I Eat Rainbows

We were excavating. That probably doesn’t help you, since we’re always excavating. We’re excavators, it’s what we do.

In this particular case, we were excavating the ruins of some unknown little Egyptian tomb, way out in the middle of nowhere. Well, Egypt, I suppose, but it sure as hell felt like the middle of nowhere. And we kept calling our client back, every week or so, saying we’d found nothing, nothing at all, and he’d say, in his gruff Russian accent, “Ze tomb o Shinkozenhenmen is zere, I know it! Keep zigging.”

Whatever we tried, sonar, line drilling, even density calculations from this one earthquake that we excavated through, it all gave exactly the same result — that there was nothing there, and ze Russian baztard waz crazy. But hey, he paid a lot, and by the hour, so we kept on it.

So that was our first mistake. We never thought to ask how he knew. We just figured was that this was roughly our equivalent of the quiet life.

Have you heard the rumours that the Egyptians were actually incredibly advanced, but most of their technology was lost? It’s true. It’s fucking true.

That’s what we found. A block of earth that was exactly the same density as its surroundings, responded to sound in exactly the same way, and was conveniently in the one place that none of our drill-scans checked, that managed to contain this massive hall.

And I mean massive. Maybe your average skyscraper would have fit in it, if you broke it in half and laid the two halves next to each other.

So, well, we’re not idiots, we’re excavators, so we don’t go in. We call up our client and he gets incredibly excited and says he’ll meet us here in a couple of days and we shouldn’t touch anything.

So, of course, halfway through the bloody first day, Derek, our resident geek, gets all excited (something about null fields), and heads in with a boatload of our equipment. Idiot slipped through my arms like a snake. He managed to say, and I quote, “This stuff is awesome! Is that a – it looks like a fusion device! This is brilliant, it’s like a tribute to Mad Science! I’m going to -”

Here his voice gets all screamy, and the line dies. And the earth drops away from under our feet, dropping us into the hall. There’s the geek’s body, and one of his stupid friends try to run towards him, and gets mowed down by this flying… thing.

So I duck and roll to the side, and I watch. I watch my entire team, one by one, get brave and decide they’re going to make a run for it, and get killed. In a new way each time.

Whoever designed those deaths wanted to see blood. Lots of it.

Finally, the bastard Russian gets here. I shout out a warning to him, and he just grins and waltzes right in, as if he owned the bloody place. And he doesn’t fucking die. He stops when he sees the bodies, and shouts at me, asking if Anyzone elze iz alive. I say no, and cautiously stand.

Then, if you bloody believe it, the bastard laughs maniacally, twirls his moustache, and fucking shoots me in the head.