Wiggins stepped away, studying something on the ground, then motioned Banks forward. They found more blood and followed a trail of it that led across the courtyard away from them, down another alley to yet another courtyard, and into the doorway of a squat, cubic building that dominated the far quadrant. A radio set, busted as if stomped on by something heavy, lay in pieces at the side of the door, and there was more blood pooled here and more shell casings. They followed the blood trail inside, noting a spatter of droplets on the floor and a red handprint on the wall. The trail led to a narrow hallway, where they lost it in the even darker shadows.
Banks motioned Hynd to bring the others forward.
“You four watch our backs,” he whispered when they were all in the doorway. “Wiggo and I will have a quick look around in here. Keep your eyes peeled. My guts are telling me there’s more to this than we can see.”
Once inside the hallway, Banks felt secure enough to turn on the light on his rifle and let it show him the path of the blood trail. It led them past two doorways that only opened into empty rooms, then stopped completely at a blank wall of stone. He was about to investigate when Hynd spoke in his ear from back at the main door.
“We’ve got movement on the rooftops, Cap, a lot of movement. Too dark to make out how many but I think they’ve got us boxed in.”
“Could we make a run for it?”
“Tricky. They’ve got the high ground and would have us in a gauntlet. The good news is they’re not shooting at us yet.”
“Stay in the doorway. Maybe they don’t know how many of us there are. Don’t shoot first but keep an eye on them.”
“Willco.”
He turned back to see Wiggins looking at where the blood trail stopped at the wall. The corporal whispered.
“There’s a wee gap here. And artificial light coming from under the bottom. I think this is a door, Cap.”
Banks rapped hard on the stone in front of this face with the butt of his rifle, ‘shave and a haircut.’ In reply, he heard a faint yelp of surprise from somewhere beyond, then a voice, a woman, shouting as if in the distance.
“We can’t get it open from this side.”
Banks found the slightest of vertical cracks, marking where the supposed doorway sat in the wall but could see no lock, handles, or mechanism for getting it open. It was going to need brute force. A lot of it.
“Sarge, come in.”
“Right here, Cap.”
“What’s the situation?”
“Still the same. There’s plenty of movement on the rooftops but no clean sight. But it’s not insurgents or rebels, Cap. I don’t think they’re people. Dogs maybe, unless there’s baboons or some such in this area. Whatever they are, they don’t move like men.”
“Can you spare two of the lads? We’ve got some heavy work needing doing. We might have found some folks.”
“They’re on their way.”
The privates, Davies and Brock, arrived alongside Banks and Wiggins seconds later. Banks made one last check of the vertical grooves that marked the door, then shouted, loudly enough that any people inside would hear.
“Stand back, we’re going to give it a try.”
All four of them put their shoulder against the door on the left side. Stone creaked and rasped against stone and the door moved but only by half an inch.
“Harder, lads,” Banks said and put his whole weight into it. The door slid inward another inch, then something gave way and it slid faster, swinging open. Two women and a man, pale but alive, stood in a square chamber on the other side.
“Are you the cavalry?” one of the women said in a Scottish accent.
“If you’re the archaeologists, aye, that’ll be us. But I was told there were ten of you.”
“There were,” the woman said and there was a sob in her voice. She had a story to tell, that much was clear, but there wouldn’t be time to hear it. Hynd came through at Banks’ ear.
“Whatever they are, I think we’ve pissed them off, Cap. We’ve got incoming.”
The shooting started as Banks led the other three men back to the main door.
He only had time to shove in his earplugs before joining Hynd and Wilkins. The two men were in kneeling position, one on either side of the doorway. Banks threw himself flat on the ground between them, leaving as little target area as possible for a sniper but it was already clear nobody was firing back and both Hynd and Wilkins had stopped shooting.
“What’ve we got, Sarge?” he shouted.
“Buggered if I know, Cap. We put something down as it came off the roof; it fell into the alleyway on the right and now everything’s gone quiet again.”
Banks turned.
“Wiggo, with me. The rest of you cover us.”
Banks, with Wiggins at his shoulder, set off at a crouching run across the courtyard, then slowed as they approached the alleyway entrance. Banks switched on his gun light and aimed at a darker shadow on the ground.
It wasn’t a rebel insurgent, or a dog, or a baboon, although it was large enough to have been mistaken for one in the shadows. But no baboon he knew of had red, compound eyes, a squat bulbous body or eight, stocky hairy legs. Whether it had been Hynd or Wilkins that shot it, they’d blown away a chunk of the body but it was clear enough what the thing had been. If he didn’t know better, he’d have identified it as a tarantula but one of enormous proportions.
Spiders. Why does it have to be bloody spiders.
— 4 —
The archaeologists stood in the chamber, watching the open door. Silence had fallen outside after the initial volley of shots. The soldiers had arrived, then left again so suddenly that Maggie wasn’t completely sure she hadn’t imagined them through sheer force of hope.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Kim said. “Do we follow them?”
“It might not be safe to go out yet. I vote we close the door again, to be sure,” Jack Reynolds replied.
“No,” Maggie said. “Leave it be. It might have been luck they got it open the last time. I’ve spent enough time in this tomb as it is. I need some fresher air.”
Before the others could stop her, she stepped out into the hallway. It was full dark outside the chamber but she remembered the way to the main entrance well enough to be able to feel her way along the corridor. A strange odor hung in the air, acrid, like burning plastic, stronger the closer to the entrance she got. She saw a slightly lighter patch ahead and headed for it, arriving at the doorway as two of the soldiers dragged something across the courtyard to drop it at the feet of the others.
She let of a yelp of surprise when she stepped forward and looked down at the broken remains of a spider the size of a large dog.
“What the bloody hell is that?” she said.
The man who’d spoken to her earlier looked over the top of the dead thing and smiled thinly.
“We were kind of hoping you could tell us.”
“I’m Maggie Boyd,” she said once they were back in the chamber, making the introductions.