SHEZMOU STRODE BAREFOOT back and forth along the deep, wide trench that kept the captive vampire meat isolated and helpless.
In the pit, the deep-set mysterious guardians vibrated and sizzled like living maracas. Who or what they were I didn't dare imagine. Ric and Bez and I watched Shezmou with varying emotions.
Bez was still bursting with pride and triumph. He figured the Big Guy was back. I still didn't see exactly how that would save anybody. Curse and kill rogue Egyptian vampires, sure.
I didn't need cheerleading to feel as trapped as the folks opposite us. On second thought, Ric and I agreed that Shezmou was the merely mortal persona of a god who'd sacrificed size and strength to come to life. Such gods could be slain and sacrificed, maybe to rise again in an afterlife, but rarely can they do their worshippers and believers any good in this one.
"It's like a zoo exhibit," I murmured bitterly as I stared across the sinister abyss toward the people scenting freedom and milling about without hope, except for the tourists pushing forward to stare at our bizarre party. " Monkey Island. The Great Ape 'enclosure.' The breeding program for the Egyptian Vampire Dynasty."
"This explains the missing Karnak tourists," Ric said, his expression grim.
"Those poor tourists!" Of course, they expected us to help them. "I can see the terrified whites of their eyes from here. It must be like being abducted on Lost, or imprisoned on Dr. Moreau's island of cross-breeding human-beast experiments. Judging by their small size, the other prisoners are at least descended from the ancient Egyptians. They buy into this mythology, this pantheon of animal-headed supergods."
"You sprang loose one of the most dreaded, apparently," Ric said, eyeing Shezmou, "even if he has some old-fashioned ideas."
He shook his head and sighed.
"I never saw these prisoners clearly when I was here before, Del. I must have been sandbagged fast after getting this far. It's nuts to think you can 'free' members of an ancient race.
"I know keeping them prisoner for generations is wrong, but who am I kidding? A former FBI agent isn't Moses, and these are real living Egyptians. They don't want to go anywhere. They want to stay here. Maybe even as victims. The world is a food chain and has been for thousands of years. Who am I to say it has to stop, anywhere, anytime?"
"Hey." I shook his arm until his greasepaint camouflaged face turned my way.
No wonder Shez took us for serpents in our high-tech "skins" and black war paint. Not all bad. Serpents were wise. And stealthy. And had an unfair but useful bad rep.
"Listen, Ric. I didn't rub albino nose with Christophe to preserve your life and freedom just to have you renounce your desert Savior complex. Obsessive do-gooders like you and me are hard to come by."
"It's called simple survival, Delilah."
"Survival is never simple, Ricardo."
He leaned his forehead against mine. "You noticed."
"So now we're here in no-man's-land again. Now what?"
"We've got Quicksilver," Ric said. "I no longer underestimate that dog's mojo. We've got Bez, who must be a world-class ankle-biter if I've ever seen one, and this Shazam character. We five could take on a lot. I just don't know how we're going to transport a couple hundred vampire-abused semihumans out of here to any shelter or safety."
"Maybe we could work up a new Cirque du Soleil show around them."
He smiled palely at my joke. "Freedom means nothing if you don't have any real role to play or work to do. I can shuffle risen zombies off to 'jobs' on desert ranches from sunrise to sunset. They're really only automatons until I free them totally. And don't think the ones I raised to save us at Starlight Lodge a month back aren't weighing on my delicate conscience. I hate to see people used and abused, but it's also pretty bad to be underused."
"Boy, you've never worked very long for a major private corporation, have you? I suppose that's why you left the FBI. Come on, Ric! We can't get anybody out of here, including the Lord of the Type AB Wine Cellar, unless we figure out how to do it ourselves."
My pep talk was all too timely.
A new maraca rumba was heating up in the distance, not just in the pit below our feet. As I'd feared, rousing Sleeping Beauty, aka Blood Boy, would not go unnoticed for long in the Egyptian underworld.
THE CONSTANT SCRABBLE of creatures in the pit had played background to our presence here.
I'd pictured millions of beetles piled atop one another clawing to climb sixty feet to reach the cavern floor.
I'd been thinking of the dung beetles represented in probably millions of scarabs in these five thousand years. Dung beetles were as sacred as cats to the ancient Egyptians. Their skill in rolling balls of dung to feed their massive underground broods provided symbols of renewal and resurrection.
Scarab amulets were placed over mummy heart sites. They'd become a modern jewelry object. I could deal with them.
"Aieee!" Bez cried in horror. He shrank as close as a child to me while we viewed the massed, writhing beetles in the stinking pit below.
"Such relentless devourers," he moaned, "of skin, hair, horn, furs, feathers, and mummy wrappings. They can enter the snuggest tomb to disfigure the dead and make them unfit for eternity."
At his words I ID'ed the little buggers. So these weren't the sacred scarabs, aka dung beetles, of lore and jewelry design. These were a nastier sort. Who hadn't watched a CSI episode where a swarm of flesh-eating dermestid beetles picked skeletal remains clean in the forensics lab?
"Away, foul Apshai," Bez shouted, his voice echoing. "Even the Book of the Dead abhors your very name."
What a gruesome alliance nature and the Karnak vampires had devised! If the beetles were inadvertent guards who held the people of the caverns captive, they themselves were also prisoners of the pit, living by picking flesh from the animal and human bones that eventually fell into their innumerable midst. Maintaining a "herd" of slowly sucked-to-death vampire victims was not a neat or humane process.
Now I heard the distant click of more than the imagined billions of beetle legs and pincers behind us. Worse, although the noise echoed off the walls of the pit below, it came from the forest of pillars, from far at its rear.
And it was gathering momentum, like oncoming rolling legions of millions of glass marbles streaming through the thick-set pillars, striking stone and caroming off, spinning along the gritty floor on an incline, gathering incredible mass and speed.
Ric and I turned and froze, heroes in a B-movie horror thriller.
Bez jumped up and down, one fist filling his wide mouth as moans of warning and despair tumbled past his knuckles. We were too stunned to check out Shezmou, but spotted a silver-gray streak zooming toward us like a ground-bound meteor.
It was Quicksilver as I'd never seen him before, running with ears pinned flat back, tail straight out to avoid drag, all four paws seemingly off the ground at once, heading our way.
Behind him came the rolling thunder of an army of oncoming foes of no description we could imagine. We spotted a low muddy-brown tide scraping through the pillars as if carrying thousands of twigs in its path, coming flash-flood fast.