He watched as Akhnaton lurched toward Krysty, who huddled in a gasping ball on the floor. Gripping her by the hair, he pulled her to her knees and slowly forced her head back. Her eyes were glassy, fogged with exhaustion and pain. With his free hand, he stripped away what was left of his robe, and his erection sprang out, thick and throbbing. His burning eyes seethed with a volcanic fury and he grinned in unholy glee.
“You’ll still have me,” he said harshly. “You’ll still give birth to my dynasty. Now more than ever, I want you. If I can’t have you as my bride, I’ll take you as my slave.”
Then Krysty’s hand flashed up, slashing swiftly and savagely like a scythe or the claws of an enraged lioness. Blood spewed in liquid tendrils from the shredded flesh between Akhnaton’s legs. He stood frozen to the spot by shock, by the sudden, overwhelming pain.
Only when Krysty tossed aside his bloody testicles did he scream, a full-throated shriek of outraged agony that seemed to collect at the point of the ceiling and stay there, the echoes chasing each other back and forth.
Akhnaton flung his head back and howled. Grasping at his crotch, scarlet squirting from between his fingers, he sank to his knees, roaring and screaming at the top of his lungs.
Krysty scrambled out of his reach and rolled to her feet. She tangled the fingers of her right hand in the hair and scalp at the back of his head. She yanked his head back, his face turned to the ceiling. Locking her wrist, extending and stiffening the first two fingers of her right hand, Krysty drove them through Akhnaton’s eyeballs, up to the knuckles.
His eyes burst, and her fingers punched through the delicate bone of his sinus cavities, cramming splinters into his brain. Akhnaton ceased his howling. Krysty jerked her hand back, blood and gelatinous matter trailing from her fingertips. He toppled over backward, legs still tucked beneath him. Blood continued to jet from the ruined swatch of flesh at his groin.
Krysty swayed over him, drawing a trembling hand across her face, wiping the man’s blood from it. Her breathing sounded like steam escaping from a faulty valve. She shambled around to face Ryan, took a faltering step, then fell to one knee.
Still dazed and fighting to control the pain that threatened to consume him, Ryan got to his feet. He heard a new sound, a grating, crunching rumble that swallowed up the echoes of Akhnaton’s scream. He looked up. The ceiling blocks quivered, and a fine rain of power sifted down from between the cracks. The uppermost stones seemed to bulge outward.
Ryan wrestled Krysty to her feet, shouting, “We’ve got to go!”
She looked at him, her eyes fathomless in her blood-streaked face. For a moment, she stared at him without recognition.
He shook her. “Krysty! Get it together!”
She moved then, sprinting with him toward the alcove. With a thunderous roar, a torrent of stone blocks poured down from above. Great slabs of rock fell and crashed. The floor quaked beneath their feet.
Ryan grasped Krysty by the wrist and pulled her past the winch and pulley and out of the opening. They reached the stairs, and Krysty took the lead, leaping down the steps four at a time. Ryan followed her closely, not daring to look behind him. One misstep would be fatal.
Fragments of flying rock pattered down all around them. Millions of tons of thundering stone collapsed behind them, and they barely kept a few yards ahead of it. The pyramid imploded, and the sound was like doomsday.
Below, the crowd lifted faces pale and wet with terror to see their pharaoh’s mighty monument falling in on itself. They scattered, squealing in fright as titanic stone cubes went bounding and skipping down the shivering face of the pyramid.
Giant black cracks zigzagged through the smooth white face of the pyramid. Great clefts were riven deep as the structure split asunder.
The stairs jumped and trembled under Ryan and Krysty’s feet. Almost without thinking, they dived from it. The two people hit the ground hard and kept rolling, not just to absorb the impact and minimize their chances of breaking bones but to put as much distance between them and the avalanche of stone blocks. Ryan grunted as flares of pain ignited in his shoulder, but he rolled frantically.