The Curse of the Dragon God (32 page)

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Authors: Geoffrey Knight

Tags: #Mystery, #Suspense, #Adventure, #Gay

BOOK: The Curse of the Dragon God
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“Then tell me, what do you want?” Richard bargained frantically. “Name it, it’s yours!”
Nursing his injured shoulder, Jake simply leaned into Richard’s face and said, “I wanna stop that bomb!”
Then he turned away, and with Shane’s help the two climbed as fast as they could up the boom, hand over hand, one foot up at a time, swiftly maneuvering through the metal lattice, leaving behind the echoing cries of Richard Conrad.
“You come back! I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you both with my own—”
Then, suddenly, a quake rippled down the boom as the outrigger began to give way completely.
Rocks fell away from the sides of the sinkhole. The entire shaft trembled with the weight of the crane sliding down into it. The sinkhole itself seemed to let out a roar with the thunderous echoes of falling rocks and grinding metal, opening its throat wide to swallow the descending crane.
Shane and Jake hauled ass.
They reached the cabin of the capsized crane, climbed up onto the underside of the outrigger, and with one quick glance at each other the two men sprang from the freefalling crane and latched on to the walls of the sinkhole.
As their feet left the outrigger—
—as their fingers clawed the rock wall and held on for dear life—
—they heard the last screams of Richard Conrad, along with the final moans of his machines, twisting and writhing into the darkness below.
Shane and Jake shut their eyes and waited for the sound of the crash, deep within the earth.
When it came, it echoed slowly, all the way up the sinkhole.
After a moment, Jake turned to Shane.
“Thanks, cowboy.”
Shane tried to smile, then glanced upward, a little daunted. “Thank me when we get to the top.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, it’s a longer way down than it is up.”
And with that, the two started climbing as fast as they could.

 

As the two grenades went off, sending a section of the cavern floor into the unknown along with Will, Bradley, Sen, the Professor, and the zidium device, Doctor Cyclops knew, as did Mya, Chad, and Xi, that the countdown to the bomb’s detonation was ticking down, and nothing in the universe would stop it now.
With his one wide eye he saw the elevator almost within reach. Then Xi, Mya, and Chad bolted past him.
“You’re work here is no longer needed,” Chad told him as he sprinted past. “Consider your contract terminated!”
Doctor Cyclops shrieked and raced after the others. “Wait! Don’t leave me here!”
Chad, Mya, and Xi had every intention of doing so, but as the three of them jumped into the elevator cage, the doctor scrambled on board with them. Xi seized him in an effort to try to evict him, but Doctor Cyclops kicked and screamed like a cat. Chad pulled Xi away. “No time. We’ll figure out what to do with him later.” He quickly nodded to Mya, who slammed the elevator cage door shut and punched the large green button in the control box.
“Mya, time check!” Chad snapped. “We have a new schedule.”
Mya guessed that the zidium device had activated its destruct mechanism no longer than a minute earlier. As the elevator began to ascend with a whine and a clatter of cables, she clicked her watch to set its timer. “Nine minutes. And counting.”

 

The rocky plate of earth crashed to the floor of a deeper, never-explored subcave of the main cavern. Will, Bradley, Sen, and the Professor all tumbled and rolled as the section of rock broke apart on the uneven ground of the hidden cave.
Registering the
ding-ding-ding
of the zidium device through his ringing ears, Will picked himself up instantly. Shimmering glints of silver, illuminated by the rays of light that shone down from the cavern above, pinpointed the path of the zidium as it bounced further into the darkness, eventually rolling to a halt a few feet away.
And all Will could see was the red digits on its display panel.
8 minutes.
34 seconds.
Beside that was a blur of numbers counting down the fractions of each second.
Will knew they couldn’t afford to let a single red digit slip away.
“We have to get out of the mine! Now!”
Trying to be gentle in his haste, Will pulled the Professor to his feeble feet and began stumbling toward the wall of the newly formed well. It was shallow, and the floor of the cavern had collapsed in a way that made the wall not so much a vertical face, but rather a steep yet climbable rocky staircase. “Bradley! Come on!”
But Bradley had caught sight of his uncle, who had managed to rise to his feet and was staring into the darkness of the cave. The old man was now staring not at the zidium, but at something else altogether. Something he wasn’t expecting to see. Not now.
“It’s beautiful,” he whispered.
“Uncle?” Bradley shot a glance between his mesmerized uncle and Will, who was struggling to get the Professor up the huge broken boulders leading to the cavern above.
“Bradley! Hurry, we have to go now!” Will shouted.
“Uncle? You have to come with us!”
Through his pain, the Professor could hear Bradley plead with his uncle. “Will, stop for a moment.”
“We don’t have a moment!” Will argued.
The Professor placed a hand on Will’s chest. “Please. For me.”
Will sucked in a deep, restrained breath, then turned the Professor around. “Sen,” the Professor called with all the volume he could muster. “Listen to your nephew. You have to come with us. Whatever you’ve done, whatever
I’ve
done, let it be. Come with us, now.”
“I can’t, Max. Don’t you see? It’s beautiful!” Sen called back, not taking his eyes off the darkness.
The Professor simply shook his head. “No, Sen, I can’t see. You were one of the last things I ever saw in my life. Remember? Come with us!”
Bradley had by now made his way down to his uncle and took him by the shoulder. He noticed blood trickling from the old man’s forehead, a blow from the fall. “Uncle Sen, come with me now. You’ve hit your head, you’re seeing things—”
“No!” Sen said, shaking Bradley off. “Look at them all! Like a thousand stars! Look at the diamonds! There
are
more diamonds here, after all! More than I could have imagined!”
He took Bradley’s jaw in his hand then and turned his face toward the darkness. After a while, Bradley saw them too. After his uncle held his jaw tightly in place for a moment. After his eyes adjusted to the pitch black.
A sparkle. Small at first. Then glimmering brightly before spreading into the black.
Five sparkles. Six. 20. A hundred.
Then thousands upon thousands of diamonds appeared, swirling along the walls of the undiscovered cave, forming shimmering veins and brilliant new constellations within the rock.
Sen laughed excitedly, greedily. “It’s mine. It’s mine!”
Then Bradley’s eye caught sight of something not sparkling and white, but red and very man-made. The digits of the bomb. “Uncle, we have to go.”
“No!” Sen snapped. He turned aggressively and slapped his nephew before tugging himself free of his grip once more, stumbling further into the glittering cave.
“Uncle!”
“Bradley! We have to go!” Will shouted. “Right now!” He looked to the Professor then, holding on tight to the elder man’s arm hoisted over his shoulders, and said softly, “We have to go, Professor. I’m sorry.”
All the Professor could do was nod. Reluctantly. Regretfully. “I know. I’m sorry too. More than he’ll ever know.”

 

“Bradley!” Will called.
Bradley hesitated for a long, agonizing moment. He recalled moments in his childhood when his uncle would tell him stories down by the pond where the goldfish popped bubbles on the lily-filled surface. He remembered the day his parents died in the car accident, and he remembered the man who held him in his arms and promised that he would protect him forever. He recalled being told that the stars were his, so long as he followed in his uncle’s footsteps, so long as he trusted the family dream and not his own. At that moment Bradley understood that the man trying to reach for the stars was no longer his uncle.
With a tear-filled sigh Bradley Zhang turned away, and against the cavern’s lights above he saw the silhouette of Will and the Professor.
“I’m coming!”

 

Mya hauled open the cage door moments before the elevator slammed to an abrupt halt at the top of the shaft. She, Chad, and Doctor Cyclops began the dash down the sloped tunnel toward the exit, where the train awaited them. Only Xi remained at the elevator shaft a moment longer, unclipping two more of the grenades from his belt.
He jammed one into the cable winch at the top of the elevator’s cage and another into the control box on the wall of the elevator, then pulled both pins and ran.
Xi made it 50 feet down the incline of the tunnel before the explosives sent a short, sharp
boom
down the mine.
The next sound he heard as he continued his sprint, quickly catching up with the others, was something like a missile plummeting toward earth as the elevator behind him plunged to the bottom of the shaft.

 

Will got to the last busted boulder at the edge of the hole in the cavern when the Professor finally floundered and lost his step.
But Bradley was there to catch him.
With Will’s help, the two young men eased the Professor out of the darkness and up into the light, where Will and Bradley took an arm each and, lifting his feet literally off the ground, carried the Professor between them, hurrying him toward the elevator shaft. They got to within 10 feet of it before Will hesitated.
“Do you hear that?”
Before Bradley could even answer, the elevator cage came hurtling down the shaft and crumpled on impact in front of them, knocking all three men clear off their feet.
In the wake of a wave of dust and rolling nuts and broken bolts, Will sat up and whispered to himself, “Holy shit, we’re screwed!”

 

Chad jumped up into the master carriage as fast as he could, allowing Mya to follow him but stopping Xi on the steps by placing a boot firmly on the snow-haired man’s chest. “For fuck’s sake, get to the engine now! Start this train and get us the fuck out of here!”
“Seven minutes, fifteen seconds,” Mya reported without being prompted.
As Xi peeled away toward the engine, Doctor Cyclops caught up to them, howling in panic. Chad grabbed the front of his scruffy jacket and hauled his frail, rickety ass aboard. “You! Come with me! If there’s one of the old man’s boys still aboard this train, he better be dead. Otherwise, you will be!”
Doctor Cyclops whimpered and fell limp, blubbering, as Chad dragged him toward the back exit of the car. Chad juggled his gun and the doorknob with one hand, holding on to the doctor with the other, then turned to Mya. “Get the diamonds, activate the zidium device, and set the timer for Beijing. I’ll get the chopper started, then let’s get the hell off this continent. I’m so damn sick of Chinese food.”
Mya took her orders and set her sights on the second silver bomb still sitting in its crate.
Chad left the car with Doctor Cyclops in tow. He hauled him into the car where Luca remained strapped to the bed. The soft groans Luca uttered indicated that not only was he still alive, he was slowly waking from one of the good doctor’s nasty concoctions.
Chad threw Doctor Cyclops to the floor, where he landed in a cowering heap. “Jesus Christ! Finish the job! Or would you prefer I did it for you?” With a sharp snap Chad cocked the hammer on his gun and marched over to the bed.
“No!” Doctor Cyclops begged.
But Chad ignored him. He reached the bed, pushed his gun against Luca’s temple, put his finger on the trigger, then—
Choof!
Outside, the sound of the first puff of steam erupted from the engine’s stack.
The train gave a small restless lurch, getting ready for its departure. Which was exactly what Chad wanted to do—depart. Time was running out. Getting the chopper ready to leave was more important than a man strapped to a bed on a train that was doomed anyway.
He pulled his gun away and decided to save the bullet. “Fine. Do it yourself.” Turning away, he headed for the door to the flatbed car carrying the chopper. Out of sight and earshot of the doctor, he smiled and said, “Take your time. At least it’ll keep you entertained on your return trip to Beijing. I’m sure you’ll have a blast.”

 

Through the wreckage of the construction machinery graveyard, Jake and Shane bolted, heading up the quarry road just in time to see the first white burst of steam mushroom into the snow-filled air and cloud the moon.
Choof!
“The others. They wouldn’t leave without us,” Shane reasoned.

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