteen military men who were still with
us. “Gentlemen, you were awesome climbing that mountain. How do you feel about crossing a desert wasteland?”

“An outstanding idea,” Lieutenant Russell said, working his way out of his harness and climbing gear. “Desert conditions don’t require nearly as much equipment.”

“Hoo-ah!” shouted the rest of the squad as they started shedding their heavy climbing paraphernalia and winter parkas.

“We push on?” Willy asked.

“We push on,” acknowledged Lieutenant Russell.

With Willy and me in the lead, my diminished squad began its long journey across the barren, parched plateau, which was crawling with giant scorpions, rattlesnakes, and poisonous spiders. The ground was riddled with cracks and fissures from baking beneath the withering heat of Abbadon’s underground sun—which, by the way, never budged. Joe pegged the temperature at 110 and holding steady.