Passage Graves (35 page)

Chapter 87

MONDAY, 4:55 a
.m.

Stenness, Scotland

A bewildered pilot yelled from a helicopter at the edge of the village. The chopper sat idle, still waiting for Hummer. David ignored him, sprinting around dead sheep to
ward Maeshowe. He glanced at his watch. 

Less than five
minutes. 

Ducking under the arch doorway, he slid sideways down the tunnel and squeezed through the narrow passage into the chamber. Across the room, the eternal stone had a faint glow. Most of the ruin was lost in darkness. Cold sweat trickled down his face. A chill moved up his spine. 

What was he supposed to do? Just put the seal in the hole?

His foot caught on something heavy and he stumbled to the floor.

There was something in his pocket. The guards had never taken it away. Pulling one of the emergency glow sticks from his pant pocket, he cracked the wand over his leg. The vial chemicals intermixed and glowed bright yellow. He lifted the wand over what had tripped him and retracted in horror. 

A corpse stared back at him, wide-eyed,
gory. It was one of Thatcher’s men, whose indented forehead and cheeks peeled away revealing a mess of imploded brain.

David retched.

“It disgusts you?”

He
looked up to see glowing eyes between him and the eternal stone. 

“I thought you enjoyed studying the dead.” Asor stepped into the light of the glow stick. His tattered jumpsuit revealed portions of his emaciated, twine-wrapped body underneath. 

David’s heart stopped.

Thatcher stood beside Asor, bound and gagged with the same prickly cord. 

Asor pulled her closer. “Your father called these ruins passage graves, portal tombs for those who believe.”

Thatcher’s face was pale, her eyes
dazed. Blood dripped from her fingers as she struggled against the twine. Asor noticed their connection. He stroked her neck. “She has more potential than I realized.”

A large ex
plosion sounded in the distance as an AVX discharge detonated hundreds of miles away. One of Maeshowe’s sister graves was wiped from the earth. The ground shook. Dust and rock fell from the walls.

David lifted the seal towards
Asor. 

The old man straightened his back. His chest heaved.
He clicked his tongue. “You thought you were so different from Brenton, but in the end, lacking faith will have killed you both.”

Thatcher blinked
down at the ground. Her gun was in the dirt, hidden behind the corpse. 

The ground shuddered
with another AVX eruption. This one was much closer. As Maeshowe’s walls crumbled, David dove across the floor. He grabbed the hilt of the gun and pulled the trigger.

Five slugs
ruptured Asor’s chest. The force of the bullets threw him into the eternal stone, but he clung to Thatcher, carrying her back with him. He looked at David with a smile. One of his teeth had broken from the impact.

Dust swirled off the dirt floor. The room came alive. 

“Give me the seal!” Asor shouted over the noise.

Thatcher cringed, trying to press one ear into her shoulder.

David grabbed his ears. The sound reverberated inside his head, like his conscious mind had betrayed him by conjuring clangorous thoughts. His teeth chattered. Vibrations cascaded along the sinew of his tissues, a reverberation that liquefied his marrow. His muscles felt as if they could drop off his bones like overcooked meat. The cacophony was bizarre. Shrieking ghosts—their cries warped and distorted—soared around the room, winding in his ears and pulsing inside his throbbing brain. Their message was clear:
Come mightily, come with horror, my Horsemen!

Asor threw Thatcher to the ground. He pulled at the twine a
t his wrist. His chant mixed with the Maeshowe’s crescendo.

Thatcher’s eyes widened with terror.

“It’s not real!” David yelled. “Brynne, it isn’t real!”

She t
ore at her throat, desperate to remove an invisible hand. 

David lunged at Asor, knocking the old man off his feet. Thatcher
dropped and writhed on the floor. She couldn’t breathe.

A third
tremor rocked the passage grave, splitting the western wall. Isbister was gone.

Asor snapped under
David’s weight. He could feel the old man scramble madly beneath him, lashing out with razor-sharp fingernails and teeth, biting and scratching, everywhere at once. David flipped Asor onto his back, but dropped the seal into the dirt.

The old man twisted unnaturally. With a harrowing crack, he broke the vertebra along
his spine to reach for the seal.

Close to the eternal stone, the diamond seal
began to glow.

Subson
ic noise intensified resonating throughout the chamber. Asor dug his fingers into David’s cheek, clawing his way to David’s eyes. He wiggled free, dragging his broken body across the floor with his arms. He held up the seal. The black of his pupils caught fire.

David reached for Asor’s feet, but the old man was out of reach. 

Asor pulled his body to the eternal stone. He inserted the key inside the lock. 

The voices
muted. The world was silent. 

David
reached for Thatcher’s hand. She was unconscious at the center of the grave. His watch alarm beeped the end of Maeshowe’s countdown.

00:00:00:00 

David pulled Thatcher to him.

In a deafening
burst, the AVX exploded.

F
luid fire engulfed them, lifting them toward heaven. To his surprise, there was no pain, only warmth and blinding light and Thatcher in his arms.

Chapter
88

MONDAY, 5:02 a
.m.

Wiltshire, England

R
ain pelted Thatcher’s face. A moment earlier, she had been soaring through the clouds. In her dreams, she was high above the earth. Everything was peaceful.

She lifted her head from a puddle
. The prickly twine was stuck to her body. David lay on the ground beside her. Surrounding them, dawn illuminated a tall circle of rectangular boulders. The giant sarsen stones, bearded with gray moss, were stacked in arches or standing solitary.

“
Stonehenge,” she whispered, carefully sitting up. 

David mo
aned. His wrist was broken. She lifted his head into her lap.

The w
armth of her dream slowly evaporated from her body. The morning chill took over. She shivered and brushed the mud off of David’s face.

Somehow, they had survived.

Chapter 89

TUE
SDAY, 9:49 p.m.

London, England

Javan twisted the Mayan ring through his bandaged fingers. His face was
knotted with anxiety, his jaw tightly clenched. The graves had been destroyed, the voices silenced. The first seal was lost, its final resting place unknown. Perhaps, like Maeshowe, it had been obliterated. His office was a disaster. It had been vandalized by intruders, most likely someone who rallied for his position as the leader of Abaddon. His authority over the largest remaining splinter group had come to a disappointing end. No one could be trusted. Now that the first seal was gone, only three could claim the post of Horseman and be saved from the Apocalypse.

He
set the Mayan the ring on his desk and looked through the papers stacked before him. A manila envelope near the bottom of the pile caught his attention.

CONFIDENTIAL:  HIGH PRIORITY - OPEN UPON RECIEPT

The British Ministry of Defense had sent the letter days ago. He opened the envelope and removed a packet of medical results.

There was a knock at his door.

“What is it?” He looked up from the report. His face paled. He jumped back in his chair, away from the desk.

A gun fired from the doorway. 

Blood spilled from Javan’s chest. He fought to lift his head.

T
he pistol was placed against Javan’s forehead.

“Please, I’ll te
ll you who killed your father!” Javan begged. “Ian, wait—it was you!”

Ian pulled the trigger.

Chapter 90

WEDNESDAY, 3:04 p.m.

London, England

Grave markers spanned the rolling hills of Westminster’s Royal Army Cemetery. Around the line of tombstones were a dozen mourners, at the edge of the funeral party stood Thatcher.

“God will call thee by thy name, Willia
m Marshall Lang,” the officiating priest said. “And when the trumpet shall sound at long last, awakening the dead, God shall beckon thee to wake saying, ‘Arise my beloved, my beautiful one, and come.’”

Four uniformed
policemen draped a British flag over Lang’s coffin.

Gunfire blasted in
salute.

O
ne by one, the crowd placed flowers over the casket and dispersed.

****

Ian sat in the driver’s seat of a car. He watched the memorial service through tinted windows. His mother’s Mayan ring fit snugly around his thumb.

The
manila envelope from Javan’s desk sat open in his lap. The contents were interesting to say the least.

CONFIDENTIAL: HIGH PRIORITY - OPEN UPON RECIEPT

He skimmed through the analysis of DNA data.

TEST SUBJECT:  WILLIAM DAVID HYDEN

IN COMPARISON TO:  BRENTON GERALD HYDEN

He stopped at the bottom of the page.

CONCLUSION:

SUBJECT is of no relation to Brenton Gerald Hyden

Ian tossed the letter onto the passenger seat. He shifted into drive and left the cemetery.

****

Dressed entirely in white, the old man hobbled through the grave yard. Many things had changed, but his disfigurement stayed the same. It was a disappointment. He hid the malformation beneath an oversized suit coat. A white top hat was pulled low over his eyes, its brim shielded his face from the sun. He shuffled forward, dragging behind him an ivory cane.

As Ian drove by, the old man looked up with a smile. His eyes were pearl oblivion. Entirely colorless, they lacked both a pupil and an iris. Regardless, his vision was perfect.
Power pulsed through his body. Energy vibrated from his pores. It was a subsonic hum, unrecognizable to the human ear. It merely disturbed the natural balance of things, unsettled nature around him. Strangers became dizzy, animals panicked. 

He turned in Ian’s direction.
Soon, they would collaborate. The priest desperately needed direction. Few were aware of the approaching Apocalypse, and only the White Horseman understood the grand orchestration that was prepared for his Chosen.

Three more were already
selected. Asor had no doubt they would ascribe to his will.

Chapter 91

WEDNESDAY, 5:26 p.m.

Box Cemetery in Swindon

Wiltshire, England

Thatcher walked along another line of gravestones. Moss-ridden, cracked, and buried under overgrowth, these markers were far more antiquated than those at the Royal Army Cemetery.  Sunlight danced through the trees, illuminating portions of the soggy grounds. She stepped over the mud, careful not to slip. Passing under the thick boughs of a willow tree, she entered a familiar area encircled by eroded cherubim statues.

“Thought I might find you here,
” she said.

David looked up from a freshly dug grave.

“I report for work Monday, but it looks like my job has already been done.” She handed him a copy of the London Globe. The headline read:

Hundreds of Thousands Return Home After Ebola Scare Ends

He looked up at her. “So you decided to go back to work?”

She shrugged. “What about you?”

“Can I slip back into the mundane as if none of this ever happened?”

Thatcher met his eyes.

David frowned. “I can’t think of anything I’d like more.”

“What would you study now that Maeshowe is gone?”

He lifted an eyebrow to consider the alternatives. “Frogs, I think.”

“I
heard Cambridge has an impressive biology department.”

“I heard that, too.”

The footstep-sounding wind blew through the trees. 

“Lang’s ceremony was respectful,” she said, pulling a strand of hair behind one ear. “A little long-winded, but you would’ve appreciated it.”

“He was a good man,” David said. He looked down at Brenton’s headstone and read the engraving. “‘Arise my beloved, my beautiful one, and come.’ What do you think that means?”

Thatcher stood beside him and studied the marker. “I don’t know. Perhaps that the dead aren’t truly lost to us. Maybe, it’s only a matter of time before they’ll be with us again.” She looked around at the other graves. For some reason, the place no longer felt diabolic. Instead, it he
ld nostalgia, a strange type of serenity. This was somewhere she wouldn’t mind being buried. She looked at David. There was something different about him. The sadness he hid away had found its way to the surface.

“I’m sorry for your loss
,” she whispered.

He lowered his head
introspectively. “I’m not the only one who has lost someone.” 

Thatcher took in a de
ep breath. David knew how to quiet her.

“Marek was a good man,
” she said.

“A
nd your uncle, too,” David said. “I think Hummer wanted to rectify his mistakes, especially when it came to you.”

They stood in silence for a moment, listening to the wind.

“‘Everything has an end, even death…’” Thatcher recalled the words of Mrs. Ehrman. “I think I finally understand what her husband meant. Those aren’t words of despair, but of hope.”

“How so?” David buried his hands in his pockets.

“If the Apocalypse is the end of all we know—we can fear it, fight it, run from it, or we can accept it as something good.”

“‘The death of death into an eternal Spring?’” he asked.

Thatcher turned to him in surprise. “You
do
know your scriptures.” 

“Tell anybody, and I’ll give you hell.”

Thatcher snorted and shook her head. “What is the end of times but a transformation from death to life? There’ll be earthquakes and plagues, but our beloved dead will rise and return to us.”

“So how do we survive to see those things?”

“Maybe we aren’t meant to…” She paused, uncertain. “But I think we should try. What if we have a role in how things end? What if our ancestors need us?”

“H
ow would we help them?”

She paused a moment. The conclusion was difficult. It was one thing to say it, and quite another to mean it. “
We could start by forgiving the ghosts that haunt us.”

David nodded. “Redeem the past to save the future?”

What lay ahead suddenly felt overwhelming.

A scripture came to
her mind. She took his hand. “‘The dead shall save the living and the living shall save the dead.’”