It was darkness that weighed a million tons, darkness that choked the life out of him, that crashed down on him and made his skin crawl. It was the darkness of deep space. Inner space.
For a moment he couldn’t breathe.
He managed to sit up. His legs screamed and ached from the interminable descent. His heart raced. He instinctively raised his hands and felt the air, which was so thin he had to labor to get a breath. His throat burned. His nostrils stung from the methane and ancient dust fog. He tried to stand, but his balance had gone haywire.
Panic took hold of him then, as he frantically felt the cinder-strewn ground around him for the flashlight. He clenched his teeth and spots of light dotted his blind eye. He started breathing so rapidly and heavily he was nearly hyperventilating. Calm down, he commanded himself, calm the hell down, or you’ll die a purposeless, lonely death down here without even engaging the enemy!
He forced himself to rise to a kneeling position, forced himself to take deep steadying breaths. His heart rate began to settle.
Tiny radiant artifacts swam like luminous stars across his narrow field of vision as he got very still, trying to organize his thoughts. He needed to get his bearings and strategize. He needed to adjust to the bottom-of-the-ocean darkness, the tomblike atmosphere, the disorienting claustrophobia. Most of all, he needed to find the opening that led into that first level.
In his mind he retraced his movements, trying to extrapolate the position of the flashlight.
At last he gave up and reached in his coat pocket and felt around for the smaller halogen headlamp. He wasn’t sure about the night-vision goggles—they required some level of ambient light in order to function—but he quickly found the halogen light and untangled it from a jumble of supplies in his side pocket. Working blindly in the dark, working solely on feel, he strapped the light around his head, felt for the switch, and flipped it on.
The slender beam leapt across a fifty-square-foot alcove of hard-packed earth. A wheelbarrow lay overturned to the right, slathered in cobwebs.
Grove managed to stand on weak legs. He slowly turned toward a doorway.
The narrow silver beam of light illuminated the top corner of an arched entrance ten feet away. Petrified wooden timbers framed the low-ceilinged passageway.
Grove looked up. His light brushed a message hastily scrawled in blood across the lintel. A garbled mess of words yammered at him, the same dead language found at the previous crime scenes. Grove sniffed in the silence.
He turned, and the beam of his headlamp landed on a human face.
The face smiled.
Its teeth were bloodstained.
“Jesus!” Grove jerked back as though slapped, the halogen light slipping off his head.
In a flash of silver light John Q Public pounced out of the shadows, a sharp object in his hand, going for Grove’s throat.