From Hell Read online

  About From Hell

  Pompeii, present day: Archaeologist Maria Monti is working at a new dig site. Like hundreds before her she is investigating the night that Vesuvius erupted, consuming the ancient city with choking ash, scalding steam and rivers of lava.

  But she has just unearthed something that shouldn’t be there, something that makes her question everything she knows about the disappearances of that fateful event.

  Several hundred miles away Alex Hunter’s family is holidaying in southern Italy when Mount Etna begins to shake, and ash blankets the countryside. Hideous figures are moving about in the smoke, snatching people from the streets, and scans indicate they are being taken into the core of the erupting volcano.

  Hell is rising and Alex Hunter must gather a team of his most battle hardened HAWCs to take on an adversary from the very depths of hell. Nothing will stop him from rescuing Aimee and Joshua, not even the devil itself.

  Contents

  About From Hell

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 01

  CHAPTER 02

  CHAPTER 03

  CHAPTER 04

  CHAPTER 05

  CHAPTER 06

  CHAPTER 07

  CHAPTER 08

  CHAPTER 09

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 41

  CHAPTER 42

  CHAPTER 43

  CHAPTER 44

  CHAPTER 45

  CHAPTER 46

  CHAPTER 47

  CHAPTER 48

  CHAPTER 49

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  About Greig Beck

  Copyright

  Do not ask of Hell, for a little piece of it burns inside all of us.

  — Greig Beck

  PROLOGUE

  The Roman city of Pompeii, 79 AD

  Mateo’s father gripped his hand tightly and turned to stare. The boy was only eight years old and short for his age, but he too sensed the danger, and moved closer to his father’s stout legs.

  Around him, people ran, bumped into each other, fell over, and yelled in both fear and anger. The ashes had been falling for over an hour now: hot, greasy. At first they fell lightly like a warm snow, but unlike snow, these flakes didn’t melt, instead their weight grew until they made roofs groan, clogged the nostrils, and coated the tongue in a sulfurous-tasting oiliness.

  The mountain had been throwing up a column of dark smoke like the trunk of a mighty olive tree whose black and gray branches had sprouted as far as the eye could see, turning noon daylight to an evening twilight.

  But now, something else was coming.

  Mateo followed his father’s gaze – a dense black cloud was rolling toward them, pouring forth from the mountaintop and spreading over the earth like a flood of ink. His father seemed frozen; for the first time, Mateo felt a tremble in the man’s big hand.

  The crowd became more frantic and his father pulled them both off the road into an alley as it surged, a rushing river of wild eyes and yelling mouths. Panic turned people to maddened beasts, and some were trampled while others beat their neighbors out of the way.

  His father held up a burning torch, trying to get his bearings. Just inside the alleyway was a dog chained to a door and, on seeing them, it whimpered a mournful greeting. Mateo crouched to pat its head, wiping away greasy ash. It blinked up at him with crusted eyelashes, and licked his hand once before laying down to curl up as if to sleep. Soon the ash was covering it over again.

  When he wakes, it’ll all be over, Mateo thought confidently.

  Then the black flood overtook them. Darkness fell, an absolute nothingness, as if one’s lamp had been snuffed out in a sealed and windowless room. Even from where Mateo and his father sheltered they could hear the people’s shrieks, which now sounded like a cacophony of damned souls in the pits of hell. Infants called for their parents, others screamed for their wives or children, trying to find them by their voices alone. Many appealed to the gods, but still more wailed that there were no gods left, and that everything was now an eternal darkness, everywhere, and for all of time.

  “We must get to the harbor,” Mateo’s father declared and pulled Mateo with him.

  Mateo’s father was a man of importance, and the keeper of the ancient texts. When the ground had shaken and the mountain began to spew its contents, he had rushed to gather several of the most valuable tablets. He still held them, tucked up under one arm.

  The ground shook again. In the distance spots of light began to appear, but it wasn’t the healthy light of the sun, rather the deep red glow of a titan’s oven. That, too, was blacked out as the darkness came on once more and ashes fell again, this time in even heavier showers. Mateo and his father continually shook them off, otherwise they would have been buried and smothered beneath their weight.

  People came and clung to Mateo’s father as if he were some sort of oracle, the last bearer of light. But the torch spluttered, and Mateo heard his father curse; the heavy ash was killing everything, even these remaining fingers of illumination.

  There came a change – strange even among the already strange – an absence of sound as if they had stuffed cloth into their ears. People stopped, listened, waited, and then Mateo heard them: shrieks. This time they were different. These weren’t just howls of fear but of an unbearable pain and terror. And then they too were shut off as if a hand had been thrust across mouths or clamped around necks.

  The torch finally went out, leaving Mateo and his father in a darkness blacker that Hades itself. And then Mateo finally did see something that froze his blood – eyes, clusters of them, not all human, and twice as high as the tallest man.

  As the eyes floated toward Mateo and his father, his father slowly drew his silver gladius. The nobleman’s stout sword was two and half feet long, heavy, and razor sharp. He pushed Mateo behind him. More and more eyes opened on the looming shape, and fixed upon them.

  There came a low moaning as if from a dozen mouths in torment. His father took a step back, but then must have realized they could not escape together. He planted his legs and held his ground.

  “I love you, my son. Run, Mateo. Run like the wind,” his father commanded, and Mateo hated hearing so much fear in those few words. “Run!”

  The shout broke Mateo’s spell of horror and he did as he was told, running blindly into walls, tumbling down steps, and tripping over fallen bodies.

  The agonized scream he faintly heard a few moments later could not have been his father. Please, not my father.

  Mateo trailed a hand along the brick wall and turned a corner to run smack into people blocking the laneway. They had linked arms, and though he could only make them out when he was up against them, he saw they had featureless masks pulled over their faces and strange symbols and eyes cut into their naked torsos, and some even had what looked like hands and other limbs strung about them.

  They pushed him backward, forcing h
im back the way he’d come.

  “I can’t!” he yelled.

  “She comes again. She must be fed,” they intoned as one.

  They lashed out with fists and feet, and Mateo turned and ran. He was spent and sick with fear and fatigue when he finally slowed. How will I find my way out? he wondered. How will I find my father?

  In the end he just sat down and put his hands over his head. I’ll just go to sleep like the dog, he thought. And then just like him, when I wake up, it’ll all be over.

  The small boy screwed his eyes shut, and almost immediately the ash began to get heavier on his body. It was hard to breathe, but it was so warm and soft, like a blanket. He let himself drift away.

  PART 1

  “Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.”

  —John Milton, Paradise Lost

  CHAPTER 01

  Pompeii, excavation site 343B – today

  Maria Monti pushed strands of thick, dark hair behind one ear as she leaned in closer to her computer set up on the field table. A smile spread over her face at what she was seeing on the small screen.

  “I think we have another one.”

  The scanner picked up the signals from the thumper they’d installed. The device sent a small impact blast into the ground, not enough force to disturb the soil and potentially damage hidden antiquities, just enough to push vibration waves down into the earth. These waves bounced off buried objects, and their software programs would read the seismic echoes and return a 3D image of the item they found there.

  About three-quarters of Pompeii’s nearly 800,000 square yards had been excavated already, and hundreds of bodies had already been discovered. Many of the plaster casts of the men, women, children, and animals of Pompeii were primarily made in the mid-1800s and were scattered among museums, research institutes, and universities throughout the country. There were many famous casts like the hugging lovers, the dog on its writhing back, or the heart-rending small boy that was sitting, head resting on arms placed over his knees as though he had simply stopped to rest and never got up.

  To Maria, they were wonders upon wonders. But to the general public they were now only of mild interest. Over 200 years of being on show had made the casts lose their historical, cultural, and financial significance.

  But getting permits to excavate on one of the Vesuvius sites was excruciatingly hard, with the labyrinthine bureaucracy to navigate – all the necessary networking, ass-kissing, and mountains of paperwork. And all that was before the process of determining how any significant finds should be dealt with.

  The other problem Maria and her team had to deal with was the actual excavation. Pulse technology had made finding the bodies simpler: they could be located without turning over a single shovel of dirt. But the actual bodies were gone, of course, and they were now just bones in a body-shaped void. In the past, this cavity would have been pumped full of plaster of Paris and left to set for a few days before a life-sized statue was dug up. The upside was the statues were easier to handle as the remains were now solid. The downside was their contents were lost, as bones, jewelry and any fine detail were subsumed within the heavy, mud-like mixture.

  But Maria had been granted her permits by demonstrating a new technique her team had perfected called “cavity glassblowing”. They drilled down to the cavities, carefully punctured them with a hollow probe, and then sprayed a lightweight composite resin mixture into the void as a gas. It filled the air pocket, coating the inside of the shell and hardening on contact, becoming like toughened glass. The bodies could be safely removed, then washed down and polished, creating a see-through representation of the person, animal, or biological object. Details could be observed right down to individual hairs, clothing remnants, buttons and jewelry still hanging around skeletal necks or decorating fingers or toes.

  The added bonus was, if they needed to remove the resin casing, then a warm water solution made it simply melt away.

  “Not a big signature.” She bobbed her head. “Maybe only four- to five-feet long.”

  “Depth?” Andreas Katsis asked. The young man had coal black hair, eyes, and matching dark eyebrows that met in the middle. Skinny forearms dangled from a dirty, sweat-soaked T-shirt, and he used one to wipe his brow.

  “Three feet down, northeastern edge of quadrant five.” Maria stood, grabbed a small flag on a metal spike, and walked among the rows of string lines they’d made to cut their work area up into ten by ten–feet squares. She carefully strode to the one designated quadrant five and stuck the small flag on the far edge. “About here.”

  Andreas brought the pick, shovel, rake, and an assortment of brushes.

  “I’ll prep the resin mix, and you, sir …” She grinned.

  “Yeah, yeah, start digging.”

  The mixture only took around twenty minutes to prepare but the excavation was where the time and effort came in. The digging progressed fairly quickly for the first few feet, but as they neared the cavity under the earth, the process slowed to taking a thin layer at a time, until Maria estimated they were within a few inches of the space left behind by the once organic material.

  She and Andreas gently inserted the spike into the soil, turning it and easing it down until they just breached the cavity space with a pop.

  She flicked a hand up. “Stop.”

  “Phew.” Andreas recoiled, and waved a hand in front of his face. “Whoever this was must have died farting.”

  He continued to wave away the escaping gas then lifted the delivery spike, which was like a giant hypodermic needle, and held it while Maria attached a tube to the end, screwing it down and sealing it. She stepped out of the hole and walked to the pump that contained a couple of large tanks of their liquid resin composite mixture. The delivery system would atomize the mixture and force it down in a pervasive mist.

  “On the count of three, two, one …” She switched the machine on and it hummed, and the pump jumped as the mixture raced along the tubing to the spike. She watched the dial indicate the rate of resin dispersion.

  After just a few seconds, she shut it down. “That should do it.”

  Andreas nodded and carefully eased the needle out then jammed a thumbnail-sized blob of putty over the hole. Maria tossed him a metal dinner plate that he laid over the top of the putty.

  “How long?” he asked and handed her back the spike.

  She took it and wiped the end clean. “That size, probably only an hour, give or take. We’ll leave it for two just to be sure.”

  The pair gathered their equipment and headed back to the open-sided tent they used as their makeshift office. Underneath the canopy was a table, chairs, a few iceboxes, and coffee mugs.

  Maria grabbed a thermos and poured two black coffees, then sat down heavily. She raised her cup. “Cin cin.”

  Andreas did the same. “Salute.”

  Maria sipped the lukewarm brew and let her eyes wander over the site. Around them, columns and walls rose up from dusty soil, and further back, entire tiled floors. Even perfectly preserved buildings had been revealed.

  The area they excavated had once been a collection of labyrinthine alleyways that ran like arteries through the busy city of Pompeii. Maria drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly, and tried to take her mind back to see that time, imagine what it must have been like, first in all its magnificence, and then in those claustrophobic lanes when the sun was blotted out.

  The beginning of the end for the city was midday, 24 August 79 AD; perversely, the day after the Roman holiday of Volcanalia, dedicated to the god of fire. At noon, Mount Vesuvius roared to life, spewing ash hundreds of feet into the air for eighteen hours straight. The choking ash rained down on the cities in the surrounding countryside, filling courtyards, blocking doors, and collapsing roofs. But that was only the beginning of the nightmare to come.

  When the cone of the volcano collapsed, it triggered an avalanche of mud and ash that rushed down the slope toward the city of Pompeii, just a little over fiv
e miles away.

  The molten river of death obliterated everything in its path. Pompeii and the smaller neighboring village of Herculaneum disappeared completely. Anyone not frightened away by the previous day’s ash fall would have been smothered, coated, or cooked by the 2000-degree layer of volcanic mud.

  Perhaps the cities would have remained a legend if not discovered by accident during the construction of King Charles III of Spain’s palace in 1738. Miraculously, the two cities were nearly perfectly preserved under the calcified layers of ash – layers that in some places were up to 150 feet thick.

  Maria had memorized the ancient city’s layout and knew that just a few hundred feet away from where she sat was the Garden of the Fugitives, which held the largest number of victims found in one place: thirteen people had sought refuge in a fruit orchard there. Not far away, nine sets of remains were found at the House of Mysteries, where the roof had collapsed, trapping them inside. A plaster cast of a fallen man could be seen inside the Caupona Pherusa tavern, where the guy might have walked in to have one last drink or maybe to give a final toast to the gods.

  The Stabian Baths, the fish market, the granary, and the Olitorium market all contained casts of victims, including animals, and tucked in an alley was the cast of a dog in a collar looking like it was simply sleeping, not far from the cast of the tiny, resting boy. Did they know each other? Maria had wondered.

  She checked her wristwatch, counting down the seconds until her resin set. Every time a new body was found, the excitement rose – who or what would it be? What story would it tell? And sometimes there was frustration; perhaps frustration with the supposedly perfect record keeping of the Romans. It was said that only a few hundred people remained behind to be covered alive by the ash, pumice, and rivers of magma. But there were other records that said not just hundreds, but perhaps thousands had remained, and their bodies had either vanished or were still hidden somewhere below their feet.