Arena 3 by Logan Jacobs

Author:Logan Jacobs [Jacobs, Logan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-04-02T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

“Booby traps, I knew it!” I cursed in the all-consuming black of the pyramid and spun around to feel the smooth cool surface of the rock that now stood where the open entrance had been just a moment before. I held up my SVA and turned up the intensity of the blade-glow. The blue-white light burned away about a three-foot sphere of the darkness all around me. Then I banged on the solid rock slab with my fist but it barely made a sound.

“Aurora!” I screamed and then put my ear against the granite. I heard absolutely nothing. Not even a muffled reply. I guessed the huge piece of stone had to be at least a foot thick and so expertly carved that I couldn’t even make out a seam where it fit in the doorway. It was as if it had always been there. I tried to engage my comms, but the granite interfered with the signal and all I got back was static. Then I turned and gazed back down the hallway. “Into the great unknown I go first, Indy.”

Without another choice, I began to walk into the bowels of the ancient structure. The floor of the hallway began to slope downward, and I felt a noticeable temperature shift. The jungle outside had been humid, hot and stifling and, while still humid as fuck, the interior of the pyramid got chilly real fast. Soon the sweat that had clung to my body outside like a salty, damp sweater, had turned to a cold, salty, damp sweater, and the sides of the hallway grew dark with streaks of condensation the deeper I got.

It was slow going as I was now completely paranoid about other booby traps. The last thing I needed was some giant circular saw from the demented mind of a strange pyramid building ancient alien race swinging down from the roof to cut me in half.

While I held the SVA-torch in my right hand slightly out in front of my face to burn away as much of the claustrophobic black as it could, my left hand trailed behind me as I let it play across the cool stone wall of the hallway. My fingers traced across the fine and incredibly elaborate carvings in the solid stone. After a little while, it was almost like I could read what was under my fingers as if it were some kind of alien braille. The idea was absolutely ludicrous, but that didn’t stop a strange image from forming in my head as I walked deeper and deeper into the dark unknown.

My mind conjured an ancient people whose ancestors had pulled themselves from the mud and muck of the prehistoric forest. They were humanoid in nature, short, stout beings with dark brown-red skin, like the lost tribes of the Amazon. Centuries passed and they evolved, learned how to read the trees, and formed symbiotic relationships with creatures of the jungle. Tribes warred. Famine and disease nearly drove them to extinction.

But they were tough sons of bitches and they survived.

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