The Nemesis Program

Chapter Twenty

Whoever had set fire to the chapel, it wasn’t kids messing around with matches. Ben had had enough experience of high-powered incendiary devices in his lifetime to know how fast a building could be reduced to a bone-melting inferno. If he and Roberta didn’t succumb to smoke inhalation first, they’d soon cook in the heat. It was already getting uncomfortable standing close to the door. The smoke was pouring in more and more through the gaps. Every moment counted.

‘What’s happening?’ Roberta asked as he leaped down the steps and started hunting around inside the tomb. She was still clutching the Tesla device.

‘What’s happening is, the whole bloody place is on fire,’ he replied. He’d found what he was looking for. Grabbing the wrecking bar off the floor, he paused to reach back inside the coffin and rip a long piece of burial shroud from the skeleton inside. Loose ribs clattered to the floor as he jerked the cloth away. ‘Keep this over your nose and mouth,’ he told Roberta, shoving it at her.

‘This was wrapped around a goddamn corpse.’

‘Do it now!’ he yelled. He dashed back to the door. Stinging tears filled his eyes as he stabbed the chisel end of the bar into the door seam and started trying to lever it open. He knew the risk of causing a backdraft that would suck fire into the tomb and turn it instantly into a superheated oven. At least it would be over quickly for them then.

He forced the bar in deeper and levered with all his strength. A piece of stonework broke away. He kept on working furiously, hardly able to keep his eyes open, racked with coughing from the smoke. Another piece of masonry broke away from the door arch. The first flames were beginning to lick hungrily around the edges of the door. The situation was worsening more rapidly than he could deal with.

He knew now that this was futile.

‘Come away from the door, Ben!’ Roberta screamed. He hesitated for a second, then stumbled dizzily back down the steps and beat his way through the smoke to where Roberta was crouching in the fiery glow at the far side of the tomb with the piece of burial shroud clamped over her face. She was no longer holding the device.

He wanted to smash the tomb walls down, tear them apart stone by stone with the steel bar in his hands. But they were impossibly thick, and buried under ten feet of earth. The door had been their only way out.

There was no way out. Not any more. They were going to burn.

Ben dropped to his knees next to Roberta and wrapped his arms tightly around her, intent on shielding her from the flames with his body when the moment came, probably just minutes away. By then, the smoke would most likely have got to them. He could feel her ribs convulsing as she fought to breathe.

He buried his face in her hair. It won’t be long now, he wanted to say.

His own life didn’t matter to him that much. He’d come very close to losing it many times before now — it had always just been a question of how the end would come about, and how soon. You got used to living with the idea. But it wasn’t right that Roberta should die like this, just because she’d wanted to find out what happened to her friend. Just because she was good, and loyal, and caring. She didn’t deserve this.

But even as he prepared himself for the worst, Ben was becoming conscious of something happening. Something strange. At first he thought it was his own pounding heartbeat filling his senses. But no; it was coming from underneath him, as if from deep beneath the flagstones: a kind of pulsing, quivering sensation that doubled in intensity with each passing second. A deep rumble, seeming to emanate from everywhere at once, flooded his ears.

Roberta could feel it too. She pulled away from his embrace, looked up at him through streaming eyes and seemed to be trying to say something, but her spluttering words were drowned out by the steadily rising sound. She motioned weakly into the shadows of the tomb.

Ben squinted through the smoke to where she was pointing, and thought he glimpsed the blink of tiny lights. Was it some trick of the retina, caused by oxygen starvation of the brain? No; he saw it again.

‘What’s—?’ he croaked inaudibly, but the question died on his lips. The whole tomb now seemed to be shaking violently. The thrumming noise seemed to penetrate everywhere and everything.

It’s an earthquake, said a voice in Ben’s mind. But it was wrong, it was impossible. They didn’t have earthquakes in northern France. Not like this.

With an ear-splitting crack, a whole section of the interior wall suddenly came crashing down in a landslide of crumbling masonry. Tentacles of flame quickly came snaking in through the jagged hole, hunting for something to consume.

Roberta struggled to her feet, bent double with coughing, and grasped Ben’s hands. Confused and disorientated, he sensed that she was trying to pull him towards the deep, dark recess where they’d opened the coffin. Over the roaring of the fire and the deafening rumble he heard her say something about ‘take cover’.

The flames were past the tomb door and rolling greedily in through the gaping cavity in the wall. But the most frightening thing was the all-encompassing vibration that rocked the floor under their feet and made it hard to stay upright. Roberta let go of Ben’s hands and frantically gripped the edge of Germain De Bourg’s coffin, struggling with all her strength to drag it out of the recess.

Seeing what she was trying to do, Ben grasped the rough stone, braced his feet against the wall and pulled with all his remaining reserves of energy, until his back felt about to break.

The coffin lurched outwards with a grinding scrape of stone on stone. A few inches, then a few inches more, until its weight overbalanced it and it toppled out of the recess and crashed out onto the flagstones, splitting apart and spilling the skeletal remains of its occupant in pieces across the floor.

Roberta clambered over the shattered coffin and into the hole, reached a clawed hand out to him to follow her. He half-caught her choking scream of ‘Get in!’ just as another great rippling crack shuddered through the tomb and a shower of rock and stone and dust came thundering down all over the floor just yards from where he was trying to stay on his feet.

Another wave of the inferno from the blazing chapel above came spreading and licking down through the hole. Ben felt its scorching breath sear his back as he threw himself into the recess with Roberta. The two of them wedged themselves in as deeply as they could against the hard stone.

Now all they could do was lie huddled there and wait for whatever was going to happen to them.