"Oh crap." They sighed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Don't move!" Alex yelled at his dad, still holding onto Femi.
Rick and Jonathan looked around the dimly-lit passageway in bewilderment. Well, more relief than anything, but still surprise. They had expected themselves to be cut up into little slices by now... but the traps hadn't started.
Alex shuffled past Femi and, holding her hand, they rushed over to Rick's side to stare down at his right foot anxiously. They exchanged looks of wisdom; they knew exactly what was going on.
"What are we going to do?" Femi shivered nervously.
Rick sent them both a sceptical grin, "With what, kids?"
"We need a... um... something to hold it." Alex mused aloud.
"Yeah, any time now Alex. Femi. Hello, if you hadn't noticed I'm trying my damn hardest not to move and it's growing really tiresome here!" Rick sarcastically announced.
"Dad," Alex looked up at him seriously, "Have you got anything heavy enough to hold the same weight down as your foot?"
He blinked blankly at his son, as though he were some kind of complete idiot. Femi and Alex waited, nonetheless, as though he was about to give them a heroic answer that would save the day!...
"Yeah, let me just pull out the weights I like to carry around with me all day." Rick snickered.
Femi sighed anxiously whilst Alex just rolled his eyes at his father's typical attitude. Always so damn cocky. But, although Alex would never admit it, Femi could already identify just how similar the two O'Connells really were.
"Well I guess you're stuck here, old man." Alex sighed, rubbing his head.
Rick snorted, "Old man - if only I could move my foot, you'd see what this old man's capable of still."
"Please, let's not bicker..." Femi sighed sheepishly.
"Tell that to him." Alex snipped bitterly.
"Alex." Femi scolded, holding his arm.
Alex rolled his eyes again. She was as bad as his bloody mother, always taking Rick's side.
"Excuse the interruption, but, uh... what about this?" Jonathan's voice appeared out of nowhere.
Everyone had seemed to have, shamefully, forgotten all about Jonathan's presence through the heat of the moment. And there he stood ever so innocently with a promisingly big rock in his hands. Alex grinned.
"What would we do without you, unc." He chuckled, and took the large brick from him.
Jonathan brushed his hands together proudly, "Don't ask me, chap."
But now, the tension was on. Alex crouched down right beside his father's foot and inhaled a sharp breath through his gritted teeth.
"On three." Rick announced.
"Wait," Alex looked up, "On three, or after it?"
"What does it matter?" Rick sighed.
Alex put the rock down angrily, "A lot, cuz' if you go on three n' I'm waitin' till after three then I'll miss, n' it'll all mess up!"
Femi shook her head and placed her finger tips to her aching forehead. They were as bad as each other, honestly.
"Why the hell would I go after three when I said on three?" Rick grunted.
"That's what I'm askin'!" Alex barked, and threw his arms up.
Rick's anger had stolen away his patience and, subconsciously, he carelessly stepped towards his son in a phase of frustration. He knew what he had immediately, as did everyone else. The 4 of them froze, gasping, holding their arms up apprehensively as to await the moment that death would come swishing and slicing towards them. Rick looked down at the floor; it began rumbling.
"Oops." He whispered.
A thunderous clank erupted from the wall and a cloud of smoke filled the air. The gang all yelled and jumped back, and in unison, they spun round and took flight down the devious, pounding corridor with god-knew-what swishing and crunching after them all. Femi stupidly cast a sharp look over her shoulder and recognised, through all of the spraying rock and frothing dust, a storm of vicious weapons swinging to and fro and shooting up from the stone ground. They were all just, at least, only 1 second ahead.
"Oh my god," Femi gasped and spun her head back round, "Don't look back!!"
"Uh, Femi?!" Jonathan cried, "I looked back!!"
The 4 of them had to suddenly duck in their running as a large, iron ball came crashing through the wall and swooped straight into the other side, tearing the brick wall apart. Alex snatched up Femi's hand when they were finally close enough and he skidded around the next corner with her clinging to his arm and desperately trying to hold herself stable. She was doing a far better job than Jonathan, at least.
"Where are we going?!" Femi yelled over the ruckus of clanging, swooshing, booming weapons all around them.
Rick's eyes darted all around for some sort of escape, but wherever he looked he was greeted with more brick. More wall. The only option was to keep going up ahead. Oh, wait, no, that wasn't possible because it was a frikking dead end!
"Oh, gimme' a break!" Rick growled.
The 4 of them slid across the dusty ground and hit against the wall. Alex covered Femi protectively, and Jonathan huddled behind Rick, and there they waited and braced themselves for the end. Closer came the spinning knives and the odd axe invention that swayed from side to side like an upside-down pendulum of a grandfather clock.
"Ooooohhh craaaaaappp!" Rick growled anxiously and turned his head away.
Hisssssssssss
Everything gradually, tauntingly, went quiet. Jonathan cracked one daring eye open as he realised that he was, in fact, still alive. Just like the others. Femi cautiously came out from within Alex's arms and looked around curiously with them all. They coughed and waved their hands to rid the air of the thick smoke and dust, and when it began to settle, they understood that the traps had simply... stopped. They had come to the end of their journey, it had seemed.
"Well", Jonathan laughed, brushing himself down, "That was bloody close. And did I panic? I think not."
Ironically, according to Jonathan's cheesy bragging, the wall behind them all gave way with a naughty little groan and the 4 of them yelling were turned over into another section of the underground graveyard where they lost their balances and fell down onto the ground in a heap on each other.
"Oh, gerroff'!" Jonathan grumbled with the heel of Rick's shoe at his lips.
Rick, being the first one up, reached down and helped Femi stagger to her feet - Jonathan had hoped his dear nephew would do the same to him, but alas, he was left to recompose himself alone. Alex came to Femi and placed a hand on her dirty cheek.
"You ok?" He panted.
Femi nodded, "Mhm. Are you?"
He smiled back at her and slid his hand down into her own. The two of them, together, commenced in looking about the new room very carefully with Rick right behind them.
"Oh my..." Femi suspired upon coming across a wall of hieroglyphics.
She and Alex narrowed their eyes attentively and wiped away the dust with their finger tips. Jonathan came up behind them and was in the middle of fixing his shirt collar when the golden twinkles caught his eye; he stepped up in between the love-birds and placed his palms against the markings.
"... Gold." He drooled.
As a new understanding dawned upon Femi, her head vaguely tilted aside and her brow creased in confusion. Well, she wasn't confused, she knew exactly what she was reading, but... how had she been so mistaken? Why had her premonitions, the little fox in her dream, led her to a place that was completely... irrelevant.
"What is it?" Rick asked Alex, who could also read the markings.
He shook his head in refusal to believe. It was impossible. His eyes skipped onto Femi's figure and he noticed the look of sheer guilt and panic stricken across her face and that trembled in her fingers as they came up to her agape lips. She was wrong. Wrong.
Femi looked all around the room in astonishment. Rick and Jonathan just looked at each other without any real idea. All they knew was that something had happened, again.
"This isn't... this isn't the place." Femi whispered.
What??
She finally found the courage to look round at Alex and the others, even though she had salty tears in her eyes. How had she been wrong? She couldn't understand it.
"Hey, hey, come on," Alex sighed and went towards her, hands out, "Don't even start with that, how were you supposed to know?"
He placed his hands on her cheeks and forced her to look at him. She gulped, trying to ingest what they had discovered, and placed her hands over the back of his.
"This isn't Hamunaptra, is it..." Femi muttered under her breath.
Rick and Jonathan felt their hope sink. All this time, they had truly believed they were onto something... but now... now, they weren't even in Hamunaptra?? All along???
"Great," Rick snarled, and suddenly kicked the wall, "This is god-damn beautiful!"
"Cut it out, dad." Alex sighed back at him.
Femi shook her head and stared straight through Alex's chest, "I-I'm so sorry... all this time, and I didn't even..."-
"Look, you can't expect your visions to always, you know... be right... right?" Alex asked.
He was trying ever so hard to make her feel ok. What could he say, really? Femi had made a mistake, but that was alright. It was ok. It made her human. But as Rick, Alex and Femi all dealt with the news in their own ways, Jonathan was having the time of his life trying to scrape out the golden tints in the hieroglyphics, chuckling away.
"Come to papa, kiddies." He giggled childishly.
He stuck the tip of his dagger into the wall to pluck out a line of gold, but it caught in a small crack and wouldn't come back out. Jonathan tugged and wiggled it but began to lose his patience, and before he knew it, he had kicked his foot violently against the wall and hiss... it shifted. The dust shifted from the rock and a clear, thin divide became visible to everyone in the room.
Rick wandered up beside him to ponder over the new discovery, and soon enough, Femi and Alex had arrived also. At first, they were just wondering whether the door led further onto their hopes of finding the Chamber of the Sadem Trah; they had to get to it before Meela. But then, their thoughts transformed into that of anticipation and pessimism, as it faintly, almost unnoticeably began to tremble. Vibrate. As though something was coming through from the other side.
Femi took a wary step back, "Alex..."
Alex looked to his dad this time. He couldn't have the answers on every occasion, after all. Rick moved into a ready stance and was just about to lift his hand out to touch the wall when splassssssssh!!
Femi let out a sharp yelp at the sight of so much sand spraying through the crack. And it was widening with each second that passed. The 4 of them retreated to the other side of the room and began pounding their hands against the wall in a hope that the secret door would spin round again. Femi looked round; the door was open, and the room was flooding with salty, cold sand by the second.
"It's coming in too fast!" Femi shouted.
"Keep trying!" Rick ordered.
Hands slammed. Feet kicked. Sand hissed maliciously. No matter how any of them tried, the door wasn't going to open again. But they weren't just going to lie down and wait for the sand to suffocate them all. It was rising up to their knees, now. Femi was beginning to panic and pressed herself against the wall, eyes closed, chest tightening against her will. Alex pounded his hands against the wall extra hard as he noticed the pain across her face. It was not about to end like this...
"Wait a minute..." Rick grumbled.
He stopped kicking the door and allowed his eyes to travel about the slowly flooding room in thought. The patterns on the walls... he suddenly realised there was a large circle on the right-hand wall. A circle made of red and white patterns and wiggly lines symbolising water.
"Hail Mary, full of grace, the lord is bloody with me!" Jonathan started panting to himself as he collapsed against the wall also.
"Come on dad, keep going!" Alex ordered angrily.
"Wait Alex!" Rick pulled him away from the wall by the scruff of his shirt and held him in place, "Remember that story your mother told us about how the Egyptians would often hold challenges and tests of the mind?"
Alex paused and eyed his dad curiously. Rick smiled.
"When this room fills up with enough sand, the pressure will force open a small gate - which's what those markings over there are tryin' uh tell us." Rick pointed.
Alex shook his head, "Are you sure about this dad...?"
Femi had overheard the entire conversation and had convinced herself to leave the safety of the wall and walk over to the two O'Connells. She took both of their hands in her own and they looked to her, concerned, but she gave a strong nod.
"It's our only chance." She shivered.
Jonathan swam through the sand and came to join with Rick and Alex. The cold, old sand was coming up to their chests, now. It was going to be only a matter of seconds that would draw the line between their deaths, or their success. Femi squeezed Alex's hand and they exchanged gentle smiles.
"See you in a minute." Alex told her.
But as the sand came crawling up to their necks, their serene attitudes became very different and Femi couldn't stop herself from suddenly pushing her way over to him and wrapping her arms around him through the thick sand. Their lips met, and their eyes shut, and suddenly their heads were underneath. Gone. But all the while, they held each other close and kept their warm lips practically glued together whilst waiting for their fate to be decided...
Femi laughed happily and twirled in the mirror's reflection; her dainty, cream dress flowed gracefully around her feet as she did so, and her bouncy black locks of hair danced upon her shoulders.
"Oh, mother, thank you! Thank you so much!" Femi gasped.
She jumped down from the platform and ran to her mother, wrapping her arms around her. Her mother, smiling, leant back to take another good look at her darling daughter.
"The gentlemen will be queuing down Grandstoke Avenue just to greet you soon." She chuckled.
Femi blushed, "Mummy, stop..."
She stroked Femi's cheek, "You shall grow into a fine young lady some day, my darling Femi. I cannot wait to watch you grow."
The two Reynold's girls smiled affectionately at each other. One, in her mid-twenties, the other, just under 8. It was Femi's birthday, and this was her mother's present; a day out in town.
Femi was snatched back into reality when she was suddenly torn away from Alex's lips. Alex's chest, Alex's arms and warmth and company. She was being pulled away by a strong force, and no matter how hard she tried to swim to some kind of surface to breathe such magical oxygen, she was being controlled by the waves of the sand.
She felt her elbow graze against a rocky edge just before she felt her stomach flip, and her top half lower down. She was falling with the sand, gliding down the mountain it had made. Her head surfaced from the deathly substance just as her body found the hard, stone floor, and she rolled over a number of times before coming to a twisted still on her side. She broke out into a fit of dry coughs; she sand was in her throat, eyes, and stuck to her lips, making it rather uncomfortable to move.
But she was alive. It had worked. She had no reason to be surprised; the O'Connell men hadn't failed her yet.
Femi rolled over and pushed herself upright, wiping her face with the back of her hands and the sleeves of her robes. Shaking her head free of the sand, she stood up and ran to the huge heap of sand to frantically begin digging her way through it in search of the 3 other members of her party.
"Alex? Rick? Jonathan! Answer me!" She coughed and gasped.
She slipped on the sand and performed another awkward roll down towards the concrete floor; however, her path was blocked by a figure lying across her path. Femi stopped herself and skidded along upon her knees, and when she arrived next to the person, Jonathan threw his head up and released a sudden, dramatic sneeze, through which a waterfall of sand came from his messy hair and plenty more spilt out from his mouth.
Femi nearly laughed, "Jonathan, thank goodness you're alright!"
She threw herself over him and hugged him so tightly that it was hard for him to breathe. But Femi, overwhelmed with relief, was oblivious to his plead for air as he patted her back.
"F-Femi... can't... breathe..." He choked.
Femi released him without a clue of what she had done and Jonathan gasped brilliantly and sank back down into the sand. Femi began brushing the excess sand from his collar and tempted, with slitted eyes, to see through the daunting darkness of the chamber in which they had fell through. A large amount of light poured in through the big, stone hole in wall, where the current of the sand had taken them through, but it still wasn't strong enough to light the whole place.
"I swear to you," Jonathan coughed, "That wasn't my fault this time... I only kicked it."
Femi ignored him and stood up anxiously, "Where're the other two??"
Jonathan shifted himself upright and joined Femi in scanning the area. It was light but not light enough, and although they were perched midway up a mountain of dust it didn't bring them any help.
"Sand... sand..." Jonathan counted off, "Oh, wait!"
Femi gasped and looked round, "What??"
"Oh, no... just more sand." He sighed.
Femi sent him a childish, sulk-like stare as he brushed himself down thoughtlessly. It wasn't a joking matter. But hey, that was Jonathan. Maybe Femi should begin to learn to be more grateful for his carefree, optimistic attitude?
M'yeah ^_~
WOW this is episode 40! *party-poppers explode all around* This is the longest story on Quizilla for me. Very emotional. Hope you fans are enjoying this :) More in results!
Yeah!
But although Jonathan had "mistaken" something in the sand, there really was something seemingly human near to them both. It started squirming gently beneath the heap of golden dust, and the more that Femi watched it, the more she perceived it to be an actual person. And it was, very much so.
"Alex." She whispered to herself.
She leapt upright at once and set off down the hillside, half falling, half slipping and half staggering along with her hair and arms flailing about gracelessly. She crashed down onto her knees when she arrived beside the person and hurriedly began digging away the sand from around the buried O'Connell.
"It's alright, I'm coming to get you, don't worry!" Femi gasped.
She finally saw a match of hair. Then two ears, then a neck, and then a face. But it wasn't Alex's. Nor was it Rick's. Just as Femi recognised her enemy, his hand shot out from the sand and grabbed the side of her head, clenching upon her hair most greedily. One of Meela's men.
"Why, 'dank you." The man sneered sarcastically.
Femi gasped and stiffened on the spot. Her eyes began to wander up the hillside of sand... one by one... growing like crooked flower stems... more of Meela's men... lurking up into the dark, musty air.
Why were they there? How were they there? Jonathan suddenly noticed what was going on and he, too, paused in the midst of his arriving panic. It was very, very tense all of a sudden.
Happy quizilling,
Goddess
