Extant by Michael McBride

Author:Michael McBride
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2021-04-26T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

RANA JUMPED UP ONTO THE SHRINE and ran through the false doorway. The others started pushing against the stone slab before she was even all the way inside. She positioned herself between Mailyn and Dr. Baumann and put her shoulder into the primitive door. It screeched across the rock floor and closed with a resounding thud.

She pressed her cheek against it and listened, felt for vibrations to betray the presence of whatever was on the other side.

“What’s out there?” Baumann asked.

Rana shushed him. Between his talking and Mailyn’s whimpering, she couldn’t hear a blasted thing.

“It just grabbed him,” Mailyn sobbed. “There was nothing I could do.”

Rana rounded on her.

“You saw it?”

“No. Not clearly anyway. Just its shape. It had a long neck. Like a snake. Only thicker.”

Rana pressed her back to the stone and looked around the inner sanctum. The majority of the spider webs had been cleared, revealing the bloodstained walls. The hieroglyphics beneath the dried spatters depicted seemingly lifelike renderings of Sekhmet, as if she had been a real person wearing the head of a lion like a mask, before whom even Osiris knelt in supplication. Every depiction of the goddess showed her holding two lashes in one hand and a flail in the other. Tethered to each lash was a serpopard, its reptilian neck held low and parallel to the ground, its bristled shoulders hunched, and its long, paddle-like tail raised to form a straight line with its spine.

Ellie and Penny watched the three of them from the opposite side of the room, where a pair of lighting arrays had been erected in either corner. The two women appeared oblivious to the threat in the sanctuary. They’d set up their laptops on folding chairs, the screens displaying the 3D laser scans from various perspectives. The scanner itself was positioned in the mouth of—

“The tunnel!” Rana shouted. It was the only way the saprophagous insects could have gotten into the temple, and if they could get in, then she had no doubt that whatever had slaughtered the others sure as hell could, too. She ran around the side of the pit. “Help me seal it!”

“What are you talking about?” Penny said. “We haven’t even started scanning it.”

Rana knocked the laptop from the nearest chair, which she grabbed by the arms and jammed feet-first into the tunnel, knocking the scanner to the ground with a resounding crack!

“Are you out of your mind?” Ellie said. “That’s a twenty-thousand-dollar piece of equipment on loan from the—”

A thunderous crash from across the room.

Baumann stumbled away from the door, which groaned as it opened into the chamber. He quickly regained his balance and shoved against it again.

Mailyn braced her feet and drove her back into the stone, for all the good it did. The false door continued to push them away from the threshold until a narrow gap formed.

“What’s happening?” Penny screamed.

“I can’t … hold this … much … longer,” Baumann said through bared teeth.

Rana ran to the pit and grabbed the massive iron grate.

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