Chapter Thirty-Four
Thirty-four
The stone is green and rough, and it’s clever the way it blends in with the hillside. It’s a huge Celtic cross, leaning heavily to the side, likely from age and weather. And it’s definitely in the right spot, where the moon and star symbol was on the map.
“What time is it?” I ask, but Allard is sitting next to the stream, eyes closed. “Asshole. What time is it?”
With a burst of energy, I make my way toward the cross.
Allard is instantly on his feet after me.
I clamber up the steep embankment to the monument, hoping for something that will explain what to do now.
The cross looks like it’s made of gray-green stone, covered in patches of lichen.
It must be over eight feet tall. Intricate knots are carved on each of the arms, with geometric designs on the middle of the ring.
I look behind me. Allard is clambering up the slope after me, and behind him, the 1982 strides past the boulder where Allard was sick.
He isn’t bothering to crouch now. He’s grinning, and he looks unhinged as he closes the distance to the cross.
He limps slightly every other step, like his knee bothers him.
It humanizes him a little, which is unfortunate.
Allard, a few feet away from me, moans. His eyes are slightly glassy as he grips his stomach and pitches forward.
I look around for anything that might be out of place: disturbed ground or any kinds of rocks that don’t belong. There’s nothing. But if we have to be here at a specific time, then I’m guessing it has to do with the light.
“Merde—” Allard says, but his voice is wavering. He lurches toward me, maybe to use me as a crutch, I have no idea, but I dart to the side just in time to avoid him. He falls heavily on the cross, his forehead slamming on the stone shaft. He slides down, hitting his head again on the stone base.
I stare at him, waiting for movement, hoping he’s killed himself. His size has not helped him here; his weight would have made that hit on his head a hard one. There’s blood, a lot of it; his forehead gushes, blood running down his face onto the stone base of the cross.
I skitter down the embankment at an angle away from the approaching 1982, who seems focused on reaching Allard. The sun beats on my head. I swing Allard’s watch up so I can see the time.
It’s 1:18.
I look back at the cross in dismay. I don’t want to go back up to it or Allard.
But then I notice the long, thin line of its shadow down the slope.
My eye follows the line of the shadow, and at the exact end is a perfectly round rock, green gray in hue, about the size of two baseballs.
If the sun weren’t shining just so, the shadow wouldn’t quite reach it.
And my guess is that under it is the final part of this game.
Allard still isn’t moving at the base of the cross, and the 1982 is at the bottom of the slope now. This would be a great time for me to run. I’d probably get pretty far before either of them figured I was gone.
But maybe because I’m hurting and dehydrated and exhausted and have so little left in my tank, I think of my dad.
He always, always finished a puzzle, except for the last one he was working on.
I hated that he’d died without finishing it.
I never found it, or I would have tried to finish it for him.
I’m so close to finishing this one. He’d want me to do whatever I could to stay alive, but he’d also want me to finish the puzzle if I could. And the rock is right there.
I scramble over to the end of the shadow and try lifting the out of place rock, but it’s deceptively heavy. I lean down and push it, but it’s going to take two hands, which I don’t have. I sit down and kick it.
Behind me, up the embankment, Allard moans.
The rock under my foot shifts slightly. I push harder, and it finally gives enough to push it aside.
There’s something buried under it. I dig madly with my hand, uncovering half of a clear plastic bag, crying out as my two broken fingers bend the wrong way into the soil.
The pain is so gut wrenching that my vision blanks for a moment.
I have to stop and breathe through it. I’m crying, tears clouding my vision, and everything in me urges me to just lie down and give up.
Another moan comes from behind me. I chance a look, and Allard is moving; he’s on his hands and knees, getting to his feet just as the 1982 reaches him, grabbing him under his arm to haul him up.
The size difference between the two is laughable; I can’t believe the 1982 is even able to hold Allard, but then I think of Professor Marini’s detached hand.
I look back at the dirt and grab at the plastic bag, but whatever’s in it is heavy and it won’t budge.
“Arrête!” Allard yells at me just as the 1982 brandishes a wicked-looking black knife, one of those horrid hunting blades that promises easy gullet slicing and pelt skinning. He shanks it hard into Allard’s middle. Allard whoofs over with the impact.
Allard rams an elbow into the 1982’s neck, sending him back a few feet.
It’s probably only Allard’s jacked-up size that is saving him now.
His meaty fist lands in the 1982’s face, and I can hear the crunch of bone from where I sit.
Blood sprays. The 1982 crumples, and Allard comes flying down the grass at me, tripping and stumbling.
I scramble to my feet, far too slowly, and start running. But it’s too late. I don’t have the trajectory to outrun his angle, and Allard slams into me, taking us both down. I scream as my broken arm hits the ground first.
I know nothing but pain.
The agony doesn’t pass. He drags me across the ground, back to where I was digging.
I scream again, but my voice peters out fast. I have nothing left.
I glance up and see his middle is gushing blood from where he was knifed by the 1982, and blood covers his face.
He can’t possibly survive being stabbed out here in the wilderness.
There’s no way the knife missed important organs.
But it hardly seems fair that the 1982 went down with a punch while Allard can hit his head and get stabbed and still come after me.
He truly is the Terminator. I kick him, satisfaction hitting me as it lands hard enough to make him recoil.
He lurches off the ground and pitches forward, catching himself next to where I was digging.
He emits a groan. It takes a moment for me to fight through my own agony and shock, but I grab the bag in the dirt.
It wrenches up; there’s a black box inside.
Allard rips it from my hand and starts opening the plastic. But he’s unsteady, teetering.
I watch as he wrestles with the plastic, tearing it off, and wonder if this is how it ends, with me on the ground in pain that’s so sharp I can taste it, the win snatched away from me at the end.
But Allard goes flying and drops the box.
The 1982 has slammed into him, still holding that wicked knife. They tumble on the ground together, blood slicking the dirt and grass.
I grab the black box from where Allard dropped it and scoot away.
I can’t get my feet to work. The box looks like a satellite communicator, with a large green button on it bearing raised SOS letters.
There are four LEDs in each corner. Someone has written PRESS TO WIN on the button in black Sharpie.
There is a grid of nine number buttons for our PINs.
I press the button.
I’m struggling to stab in the first number of my PIN when Allard rears up, throws the 1982 off him like a cloak, and flies at me. His shoulder collides with mine.
I scream as we both go down and the box flies out of my hands.
Allard kicks me so hard that I roll. He crawls after the box, but the 1982, with savage tenacity, returns, and he lands on Allard’s back like a rodeo star, grabbing Allard’s ears like they’re reins.
Allard screams and scrabbles at the 1982, but the man is pulling so hard that he’s going to rip Allard’s ears off.
I work my way to the box as Allard emits an unholy scream.
I look over to see his ear is gone. There’s a bloody, mangled hole where it should be. The ear is in the 1982’s fist.
I force myself not to puke.
Allard vomits for the both of us and falls on his side. The 1982 gets up, tosses the ear, and starts toward me.
“You set fake puzzle,” he spits in an accent so thick I can barely understand him. He has an appalling grin. He reaches for me, for the satellite box, but I yank it out of his reach, and his smile fades, replaced by a grimace of pure fury, and I wonder if now is when it ends for me.
Behind him, impossibly, Allard stirs.
The 1982 lunges for me with his heinous knife, but I’m already rolling.
My broken arm crunches beneath me, and I briefly see stars and a brilliant light of pain so sharp it’s breathtaking.
But the slight slope is in my favor, giving me momentum, and it’s in Allard’s favor too—he falls into the back of the 1982’s legs, bringing him down hard.
The 1982 lands on the ground with an audible thump, and Allard bashes his forehead into 1982’s ruined face, again and again.
He’s beating him to death with his face.
His forehead is a bloody smear, and I can’t even look at the pulpy mess of the 1982’s face as he gropes ineffectually at Allard’s arms, stabbing at Allard with his knife.
I dimly recognize that there’s no surviving this for either of them.
They are both dying out here. Allard brings his head down with a mighty slam onto the 1982’s, and there is a sickening cracking sound.
The 1982 stops moving. Allard falls heavily to the side and coughs.
His eyes are closed, and I’m hoping he’s dead, that both of them are, but the past several minutes have shown me that these two are almost unstoppable.
Allard cracks open an eye and looks at me.
He’s got multiple stab wounds, and his face is a gory mask, but he manages to start crawling toward me.
I push back, trying to get to my feet, but he manages to trip me with a foot. I go down hard—and this time when I land on my broken arm, the pain is too much. The pain rolls over me like a venomous wave. I’m not going to remain conscious much longer.
He plucks the satellite box out of my hands. Blackness crowds my vision.
He doesn’t enter anything in the box. He simply clutches it. He’s swaying, dazed with his injuries. I get it; the pain in my arm is a conflagration. I don’t have much left in me either.
I know I need to move out of his reach. This thought comes too late as his hand shoots out and grabs my ankle.
He clamps down with surprising strength despite his injuries.
I kick, but he holds on. He begins to pull me toward him, sliding me across the dirt.
I can’t get out of his grasp. His hand is too tight, already cutting off circulation in my foot.
There is no way I can physically overcome Allard. My mind races as I try to think what to do. I need to distract him. Pain pulls at me, stretching me like taffy, and I push back.
“Hey,” I say. “Hey. Listen. You want to win?”
His grip tightens. My foot feels swollen, tight. Like it will pop.
“Here’s how,” I say, the words coming slow.
“You just have to solve the last puzzle.” I watch him through the haze of pain.
There’s a flicker of something in the carnage of his face, but my ankle is screaming, the skin burning.
His hand is a human vise ratcheting tighter.
“I opened the box already. There’s one final puzzle inside.
I couldn’t do it. But you can. If you solve it, you win. ”
He slurs, “Tell me.” It’s a testament to the gravity of his pain that he doesn’t seem to question the logic behind my giving him the puzzle—or that the box didn’t open.
“You have to decode DVVKROH. That’s it.” I spell it out for him slowly, like he did for me in the wine cellar in Paris.
He wavers from where he sits. He says nothing, but I sense a slight loosening around my ankle. Yes—there’s slack now. He says, “Mee…meeting.”
“Oh.” I click my tongue through the pain, amazed I have the wherewithal for this. “No. I’m sorry. You were using a ROT9 Caesar, weren’t you? I was using a simple ROT3. It’s ASSHOLE.”
I reach out and take the box from him. It slips from his hands without a fight.
He gives a sudden shudder. He slumps to the ground. I watch as long as I can to see if he’ll move. There is a black border at the edge of my vision. His hand is open now, lax. I pull my ankle away.
I look at the box and punch in my PIN. Fighting to remain conscious feels insurmountable.
My eyes close, and I drift, one thought following me down:
I just won the Enigma Challenge.