Fortune Favors (38 page)

“Is it dangerous?”

“Fontaneda didn’t say much more about it, but we should be careful nonetheless.” He watched at the light show for a moment longer, and then glanced past her to the entrance. “Leeds’ is the real danger. We have to find the source he talked about, the Seed.”

“Then what?”

“Use it for leverage; threaten to destroy it if we have to.” He took her hand and led her out onto the walkway.

As they neared the upraised platform, they passed a cairn of hewn limestone rocks, some as large as a man’s head. At one end stood an ornately carved cross. There was a name carved on it and a pair of dates. Annie looked at Kismet for an explanation.

“Fontaneda wrote about this. In the end, his companions decided to die rather than drink...” His voice trailed off as he looked thoughtfully at the cross, and then looked down at his own hands—scraped raw and streaked with chalk dust and bat guano—and his feet which had been cut to bloody ribbons by the journey through the cave. “The Fountain didn’t just give them youth. It healed their wounds. It made Fontaneda strong; supernaturally strong.”

Then, seemingly apropos of nothing he took out his hip flask.

“You’re drinking?” Annie gasped in disbelief. “At a time like this?”

“I can’t think of a better time for a drink,” he answered with a roguish smile. Then he upended the container and let its contents dribble out onto the floor. When it was empty, he moved cautiously toward the edge of the pool.

The effects of the plasma storm seemed to increase with his approach. A tendril of light reached out and caught the outstretched hand with the flask. The tongue of energy vanished instantly upon contact, but Kismet jerked his hand back and cradled it against his chest.

 “Damn thing shocked me,” he muttered, but nevertheless resumed his advance. For a moment, the cave grew dim, as if the jolt had somehow drained the static storm of its power, but after just a few seconds, it started growing brighter again. The brief respite permitted Kismet to reach his goal without being shocked again, and he knelt right next to the water’s edge. Annie, braving the storm, moved to join him.

He cautiously probed the air above the water. Wispy tongues of static reached out to him, dancing at his fingertips, but evidently not with the same intensity as the earlier discharge. He drew back his hand and flexed his fingers, trying to shake the memory of the jolt from them. “Whatever is at work here, it’s powerful.”

Steeling his determination, he held the flask out over the water. The electricity arced into him again, conducting right through the metal of the container, but he resisted the instinctive urge to draw back and instead lowered the flask into the water.

A dull moan escaped his lips as energy began surging through him. A mist of crimson plasma began to swirl around his arm like a veil. Annie reached out instinctively, intending to pull him back, but through clenched teeth he hissed, “Don't touch me.”

Through a sheer effort of will, he drew back his hand and with it a flask full of the potent water. The ferocity of the electricity began to diminish again as he moved away, his muscles still twitching uncontrollably from the shocks. A few tendrils of light clung tenaciously to him for a moment then vanished.

“Are you all right?” she asked. She wanted to reach out to him, but his earlier warning echoed in her mind. Was he now charged with electricity? Would a single touch from him knock her on her ass...or stop her heart?

He looked at her and opened his mouth tentatively, as if unsure that any sound would issue. “I will be,” he croaked.

Then they both stared down at the prize he had retrieved. She extended a cautious and reverent hand toward it, placing her fingers against the metal.

“It tingles!”

He met Annie's stare, as if asking for her approval. She nodded reassuringly. “Do it.”

Kismet raised the flask, as in salute, and then tipped it to his lips.

* * *

He felt energy crackle between the flask and his lips, and then the water was in his mouth. There was a faint lingering taste of bourbon, but as the liquid swirled and sizzled across his tongue his ability to perceive even that was overwhelmed. Then the electricity surged through his body, causing the muscles of his extremities to begin twitching uncontrollably. Yet, whereas the static on the surface of the Fountain had been painful, even injurious, the shocks he now felt seemed to revitalize and energize him. He felt the pins and needles of increased circulation in his arms and legs. The liquid, sliding down into his digestive system was like warm liquor in his throat and stomach, and he could feel it passing immediately into his bloodstream. He had taken only a small sip, but the effect was tremendous. His body was alive with energy, his nerves quivering with excitement.

He abruptly felt a profound, gnawing hunger in his belly. The spasms nearly caused him to double over in agony. He groaned a little, and Annie, sensing but not understanding his discomfort, took the flask from his hands and set it carefully on the floor.

She gripped his shoulders. “What's wrong?”

The hunger subsided to a dull throb, but a sense of fatigue quickly replaced it. Kismet felt as if vital energy was being sucked out every pore of his body, drawn down into his core; his muscles felt like jelly.

“Nick, is it the water? Is it poison?”

“No,” he whispered.

No indeed.

Not poison. Not harmful in any way, at least not in the small amount he’d imbibed

He could almost see what was happening. His bone marrow was generating blood cells at an astounding rate. His arteries and veins of his body were swelling to accommodate the invigorated blood supply. He greedily sucked in breaths, charging the newly formed red blood cells with oxygen, and those new cells raced throughout his body, delivering their payload to his cells, which in turn began growing and dividing, healing the tissue that had been damaged by injuries too numerous to count.

The process wasn’t altogether pleasant. Cells used oxygen as a catalyst, but the raw material needed for growth and regeneration was being drawn from his body’s reserves. He didn’t know what would happen once those were depleted.

Something else was happening, too. His nerves were being overloaded with sensation. At first it was a merely an annoying itch, but within seconds, the sensation racked him from head to toe—it was especially intense in his feet. The itch grew exponentially, not just on the surface of his skin, but internally, in his organs and musculature. He could not resist the impulse to begin scratching at the painful sensation. His fingernails were visibly longer than just a moment before, and he dug them into the exposed flesh of his feet.

Annie watched, horrified as the effects became starkly visible. In a matter of seconds, Kismet's hair and nails had grown longer. When he started tearing into the bare skin of his feet, she seized his wrists to prevent him, but then gasped in disbelief at what she saw next.

Under the ragged and bloodstained tatters of his socks, his feet had healed completely. Fresh, pink skin gleamed on the soles of his feet, marred only by red claw marks from his uncontrollable scratching, and even those vanished before her eyes.

The hands she held in her own were also healed. The outermost layer of skin, tattooed with scratches and scars, the physical record of the innumerable deadly encounters he had survived over the past few days, sloughed off like the shed skin of a molting reptile, and beneath it was virginal flesh, as pink as smooth as a baby’s.

Kismet hugged his arm to his chest and clenched his teeth as he rode out the deluge of sensations. He understood now. This was indeed the Fountain of Youth, but it wasn’t magic. When he’d drunk, a chemical message had gone out into his cells, stimulating them to do exactly what they did from the moment life began—create new cells and tissue to replace and repair the old. The only difference was that the water initiated an accelerated version of this process.

The sensory overload reached an almost transcendent peak then began to subside, but he could feel the potency of the Fountain’s water tingling within him. It was still active, but for how much longer?

Annie still held him tight. He slowly unclasped his arms from around his chest, and reached out to return her embrace. “It's all right,” he whispered. “I'm fine.”

He was soaked in sweat, and a chill raised gooseflesh all over his flushed skin, but in every other way, he was perfectly healthy.

Something tickled his forehead, and he reached up to discover that his normally close-cropped hair had become a shaggy mass, a prodigious mane that fell down nearly to his eyes and tickled the back of his neck. A bushy beard had sprouted on his chin and cheeks as well.

He was still marveling at the transformation when he heard the sound of laughter.

Beyond the fantastic glow of the plasma storm, Dr. Leeds stood just inside the entrance to the cavern. The rest of the party had filed in behind him and were now spread out on the walkway to either side of him. They had all made it, though the journey had taken a toll. Elisabeth’s legendary Hollywood beauty was concealed beneath layers of guano and dust. Russell was holding a hand protectively against his right side, just under the armpit—the final spike trap had caught him with a glancing blow. Higgins seemed shell-shocked, gazing across the pool at his daughter and Kismet with a desultory stare. Leeds however, looked triumphant.

Kismet launched into motion. He thrust Annie aside, into the marginal cover of the limestone cairn, and began sprinting toward the ascending stairs and the dais, where he intuitively knew he would find the Seed from the Tree of Life.

He did not see Dr. Leeds nod sharply to one of his men. The only warning he received was Annie's screamed: “No!”

Something punched into his upper back, just below the right shoulder. The force of the blow spun him halfway around. Even as the report reached his ears, he knew that he’d been shot. A bullet—a .308 round from Higgins’ Kimber rifle, though fired by one of Leeds’ thugs—ripped through his torso, splattering the cave wall with a chaotic spray of crimson.

His momentum carried him several steps closer to his goal before the agony of the wound blossomed, paralyzing him with the pain. He stumbled headlong, clutching uselessly at the cascade of his precious lifeblood. The wave of pain crested, and then just as quickly subsided as traumatic shock plunged him into a surreal state of hyper-awareness.

He could feel his heart beating, fierce and rapid with adrenaline, but each contraction of the life-sustaining muscle pumped more blood out of the ragged holes in his torso. Blood was spilling inward too, filling his chest cavity, submerging his lungs, drowning him. The brightness of the plasma storm above the pool vanished into a hazy void, filled with white noise.

Annie was suddenly beside him, embracing him from out of the darkness, whispering tenderly in his ear. He opened his mouth to tell her...what? He couldn’t seem to connect his thoughts.

Then suddenly he was no longer in the world, no longer in his body. The abyss opened up to receive him, and he had no choice but to plunge into it.

* * *

Annie reached Kismet with the report of the rifle still echoing in her ears. She lifted him in her arms, and was immediately drenched in his blood. His eyes were open, yet he seemed to unable to see her.

Tears bled from her eyes, tracing rivulets through the mask of dust on her cheeks, as she hugged him to her breast.

“Annie...”

“Nick. Oh, Nick. Hold on.” The words poured from her without conscious thought. “Don’t leave me. I love you.”

“Seed...”

The effort of speaking that one word was too much. Whatever thought he had tried to communicate slipped from his lips in a trickle of blood.

In a flash of insight, she understood what he had been trying to tell her, and what she had to do next.

She eased his lifeless body to the ground and stood and faced the stairway, but before she could take even a single step, a steel grip clamped her upper left arm. She was hauled back, away from the dais—away from the thing Kismet had wanted her to take—and then spun around to face her captor.

Dr. Leeds glowered at her. “Oh, I don’t think so. The Seed is mine.”

She struggled, trying to break his grip, but his hook-hand looped around her wrist, turning it just enough to send a burst of pain stabbing through her. With a snort of derisive laughter he thrust her behind him, into the waiting arms of her father.

Higgins held her tight, but she struggled against his embrace. He had betrayed Kismet, betrayed them all. She struggled to the verge of exhaustion against his loathsome touch, but was unable to break free. Finally, she could do nothing but sag in his arms, weeping uncontrollably.

* * *

Dr. John Leeds gazed contemptuously down at Kismet's body, and then began ascending the steps.

The cavern might have been Mother Nature’s handiwork, but the dais was unquestionably the product of human artifice. The steps were too perfectly cut to be the result of geological processes, but the real proof was the intricate carvings on the back wall; an elaborate scaled serpent, surrounded by wedge shaped marks that told a story in the language of ancient Mesopotamia. He recognized some of it, and probably could have translated it given sufficient time, but he already knew the gist of what it said. It was a familiar tale; the story of the serpent that stole the source of immortality, a legend built on the bones of what had really happened thousands of years before. It was a story that would rewrite the history books.

The priests of the Serpent cult had stolen the source—the Seed of the Tree of Life—from the god-emperor of Chaldea, the man known to the Babylonians as Tammuz, but also as Gilgamesh and Nimrod. They had stolen the source of his power and immortality and fled east—just as Cain had been exiled into the land east of Eden—and their journey had eventually brought them here, where they had built this shrine.

The head of the carved serpent protruded from the carving, its mouth agape and hollow inside. Leeds realized that it had been crafted to disgorge a trickle of water directly onto the altar, which would in turn decant its contents into the pool, but the snake’s mouth and the spout that extended over the pool were both bone dry; the water that had once fed the Fountain of Youth had been diverted.