Tomb of the snake leah s.., p.1
Tomb of the Snake (Leah Stone Archaeological Thrillers Book 1), page 1
TOMB OF THE SNAKE
LEAH STONE THRILLERS
BOOK 1
DAVID BERENS
NICK THACKER
CONTENTS
Act I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Act II
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Act III
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
I. Act IV
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
From The Record
Afterword
ACT I
The gloom is like a weight on one's shoulders, and our flashlights and candles only make the darkness blacker. Imagination can revel in conjectures and ungodly daydreams back through the ages that have elapsed till the mind reels dizzily in space.
G.E. KINKAID
1
April 5th, 1909
GRAND CANYON, ARIZONA
Kinkaid’s left hand shook like a gambler who’d just missed his card as he gripped his notebook. The worn leather cover wore smudges of pale pink mud and dust. Dark blood dripped from the edge where he held it.
He crouched behind a statue of a cross-legged man with a protruding belly.
Buddha?
The walls around him bore intricate symbols and hieroglyphs he recognized as Egyptian. He could not read them but imagined they must have been a warning.
Without daylight, it was impossible for him to calculate how long he’d been in the cave. His best estimate was eight to ten hours. The cool, musty air of the tunnels only served to chill the sweat dripping off him.
His brown stub of a pencil slipped between his fingertips. He worked as fast as he could in the dim glow of the numerals on his wristwatch. His fingers cramped as he raced to record the details before they reached him. Dust mixed with the blood oozing from under his broken fingernails smudging his work, but he persisted.
He knew this was likely the last entry he would record in the notebook.
After that…
He froze when he heard them come around the corner. There was almost no ventilation in this chamber and it smelled like death — rotten, putrid, ancient, and still. For some reason, as he documented it, the words a deadly, snaky passageway were the best he could come up with to describe the place. His normally precise handwriting was now a jagged scrawl, but time was of the essence. He struggled to slow his breathing, afraid they would hear him.
In the infinite blackness of the chamber, he heard the inhuman scraping and thumping coming closer… closer…
… Closer.
He felt hot tears fill his eyes from fear and from the thick, acrid stench of death surrounding him. He was not ashamed that he relieved his bowels — it was involuntary, after all — just terrified that they would smell it.
The sounds went still.
They’re here.
He could almost imagine their massive heads swinging back and forth, tongues flickering in and out. And then the slow, deliberate scraping sounds of their bodies were impossibly close.
He placed the notebook on the floor with infinite care not to make a sound. As gently as possible, he slid it under the statue in front of him, hiding it as well as he could in the blackness. It would probably be buried here forever, his incredible discovery and the dangers of this temple.
His last fleeting hope as they entered the room was that whoever found his journal would be the kind of person to respect and understand the significance of his find.
Perhaps his name would live on… though he would not.
When they finally took him, he thrashed and kicked in a desperate last attempt to survive the horror.
He tried to escape, but they were far too strong.
2
Present Day
YUMA, ARIZONA
Leah Stone felt the Cobra two-way radio shatter in her hand before she heard the rifle’s report. It splintered into a thousand sharp pieces, three of which embedded into her palm. Surely she was shot. How could the shooter have missed? Maybe he’d missed on purpose. She threw herself down on the hardscrabble ground scanning the area for cover.
There.
To her left, she saw a boulder the size of a small car. A second shot whizzed by and pelted into the ground ten feet away. She rolled hard to the side and found her feet. She lunged forward and ran for the rock. The third shot hit almost as soon as she heard the report of the second.
He had fired three shots in the space of five seconds and had missed all three. Either he wasn’t very good, or he was a long way off. She didn’t care which it was, but it offered her hope that she might still make it out of there alive.
She dove behind the rock and waited, her heart pounding and her lungs aching. Her workouts were tough, but nothing compared to the stress and adrenaline of being shot at. She struggled to calm herself and realized the shots had stopped.
Was he reloading? Was he moving closer, improving his chances? The reprieve was long enough for her to assess the situation. Luckily, her hand only trickled blood. The bullet had missed her but shattered the radio leaving plastic bits of shrapnel buried in her palm, but nothing too serious.
She winced as she pulled the pieces of plastic out and tossed them aside. Given the circumstances, she counted this as a lucky break. Her pack was still on her back, but the top lay unzipped and flapping. She pulled it off and realized that she’d dumped almost all its contents in the sprint to elude her assassin.
Her water bottle sloshed in the bottom of the pack, but her first aid kit was gone. She glanced back across the dusty hill and saw it. The small red and white box had broken open, its contents strewn about like a broken piñata. And inches beyond it lay the notebook.
Dammit.
She eased her head around the far side of the rock and the shot was almost instant, splitting the edge of the boulder. Splintered shards of rock grazed her cheek and she fell back behind her cover.
She was pinned.
There was nothing she could do but wait for nightfall and try to get the journal back. She wouldn’t be leaving here without it. She opened the half-empty bottle and took a measured sip of the warm water.
She glanced down at her watch. She had at least two more hours to wait for dark. She was in a no-win situation. If she made a break for the notebook now, she would be exposed in broad daylight, even if the shooter wasn’t so good.
If she waited for sunset and the cover of darkness, she would be harder to see, but it was highly likely the assassin was making his way down into the valley… closer and closer. She figured he might not know she was unarmed and would be cautious.
Nighttime might even things up, if only slightly. She lay down in the shadow of the rock and waited.
3
When the blazing orange sky began to dim to red and then to purple, she rolled back up to her hands and knees. The cuts on her hand had stopped oozing, but they still hurt something fierce.
The notebook was still lying in the dust, its pages fluttering in the evening breeze. The air had chilled, sending goosebumps over her parched skin. A fact she was thankful for since she’d emptied her water bottle over an hour ago.
It wasn’t dark enough to make a break for it, but she wondered how much the man tracking her had changed his position. She scooped handfuls of sand into the water bottle and twisted the lid back on. She took a deep breath and tossed it out from behind the boulder.
It bounced once, but before it could hit the ground again, it exploded in a loud crack.
Yup, she thought groaning inwardly, he’s still out there, and judging by the speed of that shot… he’s pretty freaking close. That’s not good.
But the fact that he hadn’t charged her position gave her a glimmer of hope. He must think I’ve got a weapon. A stronger wind rose up and caught the cover of the notebook, flipping it over once. Another shot rang out and sand sprayed up in front of it.
“Don’t shoot the damned thing,” Leah hiss ed as the leather cover eased shut.
Thankfully, it looked to be intact. He hadn’t hit it.
She realized her eyes were wet and she was now truly terrified. She was going to lose the notebook and maybe even her life. She reached down and touched the pendant around her neck, thinking of her parents. The pain of losing them was still fresh even after seven years.
“Just go, you two,” she had said to them all those years ago. “It’ll be fun. Don’t worry; I’ll be fine!”
It was her freshman year at Arizona State, and she’d had to work hard to convince them that she could take care of herself while they were gone.
Finally, they had relented.
That was the last time she’d seen them alive. The plane flying them to Saint Thomas had taken an unexplained nose-dive into the ocean, killing everyone on board.
Her parents’ bodies had never been recovered.
Leah hadn’t flown since.
Her parents had left behind condo, which Leah now lived in, and a house in Grand Rapids, a temple of not-quite-vintage furniture and the ridiculous crystal knick-knacks her mother had collected over the years.
Thankfully, they’d bought their condo in Arizona outright and deeded it to Leah, so there wasn't any legal wrangling to be done there.
But their last will and testament had been drawn up back when Leah was a minor, so her uncle Blake had been named conservator. Although he had used their Michigan house as a home base of sorts in the States, Blake had only made one trip to Grand Rapids for the funeral.
He had cleared their bank accounts and given all the money to Leah before hopping on a plane to Africa. The house had been locked up ever since.
Her Uncle Blake called himself an archaeologist, a world-traveler, uninterested in staying in one place for too long.
More accurately, he was a treasure hunter. Always overseas searching for the world’s long-lost relics and ancient secrets — especially the ones he could cash in.
Now that she was older she saw him for what he was, and though she didn’t consider him a bad person, she knew he was a bit rough around the edges. Not the sort of guy who’d make a good fatherly stand-in, so she hadn’t tried keeping in touch with him over the years.
After her parents’ funeral in Michigan, the only thing Leah had brought back to Arizona from their home was her mother’s ankh pendant. The ankh, shaped in the Egyptian symbol representing life, was also called the “key of life.” It looked like a loop of thread, with a crosspiece in the center. Her mother had worn the pendant for as long as she could remember on a cheap gold-plated chain.
Strangely, the pendant was not alone on the chain. At some point, her mother had added a key to it. Leah replaced the tarnished chain with a simple leather cord, but kept the ankh and key in place, as a memory and homage to her late mother.
Sometimes when she felt the tingling of anxiety creeping in, she would trace the symbols etched into the metal surface of the ankh, as well as the jagged break on the bottom. The ankh had always been broken. Her mother said she liked it that way.
“Makes it more authentic, Annaleah,” her mother had said as she brushed her hand through her daughter’s long black hair, a knowing smile on her face. “Not everything worth having is perfect or pristine. Sometimes it is the imperfection that makes it so much more treasured.”
She figured one day, she might get up the courage to go through all the things they left in the Grand Rapids house. And if Blake ever made his way back here, they could organize an estate sale to get rid of the rest and sell the house. The money from the bank had been enough to buy a crappy old Land Rover — one she now affectionately referred to as Betty after her grandmother.
And then there had been the key… the key paired with the pendant. It didn’t take her long to discover that it was a safety deposit box key, but it had taken a little over a week to find the bank in Scottsdale that held the box it opened.
The haughty woman that took Leah back to the vault had been dressed in a hard-creased, light-blue pantsuit. She had glared at her under thin, harshly penciled eyebrows, making judgments about the young, thin, and clearly not wealthy woman who had entered the bank.
Leah got the distinct impression that the woman was scrutinizing her so she could accurately describe her to the police after she tried to rob the bank.
“I’ll be waiting right outside,” the woman had sniffed as she opened the vault door a little wider.
“How about you run out front and get me a cup of coffee while you’re waiting?” Leah smiled, batting her eyelashes.
She had never been one to shy away from a fight — a virtue her father often called ‘dangerous stubbornness’ — but Leah wasn’t about to let some bank lady give her the evil eye without getting an earful.
The woman had stared, slack-jawed at the obviously wayward and now rude criminal that had wandered in, but she finally huffed and stomped away.
Rolling her eyes, Leah turned back to the box. The key clicked and there was an odd sucking sound inside the rectangular metal case. Leah had never even seen a safety deposit box before, but she was pretty sure they weren’t airtight or vacuum-sealed as normal practice.
She remembered the feeling of excitement as she lifted the silicon-lined waterproof lid off the box. This must be how Blake feels all the time, she’d thought. No wonder he’s constantly chasing this rush.
The adrenaline had worn off quickly, though, when she realized what was inside.
4
It’s just… a book?
Inside the box, she had found a small leather notebook. It was a couple of inches larger than a mass-market paperback novel. She picked it up and flipped a few pages.
Nothing special, just a journal. It looked to be pretty old, but she didn’t recognize any of the names or places inside.
It wasn’t George Washington’s diary or anything cool like that.
“What is this?” Leah had asked aloud, looking in the box again to be sure she hadn’t missed anything. But she hadn’t — besides the little notebook, there was no money, no stock certificates, no bonds, nothing of any value.
She reset the lid on the box and clamped it shut again, disappointed, and slid it back into the empty slot in the wall. The woman in the pantsuit had returned then and was standing outside the vault door.
Amazingly, she was holding out a Styrofoam cup, offering it to Leah. She jerked it out toward Leah, some coffee dribbling over the edge.
Her lips were pursed in a bloodless frown as she waited for Leah to take the cup of Joe.
“You drink it,” Leah said, holding up a hand. “I don’t really like coffee.”
The woman scowled at her as Leah brushed past.
“Have a nice day,” the woman said through gritted teeth.
“Yeah,” Leah said, raising the journal up and showing it to the woman. “Seems I’ve got some reading to do. Thanks, um… ” Leah made a show of searching for a name tag on the woman’s jacket.
“Martha,” the woman said, not pronouncing the R sound, affecting a thick Bostonian accent.
“Ah. Thank you, Mahhhtha,” Leah emphasized the accent. “Tell all the lovelies at the vineyard that I said toodaloo.”
She wasn’t sure there were vineyards in Boston, or if that was a New York thing, but she figured she had gotten the point across.
The woman’s face turned red and she looked ready to burst, but Leah was already walking away.
