Empire Lost полностью

Like an overextended worm, Zahra inched and flopped to the side, slowly completing the climb in the oddest way possible. When she was safely across the gap, Zahra breathed easy and nearly passed out. There, she laid on her stomach too exhausted to move. With no one following her, Zahra took her time. She wasn’t going to move until she was confident that she could without falling over.

Note to self, she thought, have Tommy figure something else out. Her grappling hook had almost gotten her killed. She needed something less techy and more reliable. Something with less brittle, moving parts that could still be used in the same manner.

Minutes passed before she moved a muscle. When she did, it was her neck. She lifted her head and looked away from the gap, spitting out her light as she did. It rolled for a few feet before coming to a stop against the far wall. Its beam illuminated a portion of the next archway’s base. As soon as it did, Zahra climbed to her feet, taking care of her left arm. But she barely noticed the ache in her badly damaged limb. Instead, her attention was focused on what lay inside the passage.

Bodies. Dozens and dozens of bodies.

Before heading off, Zahra adjusted the tourniquet on her arm, but it wasn’t enough. With great care, she once again slid out of what was left of her black thermal. Zahra unsheathed her knife and sliced through the fabric, separating the right sleeve from the rest of the garment, and dropping the remains to the floor. As she had done before, Zahra tied the sleeve around her arm, this time, focusing on the gunshot wound itself. She needed to stem the flow of blood before she became lightheaded. Even though she had successfully evaded Joe and his men, Zahra was still in a lot of danger.

She picked up her felled flashlight and pointed in down the dark passageway. Looking up, she saw something that filled her with dread. This archway wasn’t adorned with the architect’s ancient dialect. Starting on the floor, she traced her light from left to right, following the arch until her beam met stone, once more.

Long ago, human skulls had been embedded into the rock, and each of their mouths were wide open, frozen mid-scream. Zahra had a feeling that she was about to see firsthand the aftermath of the Amazonian people’s brutal practices of human sacrifice.

Zahra swallowed down her fear and stepped through the damned archway, groping her holstered pistol as she moved. But modern-day weapons would do next to nothing down here. Generally, bullets did very little against the ghosts of the past.

Joe and his men watched Zahra Kane disappear beneath the surface of the plunge pool. Everyone, except for Joe, aimed their weapons at the water. They silently waited for the ballsy woman to reemerge. But after sixty seconds of nothing, Joe was beginning to have his doubts. After three minutes, it was plain to see that she had either drowned or had somehow survived the subterranean torrent. If that were the case, then she must have also found her way into the underworld.

No one present had ever stepped foot in that cursed place. Only Joe’s father had ever seen it, and since then, the man had refused to say exactly what he had seen.

All Joe knew was that its contents could cause the most hardened man to lose his mind and curl into a ball and pray for mercy. It wasn’t until a famous English explorer had stumbled upon it — something he had dubbed the Lost City of Z — that anyone alive knew that the secretive Amazonia hellscape actually existed. Until then, it had only been a legend.

Joe shuddered. And now, we must enter its gates and reacquire our prize. He turned to the north and visualized the hidden hilltop entrance. The village that it had once overlooked — every single piece of it — had been painstakingly removed over time, until there was only jungle remaining. Joe’s ancestors had successfully wiped Z’s entrance off the face of the planet.

They could have just as easily left Zahra to die here, but Joe still needed her. There were people over the border in Venezuela that wanted his head on a plate unless he could pay back his debt, plus interest. This was the mercenary’s last chance at redemption.

“Come!” he shouted. “Death awaits.”

Zahra couldn’t make heads or tails about what she was seeing. The bodies — and there were many — were quite old. All of them were dressed similarly, adorned head to toe in furs and leathery skins. Some of the corpses wore necklaces laced with animal teeth. She stopped and showed her light back the way she had come. Each person was positioned with their head pointed away from Zahra’s objective.

“You were running away, weren’t you?” she deduced, pointing her beam forward again. It landed on an opening up ahead. “But from what?”