The Thrones of Eden 3 (Eden) (24 page)

Bullets tore, ripped and destroyed. But the act appeared futile. There were just too many.

Savage ejected a clip and seated another in fluid motion, and then returned to firing.

Hillary stood and watched, his mouth agape, his eyes darting in his head as he white-knuckled the edge of the sarcophagus, his mind racing with ideas that refused to settle into a cohesive thought.

A cobra reared up in front of Savage, hissing, its cape flaring around its head as wide as a baseball glove. Savage took quick aim and fired, the cape, the head, now gone, the body falling limply to the stair. More took its place—two, three heads rising, then flared. It was like combating the Hydra, he thought. After you kill one, then more heads rise in its place.

The team was becoming overwhelmed.

And the smoke was rising and growing thicker.

People began to cough, their lungs getting their fill.

Suddenly Demir’s weapon went dry as the chamber clicked uselessly in quick succession. “I’m out!” he cried. He tossed the weapon aside and went for his combat knife, a KA-BAR, and withdrew it cleanly from its sheath.

Savage also went dry. But having no knife, he used the weapon like a club, the stock end of the assault weapon striking the cobras and keeping them at bay, at least for the moment.

A cobra as long as six feet and as thick as a gas hose reared up, flared its hood, and lashed out, striking one of Demir’s commandos in the thigh above the knee, a clean hit.

The soldier winced as he fell to a knee, the pain incredible as the venom began to course through his veins. The moment the man had downed himself the cobra struck a second time, the fangs catching the soft tissue of the soldier’s face before it fell back for another strike.

Cobras began to take new ground as the other soldier fell back, the man still firing off his weapon until it, too, went dry. The commando shouted out that he was out of ammo, and then went for his knife.

Everyone was backing towards the center of the platform, soon finding themselves pressed against the sarcophagus and out of room.

The wounded soldier took additional strikes as the cobras overwhelmed him, striking him with repeated blows, puncturing the man’s skin and setting off more rounds of venom shots.

The man screamed as he swung an arm feebly in defense, the snakes now crawling around him, over him, their bodies now overriding him as the soldier fell supine to the floor, then becoming a shape beneath layers of cobras that now covered his unmoving body.

Demir shouted out in Turkish.

Alyssa screamed. And so did Hillary, who cried out for God’s salvation.

The smoke was thickening.

The serpents were mounting.

And the spaces between the humans and the cobras were growing marginally thin with each passing moment, the humans having backed up to the sarcophagus that served as the centerpiece of the stage.

Soldiers swung their knives in sweeping arcs, whereas Savage continued to swing his weapon in a manic display.

Hillary, a man of desperation, saw the gleam of the staff within the body’s grasp and reached for it. Despite the futility of the moment, he considered it to be a formidable weapon.

With his hands reaching around the staff, he gave it a tug. Since the corpse’s bones had grown brittle over time and the skin had come to bear the toughness of old parchment, he was able to pull the staff free without a problem.

When he did the world began to shift.

And Mintaka began to flex its muscles.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

The ceiling began to split open like the roof of an observatory, that cyclopean eye peeling back.

They looked up, but saw little or no advantage of escape since the opening was 10 meters above them, about thirty-five feet.

Savage swung his weapon and struck a cobra viciously hard, only for more cobras to take its place. “Everyone,” he yelled, “into the sarcophagus!” Savage quickly aided Alyssa inside, the ribs of the body caving beneath her weight as plumes of dust coughed up from its torso. Hillary and the minister were next, soon followed by everyone else, a total of seven people finding enough refuge and space inside a sarcophagus that now served as a lifeboat on dry land.

The hole above them was circular. But it was Alyssa who noted that it was approximately the same size and circumference as the stage.

Hillary still held the staff. It was the key that started this, he determined. When he extracted it from the grip of the body’s hand he had triggered a final device. So he closed his eyes and waited as he held the staff close to him.

The cobras began to gather at the base of the sarcophagus, their bodies brushing against its walls, their diamond-shaped heads exploring, tongues lashing, their olfactory senses trying to make sense of their new surroundings.

Then the stage began to slowly turn in the methodic rotation of a screw. Then the motion picked up and moved faster, the stage beginning to rise to greater heights, spinning.

It was rotating from its base; the platform climbing toward the circular hole in the ceiling the same way a piston rod is punched into a valve. It was picking up speed and momentum, the centrifugal force growing, the world around them starting to become a rotating blur.

Alyssa reached for Savage. “John!”

He grabbed her hand. “Get down!”

The mummified body smelled of old dirt and must, the bones so brittle beneath everyone’s weight that it had been decimated, the skull collapsing like an eggshell.

The stage rotated and began to spiral upward, the centrifugal force eventually whipping the snakes off the platform where they fell into the depths of thickening smoke.

John and Alyssa were now looking skyward as the stage entered the open cylinder, a perfect fit. There was nothing above them but darkness that was completely and utterly black.

The spiraling forces were almost too much to handle as their stomachs began to clench.

Then they saw it, their lamps flashing on an approaching ceiling which seemed to be closing in on them much too quickly.

John draped himself over Alyssa, realizing that a sudden stop would launch them from the sarcophagus and to an apex point where gravity would eventually take over and allow them to fall back to earth.

Then the platform began to slow, its rotation becoming sluggish until it stopped altogether. Above them the star-point glitters weren’t stars at all, but another facsimile of the universe where the chamber’s ceiling served as a celestial atlas. In comparison to other charts, this one served to showcase the star of Alnitak, which was a fist-sized piece of crystal that was surrounded by innumerable cuts of smaller chips and nuggets.

Everyone slowly got to their feet with their eyes heavenward.

Nausea and dizziness eventually passed as everyone exited the sarcophagus. The celestial boat had served them well. Symbolically speaking, God had come to His journey’s end, to a chamber near the temple’s cap, to the star of Alnitak.

The body of Anu had been decimated, portions of it turning to dust and leather strips of flesh. Its bones had crumbled beneath their accumulated weights. And its skull resembled nothing more than a broken bowl that one might find at an ancient burial site.

The Culture Minister of Turkey was beside himself, as was Hillary, the men looking as if they were about to break as they gazed regretfully into the sarcophagus and at the remains, both considering that a true treasure had been lost.  

Alyssa, on the other hand, was looking at the atlas above her. If there was one thing she understood, it was that these overhead maps were a directional listing of some kind. Alnitak was the ‘showcased’ star that was surrounded by the glitter of crystals. The Alnitak crystal flared brilliantly as it absorbed the beam of her flashlight.

John stood beside her, not caring that the Culture Minister and Hillary were in the agonizing throes of regret for the loss of Anu’s carcass, the men spouting off in a series of disbelieving ‘oh no’s.’

Demir was on a knee examining the surrounding floor. He could not find a seam or hairline fissure that divided the platform from the floor of the chamber. It was as if the sarcophagus’s landing had fused with this level, the floors uniting as one and becoming a perfect seal against the pooling smoke below. For the moment Demir felt safe. So he got to his feet and looked to what everyone else was looking at, the ceiling.

The three major stars of the Orion Belt—Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka—were configured in such a way that they appeared as an arrowhead, a directional pointer, with Alnitak serving as the tip.

“It’s a directional indicator,” she said.

“To where?” asked John.

Everyone directed their lights forward until it became a shared beam. Ahead of them was a trapezoidal opening in a wall that led to a corridor that appeared to descend downward by marginal degrees, a trivial slant. Above the door was the symbol
Ƣ
, which represented the word Alnitak.

Alyssa knew that they had come to Anu’s celestial point of Heaven within Mintaka, a short voyage. But she also knew that this was much more than just a symbolic locale of life after death as well, the journey in itself more than just a tomb beneath a gorgeous lay of crystal to give off the impression of Anu’s point of origin. It was also God’s gateway to the realm of His creations in Alnitak, to the thrones of Eden. The body had been purposely elevated from the lower chamber to a point that would enable Him to look downward upon His created children of the Second Coming, a paternal figure lying in gentle repose but existing all the same.

Alyssa moved closer to the gateway, to the opening, and flashed her light down the corridor. The walkway was angled downward, the floor level and smooth.

“Now what?” said Demir. The tone of his voice was obviously that of defeat, the soldier seeing nothing but endless trails and venues offering death.

“Does your minister still have the laser measurer?” she asked.

Demir conversed in Turkish, the minister galvanizing himself as he rummaged through his backpack and produced the unit, holding it out in display. After Demir told him what he wanted, the minister set up the device on a mini-tripod, directed it down the corridor, and clicked it on. The numerical LED readout was flashing, the numbers growing and speeding along until it stopped at 5.1.

“Five-point-one,” said Hillary, doing a quick calculation. “Is that right?”

Demir translated and came back with an answer. “It’s never done him wrong,” he said.

“Then if that monitor is reading correctly,” he began, “then that means that there isn’t an obstruction for three miles.”

“The shortest distance between two points,” said Savage, “doesn’t seem so short, does it?”

“The question is, what’s the obstruction?” asked Demir. “But I guess the answer would be is that we don’t have a choice otherwise.”

“It’s Alnitak,” Alyssa stated simply. “That symbol above the doorway. It’s marking the passageway to Alnitak the same way the marking above the door in the abyss led into Mintaka. They’re connected.”

“What’s connected?” asked Savage.

“The three temples.” She looked down the corridor, a straight line into darkness. “The three temples of Eden, which also resemble the positions of the three temples of Giza as well as to represent the placement of the three major stars in the Orion Belt, are most likely Anu’s place of origin. But this tunnel, after Hillary discovered the fractured tunnel that led from Eden to Mintaka, we now discover this to be a channel that runs from Mintaka to Alnitak, which tells me that these temples are all connected.” She turned to the ceiling and reflected her light against the celestial design, but more specifically, to the connect-the-dots outline of crystals that ran from one star to the next, from one temple to the next, giving it that isosceles arrowhead look. The rows of stars connecting the temples were also charting out the tunnel-ways that connected the temples together like tramway routes.

Obviously they couldn’t move backward.

But they could certainly move forward.

Alyssa slowly closed her eyes as a preamble of a smile rounded out the corners of her lips.

Not only was this the gateway that would lead them to the secrets of Alnitak, it was also a way out of Eden.

Her smile broadened.

PART III

THE KEEPERS OF THE THRONES

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

As the laser suggested, there was an obstruction three miles down the tunnel. The walk, however, was easy on Hillary’s legs as the corridor slanted in a continuously downward angle.

But the closer they got to the tunnel’s end, a steady hum vibrated through the air in concussive waves that could be felt against their skin.

They remained cautious, their steps becoming smaller as they carefully approached a doorway of an unknown composite.

The hum grew louder.

And their senses began to heighten.

“What’s that noise?” offered Hillary, whispering.

No one answered because no one could.

With tentative steps, they inched their way deeper until they could go no further.

The doorway was bullet-shaped but arched to a point. Above the arch was the symbol of Alnitak, the symbol
Ƣ
. And beneath that was an archaic stanza Alyssa could not make sense of since the symbols, markings and cursives were completely unfamiliar to her.

“Do you know what it says?” asked Hillary.

She shook her head. “I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere before,” she answered.

The humming remained as a steady drone, a ceaseless melody that was becoming all too grating to the ears.

But when Savage reached out and grabbed the gateway’s latch the humming stopped.

Everyone looked around, expecting the worse.

But when Savage released the latch the humming started again at the same level of noise—that flat-line intensity of a waspy hum.