Chase Baker and the Da Vinci Divinity (A Chase Baker Thriller Series Book 6) (12 page)

“How do you attempt to explain away
the image of a space ship inside this ancient tunnel?”

She’s got a hell of a point.

“Let’s just keep going and hope we
not only find our man, but a way out of this thing.”

We walk for another few minutes.
Not talking, but listening, smelling, feeling with our senses at high alert.

“Chase,” Andrea whispers after a while,
her voice reverberating off the stone walls, “what’s that sound?”

“What are you talking about?” I say
over my shoulder.

“It sounds like chewing.”

I stop in my tracks, listen. I
might not have noticed had she not said anything about it, but there is a noise
coming from up ahead in the tunnel. Chewing just might be the perfect word for
it. It sounds like thousands of little mouths chewing on dead leaves.

“Maybe we should go back,” Andrea
says. “This little search could be a fool’s errand. We have our sketch book.
Let’s just go.”

“Our man, if he is a man, went this
way. And this is more than just finding him to thank him. He appears to know a
hell of a lot about da Vinci and where to find precisely what we need to find. Plus,
if we go back to the museum, there’s a good chance the cops will be there to
greet us. So let’s keep moving.” I smile. “Unless, of course …”

She looks at me with wide eyes. “Unless
what, Chase?”

“Unless, of course, you’re afraid.”

She cocks her head, peers not
at
me but
through
me with one eye open, the other all but closed.

“I’ll show you how afraid I am,
Chase Baker,” she sneers, stealing the Maglite out of my hand, shoving her way
past me, taking the lead. “How about you follow me.”

She doesn’t make it four or five
steps before falling through the floor.

Thrusting my hands out before me, I make a flying leap at her.
Trying to grab onto her. But I’m not even close. I go to the opening in the
floor and see immediately that she stepped on a wood panel that rotted out long
ago. Her fall was no more than nine or ten feet, but that’s enough of a
vertical distance to do some serious damage to the human body, especially if
she were to fall on her head. In this case, she’s shining the Maglite up at me from
where she lies inside a thick wood coffin, directly on top of the remains it
contains. The now destroyed wood lid that belonged to the coffin broke her
fall, as if she fell directly onto a cushion of balsa wood and air.

“You okay?” I ask. “You must have
fallen into a sub-chamber.” I take a further look around the room that measures
maybe fifteen by fifteen feet. “By the looks of it, a private burial chamber.
Probably owned by someone pretty filthy rich.”

“Well, right now, I’m the one who’s
filthy,” she grouses, pulling herself up and out of the coffin, revealing a
body that’s clad in full body armor and bearing a shield graced with the
Fleur-de-lis of Florence. “Please get down here … now, if not sooner.”

I point at myself. “You mean me?”

“No, the other idiot standing
behind you … Yes, you!”

I feel the breath escaping my
lungs. This is most definitely not how I wanted the search for the man who
keeps helping us to go. Assuming a seated position on the wet floor, I drop my
legs into the hole, and slide myself down into the chamber, my feet landing not
inside the coffin, but to the side onto the stone coffin altar.

Jumping down onto the dirt floor
beside the altar, I take a quick look into the coffin, use my gloved hands to
dust off the shield.

“The French loaned Renaissance Florence
the fleur-de-lis while proudly naming it Paris’ sister city,” I say. “Whoever
was buried here must have been a great diplomat or a perhaps even a member of
the Medici clan, judging by the method and placement of the coffin.”

The suit of armor is rusted in
spots and sporting holes and cracks from the ravages of time. But it is,
otherwise, remarkably preserved for a something so ancient. In fact, pushing
back the gloves that still cover his hands, I reveal skin. Parched, severely
aged skin. But skin all the same. Skin that the temperate conditions inside the
chamber has more or less mummified.

“I wonder what his face looked
like?” she says.

“Only one way to find out,” I say,
reaching into the casket with both my hands, taking hold of the helmet, and
pulling it off.

Andrea shrieks.

I feel my heart jump into my mouth,
my throat constricts.

The face isn’t a human face at all.
Rather, it might indeed be human, but it’s so disfigured and even grotesque,
that it makes my stomach turn to look at it, even in death.

“Is that a human being?” Andrea asks,
the expression on her face soured and troubled.

“The body certainly seems human.
But the face looks more like an animal.”

For brief moment, I’m reminded of experiments
biologists have proposed about growing human organs inside the embryos of pigs
and other animals. The problem being, of course, that the animal could actually
take on human qualities, or vice-versa. It’s exactly how I put it to Andrea.

“You believe it’s conceivable
Renaissance period physicians could have been working on a genetic level?” she
says. “That’s impossible.”

“You’re right,” I say. “What I’m
describing are twenty-first century experiments. Not fifteen or sixteenth
century tests combining human genes with animals. They are still only being
theorized.”

She bites down on her lip for a
beat. Until she says, “Da Vinci. There’s more to his having just entered into
the cave all those years ago. Some say that, as a young adult, he entered the
cave, not to be seen again for more than two years.”

“How can that be? He wouldn’t have
been able to survive inside a cave for that long without having to come out now
and again for food and water.”

She shakes her head. “That’s just
it. It’s an unsolved mystery. All we know is there’s a gap in his timeline and
it corresponds to a one of the few biographical notes he made about himself,
listing a date and day he entered the cave. The next we hear of him is two
years later. For all we know, he wrote about his experiences in the
Book of
Truths
.”

“We don’t exactly have time to read
it right now, so give me the Cliff Notes.”

“It’s like I explained to you in
the headquarter’s interview room, some have speculated that when he went into
the cave he was abducted by extraterrestrials who took him into space and
taught him not only the wonders of our modern world but showed him precisely
what the future would look like.”

“E.T. again,” I say, under my
breath.

“Call it E.T. if you want, Chase,
but when he returned to Florence from that two-year absence, he started
inventing machines that couldn’t possibly be constructed using the technology
of that time. He also started obsessively drawing what would come to be known
as the grotesque heads.” She points to the man, or beast, laid out in the
coffin. “I think we’ve just discovered our first real grotesque man. Proof they
really existed. Proof da Vinci wasn’t just sketching from imagination, but,
instead, recording history. Or, the history to come. Proof he’d witnessed the
modern day genetic experiments between humans and animals.”

I pull the
Book of Truths
out
of the satchel, open it.

“Maybe there’s a history of this
man/animal inside the book,” I say, carefully, but rapidly, rummaging through
the pages until I come to a sketching of someone laid out in a coffin. It
matches our man, the head grotesque, pig-like, and not of this world.

“Dear God, that’s him, or
it
,”
Andrea says looking over my shoulder.

There’s another sketch accompanying
the man. It’s Vitruvian Man.

“There’s our V-man again,” I say. I
feel my built-in shit detector speak to me. I turn, and there on the wall is
the very faded, but still visible, carving of Vitruvian Man.

“Da Vinci has been down here,” I
say. “He made pains to sketch this poor creature and to carve the Vitruvian Man
on the wall, following with a sketch in the
Book of Truths
.”

“Question is, why?” Andrea says. “Why
go to the trouble to record this man’s burial chamber?”

I’m rattling my brain for an answer
when I hear the sound of chewing once more. Only this time, the chewing noise
is growing louder and louder with each passing second.

“What the hell is that?” Andrea
says, drawing her weapon.

“I don’t know.” I swallow. “But I
don’t like the sound of it.”

We both stand stone stiff, enough
fire power in both our hands to take down a small army. But, somehow, I feel
like bullets are not going to work against whatever is coming our way. Then,
out the corner of my eye, I see it emerging, if not oozing from a small hole in
the stone wall.

A centipede.

But not the kind of small, two or
three-inch long centipede I might have uncovered in my damp garage back in
upstate New York when I was growing up. This sucker must be a foot long if it’s
an inch, and maybe an inch and a half in diameter.

“Chase, what the hell is that?!”
Andrea barks.

Coming up from out of the floor,
centipedes. Dozens … hundreds of them, creeping out of small, coin-sized
holes in the floor and walls. Holes I never noticed in the dark room until now.

“The place is infested,” I say. “Stomp
your feet.”

“There’s too many of them, Chase.”

I’m stomping my feet, feeling the crush
of the insect’s shell-like bodies, their guts splattering under my soles. But
Andrea is right. There’s too damn many of them. I feel multi- legged bugs
dropping on my head. I swat them away as fast as they drop onto my scalp.

Andrea screams as a long centipede
crawls into her hair, runs its never-still legs around her neck.

“Oh, Christ,” she shrieks, “get us
out of here, Chase.” Then, “Ouch! The bitch bit me.”

“They’ve got pinchers,” I say,
swatting more of them from my legs and arms.

Shining light on the walls, I’m not
seeing an opening. Only the life-like Vitruvian Man carved into the far wall.

“We need to leave the way we came,”
I say.

“How?” she shouts. “We don’t
exactly have a ladder at our disposal.”

The crunching noise is almost
deafening, the floor and walls nearly covered entirely in centipedes. We stay
down here another minute, they will overtake us and sting us until we’re
paralyzed with toxic shock. Then they’ll suck the life from us. Literally.

I focus my eyes on the wood coffin.

That’s the ticket …

“I’ve got an idea,” I say.

Climbing onto the altar that bears
the coffin, I shove my hands under it and heave. It takes almost all my
strength, but the dead body inside it spills onto the floor.

“My apologies, old boy,” I say.
Then, “Give me a hand.”

Andrea is slapping away at the
centipedes, ripping them away from her neck, pulling them from her hair. Her
eyes are wide and wet. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she was crying. Still,
she manages to climb up onto the altar.

“Help me tip this thing up.” She
bends at the knees and shoves her hands under the heavy casket while I lift it
a few inches off the platform. “Okay,” I say. “When I say go, give it all you
got and heave.” A dozen centipedes drop from the ceiling onto her head,
disappearing into her hair. Another couple drop onto my head, one of them
attempting to crawl into my ear. I scream, “Go! Go! Go!”

We pull upwards with all our
strength, lifting the casket so it stands on end.

Slapping the long insect from my
ear, I join my fingers at the knuckles, invert the hand, make like a footrest.

“Put your foot in here,” I command,
“then grab hold of the casket top and pull yourself up and out of the hole.”

“Brilliant!” she barks. “What about
you?”

“I’ll be right behind you. Just go.
Now. Go!”

Stepping into my finger-locked hands,
she reaches for the top end of the rectangular casket, then heaves herself up
like she would with a chin-up bar. There’s so much adrenalin shooting through
her system, she practically tosses herself head-over-heels over the casket and
out the chamber floor opening directly above our heads. Lying herself out flat
on the floor, she extends her hand to me.

“Come on,” she says. “You’re next.”

The centipedes have taken over the
floor. There’s no sign of the stone walls, only thousands of insects crawling
over one another, seeking out precious food in the form of human flesh. My
flesh.

Bending at the knees, I jump up,
and manage to grab hold of the casket. Then, using my arm strength, I pull
myself up and seize hold of her hand. Between her pulling on my arm and my
pushing myself off the casket, first with my free hand and then both my legs, I
manage to make a hasty exit from the chamber through the opening.