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 was no defense.
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 sacrificial chamber…”
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.
“Remarkable,” he said, his eyes bright. “Hydraulic fluid, walls that move, tunnels that dig themselves.”
Lex faced him. “Is there anything you didn’t tell me about this place?”
“Nothing. I have no idea what this is.”
“How could the ancients have constructed something like this?” Lex demanded.
“Clearly they had help.” It was Sebastian who spoke.
“You mean little green men?”
“I don’t know about that,” Sebastian replied. “But the one thing I do know for sure—” He pointed to the weapon cradled in Weyland’s hands. “Five thousand years ago our ancestors were killing one another with wooden clubs and knives chipped from obsidian. Not these things.”
“So little green men may not be so wide off the mark,” said Miller from the sidelines. He was rechecking the readings on his spectrometer after a thorough examination of another of the Predator weapons. “I’ve just completed a basic spectral analysis of the metal. The majority of the compounds here are simply unknown, but the two elements I can place we’ve met before—tilanium and cadmium 240.”
Miller closed the cover on his spectrometer.
“Well, whatever it is, we’re not prepared for it,” Lex said. She stared down the long, dark corridor that had opened up behind Weyland. “We’re going to round up the rest of the team and get to the surface. Let’s move.”
Meanwhile, Max and two security members whose tags identified them as Bass and Stone hauled a large wooden crate to the center of the room and pried it open. Packed inside was an arsenal of heavy weapons, including MP-5s, plenty of ammunition, and a variety of handguns and survival knives. Verheiden began handing them out. Peters took a machine gun and a sidearm. Max accepted an MP-5. Connors took a Desert Eagle.
“What the hell is this, Weyland?” Sebastian cried.
Weyland smiled pragmatically, his skin waxy and pale in the gloom. “We’ve lost contact with the surface. And this discovery is too important to hand it over to the Chinese or the Russians.”
“But this is supposed to be a scientific expedition.”
Weyland bristled. “This is my expedition, Dr. De Rosa, and I will define it. Until I know what is going on, we will be taking all necessary precautions.”
Weyland gestured toward the sarcophagus, and instantly his security team began to unload the ancient weapons rack. They carefully rolled the devices up in protective wrapping and stuffed them into a large backpack.
Lex spied the activity and confronted Stafford. “What are you doing?”
“My job. Yours is over,” Max said as he slammed a magazine into his machine gun.
Lex’s eyes narrowed. “I told you, when I lead a team, I don’t leave my team. My job is over when everyone is back on the boat safely, and that gun doesn’t change anything.”
Stafford looked to his boss. “Mr. Weyland?”
Weyland looked at Max, then at Lex.
“She brought us here, she’s getting us home.” He faced Max. “You and your crew back her up.”
As everyone assembled on the threshold of the new corridor, Max stepped aside so Lex could pass. “After you,” he said.
Lex ignored the slight condescension and consulted her wrist compass. “This bearing should take us back to the entrance. We make it to the surface and we regroup at the whaling station.”
“What about Thomas and Rousseau?” asked Sebastian.
Lex glanced at him, then looked away. “We’ll find them on the way out.”
Minutes after Lex and her group departed the Chamber of the Sarcophagus, a seemingly immovable stone portal rose into the ceiling. Then a shimmering blur appeared at the doorway of the murky chamber, stirring the stagnant air.
Blue lightning crackled and the Predator uncloaked. As the creature stalked toward the open sarcophagus, a low clicking sound reverberated deep within its throat. Standing over the now empty weapons bin, the clicking morphed into an angry rumble.
A breeze stirred as more ghostly figures drifted into the chamber. One by one, they disengaged their cloaking devices and approached the sarcophagus, until all were assembled.
The lead Predator tapped the computer keypad on its wrist with two oddly elongated middle fingers. There was a hum of energy from behind his mask as a ruby-red ray emanating from his glassy eye slits stabbed through the darkness.
Utilizing the thermal sensor built into its battle mask, the Predator scanned the stone floor for any traces of residual energy. With its head twisting to the left, then to the right, the creature’s high-tech dreadlocks swung about, scanning every inch of the chamber. Finally, the Predator found the spoor—the residual heat of footprints left behind by the humans as they moved on.
The Predator roared and thrust the tip of its curved spear in the direction of the long corridor, where the trail of ghostly footprints led deeper into the pyramid. Shifting the spear in its hand, the Predator engaged its stealth armor and faded from view. With clicks and grunts, the rest of the Predators followed in a blur, right behind the leader.