Fan Fiction ❯ The Vampire Hunter II: Bloodlines ❯ Chapter 18

Chapter XVIII

As soon as Gabrielle entered the fifth Gate, half a dozen crocodiles, which were just entering from several open passages, attacked her, while the slab behind her finished its descent to the floor. The creatures were three times Gabrielle's size and incredibly vicious, but Gabrielle was still charged from her most recent near-death experience, and she slashed at the animals in a frenzy, killing them all in less than a minute.

As the last croc hit the floor, Gabrielle let her body slide to the ground and tried to get herself under control. Her heart was beating wildly, and she felt like she wanted to come out of her skin. She'd faced death too many times over the past few hours, and it was catching up to her. Plus, she still hadn't found Clark.

"I swear by everything that is holy, if Clark dies, I will destroy you Cynthia," Gabrielle whispered.

Gabrielle slowly pushed herself to her feet. As much as she wanted to collapse into a puddle of mush, she didn't have time for it. Cynthia had made sure of that by adding a time limit to each Gate. Right now, her only focus was surviving the challenges and finding Clark. If she let herself become trapped in one of the rooms because she took a few minutes to have a nervous breakdown, Clark would be left completely on her own. Judging from what Gabrielle had survived so far, she didn't think Clark stood much of a chance in this place alone.

Gabrielle finally started looking around the room. In the center of the small chamber, she found a large deep pool of stagnant water. As she looked closer, she saw dead bloated bodies floating in it, and she quickly turned away.

As Gabrielle recalled from the three books Cynthia was using to create this representation of the Amduat, there had been many depictions of water filled with those who had drowned. Most of the humans from her time had been afraid of drowning more than any other form of death because it kept them from being properly buried. The texts of the priests had tried to assuage that fear by showing that even those who had drowned were cared for by the gods in the afterlife.

Unfortunately, that single element wasn't enough to tell Gabrielle which challenge she was facing, and other than the pool, the room appeared to be completely empty. She checked the now sealed doors where the crocodiles had entered, but it was pointless. There was no way through the thick stone, and even if she could get out that way, she still had to get to Clark.

Gabrielle moved to the far end of the room and checked the wall. At about halfway along the wall and a meter from the floor, she found a hole the width of her arm. She knelt down and looked through the hole. It went completely through the wall, which was only a foot thick, and she could see another room on the other side. The door with the clock was there, and she only had forty-five minutes until the door would open, which gave her a total of fifty-five minutes to reach the next Gate.

Gabrielle smiled. Punching through a one-foot thick stone wall wouldn't be hard at all. She quickly went to work on widening the hole, but just as she was getting it almost large enough for her body to fit through, she ran into steel. Her stomach dropped. She scraped all along the sides, but her hands found metal everywhere they touched. It seemed to be the core of the wall itself and was eight inches thick. She wouldn't be able to damage it if her life depended on it, and Gabrielle realized it did. And so did Clark's.

Gabrielle sat back on her heels and studied the twelve-inch wide hole. Continuing with the Book of Amduat, she was still supposed to be in the Land of Sokar. This was probably supposed to be the narrow pass depicted in the middle of the fifth hour according to that book, and she was supposed to squeeze through it somehow.

Gabrielle remembered what she'd had to do to get out of the manacles and cringed. She stood up and tried to punch through several other places along the wall, but her fist met steel each time. After several dozen attempts in rapid succession, she conceded defeat. Cynthia had made sure that hole was the only way into the next room, and Gabrielle was going to have to find a way to get herself through it.

She went back to the hole and checked the time. She still had about thirty-five minutes left until the door would open. She looked at the hole and then at her body. Her hips and her shoulders would be the trouble spots. They were simply too wide to fit through the tight opening. Gabrielle considered dislocating her shoulder and hip, but she wasn't sure how she could do both.

However, thinking of ways to do it gave her another solution, though she didn't think it was really a better plan. She just didn't know what else to do.

Gabrielle walked several meters away and then turned back around to face the wall. She centered herself on the hole. Before she could change her mind, she light-walked into the wall and crushed her right side. Her shoulder collapsed, and her pelvis shattered on impact. If she'd been capable of it, Gabrielle would have passed out from the pain, but all she could do was gasp, as she realized she still had to drag herself up and through the small hole.

After several minutes, and a concentrated effort not to heal the damage, Gabrielle pulled herself along the ground with her left arm. She had to dig her claws into the stone floor in order to get enough friction, but she made steady progress over the few feet that lay between her and the wall from where she'd bounced back after hitting it.

Once she was at the base of the wall, she reached up to the edge of the opening and pulled herself up into a sitting position. She could just see over the edge and the clock told her she had twenty-five minutes until the door opened.

Gabrielle braced herself. This was not going to be easy. She pulled her body up and managed to get her somewhat good leg beneath her, so that she could reach through the hole and grab onto the outer edge.

As the broken bones shifted around her lower midsection and right leg, Gabrielle whimpered and focused on breathing. The pain of ripping off her hands and feet had been nothing compared to the constant stabs of pain that made up the entire right side of her body.

Gabrielle pushed everything away and gritted her teeth, as she pulled herself up and through the hole. Screaming became her constant companion, and she dragged herself through the close space as quickly as she could. She fell out the other side and couldn't stop herself from rolling onto the right half of her body. Her screams increased tenfold and were so high-pitched that they came close to leaving the upper range of human hearing.

The increase in pain also jumpstarted her suppressed healing abilities, and her body began the process of knitting the individual shards of bone back together, along with the flesh that had been cut and mangled around them. As the pain slowly receded, Gabrielle managed to focus on healing her legs first.

She wasn't even close to being finished when she heard the door grind open, but all the bones in her body had been mostly restored to their normal wholeness, and the muscles had been reattached if not actually healed. She stood and slowly limped her way into the passage.