Chapter 1

Sheila Belloq lay in blackness on the dusty stone shelf carved into the catacomb wall. She had barely managed to hide and turn off her light in time as her nemesis, Zachary Jones, entered the burial chamber. She rolled back against the mummified corpse sharing her narrow shelf space as Jones’ light beam swept past her hiding place, then leaned forward again as he passed her. His light beam was illuminating the altar at the end of the chamber as he approached it.

She sat up partially so she could see the combination of movements that opened the secret panel in the wall in front of him, gazing with lust-filled eyes as a section of the stone wall slid noisily open to reveal a tiny recess previously hidden. She leaned farther forward, her eyes reflecting the glitter of what his portable light revealed.

Zachary Jones heard her quiet gasp echo through the chamber and quickly spun around, pistol in hand. His portable light flashed back and forth, frantically searching for the source of the sounds as Sheila dropped to the ground and pressed up against a protruding pillar.

“I know you’re here,” he called out to her. “I won’t let you have it!”

His eyes still searching the ruins, he reached behind him and closed the secret panel. He could hear Sheila’s soft laughter – and the sound of a rifle bolt being quietly pulled back.

“Belloq!” he screamed at her, his heart pounding. “You won’t kill me! You’re not a murderess!”

His eyes searched the surrounding darkness. His light frantically moved from one possible hiding place to another, trying to search her out.

“Only I know how to open the chamber, Sheila,” he said into the darkness. “The wrong combination will trigger the booby trap that will kill anyone who tries to leave. You need me alive, Sheila darling.”

As his echoes died away, he could hear her laughter echoing through the chamber, hot on the heels of his ‘darling’ as it faded away.

“Zack, sweetheart, I’ve been in here all day searching,” she called out, turning her head away from him so that her voice echoed and didn’t reveal her location. “I know where the traps are. The only thing I didn’t know was the combination...”

Her sultry voice echoed through the catacombs. “And now, you’ve given that to me, just like you’ve given me everything else I ever wanted from you.”

While she was talking, he quietly cocked his pistol, hoping the lovely, echoing sound of her voice would drown out the quiet little click. His ruse didn’t work. She heard his gun cock.

“Sweetheart! Would you actually use that on me?” Sheila asked, her sexy voice echoing through the chamber. “After all we had together? Tisk tisk ... I liked your other gun a lot better...”

Zachary could hear her shifting her position as she moved her legs around. ‘She’s over there! Get ready to duck!’

“What we had was one torrid night,” he replied, crouching, getting ready to dive out of her way. “You drugged me, you stole my map, you tried to have me arrested...”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I did all that, but you’ll have to admit you liked what I did before that...” ‘He’s getting ready to move. He should land right ... about... ‘

Zachary dived. As he did, he heard the quiet ‘Pfffft!’ of her dart gun. Then his leg was on fire. He cried out and grabbed his leg, dropping his pistol as he did so. It clattered away into the darkness, sliding down some unseen incline.

He rolled into the light so that the cameras could get a good shot of the dart sticking out of his leg.

Sheila scrambled down from her hiding place, tearing her blouse on a spike sticking out from a collapsed wall, exposing one breast which bled from the scratch the spike had caused. She knelt down in front of him (in the light so her bloody bare breast was easily visible for the cameras) with a triumphant grin on her face. According to the scripts, she was supposed to ignore the blood leaking out of the cut on the side of her exposed breast, too anxious to crow into her Nemesis’ face.

“So, Zachary Jones, you’re as big a loser as your grandfather,” she laughed, her beautiful, rose-red lips grinning widely with a sadistic twist in one corner.

Then she rose and stepped forward, moving the stones in the same sequence she had memorized while watching him. The panel slid open. Sheila reached inside.

“That necklace ... belongs ... in a museum!” Jones declared, gasping from the efforts of the sleepy dart in his leg. His face was covered with sweat. Then the powerful narcotic overwhelmed him and he collapsed in a heap. ‘They put real fucking drugs in that fucking dart gun! Assholes!’

Sheila picked up the jeweled necklace, admiring it in the light from Zack’s portable lamp. She heard a small click from inside the little vault in the wall. She quickly stepped sideways (into the light again). There was a strange numbing sensation in her side. She looked down.

“Fuck! I wasn’t fast enough,” she whispered for the sound techs as she displayed the little wooden dart sticking out of her abdomen in the bright light supposedly coming from the lantern. She suppressed a grin as she noticed the little trickle of blood from the dart wound, knowing she’d have even more fans of her snuff work after this production was released.

She carefully pulled the dart out and pretended to examine it. It was hollow. It was empty. “Snakebite kit!” she whispered, aloud, looking around to let her audience know she needed to reach the snakebite kit in her backpack quickly or she was going to die. Physically, she was already feeling lightheaded.

‘Did somebody actually put drugs in this damned thing?’ she wondered. ‘Don’t they think I can act well enough to fake it?’

Then she realized that she wouldn’t be able to fake the sweat or her feverish appearance that a real dart would have caused, so the prop guy had probably just shot her full of, hopefully, adrenalin, but more likely it was rattlesnake venom. These days, with the viewing tech available to everyone, close-up camera work was more important than ever. Plus, this scene had to be done in one take, with the Tri-D cameras silently running on small tracks throughout the cave set.

She began trotting back toward the entrance – in the same direction from which Zack had come. ‘It doesn’t matter if I walk or run – I can already feel the venom rushing through my system! That snakebite kit had better be for real!’

She ran through an unfamiliar passageway. ‘This isn’t the way I came in! Fuck! They changed the set around! I’m lost!’

She stopped. Her legs were starting to burn and her lungs were on fire. The venom in the dart was beginning to work, slowly paralyzing her. ‘I need to find my backpack! There’s an anti-venom kit in it and I’m going the wrong way!’

She staggered back the way she had come – back towards Zack. ‘Frankie should have something. He would never be unprepared for something like this ... would he?’

She stepped on a stone and suddenly remembered there were real traps built into the fake tomb set as it levered down under her weight. She dived to one side as a spiked metal arm swung down, barely missing her head. She cried out into the darkness as it slammed into the wall, pinning her left arm and shoulder and making a deep, bloody gouge that the viewers were going to love.

‘Bastard! Shit! Fuck! That hurts! These fuckers are gonna make a fortune on this if I get killed doing it!’

Groaning loudly, she tried to move the heavy weight with her right arm, twisting her body around so that she could tear herself off the spike. She succeeded, tearing off most of her blouse in the process, leaving her nearly topless, and leaned against the wall, gasping in pain, taking several deep breaths with breasts and bleeding wounds visible to the cameras before trying to use the remnants of her blouse to staunch the bleeding, not really caring right now if the angle of the shot was any good or not.

After a moment, she started forward again, each rasping, ragged breath echoing loudly through the underground ruins, one breast totally bare, the other barely covered with the bloody remnants of her blouse. ‘My fucking fans’d better appreciate this!’ (She was pretty sure they would; there were more copies floating around of that axe going into her back than there copies of the original production of that low-budget hack-and-slash she’d showed her mom last month.)

‘My adoring fans, ‘ Katie thought, remembering that conversation between two teenage guys sitting at the next table in the restaurant where she and Frank were eating one day. The kids hadn’t even recognized her, though they were very familiar with her snuff work. ‘Oh well, better get my attention back into the script ... Give my fans something new to jack off to... ‘ She smiled, wishing she could watch those boys as they watched this performance.

Katie’s legs were getting numb from the snake venom and it was hard to keep putting one foot in front of the other. She was also sweating profusely, going into shock from the wound in her left shoulder. Up ahead she could see a light. “That must be Zack’s lamp! Thank God!” whispered for the sound techs again.

She stumbled forward toward the light. She kept falling and bruising herself on the sharp edges of things she couldn’t see (more bleeding scratches on young female flesh for the perverts to enjoy). Her heart was beating so fast she thought it might explode. Her vision was starting to tunnel. She tried to move faster. ‘If that snakebite kit isn’t just a prop, it can help me!’

Now Zack was lying right in front of her, his sweat-soaked form apparently unconscious. ‘Sheila’ looked around for his pack. ‘There it is!’ She thought she saw it lying in the shadows off to one side. She turned and stepped onto another trigger stone.

“Nooo!” she cried out, and turned, trying to duck. According to the script, she had known this trap was here and she still walked right into it, trying to get to Zachary’s snakebite kit.