She panicked and retched as her head broke the surface. The combination of her brain and body needing air and the water exiting her chest cavity was nearly enough to cause her to black out. Luckily for Zahra, the fluid cleared just before it happened. With each inhalation, her vision cleared. Not that she could tell. An inky darkness had swallowed the world around her.
Zahra was in a cave, though she couldn’t tell its breadth.
She continued to tread water until she felt somewhat back to normal. Her arm was killing her, but her thoughts were racing. The split focus kept the pain from vaulting to the forefront of her mind. Also, Zahra’s adrenaline spiked, acting as a natural painkiller. The cooler water helped soothe the wound too.
With her lungs satisfied and her breathing under control, Zahra reached down to her gun belt and fished for her SureFire G2X LED flashlight. It was positioned on her hip at the four o’clock position in a custom Kydex holster. Pulling it free, Zahra cringed from the blow she had taken to her back and almost dropped the light. If she had, she would have been royally screwed. Happily, she had brought along her palm-sized light, and it was easy to readjust her grip. Paddling with her right arm and legs, Zahra carefully lifted her injured left arm, clicked on the light, and played the intense 600-lumen beam around the space. The brilliance stung her eyes, and she was quickly forced to click the switch on the tail cap again, cutting down the output significantly.
Zahra blinked away the spots and shook her head.
There wasn’t much to see in the immediate vicinity. The cavern had been naturally formed thousands of years ago. Hellish stalactites hung from the domed ceiling — some of them nearly reaching the water’s surface. This hollow was ancient based on the formation’s size. It typically took one thousand years for a stalactite to grow ten centimeters.
Zahra slowly paddled in a circle, stopping 180 degrees later. The pool of water met with a rocky shoreline off in the distance of her powerful light. Zahra moved toward it, awkwardly kicking like a three-legged dog. The only auditory sounds in the cavern were the splashing of swimming and the huffs of her heavy breaths. Reaching the shoreline, Zahra pulled herself and rolled onto her back. Before she went any further, she took stock of her arm.
She drew her SOG knife and cut away her left shirt sleeve at the shoulder. The gunshot wound wasn’t all that bad, but it still caused her great pain. Using her right hand and teeth, Zahra wrapped the cut sleeve high on her upper arm, tying it off tightly. She growled through her clenched jaw, concentrating on controlling her breathing. Standing, Zahra kept her injured arm tucked against her stomach for the time being. She’d need to limit its use until she received proper medical attention.
“Fat chance of that happening,” she snorted, sighing. Zahra would, undoubtedly, be forced to use the appendage shortly.
There was only one way out of the hollow — forward. Zahra pointed her light toward a large, perfectly cut archway. Her eyes opened wide. It was an engineered corridor and not naturally formed like the stalactites. Maybe it had been natural at one point, but it had been altered into something magnificent. The entire archway was decorated with an ancient Amazonian script. It represented a language that Zahra had never seen before.
She thought back to why Percy Fawcett had last come to the region. He had been in search of a legendary ancient Amazonian civilization.
“The Lost City of Z,” Zahra mumbled. Percy Fawcett believed the old city to be somewhere deep within the Mato Grosso state of Brazil and that the indigenous peoples there had constructed an elaborate, architecturally modern city complex.
She craned her neck, following the semi-circular path of the archway with the beam of her flashlight, hoping she’d at least recognize something — anything. But it was all an enigma to her.
Zahra walked through the archway, taking each step with care. This was uncharted, possibly treacherous, territory. Only the people that built this place would know what to expect. Fifty yards later, Zahra came to an impasse. The twenty-foot gap in the rock used to contain a rope bridge, but it had long ago rotted away. Only the support posts still existed. Each pair had been fitted into the stone ground on either side of the expanse.
“And now I have to use my arm…”
Zahra sighed and unbuckled her grappling hook. Eyeing one of the two posts, she flicked her wrist to open the blades, but it didn’t open all the way. Zahra held up the device and inspected it. One of the blade arms was slightly bent. She recalled bouncing off the walls of the underwater tube and deduced that it had been damaged then.
“
