The Anubis Plague полностью

Ali passed by the Egyptologist to retrieve his blade and slapped him on the shoulder. Baahir cringed.

“Did I get you?” Ali asked, looking at his hand. He found blood.

“Yeah, but it’s fine — I’m fine.”

Ali wiped it off on his pants. “You need to work on your reflexes.”

“You need to work on your aim,” Baahir mumbled.

“What was it?” Zahra asked, checking on her brother.

Ali paused where his knife had come to rest. “You, my friend, should count yourself lucky.” He picked up both the blade and the creature.

“What is that?” Baahir asked, squinting in the low light. From this distance, he couldn’t identify the thing that Ali had impaled.

“Androctonus… very dangerous.”

“Andro-what-now?” Baahir asked. He didn’t recognize the name.

“Androctonus,” Rabia repeated. “They’re also known as ‘man-killers.’ They’re one of the deadliest species of scorpions on the planet.”

“Scorpions?” Baahir felt the blood drain from his face. He knew how deadly the ones in this region were. “How — how are they still here?”

Zahra answered. “Very likely that the builders of this place put a nest inside the walls. It offered enough protection for the little creatures, so they stayed. Their whole colony is here, feeding off their dead comrades, waiting for someone to come.”

“So, they could rain down on my head,” Baahir said.

Rabia nodded. “You should consider yourself fortunate. I doubt anyone besides Ali could have made that throw.”

Baahir swallowed back his fear. “What about you?”

She patted her rifle. “I prefer guns.”

Baahir faced Ali and raised a shaky hand. “Uh, thanks again.”

He gave Baahir a playful wink. “Any time.”

The others continued to look around, marveling at the artistry of the pictographs. Baahir, on the other hand, didn’t give a damn about artistry. He was still shaken up by the scorpion incident, and what it meant.

That was certainly not the only booby trap we’re going to come across.

He stood by the exit, applying pressure to his shoulder wound, and when he became too antsy, he voiced his discomfort.

“Can we go, please?” he said, eyeing the ceiling.

He was answered by soft laughter and approaching feet. Soon, the foursome was on the move again, descending another spiraling set of steps. It too wound around like a corkscrew, but instead of ending at a second circular chamber, they exited into a long narrow cavern.

“Woah,” Baahir said. The grandness of the space devoured his voice.

Zahra and Rabia stepped around Baahir, joining him on either side.

His sister craned her neck back. “Definitely, ‘woah.’”

The ceiling above the space Zahra was standing in now was made up of countless crags and stalactites. The latter had formed thousands of years ago, back when water was plentiful in northern Africa. Ground-penetrating radar confirmed that much of the Sahara had been flooded for thousands of years. There was even evidence of riverbeds beneath the sand, and she had heard a theory that Atlantis had once been in that same body of water.

Some believed that Thoth, the Egyptian god of science, mathematics, and writing, had come from a majestic empire located there.

A kingdom to the west of the lands of Egypt, Zahra thought, recalling something her mother had said.

Zahra had always thought it was interesting that most ancient civilizations talked of a great teacher coming from a kingdom in the middle of an ocean. Their technological advancements and progressions were similar, yet they had never had contact with other civilizations.

“You hear that?” Baahir asked.

Zahra had not. She had been too lost in her own head.

But she did now, and the constant white noise disturbed her.

Then, it was gone.

“It’s not water,” Ali said from the rear of the group. He had stayed back near the base of the stairs.

“Agreed,” Zahra said, inching forward.

She swept her light back and forth, but found nothing except for a long, thin landbridge. On either side of it was nothing. The ground just disappeared into the abyss. So, she focused on what she could see. The bridge.

“We need to cross.”

Baahir snorted out a laugh. “Yeah, okay…” Zahra turned and looked at him. “Oh, you’re serious?”

“There’s no other way,” Rabia added. “If Khaliq came this way, he would have crossed here too.”

“He did.”

Everyone followed Zahra’s flashlight beam, seeing what she had spotted in the dusty stone pathway. Two sets of footprints beckoned them along.

“Khaliq and… Feroz… I think,” Baahir said, sounding unsure of the second man’s name.