The Sapphire Sword, page 5
Something tugged at her foot. Startled, she looked down and saw a fresh black shoot wrapping around her shoe, briars digging deep. She screamed and kicked at the vine with her other foot, managing to loosen her shoe enough to get free. As she pushed back, frantically sliding on her rump over the rotting grass, she saw a dozen other vines drawn by her movement, like living snakes swaying back and forth in search of prey.
She let out a yelp and struggled to her feet, moving as fast as she could, which was not so fast on account of missing a shoe. She looked back and could see more and more vines moving in her direction.
With teeth gritted and jaw set, she dashed down the mountainside. In only a matter of minutes she reached the grove, and what she found there chilled the blood in her veins.
The cherry trees were dead. Leaves black as soot. Cherries withered like rancid raisins, pungent with the half-sweet stench of death.
Scout tried to control her breathing. But her heart pounded so fast it was all she could do not to pass out right then and there.
Suddenly, something grabbed her hard from behind.
“Noooooooo!” she screamed, flinging herself free, ready to bite and hit and claw her way to safety. But then she saw who held her and almost fainted with relief.
“Why did you run off?” her brother Slugger demanded, shaking his head.
Flint was at his side, equally perturbed. “That was really stupid, you know!”
“Boys,” she cried. “We have to get out of here now!”
“What are you talking about?” Slugger said.
“There’s no time—”
“What is that?” Flint said, pointing up the hill.
They turned just in time to see a ten-foot wall of black vines and thorns moving down the mountain like an unstoppable mudslide.
“What the heck?” Slugger bellowed.
“Run!” Flint said, grabbing Scout’s hand and yanking her behind him as he fled.
All three children ran for their lives, the sound of cherry trees snapping like giant bones behind them. Before they knew it, they were at the edge of the quarry, on the very spot they’d stood before.
But this time, there was no way back.
They spun around and saw the vines and thorns had grown to twice their original height, stalks dripping with black ooze, thorns like teeth chewing through the forest.
“What are they?” Scout screamed.
“I don’t know!” Slugger screamed back.
“They’re getting closer!” Flint cried.
Thirty yards’ distance turned to twenty…to fifteen…to ten…
“What do we do?” Flint cried.
“I gotta think!” Slugger answered.
“I’m scared!” Scout dug her fingers into Flint’s arm.
He winced but did not pull his arm away.
The children stepped farther and farther back, retreating almost to the edge of the drop-off.
The quarry gaped behind them like an open mouth.
“Slugger!” Flint’s voice rose in panic as the wall of thorns was almost upon them.
Three separate vines suddenly emerged from the wall, slithering along the ground, back and forth like probing tentacles, closer and closer to the children.
“Watch out!” Slugger warned, grabbing a fallen limb at his feet. He lifted it high and swung it down with all his might upon the closest creeping shoot. The dead wood shattered in a dozen pieces but did its job well as the vine retracted, a gush of black tar spurting from a jagged gash. The other two vines hesitated, as if aware of a new danger.
Right then Flint looked back and saw a lip of stone jutting out at an angle from the cliff—a possible escape route rimmed by a network of exposed tree roots.
He pointed. “Look! We can climb down that ledge a ways and hold onto the roots.”
The others looked back.
“No way am I doing that,” Scout said. “I’m afraid of heights.”
“We don’t have a choice!” Flint shot back.
“Come on.” Slugger gripped his sister’s arm. “Just hold on to those roots like he said. I’m sure they’re solid.”
“How do you know?” she said, eyes wide. She dug her feet into the gravelly dirt.
“They’re still coming!” Flint shouted.
With Slugger in the lead and Flint bringing up the rear so Scout was protected between them, the children stepped onto the rocky ledge and inched their way down along the narrow, angled stone shelf. The heels of their shoes hung over open air with two hundred feet of free fall beneath. Clutching the roots for dear life, they moved with bated breath, pressing their toes as hard as they could against stone. Before they knew it, they were already twenty feet down and feeling safer.
“They’re coming again!” Flint bellowed as new vines shot out from over the drop-off. They seemed to be starting a downward search, following the children’s footsteps and smelling their scent.
“Go faster!” Flint ordered, pushing against his sister and almost slipping on loose rock.
“I’m trying!” Scout cried.
When Flint looked back again, the wall of vines had come so close to the drop-off they now appeared as a horrid continuation of the rock itself, rising up a dozen feet in undulating black. Countless new tendrils appeared from the mass, creeping down the side of the bluff like a nightmarish waterfall. The closest vine was now a mere five feet away.
“We’re not going to make it,” Flint said, his voice laced with dread.
“Just keep moving!” Slugger screamed.
Scout clutched the back of Slugger’s shirt, whimpering and crying and shivering all at once.
When the closest vine drew within inches of Flint’s left foot, he kicked it hard, smashing it with a splat. The bottom of his shoe came away slippery with odorous slime, and the vine seemed defeated. It pulled back its broken form, injured and dripping along the rock, but then it gathered itself, coiling like a snake ready to strike.
“Oh no,” Flint said.
The vine shot forward, aiming right for the boy’s ankle, thorns bristling like a monstrous cactus.
But a millisecond before the vine struck, lightning flashed above them. Jagged blue light knifed down from the sky and struck the wall of vines in an explosion of fire and roasted death. The vine went rigid, then vaporized in a puff of noxious smoke. The boom of thunder was instant and deafening, echoing off the quarry walls like a megaphone. All three children went momentarily deaf.
But at least the attacking vines had been stopped, they thought, as chunks of singed vegetation fell all around them like snowflakes of ash swirling in a blizzard.
Slugger tried to speak, though none of them could hear over the ringing in their ears. Finally, through a series of hand motions and signals, he made his message clear.
“We can’t go back,” he signed, pointing to the ledge above. The others looked and understood why.
The force of the lightning had cracked the rock in half, rendering the path behind them little more than a sheer, blackened face. No roots to grip. No fissures to shimmy along. It was beyond their skill to climb, and they knew it.
But all was not lost.
Flint’s face brightened as he motioned to the path up ahead, where it widened and continued along the edge of the quarry like an enormous spiral staircase angling down toward the water.
Slugger signaled without hesitation. “Let’s go.”
They started forward, gingerly at first as they grew accustomed to movement without handholds, then steadily faster, all but trotting down the incline. The stone path was three feet wide, cut into the cliffside with surprising precision. It was man-made, by the look of it. Likely made by the miners in their fruitless search for marble back in the day.
Within minutes, they were fifty feet above the waterline.
From their vantage down below, the wall of thorns still smoldered up above, split down the middle as if hewn in two by a giant’s blade.
“What do we do when we get to the bottom?” Scout asked, well aware of the hairy prospect of swimming those inky depths. They’d all been wondering the same thing.
“We’ll figure it out when we get there,” Slugger said tersely.
No sooner had these words left his mouth than the cliff face in front of them exploded in a spray of gravel and dust. They all three fell back, shielding their eyes as the thickest vine they’d seen slithered out from the rock in a blur of impossible speed. A second explosion erupted behind them, and a twin vine blocked their retreat.
The children huddled together in a gasping heap, wide-eyed and trembling.
There was no escape.
Closer and closer the vines came, fresh thorns growing by the second, as if preparing for their prey.
“I want Daddy,” Scout whimpered.
Her brothers felt the same. But they could only shut their eyes tight and hope for a miracle.
And that’s when lightning struck again.
But this time it didn’t strike the vines. The blinding blue bolt cut straight into the ledge beneath them, shattering rock to pebbles in the blink of an eye. All was fire and dust and terror.
Slugger fell first, then Scout. Neither of them had time to scream.
Flint clung to the rock face just long enough to see his siblings plummeting through the air below, arms and legs flailing. Time slowed to a crawl.
They met the water in terrific splashes, one after the other.
Breathless, Flint searched desperately for any sign of them when the water stilled to ripples.
But they had sunk like stones.
Flint screamed so loud and hard, his throat seemed to break. He kept screaming until his fingers lost their strength and he began to slip, then slide, then fall down and down and down toward the dark waters below.
CHAPTER
FIVE
Right before Flint hit the water, he wondered how long it would take to die. He assumed he’d sink as fast as the others but could only hope his drowning would come quickly. His feet met the water first, pointed toes slicing clean into the depths, then the water’s surface slammed into his waving arms, stinging like a firebrand from pits to elbows. The next instant, he was swallowed in a flurry of churning bubbles.
The water was cold as steel, stabbing every inch of his skin like tiny blades.
He squinted his eyes as tight as he could, praying for the end to come swiftly. But when the tumult faded and the bubbles cleared, he found himself floating peacefully underwater. He opened his eyes. The surface was ten feet above him, an undulating silver sheet, greenish shafts of light angling down like luminous sabers. All was stillness and silence.
Was this drowning?
He noticed a growing pain radiating from his chest as his lungs declared their hunger for oxygen. He realized he hadn’t taken an adequate breath before the plunge. In a sudden panic he swung his arms and kicked his legs erratically, desperate to rise to the surface—but with no proper swimming lessons in his past to guide him, his efforts were ineffective.
He screamed. Terror-filled bubbles streamed from his gaping mouth. As the final vestige of air left his lungs, he began to sink. In seconds he was dropping like an anchor into the darkened depths below. His ears ached and popped as water pressure worked its merciless magic, squeezing his brain as if it were lodged in a closing vice. He gulped for nonexistent air, eyes growing wider and wider the deeper and deeper he fell.
The pain was an unbearable fire in his chest.
And then, inevitably, he began to grow faint, stars swirling about his head.
This was it, he thought. This was drowning.
In a terrible spasm, his lungs surrendered to the depths. Water poured down his windpipe in an icy gush and filled his lungs like a sponge. He squinted his eyes still tighter, bracing for the worst.
He thought of his dad and felt a pang of pity. After losing his wife, now he was losing his kids to the very thing he’d warned them against. Flint wished he could have told him how much he loved him. How thankful he was to have such a great father who stepped up to raise his kids alone.
Wait a second, Flint thought. Am I dead yet?
Slowly, he opened one eye, then the other.
He was still underwater. He was still sinking.
But somehow, he was alive.
With a reflexive breath, he felt the strangest thing he had ever experienced. A cold wetness in his chest pressed up against his ribcage like he’d swallowed a gallon of punch. But it didn’t hurt. When he breathed out, warm water poured from his mouth and nose.
What. In. The. World?
He must be dead. Or dreaming. Because it sure seemed like he was breathing water.
He inhaled again. Deeper this time. And it felt even weirder, the coolness dipping down into his belly, tingling as if he was riding a roller coaster.
Dying wasn’t what he expected.
Something splashed into the water above. He looked up and could see movement near the surface.
Vines.
One, then two, then three, then a dozen tendrils shot into the water. Some crept along the submerged rocky face, and some spiraled down like giant leeches prowling for prey.
Flint blinked in confusion. Whether he was dead or not, the vines were still coming. He had no time to marvel over his mortality. Only his escape mattered, though such a thing felt impossible. He knew he couldn’t go up without being snagged. And there was nothing but blackness below.
As he considered what to do, he sank and sank and sank.
Then something not far below him caught his eye. It was faint at first. Likely just imagined, he thought. But then it appeared again and remained. This time, undeniable.
A light.
A blinking light.
Red as a glowing apple.
Flint stared down, mesmerized, as the scene unfolded beneath him. Once he got close enough, he realized the light came from the floor of the lake, its crimson hue illuminating the silted surface. Flint couldn’t see much more until his feet thudded gently on the ground, puffs of mud rising in a watery cloud.
He was ten feet from the light now.
And what he saw baffled his senses.
It wasn’t just a light. It was a neon sign mounted on the side of a solid square structure rising from the lake bottom itself. The sign blinked two words in undeniable simplicity: Enter Here.
Before he could question what he was seeing, an opening appeared on the cube. Two panels slid apart like an elevator. He hovered there in the water, gently bobbing, and wondered what was stranger: breathing water or finding a sign and a door at the bottom of an abandoned quarry.
Surely it was all an elaborate hallucination, the last visions of a drowning brain before it winked out altogether.
Flint heard a gurgling rush above him and looked up. The web of vines still descended in swift pursuit. In mere moments, they would be upon him.
The sign continued to blink its command.
Dead or not, Flint decided to comply.
Three quick thrusts of his feet over the slimy ground brought him to the opening. It seemed an entirely foolish endeavor to proceed, but with no alternative save being devoured by the vines, he entered the doorway.
The panels slid shut behind him.
Amid total darkness he heard a series of faint clicks, as if a machine was coming to life. The next moment, two things happened at once: A series of lights flickered on all around him, and bubbles rushed in from all sides, jetting through unseen nozzles. The waterline began to drop. Within seconds, Flint found himself dripping in open air as the last of the water disappeared through metal grates at his feet. He bent over reflexively and lurched all liquid from his lungs, his whole body going rigid as he gasped for air. Light-headed, he slowly stood straight again and breathed deep through his open mouth.
Now what? he thought, still assuming all was a mental fabrication.
As if by way of answer, a digital voice crackled through a set of speakers in the walls.
“Emergency descent initiated. Please hold on to the handrails.”
Flint tilted his head in confusion.
“You will find the handrails mounted conveniently on all sides of the escape unit. Please take hold of one now.”
Flint glanced down at the metal bars bolted to the walls, his mind still sluggish.
“Descent commencing in five…four…three…two…one…”
He had barely grabbed the closest metal bar before the floor seemed to drop out from under him. Losing his balance, he fell to his knees with a clang. The room accelerated downward. With gritted teeth, he pulled himself to his feet again and held on tight.
“Please enjoy this soothing musical selection.”
Gentle jazz poured into the elevator.
Flint listened for a moment, then looked about for any kind of control panel. He hated the thought of being carried along helplessly to an unknown destination.
“Sensors indicate an elevated heart rate. Breathe in the calming fragrance of lavender.”
A hiss of air preceded a burst of fragrance so strong it was like inhaling a direct spray of perfume. Flint choked and covered his mouth.
The elevator jolted to a stop with a metallic clank.
The music clicked off and the doors slid open, revealing a narrow passageway rimmed with floor lights.
“Please proceed along the escape route. You have two minutes to comply.”
“Where am I going?” he shouted to the air.
“You have one minute, fifty-seven seconds to comply.”
“Oh, come on!” Flint barked.
A line of bright red arrows blinked on and off along the floor of the corridor, leading to yet another doorway fifty feet up ahead.
He took a timid step forward. Then two. When he cleared the elevator doors, they slid shut with a loud hydraulic hiss.
No going back now.
“You have one minute, thirty seconds to comply.”
He really wished that stupid voice would shut up. Nevertheless, he quickened his pace, almost running down the passageway, sodden tennis shoes squishing with every step.
Before he even reached the next doorway it retracted, revealing another room beyond. Flint paused, carefully peering inside to make sure he wasn’t stepping into some kind of trap. This room was circular, with a single column at its center spanning from floor to ceiling. The walls were lined with various panels and transparent compartments. Some were stacked with opaque containers of different shapes and sizes, others with what looked like military uniforms.
