Chapter 190: Apocalypse, Newly Unearthed
Cairo, Egypt.
The ruins of an ancient pyramid complex.
A large convoy of vehicles bearing the Umbrella Corporation logo had taken up positions around the entire site, sealing it off from outside view completely.
From the perimeter, all that was visible was a steady flow of Umbrella personnel in work uniforms moving in and out, which had drawn clusters of local residents gathering to watch.
"Isn't that Umbrella Corporation? What are they doing all the way out here?"
A vendor running a cold drinks cart craned his neck and directed the question at the food stall operator next to him.
The food stall operator glanced up, handed a freshly plated chicken-and-rice to the customer waiting in front of him, and answered without breaking stride.
"Word is Umbrella partnered with the local government to come out here for historical preservation work."
"Though I don't know the specifics myself. What I do know is that the government signed off on it. Even the police are cooperating with their arrangements."
"Either way, it's a significant operation." He picked up a rag and wiped his hands. "Whatever they're doing in there is none of my business and I'm not about to go asking."
"All that matters to me is that the moment their people showed up, business got a lot better. Just on chicken rice alone, I'm moving an extra hundred portions a day."
The drinks vendor nodded along. "Fair enough. As long as it means I'm selling more drinks, I don't need to know what they're up to."
"Speaking of which, you want a drink? I've been thinking about your chicken rice. How about a trade?"
"No trade."
"Come on, three bottles for one plate. You're not losing on that deal."
"And your daughter likes my drinks, doesn't she..."
Outside the ruins, the two of them were still haggling over the small change of everyday life.
Inside the ruins, Eleanor's survey team was combing through the site inch by inch, searching for any trace of Apocalypse.
A single punch from an Astartes shattered a boulder wedged across the passage.
Once a gap wide enough for people to squeeze through had been cleared, he stepped aside and gestured for the rest of the team to follow.
Eleanor walked in second position, guiding a swarm of compact survey drones she was operating by hand.
"This way."
At a fork in the passage, she studied the feed coming back from the drones and pointed to the left-hand corridor.
The lead Astartes moved immediately, closing his grip around a timber beam that had jammed against a massive stone and locked it in place, leaving only a gap barely large enough for a dog to fit through. He simply lifted the stone off it.
The logistics team behind him surged forward the moment the stone came up and braced it in three quick moves.
Once the support was in place, the Astartes released his hold.
"The drone feed shows a passage ahead that leads directly to the inner chamber, and it's still intact." Eleanor addressed the lead Astartes. "We can pick up the pace."
He didn't respond beyond a nod and moved forward at Eleanor's direction.
The path ahead was, as she'd described, considerably clearer than what they'd been navigating. Even units as large as the Astartes could walk abreast in the corridor without difficulty.
The team moved into the passage.
As portable lighting was strung along the walls, the murals covering both sides came into view.
Eleanor slowed.
The colors had faded badly under centuries of weathering, every vivid hue worn down to muted grey, but the outlines remained sharp enough to read clearly.
She raised a hand and signaled the team to stop. Then she moved to the wall with her flashlight and swept the beam slowly from left to right.
At the center of the nearest mural stood a pyramid, its proportions stretched so tall it nearly touched the edge of the frame.
Above its apex, a figure floated in the air.
The figure's body had been rendered in gold pigment. Even after thousands of years, the gold caught the flashlight and threw back a faint reflection. Whoever had painted this had used actual gold.
The figure's arms were spread wide, and radiating from its body in every direction were thick, bold lines, as though light were erupting outward from within, flooding across the entire surface of the mural.
The lines were drawn heavily enough that each one cut from the top edge of the mural to the bottom, slicing the crowd of figures prostrating below into silhouettes.
Orderly. Every one of them in the same posture, the same direction.
Kneeling toward the glowing figure above the pyramid.
Eleanor's gaze moved to the base of the pyramid.
There, four riders on horseback were arranged symmetrically, two on each side. Their proportions were markedly larger than the worshippers around them, a deliberate choice by the artist, marking their elevated status.
The first was a white horse rider bearing a long bow, a crown on his head. The second rode a red horse and carried an oversized red blade. The third, on a black horse, held a set of scales. The fourth rode a pale green horse, and the ground beneath its hooves was filled with crawling things.
Anyone who had read the Book of Revelation carefully would have recognized all four immediately. The figures mapped almost exactly to the description in scripture.
These were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Eleanor studied the mural for a long moment. Then she looked away.
"Keep moving."
The lead Astartes stepped forward again, his heavy footfalls echoing in the corridor.
Eleanor followed behind him, her flashlight never leaving the walls.
The subject matter repeated itself as they walked. Apocalypse's image appeared again and again, as though whoever had commissioned these murals was determined that no future generation would ever forget what they had witnessed.
The passage was not long.
Less than fifty meters in, the lead Astartes came to a gradual stop.
A stone door stood before them.
It was visibly massive, two full storeys tall, its surface polished to a smoothness that stood in sharp contrast with the rough rock walls around it. A sun had been carved at its center, and standing within that sun was a figure in the same pose as every depiction of Apocalypse they had seen in the corridor.
The two door panels fit together without a visible gap. The flashlight beam couldn't find a way through.
Eleanor looked it over top to bottom, then glanced at the Astartes.
"Let's not force this one."
The Astartes, who had already tightened his right hand into a fist, slowly opened it and stepped aside without comment.
Two logistics crew members came forward with a hydraulic spreader, carefully working the metal arms into the seam between the panels.
At Eleanor's signal, they activated it.
The arms began to push.
A deep, grinding groan resonated through the entire length of the passage.
Loose fragments of stone showered down from above, pattering against shoulders and the backs of necks.
Under the pressure of the hydraulics, the ancient door that had been sealed for millennia opened a gap roughly two feet wide.
A thick wave of air rolled out through the gap, carrying the smell of dust and dry stone that had not moved in a very long time.
Eleanor narrowed her eyes against it, waved the dust aside, and slipped through sideways.
The rest of the team followed.
On the other side was a large inner chamber.
Every surface of its four walls was covered in murals: worshippers, packed densely, layered from floor to ceiling, the mass of them continuing all the way up to the dome eight meters above. In the drifting dust, Eleanor's flashlight could only barely make out the dome's outline.
But looking closely at the dome and upper walls, she could see that beneath the murals, something else had been incised into the stone. Deeper lines. Complex, interlocking patterns that ran across every surface.
If pressed to describe it, she would have said it looked like a vast circuit board.
She dispersed the dust still hanging in the air and turned her attention to the center of the chamber.
The ruin had suffered considerably in whatever incident had originally sealed it. The passage they had just come through was the only route still intact. The chamber's other three corridors were all fully blocked with rubble, and a substantial accumulation of stone had buried the central platform entirely, the structure Apocalypse had been using for his regeneration cycle.
Eleanor crossed the debris in a few steps and stood before the pile. Through the gaps between the stones, she could see him.
Apocalypse lay still among the rubble, arms at his sides, looking for all the world as though he were simply asleep.
What surprised Eleanor was his skin. It was not a normal human color. It was closer to the grey-blue of mineral stone, like a vein of ore deep in the earth.
It looked nothing like the skin of a living person. It looked like something that had been underground for a very long time.
She braced herself and shoved the boulder pinning his upper body to one side.
Once it had been cleared, she compared what she was looking at against what Matthew had described.
Grey-blue skin. Deep blue markings across the face. Body encased in armor.
She nodded. "It's him."
"Get him loaded."
With the identification confirmed, she directed the Astartes to begin clearing the debris and instructed the logistics team to prepare Apocalypse for transport.
Everything was moving exactly as planned.
Then the unexpected happened.
Outside the ruin's perimeter.
A group of people in plain clothes who had been eating chicken rice at the food carts outside looked up as though they had received a signal from inside the ruin. They set down their food without a word.
They exchanged a single look, and without any hesitation, rushed the ruin entrance at a dead sprint.
"Fuck Umbrella!"
Inside the security perimeter, the guards heard them coming and drew their weapons immediately.
Rounds chambered. Safeties off. Barrels leveled.
"Stop right there! This is a restricted area! One more step and we open fire!"
The security team leader's shout cut through the noise outside the ruin with the snap of trained authority.
Behind him, six armed guards had already fanned out, taking positions behind vehicles and temporary barricades, weapons trained on the approaching figures.
The approaching figures did not react.
They didn't slow down. If anything, they were moving faster.
There was something wrong about the expressions on their faces. A hostility, and beneath it a rage that didn't fit the situation, as though each of them had arrived carrying something that had been building for a long time.
And when they saw the guns pointed at them, something shifted in their faces. A contempt that bordered on open mockery.
The security team leader's eyes narrowed. His finger moved to the trigger.
"Fire!"
The rifles opened up simultaneously.
Muzzle flash strobed in rapid bursts. Casings rang against the sand.
The rounds tore through the air and hit the lead attacker clean: shoulder, chest, throat. Three direct hits.
He didn't go down.
His upper body rocked back slightly from the impacts. The side of his neck was half-destroyed. His feet didn't move.
And then, after a brief pause, the ruined neck simply repositioned itself, and he continued forward.
The team leader registered that something was wrong and called for the Astartes while he kept firing.
The next burst hit at closer range, and this time he saw it clearly.
A rifle round punched through the attacker's thigh from the side. What came out with it was not blood.
It was something closer to liquid metal. Viscous and burning, hissing as it hit the open air.
The skin around the wound was not the torn pink of a normal injury. It glowed orange-red at the edges, the way freshly melted iron looks when it first pours.
Heat radiated from the wound visibly, warping the air around it.
The team leader's pupils contracted.
"What the-"
"Extremis! They're on Extremis!"
"Get the Astartes out here! We need the Astartes!"
"Hostile non-standard combatants outside the perimeter!"
Gunfire.
Inside the ruin, the team preparing to move Apocalypse heard it.
Before anyone could react, the Astartes were already moving, pushing back toward the entrance.
The ruin's interior was a maze of unstable passages, several sections barely wide enough for one person, and moving at anything beyond a careful pace risked triggering further collapse. Their progress outward was slower than the sprint they would have made on open ground.
That delay cost them the outcome.
Outside, the situation had already been decided.
The Extremis-enhanced attackers hit the security line and, without a word, detonated themselves.
The others did the same.
One after another, they walked into the guards still engaging them and exploded. They went through the entire outer security team that way, absorbing everything the guards had and paying with their own lives without hesitation, until the guards were gone and the path inside was open.
Then the ones still standing moved for the ruin.
Their objective was simple.
Destroy the site.
Bury everyone inside under it.
"Fuck Umbrella!"
"This is what you get for making an enemy of HYDRA again and again!"
"Fuck! Umbrella!"
The shout cut off.
Several detonations, massive enough to shake the structure, went off above the ruin in rapid succession.
The ruins, already severely compromised, did not survive a second catastrophic event. The upper structure gave way.
Stone poured down from above.
Some time passed.
When the dust settled, what remained exposed at the surface, jutting up through the debris and into the sunlight for the first time in thousands of years, was the miniature capstone of the pyramid: covered in ancient script and carved patterns, freshly uncovered.
As sunlight reached it, the capstone blazed.
The light ran down along the carved lines like water finding channels, flowing inward through the pattern.
Inside the chamber.
Sunlight traced along the lines carved into the dome and walls, channeled by the circuit-board pattern, and reached the floor of the chamber.
The figure that had looked as though he was simply sleeping gave a sudden, violent shudder.
His eyes opened.
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