Gorgon: An Alex Hunter Novel (33 page)

Alex knew they were out of time, and also knew he was no longer all flesh anymore. He was already dead, and if they stayed, they would be too.

‘Shit, this is bad.’ Matt turned to Rebecca, grimacing.

Franks stepped in close and lifted him, bringing her face close to Alex’s. ‘Don’t you fucking dare.’ She shook him for a second, and then dropped him to shoulder her weapon as she turned to Thompson. ‘We carry him.’

‘Wait, look,’ Rebecca said.

Alex continued to watch his hand. A line of healthy color was creeping up from the wrist to the fingers. His vision slowly cleared, and suddenly the heavy weight on his chest lightened. He made a fist several times and blinked.

‘Amazing; he’s healing,’ Matt said, sitting back on his haunches.

‘Get him up.’ Franks pulled Alex roughly to his feet.

Alex nodded, leaning on her for a few seconds. ‘I’m… okay… I think.’ He looked across to the Gorgon, still in its titanic struggle with the pack of Cerberus. Its massive hands tore at their heavily plated limbs, ripping heads off and flinging them away. But their sheer weight of numbers prevailed. More appeared and threw themselves into the fight.

‘Maybe they were the Gorgons’ previous cargo,’ Franks said.

‘Before they found us,’ Rebecca whispered.

Alex turned to see Sam making his way around the melee, then sprinting to join the others. ‘Three minutes,’ he yelled to Alex. He grabbed Matt and Rebecca, threw them over each shoulder of the MECH suit, and headed for the steps.

‘Go!’ Alex yelled to Thompson and Franks. He knew the female HAWC would never let him carry her, so instead he shoved her hard and fast in the middle of her back, pushing her up the first few steps. He staggered at first, but then picked up speed.

Thompson scrambled behind them. Alex looked back to offer him a helping hand, but the SAS man simply pointed to the high cave mouth. ‘Keep going,’ he yelled.

Behind them, the Gorgon had thrown off its remaining attackers and was making its way toward the stone steps.

They barreled along the mosaic tunnel, Sam crushing 5000-year-old pristine images under his large boots. The tunnel got narrower, and he had to stop to let Matt and Rebecca off his shoulders. Matt kept one hand on the huge HAWC’s back, and with the other held onto Rebecca, which meant Sam could still pull them along at great speed. When they came to the flowstone wall, Sam didn’t stop; he exploded through it like a bulldozer.

They crossed the drained pond and headed for the metal steps, with no time to catch their breath. Their plan was for the Gorgon to be trapped by the rockfall, not to follow them out.

Sam led them up the metal steps, his feet clanging heavily on the steel. Matt and Rebecca were right behind him, followed by Casey Franks and Alex. Matt turned his head as he climbed and saw Reece Thompson emerge from the flowstone tunnel, his face beet-red. He looked up at them, his face resolute, then he sucked in a huge breath and simply … stopped.

Like a gush of foul air, a dark cloud spewed from the cave behind him and enveloped him. It coalesced, and solidified, and then huge scaled hands ripped his helmet from his face. Thompson’s mouth dropped open, and his eyes became rounder than Matt had thought was humanly possible. And then he screamed, with such fear it made Matt’s legs go weak.

‘No, Reece!’ Rebecca stopped and put her hands to her head.

Matt grabbed her and pulled her on. He saw Alex pause by the railing, as if contemplating leaping over it, but in the next second Reece Thompson shuddered and turned bone white. Magera sucked in his life force, and finished its meal by ripping the petrified husk of his body into a thousand fragments. It was obvious its rage wasn’t going to be satisfied by simply draining the intruders.

‘Move, dammit.’ Alex’s face was furious.

They were more than halfway up when Matt chanced another look over his shoulder. Magera’s solid form had started to dissipate into the dark cloud again, and Matt knew the mist would be able to move at a speed that could outpace even Sam and Alex.

‘Incoming,’ Casey Franks roared. She pounded up the steps, then turned to fire uselessly at the dark mass hundreds of feet below them.

Alex looked at his watch. ‘What the hell happened to –’

As if in answer, there came a massive hammer blow from deep in the ground. It sounded like a million volcanoes erupting, accompanied by the grinding and cracking of millions of tons of rock.

Matt saw that the entire cave system was being sucked into a giant void opening up beneath them. The stairs began to bend and then collapsed, as if the darkness was reeling them in on a length of rope. Huge stalactites fell from the ceiling like monstrous daggers, and walls split open.

Rebecca stumbled and fell. Alex sprinted past, gathering her up. He pushed at Matt. ‘Move it, Prof.’

Matt didn’t need to be told twice. He ran, his heart hammering with exertion and fear.

Vast underground wells burst their confines, pouring millions of gallons of water and debris toward them, turning the cave into a maelstrom of collapsing stone and surging whitewash.

Sam was first out into the daylight, followed by Casey, Matt, then Alex and Rebecca.

They slowed, but Alex urged them on. ‘We need to get higher. This whole area’s going to collapse.’

They ran hard for another ten minutes, up to a bluff overlooking the cave entrance. Matt’s body gave out and he fell to his knees, gasping. He looked back and gasped. The caves were gone. In their place was a huge black hole, rapidly filling with surging, muddy water.

Alex stared into its depths, and Matt knew he was searching for anything living coming to the surface. But there was nothing.

Matt rolled over to lie on his back. He heard Rebecca whisper, ‘Reece.’

‘He saved us,’ Alex said. ‘He knew what he was doing. Bought us an extra thirty seconds – the difference between that thing swallowing us and getting out. He was a good man.’

Rebecca nodded, and wiped away tears. ‘The Gorgons, the Minoans, the ship – it’s like it all never existed.’

Matt sat up. ‘No one will ever believe it did. Probably a good thing. Some people are better off not knowing what really lurks in the dark.’

Alex finally looked away from the surging water. ‘No one must ever know about it. We don’t want anyone going searching for the ship, or the Gorgon. For all we know, it could be waiting down there for someone to dig it out again.’

*

On the flight home, Alex sat apart from the others. For once there was a calm in his mind – no screaming devils calling for bloodshed; no Other One in the dark corners of his consciousness, straining at its mental chains, waiting for the opportunity to take over. He dropped his head back against the seat. He was looking forward to continuing his treatment with Alan Marshal. For the first time in years, he felt in control. Though he doubted the furies within him would ever be fully laid to rest, he knew that he was learning to master them. He smiled and opened his hands, then squeezed them into fists, feeling the strength run through him. He felt good. He felt like he had something to offer at last, something to live for.

He thought of Aimee and Joshua, remembered how the boy had seen him in the trees and waved to him. Somehow his son had sensed the connection with the strange wild-eyed bearded man hiding in the forest. He smiled. Now he had something to hope for.

Sam collapsed into the seat next to him with a thump. He’d removed the upper-body MECH gear, but he still overflowed into Alex’s space. Unlike Alex, Sam’s wounds would take longer to heal. Just about every inch of his body was covered in a bandage, stitched or daubed with iodine.

Alex grinned. ‘Hey there, Frankenstein.’

Sam snorted. ‘Just another day at the office.’ He looked hard at Alex. ‘So, good to be back?’

The big man was probably the closest thing Alex had to a brother. He nodded. ‘Yeah. It felt good.’

‘Damn right it did.’ Sam punched him in the shoulder. ‘Good to have you back, Arcadian. You’re home.’

Alex grunted and leaned forward to look out the window. ‘Nearly home.’

Colonel Jack Hammerson read the Magera report and shook his head. ‘This goddamn world will never cease to amaze me.’

He closed the folder and fed the hardcopy version into a shredder. The online version he allocated to deep storage in the underground information silos beneath USSTRATCOM.

He picked up the next folder, and pulled at his lip as he read its contents. It was a report on a covert surveillance operation on a private citizen. He looked at the photograph of the mother and child. He knew the woman well, but she wasn’t what interested him. With her was a child, a boy, less than two years old. He studied the face, the gray-blue eyes, piercing, serious. The next shot showed the boy holding up one end of a ride-on car with another kid in it. The child was lifting their combined weight with one hand.

‘Like father, like son,’ Hammerson said. He flipped the folder onto the desk and rubbed his eyes, then sat back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. ‘Ah, Aimee – there are no secrets left in this world any more.’ He sighed. ‘So, now what do we do with you, and Joshua?’

*

The interrogation rooms beneath the Kremlin were for special guests only. They were tiled and insulated, containing the screams that frequently emanated from within, and making them easy to hose out.

President Vladimir Volkov looked down at the man strapped to the gurney. A metal spike extended from his nostril, with wires leading from it to a box that sent a mild electrical current into the area of his brain between the hippocampus and amygdala. Captain Robert Graham twitched, and babbled nonstop, even though his lips were parchment-dry. The doctor pulled up one of his eyelids to examine the rolled-back orb. The captain showed no physical response to the touch.

‘He has told us everything he knows about the Arcadian treatment and the subject,’ the doctor said. ‘He has no more secrets.’

Volkov grunted. ‘Get the information down to the labs. I want the treatments duplicated and commenced immediately.’

‘It seems they didn’t have much success,’ the doctor commented. ‘Only one Arcadian out of over a hundred experiments.’

Volkov shrugged. ‘That is still one in a hundred. And we have 10,000 volunteers waiting in our gulags.’

‘And Captain Graham?’ the doctor asked. ‘He will never function normally again. Disposal?’

Volkov’s mouth turned down momentarily. ‘No, keep him alive. Let his brain empty completely. Who knows what other useful information he may have stored in there.’ He stripped off his gloves and dropped them to the floor. ‘So, now we make our own Arcadians.’ He grinned, wolf-like. ‘And in Russia, everything is bigger and better.’

Many readers ask me about the science in my novels – is it real or fiction? Where do I get the situations, equipment, characters or their expertise from, and just how much of any legend has a basis in fact? In the case of the Gorgon, there are numerous mythological and religious stories, some dating back to the Neolithic Age, of men being turned to stone, of snake goddesses, and hideous monsters living in an underworld.

The word ‘gorgon’ derives from the ancient Greek word
γοργός
, meaning ‘fierce, terrible and grim’. Another derivation is from the Greek word
gorgos
, which means ‘dreadful’. So it is an ancient word, as old as Zeus himself.

One of the earliest images of a Gorgoneia – a figure depicting a Gorgon head – dates from nearly 3000 years ago, and appears on a coin made of electrum (a natural alloy of gold, silver and other metals) discovered during excavations at Parium. Images with a Gorgon head were also found in the Knossos palace on Crete, dating from a thousand years earlier. A Lithuanian–American archeologist, Marija Gimbutas, argued that the Gorgon mythology extended back to at least 6000 BC, citing a ceramic mask from the Sesklo culture as proof. In her book
Language of the Goddess
, she also identified the genesis of the Gorgoneion in Neolithic art and jewelry.

Minoan jewelry found on the island of Mochlos in Crete shows the figure of a female goddess with a monstrous writhing head; while other Gorgons are portrayed with clawed feet, wings, fangs, tusks, flashing eyes, large teeth, and sometimes a protruding snake-like tongue. In Virgil’s
Aeneid
, written between 29 and 19 BC, Gorgons are said to live at the entrance to the Underworld, dwelling in eternal darkness. In more modern times, the Gorgon’s likeness has been immortalized by artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, and Benvenuto Cellini.

Medusa is the most famous of the Gorgon creatures. She, along with her sisters Stheno and Euryale, were the daughters of the sea Titans Phorcys and Ceto.

Many versions of the myth have Medusa, the youngest sister, as a beautiful maiden with long silky hair, said to be extremely wise but very vain. She and her sisters all served as priestesses to the virgin goddess of wisdom, Athena. However, the sea god, Poseidon (Neptune), desperately desired Medusa and raped her inside Athena's temple. Athena blamed Medusa for Poseidon’s attack and for defiling her place of worship. As punishment, she transformed the three sisters into hideous beasts with scaly skin, dragon wings, and hair formed of dozens of coiling snakes. As further retribution, the Gorgons were so horrifying that any man who beheld them was instantly turned to stone.

Medusa and her sisters grew to become vicious monsters that took great pleasure in torturing their victims. Perseus was given gifts by the gods – winged sandals from Hermes, a helmet of invisibility provided by Hades, and Athena’s silver shield – to help him kill Medusa. Perseus crept up on the sleeping Medusa by looking at her reflection in his shield, cut off her head, and presented it to Athena, who placed it in the center of her aegis, the protective shield she wore over her breastplate. Perseus escaped Medusa’s enraged sisters thanks to the winged sandals of Hermes, and by wearing Hades’ helmet of invisibility.

The Medusa tale reaches back even further than classical Greece. She also appears in Libyan images, with her hair sometimes resembling dreadlocks, and was worshiped by the Libyan Amazons as their serpent goddess. Her name there is derived from the Sanskrit word
medha
, and Egyptian
met
or
maat
, meaning ‘wisdom’.

Medusa’s face is usually shown screaming, or staring with unblinking eyes. Her tongue sometimes protrudes like a snake’s and her head is often surrounded by a halo of coiling snakes. The Medusa image was frequently used to guard and protect, up until the Christian era. Even after that, her face continued to appear on columns, doorways and gateways, signifying her role as the guardian of the threshold between the realms of the living and the dead, between the temporal world and the Underworld.

The Medusa is an ancient icon that remains one of the most popular and enduring figures of Greek mythology. She continues to be recreated in pop culture and art today. Her face is carved into a rock at the popular Red Beach in Matala, Crete; is used as the logo for the famous fashion brand Versace; and even appears in some Greek bank vaults as a talisman for luck and protection.