The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (13 page)

Evy, unable to control the truck, rocked by the ongoing blasts, veered onto Warehouse Street, and the chariot pulled away, going down Lantern Street.

Yang’s attention drawn away from them, Alex and Lin, hunkered at the foot of the sarcophagus, faced each other.

Alex said, “I’ll lay down cover. You go up and over. Ready?”

She nodded.

The chariot barreled around the next curve, going past the front museum gates as the chase came back to nearly square one. Once again the Emperor Mummy and his chariot were on Main Street, now traveling east to west.

Alex began laying down fire with his revolver and Yang ducked for cover while Lin dropped into the sarcophagus. She crawled over Li Zhou’s bones, edging toward the chariot and the Emperor, her dragon dagger at the ready. Popping up, ready to strike, Lin found herself facing Yang, who shot her twice at nearly point-blank range, blowing her back into the box.

Alex screamed: “Lin!”

Er Shi Huangdi guided his rig over a high curb and sent the distracted Alex catapulting off the rear of the chariot; he hit the pavement, hard, but reached up and grabbed the wagon’s black cleat, one-handed, his gun gone. Now he was being dragged . . .

Within the sarcophagus, the young female who’d suffered two wounds was not dead; she was waiting for her two wounds to regenerate, much as the Emperor Mummy’s terra-cotta ears had reappeared. As the bullet punctures resealed, leaving her completely healed, she was relieved that Alex had not witnessed this outright magic.

Alex, dragged but not defeated, was using a combination of sheer will and young-bull strength to latch on to another cleat, and somehow got a leg over the wagon’s side, and was attempting to pull himself up when a slender hand reached down and yanked him up and onto the rear of the cart, alongside the sarcophagus.

And in fact Lin was inside that sarcophagus, leaning out to give him that helping hand.

As they bumped along, he said, “Thank God—I thought you were dead!”

“Yang missed.”

Alex did not have time to contemplate how Yang might have missed at such close range, because he could see the Emperor Mummy up there, craned to send his dead eyes back their way.

Er Shi Huangdi turned to Yang and shouted,
“Release the wagon!”

Yang quickly went to work disconnecting the linchpin between the vehicle’s two halves.

Not far away, unaware of what was to come, at the Shanghai Opera’s outdoor theater, a crowd of New Year’s Eve theatergoers was being entertained by “The Disciples of the Pear Garden.” The cast members were working themselves up to the climax of
The Nose,
a performer in a Chen Qi mask squaring off in song against another in a Chong Heihu mask.

Back on the Emperor Mummy’s bronze-steed-drawn ride, Yang had pulled the pin, separating the chariot from the cortege wagon, which sent the latter into a wicked spin on its two wheels.

Alex, not wanting to be thrown off, dove into the sarcophagus with Lin. On top of her, he was about to excuse taking this liberty when the coffin was propelled by centrifugal force off the wagon and sent flying onto Billboard Street.

At the outdoor opera, more singing was under way, pleasing its audience, at least until Rick O’Connell on his headless horse burst through the rear paper gates just as the sarcophagus came sliding through the main gate.

Bailout time,
O’Connell thought, and like a circus acrobat, he got up and stood on the back of the runaway horse and then leaped up for a strung banner. He was up and off the horse, which got promptly clipped by the coffin. The headless metal horse flew over Alex and Lin down in the sarcophagus like a bowling pin.

Elsewhere, Evy was coming around the bend onto Main Street and almost ran head-on into the chariot, but the Emperor Mummy avoided the out-of-control, fireworks-spewing vehicle. By now the glare in the truck cab was blinding, and then there, in front of Evy, too close to do anything about it, was the cortege wagon, spinning.

She yelled to Jonathan beside her, “Abandon ship!”

And sister jumped from one side and brother from the other, hitting the pavement, skidding on their own flesh as the truck plowed into the wagon, which exploded in a huge fireball that put a very big period on the end of the sentence of the chase.

Because the chariot, unburdened by the cortege wagon and its stowaways, driven by a statue come to life, had charged away into the neon-streaked night.

 
6
 

Plane Crazy

W
hen the cab pulled up to the curb in front of the posh nitery known as Imhotep’s, the distinctive neon sign was off and the uniformed doormen were nowhere to be seen. One by one, the members of the bedraggled O’Connell party emerged from the cab, their fancy evening wear ripped and filthy and scorched, their faces smudged and bruised, their hair a mess. Among them was Lin, whose cat-burglar-black attire was also shredded and soiled, in particular the coat she wore over her black top and pants, though perhaps she looked the least worse for wear.

Rick O’Connell exited last, moving slowly and wincing from the pain that bouncing on that bronze bucking bronco had caused the family jewels, which were no Eye of Shangri-la but were priceless to him. Jonathan was weaving as if drunk, though he was very much sober, having survived concussions, explosions and more. The cabbie leaned to look out the passenger window and scowl as he barked at Jonathan in Mandarin.

Jonathan, closing his eyes as if hungover, said, “Uh, Rick, my boy—the taxi fare, if you please.”

O’Connell, whose tuxedo was a shredded memory, said, “Do I look like a man with a wallet?”

Sighing in a weight-of-the-world manner, Jonathan dug into his pants pocket—fortunately his funds had not been in either back pocket, which had been burned away with the seat of trousers—and produced some colorful bills. Several of these he tossed in the window, got another scowl for his trouble, and the vehicle tore away.

“I don’t mean to a stickler for detail,” Jonathan said, with an eyebrow arched, “but how exactly does one—even if one happens to be a reanimated, two-thousand-year-old, terra-cotta Emperor—bring bronze horses to life?”

Glumly, Alex said, “He has mastery of the elements—earth, metal, wood, water and fire.”

Frowning, O’Connell said, “That explains it.”

Jonathan, both eyebrows up, said, “Oh, yes, that explains it quite nicely. After all, what a crashing bore a mummy would be without supernatural powers.”

O’Connell, doing his best to be patient with his brother-in-law, asked gently, “Jonathan, could we go inside? Some of us may have worked up a thirst.”

“Well, you know it
is
after hours,” Jonathan said archly, and then he fiddled in his other pants pocket for his keys and found them and went over and opened the door.

Evelyn, taking charge, gestured as she said, “Come on, everybody—inside!”

“Yes,” Jonathan said, “please. Drinks are half price.”

The proprietor of Imhotep’s flipped on the lights and the room, with chairs on top of tables, looked somehow both bigger and smaller, empty of customers and employees, the mock-Egyptian decor exposed for the Hollywood-style sham it was. Jonathan ambled over and turned the lights on at the bar and got behind there to provide service. Shortly, every one was grouped loosely at and near the bar.

Evelyn had a hand on her son’s shoulder. “Sweetheart—are you all right?”

Alex frowned at her, though he did not remove her hand. “If you two hadn’t blown my position, I would have killed the bloody Emperor.”

“We were only trying to help, dear.” She drew her hand away. “To save you.”

“Did I look like I needed saving?”

Actually he had, and did; he was perhaps the filthiest and most bedraggled of all of them, with the exception perhaps of Jonathan.

But she said, “No, dear, of
course
not . . .”

His chin crinkled, much as it had when he was ten or eleven. “You don’t have to keep looking over your shoulder at me. I can hold my own.”

O’Connell, having heard this exchange, said, “Didn’t exactly look that way tonight.”

Alex turned to his father, frustrated. “You should be
happy
—you’ve raised another mummy! Now you can play the big hero, just like in the good old days.”

“I don’t believe,” O’Connell said evenly, “that I dug this one up, not in the first place, anyway. I believe that was . . .
you!”

Shaking his head, waving his hands, Alex said, “Don’t try to pin this one on me! Er Shi Huangdi wasn’t up and walking around when
I
found him!”

Evelyn got between them, a palm on either man’s chest. “Stop it, you two! Nobody’s to blame here. Alex, your father had no intention of robbing your glory much less play hero. Rick, you know as well as I do, that you and I and for that matter our son were all manipulated by Roger Wilson.”

Neither father nor son could deny that.

Jonathan, wrapping some ice in a towel for O’Connell, said, “We could go back to the museum and you two could kick Roger’s head around awhile. I’m sure even old Roger wouldn’t object, at this point.”

The dark comedy of that made both O’Connell men smile, if not at each other.

Jonathan handed his brother-in-law the ice-packed towel, and Alex moved down the bar to where Lin rested against it. Even with soot on her face and with her dark coat ripped to pieces from the knees down, she was an exotic vision.

Alex said to her, “I apologize for my parents.”

“No need. They did what they thought was right.”

“You know, Lin, we worked really well together tonight.”

“We did. Except, of course, for one detail.”

“What’s that?”

“We failed.”

That threw Alex for a slight loop, but he rebounded, saying, “Yeah, well, you
could
look at it that way. I’m more of a glass-half-full kinda guy myself.”

Behind the bar, Jonathan, bringing his nephew a Coke and the young woman a glass of wine, said, “I’m more the who-the-bloody-hell’s-been-drinking-out-of-my-glass sort of bloke, personally. And here’s yours . . .”

In the mirror behind the bar, Evelyn had been watching her son and the lovely Chinese girl speak. After Lin’s eyes found hers, Evy came over and held a hand out to her.

“I’m sorry—we haven’t been properly introduced. Who exactly
are
you?”

But Lin did not immediately answer. She waited until tempers had cooled and everyone, minimally cleaned off, had gathered at one large table, with drinks provided by their host.

With all eyes on her, Lin said, “For centuries my family has watched over the Emperor’s tomb.”

O’Connell exchanged glances with Evy—this struck a familiar chord: their friend Ardeth Bay and the fabled Med-jai warrior priests had similarly guarded the tomb of Imhotep at Hamanaptra, the City of the Dead, in the Sahara.

But that been told in Evy’s novels, too, and Lin could be an impostor with a cover story essentially written by Evelyn O’Connell herself . . .

Alex nodded toward the dagger in Lin’s jeweled belt. “Where did the snazzy dragon dagger come from? That standard issue for tomb guardians?”

“Not exactly,” she said coolly. “The weapon has been passed down through the generations of my family. The blade is enchanted, if I may use such a term among archaeologists and scholars.”

Evy said, “You may.”

O’Connell said, “I shot the ear off our clay buddy the Emperor
twice
tonight . . . and it regenerated in seconds. So we’re pretty open-minded about this kind of stuff, Lin. Go ahead.”

Lin smiled faintly and nodded. “Only
this
blade can kill the Emperor. But it must pierce the dark heart of Er Shi Huangdi to do so.”

Evy was studying Lin with what O’Connell could read in his wife as suspicion, though that might not have registered on the others. She looked to him, and then to their son, and said, “Alex, darling? Might we have a quick, private family meeting?”

Alex shrugged. “Sure.” He smiled at Lin and touched her shoulder, then joined his parents, who had stepped away from the table and out of the young woman’s earshot.

Whispering, Evy said, “What do you
really
know about this girl?”