CHAPTER TWELVE

Marcus Ayers" eyes snapped open and all he saw was black. Pitch goddamn black, like he was trapped inside a coffin. First came the cold, like he was rising to the surface of a frozen lake. Then the shivering began. Barely perceptible tremors rippling through abused muscles. Then grew in intensity until his teeth clacked together like a crazed windup toy.

Next the pain. It emanated from his skull in sickening waves, and any attempt at movement lanced a spike of agony through his temples.

What the hell had he done last night? This was the mother of all hangovers. The kind that made a man swear off the sauce for good and take up the cloth. Except he didn"t remember drinking. Didn"t remember much of anything really. Just vague impressions. Blurred images seen through fogged glass.

He tried to lift a hand to his pounding head, to ease the jackhammer doing its level best to split his skull, but his arm wouldn"t cooperate, wouldn"t budge an inch no matter how he strained. With rising panic he realized he couldn"t move his legs either, or any part of himself; he was chained up and immobile in the oppressive dark, bindings biting into the tender skin of his wrists, ankles, everywhere.

His engineer"s mind spun uselessly, trying to make sense of the senseless. This had to be a dream, a nightmare, some sadistic trick of the subconscious, because there was no way this could be reality.

He"d drifted off at his desk, that was it, fallen asleep hunched over blueprints and geologic surveys; the pressure, the late nights, they"d taken their toll, his overworked brain conjuring terrors to punish him for his dedication.

That"s all this was, all it could be; any minute now Marjorie would come clicking in on her Manolo Blahniks to rouse him, cluck her tongue and remind him he had a perfectly serviceable bed at home, if he remembered how to find it.

But – the dripping. That slow, maddening plunk plunk plunk boring into his skull, strange, out of place. Marjorie was militant about leaks, ran a tight ship in their sleek LEED-certified offices, eco-friendly down to the bone. No way she"d let a drippy faucet get past her radar.

And he was wet, wasn"t he? Damp and shivering in clinging clothes. The cold, the pervasive seep of it, all wrong. Desk naps were known to be hell on the spine, but not like this.

No, much as he railed against it, the truth was unavoidable; this was no dream, no catnap gone wrong, the pain too sharp, the details too vivid, mind-numbing terror obliterating any lingering drowsiness. Marcus was in trouble, real honest-to-Christ trouble, and he had to get a grip, focus past the screaming in his head long enough to figure a way out of this.

Was he underground? Stuck in a cave or a mine shaft, lost in the labyrinth of tunnels that honeycombed the bedrock? He"d seen enough of them, poking through blueprints and surveys. The forgotten places, left to rot while the world went on spinning overhead.

But that didn"t explain why he was bound in this hole. This wasn"t an accident or a drunken wrong turn. This was planned, purposeful. Someone"s design, as intricate and merciless as the inner workings of a watch.

A cold finger of dread worked its way up Marcus's spine, but the rational part of his brain screamed that there was a way out of this.

First, take stock: extremities compromised, body uncooperative, but his head was clearing. Okay, he could work with that, use the old gray matter for something other than gibbering. What did he know? What could he trust? His senses, that"s what; the data did not lie, so inventory those, one by one, like ticking items off a quality assurance checklist.

Sight was useless, impenetrable black pressing in on all sides, no shapes or shadows to orient himself, but smell – smell was doable. He sucked in a shuddering breath through his nose and instantly wished he hadn"t; a gag-inducing miasma flooded his sinuses, dank, musty, the stagnant funk of still waters left to fester.

And beneath that... something chemical, astringent, familiar but maddeningly elusive. Chlorine maybe, or a caustic cousin, the kind of noxious brew no sane soul would willingly marinate in.

Sound then: drip, plunk, drip, that ceaseless cadence worming into his eardrums, the audio equivalent of Chinese water torture. He strained past it, listening, reaching. The distant slap of water on something. Stone, perhaps. Containment of some sort, but the dimensions were impossible to judge in this disorienting void.

And a rusty hinge whine, a hollow clang of metal on metal.

Panic surged through him like an electric current. Any illusion of rationality was suddenly ripped to shreds. Marcus thrashed and bucked like a hooked fish, mad with the need to be free. Limbs juddered against his bonds, skin rubbing raw, ragged, bleeding under the assault. To hell with logic, with calm. There was no room for that now, no space for anything but the primal imperative to move and fight and survive.

His flailing flipped some hidden switch behind his eyeballs, because his environment suddenly swam into focus. The murky outlines solidified into a grim reality, and up above, he saw a dome-shaped ceiling lost in gloom. Curving walls glistening with damp. A pumping mechanism chugging away in the corner. A pistol gleaming like an executioner's axe.

And dead center, looming over his splayed form like a hulking sentinel – a glass monolith.

Cylindrical, massive, a single sheet of curved transparency stretching floor to ceiling. This was what cocooned him in his watery prison.

No, not glass, or not entirely; there was metal too, rivets, seams, the dull glint of stainless circumscribing the casing"s base and apex. And there, etched into the facing panel, was an array of symbols and glyphs.

At first glance, it was all random.

But no. There was a pattern there. A logic. His oxygen-starved brain groped for significance, because those shapes, they looking hauntingly familiar.

Suddenly, understanding slammed into him with the force of a rogue wave.

One was the Egyptian symbol Clepsydra.

Otherwise known as a water clock.

But this was the most messed up, bastardized version of a water clock he'd ever seen.

He"d studied these things, spent hours poring over diagrams and descriptions until his eyes crossed. Marveling at the ingenuity of the ancients, the way they"d harnessed the most basic elements to mark the passage of time. Egyptians had used these clocks to tell the time, to utilize the predictable flow of water to track the passage of hours, sun up to sun down and back again.

Only this one, this jury-rigged monstrosity, was designed for a darker purpose. Ticking down to a different sort of hour.

His last.

The glyphs blurred, jumped, resolved into stark clarity as his eyes adjusted to the gloom–not glyphs after all, but numbers, hash marks meticulously notched into the casing"s face, a scale of some kind.

12.

11.

10.

9.

8.

Marcus assumed it went down further, but he couldn't see beyond the water's dark surface.

The markings. The water, rising with mechanical regularity. His guts turned to ice as he overlaid the scene with a diagram from an old reference book, a schematic that had once fascinated him with its elegant simplicity.

Each etching was an hour.

The increments between, minutes.

All of them adding up to a countdown, red digits flashing towards zero. Towards the moment when the water closed over his head and the world went away, as neat and inescapable as lights out.

Compressed air hissed from the base as more of the noxious fluid was pumped into his transparent sarcophagus. Marcus"s mind tracked the ruthless arithmetic: rate times volume equals dead engineer. Drowned like a rat in a high-tech barrel.

His gut clenched as the true horror of the situation sank in. This was no mere captivity, no crude revenge fantasy. It was torture by fluid dynamics, a calculated construct playing to his most primal fear – the inexorable march of time, meted out drip by maddening drip. Death by the very fundamental principles that had been his raison d"etre.

It was almost elegant in its cruelty. Poetic, if he"d had a single lyrical bone in his body. But all higher thought was obliterated by the animal shriek of his primal brain. By the icy claws of terror ripping through his viscera as the water crept toward the next hashmark.

He tried to call up schematics in his head, overlay this evil machine with something familiar, something solvable. Archimedes" screw, a gravel filter, anything to tame the impossible into engineering.

But for once, the numbers failed him. The comforting solidity of immutable laws dissolved into the sloshing chaos of his tomb.

Marcus screamed then. A hoarse, broken sound that barely registered above the dripping. He bellowed and thrashed and pleaded, dignity be damned. Let his captor think him craven, pathetic, a worm wailing in the mud. If it earned him one more second, one more gasping breath, it would be worth it.

But no one came. No one heard. He was alone, forsaken, abandoned to drown in this demented fishbowl. And with a final, sickening click, the magnitude of his doom settled over him.

He was going to die here.