Chapter 65
WHEN WE REACHED the cavernous room where (ages ago, it now seemed) I had witnessed Abbadon’s pep rally, I realized that this sweltering underground cathedral with its stalactite-studded ceiling was only the entryway into a vast and hidden labyrinth of passages.
My father, unseen by the other members of our force, including my four best friends, walked at my side as I followed the dark legions and descended farther and farther into the lower depths. Our conversation was telepathic. Nobody heard our thoughts except us.
Lots of legends about this place, he said. Dante wrote of being lost in a dark wood, assailed by beasts he could not evade, unable to find the straight path out, falling into a deep place.
I swiped away the sweat dribbling down my forehead. The deeper we journeyed toward the center of the Earth, the hotter it got.
You’re feeling the effects of the “furnace of fire” the Bible speaks of, my father continued. There is a reason hell is described as a burning wind, a fiery oven, and a lake of fire. The underworld is closer to Earth’s mantle, a dense, hot layer of semisolid rock. It’ll keep getting hotter the deeper we burrow.
I had a feeling a lot of our strike force would be peeling off their tactical armor before we reached our final destination, wherever that might be.
Ancient civilizations knew of Abbadon’s kingdom. For the Greeks, his home was known as Hades, an abyss used as a dungeon of torment and suffering.
When my father said that, I thought again of Mel.
Being held prisoner.
In Abbadon’s dungeon.
And when I thought about her, I knew I had to keep pressing on, no matter how high the devil jacked up his thermostat.
When you encounter Abbadon—and you will, Daniel—trust none of what you hear, and less of what you see. Satan knows how to manipulate and deceive. There is only one way to defeat an adversary this cunning and shrewd….
Don’t let him tempt me away from who I truly am, I mentally muttered.
Exactly.
Hours passed. We slogged on through the pressure cooker of heat and humidity, winding through a maze of narrow tunnels.
Our strike force was slowing down. The horde of aliens up ahead was not. According to Joe’s radar sweeps, the distance between our two armies had grown to two, maybe three miles.
I’m growing weary, I heard my father say telepathically.
I never think of my dad as old, but right then he sounded ancient. Feeble.
Suddenly the cramped passageway we were shuffling through opened up, and we moved into an alpine valley beneath towering, snowcapped mountains—all of it eerily illuminated by glowing patches embedded in the earth, forty thousand feet above our heads.
“Incredible,” said Dana. “It’s like we’re outdoors, underground.”
“Only the sky is pitch black,” said Willy. “And it looks like there’s a couple hundred moons.”
“Because that isn’t the sky, and those aren’t moons,” said Emma. “Those are phosphorescent mineral deposits. We’re looking up, at the Earth’s crust.”
“According to my readings, we’re nine miles underground,” Joe said, consulting his super-intelligent smartphone, which was loaded up with apps they don’t sell in any store on Earth.
I used my 128:1 zoom vision to track Abbadon’s black-hooded throngs.
“They’re heading up into the mountains,” I reported.
Then, son, said my father, you better head up into the mountains, too.