Apocalypse Unseen. James Axler
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had slipped down her sweat-slicked forearm, however, and it was now cinched painfully around her wrist. Mariah felt as though her hand was being wrenched off.
“Grant?” Kane pressed.
“Just grab her, Kane,” Grant told him. “Don’t worry about me.”
With Brigid providing counterbalance, Kane leaned in and reached his other arm around Mariah’s shoulders, still clinging to her left arm with his right hand. He pulled her to him in what seemed almost a consoling hug, drawing her face toward his left shoulder and chest. Mariah flailed, still fighting the stream of loose shale that threatened to throw her into the pit, and then she had an arm around Kane. Grant let go, anchoring himself in place as the stream of rocks beneath him rushed onward like an avalanche, accompanied by a susurration of noise as they disappeared into the chasm. In a moment he had stopped moving, though the rocks continued to drop.
“No one move,” Kane instructed. “Everyone just stay still, let the rocks settle.”
Brigid clutched Kane around his waist while Mariah clung on to him like a drowning woman clinging to debris from a shipwreck.
“You’re okay,” Kane told her, gently. “You’re not going to fall.”
Around them, the rocks settled finally as the last few fell into the darkness. The ground, such as it was, felt stable again.
Brigid let go of Kane and he let go of Mariah, while Grant pushed himself cautiously back to a standing position beside them.
“Now, let’s just proceed with caution, okay?” Kane said. “No sudden moves.”
Following his own advice, Kane took wary steps up the slope, testing the ground with his toe before he proceeded, guiding the group in a path that took them a little farther away from the dangerous chasm they were tracking.
The slope continued to rise, taking the group forty or fifty feet above the tallest part of the distant fort where they had materialized. Throughout the climb, they saw no one else, though the sounds of gunfire continued to echo from the distance where two armies—one made up of blind men—fought their lunatic war.
The Cerberus group reached the summit of the gentle slope unexpectedly. Unexpected, that is, because they had not foreseen that there would be an almost sheer drop on the other side. From above, it looked like a sinkhole, a perfectly circular maw in the earth, its sides so steep that they were almost vertical. A few scaffolds were dotted here and there with ladders leading down into the hole itself. There were figures wandering among the scaffolding, and they could see two simple, boxy buildings at different levels where the people here might take shelter. The nearest ladder down was sixty feet away, a quarter turn around the circular hole.
“What the hell?” Grant muttered, gazing over the edge.
Kane looked at his partners, his eyebrows raised. “Watch that first step, huh?” he said.
“It’s a mine,” Mariah stated, looking at the formations all around them. They now saw that the slope of rock that they had climbed was waste that had been removed from the ground to create the mine shaft. The shaft itself was a perfectly vertical drop into the ground.
“Not natural, then?” Kane checked.
“No, not natural.”
Brigid turned to Mariah, quizzical. “Could this be the cause of the quake?”
Mariah shrugged. “Possibly,” she admitted. “I guess it depends on what they’re using to bore into the earth.”
Kane eyed the figures on the scaffold, trying to detect a pattern that might indicate whether they were sentries. “Guess we’re going to have to take a look-see at what’s inside,” Kane told the others, reloading his Sin Eater.
“I think I miss my workstation,” Mariah muttered as she followed the Cerberus field team around the lip of the mine.
The blind soldier’s words buzzed around Kane’s thoughts as he and Grant led the way toward the mine, creeping down the only ladder that emerged on the lip of the shaft, moving swiftly, hand over hand. Kane had come up with the plan hurriedly and on the fly—standard operating procedure for Cerberus field missions, it seemed. As the most combat savvy, he and Grant would clear the path of any resistance—not that there would necessarily be any; it was just better in Kane’s opinion to expect the worst than to be caught with your pants down. Kane’s opinion of people in general was low, since he had seen too much both as a Magistrate and as a freedom fighter.
They reached the first level swiftly. The level was made of planks lined up beside one another like floorboards—a scaffold structure held them roughly horizontal, actually at a twelve-degree slope heading down toward the mine. There was no one on this level, and a dozen strides took Kane and Grant to the next ladder, running down the sheer surface of bored rock.
Kane led the way once more, hurrying down the ladder to the level below, those eerie words of the soldier still playing on his mind.
I can see. I see the face of god before everything, lighting every step and every move, showing me the path of salvation.
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