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Chapter 7: The Curse is Upon Us!

"Oooooh, I've dreamt about this since I was a little girl!" Evy squealed as she practically ran over to the sarcophagus as the guys, including me, propped the heavy slab of stone against the wall. Something strange has been happening. Not only did I feel a year older for no reason at all, but overnight I had grown a bit of stubble under my chin. I also sprouted like a goddamn weed, putting me at 6'1, letting me tower over pretty much everyone else. Freaky.

"You dream about dead guys?" Rick asked. I rolled my eyes at her excitement. Evy looked at a rough spot on the ancient casket. "Look! The sacred spells have been chisled off! This man must have been condemned not only in this life, but the next as well!" I didn't bother to explain Imhotep's history. "Now then, let's see who's inside this thing, shall we?" Jonathan said, and went to put the key in the slot. I stopped him. "Hold on here! I know everything, remember? Let me take care of this!" I said. Jonathan grudgingly handed over the key. I slotted it in and turned. I faced the rest of the group.

"Lady and gentleman! May I present the least scary sight you shall see on this adventure!" and I gave the lid a great heave.

With a great hiss of sealed air, a corpse shot out in a cloud of dust, the jaw twisted at a strange angle. Everybody jumped away as I laughed hysterically. "Damn!" Evy exclaimed. "I hate it when these things do that!"

"Is he supposed to be like that?" Rick asked, disgusted. "Well yes, I've seen a mummy before up-close," and she glared at Jonathan, "but he seems still...still,"

"Juicy," Rick, Evy, and I said. She was right. There was a very obvious moistness to the corpse.

"It must be more than 3,000 years old," the lone ovary continued, "but it looks as if he's still...decomposing." Rick turned. "Hey, over there." He motioned for us to follow him.

"What do you make of this?" and he leaned over the underside of the lid. There were about a dozen deep scratches in the solid rock. "He was buried alive," I muttered. "Yes," Evy said," and he left a message." She traced her finger over part of the lid. There were more scratches, these in crude letters. "Death is only the beginning," Evy read. We all shared a look at the corpse. "I know this whole series of events," I announced. "While I will not disclose anything about future events, I will tell you this: You will not enjoy anything in the following days." And I left it at that.

Night fell quickly on the camp. I was wandering, and found Evy walking over to our spot, holding a small pile of black, clinking objects in her left hand. We both passed the Professor on the way back to camp. He had the Book of the Dead. Events were obviously going as planned, unfortunate as that may be. He was currently trying to force the black volume open. "You'll need a key to open that thing up," I called to him, and winked at Evy. She noticed the indention that was very obviously the shape of the sarcophagus key. She nodded in knowing, and we both took off as the Professor glanced at the keyhole.

Henderson, Burns, and whoever that other American was were joking about their respective finds with O'Connell holding up the canopic jars that I realized were holding Imhotep's organs. As O'Connell forced Beni to give up his seat for the lovely lady in the house, I leaned over to the Americans and said, "You may want to lose those. You won't like what'll happen to you." They laughed. "Kid, these will fetch at least a hundred in the middle of nowhere. I doubt that these little jam jars are going to be bad for us," Henderson said. I shook my head.

"Look what I found!" Evy said, holding up the chitinous black objects. "Scarab skeletons! Flesh-eaters. I found them inside our friend's coffin. They can survive for years on a dead body. Unfortunately, he was still alive when they started eating him."

"So somebody threw these in with our guy and they slowly ate him alive?" Rick asked, looking disgusted as he held the black shell. "Very slowly," Evy emphasized. "He doesn't sound like he was a very popular guy, eh?" Jonathan chuckled. "Yeah. Sounds like he got a little too frisky with the Pharoh's daughter," Rick said. Despite the sarcasm, he didn't know how right he was.

"According to my readings, our friend suffered the Hom-Dai, the worst of all Ancient Egyptian curses, one reserved only for the most evil of blasphemers. There are no records of it ever being performed."

"That bad, huh?" Rick asked. "They never used it because they feared it so," Evy continued. "It's written that if a victim of the Hom-Dai should ever arise, he'll bring with him the ten plagues of Egypt." We said nothing, and soon we were asleep. Except me.

I snuck over to the Professor's tent and waited. Not two minutes after I took my position, Evelyn snuck over and snatched the Book of the Dead right from his hands. "That's called stealing, you know," I whispered. She unflappably responded, "Well, according to you, Rick, and my brother, it's called 'borrowing'." We took the book back to our camp. "I didn't know you two were that kind of people," Rick said without opening his eyes. "Blame your mother. That's what I do," I said. Rick got up and crawled over to us. "I thought the Book of Amun-Ra was made out of gold," he said. "It is," Evy answerwed. "I think this may be the Book of the Dead."

Rick's eyes grew visibly wider. "Are you sure you want to be playing around with this thing?" Rick asked. "Remember what Cody said before that little boat ride through the Nile?" Evy slotted the key in and turned it, making the clasps flip open. "It's just a book," she said. "No harm ever came from reading a book." I snorted. "Riiiight," I said, rolling my eyes to the heavens. As she opened the cover, a strange wind blew through the city. "That happens a lot around here," Rick said. Evy read a short passage. "It speaks of the night and the day," she said. She continued, and at the end, I said, "Bad idea." It was met by the faintest of sounds. A very quiet roar.

"NO!"

The Professor came sprinting up to us. "You musn't read from the book!" I stood. "That's what I said!" I told him.

We looked around the ruins. Another strange breeze blew through, kicking up a little sand. The camels started grunting and kicking. They were going wild. I had always known that animals could sense things that humans normally couldn't. This was one of those times.

All the workers, Americans, and Beni lept out of their tents. All our eyes turned to the skies.

"Ah shit," I muttered.

A very large, dark cloud was moving toward us. But this was now ordinary cloud. As it neared, I ran, and the others followed. The cloud broke up into thousands of locusts. I hate bugs. I absolutely hate bugs.

The little mutant grasshoppers began zooming all over the camp. Workers, the expendable little redshirts they were, were instantly set upon, dissapearing in a cloud of insects. This allowed the rest of us to sprint into the ruins.

The bespectacled Burns suddenly tripped and lost his glasses. I didn't bother messing with his fate. It could cause some terrible repurcusions if he was allowed to leave with everything...inside of him.

I continued on with my party. Fortunately, the little corridor was well-lit with torches. Strange how no man has entered this city for thousands of years, and yet all the torches were still burning.

I stopped. Being at the head of the party, everyone else did too.

A little pile of sand raised from the ground. As soon as I stopped, I turned and pushed through the guys in the other direction. I stopped and looked at them. "Guys! Run for the love of God!"

Before I could finish, the ground burst open with hundreds of scarabs. Everyone else followed me. Rick and I turned, shooting at the flesh-eating monsters. Each bullet caused a little geyser of sand and black chitin to shoot up from the ground. Finally, he tossed the torch at the group. The beetles just crawled over the burning wood, continuing the chase even as they burst into flame.

The chase continued onto a little "Egyptian catwalk," a stone path at least three stories above a dark pit. The guys and I lept off the path, barely landing on a little stone column rising from the pit, while Evy ran and pressed herself against the wall.

We watched as the dark wave of scarabs continued down the path, completely ignoring us. What only I noticed was that Evy fell through a hidden door in the wall toward her meeting with a certain Ancient Egyptian. I could barely stifle a laugh as Rick and Jonathan called out for Evy after noticing that she had dissapeared.

We jumped back onto the path, and Rick began to bash the wall with the butt of his shotgun. I'm sorry to admit that even I don't know how to open it. "Damn it," he exclaimed, "a trap door." He started to paw at the walls for a hidden switch, when a scream turned us toward the door.

The Americans, minus Burns, along with several diggers, came screaming down the corridor in the direction that the scarabs had left. "RUN YOU SONS OF BITCHES! RUN!" Henderson shouted, and we followed them. Right on our heels was the army of scarab beetles. We continued running, but stopped at the turn. A worker had tripped, and was set upon by the scarabs. His screams soon stopped, and after several seconds, the bugs continued after us, leaving a stripped, bloody skeleton in their wake. We continued our dash through the ruins.

We soon lost the scarabs after outrunning them, and found Evy in a darkened room. "There you are!" Rick shouted, grabbing her. "Will you quit playing hide-and-seek?" He turned and saw the mummy staring at him. "Whoa!" he screamed, now aware of the problems that Evy would cause.

I caught up with him, and the rotting corpse turned to me, along with everyone else following. Imhotep turned and roared at Rick. Unfazed, we both roared back. I drew my .45 and blasted a small chunk from his skull, while Rick stunned him by blowing out his ribs with a shotgun blast. As Imhotep picked himself up off the ground, we ran as fast as humanly possible out of the city - right into an army of Med-jai, pointing bolt-action rifles at us. The Professor was huddled on the ground, clutching the book in a scared death grip.

The leading Med-jai removed the wrappings from his face, revealing Ardeth Bay. "I told you to leave or die," he said. "You refused. Now you may have killed us all. You have unleashed the creature that we have feared for more than 3,000 years."

"Relax," Rick said, "I got him."

"No mortal weapon can kill this creature!" Bay exclaimed. "He is not of this world!" He motioned, and two Med-jai lugged Burns over and dumped him in Henderson's lap. We looked at the moaning man. He could not form any recognizable words, as he lacked the tongue to form them. He could not see us either, because his eyes were sitting in the sockets of a zombie. "You bastards! What did you do to him?" Henderson cried. "We saved him!" Ardeth answered, "Before the creature could finish his work."

"Now all of you leave quickly before he finishes you all," he finished. He gave orders to the Med-jai in Arabic, and they lowered their weapons and marched off. "We must now go on the hunt and find a way to kill him," Bay said. "I told you, I got him!" Rick said. Bay stopped and looked at him. "Know this: this creature is the bringer of death. He will never eat. He will never sleep. He will never stop."

We rode out of the city as fast as we could. Even still, I knew of the bad things to come. Even worse, so did everybody else.

I am very sorry for the huge wait. By the time I finished work on the chapter, my decade-old modem burned out and I had to wait almost a month with no internet. There was also an uploading error that wasn't my fault when I tried the upload the week before. Again, sorry.